"Today, you'll all be learning how to handle firearms. That is, learning how to use and operate a working gun," Ila barks out to us.

The eight of us stand atop one of the roofs again. Target boards are set up across the area, and we all stand behind one table each. Laid out on each table is a black gun and a small box of ammunition.

I rub the morning sleepiness out of my eyes. I was never a morning person, and the Dauntless seem like a bunch of people who could stay awake all night and still be energetic the next morning. I'll have to get used to that.

"The purpose of learning how to use a gun is simple: to defend yourself. And as a Dauntless, it's not just yourself you'll need to learn how to defend. If you want to become a member of Dauntless, you might be taking up jobs defending the whole city. Guns are a necessity. You need to learn how to defend yourself in an emergency," Ila explains.

Ila motions to us, showing us the proper way to grip the gun. "Don't go waving this thing around with your finger on the trigger unless you intend to kill anyone," she warns. "Again, there's a fine line between bravery and idiocy. While we here in Dauntless are a lot more...flexible with our constraints on how initiates treat each other, we don't want to lose good Dauntless initiates because a careless one can't resist waving a dangerous weapon around like a baboon."

She lines up her own gun with the target. "You guys should adopt the following posture. Feet apart, arms outstretched. Look down your sights, take a deep breath and fire. Got it?"

We all begin following her example. The first few attempts are plenty disastrous for almost everyone.

Vincent fires first and his bullet doesn't get close to the target. Robert is next and the result is the same, much to both boys' frustration. Frank - standing on my left - is holding his gun awkwardly, straining to pull the trigger and to keep his arms outstretched at the same time. When he finally does manage to fire, he lets out a strangled cry as he does so and his bullet somehow zips in the wrong direction, nicking the edge of my target instead. Don't even ask me how.

Lisa - Bonnie's friend - yelps when she makes her first shot, dropping the gun when it kicks from the recoil. It drops back onto the table and Lisa covers her ears, shuddering. The bullet goes flying off into the distance, far from the target.

Even the Amity girl - Alyssa, her name is - isn't performing too well. For all her bravado the previous day, I would've thought her confidence would propel her to an early lead, but evidently not, as her bullet goes sailing high up and over her target.

Surprisingly, the only person to successfully hit her target as instructed, is none other than Bonnie. Looking a lot less grief-stricken as she had been yesterday, she continues firing without sparing anyone else a second glance and she hits the middle circle on her third try.

The sound of gunshots rise up into the air. More and more people begin hitting their targets after Bonnie's first victory. After wasting almost a dozen bullets, I finally nick the edge of my target. It's a start, at least.

*

Ila dismisses us and the whole lot of us head down for lunch. I load my plate with a generous helping of shepherd's pie and look around for an available place to sit. I don't see Brooklyn anywhere, and every table has at least a few people sitting around it, so I'll have to sit with someone regardless.

I feel so...alone here in Dauntless. Like I don't really fit in. Even with the initiates. The Noses - Lisa and Bonnie - have each other. The Stiffs - Katrina and Frank - have each other. Vincent and Robert have each other. And the most un-Amity like girl I've ever met, Alyssa, is sitting with Miles and a few of his Dauntless-born buddies.

Brooklyn's technically my only friend, but even so, she and I won't be seeing much of each other for Stage One.

I make my way to the table closest to me, the one occupied by Katrina and Frank.

"Mind if I sit with you guys? Everywhere else is full," I begin.

"Oh, sure. You may," Frank says hurriedly, moving aside to give me a seat.

Before I can do so, Katrina rolls her eyes and tuts loudly. "Frank, you're not Abnegation anymore. You don't have to be such a saint. Besides, this guy's not exactly good news. You know how the Candor are."

"So Frank's not a Stiff anymore, but I'm still a Candor?" I ask, taking my seat anyway. "Look, can we not have to bring our petty past factions into this? I'm no more a Candor than either of you two now."

"Depends on how you look at it," Katrina says coolly. "Seems to me like you're not one to change. Why don't you go sit with your Candor buddies?"

She points over my shoulder, to where Vincent and Robert are sitting at their own table, laughing and chattering.

"They're not my buddies," I laugh humorlessly. "We don't get along."

"Neither should we," Katrina says.

"Give the guy a break, Katrina. He doesn't seem so bad, at least, compared to those other two," Frank says.

I shoot him a grateful look as Katrina sighs and shrugs, conceding defeat.

"Did you ever get back to the guy who pushed you?" Frank asks me.

"No," I reply. "His name's Brett."

"Someone pushed you?" Katrina asks.

"Off the roof. Probably thought it was funny to pick on an ex-Candor," I say.

"He's not the only one," Katrina says.

"I'm almost kind of glad to be ditching my white-colored Candor clothes for black Dauntless ones," I say, tugging on my shirt.

"It feels strange to be wearing different faction colors for a change," Frank says. "I always found grey...so dull."

"Must feel liberating, doesn't it? To not be controlled or restrained anymore," I say to Frank. "You Stiffs couldn't even look at your reflections, could you? That's just...sad."

I half-expect Frank to get mad, but he nods. "It kind of...was. I think I just left Abnegation because I couldn't stand one more second of being in that faction. It was just so...stifling. I couldn't take it anymore, having to always be the selfless one."

"Did you get Dauntless as an aptitude test result then?" I ask.

"Yes," he says. "Even though I picked the cheese up when faced with the dog."

"You picked up the cheese? How'd you get Dauntless then if you didn't kill the dog?" I ask.

"I did kill the dog," he says. "When it ran at me, I just dropped the cheese and grabbed it in mid-air. Then I wrapped my arms around its neck and just...squeezed."

He mimics strangling the dog and Katrina shudders. Frank waves his beefy arms around, looking sheepish. "I guess my brute strength won out. I didn't even consider using the cheese to calm the dog down. I just attacked it."

"I never thought someone who didn't pick the knife would still get Dauntless as a result," Katrina says.

"You picked the knife then?" I ask.

She nods. "No hesitation."

At this, she fidgets slightly. "I'll be honest...there was this one part in my aptitude test where I had to kill someone. It was your friend. The guy who told me and Mary to shut up before our test began."

I blink, thinking back to the events of that day and, for some reason, I burst out laughing. "No way. You had to kill Maurice?"

"Well, yeah. And let me tell you, it was satisfying. Typical Candor," she says. "Even after his simulation was 'dead', I just kept stabbing him over and over again."

Frank recoils, looking slightly appalled. "Damn, Katrina. I knew you were a bit of a wildfire, but that's just plain sadism."

"So maybe now you can understand my hate of the Candor," she says, looking at me as she spoons another mouthful of her apple pie. "Don't go thinking it's just me, though. Plenty of the other transfers don't like the Candor. It's probably the most hated faction of the five. If you want to get in good with the others, you've got your work cut out for you."

I think back to Alyssa's attitude towards me on the train ride here, and Bonnie's words to me the night before, as well as Brett pushing me off the roof. "Yeah, I see what you mean."

*

After lunch, we all gather in the Training Room. Ila stands before us. Behind her is a blackboard, turned on its side so that we can't see what's written on it.

"This is Stage One," she announces. "You will all be learning how to fight. For the rest of the week, each of you will fight against another opponent, and you will be ranked according to how many victories you score as well as how many times you lose a fight. Winning a fight against a stronger opponent will raise you ranking; losing to a weaker one will lower it. Your ranking will determine where you stand among the eight of you. If you get an extremely low ranking, you risk being cut from the group, and if you get cut, you're factionless. Got it?"

For the rest of the lesson, she shows us moves and methods on fighting, having us practice our punching on training dummies. I watch as Vincent pummels his own training dummy to the ground, swinging a giant fist into his dummy with an extraordinary amount of brute force. Robert, who is skinner than his broad-shouldered friend, is making agility his forte, striking and jabbing the dummy with lightning-fast reflexes.

Lisa is on my right, and she feebly punches at her training dummy, which does not seem to be moving much. Bonnie, on my left, is slamming into it with as much strength as she can muster, but she's the smallest one of the eight of us, so that doesn't seem to be her forte.

Frank, to his credit, is doing a lot of damage to his dummy. He just needs to swing those meaty fists of his and the dummy teeters back and forth with each of his blows. On his left, Katrina attacks the dummy methodically, targeting the dummy's weak points and landing sharp, precise blows on it.

And opposite me, Alyssa is raining attacks down on her dummy, showing it hell. Looking brazen and wild, she spits a strand of hair from her mouth and kicks the dummy square in its chest.

My fist shoots out and jabs the dummy in the chest. I'd never really been in a fight before, but honestly, how hard could it be?

Being a Candor, obviously, I wasn't very well liked in school by the other faction members. Some of the only people who did like me had been my teachers, only because they could always count on the Candor to be honest about whether or not they'd done their homework. Despite being disliked because of my faction, no one really picked fights with me. Maurice, Dmitri, Nikolai and I often got dirty looks cast as us; mostly from the Dauntless and Erudite. The Abnegation would never dream of looking at us for too long, let alone cast us a glare or anything remotely unfriendly. Same goes for the Amity.

The session carries on, with the sound of fists hitting rubber echoing throughout the large facility.

"Did you even eat lunch just now, initiate? Put more strength behind your blows! No one - not even little Bonnie over here - would be bowled over by that," Ila barks, glaring at me.

I pant, trying not to let her get to me as I continue my fruitless assault on the target dummy.

"Hey! I bet I could take him," Bonnie snaps, looking slightly hurt.

"Sure you could. We'll find out tomorrow what each of you are worth," Ila says, before turning around and stalking off.

*

That night at dinner, Brooklyn sidles into the seat next to mine again.

"How was training?" she asks, stabbing a slice of chocolate cake on the end of her fork.

"It was horrible," I spit. "I might as well be swat my opponent with a fly swatter for all the good I'll do with my punches. I'm going to fail Stage One for sure."

"Hmph," she mutters. "Candor coming out in you again. You don't have to be so brutally honest. Optimism is key, remember?"

She grabs my arm, eyes lit up with a sudden revelation. "Hey, I just remembered something I wanted to ask you! You want to get a tattoo?"

"Um, maybe not now," I say. "I mean, I might not even make it past initiation, so..."

"So, all the more you should get one, in case you do fail. As a...well, a keepsake, of sorts. Though you needn't worry. I don't think you'll fail. My brother's told me that most faction transfers are always a bit...well, uncertain...during Stage One. The Dauntless-born will have trained for Stage One all your life. As long as you make it past that, Stage Two and Three are fair game for all of us," she says.

"Maybe I'll get a tattoo another day," I say.

Someone heaves his large form into the seat across from me and I look up from my plate to see Frank's large olive eyes looking back into mine.

"I just overheard a couple of the instructors talking with Freeman," he says. "They were mentioning something about a field trip tomorrow."

"Oh, yeah! My brother Berkeley's taking us out to see the Fence. The one that's patrolled by the Dauntless, near the Amity farms," Brooklyn chimes, looking excited. "People who get low ranks usually end up working those odd jobs."

"Speaking of the rankings, do more people get cut at the end of Stage Three? You mentioned that last night, didn't you?" I ask, turning to Brooklyn.

"Typically, only ten initiates make it into Dauntless," she says, looking at me. "So, if three of us are cut after Stage One, and there are eighteen of us...that leaves five to be cut after Stage Three, and ten of us will make it into Dauntless."

"Hey, Brooke. Funny seeing you here, associating with a Stiff and a Candor smart-mouth," someone calls out.

Brooklyn, Frank and I swivel round to see Brett strutting up to Brooklyn's side. "Come on, Brooke. Join us at our table. Miles's got a truly hilarious story about the time he blew up Mitch's birthday cake on his fourteenth."

Brooklyn casts me a slightly apologetic look before she grabs her plate and gets up, hurrying off after Brett.

I turn back to see Frank studying me curiously. "What?" I ask.

"Nothing," he says, hurriedly looking away.

"Nothing? As if."

Katrina slides in to sit next to Frank, but her attention is on me. "I think what was on dear Frank's mind here was that you seemed a little too attached to that girl."

"Do I?" I ask, taking a large bite out of my burger, trying to seem casual.

"Yeah. You kind of do," she says. "Frank here's just still trying to adjust to losing his Stiff ways. He's still too shy to speak his mind. You, on the other hand, have no reason to be shy - Candor like you. If you like someone, go ahead and tell her."

"Pfft. I don't like Brooklyn. At least, not that way. Besides, I've only known her two days. She's just...well, she seems...I don't know...complex? She seems bent on being nice to me but at the same time..." I shrug.

"Just cause she's a Dauntless-born doesn't mean she's unfriendly to faction transfers like most of the others are. You're the one who's always stressing that I shouldn't take you for a stereotypical Candor. Why take her for a stereotypical Dauntless-born? I mean, I've seen that prat Miles and that big-shot Brett, thinking that they own this world and this initiation just because they've grown up here. But maybe not all of them are full of themselves," Katrina says.

"That's the Stiff in you coming out into the light," I say.

She smiles and lets out a little "humph", rolling her eyes. "Just because I like to think of the best in others doesn't automatically make me a Stiff. I've outgrown that."

"You seemed pretty Stiff back at the school. You and Mary could barely even hold a proper conversation," I point out.

"To tell you the truth, I was about to yell at her when your buddy Maurice interrupted. I was only trying to be friendly because I knew Mary was nervous for her test. We were neighbors and she used to cry over the smallest things. I'd wanted to put her at ease by having her talk a bit about herself - she was always so secretive - but she just wouldn't co-operate with me and I have to admit, your friend Maurice did me a favor. I would've blown my top at her without his interruption," Katrina says. "I almost kind of miss her. I didn't have many friends as a Stiff. She was one of the closest."

"Where did she go to? Did she stay or did she transfer?" I ask.

"She's in Amity now," Katrina says sourly.

"There's a bit of good news. If Frank's words are to be trusted, a guy named Berkeley's taking us out to the Amity farms tomorrow," I say. "You can go check on your friend."

Katrina's eyes light up. "You know what? I'd actually really like that."