Tris decides Marcus is a lying liar who lies, so after breakfast she decides to go stalk him.

Marcus heads to a water filtration building, which is just a small structure with a couple of machines and pumps.

There the pipes are transparent. I can see brown-tinged water rushing through one pipe, disappearing into the machine, and emerging clear.

…no.

Just…no.

This is not how water treatment works. There isn’t some magical machine that can instantly take out…sewage? and issue forth potable water all in one small machine. This reads like a five-year-old’s concept of water treatment because it’s so basic. Now, again, this is the future with hallucination serums, so maybe things have progressed to the point that they can do this. But in that case…this is still really fucking simple and dull. Tris shows almost no interest in the world around her, so we’re getting very little details on how things run, so why waste one of the few details we do get on “water treatment is down to one machine”? If the water treatment being simple was an important point, then okay, but otherwise, at least make your shit sewage interesting.

Tris decides to announce her presence and inform Marcus that she was eavesdropping on him yesterday.

“I’m a naturally curious person. Don’t change the subject.”

*coughcoughBULLSHIT*

Tris says she wants to know if her parents died to protect this information that Marcus refuses to talk about, and Marcus says yes.

“You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time.”

Since Tris is the main character of the book we know she’s going to do other stuff, but the rest of it doesn’t exactly ring untrue.

They trade insults for a while, and then Tris leaves, never once asking herself one important question: why the fuck did Marcus go there? I mean, if the book really needed him to just be somewhere alone so Tris could talk to him, wouldn’t an abandoned hallway, a quiet path outside, or even his bedroom do just as well? But no, he specifically went out of his way to this building that he has no reason to be in, because…??? Tris, the ‘naturally curious’ one, has no fucks to give.

Tris has a dream about Will and wakes up in the middle of the night disoriented and grief-stricken, so she goes to Tobias’s room looking for comfort. They snuggle and talk mushy and kiss and it’s a legitimately nice little bit. Affectionate and supportive without overshadowing the issue that brought her in there in the first place.

They start getting hot and heavy, but Tris decides that she doesn’t want her first time having sex with him to be just because she’s trying to forget her grief.

I know that I am birdlike, made narrow and small as if for taking flight, built straight-waisted and fragile.

Ugh, books, please, can we just stop this? Small women are not inherently fragile, we’ve had a whole first book showing us Tris can (improbably, but still) kick ass, and there’s no reason she can’t be narrow and strong. It’s called ‘lean’ or sometimes ‘lithe’ and there’s nothing wrong with those words. Stop fetishizing ‘fragile’ and stop mixing it with physical prowess like muscled women need to have that so they can still be sexy.

Anyway, Tobias is very understanding and supportive, and that makes Tris finally give in to unrestrained sobbing, and then they both go to sleep. I didn’t really like Tobias/Tris in the first book – it was serviceable but not stellar – but so far in this one they’re really sweet.