XXX

Hand in hand, we walked toward the Pit. I couldn’t help but monitor the pressure of my hand. One minute, I felt like I wasn’t gripping hard enough, and the next, I was squeezing too hard. That was the problem about living in a faction where everyone could read each other like a book—you became obsessed with how people perceived you. I never used to understand why people would hold hands as they walked, but then Ace rubbed her thumb against my knuckles, and I understood completely.

“So…” I latched on to the last logical thought I remembered. “Four fears.”

“Four fears then; four fears now,” she said, nodding.

“You said everyone has ten to fifteen.”

“Most people.”

“I take it you were some kind of record?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Some people around here still call me Four. But it doesn’t stick the same as Ace.”

Four. A shiver passed down my spine. I had begun reading the Erudite papers for more than just investigation and become fascinated with their writings about the multiverse—the theory that there were millions, billions of alternate universes lying parallel to ours. They contained people who lived like us, acted like us, talked like us, but through the pulling of the straws of fate, were just a little bit...different. In the blink of an eye, I swore I caught a glimpse of one. Two Dauntless named Tris and Four, walking along the edge of the Pit, hands intertwined. Then the image was gone.

I didn’t mind. I let Tris and Four have their moment, undisturbed. This was a moment for Phoebe and Ace.

She led to a narrow path behind the chasm railing, leading to a rock outcropping near the water. I had never noticed it before—it blended right in with the rock wall. But Ace seemed to know it well.

I didn’t want to ruin the moment, but I had to know about Abigail Eaton. I had to know...everything.

“You said we were going to talk,” I said.

“We’ve talked.” She scratched the back of her neck with her free hand. She was avoiding it.

“When were you going to tell me that you’re Abigail?”

“Shout it to the whole faction, why don’t you?”

We reached the end of the path and stood at the bottom of the chasm, where the rocks rose and fell at harsh angles from the rushing water. She led me up and down, across small gaps and stepping stones. She found a flat rock near the side, where the current wasn’t strong, and sat down, her feet dangling over the edge. I sat cautiously beside her. It didn’t matter where she came from, she seemed comfortable here, inches above the roaring rapids.

She released my hand. I looked at the jagged edge of the rock.

“What you were saying about... about me being the only person you’re honest with,” she began, “the feeling’s mutual. You’re one of maybe a handful of people who know my whole story.”

“I don’t feel like I know the whole story,” I said. “I’m...I don’t know whether to be angry, or confused, or what. And what do you mean, only a handful?”

“Irene knows. A couple Dauntless leaders. Marcus knows.”

Marcus. I thought of Sajida Touma, the girl who went missing while searching for Abigail Eaton.

As if she’d read my thoughts, Ace added, “Sajida knows.”

“What happened to—”

“She’s safe. She connected the dots just hours before Visiting Day, gathered proof from Marcus, and left Abnegation on her own. She’s with the factionless for now, staying with Miriam.”

My shoulders relaxed. In the back of my mind, I had been fearing the worst—that I would find out something else had happened to her, and I would have to face Judge Touma one day and tell her that her daughter was gone.

“So you lied?” I asked quietly. “You’re not really factionless?”

Ace lowered her head, fiddling with her hands in her lap.

“I didn’t lie,” she said. “I am—I was factionless. By every definition of the word. I ran away from Abnegation when I was thirteen. A lot of people down there, they suspected I had faction blood, but they never asked. Factionless by birth, factionless by choice, it’s all the same down there.”

“But you were missing. Everyone was looking for you. It was huge, it was one of the biggest news stories for years—”

“They were looking for Abigail,” said Ace, her eyes hardening. “Abigail doesn’t have a scar like this.”

I was quiet. The question lingered on my lips, unsaid. Ace sighed mightily. From this side, the scar was all I could see, that cruel crescent.

“I ran away the same night that Marcus gave it to me. We had a fight. We were in the kitchen; it was a pan of boiling oil. I don’t think he understood what it would do.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

She shook her head. “If anything, it saved me. It put him in a compromising situation. He tried to console me, told me to say it was just an accident, and we’d never talk about it again. But he knew it wouldn’t be enough. When I ran away, it got worse for him. He couldn’t tell people why I’d really left. He couldn’t give an accurate description of me with the scar—if he claimed to know about it, even when saying it was just an accident, that’s sketchy. He couldn’t pretend I wasn’t gone. So he told the Candor and the Dauntless, ‘Look for a sweet little girl who wants to come home to her daddy’. He knew they’d never find her.”

I was quiet as I thought about it. I had only been eleven at the time, but I remembered the cloud of mourning that covered the city weeks after Abigail’s disappearance. The nighttime sigils every year, holding little candles as we sat in the church pews and listened to Marcus pray. Asking God for his little girl to come home again. All of it—a lie.

“Marcus created a cold case,” I said.

“The sympathy was good for his public image,” Ace shrugged. “But it was good for me, too. I could disappear.”

“Disappear?”

“Changed my hair, mainly. Changed my name to Alzolay, after some old baseball player. Said I was a prostitute’s orphan. I got a job at a restaurant and paid for my own living, and when I got closer to sixteen, I started going to the project schools, studying.”

“You said you passed the literacy exams because you got lucky.”

“I did. I also told you I slept on the streets. One winter, I lived in the boiler room under the school—it’s warm, you do what you have to. I was right under one of the teachers’ offices. One night, I hear a few of them talking, and they’re laughing about something, and as I listened, they admitted everything. How the exams are rigged. Closer to spring, they even started creating the rigged problems on a chalkboard. I could see it all from a vent. So I practiced them, mugged an Erudite and stole his textbooks, taught myself advanced calculus, and I passed. That’s when Irene got involved.”

I didn’t question the fact that Ace just admitted to robbing an Erudite. The mental image was actually kind of funny. I resolved to ask her more about that scene of the story later and let her continue.

“Irene put me under truth serum and got the whole story out of me. She was going to tell her superiors who I was, but I begged her, god, no, don’t make me go back there. So she didn’t. She pulled some strings, let me take the aptitude test, and I got Dauntless.”

“Just Dauntless,” I said slowly.

Her mouth pressed into a smirk. The roar of the river ensured that we wouldn’t be overheard, and she seemed to understand this. “What are you asking, Phoebe?”

“So there were others?”

“I never said that.” She chuckled. “No. It was just Dauntless.”

“How can you be you-know-what if you only got Dauntless?”

“Aptitude tests aren’t the only tell. Hey, maybe if the test let me progress further, I would’ve gotten others. I’m sure a lot of people in the city are like that. A lot of Candor don’t find out until they try the Full Unveiling, realize they have the ability to lie, and freak out.”

I nodded slowly. It made sense.

“Anyway, I got only Dauntless, but Irene still seemed wary. For my Choosing Ceremony, she found some obscure corollary that says that a sixteen-year-old can choose anonymously, and those who know her are bound by law not to reveal her identity. I chose Dauntless right in front of my father and he was forced to say nothing.”

She sounded proud of that part, and for good reason. It must have been awful for Marcus watch. Still, I had heard of those people who chose anonymously; they weren’t very common, but when they happened they weren’t held in high regards. It was worse than transferring factions. It was saying in front of the whole city, “Not only do I reject the place I came from, I have never held loyalty to them; I have never been a part of them.” They were seen as loyal only to themselves. Very few anonymous initiates became members.

“That must have been hard,” I said.

“Initiation was a bitch, yeah,” she agreed. “Everyone wanted to know where I came from. A few Candor transfers almost figured it out, actually; they realized Abigail would have been my age, that my father and I were about the same height, all that. So I dropped the bomb myself. I said I was factionless, an orphan who named herself after a baseball player. Told them I was a whore’s kid. It was so outlandish it couldn’t be a story; nobody would ruin their reputation like that if it wasn’t true; and any suspicions about Abigail disappeared. I became Ace.”

It was a beautifully crafted lie, really. Layers of secrets, layers of stories. One throwing off the scent from the other. I remembered what Lars had said about Candor confining the secret of Ace being factionless. That would have really deflected suspicion and confirmed in people’s minds that they knew all of Ace’s deepest secrets, so why press her for anything else? It was an Irene move if I had ever seen one.

I watched Ace as she breathed; it looked like a load had been pulled off her shoulders. Her face was less tense. That was what she had meant about her fears changing the way I saw her. But...they really didn’t. Maybe sometimes, when I blinked hard, I could imagine the little Abigail Eaton in her place. But the girl was far from the person she was now, the product of five years of reshaping and rebuilding. Shaving and inking and piercing and hardening, honing, polishing.

“Is Ace—” I hesitated “—who you want to be?”

She picked at her nails. She pulled a small knife from her sleeve, but put it away.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Sometimes she’s who I wanted to be, when I was on the streets. Free. Powerful.” Her lip trembled. “Untouchable.”

“But you... are. You’re incredible.”

“I thought Ace was going to give me a home. I thought maybe—” her voice cracked, trembling “—I can have what everyone else has, being able to remake myself, really become Dauntless. Forget all of the other stuff. But I can’t. I’m still factionless. I’m still Abnegation. I can’t—I can’t bear to remember Abigail, I can’t bear to forget Alzolay, and I can’t find a version of Ace that exists without either of them.”

She turned her head aside and sniffed. She was crying. I did not know what to say.

So I didn’t speak. I reached over and hugged her, and just like before, she returned it. Tight and strong and warm. But vulnerable. Quiet. She was torn and I knew what it felt like. To be fractured like that while the whole world was pulling apart around you—it was hard. It hurt.

She pulled back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “M’okay,” she murmured. The other hand had intertwined with mine.

“Maybe you were cut out for Candor, because you’re a terrible liar,” I said.

A dry smile. “Fine. I’m an emotional wreck and I don’t know what to do with it all, so I’m dumping it on you in some twisted sort of therapy session. I also struggle with the paralyzing fear that I’m burdening my loved ones with my problems, so I’m feeling a good deal of guilt right now, too.”

“Relatable, honestly.” I shrugged. “Are you okay with me calling you Ace? I can change to Abigail when we’re alone…”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t know how to feel about Abigail anymore. I haven’t heard it in a long time.”

The only one who would have said it was Marcus, in the simulation. It couldn’t bring back a good taste.

“I think Ace suits you,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that a playing card pun?”

“You’ll never know.”

(It hadn’t been. But now that she mentioned it, it absolutely was.)

Our eyes settled on a thing between us, our hands, interlocked.

“I don’t think Ace has to go away,” I said. “Maybe she just needs to change. Instead of leaving behind the old versions of you…maybe it’s time to accept them.”

“Three faces can’t fit on one person.”

“Well, that’s just quitter talk.” I shrugged. “I was told it’s only possible to have aptitude for one faction. And somehow, this tiny body fit all five.”

“And how are you managing that ?”

“My brain is very fast and very loud, all the time, and sometimes I want to die.”

“Proves my point.”

We laughed.

“But it’s not a bad thing,” I said. “It’s hard. It’s messy. But sometimes I think, maybe it’s just a part of being human. Being messy. We’re only a few millennia away from animals. Sometimes the standards of clean are just…too inflexible for almost-animals.”

Ace paused as she turned that over in her head. “When did you get so wise?”

I met her eyes. Her response was adjacent to sarcasm, but within was a genuine question, too. I thought back to an image of a girl in grey. When we were kids. Glancing at her in passing, trying to meet her elusive dark eyes. Maybe I had loved her then. I would never be able to act on it. It would have been just an indulgent fantasy, like watching the flocks of crows fly from the train every morning. Perhaps I had fixated on Ace, of all the Dauntless, because something small in the back of my mind still longed for her.

I thought of the past week, every beautiful minute where she and I would train, the spaces in between where we talked about life and living and all the things that came with. I thought of the stretches of thoughtful peace as we rode the speeding train while the sun came up, or as she sat on the balcony and watched the storms of the night sky. I thought of her fire, her intensity, her courage; but also her softness, her empathy, her selflessness. She was broken and messy and patchwork and beautiful.

“When I started watching you,” I said.

I really had to give it to Sherlock. If he hadn’t kissed me first, maybe I wouldn’t have had the courage to reach across the space and touch Ace’s cheek. Or to tilt my head up, lean forward, and press my lips against hers.

There was no trying and no thinking. Just us. Her taking my face in her hands, her fingers strong and trembling just slightly. Returning the kiss, tentative, but wanting. Our noses squishing and chins touching, her scar rough on my skin.

For a while we stayed, deep in the chasm, the roar and cold spray of water around us. And when we rose, hand in hand, I realized if we had both chosen differently, we might have ended up doing the same thing, in a more secret place, in grey clothes instead of black ones.