Pyre

Chapter 3

TRIS POV

I choke on a gasp, springing up on the couch so fast that my spine cracks painfully. My face is hot as I bat away nonexistent horrors in the dark. I search for someone to console me, to protect me from the fears that are as real at night as they are in the daytime.

Within a few moments, I remember the world I am in.

A sigh leaves my lungs at the routine of another nightmare. They have been getting progressively worse, in length and content. I guess I believed that the constant state of panic would dissipate, but instead I am riding a downward slope.

This time, it was about a lack of security. I have almost always felt unsafe in this city, whether it be when I walked past the factionless sector on the way home from school, or when the Erudite began hunting people like me. But this, the terror that paralyzes me when I am in a situation where I will be overpowered...it is something entirely different. And I don't just think about it when I have recurrent nightmares of being attacked like I was at the chasm—twice.

There really is no one left to defend me. Except myself.

As I lie back down on the couch, I skim my fingers underneath it, up against the cold metal of the gun on the floor. It is not enough to comfort me; I pull the blanket up to my chin to stop the shivering. That does not work either.

I glance longingly at the bed across the room. Even now, in the dead of a fierce winter, I would not dare go near its thick, blue comforter and cushioned mattress. Having that bed all to myself, tossing and turning against an empty space and catching a brief whiff of Tobias, would be more torturous than getting no sleep at all. That is why I refuse it, opting for the couch that leaves aches in my neck every morning.

It isn't quite dawn judging by the lack of light in the room, but at this point I know that I will not be able to fall back asleep. So I pick a wall and stare intensely at it, watching the shapes that dance in the dark on it. As the sun creeps over the buildings outside and offers light to the room, I realize that the shapes are actually there, forming the configuration of the phrase "Fear God alone."

The black paint on the wall has been such an integral part of the apartment that it has faded in the background, becoming another object that I don't think twice about, like the lamp or the wood of the floor. It has been a long time since I have noticed it.

I frown at the contrasted white wall, at the words that he left behind.

At one point, he must have found some comfort in them. After suffering abuse at the hands of his own father, after losing his mother at such a young age, he must have found solace in the phrase because it reminded him that he only had to be afraid of God. Not his father's fists, not the phobias in his landscape. Those were all controlled by Him.

Or maybe it meant something else to him, something only he could answer. Maybe it no longer carried meaning to him.

The longer I trace the words in my mind, the more agitated I become. Tobias was wrong. Being raised in Abnegation, I too believed in the divine intervention of God for many years. But after seeing victims murdered in the streets of their faction, seeing the people that did it, I refuse to believe that God made those people commit horrible deeds. God did not make Eric do what he did; Eric did. The same goes for Jeanine, and Marcus.

And even more powerful is my belief that there are much worse things to dread. There are instances where your whole existence is shattered into a million pieces with no hope of being restored. There are ungodly sights to see—violent atrocities that will always be a part of you. There are sinister places where you can only go when someone you love is taken from you.