Four: The Son (Kindle Single) (Divergent Series-Collector's Edition Book 3) by Veronica Roth

Author:Veronica Roth [Roth, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Published: 2014-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

I don’t sleep.

I pace my apartment, frantic. I pull the remnants of my Abnegation life out of my drawers and dump them in the trash, the ripped shirt, the pants, the shoes, the socks, even my watch. At some point, around sunrise, I hurl the electric shaver against the shower wall, and it breaks into several pieces.

An hour after daybreak, I walk to the tattoo parlor. Tori is already there—well, “there” might be too strong a word, because her eyes are swollen from sleep and unfocused, and she’s just started on her coffee.

“Something wrong?” she said. “I’m not really here. I’m supposed to go for a run with Bud, that maniac.”

“I’m hoping you’ll make an exception,” I say.

“Not many people come in here with urgent tattoo requests,” she says.

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Okay.” She sits up, more alert now. “You have something in mind?”

“You had a drawing in your apartment when we walked through it a few weeks ago. It was of all the faction symbols together. Still have it?”

She stiffens. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

I know why I wasn’t supposed to see it, why that drawing isn’t something she wants made public. It suggests leanings toward other factions instead of asserting Dauntless supremacy, like her tattoos are supposed to. Even established Dauntless members are worried about seeming Dauntless enough, and I don’t know why that is, what kind of threats are leveled at people who could be called “faction traitors,” but that’s exactly why I’m here.

“That’s sort of the point,” I say. “I want that tattoo.”

I thought of it on the way home, while I was cycling through what my mother said, over and over again. You can be more than either, more than any faction. She thought that in order to be more than any faction, I would have to abandon this place and the people who have embraced me as their own; I would have to forgive her and let myself be swallowed by her beliefs and her lifestyle. But I don’t have to leave, and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. I can be more than any faction right here in Dauntless; maybe I already am more, and it’s time to show it.

Tori looks around, her eyes jumping up to the camera in the corner, one I noticed when I walked in. She is the type who notices cameras, too.

“It was just a stupid drawing,” she says loudly. “Come on, you’re clearly upset—we can talk about it, find something better for you to get.”

She beckons me to the back of the parlor, through the storage room behind it, and into her apartment again. We walk through the dilapidated kitchen to the living room, where her drawings are still stacked on the coffee table.

She sorts through the pages until she finds a drawing like the one I was talking about, the Dauntless flames being cupped by Abnegation hands, the Amity tree roots growing beneath an Erudite eye, which is balanced under the Candor scales.

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