At breakfast, Caleb monologues about how cool all the farming tech is, while Tris does her damndest to drown him out, because she’s got an aptitude for Erudite but she’s still doing everything in her power to suppress it, apparently.

It doesn’t sit well with me, how much our society needs Erudite to function. But they are essential—without them, there would be inefficient farming, insufficient medical treatments, and no technological advance.

…why do you hate science so much?

We find out that Amity is completely self-sufficient, as well as supplying the whole rest of the city with food, which makes me wonder why they put up with all these other leeches. I mean, what does Candor do? Really? And Dauntless? They patrol the gate that…Amity is outside of… Abnegation doesn’t seem to really be doing much either. Amity is self-governing (like all the factions? Maybe?) and they don’t really need any charity. Amity and Erudite are literally the only useful factions in this whole set up.

They spend a while talking about Tris’s Divergent-ness, and Caleb says that getting two scores on an aptitude test is really rare because the program doesn’t really allow for it; getting three scores should be even more impossible and only worked because the test-giver manually overrode the program. So…so isn’t it possible then that tons of people are Divergent and just the test is broken? Because it sounds more like getting a two-faction aptitude is more a matter of loopholes and luck than, ya know, actual aptitude. Maybe everyone is Divergent and their tests just ended too early to tell. Maybe Caleb could have scored for four factions and the test just didn’t let him. Maybe Amity is stuffed chock full of Divergent kids who just happened to be hungry around test time so they picked the cheese.

They go on about her Divergent-ness in what is basically a summary of the last book.

“Sorry,” he says, focusing on me again. “It’s just …”

“Fascinating. Yeah, I know. You always look like someone’s sucked the life right out of you when something fascinates you.”

Good god, it’s like this book’s only experience with education is with people who don’t like it and so they assume all ‘smart stuff’ comes along with a vacant and/or pained expression.

Which, really, would explain a lot.

Tobias comes over all agitated but won’t say why, and then Marcus shows up, too.

Apparently the Abnegation have decided that staying in Amity would be selfish so they want to go back into the city, and they want Tris (and Tobias?) to escort them. Because…it’s not selfish to ask for an escort? Anyway, they’re going to leave in two days.

Not much for this chapter, alas. Most of it was just random talking, nothing really objectionable, although for all I know the science Caleb was going on about could be shifty. Still, it’s hard to get really ranty over breakfast and soil supplements.