The group decides to follow the train tracks into the city because no one knows how to navigate. Because apparently not only is there a huge amount of empty space between Chicago and the fence (which…somehow magically had all the suburbs removed at some point?) but you also cannot look around and see the giant-ass skyscrapers and head towards that. I mean, really, where are you? Did you take that fence all the way around Chicagoland? Are you past Joliet right now, book?

They feel a train coming through the rumble of the tracks.

I stare between Susan’s knees down the tracks and see no train light, but that doesn’t mean anything. The train could be running with no horns and no lamps to announce its arrival.

Okay, but, why? Is it because Dauntless just said “fuck you” to even more safety concerns? Though Tris says that as if having the lights off is a possibility, not “oh, right, they run with the lights off because Dauntless hates flashlights.” So the fact that the lights are off means something is different from usual. And we know at least some of the Dauntless have sided with the Erudite, who apparently still have some amount of control over the city.

Naturally, Tris decides they should hop on the train and ride it back to town. Because she’s just so ‘naturally curious’ that of course none of these concerns even enter her mind.

Caleb gives Susan step-by-step instructions for getting on a moving train, the way only a former Erudite can.

Wow, Dauntless make for some pretty shitty soldiers if no one in the entire faction can do something as basic as “give directions for how to do the dangerous thing.”

Also, Caleb was only in Erudite for, like, a month. Or three weeks. Or something ridiculously short like that. He hasn’t had time to be so thoroughly inundated with ‘Erudite-ness’ than lines like this make sense. After all, giving directions isn’t a personality trait, it’s a learned skill.

They jump on the train and are faced with a bunch of armed factionless people.

So…do the factionless do this all the time? Has no one noticed before? Does Dauntless have a curfew and that’s with the factionless know they can ride the train?

That kid in the first book who failed initiation for being too slow, did he ever get fast enough to jump on the train and prove his bravery and then grow bitter and resentful?

The factionless group wears a hodge-podge of different faction-coded clothing.

Most items are torn or smudged in some way, but some are not. Freshly stolen, I imagine.

…wow. Wow. I’m just…wow.

What’s the implication here? That you never actually provide clothes to the factions so if they didn’t steal they’d all be naked? That the Abnegation only donate ripped and torn clothes? (Which, wow again, your charity sucks.) That laundry is not a thing? That none of these people could be newly-factionless and have their clean clothes still with them? Why did you jump straight to ‘they don’t look like the homeless image I expected, therefore they must have done something criminal’? Fucking bullshit right there.

One of the factionless is Edward, the guy who got his eye stabbed in the first book. Why? Because reasons. Edward wants them to get off the train because he’s got a very reasonable “fuck the factions, man” attitude, but then Tobias gives his last name and Edward says they can stay. ‘Someone’ is looking for Tobias, and Tobias knows who but declines to explain to Tris because ‘it’s a long story.’

aka “The author for some reason felt the need to draw things out here for no reason.”

Seriously, unless your characters are literally running from danger or must do the same within the next few minutes, “it’s a long story” is not a good excuse. If your plot is so thin that you have to withhold information in order to make it book-length, then…well, your plot is so thin you have to withhold yadda yadda.

I don’t know how much time passes before they tell us to get off.

I’m guessing it was at least enough time to say “my mom isn’t really dead,” but don’t let that stop you both from sitting there in awkward silence instead.

BTW, where were the factionless coming from? The train was headed into town away from the fence…the only thing behind them was the fence…???

‘Naturally curious’ Tris does not wonder about this.

They jump off the train all at once.

My feet slam into the ground and continue forward, but Susan just falls to the pavement and rolls onto her side. Aside from a scraped knee, though, she seems to be all right.

Technically, she should be less injured than you. ‘Sticking the landing’ is only a concern in gymnastics, otherwise it’ll screw up your joints. As long as you fall on something with enough meat and surface area to take it, it’s better to just hit the ground.

The factionless lead us down the street and left into a grimy alleyway that stinks of garbage. Rats scatter in front of us with squeaks of terror, and I see only their tails, slipping between mounds of waste, empty trash cans, soggy cardboard boxes. I breathe through my mouth so I don’t throw up.

Um…isn’t trash collection of the jobs of the factionless? What, do they all just take it home and store it in the street? In all that space you’ve inexplicably got around your city, you couldn’t find room for a dump?

The windows are so thick with grime that almost no light penetrates them.

So, this is basically poverty porn.

And look, I get it, stuff like this happens. But also, it happens for reasons that go beyond ‘poor.’ You can also have poor people who live in, if not ideal conditions, at least serviceable ones. This right here? This is not a pure byproduct of being poor. This is a deliberate ‘fuck you’ that’s being enforced by someone else. People are not naturally inclined to live in filth. They will find places that aren’t full of garbage (there’s a whole city to pick from, after all) and do what cleaning they can with the resources available, even if it’s just ‘wipe off the windows a little with a rag.’ Shit won’t be spotless, but there is a limit to what people are willing to put up with if they have literally any other option.

Living in the town dump when there are other options available means someone had to prohibit them from moving, and then enforced that prohibition. Living in filth means being worked to the point of not having the time or energy to maintain your living space. What we are looking at is oppression, not poverty.

And it’s a veritable orgy of ‘wow, look at how poor and dirty everything is!’

We are in a factionless storehouse, and the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community … are together inside it. Are together, like a faction.

Okay, I’ll ignore the fact that your surprise at this is stupid, because at least you’ve been brainwashed into thinking it. But…what the hell is a factionless storehouse? What do they store here? And you use that like it’s a known term; do they routinely have a lot of stuff that must be stored somewhere? How, when they supposedly have barely enough sustenance to survive and get most of that from Abnegation donations anyway?

Edward leads them into the building and explains that they did used to be scattered and scrambling, before the Abnegation started to give them stuff, and they’ve since organized and are now ‘waiting’ for the faction system to fall apart. Because obviously they knew that was inevitable. Although I’m still curious as to how they’re getting enough free donations from Abnegation to just sit around when 1) they’re supposed to be doing blue-collar jobs and 2) wasn’t Abnegation struggling to come up with enough goods to do the whole support thing? Then again, very little in this book so far has flowed well from the previous book, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.

Although the implication that if you feed the poor they’ll rise up against you is pretty fucking shitty. I mean, I do get why the factionless are rising up and yay for them great, but why throw in the line about Abnegation support making the difference? Why can’t they just…you know, rise the fuck up?

We walk into an old boiler room with machinery that emerges from the darkness so suddenly I hit it with my knees and elbows.

…like, all four of them? At the same time? If you walk in any manner that allows that, it’s a wonder you can avoid tripping over blank space.

We finally get to meet Evelyn. The moment you’ve all been waiting for, I know. She looks remarkably like Tobias.

Only her eyes are different—instead of blue, they are so dark they look black.

Allow me a moment to recover from how utterly unsurprised I am by this.

Tobias and Evelyn snark at each other, and Tris is all aflutter because her mom just recently died and she keeps thinking about how she would react upon discovering she’s still alive. While that makes no sense to a normal person (Tobias and his mom obviously did not share the same relationship), it is a perfectly natural emotional reaction, doubly so when Tris’s mom died so recently.

After ragging on other books for poor portrayals of grief and stupid heroines, I feel the need to point out moments when “your thinking is wrong” is eminently appropriate. Sometimes being right is the wrong answer.

They make introductions and Caleb notices a chart full of population numbers and a map of safe houses on the back wall, which Evelyn doesn’t want to talk about for security reasons. While I approve, I also wonder why she has this information prominently displayed in the same room where she’s meeting new people. If you’re going to do OPSEC, don’t stop halfway!

As they leave the room, Tris eavesdrops on Tobias and Evelyn talking. Tobias is reiterating that he hates his mother and doesn’t want to stay with her, because evil evil mommy.

“My little band of factionless is twice the size of Dauntless,” says Evelyn.

Well that’s kind of a non-statement when we have no idea how many people are in Dauntless.

Later Tris asks Tobias why Evelyn is with the factionless.

“Why did she leave Abnegation?”

“She had an affair.” He shakes his head. “And no wonder, since my father …” He shakes his head again. “Well, let’s just say Marcus wasn’t any nicer to her than he was to me.”

“Is … that why you’re angry with her? Because she was unfaithful to him?”

“No,” he says too sternly, his eyes opening. “No, that’s not why I’m angry.”

What the fuck kind of group is Abnegation and why does no one talk about how fucking fuckity fucked up this is?

I mean, really? Tris, really? No brownie points for addled thinking in this one, because I hate it all so much. Tobias…Tobias maybe. Ish. Sort of.

Who the fucking fuckity fuck, knowing that Evelyn was getting beaten by her husband, would give her reason for leaving as ‘an affair’? Seems more like the affair and the leaving shared a common cause, but no, instead this whole narrative focused on the sexual indiscretion. The domestic abuse is a footnote, and this coming from a guy who also suffered said abuse. He should be thoroughly familiar with the reason why his mother would want to get away. But, hey, abuse has a way of changing your priorities and outlook, so who knows what his thought process going in here is. Kind of iffy on the book’s part because it’s such a sensitive subject, but still workable. Except Tris then goes on to also assume that the affair is the biggest issue here. If she had balked at his presentation of the story and brought light to the ways that DV can change how you think about things, but no, she just goes right ahead and validates it like “oh, so he beat her? I’ll ignore that. Let’s focus on how the future villain of this book had an extra-marital affair and mention it twice, while the DV will only be brought up again in relation to Tobias’s pain.”

Yeah, that’s why Tobias is upset, because when she ran she didn’t take Tobias with her. Again, Tobias gets a pass here. The whole rest of the book does not get to go along with him, though. The whole rest of the book should be going “um, she was a battered woman leaving every support system she knew; she probably didn’t have the capacity to take you with her, or possibly planned to come back for you, or you know, any of these other things that are options which don’t include her callously abandoning you.”

She left him alone with his worst nightmare. No wonder he hates her.

But nope. Instead the woman with ‘black’ eyes who had too much sex callously abandoned her son and we’re gonna leave it at that.

Well, I assume we’re going to leave it at that, based on all the complaining I’ve heard.

“It seems to me,” he says, “that the factionless are better friends than enemies.”

“Maybe. But what would the cost of that friendship be?” I say.

Well, since the only drama we’ve found with the factionless so far is “Tobias has trust hang-ups with his mommy,” probably nothing too bad. This line is supposed to be ominous, but we have no reason for it unless you think that one woman leaving an abusive husband is a sign of bad things to come.

And if you think that, get out.