Page 26 of The Sixth Fraction

“Why didn’t it work? Is there something wrong with me?”

My mother brings her hand up to my hair, to smooth it behind my ear.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the way you were born. But what you are, what you can do . . .” Her hand cups the back of my head, and she bends down to look into my eyes. “You can never let anyone know. Never. Those who have . . . they end up dead. Do you understand?”

A tremor moves through me at the word “dead.” Somehow I didn’t realize, when Tori told me being Divergent was dangerous, that she was worried I would die.

I think of the factionless woman from the Choosing Ceremony attack, the needle in her neck, dead on the ground. Her body bent into the wrong shape.

“Do you?” my mother demands, more harshly this time.

My breath catches. I’ve never heard her like this before. Even when she reprimands me, my mother doesn’t sound like this, rough and intense.

“Yes. Yes, I understand.”

Her eyes stay on mine for a few seconds more, and then she releases me.

“What do I do now? Now that I’ve seen—now that I know—” I ask, struggling to put it all into words. Knowing Evelyn’s alive, knowing my father helped cover it up, that my faction erases memories—it changes things. But I’m not sure how.

“That’s up to you,” she says. “You can pretend that the memory excision worked. You can finish your initiation, and forget all of this, and continue your life in Abnegation. That would be the safest path.” She pauses, considering, before going on. “You can also do all that, but instead of pretending it didn’t happen, you can commit yourself to finding answers from inside Abnegation. You can work your way through the ranks until you have authority, and then you can change things from within. That would take time, but it might help you to have a goal.”

I try to imagine it. Going to sleep tonight in the initiate dormitory, ignoring Mary’s snores and Susan’s quiet sobs. Waking up tomorrow to meditate and make breakfast, like everything is the same. Like I’m happy here, only . . . I wasn’t happy before, either.

And then I think about my father. Passing him in the street and offering him a smile, like he didn’t try to scour my brain of a memory against my will. Going over to my parents’ house every week or so for dinner, and making conversation like I’m not holding the image of Evelyn Eaton toting a gun—a real gun—in my mind.

My mother looks at her shoes for a few seconds. Then her eyes lift to mine, and maybe there’s trepidation in them, or maybe it’s in me, so it’s all I see. I know what she’s about to say, and I say it for her.

“Or,” I say, “there’s another option, isn’t there?”

I can leave Abnegation completely.

I can defect.

In that moment, as the setting sun burns orange against the brick of the alley, all I can think is that I want to stand at the metal bowls again and move my hand just a few inches to the side to bleed on the coals instead.

The faction system is everything I know, and everything I believe in. A path toward peace. A perfect order. Room for every kind of person to find a place where they fit. It allows us to be distinct without conflict but to be unified in purpose. The faction system is good.

I don’t decide to speak. The words just launch from my body: “I failed.”

My mother takes me by the shoulders, holding me tightly enough that I have to look at her.

“Listen to me. You did not fail; Abnegation failed you.” Her voice is all edges. “Even before the excision, you were trying to make yourself smaller to fit into this faction’s little box, and I could hardly stand it.”

“Will it get better? After initiation?”

“Oh, Beatrice.” She sighs my name. “I wish I could tell you it would,” she says softly. “But Abnegation won’t get any safer for your singular mind. It won’t expand to fit you. It won’t be better enough.”

And I know, deep down where the truth lives in my body, that she’s right. A life here would be a life of pretending, and not just pretending my father didn’t try to take away my memories, or that the faction doesn’t do that routinely—but pretending not to be curious. Pretending to be quiet.

Pretending that I’m not myself.

“I think I have to leave,” I say.

My tears spill over. They make my cheeks hot. And once I feel them, there’s no stopping them. I cover my eyes with my hands and sob into my palms.

My mother gathers me close.

“It’s all right,” she whispers against my hair. “It’s all right, Beatrice, just let it out.”