Page 64 of The Sixth Fraction

“Do what you want. But I don’t have a lot of time to spend here, so.”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, but I know what she’s not saying. She doesn’t have a lot of time to spend here—so she’s going to spend it on people she actually believes in.

She walks away, and I stand there, stung. I can feel other people’s eyes on me, Rory and Colin among them. It would be humiliating to return to the exercise after what Gretchen just said; it would be just as humiliating to walk out of here, dismissed as a waste of time.

I suck in a breath and walk back to Rory and Colin.

“You all right?” Rory asks me.

“Yeah, I just forgot about something I need to do,” I say. “See you later.”

“Tris—”

But I’m already walking out of the practice space and around the corner to the stairs. There are people in the stairwell doing a map study, the map pressed to the windows, all of them gathered around it. Closer to the lobby, Mae is jumping rope with an old cable on one of the landings. She recites a rhyme under her breath as she does it, probably something she learned in Candor.

I go down to the dormitory. There are a few of them in the Rookery, though calling them “dormitories” feels more formal than what they are, which is clusters of mattresses, each one on a low platform, with a little crate next to it for all our things. The corner of the room that I share with Colin, Rory, and Miles is empty at this hour, with Miles off learning how to tend the apiary and Colin and Rory at the self-defense lesson.

I can’t hold my tears back any longer. A sob breaks in my chest, and I let it. It’s not what Gretchen said so much as what it meant—that there’s a misalignment of what I want and what I am. That maybe I should resign myself to a lifetime of quiet pursuits that I hate, just because I’m decent at them. I felt trapped in Abnegation, and now I feel trapped again, this time by something that I can’t defect from: my body and its limitations.

I sit down on the end of my bed and put my head in my hands.

“You okay?” The voice comes from the other side of the small, windowless room. Christina’s bed is right across from mine. She’s sitting up, her legs covered in blankets, the bandage askew on her head. By the time I got back from walking Four out of here, she was already asleep, and no wonder—she just got out of the hospital.

“Yeah,” I say, dragging the heels of my hands across my cheeks. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry if I woke you.”

“I don’t believe you,” Christina says, her voice low and amused. “About being fine, I mean. And it’s cool—I’m not fine, either.”

She gestures to the bandage.

“Here, I’ll go first,” she says. “This other initiate, this guy Peter—he’s been targeting me for weeks. I’m pretty sure it’s because his girlfriend, Molly, was close to the bottom of the rankings, and he had to knock other people out to keep her in. Or because he’s just a sadistic asshole; hard to say.” Her lips purse like she just tasted something sour. She goes on: “Anyway, she hit the very bottom yesterday, which meant she’d be kicked out today. So I should have known something was coming. Last night he grabbed me while I was sleeping. He’d sharpened one of the butter knives from the cafeteria, and I don’t know what his original plan for it was.”

I stare at her, horrified.

“I tried to fight him off, but . . . he was too strong,” Christina says. “He stabbed it, and it went right here.” She taps the bandage that covers her eye, gently, with a fingertip. “So now . . .” Her voice breaks, but she keeps talking. “Now I’m down an eye. And instead of thinking about the practical stuff, like how I’m going to have bad depth perception, or how I’m going to have to learn to turn my head a lot, or whatever, all I can think is . . .”

She laughs through a sob.

“That I’m going to be ugly,” she says, in a small voice. “Isn’t that stupid? Of all the things to be focused on.”

“It’s not stupid,” I say.

“It’s a little stupid.”

“It’s not, though.” I frown at her. “You know what I think?”

She wipes her cheek, and looks at me, waiting.

“I think it’s not about being pretty,” I say. “It’s about not having the life you thought you would. Not being the person you thought you would be.” I chew on my lip. “But you’re still pretty.”

Christina snorts. “I’m the one-eyed girl. I’m always going to be the one-eyed girl.”

“No, you’re going to be the girl with the eye patch, and who knows what’s under it or how she got it?” I say. “A girl with a story. A girl who’s got . . . grit.”

“Grit.” She seems to turn that over in her mind. “All right.”

We’re both quiet for a little while. All I can think is that what I said to her applies to me, too. I lost the life I thought I’d have. I lost the version of me that I thought could exist, that day at the Choosing Ceremony. And more than that . . . the factions were supposed to be the scaffolding of my life, sturdy and strong even if the people inside them weren’t. And the day my father tried to erase my memory, I realized that scaffolding was weaker than I thought.

And now I’m here. Trying to uncover a plot to destroy even the scraps of order we have.