Page 25 of The Sixth Fraction

She gives me a sad look and then walks away. I sit on the edge of my bed and let every limb get heavy.

I need an excision.

Thank you for offering your memory.

I hear a rasping sound. I touch my chest, and realize it’s coming from me, as I try to breathe.

There’s static in my mind as I fold clothes in the donation center that afternoon, as I avoid my mother’s eyes, as I walk back with Mary. I eat alone at the end of the table, wash my own bowl and spoon. I tell myself I’m glad for the isolation; it’ll give me time to think about what happened.

But the next day, as I press an Erudite shirt flat to the table and fold in each side with a sharp crease, I think I’m getting nowhere. How many times can I remember the relief in my father’s eyes when he thought he’d successfully scrubbed my memory clean? Or the way Marcus Eaton, council leader, nodded at him like this was something they’d done a dozen times before? How many times can I wonder why they’d rather cover up Evelyn Eaton’s continued existence than find out why Robert’s dead?

How long can I pretend that everything is still normal?

There’s a sudden, sharp pain in my lip, and I taste copper. I bit into it without realizing it. I turn the shirt to fold it in half and then add it to the stack beside me.

I’m too distracted to see her coming, but my mother sets a new pile of clothes in front of me, fresh from the clothesline in the back. I’m reaching for the pile when I notice a scrap of paper resting on top of it. She left it behind. It’s small and a little crumpled, so it almost looks like a bit of garbage, but I unfold it anyway.

“STAY LATE,” it reads.

I tuck it into my pocket and go back to folding.

By the end of the day, I’ve finished my work, but I go to the back of the room to check the food inventory against what’s actually there—one of the most tedious tasks in the donation center. The bell chimes for the end of the day, and I keep working, pretending for the benefit of anyone who might glance in my direction that I’m just finishing my task.

I wave Mary on, and she leaves without me. My mother is at the front of the warehouse, flipping off the light switches and the overhead fans. She locks the front door, then leads me out the back door.

We step into the alley behind the donation center, which is full of trash bins too tall for me to see into. A neat stack of broken-down cardboard boxes stands next to us.

My mother looks up at the building, first to one corner, and then to another. I follow her gaze, not sure what she’s looking for. Whatever it is, she doesn’t seem to find it. Then she focuses on me.

“It didn’t work, did it?” she asks me. “The excision, I mean.”

When Eleanor and Benjamin first announced the month of silence, it felt like a hand around my throat. The past two days, it’s felt like the only thing keeping me together. As long as I don’t have to say any of it out loud, it’s like it never happened.

But this is my mother. She sees me . . . even when my father doesn’t.

“No,” I say, my voice rough.

“I didn’t think so.” Her brow furrows. “I know what it means when they summon people to that room, and when your father told me what you saw—”

“He told you?” I say. And then it dawns on me: her utter lack of surprise. “You know that . . . ?” I can’t make myself say it out loud. It’s too ludicrous. You know that Evelyn Eaton is still alive?

“I’ve known since before Evelyn’s funeral,” she says, looking grave.

“How is she— Why did they pretend she was dead?” I realize my hands are in fists. I force them to relax. “Why didn’t they want me to know?”

“I don’t have answers, only guesses. But Evelyn Eaton was the council leader’s wife, which means she had access to information that only the council leader would know. If our leadership decided it was better to pretend she was dead, it was likely because they didn’t want people to ask any questions about why she fled.” Her eyes soften. “And it seems they still don’t.”

“It’s been eight years,” I say. “Whatever she knows, it must be pretty awful, right? For them to go to such extremes?”

My mother hesitates, and in that moment of hesitation I remember the news brief. A concerning pattern of Dauntless wall guards suffering memory lapses.

“Oh. They don’t think it’s extreme, do they?” I say quietly.

She shakes her head.

“How often do they do it? Do you know? How many people have they done this to?”

“I don’t know,” my mother admits. “But your father is a man of rules. If he did this to you, it’s because it’s been deemed the correct procedure by the correct authorities—if it was something he viewed as ‘extreme,’ he wouldn’t have done it so readily. Not to his daughter.”