Hello my lovely readers! I'm back! I had so much fun in Chicago and (being the nerd I am) I got a lot of research done too. I have so many ideas now for this story and I saw some of the sites Veronica Roth had in mind while writing Divergent. It was my fangirl dream :).

It's been so cool to see people reviewing and favoring and encouraging me to write faster so they can read this. Thanks for that. *We're almost at 400 reviews! That is so exciting! I'll make you a deal: if we make it to 400 reviews by chapter 30, I'll post a video of me overcoming one of my many fears. Challenge is on initiates! Good luck!

**Shoutouts: pottertrubite123, cheeziesmile, nooranriaz, dauntless4evafourtris, WiseGirlSeaweedBrain, louiscompasshome00, Tatumtot1010, ChibiRealm, Adriana Writes, anonimous, MangaManga, DarcyFour, Babydoll46, elisabeth12, smileykat14, , SixandFour4eva, Eve, frytjeeeh, dollyluvsya101, 4610, Baileyboo1207, kitty484, Hungergameslover6130, carolinejean, Divergent Caster, divergentdandelion, and all the guests. You guys are seriously amazing and you make my day a little better when I see a favorite/follow/review/PM pop up in my inbox. Thanks!

America everyone!


Once I saw a picture of a country that had burning lights every hour of the day or cities with smooth black streets paved to perfection. People would walk or ride in a car or on a bike to get where they wanted to go. The country's pride was held in its people. The country's name was America. The book said that the country rose to the top of the world only to be knocked down again by another cluster of countries called the Soviet Union and led America into its demise. People were lost, their pride in their great country buried underneath their fear. I know what it must feel like to be drowning in your fear and having your pride and dignity stripped from you. I know how it feels to be at the top of the world and then die suddenly of something that you didn't even know existed.

It's almost ten o'clock but I can't bring myself to get out of bed. The man left sometime during the night but I haven't been able to sleep since because if that man left that only means I'll have another customer soon. The thought makes me roll over and press my face into the pillow. A knock at the door startles me and a voice rings out. "Get up or you don't get anything!"

Breakfast. I couldn't think of anything else I could want less. The thought of getting up and facing all those girls after what happened makes me sick. They know exactly what happened last night and now that makes me no different than them. I'm just another girl who had her pride and dignity bought with a few wad of bills. I wonder if America fell like that too with a whimper instead of a bang. The only one I think is different is Ruby. The way she looked at me last night with dignity in her eyes makes me think that she's the only one who hasn't been broken by Madame's customers. Of maybe she was but she pieced herself together again. Either way, maybe she can help me. With everything in me I push off the blanket and step out of my room.

All of the doors outside in the hallway all flung open as if everyone couldn't possibly wait another second to eat. As I walk down the aisle, I notice a couple of doors are closed and are silent. I pass by those quickly and try not think about what's going on inside. The stairs creak as I amble down them and the smell of food drifts up to where I'm standing and suddenly I can't walk fast enough. I haven't eaten since Josephine's. The last step gives a final creak and then I step in the room that was a dressing room last night. Gone are the vanities and racks of colorful dresses and in their place are a string of picnic tables pulled into two enormous tables parallel to each other that stretch across the entire length of the room. Girls are piled on top of each other and some are even fighting over food. There is no need really because there is an abundance food strewn across the tables. Eggs, bacon, toast, donuts, cereal, waffles, and pancakes line the middle of the table with bits that were dropped on the ground accidentally. All in all, the place is crowded and hot.

A plate is shoved into my hand by a girl with brown hair and dull green eyes. She walks away without saying anything to me back to a table full of quiet girls. The whole room is bursting with energy and voices. Somehow I find Ruby eating her eggs silently with two other girls sitting across from her faces down and eating their food. I push my way through the crowd and then push to other girls aside so I can sit next to the only person I know in this entire place besides Madame. Ruby glances at me once then turns back to her food disinterested. "Finally decided to show up?" She asks in tone that says she couldn't care less if I did.

"I was hungry," I say half-truthfully. Ruby shrugs and then shoves another forkful of eggs into her mouth. We eat in silence for a few moments until a girl across the table speaks up and says, "What's your name?"

She has straight golden hair that waterfalls down her back. One side of her hair is pinned back with a clip that has a purple ribbon glued on the top. Her green eyes bore into mine curiously, waiting for an answer.

"Rho," I say after hesitating for a moment. Saying my new name reminds me of my first day of Dauntless initiation. Now I have a new name. I guess it is fit because I have become an entirely different person here.

The girl smiles and says," My name is Daisy."

"She's lying, you know."

Another girl who is the spitting image of a future Daisy speaks up.

"What do you mean lying?"

"Her name is Sam," Older Daisy tells me. "I'm Lizzy."

Beside me Ruby rolls her eyes. "Madame is going to kick you out if you keep saying that to everyone."

"I don't care," the girl says but I can tell by the way her eyes waver with fear that she does.

Ruby shrugs at the same time Daisy says," I like Daisy better."

Lizzy huffs but I smile and say," Me too."

At this, Lizzy turns on me and snaps, "What are you doing here anyway?"

"Same reason you're here, stupid," Ruby speaks up not looking up from her eggs.

"I'll kill you, Libby," Lizzy says. Ruby finally snaps her head up from the plate, stands up, and slams her fist inches away of Lizzy's plate, gaining a few curious looks from nearby girls. Lizzy is somewhat startled and looks up at Ruby to hear her hiss, "Don't you ever say that again or I'll kill you, Violet. " The way she says it sends shivers down my spine. Lizzy and Ruby glare at each other until Lizzy breaks eye contact. Ruby sits down with a plop beside me and begins to eat her egg again. Somehow, I know the argument is not based upon Lizzy's death threat but the fact that Lizzy called Ruby Libby. Ruby told me the past is past and it would be better if I just forgot it. Maybe she's still trying to forget.

"So you're a Dauntless, huh?" Ruby asks me after a beat of silence.

"I don't really know what I am," I tell her honestly. After everything that has happened, am I really Dauntless or do I belong somewhere else? There isn't an answer to that. "I was Dauntless but now..."

Ruby nods like she understands. "I get it."

And maybe she does. Maybe she was in my boat a month, a week, or even a year ago and she knows what it's like to not belong anywhere after belonging somewhere your whole life.

"For God's sake, Daisy," Lizzy suddenly snaps. "Can you eat like a normal person for once?"

Daisy's mouth is stuffed with sausage rolls to the point where she looks like a squirrel going into hibernation. I struggle to keep a straight face. When the corners of Daisy's mouth turn upward just slightly, I lose it. I laugh which earns a glare from Lizzy but a smile from Ruby. Daisy swallows her food in a big gulp and then says," I like your laugh."

"Thanks," I say.

At the other end of our table, girls are whispering and pointing at the door. A man is standing in the entryway talking to Madame who is now wearing a red dress that skims the floor. Fear runs through me but not because he has a gun on him, or because he is twice the size I am. It's because he keeps glancing at me. Last night was one of the most horrifying nights of my life and I swear on my father's grave that it won't happen again. I was out of control, scared, and defeated but I suppressed my fear. That was the most important thing. If I can control my fear now, I can think my way out of this situation. I think of killing the man or somehow escaping but before a clear plan forms Madame is calling me over to her.

Every eye is on me as I get out of my seat and walk pass the two tables to reach Madame and the man. Fear is playing with my mind and crying out for me to run back to the table but I force myself to walk up to the man with a straight back and the courage of a Dauntless. I force myself to look into his eyes like I'm not completely terrified.

"Madame?" I say, not completely taking my eyes off of the man. "Why is he here?"

Madame clears her throat and wrings her hands together. Something about the way her eyes won't meet mine shocks me. Even though I've known her for less than a day, something tells me she is not one to shrivel in the presence of just anyone who happens to walk through her door.

"He's here to take you to Evelyn," she says. "She wants to speak with you." The look on her face tells me not to refuse.

I don't consent to the idea of going to see Evelyn, the factionless ring leader, but I also don't pull away with the man grabs my upper arm and directs me out the door.

As we descend the stairs, I see a cluster of girls cluttered by the window, some even with their noses up against the glass, trying to see what's going on. Ruby and Daisy are among them looking at me with a confused expression while Lizzy is still at the table grumpily pushing around her rubbery eggs. After the man turns a corner and the house disappears, I imagine that the girls slowly amble back to their tables and eat the rest of their plates like I was never even there in the first place.

As we walk, the man keeps a firm grip on his gun. His eyes keep darting in my direction as if he believes I'm going to run for it. I could almost laugh. No Dauntless would be that much of an idiot to run away from someone who has a weapon without having a weapon of their own to defend themselves if they decided to chase them. He turns sharply to the right and I follow.

The buildings gradually get shabbier as we venture further into the factionless sector. When I still belonged to Abnegation this was the part of the factionless I knew about. Dirty, cramped, and overall one step up from living next to a dumpster. Occasionally I see a person or two peak out of a window covered by a ratted burlap sack or a kid skitter across the street laughing and shrieking followed by a kid or two trying to catch them. A couple of little groups stand surrounding a growing fire and sharing a gallon of milk and passing around a sandwich or a can of green beans. Even though I lived near these people for the first half of my life, I didn't really understand how they lived. I thought they lived under bridges and stole things from other factions in order to survive. Instead, they pretended to have nothing and built on the Abnegation's pity. Anger burns inside me as we walk past the group and they whisper and point at us.

The man stops in front of a small brick building with windows thick with grime. Words like "Divergence" and "Down with the Erudite" are spray painted sloppily on the houses on either side of it. This house, however, only has a red X drawn across the rotting door. The man leads me closer to the building and then tries opening the door. He shakes the handle a little but when it doesn't open, he kicks it open instead. The impact shocks me a little and I jump as I hear the crack of his foot meeting the wood of the door causing it to spilt. The remains of the door falls to the inside of the house with a clatter. A few people are sitting inside the house around tables and papers and lamps and don't even glance up when the man walks across the threshold. I follow him and glance over at a group of men having a heated argument over something on the map they are looking at. They stop when they see me staring at them.

I follow the man down a short hallway and he comes to a stop in front of a door that is across from a room full of sleeping people, some on the floor and a few lucky others on a mattress. He knocks once and a female voice calls for him to come in and he swings the door open.

What I notice first is the abundance of maps littering the walls. Some are clean and untouched with the exception of the tacks at the four corners poking through the paper carelessly. The other maps are not so lucky. One map is covered in so much sharpie and pencil marks and scribbles to the point where I can't see the original picture. A chalk board is to the left side of the room with messy handwriting like someone wrote it in a hurry. The second thing I notice is a woman behind a steel desk hunched over. Her curly black hair is in a messy braid that falls over her shoulder. She has olive skin that isn't particularly pretty but isn't exactly ugly either. When the door closes behind me, she looks up at me revealing eyes that look almost black. She doesn't smile.

"Hello Beatrice," she says. "I'm Evelyn. I've heard a lot about you."

I don't say anything. She continues. "When Madame brought you in, I knew I had to see you. I heard you got first in your initiation class in Dauntless." She eyes me with eyes that burn with curiosity. "Well done." She pauses for a moment waiting for me to say something then keeps on talking. "I also heard you visited your brother, Caleb, in Erudite during initiation and killed your friend, Will, during the stimulation attack."

I clench my jaw together when she talks about Will. She doesn't know that he was going to kill me; she doesn't know I didn't have a choice. She's relying on cold hard facts.

"What I want to know is how and why you did those things," She tells me, her voice cold. She wants me to admit I am Divergent-that I did all those things because I'm different. I'm not going to give her anything. After a few minutes of silence, she sighs. "Don't make me get it out of you, Beatrice. I don't want you to end up like your parents."

That's when I lose it. My hand comes down on the table with a slap and swipes across the edge of the table, letting two glasses fall and crack on the ground.

"I prefer to be called Tris," I bark. "And if you say one more thing about my parents, I'll kill you."

She shrugs and stands up from her table. This irritates me even more but I swallow it down. I have to listen to why she wants me here. "Your parents were good people," she says slowly as if not to aggravate me as she makes her way over to the one of the maps covering the wall. "Your parents were selfless people. They were the prime example of what an Abnegation should be."

I snort. "Your people stole from my parents. Don't talk about them like you know them."

She turns toward the lamp light in the back of the room and in the new light suddenly everything fits together. Her eyes, not black but a deep blue, and her hooked nose, a little too big on her face, all add up to Tobias. Memories of Caleb and I hiding on the stairs as my father and mother spoke in hushed tones around the kitchen table about Marcus' wife. They said she died and rumor had it that Marcus was beating his son but they had no idea if it was true or not. I remember my mother crying over Tobias mother's death. The same woman who is in front of me, alive, is Tobias' mother.

"You..." I choke on the words. "You're Tobias mother."

She whips around to look at me. "You know him?"

I ignore her and let rage seep through me. "You left him there with Marcus. He was your son and you left him there."

"Beatrice-"

"Don't!" I say and back away from the table. I'm repulsed by her. How can someone who looks so much like Tobias be so different from him? Tobias is sweet and kind and gentle when it comes to people he loves. He'd never leave them no matter what the cost.

"I don't expect you to understand," she says and moves toward me. "I love my son. I had no choice-"

"There's always a choice," I snap. "My parents were good people and they were good parents too."

She doesn't reach out to me as I walk out of the room, slamming the door behind me.


Two weeks pass achingly slow. Each day seems to drag itself out longer and each morning comes way too soon. After the Evelyn fiasco, the same man who brought me to her (I learned later that his name is Thaddeus) brought me back into the hands of Madame. She was glad to see me but smiled coldly when I walked through the door. Thaddeus left without a word. She had Ruby escort me back up to my room with a platter full of leftover food from lunch.

The man who was in my company the night I arrived at Madame's doesn't make a reappearance and I'm glad for it. Although I wished sometimes he would have. Over the past two weeks Madame has had over twenty customers bidding for one night with the famous Tris Prior that they never got because I pretended to be sick every night one came in. Ruby even helped out a little by sticking a thermometer in my mouth and saying my fever was high. Madame went a little crazy after that, thinking I was either coming down with the illness or that I was pregnant. Even though I knew my sickness is a fake, I prayed to God I wasn't pregnant with another man's child and he answered my prayers on a stick that tested negative. I've been playing the sick card ever since though and Madame has been buying it thus far so I'm going to play it out for as long as I can.

As I'm flipping the page to a book Daisy snuck into me after today's lunch, I hear a knock on my door. Ruby doesn't wait for an answer and comes in.

"Hey," she greets and plops herself down on the bed across from me.

"Hi," I say back.

Her eyes flit to the door before she whispers, "You know you can't play the sick card forever, right? Sooner or later Madame is going to get suspicious."

A smiles tugs at the corners of my lips at the way Ruby wastes no time to get down to business. I force my mouth into a frown and say," I know."

"What are you going to do?"

That was the million dollar question wasn't it?

I answer her as honestly as I can. "I don't know."

She sighs and lets herself lay back onto the bed. I stare at her and think that this is the youngest I've ever seen her look with her red hair fanned out on the pillow and her blue eyes shut. Even though she's not much older than I am, she seems like she could be older than Tobias with the way her eyes burn icy cold even if she's laughing. I get the impression someone hurt her and made her grow up sooner than she wanted to.

Ruby opens one eyes and takes a look at the book I'm reading. She raises an eyebrow. "To Kill a Mockingbird?"

"Daisy brought it to me," I say. "It's actually pretty good."

She smiles somewhat sadly. "I know; I read it when I was eight."

"You were Erudite?" I ask.

"Yeah." Ruby picks up the book from where it rests by my left knee. She looks at the cover and continues. "I knew I wasn't smart enough to pass the test so I dropped out of initiation two years ago."

She is eighteen then. A year younger than Tobias is.

"Best decision I ever made," She says with a twinkling smile. "Nothing but a bunch of losers."

I laugh at her attempt at a joke. She smiles back, pleased, and gets up from the bed.

Her smile is gone as she goes to my closet and hands me a pair of red heels.

"You have another customer at nine," she says. "I can't guarantee that Madame is going to let another customer go. She's losing big money and she's not happy about it."

I take the shoes from her and they're heavy in my hand. The color looks like blood.

"Madame made you an exclusive because she knew she could make a lot of money on a girl who ranked first in Dauntless initiation," she says, her voice a whisper. "Be nice to her and you'll earn her trust."

I look at the high heeled shoes in my hand and think that maybe I don't want her trust. I don't want anything from her.

Ruby must see what I'm thinking because as she's walking out the door, she looks at me with a frown. Her icy eyes burn into my dull ones.

"Be careful, Rho."

The door clicks shut behind her.


Hours pass slowly and I sit on the bed as the sun sinks slowly into the ground. The colors leak in through the window and paint the floors and the walls and some of the furniture with orange light. I watch as dust particles float in the air, swirling in the light and then disappear. A sick feeling stirs in my stomach but it's more of a nervous panic than anything. I don't want another man to touch me. I still feel disgusting and tainted from my last customer. Tears fill my eyes unexpectedly as my stomach twists at my homesickness for Tobias. I miss his smile and the way his eyes would darken when he's mad and his sternness when he trained me to do something. I miss him but I don't know if I could see him again without feeling like an unwanted toy. Who wants a tainted toy when they could have a brand new, clean one?

I push the tears back and swallow the lump in my throat. It doesn't matter now anyway. I'm stuck in the situation I'm in now and it doesn't help me deal with anything if I am soaking in self-pity.

I get up from the bed and walk over to my closet. In the back, I feel for my coat and pull it out. When I put it on, it still smells that same as it did the day I came here. It smells like Zeke and Josephine and faintly of wood chips. It smells like home.

I put on my makeup on my own, making the eye shadow dark like Ruby taught me. My dress comes next- a floor length gown with a plunging neckline- and then the heavy shoes. Madame must have picked it out herself; Ruby would have never picked this out for me. The sun sinks a little lower as I wait for my customer, dread sinking in.

I hear a door open downstairs and hear boots clomping in. Men. I look outside again. The sun is still up. My brows furrow together. It's not even seven O'clock yet.

The one man demands that Madame take them to see their customer now but she refuses until I hear the sound of money being slapped into her hand. She calls Ruby to bring them upstairs. The men trudge up the stairs and the usual chatter of girls goes silent as they pass by their colorful rooms. I have a nervous feeling that they're coming to my room. My suspicions are confirmed when I see the door handle turning open. Instinctively, my hand brushes to my right pocket for a gun but, of course, it's not there, so I ball the comforter in my hand instead and pray that I can get this over soon.

The men come in, hoods over their heads and their boots still clomping on the hardwood floor, with Ruby trailing behind them. Something is strange about the way they are standing close to the door and whispering to each other. Ruby doesn't meet my eyes. Another pair of boots comes running down the hallway and they stop into my room. This man is smaller than the rest, with small shoulders and little arms. I know something is wrong when one of them snaps at the other to lock the door. When I hear the lock snap shut, the man on the right comes toward me and I scramble away from him, looking for my matches on the nightstand. Maybe I can light him on fire.

He grabs my wrist and says,"Tris, it's me."

The hood falls and I see Gabe, my initiate, staring at me.


Things are about to get real interesting... Thanks for reading!

See you soon!

Kellie Jo