RenesmeeEaton4

"THE FIVE-YEAR REUNION is coming up."
          
            Christina leans against the railing of the train platform, first bent, propped up by her elbows, then straightening, pressing her hips to the railing for stability instead. Her hair is longer now than it's ever been, densely curled and standing straight out from her head. Sometimes she wears it wrapped up in a scarf, a colorful defiance of her Dauntless history, but today it's loose.
          
            The words settle on me like a weight, familiar but still more than I'd like to bear.
          
            "So I've heard," I say. Every year the former faction members who still live in Chicago reunite to celebrate--or mourn, maybe--our common history. I have gone to some of these events and not to others, but this year's is important.
          
            Five years.
          
            "You going?"
          
            Christina tilts her head as she looks at me, then she shrugs.
          
            "I was thinking about it," she says. "It's in Dauntless headquarters. The former Dauntless headquarters, I should say."
          
            I nod, looking out at the city lights that dot the buildings around us. Some of them show glimpses of other lives--a woman braiding her hair and laughing, a man picking up after his children, the glow of a flashlight under blankets as a child steals more time awake. A bus passes beneath us, carrying late commuters to the apartment buildings near the marsh. Behind me are the silent train tracks, the rails shining as they catch the moonlight.
          
            "I know you go to headquarters every so often," she says, looking down at her hands. "Zeke told me."
          
            Zeke. That traitor.
          
            "Yeah, I go there. So what?"

RenesmeeEaton4

We fight all the time. Over whose turn it is to wash the dishes, and who gets to name Zeke and Shauna's kid--neither of us, it turns out--and how wrapped up I get in the city improvement projects, and how grouchy she is when she comes back from work some days.
            
              I still dream of Tris, sometimes. Even dream of her dying. I tell Christina about it, and she doesn't take it personally, mostly, unless she's tired or worried about something. My stash of fear landscape serum goes untouched for so long that I end up giving it to Cara to play with.
            
            
              We talk about Will, and Tris, and the lives we took, and how afraid we are, sometimes, when someone startles us, or looks too much like Jeanine or Marcus or Max. I wake in the middle of the night to her crying as she remembers pulling Hector over the edge of the roof only to realize Marlene was broken on the ground. She wakes to worse from me.
            
              We laugh all the time. Sometimes just because of a look, or a word. She speaks in strange voices, mimicking me, or her coworkers, or the birds we watch videos of in my apartment. She makes me laugh until I'm weak with it, relaxed against the couch cushions with my hands curled in, useless.
            
              She is the first one I tell when something goes well, or when something goes poorly. Or when something goes, period.
            
              She tells me, once, that she keeps a vial of memory serum in her bathroom cabinet, to remind her of what she almost lost, when I almost lost myself.
            
              We work, and dream. We fight, and we laugh, and we fall in love. We move.
            
              And we mend.
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RenesmeeEaton4

Then the session is done and the trainees leave, so it's just her and me, stretching and sipping water from the same bottle.
            
              "You talked about them like they were little tornadoes," I say. "They're not so
            bad. I think you just wanted pity."
            
              "You caught them on a good day," she says.
            
              "'Poor me, I'm Christina, I have to actually teach people things,'" I say, mimicking her. "Talk to me after you've tried to wrangle volunteers at the crack of dawn."
            
              "Oh, shut up." She smacks me with a sweaty hand wrap.
            
              "That was wet," I say to her.
            
              Her eyes are bright with laughter. She gathers the wrap into her fist and shoves it into my cheek. I smack her hand away, and she grabs mine, and then we're close together, sharing air, hands clasped, our knees touching, both smiling.
            
              Her smile fades. Our hands come apart. But instead of shifting away, I touch her jaw, run my thumb over her cheek. Her skin is dotted with sweat, and my hand is still wrapped in black fabric, but I feel--everything.
            
              "This isn't some kind of . . . experiment, is it?" she says. "To see if you've moved on?"
            
              "What? No, it's . . . I'm--I'm just . . . finally moving," I say.
            
              "Oh," she replies.
            
              I touch my lips to hers. It's quick, a scared little peck, and I don't think she breathes the whole time. I know I don't.
            
              "This okay?" I say.
            
              She puts a hand over my wrist, pulls me toward her, and smiles. Our foreheads touch.
            
              "Yeah," she says. "It is."
            
              This time, when our lips meet, it's soft and slow. It tastes salty. Her fingers hook in my shirt.
            
              And she pins me to the mat.
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RenesmeeEaton4

I told her I didn't want to teach soldiers anymore, and she told me it would just be this once, for old times' sake. Her eyes were steady on mine, and she was close and smelled like sage, and a small curl had escaped the cloth she had tied around her hair and hung right over her cheekbone. I didn't hug her good-bye. It felt dangerous, somehow.
            
              But here I am anyway, sighing as I wait at the door for my own courage to show up. Finally I decide it will come along if I do something, so I open the door and walk in. The air smells like sweat and shoes and sawdust. The security force trains in one of the factionless warehouses, but the floor is covered with mats and some kind of springy material, and there are lights everywhere.
            
              Christina is demonstrating a maneuver on one of the rowdy newcomers, as she called them. She tells him to push her, then shifts to the side, grasping his arm right under the armpit and moving so he's forced to his knees. She's grown into herself since the last time I saw her do anything like this, and moves with a little more grace, a lot more certainty.
            
              She looks up and sees me and smiles.
            
              I wrap my hands and warm up on one of the heavy bags, until I feel sweat between my shoulders. It feels good, easy. So when she taps my shoulder and asks me to walk around and correct technique, I say yes.
            
              It's like lowering myself into a stream. The water takes me, and I am a Dauntless instructor again, rolling my eyes when someone forgets to keep their guard up or to look before elbowing the pad so they elbow their partner's arm instead. Look, I tell them, and get smaller.
            
              Be ready, and act ready, she says to them, and I nod.
            
              "He was my teacher once, you know," Christina says to one of the smaller girls. "And if you think I'm tough on you, you don't know how bad it can get."
            
              "Candor smart-mouth," I say.
            
              "That's right," she replies.
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