Page 68 of The Sixth Fraction

“Banjo.”

“What’s the difference between that and a guitar? It’s rounder?”

“If you heard them both alone, you wouldn’t ask me that question. Fiddle.”

“That one’s easy, it has a stick.”

“It’s a bow.”

“Looks like a stick to me. What’s that shiny tube again?”

“The tube? Are you referring to the flute?” Rory’s cheeks are red, but she pauses and narrows her eyes at me. “Oh my God. Are you messing with me?”

I grin. “Maybe.”

“You know, Tris, you’re growing a sense of humor at an alarming rate.”

I guess she’s right. Last week I was still holding my tongue all the time. This week I’m getting a playful punch on the arm from Rory. It feels like progress.

The guitarist is still plucking the same string over and over again, then holding his head close to the wooden belly of the instrument to listen to it. The people gathered in the middle of the atrium, ready to dance, seem restless.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember you were Abnegation,” Christina says, while the fiddle player sets the beat with her toe.

I want to tell her it’s hard for me to remember, too—hard to relate to the version of myself that cut my hand and spilled my blood on the stones. And not just because I later discovered how far Abnegation’s leadership would go to cover up the truth, but because of the days before that, when I walked the hallways of headquarters every night and tried to convince myself I could fit into my faction’s mold.

Now it seems clear to me that the only way I could have is by crushing myself into a new shape.

“Really?” I say, trying to keep my tone light. “I’m told I have an uptight quality.”

She shrugs. “You’re like Four. He’s conservative by Dauntless standards. But he has . . . edges. Like you.”

I feel unsteady, like I’m sitting on a chair with uneven legs. I’m not used to people looking at me—really looking at me, not just piecing together gray clothes and a plain face and deciding they’ve seen enough.

I can’t decide if I like it. There’s freedom in no one noticing you. But there’s loneliness, too.

“Do you know what that nickname’s about?” I ask her, eager to change the subject. “ ‘Four’?”

“A lot of Dauntless have nicknames from initiation. Usually they’re related to the fear simulations, though, and I never got to that phase of initiation,” she says. “But I never asked him. I was actually kind of afraid of him—he’s not exactly warm and fuzzy.”

I think of his dark eyes on mine. He’s intimidating, sure, but I was never afraid of him. Frustrated with him, maybe.

“I don’t know,” I say. “He didn’t seem that scary to me.”

The look she gives me is a little sly. “How did he seem, then?”

“Exceptionally good-looking,” Colin says.

I jump a little; I didn’t know he was standing behind me.

“Sorry, was that question only for Tris?”

Christina raises her eyebrows at me. “Care to weigh in?”

“I mean, it’s not up for debate,” I say. “You have eyes; you’ve seen him.”

“Correction,” Christina says. “I have eye.”

I clap a hand over my mouth as I realize what I said. “I’m so sorry,” I say, against my palm.