Deep inside me I know the answer: I am being reckless. I will probably gain nothing. I will probably die.
And more disturbing still: I don’t really care.
“They’ll work their way upward,” I say between breaths. “So you should . . . go to the third floor. Tell them to . . . evacuate. Quietly.”
“Where are you going, then?”
“Floor two,” I say. I shove my shoulder into the second-floor door. I know what to do on the second floor: look for the Divergent.
As I walk down the hallway, stepping over unconscious people dressed in black and white, I think of a verse of the song Candor children used to sing when they thought no one could hear them:
Dauntless is the cruelest of the five
They tear each other to pieces. . . .
It has never seemed truer to me than now, watching Dauntless traitors induce a sleeping simulation that is not so different from the one that forced them to kill members of Abnegation not a month ago.
We are the only faction that could divide like this. Amity would not allow a schism; no one in Abnegation would be so selfish; Candor would argue until they found a common solution; and even Erudite would never do something so illogical. We really are the cruelest faction.
I step over a draped arm and a woman with her mouth hanging open, and hum the beginning of the next verse of the song under my breath.
Erudite is the coldest of the five
Knowledge is a costly thing. . . .
I wonder when Jeanine realized that Erudite and Dauntless would make a deadly combination. Ruthlessness and cold logic, it seems, can accomplish almost anything, including putting one and a half factions to sleep.
I scan faces and bodies as I walk, searching for irregular breaths, flickering eyelids, anything to suggest that the people lying on the ground are just pretending to be unconscious. So far, all the breathing is even and all the eyelids are still. Maybe none of the Candor are Divergent.
“Eric!” I hear someone shout from down the hall. I hold my breath as he walks right toward me. I try not to move. If I move, he’ll look at me, and he’ll recognize me, I know it. I look down, and tense so hard I tremble. Don’t look at me don’t look at me don’t look at me . . .
Eric strides past me and down the hallway to my left. I should continue my search as quickly as possible, but curiosity urges me forward, toward whoever called for Eric. The shout sounded urgent.
When I lift my eyes, I see a Dauntless soldier standing over a kneeling woman. She wears a white blouse and a black skirt, and has her hands behind her head. Eric’s smile looks greedy even in profile.
“Divergent,” he says. “Well done. Bring her to the elevator bank. We’ll decide which ones to kill and which ones to bring back later.”
The Dauntless soldier grabs the woman by the ponytail and starts toward the elevator bank, dragging her behind him. She shrieks, and then scrambles to her feet, bent over. I try to swallow but it feels like I have a wad of cotton balls in my throat.
Eric continues down the hallway, away from me, and I try not to stare as the Candor woman stumbles past me, her hair still trapped in the fist of the Dauntless soldier. By now I know how terror works: I let it control me for a few seconds, and then force myself to act.
One . . . two . . . three . . .
I start forward with a new sense of purpose. Watching each person to see if they’re awake is taking too much time. The next unconscious person I come across, I step hard on their pinkie finger. No response, not even a twitch. I step over them and find the next person’s finger, pressing hard with the toe of my shoe. No response there either.
I hear someone else shout, “Got one!” from a distant hallway and start to feel frantic. I hop over fallen man after fallen woman, over children and teenagers and the elderly, stepping on fingers or stomachs or ankles, searching for signs of pain. I barely see their faces after a while, but still I get no response. I am playing hide-and-seek with the Divergent, but I’m not the only person who’s “it.”
And then it happens. I step on a Candor girl’s pinkie, and her face twitches. Just a little—an impressive attempt at concealing the pain—but enough to catch my attention.
I look over my shoulder to see if anyone is near me, but they’ve all moved on from this central hallway. I check for the nearest stairwell—there’s one just ten feet away, down a side hallway to my right. I crouch next to the girl’s head.
“Hey, kid,” I say as quietly as I can. “It’s okay. I’m not one of them.”
Her eyes open, just a little.
“There’s a staircase about three yards away,” I say. “I’ll tell you when no one is watching, and then you have to run, understand?”
She nods.
I stand and turn in a slow circle. A Dauntless traitor to my left is looking away, nudging a limp Dauntless with her foot. Two Dauntless traitors behind me are laughing about something. One in front of me is spacing out in my direction, but then he lifts his head and starts down the hallway again, away from me.
“Now,” I say.
The girl gets up and sprints toward the door to the stairwell. I watch her until the door clicks shut, and see my reflection in one of the windows. But I’m not standing alone in a hallway of sleeping people, like I thought. Eric is standing right behind me.
I look at his reflection, and he looks back at me. I could make a break for it. If I move fast enough, he might not have the presence of mind to grab me. But I know, even as the idea occurs to me, that I won’t be able to outrun him. And I won’t be able to shoot him, because I didn’t take a gun.
I spin around, bringing my elbow up as I do, and thrust it toward Eric’s face. It catches the end of his chin, but not hard enough to do any damage. He grabs my left arm with one hand and presses a gun barrel to my forehead with the other, smiling down at me.
“I don’t understand,” he says, “how you could possibly be stupid enough to come up here with no gun.”
“Well, I’m smart enough to do this,” I say. I stomp hard on his foot, which I fired a bullet into less than a month ago. He screams, his face contorting, and drives the heel of the gun into my jaw. I clench my teeth to suppress a groan. Blood trickles down my neck—he broke the skin.
Through all that, his grip on my arm does not loosen once. But the fact that he didn’t just shoot me in the head tells me something: He’s not allowed to kill me yet.
“I was surprised to discover you were still alive,” he says. “Considering I’m the one who told Jeanine to construct that water tank just for you.”
I try to figure out what I can do that will be painful enough for him to release me. I’ve just decided on a hard kick to the groin when he slips behind me and grabs me by both arms, pressing against me so I can barely move my feet. His fingernails dig into my skin, and I grit my teeth, both from the pain and from the sickening feeling of his chest on my back.
“She thought studying one of the Divergent’s reaction to a real-life version of a simulation would be fascinating,” he says, and he presses me forward so I have to walk. His breath tickles my hair. “And I agreed. You see, ingenuity—one of the qualities we most value in Erudite—requires creativity.”
He twists his hands so the calluses scrape against my arms. I shift my body slightly to the left as I walk, trying to position one of my feet between his advancing feet. I notice with fierce pleasure that he’s limping.
“Sometimes creativity seems wasteful, illogical . . . unless it’s done for a greater purpose. In this case, the accumulation of knowledge.”
I stop walking just long enough to bring my heel up, hard, between his legs. A high-pitched cry hitches in his throat, stopped before it really began, and his hands go limp for just a moment. In that moment, I twist my body as hard as I can and break free. I don’t know where I will run, but I have to run, I have to—
He grabs my elbow, yanking me back, and pushes his thumb into the wound in my shoulder, twisting until pain makes my vision go black at the edges, and I scream at the top of my lungs.
“I thought I recalled from the footage of you in that water tank that you got shot in that shoulder,” he says. “It seems I was right.”
My knees crumple beneath me, and he grabs my collar almost carelessly, dragging me toward the elevator bank. The fabric digs into my throat, choking me, and I stumble after him. My body throbs with lingering pain.
When we reach the elevator bank, he forces me to my knees next to the Candor woman I saw earlier. She and four others sit between the two rows of elevators, kept in place by Dauntless with guns.
“I want one gun on her at all times,” says Eric. “Not just aimed at her. On her.”
A Dauntless man pushes a gun barrel into the back of my neck. It forms a cold circle on my skin. I lift my eyes to Eric. His face is red, his eyes watering.
“What’s the matter, Eric?” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Afraid of a little girl?”
“I’m not stupid,” he says, pushing his hands through his hair. “That little-girl act may have worked on me before, but it won’t work again. You’re the best attack dog they’ve got.” He leans closer to me. “Which is why I’m sure you’ll be put down soon enough.”
One of the elevator doors opens, and a Dauntless soldier shoves Uriah—whose lips are stained with blood—toward the short row of the Divergent. Uriah glances at me, but I can’t read his expression well enough to know if he succeeded or failed. If he’s here, he probably failed. Now they’ll find all the Divergent in the building, and most of us will die.
I should probably be afraid. But instead a hysterical laugh bubbles inside me, because I just remembered something:
Maybe I can’t hold a gun. But I have a knife in my back pocket.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I SHIFT MY hand back, centimeter by centimeter, so the soldier pointing a gun at me doesn’t notice. The elevator doors open again, bringing more of the Divergent with more Dauntless traitors. The Candor woman on my right whimpers. Strands of her hair are stuck to her lips, which are wet with spit, or tears, I can’t tell.
My hand reaches the corner of my back pocket. I keep it steady, my fingers shaking with anticipation. I have to wait for the right moment, when Eric is close.
I focus on the mechanics of my breathing, imagining air filling every part of my lungs as I inhale, then remembering as I exhale how all my blood, oxygenated and unoxygenated, travels to and from the same heart.
It’s easier to think of biology than the line of the Divergent sitting between the elevators. A Candor boy who can’t be older than eleven sits to my left. He’s braver than the woman to my right—he stares at the Dauntless soldier in front of him, unflinching.
Air in, air out. Blood pushed all the way to my extremities—the heart is a powerful muscle, the strongest muscle in the body in terms of longevity. More Dauntless arrive, reporting successful sweeps of specific floors of the Merciless Mart. Hundreds of people unconscious on the floor, shot with something other than bullets, and I have no idea why.
But I am thinking of the heart. Not of my heart anymore, but of Eric’s, and how empty his chest will sound when his heart is no longer beating. Despite how much I hate him, I don’t really want to kill him, at least not with a knife, up close where I can see the life leave him. But I have one chance left to do something useful, and if I want to hit the Erudite where it hurts, I have to take one of their leaders from them.
I notice that no one ever brought the Candor girl I warned to the elevator bank, which means she must have gotten away. Good.
Eric clasps his hands behind his back and begins to pace, back and forth, before the line of Divergent.
“My orders are to take only two of you back to Erudite headquarters for testing,” says Eric. “The rest of you are to be executed. There are several ways to determine who among you will be least useful to us.”
His footsteps slow when he approaches me. I tense my fingers, about to grab the knife handle, but he doesn’t come close enough. He keeps walking and stops in front of the boy to my left.
“The brain finishes developing at age twenty-five,” says Eric. “Therefore your Divergence is not completely developed.”
He lifts his gun and fires.
A strangled scream leaps out of my body as the boy slumps to the ground, and I squeeze my eyes shut. Every muscle in my body strains toward him, but I hold myself back. Wait, wait, wait. I can’t think of the boy. Wait. I force my eyes open and blink tears from them.
My scream accomplished one thing: now Eric stands in front of me, smiling. I caught his attention.
“You are also rather young,” he says. “Nowhere near finished developing.”
He steps toward me. My fingertips inch closer to the knife handle.
“Most of the Divergent get two results in the aptitude test. Some only get one. No one has ever gotten three, not because of aptitude, but simply because in order to get that result, you have to refuse to choose something,” he says, moving closer still. I tilt my head back to look at him, at all the metal gleaming in his face, at his empty eyes.
“My superiors suspect that you got two, Tris,” he says. “They don’t think you’re that complex—just an even blend of Abnegation and Dauntless—selfless to the point of idiocy. Or is that brave to the point of idiocy?”
I close my hand around the knife handle and squeeze. He leans closer.
“Just between you and me . . . I think you might have gotten three, because you’re the kind of bullheaded person who would refuse to make a simple choice just because she was told to,” he says. “Care to enlighten me?”
I lurch forward, pulling my hand out of my pocket. I close my eyes as I thrust the blade up and toward him. I don’t want to see his blood.
I feel the knife go in and then pull it out again. My entire body throbs to the rhythm of my heart. The back of my neck is sticky with sweat. I open my eyes as Eric slumps to the ground, and then—chaos.