Page 38 of The Sixth Fraction

My horror must be all over my face, because she smirks.

“Did you think it would be easy living?” she says. “You can always go without. More for me.”

I make myself take the can from her and drink a few sips of cold tomato soup. I remember preparing this soup with some of the other volunteers at the donation center, cooking down the tomatoes until they disintegrated.

“My mother said some factionless are better off than others,” I say. “I don’t think this is what she meant.”

“ ‘Better off’ is relative,” Evelyn says. “Now you have a choice to make. You can take off your sweater and use it as a pillow, but then you’ll get cold. Or you can sleep on this sack of cans. Up to you.”

I keep my sweater on and curl my arm beneath my head on one of the pews. I can hear someone weeping in the corner, can hear shuffling and shifting from the man I saw before.

I feel the tears coming, but I choke them down for as long as I can, until I’m sure Evelyn is asleep. Then I let go, let the tears fall hot on my cheeks. I cover my mouth with my hand to stifle my sobs. My mother promised me it would be different here than I was expecting. She promised me it would be better than what I left behind.

Instead it’s a nightmare. And I can’t wake up from it; it’s too late.

I cry until I have nothing left. And even then, tired as I am, all I can manage is a restless sleep that coasts on the edge of waking. Is this what the rest of my life will be like? I wonder as morning approaches, and it sounds like despair.

But just before sunrise, Evelyn walks over to me, her boots already tied and her hair already braided.

“You know, you could go back now and no one would be the wiser,” she says.

It’s tempting. So tempting, in fact, that I can feel the “yes” on the tip of my tongue. My back aches, and I’m full of dread. I think of my bed in the Abnegation dormitory, soft and clean, and the bland-but-familiar breakfast that waits for me in the dining hall.

But then I think about the hard knot of purpose that I tied within myself yesterday, when I decided to leave. My note to my mother. I need answers.

The Candor manifesto says, “Like a wild animal, the truth is too powerful to remain caged.” Maybe there’s more Candor in me than I thought.

“No,” I say.

Evelyn shrugs, and says, “Okay, then. Be ready to move in five. We have to get there before daybreak.”

I don’t know where “there” is, but after I pull my hair back and put on my shoes, we set out on foot. It’s just light enough to see what’s right in front of me, but everything else is shadows. We’re getting closer to the Dauntless sector of the city, which is south of the center and west, near the wall. But we’re not quite there yet.

“As you’ve now observed, there are two types of factionless in this city,” Evelyn says. “The kind who squat in abandoned buildings in their designated sector—and sometimes outside of it. Who line up for water at that little spigot near Abnegation headquarters, and go to the donation center for jars of applesauce and cans of soup and powdered protein, and otherwise stew in all the things they’ve lost or never had to begin with.”

This is another empty area, most of the windows boarded, the streets fallen into disrepair. Unlike the stretch of factionless territory close to Abnegation, though, the buildings are huge here, like stone and glass and steel giants that block out the light of the rising sun.

“But there’s another kind,” she says. “Six years ago, a few of us decided we didn’t have to live that way. We came together, and started building something better, right under the five factions’ noses.”

Evelyn stops me and points across the street, at a shorter, squat building made of red-brown brick. At first I think there’s not much to look at. Just a worn stone facade with the lower-level windows covered in plywood. But she regards it with a strange smile.

“This,” she says, “is the Rookery.”

“We have three safe houses in the city: one is the Rookery, one is the Museum, and one is the Conservatory.”

Evelyn pulls a loose square of plywood off one of the windows and steps through the empty frame it leaves behind. I follow her, and she puts the wood back where it belongs.

“You can live in whichever one you want. But the new strays go here until they figure out what their trade is going to be.”

I’m standing in an old, dusty room that’s completely empty. The walls are cracking, though the floor looks like it’s been repaired in places with new wood.

“Trade?” I say.

“Yes, ‘trade.’ Your work. You do have to make yourself useful, Tris.”

She leads me out of the dusty room, down a hallway, and around a corner.

To something else entirely.