Page 23 of The Sixth Fraction

“Yes, those.” His eyes glint a little, despite the sad set of his mouth. “Just trust me, okay? I know you. There are reasons I need to ask you this, and I can’t tell you what they are yet. How many times have you wondered about Evelyn in the past week?”

Something inside me wants to scream like a toddler throwing a tantrum. But something else reminds me this is my father, and he wouldn’t be so insistent if there was no reason for it.

“Not many times,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about”—about whether I made a big mistake choosing Abnegation; about whether I feel this way because I’m Divergent; about Robert; about Susan; about factionless radicals with guns—“other things.”

“I understand,” my father says. “I’d like you to put your hands on the stone, as you did a few days ago, and focus first on your memory of the Choosing Ceremony, and second, on your memory of looking up that photograph of the council leader. Can you do that for me?”

“You want me to give those memories to the vault,” I say.

My father’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “In a sense.”

He puts his hands on the stone table, and says, “I need an excision.”

An excision? I think, but when he nods to me, I lift my hands and press them to the table in front of me.

Too late, I think of that news brief that earned me a Penalty of Silence the other day. The headline is burned in my mind: ABNEGATION LEADERSHIP STRENUOUSLY DENIES ALLEGATIONS OF MEMORY TAMPERING.

It’s the last thing I see before I’m swallowed by my memories. It’s night. Caleb is standing in front of me, his sleeve stained red. From where the glass hit him during the Choosing Ceremony attack, I realize. His hands are on my arms. His mouth is moving, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. There are people all around us, clutched together, frightened. The Hall of Factions is beside me, its glass walls gleaming in the moonlight.

This feels like the first time I offered a memory to the vault, but it’s all wrong. Caleb’s mouth is moving, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. But no—this is a memory, so I already know what he’s saying. Robert. Robert’s dead.

We trade garbled words. I don’t recognize the language I’m speaking, and then I realize it’s because I’m saying everything backward. His eyes are wet, and then I’m crushed to his chest in a hug.

Don’t, I think, without knowing why.

I pull away, and then he’s gone. My body moves backward against my will. I’m moving in reverse across the street and around the corner of the building.

I need an excision, my father said, before the Memory Vault’s tide pulled me under.

Don’t, I think again.

My steps unwind as I retreat into the dark. Then I’m watching her go—Evelyn Eaton, with her hair pinned as tight as an Abnegation woman’s and her clothes deep red. My gaze drops to the gun in her hand, her finger curled over the trigger.

She’s stepping back, too, in what would seem like an odd dance if I didn’t now realize what was happening: The Memory Vault is unwinding my memory, like it’s tugging a snagged thread from a sewing machine, unthreading the needle, then unwrapping it from the take-up lever, then unwrapping it from the thread guide—

An excision means cutting this memory, the memory of Evelyn Eaton, out of my mind.

Evelyn turns her head away from me. My feet are about to carry me back through the emergency exit that the Dauntless sentry shoved me toward, into the chaos of the Hall of Factions, toward the stomping feet and the dead woman with a needle in her neck.

Don’t don’t don’t!

I pause there with my heel lifted, frozen between forgetting and remembering. Then I put my foot back down. I step forward, instead, closer to the woman whose ashes I watched Marcus pack into clay. She turns to look at me again. Raises her weapon again.

I move closer to watch her disappear, and then I follow my own footsteps around the building, where Caleb finds me. I force the memory forward instead of back.

Robert. Robert’s dead.

The memory ends, and the program loosens its hold, but I learned something from the way Marcus Eaton stared at me after I made my first offering and emerged, too quickly, from the Memory Vault’s grasp. It’s not normal to surface too soon.

I keep my eyes closed and my body still. Like the surface of a pond, and beneath it is my kicking feet, the tight grip of my horror at what my father just tried to do, the rush of relief that I have again managed to wriggle away from danger, the confusion at what it all means—about Abnegation, about the Memory Vault, about my Divergent brain.

Because surely the only reason I can stop the Memory Vault in its tracks is the same reason the aptitude test didn’t work on me. Divergent.

Now I understand. Now I know one reason why it’s a dangerous thing to be: because they can’t take my memories if I don’t let them.

I open my eyes and blink at my father.

“Beatrice?” he says.