A/N: We are now past the halfway point! Thank you, readers, for your continuing support!

The world went black as a bolt of unimaginable pain ripped through Johanna's face. "ARGHHHHHHHH!" she shrieked, feeling pulses of searing hot and piercing cold drill through the nerves under her skin. THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN THE PAIN!

Andrew

Natalie gasped as the Candor girl crumpled to the floor, wailing and clawing at her right eye. "I-I'm so sorry! Are you okay…?!"

Jeanine took advantage of her opponent's momentary distraction to fire again.

How depraved is she?! thought Andrew furiously. "Natalie! Watch out!"

Spasms of flame and electricity shot in all directions. The Dauntless girl screamed when a tongue of flame scorched her leg.

Jeanine smirked. "Strength is no match against intelligence, fool!" she called out over Johanna's continued yells of agony.

Gritting her teeth, Natalie launched herself forward and slashed wildly with her knife, leaving several deep gashes in Jeanine's side. Before her enemy could strike back, Natalie rolled backwards and doused the flame on her shorts. The Erudite groaned in pain and tried to take aim again.

Between Natalie's combat skills and Jeanine's high-tech weapons, those two are evenly matched, Andrew realized as he watched the fight unfold before his petrified gaze. First, Jeanine would go on the offensive, beaming wide swaths of destruction before her with her deadly instrument. Natalie would weave and dodge, her agility making her seem like a blur in the air, searching for holes in her opponent's defenses. The instant she found one, it would be Jeanine's turn to duck as Natalie sprang forward, knives tracing deadly arcs through the air.

I've got to do something, thought Andrew. I can't let Natalie face that monstrosity alone. But something prevented him from moving. Perhaps he had spent enough time around both Natalie and Jeanine to know that each could be absolutely lethal when angered. After all, there was the Candor girl still writhing on the ground, showing what could happen to him if he got caught in the crossfire. Whatever the reason, Andrew remained frozen by the trash bins.

After an interminable time, one of the laser guns on Jeanine's contraption suddenly sputtered out. Natalie jumped quickly into the opening and delivered several heavy blows to her adversary. Unfortunately, the Erudite managed to reactivate her weapon before the black-clothed girl could do any serious damage.

"I'm done playing," said Jeanine sharply. "Time to finish you off."

She pressed yet another button on her silver contraption. It instantly unleashed a gigantic, mega-powerful beam of sickly green light far into the atmosphere. Natalie dove to the side, but the beam twisted in midair, sparking with a sonic boom before turning downwards to engulf her.

CRACKLE! BOOM!

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

"NATALIE!" Andrew watched in horror as the Dauntless girl collapsed. Unlike the Candor, who had cried pitifully in pain after being hit, the Dauntless girl screeched like a deranged person and scraped madly at the pavement.

For once in his life, Andrew didn't stop to wonder exactly what had just happened. The world pulsated sickeningly between color and blackness before his eyes as all notion of self-preservation vanished. One thought and one thought only dominated Andrew's mind: MAKE JEANINE PAY.

He waited until the Erudite girl stopped laughing sadistically and staggered from the wounds in her side. Now! With a speed he didn't know he had, Andrew charged.

Natalie

"Natalie…"

Who's calling me?

"Can you hear me?"

Why is the world so dark?

"Please, say something!"

Where am I?

Natalie Prior regained consciousness by degrees, slowly edging out of the black void that had so utterly consumed her. Her mind awoke first, followed by the aching all over her body. It felt like hours before she could finally move again.

"Natalie! Oh, thank goodness you're alive!"

She groaned and opened her eyes. She was lying on a bench in a strange part of the city, the evening sunlight reflecting off the many windows to form shifting geodesic shapes on the pavement. Andrew stood beside her, attempting to rouse her.

"Wha…what happened…? Why…?" she mumbled, trying to shake the white static out of her head. "I…thought we were walking to the store…" Ambushed. Lasers. Screaming. Images of the battle flashed before her eyes. Natalie bolted upright, reaching for a weapon that wasn't there. "RUN! SHE'S GOING TO KILL US!"

"It's okay, you're safe now," said Andrew soothingly. "This is the old Erudite sector of the city. Nobody will think to find us here."

Natalie looked at him in confusion. "Hang on, what happened? The last thing I remember was getting shot with that weird light."

With a shaky breath, Andrew answered, "A-after you got hit with that green beam, you collapsed to the ground and started screaming incoherently…"

Well, that was embarrassing, thought Natalie. I've been trained in combat all my life, and in my first real fight I'm defeated by an Erudite freak?

"…y-you looked like you'd lost your mind, and Jeanine just stood there, laughing…" He paused. "I'd never been so angry in my whole life. I attacked her and wrenched the gadget out of her hands. F-for a moment I thought I could end everything right then and there...I had the silver gun aimed right at Jeanine's head and everything…"

Natalie winced. "Did you?"

He shook his head. "At the last moment, she said she'd hit you with high-powered zetha rays. An invention of her father's, apparently, that would slowly eat you up from the inside and kill you. Judging by the way you were acting, she wasn't kidding."

A death ray? Jeanine actually intended to murder us? The world seemed to dip and sway. A sudden fear seized her. "A-am I going to die?"

"No, of course not." The Erudite boy looked pale. "I-I forced Jeanine to tell me the cure, but in return she demanded that I not kill her." Andrew stopped to take another deep breath, looking on the verge of hyperventilation. "There was nothing I could do…you were dying right before my eyes, and I figured I could still shoot Jeanine after you were healed…but then the Candor…the Candor girl's screaming had brought the Dauntless police. There-there was no way to explain what had happened. They would've arrested all of us. So we scattered…you were still semi-conscious, so I led you here, a-and you collapsed..."

Natalie could only imagine the terrors Andrew must've faced in the past few hours. She thought back to the countless times she'd claimed to be "cheating death" by dangling upside down over the rails by the chasm, juggling knives, or going down the zip line without a harness. Now that she had come to the very edge of oblivion itself, life suddenly seemed a whole lot more precious. "I don't know how to thank you. You could've died trying to save me."

"Jeanine was going to kill me next," Andrew pointed out. "I was saving my own skin as well as yours."

"Thank you all the same." Natalie looked towards the setting sun. "You really think we shouldn't tell the authorities about this?"

"Tell them what?" asked Andrew in a defeated tone. "We can't tell anyone about Convergence, and to others we're just as guilty for fighting as Jeanine."

Yeah, that's definitely how the Candor judges would rule it, reflected Natalie. "So, this means you're definitely leaving Erudite, huh?"

Andrew nodded solemnly. "Staying in Erudite when Jeanine's going to become leader would be suicide." He rubbed his temples. "Ugh…This is horrible. All my life, I assumed I wouldn't transfer. I might not always agree with some of the people in my faction, but I love learning. And now…what on Earth am I going to do?"

Gosh, what would I do if I had to leave Dauntless? Natalie shuddered and pushed the thought away. "Well, obviously you couldn't be Candor. They'd make you tell about all of this. But couldn't you be, like, Amity? They believe in peace, so you'd probably be safe there."

He shook his head. "No. Peace serum is almost as bad as truth serum. Who knows what I'd say if I ever got injected with that stuff?"

"I didn't think of that," Natalie admitted. "Well, up until today I would've said you'd never make it through Dauntless initiation, but considering how you just single-handedly took down a super-genius maniac wielding a laser gun…"

Andrew coughed. "Natalie, don't exaggerate. I had the element of surprise. I could never fight like you did."

"But fighting's not all there is to it," said Natalie with a strange sense of urgency. "Are you afraid of heights, fast speeds, or darkness?" For some reason, she found herself hoping he would say 'no'. You're being silly, Nat, she scolded herself. That was just a joke. Andrew could never survive in Dauntless.

"I'm not scared of the dark," he answered carefully. "As for heights and speeds, I'm fine with standing near the windows at the top of the Hub, and I think I can tolerate any speed a car can produce."

Maybe, just maybe, this can work. "Could you jump off a seven-story building if there was a net at the bottom?"

"Depends on the circumstances. Am I running for my life?"

"Well, no…you're just doing it because the building's there."

Andrew looked at her blankly. "Why would I do that? It would be risking my life for no discernible reason."

Natalie felt her heart sink. That's Dauntless in a nutshell: risking one's life for the fun of it. Rats. Trying to hide her disappointment, she said, "Well, maybe not then. I guess you could always go to Abnegation. Nobody fails their initiation, and no sane Erudite ever visits them."

Andrew laughed bitterly. "Abnegation? All my life I've heard nothing but bad things about them, thanks to my faction's prejudice. I never thought I'd one day have to seek them for refuge."

"They're not bad. Just…a little on the lame side sometimes."

"I assume you're staying Dauntless, right?"

Natalie nodded firmly. "Of course. I wouldn't fit in anywhere else." For a moment, she thought she'd caught a fleeting look of disappointment on Andrew's face, but it was gone so quickly she thought she must've imagined it. Natalie cleared her throat and changed the subject. "Say, what happened to that poor Candor?"

"I don't know," Andrew admitted. "She stayed in the alley, so I'm guessing the Dauntless took her to the hospital. Her eye looked pretty bad."

That was all my fault. "Oh no. If only we'd just backed down, she wouldn't have been hurt…d'you reckon she's scarred for life?"

"Please, don't think like that," Andrew pleaded. "Jeanine was the one who fired her weapon. You were only trying to defend yourself. Besides, the Candor girl will recover; I don't think Jeanine used the lethal ray on her." He stopped and said suddenly, "Even though I don't think that girl remembered much about the fight, will the Dauntless police go take some DNA samples and track us down?"

The idea was so silly Natalie burst out laughing. "Dauntless? Taking DNA samples?"

He blinked. "What?"

"You really are Erudite, Andrew," she laughed. "The Dauntless don't investigate. They look around for people with guns. If they didn't find any, they probably told the doctors at the hospital that the girl was attempting some dangerous dare or something."

"Well, I guess we're safe then," said the Erudite boy in relief. "I just wish Jeanine hadn't escaped…"

Natalie hesitated. Part of her was screaming for revenge against the girl who had just tried to kill her, but another part warned her against it. "No, stabbing Jeanine would make us just as bad as her."

"I guess that's true," Andrew agreed. "But if she's prepared to kill people as a sixteen-year-old, what's the city going to be like when all of Erudite is under her control?"

"Well, they're not stupid," Natalie reasoned. "If the Erudite find out their leader is corrupt, they'll elect a new one."

"Unless Jeanine is so smart she can trick them into complacency," Andrew pointed out.

Natalie could think of no optimistic response to that.

June 3

Evelyn

"I don't know where I should go, Zachary." Evelyn pressed her forehead against the wall of her best friend's flat, listening to her panicked thoughts run and collide with each other in her mind. "I've got less than two weeks to decide, and I have absolutely no idea where to go."

Zachary looked at her in surprise. "You're sixteen? Already?"

She frowned. "Of course. I'm not that much younger than you."

"Well, isn't this kind of a no-brainer?"

Evelyn sighed. Zachary understands me so well, but there are some faction things he just doesn't understand. "Candor and Dauntless are out of the question. That's the easy part. And I'm definitely not staying in Erudite, though I do feel bad for abandoning my father. But I can't decide between Amity and Abnegation! There are these two people at school, Marcus and Johanna, who keep giving me different advice. Marcus supports Abnegation. He says they are the only decent people, because they want to help others, and they have all the power, too. Which, by the way, I find kind of strange. The Amity, according to him, are nothing but a bunch of useless hooligans who do nothing but wander around their orchards all day. But Johanna says exactly the opposite. She claims the Amity try to make everyone happy, while Abnegation takes the joy out of everything. I honestly can't tell who's right."

Zachary looked at her for a few seconds. "That was not what I was expecting you to say at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, haven't you considered just abandoning the faction system altogether and coming out here?" asked the factionless boy. "You'd have a much better time away from the city. Your father can join us too. He could probably scavenge more as a factionless man than he could earn at that menial job of his."

Evelyn looked at him skeptically. "That's, that's…"

"Crazy?" interjected Zachary. "Illogical? That's what the Erudite want you to think, Evelyn. You've seen what factionless life is really like. You know better."

"But still…" Evelyn struggled with herself. "It just seems…wrong."

Zachary raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were different, Evelyn. You said you hated Erudite, even though you were born into it. You once said you'd be willing to be factionless if everyone was kind to you. Well, I can promise you the factionless are a whole lot nicer than the Erudite."

"But…but I want to belong someplace," Evelyn explained desperately. "I don't want to be in the middle of nowhere."

"You wouldn't be in the middle of nowhere," said Zachary softly. "You'd be part of the factionless community. Okay, perhaps your father is a little old to be moving here, but you could certainly make it. With enough support, we might even be able to attack Erudite someday. Wouldn't that be nice?"

Marcus said something quite like that, Evelyn noted. She had gradually come to find the idea oddly appealing. "That's nice, but I'm not sure whether it warrants leaving the factions altogether."

"Please, Evelyn. You're my closest friend. Don't become a mindless slave to one of the factions," entreated Zachary. "Because that's what they are. They act a certain way their whole lives, and everywhere there are restrictions, restrictions, and more restrictions from their stupid faction manifestos."

That's a little extreme, was Evelyn's first response to this. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that he was right. The Erudite around her could see the world only as bits of information, the Dauntless saw objects based on their effectiveness as weapons, and so on. People who differed from the norm were immediately rejected. People like me. Evelyn found herself saying, "You're right, Zach. The factionless are the only ones who are truly free."

"So, will you abandon the factions on Choosing Day?" asked Zachary urgently.

Under his intent gaze, she answered without thinking, "Of course I will."

"I knew I could count on you, Evelyn." Zachary smiled and reached for something concealed under a pile of rags. "Look what I found in the dump the other day."

The girl's eyes widened as she saw the statue in his hand. It was made of sparkling blue glass fitted together in the shape of a person. "It's so pretty! Why would anyone throw it out?"

"Judging by the material, it was made by an Erudite. A misfit, probably, who enjoys making art even though it's considered 'illogical'. Most likely, the creator threw this out so his faction wouldn't find it." Zachary pressed the sculpture into Evelyn's hands. "The faction system is deeply flawed. At least a quarter of the people shouldn't fit in any faction. Yet most don't have the courage to leave, to stand out and become who they were meant to be. Instead, they struggle to adopt a mindset that is completely unnatural for them. Don't be one of them. I want you to keep this, Evelyn, as a reminder of the factionless inside of you. Embrace it, as the person who made this sculpture never could."

Evelyn shivered as she accepted the gift. Do I really have the courage to become factionless?

June 9

Johanna

"Don't do that!" Johanna drew back sharply as the yearbook photographer attempted to scoop her brown hair aside. "I like it that way. Please leave it alone."

The man blinked. "But I can only see half your face!"

"Leave my hair alone," Johanna repeated with unusual firmness.

The man shrugged and proceeded to take her picture. Behind her, the kids in line smirked and elbowed each other. She deliberately ignored them.

In the coming years, Johanna knew she would have to get used to people staring at the deformity that was now the right side of her face. According to the doctors, she would never regain full sight in her damaged eye. But she wasn't going to let her hideous scar be photographed. Not for the yearbook. Never.

The girl wondered for the hundredth time how she had gotten that scar. The Dauntless patrol told her they'd found her crying in a deserted alley. Johanna remembered nothing except a blinding bolt of light, like the magnesium lamp now flashing in her face. Either her attacker had somehow erased her memories, or her mind had wiped the event away due to sheer trauma. What did I do to deserve this?

The next chapter is the Aptitude Test!

Trivia #4 Answer: Well, Jeanine defeated Natalie, but then Andrew defeated her, so technically Andrew won the fight.

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