Chapter Eighteen

Enter the fear simulations! I think Roth just borders the line where serums are a bit too heavily used, but she doesn't go over. And, as we said in class, it's an efficient way of testing the initiates. Several initiates are called into a room before Tris but no one has any idea what's going on until it's their turn. When it's Tris' time we get to get up close and personal with her deepest fears, after a quick injection. The objective of the exercise is not to eliminate your fear, but to suppress it and control it, which Tris does slowly.

It starts with a very quiet and saturated field. In the horizon she sees birds and, boy, do those birds see her. Within minutes Tris is covered in crows that are trying to claw her to bits.

"I scream and sob, insensible, illogical. I am dying; I am dying; I am dying. 
My skin sears and I bleeding and the squawking is so loud my ears are ringing, but I am not dying, and I remember that this isn't real; but it feels real, it feels so real. I call out for him, inhaling feathers, exhaling, 'Help!' But help will not come; I am alone."

This is a prime example of how Roth writes in the moment, almost like a stream of consciousness, which I both love and hate.

Tris proceeds to bite the head off a crow and then knock the others off. Eventually she conquers her fear and she wakes up, and when does she's hysteric. She cries and thrashes and Four does his best to console her in a weird bad-timing flirty kind of way.