Insurgent

“Anything to get him out of Dauntless. I don’t care if he saved my life, I still don’t like him.”

“Hopefully we won’t have to worry about faction distinctions anymore by the time this is over. It’ll be nice, I think.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t feel like picking a fight with him here. Or reminding him that it won’t be so easy to persuade Dauntless and Candor to join the factionless in their crusade against the faction system. It may take another war.

The front door opens, and Edward enters. Today he wears a patch with a blue eye painted on it, complete with a half-lowered eyelid. The effect of the overlarge eye against his otherwise handsome face is both grotesque and amusing.

“Eddie!” someone calls out in greeting. But Edward’s good eye has already fallen on Peter. He starts across the room, nearly kicking a can of food out of someone’s hand. Peter presses into the shadow of the door frame like he is trying to disappear into it.

Edward stops inches from Peter’s feet, and then jerks toward him like he is about to throw a punch. Peter jolts back so hard he slams his head into the wall. Edward grins, and all around us, the factionless laugh.

“Not so brave in broad daylight,” Edward says. And then, to Evelyn, “Make sure you don’t give him any utensils. Never know what he might do with them.”

As he speaks, he plucks the fork from Peter’s hand.

“Give that back,” says Peter.

Edward slams his free hand into Peter’s throat, and presses the tines of the fork between his fingers, right against Peter’s Adam’s apple. Peter stiffens, blood rushing into his face.

“Keep your mouth shut around me,” he says, his voice low, “or I will do this again, only next time, I’ll shove it right through your esophagus.”

“That’s enough,” Evelyn says. Edward drops the fork and releases Peter. Then he walks across the room and sits next to the person who called him “Eddie” a moment before.

“I don’t know if you know this,” Tobias says, “but Edward is a little unstable.”

“I’m getting that,” I say.

“That Drew guy, who helped Peter perform that butter-knife maneuver,” Tobias says. “Apparently when he got kicked out of Dauntless, he tried to join the same group of factionless Edward was a part of. Notice that you haven’t seen Drew anywhere.”

“Did Edward kill him?” I say.

“Nearly,” Tobias says. “Evidently that’s why that other transfer — Myra, I think her name was? — left Edward. Too gentle to bear it.”

I feel hollow at the thought of Drew, almost dead at the hands of Edward. Drew attacked me, too.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I say.

“Okay,” Tobias says. He touches my shoulder. “Is it hard for you to be in an Abnegation house again? I meant to ask before. We can go somewhere else, if it is.”

I finish my second piece of bread. All Abnegation houses are the same, so this living room is exactly the same as my own, and it does bring back memories, if I look at it carefully. Light glowing through the blinds every morning, enough for my father to read by. The click of my mother’s knitting needles every evening. But I don’t feel like I’m choking. It’s a start.

“Yes,” I say. “But not as hard as you might think.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Really. The simulations in Erudite headquarters … helped me, somehow. To hold on, maybe.” I frown. “Or maybe not. Maybe they helped me to stop holding on so tightly.” That sounds right. “Someday I’ll tell you about it.” My voice sounds far away.

He touches my cheek and, even though we’re in a room full of people, crowded by laughter and conversation, slowly kisses me.

“Whoa there, Tobias,” says the man to my left. “Weren’t you raised a Stiff? I thought the most you people did was … graze hands or something.”

“Then how do you explain all the Abnegation children?” Tobias raises his eyebrows.

“They’re brought into being by sheer force of will,” the woman on the arm of the chair interjects. “Didn’t you know that, Tobias?”

“No, I wasn’t aware.” He grins. “My apologies.”

They all laugh. We all laugh. And it occurs to me that I might be meeting Tobias’s true faction. They are not characterized by a particular virtue. They claim all colors, all activities, all virtues, and all flaws as their own.

I don’t know what binds them together. The only common ground they have, as far as I know, is failure. Whatever it is, it seems to be enough.

I feel, as I look at him, that I am finally seeing him as he is, instead of how he is in relation to me. So how well do I really know him, if I have not seen this before?

The sun is beginning to set. The Abnegation sector is far from quiet. The Dauntless and factionless wander the streets, some with bottles in their hands, some with guns in their other hands.

Ahead of me, Zeke pushes Shauna in her wheelchair past the house of Alice Brewster, former Abnegation leader. They don’t see me.

“Do it again!” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

“Okay …” Zeke starts to jog behind the wheelchair. Then, when he’s almost too far away for me to see, he pushes himself up with the handles so that his feet aren’t touching the ground, and together they fly down the middle of the street, Shauna shrieking, Zeke laughing.

I turn left at the next intersection and start down the cracked sidewalk toward the building where Abnegation had its monthly faction-wide meetings. Though it feels like it has been a long time since I last went there, I still remember where it is. One block south, two blocks west.

The sun inches toward the horizon as I walk. The color drains from the surrounding buildings in the evening light, so that they all appear to be gray.

The face of Abnegation headquarters is just a cement rectangle, like all the other buildings in the Abnegation sector. But when I shove the front door open, familiar wood floors and rows of wooden benches arranged in a square greet me. In the center of the room is a skylight that lets in a square of orange sunlight. It is the room’s only adornment.

I sit on my family’s old bench. I used to sit next to my father, and Caleb, next to my mother. Now I feel like the only one left. The last Prior.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Marcus walks in and sits down across from me, his hands folded in his lap. The sunlight is between us.

He has a large bruise on his jaw from where Tobias hit him, and his hair is freshly buzzed.

“It’s fine,” I say, straightening. “What are you doing here?”

“I saw you come in.” He examines his fingernails carefully. “And I want to have a word with you about the information Jeanine Matthews stole.”

“What if you’re too late? What if I already know what it is?”

Marcus looks up from his fingernails, and his dark eyes narrow. The look is far more poisonous than any Tobias could muster, though he has his father’s eyes. “You can’t possibly.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. Because I have seen what happens to people when they hear the truth. They look like they have forgotten what they were searching for, and are just wandering around trying to remember.”

A chill makes its way up my spine and spreads down my arms, giving me goose bumps.

“I know that Jeanine decided to murder half a faction to steal it, so it must be incredibly important,” I say. I pause. I know something else, too, but I only just realized it.

Right before I attacked Jeanine, she said, “This is not about you! It’s not about me!”

And this meant what she was doing to me — trying to find a simulation that