The Testing

Cia is primarily defined by her intelligence, compassion, and determination. Because the novel is written in a first-person limited point of view, the reader experiences the world the way Cia does. These qualities in combination contribute to the picture of the world that Cia lives in. Without Cia’s perspective, the reader would not be privy to the many subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints at the dark, brutal nature of the Commonwealth.

Cia’s intelligence and determination are the qualities that earned her the notice of her new teacher and the Testing officials. Her intelligence was nurtured by her family and is demonstrated through her early inventions, her varied scholastic aptitude, and her ability to quickly and accurately solve problems. These qualities serve her well after she’d been chosen for The Testing, too, tempering her trusting nature enough that she is able to recognize and avoid the sabotage frequently planned by the other candidates. One important example of this is Cia’s performance in the teamwork stage of The Testing. All four candidates heard the same instructions. Only Roman and Cia saw the potential for sabotage but while Roman seized the opportunity to trick the others, Cia opted for the compassionate route, instead. Once she began seeing dangerous patterns in The Testing methods, she applied this knowledge to other situations in which her intelligence saved her and Tomas’s lives such as the deadly lure of the oasis, the construction of the bicycles, her discovery of the bracelets’ latches and microphones, and the necessity of draining the poison and pus from her wounds.

Cia’s determination works well with her intelligence as she survives The Testing. She is driven but not overly stubborn. This means she can adapt as the situation changes and can endure obstacles and hardships that may have crushed the will of others. The will to finish is essential in passing The Testing, evidenced by what the candidates must endure and by the typical suicides and disappearance of candidates who sought medical treatment or admitted weakness. There are many occasions in the novel during which Cia had to push herself to the very limits of her strength and ability when it would have been infinitely easier and less painful for her to lie down and give up. One striking example is the way Cia almost kills herself getting Tomas across the finish line with her. She was near death, enough that she was unconscious for most of nine days even after receiving medical treatment, but she still refused to give up or to leave Tomas behind.

It is Cia’s compassion that makes her truly stand out in The Testing. She has a capacity to care about others that many of her fellow candidates either lack or were willing to give up in favor of success. Cia’s unwillingness to cause direct harm or allow indirect harm to people around her stands out in this setting. Not only does she see the value in the lives of her fellow candidates, but she recognizes the humanity of the mutated people she encounters at the river and in the city. Though Cia kills several of the mutated humans in self-defense, she perceives and honors the dead as people whose lives had value. When more of the mutated humans are killed by Brick in the city, those deaths haunt her, too, adding to the pile of bodies that appear in her traumatic nightmares.

The society in which Cia lives values intelligence and determination but do they not value compassion. It is the first two that allow Cia to find a place in the midst of the center of power, but it is the third, her compassion, that drives her to resist the brutality and advocate for change—marks of a true leader.