Page 113 of The Sixth Fraction

“That’s unsettling,” I say. “Don’t tell me you ever looked like that in Abnegation. I won’t believe you.”

She smiles that half smile that means she’s got something else on her mind. She moves closer, on careful feet that remind me of my mother creeping toward my hospital room. Factionless feet.

“What happened?” she says. “You look . . .”

She doesn’t finish her sentence.

“One of my initiates died,” I say.

The smile disappears. She’s quiet for a few seconds.

“That’s awful,” she says.

“I didn’t know him that well.”

“Still awful.” She reaches out, not touching me but offering to.

I reach back. I’m not holding her hand—we’re at the wrong angle for that—but our fingers are laced together, and I think of that game Abnegation kids play, where they knit their hands together so they can’t see whose are whose.

She stares at our joined fingers and gets a strange look on her face I don’t know how to interpret.

“What brings you here?” I say.

“Oh.” She lets go of me and fidgets with the hem of her jacket. “I think I need help with something.”

She digs in her jacket pocket for something and holds it out to me.

“A bullet?” I say, taking it from her. I’ve never handled real ammunition, only needles. But I’ve watched Zeke load his gun at the wall half a dozen times.

“So it is a bullet,” she says. “I thought so, but I had to be sure.”

“Why? Where’d you find it?”

Her lower lip snags on her teeth. She looks away.

“It was in a crate,” she says. “A crate being transported by the factionless.”

I close my fist around the bullet. Dread creeps down my spine like a drop of sweat.

“They stole lethal ammunition from the Dauntless?” I say. “Do you know why?”

“Robert—the Abnegation boy who died at the Choosing Ceremony— he was shot with a bullet. But I hoped it was just one gun. Someone gone rogue.” She pushes her hands through her hair. “Not a crate full of them.”

Robert. She said that name like she knew him. She must have—he was her age; he was in Abnegation. For a second I think her eyes are full of tears. Then she blinks, and they’re gone.

A heavy sigh falls out of me like a burden I can’t help but set down. I drop the bullet on the kitchen counter and think of the note my mother left in the cabinet for me, woven with memories. On the safest day, she told me to meet her, knowing I’d know what that meant. Like she and I were still close.

“I knew it was a bullet,” Tris says. “I didn’t really need you to tell me. I just—I need to know—”

“You want to know what kind of person my mother is. If she’s capable of . . .” I gesture to the bullet. “Something like this.”

“I already know she is,” Tris says. “I just don’t know why. I mean, I can guess what the ultimate goal is, but—”

“I do,” I say. “I know why.”

I look up at her, and I think about what Hana said to me earlier. About wanting intimacy without vulnerability. About how impossible that is, because caring makes you vulnerable anyway. I’ve been holding Tris’s association with my mother like a shield between us. But I don’t think it’s the real reason I’m holding her at a distance. I think I’m afraid that if I did try—if I did give her something of myself, I’m afraid of all the things she’d know about me then.

Her eyes are bright. Not a soothing blue, but an unearthly one. They challenge me to say something, to do something.