Insurgent divergent tril.., p.36
Insurgent (Divergent Trilogy, Book 2),
p.36
“Get out a cutting board and cut some harva root for me,” she said, and she pulled on a pair of gloves. “We’ve used hushflower before, right?”
“In sleeping elixir,” Akos said, and he did as she said, standing on her left with cutting board and knife and dirt-dusted harva root. It was sickly white and covered in a fine layer of fuzz.
“And that recreational concoction,” she added. “I believe I told you it would be useful at parties someday. When you’re older.”
“You did,” Akos said. “You said ‘when you’re older’ then, too.”
Her mouth slanted into her cheek. Most of the time that was the best you could get out of his mom.
“The same ingredients an older version of you might use for recreation, you can also use for poison,” she said, looking grave. “As long as you double the hushflower and halve the harva root. Understand?”
“Why—” Akos started to ask her, but she was already changing the subject.
“So,” she said as she tipped a hushflower petal onto her own cutting board. It was still red, but shriveled, about the length of her thumb. “What is keeping your mind busy tonight?”
“Nothing,” Akos said. “People staring at us at the Blooming, maybe.”
“They are so fascinated by the fate-favored. I would love to tell you they will stop staring someday,” she said with a sigh, “but I’m afraid that you . . . you will always be stared at.”
He wanted to ask her about that pointed “you,” but he was careful around his mom during their lessons. Ask her the wrong question and she ended the lesson all of a sudden. Ask the right one, and he could find out things he wasn’t supposed to know.
“How about you?” he asked her. “What’s keeping your mind busy, I mean?”
“Ah.” His mom’s chopping was so smooth, the knife tap tap tapping on the board. His was getting better, though he still carved chunks where he didn’t mean to. “Tonight I am plagued by thoughts about the family Noavek.”
Her feet were bare, toes curled under from the cold. The feet of an oracle.
“They are the ruling family of Shotet,” she said. “The land of our enemies.”
The Shotet were a people, not a nation-planet, and they were known to be fierce, brutal. They stained lines into their arms for every life they had taken, and trained even their children in the art of war. And they lived on Thuvhe, the same planet as Akos and his family—though the Shotet didn’t call this planet “Thuvhe,” or themselves “Thuvhesits”—across a huge stretch of feathergrass. The same feathergrass that scratched at the windows of Akos’s family’s house.
His grandmother—his dad’s mom—had died in one of the Shotet invasions, armed only with a bread knife, or so his dad’s stories said. And the city of Hessa still wore the scars of Shotet violence, the names of the lost carved into low stone walls, broken windows patched up instead of replaced, so you could still see the cracks.
Just across the feathergrass. Sometimes they felt close enough to touch.
“The Noavek family is fate-favored, did you know that? Just like you and your siblings are,” Sifa went on. “The oracles didn’t always see fates in that family line, it happened only within my lifetime. And when it did, it gave the Noaveks leverage over the Shotet government, to seize control, which has been in their hands ever since.”
“I didn’t know that could happen. A new family suddenly getting fates, I mean.”
“Well, those of us who are gifted in seeing the future don’t control who gets a fate,” his mom said. “We see hundreds of futures, of possibilities. But a fate is something that happens to a particular person in every single version of the future we see, which is very rare. And those fates determine who the fate-favored families are—not the other way around.”
He’d never thought about it that way. People always talked about the oracles doling out fates like presents to special, important people, but to hear his mom tell it, that was all backward. Fates made certain families important.
“So you’ve seen their fates. The fates of the Noaveks.”
She nodded. “Just the son and the daughter. Ryzek and Cyra. He’s older; she’s your age.”
He’d heard their names before, along with some ridiculous rumors. Stories about them frothing at the mouth, or keeping enemies’ eyeballs in jars, or lines of kill marks from wrist to shoulder. Maybe that one didn’t sound so ridiculous.
“Sometimes it is easy to see why people become what they are,” his mom said softly. “Ryzek and Cyra, children of a tyrant. Their father, Lazmet, child of a woman who murdered her own brothers and sisters. The violence infects each generation.” She bobbed her head, and her body went with it, rocking back and forth. “And I see it. I see all of it.”
Akos grabbed her hand and held on.
“I’m sorry, Akos,” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she was saying sorry for saying too much, or for something else, but it didn’t really matter.
They both stood there for a while, listening to the mutter of the news feed, the darkest night somehow even darker than before.
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About the Author
PHOTO © NELSON FITCH
VERONICA ROTH is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and several stories written in the world of Divergent. Now a full-time writer, Ms. Roth and her husband live near Chicago. You can visit her online at www.veronicarothbooks.com.
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Books by Veronica Roth
Divergent • Divergent Collector’s Edition
Insurgent • Insurgent Collector’s Edition
Allegiant • Allegiant Collector’s Edition
The Divergent Series Complete Collection
Free Four
Four: The Transfer: A Divergent Story
Four: The Initiate: A Divergent Story
Four: The Son: A Divergent Story
Four: The Traitor: A Divergent Story
Four: A Divergent Collection
The Divergent Series Ultimate Four-Book Collection
Carve the Mark
The Fates Divide
Praise for the Divergent Series
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
INDIE BESTSELLER LIST
FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR, GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS
NPR BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
BARNES & NOBLE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
AMAZON.COM BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ALA BEST FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
“DIVERGENT is a captivating, fascinating book that kept me in constant suspense and was never short on surprises. It will be a long time before I quit thinking about this haunting vision of the future.”
—JAMES DASHNER,
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE MAZE RUNNER
“A taut and shiveringly exciting read! Tris is exactly the sort of unflinching and fierce heroine I love. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.”
—MELISSA MARR,
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WICKED LOVELY
“Promising author Roth tells the riveting and complex story of a teenage girl forced to choose between her routinized, selfless family and the adventurous, unrestrained future she longs for. A memorable, unpredictable journey from which it is nearly impossible to turn away.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)
“This is one fast-paced read that sticks in your head for days after you put it down, both because of its video-game-like scenes and its thought-provoking premise.”
—HOLLYWOODCRUSH.MTV.COM
“This gritty, paranoid world is built with careful details and intriguing scope. The plot clips along at an addictive pace, with steady jolts of brutal violence and swoony romance. Fans snared by the ratcheting suspense will be unable to resist speculating on their own factional allegiance. Guaranteed to fly off the shelves.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“With brisk pacing and lavish flights of imagination, DIVERGENT clearly has thrills, but it also movingly explores a more common adolescent anxiety—the painful realization that coming into one’s own sometimes means leaving family behind, both ideologically and physically.”
—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“The depth and richness of Beatrice herself make this an accessible option for both sci-fi buffs and realistic fiction fans.”
—BCCB
“Roth paints her canvas with the same brush as Suzanne Collins. The plot, scenes, and characters are different but the colors are the same and just as rich. Fans of Collins, dystopias, and strong female characters will love this novel.”
—SLJ
“You’ll be up all night with DIVERGENT, a brainy thrill-ride of a novel.”
—BOOKPAGE
Credits
Cover art ™ & © Veronica Roth 2012
Cover design and landscape art by Joel Tippie
Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
INSURGENT. Copyright © 2012 by Veronica Roth. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-06-202404-6 (trade bdg.)
ISBN 978-0-06-212784-6 (international edition)
12 13 14 15 16 CG/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780062114457
Version 05082018
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Veronica Roth, Insurgent (Divergent Trilogy, Book 2)
