Short chapter - kind of a bridge chapter to move the story to a different place. But please R&R!

It's mostly quiet in Erudite. People seem to have taken the order to stay in their homes seriously. We do see a few armed blue shirters, but they either surrender their weapons to us voluntarily or flee at the sight of our black clothes. We're going to have more guns than we can carry, at this rate.

Then we run into two Dauntless in the stairwell, apparently weaponless, with ragged holes in their jackets where the traitor armbands used to be. "Do
you guys know where everyone went?" the man says. The woman he's with elbows him in the ribs excitedly.

"I recognize you! You're Tris!" she exclaims, mouth open in shock. "We heard you were alive!" She pulls Tris into a hug. I'm wondering if maybe one of these people fired the bullet that wounded Tris or the one that killed her mother. Or maybe that guy's boot is the one that left a bruise so deep on my cheekbone that it may never fully heal. But these two seem totally oblivious to how we might be feeling about them.

Tris handles it better than I do. "Yeah, thanks," she says briskly. "Do you know where the main hospital is? One of our Dauntless friends was taken there."

"Sure," the man says enthusiastically. "It's on the 9th floor - we can take you to it."

"Oh, hey," Tris says hastily, "that's okay - you should actually get back to Dauntless. They want everyone to go back - we're just checking on our friend before we go."

They tell us how to get to the hospital and move off down the stairs. About a flight down, the woman calls out awkwardly from the shadows, "Uh, Tris?"

"Yeah?" Tris says, grinding her teeth impatiently.

"We're... really...uh...we're really sorry. About...everything."

"Yeah, okay," Tris says softly, nodding at them and waving. We don't talk as we climb the stairs. "Thank you," Tris says, pausing as we reach the 9th floor.

"For what?"

"For not saying what you were thinking out loud."

I just look at her for a moment. "I suspect," I say slowly, "that's going to happen to you a lot."

She sighs and says, "The sooner we get outside the wall, the better."

"No arguments there."

We look at each other, realize what we just said, and both start laughing hysterically.

"There must be something seriously wrong with us," I say, still chuckling.

Tris wipes her eyes and grins up at me. "Every now and then, it's nice to just be a teenager."

We get to be teenagers a little longer once we find the hospital. Darius is awake, and he's playing Dauntless Slap with Christina and
Uriah. It's a card game that generally goes from being a little kids game to a drinking game to something no adult would play. The first player to
call slap on a red card gets to hit another player. If you make a bad call, everyone else slaps you. Both Uriah and Christina have red cheeks,
but Darius is pale against the pillows, and while I know that's partly from the blood loss, I suspect he's also just better at Slap. He looks up when we
walk in, and Christina happily screams, "Slap!" and smacks Darius across the face. That might seem a terrible thing to do to someone who
almost died today, but Darius just cracks up. "You are so going down!" he says to Christina.

Inez is sitting nearby in a chair, watching, with an amused expression. Her smile fades when she sees me looking at her.

"I'll go now," she says curtly, rising to her feet.

"No, stay," Tris says, putting a hand on her arm. "We want to talk to you about something."