LITMIR.BIZ

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nose. Scrubbing the floor when no one else wanted to was something that my mother would have done. If I can’t be with her, the least I can do is act like her sometimes.

      I hear people approaching, their footsteps echoing on the stone floor, and I look down at my shoes. I switched from gray sneakers to black sneakers a week ago, but the gray shoes are buried in one of my drawers. I can’t bear to throw them away, even though I know it’s foolish to be attached to sneakers, like they can bring me home.

      “Tris?”

      I look up. Uriah stops in front of me. He waves along the Dauntless-born initiates he walks with. They exchange looks but keep moving.

      “You okay?” he says.

      “I had a difficult night.”

      “Yeah, I heard about that guy Edward.” Uriah looks down the hallway. The Dauntless-born initiates disappear around a corner. Then he grins a little. “Want to get out of here?”

      “What?” I ask. “Where are you going?”

      “To a little initiation ritual,” he says. “Come on. We have to hurry.”

      I briefly consider my options. I can sit here. Or I can leave the Dauntless compound.

      I push myself to my feet and jog next to Uriah to catch up to the Dauntless-born initiates.

      “The only initiates they usually let come are ones with older siblings in Dauntless,” he says. “But they might not even notice. Just act like you belong.”

      “What exactly are we doing?”

      “Something dangerous,” he says. A look I can only describe as Dauntless mania enters his eyes, but rather than recoil from it, as I might have a few weeks ago, I catch it, like it’s contagious. Excitement replaces the leaden feeling inside me. We slow when we reach the Dauntless-born initiates.

      “What’s the Stiff doing here?” asks a boy with a metal ring between his nostrils.

      “She just saw that guy get stabbed in the eye, Gabe,” says Uriah. “Give her a break, okay?”

      Gabe shrugs and turns away. No one else says anything, though a few of them give me sidelong glances like they’re sizing me up. The Dauntless-born initiates are like a pack of dogs. If I act the wrong way, they won’t let me run with them. But for now, I am safe.

      We turn another corner, and a group of members stands at the end of the next hallway. There are too many of them to all be related to a Dauntless-born initiate, but I see some similarities among the faces.

      “Let’s go,” one of the members says. He turns and plunges through a dark doorway. The other members follow him, and we follow them. I stay close behind Uriah as I pass into darkness and my toe hits a step. I catch myself before falling forward and start to climb.

      “Back staircase,” Uriah says, almost mumbling. “Usually locked.”

      I nod, though he can’t see me, and climb until all the steps are gone. By then, a door at the top of the staircase is open, letting in daylight. We emerge from the ground a few hundred yards from the glass building above the Pit, close to the train tracks.

      I feel like I have done this a thousand times before. I hear the train horn. I feel the vibrations in the ground. I see the light attached to the head car. I crack my knuckles and bounce once on my toes.

      We jog in a single pack next to the car, and in waves, members and initiates alike pile into the car. Uriah gets in before me, and people press behind me. I can’t make any mistakes; I throw myself sideways, grabbing the handle on the side of the car, and hoist myself into the car. Uriah grabs my arm to steady me.

      The train picks up its speed. Uriah and I sit against one of the walls.

      I shout over the wind, “Where are we going?”

      Uriah shrugs. “Zeke never told me.”

      “Zeke?”

      “My older brother,” he says. He points across the room at a boy sitting in the doorway with his legs dangling out of the car. He is slight and short and looks nothing like Uriah, apart from his coloring.

      “You don’t get to know. That ruins the surprise!” the girl on my left shouts. She extends her hand. “I’m Shauna.”

      I shake her hand, but I don’t grip hard enough and I let go too quickly. I doubt I will ever improve my handshake. It feels unnatural to grasp hands with strangers.

      “I’m—” I start to say.

      “I know who you are,” she says. “You’re the Stiff. Four told me about you.”

      I pray the heat in my cheeks is not visible. “Oh? What did he say?”

      She smirks at me. “He said you were a Stiff. Why do you ask?”

      “If my instructor is talking about me,” I say, as firmly as I can, “I want to know what he’s saying.” I hope I tell a convincing lie. “He isn’t coming, is he?”

      “No. He never comes to this,” she says. “It’s probably lost its appeal. Not much scares him, you know.”

      He isn’t coming. Something in me deflates like an untied balloon. I ignore it and nod. I do know that Four is not a coward. But I also know that at least one thing does scare him: heights. Whatever we’re doing, it must involve being high up for him to avoid it. She must not know that if she speaks of him with such reverence in her voice.

      “Do you know him well?” I ask. I am too curious; I always have been.

      “Everyone knows Four,” she says. “We were initiates together. I was bad at fighting, so he taught me every night after everyone was asleep.” She scratches the back of her neck, her expression suddenly serious. “Nice of him.”

      She gets up and stands behind the members sitting in the doorway. In a second, her serious expression is gone, but I still feel rattled by what she said, half confused by the idea of Four being “nice” and half wanting to punch her for no apparent reason.

      “Here we go!” shouts Shauna. The train doesn’t slow down, but she throws herself out of the car. The other members follow her, a stream of black-clothed, pierced people not much older than I am. I stand in the doorway next to Uriah. The train is going much faster than it has every other time I’ve jumped, but I can’t lose my nerve now, in front of all these members. So I jump, hitting the ground hard and stumbling forward a few steps before I regain my balance.

      Uriah and I jog to catch up to the members, along with the other initiates, who barely look in my direction.

      I look around as I walk. The Hub is behind us, black against the clouds, but the buildings around me are dark and silent. That means we must be north of the bridge, where the city is abandoned.

      We turn a corner and spread out as we walk down Michigan Avenue. South of the bridge, Michigan Avenue is a busy street, crawling with people, but here it is bare.

      As soon as I lift my eyes to scan the buildings, I know where we’re going: the empty Hancock building, a black pillar with crisscrossed girders, the tallest building north of the bridge.

      But what are we going to do? Climb it?

      As we get closer, the members start to run, and Uriah and I sprint to catch them. Jostling one another with their elbows, they push through a set of doors at the building’s base. The glass in one of them is broken, so it is just a frame. I step through it instead of opening it and follow the members through an eerie, dark entryway, crunching broken glass beneath my feet.

      I expect us to go up the stairs, but we stop at the elevator bank.

      “Do the elevators work?” I ask Uriah, as quietly as I can.

      “Sure they do,” says Zeke, rolling his eyes. “You think I’m stupid enough not to come here early and turn on the emergency generator?”

      “Yeah,”

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