Page 117 of The Sixth Fraction

He shrugs.

“All she thinks about is what she can take from him,” he says. “Doesn’t matter who else gets hurt. She’ll quite literally burn the entire system down just to get to him.”

I think of Evelyn Eaton fleeing Abnegation in the dead of night with my mother at her side, helping her get out. I wonder if they talked about Four, if Evelyn had some kind of plan to go back and get him, if my mother was concerned—or if she even knew why Evelyn was leaving. I think of Marcus like an inferno, and Evelyn running for her life to escape the flames. But she left Four to burn. Not just in Marcus’s cruelty, but in his own grief for his mother.

And then she came back and expected . . . what? For him to rejoice?

“Does anyone else know about him?” I ask. “About—what he’s really like?”

He scowls. “Of course not. Can you imagine the headlines if it got out? I’d have to leave the city to get away from it.”

I sidestep a broken bottle and consider my next words carefully. “Why would you need to get away from it? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

His shoulders hunch, like a cat with its hackles up.

“You think I won’t understand,” I say, and it’s just a guess, but judging by the way he stares at me, it’s a good one. “Try me.”

He’s quiet for a few seconds, and I think maybe I ruined it, broke whatever tentative trust we’ve established. But then he says, “Growing up, I was only ever Marcus’s son. If I ever showed even a hint of individuality, of personality, he made sure I regretted it. So when I chose Dauntless . . . it was like I finally got to exist, for the first time. I didn’t have to be his. If everyone knows about this, about him . . .”

He shakes his head.

“And that’s all assuming they believe it,” he says. “He spent a lifetime telling people I was ‘troubled.’ He discredited me in advance. If this came out, and they still didn’t believe me—” He cuts himself off. Swallows hard.

He doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to. If he went through the ordeal of his private pain being made public, the loss of his Dauntless haven, and Abnegation still called him “troubled,” it would be worse than keeping quiet. It would be unbearable.

“Do you want to know why I really left Abnegation?” I say. “Because it wasn’t just that I didn’t fit there—even though I didn’t.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Did something happen?”

“After the Choosing Ceremony attack . . . I saw Evelyn. I recognized her. And when I told the Abnegation leadership about it, my father tried to erase my memory of her, to maintain their cover-up. Only . . .”

“It didn’t work,” Four says. “Because you’re Divergent.”

I nod.

“I’d been thinking of Abnegation as . . . pure, somehow. Like even if I didn’t fit in there, at least they were doing everything right, and I couldn’t go wrong if I followed their teachings.” I laugh softly. “It feels so stupid, now. But I’m glad it happened. Because I needed to see things for how they were and not how I wanted them to be.”

Abnegation, the faction that erases memories and blindly trusts its leader. Candor, the faction that kept a child with a mother who was hurting her. Dauntless, the faction that harasses the factionless. Erudite, the faction that controls information instead of offering it freely. And I have no idea what I’ll discover about Amity.

The system is broken because every faction trusts in its own virtue. And the factionless aren’t much better, secretive and separate, the faction system so deeply ingrained in them that they imitate it even when they’re defying it.

“I don’t trust the factionless much more than I trust Abnegation,” I say. “But they’re teaching me to trust myself. To listen to myself and what I want, for the first time in my life.”

I stop, and look up at him.

“What do you want?” he says quietly.

Sometimes you decide things in the moment, and sometimes you realize they were already decided a long time ago. Like when he hauled me to my feet at the Choosing Ceremony and shoved me toward safety. Or when I boarded a train and saw him standing in a shaft of moonlight, steady as a rock no matter how the ground moved.

I step closer and rest a hand on his chest, like I did in the fear simulation. Then I slide my hand up, around his neck, my fingertips brushing over the short hairs at the nape of it. I stand on my tiptoes and bring his head down, closer to mine, so I can whisper right up against his mouth.

“You,” I say.

And I kiss him.

It’s tentative, at first. A press of lips in the dark. But it sends a thrill through my entire body. I surge toward him; he surges toward me. One of his hands brushes my cheek, his fingertips curling behind my jaw; his other hand goes to my waist, pulling me closer.

He kisses me harder. My lips part beneath his in a gasp. I didn’t realize how much it would ache, to touch someone like this; I didn’t realize how good it would feel. How it would be like sating hunger and provoking more hunger at the same time, having and wanting in equal measure.