"Tobias, a word please," Rowena booms, as the group of Candor Divergent gathers their belongings together.

I turn to her politely, hoping whatever she has to say won't take long.

"In private," she clarifies. I look over at Inez, who nods and says "I got this," as she swabs Elsa's finger for the test. I follow Rowena out of the cafeteria, nearly jogging to keep up with her.

"This way," she says, opening a door and waving me inside. It's a small office, full of books and piled high with papers. Rowena does not sit down, nor does she mince words, but she does lower her voice.

"You need to be careful, Tobias," she says, looking at me intently. "Don't let yourself forget that the campaign to eradicate the Divergent did not start with Jeanine, and I am damn sure it didn't end with her, either. Every faction bears some blame for what has happened."

"I understand."

"Do you?" she says curiously. "At least when Jeanine was around, you knew who your enemies were."

I nod politely, but my thoughts are churning. She sighs and grips my shoulder briefly.

"Just be careful, and let me know if you need any help."

I nod again. "Thank you, Rowena. I appreciate the warning and the offer."

She returns my nod. "And I would tell you to take good care of my niece, but she's a tough girl; she can take care of herself. Her father disappeared years ago, and her mother - my sister - died in suspicious circumstances. It was Elsa who found the body." She pauses and watches me closely. "She's had to grow up fast."

"I know how that feels," I murmur.

She smiles tightly and opens the door. "So I understand. Well, then. Good. You should probably get moving now. Just remember to watch your back - even when you're in Dauntless. Maybe especially there."

I'm tempted to think Rowena is just paranoid, but I have a bad feeling this is not a guess on her part. She must have informants. Before we leave the office entirely, I study Rowena's face closely.

"Are you Divergent, too, Rowena?" I ask her softly. She just smiles at me without answering and heads back down the hall toward the cafeteria, where everyone is ready and waiting for me.

"Let's go," I say, and the Candors shoulder their packs. Elsa hugs her aunt, wiping a few tears off her cheeks as we walk out.

Back in the street, Inez falls in step beside me, and I glower at her.

"What the hell, Inez?" I mutter as we walk back onto the street. "She's just a kid. Why did you say she could come with us?"

"I don't know how you ever got to be a faction leader," Inez snorts, "'cause you suck at politics, Toby. Don't matter if she's an old lady in a wheelchair with an imaginary friend - we have Candor as long as we have her."

"Whatever," I huff. "You get to babysit her."

She smirks at me.

"What?"

"I think you're going to be seeing a lot of her, actually."

Inez is right, of course, as usual. When Tris sees Elsa, she gives a little scream and then pulls her into a giant hug.

"You made it!" Tris gasps. "I never saw what happened to you!"

Elsa is crying. Ugh. "They would have caught me, and now I'd be dead, just like Joe. But you saved me, you got me out. You got me out!"

They cling to each other for a few more minutes. I don't really know what they're talking about; as far as I know, we never saw Elsa before today.

"I still can't believe you're here," Tris says.

"I came to help with the mission, to go outside the wall," the girl says softly. I expect Tris to scoff or maybe even let her down gently, but instead, she just beams at the girl, asks her name, and says she's proud of her.

I meet Inez's eyes, and she smiles broadly at me and winks.

Elsa basically becomes Tris's shadow, something that ordinarily would annoy her no end, but not with Elsa. Tris is always happy to see her, always talking to her or patting her on the arm, squeezing her shoulder.

"I feel like we have a pet," I grouse that night in bed.

"You don't know how I know her, do you?" Tris says, watching me.

"No, I don't, as a matter of fact."

"In the Erudite attack," she says, "when the blue serum didn't affect me or Uriah, and we realized it identified us as Divergent, I knew right away what they were going to do. So Uriah went for help, and I went to see if I could warn or find the Divergent among the Candor and the refugees in time to get them out."

"Yeah, I remember. One of your little suicidal impulses."

"Let me just tell you the story, Tobias," she scolds me. "You know it's not like that, anymore."

She stares at me angrily and I sigh, nodding, rubbing circles on her upper arm.

"I put on one of the dead Traitor Dauntless's jacket and sneaked up the stairs. They were up there, looking through all the unconscious people for anyone who was awake. I realized that anyone they hadn't already caught knew to pretend to be out, so I started stepping on people's fingers. Elsa flinched when I stepped on hers, and I told her to run. Eric caught me immediately after that, so I was never sure if she made it."

"I'm so glad he's dead, Tobias, but I'm sorry you had to do it. I should have finished him off right then," she whispers.

"No," I say softly, wiping away the tears on her cheek. "It was a long time coming. I think we both knew that I was going to kill him someday. It's part of the reason he hated me so much - he was afraid of me."

"Are you okay?" she says haltingly. "I mean, you were afraid of him, too."

"No, actually, I wasn't," I say evenly, though part of me is raging at her for thinking that I could ever be afraid of Eric. "Whoever that is supposed to be, in my fear landscape, it wasn't Eric."

"I never thought it was," she responds. "I just thought you were afraid to kill. I hope..." she hesitates. "I just hope that's not a fear you get over."

I don't tell her that it really was easy for me to kill him.

The next morning, when we're all together over breakfast, Tris broaches maybe bringing a cot into our apartment for Elsa, but I refuse outright. I tell her Elsa is just fine sharing a room with Cyd, the dead kid's mother, who's sitting just down the table from her.

When Tris finds out who Cyd is, she freezes, and then turns to Cyd, her eyes fractured by guilt. "I am so sorry," Tris whispers. "So very sorry. It was all my fault. If I hadn't..."

Cyd cuts her off. "No," she says, her voice like a razor. "Don't you dare blame yourself for what happened to Joe. Don't you dare. I know exactly who to hate for taking my son away from me. And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure anyone who had anything to do with it pays. And for the ones you and Tobias already got rid of, I will erase them. I will make sure their lives didn't mean anything." I look at her uneasily, wondering if she's maybe too damaged to be a part of our team right now, but she looks steady and focused.

Tris takes Cyd and Elsa to the training room for their assessment, and I stay in the control room. Cara and Linus are looking at something together on a computer screen.

"It just doesn't make sense!" Cara says in frustration.

"What doesn't?" I ask, pulling up a chair next to them.

"You've only found 11 Divergent," Linus explains mildly. "By our calculations, at least 30 percent of the population should be Divergent. Maybe more. It's hard to say because we don't know how many there were in the original, stage zero population."

I look at him blankly.

"Edith Prior's cohort," Cara explains. "Since we don't know how many Divergent the experiment started with, it's difficult to calculate just how many there should be now. But based on the lists we do have, which track two generations, we estimate that 30 percent is the minimum; it could be more like 50 percent."

"50 percent probably doesn't count for the exterminations, though," Linus corrects her. "From these records, we know that about half the Divergent they were tracking didn't survive."

"They were all murdered?" I say, feeling nauseous.

"Not all," Cara says evenly. "Well, not directly, anyway. The survival rate in Factionless wasn't great - until about ten years ago."

"What happened ten years ago?"

"Your mother went to Factionless," Linus explains apologetically, "And the Priors started their relief efforts."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do we, really," Cara says gently. "We're not sure if Evelyn approached them, or if they approached her, but the correlation of those events suggests they were working together, within a year of her exile. I don't suppose you'd be willing to ask her? Your mother?"

I shrug. "Does it really matter?"

"It might," Linus notes. "I'd like to know what the catalyst was for such a significant shift. No one had shown any concern for the Factionless before that, or any sign that they knew there were so many Divergent among them." He frowns at me.

"And frankly, the fact that you only found three can't be right. We need to figure out where the rest of them are."

"Well, we have enough to form the team," I say. "We can conduct the mission with what we have."

"Yes," Linus said patiently, "but whoever put us here is going to consider the experiment a failure if there are only 15 or so Divergent. I'm not sure what will happen to the rest of us if they think this was a failure."

"If they even care at all, anymore," Cara says cheerfully.