Page 85 of The Sixth Fraction

And by the sixth floor, I have to hold my jacket over my nose and mouth so I’m not inhaling it.

On the seventh-floor landing, Four jerks my hand, pulling me away from the stairs and deeper into the building. The white marble and old-fashioned columns of the rest of the space yield to glass: glass walls, a glass ceiling, and even a glass floor, the blocks of it too thick for me to really see beneath me. Glass is the material that was in the Candor bowl at the Choosing Ceremony, the material that I associate with truth-telling.

We turn a corner and I can’t help it; my feet go still.

I’m in an impossibly tall, octagonal room. It’s as if someone took the core out of the center of the building and replaced it with a pillar of crystal. Jagged panels of glass, built to reflect and refract light, stretch above me as high as I can see. And in the center of the space is a podium. I suspect it’s an access point to Candor’s central computer, the way the stone table was the access point for Abnegation’s. There are eight glass doors leading in every direction; we came in at the bottom of the octagon.

As I watch, smoke spills into the room from the top of the octagon, right across from me. A calm, feminine voice speaks from nowhere and everywhere, loud enough to be heard over the pulsing alarm.

“Fire-containment protocol will go into effect in one minute,” it says. “Please evacuate.”

“Damn it,” Four says, and he hurries across the room, dragging me behind him. “That’s not good—”

“What’s the fire-containment protocol?” I say, tripping behind him.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it involves minimizing a fire’s spread, which probably means—”

I hear a slam behind me, and turn to see a metal wall where there was glass just a moment ago. It appears to have dropped down from the ceiling. I look back at Four, wide-eyed.

“Something like that,” he finishes.

Chapter 28

Tris

The air is hazy with smoke. We both duck down low, where the fresher air is. My eyes sting. I hear slamming in the distance as other metal walls come down, presumably partitioning the space so that fire can’t break through it.

Then I hear pounding. A frantic, uneven rhythm that can only come from a human, not an automated system. I pull Four toward it. “Someone’s shouting, come on—”

We run down one of the narrow glass corridors that borders the octagonal room. The pounding is coming from the other side of one of the metal containment walls. As we get closer, I can hear a voice shouting on the other side of it.

“Help! Can anyone hear me?”

I let go of Four’s hand and slam my fist into the wall. The shouting and pounding stops.

“We can hear you,” Four calls out, as I press my ear to the wall.

“There’s a girl!” the voice says. “Stuck in the safe room on your side! We were trying to find someone who could let her out when the walls came down.”

I look at Four.

“We’re on it,” Four calls back. And to me, in a quieter voice: “Let’s go.”

“How do you know your way around this place?”

“Sometimes fear simulations are revealing,” he says. “When they reveal information about criminal behavior, I have to testify about what I’ve seen. It’s only happened twice, but it’s hard to forget this place.”

I follow him down the hallway and around the corner—

And into a wall of fire.

Both of us rear back as black smoke billows toward us. I think of the aptitude test as I hack into my jacket. Four sinks into a crouch, and I follow suit. The air closer to the floor is clearer, and I can see down the long hallway. Where the glass walls stop and the drywall begins, everything is burning.

In between the shrieks of the alarm I hear screaming and pounding again, this time not as loud or as forceful as before. There’s a door at the end of the hall that seems like the likely source. The safe room.

And between it and us are flames.

“You should go back and get help,” Four says to me. “I can figure something out.”