Then he smiles a little. “We know someone who’s been looking for you, Tobias Eaton.”
Tobias and I sit on the edge of the car with our legs dangling over the edge.
“Do you know who it is?”
Tobias nods.
“Who, then?”
“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “I have a lot to tell you.”
I lean against him.
“Yeah,” I say. “So do I.”
I don’t know how much time passes before they tell us to get off. But when they do, we are in the part of the city where the factionless live, about a mile from where I grew up. I recognize each building we pass as one I walked by every time I missed the bus home from school. The one with the broken bricks. The one with a fallen streetlight leaning against it.
We stand in the doorway of the train car, all four of us in a line. Susan whimpers.
“What if we get hurt?” she says.
I grab her hand. “We’ll jump together. You and me. I’ve done this a dozen times and never got hurt.”
She nods and squeezes my fingers so hard they hurt.
“On three. One,” I say, “Two. Three.”
I jump, and pull her with me. My feet slam into the ground and continue forward, but Susan just falls to the pavement and rolls onto her side. Aside from a scraped knee, though, she seems to be all right. The others jump off without difficulty—even Caleb, who has only jumped from a train once before, as far as I know.
I’m not sure who could know Tobias among the factionless. It could be Drew or Molly, who failed Dauntless initiation—but they didn’t even know Tobias’s real name, and besides, Edward probably would have killed them by now, judging by how ready he was to shoot us. It must be someone from Abnegation, or from school.
Susan seems to have calmed down. She walks on her own now, next to Caleb, and her cheeks are drying with no new tears to wet them.
Tobias walks beside me, touching my shoulder lightly.
“It’s been a while since I checked that shoulder,” he says. “How is it?”
“Okay. I brought the pain medicine, luckily,” I say. I’m glad to talk about something light—as light as a wound can be, anyway. “I don’t think I’m letting it heal very well. I keep using my arm or landing on it.”
“There will be plenty of time for healing once all this is over.”
“Yeah.” Or it won’t matter if I heal, I add silently, because I’ll be dead.
“Here,” he says, taking a small knife from his back pocket and handing it to me. “Just in case.”
I put it in my own pocket. I feel even more nervous now.
The factionless lead us down the street and left into a grimy alleyway that stinks of garbage. Rats scatter in front of us with squeaks of terror, and I see only their tails, slipping between mounds of waste, empty trash cans, soggy cardboard boxes. I breathe through my mouth so I don’t throw up.
Edward stops next to one of the crumbling brick buildings and forces a steel door open. I wince, half expecting the entire building to fall down if he pulls too hard. The windows are so thick with grime that almost no light penetrates them. We follow Edward into a dank room. In the flickering glow of a lantern, I see . . . people.
People sitting next to rolls of bedding. People prying open cans of food. People sipping bottles of water. And children, weaving between the groups of adults, not confined to a particular color of clothing—factionless children.
We are in a factionless storehouse, and the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community . . . are together inside it. Are together, like a faction.
I don’t know what I expected of them, but I am surprised by how normal they seem. They don’t fight one another or avoid one another. Some of them tell jokes, others speak to each other quietly. Gradually, though, they all seem to realize that we aren’t supposed to be there.
“Come on,” Edward says, bending his finger to beckon us toward him. “She’s back here.”
Stares and silence greet us as we follow Edward deeper into the building that is supposed to be abandoned. Finally I can’t contain my questions any longer.
“What’s going on here? Why are you all together like this?”
“You thought they—we—were all split up,” Edward says over his shoulder. “Well, they were, for a while. Too hungry to do much of anything except look for food. But then the Stiffs started giving them food, clothes, tools, everything. And they got stronger, and waited. They were like that when I found them, and they welcomed me.”
We walk into a dark hallway. I feel at home, in the dark and the quiet that are like the tunnels in Dauntless headquarters. Tobias, however, winds a loose thread from his shirt around his finger, backward and forward, over and over. He knows who we’re meeting, but I still have no idea. How is it I know this little about the boy who says he loves me—the boy whose real name is powerful enough to keep us alive in a train car full of enemies?
Edward stops at a metal door and pounds on it with his fist.
“Wait, you said they were waiting?” says Caleb. “What were they waiting for, exactly?”
“For the world to fall apart,” Edward says. “And now it has.”
The door opens, and a severe-looking woman with a lazy eye stands in the doorway. Her steady eye scans the four of us.
“Strays?” she says.
“Not hardly, Therese.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder, at Tobias. “This one’s Tobias Eaton.”
Therese stares at Tobias for a few seconds, then nods. “He certainly is. Hold on.”
She shuts the door again. Tobias swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“You know who she’s going to get, don’t you,” says Caleb to Tobias.
“Caleb,” Tobias says. “Please shut up.”
To my surprise, my brother suppresses his Erudite curiosity.
The door opens again, and Therese steps back to let us in. We walk into an old boiler room with machinery that emerges from the darkness so suddenly I hit it with my knees and elbows. Therese leads us through the maze of metal to the back of the room, where several bulbs dangle from the ceiling over a table.
A middle-aged woman stands behind the table. She has curly black hair and olive skin. Her features are stern, so angular they almost make her unattractive, but not quite.
Tobias clutches my hand. At that moment I realize that he and the woman have the same nose—hooked, a little too big on her face but the right size on his. They also have the same strong jaw, distinct chin, spare upper lip, stick-out ears. Only her eyes are different—instead of blue, they are so dark they look black.