“So you were all Abnegation, huh?” He shovels several noodles and a piece of carrot into his mouth, and passes the can to the woman on his left.
“We were,” I say. “But obviously Tobias and I transferred, and . . .” Suddenly it occurs to me that I shouldn’t tell anyone Caleb joined Erudite. “Caleb and Susan are still Abnegation.”
“And he’s your brother. Caleb,” he says. “You ditched your family to become Dauntless?”
“You sound like the Candor,” I say irritably. “Mind keeping your judgments to yourself?”
Therese leans over. “He was Erudite first, actually. Not Candor.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, “I—”
She interrupts me. “So was I. Had to leave, though.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t smart enough.” She shrugs and takes a can of beans from Edward, plunging her spoon into it. “I didn’t get a high enough score on my initiation intelligence test. So they said, ‘Spend your entire life cleaning up the research labs, or leave.’ And I left.”
She looks down and licks her spoon clean. I take the beans from her and pass them along to Tobias, who is staring at the fire.
“Are many of you from Erudite?” I say.
Therese shakes her head. “Most are from Dauntless, actually.” She jerks her head toward Edward, who scowls. “Then Erudite, then Candor, then a handful of Amity. No one fails Abnegation initiation, though, so we have very few of those, except for a bunch who survived the simulation attack and came to us for refuge.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about Dauntless,” I say.
“Well, yeah. You’ve got one of the worst initiations, and there’s that whole old-age thing.”
“Old-age thing?” I say. I glance at Tobias. He is listening now, and he looks almost normal again, his eyes thoughtful and dark in the firelight.
“Once the Dauntless reach a certain level of physical deterioration,” he says, “they are asked to leave. In one way or another.”
“What’s the other way?” My heart pounds, like it already knows an answer I can’t face without prompting.
“Let’s just say,” says Tobias, “that for some, death is preferable to factionlessness.”
“Those people are idiots,” says Edward. “I’d rather be factionless than Dauntless.”
“How fortunate that you ended up where you did, then,” says Tobias coldly.
“Fortunate?” Edward snorts. “Yeah. I’m so fortunate, with my one eye and all.”
“I seem to recall hearing rumors that you provoked that attack,” says Tobias.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “He was winning, that’s all, and Peter was jealous, so he just . . .”
I see the smirk on Edward’s face and stop talking. Maybe I don’t know everything about what happened during initiation.
“There was an inciting incident,” says Edward. “In which Peter did not come out the victor. But it certainly didn’t warrant a butter knife to the eye.”
“No arguments here,” says Tobias. “If it makes you feel any better, he got shot in the arm from a foot away during the simulation attack.”
And it does seem to make Edward feel better, because his smirk carves a deeper line into his face.
“Who did that?” he says. “You?”
Tobias shakes his head. “Tris did.”
“Well done,” Edward says.
I nod, but I feel a little sick to be congratulated for that.
Well, not that sick. It was Peter, after all.
I stare at the flames wrapping around the fragments of wood that fuel them. They move and shift, like my thoughts. I remember the first time I realized I had never seen an elderly Dauntless. And when I realized my father was too old to climb the paths of the Pit. Now I understand more about that than I’d like to.
“Do you know much about how things are right now?” Tobias asks Edward. “Did all the Dauntless side with Erudite? Has Candor done anything?”
“Dauntless is split in half,” Edward says, talking around the food in his mouth. “Half at Erudite headquarters, half at Candor headquarters. What’s left of Abnegation is with us. Nothing much has happened yet. Except for whatever happened to you, I guess.”
Tobias nods. I feel a little relieved to know that half of the Dauntless, at least, are not traitors.
I eat spoonful after spoonful until my stomach is full. Then Tobias gets us sleeping pallets and blankets, and I find an empty corner for us to lie down in. When he bends over to untie his shoes, I see the symbol of Amity on the small of his back, the branches curling over his spine. When he straightens, I step across the blankets and put my arms around him, brushing the tattoo with my fingers.
Tobias closes his eyes. I trust the dwindling fire to disguise us as I run my hand up his back, touching each tattoo without seeing it. I imagine Erudite’s staring eye, Candor’s unbalanced scales, Abnegation’s clasped hands, and the Dauntless flames. With my other hand I find the patch of fire tattooed over his rib cage. I feel his heavy breaths against my cheek.
“I wish we were alone,” he says.
“I almost always wish that,” I say.
I drift off to sleep, carried by the sound of distant conversations. These days it’s easier for me to fall asleep when there is noise around me. I can focus on the sound instead of whatever thoughts would crawl into my head in silence. Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and the guilty.
I wake when the fire is just a glow, and only a few of the factionless are still up. It takes me a few seconds to figure out why I woke up: I heard Evelyn’s and Tobias’s voices, a few feet away from me. I stay still and hope they don’t discover that I’m awake.
“You’ll have to tell me what’s going on here if you expect me to consider helping you,” he says. “Though I’m still not sure why you need me at all.”
I see Evelyn’s shadow on the wall, flickering with the fire. She is lean and strong, just like Tobias. Her fingers twist into her hair as she speaks.
“What would you like to know, exactly?”
“Tell me about the chart. And the map.”
“Your friend was correct in thinking that the map and the chart listed all of our safe houses,” she says. “He was wrong about the population counts . . . sort of. The numbers don’t document all the factionless—only certain ones. And I’ll bet you can guess which ones those are.”