Cold Hearts | Tobias Eaton

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"THEY'RE JUMPING OFF!"

I lift my head. I sit forward. The train has slowed down in the past few minutes, and I see that the boy who shouted is right: The Dauntless in the cars ahead of us are jumping out as the train passes a rooftop. The tracks are seven stories up.

The idea of leaping out of a moving train onto a rooftop, knowing there is a gap between the edge of the roof and the edge of the tracks, sparks something inside of me. I push myself up and stumble to the opposite side of the car, where the other faction transfers stand in a line.

"We have to jump off too, then," a Candor girl says. She has a darker skin and short hair.

"Great," a Candor boy replies, "because that makes perfect sense, Christina. Leap off a train onto a roof."

"This is kind of what we signed up for, Peter," the girl points out.

I look at Jacqueline and smirk at her. She does the same.
"Want to show them the power of Train Club?" she whispers to me.
"The what?" I don't here more because we move to the edge.

"Well, I'm not doing it," says an Amity boy behind us.

And we jump. A weightless moment, and then my feet slam into solid ground and pain prickles through my hands.I look at Jacqueline. She's laughing and so am I.

"That was fun," she says. And i can't disagree. Maybe this choice was better then the others.

I see Christina, the Candor girl, and Beatrice jump. All the initiates except the Amity boy made it onto the roof, with varying levels of success. The Candor girl with crooked teeth, Molly, holds her ankle, wincing, and Peter, the Candor boy with shiny hair, grins proudly—he must have landed on his feet.

Then I hear a wail. I turn my head, searching for the source of the sound. A Dauntless girl stands at the edge of the roof, staring at the ground below, screaming. Behind her a Dauntless boy holds her at the waist to keep her from falling off.

"Rita," he says. "Rita, calm down. Rita—"

I stand and look over the edge. There is a body on the pavement below us; a girl, her arms and legs bent at awkward angles, her hair spread in a fan around her head. My stomach sinks and I stare at the railroad tracks. Not everyone made it. And even the Dauntless aren't safe.

Rita sinks to her knees, sobbing. I turn away. I don't want to be seen as rude or be rude. And watching someone weep is really rude.

While I'm not sure I will survive initiation, I know I'll try my best.

"Ooh. Scandalous! A Stiff's flashing some skin!"

I lift my head. "Stiff" is slang for Abnegation, and I'm with my sister the only one here. Peter points at Beatrice, smirking. I hear laughter. I would help her, but every time our eyes meet she looks somewhere. Maybe she just wished, she would be here alone and I ruined it.

"Listen up! My name is Max! I am one of the leaders of your new faction!" shouts a man at the other end of the roof. He is older than the others, with deep creases in his dark skin and gray hair at his temples, and he stands on the ledge like it's a sidewalk. Like someone didn't just fall to her death from it. "Several stories below us is the members' entrance to our compound. If you can't muster the will to jump off, you don't belong here. Our initiates have the privilege of going first."

"You want us to jump off a ledge?" asks an Erudite girl. She is a few inches taller than I am, with mousy brown hair and big lips. Her mouth hangs open.

I don't know why it shocks her. These people are crazy and she realized it only now?

"Yes," Max says. He looks amused.

"Is there water at the bottom or something?"

"Who knows?" He raises his eyebrows.

The crowd in front of the initiates splits in half, making a wide path for us. I look around. I look at Beatrice who looks like she is rethinking her whole life, and Peter, who is probably thinking about painting his nails.

I walk toward the ledge with Jacqueline and hear snickers behind us. If it was problem with two people jumping, he would probably said something.

Max steps aside, leaving our way clear. I walk up to the edge and look at my newly made friend.

"So the Adopted Club jumps?" I hear her, she sounds brave. A lot more than me.

"The Adopted Club will do a flip." I say to her.

I don't look back. I don't think. And we just jump.

The air howls in my ears as the ground surges toward me. We did do a flip, so even if it was just a joke from dauntless, we enjoyed it. The hole surrounds me and I drop into darkness.

I hit something hard. It gives way beneath me and cradles my body. The impact knocks the wind out of me and I wheeze, struggling to breathe again. My arms and legs sting. But the fall is not that hard as it could be.

"I'm not your bed." Says my pillow.

A net. There is a net at the bottom of the hole. I just jumped off a roof. I scream the loudest I can and soon Jacqueline does too. I see woman near us.

"Why are you screaming?" She asks us.
"So they think it's really bad." We laugh.

We have to stand on solid ground again. I see a few hands stretching out to us at the edge of the net, so I grab the first one I can reach and pull myself across. I roll off, and I would have fallen face-first onto a wood floor if he had not caught me.

"He" is the young man attached to the hand I grabbed. He has a spare upper lip and a full lower lip. His eyes are so deep-set that his eyelashes touch the skin under his eyebrows, and they are dark blue, a dreaming, sleeping, waiting color.

His hands grip my arms, but he releases me a moment after I stand upright again.

"Thank you," I say.

We stand on a platform ten feet above the ground. Around us is an open cavern.

"Can't believe it," a voice says from behind him. It belongs to a dark-haired girl with three silver rings through her right eyebrow. She smirks at me. "A Stiff and Pansycake , the first to jump? Unheard of."

"There's a reason why they left them, Lauren," he says. His voice is deep, and it rumbles. "What's your name?"

"Um..." I don't know why I hesitate. Maybe because I don't know who he asked? Or just because Kazuha was the old me - the unwanted kid left on the street in Abnegation? Or because Keigo was the little baby that surely had a family somewhere, and killing it now would mean, she'll never meet them?

"Think about it," he says, a faint smile curling his lips. "You don't get to pick again."

A new place, a new name. I can be remade here.

"Keigo," I say firmly. I hear Jacqueline after a few seconds "Jin-Soo"

"Keigo and Jin-Soo," Lauren repeats, grinning. "Make the announcement, Four."

The boy—Four—looks over his shoulder and shouts, "First jumpers—Keigo and Jin-Soo!"

A crowd materializes from the darkness as my eyes adjust. They cheer and pump their fists, and then another person drops into the net. Her screams follow her down. Beatrice. Everyone laughs, but they follow their laughter with more cheering.

Four sets his hand on my back and says, "Welcome to Dauntless."