Agents of the Forgotten Faction

|Chapter 22|

I stand with Will and Christina at the railing overlooking the chasm, late at night after most of the Dauntless have gone to sleep. It's been a couple days since the incident and everyone has moved on with their lives. Well everyone but me. I still feel the guilt there. Every night when I go to bed I have about a 30 minute session with the guidance counsellor in my ear talking about ways to deal with the grief. I'm grateful for the support network but I don't feel like it is working.

I managed to find a temporary tattoo of the Abnegation symbol and put it on my shoulder. So now I have one of the Dauntless and one of Abnegation. I feel like it's part of me now. I step up on one of the barrier's crossbars, pressing my hips to the railing to keep my balance.

This is where Al stood. I look down into the chasm, at the black water, at the jagged rocks. Water hits the wall and sprays up, misting my face. Was he afraid when he stood here? Or was he so determined to jump that it was easy? Christina hands me a stack of paper. I got a copy of every report the Erudite have released in the last six months. Throwing them into the chasm won't get rid of them forever, but it might make me feel better. I stare at the first one. On it is a picture of Jeanine, the Erudite representative. Her sharp-but-attractive eyes stare back at me. Her type of state looks confident, fierce likes she's not going to let anything stand in her way. I realize the way her eyes look are almost like mine.

"Have you ever met her?" I ask Will.

Christina crumples the first report into a ball and hurls it into the water.

"Jeanine? Once," he replies. He takes the next report and tears it to shreds.

The pieces float into the river. He does it without Christina's malice. I get the feeling that the only reason he's participating is to prove to me that he doesn't agree with his former faction's tactics. Whether he believes what they're saying or not is unclear, and I am afraid to ask.

"Before she was a leader, she worked with my sister. They were trying to develop a longer-lasting serum for the simulations," he says, "Jeanine's so smart you can see it even before she says anything. Like...a walking, talking computer."

"What..." I fling one of the pages over the railing, pressing my lips together. I should just ask.

"What do you think of what she has to say?"

He shrugs.

"I don't know. Maybe it's a good idea to have more than one faction in control of the government. And maybe it would be nice if we had more cars and...fresh fruit and..."

"You do realize there's no secret warehouse where all that stuff is kept, right?" I ask, my face getting hot because I made that up and I hope it's right.

"Yes, I do," he says. "I just think that comfort and prosperity are not a priority for Abnegation, and maybe they would be if the other factions were involved in our decision making."

"Because giving an Erudite boy a car is more important than giving food to the factionless," I snap.

"Hey now," says Christina, brushing Will's shoulder with her fingers.

"This is supposed to be a lighthearted session of symbolic document destruction, not a political debate."

I bite back what I was about to say and stare at the stack of paper in my hands. Will and Christina share a lot of idle touches lately. I've noticed it. Have they? Are they a thing?

"All that stuff she said about your dad, though," he says, "makes me kind of hate her. I can't imagine what good can come of saying such terrible things."

I can. If Jeanine can make people believe that my father and all the other Abnegation leaders are corrupt and awful, she has support for whatever revolution she wants to start, if that's really her plan. But I don't want to argue again, so I just nod and throw the remaining sheets into the chasm. They drift back and forth, back and forth until they find the water. They will be filtered out at the chasm wall and discarded.