Last time, Rhine finally gets that holy shit they need to escape like right now. Lilac, for some mysterious reason, is willing to sacrifice to help her and will probably die, as all good people do. That’s probably why this world sucks so much, the good people sacrifice themselves to protect the selfish spiteful monsters who only feel empathy for rapists.

It takes me a long time to realize that we aren’t walking away from Madame’s carnival so much as around it in a circle.

Of course it does. You spent months wandering the gardens of Rapist-chan.

The grass murmurs secrets in lost languages and grabs at my heels.

The author is really getting some quality mileage out of Rhine’s slightly drugged state. She really should’ve had everything in a setting with drugs everywhere. Rhine has such lovely hallucinations.

Incidentally, Rhine just now asks exactly she was drugged with, and it seems more angel’s blood, but with a depressant to knock her out? I thought that’s what angel’s blood was in the first place. Also, how come she doesn’t seem to be having any nightmares? Her hallucinations seem amazingly tame, particularly when she should be primed for nasty stuff given she’s already scared and in danger.

It feels as though the world is a giant bubble about to pop, spilling forth bees and words. I am walking lightly so as not to disturb it, all the while knowing something is very wrong with my perception.
Above us I can see clouds twisting and somersaulting in the dark sky, obscuring stars now. Thunder growls my name, a warning.

So pretty though!

Lilac also claims Rhine put up a fight and almost scratched the woman’s eye out, but much like last book’s eventual claim she struggled against the gatherers, we naturally don’t get to see anything like that.

Rhine asks about the woman’s daughter to find that she and the husband (who was a doctor because men get jobs and women just are in this) were killed by Rhine’s naturalist cultists, just like Rhine’s parents, Rose’s parents and pretty much everyone trying to do anything halfway helpful.

Then Maddie and Gabriel show up. Also, there’s someone who Rhine thinks is the tiny little girl from before, who suddenly has lots of doctor knowledge and is saying Maddie is really, really sick and the air’s only making it worse.

all of a sudden the carnival lights up, and Jared is yelling for Lilac to come out, it’s all right, Madame doesn’t want to hurt her. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Come out, girls, come on out.

And hm. Jared seemed a decentish guy for the circumstances, but we’ve never seen how far he’s willing to go when he’s ordered. So, he might be telling the truth, might not.

Worryingly, Lilac stays down, and she’s the one who I’d bet is the best judge of such.

I can’t let him get me. At least as Linden’s bride I served a purpose. I kept my husband busy and alive and not lost in grief for his first wife, Rose. But if I go back there now, Linden will have turned his back on me for sure. Vaughn will be able to do whatever he pleases. Sedate me, kill me, cut me open, scrape the blue and brown from my eyes and study them under a microscope.

And Linden won’t care, yes. He’ll let it happen. That is something bad about Linden himself. Do you understand that yet?

“—something of an escape artist—” Madame is saying, without an accent. Her real voice is craggy and dry. It sounds deliberately ugly. But I can’t shake the thought that she was once pretty and maybe even kind.

There is something just horribly, horribly wrong with this book’s view on appearances.

Then Evil Mad Scientist calls out in a good-natured, with a hint of a laugh voice. I remember him as being more reserved than that, but thinking back, no, maybe that’s true. Rhine describes him constantly as being a pile of snakes and all, but she never can give anything concrete about it, never that he’s actually speaking cruelly or anything.

“—Linden is concerned about you. Cecily is sick with worry.” I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing for the delirium I felt a few minutes ago, when words meant nothing on their way through my hearing. But Linden and Cecily won’t go away. My melancholy husband; my withering younger sister wife, forever trying to shush the baby who is forever crying in her arms.

Yes, because you knew they’d switched the baby onto formula so it wouldn’t suckle from her anymore but thought it was funny not to tell Cecily so you could watch her crying over how her baby wouldn’t eat. That’s before you decided it was her fault Jenna died, I might add.

But Rhine’s thoughts are just that Evil Mad Scientist wouldn’t let her be with them. Keeping you away from Cecily may well be the only decent thing the man’s ever done. She also helpfully explains that this is definitely the most scary thing she’s been though and, she explicitly says, not the kidnapping where she would either get picked and raped or murdered. That was no biggie. Evil Mad Scientist is totally different.

Vaughn is saying, “Darling, come out,” and, “Rhine, be realistic. You have nowhere else to go. We’re your family.”
Family. No. Unlike my sister wives, and unlike the girls in this place and thousands like them on the streets, I know what a family is.

Holy shit, Rhine.

Jenna’s sisters died, that doesn’t mean they never existed. Cecily cared deeply for her son. Lilac raised Maddie. Scarlet and Coral grew up together. They don’t stop counting as people just because some guy stuck his dick in them.

What the hell do you know of family, anyway? Your parents were scientists but you prefer the creed of the people who murdered them for daring to try to help anyone. You said you wanted to get back to your brother but you thought of him what, once a month or so? Even when you had the opportunity to tell that wonderful “husband who adores you” about him, you didn’t bother. You only really ran away in the end because you wanted to be with your boyfriend and away from Evil Mad Scientist because dissection is wrong, and even now you’re looking back fondly on your time as property. Certainly knowing about family didn’t mean enough to stop you from smirking at Cecily caring for her baby.

Anyway, turns out Jared is actually helping them escape. He shouts that he sees them, then hops over where they’re hiding while he drops something, then runs off in another direction.

They start creeping away while Evil Mad Scientist says that Cecily’s baby is really ill and Rapist-chan is wasting away in his room for love of her. Bullshit, Rapist-chan would just start fucking Cecily again to make sure he has a replacement baby.

“It’s not true,” I whisper as I run. “It’s not true, it’s not true.”

This is obviously for Rapist-chan, because she doesn’t give a fuck about Cecily or her baby, but Rapist-chan being sad is terrible!

The power goes out, so now they can get over the fence. Lilac helpfully mentions the humming is because it’s electrified. She also says that they don’t have long because if Jared doesn’t fix it, the woman will know what’s up. It seems it should be possible for a generator to be legitimately broken for more than a few minutes.

Gabriel and Rhine make it up easier, but Lilac is trying to carry Maddie and having a lot of trouble, so Gabriel grabs Maddie and despite it being very clearly stated that she’s functionally mute and that indeed kids of her type generally are, Maddie starts making noise and then screams. Also, Maddie’s away from her mom all the time, so you wouldn’t expect her to be the clingy type – even now, she’s spent the day hiding presumably with other people.

But somehow, she screams and now everyone will be looking there, despite the fact that no one they’re looking for is a screamy kid.

I guess they’ll get caught then, maybe? I find it hard to believe that they’ll go back to the mansion – if Rhine was alone it’d be possible, but obviously Evil Mad Scientist isn’t going to take the servant who cuckolded his son back, and obviously Rhine can’t lose her love interest like that – it’s only acceptable to give up on a love interest if you’ve got another one established already. Plus it’d mean just dumping all the supporting characters, and we’ve got the issue of Maddie needing medical care.

Escape seems hard to believe either, though – they’re over the fence, yes, but Rhine’s just so passive and useless, can we really have a story where she successfully accomplishes more than one thing in the book? We’re a chapter short of a third of the way, at this rate Rhine might accomplish three or even four things this book!

Perhaps Evil Mad Scientist will get killed somehow in the chaos and then Rhine and Gabriel will get dragged back. Or maybe the gatherers finally show up and Gabriel pretends to be another one and she ends up at a new prostitution ring?