So let’s start with what this book did right.

The setup is an okay idea. It’s a good way to show her getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. It has to be handled carefully, though, to avoid the idea that this is actually worse than where she was before. Less emphasis on the shallower aspects, the fine sheets and all that. Those should be the parts of it she was most able to give up. The subtext that all of this is okay so long as she’s getting paid enough is pretty uncomfortable.

Rather, there needs to be a direct connection between this and the previous book, since both are about such similar things. The “running away from the other business” line would be very good with that. Rhine should see this as running from one cage to another. She still has her brother to get back to, and supposedly she values freedom for its own sake as well. I think a good balance would be for her to view her present circumstances as more escapable – they don’t have anything like the resources her husband could bring to bear – but also more deadly, since they’ll kill her if she tries and fails. She’d still be cooking if she stayed in the frying pan, after all, but here she has a chance to get away entirely.

Oh, right, they’re not absurd accidental captors. Everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Rhine hides (or never took in the first place) the ring, and otherwise tries to keep anyone from knowing she’s someone’s runaway wife, but this just moves her into the new box of a girl who’s attractive enough to get picked for that. Maybe she did bring the sweater, but it was with the intent of selling it – and maybe she took it off so it was hidden or it was mussed enough no one looked twice at the time. Otherwise, she could lie that the two of them were servants and she took it when she ran off – they’ll take it from her, but at least they might not realize she was a wife.

Mind you, we still have the problem that it doesn’t make sense that prostitution would be such a moneymaker. I think the fix is to make all this withering single-sex. We already labor under the absurdity of men living longer than women, why not just say that the men live normal lifespans? Then you’d have a huge imbalance in numbers, and also we’d be scaling back the level of disaster enough for it to be believable that they’d still be able to keep skyscrapers intact. This trilogy seems like it’s meant to be about the slow death of the human race, but the disaster seems like it’d be killing us a lot faster than that.

So there we go. Women are at once valuable and disposable. There’s not enough to go around, explaining why there’s entire professions around kidnapping and imprisoning them, but they’re only good for a few years after you catch them, so it’s not that big of a deal if you have to kill one of the older ones for causing trouble.

It’s not like this even changes Rhine’s relationship with her brother, since he was already acting like he was the one in charge of everything.

Or let’s say the first generation are immortal, because that’s basically the role they play. (Hey, also, what if the first generation are actually the second? The initial superbabies reproduced just fine, and it was only when the grandchildren showed up that they realized something had gone horribly wrong. If they were intended to be immortal, you’d also likely have people waiting longer to have kids, meaning it’d take that much longer to get to the third generation.) That frees us up a lot in timeline – how long would it take for people to accept the idea women are chattel? Then that’s how long it’s been. The gatherers aren’t connected at all to the people who actually want the human race to keep going and instead they’re the expression of the nihilistic branch – everyone’s doomed, so what does it matter if you kill a few more? And they’re right in a way – despite raping thirteen year olds and everything else the first generations do, the population has been slowly dropping and there doesn’t seem any way to stop it. The people who buy wives do it because they’re wealthy and they can, and if the world just outside the mansion gates burns, what do they care? The only issue is that prostitution being so lucrative can’t be explained this way, but then it never made sense that it was. The gatherers just kill the unwanted here, rather than brothels being everywhere to buy more girls. Rhine happens to trip over a brothel by bad luck and happens to be wife-attractive so they want to keep her, but there aren’t brothels everywhere.

There is something that could be done with someone who’s actually well-meaning. In this case, though, it’d really work better with Rhine being a more active participant – there’s people out looking for her, and this is a good place to hide. The woman’s crazy, so she’s constantly on the lookout for spies, so she’ll keep anyone else out just as a matter of course and not think to check the girls to see if she’s actually got such a valuable piece as a runaway wife. Maybe add in that Gabriel’s sick, so they can’t just keep moving. (Maybe even add in this is part of why they’re at such risk of discovery. Servants are owned just like wives, so the hunt is for both of them.) This lets the second book have a setting that’s overall better than the mansion prison by making the tension be about Rhine’s balancing act. It’s her decision to stay there, but it’s dangerous, and if she wants to actually avoid prostitution while she’s hiding out as one, she’s going to have to work hard at it – make herself useful enough in other ways they let her stay and without making anyone wonder why she’s staying around when she has such issues with it. (Naturally, none of her just being too special to prostitute.) And then we could have the required threat of sexual violence to everything without having it just avoid the main character for no reason. We could even see that the other girls there have made a similar choice – the woman may be crazy and sometimes violent, but she’s the only one who knows how to deliver babies or keep the heat running and all those other things that take time to learn. It’s better inside the tents than it is some of the places they escaped from outside.

That would be best reserved for a later area – Rhine first gets away from the more awful prostitution, then, knowing how close her original owners are and that the prostitution ring is also on her tail, is more likely to be desperate for a place to lay low.

Another direction to go in is to just abandon any conceit of this place making sense and double down on the dream logic. Go toward some hybrid of magical realism and drug-induced hallucination. In a number of future dystopias I’ve read, there are cheap drugs around for a more cyberpunk bread-and-circuses setup. Have everyone be on those, including the main character. The drugs stay in your system for extended periods and even withdrawal only changes around your delusions rather than letting you sober up. Then push it so far that you can’t be sure if it’s really the drugs or if maybe this is actually how things work. Rhine’s narration already has weird emphasis and leaps of reasoning- the person she’s afraid of is like a pile of vipers, the incinerator swells ominously with its patchwork skin of discarded signs from happier days, the girls are like glittering insects…Rhine’s manner of description lends well to her focusing on some small detail and blowing that out of proportion so the thing we get is all off balance, or to outright imagining some trait. And the fact other people are likely perceiving their own skewed worlds makes the behavior of everyone else work much better as well – people’s reactions to Rhine rarely if ever seem based just off her.

It fits particularly well with the woman here. One of the things I’ve been wondering is why, if she’s so crazy and abusive, no one’s just killed her. The guards and prostitutes seem on good terms and they all care about Maddie, so it really doesn’t seem like anyone’s here because they’re so loyal to her. And it’s not like she’s actually doing anything useful given other people seem in charge of treating the injured, tending the gardens and keeping the place running. (For that matter, given the apparent value of the strawberries, they could probably make a good living selling the stuff from the gardens and make their little area some sort of farming commune.) But make it so paranoia and delusions are commonplace, and she no longer stands out enough for people to expect her replacement to be any better – plus, everyone else will be off kilter, so they’re less likely to think she’s just crazy in the first place.