And then it happens. I step on a Candor girl’s pinkie, and her face twitches. Just a little—an impressive attempt at concealing the pain—but enough to catch my attention.
I look over my shoulder to see if anyone is near me, but they’ve all moved on from this central hallway. I check for the nearest stairwell—there’s one just ten feet away, down a side hallway to my right. I crouch next to the girl’s head.
“Hey, kid,” I say as quietly as I can. “It’s okay. I’m not one of them.”
Her eyes open, just a little.
“There’s a staircase about three yards away,” I say. “I’ll tell you when no one is watching, and then you have to run, understand?”
She nods.
I stand and turn in a slow circle. A Dauntless traitor to my left is looking away, nudging a limp Dauntless with her foot. Two Dauntless traitors behind me are laughing about something. One in front of me is spacing out in my direction, but then he lifts his head and starts down the hallway again, away from me.
“Now,” I say.
The girl gets up and sprints toward the door to the stairwell. I watch her until the door clicks shut, and see my reflection in one of the windows. But I’m not standing alone in a hallway of sleeping people, like I thought. Eric is standing right behind me.
I look at his reflection, and he looks back at me. I could make a break for it. If I move fast enough, he might not have the presence of mind to grab me. But I know, even as the idea occurs to me, that I won’t be able to outrun him. And I won’t be able to shoot him, because I didn’t take a gun.
I spin around, bringing my elbow up as I do, and thrust it toward Eric’s face. It catches the end of his chin, but not hard enough to do any damage. He grabs my left arm with one hand and presses a gun barrel to my forehead with the other, smiling down at me.
“I don’t understand,” he says, “how you could possibly be stupid enough to come up here with no gun.”
“Well, I’m smart enough to do this,” I say. I stomp hard on his foot, which I fired a bullet into less than a month ago. He screams, his face contorting, and drives the heel of the gun into my jaw. I clench my teeth to suppress a groan. Blood trickles down my neck—he broke the skin.
Through all that, his grip on my arm does not loosen once. But the fact that he didn’t just shoot me in the head tells me something: He’s not allowed to kill me yet.
“I was surprised to discover you were still alive,” he says. “Considering I’m the one who told Jeanine to construct that water tank just for you.”
I try to figure out what I can do that will be painful enough for him to release me. I’ve just decided on a hard kick to the groin when he slips behind me and grabs me by both arms, pressing against me so I can barely move my feet. His fingernails dig into my skin, and I grit my teeth, both from the pain and from the sickening feeling of his chest on my back.
“She thought studying one of the Divergent’s reaction to a real-life version of a simulation would be fascinating,” he says, and he presses me forward so I have to walk. His breath tickles my hair. “And I agreed. You see, ingenuity—one of the qualities we most value in Erudite—requires creativity.”
He twists his hands so the calluses scrape against my arms. I shift my body slightly to the left as I walk, trying to position one of my feet between his advancing feet. I notice with fierce pleasure that he’s limping.
“Sometimes creativity seems wasteful, illogical . . . unless it’s done for a greater purpose. In this case, the accumulation of knowledge.”
I stop walking just long enough to bring my heel up, hard, between his legs. A high-pitched cry hitches in his throat, stopped before it really began, and his hands go limp for just a moment. In that moment, I twist my body as hard as I can and break free. I don’t know where I will run, but I have to run, I have to—
He grabs my elbow, yanking me back, and pushes his thumb into the wound in my shoulder, twisting until pain makes my vision go black at the edges, and I scream at the top of my lungs.
“I thought I recalled from the footage of you in that water tank that you got shot in that shoulder,” he says. “It seems I was right.”
My knees crumple beneath me, and he grabs my collar almost carelessly, dragging me toward the elevator bank. The fabric digs into my throat, choking me, and I stumble after him. My body throbs with lingering pain.
When we reach the elevator bank, he forces me to my knees next to the Candor woman I saw earlier. She and four others sit between the two rows of elevators, kept in place by Dauntless with guns.
“I want one gun on her at all times,” says Eric. “Not just aimed at her. On her.”
A Dauntless man pushes a gun barrel into the back of my neck. It forms a cold circle on my skin. I lift my eyes to Eric. His face is red, his eyes watering.
“What’s the matter, Eric?” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Afraid of a little girl?”
“I’m not stupid,” he says, pushing his hands through his hair. “That little-girl act may have worked on me before, but it won’t work again. You’re the best attack dog they’ve got.” He leans closer to me. “Which is why I’m sure you’ll be put down soon enough.”
One of the elevator doors opens, and a Dauntless soldier shoves Uriah—whose lips are stained with blood—toward the short row of the Divergent. Uriah glances at me, but I can’t read his expression well enough to know if he succeeded or failed. If he’s here, he probably failed. Now they’ll find all the Divergent in the building, and most of us will die.
I should probably be afraid. But instead a hysterical laugh bubbles inside me, because I just remembered something:
Maybe I can’t hold a gun. But I have a knife in my back pocket.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I SHIFT MY hand back, centimeter by centimeter, so the soldier pointing a gun at me doesn’t notice. The elevator doors open again, bringing more of the Divergent with more Dauntless traitors. The Candor woman on my right whimpers. Strands of her hair are stuck to her lips, which are wet with spit, or tears, I can’t tell.
My hand reaches the corner of my back pocket. I keep it steady, my fingers shaking with anticipation. I have to wait for the right moment, when Eric is close.
I focus on the mechanics of my breathing, imagining air filling every part of my lungs as I inhale, then remembering as I exhale how all my blood, oxygenated and unoxygenated, travels to and from the same heart.