Last time, Rhine’s still sick and also super important.

This chapter, she’s still still sick and now her hair is coming out in clumps. She decides to fake it and somehow just willpowers her way through despite previously not being able to stand.

She’s also thinking about her brother. She explains they have no relatives, which, now that we know the superbabies were apparently done in a single batch, actually may make sense – no one had siblings. Therefore, Rowan is either searching for her or avenging his death. Given Rowan appears competent, you’d think we could rule out the latter by the fact there’s been no word of someone arsoning his way through the houses of rich rapists. But maybe the media’s covering it up lest anyone else get ideas.

There are so many places for Gatherers to dump an unwanted girl’s body, and Rowan would have stayed long enough to search all of them before moving on.

But…that wouldn’t have done much good because the meetup with Linden-chan and therefore the place the bodies were discarded was a good distance away. And that should be standard practice. You don’t want to be selling or dumping bodies where there’s people who know them.

Anyway, Rhine pretends she’s feeling better more. She thinks of Jenna and how Her fingers always carried the ghosts of her little sisters. She never mentioned them, and I never knew their names, but still I could sense that when Jenna was quelling one of Cecily’s tantrums or dabbing at my tears, she was remembering how she’d cared for them. which is what I’ve always thought but it’s nice to see the book agree.

“Do you know why we’re married to House Governors?” she said. “It would be one thing if we were penned like horses and let out for breeding, but it isn’t like that. We aren’t pets—we’re wives, which is worse.”
I’d thought about what it would mean to be penned for breeding, and then I raised my eyes and watched a cloud that looked like a broken octopus. “How is it worse?” I said.
“Because if we weren’t wives, it would just be what it is—stealing girls and making them obey. But people used to get married to spend their lives together. There’s intimacy. It implies it was consensual. It’s not just our freedom that was taken, it was our right to be unhappy, too.”

And…wow. Jenna says what’s going on. She points out it’s horrible and that all of this is the nice face they’ve tried to put on it to pretend it’s anything but what it is. It’s like between the end of the first book and the publishing of this one, someone sat down with the author and explained that gothic romance tropes being institutionalized did some bad things.

But then…

At first I couldn’t rationalize it. Being a bride was something I wanted to escape, but surely it was better than being a prostitute or a faceless baby machine. “We still have a right to be unhappy,” I told her. “We just have to pretend with Linden, that’s all.”
She laughed bitterly. “Oh, Rhine,” she said. She rolled on top of me and took my face in her hands and smiled so sadly. “None of us are pretending.”

I don’t even fucking know. I don’t. Sometimes I think I understand the book, and sometimes the book even seems to realize what’s going on. And then you’re smacked by something like this.

And now, suddenly, I understand what Jenna was saying. When I was married to Linden in the gazebo, my hand was limp in his. My eyes bored through him. I didn’t hear the vows being spoken. And when he talked to me, much later, my smiles were lies. My kisses were for the higher purpose of escape.

…well, I’m glad you understand it, because now I’m totally confused.

But we do sort of pick up with Gabriel asking what she’s thinking of and Rhine saying choice which does get to the heart of things, though naturally it’s followed by her wondering if she made the right one and how she misses the wive’s floor and stuff like Cecily sneaking into her bed whenever she couldn’t sleep, which I don’t think happened because the book made a big point of how they all agreed they couldn’t enter each other’s rooms without express permission, and also precious Rapist-chan.

At least she realizes she shouldn’t miss the guy and finally admits what was going on.

He spent his days doing as he pleased while his wives were made to wait in their cage. I was right to run away. Even Cecily, ever content to be his prisoner, had enough sense to recognize that.

He was free and they were his prisoners. Rhine seems to have finally stopped acting like he was the biggest victim in all this.

I’m not sure what to make of this book’s shift. It’s an improvement, I think, but it does make things all the more jarring when she’s saying this stuff but we’re still having to listen to her fond reminiscences.

Anyway, Rhine then kisses the boy she actually chose and who helped her leave instead of keeping her trapped. It’s going great until Gabriel starts to reach under her shirt and realizes she’s about to spontaneously ignite from fever, which puts a damper on sexytime. Gabriel gets upset when she tries to deny it, which is possibly the most reasonable anger we’ve seen from a love interest in all the books. And then she admits it.

“Okay,” I say, pushing myself upright. “Okay, yes. I feel terrible all the time, and I don’t know what’s happening, and I’m scared. Okay?”

So basically everyone’s being a reasonable adult. Rhine was hiding it because there wasn’t anything she could do and she thought it’d make him feel better, but when he says otherwise she explains.

Gabriel wonders if somehow it’s Evil Mad Scientist. Rhine agrees on the yeah seems plausible and yet how could he possibly be doing so. I’m starting to think it is just because it’s the only suggestion anyone has. They go to sleep and Rhine thinks of Gabriel’s promise to protect her and how if Evil Mad Scientist has destroyed her vitals there’s nothing he can do.

And then…in the morning, they’ve dug up medical journals! Gabriel is taking initiative that involves research and investigation. And then Rhine actually reads them too. Will the wonders never cease.

They read about lots of disorders and her symptoms still just seem to be flu. It’d help here if she could explain the symptoms of “the virus” so we have an idea of how they compare.

But we don’t, which makes it hard to tell if Gabriel’s sudden surety that they need to head back to Evil Mad Scientist makes sense.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Have you lost your mind?”

<3!

“He followed you to Madame’s, didn’t he? Maybe there was some truth to the things he was saying. Maybe he wanted to tell you about what’s happening to you.”

No. No that does not really follow.

Also, it seemed like it was less “follow” and more “Madame told everybody she had some valuable property with distinctive eyes and he put two and two together.”

Rhine says that if he wanted her back it was probably for murder experiments. Gabriel insists that whatever’s going on is definitely Evil Mad Scientist and therefore he must have come to get her to fix it, because obviously triggering a death flu is the sort of thing you do when you’re very invested in being helpful.

“That makes absolutely no sense,” I say, ignoring the small bit of me that agrees.

Noo Rhine cling to sanity clliiinnnggggggggg.

Gabriel then suggests that maybe he was in the middle of some freaky experiment and running away interrupted it, which wow that is not a reason to return. Rhine does not argue this and just says he’ll totally kill her if she goes back, so I guess that’s probably right.

Gabriel fights back with mutterings about how Jenna was right. She knew you so well. She was right—you don’t get it. Vaughn doesn’t want you dead. What use would you be to him dead? He wants to see what makes you breathe, and why your eyes are that way. There’s something in you that gives him hope.”

With the complete lack of understanding of science everyone in this book has, that’s actually not a stupid thing for Gabriel to think. Of course, Evil Mad Scientist seems to be the exception, so he probably knows you can find out lots of stuff by cutting open the person’s corpse.

But Rhine just gets mad Jenna kept secrets and how she’s dead now so she’s not that smart even though she knew she’d get killed so I don’t think that’s a very good point.

Anyway, she starts crying and saying she doesn’t care if he’ll kill her or not she’ll never go back so she wins the argument.

I hear whispers in my blood, and I know— I know —that there is something lethal inside of me that cannot be explained by these books.

So maybe they’ll decide to dodge Evil Mad Scientist and try Rapist-chan? Or maybe Gabriel will leave to do it for Rhine.

Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worst. I’ll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I’d sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

I think this is the most complete expression of the book’s philosophy. Freedom and nature are intertwined weirdly, as are captivity and science. It’s better to die free in a ruined world than live on through science as a captive, but things are a lot shakier otherwise – is it better to die as a captive so long as things are pretty and there’s no science involved? Is it okay to live free with science? Is the wires in her veins thing a statement about quality of life or are cyborgs just inherently wrong?