“Yes, it’s his fault, of course it’s his fault!” I say, louder than I mean to be. “If they weren’t all fighting for one of ten slots, they wouldn’t be so desperate they’re ready to attack each other! He has them wound up so tight, of course they’re bound to explode eventually!”
Max is quiet. He looks annoyed, but he isn’t calling me ridiculous, which is a start.
“You don’t think the initiate who did the attacking should be held responsible?” Max says. “You don’t think he or she is the one to blame, instead of Eric?”
“Of course he—she—whoever—should be held responsible,” I say. “But this never would have happened if Eric—”
“You can’t say that with any certainty,” Max says.
“I can say it with the certainty of a reasonable person.”
“I’m not reasonable?” His voice is low, dangerous, and suddenly I remember that Max is not just the Dauntless leader who likes me for some inexplicable reason—he’s the Dauntless leader who’s working closely with Jeanine Matthews, the one who appointed Eric, the one who probably had something to do with Amar’s death.
“That’s not what I meant,” I say, trying to stay calm.
“You should be careful to communicate exactly what you mean,” Max says, moving closer to me. “Or someone will start to think you’re insulting your superiors.”
I don’t respond. He moves still closer.
“Or questioning the values of your faction,” he says, and his bloodshot eyes drift to my shoulder, where the Dauntless flames of my tattoo stick out over the collar of my shirt. I have hidden the five faction symbols that cover my spine since I got them, but for some reason, at this moment, I am terrified that Max knows about them. Knows what they mean, which is that I am not a perfect Dauntless member; I am someone who believes that more than one virtue should be prized; I am Divergent.
“You had your shot to become a Dauntless leader,” Max says. “Maybe you could have avoided this incident had you not backed out like a coward. But you did. So now you have to deal with the consequences.”
His face is showing his age. It has lines it didn’t have last year, or the year before, and his skin is grayish brown, like it was dusted with ash.
“Eric is as involved in initiation as he is because you refused to follow orders last year—” Last year, in the training room, I stopped all the fights before the injuries became too severe, against Eric’s command that the fighting only stop when one person was unable to continue. I nearly lost my position as initiation instructor as a result; I would have, if Max hadn’t gotten involved.
“—and I wanted to give you another chance to make it right, with closer monitoring,” Max says. “You’re failing to do so. You’ve gone too far.”
The sweat I worked up on my way here has turned cold. He steps back and opens his door again.
“Get out of my apartment and deal with your initiates,” Max says. “Don’t let me see you step out of line again.”
“Yes, sir,” I say quietly, and I leave.
+++
I go to see Edward in the infirmary early in the morning, when the sun is rising, shining through the glass ceiling of the Pit. His head is wrapped in white bandages, and he’s not moving, not speaking. I don’t say anything to him, just sit by his head and watch the minutes tick by on the wall clock.
I’ve been an idiot. I thought I was invincible, that Max’s desire to have me as a fellow leader would never waver, that on some level he trusted me. I should have known better. All Max ever wanted was a pawn—that’s what my mother said.
I can’t be a pawn. But I’m not sure what I should be instead.
+++
The setting Tris Prior invents is eerie and almost beautiful, the sky yellow-green, yellow grass stretching for miles in every direction.
Watching someone else’s fear simulation is strange. Intimate. I don’t feel right about forcing other people to be vulnerable, even if I don’t like them. Every human being is entitled to her secrets. Watching my initiates’ fears, one after another, makes me feel like my skin has been scraped raw with sandpaper.
In Tris’s simulation, the yellow grass is perfectly still. If the air wasn’t stagnant, I would say this was a dream, not a nightmare—but still air means only one thing to me, and that is a coming storm.
A shadow moves across the grass, and a large black bird lands on her shoulder, curling its talons into her shirt. My fingertips prickle, remembering how I touched her shoulder when she walked into the simulation room, how I brushed her hair away from her neck to inject her. Stupid. Careless.
She hits the black bird, hard, and then everything happens at once. Thunder rumbles; the sky darkens, not with storm clouds, but with birds, an impossibly huge swarm of them, moving in unison like many parts of the same mind.
The sound of her scream is the worst sound in the world, desperate—she’s desperate for help and I am desperate to help her, though I know what I’m seeing isn’t real, I know it. The crows keep coming, relentless, surrounding her, burying her alive in dark feathers. She screams for help and I can’t help her and I don’t want to watch this, I don’t want to watch another second.
But then, she starts to move, shifting so she’s lying in the grass, relenting, relaxing. If she’s in pain now she doesn’t show it; she just closes her eyes and surrenders, and that is worse than her screaming for help, somehow.
Then it’s over.
She lurches forward in the metal chair, smacking at her body to get the birds off, though they’re gone. Then she curls into a ball and hides her face.
I reach out to touch her shoulder, to reassure her, and she hits my arm, hard. “Don’t touch me!”
“It’s over,” I say, wincing—she punches harder than she realizes. I ignore the pain and run a hand over her hair, because I’m stupid, and inappropriate, and stupid …
“Tris.”
She just shifts back and forth, soothing herself.
“Tris, I’m going to take you back to the dorms, okay?”
“No! They can’t see me … not like this …”
This is what Eric’s new system creates: A brav
e human being has just defeated one of her worst fears in less than five minutes, an ordeal that takes most people at least twice that time, but she’s terrified to go back into the hallway, to be seen as weak or vulnerable in any way. Tris is Dauntless, plain and simple, but this faction isn’t really Dauntless anymore.
“Oh, calm down,” I say, more irritable than I mean to be. “I’ll take you out the back door.”
“I don’t need you to …” I can see her hands trembling even as she shrugs off my offer.
“Nonsense,” I say. I take her arm and help her to her feet. She wipes her eyes as I move toward the back door. Amar once took me through this door, tried to walk me back to the dormitory even when I didn’t want him to, the way she probably doesn’t want me to now. How is it possible to live the same story twice, from different vantage points?
She yanks her arm from mine, and turns on me. “Why did you do that to me? What was the point of that, huh? I wasn’t aware that when I chose Dauntless, I was signing up for weeks of torture!”
If she was anyone else, any of the other initiates, I would have yelled at her for insubordination a dozen times by now. I would have felt threatened by her constant assaults against my character, and tried to squelch her uprisings with cruelty, the way I did to Christina on the first day of initiation. But Tris earned my respect when she jumped first, into the net; when she challenged me at her first meal; when she wasn’t deterred by my unpleasant responses to questions; when she spoke up for Al and stared me right in the eye as I threw knives at her. She’s not my subordinate, couldn’t possibly be.
“Did you think overcoming cowardice would be easy?” I say.
“That isn’t overcoming cowardice! Cowardice is how you decide to be in real life, and in real life, I am not getting pecked to death by crows, Four!”
She starts to cry, but I’m too struck by what she just said to feel uncomfortable with her tears. She’s not learning the lessons Eric wants her to learn. She’s learning different things, wiser ones.
“I want to go home,” she says.
I know where the cameras are in this hallway. I hope none of them have picked up on what she just said.
“Learning how to think in the midst of fear is a lesson that everyone, even your Stiff family, needs to learn,” I say. I doubt a lot of things about Dauntless initiation, but the fear simulations aren’t one of them; they are the most straightforward way for a person to engage their own fears and conquer them, far more straightforward than the knife throwing or the fighting. “That’s what we’re trying to teach you. If you can’t learn it, you’ll need to get the hell out of here, because we won’t want you.”
I’m hard on her because I know she can handle it. And also because I don’t know any other way to be.
“I’m trying. But I failed. I’m failing.”
I almost feel like laughing. “How long do you think you spent in that hallucination, Tris?”
“I don’t know. A half hour?”
“Three minutes,” I say. “You got out three times faster than any of the other initiates. Whatever you are, you’re not a failure.”
You might be Divergent, I think. But she didn’t do anything to change the simulation, so maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s just that brave.
I smile at her. “Tomorrow you’ll be better at this. You’ll see.”
“Tomorrow?”
She’s calmer now. I touch her back, right beneath her shoulders.
“What was your first hallucination?” she asks me.
“It wasn’t a ‘what’ so much as a ‘who.’” As I’m saying it, I think I should have just told her the first obstacle in my fear landscape, fear of heights, though it’s not exactly what she’s asking about. When I’m around her I can’t control what I say the way I do around other people. I say vague things because that’s as close as I can get to stopping myself from saying anything, my mind addled by the feeling of her body through her shirt. “It’s not important.”
“And are you over that fear now?”
“Not yet.” We’re at the dormitory door. The walk has never gone by so quickly. I put my hands in my pockets so I don’t do anything stupid with them again. “I may never be.”
“So they don’t go away?”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes new fears replace them. But becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that’s the point.”
She nods. I don’t know what she came here for, but if I had to guess, it would be that she chose Dauntless for its freedom. Abnegation would have stifled the spark in her until it died out. Dauntless, for all its faults, has kindled the spark into a flame.