Page 155 of The Sixth Fraction

“Can I look at it?” he says.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Caleb and my father clutched together, Caleb’s head buried in my father’s shoulder as he sobs. I feel like there’s something selfish in that, my brother daring to take comfort from a man who’s just lost his wife.

Because I’m the parent, and you’re the child.

I shudder. Tobias is pulling my jacket down and away from my arm. I look down at the wound. It’s a bloody mess. He prods it, gently, squinting through the dark to look at it.

“I think the bullet went right through you,” he says. He stands, tapping my shoulder. “There’s the exit wound.”

“Is that good?” I ask him.

“Very,” he replies. “We just need to wrap it until we can get you to a doctor.”

“Here,” a deep voice says.

I look up to see Marcus Eaton standing off to the side, holding out a bundle of fabric. It’s his shirt—he still has an undershirt on, with his gray jacket over it, but he must have taken off his middle layer.

“Use it to bind the wound,” he says.

The sight of him makes rage surge inside me so suddenly that I feel sick. How can he stand to put on that sympathetic expression, that gentle voice, when he’s such a monster beneath them both? I still remember the way he looked when he raised a hand to his son. Wild. Out of control.

Tobias takes the shirt and starts ripping the fabric.

I hear, off in the distance, another gunshot. I think of Abigail Baker, lying on the bed, her arm outstretched. There are twenty-five council members. How many of them are still alive? How many of them will stay alive, with simulation-bound Dauntless hunting them down?

“We have to go.”

“We’re not going anywhere right now.” Tobias is standing in front of me, now, one leg between my knees and the other kneeling on the pew so he can wrap a strip of fabric around my arm. He ties it tight, then grabs another one.

“No, I mean . . . we need to go to Dauntless headquarters,” I say. “That’s where the simulation must be coming from, if it’s affecting only Dauntless initiates.”

“Are you sure?” Caleb’s voice sounds rough, but he’s no longer sobbing, at least. He clears his throat. “How would the computer reach that far?”

“Signal repeater,” Tobias says without looking away from me. “Eric’s wearing one.”

“A portable signal repeater? That sounds—” Caleb starts, but I interrupt him.

“This won’t stop until the simulation stops,” I say.

I can feel the grief inside me like a gathering storm. The tension of it, and the rumble of thunder in the distance, and the dark clouds amassing. But it’s not here yet. Right now, I’m still in the numbness of shock.

I may as well make use of it.

Tobias studies me for a few seconds and then nods.

“Okay,” he says. “We’ll go.”

“She doesn’t need to do that,” my father says. “Look at her, she’s—”

I stand up, holding my injured arm against my stomach. “You’re welcome to stay here. But I’m going.”

“I am not leaving you alone with this,” my father says softly.

Bitter words come to me then. Angry words. And true words, too—that I remember what he tried to do to me in the Memory Vault, that I know he and my mother were fighting. I swallow them all down.

“We’ll go together,” Marcus says as if it’s decided already. “Lead the way.”

It feels like I’m dreaming. There can’t be a reality where I’m racing down the street in the Abnegation sector with Marcus Eaton at my heels, a bullet wound in my arm and a gun in my hand. Or where I’m running along a train platform behind my brother, screaming at him to jump. Or where I’m watching the sunrise from between the passing buildings, its light diffused by the cloud cover, and listening to Tobias talking to my brother.