Chapter Thirty-five

Tris wakes up in a glass tank and slowly, the water starts rising up from the bottom. She realizes that they're going to make her face her fear and actually die for it. This is the most absolute cruel thing any person could ever do to another. I know that there are bad people out there, and they do absolutely horrible things, but this is a new low. They are using her own mental and emotional fears, and using them against her as a form of punishment for something she can't control. I thought that the Erudite believed in, "A calm mind is a clear mind," not, let's try this experiment when we put an innocent person in her own fear until she dies. That doesn't sound very calm or clearing to me.

"If I refuse to give up now, it will look brave to whoever watches me with that camera, but sometimes it isn't fighting that's brave, it's facing the death you know is coming."

Tris decides that she is going to face this bravely and not give them a show. As the water continues to rise, she sinks to the bottom of the tank and lets all her air out. She will not allow any body part to fight it, she will make it come faster.

Okay, you know someone has to save her because there's four chapters left, and on top of that two whole books! It turns out to be her mom? How did she find her? How did she not get shot? Her mom also has a gun and is shooting people, Tris also notices that she has a tattoo under her arm. Pretty much, her mom is bad*ss!

"I stare at her. I sat next to her at the kitchen table, twice a day, for sixteen years, and never once did I consider the possibility that she could have been anything but Abnegation-born. How well did I actually know my mother?"

Her mom says that she's been watching people get off the train and her intent was to save her all along. Tris gets one quick question in about why her mom knows about being divergent and it turns out that it's because she is Divergent; she had to leave Dauntless and find a safer faction.  The Dauntless can't be controlled and that scares the leaders of factions, that's why they are such a threat.

I still don't understand why they would just make a Divergent faction, and if they really are afraid of not being able to control them, just make them factionless! They have no power then! I don't understand why humans mind's are programmed to think "worst-case-scenario" and to be cruel. There are simple solutions to a lot of problems in the world.

Back to the story, Tris's mom advises her to head to a building and knock a pattern, that's where her dad and brother are, and in order for a distraction Tris's mom runs into a crowd of Dauntless soldiers. Tris won't leave her mother, but after watching her get shot to death, she finds her inner strength and makes her way to the building.

"Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again."