1
chapter
one
Tr i s
I pace in our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echo-
ing in my mind: My name will be Edith Prior, and there is
much I am happy to forget.
“So you've never seen her before? Not even in pictures?”
Christina says, her wounded leg propped up on a pillow.
She was shot during our desperate attempt to reveal the
Edith Prior video to our city. At the time we had no idea
what it would say, or that it would shatter the foundation
we stand on, the factions, our identities. “Is she a grand-
mother or an aunt or something?”
“I told you, no,” I say, turning when I reach the wall.
“Prior is—was—my father's name, so it would have to be on
his side of the family. But Edith is an Abnegation name,

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and my father's relatives must have been Erudite, so . . .”
“So she must be older,” Cara says, leaning her head
against the wall. From this angle she looks just like
her brother, Will, my friend, the one I shot. Then she
straightens, and the ghost of him is gone. “A few genera-
tions back. An ancestor.”
“Ancestor.” The word feels old inside me, like
crumbling brick. I touch one wall of the cell as I turn
around. The panel is cold and white.
My ancestor, and this is the inheritance she passed to
me: freedom from the factions, and the knowledge that
my Divergent identity is more important than I could
have known. My existence is a signal that we need to leave
this city and offer our help to whoever is outside it.
“I want to know,” Cara says, running her hand over her
face. “I need to know how long we've been here. Would you
stop pacing for one minute?”
I stop in the middle of the cell and raise my eyebrows
at her.
“Sorry,” she mumbles.
“It's okay,” Christina says. “We've been in here way too
long.”
It's been days since Evelyn mastered the chaos in the
lobby of Erudite headquarters with a few short commands
and had all the prisoners hustled away to cells on the third

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floor. A factionless woman came to doctor our wounds and
distribute painkillers, and we've eaten and showered sev-
eral times, but no one has told us what's going on outside.
No matter how forcefully I've asked them.
“I thought Tobias would come by now,” I say, dropping
to the edge of my cot. “Where is he?”
“Maybe he's still angry that you lied to him and went
behind his back to work with his father,” Cara says.
I glare at her.
“Four wouldn't be that petty,” Christina says, either
to chastise Cara or to reassure me, I'm not sure.
“Something's probably going on that's keeping him
away. He told you to trust him.”
In the chaos, when everyone was shouting and the
factionless were trying to push us toward the staircase,
I curled my fingers in the hem of his shirt so I wouldn't
lose him. He took my wrists in his hands and pushed me
away, and those were the words he said. Trust me. Go where
they tell you.
“I'm trying,” I say, and it's true. I'm trying to trust
him. But every part of me, every fiber and every nerve, is
straining toward freedom, not just from this cell but from
the prison of the city beyond it.
I need to see what's outside the fence.