Last time on not-Wither, a horrible truck conversation about how Rhine is so super great!

The truck stops. I don’t know how long it has been. Hours. A day, maybe.

Vomit appears to be the only bodily function that exists in this book.

They overhear someone saying that driving all night would get the truck to West Virginia, so apparently they’re still a ways off from Pennsylvania.

Another voice says, “We could stop for the night.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“One of us could sleep in the front, and the other could sleep in the back.”
A riot of laughter, fading as it gets farther away.

So…what’s up with this? Possibly it’s just I don’t get why there’s a joke here. It seems the first driver is saying he can’t afford a room for the night, which in turn begs the question of how there can be those if they’re priced beyond a driver’s salary – current day drivers get decent pay and they live in a world where basically everyone knows how to at least drive a car and also where there’s a real police force that’d stop you from just deciding to take off and sell the stuff yourself. Drivers should be in relatively short supply and also people with the potential to screw you over pretty badly.

Also, there’s obviously no lack of space, so housing prices should have collapsed and renting a room is cheap.

Anyway, they run out of the truck so they won’t be found.

Maddie is holding her mother’s bag, stuffed full now with bags of Kettle snacks. I don’t know why Madame thought this child was stupid; so far she’s been a step ahead of me at every turn.

Like so much, this doesn’t say Maddie’s smart so much as that Rhine’s a complete idiot.

Maddie also appears to have been smart enough to clean up the evidence of her snacking and theft, because the truckers unload the boxes where they were hiding yet notice nothing amiss.

Rhine intends to get back on the truck, further underlying how little her trauma actually affects the story, but Gabriel is too sluggish with withdrawal and they don’t make it.

The door to the Flamingo Six opens, bursting with a laughing crowd of first generations who then scatter into cars. We must be near a wealthy area if people own cars, because only first generations can afford them.

The information is laid out weirdly – she’s already seen the cars before this, and also if wealth is a matter of first generation density, then the crowd of them is the important factor.

I also don’t believe this. Once again, the population is collapsing. America is full of cars (and cars actually aren’t too hard to manufacture once you know how – the high cost is because you’re paying for the R&D and then changed factories for the new parts). Plus, we know there’s enough automobiles hanging around that gatherers can be picky about only vans and manage to have fleets of the things.

Oil to run them is a more likely limiting factor, but that doesn’t fit well either – again, you’ve got the gatherers driving all over in those vans, which is not a behavior you’d expect if gas is hard to find. You’d think they’d only use the vans for transporting a full cargo of girls, which in turn means they won’t be running all the time (there’s a limited number of girls) and people should be even more motivated to attack them on sight. You also wouldn’t have trucks delivering things, especially not Pennsylvania to South Carolina distances. Other methods, like trains and boats, would be used as much as possible.

They seem to colonize in places, as though the rest of society is too difficult for them to face. There are those that boycott the birth of new children, pro-naturalists who intend to carry out the rest of their own lives without trying to bear or save us new generations, who are dying the day we are born.

Or they’re just following the usual patterns of the wealthy seeking their own company and trying to keep away from the riffraff.

Sometimes I envy them, to have lived seventy years already, to be so at peace with death.

All first gens seem to be seventy.

I’ve been trying to make sense of how you could have a universal switchover to superbabies followed by the discovery of the second gen’s mortality without any of the original models still being around to have regular kids. And it seems like it’s actually in the same vein as America accidentally the whole world, where there’s one single simultaneous batch of the superbabies making up an entire “generation”.

The building they’re in front of turns out to be a restaurant run by a first gen couple, because sure fiddle why Rome burns why don’t you.

Rhine lets them think Gabriel’s sick from the “virus” because she thinks they wouldn’t feed them if they knew he was detoxing.

Some first generations are opposed to our existence enough without thinking we’re all addicts.

It really makes no sense for the first gens to be blaming the second gens, especially when so far we’ve seen no sign of the second gens being dangerous toward the first or even the first gens being concerned about that. The second gens seem an amazingly placid population, in fact – with nothing to live for, they seem to just obediently work for the people who fucked up their world, and the closest thing to criminal activity we’ve seen is the abuse of the second-gen female population. Not one of the entire doomed generation seems to have decided that, fuck it, I’m dying next week so why not strap dynamite on my chest and blow up some fucking adults?

I mean, how much do you think one of the meals this place serves costs in a world where lots of people can’t even eat? Let’s go by Rhine’s comparatively well off brother – a week’s wages? A month’s wages? A year’s? How many starving six year olds do you think the scraps from the plates here would feed?

(Also there’s the fact that she has an actual sob story regarding why he’s coming down from angel’s blood that establishes they’re not addicts and might make people feel pretty bad for them.)

they let us sit at a small foldout table in the break room, and give us bowls of chicken noodle soup and grilled sandwiches.

Is this like, fancy artisan heritage chicken with fresh made noodles? Rhine doesn’t seem to mention anything about it being particularly impressive, but maybe she’s just snobby after her fancy wife suppers. If this is half as basic as it sounds, though, how are they in business? This is a world where you can beat four year olds into being insanely talented seamstresses and makeup artists, and even in our world it’s not that hard to teach teens to cook for restaurants.

Rhine spins the story that they’re trying to get to Gabriel’s home in West Virginia so he can die with his family.

I wonder, how often would people even leave? Leaving is a big disruption and one that generally puts you at a temporary disadvantage. Normally, that’s outweighed by the potential benefits, but…that takes time. And these people don’t have time. Moving to a new place and taking a year to get settled is no big deal if you’ll be better off for the next twenty. Even moving and finding nothing and having to move again so you spend two years on it isn’t that bad. But consider Rhine – if she moved to a new place now, she’d be eighteen by the time she finished settling in on this timeline. She’d then have a good year of work plus some months before the virus weakened her, then a little later she’d be dead. If she miscalculates and finds she needs to move again, by the time she’s settled she’ll have hit the decline period with her savings already gutted by transition.

Add to that how very short a time you have with your family…Gabriel’s must all be younger than him to still be around (if they were first gens, Gabriel would never have left, after all. First gens are the only reliable providers there are) and that additionally means they likely would rely on him for help surviving, since the oldest sibling is also generally the most skilled (in the event of twins, Rhine’s depiction suggests the presence of a dick is a bonus as well). Having betrayed them by leaving it’s hard to believe they’d even want him back. The only way I’d imagine he’d still be one good terms would be if he’d left to get better employment and sent the money home, but like I said, moving is risky and furthermore, if he does manage to settle in a good area, his family should follow him – having someone already there would minimize their own transition losses and get them in better positions for when he inevitably dies.

…also, there’s no way to send the money when there likely is no postal service and if there was, there’s no laws enforcing that they can’t tamper with the mail. I don’t think there’s even a way to send a message back to say you’re not dead, since Rhine certainly hasn’t.

(Apparently there’s no phones. Rhine mentioned them back in the first book because she answered them for a company, but no one else has them. Communication over distances is gone.)

When Elsa checks in on us, she frowns at Gabriel’s sleeping form. “Don’t you have anyone you could stay with tonight?”
…
I weave a lie, and I’m so tired and my mind is so muddled that I’d be surprised if it makes any sense. Something about a bus breaking down, and there not being another ride out until morning

Okay, so there’s buses and trucks and vans but only first gens have cars.

Also, why does she need a story here? It’s amazing enough Gabriel would have any family to go back to. Our social structure is destroyed along with their lifespans – by the time you’re old enough to know you have aunts and uncles, they’re dead. At most, you might keep in touch with cousins, but given second gen parents die while their kids are still single digits, it’s unlikely either group could keep in touch or would have any time or energy to concern themselves with others.

The bus story suggests that physical travel is still affordable to the second gens, but they don’t have the time – assuming a family reunion every year, the kids would only meet a handful of times they could even remember. And what does kinship mean under those conditions? Families are kept together because the adults remember growing up with each other. The kids would concern themselves more with their local friends, the kids they’d actually grown up with even if they shared no genes. (And we’ve seen how amazingly little that’s worth in Rhine, who thinks of her friend next door who was her age – no idea what happened to the girl after her dad died, only mild sadness at the memory, doesn’t even affect her similar willingness to abandon the other two “sister” wives to Evil Mad Scientist’s clutches.)

Elsa believes it, which is when I truly begin to suspect that something is a bit off about her.

Firstly, I don’t see why it’s unbelievable unless buses are actually super rare and/or expensive and so it’s implausible you two would’ve been on one. Second, maybe she knows you’re lying and just doesn’t feel the need to press you, because either way you need a place to stay.

Her offer, incidentally, convinces Rhine there’s something wrong with the woman. Bear in mind Rhine’s life has been full of strangers offering her nice things, most recently Lilac messing up her own escape to save Rhine who was the source of all the trouble in the first place, so this is neither a sign of how her worldview is skewed nor a statement that in the current world no one sane could be nice.

Elsa starts to talk about her dead son Charlie.

she can hear his ghost in the halls. His words, she says, got trapped in the wallpaper, and they leap between the little blue flowers of it, echoing, playing with one another.
Maddie is transfixed by this woman’s words, her head canted all the way up, watching Elsa’s lips move. I wonder if Elsa and Maddie are on the same wavelength. If Maddie could speak, would she tell of laughter in clouds, or ghosts in her hair?

So seems like Maddie will avoid being the littlest victim because the book’s too busy trying to use her as a mirror to everyone we meet.

To answer your question, Rhine, no, they’re not. Elsa is mad with grief. Maddie has some sort of innate mental disorder with completely different symptoms to boot.

We learn Charlie didn’t marry.

She says she’d love to find a girl for him, one day, who can reach him in death. And then she asks me if I know how to sing.

oh god oh god run

But she doesn’t ask about my eyes, how I got them or if I’m malformed, which I appreciate.

Or you could just totally blow off the fact she wants to find a girl for her son so they can be ghost married.

Maybe because in her world everything is out of sorts.

Maybe because different colored eyes aren’t actually the most special thing in the world or even all that noticeable at a distance, and also a sum total of one person ever has even suggested they mean you’re malformed. Which is especially telling when everything that happened last book revolved around how people thought your eyes were great, so ditch the martyr complex.

Oh, and when the husband comes by Maddie rabbit-freezes, then hides under the table as soon as he’s gone. Rhine manages to not be horrible for a little while:

She won’t come out, no matter how many times I ask, so I give up. I make a game of tapping my foot against the floor in the rhythm of a song I remember from one of Linden’s parties, and then, without warning, I’ll tap Maddie’s leg instead.
She likes this. I can hear the bubbling breaths that, I come to realize, are her way of giggling.

So on balance Maddie’s worth it for Rhine doing something other than rapist apologism, even if it means she’s compared to everyone in stupid ways.

Then the husband returns to say they can rent their spare room and they’ll work out payment in the morning. Jeeze, first tarot lady and now him. If it’s empty space, what are you losing by letting some people use it for a few hours? Is part of the superbaby genome a rabid love of capitalism?

He has a kind face. Sad, dark eyes like his wife has. Laugh lines. Gray-brown hair and a close shave. But when he smiles at me, something about it makes me want to climb under the table myself. Not to hide with Maddie but to protect her.

Also apparently he’s a child molester? Which Rhine can tell from how he looks at her, even though anything sexually threatening there should be aimed at her.

I guess that’s the point of the bit about evil child molesters earlier, it’s to explain why creepy rape smiles aren’t causing Rhine to swoon over his obvious inner pain and how pure and innocent he is this time.

Well, at least she’s got some standards.