The sudden silence is not nearly as jarring as the sudden impact. I wheeze, struggling to breathe again, and instinctively push my hands down in order to lift myself up. Except my left fingers kind of graze something hard and my pinky almost snaps backwards as my palm plummets into nothing and my right hand just goes straight into the darkness hitting nothing, making me tilt to that side and my landing sway. Okay, so a net.

The hole that I fell through seems a whole house above me and as a result the sunlight only illuminates the air above me. A half-relieved, half-hysterical laugh bubbles up and I cover my face with my hands. I just jumped off a roof. Slowly but surely my heart rate is returning to normal, and even though all I want to do is lay here covering my face for the next hour or so, contemplating my life choices, I know that sooner or later someone else will likely be coming down after me, and if I don't move, on top of me. Now that I know what to grasp for I sit up a little bit and peer into the darkness around me unsure of what to do next. All I want to do is stand on solid ground again.

That's when I realize that it's not actually pitch black down here. As my eyes begin to adjust I can make out a couple of dim lighting fixtures dotting the ceiling and a few hands reaching out to me from what I assume is the end of the net.

Ignoring my sore and tired limbs I stretch my arm and grab the closest hand to me and pull myself across, although I have a small feeling that whoever's hand this was did most of the pulling. I rolled off and would've fallen face-first into a wood floor had he not caught me.

"He" being the young man attached to the hand I grabbed. The one who's heartbeat I'd swear I can hear, though it's probably just some weird echo of my own. My head was pretty shaken up during that fall. 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 a dark blue, a dreaming, sleeping, waiting color.

His hands grip my arms, but he releases me a moment after I stand upright again. As soon as his hands abandon me the beating echo goes away.

"Thank you," I say my voice calm despite my near breathlessness.

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 glinting rings through her right eyebrow. She smirks at me. "A Stiff, the first to jump? Unheard of."

"There's a reason why she left them, Lauren," he says. His voice is deep and resounding in this underground hole. "What's your name?" he asks turning to me.

It takes me a second to understand that he's talking to me. And then a few more to decide on an appropriate response. It's not that I've had any deep seated desires to go by a different name, or even any problems whatsoever with 'Beatrice'. It's just- I don't know, the Beatrice that my parents would wish a good day at school, or scold for sarcasm, or politely ask a favor from seemed starkly out of place down here, in this cavern, breathless and exposed (at least by Abnegation standards).

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

Well, might as well pick something I won't have to constantly remind myself to respond to. Oh and 'Bea' is totally out of the question.

"Tris." I say firmly.

"Tris." Lauren repeats, grinning. "Make the announcement, Four."

The boy- Four- looks over his shoulder towards a tunnel or something that I'm just now becoming aware of and even so, barley able to make out, and shouts, "First jumper- Tris!"

A crowd materializes from the darkness, cheering and fist pumping, and then another person drops into the net. Her screams follow her down. Christina. Everyone laughs, but they follow their laughter with more cheering.

Four sets his hand on my back and I'm so started by the phantom beating I feel just as strongly as before, that I almost miss it when he says, "Welcome to Dauntless."