Tris and Christina go to the ‘Erudite dorms’ (because the Dauntless get individual rooms, but everyone else gets open bays?) so that the author can show us what she thinks smart people sound like.

It is, of course, a senseless disaster.

Anyway, around all the random dictionary spewing and babbling “look at me I’m so smart” tangents (I swear, it’s like she got all her inspiration from Bones, and I make no secret of how much I detest that so thoroughly illogical character) wow I’m doing a lot of parenthases today.

Around all that mess, they do end up talking about the plan. We don’t know what the girls told them, but we hear everyone else picking it apart. They end up deciding that instead of stealing the information by putting it on a physical medium, they’ll use their wireless network to simply transfer it to a computer in a different building.

Although, if they have that ability, then why don’t they transfer more stuff? In fact, what’s on those other computers? What counts as “Erudite” data, as opposed to, say, Amity data? Do the Erudites have a backup somewhere? Do they have a server farm in the basement to handle this network? Are all the other factions’ data kept on the same servers as the Erudite’s? Are they about to wipe out everything from all factions in this mad-dash to destruction?

DOES ANYONE IN THIS BOOK ACTUALLY CARE?

No. They do not. Even the people here who supposedly are all about information don’t care about everything that’s about to go down.

(How do the factionless even plan to ‘destroy’ all the ‘information’? Are they just going to smash all the computers they see? I mean, I’ll bet you ten bucks and a turkey sandwich that they don’t even know any network exists, much less what a server is, so if those things aren’t kept in an office somewhere they’ll probably be spared.)

Cara and a new guy named Fernando volunteer to go with them.

“You do realize that if you come with us, you might get shot,” says Christina. She smiles. “And no hiding behind us because you don’t want to break your glasses, or whatever.”

Cara removes her glasses and snaps them in half at the bridge.

I like you, Cara.

They also decide to Q it up and hand out gadgets, because apparently when they ran from their faction towards sanctuary, they took some toys with them.

Everything about this scene just screams “oh shit, I’ve written myself into a corner, better throw in some new shit.”

There’s also some stabs at “oh, the Erudite aren’t all that bad,” but I still think it’s too little too late. When ‘Erudite is evil’ is literally one of the foundations of the plot of the book, you can have as many of these stabs as you’d like but it doesn’t fix anything.

The attack will begin in the afternoon, before it is too dark to see the blue armbands that mark some of the Dauntless as traitors.

Wait, so, is this going down…now? Today? Last we heard they had three days before the attack, but now Tris’s group waited until the day of the day of said attack before doing anything to thwart it? What is with these people and their insistence on scheduling things far away but still somehow waiting until the last minute anyway?

They meet up with some Amity and a bunch of trucks to head back to the city.

Christina starts toward the truck cab, and I go for the truck bed, with Fernando behind me.

“You don’t want to sit up front?” says Christina. “And you call yourself a Dauntless… .”

“I went for the part of the truck in which I was least likely to vomit,” I say.

…how is sitting in the open truck bed less brave than sitting in the cab which has seatbelts and also walls and a ceiling and shit?

Also not sure how you’d get less motion sick there…

They get to the gate and see it’s not only unguarded, but left wide open, and speculate that someone told Jeanine about the plan and she’s brought all forces home to deal with it. Okay, awfully convenient, but why did they leave the gate open?

They get to about two blocks from where the fighting is already going on, and Fernando randomly calls Tris “Insurgent” because…title drop. There’s really just no other reason for it, especially right now. And then it goes into like half a page about defining the word, because reasons.

And then they…chit chat for a while about faction transfers. While two blocks away from bullets flying. Because, you know, such a great time for that. I’m not even bothering to try and make sense of all the faction bullshit anymore because there’s just really no point to it. Anything conclusions you draw about it is just going to be retconned five pages later, so I find it hard to give a shit about anything except “oh, wow, Tris is special again, I’m shocked” and “get on with it already.”

Tris has another moment of being unable to handle guns without freaking out about it, so she takes the taser they have instead. They all run towards the fighting but are stopped short when they see a line of simulation-controlled Candor people just standing there with guns. Tris tries to test the limits of their programming and steps out, but gets shot at for her troubles. They poke around a bit and realize that said Candor’s are surrounding the whole building.

Sigh. Here we go again.

We already heard bullets flying and fighting going on while driving up to this place, so if there’s a human shield of placid robot guards were they put in place after the fight started? Why are they not inside fighting? Why, when they saw Tris well enough to shoot at her, did they not also do anything like chase her or report it or literally anything else at all besides get back into line? The Dauntless were programmed to gear up, get on a train, travel, pull people out of houses, and do all sorts of stuff in the last book, but these people can’t shoot anything that isn’t directly in front of them? They can’t push a radio button and say “someone’s here”?

When Tris’s group goes next door and shoots out a lock to get in the building, the robots’ programming doesn’t cover “investigate strange noises”?

Anyway, Tris and her group decide to use this other building to jump across the street and get in that way.

Because, you know, people-robots apparently can’t be programmed to look up. Or respond to stimuli at all. They’re such useful guards like that.