the JUMP
A small girl from Abnegation finds her way amidst the Dauntless
By Hannah Crews
16-year-old Beatrice "Tris" Prior was raised under the principle of always thinking of others first and never drawing attetion to herself. "I've never been good at that," Tris admits. "I didn't want to leave my family, but I knew it would be better for me and the community if I tried a different lifestyle." Tris made the decision at the Choosing Ceremony to sprinkle her blood over the bowl of fiery coals representing the brave Dauntless instead of any of the other faction bowls. These include selfless Abnegation represented by stones, honest Candor by glass, kind Amity by earth, and knowled-geable Erudite by water.
Tris and the other Dauntless initiates then rush down almost 20 flights of stairs and jump onto a moving train that will take them to the Dauntless compound. "One of the kids didn't make it," she says sadly. "He was running by the train but he fell too far behind." The initiates must then jump off of the train and land on the roof of a building. "Then we were told that to enter the com-pound, we had to jump off the ledge of the roof down into a huge hole in the concrete." Tris was the first initiate to jump. "I figured the less I thought about it, the less of a chance I had of losing my nerve." A net cat-ches all of the initiates at the bottom, and the group is seperated into the Dauntless-borns and the initiates who transfered from other factions. "Our instructor, Four, showed
us around and explained how things work in the compound." The initiates were told that they should arrive at the Dauntless training center no later than 8 o'clock AM, and that after 6 PM they would be free to do whatever they like.
The first day of training begins with gun instruction and target practice, which then moves to fighting practice as the first stage moves on. "A lot happens in the first stage. You become comfortable with the envi-ronment and people around you," Tris ex-plains. By the end of this stage, there are only seven out of the 12 original transfers. 4 are factionless; one is dead.
The second stage consists of a stimulation sequence similar to that which is used in the aptitude test. Each initiate is given a serum that induces a fearful hallucination. When he/ she is able to either face his/her fear or re-gister a normal heart rate, the hallucination ends. The faster a person is able to wake up, the better they have done. Stage three is quite similar to two, except that the hallu-cinations are sequenced one after the other. The initiate has to act against every one of their fears to wake up, not one at a time.
At the end of initiation, both the Dauntless-borns and transfers are ranked 1 through 10; anyone lower than 10 becomes factionless. Tris was able to jump all the way from a quiet, invisible Abnegation girl to number-one ranked Dauntless member.