LITMIR.BIZ

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head, my knees pressing to the pool of blood, and put my hands on his shoulders.

      “Lie still,” I say. I feel calm, though I can’t hear anything, like my head is submerged in water. Edward thrashes again and I say it louder, sterner. “I said, lie still. Breathe.”

      “My eye!” he screams.

      I smell something foul. Someone vomited.

      “Take it out!” he yells. “Get it out, get it out of me, get it out!”

      I shake my head and then realize that he can’t see me. A laugh bubbles in my stomach. Hysterical. I have to suppress hysteria if I’m going to help him. I have to forget myself.

      “No,” I say. “You have to let the doctor take it out. Hear me? Let the doctor take it out. And breathe.”

      “It hurts,” he sobs.

      “I know it does.” Instead of my voice I hear my mother’s voice. I see her crouching before me on the sidewalk in front of our house, brushing tears from my face after I scraped my knee. I was five at the time.

      “It will be all right.” I try to sound firm, like I’m not idly reassuring him, but I am. I don’t know if it will be all right. I suspect that it won’t.

      When the nurse arrives, she tells me to step back, and I do. My hands and knees are soaked with blood. When I look around, I see that only two faces are missing.

      Drew.

      And Peter.

      After they take Edward away, I carry a change of clothes into the bathroom and wash my hands. Christina comes with me and stands by the door, but she doesn’t say anything, and I’m glad. There isn’t much to say.

      I scrub at the lines in my palms and run one fingernail under my other fingernails to get the blood out. I change into the pants I brought and throw the soiled ones in the trash. I get as many paper towels as I can hold. Someone needs to clean up the mess in the dormitory, and since I doubt I’ll ever be able to sleep again, it might as well be me.

      As I reach for the door handle, Christina says, “You know who did that, right?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Should we tell someone?”

      “You really think the Dauntless will do anything?” I say. “After they hung you over the chasm? After they made us beat each other unconscious?”

      She doesn’t say anything.

      For a half hour after that, I kneel alone on the floor in the dormitory and scrub at Edward’s blood. Christina throws away the dirty paper towels and gets me new ones. Myra is gone; she probably followed Edward to the hospital.

      No one sleeps much that night.

      “This is going to sound weird,” Will says, “but I wish we didn’t have a day off today.”

      I nod. I know what he means. Having something to do would distract me, and I could use a distraction right now.

      I have not spent much time alone with Will, but Christina and Al are taking naps in the dormitory, and neither of us wanted to be in that room longer than we had to. Will didn’t tell me that; I just know.

      I slide one fingernail under another. I washed my hands thoroughly after cleaning up Edward’s blood, but I still feel like it’s on my hands. Will and I walk with no sense of purpose. There is nowhere to go.

      “We could visit him,” suggests Will. “But what would we say? ‘I didn’t know you that well, but I’m sorry you got stabbed in the eye’?”

      It isn’t funny. I know that as soon as he says it, but a laugh rises in my throat anyway, and I let it out because it’s harder to keep it in. Will stares at me for a second, and then he laughs too. Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now.

      “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just so ridiculous.”

      I don’t want to cry for Edward—at least not in the deep, personal way that you cry for a friend or loved one. I want to cry because something terrible happened, and I saw it, and I could not see a way to mend it. No one who would want to punish Peter has the authority to, and no one who has the authority to punish him would want to. The Dauntless have rules against attacking someone like that, but with people like Eric in charge, I suspect those rules go unenforced.

      I say, more seriously, “The most ridiculous part is, in any other faction it would be brave of us to tell someone what happened. But here…in Dauntless…bravery won’t do us any good.”

      “Have you ever read the faction manifestos?” says Will.

      The faction manifestos were written after the factions formed. We learned about them in school, but I never read them.

      “You have?” I frown at him. Then I remember that Will once memorized a map of the city for fun, and I say, “Oh. Of course you have. Never mind.”

      “One of the lines I remember from the Dauntless manifesto is, ‘We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.’”

      Will sighs.

      He doesn’t need to say anything else. I know what he means. Maybe Dauntless was formed with good intentions, with the right ideals and the right goals. But it has strayed far from them. And the same is true of Erudite, I realize. A long time ago, Erudite pursued knowledge and ingenuity for the sake of doing good. Now they pursue knowledge and ingenuity with greedy hearts. I wonder if the other factions suffer from the same problem. I have not thought about it before.

      Despite the depravity I see in Dauntless, though, I could not leave it. It isn’t only because the thought of living factionless, in complete isolation, sounds like a fate worse than death. It is because, in the brief moments that I have loved it here, I saw a faction worth saving. Maybe we can become brave and honorable again.

      “Let’s go to the cafeteria,” Will says, “and eat cake.”

      “Okay.” I smile.

      As we walk toward the Pit, I repeat the line Will quoted to myself so I don’t forget it.

      I believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

      It is a beautiful thought.

      Later, when I return to the dormitory, Edward’s bunk is stripped clean and his drawers are open, empty. Across the room, Myra’s bunk looks the same way.

      When I ask Christina where they went, she says, “They quit.”

      “Even Myra?”

      “She said she didn’t want to be here without him. She was going to get cut anyway.” She shrugs, like she can’t think of anything else to do. If that’s true, I know how she feels. “At least they didn’t cut Al.”

      Al was supposed to get cut, but Edward’s departure saved him. The Dauntless decided to spare him until the next stage.

      “Who else got cut?” I say.

      Christina shrugs again. “Two of the Dauntless-born. I don’t remember their names.”

      I nod and look at the blackboard. Someone drew a line through Edward and Myra’s names, and changed the numbers next to everyone else’s names. Now Peter is first. Will is second. I am fifth. We started stage one with nine initiates.

      Now we have seven.

       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      IT’S NOON. LUNCHTIME.

      I sit in a hallway I don’t recognize. I walked here because I needed to get away from the dormitory. Maybe if I bring my bedding here, I will never have to go to the dormitory again. It may be

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