Page 5 of The Sixth Fraction

The bell rings. I shut the window.

My knee is bouncing so fast it’s shaking the table, but the other Abnegation are too practiced in self-denial to say anything. The test administrators have been calling us back at random. Every time one of them steps into the cafeteria where we’re all waiting, everyone straightens up and goes quiet.

In between those moments, I watch the factions play their favorite games. You can learn a lot about a faction from its games. The Erudite love games of strategy. They lay out complex systems of hexagonal tiles and cluster around them, their heads so close together I can barely see between them. The Candor are more concerned with wordplay, though, and whatever their game is, it’s loud and involves constant arbitration. At the Amity table, some people are passing out scraps of paper and pencils. They all draw the same thing and then line up their work to point out what’s good about each one. And a group of Dauntless are in two lines playing some kind of slapping game that’s made the pale-skinned ones’ knuckles red.

Abnegation sits and waits.

It’s not that we don’t have games. We just save our unguarded moments for private spaces. Out here, in public, is for disappearing. Like a rabbit in the grass, or a mouse in a dark corner, going so still that a predator’s eyes pass right over them. That none of the other students—at least the ones outside of my faction—know my name, that they can’t tell me apart from Susan . . . it means I’ve done something right.

The Dauntless test administrator, a tall black-haired woman with a hawk tattooed on her throat, steps out of her testing room. Everyone goes still as she looks at the clipboard in her hands.

“Beatrice Prior,” she says, and my name sounds muffled. I sit for so long that Susan nudges me with her elbow, and then I stand too fast, hitting my knee on the table as I rise.

Wincing, I limp over to the test administrator and follow her back into the room.

There’s not much in it: a padded chair with armrests, almost like a dentist’s chair; a high stool nestled under a table with a computer on it, the screen bright and blank; and, by the door, a metal box, like a toolbox, that’s closed but unlatched.

“My name’s Tori.” She gestures to the chair. “Sit.”

She sounds tired. Or bored. She sits on the stool, one boot propped up on the stool’s joint. Her laces are untied, the tongue of her boot flopping over. She shrugs off her jacket and tosses it aside; beneath it she’s wearing a black tank top, and I can see that every inch of her arms is covered in tattoos. Flames dancing across one arm; flowers spilling petals down the other.

I sit, my hands folded in my lap. She nudges the metal box open with her toe and takes out a syringe. Even through the plastic covering, I can tell the needle is big and thick. My mouth goes dry. She fumbles in the box for a bottle of what appears to be antiseptic and a cotton ball.

“Here’s how it works,” she says. “I stick you with this needle, which will flood your system with tiny transmitters and receivers. They’ll all travel to your brain and set up shop there. Then I’ll be able to use this”—she touches the computer—“to trigger the aptitude test. Which I could tell you about, but you won’t remember what I told you once you’re taking it, so there’s really no point.”

She yawns. She’s already done this ten times today, but I still can’t believe she can be so casual about it.

“Tiny transmitters and receivers will . . . live in my brain?” I ask. “For how long?”

“Forever,” Tori replies.

“Forever?”

Tori rolls her eyes. “Your faction stores memories in its little Memory Vault, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how did you think they got the memories in there? Did you think your leaders submitted detailed diary entries? No. They interface with a big, powerful computer using the little transmitters and receivers that have lived in their brains since they were sixteen, when they took their aptitude tests.” She gestures widely to the room. “Hence all this. You know, Abnegation is really doing itself a disservice by discouraging curiosity. You should already know all this.”

“We know things when they become relevant,” I say. “Not just to indulge a whim.”

“I’m a big fan of whims, myself.” Tori brushes her fingers across the wings on her neck. “Got this ink on a whim, and now it’s my favorite one.”

She opens the bottle of antiseptic and squeezes some of it onto the cotton ball. It’s bright orange. She stands over me, and dabs it against the side of my neck.

“Why the hawk?” I ask her.

She smiles a little and tosses the soiled cotton ball onto the table. “The hawk symbolizes the sun. I was afraid of the dark.”

She picks up the syringe and unsheathes the needle.

“Not anymore?” I ask.

The needle is coming toward my neck. It looks more like the skewering end of a kitchen thermometer than the sewing needle I use to embroider. I should look away, or close my eyes, but instead I watch—watch the light catching on the metal, and Tori’s tattooed finger on the syringe’s plunger.

The pain is both sharp and deep. Her eyes find mine.

“Not anymore,” she says, and then everything goes black.