Divergent dt-1

by Veronica Roth

  “Confinement,” I say.

  He makes a guttural noise. I tilt my head and pull back enough to look at him. I can barely see his face, it’s so dark, and the air is close; we share breaths. He grimaces like he’s in pain.

  “Hey,” I say. “It’s okay. Here—”

  I guide his arms around my body so he has more space. He clutches at my back and puts his face next to mine, still hunched over. His body is warm, but I feel only his bones and the muscle that wraps around them; nothing yields beneath me. My cheeks get hot. Can he tell that I’m still built like a child?

  “This is the first time I’m happy I’m so small.” I laugh. If I joke, maybe I can calm him down. And distract myself.

  “Mmhmm,” he says. His voice sounds strained.

  “We can’t break out of here,” I say. “It’s easier to face the fear head on, right?” I don’t wait for a response. “So what you need to do is make the space smaller. Make it worse so it gets better. Right?”

  “Yes.” It is a tight, tense little word.

  “Okay. We’ll have to crouch, then. Ready?”

  I squeeze his waist to pull him down with me. I feel the hard line of his rib against my hand and hear the screech of one wood plank against another as the ceiling inches down with us. I realize that we won’t fit with all this space between us, so I turn and curl into a ball, my spine against his chest. One of his knees is bent next to my head and the other is curled beneath me so I’m sitting on his ankle. We are a jumble of limbs. I feel a harsh breath against my ear.

  “Ah,” he says, his voice raspy. “This is worse. This is definitely…”

  “Shh,” I say. “Arms around me.”

  Obediently, he slips both arms around my waist. I smile at the wall. I am not enjoying this. I am not, not even a little bit, no.

  “The simulation measures your fear response,” I say softly. I’m just repeating what he told us, but reminding him might help him. “So if you can calm your heartbeat down, it will move on to the next one. Remember? So try to forget that we’re here.”

  “Yeah?” I feel his lips move against my ear as he speaks, and heat courses through me. “That easy, huh?”

  “You know, most boys would enjoy being trapped in close quarters with a girl.” I roll my eyes.

  “Not claustrophobic people, Tris!” He sounds desperate now.

  “Okay, okay.” I set my hand on top of his and guide it to my chest, so it’s right over my heart. “Feel my heartbeat. Can you feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Feel how steady it is?”

  “It’s fast.”

  “Yes, well, that has nothing to do with the box.” I wince as soon as I’m done speaking. I just admitted to something. Hopefully he doesn’t realize that. “Every time you feel me breathe, you breathe. Focus on that.”

  “Okay.”

  I breathe deeply, and his chest rises and falls with mine. After a few seconds of this, I say calmly, “Why don’t you tell me where this fear comes from. Maybe talking about it will help us…somehow.”

  I don’t know how, but it sounds right.

  “Um…okay.” He breathes with me again. “This one is from my fantastic childhood. Childhood punishments. The tiny closet upstairs.”

  I press my lips together. I remember being punished — sent to my room without dinner, deprived of this or that, firm scoldings. I was never shut in a closet. The cruelty smarts; my chest aches for him. I don’t know what to say, so I try to keep it casual.

  “My mother kept our winter coats in our closet.”

  “I don’t…” He gasps. “I don’t really want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Okay. Then…I can talk. Ask me something.”

  “Okay.” He laughs shakily in my ear. “Why is your heart racing, Tris?”

  I cringe and say, “Well, I…” I search for an excuse that doesn’t involve his arms being around me. “I barely know you.” Not good enough. “I barely know you and I’m crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?”

  “If we were in your fear landscape,” he says, “would I be in it?”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Of course you’re not. But that’s not what I meant.”

  He laughs again, and when he does, the walls break apart with a crack and fall away, leaving us in a circle of light. Four sighs and lifts his arms from my body. I scramble to my feet and brush myself off, though I haven’t accumulated any dirt that I’m aware of. I wipe my palms on my jeans. My back feels cold from the sudden absence of him.

  He stands in front of me. He’s grinning, and I’m not sure I like the look in his eyes.

  “Maybe you were cut out for Candor,” he says, “because you’re a terrible liar.”

  “I think my aptitude test ruled that one out pretty well.”

  He shakes his head. “The aptitude test tells you nothing.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What are you trying to tell me? Your test isn’t the reason you ended up Dauntless?”

  Excitement runs through me like the blood in my veins, propelled by the hope that he might confirm that he is Divergent, that he is like me, that we can figure out what it means together.

  “Not exactly, no,” he says. “I…”

  He looks over his shoulder and his voice trails off. A woman stands a few yards away, pointing a gun at us. She is completely still, her features plain — if we walked away right now, I would not remember her. To my right, a table appears. On it is a gun and a single bullet. Why isn’t she shooting us?

  Oh, I think. The fear is unrelated to the threat to his life. It has to do with the gun on the table.

  “You have to kill her,” I say softly.

  “Every single time.”

  “She isn’t real.”

  “She looks real.” He bites his lip. “It feels real.”

  “If she was real, she would have killed you already.”

  “It’s okay.” He nods. “I’ll just…do it. This one’s not…not so bad. Not as much panic involved.”

  Not as much panic, but far more dread. I can see it in his eyes as he picks up the gun and opens the chamber like he’s done it a thousand times — and maybe he has. He clicks the bullet into the chamber and holds the gun out in front of him, both hands around it. He squeezes one eye shut and breathes slowly in.

  As he exhales, he fires, and the woman’s head whips back. I see a flash of red and look away. I hear her crumple to the floor.

  Four’s gun drops with a thump. We stare at her fallen body. What he said is true — it does feel real. Don’t be ridiculous. I grab his arm.

  “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s go. Keep moving.”

  After another tug, he comes out of his daze and follows me. As we pass the table, the woman’s body disappears, except in my memory and his. What would it be like to kill someone every time I went through my landscape? Maybe I’ll find out.

  But something puzzles me: These are supposed to be Four’s worst fears. And though he panicked in the box and on the roof, he killed the woman without much difficulty. It seems like the simulation is grasping at any fears it can find within him, and it hasn’t found much.

  “Here we go,” he whispers.

  A dark figure moves ahead of us, creeping along the edge of the circle of light, waiting for us to take another step. Who is it? Who frequents Four’s nightmares?

  The man who emerges is tall and slim, with hair cut close to his scalp. He holds his hands behind his back. And he wears the gray clothes of the Abnegation.

  “Marcus,” I whisper.

  “Here’s the part,” Four says, his voice shaking, “where you figure out my name.”

  “Is he…” I look from Marcus, who walks slowly toward us, to Four, who inches slowly back, and everything comes together. Marcus had a son who joined Dauntless. His name was…“Tobias.”

  Marcus shows us his hands. A belt is curled around one of his fists. Slowly he unwinds it from his fingers.

  “This is for y
our own good,” he says, and his voice echoes a dozen times.

  A dozen Marcuses press into the circle of light, all holding the same belt, with the same blank expression. When the Marcuses blink again, their eyes turn into empty, black pits. The belts slither along the floor, which is now white tile. A shiver crawls up my spine. The Erudite accused Marcus of cruelty. For once the Erudite were right.

  I look at Four — Tobias — and he seems frozen. His posture sags. He looks years older; he looks years younger. The first Marcus yanks his arm back, the belt sailing over his shoulder as he prepares to strike. Tobias shrinks back, throwing his arms up to protect his face.

  I dart in front of him and the belt cracks against my wrist, wrapping around it. A hot pain races up my arm to my elbow. I grit my teeth and pull as hard as I can. Marcus loses his grip, so I unwrap the belt and grab it by the buckle.

  I swing my arm as fast as I can, my shoulder socket burning from the sudden motion, and the belt strikes Marcus’s shoulder. He yells and lunges at me with outstretched hands, with fingernails that look like claws. Tobias pushes me behind him so he stands between me and Marcus. He looks angry, not afraid.

  All the Marcuses vanish. The lights come on, revealing a long, narrow room with busted brick walls and a cement floor.

  “That’s it?” I say. “Those were your worst fears? Why do you only have four…” My voice trails off. Only four fears.

  “Oh.” I look over my shoulder at him. “That’s why they call you—”

  The words leave me when I see his expression. His eyes are wide and seem almost vulnerable under the room’s lights. His lips are parted. If we were not here, I would describe the look as awe. But I don’t understand why he would be looking at me in awe.

  He wraps his hand around my elbow, his thumb pressing to the soft skin above my forearm, and tugs me toward him. The skin around my wrist still stings, like the belt was real, but it is as pale as the rest of me. His lips slowly move against my cheek, then his arms tighten around my shoulders, and he buries his face in my neck, breathing against my collarbone.

  I stand stiffly for a second and then loop my arms around him and sigh.

  “Hey,” I say softly. “We got through it.”

  He lifts his head and slips his fingers through my hair, tucking it behind my ear. We stare at each other in silence. His fingers move absently over a lock of my hair.

  “You got me through it,” he says finally.

  “Well.” My throat is dry. I try to ignore the nervous electricity that pulses through me every second he touches me. “It’s easy to be brave when they’re not my fears.”

  I let my hands drop and casually wipe them on my jeans, hoping he doesn’t notice.

  If he does, he doesn’t say so. He laces his fingers with mine.

  “Come on,” he says. “I have something else to show you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  HAND IN HAND, we walk toward the Pit. I monitor the pressure of my hand carefully. One minute, I feel like I’m not gripping hard enough, and the next, I’m squeezing too hard. I never used to understand why people bothered to hold hands as they walked, but then he runs one of his fingertips down my palm, and I shiver and understand it completely.

  “So…” I latch on to the last logical thought I remember. “Four fears.”

  “Four fears then; four fears now,” he says, nodding. “They haven’t changed, so I keep going in there, but…I still haven’t made any progress.”

  “You can’t be fearless, remember?” I say. “Because you still care about things. About your life.”

  “I know.”

  We walk along the edge of the Pit on a narrow path that leads to the rocks at the bottom of the chasm. I’ve never noticed it before — it blended in with the rock wall. But Tobias seems to know it well.

  I don’t want to ruin the moment, but I have to know about his aptitude test. I have to know if he’s Divergent.

  “You were going to tell me about your aptitude test results,” I say.

  “Ah.” He scratches the back of his neck with his free hand. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes. I want to know.”

  “How demanding you are.” He smiles.

  We reach the end of the path and stand at the bottom of the chasm, where the rocks form unsteady ground, rising up at harsh angles from the rushing water. He leads me up and down, across small gaps and over angular ridges. My shoes cling to the rough rock. The soles of my shoes mark each rock with a wet footprint.

  He finds a relatively flat rock near the side, where the current isn’t strong, and sits down, his feet dangling over the edge. I sit beside him. He seems comfortable here, inches above the hazardous water.

  He releases my hand. I look at the jagged edge of the rock.

  “These are things I don’t tell people, you know. Not even my friends,” he says.

  I lace my fingers together and clench. This is the perfect place for him to tell me that he is Divergent, if indeed that’s what he is. The roar of the chasm ensures that we won’t be overheard. I don’t know why the thought makes me so nervous.

  “My result was as expected,” he says. “Abnegation.”

  “Oh.” Something inside me deflates. I am wrong about him.

  But — I had assumed that if he was not Divergent, he must have gotten a Dauntless result. And technically, I also got an Abnegation result — according to the system. Did the same thing happen to him? And if that’s true, why isn’t he telling me the truth?

  “But you chose Dauntless anyway?” I say.

  “Out of necessity.”

  “Why did you have to leave?”

  His eyes dart away from mine, across the space in front of him, as if searching the air for an answer. He doesn’t need to give one. I still feel the ghost of a stinging belt on my wrist.

  “You had to get away from your dad,” I say. “Is that why you don’t want to be a Dauntless leader? Because if you were, you might have to see him again?”

  He lifts a shoulder. “That, and I’ve always felt that I don’t quite belong among the Dauntless. Not the way they are now, anyway.”

  “But you’re…incredible,” I say. I pause and clear my throat. “I mean, by Dauntless standards. Four fears is unheard of. How could you not belong here?”

  He shrugs. He doesn’t seem to care about his talent, or his status among the Dauntless, and that is what I would expect from the Abnegation. I am not sure what to make of that.

  He says, “I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different. All your life you’ve been training to forget yourself, so when you’re in danger, it becomes your first instinct. I could belong in Abnegation just as easily.”

  Suddenly I feel heavy. A lifetime of training wasn’t enough for me. My first instinct is still self-preservation.

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “I left Abnegation because I wasn’t selfless enough, no matter how hard I tried to be.”

  “That’s not entirely true.” He smiles at me. “That girl who let someone throw knives at her to spare a friend, who hit my dad with a belt to protect me — that selfless girl, that’s not you?”

  He’s figured out more about me than I have. And even though it seems impossible that he could feel something for me, given all that I’m not…maybe it isn’t. I frown at him. “You’ve been paying close attention, haven’t you?”

  “I like to observe people.”

  “Maybe you were cut out for Candor, Four, because you’re a terrible liar.”

  He puts his hand on the rock next to him, his fingers lining up with mine. I look down at our hands. He has long, narrow fingers. Hands made for fine, deft movements. Not Dauntless hands, which should be thick and tough and ready to break things.

  “Fine.” He leans his face closer to mine, his eyes focusing on my chin, and my lips, and my nose. “I watched you because I like you.” He says it plainly, boldly, and his eyes flick up to mine. “And don’t call me ‘Four,’ okay? It’s nice to hear my name
again.”

  Just like that, he has finally declared himself, and I don’t know how to respond. My cheeks warm, and all I can think to say is, “But you’re older than I am…Tobias.”

  He smiles at me. “Yes, that whopping two-year gap really is insurmountable, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not trying to be self-deprecating,” I say, “I just don’t get it. I’m younger. I’m not pretty. I—”

  He laughs, a deep laugh that sounds like it came from deep inside him, and touches his lips to my temple.

  “Don’t pretend,” I say breathily. “You know I’m not. I’m not ugly, but I am certainly not pretty.”

  “Fine. You’re not pretty. So?” He kisses my cheek. “I like how you look. You’re deadly smart. You’re brave. And even though you found out about Marcus…” His voice softens. “You aren’t giving me that look. Like I’m a kicked puppy or something.”

  “Well,” I say. “You’re not.”

  For a second his dark eyes are on mine, and he’s quiet. Then he touches my face and leans in close, brushing my lips with his. The river roars and I feel its spray on my ankles. He grins and presses his mouth to mine.

  I tense up at first, unsure of myself, so when he pulls away, I’m sure I did something wrong, or badly. But he takes my face in his hands, his fingers strong against my skin, and kisses me again, firmer this time, more certain. I wrap an arm around him, sliding my hand up his neck and into his short hair.

  For a few minutes we kiss, deep in the chasm, with the roar of water all around us. And when we rise, hand in hand, I realize that if we had both chosen differently, we might have ended up doing the same thing, in a safer place, in gray clothes instead of black ones.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING I am silly and light. Every time I push the smile from my face, it fights its way back. Eventually I stop suppressing it. I let my hair hang loose and abandon my uniform of loose shirts in favor of one that cuts across my shoulders, revealing my tattoos.

  “What is it with you today?” says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are still swollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face.