Not just a young man—a Candor, dressed in black and white from head to toe.
I run toward them, and when I see a tall factionless girl draw back her foot to kick again, I shout, “Hey!”
No use—the kick hits the Candor boy in the side, and he groans, twisting away from it.
“Hey!” I yell again, and this time the girl turns. She’s much taller than I am—a good six inches, in fact—but I’m only angry, not afraid.
“Back up,” I say. “Back away from him.”
“He’s in violation of the dress code. I’m well within my rights, and I don’t take orders from faction lovers,” she says, her eyes on the ink creeping over my collarbone.
“Becks,” the factionless boy beside her says. “That’s the Prior video girl.”
The others look impressed, but the girl just sneers. “So?”
“So,” I say, “I had to hurt a lot of people to get through Dauntless initiation, and I’ll do it to you, too, if I have to.”
I unzip my blue sweatshirt and toss it at the Candor boy, who looks at me from the ground, blood streaming from his eyebrow. He pushes himself up, still holding his side with one hand, and pulls the sweatshirt around his shoulders like a blanket.
“There,” I say. “Now he’s not violating the dress code.”
The girl tests the situation in her mind, evaluating whether she wants to fight me or not. I can practically hear what she’s thinking—I’m small, so I’m an easy target, but I’m Dauntless, so I’m not that easy to beat. Maybe she knows that I’ve killed people, or maybe she just doesn’t want to get into trouble, but she’s losing her nerve; I can tell by the uncertain set of her mouth.
“You’d better watch your back,” she says.
“I guarantee you that I don’t need to,” I say. “Now get out of here.”
I stay just long enough to see them scatter, then keep walking. The Candor boy calls, “Wait! Your sweatshirt!”
“Keep it!” I call back.
I turn a corner that I think will take me to another staircase, but I end up in another blank hallway, just like the last one I was in. I think I hear footsteps behind me, and I spin around, ready to fight the factionless girl off, but there’s no one there.
I must be getting paranoid.
I open one of the doors off the main corridor, hoping to find a window so I can reorient myself, but I find only a ransacked laboratory, beakers and test tubes scattered across each counter. Torn pieces of paper litter the floor, and I’m bending to pick one up when the lights shut off.
I lunge toward the door. A hand grabs my arm and drags me to the side. Someone shoves a sack over my head while someone else pushes me against the wall. I thrash against them, struggling with the fabric covering my face, and all I can think is, Not again not again not again. I twist one arm free and punch, hitting someone in a shoulder or a chin, I can’t tell.
“Hey!” a voice says. “That hurt!”
“We’re sorry for frightening you, Tris,” another voice says, “but anonymity is integral to our operation. We mean you no harm.”
“Let go of me, then!” I say, almost growling. All the hands holding me to the wall fall away.
“Who are you?” I demand.
“We are the Allegiant,” the voice replies. “And we are many, yet we are no one. . . .”
I can’t help it: I laugh. Maybe it’s the shock—or the fear, my pounding heart slowing by the second, my hands shaking with relief.
The voice continues, “We have heard that you are not loyal to Evelyn Johnson and her factionless lackeys.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Not as ridiculous as trusting someone with your identity when you don’t have to.”
I try to see through the fibers of whatever is over my head, but they are too dense and it is too dark. I try to relax against the wall, but it’s difficult without my vision to orient me. I crush the side of a beaker under my shoe.
“No, I’m not loyal to her,” I say. “Why does that matter?”
“Because it means you want to leave,” the voice says. I feel a prickle of excitement. “We want to ask you for a favor, Tris Prior. We’re going to have a meeting tomorrow night, at midnight. We want you to bring your Dauntless friends.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let me ask you this: If I’m going to see who you are tomorrow, why is it so important to keep this thing over my head today?”
This seems to temporarily stump whoever I’m talking to.
“A day contains many dangers,” the voice says. “We’ll see you tomorrow, at midnight, in the place where you made your confession.”
All at once, the door swings open, blowing the sack against my cheeks, and I hear running footsteps down the hallway. By the time I’m able to pull the sack from my head, the corridor is silent. I look down at it—it’s a dark-blue pillowcase with the words “Faction before blood” painted on it.
Whoever they are, they certainly have a flair for the dramatic.
The place where you made your confession.
There’s only one place that could be: Candor headquarters, where I succumbed to the truth serum.
When I finally make it back to the dormitory that evening, I find a note from Tobias tucked under the glass of water on my bedside table.
VI—
Your brother’s trial will be tomorrow morning, and it will be private. I can’t go or I’ll raise suspicion, but I’ll get you the verdict as soon as possible. Then we can make some kind of plan.
No matter what, this will be over soon.
—IV
Chapter eight
IT’S NINE O’CLOCK. They could be deciding Caleb’s verdict right now, as I tie my shoes, as I straighten my sheets for the fourth time today. I put my hands through my hair. The factionless only make trials private when they feel the verdict is obvious, and Caleb was Jeanine’s right-hand man before she was killed.
I shouldn’t worry about his verdict. It’s already decided. All of Jeanine’s closest associates will be executed.
Why do you care? I ask myself. He betrayed you. He didn’t try to stop your execution.
I don’t care. I do care. I don’t know.
“Hey, Tris,” Christina says, rapping her knuckles against the door frame. Uriah lurks behind her. He still smiles all the time, but now his smiles look like they’re made of water, about to drip down his face.
“You had some news?” she says.
I check the room again, though I already know it’s empty. Everyone is at breakfast, as required by our schedules. I asked Uriah and Christina to skip a meal so that I could tell them something. My stomach is already rumbling.
“Yeah,” I say.
They sit on the bed across from mine, and I tell them about getting cornered in one of the Erudite laboratories the night before, about the pillowcase and the Allegiant and the meeting.
“I’m surprised all you did was punch one of them,” Uriah says.
“Well, I was outnumbered,” I say, feeling defensive. It wasn’t very Dauntless of me to just trust them immediately, but these are strange times. And I’m not sure how Dauntless I really am, anyway, now that the factions are gone.
I feel a strange little ache at the thought, right in the middle of my chest. Some things are hard to let go of.
“So what do you think they want?” Christina says. “Just to leave the city?”
“It sounds that way, but I don’t know,” I say.
“How do we know they’re not Evelyn’s people, trying to trick us into betraying her?”