The serum wears off hours later, after which point Tris is suitably furious at being jacked up on happy juice without so much as a by-your-leave.

Tobias comes in and decides to hide the flash drive in the exact same place as before, because apparently Peter won’t think to look there again. Um…why not? I tend to look in the same place repeatedly out of reflex/habit/weird brain quirk and it’s a common enough occurrence, plus there’s no reason for Peter to not look there since it only takes a second to peek behind a dresser. And why do they have to hide it at all?

In fact, why are they keeping it? We’ve had it implied that there’s something else on the hard drive (for no good reason, but still) but they stoutly refuse to look at it. If it really has just the simulation data on it (as it should, since Tobias is the one that put this thing together, and unless it had a file on it already or Tobias was snatching random files to download then…???) then they should either destroy it or talk about plans to use the information. Maybe show it to the other faction leaders as proof of…shit, I don’t know, it’s kind of hard to really make any sort of predictive anything right now when we don’t know what’s going on the city. And while the characters should be just as clueless, they are acting like they have at least some sort of an idea of what’s going on. The result is that it feels like the book is assuming “the situation back in the city is just so obvious, everyone knows what’s going on except for the details.” But the only “so obvious” thing I can think of is that all the Dauntless got pissed off at being mind-controlled and burned down the Erudite camp, and if that’s what happened then all of these Amity chapters are pointless.

Basically the entire transition from one book to the next so far is extremely clumsy, and it feels like Divergent was written and finished before Insurgent finished taking shape. The last book, for all its faults, did have a nice, solid ending, and as such it’s really hard to suddenly decide to change the game on the first page of the new book. It just makes all the characters look like idiots.

Anyway, then they wonder why Tris couldn’t fight off the serum if she could break the other hallucination serum.

For some reason, no one bothers to point out that these two drugs obviously do vastly different things to the brain, and there’s no reason to think that any one trick will work against both or even that they are in the same category except as “liquid something or other that gets injected.” The fact that they’re both called ‘serum’ doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re connected, especially since the book isn’t following any real definition of serum in the first place. (BTW: serum – the thin, clear part of blood or plant fluids.)

Later Tris decides to go climb trees because she’s too embarrassed to be social and too grieving to sit still. She hears a truck coming and knows it must be Erudite because the Amity only deliver their goods on the weekend. For…some reason. So she climbs the tree for a better look.

Cars with black roofs—solar panels, which means only one thing. Erudite.

Okay, but, why? Isn’t the whole point of dividing all the jobs up so that the faction best suited can do the stuff for the whole city? Amity doesn’t grow food for Amity, they grow it for everyone. Dauntless doesn’t patrol a fence around Dauntless, they go around the whole city. So why does Erudite keep their solar powered cars? Are these an experimental design not ready for mass production?

My guess is there is no reason, because Insurgent.

Tris runs to the dining hall to warn everyone, and they decide that the best course of action is for everyone to dress like Amity so that they won’t be able to tell refugee from not.

When Tris is in her room, she has a couple of moments. First she hates picking up the gun she has, even though she does it anyway, though she doesn’t seem inclined to use it readily. Then she struggles with what to do with the hard drive, since she doesn’t want to destroy the only record of her parents. Both of these take about a page, they are good emotional quandaries to have, and they come up naturally and with enough presence to be felt but without stopping the narrative in order to dwell on them. I like it.

Of course then Tris destroys the thing anyway. Man, that hard drive was pretty fucking useless, wasn’t it? They never looked at it, never used it, never planned to use it… It’s like the book suddenly lost interest in the thing (making it even more obvious that the plot of this book was not nailed down prior to the final draft of the last book).

(Seriously, people, at least have a solid outline of your series before publishing the first book.)

The Erudite arrive, and they have Dauntless people with them who all have blue ribbons around their arms to signify they sided with Erudite.

When the Dauntless come closer, I see strips of blue fabric wrapped around their arms that can only signify their allegiance to Erudite. The faction that enslaved their minds.

Tobias takes my hand and leads me into the dormitory.

“I didn’t think our faction would be that stupid,” he says.

Sweetie, this goes beyond stupid. This…well, basically, this is leaving out information from your book and then carrying merrily along as if the audience knows everything you know. If we had any indication before this point that Erudite had tried to explain away the simulation, or even that they had recruited before and mind-controlled the ones that didn’t agree, or just literally any attempt at all to fucking explain this shit right here, okay, you can call people stupid for falling for it.

But at this point, you should be saying “fuck the what? Fudgeing ducks? Why with the what and the who and huh?” because you literally have no idea what’s going on. But you are acting like you have at least half a clue, which is why I keep flailing around going “stop it!”

Everyone gets called to the meeting hall.

I am supposed to be braver than the Abnegation, but they don’t seem as worried as I am. They offer each other smiles and walk in silence

It’s almost like, gasp, there’s more than one way to be brave.

Hey, wait, wasn’t that a theme from the first book? That Tris just randomly forgot?

Everyone tries to act peppy like Amity people and Tris is amazed at how it makes her actually feel peppy, too.

It is amazing how pretending to be in a different faction changes everything—even the way I walk. That must be why it’s so strange that I could easily belong in three of them.

Or maybe it’s that the customs and strictures of a group have more bearing on everyone’s outward presentation than just their ‘natural inclination towards peace/honesty/whatever.’ Your body movement literally has an effect on your state of mind. Standing confidently makes you more confident. Smiling makes you happier. This is a known thing.

And yet, even as Tris realizes this since they seem to have forgotten, she attributes it to her uber-special brain instead of realizing literally anything about the faction system. This is why (as was some of my lovely readers discussed in the comments) having Tris be uber-special wasn’t really the best narrative choice. It means so much of what she learns doesn’t necessarily have to apply to the world at large, and instead could be explained away with “Tris has the specialist of all special brains.”

Johanna comes in to explain that the Erudite are looking for Tris et all (without using names) and also announces that she lied and said the group already moved on. Erudite wants to search the place, but because Amity is Amity they have to all vote on it.

Does anyone object to a search?”

The tension in her voice suggests that if anyone does object, they should keep their mouth shut. I don’t know if the Amity pick up on that kind of thing, but no one says anything.

Considering the fact that they claim to be unanimous or nearly-unanimous on every subject, I would hazard a guess that Amity is very good at picking up on that sort of thing. Which means that this place is less of a democracy and more of a very cheerful dictatorship.

One of the Dauntless notices Tobias and singles him out, which then results in an impromptu firefight. Tris goes into seize-up/flashback mode at the sound of gunshots (yay! I mean, sad, but yay!) and struggles to react even after several seconds of hesitation. She can’t even fire her gun when someone aims right at her, so Caleb jumps in and does it instead.

After everyone is subdued or otherwise disposed (most of the group went a-searching, so there only like four), everyone in Tris’s group takes off running. They run through a cornfield and split up into smaller groups while the other Dauntless chase them and open fire. Tris, Tobias, Caleb, and Susan find a hole in the fence around the city and slip inside. (If the city-spanning fence is made of chain link, there must be dozens or hundreds of these holes, which begs the question of why you need a large impressive gate. The fence could be explained as a visual deterrent or boundary marker reinforced with social taboo/brainwashing, but an elaborately locked gate doesn’t make sense unless the fence is solid.)

When they get to a point of taking a break, Tobias yells at Tris demanding to know why she froze, and she denies any problem. I’m torn. Because, on the one hand, not everyone recognizes or knows how to deal with signs of trauma. On the other hand, that should be an issue that Dauntless is intimately familiar with. Granted, there’s not a lot of combat going on when your only job is to guard a rusty fence that no one even wants to get out of anyway, but they also have people routinely die while going to work, so the trauma part should still be a factor. Combat isn’t the only way to get PTSD.

Frankly, it’s not even the most common way.

They start running again. For…no real good reason; no one is chasing them anymore. Oh well, dun, dun, dun!