Free Four Divergent Stories: The Transfer, The Initiate, The Son, and The Traitor (Divergent Series) by Veronica Roth Page B

scream and thrash as the blades dig into my eyelids.
    My hands find not a weapon but a doorknob. I twist it, hard, and fall back into another closet. The Marcuses lose their hold on me. In the closet is a window, just big enough for my body. As they chase me into the darkness, I throw my shoulder against the glass, and it shatters. Fresh air fills my lungs.
    I sit upright in the chair, gasping.
    I put my hands against my throat, on my arms, on my legs, checking for wounds that aren’t there. I can still feel the cuts and the unfurling of blood from my veins, but my skin is intact.
    My breaths slow down, and with them, my thoughts. Amar is sitting at the computer, hooked up to the simulation, and he’s staring at me.
    “What?” I say, breathless.
    “You were in there for five minutes,” Amar says.
    “Is that long?”
    “No.” He frowns at me. “No, it’s not long at all. It’s very good, actually.”
    I put my feet on the floor and hold my head in my hands. I may not have panicked for that long during the simulation, but the image of my warped father trying to claw my eyes out keeps flashing in my mind, causing my heart rate to spike again and again.
    “Is the serum still in effect?” I say, clenching my teeth. “Making me panic?”
    “No, it should have gone dormant when you exited the simulation,” he says. “Why?”
    I shake my hands, which are tingling, like they’re going numb. I shake my head. It wasn’t real , I tell myself. Let it go.
    “Sometimes the simulation causes lingering panic, depending on what you see in it,” Amar says. “Let me walk you back to the dormitory.”
    “No.” I shake my head. “I’ll be fine.”
    He gives me a hard look.
    “It wasn’t a request,” he says. He gets up and opens a door behind the chair. I follow him down a short, dark hallway and into the stone corridors that lead back to the transfer dormitory. The air is cool there, and moist, from being underground. I hear our footsteps echo, and my own breaths, but nothing else.
    I think I see something—movement—on my left, and I flinch away from it, pulling back against the wall. Amar stops me, putting his hands on my shoulders so I have to look at his face.
    “Hey,” he says. “Get it together, Four.”
    I nod, heat rushing into my face. I feel a deep twinge of shame in my stomach. I am supposed to be Dauntless. I am not supposed to be afraid of monster Marcuses creeping up on me in the dark. I lean against the stone wall and take a deep breath.
    “Can I ask you something?” Amar says. I cringe, thinking he’s going to ask me about my father, but he doesn’t. “How did you get out of that hallway?”
    “I opened a door,” I say.
    “Was there a door behind you the whole time? Is there one in your old house?”
    I shake my head.
    Amar’s usually amiable face is serious. “So you created one out of nowhere?”
    “Yeah,” I say. “Simulations are all in your head. So my head made a door so I could get out. All I had to do was concentrate.”
    “Strange,” he says.
    “What? Why?”
    “Most initiates can’t make something impossible happen in these simulations, because unlike in the fear landscape, they don’t recognize that they are in a simulation,” he says. “And they don’t get out of simulations that fast, as a result.”
    I feel my pulse in my throat. I didn’t realize these simulations were supposed to be different from the fear landscape—I thought everyone was aware of this simulation while they were in it. But judging by what Amar is saying, this was supposed to be like the aptitude test, and before the aptitude test, my father warned me against my simulation awareness, coached me to hide it. I still remember how insistent he was, how tense his voice was and how he grabbed my arm a little too hard.
    At the time, I thought that he would never speak that way unless he was worried about me. Worried for my safety.
    Was he just being paranoid, or is there still something dangerous