Page 48 of The Sixth Fraction

“Man, there’s already three of you in there, how many factionless does it take to run this place?” the sentry says. She’s Jove’s age, her eyes creasing at the corners like she’s had a lifetime of laughter. Right now, she seems to be laughing at our expense.

There’s a name tag on her chest, which means she’s an officer. It reads “Weaver.”

“Sounds like the setup to a joke,” another sentry—this one younger—says. “ ‘How many factionless does it take to clean some water?’ ”

“An infinite number!” someone chimes in. “Because the more they clean it, the dirtier it gets.”

Jove doesn’t take the bait, but I can see the tension in her shoulders.

“These are newbies,” Jove says. “They just need to learn the process.”

“Newbies, huh.” The younger sentry, who told the joke setup, looks me over in a way I don’t like. “So young, and already so empty of potential.”

My face burns. Rory reaches over and grabs my arm, like she’s trying to hold me back, even though I haven’t moved.

“Fine, whatever,” the first sentry—Weaver—says to Jove. “Just don’t cause any problems.”

Weaver steps aside, and we walk past her in a line. I don’t meet her eyes.

I expect to climb stairs to the top of the overpass, but when Jove leads us through a door, the steps take us down, beneath the street. They’re lit by strips of blue light that are too dim for me to see anything other than my feet. The air smells like mildew.

At the bottom of the stairs, we walk down a long corridor. The walls here are wet, and I can hear dripping somewhere. Through another door, and my mouth falls open.

We’re in a cavernous space, so big I can’t see the limits of it. And standing in front of us are huge, cylindrical tanks, each one as big as a house. All around me is the sound of churning and humming. I’ve never seen anything like it.

“All right, buddy up and find someone to shadow,” Jove says.

Rory turns to me with her fist resting on her open palm. After a few days of this I now recognize the gesture. I mimic her, and so does Colin. On a count of three, Rory and Colin both stick out their first two fingers, and I only stick out one. They give me an apologetic look.

“Prior, you’re with me,” Jove says. “Evelyn told me to keep an eye on you anyway.”

I follow Jove into the field of tanks. She climbs a set of metal stairs next to the second one, and we climb up to a platform one story above the ground, where a bearded factionless man is standing over a huge plastic container.

From here I can see into the story-high tank. It’s full of dark, murky water—like the water that runs into the storm drains when it rains. It smells like rotten leaves and mud.

“Hey, Carr,” she says. “This is Tris. She’s a stray. Tris, this is Carr, he’s here every shift.”

“If you find work you like, keep doing it,” Carr says to me, though I didn’t ask.

“What guild are you in?” I ask.

“Fixers,” he says. “We work out of the Museum.”

The Museum, I’ve learned, is the largest of the three factionless safe houses. I still don’t know what that means, exactly, in terms of numbers. But I counted the chairs in the Rookery the other day, and there were one hundred.

Jove snaps to get my attention.

“Whoever built this place made the process as automated as possible, so there only have to be three people in here a day, Carr included. We sign up for shifts once a month. Everyone is either Step One, Step Two, or Step Three—lucky you, you get to be Step One,” Jove says to me. “That bottle is full of coagulant.” She points to the container at Carr’s feet. It’s half my size. The coagulant inside it is tinted blue. “All you have to do is lug some coagulant over from the storage room, pour it into this big tank—”

Carr bends down and heaves the container into his arms, which are as thick as my legs. He tips the coagulant into the tank beside us. I listen to the glug glug glug as it empties.

“Then you turn on the spinners, which is probably not the right name for them, but there won’t be a quiz,” Jove says, and Carr sets the container down, then turns to reveal a small control panel with three buttons on it. One is green, one is red, and one is blue. He presses the green one.

“And the coagulant makes all the dirt in the water stick together in a mass. Once the churn is over, the blue button gets rid of all the masses, and Step Two will come in to finish purifying. But that’s not our business—all we do is move along to another tank and do the same thing all over again. Any questions?”

“Who makes the coagulant?” I ask.

“Who else? Erudite, in their printing labs,” Jove says. “They make all kinds of things in there.”