The Lovebirds, she calls us.

…
She is building a cage

Well, that’s a bit terrifying.

from bits of rusted wire and coat hangers. She has Gabriel bend the lengths of wire into curves and paint them with a coating I’ve spent the morning mixing from gold eye shadow, water, and paste.

And there’s our lovely phantasmagoric apocalypse setting! She has them building their own cage out of scraps of the world before, back when we manufactured coat hangers for that purpose instead of scavenging them for other uses, and the gold color isn’t just fake, it’s fake gold color, from fake paint, made out of makeup which is inherently fake and ephemeral.

The other girls are apparently pissed off by losing their makeup.

They shove me as they pass; their lifeless eyes bore into me; they mutter words I can’t hear, spitting on the ground.

That’s a lot of energy from people with lifeless eyes.

“They’re jealous,” Lilac says

Dear authors,

If you find yourself in the position where a bunch of people are angry or resentful of your character, and the explanation for this ends up being “they’re just jealous” you should stop and think about what you’re doing for a few hours.

Of course, if the rest of the story is like the rest of this story you should probably skip the reflection and go straight to seeking psychiatric help.

Anyway, currently she’s dyeing feathers blue, presumably because they’re going to be in bird costumes? Wouldn’t those get in the way of people seeing her? I mean, the whole thing about her is she’s actually pretty and in good health. Under an inch of makeup and twenty pounds of feathers, you could replace her with a poodle and no one would notice.

I wonder what type of bird had to die for this cause.

Birds don’t have to die for you to get feathers. Also, given the state of things, if people are killing birds I’d assume it’s for the eating of their delicious flesh, and the feathers are just the leftovers that’d otherwise be thrown away.

The dye stains my fingers, lands in fat drops on the threadbare oversize shirt that makes up my entire outfit. Madame will not have dye spilling onto her good clothes.

…so, she’s not an idiot is what you’re saying. This is phrased like it’s a criticism but for god’s sake, are you really upset she doesn’t want you ruining clothing? It’d be one thing if she was making you do it naked but this is just basic, basic management.

Anyway, Madame shows up to say she’s doing it wrong, whatever she was doing, and anyway to come somewhere else to do something else.

I’m able to scrub most of the dye from my fingers. Some of it is trapped along my cuticles, outlining my nails in blue, making my hands look like sketches of themselves.

:D though. Actually, I’m surprised there’s not description of her made-up face looking like a doll’s.

Anyway then Madame creepily discusses her nice shoulder blades and how her back shows just the right amount of spine. because we must know how Rhine is better than everyone. In another book, this would be about the downsides of beauty, how this is why Rhine was kidnapped then and is getting trapped here now, but her beauty instead is always why she always gets to avoid the bad fates that wait for other girls.

She says that soon, Rhine will die horribly like everyone does.

“Will you charge admission for that?” I say.
“No,” she sighs, and tosses her spent cigarette over the edge. She looks small and incomplete without it. “I intend to make my customers forget these ugly things. No one will look at you and think about your expiration date. They will see youth stretching out like a canyon.”

Which makes me think of the story of Buddha being raised in walled garden-palaces where all the servants were picked to be young and healthy.

Oddly, it’s not a very good description of how things are being set up in this book, though. The girls are thin and filthy and Rhine talks about them having filmy eyes. They seem to be drugged and badly fed. You’d think someone with this attitude would be working harder to keep them outwardly healthy in appearance.

Most of the girls are sleeping through the day, but a few of them are up and about, bossing the children, tending the weedy gardens, flaunting themselves before the bodyguards for a bit of attention.

What a negative way of looking at it. Why can’t they be keeping an eye on the children or supervising them? They might well be their mothers. Tending to weedy gardens makes them sound lazy or incompetent, since of course if they were doing it right they wouldn’t be full of weeds. And flaunting themselves? That’s there to say it’s okay whatever happens to them, they’re sluts and they want the attention anyway.

Rhine also adds they all hate her for being better than them, because we can’t possibly forget that for a moment.

Madame then says that she and her boyfriend should act like they’re alone while they’re being watched. Rhine’s not thrilled with this.

But I only need to play along until I find an escape, and there are worse things than being trapped in a makeshift birdcage with Gabriel, pretending we’re alone. Right? My throat feels dry and swollen.

Yes, there are worse things than that. There are a lot of worse things and you just escaped one of them.

The woman then takes out a container with a single pill in it, which is an anti-pregnancy pill she claims to get from someone who does the manufacturing personally.

“I can’t waste them on all my girls, of course,” Madame says. “Only the useful ones. I shudder to think what other horrors would fall from Lilac’s womb if I let her reproduce again.”

The book is all like this – these subtle little jumps. Is she giving Lilac birth control because she doesn’t want her occupied with a pregnancy, or because she doesn’t want another kid like Maddie out of her? Those are two different things – a sufficiently useful girl would warrant birth control even if she expected her to have normal kids, and if she’s sufficiently horrified by the idea of Maddie Two that could motivate her to provide it for a girl she’d otherwise not mind losing to pregnancy.

The bigger question, though, is why steady pills appear to be the only option. A lot of the difficulty in manufacturing birth control is the balancing act where you want temporary but not permanent sterility, but here you’d think the latter would be the goal. There’s also long-term birth control that would likely be better, since if birth control is an underground thing, it’s better to have a small volume of high volume product and not, say, daily pills.

There’s actually a really good option here – copper. The modern sort is pretty carefully designed but really, just sticking anything coppery into the womb has a pretty good effect. You just need enough competence to not damage anything in the process, and given she’s able to reliably deliver babies, I’d expect her to be able to manage that well enough. No worry about getting a bad batch of pills, cheap enough that you could do it for all of them… The main concerns are inflammation leading to permanent sterility, and the latter part isn’t something anyone here sees as a downside.

But obviously Rhine will have to end up having kids once her special eyes fix everything, and besides sticking one of those things in would destroy her hymen which is the source of her power.

Oh, also apparently Lilac is the priciest whore in the place, which means her customer base is mostly the best paid first generations. So being pretty means you have to fuck grandpas. Rhine also says that Lilac is smart and pretty and a good mom. I’m increasingly worried she’ll end up sacrificing herself for Rhine, because she seems to slot right in to Jenna’s role.

So anyway Madame jams the pill down her throat. Then she says the clouds look like they’re the braid on a little girl,

I think she misses her dead daughter more than she cares to admit. I take bizarre comfort in this. The pain proves she is human after all.

This is like the third or fourth time Rhine has suddenly realized the woman is human. Maybe eventually the lesson will even stick more than a few seconds.

The loose dirt is warm under my bare feet, humming with the life of Jared’s machine.

How on earth does this work though? I really can’t think of any way to get heat into the ground like this without laying down wire or pipe.

Later she’s helping everyone set the cage up. Gabriel asks if they’re actually going to do this, and Rhine says there’s something bad about the fence, it’s buzzing. She obviously has no idea what an electric fence is, but she’s cultivated some healthy neophobia – if she doesn’t know what it is, then yeah, probably a bad thing.

Gabriel, having not gotten enough shocks as a sheltered servant, says “It couldn’t hurt to check it out.” Oh yes it could.

Rhine also argues against it on the basis it’d tip their hand – if they’re caught exploring ways to escape in the future, they won’t be able to actually escape the people who discover them. Gabriel says they’ll just make sure they’re not watched, even as they’re currently being watched, something only Rhine appears aware of.

She’s being rather wishy-washy, but she definitely seems more competent this book.

Madame wanted a yellow tent originally, but decided the peach tarp would be most flattering on our skin. She says I’m as pale as death.

This is like being “too thin”. Anyway, if Rhine actually was too pale they’d just dust her in rouge or something.

I am positively covered in feathers; they’re in my hair, and arranged like giant angel wings at my back. The dye hasn’t quite set, and watery streaks of color stain my arms.

I find this hard to believe – this was a while ago, and feathers don’t take that long to dry. Actual streaks of color would require them to be outright soaking – merely wet would just stain where she touched.

But presumably it makes sense in metaphor if it doesn’t in reality. I guess another reminder of the fakeness of everything? That seems to be the division – in Linden’s mansion, the glamour never showed its cracks. She was in the position of the outsider looking at the beauty and artifice, not the servant on the other end trying to make it look that way.

Gabriel again suggests running, but Rhine is certain they’d only be caught. Besides, she rationalizes, if she looks like the woman’s daughter maybe she’ll be better treated, and she thinks she can feel a tentative trust growing between us that maybe she can use to escape.

It worked with Linden

No, it didn’t. From outside Cecily’s window you saw the hologram hiding the exit. Then you ran, and Cecily sent a servant out to open the gate.

But Rhine’s forgotten that. Instead, she just worries Madame won’t be like Linden, and claims Lilac is trusted with everything But I’ve never seen Lilac any closer to freedom than the rest of them.

Which doesn’t make sense at all. Like Jenna, it seems like Lilac accepts this place as better than the alternative. There’s no sign she’s trying to get freedom, so how can you judge how close she is to it? Indeed, there’s no sign at all that running is inherently dangerous – the problem, it seems, is that if she runs with Gabriel the fact the woman is insane will make her blame Gabriel and kill him for being a spy. We have no idea what happens to girls who try to leave.

“Just kiss me,” I say, raising the latch of our cage and backing in.

Nicely done chapter ending, though.