XXVII

I blinked, bewildered.

“What?” I asked. “Having a tattoo doesn’t mean I’m Divergent. They won’t kill me for it.”

“But they’ll ask where you got it,” said Irene.

“So I’ll lie. You said you’ll teach me how to lie.”

“The only tattoo shops are in Dauntless, you can’t lie. They’ll find out that you went there.”

“Then I tell them that I was learning to defend myself and couldn’t get the risk license.”

“And when they ask what getting a tattoo has to do with defending yourself?”

Oh, no. Now I got it.

“By getting that thing, you’ve proclaimed to the world that you don’t follow the normal pattern of thinking. That you don’t want to conform. You said it’s a rose? And that’s the scar you got from that factionless woman? My God, Phoebe, that’s even worse. You might as well have written ‘I’m a critic of the faction system’ on your forehead.”

“But it’s not on my forehead,” I retorted. “It’s on my chest. It’s not hard to hide.”

Irene stood up. “Do you really know so little about the Full Unveiling?”

I stood up too. We were the same height. Eye to eye, if not for the glasses. “I know that I have to tell all my secrets,” I said. “And I know that I can lie because I’m Divergent. You told me that I can do that—”

“You can avoid talking about your aptitude test results. You cannot avoid a tattoo like that,” she snarled. “You will be naked—metaphorically and literally. The uniform of the Full Unveiling is only a loincloth, and the room where it happens is a room with walls of one-way mirrors. You can hide nothing, Miss Prior, nothing other than what’s in your mind.”

Oh, no, indeed.

Involuntarily, I hugged myself, deeply uncomfortable. I didn’t like this new information at all. Wearing a t-shirt was hard enough for me; standing naked in front of the whole faction? Now I understood why some initiates could pass the exams but refuse to take the Full Unveiling. It was a different kind of vulnerability. I hated that my first, immediate thought was a fear—what if there was a man like Beauregard in the audience?

“I can get the tattoo removed,” I said weakly. Lars and the other Dauntless transfers had talked about removing theirs.

“You’d better,” replied Irene.

“I will.”

“You’re lying.”

I stayed silent. Irene sighed for the umpteenth time since I’d stepped into the office.

“It’s not an option, Miss Prior. Your choices are to remove it and take the Full Unveiling as planned, to keep it and die, or to leave the faction. That’s all I have to say.”

“That can’t be it,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

I shook my head. “No. That can’t be all my options. Why would Candor kill me for being Divergent? It’s what I am.”

“That’s not how it works. It’s not a single-faction issue. You mention Divergence, we’re required by law to report it.”

“What do you mean, report it?” I asked. “To who?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“But kill me?”

“They would. They’d make it look like an accident. Maybe a suicide. Or you fail initiation. Four weeks later they find your body in the canal, say you overdosed. Sometimes you just disappear. Time passes, people forget.”

She sounded tired. Like she’d given this explanation to a hundred Divergents before me. Maybe she had. I looked at her for a while, trying to read anything else her, but couldn’t. No wonder she was able to lie so well. When the eyes were hidden, when the very way she moved to navigate the room was new, it was all the more difficult to know what she was thinking. It made me bitter. I wanted to think she had good intentions. But all the mystery was frustrating.

“I shouldn’t have to lie,” I told her. “Not here.”

Irene sighed. “I know. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Maybe.

“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll get the tattoo removed and I’ll do the Full Unveiling as planned. So what now?”

Irene regarded me in her own way. She reached out her hands and I gave them, letting her feel my hands. Her thumb traced a scrape on my palm from yesterday’s training.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll ask Ace to begin the second stage of Dauntless training.”

+ + +

“No,” said Ace.

I frowned. “Why not?”

Ace’s gaze darted. It was Wednesday morning. We were in the private Dauntless office, where I had tracked her down. She was lounging on the couch and eating a breakfast of six hard-boiled eggs, which was excessive, in my opinion.

“Can’t she just give you the truth serum?” she grumbled. “It can’t be hard to get.”

“Actually,” I cleared my throat, having learned this answer and prepared it thoroughly, “the Academic Integrity department keeps careful records of the truth serum. If you want access, you have to file an official request. Even someone like Irene can’t work around it.”

Ace mumbled something along the lines of “hrm hrm bureaucratic red tape hrm hrm.” She drove her fork right through an egg and ate it in one bite.

I tried another card. I puckered my bottom lip and said, “Please?”

“No.”

“But why?”

“I have some things I need to tie up.”

An irritatingly vague answer. I folded my arms. “Like what?”

“Mind your own business.”

“Okay. So why can’t we train?”

“We can train,” said Ace. “Just not stage two.”

“Irene said—”

“I know what Irene said; I know what she’s asking me to do. Damn it.”

Ace stabbed an egg with her fork so hard that it slipped out and rolled onto the floor. She stopped to glare at it.

“That’s your fault. Pick it up,” she said, pointing the fork at me.

“It’s on the floor, you can’t eat it,” I said.

“I can and I will.”

Gingerly, I knelt and picked up the egg. “It’s covered in dirt.”

Ace bit one of the clean eggs. “So?”

“That’s disgusting,” I told her.

“Rinse it off.”

“Just get a new one,” I said. “You were saying how Talon keeps stealing your food, go steal some of his.”

“You’re holding the egg right now,” said Ace. “Put it in my bowl.”

She sounded completely serious, but there was a twinkle in her eye that made me laugh. “No!”

“It’s not difficult, Phoebe. Hand goes to bowl, hand releases egg, Ace eats egg.”

“I don’t know how you can say that with a straight face,” I snickered. “Hey, let’s make a deal—you give me stage two, I’ll give you the egg.”

That did it; Ace’s grin finally broke out, and she put her bowl aside to stand up.

“You’re a little shit,” she teased. “Gimme that.”

She lunged. But I remembered what she’d taught; I stepped, slid, and evaded easily.

“No, this is leverage,” I said.

“It’s an egg,” Ace insisted, making another swipe.

I danced away, moving to her right to take advantage of her blind spot. My hip hit the desk and Ace grinned, thinking she had me cornered, but I was a step ahead. I dropped to my knees and crawled under the desk to the other side.

“Stage two or hunger,” I called.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re chasing an egg.”

She lunged one last time. I darted and clambered onto the couch. I had thought to stand on the armrest and hold it high, but Ace whirled around and bumped into me, and with a shriek I fell backwards. The egg slipped out of my hands. Surprised, Ace stumbled, and then she fell too.

We were nose to nose again, sprawled on the couch, Ace above me.

I was speechless. So was she. It was inescapable now—how her body weight pressed into mine, the way our legs tangled when we fell, the unique scents of well-worn leather and soap and something else distinctly her.

I wanted her to kiss me. I wanted it more than anything. But on the precipice, now I was afraid, and maybe that’s what she sensed that made her pull back and stand up.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “That—keeps happening.”

“Yeah,” I laughed breathily, sitting up and fixing my hair. Inside, I was cursing. She definitely thought I was some desperate little kid now. If I was only a Dauntless, if I was only an equal to her, maybe it would’ve been different. But I wasn’t. I was just a strange little Candor girl, meddling in things she didn’t understand. “That was dumb.”

“I didn’t really want the egg,” said Ace.

“I meant—nevermind.”

“What?”

“I meant the falling part. That was dumb.”

“Yeah,” said Ace, rubbing the back of her neck. “That was...that was dumb.”

It was uncomfortable and awkward for a while. Ace looked around for the fallen egg, picked it up, and tossed it out.

“Look,” she finally sighed, shoving her hands in her pockets, “if you’re gonna start stage two, I…I can’t do it tonight. There’s a lot of things going on.”

“Right,” I nodded. “That’s fine.”

“Tonight we can move on to offensive maneuvers. I’ll teach you how to hit. We’ll…begin stage two this weekend.”

“Right. Right.”

“Right,” she said. “Well...you should get to class.”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes as she unlocked the door, checked for witnesses, and let me out. For a few moments after the door closed behind me, I stayed there, still in a daze. I brushed the wrinkles out of my shirt and sighed.

“Right,” I whispered.