XIV

At least I got the mercy skips that I wanted.

I spent one night in the hospital and the next two days in my bedroom. I had a three-inch cut stretching from my collarbone to just above my heart. It was closed with stitches, lathered in healing gel, and wrapped in a bandage, and for good measure my left arm was put in a sling so I wouldn’t move it too much while the cut healed.

I didn’t speak for a while after the incident. Just found a window and looked out at the sky. Initially it was just the Amity nurses, rotating in and out through my room. I didn’t want to talk to them. They echoed platitudes like “You’re safe now” and “Breathe” that went in one ear and out the other.

When they let my friends in, around dinner time, then it was a little easier. Oona and Ravi rushed in first.

“Oh my god, Phoebe,” Oona sobbed. She looked like she wanted to hug me, but a nurse held up a hand and she stopped. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I said flatly. The painkillers they gave me had wiped out every last emotion in my body. “Someone tried to stab me.”

“Yeah, Loony, someone tried to stab her,” said Ravi.

He held out his fist for what I’d come to know as a “fist-bump”. I clumsily gave it. “You’re a legend, by the way,” he told me. “Everyone’s talking about you. Phoebe Prior, the initiate who solved a case that even the pros couldn’t.”

“I almost got stabbed,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but you solved it,” said Ravi.

“Everyone’s talking about me?” I mumbled. I didn’t know much at that moment. But I knew I didn’t like people talking about me.

“Don’t worry, it’s all good stuff,” said Oona. “I mean...mostly. It turned out that the crazy woman was planning to kill Beauregard in his sleep, but she didn’t know that he was going to be gone so long. She hid in the attic and was waiting for the police to leave the house before killing him later. You kinda saved his life. Some people are calling you stupid for going up there all alone, but most people think that’s unfair, since nobody knew the crazy woman was up there, so how could you have known.”

The crazy woman. The woman who grabbed me, wrapping her knobby hands around my body, holding the knife up. “What happened to her?”

“Ace shot her, remember?” said Ravi.

“She’s dead?”

Both of them nodded. They seemed happy. But now, my chest hurt, burning not just in the wound but deep inside of me.

“Who was she?” I croaked.

“Some factionless prostitute,” Ravi told me. “We called Beauregard in to identify her and found she was one of his old students in the factionless project schools. Guess she came back for revenge against the old man, but she didn’t know he was out of the house, and he called the cops before she could spring out on him.”

I didn’t like that word, revenge. Something about it didn’t feel right. The woman had called it justice. Justice for what? Revenge for what? I wanted to ask, but Oona and Ravi probably wouldn’t have an answer. I kept that to myself.

I thanked them, we had a nice hospital dinner together, and they left. The nurses gave me a drug that made me sleep for fifteen hours.

The next morning, I was released back to Candor. A nurse got me situated in bed and lined all sorts of medication, bandages, and healing gels on my bedside table. Then I was left alone again. I liked being alone, but only sometimes, and right now I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I found one of Morris’ lectures in the student website and cranked the volume to max so the silence of the apartment wouldn’t drive me insane.

I had almost died. And all I had done about it was cry.

At eleven thirty, after the first class of the day let out, I heard voices in the apartment beyond. Then there was a soft knock. “Phoebe?” said Oona, cracking open my door.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You’ve got a couple more visitors, can they come in?” she asked.

I pushed my curls out of my eyes and reached for my white robe to cover my shoulders. “I don’t look great, but okay.”

She grinned. Then she stepped aside. “Step inside, everyone!”

I had a split second to wonder what “everyone” meant and regret all my life’s decisions.

Then my room exploded with people. Ravi and Oona of course. The whole squad of Dauntless, Lars, Zac, Altagracia, Felice, Teddy. Jed from Amity. Leanne from Erudite. And so many Candor-born-Sherlock, Eurydice, Brighton, and Clyde, all of the ones who had been there as I was wheeled out of Beauregard’s house on a stretcher. Sherlock held a giant bouquet of more flowers than I could name, and Lars cleared my desk so that it could sit there in a vase. On the front was a big heart-shaped card reading “GET WELL SOon” in bubble letters that shrunk smaller as they approached the end until the last two letters had to curve on the edge of the heart.

“Surprise!” Oona sang, doing jazz hands.

“How—why—” I was speechless.

“We thought you might need cheering up,” said Lars.

“Oh, God, you really didn’t need to.”

“Of course we did,” said Oona, putting her hand on my shoulder. “When someone from your faction takes a knife for the team, this is what you do for them. Organize the whole class, pool some money for flowers, and make a get-well card.”

“I did all the organizing and planning, you’re welcome,” Ravi put in.

“He’s joking,” Oona replied quickly. “I did the planning.”

My face was heating up so fast I thought it might explode. Awkwardly, I got out of bed to look at the flowers. I didn’t like how everyone was staring at me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I touched a sunflower. Neither Abnegation nor Candor were much for pops of color in their interior decorating, and I felt like I was seeing color for the first time in years. Yellow was so pretty. I wanted to live in it.

“Where did you get these?” I asked.

“I got up early this morning to buy them from some Amity farmers,” said Sherlock. “Do...do you like them?”

“They’re beautiful,” I said.

The full force of the meaning hit me like a wave. Someone had gone out of their way to get me something so that I could look at it and like it. Not for any purpose. Just so I might find a bit of joy. I had spent all my life giving, and giving, and giving. And now I was getting.

I couldn’t help it. I cried again.

It made for an awkward few minutes as everyone asked why I was crying. But eventually I was able to put myself together long enough to kind of explain; I had never received a frivolous, non-utilitarian gift before. It was happy crying. I got a few hugs, which I didn’t often get either. Most people left after that. Leanne and Oona stayed. Sherlock and Ravi went down to the dining hall to pick up some meals in to-go boxes. The five of us ate in my room together.

They stayed until two, when they all left for their afternoon class. I was alone again for a while. Miriam, our housekeeper, came a few minutes later to clean, like she would normally do when we were out of the apartment.

Miriam and I never spoke much. I rarely saw her, and when I did, there was not much to say. Our lives were so different that I didn’t know where to start.

But today the silence was amicable. She swept my floor and took the laundry and tidied the closet. She looked at the flowers for a little while before jerking herself away, as if it wasn’t her place to look at pretty things. I told her that it was fine and she should try smelling them, too. She liked them.

When someone knocked on the apartment door, Miriam opened it. To my surprise, it was Ace.

“Am I interrupting anything?” she asked.

“No, come in,” I said.

Ace did and sat down in the desk chair. It was a little odd, seeing someone so huge and powerful in a small plastic rolling chair. The awkwardness seemed to puncture even Ace’s cold exterior. She stuck her hands in her pockets and pulled out a little brown bag.

“I, uh, got you something,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, unwrapping it. It was a palm-sized piece of chocolate in the shape of a knife, decorated with red fondant. Congrats on the Stab, it read.

“Dauntless tradition,” said Ace, not meeting my eyes. “Sorry if it’s not tasteful.”

I smiled. I didn’t really see the humor, but I liked that Ace had gotten me something. “I’m sure it’ll be very tasty,” I said, putting it on my bedside table.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I keep having to state that I almost died because it’s begun to not feel real to me,” I said.

Ace chuckled. “Yeah, the first time’s like that.”

“What’s it like the second time? The denial doesn’t kick in at all, reality hits you full force, and you end up a bawling mess on the floor? Because I don’t like doing that.”

“You’re not wrong.”

I smacked my jaw. “Wow. I can talk at normal speeds again, that’s cool,” I observed.

“Did I miss seeing you on painkillers?” Ace smirked.

“Painkillers Phoebe is not as fun as she sounds,” I told her.

“If you say so.”

“I cried about flowers.”

“On the contrary, Painkillers Phoebe sounds like a delightful person.”

We laughed and then fell into silence. Miriam began to clean the bathroom mirror, the paper towel squeaking quietly on the glass.

I looked down at my hands. Then I looked at the bandage on my chest. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the knife. The woman’s sore-spotted skin.

“Ace?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for saving me.”

Ace grunted. “Just doing my job.”

I supposed she was. I still hadn’t really wrapped my head around the fact that not only had I almost died at the hands of a factionless woman; I was saved by one too.

“Ace?”

“What now?”

“The woman who attacked me. Who was she?”

In the bathroom, the squeaking stopped.

“I don’t know,” said Ace.

“You’re lying,” I said.

Most of the time I couldn’t tell with Ace. This time I could. She averted her eyes.

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“No.”

“But do you know who she was?”

Ace hesitated again. “I don’t know. I have a feeling I might. But I never knew her personally.”

“I did,” said a soft voice.

Miriam stood in the door, wringing her hands in her apron. When we turned, she flinched back, as if ready for a blow or a shout, but we just stared.

“You knew her?” I said.

Miriam nodded. After a second, she limped closer and then leaned against my bedpost for support.

“We...went to school together,” Miriam replied. “She was my age.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Never got one,” she said. “She called herself Lady Rose.”

She had never had a name. I had only caught a single glimpse of her face as she lay dead on the attic floor. A forgettable face, covered in dust and disfigurement and so much of her own blood. I had thought of her only as “the woman” or “the thing”. Lady Rose.

“What was she like?” I whispered. I almost didn’t want the answer.

Miriam looked at her hands, twisted in her apron. “Kind. Back then. When—when I had to leave school to work, she tried to teach me how to read. She had hope for everyone. She wanted to become an Erudite. Wanted to come back and help all us factionless kids. This was before you,” she added, looking at Ace. “Nobody from the projects had made it into the factions before.”

Ace’s eye twitched. I could tell she didn’t like people pointing out where she had come from, even Miriam. But she didn’t say anything.

“Lady Rose never had parents,” said Miriam, “didn’t have any way to provide for her, except begging the Stiffs for scraps. She shoulda gone to the sweatshops like the rest of us. But she kept going to the project school. We all thought she was asking to starve. Then later we realize she looks healthy, she’s eating, she has clothes, even though she spent the whole workday at the school. We ask and she just smiles and says it’s her secret. The kids who did still go to school said the teachers liked her a lot, so much, giving her hugs and touching her hair.”

“God,” Ace whispered.

But I didn’t understand. “What’s wrong with that?”

Miriam wouldn’t look up. Ace just turned away, crossing her arms like she was hugging herself.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this,” said Ace. “Just forget it, Phoebe.”

“What? No, I want to know!”

Hesitating, Ace put her hand over her mouth. Then she said, “You have to swear not to tell anyone.”

Now I was just confused. I wanted to ask why everything had to be so secretive, but I also really wanted to know.

“Okay,” I said.

“School in the projects…isn’t like school in the factions,” Ace said. “It’s not a good thing if a kid’s doing well.”

“Why not?”

Ace and Miriam exchanged a glance. Then Ace said, “Because the only way to do well is by giving the teachers something they want, and factionless kids don’t have money.”

There were a few more seconds where I still didn’t understand. I wish that the seconds had lasted longer.

I wanted to vomit. I wanted to tell them that they had to be lying, no human being would be evil enough to do something like that. But in the back of my mind I knew what I believed to be true—human beings were evil enough. But for the longest time, I refused to believe that they could exist in the factions.

“How old was Lady Rose?” asked Ace.

“I don’t know,” Miriam confessed. “She was so quiet about it; it could have started at any time. We only figured it out when she was fourteen. She told us, ‘Mr. Beauregard promised me that I’ll pass the literacy tests, then I can take the aptitude test.’ No project kid is smart enough to pass the literacy tests. But she was so sure.”

I found it hard to meet her eyes. She was blinking back tears. “What happened?”

“She turned sixteen and took the literacy tests.” Miriam wiped her eyes. “She failed anyway.”

Ace shifted, hugging herself tighter.

“She was so angry,” said Miriam. “She wanted to take it again, she thought that it had to be a mistake, but they wouldn’t listen. She reached out to Candor, Dauntless, and Abnegation, but nobody cared. She wanted to kill all of them. She almost killed herself. I tried to leave her alone, I wanted to focus on this job and raise my son, but I couldn’t stop hearing things. She got into drugs. Worked in the red-light district, only job she could get. That was seven, eight years ago.”

“But she never forgot her abuser,” said Ace.

“Is that why she—” I hesitated, unsure of how to put it. I was going to say “wanted revenge.” But now I really didn’t like that word. Fortunately, I didn’t have to finish for them to understand.

Miriam nodded. Then she let out a humorless laugh. “I heard she wanted to kill him with a Choosing knife. She always liked symbolism; she was sort of a poet.”

“So Beauregard lied,” I said. “He told the police that he didn’t know anyone who hated him.”

Ace’s eyes narrowed. “Beauregard lied about a lot of things. Last night, the Candor put him under truth serum and asked the questions again. He wasn’t late at the office the night of the break-in-he was with friends in a strip club. That’s why he left his car at home, so it wouldn’t be on record that he was there. I’m sure they also know about Lady Rose’s motives for wanting him dead.”

“So they’re going to do something about that?” I asked, my voice verging on desperate. “He’s going to jail now, right?”

I wasn’t expecting the silence that came after that. Or the choked, sad laugh that came from Miriam’s mouth.

“No,” she said. “They’ll probably give him a raise.”

Ace stood so fast that the swivel chair bumped against the table.

“Don’t say that!” she snapped.

Miriam winced, then looked at her feet.

“What?” I asked.

“What does it matter?” Miriam croaked. “I told her about Lady Rose. I’ve probably lost my job already.”

“You could save your job if you shut up,” said Ace.

“Stop ordering her around,” I said. “What’s wrong with you? Why won’t they punish Beauregard?”

Ace whirled around to me. “Why do you care?”

“Because that’s not right! I thought we were supposed to uphold justice, and now we’re letting a child abuser go?”

“Phoebe, I hate this as much as you do. But it’s not my place to say things. And you shouldn’t either—”

“Why not? What do you mean, it’s not your place?”

“The fact that it’s not glaringly obvious tells me that maybe I shouldn’t answer that!” Ace yelled. “God, Stiffs really are the worst of them, aren’t they? Thinking that the factions make everything fine? Since you’re not in class right now, here’s a social studies lesson—ninety—five percent of this damn city has the life that Lady Rose had. If we jailed every ‘public servant’ who abused the factionless, all of those seats would be empty!”

I flinched. Miriam’s hands were over her mouth. Ace’s face was red from yelling, but then went white as a sheet. She whirled around, as if looking for someone who might be listening, and stormed out of my room to the front door and peered outside. She closed all the doors again.

“You promised not to tell anyone what I said,” Ace hissed.

I nodded quickly. I realized I was trembling—I had never heard Ace yell like that, and it was terrifying. I wanted to argue. I wanted to protest with all the soundbites that I knew regarding the factionless, that if the factionless wanted a more comfortable life, they would work for it; that if the factionless wanted success for their children, they should have thought of that when they were part of the factions; that just because some Erudite teacher turned out to be a bad apple didn’t mean that the whole system was corrupt.

But there were still so many things that didn’t make sense to me. Why it was impossible to succeed in a project school. Why Lady Rose hadn’t just told the police what her teachers were doing to her. Why Beauregard still had a job. I had never had to explain away any of that before. I couldn’t bring myself to do it now.

“I think I want to be alone,” I whispered.

Miriam nodded and ducked out of the room before Ace or I could say another word to her. Ace lingered, her gaze darting from me to her shoes to a vacant spot on the wall.

“I’m sorry if I upset you,” said Ace. “But there’s a lot more to this city than what the factions tell you. I hope you’ll understand that one day.”

She turned and left.

I looked out the window at the Chicago skyline.