Powerful

17. Burn Your Biographies, Rewrite Your History

Hendo had been playing with the edges of his rolled up scroll the entire time the group had been talking, and now, he opened it up, and laid it out on the table. Everyone else crowded round to look.

"A map of the city?" Asked Rory. "Where'd you get that?"

"Trent and Hannah went on a mission to pinch it from Erudite for me," Hendo glanced at the young initiates, who both nodded, a slight smirk gracing Trent's features, as he nudged Hannah. Hannah smiled back at him.

The map looked old, slightly frayed at the edges of the paper, although that was partially from Hendo's fingers picking at it for the past ten minutes. It was brown, and a little smudged with oil and dirt, but highly detailed. It curled up at the edges, indicating it had been rolled up in a scroll for considerable time.

Jord reached out with her power, sourcing four of Virgil's heavier books from the shelf, and flew them over, landing one on each corner of the map, weighting it down. Hendo and the others looked at her in surprise.

"Stop flexing," Virg rolled his is eyes at her, and Jord laughed.

"Anyway," said Hendo, turning back to his map. "I wanted a map so I could find a place where we could build our new faction. And..."

"You found one?" Asked Gini.

"I found one," Hendo confirmed. He pointed to an empty space in the open fields, not as far out as Amity, but still, it was almost in the middle of nowhere. "I was looking at this map, and I noticed something. Virg, do you have a pen?"

Virg nodded silently, and went over to his bookshelf, pulling one out of the pot that sat at the top of it, and passing it to Hendo. Everyone watched as he began to draw lines on his map.

"I realised, the city is actually divided up like a pizza," he said, as he drew. "It's in two halves like this - see, we've got Dauntless and Abnegation on this side, and Amity, Erudite and Candor on the other. Each faction's got roughly one sixth of the city. So what's this empty spot doing up here, between Dauntless and Amity?"

He pointed to it with his pen, jabbing the paper insistently.

"It's for us," said Jord. "The Divergent faction."

"That depends who you ask," said Hendo, glancing at her. "Lia and I went there this morning, and well..."

"Someone's already moved in," said Lia.

"Who?" Asked Virg, his brow knit together.

"The factionless base is there. It's pretty much just a tin shed, and at a glance you'd mistake it for a junk yard, but it's there."

"They've kept that quiet," said Gini, with a frown. "Judging by the map, even the Erudite leaders don't know they're there."

"Unless Erudite are trying to hide the fact that it exists," Suggested Lia. "Believe me, that's possible. Don't wanna shame my old faction too much, especially since I'm part Erudite myself, but they could really do with some Candor honesty in there."

"What do you mean?" Asked Ems. "What are they hiding?"

"A lot of stuff," said Lia. "Talk about a corrupt government. You think Dauntless is bad? Try living there and see how you get on."

"Every human character is flawed in some sort of way," said Virg. "Don't ever think that because you're Divergent and you can see things for what they are that you're above that, because you're not. You've got your own inconsistencies, okay? If we're gonna build our own faction, we're gonna build it on people who are humble enough to know they're flawed, or we won't build it at all. And perhaps most importantly, we have to work together."