Chapter 24: Candor Questions
"Four doesn't give private sessions."
Christina's voice was flat. Direct. The Candor cutting away everything except the essential question.
"Why you?"
I kept walking. "Improvement plan. My simulation scores are the worst in the transfer class."
"That explains group sessions. Not private rooms. Not Four personally supervising." She fell into step beside me, matching my pace. "What's actually going on, Logan?"
The question hung in the air between us—demanding, patient, unwilling to be deflected. Christina had been watching me for weeks. She'd named my analytical patterns during kitchen duty, caught partial truths in casual conversations, noticed too many things that were supposed to stay hidden.
Now she was done waiting.
"I volunteered for extra practice." I kept my voice steady despite the RSV debuff making my thoughts slow and thick. "Four approved. That's it."
"You're not lying." Christina's eyes studied my face with Candor-trained precision. "But you're not telling the truth either."
The observation was accurate enough to sting.
"Those aren't the same thing?"
"In Candor, they're different crimes." She stopped walking, forcing me to stop with her. "Lying is saying something false. Not telling the truth is saying something true that hides the real answer. You do the second one constantly."
"She sees too much. Always has. This was inevitable."
"Everyone hides things, Christina."
"You hide everything." Her voice wasn't angry—something closer to frustrated, maybe hurt. "I've known you for five weeks. I know you're smart, you're observant, you think twelve moves ahead. But I don't know you. The real you. The one who exists when you're not performing for everyone."
The silence stretched. Below us, the Chasm roared its eternal commentary on human struggles.
I should have deflected. Should have offered another half-truth, another carefully constructed response that satisfied her question without revealing anything. The mask demanded it.
But the simulation had scraped me raw. The RSV debuff left me depleted. And Christina was standing there, waiting, asking for something genuine from someone who'd forgotten how to give it.
"I'm scared I'm losing track of who I am."
The sentence escaped before I could calculate its implications. One genuine fragment, slipping through the cracks in my performance.
Christina went quiet.
She walked to the Chasm railing—not the careful distance most people kept, but right up to it, sitting down and letting her feet dangle over the void. The same railing where I'd found Al counting the steps to ending. The same void that had nearly swallowed Tris.
She said nothing for two full minutes.
The silence should have been uncomfortable. Should have demanded filling. Instead it felt like space—room for something that wasn't performance or strategy or calculated positioning.
"That might be the first honest thing you've said to me."
I sat down beside her. The railing was cold through my pants. The Chasm spray misted upward, settling on exposed skin like tiny reminders of how close the void actually was.
"Probably."
"You're not going to explain it, are you? The losing track thing. What it means."
"No."
Christina nodded. No push. No demand. Just acknowledgment that the crack existed, and acceptance that it wouldn't widen tonight.
"You know what I hate most about Candor training?" she said after a while. "They teach you to read people. To spot deception, catch partial truths, identify when someone's hiding something. But they never teach you what to do when the person hiding things is someone you care about."
The words landed somewhere vulnerable.
"Someone she cares about. Not a subject to observe. Not a mystery to solve. Someone she cares about."
"What do you do?" I asked. "When you can't decide whether to push or wait?"
"Usually push." A small smile. "Candor instincts. We're not great with patience." The smile faded. "But with you... I don't think pushing helps. I think you just retreat further into whatever fortress you've built."
The observation was painfully accurate.
"So you're waiting."
"I'm here." She turned to look at me—direct eye contact, nothing hidden in her expression. "That's different from waiting. Waiting implies I'm expecting something specific. Being here just means... I'm here. Whatever that means to you."
I didn't have a response. The genuine fragment I'd offered was already more than I'd intended. More would risk exposure. More would crack the mask beyond recovery.
But I sat there anyway. On the railing, over the void, next to someone who'd seen through years of performance and decided to stay.
The Chasm roared beneath us. The mist settled on our skin. The silence held.
We walked back to the dormitory at my pace, not hers.
Christina's usual stride was fast, purposeful, the Candor directness expressed through movement. Tonight she matched my slower steps—the RSV debuff still dragging at my system, making every motion heavier than it should have been.
She didn't comment on it. Didn't ask why I was moving like someone recovering from injury. Just adjusted.
"Four's going to keep testing you," she said as we reached the dormitory entrance. "Whatever he's looking for—you know that, right? He's not going to stop."
"I know."
"And you're not going to tell me what he's looking for."
"No."
Christina nodded. Turned to go inside. Then paused, one hand on the doorframe.
"When I was six, my family did truth circles. Candor tradition—everyone sits together and says one true thing about someone else in the circle. I hated it. Not because people said mean things, but because they said true things. True things you didn't want to hear."
She looked back at me over her shoulder.
"You're afraid of something bigger than car crashes, Logan. Something that doesn't have a name in any simulation I can imagine. And I think whatever it is—it's eating you alive from the inside."
The door closed behind her.
I stood in the corridor, processing the observation, calculating implications, trying to fit her perception into the framework of acceptable risks.
She hadn't guessed the truth. Couldn't have guessed—transmigration wasn't a concept this world could contain. But she'd seen the shape of it. The way fear of something impossible had carved itself into my behavior.
"She's getting closer. Every conversation, every observation, she's mapping the territory around the secret even if she can't see the secret itself."
Tomorrow, the second round of fear simulations would begin. Four would have new tests, new configurations, new traps designed to catch the Divergent awareness I kept suppressing. And Christina would be watching, cataloguing my responses, adding data to her own investigation.
The walls were closing in from every direction.
I walked into the dormitory and found my bunk—the same bottom corner I'd claimed the first night in Dauntless. Al was asleep across the room, breathing steadily, alive because I'd reached him at the Chasm. Tris was curled in her bunk, knife-shaped tension even in sleep, survivor of an attack that had happened two days wrong.
Somewhere above, Four was reviewing his notes. Calculating next steps. Planning tests that would push harder and dig deeper until the data resolved into something definitive.
And Christina was lying in her own bunk, probably not sleeping, thinking about the fortress I'd built and the cracks she'd finally seen inside it.
"You're surrounded by people who want to understand you. And every one of them is dangerous for different reasons."
I closed my eyes and started preparing for tomorrow's simulation. The landscape would be different—Four had promised new configurations. The fear would be different. The test would be different.
But the choice would be the same: suffer completely, or be seen.
I knew which one I'd choose.