Disclaimer: I don't own Divergent.

Eric's in for a shock when he returns to Dauntless headquarters.

The first sound he hears is Shauna shouting. At Tobias, and loudly. Angrily. "And I'm telling you, it can't go on like this. Either you choose me, or lump yourself in with those traitors."

Eric stops and watches her for a while. He doesn't know if he can recognize the cute, high-energy Dauntless-born who'd always greet everyone with a big smile. This girl here, she isn't her. This girl's lips are tightly pursed, her manicured fingernail aimed right between her boyfriend's eyes. Her arms are a folded barricade over her heart, not letting Tobias in.

But, Eric thinks worriedly, keeping him out won't be the worst of it. Soon, she'll blow up at him.

Tobias seems to sense this, too, because he's backing away and his hands are up by his head. "I left my entire family behind for this," he sputters out, "and you call me a traitor?"

Shauna's glaring contemptuously at him. It hurts to watch. "Not you," she snaps. "Your friend. Eric's Divergent, isn't he?"

Eric freezes.

"Looks like a Dauntless, dresses like a Dauntless, talks like a Dauntless, but deep down, still an Erudite," Shauna continues to accuse him. Eric listens, incapable of running to a place where he can't hear. His muscles clench up within him and his blood turns cold in his veins.

Because Shauna is right. Even though she's also wrong.

Eric's not one of the Divergent, never has been, doesn't want to be. He loathes the word and the fringe group it describes, more than he hates his family of origin, or his former best friend. But Shauna's description of him is one hundred percent accurate. He looks like a Dauntless. Wears Dauntless clothing. Tries to stick to the Dauntless slang and the Dauntless customs. While colluding with the leader of Erudite behind everyone's backs.

Lucky for Eric, Tobias is there. Even after all he's said and done, his former friend won't sink so low as to scapegoat him. "You're talking crazy," Tobias says to Shauna.

"I'm not," Shauna argues back. "Mom told me about those people. 'Cause of her, I know not to touch them with a ten-foot pole."

"Well, you do you," says Tobias, with resignation, "but I won't write off my own best friend."

He looks firm, resolute. This makes Eric feel unexpectedly guilty. No matter his feelings on the Divergent and the fact that Tobias is one of them, it'll always seem wrong to turn on someone who calls you his friend.

Shauna doesn't care about that. She can't see reason at the moment, only her aversion to the Divergent and their allies. "Then I'm leaving," she declares loudly. She levels one last glare at Tobias. "Bye."

It's not until she's marched halfway across the dorm that Tobias starts calling after her.

"Wait. Shauna…" He actually looks distraught.

But his girlfriend, now just another ex, never looks back.


Everything's gone to hell, and the worst part is, the fault is all mine. To think things first started going wrong when my girlfriend came to see me in the morning. At any other time, I would've been happy to be with her.

But not then. Right at that moment, I'd been reading.

I curse myself aloud when I think about how utterly careless I was. I didn't even consider keeping the book hidden under my blanket, or at the very least, turning so I wouldn't be facing the door. Shauna saw what I was doing and pestered me until I let her see the title of the book.

She asked me if it was fiction. This incensed me, for reasons I couldn't explain. I was seconds from telling her the truth, that it was history, our history. But just then, I remembered something. It was like God had popped down from above and was giving me a warning.

I remembered something I'd just read that very same morning, from the same book Shauna was asking me about. Something the writer, Frederick Douglass, wrote about one particular white man, about how this man had so many enslaved people forced to work for him, some of them wouldn't even know him when they saw him. About how one day, he ran into one of those enslaved people on the road and asked him whether he was treated well. Of course the man replied, "No, sir." And for simply telling the truth, the man was handcuffed, sold, and forcibly separated from everyone he loved.

Maybe it was God warning me, or the ghosts of those in my family tree who suffered similar fates, but either way, I knew I'd never be able to tell Shauna the truth.

So I told her yes, the book I'm holding is a fictional work. And I thank God that I did. I never could've guessed how she'd react to seeing, in my pile of reading material, the book by Martin Luther King, Jr.

She damn near had a meltdown right then, at six in the morning.

With literal tears brimming in her eyes, she begged me to ignore the "Divergent propaganda" and put the book "in the trash can, where it belongs". I said sorry, but no. I said it was "too interesting", that I thought it was another fictional work, written by an author with a big imagination and a love of utopias.

My lies saved me. But they put Eric on the chopping block. Shauna assumed the book was his, and said she was gonna report him to Dauntless police.

I thought I'd have an actual heart attack. I scrambled to think of a way to clear Eric's name.

Sadly, I had nothing. It was fortunate Shauna admitted that she had no evidence, that she'd have to catch Eric in the act of showing his Divergence. Which is never going to happen.

Or will it?

I breathe out slowly as another realization hits me. Eric already thinks I'm cheating in initiation, if I were the one on the Dauntless cops' watchlist, he wouldn't really give a damn. He might even help in the investigation. I don't know, it might be callous of me, but…

Would it be better to just let Eric go?


Eric is torn. He doesn't know which would be worse, letting Tobias go, or letting this opportune moment be wasted. He just has to send a report to Jeanine, and he'll have done away with one of those Divergents. Problem is, he'll falter doing it, after Tobias just spoke in favor of him, again.

It's bad. He needs to report his former friend now. Any other time, and Jeanine will ask why he didn't do so before, if he secretly sympathized with someone he knew to be Divergent, if he isn't firm enough in his beliefs to work for the revolution. He needs to put his foot down and remove Tobias from his life.

But all bets are off when Tobias actually sees him.

"Where've you been?" his former friend asks. "I searched the whole dorm for you."

Eric's hoping Tobias doesn't get any closer, but he does. Suddenly infuriated, Eric turns around. "I'm back now, aren't I?" he barks, indifferent to how rude he sounds.

Then another unwelcome surprise comes around the corner. Mia, the girlfriend Eric's still with. Just her voice, actually. "Dang," Eric can hear her say. "What's with that attitude?"

All the voices in Eric's head are saying no. No to Tobias trying to converse with him, no to Mia interrupting them. Eric wants to deliberate his situation alone, but neither of these people are allowing that!

He looks at Mia this time, and glares at her. "That's just me," he replies to her. "You get this when you push me too far." Then, without another explanation, he walks speedily away.

But Tobias just won't stay in his lane. He chases after Eric, more like a pursuing cop trying to carry out an arrest, than a concerned brother. "Cut the crap," he lectures. "Mentally, you ain't in a good place."

"Oh, and you are?" Eric growls at him.

Tobias doesn't answer right away, so Eric simply turns back around and takes off down the ill-lit corridor. He can barely even hear it when Tobias goes to Mia and implores, in a voice weakened by pain, "Talk some sense into him. Please."


Eric lets the elongated shadows in the hallway swallow him, as he walks hurriedly away from Tobias and the sound of his girlfriend's voice.

Much to his annoyance, Mia took Tobias' suggestion. She's standing posed against the backdrop of the light from the transfer dorm, so her shape is illuminated, and Eric can see her hands on her hips and her face taking on an expression you'd see on a shrewish housewife. "Hey, come back!" she orders him. "I'm speaking to you!"

"Now's not the time," he shouts back, before continuing to stomp away.

"Then when?" Mia keeps badgering him. She aggressively pursues him, the bottoms of her shoes making just as much sound on the stone floor as his. "You've been acting strange lately."

"Your problem, not mine," Eric spurns her.

He walks until the loudest noise he can hear isn't coming from himself, but from a roiling, churning ocean. The waters of the chasm, to be more specific. Only, when he walks within view of the ledge, he's unable to see the bottom of the chasm at all.

He's able to see the abnormally smooth, impossibly streamlined curve making up the wall above the chasm, over which a wide plane of moving water flows. After that initial bend in the curve, both the wall and the water dip and descend into nothingness. Nothing that can be seen with a human eye, that is. Just pitch darkness. Blackness without a definite size, without a predetermined form. A lack of anything that seems to go on forever and ever, like death itself.

The comparison triggers Eric's fight-or-flight instincts. He chooses to flee, and walks quickly back in the direction from which he came. He realizes that means he might bump heads with Mia.

And here she comes. "Do you hear yourself?" she's yelling at Eric. She gestures with a hand to Tobias, who's right behind her. "Your friend just defended you, and you just brushed him off."

Eric shouts at the maximum volume that his throat can manage. "You don't even know the whole story!"

Mia is only a couple paces from him now. "I can guess," she says, in a voice as hard as the ground below them. "Initiation is what pushed you too far."

Eric starts to walk backwards, back in the direction of the chasm. He's aware it's because he can confront neither his girlfriend, nor the notion that the statements she made might be true.

Mia bears down on him. "You got duped," she continues, "into thinking your life depends on your rank. You've gotten so insecure…"

Insecure.

That one word is disseminated to every last neuron in Eric's brain, until there's only room in his head for violent impulses. "Christ," he manages to utter through gritted teeth. "Will you shut up?"

He raises a fist and quickly snaps it toward his girlfriend's face. Before the gravity of what he's done can sink in, blood's bursting from the bottom of Mia's mouth.

"Shit," is the only syllable that makes it past Eric's lips, after he sees what he just did.

And then Mia's punching him in the head.

Eric staggers back. Warm, syrupy blood's spouting from a site on his forehead, close to his temple. It fills his right eye with a misty redness, so he can only see out of his left. He lifts a hand to clean some of the blood off, but when there's nothing guarding his torso, Mia hits him hard in his rib cage, forcing him back even further.

His back smacks into the metal railing, and he realizes he's closer to the chasm than he thought.

He gets an idea. A good idea, but a sick, warped, messed-up one. When Mia grabs the sides of his head with both her hands, he traps her wrists in between his fingers, then he twists his torso around so she body-slams the railing and backflips right over it.

Smack! The impact of her shoulders and back on the solid surface below knocks the wind out of her. She lies flat on her back for a good five seconds, her left leg bent under her body, her arms spread out on either side of her, like a child miming a butterfly. Then something happens that makes Eric want to look away.

Mia's body starts sliding, slowly but surely. In seconds, she'll have no more purchase on the curved surface, and it'll empty her into the dark ocean below.

Eric's hoping Mia doesn't know what's in store for her. But she does. "Eric, help me!" she gasps, and it's all she can get out, before she loses whatever flimsy grip she had.

She screams once, then the blackness eats her whole. Eric squeezes his eyes shut.

Should've plugged his ears too, he thinks, because an instant after Mia's fall, he hears a sound like an egg breaking apart on the rim of a bowl. Then he can suddenly see again, and he looks into the chasm for a long, long time, until he's able to locate all that's left of his girlfriend.

His mouth is, all of a sudden, open, but he can't remember actually opening it. It's weird. Was he in the midst of saying something to Mia? Can he still say it to her, when she's now deaf, and blind, and mute?

The words make their way out after five, or ten, or fifteen seconds, Eric isn't sure. "Sorry," he squeaks, his voice a dry husk of a voice. He struggles to clear his throat, then makes another attempt at screaming into the void. "I'm sorry!" he manages, before he finally turns away from the chasm.

When again his vision focuses, the first person he sees is Tobias.

His former best friend's standing closer to Eric than he originally guessed, and he's also looking at Mia. When his gaze shifts from her to Eric, the creeping look of horror on his face doesn't wane. Eric thinks it's the kind of horror that makes one feel as though they had no mouth, and all they wanted to do was scream.


Eric closes his eyes then opens them again. Now he's in the upper part of the Dauntless compound, the portion at street level. His face just got slapped by the ruthless midday sun, and it stung.

But not as much as the hurt inflicted on his ears, when he first heard that horrific screaming.

It's coming from a stout woman in her late fifties, a woman with golden-brown skin and a curly mop of black hair. A woman who looks very much like Eric's deceased girlfriend.

Mia's grandmother. That's who is screaming.

"Why?" she wails, hitting the floor with her palms until her skin starts to crack. "Why, God, why?" She sees Tobias standing nearby, looking mutely at the wall, and she ambles over to him, almost bowling him over. Her thick hands hold tight to his shoulders. "Tell me," she says, in a weak, rasping voice. "Who was it? Did her boyfriend kill her out of spite?"

Eric takes what he thinks is the deepest breath he ever took in his life.

It's freely released a moment later, when Tobias shakes his head fiercely at the woman. "He didn't do it," he says firmly. The woman seemingly shrinks in her disappointment, and then she's taken out of the compound.

And that's the last earthly reminder Eric receives, of the girl he thought loved him.


"You owe me one," I hiss next to Eric's ear. I already have regrets about standing up for him, taking the blame off of him, and excusing the atrocious crime he committed. I can't even begin to understand why I did all those things. I thought I'd already sworn up and down that I'd leave him behind, find solace in Zeke and Shauna instead. But Shauna's gone now, and Zeke has too many obligations to his mom and little brother.

Maybe that's the real reason I spared my former friend, because he always, always stuck around before, when no one else did. I'm in too deep to give up on the only constant presence in my life.

Well, giving up's about to get so much easier for me, because after I tell Eric he owes me, he just looks at me, completely indifferent, and says, "No, I don't."

The choice is made, and he made it for me.

AN: Well, that sucked. Both Tobias and Eric had their relationships end at the same time. Oh well, things are gonna look up for Tobias later on. Just not now. Lol.

The reason I had things end this way between Tobias and Shauna is because, in the second book, it's revealed that Shauna hates the Divergent. She got it from her mom, who brainwashed her with that weird conspiracy theory about "faction traitors" and such. Just like how Jeanine brainwashed Eric with the same unproven theories.

Mia's sad fate was borrowed from the ending of Tim Egan's short film Curve, starring Laura Turner. As was the description of the curve in the wall above the chasm.

The last line of the section in which Mia dies was taken from the title of Harlan Ellison's short story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

In the next installment, Tobias is gonna make an even more shocking discovery about his family's past. Leave a review and I'll be posting it soon.