Veronica Roth - Divergent Series

“Thanks,” I say, nodding to Will.

“Is he right?” Will asks quietly. “Are you trying to manipulate us?”

“How on earth would I do that?” I scowl at him. “I’m just doing the best I can, like anyone else.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs a little. “By acting weak so we pity you? And then acting tough to psyche us out?”

“Psyche you out?” I repeat. “I’m your friend. I wouldn’t do that.”

He doesn’t say anything. I can tell he doesn’t believe me—not quite.

“Don’t be an idiot, Will,” says Christina, hopping down from her bunk. She looks at me without sympathy and adds, “She’s not acting.”

Christina turns and leaves, without banging the door shut. Will follows. I am alone in the room with Al. The first and the last.

Al has never looked small before, but he does now, with his shoulders slumped and his body collapsing on itself like crumpled paper. He sits down on the edge of his bed.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says.

His face is bright red. I look away. Asking him was just a formality. Anyone with eyes could see that Al is not all right.

“It’s not over,” I say. “You can improve your rank if you…”

My voice trails off when he looks up at me. I don’t even know what I would say to him if I finished my sentence. There is no strategy for stage two. It reaches deep into the heart of who we are and tests whatever courage is there.

“See?” he says. “It’s not that simple.”

“I know it’s not.”

“I don’t think you do,” he says, shaking his head. His chin wobbles. “For you it’s easy. All of this is easy.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah, it is.” He closes his eyes. “You aren’t helping me by pretending it isn’t. I don’t—I’m not sure you can help me at all.”

I feel like I just walked into a downpour, and all my clothes are heavy with water; like I am heavy and awkward and useless. I don’t know if he means that no one can help him, or if I, specifically, can’t help him, but I would not be okay with either interpretation. I want to help him. I am powerless to do so.

“I…,” I start to say, meaning to apologize, but for what? For being more Dauntless than he is? For not knowing what to say?

“I just…” The tears that have been gathering in his eyes spill over, wetting his cheeks. “…want to be alone.”

I nod and turn away from him. Leaving him is not a good idea, but I can’t stop myself. The door clicks into place behind me, and I keep walking.

I walk past the drinking fountain and through the tunnels that seemed endless the day I got here but now barely register in my mind. This is not the first time I have failed my family since I got here, but for some reason, it feels that way. Every other time I failed, I knew what to do but chose not to do it. This time, I did not know what to do. Have I lost the ability to see what people need? Have I lost part of myself?

I keep walking.

I somehow find the hallway I sat in the day Edward left. I don’t want to be alone, but I don’t feel like I have much of a choice. I close my eyes and pay attention to the cold stone beneath me and breathe the musty underground air.

“Tris!” someone calls from the end of the hallway. Uriah jogs toward me. Behind him are Lynn and Marlene. Lynn is holding a muffin.

“Thought I would find you here.” He crouches near my feet. “I heard you got ranked first.”

“So you just wanted to congratulate me?” I smirk. “Well, thanks.”

“Someone should,” he says. “And I figured your friends might not be so congratulatory, since their ranks aren’t as high. So quit moping and come with us. I’m going to shoot a muffin off Marlene’s head.”

The idea is so ridiculous I can’t stop myself from laughing. I get up and follow Uriah to the end of the hallway, where Marlene and Lynn are waiting. Lynn narrows her eyes at me, but Marlene grins.

“Why aren’t you out celebrating?” she asks. “You’re practically guaranteed a top ten spot if you keep it up.”

“She’s too Dauntless for the other transfers,” Uriah says.

“And too Abnegation to ‘celebrate,’” remarks Lynn.

I ignore her. “Why are you shooting a muffin off Marlene’s head?”

“She bet me I couldn’t aim well enough to hit a small object from one hundred feet,” Uriah explains. “I bet her she didn’t have the guts to stand there as I tried. It works out well, really.”

The training room where I first fired a gun is not far from my hidden hallway. We get there in under a minute, and Uriah flips on a light switch. It looks the same as the last time I was there: targets on one end of the room, a table with guns on the other.

“They just keep these lying around?” I ask.

“Yeah, but they aren’t loaded.” Uriah pulls up his shirt. There is a gun stuck under the waistband of his pants, right under a tattoo. I stare at the tattoo, trying to figure out what it is, but then he lets his shirt fall. “Okay,” he says. “Go stand in front of a target.”

Marlene walks away, a skip in her step.

“You aren’t seriously going to shoot at her, are you?” I ask Uriah.

“It’s not a real gun,” says Lynn quietly. “It’s got plastic pellets in it. The worst it’ll do is sting her face, maybe give her a welt. What do you think we are, stupid?”

Marlene stands in front of one of the targets and sets the muffin on her head. Uriah squints one eye as he aims the gun.

“Wait!” calls out Marlene. She breaks off a piece of the muffin and pops it into her mouth. “Mmkay!” she shouts, the word garbled by food. She gives Uriah a thumbs-up.

“I take it your ranks were good,” I say to Lynn.

She nods. “Uriah’s second. I’m first. Marlene’s fourth.”

“You’re only first by a hair,” says Uriah as he aims. He squeezes the trigger. The muffin falls off Marlene’s head. She didn’t even blink.

“We both win!” she shouts.

“You miss your old faction?” Lynn asks me.

“Sometimes,” I say. “It was calmer. Not as exhausting.”

Marlene picks up the muffin from the ground and bites into it. Uriah shouts, “Gross!”

“Initiation’s supposed to wear us down to who we really are. That’s what Eric says, anyway,” Lynn says. She arches an eyebrow.

“Four says it’s to prepare us.”

“Well, they don’t agree on much.”

I nod. Four told me that Eric’s vision for Dauntless is not what it’s supposed to be, but I wish he would tell me exactly what he thinks the right vision is. I get glimpses of it every so often—the Dauntless cheering when I jumped off the building, the net of arms that caught me after zip lining—but they are not enough. Has he read the Dauntless manifesto? Is that what he believes in—in ordinary acts of bravery?

The door to the training room opens. Shauna, Zeke, and Four walk in just as Uriah fires at another target. The plastic pellet bounces off the center of the target and rolls along the ground.

“I thought I heard something in here,” says Four.

“Turns out it’s my idiot brother,” says Zeke. “You’re not supposed to be in here after hours. Careful, or Four will tell Eric, and then you’ll be as good as scalped.”

Uriah wrinkles his nose at his brother and puts the pellet gun away. Marlene crosses the room, taking bites of her muffin, and Four steps away from the door to let us file out.

“You wouldn’t tell Eric,” says Lynn, eyeing Four suspiciously.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he says. As I pass him, he rests his hand on the top of my back to usher me out, his palm pressing between my shoulder blades. I shiver. I hope he can’t tell.

The others walk down the hallway, Zeke and Uriah shoving each other, Marlene splitting her muffin with Shauna, Lynn marching in front. I start to follow them.