Okay, so here's the thing: I was always very bothered by Divergent. I think that there was a lot of potential within the series, but for two things: A basic lack of knowing how people function and a lack of logic.

The idea for this wouldn't leave me alone, and now, I am rewriting the series while I add in both of those missing elements.

Some part of this are basically the same, and things only really start to branch off and get into the other elements until most of the way through the fourth chapter. The stuff before that is a lot of rehashing what everybody already knows from the first book, as well as working hard to establish the world that they live in. It's not quite the same as in the books, so don't be so quick to brush it off.

Also, because I know that a lot of people are going to ask this: Amity doesn't exist in this because their function was almost identical to Abnegation. There are plenty of people who are in the Abnegation faction (and you will soon find out why), so there would be more than enough people to help with the homeless as well as to grow food for all four factions.

And one more thing: Homeless does not equal factionless. The factionless still exist, just not in the exact same concept as in the original book. I haven't quite started to write with the factionless plot just yet, but trust me when I say that you'll know when it's introduced.

Homeless people within the context of this story are simply just that: people who are homeless.

Human beings are exceptionally very fragile creatures. You put a bullet into their brain, their heart, their lung, they'll die. You take out their internal organs, they'll die. They lose two-thirds of the blood in their body, they will die.

However, there is much to be said about the emotional and psychological resilience of humans. Humans can go through all sorts of emotional trauma and somehow come out even stronger than before they went in.

In the year 2073, a group of scientists in the United States was tasked to find out exactly how far that humans could be stretched. The first project, codenamed First City, gathered a bunch of test subjects into a simulated city for an indeterminate amount of time. The project was deemed a failure after every single scientist working on the project was found dead about eight months into the project— every single death had been ruled a suicide. It is still unclear to this day what had gone on inside of First City, but, judging by the notes that lead up to the tragedy, just witnessing the extreme amounts of psychological torture that the scientists were inflicting upon their subjects had driven them all to suicide.

After a new group of scientists analyzed the notes and dismantled First City, a new test began, codenamed New City. Once again, the goal was to test to see how far humans could be stretched before they broke.

It wasn't until Dawn City, nearly fifty years later, that the American Public caught wind of the disturbing science experiments. And, what made the situation even worse, was that, after much mud-slinging, nearly half of the government admitted to, not only having prior knowledge about the experiments, but also voted in favor of giving more money to the projects to keep them running.

However, once the initial shock that the government was, not only condoning such experiments, but was also backing them, had worn off, the public did something that was one part shocking, but mostly completely expected: They wanted to watch the experiments themselves. They were annoyed at what humanity had first dubbed "reality television", since it had started to become more and more obviously scripted. To watch the experiments, they explained, was pure and raw, and therefore, held the most entertainment value.

The year is now 2203. The experiment of Divided City had been running for the past 70 years, and is currently in its third generation. None of the citizens of Divided know that they are in a massive science experiment, nor are they aware that every single movement that they make is filmed 24/7.

Chapter 1

As Beatrice Prior watched her nimble fingers twisting her long, sandy blonde hair into a braid, she thought that she saw a faint, red, blinking light in the upper right-hand corner of the mirror. But as she stood up onto her tip-toes to get a better look, the only thing that she saw was her own reflection.

She brushed it off as a floater in her eye. After all, it didn't make sense for there to be a red, blinking light in her bathroom mirror. How… She struggled to think of a word to describe somebody spying on her in the bathroom. It was creepy yes, but also seemed rather boring. The Prior family was a very boring family. Or at least, Beatrice thought so.

But, maybe she wasn't one to ask about the subject. She thought that everybody who lived in Abnegation all lead very boring lives. The credence of the faction revolved around being as selfless as they possibly could. The adults spent most of the day working with the homeless to help get them off the streets, which was a seemingly endless job. If they weren't doing that, then they would help out members of the other factions with other jobs: painting houses, fixing cars, running basic errands.

The children in Abnegation were expected to help their parents as much as they could, but they also had an obligation to attend school. The school was run by Erudite, and only lasted until the students were sixteen. Once a year, all of the children who had turned 16 in the past year were rounded up. First, they were given a test to see which of the four factions that they should go into. Abnegation for the selfless, Candor for the honest, Dauntless for the brave, or Erudite for the smart.

The children were encouraged to listen to their heart and to pick a faction that they felt as though they would be best in. Sound advice, for certain, but it also came with a horrible double standard: Pick the faction that you were born into or else face social shaming and ostracization.

There was an uneasy feeling in Beatrice's stomach at the thought of the upcoming test. It was completely forbidden to speak about it, but there were rumors that the others in Beatrice's year were talking about. Everything from trial by combat to picking a slip of paper with the faction written on it out from a hat (the old, "it's fate if you pick the faction that you feel you belong with method", they say. If you pick something else, then obviously, your feelings on the subject are wrong). Each one sounded stupider and more outrageous than the last.

Beatrice wished that she could speak to her older brother, Caleb about it. But he'd done his selection exactly one year ago today, and he'd selected Erudite. She had seen him exactly once since then, and it was only at the quarterly meeting of the four factions, and only from a distance. Caleb had never looked over towards where Abnegation faction sat, and their parents had never looked over towards where the Erudite faction sat. It had made Beatrice's heart ache.

The train car for the Abnegation was quiet, but that wasn't anything new at all. As part of the faction's ideology towards selflessness, they tried to talk as little as possible, so as to not offend somebody with too much noise. As the train rounded a bend and headed towards the Dauntless faction, the air was filled with the war-like cries of the Dauntless students as they jumped onto the train. On the seat besides Beatrice, Susan Black pressed her lips together.

It wasn't exactly a secret within the Abnegation faction that they thought that the Dauntless were reckless morons who would only get themselves killed. But the members of the faction only said this to their own families, behind closed doors. Never in public; it might offend somebody.

Beatrice had known Susan her entire life; they lived across the street from one another, and had played together when they were younger. Susan was the only friend that Beatrice had, as sad as that might seem. Beatrice wanted to ask Susan about what faction that she might join, but hadn't been able to find a good opportunity to bring it up. She knocked her knee gently into Susan's; a simple gesture that could easily be mistaken as an involuntary movement caused by the gentle rocking of the train. But the two girls were close to one another, and frequently used little things like knocking their knees together on the train ride to school to communicate. Susan looked at Beatrice from the corner of her eye; it was also against the Abnegation ideology to look directly at somebody as the person being looked at might become uncomfortable.

The train pulled to a stop outside of the school, and everybody started to disembark. When Beatrice got to the edge of the station platform, she stopped and half-turned so that she could watch. As the train passed the hillside that was directly to the right of the school, all of the Dauntless students jumped out from their car. They all rolled down the grassy bank, and it looked like a black mudslide.

"What are you thinking?" Susan asked Beatrice in a gentle whisper as they started into the school. "Not Dauntless, for sure."

"I don't know," Beatrice said with a sigh of frustration. "I suppose that I'm just going to wait for the test to tell me." The truth was that she had been thinking about Dauntless. It certainly took a lot of courage to leave the faction that one was born into, so why not leave Abnegation for the bravest faction that there was?

As they walked up the stairs, the other factions branched off to their own floors until it was only the Abnegation children left. Even though everybody went to the same school, the classes were divided by factions. Abnegation was on the top floor so that they wouldn't have to burden any of the other factions with walking up all four flights of stairs. The only reason why factions like Dauntless and Candor even attended school was because the government mandated that children between the ages of four to sixteen must attend. Every single person in Erudite was behind the idea one-hundred percent, and explained that, just because some child wouldn't grow up to join their faction, they didn't want uneducated people running around the city. And with programs like cooking, family care, emergency aid, the Abnegation were quickly turned onto the idea of the idea as well.

While Erudite was in charge of the majority of the classes, sometimes volunteers from Abnegation came in to teach the students classes such as sewing or cooking. Once, about a year ago, some Dauntless wanted to teach the students self defense. They claimed that it might help save a life if somebody was ever mugged. Abnegation and Candor were almost dead-set against the idea, while Erudite was divided on the issue. Talks to open up a separate building for self-defense lessons were still being discussed.

When the Abnegation students got up to the last floor, the found four adults, one from each faction, waiting for them. "Welcome, welcome," a woman from Dauntless said. "All students except for seniors, please make your way to your classrooms." There was a moment as everybody else shuffled off to class, and left only about two dozen students who were going to undergo their aptitude test today. "As you are aware," the woman started once the last door had closed. "Today is the day that you will be tested to see which faction suits you the most, and tonight, you will have to choose which one that you will spend the rest of your life in. The test will be a hallucinogenic simulation drug that will allow us to see how you would react in a number of different scenarios." Beatrice let out a breath that she hadn't known that she'd been holding. Whatever the other students had said, that sounded much less scary. "There are, however, only four machines for this floor, so we will call you in one by one. Please remain silent so that the others can hear their name being called." No need to tell members of Abnegation that, but nobody was going to point it out to the lady.

As the four volunteers took four students into the rooms to be tested, the group collectively decided to sit down on the floor to wait. "Susan Black," somebody called from a room. Susan got up to go into the room, and Beatrice noticed that her friend was shaking like a leaf.

"Good luck," Beatrice whispered under her breath, but she wasn't sure if Susan heard or not because the other girl gave no indication. Beatrice tried to keep track of how long that the people were in the rooms. Some of them were in and out in a couple of minutes. Others went in and hadn't come out by the time that somebody called her into one of the rooms.

It was the Dauntless lady. The desks had all been shoved up against the far wall, under the windows, and a lounge chair sat in the middle of the floor. There was a bunch of equipment behind the chair. "Hello, Beatrice, I'm Tori," the woman introduced herself. "The way that this works is that I'm going to inject you with this. It has a bunch of nano-computers inside of it, and it'll transmit everything that you experience onto the monitor." She patted the monitor in question.

"Will it hurt?" Beatrice asked as she eyed the giant needle Tori held up.

"You might experience some mild irritation at the injection site later, but it'll just be like getting your immunizations at the doctor's office," Tori explained gently. She motioned towards the chair. "Please, have a seat and we can get started." Beatrice sat down, and Tori moved her braid away from her neck and stuck the needle in. It hurt a lot more than the last time Beatrice had gotten a shot at the doctors, but she wasn't exactly going to say that. "It'll just take a moment for everything to get started. Don't think twice about doing anything; go with your gut feeling, Beatrice." She could only nod; her head felt as if it was slowly being filled with cotton balls.

The classroom was gone, and Beatrice found herself standing in the middle of the street. It was completely devoid of life, but, after a moment, she heard some rough shouts. "Hey, stop her!"

"HELP! Help me! Somebody please!" a woman screamed out. Beatrice immediately took off in the direction that the shouts were coming from. She found a man standing over a woman; he was holding a knife, and the woman was cowering on the ground.

"Leave her alone!" Beatrice yelled at the man. The man turned away from the woman slowly and faced Beatrice.

"Don't worry, baby, there's more than enough time for me to gut you, too," he said.

"Leave her alone," Beatrice said again. Her words sounded braver than she felt. "Just let her go, okay?" The man started to calmly saunter over towards where Beatrice stood. She looked around for a weapon, anything that she could use to defend herself with. There! At her feet was a brick. She quickly bent over and picked it up.

"Don't take another step or else I'll smash your head in!" Beatrice hissed as she shifted her weight into a stance that would give her a better chance against the creep.

"You don't even know what you're doing," the man sneered at her. He spun back around and went over to the woman. Before Beatrice could cry out, he slit the womans throat. While the man had his back to her, Beatrice ran up and started to smash the brick against his head. The first two hits didn't seem to do much to hurt him (or at least, not as far as she could tell), but the third blow sent the man to his knees, and the fourth one made him fall face-first onto the ground.

The man incapacitated for the moment, Beatrice turned her attention towards the woman. She was clutching at her throat and blood gushed out from between her fingers. "H-help…" The woman struggled to say.

"Shh, don't talk," Beatrice whispered as she dropped to her knees in front of the woman and quickly yanked off her shirt. She pressed the cloth over the wound. "HELP! Somebody, please! Help! We need a doctor!"

Beatrice awoke in the chair, gasping for breath. Her fingers were digging painfully into the padded armrests. "Easy there, it's okay," Tori said as she came around to face the younger woman. "You're safe now. None of that was real."

"W-what was that?" Beatrice stammered out. She was shaking badly and sweating profusely.

"Your aptitude test," Tori said. She pulled over the chair that she'd been sitting on around so that she could face Beatrice. "There's something very important that I have to tell you, Beatrice."

"What?" Beatrice's stomach fell; that was never something that anybody wanted to hear.

"You scored for all four factions with flying colors," Tori explained.

"What? No, that's impossible," Beatrice said with a firm shake of her head.

"It is possible, it's just highly unusual," Tori said gently. "You might have heard of it before: Divergent."

"Divergent?" Beatrice repeated the word blankly. Then the reality of what Tori had just said sunk in. "N-no! That's not possible!" Divergents were only urban myths. People said that they were horrible monsters who only had one goal: to dismantle the faction system and overthrow the government. Beatrice didn't feel like a monster at all. She just wanted to pick a faction— something away from Abnegation. She didn't want to overthrow or dismantle anything. "Your test is wrong!"

"The rumors and myths are the things that are wrong," Tori whispered harshly. "Divergents are people who have the potential to be in multiple factions at once. But, the danger posed to divergents is worse than the danger from divergents. You must never tell anybody about this unless you wish to die. My… My brother, he was a divergent. They found him, in Dauntless. They discovered this and they killed him."

"Wait, that doesn't sound right. Are you certain that he wasn't killed for some other reason?" Beatrice asked sharply. "I… I mean to say, I'm sorry that your brother was killed, but to say that the cause of his death was that people discovered his divergence seems a bit… extreme."

"I can't explain it to you right now, but just know that I have proof that they killed him because of his divergence," Tori said simply. "Dauntless is a very dangerous faction for you to go into, as they use the same hallucinogenic serum as part of the training. They will know that you're a divergent almost as soon as that part begins. Erudite is also out, because, while they don't use the serum, they are highly intelligent. They will notice that you're not quite like them, no matter how hard that you try to fit in. And Candor is also a very risky move. In order to test the initiates into the faction, they give them a very extreme lie detector test. I've heard that it can go on for hours. It wears you out, and you're more likely to slip up and say something that you shouldn't."

"So what should I do?" Beatrice said with some annoyance. "Be safe and stay in the safe faction that never rejects anybody? That I should spend the rest of my life handing out dinner rolls to the homeless?"

"That's exactly what you should do if you don't want to die a quick but painful death," Tori said flatly. "You might think that this is some kind of a joke-"

"That's not what I think at all. I think that there's some kind of a mistake."

"Beatrice," Tori hissed as she got into the younger woman's face. "I've been running the machine for the past five years now. I do not make mistakes. And, not once in those five years have I ever once seen anybody get more than one result."

"Then your test is flawed and stupid. Some guy who slits the throat of a lady? What is that even supposed to mean?!"

"It's a metaphor," Tori said with some irritation. "Look, if you don't believe me, fine. But don't say that I didn't warn you." Tori then pulled a small knife out from her pocket. Beatrice recoiled in fear, worried that the woman was crazy and that she was going to hurt her. But Tori turned away from where Beatrice sat and used the knife to pry off a panel on the back of the machine. She then pulled out a small, flat piece of plastic— Beatrice recognized it as the device that store the computer's memory— set it down on the table, and smashed it with the handle of the blade. "I'll hand-record your results as being for Abnegation. Get out of here, because I have to fix the machine now."

In a panic, Beatrice scrambled from the room. Tori stormed out from the room on Beatrice's heels, but went into one of the other rooms instead.

A couple others were still waiting for their turn, looked up at Beatrice, confusion written on their faces. "The machine broke about a second after I finished," Beatrice explained. The lie felt heavy on her tongue, but seemed to weight heavily on her heart.

"It wasn't your fault, Beatrice," somebody said. Beatrice hung her head and hurried out from the hall. She practically ran down the stairs, which were currently empty as it was nowhere near the end of the school day.

Once she was outside, she paused, uncertain of where to go. Home was a pretty safe bet, but if she went home, and if her parents were at home, too, from one of their various volunteer positions, they'd want to know why she was home from school so early. She didn't want to have to lie again, especially not to her parents. And she didn't want to have to talk to anybody.

Despite her misgivings about what Tori had said, something was not sitting right with Beatrice about the test. What had all of the other's tests been like? Why wouldn't somebody react in nearly the same way? Okay, sure, the longer she thought about it, she was certain that soft-hearted people like her brother wouldn't have been able to knock the guy's skull in with the brick. But why wouldn't somebody confront a person who was about to attack a helpless lady?

The only logical conclusion was that there was something inherently wrong with a test if it told Beatrice that she fit into all four factions at once and was a divergent. She was just a girl, barely over sixteen. She was not a monster.

Beatrice turned to go to the only place where nobody was going to be at the moment: the forum. It was where the factions met four times a year to discuss everything that needed to be addressed. But tonight, it would be where the sixteen year olds would pick which faction to join. Sometimes the forum was used by some larger groups to discuss things, but, since the choosing ceremony was tonight, there wasn't supposed to be anybody scheduled for the space.

It was empty, as promised. As Beatrice walked in through one of the doors, her footsteps echoed almost ominously in the massive, empty hall. There were four sections, for each of the factions, and they all converged downward towards the stage. At the moment, the four, massive bowls stood in the middle of the stage. The first bowl on the left was filled with grey stones that represented Abnegation. The one next to that wasn't filled with anything, and the bowl was made out of a glass so purely transparent, from up at the top of the hall, it was almost as if it wasn't there at all. Later tonight, as people choose to enter Candor, it would become red with blood.

The third bowl was made from the same substance as the Abnegation one was and was currently filled with firewood; it would be lit before the ceremony. The final bowl was made from glass, but the glass had a slight blueish tinge from it. Even without looking too closely at it, Beatrice knew that it was filled with water.

She walked about halfway down the steps and then moved to the middle of the row to sit down. She stared at the four bowls. What should she do? Tori had seemed certain that if Beatrice joined any faction other than Abnegation that they would find out about her divergence and kill her. She looked down at her hands. They were pale white, with faint blue-green veins that ran just under the skin. The lines on the palms were so familiar to her, she could draw them with her eyes closed. Her nails were cut short and there were some faint scratches on the back of her right hand from two weeks ago when she'd been trimming somebody's rose bushes for her community service.

She wasn't a monster. There was no such thing as divergent. There was something wrong with the test if it so easily marked Beatrice down for all four factions. Being suited for two factions was impossible, so fitting inside of all four?

She didn't know what to do.

Beatrice wasn't sure how long that she sat there. It grew dark outside, but she didn't notice. People started to show up for the ceremony, but she didn't move.

"Beatrice, we've been worried about you," her mother, Natalie, said as she and her father noticed their daughter.

"I'm sorry," she said slowly. "I've been thinking."

"You'd better get down to the front," Andrew, Beatrice's father, said. Beatrice stood, smoothed out the fabric of her grey dress, and moved slowly down to the steps.

"Where were you?" Susan whispered as Beatrice passed her friend.

"Here," Beatrice answered simply. She walked down and took her seat so that they were all sitting in alphabetical order.

The four leaders of the factions came up onto the stage. Beatrice knew Marcus Eaton quite well, since he and her father worked together quite frequently. She didn't know much about Jeanine Mathews, but Beatrice had always thought that the woman was exceptionally cold and calculating; she never wanted to do anything unless there was something in it for her. Beatrice knew the leader of Candor by name only: Jack Kang. He was quite vocal with the things that he wanted for his faction, but the problem was that his faction hardly ever wanted anything. The final person up on stage was somebody that she'd never seen before. Thanks to the high-risk jobs associated within the Dauntless factions, the mortality rate was exceptionally high. And not even the people in office were immune from taking on those dangerous jobs.

Marcus stepped forward to give the speech that one of the leaders gave every year. It was literally the same speech every year; Beatrice practically had it memorized, despite the fact that it was only given once a year.

"Once again, we are here to celebrate the passage of time," Marcus started. "Another group of children become adults on this day. With the passage of time comes an honored ritual to let each of our children choose the faction that they wish to spend the rest of their lives in." He didn't say that the likelihood of initiates in any faction other than Abnegation dropping out for any reason were exceptionally high. By the time that July rolled around, at least half of the sixteen year olds would be in Abnegation. Marcus went on to describe the qualities of each of the factions on some off-chance that somebody had somehow managed to grow up in the faction society but forgot all about the factions.

Finally, one by one, the four faction leaders started to call out the names of those who would have to walk up to make their selection. It was a long and dull process, but Beatrice grew more and more anxious the further down the alphabet that the names got. She still hadn't made up her mind.

In a loud, clear voice that seemed to carry to the back of the hall, the Dauntless leader said, "Beatrice Prior." On shaking legs, Beatrice stood and walked up the steps to the stage. The bowls seemed much larger up close— Beatrice could probably fit inside of them. Marcus silently handed her a small knife. She paused in slitting open the palm of her hand in order to give her a few more seconds to decide.

She walked over towards the Abnegation bowl, but then kept walking past it. The knife cut into the flesh on her hand, and a couple drops of blood fell onto the stage instead of into the bowl, but nobody seemed to notice at the moment. As she headed off the stage in the opposite direction that she'd entered from, the Dauntless leader handed her a large bandage. "Welcome," he whispered. His face betrayed no emotion.

Beatrice sat down in a seat that had been abandoned when somebody had left Dauntless moments earlier. "Welcome," a girl on Beatrice's right said. She seemed much more friendlier than the leader had been.

"Hi," Beatrice said, and offered the other girl an easy smile. It was as if a massive weight had been lifted from Beatrice's shoulders. She watched the rest of the ceremony with some mild boredom, and then stood as one with her new faction as soon as it was over. The new initiates followed the members up the stairs to the top of the building, but they didn't leave through the doors like the rest of the factions were doing. Instead, they continued on up to the rooftop.

Beatrice worried that they'd all gone completely insane when she heard the loud rumble of the approaching train. "Are they nuts?" the girl that Beatrice had sat next to asked under her breath. As the train came around the corner on the elevated tracks, the members were quick to jump into the cars; all of the doors were open and all were painted black for Dauntless.

After a few seconds, the only people left on the rooftop were transfers. "Come on!" one of the members called back from a train car that was getting further and further away. Beatrice had been watching the Dauntless jump on and off the trains for about as long as she could remember. The fact that the track was elevated in this part of the town shouldn't make any difference than the tracks that went past the school. She ran and made a leap for the open door of a car as it zipped past the roof.

She didn't quite make it and her left foot slipped a little. Beatrice felt her stomach plunge down— she was going to fall to her death. Then somebody roughly grabbed her arm and yanked her inside. She stumbled and fell onto her knees, and then looked up to see the Dauntless leader pull in several other initiates who had also jumped. Although she didn't know why, Beatrice was happy to see the girl that she'd been sitting next to had made it into the car.

"Come on!" an initiate called out to somebody still on the roof. Beatrice got up and went to look.

"This is nuts! I should have never picked Dauntless!" the boy called out. He was standing on the far edge of the roof, and in a few seconds, it would be too late for him to make it onto the train. And then the moment passed, and the boy got farther and farther away. Beatrice stepped back away from the door and looked around at the other initiates. She spotted the other girl standing near the back, and moved towards her.

"I don't understand," Beatrice said to the girl. "This isn't a test of bravery, but now, that boy is forced to join Abnegation."

"The reason why we have the initiates jump on and off the train rather than to just walk them over to our headquarters is not to test their bravery," a deep voice said from behind them. Beatrice jumped— she hadn't realized that anybody was behind them. It was the leader of the Dauntless; she still didn't know his name. Now that she was closer to him and had a moment to look at him, she realized that he wasn't much older than she was; maybe a couple of years.

"Then why?" she asked him.

"It's about physical endurance," he explained. "Being in Dauntless is a very physically demanding experience. If you can't jump on and off a moving train, then you're probably not going to last very long in training. He should have realized that this is our preferred method of travel, and thought about that before he chose Dauntless."

"You sound so heartless," Beatrice said without really thinking.

"Is it really heartless for him to find out now that he's not cut out for Dauntless or in a week after he's made friends and started to settle into the initiate rooms and then we have to kick him out?" the man quipped. Beatrice pressed her lips together but didn't answer; there was no answer for something like that. "That's what I thought." He stood and started to make his way over towards the open door.

He stuck his head out and a second later, the air was filled with the excited shouts of the Dauntless members as they jumped off the train. "Our stop is coming up," the man said to everybody. "Get ready, or you can go join that young man in Abnegation tonight." Beatrice shuffled forward to jump along with the others.

The rooftop that they would be jumping onto was a lot further from the elevated rails than the rooftop of the forum. It was also covered in gravel that dug painfully into every inch of Beatrice as she rolled across the surface. As Beatrice pulled herself to her feet, she noticed that the only other people who stood on the roof were the transfers. The only person from Dauntless was the leader.

He strode past all of them and walked over to the edge of the roof. "Welcome," he said to them evenly. He didn't have to raise his voice— when he spoke, people listened. "As you might have already guessed, that was your first test in Dauntless. And if you thought that it was difficult, have I got some bad news for you: it's only going to get a lot worse." He motioned behind him; there was a large space between the edge of the roof where they stood and the next roof over. It was dark, and they could not see the bottom. "This is your next test."

"What is?" somebody asked. "To jump off of the roof? Are you nuts?"

"I guess that we'll just have to wait and see," the man said with a mischievous glint in his eyes. His mouth didn't betray him, and Beatrice wouldn't have noticed the look if she hadn't been watching him so carefully. "Who's first?" After a beat and nobody had stepped forward, Beatrice did. "What's this? The stiff is all a lot braver than the rest of you guys?" Beatrice felt her face flush, but she wasn't quite certain if it was from anger or embarrassment.

"We're willing to sacrifice a stiff so that the rest of us might survive," the same boy jeered. Some of the others were quick to agree. Beatrice marched over to the lip of the roof and looked down. Whatever was at the bottom, it was a long way down. She didn't want to second-guess her decision to join Dauntless, so, she took a deep breath and simply stepped off from the roof.

A startled scream burst from her lips as she descended. Her eyes closed in some strange desire not to see the ground— or whatever waited for her at the bottom of the hole. A second later, she fell onto something. It wasn't exactly soft, but it had a massive amount of give to it. It smelt like plastic and storage.

"Whoo, yeah!" several people cheered. Beatrice opened her eyes and found herself lying on a giant blow-up block. She's seen the emergency crews use one of them about a year ago when somebody climbed up onto an old bridge and threatened to kill themselves. When he jumped down, the block was under him already, and he fell onto it and survived.

Hands reached up and helped Beatrice get own from the block. Almost as soon as she was off, people started to work to inflate it again. "What's your name?" a young man asked. He hardly looked a year older than Beatrice. She opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off. "You have a fresh start here, but you only get one chance to introduce yourself," he cautioned.

After a moment of thought, she answered, "Tris."

Thank you very much for reading! Please, let me know if you spotted any sort of grammatical errors so that I might fix them. Reviews are appreciated.