Four: A Divergent Collection (Divergent Series Story)

by Veronica Roth

That’s why Jeanine Matthews frequents Dauntless headquarters, that’s why she keeps planting minions in your faction to report on their behavior.

Wait, so was Will a minion!?!?!?

You can be more than either, more than any faction.

“That’s a word we have for people who are aware during simulations, who refuse categorization,” she says. “A word you don’t speak without care, because those people often die in mysterious circumstances.”

maybe there is a masochistic streak inside me that uses pain to cope with pain.

Even now I don’t want to imagine what reconciling with her would be like, what having a mother would be like. I’m too old to hear comforting nonsense anymore. Too old to believe that everything will be all right.

Soon he’s going to look more like a pincushion than a human being.

“Wasn’t sure someone with your background could ever develop a sense of humor. Your father doesn’t seem like the type to allow it.”

“I would improve Dauntless by fostering true bravery instead of stupidity and brutality,” I say. “Take out the knife throwing. Prepare people physically and mentally to defend the weak against the strong. That’s what our manifesto encourages—ordinary acts of bravery. I think we should return to that.”

That’s what I really want—to shed all the people who want to form and shape me, one by one, and learn instead to form and shape myself.

even though he’s the worst faction traitor of anyone I’ve met, and probably responsible at least in part for Amar’s death, I can’t help but feel a little grateful to him for letting me go so easily.

“Yeah,” I say. “I am.”

GODDD, love this trio so much

At least here I have friends to keep me company while it happens.

Evelyn, Someday. Not yet. —4 P.S. I’m glad you’re not dead.

Beatrice. That name is so wrong for her.

another thing I’ve discovered is that the Dauntless are always up for a prank, and rarely looking for a lie.

“I . . .” Lie! Lie now! “I thought I saw something,” I finish lamely.

For some reason, my first thought is her, her wide eyes staring at me from the recesses of my memory.

I have to suppress a sigh of relief. It’s not her. Nothing happened to her.

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.

I ignore the pain and run a hand over her hair, because I’m stupid, and inappropriate, and stupid .

A brave 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.

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,

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.

She’s not learning the lessons Eric wants her to learn. She’s learning different things, wiser ones.

“Learning how to think in the midst of fear is a lesson that everyone, even your Stiff family, needs to learn,”

When I’m around her I can’t control what I say the way I do around other people.

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 moves closer to me. I felt safer when there was more space between us. Even closer, and I think about touching her, and my mouth goes dry. I almost never think about people that way, about girls that way.

Like nothing ever happened—like she didn’t just spend three minutes overwhelmed by terror. She’s stronger than I was.

“No, Tris,” I say. “You look . . .” I try a Dauntless expression. “Tough as nails.”

The attack will be against Abnegation.

“You already knew,” I say slowly, struggling to process the truth. “You knew they were planning something like this, and have been for a while. You’re waiting for it. Counting on it.”

I shouldn’t be so surprised to find that a faction is full of liars, but I guess there are parts of me that are still naive, still like a child.

Then she slips her fingers between mine, and I stare at her, startled. I squeeze her hand, lightly, and it registers through my turmoil and my exhaustion that though I’ve touched her half a dozen times—each one a lapse in judgment—this is the first time she’s ever done it back.

And I stand in the hallway, alone, grinning like an idiot.

I see her hair, blond, and I can hardly see anything else.

She isn’t badly injured, but Drew might be.

I wonder if this is what it was like for him, I think, remembering the wild, frantic look in Marcus’s eyes every time he got angry.

“Your hands,” she says, and it’s a ridiculous thing to say, so stupid, to be worried about my hands when she was just dangled over the chasm by her throat.

I shouldn’t let her see this side of me, the side that derives savage pleasure from Drew’s pain. I shouldn’t have this side.

Maybe she and I are the same.

In that moment I’m able to accept the inevitability of how I feel, though not with joy. I need to talk to someone. I need to trust someone. And for whatever reason, I know, I know it’s her.

“I didn’t threaten you,” I say. “I’m not even touching you. And according to the footage of this room that’s stored on the control room computers, we’re not even in here right now.”

“I’m the one who’s threatening you,” Shauna says,

“One more violent outburst and I’m going to teach you a lesson about justice.”

“An eye for an eye. A bruise for a bruise.”

“Eric may not care if you go after your peers,” Zeke says, “but we do, and there are a lot of Dauntless like us. People who don’t think you should lay a hand on your fellow faction members. People who listen to gossip, and spread it like wildfire. It won’t take long for us to tell them what kind of worm you are, or for them to make your life very, very difficult. You see, in Dauntless, reputations tend to stick.”

“You may be able to cause pain, initiate . . . but we can cause you lifelong misery.”

My initiate—my responsibility, and I failed,

Dead people can be our heroes because they can’t disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.