Page 73 of The Sixth Fraction

Fernando steps forward a few minutes later, some kind of metal wedge in hand, with triangular struts to hold its shape. He puts it in the path of the first set of doors, obviously hoping it will be strong enough to keep them from slamming. He has to yank his hand back to keep it from getting caught; the doors crush the wedge he made into fragments, sending bits of metal flying in every direction. Fernando curses and jumps back.

Caleb looks at the bits and pieces of what Fernando made, and it seems clear to him that anything he could construct with his bare hands is not going to stand up to the strength of those doors. So the scrap heap must be a misdirection. Just because the doors seem to be slamming at random intervals doesn’t mean they really are random. There’s a pattern. And once he figures out what that pattern is, he can make his way past them.

He gets up to take a scrap of paper from the pile and a broken pencil, and then starts to take notes. He marks each door and writes down which ones are open or closed at any given moment. For a long time he keeps marking the page, hoping a pattern will emerge. “O-O-O-C,” he writes, the O’s for “open” and the C’s for “closed.” “C-C-O-O-C.”

He’s running out of space on the page, so he starts writing hash marks instead of C’s, and that’s when he sees it.

He’s writing in binary.

His heart skips a beat. He starts translating his notes into ones and zeroes instead of C’s and O’s.

T-I-E-N

T-B-E

P-A-T-I

E-N-T-

Caleb laughs when he recognizes the repeating phrase: “BE PATIENT.” He scrambles to his feet and stands right in front of the first set of doors. His body is shaking. Any small errors in his timing and he could get seriously injured, a foot or a hand crushed between the powerful doors.

Or a skull—they could probably also crush a skull.

He waits for the doors to slam a few times before he decides on the correct timing for the first set. Then he moves, darting forward immediately after the doors close. They slam right behind him, the force of their movement creating a rush of air that he can feel against the back of his neck.

He keeps moving. The next letter is 01000101, so the second door will be closed, then open, then closed again. He rushes past the second threshold, and he’s at the third. It’s usually open—it only slams on the third and the final letter in the sequence. He waits for the final one to pass, and then keeps moving.

He’s at the fifth set of doors when he makes his first mistake, misunderstanding his place in the sequence and almost stepping into the path of the crushing doors. He leaps back just in time, his heart racing, and has to stop, legs trembling, to get his bearings. For a moment he’s lost in the uneven rhythm of the slamming, unsure where the sequence starts or ends. He closes his eyes and thinks about his breathing.

In. Out.

Be patient.

Shaking out his hands, Caleb continues. He makes it past the fifth set of doors. The sixth. The end of the hallway is in sight, a simple wooden door. He moves past the seventh, and then the last.

He’s finished.

He did it.

Caleb looks back at the others, some of whom are just now making their way down the hallway, the same way he did. But he did it first.

Grinning, Caleb opens the door.

He surfaces from the simulation. He’s standing in the courtyard pool, a lily pad near his bare ankle. All around him, the other initiates are still standing with their eyes closed, motionless as they move through the labyrinth in their minds. As it always does when he emerges from a simulation, he feels foolish for thinking there was an actual hallway of slamming doors inside of Erudite headquarters. It seems strange that his mind can’t process that he’s in a simulation while he’s in one. But that’s the way they work for everyone.

He steps closer to Cara, and she smiles at him.

“Congratulations,” she says. “You’re the first.”

And Caleb says, with not a trace of Abnegation bashfulness: “I know.”

Jeanine Matthews looks startled when he opens the door to her office. As the first initiate to pass his final test, his reward is to meet with the faction’s representative directly so that he can request his internship placement. Every Erudite initiate does an internship for their first three months in the faction, and then they go on to additional schooling. And only the first three to finish the final labyrinth get to meet with Jeanine Matthews.

Her hair is pulled back into a neat twist today, a pair of glasses perched on her delicate nose. Up close, he can see that her pale skin is freckled across the bridge of her nose and her forehead. She’s sitting behind her desk, which is made of polished glass and stacked high with papers. When she overcomes her shock at seeing him there, she stands, and extends a hand for him to shake.

“Well done, Mr. Prior,” she says. “I’m delighted to see how much you’ve improved since you arrived.”

“Thank you.” He shakes her hand and sits in one of the chairs across from her desk.