Last time, a gatherer came to buy Rhine and there was shooting and coughing blood and screaming and Gabriel’s maybe poisoned!

This may be a terrible book from a moral standpoint but stuff absolutely happens in it.

This chapter, Rhine sees Madame running at her with a raised syringe that she stabs Rhine in the shoulder with. Don’t do this, everyone, you might break it or something.

Now she’s waking up.

“It’s done,” a voice says. A voice that’s dark and baritone. Jared. “She’s dead.”

I don’t remember if we learned Jared’s skin color but I wonder if that’s why his voice is getting called a color here. I’m thinking he might be dark skinned just because he’s close to Lilac and if that was an interracial relationship I think the book would be making a big deal of its progressiveness.

Anyway, Rhine wonders if this is her being dead, because poison for Gabriel is impossible but poison for her completely believable, and I wonder if Jared faked her death, and then it becomes clear he’s talking about Maddie, and it seems he’s lying about that, because when Madame asks for the body to get the dress off her, he says he’s already burned the girl.

Following the thought processes behind this book are difficult. Was the incinerator introduced to allow an easy way to fake Maddie’s death? Or was it there for the sake of style and symbolism, and it’s just getting used here because it was already a feature?

She wakes up again to yellowness.

Buttercups, I think. They sprouted
up in my mother’s garden one year, an unexpected surprise. She’d been experimenting with seeds and compost. “Look,” she told me, crouching down. I was so small back then—small enough that I could pretend to be lost in that garden, which didn’t seem as big after my mother died. The sunlight burned my exposed shoulders. I dug my fingers into the cold earth, probing for worms. I liked dangling them, liked the way they retracted and expanded their beige-pink bodies between my fingers.
“Buttercups,” my mother said. Buttery, rubbery little flowers were coming up in the dirt.

That’s a cute little story. Seems a bit at odds with Rhine’s claims of how poor the ground is in the city – worms aren’t really everywhere. That’s what I like about where we live, we’ve got these massive earthworms so you know the soil’s good.

My brother was sword-fighting with a stick nearby, parrying and stabbing at the air.
“They’re just weeds,” he said.

Man, seems he was always pretty joyless. Weirdly so – Rhine’s story and other comments make it clear that plants of any kind were rare and hard to grow in the city, to the point that without their mother the whole garden just dies. And buttercups aren’t particularly weedy even without that.

She and Gabriel are awake enough to hold hands. They overhear Lilac and Jared discussing their fate – Gabriel’s to be “gotten rid of” and she’s found another potential buyer for Rhine. You know, has anyone tried messing with organ transplants? Boys live longer than girls, so they’d be better candidates. Plus surely there’s at least one brothel in the country that caters to gay guys. There should be some way you can get money for a healthy seventeen year old.

Rhine is still too out of it to understand this and anyway she’s busy passing out again. The events of this book could generate years worth of YA covers.

Then someone jerks her awake and is yelling at her to get up and move. Instead Rhine throws up, and her probable savior realizes he’s got to do everything himself and just picks her up to run with her. This is why it’s important to be a tiny female and be rescued by large men, otherwise they might not have enough upper body strength to sprint around with you.

When she’s set down again she manages to remain uprightish without more vomit. Progress!

Jared, who’s the one moving her about, demands “What have you done?” His voice is low, thunderous. “What have you brought to this place?”

Which is kind of cool! We don’t know any more than she does, but certainly, her presence alone appears to be destabilizing things. She’s led to conflict with the gatherers, the carnival’s top enforcer getting shot in the arm, and the previously stable situation between Madame and Maddie exploding. She also seems pretty bad for group cohesion in a more general sense, with everything we hear being about how the rest of the girls resent her special treatment, and having her own boyfriend with her.

But sadly it’s nothing to do with that. Jared says scary people are here looking for her – I was thinking gatherers, but no, it’s that scary person she knows.

“A Housemaster,” Jared says. “He claims you’re his property.”

Okay, I’ve been cuddling up to this book’s sweet, sweet existing description, so I do have to take a moment to say wait, is that a specific thing? I kind of just assumed everyone was calling him that because he was in charge. It doesn’t sound like something someone from outside the household would be using – surely the fact he’s a first gen insanely wealthy doctor guy is all more relevant – and actually sounds more like a staff job, like butler or something where it’s a job you’re getting paid to do. Wikipedia backs me up on this supposition.

It must mean something else here. In Exalted, the heads of household are freaky superhumans who’ll live hundreds of years, leading to them breeding their descendants like prizewinning horses. You’d think there’d be something similar going on here – the first generation will outlive children and perhaps grandchildren, and they also represent the only real continuity left in the world. Furthermore, we have households being incredibly important and incredibly powerful, with entire institutions, the gatherers being based around supplying them with a particular commodity.

So, I’d think a housemaster might be someone wealthy and powerful enough that he’s trying to turn his household into a power player. Someone you wouldn’t want to cross. But I don’t think that’s ever been said or suggested.

How could Housemaster Vaughn have followed me here? My father-in-law played the role of a mad scientist, it’s true, but his domain ended at the mansion gates.

He really wasn’t mad at all, and also he owned a giant hospital too.

Plus, Rhine, you already told us there’s a whole profession hired by rich people to find out where their stolen property got to. The fact you stole yourself doesn’t change anything.

Now, the fact he was willing to kill Jenna for not playing her part right might suggest he’d be willing to cut his losses once you proved yourself so unsuitable as to run away. But the fact he may have killed his grandchild just to get back at someone for not wanting children originally says that he is as petty as he is terrifying, and it’s possible he’s here just to kill you for trying to cross him.

There’s also the fact he switched his second grandchild onto formula despite breast milk being better in every conceivable way, which speaks of a pathological need to control everyone around him. It may also have been some sort of punishment to Cecily, which would mean he’s willing to cut off his nose to spite his face.

Really, it’s not a surprise he’d hunt you down.

Without lights and from a distance, the carnival in the moonlight looks like one of Linden’s unfinished drawings. All lines and beams and angles. I feel as though I have tripped and fallen into the unreal world of his sketchbook.

Pretty! Also, worrying. I was so hoping we’d be done with the rapist, but he keeps coming up and now I’m thinking he’ll actually reappear in the flesh. Of the characters Rhine thinks a lot of, Rose and Jenna are dead, but he’s still alive.

Jared explains he’s not really helping out here but was actually ordered to hide her by this book’s evil adult until last book’s evil adult coughs up enough dough.

“He’s lying,” I say. “Whatever he told you, he’s lying. I don’t know any Housemasters, and I’m not anyone’s property.”
“Really?” Jared says. He folds his arms, and his shadow doubles in size, then deflates back to normal. “He seemed to know an awful lot about you. Rhine.”

Why are they even having this conversation.

Rhine is wearing a wife’s ring showing up in a wife’s clothes. Right now, the only thing she could possibly say was that she isn’t the wife but just stole the woman’s stuff – best would be to say the woman ran first, leaving the ring as you would expect one to do, and she and Gabriel took advantage of the chaos and search to run off themselves.

It’s sort of plausible – wearing wife stuff isn’t nearly as idiotic when you’re not a wife, especially if she figured that the woman would be found before long so no one would be putting out descriptions for a runaway wife in general. The only flaw is Rhine is pretty enough to make it unbelievable she’d be a servant, but she could try to muddy the waters by saying her eyes really are a deformity, even if they’re pretty, and her particular owner wasn’t willing to risk it, and that “Rhine” is the name of the actual wife who must not have been found, not her.

Of course, given her eyes are her most distinctive trait, it’s most likely that’s what he said. Dammit, Rhine, you went through all the trouble of getting contacts last book and all you did with them was wear them while running around the mansion full of people who knew your face. If you were wearing a brown contact lense right now, his description wouldn’t fit you and you could claim you just stole the stuff. Maybe even say that you’re someone else entirely who met actual Rhine recently and she gave you the stuff to throw the guy off the scent. If you say where she was going, there’s a slim but existing chance that they’ll run off now in that direction.

Far more likely they’d drag you up there just in case, but it might make Jared doubt there was any point to that long enough to run for it.

But no instead she has a panic attack about oh my god my name they know my name, because despite everyone constantly saying that Gabriel is mumbling in his sleep and her presumably doing the same when she’s doped up and her hearing him say her name at least once, no one else heard it ever.

Lilac’s there too.

She runs her thumb over my wedding band and says, “Was marriage really so bad? Worse than this place?”
It’s a good question, and my mind is so bleary right now that I can only answer honestly. “No,” I say. “Not worse than this.”

Oh christ Rhine.

I had a comfortable bed. A husband who adored me. Sister wives to quell the loneliness—or, on most days, to share it with me. Maybe I should give up. Walk through this dilapidated carnival one final time to give myself to Vaughn, and sober up on the long drive back home.

FUCK YOU GO DO THAT THEN

But no, she can’t for reasons other than being the imprisoned property of a child rapist. That part was awesome.

Beneath the comforts of the floor I inhabited

Ahem “was locked up on”.

with my sister wives, something much darker lurks. I think of Rose’s lifeless hand falling out from beneath the sheet

You mean her inevitable death that was delayed by Evil Mad Scientist. He didn’t kill that one.

Jenna dying in front of me, the story of Rose and Linden’s dead child. All the agony and devastation could be blamed on just one man

Again, Rose’s death is not his fault. I guess maybe the agony of the delaying was, but that was really done because Linden wanted it.

At least when it’s down to the wire and you’re actually facing the thought of seeing him again you managed to stop blaming Cecily for everything. Amazing! Maybe by next book you could work up to blaming Linden for anything at all.

And so, Rhine says Evil Mad Scientist is the problem:

If he doesn’t kill me, he’ll do something much worse. He has done worse.”

He’ll kill her or her hypothetical baby that is all he seems to actually do. Dissecting your body after you’re dead isn’t a separate thing from killing, in fact it kind of required you die first.

Rhine says they need to escape, and the two seem less than enthused.

She starts leading me away, but Jared calls out to her, “She’s brought nothing but trouble. We should just give her up and be done with it.”
“You know I can’t,” Lilac says.

Oh, yeah, she’s this book’s Jenna. I’m sorry Lilac. You shouldn’t do this, Rhine’s not worth it.