Last time, fortune telling is real I guess. Also Rhine is special.

She has a nightmare about her parents’ house (because I guess she still doesn’t think of it as hers) burning and yelling to her brother that she’s still alive. Well, that makes sense with the fortune telling last chapter preying on her fears.

She wakes and Gabriel gives her the bread to eat.

I can’t bear to think of the wonderful breakfast that would have been waiting for me at the mansion.

Christ shut up.

He adds that Annabelle says if they get water from a nearby steam she’ll boil them a bath, because that sure doesn’t take an enormous amount of energy to heat.

“You should rest. You look like you need it.”
I could swear there’s malice in the way he says it.

Rhine decides he’s mad at her because life’s sucked since leaving the mansion. She starts to say things will get better but he says it’s fine and leaves.

Annabelle is inspecting one of her walls when we step outside. She’s muttering about
the wind always tearing the boards loose. She points us to the river and offers the stack of
rusted, mismatched buckets she keeps for collecting and boiling bathwater.

1) Steam and river are different things.
2) Why does she live in a shack in the middle of nowhere? From what Rhine’s said, there’s empty houses all over.
3) Unless first gens have astounding immune systems, she’d have to use those for boiling all her water. And she’s probably still getting poisoned by all the pollutants that are in them.

Rhine worries more about Gabriel being upset because life sucks.

“How do you think Vaughn found me so quickly?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel’s voice is worried. “I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe we aren’t very far from the mansion yet. He might still know people in these parts.”
“It seems like a stretch,” I say. “I thought we’d gone pretty far.”

I wonder if this is an earlier draft artifact? They’ve identified their location as South Carolina, and the mansion was in Florida, abet a version that spent winters under twenty feet of snow. Here they’re talking as if they don’t know their location – otherwise, it’d be that Evil Mad Scientist’s reach is further than they thought, not that they hadn’t gone as far as they thought.

Something that might be interesting would be for them to have no sense of distance and not know if South Carolina far is from Florida, but in that case, they should be saying that’s where they’re confused: “I thought South Carolina was far away from Florida.” or something along those lines.

Annabelle boils the water for us over the fireplace, one bucket at a time, and dumps it into a washbasin.
The warm water does wonders for me, even if I am sponge-bathing with a threadbare rag.

Uh. How much water is being used here, exactly? Washing with a cloth shouldn’t take lots of buckets of water, especially since if you’re boiling water but the stuff you’re washing in is warm rather than scalding you must be adding the boiled water to cold water.

She then exchanges her impractical dress for jeans and a sweater.

I think of the beautiful sweater Deirdre knit me; it’s gone forever now, a part of Madame’s demented circus.

Shut the fuck up about your stupid sweater your slave made you.

Annabelle hugs them goodbye. Since Annabelle also fleeced them of everything of value, I’m inclined to view this as just acting to keep them from realizing they’ve been screwed over until they’re too far away to do anything about it.

I see no promise of customers anywhere. We are standing in a ghost town, more dilapidated than Madame’s carnival, every building plucked of vital pieces to be used in makeshift houses like Annabelle’s.

Firstly, so, does that mean Annabelle’s just crazy? Second, why would people be raiding buildings to build their houses when they could just live in the buildings? One’s a lot more work for a lot less gain.

This kind of raiding usually takes place with expanding populations, where there isn’t enough to go around with all the buildings people need to make, and/or where there’s a few buildings that are nominally owned by someone so you can’t just set up shop in them but can snag stuff from them during unattended periods.

But no one seems to own stuff these days. Rhine doesn’t say anything about having to afford taxes on her house or any other bills, and we’ve established electricity seems to be free within the city grid.

I know we can’t walk to Manhattan; I know we’ll have to work something out before dark. Annabelle told us there would be a town a few miles up, if we stayed along the coastline.

Why don’t you steal another boat?

Seriously, it worked great last time and there’s a good chance that the security on another boat will be much the same. The only issue is the plunging into cold water at the end bit, which would be dangerous the further north you get even ignoring Maddie not being able to swim, but you’re in less of a hurry this time so just scope out the boats to find one with a smaller lifeboat on it. Ditch the boat father out and paddle ashore. Maybe there’ll even be one of the smaller motorboats attached, so you can use that.

This may not work for whatever reason, but why wouldn’t that be Plan A?

Instead Rhine asks if Gabriel thinks Evil Mad Scientist was telling the truth. He tells her the obvious: no. She tells us again that he’s really angry seeming.

In the mansion he was always warm and alive. In the cold autumn air he’d bring me hot chocolate and hide for a while in the leaves, always red at the cheeks and hands. Vivaciousness under his suppressed smiles. Now he is not that boy at all.

Which, to me, says that she was really in love with him because he was an attentive servant, unaware that most of that was an outgrowth of the fact he literally was employed to be a servant.

But instead, the real reason Gabriel is cranky is because he’s been taking angel’s blood.

“I couldn’t see straight,” he says. “I was in so much pain.”
“I was sick too,” I say.
“Not like I was. I was having nightmares. You. Always you. Drowning. Burning alive. Screaming.

I’m not seeing how taking more nightmare meds helps with that. Also, both of them were really drugged on the stuff, so why is only he addicted?

He looks back at me, and I don’t see the drug or Gabriel in his eyes, but some sleepy inbetween. Something I created. A boy I ruined.

Drugs don’t ruin you. Stop being weird about this, Rhine.

I had a goldfish when I was little—a bloated orange thing my father gave me for my birthday. Days later I poured it into a drinking glass while I cleaned its tank and filled the tank with fresh water. Only, when I transferred it back into its tank, clean and crystal clear, the fish swam erratically for a while, tilted at an angle, and died.
It was too much too fast, my brother chided me. The transition from one body of water to the next needed to be gradual. I’d killed it with shock.

I guess lots of people have their little childhood memories of doing horrible things to animals. Let’s take a moment to remind everyone of proper fish procedure so people will have fewer:

1) Fish do not breath water! They breath oxygen just like you do. Do not put them in a drinking glass because water gets oxygen through the surface, and the less surface area there is, the less oxygen can get in. Goldfish are extremely forgiving about this because they can gulp air from the surface instead of dying immediately, but they’re doing that because they’re suffocating and need you to help them before they die.

2) Tap water has chlorine! Chlorine will cause your fish to die a horrible death. Use water conditioner and/or let water sit out for a day so it can evaporate. Boiling it also helps. For best results, boil then let it sit. Never just dump it in.

3) You should not be changing all the water at once! Even if the water quality is terrible, you’re better off replacing half of it than all of it. Bacteria are part of water quality mantenence. Replace all the water and the bacteria are gone, and your water quality will quickly plummet again before they can breed back to the proper numbers. Also, water has PH and such that the fish is used to. That needs to be shifted very, very slowly.

4) Fish don’t like any temperature of water! Water from the tap is usually way, way too cold for them. Acclimating them to it is like someone trying to acclimate you to being dropping naked in the antarctic – you’re going slower but the result will be the same. (This is another reason why not changing ALL THE WATER in one go is a winning idea!)

5) The one area I have found fish to be surprisingly robust is in the dumping from one body of water to another. If your fish dies upon being put in a cleaned tank, you fucked something else up. The water in your tank should not be significantly different.

6) PARENTAL SUPERVISION IS IMPORTANT. CHILDREN, FIND AN ADULT BEFORE DOING ANYTHING. PARENTS, NO, IT IS NOT “THEIR RESPONSIBILITY” IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY AS THE ADULT TO PREVENT WHATEVER SMALL ANIMAL YOU CHOSE TO BRING INTO THE HOUSE FROM DYING.

Back to now, Rhine is saying it’s totally understandable Gabriel’s like this because he grew up in the mansion and isn’t used to the outside world

of murderers and thieves and empty shells of people

STOP TALKING ABOUT THE GIRLS LIKE THAT.

She says they should ration the drug out, possibly as an excuse to keep him from using too much, and says that once they find a safe place he needs to detox.

We pass through a town that at a glance looks abandoned, but I can hear footsteps running behind broken buildings, the sharp sigh of machines.

So do they have electricity? The south doesn’t have many rivers that could be harnessed, so I doubt they could be using the river/stream for much.

“When are you going to acknowledge that we can’t walk a straight line to Manhattan?”

I don’t know when she claimed they could. She’s moving right now because they’re running away from Evil Mad Scientist.

Maddie breaks her hand away from mine and crouches in the dirt to inspect a cockroach that’s skittering in circles. There are probably hundreds more of them; we’re standing by a landfill, and the smell is making my eyes water.

Fun fact: cockroaches can survive a lot, but not cold. They will not actually take over the planet when we go – we’re the source of their success.

Now, a landfill’s decomposition generates heat. But that requires this to be an active landfill and for there to be a lot of organic matter thrown away. Both seem unlikely in the present day, despite Rhine’s claim the place stinks – besides, it’s winter, it really shouldn’t even if it were the sort we have now.

“We can take a break and regroup. But not right here. Someplace with cleaner air.”
“There is no place with cleaner air,” Gabriel counters. “From the moment we left it’s been one horrible thing after another.” He looks right into my eyes, pausing purposefully between the words. “There is nothing better.”

Gabriel’s getting annoying. Besides, they already did get a look at the fun side of outside the mansion when they got to the bright city and snuck into the movie theater.

The earth rumbles with the weight of a garbage truck in the distance. The truck, shuttering and spitting fumes, hurls more trash into the landfill. It doesn’t seem possible, but I swear the smell gets worse.

This makes no sense at all.

You can have the very poor and very rich coexisting, but you need a certain minimum number for the rich to be able to generate a lot of waste and even more for it to be thrown out without getting scavenged away by the poor. I can believe old landfills aren’t being mined for stuff, because with the collapsing population the only resource left to concern yourself is food. But people should be eating food out of the garbage of the rich houses long before it gets this far.

Rhine decides to be hopefully and points out trash = civilization. That’s surprisingly competent from her. She’s really been much better this book.

Maddie then decides that dammit, if no one else will move the plot she will, and runs off to point at a delivery truck.

I hesitate. My heart is hammering in my ears. From all the way over here, I can smell the metal air of the truck, remember the pulsing darkness of the Gatherers’ van like a weight compressing my skull, the tendrils of madness that slither and coil around my arms and legs

Hey, realistically depicted trauma. Wasn’t expecting to see you here.

Rhine attempts to argue against it by saying they don’t know where it’s going, but when Gabriel asks how they could find out, she says her brother did deliveries sometimes (I wonder if they relaxed driving restrictions?) and trucks are labeled with the lot they go home to, including the state abbreviation.

“PA . . . Pennsylvania? Is that far from New York?” he asks.

See kids, learn geography and you too can stow away on delivery trucks to escape evil mad scientists!

Anyway, so Rhine still hates the idea but can’t make any excuse for why they shouldn’t go.

The side of the truck has a cartoon of a laughing baby chick, and the words CALLIE’S KETTLE SNACKS & SOFT DRINKS are formed around it in a circle.

Hm. Snack food does manage to coexist with extreme poverty, but it seems a poor use of energy if we assume the government is actually trying to keep stuff going as usual, since it requires a lot of processing. And even if there were snack companies, I wouldn’t expect there to be more than one or two brands crawling along through bulk processing and brand recognition, but Rhine doesn’t seem to recognize this one.

Also, why is it here? Is it doing individual deliveries to businesses who buy it as a perk for their employees?

But anyway, they’ve found food and a ride. We might actually get to New York this book! I’m really surprised, I figured it’d just be a string of prostitution scares.