Four Divergent Stories: The Transfer, The Initiate, The Son, and The Traitor (Divergent Series) (7 page)

We’re close to Dauntless headquarters now. The buildings are sagging where they stand.

“Who’s left?” Lauren says, her bleary eyes skipping over each face until she reaches mine. “Ah, the numerically named initiate from Abnegation. Four, is it?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“A Stiff?” The boy who sat so comfortably beside Amar looks at me, his words running together. He’s the one holding the flask, the one determining the next dare. So far I’ve watched people scale tall structures, I’ve watched them jump into dark holes and wander into empty buildings to retrieve a faucet or a desk chair, I’ve watched them run naked down alleyways and stick needles through their earlobes without numbing them first. If I was asked to concoct a dare, I would not be able to think of one. It’s a good thing I’m the last person to go.

I feel a tremor in my chest, nerves. What will he tell me to do?

“Stiffs are uptight,” the boy says plainly, like it’s a fact. “So, to prove you’re really Dauntless now . . . I dare you to get a tattoo.”

I see their ink, creeping over wrists and arms and shoulders and throats. The metal studs through ears and noses and lips and eyebrows. My skin is blank, healed, whole. But it doesn’t match who I am—I should be scarred, marked, the way they are, but marked with memories of pain, scarred with the things I have survived.

I lift a shoulder. “Fine.”

He tosses me the flask, and I drain it, though it stings my throat and lips and tastes bitter as poison.

We start toward the Pire.

Tori is wearing a pair of men’s underwear and a T-shirt when she answers the door, her hair hanging over the left half of her face. She raises an eyebrow at me. We clearly woke her from a sound sleep, but she doesn’t seem angry—just a little grouchy.

“Please?” Amar says. “It’s for a game of Dare.”

“Are you sure you want a tired woman to tattoo your skin, Four? This ink doesn’t wash off,” she says to me.

“I trust you,” I say. I’m not going to back out of the dare, not after watching everyone else do theirs.

“Right.” Tori yawns. “The things I do for Dauntless tradition. I’ll be right back, I’m going to put on pants.”

She closes the door between us. On the way here I racked my brain for what I might want tattooed, and where. I couldn’t decide—my thoughts were too muddled. Still are.

A few seconds later Tori emerges wearing pants, her feet still bare. “If I get in trouble for turning on lights at this hour, I’m going to claim it was vandals and name names.”

“Got it,” I say.

“There’s a back way. Come on,” she says, beckoning to us. I follow her through her dark living room, which is tidy except for the sheets of paper spread over her coffee table, each one marked with a different drawing. Some of them are harsh and simple, like most of the tattoos I’ve seen, and others are more intricate, detailed. Tori must be the Dauntless approximation of an artist.

I pause by the table. One of the pages depicts all the faction symbols, without the circles that usually bind them. The Amity tree is at the bottom, forming a kind of root system for the eye of Erudite and the Candor scales. Above them, the Abnegation hands seem almost to cradle the Dauntless flames. It’s like the symbols are growing into one another.

The others have moved past me. I jog to catch up, walking through Tori’s kitchen—also immaculate, though the appliances are out of date, the faucet rusted, and the refrigerator door held closed by a large clamp. The back door is open and leads into a short, dank hallway that opens up to the tattoo parlor.

I’ve walked past it before but never cared to go inside, sure I wasn’t going to find a reason to attack my own body with needles. I guess I have one now—those needles are a way for me to separate myself from my past, not just in the eyes of my fellow Dauntless, but in my own eyes, every time I look at my own reflection.

The room’s walls are covered in pictures. The wall by the door is entirely dedicated to Dauntless symbols, some black and simple, some colorful and barely recognizable. Tori turns on the light over one of the chairs and arranges her tattoo needles on a tray next to it. The other Dauntless gather on benches and chairs around us, like they’re getting ready to see a performance of some kind. My face gets hot.

“Basic principles of tattooing,” Tori says. “The less cushion under the skin, or the bonier you are in a particular area, the more painful the tattoo. For your first one it’s probably best to get it done on, I don’t know, your arm, or—”

“Your butt cheek,” Zeke suggests, with a snort of laughter.

Tori shrugs. “It wouldn’t be the first time. Or the last.”

I look at the boy who dared me. He raises his eyebrows at me. I know what he expects, what they all expect—that I’ll get something small, on an arm or a leg, something that’s easily hidden. I glance at the wall with all the symbols. One of the drawings in particular catches my eye, an artistic rendering of the flames themselves.

“That one,” I say, pointing to it.

“Got it,” Tori says. “Got a location in mind?”

I have a scar—a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It’s always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I’ve experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself, I began to doubt that I had lived through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don’t disappear forever—I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars.

That is what this tattoo will be, for me: a scar. And it seems fitting that it should document the worst memory of pain that I have.

I rest my hand on my rib cage, remembering the bruises that were, and the fear I felt for my own life. My father had a series of bad nights right after my mother died.

“You sure?” Tori says. “That’s maybe the most painful place possible.”

“Good,” I say, and I sit down in the chair.

The crowd of Dauntless cheer and start passing around another flask, this one bigger than the last, and bronze instead of silver.

“So we have a masochist in the chair tonight. Lovely.” Tori sits on the stool next to me and puts on a pair of rubber gloves. I sit forward, lifting up the hem of my shirt, and she soaks a cotton ball in rubbing alcohol, covering my ribs with it. She’s about to move away when she frowns and pulls at my skin with her fingertip. Rubbing alcohol bites into the still-healing skin of my back, and I wince.

“How did this happen, Four?” she asks.

I look up and notice that Amar is staring at me, frowning.

“He’s an initiate,” Amar says. “They’re
all
cut and bruised at this point. You should see them all limping around together. It’s sad.”

“I have a giant one on my knee,” volunteers Zeke. “It’s the sickest blue color—”

Zeke rolls up his pant leg to display his bruise to the others, and they all start sharing their own bruises, their own scars: “Got this when they
dropped
me after the zip line.” “Well, I’ve got a stab wound from your grip slipping during knife-throwing, so I think we’re even.” Tori eyes me for a few seconds, and I’m sure she doesn’t accept Amar’s explanation for the marks on my back, but she doesn’t ask again. Instead, she turns on the needle, filling the air with the sound of buzzing, and Amar tosses me the flask.

The alcohol is still burning my throat when the tattoo needle touches my ribs, and I wince, but somehow I don’t mind the pain.

I relish it.

The next day, when I wake up, everything hurts. Especially my head.

Oh God, my head.

Eric is perched on the edge of the mattress next to mine, tying his shoelaces. The skin around the rings in his lip looks red—he must have pierced it recently. I haven’t been paying attention.

He looks at me. “You look like hell.”

I sit up, and the sudden motion makes my head throb more.

“I hope that when you lose, you don’t use it as an excuse,” he says, sneering a little. “Because I would have beat you anyway.”

He gets up, stretches, and leaves the dormitory. I cradle my head in my hands for a few seconds, then get up to take a shower. I have to stand with half my body under the water and half out, because of the ink on my side. The Dauntless stayed with me for hours, waiting for the tattoo to be finished, and by the time we left, all the flasks were empty. Tori gave me a thumbs-up as I stumbled out of the tattoo parlor, and Zeke slung an arm across my shoulders and said, “I think you’re Dauntless now.”

Last night I found myself relishing the words. Now I wish I could have my old head back, the one that was focused and determined and didn’t feel like tiny men with hammers had taken up residence inside it. I let the cool water spill over me for a few more minutes, then check the clock on the bathroom wall.

Ten minutes to the fight. I’m going to be late. And Eric is right—I’m going to lose.

I push my hand into my forehead as I run toward the training room, my feet halfway out of my shoes. When I burst through the doors, the transfer initiates and some of the Dauntless-born initiates are standing around the edge of the room. Amar is in the center of the arena, checking his watch. He gives me a pointed look.

“Nice of you to join us,” he says. I see in his raised eyebrows that the camaraderie of the night before does not extend to the training room. He points at my shoes. “Tie your shoes, and don’t waste any more of my time.”

Across the arena, Eric cracks each one of his knuckles, carefully, staring at me the whole time. I tie my shoes in a hurry and tuck the ends of the laces under so they don’t get in my way.

As I face Eric I can feel only the pounding of my heart, the throbbing of my head, the burning in my side. Then Amar steps back, and Eric rushes forward, fast, his fist hitting me square in the jaw.

I stumble back, holding my face. All the pain runs together in my mind. I put up my hands to block the next punch. My head throbs and I see his leg move. I try to twist away from the kick, but his foot hits me hard in the ribs. I feel a sensation like an electric shock through the left side of my body.

“This is easier than I thought it would be,” Eric says.

I feel hot with embarrassment, and in the arrogant opening he leaves me, I uppercut him in the stomach.

The flat of his hand smacks into my ear, making it ring, and I lose my balance, my fingers touching the ground to steady me.

“You know,” Eric says quietly, “I think I’ve figured out your real name.”

My eyes are blurry with half a dozen different kinds of pain. I didn’t know it came in so many varieties, like flavors, acid and fire and ache and sting.

He hits me again, this time trying for my face but getting my collarbone instead. He shakes out his hand and says, “Should I tell them? Get everything out in the open?”

He has my name between his teeth,
Eaton
, a far more threatening weapon than his feet or his elbows or his fists. The Abnegation say, in hushed voices, that the problem with many Erudite is their selfishness, but I think it is their arrogance, the pride they take in knowing things that others do not. In that moment, overwhelmed with fear, I recognize it as Eric’s weakness. He doesn’t believe that I can hurt him as much as he can hurt me. He believes that I am everything he assumed me to be at the outset, humble and selfless and passive.

I feel my pain disappear into rage, and I grab his arm to hold him in place as I swing at him again, and again, and again. I don’t even see where I’m hitting him; I don’t see or feel or hear anything. I am empty, alone, nothing.

Then I finally hear his screams, see him clutching his face with both hands. Blood soaks his chin, runs into his teeth. He tries to wrench away but I am holding on as hard as I can, holding on for dear life.

I kick him hard in the side, so he topples. Over his clutched hands, I meet his eyes.

His eyes are glassy and unfocused. His blood is bright against his skin. It occurs to me that I did that, it was me, and fear creeps back in, a different kind of fear this time. A fear of what I am, what I might be becoming.

My knuckles throb, and I walk out of the arena without being dismissed.

The Dauntless compound is a good place to recover, dark and full of secret, quiet places.

I find a hallway near the Pit and sit against the wall, letting the cold from the stone seep into me. My headache has returned, as well as various aches and pains from the fight, but I barely register any of them. My knuckles are tacky with blood, Eric’s. I try to rub it off but it’s been drying too long. I won the fight, and that means my place in Dauntless is secure for the time being—I should feel satisfied, not afraid. Maybe even happy, to finally belong somewhere, to be among people whose eyes don’t skirt mine at the lunch table. But I know that for every good thing that comes along, there is always a cost. What is the cost of being Dauntless?

“Hey.” I look up and see Shauna knocking on the stone wall like it’s a door. She grins. “This is not quite the victory dance I was expecting.”

“I don’t dance,” I say.

“Yeah, I should have known better.” She sits across from me, her back against the opposite wall. She draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. Our feet are just a few inches apart. I don’t know why I notice that. Well, yes I do—she’s a girl.

I don’t know how to talk to girls. Especially not a Dauntless girl. Something tells me you can never know what to expect from a Dauntless girl.

“Eric’s in the hospital,” she says, and there’s a grin on her face. “They think you broke his nose. You definitely knocked out one of his teeth.”

I look down. I knocked out someone’s tooth?

“I was wondering if you could help me,” she says, nudging my shoe with her toe.

As I suspected: Dauntless girls are unpredictable. “Help you with what?”

“Fighting. I’m no good at it. I keep getting humiliated in the arena.” She shakes her head. “I have to face off with this girl in two days, her name’s Ashley but she makes everyone call her Ash.” Shauna rolls her eyes. “You know, Dauntless flames, ash, whatever. Anyway, she’s one of the best people in our group, and I’m afraid she’s going to kill me. Like actually kill me.”