I see a few hands stretching out to me at the edge of the net, so I grabbed the first one I could reach and pull myself across. I roll off, and would have fallen face-first onto a wood floor if he had not caught me. "He" is the young man attached to the hand I grabbed. He has a spare upper lip and a full lower lip. His eyes are so deep-set that his eyelashes touch the skin under his eyebrows, and they are dark blue, a dreaming, sleeping, waiting color.

So small as to be negligible. It's strange, but there's something in that thought that makes me feel almost...free.

I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did. I don't.

You know what Abnegation used to say about pride?' 'Something unfavorable,I assume.' I laugh.' Obviously. They said it blinds people to the truth of what they are.

Fear," she says, "is more powerful than pain.

It's wrong," he says. "It doesn't matter if your parents are in a better place, they aren't here with you, and that's wrong, Tris. It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't have happened to you. And anyone who tells you it's okay is a liar.

He holds my face in both hands and kisses me back. I press into the distance between us until it is gone, crushing the secrets we have kept and the suspicions we have harbored-for good, I hope.