Last time, First Generation Brothel-Lady doesn’t seem to get that Rhine isn’t here to be a prostitute, and after a bit of protest Rhine does what she does best and gives up.

Gabriel is sleeping and also shirtless. Evil Madame has shown her evilness by telling her to just go hang out there rather than get to work.

There’s a basin of water and some towels and soaps that look like they were hand-carved.

Okay, so all the girls are filthy, but they like soap enough to carve it?

She can’t wake him up and he just manages to mumble that the purple girl did something. And on cue, a girl comes in with a fresh off the laundry line blanket and she says she gave him something for the pain. Rhine shoves her away when she tries to help put the blanket over Gabriel.

“You’ve helped enough, thanks. Whose fault is it that he was in pain to begin with?”

And Rhine’s blaming powers appear again. Yes, clearly this random girl, possibly the same one getting backhanded earlier, is the root source of your problems.

The girl explains that the woman in charge would’ve ordered him punched unconscious otherwise. That doesn’t really work, but she’s explaining the woman’s actually kind of crazy, so maybe we can write it off as insanity behind the order and not things objectively working that way.

“Most of what that woman says is nonsense. The opiates make her so paranoid.”

This is actually true, although precisely it’s withdrawal that generally does it.

Anyway, this suggests she’s well-meaning-ish but insane. So, they should just run off at the first opportunity. Even if she decides she should pursue them, it doesn’t sound like she’s got a big enough power base here to actually pursue beyond there.

At least this girl is not as nightmarish as the rest. Under all that makeup I can see the sympathy in her eyes that are two small dark stars in a nebula of green eyeliner.

How are the rest nightmarish? You’re saying she’s wearing lots of makeup but now that you’re close up you can see she’s an ordinary, decent person. You haven’t seen anyone else close up.

She explains she’s “purple girl” because her name’s Lilac and her dress has lilacs, and there’s no mention of if that’s her actual name. You’d think it isn’t, since it sounds like Crazy Lady names them after flowers.

Incidentally, she’s got dark skin. Hm.

She opens the tent flap, exposing the night sky and filling the tent with cold air and laughter, and the desperate grunts of men and the giggling of girls

This really seems comparatively not too bad a place. Last book opened with Rhine in a tangle of terrified girls in the dark. They were then lined up, a few were picked and the rest were shot, and Rhine was drugged into unconsciousness to wake up in her mansion prison. Right now the biggest point against this place seems to just be ew, sex.

She promises the unconscious Gabriel that she’ll get him out of here. Hopefully that means actual effort from her this book, although I doubt it.

She’s covered in salt so she wants to wash off, but the bodyguards keep looking in at every noise, so she just washes her limbs. Then she lies down with Gabriel and acts like she’s asleep while eavesdropping on what they’re saying, but she can’t make sense of it:

Angel’s blood. The new yellow. Dead greens.

Probably drugs, but sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? I hope it’s something cool.

Men yell at them from a distance, and they go, their jewelry clattering like plastic shackles.

Not like Rhine’s expensive wedding ring – she’s better because she has a real metal shackle!

Anyway, she’s exhausted, so it stops being pretending to sleep before long.

One minute Gabriel is beside me, and then in the next, Linden is wrapping himself around me the way he did in sleep. He sobs in my ear and says his dead wife’s name, and I open my eyes. The hard dirt and thin blanket is an unwelcome change from the fluffy white comforter I was just hallucinating, and for a moment Gabriel seems strange. His bright brown hair nothing like Linden’s dark curls; his body thicker and less pale.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

I was steeling myself for there maybe being more love triangle bullshit this book, but I at least thought it’d involve a new boy. I’m sure there’s plenty more rapists for Rhine to swoon over. But no, the one who raped a thirteen year old is the one the book really feels needs to stick around instead.

Gabriel’s still out of it, so she goes to sleep again and this time dreams about snakes.

they coil around my ankles. They try to take off my shoes. I wake in a panic. Lilac is kneeling at my feet, easing my socks off.

Wow, Lilac is really nice. I hope she doesn’t get herself killed helping Rhine out.

See, wet socks can do some really nasty stuff to you, ranging from keeping you cold, as Lilac says is the issue, to making your feet rot off – which takes a while for proper bone-exposing fun, but even a night of it isn’t going to be good for you. Don’t google this.

Rhine then explains that also, it’s freezing cold and her breath is misting. Huh. Yeah, she ran away in January, didn’t she? End of it, I think. And in this world that involved huge snow drifts across Florida, and they’ve been heading north…this really should’ve been a major issue before now. Just the ocean to shore had a good chance of hypothermia, and they’ve been soaking wet for hours since then.

I don’t know how these girls haven’t frozen to death in their flimsy dresses.

A heavy outfit that is soaked through in saltwater is the bigger concern. Do you realize she’s wearing jeans as well as that sweater? Really, book, think.

Lilac’s thinking. She towels off Rhine’s feet and then pulls out some drugs.

She mixes powder and water in a spoon and takes a lighter to it until it bubbles, then draws it up into a syringe.

Not the most hygienic but she seems to know what she’s doing, which suggests that she’s done it before and it hasn’t ended in deaths. And there’s not much need to even worry about how clean the syringe is, since a lot of the diseases take a while to kick in and Gabriel’ll be dead regardless within ten years.

Then she starts tying a strip of cloth around Gabriel’s arm above the elbow—which is something my parents used to do before administering emergency sedatives to hysterical lab patients

Wait what.

—and that’s when I push her away.

Nope back up here.

They drugged “hysterical lab patients”? Not as in, sick people at a hospital but as in people they were experimenting on?

They had “emergency sedatives” at the ready for when pregnant women tried to escape their lab? Rhine watched this happen regularly?

What the fuck does the author even think she means here? She obviously thinks whatever she’s talking about is acceptable and probably even good, a sign of these people being caring and stuff, and what circumstances is she imagining to make it anything like that?

And it’s a deliberate choice. We were told last book that they handled the births, so there would have been plenty of opportunities for them to be administering painkillers to women in labor. Yet no, there’s something about this that makes the author think this is how she should talk about it. This is what Rhine’s sainted parents should be pictured doing.

What does she think they’re doing when she writes this?

Lilac explains it’s to keep him calm and not in pain.

I think of the warm toxins flowing through my blood after I was injured in the hurricane and she decides that she’d have rather been feeling the pain of her injuries than be drugged, so she should deny Gabriel painkillers so he can have that chance.

Lilac is attempting to talk her down from this when she gets upset because she sees a kid crawl into the tent through a small opening along the ground. and see Rhine, the tents are not in fact glued down.

her eyes are like marbled glass, so light they’re barely even the color blue—a startling contrast to her dark skin.

So, Lilac’s kid. She’s really upset and saying the kid needs to leave quick because they’ll get in trouble if Madame sees her.

The child goes, but not before pushing back and huffing indignantly through her nose.

Not clear how old the kid is. Is it weird she’s not talking? After all that about Rhine’s malformed eyes, the fact her eyes get a weird description seems ominous. From the bit about super light blue and glass she sounds like she’s blind, but she seems to be navigating okay.

Out in the night someone yelps in pain or maybe just aggravation, and Madame’s shrill voice cries, “Useless, filthy child!”
Lilac is on her feet the next instant, but she has left the syringe on the ground for me. “He’ll want it,” she tells me as she hurries for the exit. “He’ll need it.”

And sounds like the kid might as well have stayed. Hm. It’s nice to see how there’s people and relationships beyond Rhine. Wonder why the kid’s hated so much? Doesn’t sound like the working girls are any cleaner, and earlier she claimed to be helping the girls give birth and such, so it seems weird she’d hate the resulting kids just for existing.

Finally, Gabriel wakes. He’s a bit confused about what happened and she once again asserts that she’ll save both of them. She does not ask him if he’s in pain and let him decide about the syringe of pain meds for himself.

I can see him fighting to stay awake. There’s a dark bruise forming on his cheek; his mouth is chapped and bleeding; he’s shaking so hard, I can feel it without touching him.

Also there’s the fact he seems to be going into shock, and it’s unlikely opiates would make that worse.

I wrap the blanket around him more snugly, trying to imitate the cocooning technique Cecily swaddled the baby with on a cold night. It was one of the few times she looked sure of what she was doing.

Fuck you, Rhine.

She tells him to go back to sleep, the cure-all.

I manage a fitful sleep beside him, shivering, covered with only a damp towel so Gabriel can have all the covers.

Yeah, that’s not going to save him or perhaps even yourself, especially when you’re both still wearing your wet clothes. I’d say you’ll feel bad when he dies because you weren’t willing to strip in case some bored guards got a glimpse, but you’ll probably just blame the little girl for the death or something.

I dream of crisp bed linens; of sparkling gold champagne that warms my throat and stomach as it goes down; of category-three winds rattling the edges, revealing bits of darkness behind a shiny perfect world.

Hm, this is acceptable. She’s dreaming of what she had but remembering how terrible it really was too.

She wakes up to Gabriel vomiting in the corner. Hm. On the one hand, vomit is unglamorous. On the other, considering he’s drugged, you’d expect him to be throwing up in his sleep, so on balance I still feel it’s getting sanitized.

She’s somehow deduced the meaning of the girl’s whisperings to guess he was given “angel’s blood” so it is a drug. He recognizes what sure sounds like a street name as a sedative that Evil Mad Scientist had tons of.

Hospitals used to carry it, but they stopped because of the side effects.”
“Hallucinations. Nightmares.”

Yeah see we have this stuff called morphine and chloroform and it basically just works without any freaky side effects so they would probably just use that.

(By the way, if anyone’s interested in having something similar that’s a little less plot-devicey, may I introduce you to benzodiazepine? Long prescribed to help people sleep and reduce anxiety, they actually just damage your brain so that while your sleep is miserable and poor (even more so than it is already, in fact), you have no memory of it and guess you must have had a good night’s sleep. Also, this damage is cumulative, not temporary. Use it on someone in pain, and they’re still in pain and suffering all the stress of it, they’re just unconscious and won’t remember it later, just as Rhine describes her own experience. Oh, and it takes a really high dose to actually knock people out. THAT is totally what you should be using for a poor quality sedative probably used by people who don’t care too much about the person’s wellbeing or by people in bad enough circumstances it’s all they’ve got.)

(For less evil, plain old chloroform similarly does little to reduce the stress and pain, it just doesn’t accidentally kill your brain.)

I think of the warmth that spread through my veins after the hurricane, think of being unable to move; Vaughn only kept me conscious long enough to threaten me. And though I don’t remember it, Linden claimed I muttered horrible things while I dreamt.

I want to call this a retcon but this book is elusive – maybe that really was the author’s intent all along. The book’s always been big on hating “unnatural” stuff like medicine and doctors, and it’s often had to follow its thought process.

But yeah so apparently Evil Mad Scientist kept terror sedatives on hand just in case he needed to menace some victims.

“I dreamt you’d drowned,” he says. “Our boat was burning and there was no shore.”
“Not possible,” I say. His lips are chapped and bloody against my forehead. “I’m an excellent swimmer.”
“It was dark,” he says. “All I could see was your hair, going under. I dove after you and realized I was chasing a jellyfish. You were nowhere.”
“I’ve been here,” I say. “You’re the one who’s been nowhere. I couldn’t wake you up.”

Rhine, just reassure the guy after his nightmare, you don’t need to make this into an argument. “Don’t worry I’m a good swimmer” is okay, try repeating that maybe.

He smells like blood and Madame’s perfume, which lingers in the white soapy film that floats in all the water basins.

This is like the dozenth time she’s mentioned the soap makes people smell like the woman’s “perfume”. You’d think at some point she’d realize that it’s probably soap she’s smelling there too. Does the book avoid that because it’d doesn’t fit the narrative about how filthy everyone is?

Gabriel is still pretty out of it and starts falling back asleep, rambling about all the ways he saw her die. He goes back to sleep for some reason, even though this seems a great reason to try to keep him up. Maybe she can’t – it’s unclear, Rhine’s efforts tend to be so minor it’s hard to tell if she’s actually doing all she can or not.

When I sleep, I dream of smoke. Curling, twisting, weaving paths that lead nowhere.

But the book definitely is nice and poetic.

Rhine’s woken up by the woman in the morning. So, she let Rhine sleep all during the night, when all their clients are there. It’s sort of like she’s not forcing Rhine into prostitution.

Madame is speaking in that phony accent again, her consonants flourishing like the smoke from her lips.

How do you know, exactly? I mean, it’s not like you should know much about real accents,

Daylight is a blinding force behind her, filling the silk outline of her scarves like rainbow lizard crests, making her face a shadow. And the whole tent is full of green, reflecting on my skin.

But at least the writing is still super pretty!

Sometime in the night Gabriel pulled me back into the blanket with him

Perhaps the only reason you two are alive. Cold is dangerous. I’d think you’d know that, what with your traumatic memory of finding a six year old frozen to death on your doorstep and all. You’re from several states north of wherever you are now, so you should be more familiar with the cold than them, but nope. Maybe it’s because you grew up in a city and just never got wet for too long?

Anyway, he’s asleep and although she apparently couldn’t wake him up all night, this time she knows it’s because Madame or somebody jabbed him with the needle.

Madame takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. She cups my face in her papery hands and smiles. “Even lovelier in the daylight, my Goldenrod.”
I’m not her Goldenrod. I’m not her anything. But she seems to have claimed me as one of her possessions, her antiques, her plastic gems.

While the basic sentiment is understandable, you continue to draw the weirdest lines, Rhine.

“You do not want to wear the beautiful dress I laid out for you?” It hangs over her arm now like a deflated corpse, like the bloodless body of the girl who wore it last.

You have no idea anything bad happened to another girl.

Anyway, she offers to have the “little ones” wash her sweater for her. I’m going to go with the guess that diamonds just don’t have any value – they’re too much effort to collect when most people are starving, but anyone who could afford them already has piles and no need to buy a sweater of them.

Oh, and apparently she’s switched accents, because Rhine knows her accents.

She thrusts the dress at me, and unwinds a fur stole from her shoulders and drapes it around my neck. “Change. I’ll wait for you outside. It’s a beautiful day!”
…
When she’s gone, I change quickly, figuring it’s my only way out of this tent. And I admit that the silk feels nice against my skin, and the stole, despite the choking must, is so warm I could get lost in it.

So basically, she’s a kind of crazy grandma. The dress was just because she’s got lots of dresses and Rhine was soaking wet and needed a change of clothes.

She then kneels by Gabriel and yet again promises to save both of them. I’m starting to get a little worried the book’s decided that her repeating this will count as doing that.

Madame peels back the tent flap and tsk-tsks, snagging my wrist and tugging so hard, I think of the time my arm was dislocated and my brother had to snap it back into place. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. My bare feet are dragging, and I realize I’m not really trying to keep pace with her.

Kind of mixed messages here. On the one hand, she’s wrenching you around. On the other hand, normally pain makes people react and you’re not doing that either.

Two little girls go in to get her clothes – interesting they were waiting for her to leave. Probably just description fluff, but it suggests the woman doesn’t want Rhine interacting with them.

the sky is a light candied blue, like I’m looking up through a sheet of ice.

:D though.

The woman looks at her tangled messy hair and I’m sure she’s going to criticize it only for this to not happen and instead she says not to worry about Gabriel. Then we finally get something scary:

“He’ll wake up when he can learn to be reasonable about sharing you.”

There we go. She’s keeping Gabriel asleep with nightmare meds unless they both play nice. That’s pretty horrifying. Now, let’s see if the book follows it up with Rhine reacting to this threat.

In the daylight, without the commotion or the light of the Ferris wheel, I can see what a wasteland this place is. Long stretches of just dirt, or a rusty piece of machinery erupting from the ground like it’s growing from a seed. There’s another ride off in the distance, and at first I think it’s a smaller Ferris wheel turned onto its side, but as we get closer, I can see metal horses inside of it, impaled by poles, their legs poised as though they were trying to escape before they were immobilized. Madame catches me staring and tells me it’s called a merry-go-round.

…I’ll interpret that as Rhine pushing her feelings on the threat onto her surroundings and call it a reaction.

The black eyes of the horses fill me with pain. I want to break the spell on them, to animate the muscles in their legs and set them running free.

Especially because, let’s face it, Rhine is a pretty terrible person, and she wouldn’t care unless she was seeing them as representing herself. She was fine leaving her surviving sister wife and beloved child servant trapped.

She’s led into the big rainbow tent mentioned last night and Rhine sees the girls piled together and sleeping.

Long, bony limbs hunched against each other, and lipstick-smeared mouths full of rotted teeth. And for some girls it’s not lipstick—it’s blood. Unlit lanterns hang over their heads. The sun through the tent lights them up in oranges and greens and reds.

This…kind of weird. Why are their teeth rotting out when they’re only teens? Are they living off sugar? That is possible – these days, manufacturing sugar is so cheap that it ends up being where the poor get their calories. But no matter what, blood really doesn’t look that red for long, so you really wouldn’t mistake it for lipstick.

It’s not like we need to stuff in the reminder of mortality here anyway, because she says there’s another tent (inside? linked by an opening?) which has its entrance covered by scarves and oozes thick perfume and decay, so that’s where the dying girls are. It’s set up fine for that to be the pall cast over everything, without having the other girls be falling apart already.

as I cared for Jenna during those final days, I could see her sallow skin beginning to bruise, and then the bruises would sink down to the bones and fester.
…
My sister wife rotting from the inside out.

Which is a pretty creepy description, but Jenna didn’t die of the virus/genetic disorder/whatever. Evil Mad Scientist killed her. There’s no reason to look at the specific details of her symptoms and assume that holds true.

“I call this my greenhouse,” Madame says. “The girls sleep all day, so they can be fresh as daisies in the evening. Lazy girls.”

This is definitely one of those red flags. She’s keeping them up all night, then calling them lazy for sleeping. But then, we’ve been told she’s crazy too. Is that meant to absolve her of any blame? The book seems very negative about her, but Rhine hasn’t blamed her for anything either.

Rhine explains that Madame explained all the girls are named colors so she can keep track of them which it seems has to do with age, since she says the green group who saw Lilac give birth are dead now. She also claims Lilac is the only one with a plant name despite goldenrod totally being a plant too, and it’s from her being found in the lilac shrubs that border the vegetable gardens so crazy or not, the woman seems to know what she’s doing running this place. Rhine and her brother certainly didn’t bother with a garden. Of course, if she’s feeding them vegetables and not candy, it’s all the odder they’ve got rotten teeth… Perhaps vegetables are worth more, so they grow some and trade them for cheaper, bulkier food.

Madame explains her problem with the girl earlier is that her leg is deformed so she won’t be any good as a prostitute.

she can’t even be put to work! She scares the customers away. She bites them!”

That’s actually a pretty valid objection. The customers are the ones giving them the money to feed everyone. Rhine’s complaints about her fake jewelry mean it doesn’t seem like she’s living a rich life while the prostitutes do all the work – keeping them fed and clothed, running a sickroom for the dying girls, teaching the babies, that’s all got to take money.

Lilac, who is burrowed among the others, draws her daughter into her arms without opening her eyes. “Her name is Maddie,” she mutters, her voice slurred.

Which is sweet, but…why the biting people thing? The whole thing would work so much more cleanly if the kid was hated for something out of her control, where she can do work enough to pay for herself but isn’t as valuable as she could be and the woman hates her for that.

“Mad is right,” Madame Soleski says, nudging the child with her shoe. Maddie cants her head up at her with a violent stare. She snaps her little teeth at the old woman, venomous and defiant. “And she doesn’t speak!” Madame goes on. “Malformed. Horrible, horrible girl. She should be put down. Did you know that a hundred years ago when an animal was useless, they used to have a chemical that would put it to sleep forever?”

So I guess she’s Evil Mad Scientist for the book. That makes sense, actually.

Evil Mad Scientist Dad was really inconsistent in his evil – Rhine hated him for all sorts of stupid things, much as she’s hating Evil Mad Scientist Mom for her fake jewelry, while being oddly chill about the occasional actual evil, such as blaming Cecily for the fact he murdered Jenna or reacting to the actually sinister stuff she’s hearing now. We’ve even got it tied to an incredibly weird view of science, where there is “a chemical” used to kill animals and apparently it’s been lost, like non-nightmare sedatives, and also apparently before then no one killed useless animals. And it seems that in the future she grew up in, they didn’t teach that people just smothered deformed babies at some points in history. (A hundred years ago is only a couple decades before she was born, so presumably even that’s our future.)

I wonder if the author’s trying to blame science at large for killing deformed animals? “Nature” seems good in this, while science the source of everything wrong, so killing the weak is obviously a modern evil.

But right now, Rhine is just nauseous from the smell.

One of the girls is twirling her hair, and it’s falling out in her hands.

That’s a particularly bad sign.

But then we get a bit of whiplash, as she sees a guard sneak a strawberry from his pocket and hand it to Maddie, who eats the entire thing in one bite. So there’s kindness and fruit here.

I fight to keep my breathing even, but I want to cry out. I’m furious—maybe as furious as I was when I climbed out of the Gatherers’ van. I stood very still in a line with the other girls. I said nothing when I heard the first gunshot—the unwanted girls being murdered one at a time.

Why? Why is this as horrible as that? Why is this as horrible as kidnapping girls and then murdering them?

There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn’t want us at all. It steals us, destroys us, piles us like dying cattle in circus tents and leaves us lying in filth and perfume until we’re wanted again.

The world is dying and there isn’t food and shelter to go around. You know this – you spent last book talking about the fact your entire city was in the grip of crippling poverty, about kids freezing to death in the streets and desperate girls getting into cars with old men.

If the book could settle down to the idea these girls are being forced to be here and kept like animals, then there’d be a nice point here. But it seems like the girls are filthy because of the general depression and misery from watching their death crawl toward them, and they’re here because it’s safer and better than it is elsewhere. Perhaps you could hate that this is the lot of people in your world, but you seem to hate this more than the world that makes this seem the better option.

I ran from that mansion because I wanted to be free. But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

But…there are. Rhine’s story is she made is sixteen years before she was kidnapped, and that’s several years when it was just her and her brother. She hasn’t spent her whole life enslaved, so it doesn’t make sense for her to claim freedom is impossible.

If Rhine’s whole world was the mansion, this would make sense. But it isn’t, and a large part of why she tries to escape is because she does know what the world outside is like. She’s not like Cecily, who spent her life before in an orphanage and didn’t know anything better.

She then thinks she hates her parents for having them and abandoning them to live in this world, which is a bit unfair – if her parents weren’t killed, they’d have probably outlived the both of them. I wish there was more attention to this part – the first generations will outlive their children and probably their grandchildren too. Rhine says her parents made sure they were educated because they thought learning was important, but how much of it was because her parents never thought their kids would need to fend for themselves? I mean, French lessons? That makes me wonder if their education was more like teaching a pet tricks.

Rhine finally examines Maddie to say that she’s pretty messed up, with arms of different lengths and underdeveloped toes. That sounds like the sort of birth defects they should be seeing all the time from too young mothers dealing with hunger and malnourishment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the environment is also somewhat toxic – eating from vegetable gardens planted in soil full of lead and gasoline and plastic, breathing air full of the dust of the crumbling city and the decaying trash left out to disintegrate. Plus, I doubt there’s much in the way of safety regulations either.

Then they go outside, where Rhine sees lots of other kids who are perfectly healthy because apparently there are no real consequences to starving teen mothers and birth defects are rare and strange. (They’re doing work, which includes polishing the woman’s fake jewelry, despite the fact one of the many nice things about fake stuff is that unlike, say, real silver, it doesn’t usually need constant polishing.)

“My girls produce like jackrabbits.” Madame says the last word with malice. “Then they die and leave me to care for the mess they leave behind. But what can be done? The children make good workers at least.”

I’m thinking maybe this is meant to be showing her hypocrisy and unfairness, that she’s prostituting the girls while resenting them for the children that are produced. But on the other hand, from Lilac’s story it seems this is where pregnant girls actually go, so maybe it’s this issue she’s resentful about. And given last book established children starve/freeze, are raised in hellish orphanages, or are sold by those orphanages to be servants or wives…this place just isn’t all that bad after you’ve established everything in this world is terrible.

Long ago President Guiltree did away with birth control.

Okay how the fuck would you even do that.

Rhine, you just told us that there aren’t police and you can’t even imagine a world with them. How exactly can he stop anyone from doing anything? Are all existing companies nationalized? That is my best guess for how their economy could be functioning even this well. In that case, there’s no general laws but he controls production, so there just aren’t any condoms. But condoms are pretty simple in concept, and you can make reusable female ones, so you’d think a black market would spring up.

She explains the guy is another eeeevil mad scientist for believing that the human race shouldn’t just give up and he did this because he feels it’s our responsibility to keep the human race alive which continues to not make sense in the context of the rest of the book. A lot of uneducated doomed kids will manage to have a lot of accidental pregnancies, and a lot of poor and orphaned girls will want to have a baby because at least it’ll love them.

There are still people who do abortions, but we don’t want to say abortion so it’s “terminate pregnancies” and then she mentions abortion later as if it’s a separate thing. She spends a moment thinking that her parents probably knew how and she doesn’t know if they ever did it. I don’t know why she’s wondering, since why would her parents bother when they only dealt with pregnant girls so they could experiment on the resulting babies.

She also says that while obviously you’re not allowed to, I’ve never heard of the president actually punishing anyone for disobeying one of his laws. and how do you even have laws with no enforcement in the first place? How do you even imagine “the president” punishing people when you can’t imagine police? Do you imagine him personally showing up on the doorstep?

Apparently not even that, because Rhine then claims I’m not entirely sure what the president even does. Well, you know he makes laws and banned birth control.

I guess at least this book mentioned birth control and it’s implied to be good since people who don’t want to just curl up and die are evil in this.

My brother says the presidency is a useless tradition that might have once served a purpose but has become nothing but formality—something to give us hope that order will be restored one day.

Your brother is the same damn age as you so why do we always get your brother telling you how stuff works? Also, he managed to ban birth control, so obviously he’s more than a figurehead.

I hate President Guiltree, who has been in charge of this country longer than I’ve been alive.

Okay, so this may be unintentional but it actually works really well:

We declared martial law in response to the disaster, including suspending elections. The government spent the past 20? years nationalizing more and more of the country to keep basic industries going. That’s why we’re not seeing a feudal system, why there’s still electricity and television everywhere, why there’s some semblance of order. Most people are, at various steps removed, government employees. Rhine mentioned last book that there’s factories making frozen dinners in Manhattan – that’s what you’d see if the American military-industrial complex had to buckle down and just try to keep feeding a population of constantly dying children, you process everything and put it into prepared meals so it doesn’t require any education to avoid scurvy, and you put a microwave in every house.

With his nine wives and fifteen children—all sons—he does not believe the end of humankind is near.

Okay, first off, if you’ve got fifteen kids and not a single daughter, there’s only three possibilities:

1) You’re lying.
2) You’re killing the girl babies.
3) Your balls are broken.

And I think we actually have some evidence for three! Rapist-chan is his dad’s second son. Jenna had sisters, plural – so, while obviously if she’d had brothers too they wouldn’t have been in the van with her, three kids to the same mother is a lot in the current situation and she certainly acts like her entire family is gone.

Rhine and her brother are the only example we have of a couple managing to have children of both sexes, and that’s because they were the second batch of twins – and I think we were even told the first miscarried pair were a boy/girl set too. Plus, there’s the fact they both have two different eye colors despite the fact opposite sex twins aren’t supposed to be related – if women are also cloning their eggs and the weird eye thing’s from their mom, that would make sense. So every case we have, they seem to keep having the same kind of kid.

This suggests something’s gone really wrong with the gametes. It seems like their sex cells are just cloning themselves from a single master copy instead of doing all the fancy splitting and recombining that you’re supposed to do to ensure diversity.

And that might give us a clue about the whole “withering” business – sex cells need to add telomeres to the ends of DNA for the next generation. If sperm can’t even manage to divide properly, I really doubt they’re doing that right either.

And what if the superbabies had something added in to make sure cells that ran out of that buffer or even just got a bit low always committed suicide as an anti-cancer thing, instead of just sometimes? (The Child Garden, which seems like the likely inspiration for the book, has the short lifespan be the result of DNA changes to prevent cancer and stop mutation, done by a virus.) That’d also explain why we don’t seem to see any first generations who’ve gotten old enough to be actually unhealthy, as soon as they get down to the wire they might die quite suddenly. Alternatively, the first gens might have a good stock of adult stem cells that are supposed to replace those cells, but the short telomeres of the second gens have screwed up that system/the sex cells cloning themselves is part of a broader problem with cells not resetting properly, so the younger generation doesn’t have extra stem cells.

Mass cell suicide seems like it’d be a decent fit for the symptoms we have, too. The stomach, lungs and skin rely on a lot of cell replacement, and we have vomiting, coughing blood and bruising as primary symptoms. The brain, on the other hand, does not have a lot of cell division and that fits with how people appear to remain lucid right up until the end.

The only problems are that this doesn’t explain why people keep calling it a virus, why no one’s noticed the birth pattern, or why it’s unfixable by more genetic engineering. It would, however, give us a situation where there was a good chance that the third generation kids might be fixed. If the telomeres are getting shortened so much in the second gen, if the same thing happens again you’d expect the third gen to die in utero but they seem to be growing up normally.

But probably that was just the author trying to explain why he doesn’t care about the bad stuff happening to girls, he doesn’t have daughters, so it’s academic.

Anyway. SECONDLY, no one who had nine wives and a mere fifteen children out of them is going to see anything but the end of humanity looking out from each of their faces. Those nine wives need to have two kids each just to manage replacement rate, higher to make up for child mortality and higher still to make up for the other girls who don’t have the will or means to have kids. He’s three short of even just hitting replacement rate and he’s the most powerful man in the country. Humanity is dead.

Thirdly, anyone seeing that a nine wives one husband setup has produced fifteen worthless male children is going to just go eat a bullet at the first opportunity. That’s nature taking time from her busy day to personally tell you that no, you are fucked. If he’d had fifteen daughters, he’d at least have managed to have the wives replace themselves, and since it’s women who are the bottleneck in reproduction, they’re what’s important. Even if all kids were girls humanity could keep going for quite a while off stockpiled sperm, probably long enough to get better at cloning or learn to synthesize sperm from ovaries. Hell, you could baste girl embryos in testosterone and cross your fingers – maybe one of them will be a lucky mutant! There’s a lot we can do to get around a lack of men, but we’re nowhere near able to handle artificial wombs yet.

Fifteen sons? I’m sorry but I’ve got to admit that Rhine’s right and we should just lie down and die. Continuing to struggle at this point will only make nature angry and then she’ll kill us with trees and that would just be embarrassing.

He makes no move to stop the Gatherers from kidnapping brides, and encourages madmen like Vaughn to breed infants who will live their lives as experiments.

The problem with the gatherers isn’t kidnapping girls, it’s killing almost all of them. How many girls were in the lineup with Rhine? It was more than a dozen, I’m sure. Three girls living out of a dozen means those three girls need to produce twenty-four children between them to make up the difference, or eight each. That’d be virtually impossible even with normal lifespans. It’s a joke in this world. Jenna, at eighteen, could only produce a maximum of two children. Only Cecily could possibly do it, and that’s assuming she has more than one kid in a single year – she’s more likely to miscarry and/or die in the attempt. At one a year, she’d manage only seven, and there’s still a good chance she’d miscarry or die along the way.

The gatherers are by far the biggest threat to the long term survival of the human race.

Rhine recounts how one time at the mansion they saw him on a commercial, and Cecily said he looked handsome because we have to hate Cecily. Jenna said he looked like a child molester. We’d laughed about it then, but now that I’m in a scarlet district, Jenna’s former home, I think she must have been serious. Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide in a person.

…What the fuck.

LINDEN RAPED A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD. A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD WHO WAS SITTING IN THE ROOM WHILE YOU LAUGHED AT THE IDEA THE PRESIDENT LOOKED LIKE ONE.

Just.

What the fuck.

So the author understands molesting children is wrong, she just…what does she think those words mean?

Maybe it’s because Cecily is thirteen. “Child molester” means someone who has nonreproductive sex, and Cecily, as she demonstrated, was old enough to have a kid and therefore can’t have been a child herself, and they can all have a hearty laugh at the guy having sex with eleven year olds, because that’s just wrong.

Although…it’s a weird line to draw at all, isn’t it? This is a world where six year olds freeze to death in the street, where being owned as slaves is the best fate we’ve seen so far.

So I guess it comes down to, is it better to rape six year olds but pay them so they eat or ignore them totally and let them die?

God, this is a horrible setting.

Well, let’s more from inferred back to obvious horribleness.

So, Rhine’s shown the gardens. Only the strawberries are growing currently. Presumably they’re everbearing strawberries.

“You should see them in the spring sunshine,” she says giddily. “Strawberries and tomatoes and blueberries so fat they explode between your teeth.”

It sounds like she’s feeding people off this garden, so why do the girls all have rotten teeth?

It does seem like she’s not making the best decisions regarding food crops, but it seems just as possible that she’s got other crops and these are just the treats she’s bragging about.

I wonder where she gets the seeds.

Uh. Rhine. Plants produce seeds.

Also, two of the three plants she said aren’t grown from seed normally. Blueberries and strawberries both bear year after year.

Rhine claims seeds are difficult to find in the city, presumably because there’s just no market for it in the first place, then gives the usual all of our fruits and vegetables seem to have taken on the city’s gray tinge. which come on our current chemical ability is why modern fruit in stores is in such cheery colors! Oranges are not meant to look like they were all colored in by a bright crayon. Peaches are supposed to have blotchy spots. And that beautiful polished shine on those apples is wax.

In fact, it’s quite possible Rhine is eating fresher food than we are. Maybe they don’t bother prettying food up these days and stuff isn’t shipped such long distances.

She shows me the other tents, full of antique furniture, silk pillows piled on the dirt floors.

Nope. You would definitely be using rugs. Or old blankets. Or even tarps. Look, this is just basic, okay?

Dirt wears fabric down, and cleaning the dirt out also wears it down. Why do that when you can just throw down anything else and it’d make the place look even fancier while saving you a lot of trouble?

Especially because, do they even make silk in this world? I assume someone somewhere is still doing it for the sake of the super rich, and it is possible to grow in the US, but it’d be far more expensive with the demand so low. Everything here seems like it’s the sort of decadence you get from lots of people dying and leaving their stuff, but that doesn’t last forever and you’d think a first generation of all people would be thinking about that.

“A girl like you is wasted as a bride.” She says the word like vasted. “A girl like you should have dozens of lovers.”

And here we solidly end up in the gothic bin again.

In the modern world, for all its faults (and the fact this book exists is proof enough of those) people at least understand, in a general way, that there’s consent and rape and women having different opinions about things. There’s a conversation.

What we see here, a character just asserting her own viewpoint as if it’s the only one, is something from a much older setting. The brothel owner is not part of decades of discussion across continents about sex and prostitution and happiness. She just has her own, very local, experience and no idea there’s other options. That makes sense when it’s horse and carriage days. Not so much when it’s the future and this particular woman grew up in a normal world.

(Also, it’s been doing that “she says it like” to illustrate the accent all damn chapter. Just say she’s somehow a future gypsy and get it over with, book!)

Anyway, Rhine has a moment of seeing her as an actual person with humanity and sad brown eyes.

And oddly familiar, though I’m sure I’ve never seen anyone like this woman in my life.

Her certainty is not because she’s currently in South Carolina, because I can’t escape that even by moving to a new book, which means it’s several states away from where she spent her whole life, but because she always avoided the prostitution districts back home.

Her lips curl into a smile, and it’s a kind smile. Her lipstick cracks, revealing a bleary pink underneath.

So I guess she’s settling in to be replacement Linden, not replacement Evil Mad Scientist. Or maybe she’ll be both for the book, jumping back and forth as the moment requires.

We’re standing by a heap of rusted scrap metal that is humming mechanically and emitting a faint yellow glow.

Oh god author electronics does not work like cartoon radiation come on you live in the current day you know this.

The idea is it’ll warm the soil so she can plant in the winter. Where is all this power coming from? Hm, I wonder if they can tap street lamps. I heard that people do that to grow marijuana so it’s not as obvious as running up a huge power bill in their house.

Why not just greenhouses, though? That’s the traditional way of getting the soil warmer, and there’s surely no shortage of glass.

Maybe I’ve been breathing in too much of her smoke secondhand, but I’m in awe of her. Things fill with color as she moves past them. Her gardens grow. She created a strange dreamland with only the ghost of a dead society and some bits of broken machines.

So before she does anything particularly evil, she’s monstrous, but afterward, she slowly becomes a nice person in your eyes. Oh Rhine. Please do change.

Rhine is also impressed that the woman doesn’t sleep, because somehow Rhine knows that despite spending last night asleep and despite it being very possible that maybe Good/Evil Lady stays up until morning and then sleeps once she’s given the next crew their orders. Rhine’s only been here a few hours, after all.

Rhine’s told she belongs here, because love is a wound and she shouldn’t get involved. The woman smiles and Rhine, like last book, reminds us that the first generation are all old now, and that soon they’ll be gone forever and with them the very knowledge of what age looks like. But…not that soon, I don’t think. Her parents would be in their late sixties now, and Evil Mad Scientist seemed in his seventies. People live to be a hundred already. The oldest person on record lived to be 122 years old, and there are a lot of others who’ve neared that. If the superbabies merely reach the normal maximum lifespan of humans, they should live to be at least 120. That means a seventy year old still has fifty years to go – more than twice Rhine’s lifespan.

But, that’s assuming no one screwed up the superbabies, and as I mentioned with the earlier speculation, maybe they’re very healthy and then suddenly die. But an average death by eighty is actually pretty bad – in the US, if you live to be seventy-five, your average lifespan from them is just over twelve years, or eighty-seven. The superbabies are supposed to be unusually healthy and they seem to have weird future technology, they should be easily getting to ninety.

Even if this woman’s eighty, if she lives to be ninety Rhine will still die well before she does. She’s got a decade. Rhine has three years.

(For more interesting numbers, check this out!)

The woman says she once made the mistake of loving someone and had a child with him, a kid who was blond like Rhine. Rhine, being stupid, decides to ask what happened when they are obviously dead. The woman says the obvious, and adds in “murdered” which may be referring to one or both.

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”

Roses don’t really multiply well. Bloom and die, yeah, but blooms aren’t a new plant.

Rhine suddenly wonders if her brother thinks this, knowing she’ll die before him.

“You are to be loved in moments. Illusions. That’s what I provide to my customers

Back to stock brothel-madame talk.

Rhine somehow makes the connection between the woman seeing love as a wound to Jenna being the same thing because she didn’t love the rapist and then jumps from that to say that what’s important is being useful or else you’re killed, which is true but really doesn’t follow from the rest. But it gets her actually doing stuff, namely, she starts talking about what a great help Gabriel will be with the lifting things and the cooking. Madame is not impressed and says she can’t trust him. Rhine doesn’t see why it’s different to trust her, and Madame says that oh that’s not what’s happening here.

“I am not trusting you. I am preparing you.”

Doesn’t it sound like this is leading into prostitution? But you should have faith in this book to always find an extra unpleasant twist to it all.

“I do the best I can for my girls, but they are weary. Used up. You are perfect. I have been thinking, and I will not hand you over to my customers so they can reduce your value.”
Reduce my value. My stomach twists.
“Rather,” Madame says, “I think I could make more money off you if you remain pristine. We shall have to find a place for you. Dancing, maybe.” I can feel her smile without seeing her face. “Letting them have a taste. Letting them be hypnotized.”

And here we go.

Rhine is special because she’s a virgin, and so people make exceptions for her to keep her one. The other girls are used goods, and we don’t even need to feel real sympathy for them currently because hey, they’re soulless and broken now, and it’s a shame but there’s nothing that can be done, they’ve already been used up.

Maybe we should just be grateful this book is at least misogyny from the female perspective, so we’re spared a paragraph on how loose and disgusting their vaginas are, because that’s how vaginas work, you can only take them out for a drive so many times before they get too worn out.

Rhine is just all upset for some reason by this, and it’s probably just going to be out of prudishness because god knows it’s too much to expect Rhine to ever have a halfway normal reaction to anything. She does remain on the ball with Gabriel, saying that if she’s here, he needs to be able to stay too. Madame agrees but says she’ll definitely kill him if he’s a spy. That’s actually a bit of a problem – Lilac says that she’s insane and sees spies where there are none, so the fact Gabriel isn’t doesn’t mean he’s safe.

She’s then sent to a tent to hang out with Gabriel, and finds one of the little girls from before sitting with him.

“Please don’t be mad; I know I shouldn’t be here,” she says

In so many ways this is such a sad setting. Why is this girl apologetic for this?

The little girl wants to know if Gabriel gave her the ring.

“Someday I’ll have a ring that’s made of real gold too,” the girl says. “Someday I’ll be first wife. I know it. I have birthing hips.”

And such a horrible setting. But Rhine is no less horrible:

I’d laugh under less dire circumstances. “I knew a girl who grew up wanting to be a bride too,” I say.
She looks at me, and her green eyes are wide and intense. And for a second I think maybe this girl is right. She will grow up to be passionate and spirited; she will stand out in a line of dreary Gathered girls; a man will choose her, and come to her bed flushed with desire.
“Did she?” the girl asks. “Become a bride, I mean.”
“She was my sister wife,” I say. “And yes, she was given a gold ring too.”
The girl smiles, revealing a missing front tooth. Pale brown freckles dot her nose and spill into her cheeks like a blush.
“I bet she was pretty,” the girl says.
“She was. Is,” I correct myself. Cecily is gone from me, but she’s still alive. I can’t believe I almost forgot. It seems like forever ago that I left her screaming my name in a snowbank. I ran, didn’t look back, angrier with her than I’d ever been with anyone in my life.
The memory is a lifetime away from this smoky, dizzying place. I don’t even feel angry anymore. I don’t feel much of anything at all.

In another book, this might be an interesting choice – to make the character in such a terrible place be terrible herself, to show that in places like this, empathy and kindess are ground out of you, and yet that doesn’t change how the horrors she faces are still just as wrong. People will often talk about how something is bad because it’s happening to a nice person, and I feel this leads to the idea that if the person it’s so nice, what happens is more acceptable. It turns into a formula for justifying why you shouldn’t care what happens to people – she wasn’t polite enough, she wasn’t friendly enough, she didn’t dress properly, so it’s not such a tragedy.

But by all appearances Rhine is supposed to be the hero of this horrorshow. Rhine, thinking about a little girl hoping to be bought because it’s all she knows in life and imagining that happening being some sort of happy ending. Rhine, acting like Rose (the one who convinced Linden to buy new wives, the reason for their suffering and the rest’s death) is still alive but treating Cecily like she’s dead. Cecily, who did everything she could to help Rhine and who Rhine betrayed in every way in return, who is the one who ultimately helped them escape, who she abandoned there.

And she doesn’t even regret it. She’s empty of anger because she no longer cares enough about Jenna’s death to have any anger at all, not because she realizes she was blaming the one innocent person in the whole affair.

Lilac comes in to ask how Gabriel’s doing, and the girl reacts guiltily and runs off muttering apologies, calling herself a stupid girl. because this setting has to be as depressing as possible.

Rhine informs us that Lilac’s pretty even without makeup, but her idea of beauty is rather disturbing:

Her eyes are sultry and sad, her smile languid

It’s the beauty of the covers of these books, of the drowning Ophelia that graces so much of YA lit.

Lilac says that yeah, she’s been keeping Gabriel drugged, and explains that it’s because the woman in charge fears boys stealing her girls. For some reason that’s what she means by “spies”, apparently.

“Yet she lets anyone with money come in and have their way with them.”
“Under strict supervision,” Lilac says pointedly. “If anyone tries something funny—and sometimes they do . . .” She makes a gun shape with her hands, points at me, shoots. “There’s a big incinerator behind the Ferris wheel where she burns the bodies.

While it’s disturbing for someone unstable to be in charge of all this, this is the first sign we’ve seen in this series of anyone having any concern for women. Even the mansion Rhine escaped from had all its security bent around keeping them in, not keeping the rest of the world out.

Rhine instead explains that an incinerator isn’t surprising, despite it being an already established way of disposing of incriminating bodies, as if the author thinks people in the current world would need some major reason to switch over to it.

We’re dropping off so quickly, there’s not even room to bury all of us

Incorrect – incineration, at least complete incineration, takes more processing power and time than simply digging mass graves – especially when the one thing they don’t lack for is unskilled workers. Here as in so surprisingly many places, the Nazis were not actually picking the most sensible method. You would need extraordinarily limited space to run out of room for graves, especially if you’re not stuffing them with preservatives. The worms will eat down to the bones quite fast.

However, if you’ve got a furnace already, this is a perfectly good way of disposing of the occasional corpse, or at least the bits that can rot.

and there are some rumors that the virus contaminates the soil. And just as there are Gatherers to steal girls, there are cleaning crews who scoop up the discarded bodies from the side of the road and haul them to the city incinerators.

Okay, you know what? This could make sense.

I think what the adults said was probably that bodies contaminate the soil with bacteria, because obviously no one’s taking the time to pump formaldehyde in and seal them in tight caskets and make sure they’re buried deep enough. The second gen kids don’t get much of an education, and the main “disease” they know of is the thing that kills everyone in their twenties, so they hear that dead bodies are a health hazard and they assume it must have to do with that.

Of course “the virus” “contaminating” stuff makes no sense, and there’s no sign of what this could possible involve. But that’s because they don’t know either. +They have no idea, but they have other things to worry about. There must be so many things that don’t make sense to them because they’re all artifacts of pre-collapse society. There’s no longer any need to educate people about how the cities work, because the best you get out of these kids is a couple years unskilled labor. Rhine doesn’t wonder why there’s a street light still on in an abandoned area, because she likely has no idea where electricity comes from or even what it is. She’s never made any reference to knowing about sanitation either.

The government is presumably the one keeping the lights on and the water running, and the majority of the population, the kids, don’t even know it’s there. Plenty of them probably work doing maintenance on the pipes and sewer lines, repairing wires, collecting bodies and feeding them into the furnaces, with little or no idea what the actual purpose is.

Anyway, Lilac is here to get her ready for tonight, which means makeup and stuff, and naturally she says that Rhine is so much prettier than the other girls and will be great to work with, and Rhine thinks about her “little domestic” back at the mansion and how sometimes I would let her do my makeup if I was bored because that’s Rhine’s idea of kindness, not giving the six year old crayons so she could actually draw.

After makeup will come “training” which will be about “seduction” and not seduction as a euphemism for sex because of course Rhine is too special for that.

She then wishes Gabriel would wake up to rescue her the way he did in the hurricane which really wasn’t much of a rescue, given everyone was out looking for her and it just led to her getting locked back up.

Ah. That was an enormous chapter, but with so much to it.