Tris helps clean up the lobby while suffering through some delightfully well-done bits of painful memories and mental exhaustion. Really, for everything else that’s wrong with this book, stuff like this is just excellent. If this author had a co-writer to help smooth out all the non-character problems, could probably produce a top-notch work.

While she’s working, Tris sees Tori and Zeke approaching, and Tori is injured. They get inside and claim they were spying on the traitors, not traitors themselves, and demand medical aid for Tori. Zeke says they can arrest them, truth serum them, whatever, so long as they help Tori stop bleeding out.

One very awkward transition later – in which we move to a new room in the space of a paragraph break, have everything described, and then learn that Zeke was serum-ed and cleared – everyone sits around enjoying dessert and spy stories.

“Anyway, as I was saying,” says Zeke, rubbing his eye, “I was mostly working on getting Erudite defectors out safely. That’s why there’s a big group of them here,

There is? Did you decide this to be true just now, and then forgot to go back and edit? We’ve had mention of some defectors before, not on the size, or really anything at all about them besides the fact that they exist and still wear fake glasses.

Anyway, Zeke doesn’t know what Tori as doing there. And Tobias is off with Jack finding out about the peace treaty thingy he’s proposing.

Tris ends up accidently listening to Cara (Will’s sister) comforting Christina over Will’s death, and defending Tris in the process.

But that girl was probably scared out of her mind, certainly not capable of assessing situations cleverly at the time, if she was ever able to do so.”

My eyes fly open. What a—I run through a short list of insults in my mind before listening to her continue.

Well, good job both proving her right and also insulting the person trying to defend you.

“And the simulation made her incapable of reasoning with him, so when he threatened her life, she reacted as she had been trained by the Dauntless to react: Shoot to kill.”

There’s just so much in this book that’s a good idea but that is also spoiled by the fact that Dauntless training royally sucks. (And is only two weeks long.) She spent half a day shooting at paper targets and then after that played capture the flag with paintball guns. (Or lasers, or whatever it was, nonlethal is the point here.)

After Cara convinces Christina that Will’s death at least wasn’t malicious, Tris leaves and Tobias shows up. Apparently we’re playing musical characters this chapter. There’s been a lot of stuff going on, most of it unconnected and just thrown in willy-nilly. It…isn’t really that bad, just kind of annoying for our purposes. Oops.

They all sit around and try to figure out what Erudite will do at the meeting.

They all look at me. Expectantly.

“What?” I say.

“You’re Divergent,” Zeke replies.

“So is Tobias.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have aptitude for Erudite.”

“And how do you know I do?”

Zeke lifts his shoulder. “Seems likely. Doesn’t it seem likely?”

Ah, yes, based on the brilliance of your…um…well there was that time that…erm….hm…

Look, we’re in her head and see no signs of intelligence, but the people outside her head should be seeing even less. In fact, she’s the least inquisitive and least innovative of the whole bunch. She follows along with the crowd and her best claim to fame is that one time she shot her way into a building and then didn’t fight her boyfriend.

“Don’t you think someone with the aptitude for multiple factions might have a loyalty problem? If she’s got aptitude for Erudite, how can we be sure she’s not working for Erudite?”

You guys really, seriously need a dictionary.

I could sort of buy them conflating aptitude and loyalty if the faction system had been set up better, but we’ve already seen people who hang on to their affection for past factions even when they don’t have ‘aptitude’ for it (or lack loyalty to a new faction where they do have aptitude), so they should already be aware this isn’t how things work.

Especially with Shauna’s later rant about her own loyalties, it’s a good idea, it’s just a good idea that only showed up right now, so the rest of the worldbuilding doesn’t really prop it up.

“If I were in this situation, staring at a group of Dauntless guards and Jack Kang, I probably wouldn’t resort to violence, right?”

“Well, you might, if you had your own Dauntless guards. And then all it takes is one shot—bam, he’s dead, and Erudite’s better off,” says Zeke.

“Whoever they send to talk to Jack Kang isn’t going to be some random Erudite kid; it’s going to be someone important,” I say. “It would be a stupid move to fire on Jack Kang and risk losing whoever they send as Jeanine’s representative.”

Well if their plan is to shoot Jack, they wouldn’t then send someone high ranking, would they?

The more logical argument to make is that shooting Jack doesn’t actually benefit them. Unless it does, somehow, and we just don’t know that?

In fact, they sort of brought up the idea of the Erudite shooting Jack on sight out of the blue. Why would they think that? What would anyone gain by Jack being dead, when Jack literally wants to roll over and play nice for his glasses-wearing masters? Then again, this is one time where the Dauntless are showing their “only have aptitude for one thing” chops.

“I think,” I say, “that Jeanine Matthews will manipulate him. And that he will do anything to protect his faction, even if it means sacrificing the Divergent.” I pause for a moment, remembering how he held his faction’s influence over our heads at the meeting. “Or sacrificing the Dauntless. So we need to hear what they say in that meeting.”

Wow, Tris, you’re so smart. It’s not like he said exactly this in plain words to your face or nothing. Good on you for ‘figuring it out.’

So, they decide to spy on the meeting.

Instead of going straight to that promise of action and plot development, though, we get to sit through dinner and listen to a conversation about whether or not they’ll be able to go back to the old faction system after this. I don’t really see why not; you guys are all cohabitating but it’s not like you’re actually mixing all that well. Maybe there will be a few more interfaction friendships going on, but I don’t see that materially hurting the system itself.

People are still randomly taunting Tobias for being a coward, so he decides to up and beat the shit out of his father with no warning. This whole subplot is so random and senseless that I don’t even know what to say about it. I mean, jeeze, I know the Dauntless are all about bravery, but it’s not like Tobias is the first person in all of history to have a fear of something. We already know the average number of fears big enough to go into a landscape is 15ish.

Tris follows him out of the room to ask “what the fudge was that?” and he responds with emotional sniping about how she doesn’t really care about him anymore so why is she asking. They haven’t really interacted except for sniping, have they? It’s kind of a shame, because we don’t get to see what they’re like when they’re trying, but at the same time it’s not like they’ve had time to repair their relationship either. Tobias comes off as an ass, but…I’m trying to phrase this without sounding like I’m forgiving him… He comes off as very human, which makes for good story drama. He’s an ass, he needs someone (maybe Cara?) to verbally slap some sense into him, and he’s emotionally abusive. But at the same time I get the sense that it’s very situational. The fact that he responds to stress by taking it out on Tris isn’t good, it’s still abusive, it’s still indicative of long-running problems when it comes to communication and trust. But he is responding to his situation in a flawed way, and that’s way better storytelling that someone who is an ass through every scene, or someone who is an ass but the story doesn’t recognize it. So, in that sense, I do like it.

They split ways, and Tris sees Marcus limping off to get medical attention. She randomly remembers that little plot nugget about Erudite having important information that the Abnegation…needs? Wants? Already has? Had? Something. Tris steps in to remind Marcus that she can help him get it. Because…now she wants to? Or did she always? I’ll be straight, I forgot all about this plot and whatever details are involved because it was so long ago and so weird even back when it first came up. And it’s just as nonsensical now. Tris ignored all of this for days, and then pops up to say “hey, I’m gonna go get whatever that was, because I, you know, just care so much about it.”