Page 141 of The Sixth Fraction

Jeanine looks over her shoulder at him. The teapot is on the counter, with a strainer full of dried leaves already inside it. The sun has long since set, but the pot reflects the overhead lights like a glittering stone.

As usual, she doesn’t look alarmed. She just turns to face him, and waits.

“I’ve been keeping something from you,” Caleb says. “Something my mother asked me to do— I didn’t do it!” He hastens to add the last part. “But I should have told you what she asked for.”

“I appreciate that you didn’t act on this,” Jeanine says calmly. “But what did your mother ask you to do, Caleb?”

“She asked me to compare the aptitude test results from the past few years to the number of Erudite faction transfers,” Caleb says. “I don’t know why. She delivered the message through my sister.”

Jeanine sighs quietly. She gestures to the chair by the window that’s usually his.

“Sit, Caleb,” she says. “This will be a difficult conversation, though perhaps not for the reason you think.”

Caleb is trembling a little. Just the edges of him, like a leaf in the wind. He perches on the chair that he’s come to think of as his, and watches Jeanine pour the hot water into the teapot, watches her gather up the mugs and carry both pot and mugs over to the little table between their two chairs. Then she sits and looks out at the city below. He follows her gaze to the idyllic Erudite sector that’s now dark—but during the day, it’s full of children playing with binoculars, adults having picnics and playing chess, teenagers reading in the shade.

And beyond it, the rest of the city—troubled, broken, and as strange to him now as anywhere outside the Abnegation sector used to be.

“I am not angry with you,” Jeanine says. “Family loyalty is a difficult thing to shake. No matter how much we all insist ‘faction before blood,’ a mantra is not a reality.”

For perhaps the first time, he wonders where Jeanine came from. She seems Erudite-born, so he assumes her parents are still alive, still here, yet he never hears about them. She must not have siblings, either. In his mind she stands alone, singular, unique.

“That’s why I’ve delayed talking to you about your mother. I didn’t want to complicate things for you before you were ready.” She looks at him, now, her expression grave. “Your mother is not who she claims to be, Caleb.”

Caleb nods. He knows this already, like he told Beatrice the day she came to Erudite headquarters. He’s been thinking about how often his mother got her way without appearing to get her way. And smaller moments, too—when her posture shifted, or her gait, or she used words she wasn’t supposed to. Like a snake that’s still shedding its skin, she wore two versions of herself at the same time.

“To the world, Natalie Prior presents the image of the perfect Abnegation wife and mother,” Jeanine says. “But she uses her position as a council member’s wife to influence other people. I believe, for example, that she’s the one who encouraged your sister to defect from Abnegation and become factionless—not because it was the best thing for Beatrice but because Natalie wanted eyes on them.”

He remembers asking his sister why she left Abnegation. I just made the wrong choice, and I couldn’t live with it. That was the only answer she gave, despite his insistence that something must have happened to make her do something so drastic. Is it so difficult to believe that their mother might have nudged her along?

“She has also been complicit in covering up the most troubling reports that have surfaced from Abnegation,” Jeanine says, still in that grave tone. “About the Memory Vault. Have you seen any of those?”

Caleb frowns. “The ones about Dauntless wall guards emerging from the vault with memory loss?”

“Precisely,” Jeanine says. “Your former faction has always been secretive about what exactly happens in the Memory Vault. They claim its function is merely to store memories that are important to the city’s history. To keep a record of what’s happening in all factions. And we trust them, don’t we? People of all factions, selected seemingly at random, report to the Memory Vault every month to share their recollections.”

She tilts her head.

“But no faction computer is made to do only one thing. So if their Memory Vault has the capacity to store a memory,” she says, “it must have other functions, Caleb. Until we started hearing reports of memory gaps, we weren’t sure exactly what those functions could be. But it seems clear to me, now, what the Memory Vault is designed to do.”

His throat feels tight. “To erase memories, you mean.”

Jeanine nods.

“Imagine, if you will, that you endure a great hardship in your life. A loss, or a trauma, or an impossible challenge,” Jeanine says. “Imagine what would happen if I erased it from your memory. You would still feel it, but you would have no idea what that feeling was attached to. No explanation for why you felt the way you did. Imagine what that would do to you.”

Caleb imagines a feeling with no explanation, the mind reaching for sense when sense isn’t available. Like a broken circuit, electricity running through it with nowhere for it to go, energy with no focus.

“Or . . .” Jeanine leans forward, her eyes intent on his. “Imagine I take this technology a step further. Imagine I decide to extract some essential part of you. Your memories of having a sister, for example. Your memory of choosing Erudite. Your entire childhood. I could make you into an only child, a good little Abnegation soldier, or a blank slate, if I decided it served my interests. That is what the Memory Vault’s technology can accomplish.”

Fear is humming in his chest like an engine. Caleb has never thought of a person this way, as a program that can be overwritten if you don’t like the way it’s functioning. But it’s not so absurd to think of the human brain as a system of complex circuitry, electricity lighting up its neurons, data rushing in and out with every breath, every heartbeat. So is it difficult, then, to think of a person the way you think of a computer—something you can program, alter, or even destroy, if you have the right tools?

He takes a shuddering breath.

“Abnegation is more powerful than we could ever imagine,” Jeanine says. “The ability to control what information people know or don’t know is the ability to control minds. To control identities. To control . . . everything.”

The tea is still sitting in its pot, untouched.

Jeanine’s gray eyes are on his.