if they don’t see me, they’ll find out, they’ll talk about me—
“Nonsense.”
He grabs my arm and hauls me out of the chair. I blink the tears from my eyes, wipe my cheeks with the heel of my hand, and let him steer me toward the door behind the computer screen.
We walk down the hallway in silence. When we’re a few hundred yards away from the room, I yank my arm away and stop.
“Why did you do that to me?” I say. “What was the point of that, huh? I wasn’t aware that when I chose Dauntless, I was signing up for weeks of torture!”
“Did you think overcoming cowardice would be easy?” he says calmly.
“That isn’t overcoming cowardice! Cowardice is how you decide to be in real life, and in real life, I am not getting pecked to death by crows, Four!” I press my palms to my face and sob into them.
He doesn’t say anything, just stands there as I cry. It only takes me a few seconds to stop and wipe my face again. “I want to go home,” I say weakly.
But home is not an option anymore. My choices are here or the factionless slums.
He doesn’t look at me with sympathy. He just looks at me. His eyes look black in the dim corridor, and his mouth is set in a hard line.
“Learning how to think in the midst of fear,” he says, “is a lesson that everyone, even your Stiff family, needs to learn. That’s what we’re trying to teach you. If you can’t learn it, you’ll need to get the hell out of here, because we won’t want you.”
“I’m trying.” My lower lip trembles. “But I failed. I’m failing.”
He sighs. “How long do you think you spent in that hallucination, Tris?”
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “A half hour?”
“Three minutes,” he replies. “You got out three times faster than the other initiates. Whatever you are, you’re not a failure.”
Three minutes?
He smiles a little. “Tomorrow you’ll be better at this. You’ll see.”
“Tomorrow?”
He touches my back and guides me toward the dormitory. I feel his fingertips through my shirt. Their gentle pressure makes me forget the birds for a moment.
“What was your first hallucination?” I say, glancing at him.
“It wasn’t a ‘what’ so much as a ‘who.’” He shrugs. “It’s not important.”
“And are you over that fear now?”
“Not yet.” We reach the door to the dormitory, and he leans against the wall, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I may never be.”
“So they don’t go away?”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes new fears replace them.” His thumbs hook around his belt loops. “But becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that’s the point.”
I nod. I used to think the Dauntless were fearless. That is how they seemed, anyway. But maybe what I saw as fearless was actually fear under control.
“Anyway, your fears are rarely what they appear to be in the simulation,” he adds.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, are you really afraid of crows?” he says, half smiling at me. The expression warms his eyes enough that I forget he’s my instructor. He’s just a boy, talking casually, walking me to my door. “When you see one, do you run away screaming?”
“No. I guess not.” I think about stepping closer to him, not for any practical reason, but just because I want to see what it would be like to stand that close to him; just because I want to.
Foolish, a voice in my head says.
I step closer and lean against the wall too, tilting my head sideways to look at him. As I did on the Ferris wheel, I know exactly how much space there is between us. Six inches. I lean. Less than six inches. I feel warmer, like he’s giving off some kind of energy that I am only now close enough to feel.
“So what am I really afraid of?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Only you can know.”
I nod slowly. There are a dozen things it could be, but I’m not sure which one is right, or if there’s even one right one.
“I didn’t know becoming Dauntless would be this difficult,” I say, and a second later, I am surprised that I said it; surprised that I admitted to it. I bite the inside of my cheek and watch Four carefully. Was it a mistake to tell him that?
“It wasn’t always like this, I’m told,” he says, lifting a shoulder.