The next morning Tris goes to clean up in the warehouse bathroom, where she has to birdbath it in a sink alongside several others. Because apparently in this world where they don’t have plates, they do have working indoor plumbing???

Was the idea just that they were sharing cans because they didn’t know/didn’t care about germs? Was the book trying to show off that Tris is ‘so smart’ and not that the factionless were ‘so plateless’? Because that’s a whole new level of fail, right there. Human ingenuity knows no class, and it’s not hard to figure out you shouldn’t be double dipping your spoon on a regular basis. We haven’t all eaten out of a communal bowl for ages before anyone even thought of germs, so it’s not like you need to know one before you come up with the other.

Speaking of human ingenuity knowing no bounds, showers are a cinch to hook up once you’ve got running water. Hell, they’re pretty easy as long as you have water, period. All you need is something to keep the water up high and let gravity do the rest. You could take any group of reasonably intelligent human beings with no education and give them running water and they’d have an improvised shower built inside an hour. (Assuming you asked them to; if they’d never seen a shower they might not think there’s any need for such a thing.) And these are no ‘uneducated’ people; these were the middle class people who just got kicked out to the city dump for bullshit reasons, so they even are accustomed to the convenience of a shower and have reason to want to build one.

But, hey, admitting that people living on the fringes of society are god-damn resourceful as hell would get in the way of the poverty porn, wouldn’t it?

Susan comes by and they chat about how different their lives turned out, and then they see some people wandering off to go paint secret codes for the other factionless people to see. Evelyn explains that she developed the code that they use.

I am not sure why she would choose to tell me something about the factionless codes until I turn around. I see a familiar look in her eyes—it is the same as the one Jeanine wore when she told Tobias she had developed a serum that could control him: pride.

Ooo, yes, how dare she…do a good job and actually realize that? The horror! Secret codes are just like mind controlling someone!

Evelyn mentions she was born in Erudite, and when Tris tries to turn that into an insult, Evelyn mentions that Tris’s father was born there, too. Tris is utterly flabbergasted by this, though I’m not sure why. Everyone knows that people change factions, and they have it hammered into them that “faction before blood,” so why would the knowledge of someone’s home faction matter at all? Why wouldn’t the reaction be “and? He was clearly Abnegation at heart, that’s why he moved.”

But for some reason this cuts Tris to the quick, and she gets mad at Evelyn for it. She says that she’ll warn Tobias away from Evelyn, because Evelyn is obviously trying to manipulate him into something.

“My dear girl,” she says. “I am his family. I am permanent. You are only temporary.”

Again, they grew up in a society where once you turn 16, if you don’t pick your home faction, you literally have no family anymore. Or you get a new family, depending on how you look at it. Families are the definition of impermanence in this world, not the other way around. So why would this argument have any weight at all? We had last chapter a nice little bit of ‘product of her upbringing’ thinking, and now we’ve switched over to ‘thinking pretty much just like the audience.’

She goes to find her brother eating peanut butter.

I remember the rows of peanut plants in the Amity greenhouses. They grow peanuts because they are high in protein and fat, which is important for the factionless in particular.

So they need dense, efficient food, but also they have enough cans of the stuff to eat as much as they want and even let guests snack in between?

Also, how big are those greenhouses? That’s not generally considered a sustainable way to grow food crops. Why wouldn’t they plant foods that are habitable to the area and can be grown en mass instead of using greenhouses just for the sake of growing a variety of food closer to the audience’s diet?

Anyway, Caleb wants to go with Susan to what’s left of the Abnegation faction.

“Why don’t you come with us?” he asks. “Abnegation would welcome you back; I’m sure of it.”

So am I—the Abnegation don’t hold grudges.

So if you can join/rejoin the Abnegation faction at any time because ‘no grudges,’ then what’s with all the factionless people?

Afterwards, Tris and Tobias spontaneously decide to go check out the Candor headquarters. Just…really spontaneously.

Our eyes meet across the room, and I know it’s time to leave.

Candor headquarters is large enough to contain an entire world. Or so it seems to me.

And that’s all we get.

Okay, I guess we’re over at Candor now. Which, by the way, is the Merchandise Mart repurposed.

Abnegation has houses in a neighborhood, but these people are in a commercial building and the Dauntless are underground? What, did all the houses and apartments in Chicago evaporate like the suburbs?

[Tobias] seemed so determined to get to Candor headquarters that I wonder if he’s planning something without me.

When has he been ‘so determined’? Somewhere in the mysterious void of that paragraph break?

They walk in and see a bunch of Dauntless just standing around in the lobby. Why? Who the fuck knows. Probably because they think this counts as guarding, instead of, you know, being outside to see threats coming before they get into the enclosed space.

A Dauntless soldier with an arm in a sling approaches us, gun held ready, barrel fixed on Tobias.

Yup. These guys are idiots who think you can guard a building from inside the front door.

And now that Tris and Tobias are in there, the other Dauntless don’t seem to know what to do. The lady pointing a gun at Tobias gets slightly panicked, and there’s clearly no established protocols for what’s supposed to happen when someone casually walks in the front door.

Evelyn wants these idiots for their ‘combat experience?’

They finally get themselves sorted out and search the pair for weapons, then the lady with the gun informs Tobias that they’re supposed to arrest both of them. Dun dun dun.