Beatrice," she says. "Beatrice, we have to run." She pulls my arm across her shoulders and hauls me to my feet. She is dressed like my mother and she looks like my mother, but she is holding a gun, and the determined look in her eyes is unfamiliar to me.

Eyes open, then," I say, tapping the skin between my eyebrows. I don’t really need her eyes to be on mine, but I feel better when they are.

I wonder how I seem to them. They must see someone I don't see. Someone capable and strong. Someone I can't be; someone I can be.

My mother told me once that we can't survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn't want to. Without a faction we have no purpose and no reason to live.

Any idiot can stand in front of a target," I say. "It doesn't prove anything except that you're bullying us. Which, as I recall is a sign of cowardice" "Then it should be easy for you," Eric sys. "If you're willing ot take his place.

I feel like someone breathed new air into my lungs. I am not Abnegation. I am not Dauntless. I am Divergent.

When her body first hit the net, all I registered was a gray blur. I pulled her across it and her hand was small, but warm, and then she stood before me, short and thin and plain and in all ways unremarkable- except that she had jumped first. The stiff had jumped first. Even I didn't jump first. Her eyes were so stern, so insistent. Beautiful.