Divergent (Fanfic)

Chapter 20

Yesterday, Tristan had warned us that the Lie Detector part of Initiation would be a lot more difficult then the previous two weeks.

He wasn't wrong.

We were taken to a corridor, and he read our names out in order of of rank. We lined up in that order and were lead through the door at the end of the corridor.

In front of me, the long,rectangular room was split into sixteen sections, divided by walls like the ones that split small cubicle 'offices' at the workplaces. Inside each section was a chair, but not one like the chairs in the aptitude test rooms. It was just an ordinary-looking chair next to a machine smaller than the ones I'd seen before.

We were all sent to sit on one of the chairs, staying in the order we had been out in. Once we had all sat down, Tristan and Tom walked down the row injecting everyone with some kind of pale blue liquid.

'What is it?' I said, holding up a hand to bar my neck from the needle as Tristan came up to me with a syringe.

'Lie detector serum,' he wouldn't go into any more detail, so I dropped my hand and felt the anticipated sting of the needle, and the initial cold as the serum flooded into my system. He then attached a single electrode to the inside of my right elbow.

When everybody had been injected, Tom and Tristan moved backwards so that we could all see them. 'Look to your right, and you will see a pair of headphones. Put them on,' instructed a female voice - the same voice that was used in the aptitude test, Jeanine Matthews'.

'I will ask you some questions, and you are to answer them honestly. If you lie, they you will feel a small electric shock. The shock gets more painful with every lie. Lie more than three times today, and you fail Initiation.'

I waited for her to continue. After a moment, she - or, just her voice - said, 'why did you choose Candor?'

The first question, and I already had to lie.

'It's the right place for me to be,' I said. I could feel the lie detector serum inching towards the electrode on my arm. But it was only a serum - somehow, I could fight it. I fought simulations, and now I fought this.

This could help me practise fighting off the truth serum.

'If you were to transfer to any other faction, which would it be?'

'I don't belong in any other faction,' I replied easily, not letting my voice shake, focusing on deceiving the lie detector serum.

The day went of with questions like this. It got very boring after, 'do you enjoy it here?' Which was about the fifth question. But the test went on for the rest of the day.

And the next day.

And the next day.

And for the next ten days after that, until the second to last day of Initiation. The last question we were asked was easier to answer than many of the other deeply personal things we had been asked previously.

'What were your aptitude test results?'

I just thought of it as, 'what faction was eliminated in your aptitude test?'

Because the eliminated factions were results too.

Right?