AN: You guys are awesome! Because you asked, here it is... This is a short chapter, and a transitional one - time to take them outside the wall... So, sorry to be so slow, but I am still working at it...

The train lurches to the left, clacking ominously, and we all sway with the motion. There are no seats, and nothing to hold on to, so we do the best we can, pressing our backs against the rusty metal walls. A couple of people are asleep in the middle of the car on their bedrolls, and I keep a wary eye on them. The door is open, after all. It would be bad if we came to a sharp turn and they rolled right out.

According to Cara, this is called a freight train, meant to carry goods, rather than passengers, which is why it doesn't have any seats. We don't have any trains like this left inside our perimeter, but this one was less than a day's walk outside the wall. Evelyn told us it's how we used to get our supplies, and it still runs on its automated course every three months, even though the cars carry nothing but dust now.

I squint outside at the countryside rolling by. Right now, it's just flat, frozen brown fields. Every now and then, we go through a town and once we even went through a city that looked as big as the one we came from. We have to stay away from the doors when we go through these places, even though we're all curious to see what they look like. Cara thinks most of the towns and cities are uninhabited, but it's possible people still live in some of them, and we need to avoid the people. Until we reach our destination. And then we definitely need to avoid the people.

Because they don't know about us. Well, we don't think they do. Most of them, anyway.

There are so many unanswered questions.

I flex my fingers, wincing. Even after another month of recovery, I can't quite grip with my left hand, and if I sit still for too long, my fingers fall asleep. Sometimes, my whole arm will go numb, prickling painfully when I shake the circulation back.

Gordon and Lou are helping me with some exercises, but it might never get better, so I didn't think we should wait any longer. Especially with Marcus already out there somewhere.

There's no way he knows as much as we do, of course. But he had the coordinates, too. We have to hope we get there before he does, because if they meet him first and think he's the result of their experiment, they might just kill us all.

I sigh. There's so much we still don't know, but we did learn a few things from the small computer and Bruce's journal, as well as the files I found.

We were definitely an experiment, and a secret one at that, but not the only one. "Of course not," Cara had snorted when I expressed surprise. "What kind of experiment would only have one trial?" She rolled her eyes. "An invalid one, that's what. You have to test your hypothesis over and over again..."

"I know," I had said, feeling nauseated. That was what Jeanine said, when she told me she was going to inject me with purple serum. Well, it's what she made Tris's brother tell me. "How many of us are there?" I asked her.

"There were 20," she said quietly. "None as big a city as ours, and spread out across a very large area. We don't know much about the others, except where they were." She had held out the folders to me, and I took them, rifling through them slowly. "They all have the faction system, though there was a control, modeled on whatever societal arrangements they usually had, and it's not clear to me what those were. That much we know," she had continued, "and all of them started out the same size - we have lost about a third of our population here in what they called the Chicago Experimental Area. If any of them were successful, the populations might have grown. It's in the documentation that they did not want any group other than Amity to reproduce beyond the replacement rate - meaning, no more than two children per family. Presumably because that made it easier to sustain the experiment."

"What we still don't know," she had sighed then, "is why. What the experiment was for? Other than propagating Divergence, apparently."

"We do know," Tris had interrupted, "that Bruce and Jana had orders to shut their part of the experiment down. They were supposed to destroy all records and cameras in the monitoring station and then return to the company's headquarters. The last entry in Bruce's journal says he and Jana were arguing about the orders, that she didn't trust the company. She thought they were going to go to prison or even be "disappeared." He had long suspected she'd been sneaking past the gate and interacting with the test subjects and figured she had been caught. He thought she was a little desperate and was worried about what she might do."

"But why?" I had asked. "Why shut down the experiment, but leave us in place?"

"We don't know," Cara shrugged. "Bruce didn't know, and there were no other records about it, just that the experiment was supposed to be a secret, and its integrity had been breached somehow."

"And the company has the same coordinates we were given?"

"Yes. The company is called the Fortress Foundation - it's in a place called Seattle. We can actually use the compass device Fernando had to find it. It's a couple thousand miles away."

I had groaned. "It will take us forever to get there. And I'm not going to be able to walk that far for months."

"No," Cara had smiled, patting my hand, "we're not walking. There's a train that will take us straight there. Well, not exactly straight, but much faster than walking, in any case."

That was only a week ago. I look across at Cara, who is asleep, with her head in Leo's lap. I still think it was a mistake for him to come. Everyone else on this team is Divergent. Plus there's a lot of rebuilding to do back at home. But he and Cara refused to be separated again, and we need her.

"Stop fretting," Tris shouts over the rumbling wheels and rushing air.

"What makes you think I am?" I snap at her, but she just gives me a serene smile and touches a fingertip between my eyebrows.

"You get this zigzag wrinkle right here, and your eyebrows go so low over your eyes I wonder if you can actually see."

I scowl at her, but feel oddly pleased that she has mapped and memorized the intimate details of my face. Her fingertip rests on the corner of my mouth. She leans into me, her breath warm on my ear.

"And that is where you hide a smile when you're happy about something." She leans over and kisses me lightly on the lips and then rests her head against my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her, and soon she is sound asleep.

The air flowing into the cars is getting colder, and squinting out the cargo door, I can see nothing but trees - I have never seen so many trees all in one place, not even in Amity's best orchards. And I have certainly never seen trees like this. They are very tall and almost triangular, and while it's hard to get a good look from where I'm sitting, the leaves look thin, spiky, and very green, even though it's still late winter. The smell wafting into the car, presumably from the strange foliage, is fresh and almost spicy. Inez and Jose are at the door, beckoning Laila and the other over to the door to get a better look, but I don't want to wake Tris.

"Did you see those things?" Uriah murmurs, as he sits down next to me and leans in close. "Do you know what they are?"

I shake my head.

"Me, either." He only sits still for a few seconds before he pops back up to crouch by the door.

Soon, the train starts to climb uphill, and the terrain shifts again. The spiky trees are still there, but the land itself is rising in huge swells, as tall as the Pire back in Dauntless, or taller even. I wish Tris would wake up, because I want to go get a closer look, myself.

Then we level out and break through the trees, and I finally shake her out of her slumber.

"Tris, wake up," I say. "You need to see this."

She blinks her eyes and stretches her arms high, with a huge yawn.

"What?" she asks, blearily.

"Let's go look," I pull her hand and scoot over to the door, which everyone is thronged around now. We can see a huge lake, like the marsh back home, only this one actually has some water in it. There's a dry ring above it, so clearly not as much water as it used to have once upon a time, but still, there's more water than any of us has ever seen in one place before. Behind the lake are giant hills, with points that seem to scrape the clouds, dusted at the top with what I assume is snow. There's a mirror image of the hills reflected on the surface of the water.

"Those look taller than the Hancock building," Uriah shouts.

"Much, much taller," Gordon agrees.

"These are mountains!" Cara exults. "I read about them once in one of Linus's old books, but I didn't realize they still existed, or that they looked like that!"

"It's so beautiful," Tris says in my ear. "I don't think I've ever even dreamed of a place this beautiful."

I nod, staring at the landscape. I don't want to say it out loud, in case it sounds stupid, but I wonder if maybe we could come back here someday? We could start over, without the faction system and all the terrible things we've done to each other, without all the mouldering, broken buildings. We could make our own future, without the burden of generations of lies. I glance at Tris and see the bright blue sky reflected in her wide eyes and I make myself a promise. There's nothing left to lose, anyway, so we'll start over somewhere. If not here, then somewhere else, now that we know there's so much possibility beyond the wall.

Tris grabs my hand and squeezes it hard. I look at her again, and it's like the scene outside is still captured in her eyes, and I know she's thinking the same thing I was. I feel a smile take control of my face, and I nod at her.

"Someday," she whispers, smiling back at me.

For the next two days, we don't pass through many towns, so we all spend a lot of time looking out at the scenery. It continues to be strange trees and mountains, and while we don't see a lake as big and pristine as that first one, we do see many lakes and rivers. Sometimes, the train crawls slowly, and once it even came to a complete stop. It was very tempting to just jump off.

"I wish Darius and Christina weren't back in Chicago, counting on us," Leo said to me that time. He and I were the only ones not craning our necks to look out the door.

"I hear you," I muttered, only I was thinking that Darius and Christina would do just fine without me.

Leo chuckled. "I think you're ready to jump out right this second, anyway. I'd say that Evelyn would be upset at never knowing what happened to you, but I'm not sure you care."

"We've made our peace," I pointed out to him. "You know that."

"I know, I know," he said, grasping my shoulder. He looked around and leaned in close to me. "Speaking of making peace, did you ever talk to Tris about Uriah?"

I shook my head, looking away from him.

"Want me to talk to him?"

"No," I said, glancing at him in alarm. "No - don't. It's okay, Leo. I don't need to know."

He had looked at me skeptically, but agreed not to say anything.

"I think it's really bugging you, though," he observed. "You kind of need a clear head for what we're about to do, you know."

"Yeah, I know," I said, folding my arms and turning away.

We're getting close to our destination now. At least, Cara thinks we are, based on how far away this place is supposed to be. It is warmer here, though clammy with rain and mist, and the land has leveled out again. The air feels different, too. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's a taste or a smell that isn't what we're used to.

Now we all have to flatten ourselves on the side of the train, flanking the door, because we're definitely seeing inhabited towns. I'm closest to the door, with Rat across from me, so the two of us can see out a little, and what I am seeing now literally takes my breath away. We've just emerged from a tunnel, and there's a city below us, maybe as big as Chicago, with one important difference: the buildings don't look like they're all shattered and abandoned. As we clatter down into the city, I'm only catching glimpses here and there, but it looks like there are people walking around on the streets, skyscrapers of glass and metal, and more cars than I've ever seen, on big, busy roads. As we round a curve in the track, the train slows down, and I have a gut feeling we are reaching the end of the line. I glance up at Rat, and he nods.

"Everyone get ready," I shout out, and I hear Rat shouting, too. "It's time."

The train is barely moving now, and I decide we should jump off before it actually reaches the terminus, just in case there's someone there. There are a bunch of old cargo containers strewn about in this area, so this looks like a good place to get off, hide, and take stock. I give Rat the signal, dropping my clenched fist down sharply.

There are eleven of us, so we're able to jump together, for the most part, and with no injuries. Everyone with us has some experience hurling themselves off trains moving much faster than this, after all.

We run over into the old containers and crouch, catching our breath.

"Welcome to Seattle," I say under my breath.