XXVIII

That night I brought a backpack up to the roof. “What’s in there?” asked Ace.

“Change of clothes and papers,” I said. “I need to study.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Carrying Candor notes into a Dauntless compound. Good way to get caught.”

“They’re not Candor. They’re Erudite.”

I took off my white shirt, wadded it up, and put it under my journal and the newspapers. Underneath I was wearing a black tank top. My stomach tightened as the wind hit the bare skin of my shoulders and as I saw the rose tattoo on my chest. It was almost all healed now, vibrant red and green inside an outline of black ink. I could only hope it distracted enough from my skinny, freckled arms and flat chest. Not that I cared what Ace thought about how I looked…or anything.

“What’s in the Erudite newspapers that you’d care about?” asked Ace.

“You know,” I said, “news.”

She offered to carry my bag so I could concentrate on the journey across the buildings. She let me lead, testing my memory of the way.

This time, when the train came, I jumped on without needing help. Then I sat at the back of the car and opened one of the papers.

It was hard to focus. Ace sat in the opening of the train car, as if daring the wind and speed to rip her away. I couldn’t stop thinking of her. There was still a weird atmosphere between us, at least, I felt one. Ace either didn’t feel it or was just very good at hiding it.

“You know,” she commented, “I’ve only seen one other Candor initiation, but I’m pretty sure you need to study for them to do well.”

“I do study,” I said.

“By reading Erudite papers?”

“By going to class.”

She laughed. “That’s not enough.”

“What does a Dauntless know about studying?” I raised an eyebrow.

Ace leaned back and put her hands behind her head, landing with a soft thud on the train car floor. “I was someone before I was Dauntless, Phoebe.”

“Oh.” Yes. She had gone to school, and she’d passed the literacy exams. The first factionless to do so. It was amazing, now that I really thought about it—almost confusing.

“How did that work?” I asked quietly. “Passing the literacy exams? You told me that the factionless schools make that impossible.”

“They do,” said Ace.

“What about you?”

“I was lucky.” She kicked her legs idly.

“What do you mean?”

“Being smart doesn’t matter. Hard work doesn’t either. I met a hundred kids smarter and more hardworking than me and none of them passed.”

“Why not?”

“Some worked full time. That’s sixty hours a week, down there. If you’re a single-earner home, it’s eighty. Some had kids. Some had their parents’ kids. The ones that took the exams, there’s not many, since everyone knows nobody will pass.”

Ace sighed.

“The thing is,” she continued, “the reason none of ‘em pass is they’re not taught what they need to pass. The curriculum between the faction schools and the project schools, they’re the same, right? But there’s different tests, and the factionless test is harder.”

“That’s not fair,” I protested.

“Candor thought it was,” said Ace. “ Zarcero v. Erudite. Precedent for the Rising Stars Act, which states that factionless children wishing to take the aptitude test must pass advanced versions of the literacy tests to prove that they are capable of succeeding in the faction lifestyle. The rationale is that factionless children carry faulty genetics from their parents, who couldn’t succeed, and therefore need longer, more difficult testing to make sure the kids are capable. Conversely, faction-born children carry good genetics from intelligent parents, so they don’t need as much insurance.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. But it’s real. It’s kept pretty quiet—factionless kids think that studying their class notes will be enough, they’ve practiced until they can ace the regular test, and then the advanced calculus hits them like a train.”

“How did you pass?”

Her eyes were closed, but her brow and jaw tightened. “Like I said,” she murmured, “I got lucky.”

It was a lie if I had ever heard one. My stomach twisted at a terrible thought—Ace had once said that the only way to get anywhere in the factionless schools was by bribery. Bribery of the worst and most tragic kind. Had Ace…?

“I’m really good at math,” she cut my thought off. “That’s all.”

My shoulders relaxed. At least that part wasn’t a lie.

“So did you ask about my test because you really wanted to know,” Ace continued, “or was it just to get me off your ass about not studying?”

“I am studying,” I told her. “I mean...I will. I’m preoccupied with a lot of things.”

“Like reading Erudite papers.”

“Right.”

“And tracking down missing girls.”

“Because someone needs to find them.”

“And harassing Irene.”

“I wasn’t harassing her.”

“She had a lot of choice words for you.”

I ignored that.

I had been skimming the papers the whole time, searching for things that jumped out at me. Not things that matched, necessarily. But I was learning to look for things that didn’t.

“Ace,” I said, “what do you know about the problem with the Erudite?”

She snorted. “Which one?”

“What’s happening right now,” I said. “Trying to make changes to the faction system, and all that. Blaming the Abnegation for it.”

“I’ve heard of that,” she shrugged. “Don’t think it’ll amount to much.”

“Look at this.” I motioned her to come over and look at my work. I folded two separate pages and placed them side by side, highlighting two passages in yellow. “This first one was written right after Lady Rose died.”

Ace squinted as she read it. “The blood of Lady Rose is on all of our hands—our desire for peace has outweighed the cosmic demand for justice, and we have become blind to the suffering under our noses. It is up to us to change this system, to remove those from power who misuse it, and to answer the outcry of those we have ignored and oppressed for generations.” She frowned at me. “That’s all true. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But that’s the problem. This was written by Antoinette Manson, an Erudite journalist who transferred from Candor four years ago. She typically writes pieces about the justice system, having come from inside it. Violently anti-Abnegation—she did a whole series of reasons to remove the faction from the faction system.”

“That’s a little harsh,” said Ace.

I shrugged. “Not really. Garden-variety criticism, actually. If there’s anything Erudite can agree on, it’s that Abnegation is useless at running the government.”

She snorted. “Touché.”

“But she’s always been pretty pro-factionless. She had a lot of milder pieces before this, analyzing the few accounts we have of ancient societies, questioning whether a society like ours is really the best way to keep the peace. Sometimes she even cited some of the things Sajida Touma was researching—People v. Ophelia, Criticisms of a Selfless Governance. A lot of controversial theories. This was just the first incidence of actually calling for action.”

“So what’s up with it?”

“This.” I pointed to the highlighted portion of the second folded newspaper. “After the call to action piece, Antoinette stopped appearing in the papers for a week. That’s not out of the ordinary, since not every journalist writes in every edition. But this article is the first she wrote when she returned. It was published the same day the two men tried to murder Beauregard.”

“This blood continues to stain our hands,” Ace read aloud. “With every day we sit in complacency, the situation in the projects becomes more dangerous. We have tolerated the rise of violent thugs, the breeding of Divergent, the decline of conscience and respect for due process of law, and sabotage by the Candor and Abnegation of our forward progress. Will we turn a blind eye to the bloodshed in our own streets? Will we allow the idealist and the self-righteous to dictate the fates of thousands of people? Or will we rise up once and for all, united as one faction, hand in hand with our brothers and sisters in the projects?”

“It’s a different attack,” I said. “On the surface, it sounds pro-factionless, but the focus changed. It’s not about changing the system as a whole—it’s targeting Abnegation and Candor specifically, which Antoinette never did before. And it calls the factionless our brothers and sisters at the end, but in the beginning, they were violent thugs who didn’t respect the law. The blame’s on the factionless, not the factions.”

“You’re right,” said Ace, her eyes wide. “Look at that, in the second one.

“ United as one faction .”

“Like the Erudite aren’t even part of the problem.”

“Even though she makes it clear in the first piece that it’s their fault too.”

Above our heads, the train whistled. Ace stood up and looked out.

“We’re almost here,” she said. “Do you need me to—
uh—”

Her face reddened. I shoved the newspapers in my backpack, an excuse not to meet her eyes.

“Actually, I think I can jump on my own,” I said.

She nodded. Maybe in relief. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I said, equally relieved.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

As the train approached the Dauntless roof, I stood and handed Ace the backpack again. Our fingers brushed. Maybe she felt the nervous trembling as I looked out at the oncoming roof, further than it had seemed when I flew over it in Ace’s arms.

She slung the backpack over her shoulders and reached out her hand again, clasping it around mine.

“We can jump together,” she said.

My heartbeat quickened. When I met her eyes, she was smiling slightly.

We didn’t have time to exchange words. We stepped back, Ace said, “Now,” and we leapt. Flew.

A weightless moment, and then my feet slammed into solid ground and jarred all the way up my legs. The rough landing sent me stumbling, but Ace was quick and caught me, letting me lean back against her. She was laughing.

“Not bad, not bad,” she said. “Legs were a bit... stiff on the landing, but not bad.”

I started to say thank you until I caught the pun. “Noooo,” I groaned, which made her cackle more.

I was prepared to jump off the roof into the pit with the net again, but Ace beckoned me to the other edge and helped me climb down a fire escape instead. “Since you jumped off the train, I’ll give you a pass on the net fall,” she explained.

“So there was a ladder alternative,” I said.

She made a face up at me. “Yeah. But on the more practical side, Eric must’ve seen us pass under one of the main corridor cameras. I’d rather avoid a confrontation with him.”

I nodded. I did not like Eric. Something about him was...slimy.

“So about the journalist,” said Ace, climbing over the railing of the fire escape to a ledge on the side of the building. The stairs at that section had given out from years of neglect, so Ace gingerly turned and lowered herself from the ledge to the next level of the fire escape. I watched her carefully, knowing that she would expect me to copy her movements.

“Right,” I said. “Something about it—it’s just not right. I know people change their minds. But—”

I paused as I also climbed onto the ledge. To my relief, it felt easier than it had looked, since I was smaller and had more purchase. Ace helped me as I dropped down to the fire escape again. I thought about how to explain myself, how to describe the deep gut instinct that told me when something wasn’t quite right. Finally I just shook my head.

“It's not just Antoinette Manson, either. A lot of the papers are like this. One day, it’s that sort of revolution talk, trying to get the factions to see that they’re the problem; the next day, it’s calling the factionless the problem.”

“Yeah,” said Ace. Then she sighed. “Though I can’t help but think it’s just—how it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every day, it gets harder to be factionless. You watch the papers long enough, you’ll see less and less people standing up for the little guy, until it seems like there’s none left.”

“But that’s terrible. There has to be something going
on—”

“There is. It’s called life being unfair,” said Ace. She stopped by a window and pushed it open, climbing inside. “The only thing you can do about it is put those papers away, focus on your exams, and become one of the good guys.”

“I’m getting tired of people telling me that there’s nothing I can do,” I muttered. I climbed in after her and we stood at the end of a long, dark hall.

“Enduring isn’t nothing,” said Ace.

We passed into the Pit and through the throngs of people. I tried to act casual, but let my eyes scan for familiar faces. Ace had told me earlier about some of the McCandless kids she knew. An eighteen-year-old, Lilith. Raphael, a thirteen-year-old. An aunt, Hana McCandless-Pedrad, and cousins Ezekiel and Uriah. A dozen other second and third cousins, a strong lineage of Dauntless. My red hair was nowhere in the living lineage, though sometime long ago there must have been a Caucasian McCandless, because some were lighter-skinned. Every once in a while, I would meet eyes that looked almost like my mother’s; I would catch a gait like my brother’s out of my peripheral vision; I would see freckles and a grin that I was learning from the mirror. Faction didn’t matter. Naming didn’t matter. Choosing Ceremony didn’t matter. My family was all around me. The feeling in my chest was somewhere between homesickness and homecoming.

I watched Ace carefully as we left the Pit and she took me back to the training room. Did she have family here, biological or found? When she left the projects, who did she leave behind? I didn’t know. She was becoming more of a mystery to me every day. Somehow, she managed to be unlike any Dauntless I had ever known and unlike any factionless I had ever known; living by philosophies shunned by both—philosophies of keeping her head down and following the rules.

We warmed up that day by reviewing evasive maneuvers. It brought back (for both of us, I safely assumed) memories of an egg and a fall just earlier this morning. Nothing was said about them. Once Ace was satisfied, she took me to the back with the punching bags.

“We’ll start with hand strikes, then kicks,” she explained. “When you’re striking, don’t think of it as just your arm or your leg making the movement. You are using your whole body to strike, using the same concepts of balance and weight distribution that we talked about in evasion.”

“Like a dance,” I said.

“Yes,” she nodded, “but also, no. A dance is planned. This is more like—like conversation. You can’t plan what the other person’s going to say. You can practice your arguing points, sure. But you can’t expect them at a time. So you have to think on your feet.”

“And watch the opponent,” I finished. “The first pillar of arguing is the practice of listening.”

Ace snapped her fingers. “There you go.”

She named a few different strikes, demonstrating each one on a punching bag. As I began, she folded my hands into the proper form, thumb outside, wrist straight, and did the motions on the punching bag next to mine for me to follow.

I caught on as we practiced. Like with the dodging, it took a while to match the movements of my body to hers. Even then, I felt like I wasn’t doing something right—I was bony, awkward, like a straw man punching a wall; the leather stung my knuckles bright red and the bag barely moved no matter how hard I hit it. Next to me, Ace stood straight and watched critically for a few moments. Sweat dripped down my brow.

“You don’t have much muscle,” she said, “which means you’re better off using your elbows for a powerful blow. Palm to fist, like this.”

She demonstrated and I mirrored it, driving my elbow into the bag. Still hurt. I slipped a little, skinning it. Ace nodded and said, “Good.”

Suddenly, she came behind me and pressed a hand to my stomach. I couldn’t help myself; I gasped.

“Keep the tension here,” she said. Maybe she was going to say something else, but it was at that moment that she seemed to register the accidental gasp. She pulled away quickly.

“I—can teach you some exercises to, um, strengthen your core,” she added, gaze darting. “So...keep practicing.”

She turned back to her own bag, her back to me. For the few seconds after, I could still feel the pressure of her palm, the heel of her palm touching one side of my ribcage, her fingertips brushing the other side. It didn’t help that Ace had abandoned her shirt again. Her sports bra today was dark red and aligned down her spine were miscellaneous tattoos. At the nape of her neck was a cross with a snake entwined around it. Her shoulders were emblazoned with flames that looked like an angel’s wings. Most of her skin, though, was striped with scars—diagonal, pulled down from left to right, the same wound from the same weapon. She’d been whipped. The scars, like the one on her face, were at least five to eight years old. It made my stomach twist. I wondered what kind of monster would whip a young girl. I could only hope that I didn’t know their name.

I turned my focus to the bag, making my punches short and sharp, putting the power into my elbow strikes and back fist strikes. Later we covered kicks, which were harder, and which left the tops of my feet raw and red and my hips stiff. And long, long afterwards, she took me back to the shooting range and I tried the gun again. I still did not like it, not one bit. But she taught me how to aim and by the end of it, I could hit the edge of the target.

I was too tired to do anything, so we returned to Ace’s apartment. As she unlocked the door, I looked down at my tattoo. I didn’t want to remove it. It had hurt like the dickens to get and I liked it; I couldn’t let it go to waste. Maybe I could explain. Maybe there was some way that I could hide it. Makeup? I had never worn makeup before. I didn’t know how to use it.

As we stepped inside, Ace saw me looking at it and said, “It looks nice, by the way.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But Irene said I have to remove it. For the Full Unveiling.”

Ace was quiet. She went to the fridge and instead of a beer, pulled out a pitcher of water. Out of habit I didn’t want to ask for it, lest I be an inconvenience. But she poured me a glass anyway.

“Phoebe, I…I need to tell you something,” she said haltingly, looking at the glasses. Our fingers brushed when she gave one to me.

“Anything,” I said.

She led me out onto the balcony. Today, the night skies were clear, and below us were the dark shadows of buildings. The air was warm and still. We stood next to each other and leaned against the railing.

“When you take that test,” said Ace slowly, like she was struggling to piece the words together, “the Full Unveiling, I mean—taking the truth serum—if you’re on a strong enough dose, you learn things about yourself. There’s no escaping them. Because you’re—you know, you know what—there are things you can do to hide them inside yourself. But it’s eye opening. Sometimes it even surprises you with what you know.”

I frowned. “Ace, what are you talking about?”

“If we’re going to start the second stage of training, I want to know something,” she replied. Now all the words spilled. Tumbling over each other. She wouldn’t meet my eyes and fiddled with her hands. “The second stage is like the Full Unveiling. It reveals parts of you that you would rather not see. It makes you understand your own head in ways that humans really shouldn’t.”

Now I was silent. Oh.

“Irene asked to show you inside my head,” Ace said. “When I do...you’re going to learn things. And it might change the way you think about me.”

“It can’t be that bad—”

“It’s not bad. I mean—I don’t know. I haven’t shown anyone like this. I don’t know if it’s bad.”

“Can’t you tell me?”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“I can detect lies now, Ace.”

“I’d rather you see it. I only know that—I need to know something. I need to know how you feel about me, as the person you know me to be, the former factionless, current Dauntless, me. Just Ace.”

Again, I fell silent. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I did. I knew painfully well. I wanted to say that I was confused, I was doubtful, and above all I was scared, because I only knew one Ace and that Ace was already frightening enough as it is. She was frightening because she did things to me that I had never felt before; she made my heart weak and my hands tremble. She was my best friend. She was my beloved. She burned me.

Honesty had never been so hard, ever.

Finally I admitted, “I like you. A lot.”

I looked up to meet her eyes. We did, for a second. She pulled away first.

“And I think I love you. A little.” My heart pounded. “You’re the coolest, bravest person I’ve ever met. You’re funny without trying and you’re nice when you think you’re not at all. But I don’t understand you. I feel like I can’t trust you sometimes. There’s things you’re not telling me, things that don’t line up, and it scares me.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“If the second stage helps me make sense of this all, I want to do it,” I said. “My life is so full of unknowns, I want to be sure of something.”

“Yeah.” Ace rubbed the back of her neck. “Me too.”

It came slow enough to see, slow enough that maybe I could have reacted, though I didn’t understand that it was real until it happened. Ace leaned down, touched my face, and kissed my cheek—soft, gentle, pressing in for a second before pulling away.

“Get some sleep,” she said. “You’ve had a long few days.”

Now I was truly speechless. I stared at her, stars in my eyes, touching my fingers to the place she kissed me. She was looking out at the horizon. But I knew she wasn’t really looking. That was her tell—not necessarily for when she was lying, but when she was avoiding something. Something like the hesitation, the reluctance as she pulled back from me.

But she was right. I had had a long few days, and despite my heart racing from the little kiss, I was too tired to pursue it.

“Goodnight, Ace,” I said quietly.

I could see the conflict in her eyes. Conflict about... something I could not yet decrypt. She nodded, staying there, staring at the skyline just like she had Monday night, when the rain drummed quietly on the balcony and splashed on her face.

It was quiet as I climbed into bed.