Tris hits the floor and realizes that she wasn’t shot with a bullet, but she was shot with something because the force of it knocked her over.

Sigh.

Look, bullets are not some sort of magic murder capsules that impart special ability to kill people by dint of being bullets. They are blunt objects flung with great force. If you fling something, anything, with great enough force to knock a person over (which most bullets don’t even do!) then…well, then it’s basically a bullet anyway. Well, anything small. You could throw a beanbag chair at someone and knock them over and not have bullet effects, but I think you get my point.

Tris finds something bumpy under the skin of her shoulder.

So she was hit with something that penetrated her skin, but also had enough force to knock her over, but also also was polite enough to not pass all the way through her body?

Then someone throws out a canister that sprays white smoke, but only for a few seconds. Everyone but Tris falls unconscious, so she plays alone while the rest of the Erudite-Dauntless invaders walk through on their way to the elevators. Eric is with them. I can’t tell you how little I care. I barely remember Eric from the last book. Did he…do stuff? I mean, that was unique to him, not just generic “Erudite is evil but also very, very stupidly evil” stuff?

“Not sure why we can’t just shoot them all in the head,” one of them says. “If there’s no army, we win.”

“Now, Bob, we can’t just kill everyone,” a cold voice says. […] “No people means no one left to create prosperous conditions,”

Okay, but, why not just shoot the people with the guns, then? Bob is pretty specifically talking about the people in this room and ‘army’ so I don’t think he means shoot all the Candor in the building, and…well, that is one way to end a war; kill all of the other side’s fighters. (Then again, this isn’t a war, it’s not organized enough to be a war, this is…idk, a coup?) Also, what are these people going to do to create ‘prosperous conditions’? Their only job is one Bob and his group is already doing, plus they’re pissed at you, plus they (ostensibly) know how to fight, seems like if you leave them alive they’d do the opposite of peaceful and prosperous.

So I guess basically Eric is still around to be just a mouthpiece for how stupidly evil Erudite still is?

There’s a gun a few feet to my left. If I opened my eyes, I could grab it and fire at him before he knew what hit him. But there’s no guarantee I would be able to touch it without panicking again.

While I do like Tris’s gun phobia, I would like to take this moment to point out that she has still had exactly half a day of target practice. In her entire gun-toting career, that’s it. Half a day.

No other practice. At all. Ever.

She played capture the flag once, and there was all that firing at people during the climax, but panicked firing where you’re not even sure if you hit stuff isn’t great ‘practice.’

So she keeps going on as if her gun phobia is her only impediment and she’d be Rambo without it, but she has literally had half a day of target practice, ever, and there’s every reason to believe that even if she could hold one of those things steady she’d just wind up hitting the wall anyway.

I mean, not that you’ll get the book to admit that, because the book thinks half a day is all you need in order to become a sharpshooter during frikkin combat conditions, but still.

So, if you live in the states and you want to write about guns, see about going to a gun range. I’m not sure how it is all over, but the ones I’ve been to will let you rent firearms from them to shoot, so you literally can just go in for a day to see what it’s like and need no further commitment. (Well, you’ll need a safety class, but every single range I’ve ever seen offers those, because it’s bad for business if you get yourself shot. Also the people working there really like firearms, so if you need help they will help you, because they want you to do it properly and have a good time.) Seriously, just take a day. Fire one. See what it’s like. See how much it’s possible to learn (or not learn) in a single day’s time.

And if you can’t do that, because it’s not an option everywhere and it does take some money, talk to someone who has. Ask me if you have no one else.

Whatever they gassed us with, it had to be simulation-inducing or I wouldn’t be the only one awake. It doesn’t make any sense—it doesn’t follow the simulation rules I’m familiar with—but I don’t have time to think it through.

When you point out that your own science doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t actually make it better.

Why is everything a simulation in these books? Why is it that even when they have the technology to make such advanced products as the ‘serums’, they can’t also make just ‘knock out gas.’ I mean, that’s not actually a thing currently, not a safe version anyway, but neither is mind control serum, so…

Good god, I’m still on the first page.

Tris goes to loot a jacket from one of the dead traitor-Dauntless, and I’m pleased that she has such a hard time with the concept but still thinks it’s necessary enough to work through it. Uriah turns out to also be Divergent and does the same thing, and they run after the other group to try and find out what they’re doing.

Tris figures that the newcomers are going to go through each floor and knock people out one by one, and she figures this out through the evidence of…god powers, I guess, so she sends Uriah up to the third floor ahead of the group to tell people to evacuate. She goes through the second floor behind the invading group looking for Divergent.

Because apparently Tris is the only person in the world smart enough to ‘play dead until alone and then run away,’ even though Uriah just did that…

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.

Unconscious…mind controlled zombie walking around…it’s basically the same thing, right?

We are the only faction that could divide like this. […] We really are the cruelest faction.

You know what would really help with this?

Any idea, literally any idea at all, of why half the Dauntless decided to side with the people who mind-controlled them.

Erudite is the coldest of the five

Knowledge is a costly thing

I am more convinced than ever that this author’s entire concept of ‘smart people’ comes from watching Vulcans on Star Trek. No one who has met an actual scientist would think they are emotionless.

Or, hell, an actual ‘anything that requires more than a four-year degree.’ Science ain’t the only over-educated field.

Is this a running theme? I feel like I’ve come across the ‘scientists are cold and unfeeling’ thing in more than just this, but all I can think of at the moment is The Iron King. I guess it makes sense, if you see literary trends as being super-simplified versions of our current beliefs and fears. A lot of the environmental debate is framed as ‘science vs nature’ and how technology and science is fucking shit up, and I guess if you could distill that sort of a binary belief down to ‘scientists must not care about anything if they’re cold enough to keep fucking over our planet.’

I mean, it’s still wrong, but I can kind of see how someone who only half-watches the news and doesn’t think about it too hard could come to that conclusion.

Turns out the other group is doing the same thing Tris is, but they’re collecting up the Divergent/awake people to, as Eric puts it, ‘decide who to kill and who keep’ later. Tris speeds up her search by stepping on people to see who reacts to pain, because yeah, that pretty much is the best option here, it’s not like she’s actually injuring anyone and time is of the essence.

She finds one little girl who’s awake and tells her to run when no one’s looking, but unfortunately Eric was looking and he catches Tris.

“I was surprised to discover you were still alive,” he says. “Considering I’m the one who told Jeanine to construct that water tank just for you.”

Really? So that really was a purpose-built death trap of inanity? Sigh.

I try to figure out what I can do that will be painful enough for him to release me. I’ve just decided on a hard kick to the groin

Kneecaps. Always go for kneecaps. Plenty of men can power through a groin kick, but if you kick someone’s knee backwards, shit’s done, son. It hurts worse, AND even if they have a high enough pain tolerance, it doesn’t matter, because the knee just plain doesn’t work after that so they can’t chase you anyway.

But Tris spends too long thinking about where to kick and he gets a better submission hold on her and starts marching her down the hall.

“Sometimes creativity seems wasteful, illogical … unless it’s done for a greater purpose. In this case, the accumulation of knowledge.”

You are literally the worst scientists I have even ever heard of.

They get to the elevators where some traitor-Dauntless are guarding all the other Divergent.

“I want one gun on her at all times,” says Eric. “Not just aimed at her. On her.”

A Dauntless man pushes a gun barrel into the back of my neck.

GUNS ARE RANGED WEAPONS FOR A FUCKING REASON YOU FUCKING DIPSHIT.

All this means is that now the damn thing is close enough for her to grab. How does “gun pointed at the person, but too far away for them to actually attack you” make less sense than “jam it into their neck where they can easily grab it or kick you or any number of other things”?

“I’m not stupid,” he says, pushing his hands through his hair. “That little-girl act may have worked on me before, but it won’t work again. You’re the best attack dog they’ve got.”

But is she? Is she really?

Tris…isn’t actually that great of a fighter. I mean, sure, she’s active, which puts her above like 90% of other YA heroines, but objectively? Most of her involvement in the plot comes from either convenience or her ability to just be awake, not from any actual skill she’s got, and she hasn’t displayed particularly impressive fighting ability so far since everything has been either ‘training’ or ‘running away’ or ‘melee in which it’s hard to judge skills anyway and also you were part of a group of people all doing the same thing.’ I’m struggling to think of a time when she’s actually been an exceptional fighter, much less better than the whole rest of the “we live for fighting” group.

Also when has she ever had a ‘little girl act’? She’s little, she’s a girl, but mostly she doesn’t really act like it. She just acts like everyone else, while being mildly short, but not shorter than everyone else since there were other short Dauntless girls around to give her clothes…

Someone else brings Uriah around because he got caught too, and then Tris remembers that she still has a knife in her pocket. So I guess next chapter we get to see some improbably knife fighting skills, which she has had zero days of training in. (Remember, all they did was throw them, not fight with them.)