❝ I knew, from that moment on,
that nobody could ever confess,
they love me, without the splintered thought of you
running through my mind.
Consciously or not, my soul will always be tangled
with you. ❝
Aurora Matthews, the daughter of Jeanine Matt...
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I was woken by the sound of clashing against the railing. As I pulled my body up to face the sound, it was four.
"I want everyone in the pit. Two minutes."
As we all gather up into the pit after getting ready, we stood in the middle ready to listen to Four and what he has to say.
"There are two stages of training. The first is physical. Push your bodies to the breaking point and you'll master the methods of combat. The second is mental, again breaking point. Face your worst fears and conquer them, unless they get you first. You will be trained separately from the dauntless born but you'll be ranked together. After initiations, ranking will determine what jobs you move into. Leadership, guarding the fence, or keeping the factionless from killing each other."
Eric then spoke up, "The second purpose is that the rankings will also determine who gets cut."
I look around the room where I meet Sarai's worried face.
"-Cut?" Sarai curiously questions.
"At the end of each stage of training, the lowest ranking initiates will be leaving us."
"To do what?" The boy, Al, interrupted.
"There's no going home to your families, so you'd live factionless."
Will, a friend from Erudite who was next to Al spoke up, "Why didn't we know that?"
"It's a new rule."
"But that's...not fair!" the broad-shouldered Candor girl, Molly, says. Even though she sounds angry, she looks terrified. "If we had known —"
"Are you saying that if you had known this before the Choosing Ceremony, you wouldn't have chosen Dauntless?" Eric snaps. "Because if that's the case, you should get out now. If you are really one of us, it won't matter to you that you might fail. And if it does, you are a coward."
"You chose us," he says. "Now we have to choose you."
We separate into sections dauntless born and transfers once again as four led us outside.
"The first thing you will learn today is how to shoot a gun. The second thing is how to win a fight." Four presses a gun into my palm without looking at me and keeps walking. "Thankfully, if you are here, you already know how to get on and off a moving train, so I don't need to teach you that."
I shouldn't be surprised that the Dauntless expect us to hit the ground running, but I anticipated more than six hours of rest before the running began. My body is still heavy from sleep.
"Initiation is divided into three stages. We will measure your progress and rank you according to your performance in each stage. The stages are not weighed equally in determining your final rank, so it is possible, though difficult, to drastically improve your rank over time."
