Agents of the Forgotten Faction

|Chapter 23|

Hand in hand, we walk towards the Pit. I monitor the pressure of my hand carefully. I've never really had the need to hold someone's hand in a romantic way. Most of the time when I need to hold someone's hand its to pull them up from the side of a falling car or something drastic like that. I never really understood why people did the gesture but then he runs one of his fingertips down my palm, and I shiver and understand it completely. But I try to remember that I am playing with his emotions to get the intel that I need. 

"Tris be a player lets remember no strings attached," Hill reminds me. 

"So..." I latch on to the last logical thought I remember. 

"Four fears." 

"Four fears then; four fears now," he says, nodding. "They haven't changed, so I keep going in there, but...I still haven't made any progress." 

"You can't be fearless, remember?" I say. "Be use you still care about things. About your life." 

"I know." 

We walk along the edge of the Pit on a narrow path that leads to the rocks at the bottom of the chasm. I've never noticed it before—it blended in with the rock wall. But Tobias seems to know it well. I don't want to ruin the moment, but I have to know about his aptitude test. I have to know if he's Divergent or if he's even from here. The Academy won't tell, that's classified information.

"You were going to tell me about your aptitude test results," I say. 

"Ah." 

He scratches the back of his neck with his free hand. 

"Does it matter?" 

"Yes. I want to know." 

"How demanding you are." 

He smiles. We reach the end of the path and stand at the bottom of the chasm, where the rocks form unsteady ground, rising up at harsh angles from the rushing water. He leads me up and down, across small gaps and over angular ridges. My shoes cling to the rough rock.

The soles of my shoes mark each rock with a wet footprint. He finds a relatively flat rock near the side, where the current isn't strong, and sits down, his feet dangling over the edge. I sit beside him. He seems comfortable here, inches above the hazardous water. He releases my hand. I look at the jagged edge of the rock. 

"These are things I don't tell people, you know. Not even my friends," he says. 

I lace my fingers together and clench. This is the perfect place for him to tell me that he is Divergent, if indeed that's what he is. The roar of the chasm ensures that we won't be overheard. I don't know why the thought makes me so nervous. 

"My result was as expected," he says. "Abnegation." 

"Oh." 

Something inside me deflates. I am wrong about him. Is he really from here? No that can't be right, he has the necklace, his father is Marcus Eaton and he is the perfect age, matching that boy that was always with Tasha. Does he remember me? Does he know who I really am? Did he go through the memory swipe? 

The memory swipe was for operatives to leave the system and be inserted into somewhere to have a normal life. It was also for those disobedient operatives whose skills were too good to be passed up so instead of submitting them to the arena they would be given a memory swipe and a clean slate. Skills would be retained in the memory but a different persona would be implanted, perhaps a different name.

Well needless to say Four's answer disappointed me. If he really was from here I would have thought he was given a Dauntless result. 

"But you chose Dauntless anyway?" I say.