Page 56 of The Sixth Fraction

“He’s earned it.” Zeke grabs the bread from me and sets it on the counter next to his mother.

She’s chopping raw meat—a rare thing even in Dauntless—with a huge knife. Uriah is stirring a pot of red sauce on the stove. His lip is split from yesterday’s fight against one of the other Dauntless-borns. Brett. Brody. I can’t remember.

Zeke stands at the other counter, an onion in hand. He turns it stem up on the cutting board and holds the knife over it.

“Stop,” I say. “Don’t mangle a perfectly good onion.”

“I’m not going to mangle it.”

“Yes you are.” I cringe. “Hand over the knife.”

Zeke sets down the knife and backs away from the counter, his hands up like I’m about to arrest him. I stand at the cutting board and turn the onion. It’s been a few months since I’ve done this—I don’t bother with more than the necessities when I cook for myself—but it’s not something you forget.

“No one is going to believe me when I tell them about this tomorrow,” Uriah says.

“When you tell them that I’m extremely good with a knife?” I say, pointing it at him. “They absolutely will.”

“Uriah, I believe I told you to carry Mrs. Davis’s laundry up to her so she doesn’t try to do it herself,” Hana says. “Ezekiel, set the table.”

“Dinner’s not even close to ready.”

“Then you have plenty of time to do it correctly.”

Zeke and Uriah both disappear, and I concentrate on slicing the onion lengthwise, not enough to break it apart, not yet. For a few long seconds I’m listening to the chopping, and the bubbling of the pot on the stove, and the hiss of water as Hana rinses something in the sink, and it reminds me of home.

And thinking about home makes my throat tighten.

“So, tell me. How is Uriah doing, really?” Hana asks me.

“He’s doing well,” I say, a little surprised. “Very. He didn’t tell you?”

“I don’t mean his ranking. I mean—he’s getting along with everyone? He’s well-behaved?”

I laugh. I don’t tell her that, at this point, if an initiate isn’t attacking his peers in the training room, I’m happy with their behavior.

“Yes.” I run my finger across the flat of the knife to push the last bits of onion onto the board and then look over my shoulder at her. “You have nothing to worry about with Uriah.”

“And you? How are you doing?”

I offer her the cutting board. She nods toward the pot. “In there, please.”

I add the onions to the pot in batches, and then stir them into the sauce. The smell of it is strong—complicated. Nothing I’ve eaten before. My mouth waters, and I almost forget what she asked me.

“Ezekiel tells me you spend a lot of time in your fear simulations,” she says.

I keep stirring.

“You must understand,” she says. “I think everyone needs someone to worry about them.”

The and you don’t seem to have anyone goes unsaid. I set the spoon to the side.

“This particular initiate class has been stressful,” I say to her. “And I’ve always had a peculiar way of dealing with stress. I guess.”

Hana tucks her hair behind one ear. She’s wearing earrings that I recognize from the photographs in the entryway—her late husband’s old pair. I wonder, for a moment, what they must have been like together. Did they fight? Did they make jokes? Both?

“You’re very disciplined,” she says. “That’s not a bad thing. But be careful that you don’t use discipline to punish yourself. So to speak.”

I think, suddenly, of her. I’ve thought about her a lot in the past few days, Beatrice, a Stiff name for a factionless girl—or rather, I’ve thought about what she said to me. You don’t quite fit no matter where you are. Even in Dauntless, even with as good as I am at all the things they told me to be good at, I’m still not quite right, am I? The alternative—that you’re the one who’s broken—is too much to bear.