Tris goes back to her room to check on the gun she hid there, but she finds that holding it again is too much for her to handle and she’s still in the grips of trauma from shooting people. (Oh, excuse me, from shooting Will. Although, fixating on one point that is more familiar to you in a sea of bad memories does happen, but I’m still pissed off that she shot all those guards and no one has said anything about it.)

While she’s in there, she overhears Marcus and Johanna walking outside her window.

I am out of my room before I can evaluate why I want to follow them.

I’m guessing it’s the same reason you went to go see your brother in the last book: it happens to be convenient and your author wanted you to.

Johanna is wondering if Jeanine attacked now because her methods were finally in place or if there was some other inciting event. Marcus acts cagey until she calls him out on it and admits that there’s some uber secret special information that Abnegation had, and Jeanine wanted to steal it. He refuses to say what this information was, though.

Johanna reminds him that they’ve been friends for a long time so she hopes he’ll come to trust her, but she won’t push, and then she leaves. Tris fixates on an comment Marcus made about ‘leaders risking their lives for this info’ and wonders if her parents were part of that group, so she goes off to find Tobias to talk to him about it.

She finds Tobias and Caleb in Tobais’s room throwing knives at cheese. You know, as you do. (They only get five minutes of shower time, but you can take a giant wheel of cheese out of the kitchens?)

“Caleb came by to discuss something,” Tobias says, leaning his head against the wall as he looks at me. “And knife-throwing just came up somehow.”

“As it so often does,” I say

Hey, don’t steal my jokes, book.

They mention a book/manual that Caleb is reading right before he leaves.

“Thanks for that,” I say. “Now he’s going to talk my ear off about water filtration and how it works. Though I guess I might prefer that to what he wants to talk to me about.”

Shut up, Tris, you could do with a touch more curiosity. Your world is shaky as shit; learning more about it wouldn’t hurt. At least even if it doesn’t fit together, we can straight-up blame it on the author instead of the fact that details keep floating around detached from everything else.

Especially right now, Tris’s lack of curiosity about the world hurts us. Everything is thrown into so much confusion and there’s a mysterious “information” cropping up, we need someone who can observe and report instead of relying on what she’s “always known.” We’ve reached the point where the party line is being challenged, so if Tris doesn’t start getting curious, we’re going to be flying blind because the only info we do have (party line) is fucked.

But also in general non-curious characters are boring as shit.

“I told him how we got together—that’s how knife-throwing came up,” he says, “and I told him I wasn’t messing around.”

The lack of symmetry in this punctuation hurts me. I don’t think it’s technically wrong, but still.

Tris tells him about the conversation she overheard, but Tobias dismisses it. He doesn’t think anything is technically a lie, but he thinks Marcus is probably playing up the value of the info in order to make himself look more important. Tobias would rather focus on finding out what’s going on in the city and taking Erudite down (because in the logic of this book’s world it’s just so obvious that they’re in power now?) rather than investigating.

When I found out that I was Divergent … when I found out that Erudite would attack Abnegation … those revelations changed everything. The truth has a way of changing a person’s plans.

While I like the sentiment, finding out that she was Divergent changed jack-zero-diddly for Tris. Literally the whole book could have gone down the same if she was 100% Dauntless. Okay, she’d need the serum resistance part, too, but being able to buck hallucinations wasn’t actually part of her plan, it was just a thing that happened to happen.