Tris wakes up in the middle of the night to Christina tugging her out of bed, frantic about some crisis going down. Seems that there are a few people who got simulated into going up on the roof, and now everyone is headed there to see what’ll happen next.

The stairs to the roof smell like old paint. Dauntless graffiti is scrawled on the cement-block walls in black paint

Is Dauntless graffiti really any different from any other kind of graffiti? What was the point in specifying that? So much of this world already was overly reliant on the faction system, with so many completely unrelated things being divvied up arbitrarily, and now it’s gotten even lazier and we’re just throwing names in front of stiff for shits and giggles.

They get to the roof and see three people standing on the edge, two named characters and one 8 year old little girl. All of them are zombified. Christina suggests jumping them to pull them away from the edge, and Tris doesn’t want to spook whoever is controlling them into making them jump. But she says to stand beside the child, ‘just in case.’

She is too young for this, I think, but I don’t have the heart to say it, because it means Marlene is old enough.

I like this line.

So now that the scene is set, I have to ask…where is everyone else? Seems like Tris and Christina are the only ones here, which begs the question of how Christina found out about this, and why she only woke up Tris instead of just shouting “HOLY SHIT ROOFTOP NOW” to everyone within shouting distance.

Betcha if you had more than two people you could ‘just in case’ all three of those kids, instead of just the youngest one.

Marlene zombie-talks and says that one of the Divergent need to deliver themselves to the Erudite, and every two days that doesn’t happen, more kids will jump off the roof. I guess just any Divergent will do, and only one of them needs to show up? Kind of a vague set of parameters, there.

Christina gets the youngest kid, Tris dives for the middle kid, and Marlene drops to her death. See why having more people would have helped?

After making sure the two kids are okay, Tris walks out in shock and has a little mini-breakdown in the elevator before thinking about what just happened.

Overall, not a terribly objectionable scene. I mean, there’s the confusion over why only Tris and Christina are there, but not the worst gaff ever. No, what I’m far more interested in is how this fits in the overall structure of the book. It feels…just so very episodic. We seem to keep repeating the same basic idea here: the Erudite want the Divergent. It’s just that, over and over, with different set dressing each time but no build up. We’ve done this in Amity, in Candor, and now it’s time for Divergent Hunt 3: Dauntless Edition. These attempts don’t build on each other, and as a result everything about this feels so fractured and…just sort of weird. Each time it happens, it comes after this nonsense reset and then pops up out of nowhere.

Later, Tris sneaks out of Marelene’s funeral service because she just can’t put up with that right now, and Christina follows her. Christina tries to say that she understands now, and that she’s trying to forgive Tris, but Tris is very upset that it took “proof” in the form of someone else dying for Christina to get to this place, so she snaps instead of accepting. Again, I really like this. Of all the ‘episodes’ of this storyline playing out, so far this one is has the best emotional payout attached. Well, I guess practice does make perfect, yes?

Later, it’s meal time and Tris goes to the cafeteria, where everyone stares at her for being Divergent. At least this time it’s because of that whole ‘turn yourself in or die’ thing. There’s some idle chatting, and then Tobias shows up with the other two leaders. They start talking about who/if someone is going to go to Erudite. Tris, by implication, volunteers. Uriah and Tobias both say no one should go. I’m really on Tobias’s side. He says they can stop more people from being killed by staying vigilant, and there’s decent reason to believe that’s true. Apparently the Erudite can’t really control their zombies very well without being able to see them, so just make sure everyone who’s been shot during the Candor attack is around someone who hasn’t been shot, double check that all your cameras are covered, and wait. Tris agrees, reluctantly.

Later she goes to Tobias’s room while idly and morosely wandering around (which, despite being used for this convenient set up, I do like for showing her mental state) and Tobias finds her in there.

He launches immediately into douchecanoe mode.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he says.

“An idiot?”

“You were lying. You said you wouldn’t go to Erudite, and you were lying, and going to Erudite would make you an idiot. So don’t.”

Fucker, she’s sitting on your bed and sniffing your covers; why do you think it’s appropriate to call her an idiot and a liar as soon as you walk in the room?

He does at least admit that all irrational behavior is just because he’s scared of losing her (though it’s been going for a long time and he’s not exactly tried anything besides douchy yelling, so…) and then they make out.

Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to.

I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things.

[…]

This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do.

I rather like this, but I don’t think for the reasons I’m supposed to. It just convinces me more than ever that their relationship is already DOA. I mean, she’s basically admitting that she’s changed from how she used to be and this changed version of herself doesn’t feel like kissing Tobias, she only feels like hanging onto some nostalgia. That’s a thing that happens and is worth writing about, except for the part where I never cared about old Tris’s romance, so it’s only interesting in a vague sort of way.

Tobias makes her promise not to go, which she does, though in her mind she’s lying because she worries he’ll go if she doesn’t.

Um, what happened to the whole ‘let’s see if we can stop anyone from dying’ plan? After all, the idea that the Erudite only want one Divergent is pretty ridiculous, given their actions before, so what’s to stop them from carrying on even after one person plays martyr? Of course, since the book can’t be bothered to build on its own past, of course they’ve forgotten everything Erudite has done up to this point. (But even without that, how does ‘send us only one of the thing we really really want’ make sense?)