Last time on Fever, Rhine is too special and pretty and virginal to have to be a prostitute.

Maddie is sitting at the entrance, peeking out into the night. I follow her gaze and catch the smooth white of a thigh, wisp of a dress. There are desperate, shuddering grunts and gasps. Lilac giggles as she smears lipstick onto my mouth. “That’s one of the Reds,” she says, “probably Scarlet. She wants the whole world to know she’s a whore.” She straightens her back, yells the word “Whore!” out into the night; it flies over Maddie, who is stuffing her mouth full of semi-rotten strawberries and watching. The girl outside yips and howls with laughter.

Huh.

I think I’ll just say that Lilac is teasing, given you can read it either way and she and the other girl laugh.

Anyway, where are these rotten strawberries coming from? Sure, if you buy them at the store they’re half gone to mold, but they don’t really rot that fast on the plant. I usually lose a couple, but that’s due to not checking often enough, which I can’t imagine is the issue here, and involves fungus particularly attacking the otherwise healthy strawberry, so you really wouldn’t want to pop that in your mouth – you cut off the mold spot and see it’s fine underneath, or, the entire thing’s full of mold and not safe to eat.

Semi-rotten is how I’d talk about the mushy patches on store strawberries. You wouldn’t get those unless you pick a ton of them and then leave them out for a bit. If these were being sold, it’s not impossible a couple were damaged and left over, but that doesn’t seem to fit with the idea the woman’s paranoid and only lets boys in because there’s no other way to run a brothel.

Rhine doesn’t get why Lilac has her kid there to see all the sex, but then claims that Cecily and Jenna had no trouble getting naked in front of her or each other, or wandering around in their underwear. I sure don’t remember any of that.

Late in her pregnancy Cecily didn’t even bother with the buttons of her nightgown, and her stomach floated in front of her everywhere. I guess being raised in such close quarters with so many other girls leaves no room for shyness.

No, that part is probably just the pregnancy. Severe discomfort tends to make you not care about anything. You can see a more moderate version when the weather gets hot and people start wearing as little clothing as they can.

Incidentally, this didn’t happen, because Cecily spent almost her entire pregnancy confined to bed. (It’s also pretty unlikely they were walking around in their underwear, because there were servants going in and out all the time.)

Anyway, Rhine fears that if she acts prudish it’ll make it unbelievable she had an affair with Gabriel. After all, we all know that if you have sex ever, you lose all shyness and become fine with anyone seeing you naked. It’s kind of like how obviously it’s fine Jenna had all that sex she didn’t want – she wasn’t a virgin, and only virgins mind getting forced to have sex. For everybody else, it’s not rape, it’s a mild inconvenience.

Then we hear about the “color-sorting” for the girls. It is not, as I assumed, based on age. That would make too much sense.

The Reds are Madame’s favorites: Scarlet and Coral have been with her since they were babies, and she lets them borrow her costume jewels. She lets them take hot baths and gives them the ripest strawberries from another little garden she grows behind the tent, because their bright eyes and long hair fetch the highest prices.
The Blues are her mysterious ones: Iris and Indigo and Sapphire and Sky. They cling to one another when they sleep, and they giggle at the things they whisper among themselves. But their teeth are murky and mostly missing, and they only get chosen by the men unwilling to pay for more, and they’re never in the back room for long. Men take them hurriedly, sometimes standing up, against trees, or even in the tent with all the others there to see.

Apparently realizing that having favoritism decided upon appearance is just confusing, and that this doesn’t fit well with the idea Lilac got her name just because of where she was found or why “the greens” can have both died as if that had some connection to age, or that it’s hard to try to think of how many subcategories you’d be able to make up,  Rhine then brushes off the rest of the explanation with There are more girls. More colors that blend together into one muddy mess so I guess only the Reds and maybe Blues will matter.

(We’ve already forgotten the claim that only Lilac is named for a plant, or else the author doesn’t know that Iris is a flower (and Indigo, while usually referring to the dye, is also the common name for the plant it comes from). What was the point of that? It doesn’t seem to mean anything special about Lilac, and even back then it was contradicted by the fact her name for Rhine was Goldenrod.)

Also, this is kind of confusing – are they her favorites because she raised them or because they’re the most valuable? There must be other girls coming in who manage long hair and all their teeth.

Maddie fetches peroxide for Lilac and we learn that she can read, she just doesn’t talk.

“Malfie” is an unkind term for the genetically malformed.

Oh boy more of the author not understanding what things are genetic.

Sometimes women would give birth to malformed babies in the lab where my parents worked—children born blind, or deaf, or with any of an array of disfigurements. But more common were the children with strange eyes, who never spoke or reached the milestones the other children did, and whose behavior never synced with any genetic research.

Okay, look, if you’re reliably getting a particular phenotype, then it sure sounds like they’ve all got the same disorder, which means that their behavior should sync up fine with the other kids with the same disorder. Also, what the fuck does whose behavior never synced with any genetic research even mean? This is almost word salad levels of nonsense.

And before my brother and I were born, our parents had a set of malformed twins; they had the same heterochromatic eyes—brown and blue—but they were blind, and they never spoke, and despite my parents’ best efforts they didn’t live past five years.

See, this is what I mean about how their gametes seem to be producing clone cells. Heterochromatic eyes are rare and getting the exact same ones across four kids? That’s just about impossible. Remember, opposite sex twins like Rhine and her brother should be no more closely related than regular siblings.

Malformed children are put to death in orphanages, because they’re considered leeches with no hope of ever caring for themselves. That’s if they don’t die on their own. But in labs they’re the perfect candidates for genetic analysis because nobody really knows what makes them tick.

So naturally no one considered fucking working together, handing off the ordinary kids they get to the orphanages and taking in the deformed kids from the orphanages, because who the fuck cares if the kids are getting killed?

The author also seems to have forgotten that last chapter the woman was talking about killing deformed children as something done long ago, and that if this is the standard treatment, she actually is being a lot kinder than normal to let Maddie stay.

Speaking of her, Madame is shouting for Lilac who mutters that it’s because she’s drunk, and so Lilac heads off, trailed by Maddie carrying the bucket of semi-rotted strawberries with her because apparently there’s a ton of those. I really think at this point the author is picturing the plants bearing plastic containers of supermarket strawberries. That’s the only way you’d have such a high proportion be rotten.

Rhine feels exhausted and wonders if maybe it’s the smoke. She listens to the carnival outside.

I think there’s something magical about it all. Something that lures Madame’s customers in like fishermen to a lighthouse gleam.

Oh for christ’s sake. Am I going to have to put up with another book of the author not knowing what lighthouses are? THEY ARE NOT LURES. THEY ARE THE OPPOSITE OF LURES.

I’m dressed in only a gold satin slip (gold has become Madame’s official color for her Goldenrod)

Really, book? You felt that needed clarification?

Anyway, it’s warm, which she attributes in part to Jared’s underground heating system despite the fact that last chapter that seemed like something still theoretical and also was for the gardens and all the candles in the lanterns because yeah, raised light sources are the bestest source of heat ever. That’s why castles don’t have fireplaces!

We know they have a furnace, why wouldn’t that be used to keep things warm?

Actually…we have all this colored light business with the tents, gardens, and various possible sources of heat. Why isn’t the whole thing taking place in greenhouses? Imagine ones set up like stained glass. They’d be warmed by the sunlight and also hold the warm air piped in better, and you’d have the illusion of summer in winter. It could be this whole metaphor where the girls are like flowers that can only survive and bloom in hothouses.

As Rhine’s dozing off she imagines Jenna’s with her and warning her not to forget how she got there, prompting Rhine to tell us about how oh she misses Jenna so much and at least in her dreams she can pretend Jenna’s not dead. Meanwhile the as far as we know still alive Cecily she’s fine treating as dead.

Then Gabriel heads in, and she sees he’s dressed in guard clothes, which seems pretty promising. Rhine tells us only now that oh by the way this morning Lilac was told to stop drugging him, which you’d think would have been important enough to mention earlier.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I haven’t come up with a plan to get us out yet, but I’ve bought us some time, I think. Madame wants me to perform.”
“Perform?” Gabriel says.
“I don’t know—something about dancing, maybe. It could be worse.”
He says nothing to that. We both know the type of performances the other girls put on.

Well, on the positive side, she’s still viewing it as her job to find a way to escape. On the other, wow, you two are really working hard to ignore that Rhine just escaped being a sex slave, and that having to dance is really not a “could be worse” thing compared to that.

Gabriel starts to talk about that, but then they think they hear something, so they drop the subject. Then she hugs him because she missed him and they start kissing.

The smoke of the incense is alive. It traces the length of us. The heady perfume of it makes my eyes water, and I feel strange. Weary and flushed.
“Wait,” I say when Gabriel slides the strap of my slip down my shoulder. “Doesn’t this feel
weird to you?”
“Weird?” He kisses me.
I swear the smoke has doubled.
There’s a rustling sound on the other side of the tent, and I bolt upright, startled.
…
Something has happened. Some kind of spell. Some supernatural pull. I’m certain this can be the only explanation. There’s the feeling of returning from someplace far.

It’s totally not a supernatural spell. Madame laughs, giving the game away, and extinguishes the incense sticks that were apparently aphrodisiacs that worked surprisingly well, especially considering these people can’t even manage knockout drugs that don’t give you supercharged nightmares, and Rhine learns that a bunch of guys were watching the whole thing through a slit in the tent.

“Yes, you put on quite a show.” She’s looking at me when she adds, “Men will pay great money to see what they can’t touch.”

See, Rhine, now this is worthy of a miserable “it could be worse”. It could be! But it’s probably a good idea to run for it now anyway.

In conclusion:

I hope that fills you with as much trepidation as it does me.