Four followed me back into the testing room but as he walked towards the injection table, I stand staring into the room.
"How's this exactly going to help me?" I fold my arms.
"Just shut the door." Four states.
I close over the door.
"You're going to be practicing." He continues.
"That's not going to work, I already know how to get out of them."
"You're not going to be practicing in your mind. You're going to in mine." He says walking over to the machine as he takes off his jacket. My face looks in disgust but it was more me trying to figure out how that was going to work.
"Have you ever done this before?" I ask.
"No, I haven't." Four says while looking down.
"Great. I think it would've been easier if Al and the others killed me the other night." I sigh sarcastically. Four didn't find it funny however.
I awkwardly grin back at his expression.
"Are you sure you want to?" I say as I walk in a circle.
"Why wouldn't I want to?" Four says softly, causing me to stop. I'm not sure if I like this version of him.
"I mean, we barely know anything about each other. You haven't told me anything about your life and now you're just going to let me inside your head?"
"Why- Are you afraid?" His expression lightens as he waits for an answer.
"I don't get afraid...I mean unless there's fire or water involved." I glance up at him at the end of the sentence. From the look on his face, I don't think there is any fire or water.
"Wait, so, you're not afraid?" I continued.
He thought for a second before he continued. "No." he said as he looked back down.
He grabs the injection as he puts it to the side of his neck, pushing the syringe so all the liquid disappeared. He then took the side of me face and moved it ever so slightly so he could inject the serum also to the side of my neck.
His touch made me shiver on the inside but I tried to ignore it.
He looked at me for a couple of seconds as my eyes immediately began to feel tired. I don't think getting enough sleep had helped.
I sat in front of him on the chair, as he attached a neurone transmitter pad onto the side of my face, the other side of it was on his head.
I slowly blinked before I relaxed and felt like I was no longer in the room.
The simulation takes us. The ground I stand on is no longer made of cement. It creaks like metal. Fight pours in from all angles, and the city unfolds around us, glass buildings and the arc of train tracks, and we are high above it. I haven't seen a blue sky in a long time, so when it spreads out above me, I feel the breath catch in my lungs and the effect is dizzying.
Leaning back up, I sat on top of some tight rope that was attached between each wall. I looked over to the edge and saw a huge distance between where I sat and the ground.
"Fear of heights. Would've never guessed." I said as I stood up.
"It's not real, we could just jump."
"No. Divergent would jump, dauntless would get to the that building." He looked over to the building to the side.
"If you want to pass, if you want to avoid discovery, you must do everything the way a dauntless would do it. You must find some tool, some method to survive."
I left some space between Four and I and as he got onto the building, I allowed myself to run to it.
"I get it, you're not afraid of heights. But you need to pace it. You can't be too quick with the simulation, you have to let it happen." He responded.
We climbed into the building that brought us into the ventilators of the roof. Four turned a corner as I followed from behind. When he tried to turn back though the walls closed in, trapping us. He tries to push to see if the wall would open, but nothing happens. Immediately the other wall begins to close in and Four sits down and touches his feet to the opposite side of the wall to stop it from caving in on us.
"Fear of confinement. You have to find a way of stopping it. What would a dauntless do?"
I looked down and noticed some screws on the floor, I picked them up and tried to jam them into the gap of the wall.
"Good."
However, each screw popped out as I kept putting them in.
"Take your time. I'm just enjoying myself in this shrinking box."
"Don't you see that I'm trying! "I yelled back at him in frustration to the screws.
"You know, most boys would enjoy being trapped in close quarters with a girl." I roll my eyes.
"Not claustrophobic people, Quinn!" He sounds desperate now.
"Okay, okay." I set my hand on top of his and guide it to my chest, so it's right over my heart. "Feel my heartbeat. Can you feel it?"
"Yes."
"Feel how steady it is?"
"It's fast."
"Yes, well, that has nothing to do with the box." I wince as soon as I'm done speaking. I just admitted to something. Hopefully he doesn't realize that. "Every time you feel me breathe, you breathe. Focus on that."
"Okay."
While Four was crawled up like a child, I kept trying to fit the screws into the wall. I was failing. We still had a bit of time left but not much.
"Why don't you tell me where this fear comes from. Maybe talking about it will help us...somehow."
I don't know how, but it sounds right.
"Um...okay." He breathes with me again. "This one is from my fantastic childhood. Childhood punishments. The tiny closet upstairs."
I press my lips together. I remember being punished. I was never shut in a closet. The cruelty smarts; my chest aches for him. I don't know what to say, so I try to keep it casual.
"My mother kept our winter coats in our closet."
"I don't..." He gasps. "I don't really want to talk about it anymore."
"Okay. Then...I can talk. Ask me something."
"Okay." He laughs shakily in my ear. "Why is your heart racing, Quinn?"
I cringe and say, "Well, I..." I search for an excuse that doesn't involve his arms being around me. "I barely know you." Not good enough. "I barely know you and I'm crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?"
"If we were in your fear landscape," he says, "would I be in it?"
"I'm not afraid of you."
"Of course you're not. But that's not what I meant."
He laughs again, and when he does, I was able to fit the screws in the wall, breaking apart with a crack and fall away, leaving us in a circle of light. Four sighs and lifts his arms from my body. I scramble to my feet and brush myself off, though I haven't accumulated any dirt that I'm aware of. I wipe my palms on my jeans. My back feels cold from the sudden absence of him.
He stands in front of me. He's grinning, and I'm not sure I like the look in his eyes.
"Maybe you were cut out for Candor," he says, "because you're a terrible liar."
"I think my aptitude test even agrees with you on that one."
He shakes his head. "The aptitude test tells you nothing."
I narrow my eyes. "What are you trying to tell me? Your test isn't the reason you ended up Dauntless?"
Excitement runs through me like the blood in my veins, propelled by the hope that he might confirm that he is Divergent, that he is like me, that we can figure out what it means together.
"Not exactly, no," he says. "I..."
He looks over his shoulder and his voice trails off.
Four walks over to the dim light. A girl stands a few yards away, she is completely still, her features plain—if we walked away right now, I would not remember her. To my right, a table appears. He picked up a gun from the table.
"As a dauntless soldier, you have to follow orders you don't always agree with." He said, looking over to a girl strapped in a chair.
"Who is she?" I questioned.
He looked back over to me before looking at the girl again. "She's an innocent."
He walks forwards, raising the gun to the same position as her head.
"I have to kill her. But I can never do it, unless I look away."
I watched as he slowly turned his head away from the girl as he fired the bullet. I watched as the girl dropped to the floor, not phased, but Four didn't look back to see. Instead, he walked away, breathing heavily.
We were morphed into a room, a room that I wasn't familiar with but it looked familiar to him.
"Why are we in abnegation?" I question.
I notice Four looks around him as though he is waiting for someone, he looks back to me.
"Your last fear is your worst fear. It lives in the deepest part of your mind."
What was Four's biggest fear?
I look up to see what he's looking at. There a man stood at the bottom of the stairs with a belt in his hand. It was Marcus Eaton. The paper my mum released was true. Marcus Eaton did abuse his child. That son was him.
"Marcus had a son...What was his name?" I asked curiously.
"Tobias." Marcus looked at Four as he walked towards us.
Marcus shows us his hands. A belt is curled around one of his fists. Slowly he unwinds it from his fingers.
"This is for your own good," he says, and his voice echoes a dozen times.
A dozen Marcus' press into the circle of light, all holding the same belt, with the same blank expression. When the Marcus' blink again, their eyes turn into empty, black pits. The belts slither along the floor, which is now white tile. A shiver crawls up my spine.
I look at Four—Tobias—and he seems frozen. His posture sags. He looks years older; he looks years younger. The first Marcus yanks his arm back, the belt sailing over his shoulder as he prepares to strike. Tobias shrinks back, throwing his arms up to protect his face.
I dart in front of him and the belt cracks against my wrist, wrapping around it. A hot pain races up my arm to my elbow. I grit my teeth and pull as hard as I can. Marcus loses his grip, so I unwrap the belt and grab it by the buckle.
I swing my arm as fast as I can, my shoulder socket burning from the sudden motion, and the belt strikes Marcus's shoulder. He yells and lunges at me with outstretched hands, with fingernails that look like claws. Tobias pushes me behind him so he stands between me and Marcus. He looks angry, not afraid.
"Tobias...I'm just trying to help you to be better." One of the Marcus' walked towards Four.
But, before he could, Four grabbed his hand and punched him to the ground, causing the rest to fall with him.
The hallucination ended and I rose back from the seat in the room. I turned round to see a panicked Four behind me. His breathing was heavy but he still reached up to take the transmitter off the side of my head.
The words leave me when I see his expression. His eyes are wide and seem almost vulnerable under the room's lights. His lips are parted. If we were not here, I would describe the look as awe. But I don't understand why he would be looking at me in awe.
I didn't think what my mum said was true. But, here I sit now and realise, she wasn't lying...