Page 128 of The Sixth Fraction

Christina stands next to me. As the wind dies down and the light goes pink, she takes my hand and squeezes it.

“I’m not glad about what happened to me,” she says. “But I’m glad we met.”

I squeeze her hand back. “Me too.”

Chapter 44

Four

My head is throbbing. I haven’t been sleeping much since that meeting with Natalie Prior. I feel like two people fighting for space in one body. One of those people can’t stop thinking about Tris. What she’s doing. What she’s thinking. How it would feel to touch her.

The other person is a coiled spring, a fragile combustible. He very carefully doesn’t watch Eric from across the dining hall. Doesn’t observe Edward or Will—my last remaining Erudite transfers—in the training room. He’s just waiting for something. Some insight that will tell him what’s coming.

Just waiting.

I’m in line for soup in the cafeteria when Eric sets his tray down next to mine.

There’s no reason why someone like Eric should rattle me. He’s shorter than I am, and though no one would call him weak, he’s sparer, too. I beat him in a fight during initiation, and I’m pretty sure I could do it again, if I had to, since I’m better now than I used to be, and Eric doesn’t spend much time in the training room. But when he’s near me, I always get the urge to bolt.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a few days,” Eric says.

I pick up the ladle in the tureen of soup and scoop some of it into my bowl. It’s a simple vegetable stew today, tomatoes, peas, and potatoes in an herbed broth. Like a lot of our food in Dauntless, it probably has some lab-made protein mixed into it, because the broth looks thicker than it should, and the soup they serve for lunch is always filling.

For the first time, I realize how dependent we must be on Erudite, not just in Dauntless but in the city as a whole. Our food, our fabric, our technology. If they decided to cut us off, for any reason, we would be screwed.

“Oh?” I say. “About what?”

“To find out how your initiates are doing, obviously,” Eric says. “You’ve had a random stabbing and a suicide in the span of a month. Any other calamities I should be looking out for?”

I grit my teeth, but I can’t argue with him. This initiate class has been a disaster, and like it or not, I’m the one in charge of them. So their calamities, as he calls them, reflect poorly on me.

“They’re under stress,” I say. “But they’re fine. Maybe next year you should consider relaxing your more intense policies so your initiates aren’t quite so wired to explode.”

Eric sighs. We slide our trays along the counter, and each of us grabs a hunk of bread from the pile in front of us. I’m hoping that’s the end of our conversation, but he follows me to a table, and sets his tray down across from mine. Luckily he doesn’t sit.

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he says.

“That’s because we have.”

“Fine, let me change it up, then.” He leans forward, onto his hands, so he’s looming over me. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you. I know you’ve been disappearing. No one seems to know where you’re going. So I’m starting to wonder . . . should someone so inattentive really be in charge of our initiates? Someone whose behavior is so . . . unpredictable?”

Eric’s done a good job of fitting into Dauntless. It’s the piercings. The piercings do a lot of work for him, so you almost don’t notice that, despite his shiny metal face and the bluster of Dauntless toxicity he spouts, he’s really just watching everything. Everyone.

Me.

I didn’t tell Tris’s mother that Jeanine and Eric accessed my records, that they probably suspect I’m Divergent. But if I needed confirmation that Eric is keeping too close an eye on me, I just got it.

My face heats, but I don’t want him to see me squirm. I take a bite of bread and look up at him as I chew it, taking my time.

“That’s funny,” I say. “Because you’ve been disappearing, too, haven’t you?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“No? So that wasn’t you in Erudite headquarters the other day? You’re not exactly hard to identify, you know. Might want to keep that kind of behavior quieter if you don’t want people to notice.”

His dark eyes are cold.

“I see,” he says. “You’ve been talking to that girl. The one who told me she’s just a young Dauntless who misses her brother.” He makes a show of looking around the cafeteria. “Don’t see her here, do you?”