Divergent Trilogy 01.1 FREE FOUR: Tobias tells the story (2 page)

The accusation makes me feel cold. She thinks I’m like Eric? She thinks I want to impress him?

“I am not sadistic.” I lean closer to her and suddenly I feel nervous, like something is prickling in my chest. “If I wanted to hurt you, don’t you think I would have already?”

She’s close enough to touch, but if she thinks I’m like Eric, that will never happen.

Of course she thinks I’m like Eric. I just threw knives at her head. I screwed it all up. Permanently.

I have to get out. I cross the room and, at the last second before I slam the door, shove the point of my knife into the table.

I hear her frustrated scream from around the corner, and I stop, sinking into a crouch with my back to the wall. Before she got here everything had stalled inside me, and every morning I was just moving toward nighttime. I’d thought about leaving—I’d
decided
to leave, to be factionless, after this class of initiates was done. But then she was here and she was just like me, putting aside her gray clothes but not really putting them aside, never really putting them aside because she knows the secret, that they are the strongest armor we can wear. 

And now she hates me and I can’t even leave Dauntless to join the factionless, like I was going to, because Eric’s eye is on her like it was on Amar last year, right before he turned up dead on the pavement near the railroad tracks. All the Divergent end up dead, except me, because of my fluke aptitude test result, and if Eric is watching her, she’s probably one, too. 

My thoughts skip back to the night before, how touching her sent warmth into my hand and through the rest of me, though I was frozen with fear. I press my hands to my head, press the memory away.

I can’t leave now. I like her too much. There, I said it. But I won’t say it again