Last time on Fever, they’ve met some nice greedy first gens who offer to let them rent a room for the night. Also, one of them has a pedo smile.
The restaurant closes at ten, so apparently while they were there it was still open. I’d assumed the floor of first gens indicated it was done for the night.
I coax a little of someone’s leftovers into him as we wash dishes.
So yeah, they’re just throwing away perfectly good food in a world where the starving children are right next door.
(And how are they kept away from this place? Rhine says first gens group together, but as the only people who have money and spare anything, the kids should follow them like shivering locust. Instead of stray cats in the alley behind the restaurant, there’s a bunch of feral toddlers digging through the trash. Older kids should be busy carjacking all those nice first gen cars.
Possibly this is a gated community and they only got in because the truck was allowed through, but in that case there’d need to be much more explanation for where Rhine’s group came from.
Maddie, standing on a lemon crate, dries them with surprising care. Something tells me that the sound of shattered glass would set her off and that she knows it.
What? You’re the one who keeps saying she’s smart, why can’t she just be careful because she’s learned how to do this? Plus I’d expect breaking dishes would set Madame off, and she’d have learned breaking things makes people scream and hit her.
The bedroom has only one creaky twin bed, and I’m about to suggest we let Maddie have it, when she takes her mother’s bag, yanks a pillow from the pristinely made-up covers, and climbs under the bed. Used to the perpetual state of hiding that Madame forced on her, I guess.
Or she might be a nervous kid who likes to hide. I mean, the one time we saw her sleeping before, she was in the pile of girls in plain sight, being held by her mom. When she knew where she was and Madame and her mother were there, she wasn’t sleeping under beds. Madame and her mother are gone now along with the familiar surroundings, and she’s climbing under a bed. I’d assume the problem is her mom’s gone, but it might also be not knowing the area – Maddie seemed pretty great at navigating the tents, so she probably felt a lot safer there.
And perhaps there she knew what she could expect from people – strawberries from the guards, kicks from Madame. She seems pretty freaked out by the maybe-pedophile guy here, and perhaps that’s as much because he’s an unknown as anything. Given there were plenty of healthier little kids back at the brothel, it’s unlikely anyone looked twice at her, and given Madame’s shoot first then hide the body policy and then shoot anyone who suggests asking questions at any point might’ve been a good idea, I’d assume the guards would have a lot of leeway in killing anyone who looked too interested in one of the little kids. Maybe it’s really them she’s missing.
Elsa hums and smiles at her and says she always wanted a granddaughter.
No lack of orphans, lady.
Rhine explains her plan is to stay up because no one else can keep watch. You could just block the door, you know.
Elsa also gives them a change of clothes of the night that’s obviously her son’s stuff.
including sweatpants that don’t quite stay on my hips even with the drawstring pulled taut. because Rhine is so tiny her hips basically don’t exist. Why did anyone pick this girl to breed with? Surely when she got there Evil Mad Scientist would’ve been like well that one’s gonna die in child birth, let’s try again son.
Maddie pulls out the ancient kid’s book her mom thoughtfully pack for her. It contains someone’s name and a Manhattan address.
“Who is that?” I ask Maddie. “Do you know who lives there?”
She sighs the hair out of her face. Now that it’s clean, it’s like the fine fuzz of a dark baby chick.
SHE CAN WRITE YOU IDIOT.
Maddie is entirely capable of communication and hasn’t even shown she’s adverse to it. When she wanted Rhine to run away, she didn’t gesture wildly or point or anything, she wrote a word. She may well be mute because of a physical deformity – Rhine’s said her laugh sounds really weird, which is odd because a kid’s laugh is a programmed behavior, they all start off doing it the same, but a kid with a messed up throat would obviously sound different. Her silence otherwise is easily attributed to frustration she can’t make the right sounds.
Anyway, Rhine reads her the book, which is nice, and when Gabriel returns and lies down she can see how much pain he’s in so she rubs his back while comparing him to Cecily in labor, which in turn reminds me of what a terrible person Rhine was about everything there. Bad move, book.
I have been too selfish. While he was dealing with the shock of a world without holograms, and bearing the poison of that awful drug, I have been worrying over my sister wives and dreaming of down comforters, missing the taste of June Beans. And that is no good. I left those things behind.
Yes!
It’s time to let them go
Yes!
tuck them someplace safe in my memories and never speak of them again.
ARRRRRG!
Also, she can’t do that until she asks Gabriel about Jenna, despite the two things not actually being the same. Gabriel grudgingly admits that yeah, that happened.
“Jenna was keeping secrets from me.” And then I realize the reason I can’t let this go is because I’m angry. “She was a sister to me. I confided in her.
You used her. Don’t try to pretend now that you were all about honesty there.
Gabriel says Jenna knew she would be killed.
Vaughn. The cause for all the suffering my sister wives and I endured.
Yeah the rapist who bought you was totally innocent. That memory of Cecily curled in a ball from labor, screaming? Definitely not the fault of the guy who fucked a thirteen year old until she was pregnant. Jenna’s dead sisters? Totally Evil Mad Scientist’s fault.
He says that before she set a fire to let Rhine sneak down to see Gabriel, she snuck down on her own because Jenna was fucking competent.
“She knew that we were planning to escape
“Right, which is why I can’t believe she kept secrets! I was totally incompetent so she knew my secrets, why wouldn’t she be nice and tell me hers in return?”
Jenna was worried because Rhine works so hard to take care of everyone. And did she ever take care of Cecily. Good odds the girl suicided.
to be in control
Okay, so Jenna’s obviously talking about one of her dead sisters who looked like Rhine. Even the book knows this because this book has been all about how Rowan was in charge of everything because Rhine’s incompetent and weak.
that you didn’t pay any attention when you were in danger.
Oh, if only that were true. But no, Jenna, she spent the entire damn book talking about how evil Evil Mad Scientist was, it’s just she was also too lazy and weak-willed to actually do jack shit about that and too incompetent to try to play nice.
She asked me to take care of you even when you didn’t let on that you needed it.
This one’s harder to evaluate because while Rhine is weak-willed, she’s also got plot insulation from bad stuff so it’s hard to tell how she’d act in a situation where she really needed help. Certainly was fine letting Jenna help her out.
Also Jenna said even more, presumably something actually plot relevant, but she made Gabriel swear never to tell her and Gabriel says that if it mattered he would but he’s pretty sure it doesn’t, despite the fact he doesn’t know anything about the world so how would he know?
He finishes up saying he doesn’t trust the nice couple.
I don’t either. Elsa is lost in the wistful wasteland of her own mind, and Greg seems to terrify Maddie.
Okay, depression doesn’t make you untrustworthy. Creepy plans to get your son a ghost bride, yes, but Rhine is complaining about wistfulness and not ax murdering tendancies. And the book really hasn’t established what the hell Maddie’s supposed to be enough to justify if it’s make sense for her to be a judge of character.
Rhine goes on to say that first she thought Maddie’s brothel experiences made her scared of men, but that wouldn’t even make sense because the place was full of armed guards that wouldn’t even let you fuck in private, so I don’t think she’d associate the customers with danger when mostly they were the ones getting murdered. Instead of using logic Rhine says that Maddie liked Jared and Gabriel and therefore can’t be scared of men, because obviously if you’re okay with any guy you’re okay with all of them.
Gabriel spends the night snarling “hateful” stuff that she’s pretty sure isn’t at her but she’s got no idea who it is aimed at. He wakes up at one point thinking they’d been discussing going back to the mansion by helicopter.
I make my way down the hallway
You are super failing at the whole keeping watch thing.
I open the door and find a plastic bottle of water.
Not even the apocalypse will stop people from buying fucking water bottles.
Plastic, my brother says, is the most brilliant chemical invention because it never deteriorates
Finally, some conclusive proof her brother is actually just a confident idiot.
once it has served its purpose, it can be melted down and made into anything else, or left to rot forever in a landfill.
First off, nope. Second off, nope. Third, “rot” really does suggest actually rotting which involves deterioration.
Plastic is a pretty wide net. Some break down relatively fast, some extremely slowly. But even when we talk about them not breaking down, it’s rare anyone means there’s no deterioration at all – plastic bottles in particular are kind of infamous for breaking down just enough that unpleasant things end up in the water they hold.
Scientists could make bottles, he says, but not humans.
Scientists made some fucking awesome humans. The problem was when those humans decided to make more humans by fucking, instead of sticking with science.
Granted they seem to have accidentally taken out the part of the brain that would realize this, but we’re not talking about competence here, just if they made the mayfly kids.
Gred is there in the kitchen, which Rhine was totally oblivious to. Even ignoring her supposed keen anti-intruder senses, she shouldn’t remember the layout well enough to have found her way here without looking around very closely. The trope where someone stumbles sleepily through a dark room works when it’s their own house, so they don’t need to look where they’re going.
Greg says it’s nice of her to get her husband water, but warns her to take care of herself too because Rhine is totally selfless.
When they’re dying like that—it just sucks the energy right out of your soul. It makes you feel like you’re the one dying.”
Technically, taking care of a dying partner generally lowers the other person’s life expectancy notably, so you might say you actually are feeling yourself dying in the process. I don’t know if they did a study on what watching a kid die did to parents, though.
Rhine says that sure Gabriel isn’t dying but now she’s thinking of Jenna
I promised myself to let my sister wives go, but that is a pain that will never leave me.
Once again, Cecily, not dead, just abandoned. Also, you hated her the whole time.
Gabriel says their kid died more than thirty years ago. Since they appear to be seventy on the dot, they had sex starting at twenty, she got pregnant shortly after, they had a son, he died in their forties.
Of course, while this supports my supposition that the superbaby problem wasn’t noticed because it took them so long to reproduce, that explanation no longer works because they apparently only happened once, so any original model who wasn’t of age to buy a superbaby would’ve had a regular kid.
Hm, that if superbabies were radiation immune or something? So the reason there’s no original models is all that mass death. Unfortunately, while radiation damages dead tissue, it does very little – DNA is generally damaged when the cells are in the process of division. They’d still be able to dig up corpses fine. But then, they’d still be able to clone themselves fine too.
“Thirty years. Elsa’s still not quite right about it.”
By the way, don’t you guys have therapists? Pretty obvious your wife needs actual help. Or, failing that, a new kid. With how Rhine talks, you guys won’t live to see it die.
Greg is drinking because drugs are bad kids. He says they failed them, which yeah, the first gens have done an amazingly horrible job at keeping things going. I’ve been assuming most of the functioning of the world is down to them, but there really isn’t any evidence of this. What we actually see them doing is dealing with a high death rate by banning birth control and encouraging kidnapping a couple girls and murdering the rest.
“What does it feel like to know exactly when you’ll die?”
And now that we get into that…how many kids make it that long? Rowan killed a gatherer who’d come to take Rhine when they were younger, Rhine keeps coming back to the memory of the kid’s corpse in their backyard, gathered girls are regularly murdered, plenty of the boys who frequented the brothel were killed… There doesn’t seem much in the way of health care or even knowledge of it among the average person, and if they’ve been vaccinating it hasn’t been mentioned and certainly there’s plenty of people with compromised immune systems, so there should be diseases just ripping their way through the population every now and again. Cecily nearly dies in childbirth six years short of her set date, Jenna is murdered a year early.
The age thing is a hard limit on how long she can live, but it’s odd she or anyone takes getting that far for granted.
But anyway we need to justify the scariness.
“Wait,” he says. “Just—wait. You have so much life in you still. You’re the warmest thing I’ve seen in years.”
I jerk my arm, but his grip tightens. His eyes darken. “Let go,” I say.
“In a couple of years you will be nothing but ash,” he says.
This is a weird conversation. Is he turned on by her mayflyness? You’d expect thinking about how she’ll die gruesomely soon wouldn’t really be a turn on, and if the idea is the young live fast and brightly, it’s certainly never come up before – everyone seems to view them as about as alive as someone walking to the electric chair.
He kisses me. It’s a hard, forceful kiss, his tongue prying my mouth open, attacking me with salt and cheap liquor and hot, coppery breaths. My struggle is immediate, my body moving on its own, pushing, kicking, resisting.
So okay then. The book accepts that if the rape victim struggles it’s rape. It technically could be worse, so let’s thank the book for managing to find a point where even it draws the line.
I feel like his tongue is slithering down my throat, choking me. His other hand moves past the drawstring of my sweatpants. He has calloused papery fingers like Vaughn has in all of my nightmares
So this seems to confirm the idea the setting is like this because the author needs the men to be older than the women but doesn’t want them to actually be old, and enforces that by having it split between younger than twenty-five boys and ancient seventy year old men. Linden-chan is a kawaii rapist, old men are gross and terrible, therefore this man trying to rape her is just like Linden’s father, even though the man seemed to have no interest in sex at all and quite notably was the only one who was willing to treat Cecily as a little girl.
Rhine, being a strong female character, is saved by Gabriel smashing Greg’s head in.
“I could kill him,” he’s muttering as he pulls me down the hallway and into the bedroom. “I could kill him.”
“It’s the withdrawal talking,” I say. “This isn’t you. You aren’t like this.”
“Oh, it’s me,” he says.
I’m on Gabriel’s side here. It’s not even like there’s anything to weigh against it, since these particular first gens are doing nothing at all to help the second gens.
Gabriel sends the two of them out, and Rhine notes Maddie’s faster than me; she’s used to running for safety, but has she ever truly been safe? Maddie is, of course, a tiny girl with a crippled leg, so this seems to just indicate Rhine really, really sucks. It’s a good thing wives are chosen for attractiveness and not fitness.
Maddie does make the mistake of opening the door, which triggers an alarm. They run.
Over the noise Gabriel is asking me what authorities the alarm will summon. He is still expecting some rule maker, some god, some Vaughn to come and punish the offenders.
“None,” I say. “No one is coming. The alarm is meant to wake them up if anyone breaks in.”
So apparently even the first gens have no sense of community.
Wispy, frail Elsa, and dark, staggering Greg, who is in his own way just as gone as his wife.
Oh god Rhine, the one time you actually admit a rapist is terrible and you’re still going right for sympathy. Maybe he just likes raping girls! Maybe he was always like this! Certainly we know that for some reason, Charlie had no luck with girlfriends, and having a rapist dad would put a crimp in that.
But no, Rhin’e just rambling about how this alarm is just like how Rowan and she had an alarm.
Everyone wants to defend what belongs to them.
This is an interesting choice of words. I’d have used “protect” in this statement but I think “defend” is what’s really going on – why can’t other people live in Rhine and Rowan’s warm house too? Because it’s theirs. Why do first gens demand payment for their floor or spare room from desperate second gens? Because it’s theirs. This is a world ruled by selfishness.
Rhine, having needed to be told to run away and then physically shoved out the door when the alarm went off, now learns that Gabriel meanwhile robbed them.
Gabriel. I didn’t think he had it in him.
Indeed, I’m pretty sure he’s never encountered a place like this, but somehow he knew about the cash register or wherever else he grabbed the money from.
And I might have been unhappier about the fact that he stole from the people who took us in if I couldn’t still feel Greg’s hand on my thigh.
She had no problem with robbing the truck even though the drivers will probably get in trouble for the loss and unlike these people, can’t afford that. This is Rhine’s best sense of morality – explicit, direct kindness is enough to make her think it shouldn’t be answered with cruelty, but she doesn’t care about people otherwise.
Also I think she still hasn’t figured out Greg probably took them in precisely because he wanted to rape her later, let alone that Elsa was sounding pretty dangerous too. She seems to be viewing it as a balance thing – they were nice but also one tried to rape her.
Gabriel says it’s enough for bus fare, because Gabriel totally knows stuff about how the world works.
I mean, back at the carnival brothel Rhine wasn’t accomplishing too much, but at least she was the one who needed to try. Even a little while ago she was the one who knew how trucks worked and could negotiate with others for help. But the author must figure she’s spent enough time letting Rhine be useful just because it makes sense, and now she can go back to a guy being in charge.
It would have been easier for him to work out his withdrawal simply lying in the back of a truck, in the cool darkness. But he did this for me, because he could feel how I was reacting to that dark place and knows I don’t care to relive it.
Yes, detoxing is so much more pleasant hiding in a bumpy truck constantly wondering if you’ll be discovered, not sure if you’re even going the right way.
I feel a wave of something I can’t explain, but it makes me happy and weak and nauseous at the same time.
That’d be you slotting into your approved gender role.
She says the houses are nice and have nice lawns, therefore they’re all first gens, therefore no gatherers.
Still, though, I gasp when a car passes us
I get what you’re trying to do and I appreciate the effort, but you’ve got to be more consistent. It’s okay you only remembered Rhine might be a bit traumatized by gatherers around the truck bit. That’s what the magic of editing is for. Just go back and stick some references in before that point.
Gabriel is still hallucinating from withdrawal despite Rhine being totally unaffected. He’s seeing snakes.
In the worst of my medicated delirium, Vaughn always became a snake. But I thought that had more to do with Vaughn than anything else. There was one time when Vaughn, Linden, my sister wives, and I were holed up in the basement during a hurricane. I’d started falling asleep, and as Vaughn spoke in the distance, he transformed into a giant insect. A cricket, I think. Not as damaging as a snake but still unsettling. And every time he spoke to me, I could feel cockroaches running down my neck. But that’s no surprise. Vaughn has never seemed human to me.
This is a weird paragraph. It starts off like it’s Rhine wondering if the reason she imagined that is the medication, but then she starts rambling about how much the guy sucks and loses that whole train of thought.
we find the bus station. It’s one of the few buildings still lit.
Okay, so let’s think about this.
1) First generations have cars.
2) First generations move to communities like this to get away from the rest of society.
3) ???
4) BUSES FOR EVERYONE YAY
So she goes to check out the map and tells Gabriel to rest, but he doesn’t.
“Why aren’t you resting?” I say.
“Why aren’t you ?”
“What?” I say. “Me? I’m okay.” I purse my lips, trying to focus on the city names but finding they all look the same. For some reason I’m not comprehending what I’m looking at.
Gabriel puts his hand on my shoulder. “Rhine,” he says. “You’re not okay. Just admit it.”
Because the author earlier said she’d be like this, so now she is. Sane chronology is hard.
So Rhine starts shaking and sobbing and he promises he’ll smash the bad men’s heads in. It’s abrupt, it’s inconsistent with how she spent last book shrugging off everything that happened, but hey, if Rhine wants to finally join the human race, I’ll take it. Perhaps next she’ll even be able to figure out Linden-chan is bad.