Tris nods off, and the screen goes dark. I skip through her naptime, and see we're walking into the Abnegation sector. It appears that there was a little bit of a narrative gap there, as if the simulation itself fast forwarded, but Tris does not notice.

She winces a little, and hops awkwardly over a rough patch of pavement. I see that we both have bare feet, though Peter has shoes. Our feet must be wrecked, given the shattered landscapes we've been running through, ever since we escaped from Erudite. But we walk on – I don't even register discomfort.

I worry that Abnegation will be deserted, and I will have to watch the memories of her dead parents and traitorous brother haunt Tris. But the streets are increasingly busy as we move deeper into the quarter, everyone staring at us as we pass.

It's almost as if the vision I tattooed onto my skin has come to life, borne of tragedy. The remnants of Abnegation are mixing with the factionless, and there are refugees from Erudite and Candor, too. I don't see any Amity, but there couldn't be so many people here without cooperation from the Amity. They would all be starving.

We may have to come up with a new symbol for the factionless – I wouldn't want anything to be missing back there. Or maybe, I think more seriously, we need a symbol for unity.

There are Dauntless in the picture, too – specifically, our friends, who are probably all in the lobby downstairs right now, risking their lives for us. For each other.

I watch Christina and Uriah on the screen, as I hover protectively over Tris. Christina told me before I left for Erudite what Tris said to her, her hunch about Marcus. Christina sobbed then, saying she suspected what Tris was going to do and should have tried to stop her. At first, I was inclined to agree and started to say so, which even for me would have been harsh. But I understood how important it was to Tris to have her best friend back, and I told Christina so. She knows I'm not the type to say something just to spare her feelings, so it clearly did make her feel better. It really mattered to Tris that she had someone she could trust with her most important and dangerous secret.

Because she sure couldn't trust me, could she? I wouldn't even listen to her theory about what the Abnegation knew, and what might be outside the fence. I couldn't stand to hear her take Marcus's side.

Speaking of the devil, in the simulation, we've just gone into my father's house, of all things, which appears to be occupied by my mother and a band of factionless. We go upstairs, and the simulation accurately portrays which of the two bedrooms was mine. OK, not all that hard – all Abnegation houses are basically the same, and Marcus wasn't the type to allow any deviation.

"What's this?" Tris says, picking up a blue glass statue. Yes, what is that? I've certainly never seen it before.

"My mother smuggled that to me when I was young. Told me to hide it," I explain in the simulation. "The day of the ceremony, I put it on my dresser before I left. So he would see it. A small act of defiance."

I sit bolt upright. There is no glass statue in my room. My mother never gave me anything to remember her by. I pause the simulation and go back, looking carefully at the indicators. When the statue appears, just for a moment, the brain scan spikes, higher than I've seen it go, and the broad front region of Tris's brain lights up. As soon as I explain what the statue is, the indicators drop back down into more normal activity.

I stare at the screen, fingers steepled against my chin, hope flaming in my chest. Could it be that she just fought the simulation?