“Please,” says Susan, her lip wobbling. Her eyes fill with tears. “We’ve been running . . . and the rest of them are dead and I don’t . . .” She starts to sob again. “I don’t think I can keep going, I . . .”
I get the strange urge to hit my head against the wall. Other people’s sobs make me uncomfortable. It’s selfish of me, maybe.
“We’re running from the Erudite,” says Caleb. “If we get off, it will be easier for them to find us. So we would appreciate it if you let us ride into the city with you.”
“Yeah?” Edward tilts his head. “What have you ever done for us?”
“I helped you when no one else would,” I say. “Remember?”
“You, maybe. But the others?” says Edward. “Not so much.”
Tobias steps forward, so Edward’s gun is almost against his throat.
“My name is Tobias Eaton,” Tobias says. “I don’t think you want to push me off this train.”
The effect of the name on the people in the car is immediate and bewildering: they lower their weapons. They exchange meaningful looks.
“Eaton? Really?” Edward says, eyebrows raised. “I have to admit, I did not see that coming.” He clears his throat. “Fine, you can come. But when we get to the city, you’ve got to come with us.”
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.