Divergent Collector's Edition

by Veronica Roth

  “PROTODRAFT” OF “SELF-SACRIFICE”

  TOBIAS’S POV

  Every third Saturday of the month, Tobias and his brother took turns sitting on a stool in their father’s bathroom. The man held the clippers in one hand and a towel in the other, ready to brush stray hairs from whichever son’s neck happened to be sprinkled with them at that particular moment. The other brother stood off to the side, watching, and waiting for his own turn. It took about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, every third Saturday.

  Every third Saturday of the month, Tobias stared at his reflection in the mirror and hated his father for cutting off his hair. He hated the sound of the clippers buzzing in the silent bathroom. He hated the itchy sprinkling of tiny, fine black hairs that dusted the back of his neck. He hated Kaleb’s passive face as he regarded the ritual, like it was unimportant, like it didn’t matter. And there was something else that he hated, something less tangible, more indescribable. He hated feeling like he had no choice.

  But they lived a simple life. A self-sacrificial life. So they, like all of the other men of their faction, did not bother with something as useless as a styled, full head of hair.

  It wasn’t much better for the women, though they cut their hair much less frequently. The length was just past the shoulders, and it was never worn down. Always in a bun at the back of the head. Pulled tight against the skull, sharpening the angles of even the softest of faces. But then, they were not concerned with the angles of their faces, or how stylish they looked. That was the point.

  Tobias stared at his reflection and heaved a sigh. He had looked the same since early childhood—exactly the same. His hair remained the same shade of dark brown, his eyes the same shade of warm, golden brown. His nose was still his mother’s nose . . . not hooked at the end like Kaleb’s, but turned up at the end, slightly. And the eyebrows; oh, the eyebrows. Still as dark and thick as usual. Worse, even.

  And of course, the centimeter-long hair.

  As he pulled the robe over his shoulders, it occurred to him that he was not suited to this life. Kaleb was suited to it. He awakened every morning and didn’t even look at himself. He didn’t think twice about the clothes that he wore—monochromatic, dark gray, as plain as could be designed. He went straight to the kitchen and started to make breakfast for his family, whether his brother stumbled in late or not. Kaleb was disciplined. Self-disciplined. Tobias wasn’t at all like that.

  Kaleb was prepared to lead a self-sacrificial life.

  Tobias walked into the kitchen, where Kaleb was putting slices of bread into the toaster, and took out the frying pan. Eggs. When Kaleb was making the toast, it was Tobias’s job to make the eggs. He took four out from the refrigerator and set them to the side as the butter in the center of the pan melted.

  Tobias remembered how they all liked their eggs. Their father liked his over easy. Their mother, simply fried. Tobias and Kaleb shared one thing, at least—they preferred scrambled. And thank goodness for that, or Tobias would have a hell of a time making breakfast.

  Tobias’s father walked into the kitchen, carrying the newspaper in front of him, and set it on the table. He stood beside Tobias and looked down at the sizzling square of butter in the pan. Tobias felt a heavy hand press against the top of his spine. An affectionate gesture, from father to son. Tobias cracked one of the eggs against the side of the pan. A surge of motivation to be better, to be . . . different, to make the eggs properly, to not grumble internally as he did so . . . filled him. Maybe he didn’t have to be a disappointment. Maybe.

  “You two have aptitude tests today, I hear,” the man said. “I wish you well.”

  “Thank you,” said Kaleb, putting the four pieces of toast on a plate. He set them on the table.

  “You aren’t nervous, are you?” his father asked, glancing sideways at Tobias.

  “No,” replied Tobias. He cracked another egg. “They’re just supposed to give us an idea of where we might fit. They don’t change our choices, necessarily.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” the man laughed, giving Tobias’s hair a tousle—or what would have been a tousle, if there had been enough hair.

  I know that, thought Tobias. That’s why I said it.

  He cracked another egg and watched the yellow yolk ooze onto the pan.

  Their father moved away and sat down at the kitchen table. Kaleb offered Tobias a fork and raised an eyebrow. Kaleb, at least, understood that Tobias was faking it. He always did.

  Tobias shook his head. He took the fork from his brother and dragged it through one of the eggs, breaking the yolk.

  The aptitude tests weren’t a measure of what they had learned. They were a measure of values. They determined what faction, or what society, each person ought to be a part of. As his father’s son, Tobias was supposed to be part of Abnegation. Abnegation was the reason that he hadn’t ever had hair longer than half an inch. Abnegation was the reason he was wearing an outfit of all gray. Abnegation had dictated the course of his life, of his brother’s life, of his parents’ lives. It was everything that they believed in, everything that he was supposed to believe in.

  CHAPTER ONE FROM

  FIRST DRAFT OF DIVERGENT

  TRIS’S POV

  Looking at my reflection is an act of rebellion.

  There is one mirror in my house. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every second month, the day my mother cuts my hair. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs.

  I sit on the stool and my mother stands behind me with the scissors, trimming. The strands fall on the floor in a dull, blond ring.

  When she finishes, she pulls my hair away from my face and braids it. I note how calm she looks and how focused she is. She is well-practiced in the art of losing herself. I can’t say the same.

  I sneak a look at myself when she isn’t paying attention—not for the sake of vanity but for the sake of curiosity. A lot can happen to a face in two months.

  “There,” she says when she ties the end of the braid. She smiles at our reflection. “You have aptitude tests today, I hear.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Are you nervous?”

  I stare into my own eyes for a moment. The aptitude test will help me determine which of the five factions I belong in. And tomorrow, at the Choosing Ceremony, I will decide on a faction; I will decide the rest of my life; I will decide to stay with my family or abandon them.

  “No,” I say. “The tests don’t have to change our choices.”

  “Right.” She smiles. “Let’s go eat breakfast. Your brother made scrambled eggs for us.”

  “Thank you. For cutting my hair.”

  She kisses my cheek and slides the panel over the mirror. My mother could be beautiful, in a different world. Her body is thin beneath the gray robe. Her face is heart-shaped and she has long, lovely eyelashes. And when she lets her hair down at night, it is sleek and wavy. But she chose to hide that beauty, many years ago, when she chose to be a member of Abnegation.

  We walk together to the kitchen. On these mornings when my brother makes breakfast, and my father’s hand skims my hair as he reads the newspaper, and my mother hums as she sweeps up my hair trimmings—it is on these mornings that I feel guiltiest for wanting to leave them.

  My twin brother, Caleb, has inherited my mother’s talent for selflessness. He gives his seat to a surly Candor man on the bus without a second thought.

  The Candor man wears a black suit with a white tie—Candor standard uniform. Their faction values honesty and sees the truth as black and white, so that is what they wear.

  The gaps between the buildings narrow and the roads are smoother as we near the heart of the city. Five years ago, volunteer construction workers from Abnegation repaved some of the roads. They started in the middle of the city and worked their way outward, so the roads where I live are still cracked and patchy, and it’s not safe to drive on them. Not that we have a car.

  Caleb’s expression is placid a
s the bus rocks, sways, and jolts on the road. The gray robe falls from his arm as he clutches a pole for balance. I can tell by the constant shift of his eyes that he is watching the people around us—striving to see only them and to forget himself. The Candor faction values honesty, but our faction, Abnegation, values selflessness.

  The bus stops in front of the school, and I get up, scooting past the Candor man. I grab Caleb’s hand for balance as I stumble over the man’s shoes. My slacks are too long, and it’s difficult to be graceful.

  The Upper Levels building is the oldest of the three schools in the city: Lower Levels, Mid-Levels, and Upper Levels. Like all the other buildings around it, it is made of glass and steel. It has no stairs, only ramps and elevators, and no lawn, though there is a large steel sculpture that the Dauntless climb after school, daring one another to go higher and higher. Last year I watched one of them fall and break her leg. I was the one who ran to get the nurse.

  “Aptitude tests today,” I say.

  He nods as we pass through the front doors.

  “You aren’t at all worried about what they’ll tell you?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. We pause at the split in the hallway where he will go one way, toward math, and I will go the other, toward history. He frowns at me. “Are you?”

  I could tell him that I’ve been worried for weeks about what the aptitude test will tell me—Abnegation, Candor, Erudite, Amity, or Dauntless?

  Instead, I smile and say, “Not really.”

  “Have a good day.”

  I walk toward history. As far as I remember, Caleb has not said an unkind word to me. Why is that irritating?

  The hallways are cramped, though the light coming through the windows creates the illusion of space, and they are one of the only places where the factions mix, at our age. A tall boy in a blue T-shirt elbows me in the shoulder and doesn’t apologize. A girl with long, curly hair shouts “Hey!” next to my ear, waving at a distant friend. A jacket sleeve smacks me in the cheek. And it occurs to me:

  They don’t notice me.

  I pause by a window in the E Wing, my cheeks hot. The gray clothes and the plain hairstyle and the unassuming demeanor of my faction are supposed to make it easier for me to forget myself, but they make everyone else forget me, too. I know that. I have always known it. So why do I suddenly hate it?

  I see my reflection in the window. My narrow face and my wide, round eyes and my long, thin nose. I still look like a little girl, though sometime in the last few months, I turned sixteen. The other factions celebrate birthdays, but we don’t. It would be self-indulgent.

  I glance at the clock: 7:25. I stopped just in time to see the Dauntless arrive. I do this every morning.

  The train whistle blares, the sound resonating in my chest. The light fixed on the front of the train clicks on and off as the train hurtles past the school, squealing on iron rails. And as the last few cars pass, a mass exodus of young men and women in dark clothing hurl themselves from the moving cars, some dropping and rolling, others stumbling a few steps before regaining their balance. One of the boys wraps his arm around a girl’s shoulders, laughing.

  My father calls the Dauntless “hellions.” They are pierced, tattooed, and black-clothed. They should perplex me. I should wonder what courage—which is the virtue they most value—has to do with a metal ring through your nostril. Instead, my eyes cling to them wherever they go.

  It is a foolish practice. It must be stopped. I turn away from the window and press through the crowd to the history classroom.

  DAUNTLESS COMPOUND MAP

  THE EVOLUTION OF CALEB

  VERONICA ROTH

  I LEARNED, SOMETIME in the course of my writing education, that not all characters can be “round.” That is to say, not every character on the page will be three-dimensional—some will be a little flat, because you can’t spend that much time with everyone or your book will be five thousand pages long. When I wrote the first draft of Divergent, Caleb Prior, Beatrice Prior’s brother, was intentionally “flat.” He appeared on the page as someone who was better at being Abnegation than his sister, who chose Abnegation at his Choosing Ceremony without a second thought and didn’t reappear again until Tris saved his life at the very end.

  When he did reappear, it was as a perfect Abnegation faction member—he was engaged to Susan Black, the gray-clad girl next door whose behavior was also exemplary; he was averse to conflict; he grimly accepted his mother’s fate by saying, “That’s as it should be,” because she had died in a self-sacrificial way. He wasn’t so much a character as an example of everything Tris at the beginning wished she could be, and served to demonstrate how far she had deviated from that example by the end. Caleb Prior was the Abnegation archetype, an impossibly good and selfless human being.

  Rough Draft Caleb was the quintessential “overachieving older sibling” stereotype, the oldest child who could do no wrong in the eyes of the parents, the one who succeeded at everything he tried and couldn’t understand why the younger sibling couldn’t do the same. Tris felt that she was incapable of developing Caleb’s strengths even as she longed for them; in the rough draft (and even in the final draft, at least in the beginning of the book), it was one of the defining features of their relationship. He was the better Abnegation, and that’s what Tris wanted to be.

  Here is Rough Draft Caleb making his choice:

  CALEB CHOOSES ABNEGATION

  The bus we take to get to the Choosing Ceremony is full of people in gray shirts and gray slacks. A pale ring of sunlight burns into the clouds like the end of a lit cigarette. I will never smoke one myself—they are closely tied to vanity—but a crowd of Candors smokes them in front of the building when we get off the bus. The building is tall and made of green glass. We call it the Hub; it’s where the politicians work, and where the factions gather, when they have to.

  I follow my parents off the bus. Caleb seems calm, but so would I, if I knew what I was going to do. Instead I get the distinct impression that my heart will burst out of my chest any minute now, and I grab his arm to steady myself as I walk up the front steps.

  The elevator is crowded, so my father volunteers to give a cluster of Amity members our place. We climb seven flights of stairs instead, following him unquestioningly. We set an example for our fellow faction members, and soon we become a mass of gray fabric ascending cement stairs in the half-light. We settle into the same pace. The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation’s hive mind, projecting always outward.

  But then my legs get sore, and I struggle to breathe, and I am again distracted by myself.

  Caleb holds the door open on the seventh floor and stands like a sentry as every member of Abnegation walks past him. I would wait for him but the crowd presses me forward, out of the stairwell and into the room where I will decide the rest of my life.

  The room is arranged in concentric circles. On the edges stand the Choosers—the sixteen-year-olds of every faction. We are not called members yet; our decisions today will make us members. We arrange ourselves in alphabetical order, according to the last names we may leave behind today. I stand between Caleb and Molly Rockwell, an Amity girl with rosy cheeks and a yellow dress.

  Rows of chairs for our families make up the next circle. They are arranged in five sections, according to faction. The responsibility to conduct the ceremony rotates from faction to faction each year, and this year is Abnegation’s. Marcus will give the opening address and read the names.

  In the last circle are five metal bowls so large they could hold my entire body, if I curled up. Each one contains a substance that represents each faction: gray stones for Abnegation, water for Erudite, earth for Amity, lit coals for the Dauntless, and glass for Candor.

  When Marcus calls my name, I will walk to the center of the three circles. I will not speak. He will offer me a knife. I will cut into my hand and sprinkle my blood i
nto the bowl of the faction I choose.

  My blood on the stones. My blood sizzling on the coals.

  Before my parents sit down, they stand in front of Caleb and me. My father kisses my forehead and claps Caleb on the shoulder, grinning.

  “See you soon,” he says. Without a trace of doubt.

  My mother hugs me, and what little resolve I have left almost breaks. I clench my jaw and stare up at the ceiling, where globe lanterns hang and fill the room with blue light. She holds me for what feels like a long time, even after I let my hands fall. Before she pulls away, she turns her head and whispers in my ear, “I love you. No matter what.”

  I frown at her back as she walks away. She knows what I might do. She must know, or she wouldn’t feel the need to say that.

  Caleb takes my hand. The room slowly comes to order. I should be observing the Dauntless; I should be taking in as much information as I can, but I can only stare at the lanterns across the room. I try to lose myself in the blue glow.

  Marcus stands at the podium between the Erudite and the Dauntless and clears his throat into the microphone. “Welcome,” he says. “Welcome to the Choosing Ceremony. Welcome to the day we honor the democratic philosophy of our ancestors, which tells us that every man has the right to choose his own way in this world.”

  Or: one of five predetermined ways. I squeeze Caleb’s hand.

  “Our dependents are now sixteen. They stand on the precipice of adulthood, and it is now up to them to decide what kind of people they would like to be.” Marcus’s voice is solemn and gives equal weight to each word. “Decades ago our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race, or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world. Rather, they determined that it was the fault of human personality—of man’s inclination toward evil, in whatever form that is. They divided into factions that sought to eradicate those qualities they deemed responsible for the world’s disarray.”