Last time, Erudite-siding Dauntless attack with their idiotproofed guns.

Tris goes down, only to find out she’s not really shot and something else is going on. Then they throw a smoke canister in, but seconds later she can see again.

What was the point of that?

Indeed.

Everyone’s unconscious. Since she didn’t mention them being awake before this, it seems like the canister had nothing to do with that.

Anyway, Tris decides that playing along has never led her wrong so she slumps over asleep to in the hopes of figuring out what’s up.

One of the blue Dauntless is grumbling about the lack of headshots, because did we mention smart people are evil? They’re super evil you guys. And the voice of reason is Eric:

“No people means no one left to create prosperous conditions,” Eric continues.

Your mandatory reminder that prosperity is also evil.

Eric orders the soldiers who seem surprisingly okay with being talked to like they’re trained monkeys to keep going through the building. They do so, and Tris gets up and examines the situation again.

Whatever they gassed us with, it had to be simulation-inducing or I wouldn’t be the only one awake.

So it was the canister and it’s just the author thought it was more important to write Tris ignoring everyone around her at the start followed by focusing just on the canister than mention the people being knocked out.

Also, the truth serum just demonstrated divegence fucks with non-simulation effects, but Tris doesn’t even consider that maybe she’s just immune to knockout gas even as she tells us this is weird and doesn’t fit what she knows about simulations.

Tris then moves to looting the body of a blue Dauntless killed in the shootout. This bit’s good. Since Dauntless always shoot out the other person’s head, hers is blasted open and Tris finds that traumatizing and ends up pausing to put her own jacket over the injury to hide it. She wants to take the blue armband but finds out it’s not just tied on but actually part of the jacket, so she pulls the whole thing off the corpse.

Then Uriah pops up because he’s also divergent. Jesus christ Eric, you sure dropped the ball on wiping these guys out. She tells him to loot another corpse and she sees it’s a kid who isn’t even old enough for initiation.

I flinch at the sight of his death-pale face. Someone so young shouldn’t be dead; shouldn’t even have been here in the first place.

Yeah yeah war is hell more importantly yes, he shouldn’t be there, so how come he is? Is Erudite not satisfied by treating the Dauntless defectors like dumb animals and wanted to step up their mistreatment by also forcing the kids of those who join them into the army’s front lines? Even if the kid was in favor, being a dumb kid, it’s really hard to believe he’d have joined by himself as opposed to following his family, which means either they gave the okay despite Dauntless normally not working like that or Erudite overruled them.

It’s not even like it’s an issue of manpower. They probably are lacking in it, but Erudite needs to defend some of their own areas, and you could use the kids for that. Simply having them on guard would prevent attacks of opportunity and free up the trained people for your offensives.

“They’re the only ones who are dead,” he says quietly. “Something about that seem wrong to you?”

Huh. So there’s also something intended to be weird here, but I’m not sure what. And he may just mean that it’s only the blue Dauntless that died but we already know the blue Dauntless don’t seem to have been shooting to kill so that’s not weird.

“Questions later. We have to get up there.”
“Up there? Why?” he says. “We should get out of here.”
“You want to run away before you know what’s going on?” I scowl at him. “Before the Dauntless upstairs know what hit them?”

1) Tris, if the Dauntless upstairs can’t take screams and gunshots as advance warning, there is really nothing else you could possibly do to get the concept across.

2) Oh, so now you’re not in favor of running away before you know what’s going on? Shame you didn’t feel that way last book.

“They’ll work their way upward,” I say between breaths. “So you should … go to the third floor. Tell them to … evacuate. Quietly.”
“Where are you going, then?”
“Floor two,” I say.

She appears to be assuming floor two has been taken by the blue Dauntless who are moving on, while floor three is currently empty and with time not only to evacuate but do so sneakily. I can only assume there are some really amazing distances between floors.

Tris thinks about how there’s some Candor children’s song that doesn’t rhyme:

Dauntless is the cruelest of the five
They tear each other to pieces…

And how this has never seemed truer to me than now, watching Dauntless traitors induce a sleeping simulation that is not so different from the one that forced them to kill members of Abnegation not a month ago.

But you were just saying this didn’t bear any resemblance to any simulation! God damn you editor.

We are the only faction that could divide like this. Amity would not allow a schism; no one in Abnegation would be so selfish; Candor would argue until they found a common solution; and even Erudite would never do something so illogical.

Amity would absolutely schism. What we saw of them in the previous book, sure, those guys just value getting along. But we now know Amity is a hive mind that appears to have some no true Scotsman fallacy going on where all group decisions are unanimous. We can guess when it’s just one or two people who disagree they’re kicked out, but if they ever had a situation where a large minority wouldn’t be swayed, bam, instant schism. They don’t have any conflict resolution beyond the unanimous thing, they can’t actually handle people in their group not agreeing with the rest. If it’s a split down the middle, they wouldn’t even be able to appeal to the fact one group was larger to try to force the others over.

Abnegation are joyless Puritans. Probably the only reason their faction hasn’t split into a million subfactions is they don’t seem to have much of a philosophy and instead made their anti-selfishness stuff into more of a cultural thing while allowing every individual the right to their own private beliefs. It’s easy to picture them splitting over the issue of what’s best, especially given they seem to have at various conflicting beliefs. I mean, they give things to the factionless to make their lives better, but also believing having stuff makes you unhappy and prosperity is a zero sum game. It’s really easy to picture them splitting into the social progressives who want to improve everyone’s quality of life and the ascetics who think trying to do that is just making them suffer more. Another possible route is for some to take the zero sum prosperity idea to mean it’s helpful to start scourging yourself while the others say this is just a form of selfishness.

Candor would argue until they found a common solution

Yes how could the arguing faction that insists there’s objective truth to everything possibly not come to a common solution everyone’s pleased with. They sure don’t seem like they could easily end up with two or more opposed camps that each believes they’re the only right one at all.

As to Erudite…I mean, has this woman ever see scientists? The only thing I can see working here is they appear to be an IQ-based hierarchy so they could be using that to cut the academic squabbling to minimum. That still doesn’t get rid of the problem of a bunch of the lower scorers deciding fuck you guys and your IQ cult and your suppression of my beautiful study saying IQ cultism is stupid and taking off.

The only thing Dauntless really has is just that they’re the only armed faction, therefore the only faction that could hurt any faction is Dauntless, therefore they’re the only faction that could ever shoot at each other. We know the other factions are still fine killing faction members indirectly, because that really is what the factionless system amounts to.

I guess maybe the five faction things may be set with the result that you can’t schism, only murder each other until a new faction emerges, except unfortunately Tris used the word schism for this situation. Shame, because the other one seems creepier. Instead of just whining about how dare those guys split with us, it’d be an irrevocable decision that spells death for one of the two groups. Maybe even say it’s happened with Dauntless once before and the “song” that doesn’t resemble a song is actually saying that because it’s the Dauntless are the only group that’s ever been willing to murder their way to a new consensus. And it does make sense they’d be willing to – they seen to have no real bonds given they’re willing to throw their parents off trains and ensure only half their children can even make it in.

Plus, it’d give a sense of history! There’s power in “omg this has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE” but there’s also power in history and myths, in having one thing mean other things. (That’s why I loved so much about Pokemon BW, even if there were plenty of other problems.) Knowing that a schism ends in at least half the people dead is even more powerful than a schism just being a thing that’s never happened.

(Or conversely – what if there used to be more than five factions, and “Dauntless” what happened when there was a bloody fight between two militarized factions that disagreed until the survivors unified into one? That’d mean the blue Dauntless were signifying that the faction was being absorbed into Erudite, and the original Dauntless weren’t just facing their faction being subverted but their entire value system being removed. It doesn’t even have to contradict the fact Tris’ knowledge of history is that there were always five factions, since the teachers are Erudite, not Candor, and it seems only Candor wouldn’t be fine rewriting history.)

I step over a draped arm and a woman with her mouth hanging open, and hum the beginning of the next verse of the song under my breath.
Erudite is the coldest of the five
Knowledge is a costly thing…

SONGS FUCKING RHYME.

Also good to know Abnegation aren’t the only prejudiced assholes. From this, I’d guess Erudite isn’t going to be treating Candor much nicer than they did Abnegation, since both have set themselves up as their enemies and best of all, done it irrationally which probably is what Erudite is using to justify taking away their ability to think at all – clearly they make stupid decisions so Erudite should make the decisions for them.

I wonder when Jeanine realized that Erudite and Dauntless would make a deadly combination. Ruthlessness and cold logic, it seems, can accomplish almost anything

For example, I bet Erudite would point to this as why Tris needs to be a gun zombie, because look at this, she thinks Dauntless + Erudite is some sort of special combination as opposed to Dauntless + Any Faction = fulfillment of that faction’s goals because Dauntless have guns and it’s just Erudite was smart enough to figure out how to do it before anyone else. Tris should not be making decisions about anything, ever, until she agrees to turn her fucking brain on again.

Anyway, Eric walks right by Tris to see a divergent Candor they’ve found.

Bring her to the elevator bank. We’ll decide which ones to kill and which ones to bring back later.”

Wouldn’t it be easier to just decide on the spot and shoot whoever you don’t want, rather than ferrying all of them, then trying to handle the much larger group, then having to kill the ones you don’t want all at once and risking the whole group turning on you?

Also, I can think of a nice, easy way to choose! If Candor and no weapons training, herd. If Dauntless and weapons training (also a good enough actor to have gone unnoticed during the Abnegation attack), shoot. There we go!

Tris realizes she has to do this fast so she starts walking on the people’s bodies to see who twitches and she manages to find a girl she tells to run into the elevator.

Eric sees it.

“I don’t understand,” he says, “how you could possibly be stupid enough to come up here with no gun.”

You know, Tris’ gun phobia is working out nicely. It means I don’t have to bitch every five seconds about why she doesn’t just shoot him already, or about how stupid it’d have been for her to forget to carry a gun. And it’s a nice Dauntlessy thing that she’s got one fear but is still able to do all sorts of really brave stuff, like diving into the midst of the enemy without even a gun.

Tris stomps on his shot foot but he’s disciplined enough to not let go.

But the fact that he didn’t just shoot me in the head tells me something: He’s not allowed to kill me yet.

He keeps villain monologuing her about what a surprise it is she survived his death trap while Tris, bless her, is just pondering how if he’s not going to shoot her she’ll just keep kicking until he lets go, where next?

You see, ingenuity—one of the qualities we most value in Erudite—requires creativity.”
…
“Sometimes creativity seems wasteful, illogical … unless it’s done for a greater purpose. In this case, the accumulation of knowledge.”

Then she crushes his balls with a kick and tries to run for it, but he manages to grab her again and wrenches her own injury to incapacitate her. Isn’t it nice how past injuries don’t just magically disappear in time for the next situation?

As Tris is marched off probably to be dangled above a shark tank or something Uriah also gets dragged in.

If he’s here, he probably failed. Now they’ll find all the Divergent in the building, and most of us will die.

Seriously how is no one hearing this? Aside from the gunshots, Tris just screamed bloody murder when her wound got ripped into.

We end with Tris remembering that she’s still got a knife they don’t know about. With luck, this will also end up making friends with Eric’s balls. It’ll be a victory both for Tris and for evolution. Seriously, who the fuck things deathtraps are a good idea?