Last chapter, we end with Rhine’s great plan of Gabriel getting up to wake her if he starts to fall asleep.
Bizarrely, that actually happens. He wakes her up to say he’s exhausted and needs to nap, so she’s up.
It occurs to me that I’ve just inherited this child, that Lilac lost her daughter and her chance of freedom in one fell swoop, and gave both of those precious things to two strangers.
Whoa whoa whoa. Again, we do not know if Lilac was attempting to escape before this, nor that it’s impossible for her to do so now. Until recently we didn’t even know if you were being kept prisoner or just Gabriel. Really, as someone who, unlike Gabriel, actually has free run of the place and is on good terms with the guy controlling the electricity, getting over the fence shouldn’t be difficult. Furthermore, we know the majority of people there seem to like Maddie. They wouldn’t like that the woman tried to kill her and would likely support Lilac leaving to be with Maddie. Even if we must have the girls have no emotions but spite and bitterness, Lilac escaping would serve to remove her from the competition – she’d no longer be getting the highest price or being in charge.
Now, they can’t know this for sure, and it’s even possible Lilac might decide she’s better off staying, we don’t know her well or maybe she thinks that running now will get them caught or something. But it should be at least plausible that Lilac will try to join them tomorrow instead. If nothing else, they might as well leave a message in case she comes this way.
Anyway, Rhine tells Maddie she totally lost her mom too – under different circumstances at a different age to a different degree.
Annabelle returns a few minutes later with arms full of splintered boards that I guess she has foraged from nearby buildings. I didn’t get a good look at the area, but I think most of it’s abandoned.
“Your face is much nicer after you’ve had a little sleep,” Annabelle says. She kneels by the fireplace and begins piling the boards into a triangle.
GAH RUN RUN NOW
A lot of modern wood is treated to be resistant to termites and such by getting impregnated with such friendly substances as arsenic.
Now. We have no way of knowing if this wood actually was treated. Maybe it’s safe. Maybe it’s fine. But we do know that it’s wood that’s remained in an abandoned, stripped area, exposed to the elements, without rotting away in all this time. I’d get out of there.
It’s almost twelve so Rhine says they’ll go soon.
“Off to your broken castle, Empress?”
“I thought empresses lived in palaces,” I say.
She laughs, and the sound catches in the glass wind chimes outside her door. “You were something great in a past life,” she says. “A siren, maybe, or a mermaid.”
It’s a shame she made a point earlier that although there’s incense, it’s nice incense like at her precious mansion and not the icky drugged stuff from the carnival, because this whole conversation is so much more fitting from the dream logic point of view. I mean “something” like a pair of things known for beauty but never anything particularly “great”? That’s the sort of thing your brain pulls up when it’s forgetting the start of the line before it reaches the end.
Rhine thinks it’s all bullshit, and I am kind of glad that she at least draws the line at being reincarnated from an imaginary species, but agrees that water’s great.
“There’s a man who would drown for you, I bet,” Annabelle says. Then, imitating my tone, she adds, “In this life, anyway.” She smiles ruefully at Gabriel, and I can tell she isn’t talking about him.
God, we’re really going to see fucking Linden-chaaaaaaaaaan again. I mean, it can’t be her brother, since the guy is just Mr. Practical and besides, that’s really a more romantic phrasing.
Annabelle offers to read the cards. She says she usually does past lives, but Rhine seems like someone with current issues. So Rhine gives her another damn necklace.
My brother says fortune-telling is a form of psychology, and I know he’s right. But a very small part of me —the part that is homesick, and tired, and afraid to die—wants to believe that I could have been an empress or a siren, that I was once destined for greatness.
A siren is just a creature that sings people to their death, sort of like how you keep insisting lighthouses are something to steer directly toward. And if you wanted to be an empress you could’ve stayed in the rapist’s empire.
Annabelle needs to know her zodiac sign, which, depending on how far in the future this is, is either going to be one off the actual position of the stars supposedly governing things or even more than that.
It hits me all at once.Time stood still for me in the mansion. Looking back, those months now feel as small as minutes. But as I frittered away in Linden’s dreamland, the world was going on nonetheless. Time was passing. My life span lessening.
She just realized this. Christ, Rhine.
She claims she totally knew but has been in denial, which sure book sure.
Anyway, she’s supposedly Aquarius, January 30th. Eridan – well, that may not be her personality but she’d be a great fangirl of the guy. Eridan’s even an emotional leech who’s comparatively less into actual sex and would probably spend all his time whining about how dead his previous love is to any new girlfriends. Rhine would cuddle him while he cries perfect tears any day. Assuming it’s not so far in the future the stars have shifted much further, the actual sign she was born under is Capricorn. Gamzee lacks obvious associations, but there’s the twin thing and possibly Rhine’s callous disregard for the lives of others. Should this be far, far future, which may be necessary to explain just how much the climate seems different, she might be all the way back to Sagitarius. Equius works with her uncomfortableness with sex and worship of those socially above her.
This doubles as a nice demonstration of why astrology is bullshit. You can make anything fit. Scorpio? Again the callous disregard for the lives of others, this time in a more self-centered flavor that certainly fits Rhine, and the laboring under a genetic curse of sorts. Plus, both their parents are dead! Libra? Combine Evil Mad Scientist and Rapist-chan into a single entity and you similarly have someone friends with a terrible person, and then they kill another friend and ties are cut, with a side of slow building regret for doing so. Virgo? Virgin-aligned, special blood vs special eyes, likes gardens, favors gothic romance and love interests who are terrible but ultimately swerves toward the less terrible. I can do this all day or until we reach twelve.
As to what this book thinks this stuff means, Aquarius = unpredictable which Rhine assumes also = hard to catch. Which shows how this is all bunk – Rhine was predictably caught by answering a gatherer’s trap ad just like lots of other girls, at which point she predictably behaved when she was lined up and predictably went into the nice car with her new owner and predictably chafed at confinement but not so much she really tried hard to escape.
Then she stumbles through the the questioning:
“I’m trying to find someone,” I say.
“That isn’t a question.”
“Where is the person I’m trying to find? then.”
So maybe Rhine’s trying to catch her in a lie, since otherwise she should be asking if he stayed where she was, but if that’s what she wants, ask where he was before. See how well the woman does with stuff where you need to know the answer.
Anyway, to answer she has to draw cards.
There’s a picture of a man on one card, a woman on the other. Both of them are dressed
royally with red robes and crowns. I read their respective captions:
The Empress.
The Emperor.
You know what I wish? I wish fictional tarot cards resembled the real ones better, where there’s non-obvious meanings to them. But no, the girl being referred to incessantly as empress with a twin brother naturally draws these two cards.
“I didn’t know the cards were gender specific,” I say. “What makes you sure I’m not the Emperor rather than the Empress?”
“Gender has nothing to do with it,” Annabelle says, sliding the two cards toward me. “This is the card you chose first.”
But as she’s not an actual person but a character, gender presumably has everything to do about why the author did this.
What would have been great here would be for Annabelle to say that oh no, according to how they were drawn Rhine is the emperor, because they actually aren’t gender specific.
I’m replaying the way she shuffled the cards, trying to remember if anything was strange about it, if she glanced at them, if she manipulated them so that they would read what she wanted them to read. But I can think of nothing
It’s not immediately obvious how someone might have manipulated the deck!?!??!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!??????? WOW THAT IS SUPER CONVINCING.
In fairness Rhine probably doesn’t know anything much about this, so I understand that obvious stuff like dogearing a card so you can do it by touch wouldn’t occur to her. But anyone can learn the basic fact that people who make their living scamming are probably not obvious about it, and that if you don’t know anything about it, you’re probably not going to be any good at figuring out how they could have done that.
even if this is all a scam, at least it’s entertaining and all it cost was a necklace I didn’t care about
Why won’t you just die already, Rhine? I don’t understand how you’ve avoided that so long when you have the survival skills of a fictional lemming.
“The Empress is a good card. The Empress is nurturing and loyal.
Rhine could stand to be more like that, yes.
she traces her finger over the vines and flowers etched into my wedding band. “The Empress loves tending to living things, seeing them grow. But if a flower is overwatered, it wilts.”
Yes the object stuck on her by her rapist owner before they’d so much as exchanged words is naturally a great insight into Rhine’s personality.
But Rhine just hears about flowers wilting and reminds us how her mom’s lilies died despite her best efforts.
“Perhaps,” Annabelle says, “you love too fiercely.”
Again I let nothing on my face reveal that she’s stumbled upon a truth.
And this is why fortune telling works. It doesn’t matter if everyone else can tell it’s objectively wrong, so long as the person hearing it thinks that’s totally them. And most people would agree that their biggest flaws are being too great.
Anyway, so the emperor is commanding (check!) and also brave, which who knows, maybe.
“Because you drew this card next to your own, I believe it represents someone close to you. Someone as a part of your being as you yourself are.”
“Thank god no one ever draws tarot cards who this couldn’t apply to. That’d be awkward.”
Fortune telling being super real, the lady can tell it’s her twin. Rhine continues to say it’s all bullshit based on a cold reading, because Rhine isn’t the sort of sue who can’t be wrong to teach her not to be so uppity with opinions and thinking she knows anything. Somehow Rhine knows all about the basics while being entirely ignorant of the subject otherwise.
Annabelle snaps to get my attention. I look at her.
“I am having a hard time reading your twin,” she says, exasperated, “ because there is something about this person that you won’t admit even to yourself.”
Okay see Rhine that’s when you should declare it bullshit, she’s refusing to say anything further until you say more and give her more to riff off.
Instead Rhine just claims she knows absolutely everything about her brother, which isn’t actually disagreeing with what the nice charlatan said, and in the next breath adds she’s got no clue where he is because apparently knowing everything doesn’t include knowing such a basic reaction as if he’d stay where he was or leave.
For some reason Annabelle responds by saying “The Emperor is a powerful card,” she says. “It indicates a person who likes being in command.” which has what to do with the subject?
Rhine agrees internally that yes, her brother totally did everything for her, including dragging her out of bed when she was out of it due to grief. Sort of a male Katniss, but presumably fewer arrows and less unbalanced.
Her third card is the world card.
“This card never comes up,” Annabelle says. “Except, I remember, back when I was a girl doing readings in my hometown. Before we knew about the virus. It has not come up since then.”
Oh christ.
“It’s a good card,” she says. “It means everything will fall into place. Your world will come together.”
Yes I already know Rhine’s magic eyes will fix everything.
Lady Charlatan then explains that the cards mean life/death/rebirth, which means the world means Rhine’s personal rebirth but obviously her magic eyes fixing everything will be Rhine causing the rebirth of the world.
“And the Emperor represents death?” I say. That seems like an easy guess. We’re all dying quickly enough.
No that should be pretty weird. Your twin will outlive you thanks to the author’s requirement for sexy slightly older men. Really the only death representation he has is that by having a longer lifespan he reminds her of the extra unfairness in her own shortened one.
Like every tarot card reader ever, Annabelle starts in with how they aren’t always literal and have you heard that death can mean change????????
“Who’s changed?” I say. “Me, or the Emperor?”
I’m not bothering to look any of this up to compare how it works with how it’s getting portrayed because I mean come on tarot cards they’re for people too boring to see things in tea leaves. But this sounds particularly bullshitty even still. If the emperor is representing her brother and it’s drawn in the death slot, that would suggest he’s the one that changed. If you can just mix and match the effects however you please, then why even bother with the card order meaning anything? Just say whatever you feel like is rebirth. Maybe Rhine’s life is the world because everything always falls into place around her.
Fortune Teller Lady closes with a good one:
what I can tell you is this: Things will get worse before they get better.”
Yeah it’s pretty hard to argue with that one. No matter how bad things get, they always could theoretically improve from there unless you die, and dead people tend not to ask for refunds.
Rhine, having discarded her claims this is bullshit around when they started getting bullshit enough to claim such, just explains that’s something only the first gens say because the second gens are practically mayflies.
“He is not as you remember him,” Annabelle says.
And that’s all we’re getting from her, including such basics as if he’s even still alive. Rhine, not taking the hint, then asks “Has he given up on me?” and fortune-teller lady turns out to be kind of a bitch and won’t even give her that much. Rhine claims she looks sympathetic, but Rhine’s a terrible judge of character. Look, just say he hasn’t. What, are you expecting to get slammed on Yelp latter? Two stars, lady said lots of stuff but my brother turned out to be shocked and happy to see me rather than unshocked and happy, would not offer meaningless trinket for platitudes again.