Before they go on their spying mission, Tris gets handed a gun, which she still can’t even hold properly without panicking. She decides to go into a bathroom and “fix this problem in the next five minutes” by forcing her emotions down with a hammer. This fails in exactly the way that it should. I love the entire concept.

Then Tobias comes in and I want to hiss at him. I mean, Tris obviously needs some emotional support so I shouldn’t be wanting her to stay alone and crying in a bathroom, but all the emotional scenes just turn so nonsensical when he shows up.

Tris confronts him about beating up Marcus out of the blue.

“I needed to prove to the Dauntless that I am not a coward,” he says. “That’s all. That’s all it was.”

What happened to last-book-Tobias, who kept going on about how the Dauntless views are twisted and sometimes doing nothing is the braver option and that bravery used to actually mean something positive for other people instead of just a bunch of brute force? I’m starting to miss him.

Tris does not point this out, instead she wonders why Tobias would care (for once, ignoring my question for one that doesn’t make me mad), then realizes that it’s because he wants to be a Dauntless leader so he can lead them back to Mommy Evelyn. I guess technically that does mean he’d have to bend to their perceptions a bit, but it would be nice if we’d seen him…idk, do literally anything else toward that goal as well. You know, talk to people a little? Garner support? Do leader-y things?

He’s mostly been absent since we showed up at Candor, hasn’t he?

They argue about whether or not Tris should go, with him saying she’s been taking reckless risks and should go if she’s still so twitchy about carrying a gun and also there’s other people who can do this so they don’t need her, and Tris saying…???

“I am not the kind of person who just sits back and lets other people take all the risks!”

Um, okay, but it’s not like you told them to go in your place. This is something you see more from leadership characters, but in Tris’s case, she’s basically saying that if she just hears about someone else doing something risky she’s got to go along, because there’s a risk somewhere so she’s going to take it? (Again, sounds very Dauntless-and-not-anything-else, further making it seem like she’s the only person in the book who ISN’T Divergent.)

Tobias has a point; she’s utterly superfluous in this mission and actively dangerous if no one knows which way her PTSD is going to pop. They still don’t seem to understand that’s what’s going on with her, but Tobias is finally trying to respond to it and do damage control. I take back what I said when he walked into the bathroom here.

Since Tobias can’t really lock her in a room to make her not go on the mission, he decides to invite himself along instead.

They go to the Michigan Avenue Bridge (I think? Or one like it) to spy in the meeting place. It’s a two-tiered bridge with lots of places to hide under the lower (pedestrian) tier, and that’s where they stow themselves prior to the meeting.

Both sides show up and have their meeting right on top of the spies. Erudite sends someone named Max, who I should apparently remember from the first book but don’t. Sorry, Max. Tris says there’s something off about how he’s talking.

Max points out to Jack that his faction is completely useless and disposable.

“I mean that you are the only disposable faction. Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us. And you have not done much to win the favor of your Dauntless guests,”

My only real question is why no one figured this out, you know, before the coup. What have they been doing this whole time? Apparently their only method of truth-finding is to inject someone and write down their answers, and surely it can’t take too much manpower to get that done so…does everyone else just twiddle their thumbs a lot?

They verbally parry a little bit, and Tris realizes that Max is talking more like Jeanine than himself so he’s probably getting fed his lines through an earpiece.

And the signal from an earpiece can stretch only a quarter of a mile at most.

How do you know this? Have you ever had cause to use one before? I mean, she wasn’t even sure how simulations work and those have been present since the very first chapter, but she knows this off the top of her head?

Max/Jeanine delivers the demands: that they allow the compound to be searched, that they hand over Eric, and that they give a list of everyone who wasn’t injected during the attack.

And why do you need those names? What do you intend to do with them?”

Because those are the people who weren’t Divergent-tested. I mean, I know the answer is going to be something else because this book is trying to shoehorn in that ‘mystery’ with a hammer, but obvious answer is still obvious.

Jack gets mad enough at how things are going to try and physically manhandle Max.

“Release me,” says Max. “Or I will order my guards to fire.”

I frown. If Jeanine is speaking through Max, she had to be able to see him in order to know that he was grabbed.

Um, there’s no indication that Max is zombified here. She doesn’t say he’s being mind-controlled, just that he’s being fed lines. I’m pretty sure it’s entirely possible, in that sort of situation, for Max to ad-lib something as simple as “let go.”

Tris ‘figures out’ where Jeanine is through super-accurate guessing and starts to climb off the bridge, because apparently finding out how this meeting ends isn’t important anymore? The others follow her, except for Lynn who apparently decided it was a good idea to climb up and shoot Max. While a shootout erupts, Tris and Tobias run towards the building where Jeanine is, only to see her, a mystery man, and Peter escaping out the back door. Not sure why they’re doing that since it only puts them closer to the guns going off, but eh, I didn’t really want to read about Tris trying to search a whole office building.

For some reason, they square off with Peter instead of their actual target, because…man, fuck Peter, what is he even doing here? How did he become so important to the story? He was just a garden variety bully who only gained any importance in the plot by virtue of being a named character before it started, and the more he shows up the less sense any of it makes. He should be a peon. Just because he’s socially significant to Tris doesn’t mean he’s significant to literally anything else going on.

A scream pierces the air. It is anguished and female.

“Sounds like your friends need you,” Peter says with the flash of a smile—or bared teeth, I can’t tell. He keeps his gun steady. “So you have a choice. You can let us go, and help them, or you can die trying to follow us.”

…but whoever that was still has all those other people with her, and it’s not like Tris is some wiz medical guru. She doesn’t even have a first aid pack. What good would she be if she turned around now?

So naturally Tris and Tobias abandon their pursuit, don’t shoot Peter, and run back towards the others. Because, you know, she’s just so logical and Erudite.

They get back to find that Shauna has been shot in the back. Tobias decides to carry her out of there, despite the fact that it’ll probably cause damage. He doesn’t really say why, but to save my sanity I’m going to assume it’s because their afraid more guns will return to this spot. Moving the injured is a terribly bad idea, but at least it’s better than getting more shot.

Unfortunately he decides to just up and throw her over his shoulder and let her just fucking bounce there the whole run back to the Candor HQ.

Hey, did you know you can make an improvised litter from a blanket and two sticks? Or even two jackets and two sticks? Or a fucking piece of rope?

Hell, any kind of two-person carry (they’ve got three people there, and Tris can’t even use the excuse of providing security for why she doesn’t help) would be better than a over-the-shoulder-toss. I’m pretty sure even a proper fireman’s carry would be better; at least there’d be more support for her back.

After they probably cause irreparable damage to Shauna’s back and hand her over to some doctors, Tobias gets mad at Tris for running off like that.

“I am not senselessly risking my life. I am trying to make sacrifices, like my parents would have, like—”

“You are not your parents. You are a sixteen-year-old girl—”

I grit my teeth. “How dare you—”

“—who doesn’t understand that the value of a sacrifice lies in its necessity, not in throwing your life away!

Yes! Awesome!

And if you do that again, you and I are done.”

…wow. Asshat.

Although, again, he’s too emotionally involved to have any clarity here, so he’s a very human and squishy asshat, but an asshat all the same. Threatening to take away her emotional support and basically trying to blackmail her into getting better than actually doing anything to address her problems.

“If you throw yourself into danger for no reason again, you will have become nothing more than a Dauntless adrenaline junkie looking for a hit, and I’m not going to help you do it.”

And then he compounds the problem by completely missing the fact that she’s NOT FUCKING DOING THIS FOR FUNZIES.

Later, after Tobias makes Tris’s emotional state worse by heaping undeserved accusations on her, Tris goes to visit Tori and chat. Tris wants to call a meeting of all the Dauntless, and Tori talks about her spy mission. She talks about the secret lab that Jeanine had on the top floor of their building. Her mission wasn’t to get into the lab, though, it was to kill Jeanine. Tris is understanding of this bloodlust, but doesn’t like that she understands it.

Eh, I’m mixed. On the one hand, apparently killing Jeanine would stop the whole mess, because there’s no indication that anyone else is driving this forward. All of the blame and all of the motivation and all of the impetus is heaped onto one head. On the other hand, how fucking cheap is that? I know we like to display history as being a series of lone rangers riding in and changing the course of the world (for good or for ill), but that doesn’t happen, there’s always an underlying social and power structure that was pushing things toward that end already. The big figures from history? They’re just the faces, people who may have sped things up a fraction or put a pretty speech to it, but it is pretty much impossible to move an entire society to doing something if they weren’t already headed in that direction, and once they are on a roll, cutting out one figurehead isn’t going to stop them.

Well, you know, in real life. In YA Dystopia that’s apparently exactly how things work.

Later, the Dauntless meeting is called and Tris repeats the list of demands that Erudite had. They decide they can’t stay if Jack is going to make that deal (um, he didn’t seem too keen on agreeing at the time, tho?) so they wonder where else they can go.

“Home,” Tobias says, lifting his head at last. Everyone is listening. “We should take back what’s ours. We can break the security cameras in Dauntless headquarters so the Erudite can’t see us. We should go home.”

Um, wasn’t the whole reason you didn’t do that already the fact that you couldn’t find all the security cameras? What’s changed in the last week to make that suddenly an option again?

Besides, just the fact that you’re breaking them should tip the Erudite off to your location, so if that’s your problem then it’s still a problem.

They decide before they leave that they need new leaders, because all of their old ones are traitors now. Tori, Tris, Tobias, and a random dude name Harrison are nominated, and Tris boggles at the fact she was picked out. Me, too, she’s not exactly displayed great leadership skills. Mostly she just runs around doing her own thing a lot. Fortunately, Tris agrees and bows out, leaving the other three as the new leaders. (Their factions laws say there need to be an odd number of leaders, so they can’t have four.)