Last time Candor proves they’re surprisingly untrustworthy and going to hammer their faction’s values down everyone else’s throat if they get half a chance, but no one cares and Tris keeps going on about unburdening yourself in an unqualified good.
Christina is waiting for Tris.
“Christina,” I say, but the only words I can think of—I’m sorry—sound more like an insult than an apology. Sorry is what you are when you bump someone with your elbow, what you are when you interrupt someone. I am more than sorry.
“He had a gun,” I say. “He was about to shoot me. He was under the simulation.”
“You killed him,” she says. Her words sound bigger than words usually do, like they expanded in her mouth before she spoke them.
While I continue to find the initial situation poor, because seriously no one made you try to get bonus points for headshots, the fallout is pretty good! Tris has had PTSD, spiraling guilt, and even once she finally manages to admit to it has no idea how to handle what comes next.
Uriah comes over after Christina leaves to say that he sure appreciates Tris killing the guy since that was part of saving everyone else. He says Christina will come around eventually. Really, much of her reaction is probably because Tris lied about it originally, making it that much worse of a shock. If Tris had broken down when Christina first said it, she might have forgiven her on the spot.
Some Dauntless brush against me and they murmur words that sound like gratitude, or compliments, or reassurance. Others give me a wide berth, look at me with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
In a different faction, this might actually make sense, in that Will wasn’t the only Dauntless shot and none of the regular Abnegation were fighting back, so anyone who lost a friend knows there’s a good chance it was Tris. But this is Dauntless, where they’re trained to beat each other bloody for barely any reason, so they should have a slightly firmer grip on the idea of someone needing to kill their friends for the greater good.
Tobias is also testy, but says they shouldn’t talk now and they walk out holding onto each other. Aw. He goes to sleep but she goes on a long run until she’s in agony, then stares at the Candor Truth Chair.
How strange that something so simple could have been instrumental in my decision to ruin one of my most important relationships, and damage another.
It’s bad enough that I killed Will, that I didn’t think fast enough to come up with another solution. Now I have to live with everyone else’s judgment as well as my own, and the fact that nothing—not even me—will ever be the same again.
The Candor sing the praises of the truth, but they never tell you how much it costs.
How could you need an explanation from Candor when you spent the last dozen chapters going on about how you could never ever tell because it’d make people hate you and change everything?
For a second, I allow myself to reenter the memory of the interrogation. Tobias’s lack of expression; his anger afterward, suppressed for the sake of my sanity. Christina’s empty look. The whispers, “Thank you for your honesty.” Easy to say that when what I did doesn’t affect them.
Right, see, if you were a bit more on the ball, you could’ve tried raising the actual problems with Tobias’ interrogation and maybe got them to knock it off for the both of you.
Then Tris throws the chair off the top of the building and watches it shatter. Well then. And she imagines Al standing by the pit before he jumped.
He must have stood there for a long time, making a list of all the terrible things he had done—almost killing me was one of those things—and another list of all the good, heroic, brave things he had not done, and then decided that he was tired. Tired, not just of living, but of existing. Tired of being Al.
Or maybe he didn’t stand there for ages making lists. We don’t know because he’s dead and your responsibility to him ended at the murder attempt. But hey, if we’re speculating, can I point out that he may have jumped for the more selfish reason of knowing he was going to fail anyway and not wanting to be factionless? It was his poor scores that pushed him to attempt to kill Tris, after all.
…and then Tris almost kills herself.
For the first time I feel like I understand Al. I am tired of being Tris. I have done bad things. I can’t take them back, and they are part of who I am. Most of the time, they seem like the only thing I am.
I lean forward, into the air, holding on to the side of the window with one hand. Another few inches and my weight would pull me to the ground. I would not be able to stop it.
Tris has only done one bad thing, and it was aiming for Will’s head, and the book doesn’t even seem to care about that in particular because it still hasn’t mentioned she could’ve aimed anywhere else. It’s just insisting shooting Will in self-defense is automatically evil (although all the other equally innocent people she mowed down seem to be fine) and she is terrible for it.
The most charitable reading is this is only Tris’ feelings, not anything endorsed by the narrative as whole, but it doesn’t seem to be presented as Tris going off the deep end the way stuff like her fear of the gun was. At best, the book seems to be presenting it as a perfectly valid opinion that not everyone in Tris’ life shares.
Tris’ only reason for not killing herself is just that her parents died to save her so she can’t kill herself now.
“Let the guilt teach you how to behave next time,” my father would say.
“I love you. No matter what,” my mother would say.
Okay but in actual fact Tris was the hero of the events in question. Her father might possibly say that, but only in the sense that’s probably the rote response to anyone saying they feel guilt because Abnegation just wants you to shut up and get back to your duties.
She goes back to where Tobias is only to find he’s woken up and they get in the elevator for another trip, this time further down. Tris starts shaking.
I should say something, but I don’t know what to say. I can’t apologize, because I only told the truth, and I can’t change the truth into a lie. I can’t give excuses.
“You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?”
Ah. So I guess Tris is so hung up on how what she did was the worst thing ever she didn’t even consider he’d be mad about her hiding it. She says she couldn’t and he says yes she totally could’ve and she loses it about how he has no idea what it’s like to have killed your friend and Tris, you killed a lot more than just your friend and again, those people were also totally innocent. I completely understand that killing Will would be the worst of the murders you committed, but the other murders were still murders of innocent people.
This makes him less mad but he still wishes she’d trusted him, and she stops herself from saying of course she does because she realizes that yeah, she didn’t trust him to not hate her for what she did.
“I mean,” he says, “I had to find out that you almost drowned in a water tank from Caleb. Doesn’t that seem a little strange to you?”
Just when I was about to apologize.
I wipe my cheeks hard with my fingertips and stare at him.
Well, this is an unexpected direction. It’s actually pretty nice to have characters have a relationship squabble that’s believable and not about sexual availability.
Tris, who doesn’t seem to have even realized keeping the other stuff quiet matters, is now pissed because it reminds her that she had to find out about his mom being not dead and also new evil factionless leader, and oh by the way she overheard the conversation about allying with them. Tobias says that’s different because he was intending to tell her just not immediately, which would hold so much more water if I hadn’t had to sit through the train ride of no I’m not telling you who we’re going to see let’s just sit in silence, and Tris is all well then why do I have to tell you everything immediately, and he says the issue is obviously she was planning to never tell him ever, and she says no she decided she needed to come clean at the end there.
“What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!”
“Oh, so it’s not enough that I told you; it has to be in the right setting?”
Tobias’ response is kind of dumb, since that she killed a friend he wasn’t close to isn’t much of an intimate confession and they’ve already been over that she was wrestling with it, but they’re both wound up enough that you can see the argument just going in inertia.
But apparently Tris’ words infuriate him instead of realizing it’s a stupid nitpick on his original grievance, and he says she isn’t easy to be with, and that horrifies Tris and then she starts telling us that she can’t say how much she needs him because they could die at any moment so it’s better not to need each other, which is stupid, and she apologizes for not being honest.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” He frowns.
“What else do you want me to say?”
He just shakes his head. “Nothing, Tris. Nothing.”
I’m not too impressed with the ending – Tris has realizes her earlier errors, she already made an effort to fix things by telling about Will and then addressed his complaint about that fine with her rant about how she couldn’t handle what she’d done. His core problem, that he wants her to talk to him more in general, doesn’t seem to have quite registered, but he isn’t making any effort to get her to open up and see if she’ll tell him all the other stuff she’s been keeping to herself and so long as he’s mostly harping on the one thing it makes sense that Tris will see that one thing as being his main objection.
If we’re to view him as flawed, it could just be that he can’t take Tris’ criticism that he hasn’t been behaving much different and that’s what he’s currently twisted up over, but that hasn’t featured in his interactions before now so it’s a bit of a jump.
It really seems like it’s just designated angsting time. Tris’ relationship was unusual in that it was a positive thing for the two of them, and this book seems to be removing a lot of the good ideas of the last one, so I suppose making the relationship a drama-filled detriment makes sense.