Page 151 of The Sixth Fraction

“There are Dauntless in the streets,” she says. “Young. Initiates, maybe. They’re targeting the council. Caleb came to us an hour ago to warn us the attack was coming.” I feel her hands on my shoulders, and I open my eyes. That hard look she was wearing a few minutes ago, the one that made her look like a stranger, is gone. She’s my mother again. “Beatrice, we have to run.”

I remember Eric shouting Go after them! I cross the room and open the back door. There are wooden stairs that zigzag down to a stone patio, and beyond it, the alley behind Building A. I start to run, the heavy, still feeling of looking at Abigail Baker’s body fading to the background.

We run into the alley, toward the street. The sun hasn’t yet crept over the horizon. Soon the earliest risers in Abnegation will be awake, meditating, preparing breakfast for their loved ones, already on their hands and knees in the community gardens, tending to the plants. I hear a gunshot in the distance.

My mother is about to step out of the alley when I hear running footsteps. I yank her back just before two Dauntless rush past us. I recognize one of them from my classes. A girl, the one who’s always laughing. Uriah’s friend.

She isn’t laughing now. Her eyes are glazed, her jaw clenched. I tense in anticipation of her seeing us, but she doesn’t see us, doesn’t even look in our direction. There’s something not right about her.

“They must be in a simulation,” I say once the footsteps have faded.

“You might be right about that,” my mother says. “Let’s go.”

We run side by side. Everything looks so normal. A quiet street, cracked but clean. The windows of Abnegation headquarters, clean and polished and dark. Another gunshot, and I wonder if that one hit my father. I shudder involuntarily at the memory of his body on the floor in the fear simulation. The back of his head—

“There! They’re right there!” a voice calls out, and there’s another gunshot.

“Run!” my mother screams, and I do.

A dark shape barrels out of the alley from the side and slams into me. I fall, smacking my head on the pavement. The boy from Marcus’s apartment, the one with the light brown hair, grabs my arm and wrenches me to my feet.

I twist, trying to get away from him, but his fingers only tighten around my arm. He’s stronger than I am; much stronger. I dig my heels into the pavement, and he yanks me forward, half dragging and half carrying me until I’m pressed up against a brick wall.

Then the cold barrel of the gun is against my head. In that moment, all I can think is that I’m just getting started. Just getting to know what I’m good at and what I’m not, who I am and who I’m not and who I could be. I’m just starting to understand what people mean when they say they’re in love. Everything I feel and everything I am is a tiny shoot poking out of the dirt—it’s only the start of something, and this boy is about to take it away.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

Instead of resignation, all I feel is want. I want to live. I want to survive. I want I want I want—

I hear a bang, and I wonder if it’s another gunshot in the distance, or if it’s the one that’s about to kill me. Maybe time slows down in the moments before you die, so you can hear everything leading up to it; maybe a part of me really will live on, like the religious leaders of my youth taught me, maybe—

“Go!” my mother screams, and just like I did when I first jumped on a train, I trust her. I lurch to the side and start running. It’s only as I’m moving away from the alley that I piece together what just happened: The bang was my mother firing at the boy.

I look over my shoulder to see the boy, still alive, grabbing his arm with a look of agony on his face. My mother is right behind me, her eyes wide.

I run. I sprint across the street. I can hear her feet chasing mine, and another set—the boy’s, as he pursues us.

My mother catches up to me and grabs my hand.

“Push through that door!” she says, and I don’t question which door, I just shove the first one I see. I stumble into the water-reclamation building across the street from Abnegation headquarters.

My mother pulls the door closed behind us and grabs a nearby chair to shove it under the door handle.

We’re in a huge warehouse space, with a water tank in the center of it, twice as wide as it is tall, like a giant bowl. My mother’s hand is sweaty as she tugs me around the tank. The door we just went through shudders; he’s trying to kick it down.

I think we’re going to keep running, but my mother turns to me, instead. She reaches under the collar of her shirt.

“We don’t have much time.” She tugs on a chain and pulls a locket up from beneath her clothes. She drags it over her head, pulling some of the pins out of her hair as she does. “Take this. You can use it to find my journal; it’ll tell you everything you need to know. I hope it’ll help you understand that I did what I had to do.”

I feel the nag of dread, insistent as a child tugging on my hand to get my attention. I take the locket and drop it over my head. Its weight settles against my sternum. Her eyes are insistent on mine.

The door shudders again. And again.

My mother gives me the gun she’s holding. She wasn’t holding it a few minutes ago, so she must have taken it from whoever attacked us in the street.

“Take this, too. You might need a backup.” She reaches behind her, under her jacket, to take out another weapon. This one has a fluorescent strip on its side—it’s a needle gun. She turns the safety off, and says, “Go to the meeting point to find your father. Do you remember that old church you always wanted to go into as a kid? And your father told you it was too dangerous? Well, that was a lie, it’s perfectly safe—”

“Stop! Stop talking like you’re not coming with me,” I say.