Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)

by Veronica Roth

“I didn’t choose the blood that runs in my veins,” I replied. “Any more than you chose your fate. You and I, we’ve become what we were made to become.”

“Honor,” I said with a snort. “Honor has no place in survival.”

Horrible. Was that what life was? I had never put a word to it. Pain had a way of breaking time down. I thought about the next minute, the next hour. There wasn’t enough space in my mind to put all those pieces together, to find words to summarize the whole of it. But the “keep going” part, I knew the words for. “Find another reason to go on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.” I knew mine: There was a hunger inside me, and there always had been. That hunger was stronger than pain, stronger than horror. It gnawed even after everything else inside me had given up. It was not hope; it did not soar; it slithered, clawed, and dragged, and it would not let me stop. And when I finally named it, I found it was something very simple: the desire to live.

I didn’t want relief. I had earned this pain.

“It’s s’posed to be me saving you,” Eijeh whispered at one point. Or the closest to a whisper as he could get; he’d always been terrible at sneaking. “Who says? Some kind of manual on brotherly conduct?” Eijeh had laughed. “You didn’t read yours? Typical.”

Freedom. He offered it like someone who didn’t know what it meant, someone who had never had it taken away.

“I know what it is to become something you hate. I know how it hurts. But life is full of hurt.” Shadows pooled in her eye sockets like they were proving her point. “And your capacity for bearing it is much greater than you believe.”

I had watched him pack some clothes and some of the books I had given him, his favorite pages folded over. Though I had already read all those books, I wanted to open them again just to search out the parts he most treasured; I wanted to read them as if immersed in his mind.

I didn’t mind showing skin. I was far from frail, with thick thighs and a small chest, and it didn’t concern me. This body had carried me through a hard life. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to.

“You want to see people as extremes. Bad or good, trustworthy or not,” I said. “I understand. It’s easier that way. But that isn’t how people work.”

That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness—you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you.

“I have seen futures where you do, and futures where you don’t,” she said. And, smiling, she added, “But you always, always try.”