“I’m sorry,” my mother says gently. “I believe you are mistaken.”
“Mistaken. Ha,” Cara snaps. “I’m sure you’re exactly what you seem. A faction of happy-go-lucky do-gooders without a selfish bone in their bodies. Right.”
“Don’t speak to my mother that way,” I say, my face hot. I clench my hands into fists. “Don’t say another word to her or I swear I will break your nose.”
“Back off, Tris,” Will says. “You’re not going to punch my sister.”
“Oh?” I say, raising both eyebrows. “You think so?”
“No, you’re not.” My mother touches my shoulder. “Come on, Beatrice. We wouldn’t want to bother your friend’s sister.”
She sounds gentle, but her hand squeezes my arm so hard I almost cry out from the pain as she drags me away. She walks with me, fast, toward the dining hall. Just before she reaches it, though, she takes a sharp left turn and walks down one of the dark hallways I haven’t explored yet.
“Mom,” I say. “Mom, how do you know where you’re going?”
She stops next to a locked door and stands on her tiptoes, peering at the base of the blue lamp hanging from the ceiling. A few seconds later she nods and turns to me again.
“I said no questions about me. And I meant it. How are you really doing, Beatrice? How have the fights been? How are you ranked?”
“Ranked?” I say. “You know that I’ve been fighting? You know that I’m ranked?”
“It isn’t top-secret information, how the Dauntless initiation process works.”
I don’t know how easy it is to find out what another faction does during initiation, but I suspect it’s not that easy. Slowly, I say, “I’m close to the bottom, Mom.”
“Good.” She nods. “No one looks too closely at the bottom. Now, this is very important, Beatrice: What were your aptitude test results?”
Tori’s warning pulses in my head. Don’t tell anyone. I should tell her that my result was Abnegation, because that’s what Tori recorded in the system.
I look into my mother’s eyes, which are pale green and framed by a dark smudge of eyelashes. She has lines around her mouth, but other than that, she doesn’t look her age. Those lines get deeper when she hums. She used to hum as she washed the dishes.
This is my mother.
I can trust her.
“They were inconclusive,” I say softly.
“I thought as much.” She sighs. “Many children who are raised Abnegation receive that kind of result. We don’t know why. But you have to be very careful during the next stage of initiation, Beatrice. Stay in the middle of the pack, no matter what you do. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Do you understand?”
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“I don’t care what faction you chose,” she says, touching her hands to my cheeks. “I am your mother and I want to keep you safe.”
“Is this because I’m a—” I start to say, but she presses her hand to my mouth.
“Don’t say that word,” she hisses. “Ever.”
So Tori was right. Divergent is a dangerous thing to be. I just don’t know why, or even what it really means, still.
“Why?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t say.”
She looks over her shoulder, where the light from the Pit floor is barely visible. I hear shouts and conversations, laughter and shuffling footsteps. The smell from the dining hall floats over my nose, sweet and yeasty: baking bread. When she turns toward me, her jaw is set.
“There’s something I want you to do,” she says. “I can’t go visit your brother, but you can, when initiation is over. So I want you to go find him and tell him to research the simulation serum. Okay? Can you do that for me?”
“Not unless you explain some of this to me, Mom!” I cross my arms. “You want me to go hang out at the Erudite compound for the day, you had better give me a reason!”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.” She kisses my cheek and brushes a lock of hair that fell from my bun behind my ear. “I should leave. It will make you look better if you and I don’t seem attached to each other.”
“I don’t care how I look to them,” I say.
“You should,” she says. “I suspect they are already monitoring you.”
She walks away, and I am too stunned to follow her. At the end of the hallway she turns and says, “Have a piece of cake for me, all right? The chocolate. It’s delicious.” She smiles a strange, twisted smile, and adds, “I love you, you know.”
And then she’s gone.
I stand alone in the blue light coming from the lamp above me, and I understand:
She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process.
My mother was Dauntless.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THAT AFTERNOON, I go back to the dormitory while everyone else spends time with their families and find Al sitting on his bed, staring at the space on the wall where the chalkboard usually is. Four took it down yesterday so he could calculate our stage one rankings.
“There you are!” I say. “Your parents were looking for you. Did they find you?”
He shakes his head.
I sit down next to him on the bed. My leg is barely half the width of his, even now that it’s more muscular than it was. He wears black shorts. His knee is purple-blue with a bruise and crossed with a scar.
“You didn’t want to see them?” I say.
“Didn’t want them to ask how I was doing,” he says. “I’d have to tell them, and they would know if I was lying.”
“Well…” I struggle to come up with something to say. “What’s wrong with how you’re doing?”
Al laughs harshly. “I’ve lost every fight since the one with Will. I’m not doing well.”
“By choice, though. Couldn’t you tell them that, too?”
He shakes his head. “Dad always wanted me to come here. I mean, they said they wanted me to stay in Candor, but that’s only because that’s what they’re supposed to say. They’ve always admired the Dauntless, both of them. They wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain it to them.”
“Oh.” I tap my fingers against my knee. Then I look at him. “Is that why you chose Dauntless? Because of your parents?”
Al shakes his head. “No. I guess it was because…I think it’s important to protect people. To stand up for people. Like you did for me.” He smiles at me. “That’s what the Dauntless are supposed to do, right? That’s what courage is. Not…hurting people for no reason.”