Page 78 of The Sixth Fraction

“He’s a careful person. I suppose I taught him to be.” She doesn’t meet my eyes. She’s focused on the city beyond the train. “I won’t ask you to keep trying to persuade him if you don’t want to. But if you do find a way to see him again—maybe when you’re a Fox . . .” She shrugs. “It wouldn’t hurt to give him a point of contact among the factionless. One he trusts more than me.”

I don’t think Tobias Eaton will ever trust me, but I don’t tell her so. If Evelyn wants to give me an ongoing mission, wants to support me becoming a Fox, I’m not going to argue with her.

“It’s almost my stop,” she says. “You should go back to the Museum. It’s not safe for us to wander around alone these days. But listen—”

She steps back into the car, and looks me in the eye.

“One of the Foxes’ banners is at the Ferris wheel,” she says.

“What?” I say. “Can you even tell me that?”

Evelyn grins.

“I can do as I please,” she says. “But in this case, I’m doing it because you’ve done me a favor, and I want to repay it. And because I think you’ll be a good Fox. Be careful, though—tomorrow is the annual game of capture the flag that the Dauntless initiates do, so they’ll be anywhere and everywhere. Better to avoid them, if you can.”

She quirks her eyebrows and then jumps off the train. I swallow a gasp. I didn’t even realize we were approaching a platform. I grab the handle next to the door and lean out into the dark to watch her figure running toward the stairs. From here, she could be going anywhere.

The Ferris wheel, I think. It’s a good place to start.

Chapter 26

Four

Zeke holsters his gun and grabs the coffee cup right out of my hands. “Bless you, Four. The stuff they have out here is garbage water.”

Technically, wall guards aren’t supposed to put their weapons—which are loaded with lethal ammunition, not needles—away while they’re on patrol, but it’s early in the morning and there’s nothing going on. Even if it were afternoon, there would be nothing going on. Wall patrol is a high-status detail, only for the most trustworthy and skilled Dauntless, but it’s also mind-numbingly boring.

What I can see from this vantage point is: nothing. A flat expanse of land overgrown with plants and blanketed by fog that will dissipate by midmorning. Here and there I can see the remnants of whatever world preceded us, patches of pavement and bits of sidewalk, the outline of a building’s foundation in the ground, a strip of train tracks like a stray eyelash.

“You ever see anything out there?” I say.

For a second Zeke’s eyes go blank, like he’s sleepwalking. Then he blinks, and the blank look is gone.

“A whole herd of deer ran past a few days ago,” Zeke says. “One guy decided to shoot at them, and he got tackled by three people simultaneously. Luckily he’s got bad aim.”

“Bad aim, and he’s still a wall guard?”

“The monotony wears on some people,” Zeke says. “Case in point, later today we have to do a full inventory because some idiot miscounted the weapons deliveries. We’re missing an entire crate full of guns is what that means. How do you miscount an entire crate?”

I shake my head. As difficult as my job sometimes is, I wouldn’t trade it for the tedium of Zeke’s. He chose it because he likes to be outside and he doesn’t mind being alone with his thoughts, he says. But for some reason, even though I like to be alone, I never considered it. I think I wanted to do something more . . . constructive.

More selfless? A voice in my head asks me.

My thoughts slide back to my conversation with Tris last week. You know where I’m from, and you think that’s enough—that’s what I said to her. Like when I came here, I rooted out the Abnegation parts of me and put them on the coals to burn.

Sure. Like that’s even possible.

So tell me what I should know, Tris replied, eyes steady on mine.

“What brings you to this fine establishment early in the morning?” Zeke says, gesturing to the emptiness around him. The next post is so far away from him that the guard looks like a black smudge.

“Quarterly check on the signal repeaters,” I say.

“Right. Signal repeaters.” Zeke frowns. “I totally understand what those are and definitely don’t need them explained for the fifth time.”

The fence that encloses our city isn’t only protected by guards. It’s protected by a layer of fear simulations generated by the Dauntless computer—but even though Dauntless headquarters is close to the wall, the Dauntless computer can’t reach this far on its own. So there are signal repeaters fixed to the wall to channel the computer’s simulations and project them outward.

Anyone approaching the city from outside would enter the projection zone and be confronted by their worst nightmares, which would give the wall guards ample time to shoot them down.