Last time, Tris was captured but still has a knife! Stabbings are imminent.
Tris begins to meditate on her breathing and heart.
Hundreds of people unconscious on the floor, shot with something other than bullets, and I have no idea why.
But I am thinking of the heart. Not of my heart anymore, but of Eric’s, and how empty his chest will sound when his heart is no longer beating.
Finally, one of the obvious people to kill will die!
Tris then remarks that she’s not actually comfortable with the idea of murdering someone with a knife, which is good of her, and then that she’ll do it anyway because it’s necessary, which is better.
“My orders are to take only two of you back to Erudite headquarters for testing,” says Eric. “The rest of you are to be executed.
God god Eric and you call yourself intelligent.
Then he tops himself:
“The brain finishes developing at age twenty-five,” says Eric. “Therefore your Divergence is not completely developed.”
Yes how could various stages of brain development possibly be helpful information. Also, THEN WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU SHOOT HIM AT THE TIME?
So that kid is shot. And again, eh.
It was a good move to have them knocking out everyone and then dragging off some people. That avoids the deaths burnout. But now we’re back on the murder train, and wow am I murdered out. This is a bit better because at least it’s only one person so far, but I’m still stuck on the fact this is all happening with an incredibly tiny population and there’s not going to be much less at this point.
“You are also rather young,” he says. “Nowhere near finished developing.”
He steps toward me. My fingertips inch closer to the knife handle.
“Most of the Divergent get two results in the aptitude test. Some only get one. No one has ever gotten three, not because of aptitude, but simply because in order to get that result, you have to refuse to choose something,” he says, moving closer still. I tilt my head back to look at him, at all the metal gleaming in his face, at his empty eyes. “My superiors suspect that you got two, Tris,” he says. “They don’t think you’re that complex—just an even blend of Abnegation and Dauntless—selfless to the point of idiocy. Or is that brave to the point of idiocy?” I close my hand around the knife handle and squeeze. He leans closer. “Just between you and me … I think you might have gotten three, because you’re the kind of bullheaded person who would refuse to make a simple choice just because she was told to,” he says. “Care to enlighten me?”
oh god this is so stupid
It’s not just making her the specialest. It’s that we get this whole song and dance about how no one knows, but he just guessed anyway so he can go on about just how special she’d be.
Tris enlightens him with stabbings.
I close my eyes as I thrust the blade up and toward him. I don’t want to see his blood.
It’s really rare to see either a character bothered by violence or actually doing shit. Look at Tris managing both at once! It really helps balance out the part where the rest of the book is so fucking stupid.
A few good stabs are enough to take out Eric, and the rest of the blue Dauntless are all shit right we don’t have our actual guns out, and while they’re trying to solve that Uriah goes for the actual gun of one of them and it’s a shootout!
Tris tries to grab Eric’s gun but still can’t, and suddenly there’s Dauntless everywhere shooting, including Tobias!
The other Dauntless shoot the blue Dauntless into retreat while Tris feels like shit that she can’t handle a gun.
On the floor, Eric moans. Still alive, for now.
The gunshots gradually stop. My hand is wet. One glimpse of red tells me it’s covered in blood—Eric’s. I wipe it off on my pants and try to blink the tears away. My ears ring.
“Tris,” Tobias says. “You can put the knife down now.”
Tobias, hello, Eric isn’t dead yet! The knife is still needed.
Next chapter then has Tobias explain what happened. See, one Erudite (so, there were Erudite in addition to blue Dauntless?), Will’s sister, ran to the top floor to alert the Dauntless who then surrounded the blue Dauntless.
God do I wish this was taking place in a story with an actual culture and not just a few phrases, because in a better book the conflict of faction vs blood could actually matter. What about the Erudite whose family members were in Candor? Is this predictable (Tris, like most kids, has always assumed that faction before blood just happens when you become an adult and pick your faction, but in practice there’s divided loyalties everywhere) or a sign their whole society’s cracked apart? Do the factionless even need to have an uprising to remove the factions or is it going to crumble apart in the aftermath regardless?
In conclusion, kind of disappointed it wasn’t that the girl Tris helped escape went to the top and sounded the alarm. If Will’s sister’s help doesn’t matter in worldbuilding terms, it shouldn’t be there at all when there’s another better fitting piece.
Tris now examines what the nonfatal guns shot her with.
A metal disc about the size of my pinkie fingernail is pressed against my skin. Surrounding it is a patch of blue strands, like someone injected blue dye into the tiny veins just beneath the surface of my skin. Frowning, I try to peel the metal disc away from my arm, and feel a sharp pain.
Gritting my teeth, I wedge the flat of my knife blade under the disc and force it up.
The Dauntless, everyone.
For some reason this is agonizing to the point she’s screaming and blacking out, but she keeps at it rather than going to get help from anyone and no one comes to see why Tris is screaming quietly in the corner while jamming a knife into her arm. She pries it up to find a needle the length of her pinke.
Judging by the blue dye in my arm and the needle, they must have injected us with something. But what? Poison? An explosive?
The transmitter for the simulation you idiot. They injected everyone, then threw the canisters that knocked out the non-divergent. The simplest answer is the injection was necessary for the canister half to work.
Apparently Tris has been doing all that from inside a “public restroom” which I guess is soundproofed like everywhere else in this building and that’s why no one heard the screaming.
Uriah comes in and she explains he’s also very cute.
all his features are proportionate, his eyes dark and lively, his skin bronze-brown.
This seems random but may just be Tris riding an endorphin high from all the stress and now the self-injury. Uriah expresses horror at her yanking that out and also all the blood, because Tris is bestest most dauntlessness.
I touch my jaw. It is tender where Eric’s gun struck me—I will have to put healing salve on it so it doesn’t bruise.
Healing salve is now officially magic.
She asks if Eric’s dead and no the Candor patched him up. I blame you for this, Tris, you could’ve stabbed him a few hundred more times before anyone else got there in time to discuss the rights of prisoners.
I guess what’s really bugging me isn’t that the annoying people don’t die, it’s that the book is slaughtering redshirts left and right but the annoying people don’t die. Last book the safest people on every side of the conflict were the assholes we want gone. There have now been two attacks leading first to the Abnegation being slaughtered and now the blue Dauntless getting slaughtered back and yet still none of the assholes died, only other people.
The situation might be tolerable if the whole series was doing its best to avoid a death toll. If the Erudite had just been rounding up Abnegation with the intent of turning them into more zombies, for example, then they’d have been attempting the extermination of a faction but been stopped without actually destroying that faction. If they’d just been rounding up divergents and talking about their evil plans later to, say, see how they handled fears in simulation and then stuff them in custom deathtraps to see if there was any change, that’d also have been acceptable, plus that is sort of what you’d expect from people who are trying to science while evil. Maybe they’ve got all sorts of experiments written up that Abnegation was always saying no to!
Kang’s interrogating him in private right now.
Oh, right, also magic truth serum. Hey, wouldn’t it make more sense to have made that their main reason. Also, why private? They made you do it in public and they’re the truth faction. The author could just say it’s happening but that they personally aren’t watching.
“Why storm in here and fire those things at us and then knock us all out? Why not just kill us?”
“No idea,” I say. “The only use I see for it is that it helped them figure out who’s Divergent and who’s not. But that can’t be the only reason they did it.”
Why not? That seems like a perfectly good idea. The divergents are a problem for their zombie plan. Remove the divergents first, them zombify the rest.
But so it is said by a protagonist, and so must it be.
“I don’t get why they have it out for us. I mean, when they were trying to mind control themselves an army, sure, but now? Seems useless.”
I frown as I press a clean paper towel to my shoulder, to stop the bleeding. He’s right. Jeanine already has an army. So why kill the Divergent now?
No, she has half of an army, and incidentally they’re now occupied just facing down the other half of the army. If they try to do anything else, there’s a good chance the other half of the army goes after them. I mean yes, the Dauntless do seem to just be sitting around like idiots, but maybe as little as she thinks of them she’s not underestimating them enough and doesn’t realize she could just go annex the outside the fence Amity to swell her ranks or whatever because the height of Dauntless intelligence gathering is squinting at the Erudite building.
Tris muddles out that “Jeanine doesn’t want to kill everyone,” which no shit she only told you that explicitly and has since acted consistently in that manner. What she wants is control.”
While it is still wrong what Erudite is doing, I’m starting to understand why they don’t view any other faction as being fellow people because holy shit Tris you just worked out the person with a simulation designed to control people she planned to use to seize control of your entire society might possibly value control?
Tris follows up this brilliant revelation by saying “She must be planning another simulation,” I say. “Same thing as before, but this time, she wants to make sure that everyone is either under its influence or dead.”
WHY WAS THIS NOT WHAT EVERYONE’S BEEN ASSUMING THE ENTIRE TIME??????????????
“But the simulation only lasts for a certain period of time,” he says. “It’s not useful unless you’re trying to accomplish something specific.”
Part of the problem would appear to be the author knows the exact length of time the simulation was going to last before, and therefore the characters all know, so she forgot no one reading this book would take the zombification of last time to mean it was a limited effect.
And no one now realizes you could just make sure the final order you gave each time was “inject yourself with this needle” to make it last indefinitely.
“I don’t get what this thing is either. If it was like the other simulation inducing injections, it was just meant for one use. So why shoot these things at us just to put us unconscious? It doesn’t make any sense.”
So apparently that’s also going to be true, despite the fact if their plan had worked they’d only have needed that one use. You round up the divergent and kill them, then go back through and more carefully inject the unconscious with your zombie sim.
Uriah then asks her to keep it a secret that he’s divergent.
We learn that of the hundreds of people in the Merciless Mart, only eighty don’t have needles buried in their flesh, seventy of whom are Dauntless
So looks like my numbers were about right! Candor is measured in the hundreds, and apparently Dauntless was originally maybe two hundred total, assuming the split was actually equal. Maybe three hundred depending on if the Dauntless that got out and avoided getting shot where the majority or minority of the total Dauntless in the building.
I really can’t figure out how any of this works, though. There’s like a million floors and they seem to have been going floor by floor, so apparently they got to the top of the building before the Dauntless who got advanced warning came back and shot them.
It’s weird that Mockingjay was making a big deal about war reducing the human race to the point it’d just go extinct when they had thousands of people even in the smallest district, while here they’re killing people without hesitation despite the fact they may not even have a thousand people total.
You know, maybe Erudite just has a giant bank of embryos and the idea genetic diversity has anything to do with your population size isn’t a concept anyone’s familiar with.
Caleb then pops up and tells he just got there.
I came with Marcus,” he says. “As our only legal political leader, he felt it was his duty to be here
Bear in mind Tobias has confirmed under truth serum that Marcus is very bit the child-abusing bastard Erudite claimed he was in front of the entire Candor faction. Is anyone going to finally react to that?
—we didn’t hear about the attack until an hour ago. One of the factionless saw the Dauntless storming into the building, and news takes a while to travel among the factionless.”
Given he was staying with the factionless who are run by his ex-wife who just met with her son to find out he abused the kid too, apparently not!
Oh yeah, also Peter’s alive. Do you see just how frustrating this is?
Tris heads off to warn Tobias, but then stops because she doesn’t want to tell him in front of everyone. Just lean over and whisper dammit, it’ll be worse if he doesn’t find out and runs into the guy.
Or, I guess, if she tries to go talk to him privately and then the other Dauntless start shouting his dad’s there.
Another one yells, “I saw your daddy here earlier, Eaton! Are you gonna go hide?”
Tobias straightens and stiffens, like someone is training a gun at his chest instead of jeering at him.
“Yeah, are you gonna hide, coward?”
Yeah, no. We’ve never seen the Dauntless react this way toward any fear. The repeated refrain of last book was Dauntless face their fears and try to work past them, with only outsiders being surprised at the idea Dauntless could have fears.
Also, Tobias is generally known as scary, and his nickname indicates he has less fears than anyone else. Now they know he’s only got three other fears. Unless they’re really sure one of the remaining three fears is “stabbing the shit out of people who jeer at me” this is not a wise decision. Oh, right, and also they’re in the middle of an actual war against half their group who joined the people who want to turn them into zombies. (And he’s standing next to his girlfriend who is the sole survivor of the assault to rescue them from that.)
This is wangst for wangst’s sake.
I grab Tobias’s arm and steer him toward the elevators before he can react. He looked like he was about to punch someone. Or worse.
That seems helpful. Tris, steer him back in. The population needs culling.
They head off and Tris tries to work out what the Erudite are planning and stuff, given his mom’s assumption the factionless are next has proven wrong.
“Well, think about it,” he says. “Think it through, like the Erudite.”
I give him a look.
“What?” he says. “If you can’t, the rest of us have no hope.”
They’re fucked.
Tris guesses it’s because the factionless are spread out while Dauntless have just increased Candor’s already high density. But really, the factionless being spread out is only a problem if you’re the borg, otherwise that just makes it easier to overwhelm each section.
He says that also, if Jeanine attacked Abnegation she’s got all the data saying the factionless are full of divergents. But then again, that doesn’t seem to matter now that they’ve got a plan built around figuring out who’s divergent and then shooting those people. But anyway, he says it’s illogical which the book keeps using because it’s trying to get across that the Erudite are evil Vulcans because science is about coldness and sacrificing babies.
“The transmitter and the liquid that induces the simulation. The transmitter communicates information to the brain from the computer, and vice versa, and the liquid alters the brain to put it in a simulation state.”
I nod. “And the transmitter only works for one simulation, right? What happens to it after that?”
“It dissolves,” he says. “As far as I know, the Erudite haven’t been able to develop a transmitter that lasts for more than one simulation
Maybe if the author paid more attention to science than ranting about evil Vulcans, she’d know that making a transmitter dissolve as soon as you’re done with it is actually difficult and has to be done on purpose, while making a chunk of metal you stick in someone stay stuck in them is really easy.
Apparently he hasn’t been brought up to speed about the needles, so she explains they were shot and then the canisters knocked almost everyone out, and by the way did he know Uriah’s divergent? Yes. Tris is momentarily irritated he kept it a secret before realizing that’s unreasonable. I wonder how she’d feel knowing that Tobias knew all the divergent were being murdered but only cared about protecting Tris from that.
“You saved our lives, you know,” I say. “Eric was trying to hunt us down.”
“I think we’re past keeping track of who has saved whose life.”
Yeah, I really wonder how she’d take the short story and his fuck everyone who isn’t this hot chick attitude.
Tris then just knows that Jeanine has cracked the issue of a transmitter and the new one will last forever so they can take over anyone ever. Wouldn’t the more likely limiting factor being the chemical? That seems way more likely to degrade rapidly over time.
Tobias decides what he really wants to talk about is how amazing it is she went up after escaping instead of escaping, especially with her gun phobia.
“What makes you think I didn’t have a gun?” I scowl.
Tris, you said you would try to be more honest.
Tobias says she should’ve stayed with Amity, she says she hates Amity, he says she’s acting suicidal.
“I was trying to do something useful!”
For a few seconds he just stares at me.
“You’re more than Dauntless,” he says in a low voice. “But if you want to be just like them, hurling yourself into ridiculous situations for no reason and retaliating against your enemies without any regard for what’s ethical, go right ahead. I thought you were better than that, but maybe I was wrong!”
We have seen zero evidence of that from Dauntless. We’ve also seen zero evidence of anyone but Peter “retaliating against your enemies without any regard for what’s ethical”. This is just nonsense.
Anyway she just says fuck you the Dauntless gave you everything.
The tiles in the Merciless Mart are always black and white, and here they are in a checkered pattern. If I unfocus my eyes, I see exactly what the Candor don’t believe in—gray.
Well, that’s dramatic and all, but it doesn’t change the fact this conversation has gotten incredibly stupid.
He explains he’s scared he’ll lose her.
I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that he might be right. There is a part of me that wants to be lost, that struggles to join my parents and Will so that I don’t have to ache for them anymore.
Why can’t girls just risk their lives for important causes because they’re heroic?
The real problem, I guess, is that Tris isn’t acting suicidal. There was a good chance there would be people outside if she ran (though no one seems aware of this, it’s reasonable to surround the building and would’ve stopped Dauntless’ counterattack) and a good chance that even if she escaped, Erudite would’ve turned on the factionless in the next phase and killed her then. So running just delays the inevitable a bit. Meanwhile, heading up let her save people.
At most, it was stupid to try to follow after the group instead of also trying to go to a higher floor for reinforcements…but we’ve just been listening to Tris struggle though to figuring out the person with CONTROL IS AWESOME written on every inch of her clothes might possibly be into controlling things, so yes, she is legitimately stupid enough to have not realized that.
Maybe if Tris’ plan had been to just sneak up behind and then stab Eric to death. That would indeed have been pretty suicidal for dubious gain.
She returns to find one of her friends flirting to Caleb and wonders what he’ll think of her faction and vice versa. And she thinks about how he’s the only family I have left and I feel desperate, desperate to keep him around, desperate to narrow the gap between us.
Which is both a nicely realized reaction for Tris and also really annoying because once again the book is ignoring its faction before blood bit. Tris expected that her brother choosing Erudite meant they would never see each other again, and her own choice of Dauntless meant she expected never to see her parents again either.
Lynn asks who Susan is and learns she’s Abnegation.
“Don’t you think that’s kind of a stupid move? I mean, when all this is over, you’ll be in different factions, living in completely different places…
Marlene says to not talk about that, but no, what exactly does this look like in practice? We’re told that factions only interact with their own members, and that lots of kids leave their families and friends for a new faction, and that the new faction is meant to be their new and only family. So what actually happens? Is this some weird blip because the chaos has caused him to be able to jump between factions? But if it’s not supposed to happen, why doesn’t anyone act like it’s weird or unexpected that it’s happening? (Plus, he’s already abandoned Erudite, and Erudite may not even exist as a faction when this is over, so he could just rejoin Abnegation.)
Speaking of, Cara, Will’s sister, walks in and goes to where a few tables of Erudite refugees sit. Not knowing the size of the tables, we can’t make estimates, but evidently, at least a handful of Erudite left like Caleb did. Why wasn’t that mentioned before? Tris tells us they’ve mostly switched to Candor colors (so are they actually joining Candor or what?) but they still wear their glasses MAYBE THEY ACTUALLY NEED THEM.
“I can’t go back to Erudite any more than they can,” says Caleb. “When this is over, I won’t have a faction.”
That’s melodramatic. Abnegation has been gutted and he’s the kid of a dead official who died saving them. They’d let him back in.
Tris realizes that wow, he actually misses the stupid geek faction, and says he can go sit with the other former Erudites.
“I don’t know them.” He shrugs. “I was only there for a month, remember?”
Yeah, but you could have a conversation about thinky things without Tris or her friends shoving your head in a toilet. Really, when you remove the part where the factions are insane they actually start to make sense – Tris is happy around other thrillseekers, Caleb is happy to finally be able to learn stuff and talk to people about it, whatshisface was presumably really happy to be able to smile and hug people as part of being nice instead of a joyless Puritan, etc.
Come to think of it, the only faction where it’s not clear if people actually like the community is Abnegation itself. Susan stays but we know they guilt-trip the kids into that, so it doesn’t tell us anything, and we know Tris’ mom did it for survival.
Uriah says he heard someone else say that Eric said during interrogation that he didn’t know anything. Of course, for all we know Eric’s another divergent. Maybe he’s even a triple divergent like Tris – I mean, he seems Erudite/Dauntless, but maybe being triple is why he was so sure she was one too.
Caleb says this is totally reasonable – if you don’t tell anyone the whole plan, then no one person can give you away. Further evidence they’re IQ cultists with a strict hierarchy and don’t have much to do with knowledge, because I can’t imagine anyone valuing knowledge thinking it’s best for the group to have as little information about what’s happening as possible.
For the record, Eric having any idea what he was supposed to do with the divergent might have let him make better decisions than ferrying all of them to a single location and only then shooting most of them.
“I heard the Candor made ice cream,” says Marlene, twisting her head around to see the lunch line. “You know, as a kind of ‘it sucks we got attacked, but at least there are desserts’ thing.”
“I feel better already,” says Lynn dryly.
“It probably won’t be as good as Dauntless cake,” says Marlene mournfully. She sighs, and a strand of mousy brown hair falls in her eyes.
“We had good cake,” I tell Caleb.
“We had fizzy drinks,” he says.
What.
Apparently joining a faction also means you only get one form of dessert as well. They really took the hat distribution seriously.
“Ah, but did you have a ledge overlooking an underground river?” says Marlene, waggling her eyebrows. “Or a room where you faced all your nightmares at once?”
“No,” says Caleb, “and to be honest, I’m kind of okay with that.”
Oh, Caleb, you’re fun. There’s really been a lack of snark.
“Si-ssy,” sings Marlene.
“All your nightmares?” says Caleb, his eyes lighting up.
…but then it’s ruined by poor editing. The author wrote two responses and didn’t realize she’d doubled up or worse, realized it made no sense but liked both answers so she didn’t want to delete one, and was too damn lazy to do the minimal editing to fit both in – all the other kids need to do is mention the nightmares again and that’d let Caleb start to think about it more seriously.
He starts asking where the nightmares come from, the computer or your own brain, and the response is actually interesting:
“Oh God.” Lynn drops her head into her hands. “Here we go.”
That looks like Tris and Tobias’ reaction, right? But she’s not talking about Caleb!
Marlene launches into a description of the simulations
No, Marlene apparently is just as geeky, at least on this subject, to the point that Lynn finds this predictable. Marlene and Caleb bond over possessing basic curiosity while Tris tunes them out and then passes out in exhaustion on the table. Because hey, how simulations work has only been the topic you were discussing multiple times, why would there be any point in listening to people who know how it works?