The next day all the Candor and Dauntless gather to talk about what happened during the attack.

“I have heard many reports from a variety of perspectives, and have gotten a sense for what is straightforward and what requires more investigation.”

[…]

“What seems to me to require more investigation,” Jack says, “is the Divergent.”

*sigh* Of course that’s what you’d say. Because why bother investigating anything logical when you can just keep harping on what the book thinks is oh-so-clever?

They ask for the Divergent to step forward and be questioned, because apparently in the middle of a giant crowd is the perfect time to do this. What was Jack doing during that whole ‘listening to reports’ time period and why couldn’t he have done this then? Especially since publically marking people out as special right now doesn’t seem terrible safe.

Anyway, Marcus is one of the people who step forward so he starts talking.

“I understand that you are concerned—that you all are concerned. You had never heard of the Divergent a week ago

So no one heard of them, they just have bedtime stories and fables about them?

I think this is an editing problem. Different drafts of the book went in slightly different directions each time, and when they got combined in the final round of edits no one bothered to make sure it all hung together properly.

“No, I do not [know why the Erudite were looking for us],” says Marcus. “Perhaps their intention was merely to identify us. It seems like useful information to have, if they intend to use their simulations again.”

“That was not their intention.” The words are past my lips before I decide to speak them. My voice sounds high and weak compared to Marcus’s and Jack’s, but it’s too late to stop. “They wanted to kill us. They’ve been killing us since before any of this happened.”

1) “looking for” and “so that I can kill them” are not even close to conflicting.

2) Eric out-and-out said they were going to experiment on at least some of you.

3) indentifying and killing everyone before another simulation seems like a perfectly logical guess, since you fucked up their last simulation by being awake.

Again, the book knows what’s going to happen and has all the characters react as if they’ve read the script, instead of flowing out of what’s already happened. And again, it’s not like thing wouldn’t work if they guessed wrong, because Erudite is going to keep doing their do whether our main characters know it or not.

Jack thinks that the claim Divergents have been going mysteriously dead for years are a wild conspiracy theory, so Tobias points out that they have record of a dozen mysterious deaths of people who have Divergent-like simulation results.

Jack shakes his head. “While that is intriguing, correlation does not constitute evidence.”

Okay, I’m more convinced than ever that these people know exactly SHIT about investigation and truth-seeking and instead rely 100% on truth serums and it’s crippled their intended purpose.

Jack says that since the Erudite clearly only want a small fraction of people and not to harm the rest, he’s going to try and broker a peace deal with Jeanine. Tris drops the bombshell that the Erudite plan another simulation, and Jack doesn’t believe her.

Jack is the only person talking besides our main characters. Why did they need a giant auditorium audience for this?

I can’t launch an attack based on a little girl’s speculations.”

And then Tris fumes about how everyone sees her as a little girl.

I don’t really understand this. It’s another thing that seems to have popped up in this book and is unevenly applied. In the last book, she was slight in stature and that worked against her in the fights, but that’s different from specifically being seen as ‘child-like.’ Mostly she was treated the same age as everyone else, that age being ‘young adult,’ since her age group is out of school and embarking on an adult life. Only the bullies called her a child, and that specifically while taunting her in one instance. In this book, Marcus called her a little girl, once. Other than that, she’s been treated as and interacted with people as and acts as a young adult. Which is in keeping with what would be normal for their society, since they let 16 y/o’s make adult life path choices. The fact that Tris is short doesn’t de facto make her a child, either in fact or in public perception. So ‘little girl’ comes up out of the blue and seems to serve no purpose except to shut down the conversation.

He’s right. We can’t attack Dauntless traitors and Erudite without Candor’s numbers. It would be a bloodbath if we tried.

Seems like it would a bloodbath even with Candor, given the fact that they’re not exactly a group full of Rambos. Then again, Erudite isn’t either, maybe you could pit the extras against each other.

Anyway, Tris decides that since they don’t have the Candor to be cannon fodder, they need the factionless.