Last time on filler rape rape filler, Cecily’s baby is fine.

Anyway, it’s Christmas Completely Secular Winter Solstice Day, and Jenna steals a lighter. Considering there are candles everywhere, I don’t get why she needs to steal something to start a fire, but whatever, it’s Jenna being a cool protagonist. She flirts and then pulls it out of his hand while he’s distracted.

The second he’s gone the seduction leaves her gray eyes and she becomes just a girl again. In my doorway, I applaud, and she makes a curtsy with her skirt.
She’s sweating a little, as though the effort exhausted her. But she holds the lighter like it’s a trophy.

This is kind of worrying. The first paragraph is some nice characterization – the second suggests that it’s not that Jenna is actually blasé about sexuality, but that she’s just very good at tamping down outward signs of trauma.

I’m going to set the sitting room on fire,” she says matter-of-factly.

Jenna’s not only the nicest but also the most proactive character, and the only one who does things dramatic enough to be worth reading about.

I make her wait until I’ve put the green contacts into my eyes. “Maybe then I won’t be recognized,” I say.

I thought that was already the plan, but from the way the book introduces it, it’s just as possible it only occurred to her now.

Jenna is impressed by my cunning. “Look for a biohazard suit,” she says. “Then nobody will recognize you for sure

This is unintentionally very funny. Jenna is so impressed by her cunning she points out Rhine’s hours of learning to wear contacts were pointless because the suit will work better. “Jenna is extremely diplomatic.” would be a better statement.

Rhine thinks that there’s no way she could do that because the rooms in the basement are scary. And all this when it isn’t even her escape attempt!

She also notes Jenna looks particularly happy.

I think she has wanted to set fire to this place for a long time.

I’m surprised she never tried lighting the rapist on fire, come to think of it. He liked candles and Rhine keeps saying he’s weak and fragile, she’d just have to smother him or something for a bit then dump all the candles on the bed. Might even be able to do it while he’s still conscious if she can gag him and tie him up.

It’s wrong to kill people in horrible ways no matter what they do, but I wouldn’t exactly feel bad for him.

There’s no stairwell leading to the wives floor, and I’ve always wondered what would happen if there were ever a fire, but knowing Vaughn, he would let Linden’s wives die and replace us later.

Didn’t we already spend like a chapter on this subject, with the conclusion being that he had plenty of failsafes and the wives were super-valuable?

Green-eyed and anonymous

For Rhine’s next trick, she’ll hide from the evil mad scientist by sticking her head in the ground, plunging the world into darkness and rendering herself invisible.

Despite her whining, she does put on a suit like Jenna told her. Rhine may not be a good protagonist, but at least she knows to follow the directions of the people who actually know what they’re doing.

She wanders around whispering his name. She’s apparently the least stealthy person ever, because he sees her wandering around and walks up to her from behind.

Rhine hugs him because she thought he was dead! Despite that not making any sense.

Gabriel then attempts to explain the obvious, that if she’s worried about him being hurt, going to find him isn’t helping.

The Housemaster knows everything. He knows about the kiss. He knows you tried to run away. If he catches us together, I’m out of here.”
“He’ll kick you out?”
“I don’t know. But I have a feeling a body bag will be involved.”

Rhine then goes on about how no one leaves alive…except for the rapist who leaves whenever he feels like it, and the people delivering supplies, and of course the many people who come to visit for the parties, and… I’m sorry Rhine, I’m interrupting your baseless nonsense, back to you:

In fact, I’m not even convinced anyone leaves this place once they’re dead. More bodies for Vaughn to dissect. Is that what Jenna was trying to warn me about? I imagine my eyes in a jar in one of Vaughn’s medical rooms, and I purse my lips against a wave of nausea.

So whiny. Really, they deserve each other. They can escape together and trade baseless claims the guy’s evil. “And the way he petted the kitten made it obvious he planned to light it on fire!”

I haven’t been harping on Gabriel because I assumed he had some reason to be acting like this. But we’ve quite far along now and he has yet to tell us any horror stories about how servants just disappear, or how anyone who gets sick is reassigned to the basement, or how sometimes the guy injects them with stuff and won’t explain why. He hasn’t even mentioned the dead baby.

Rhine then says that she found the way out and wants him to go with her.

There’s a glitch in the trees that border the property. Some of them aren’t real. They’re a hologram.”

That’s not what glitch means, and also, he probably already knows.

See, he’s there when the deliveries arrive, as well as being one of the people who cared for the garden.

Actually, Gabriel telling her would have been a good way to justify his otherwise useless presence in this book. He’s just causing a love triangle and showing her a book from the library she was looking through to tell her the meaning of the name she should have been told by her parents in the first place.

But Gabriel telling her the way out when she makes it clear she’ll keep trying to escape either way, so he might as well help her succeed, that’d go a long way to giving him a reason for being here. It’d also show a major improvement from how he was before, when he tried to convince her to stay so she’d be with him.

I know, just know, that he’s going to use logic against me, and that will never do if I want to get out of this place at all before I die, so I kiss him.

There is so amazingly much wrong with this. There’s the anti-intellectualism that’s so terribly common to American media, where logic is used “against” the person, as if pointing out the problems reality has with their plan somehow matters more than that it won’t work when they try it. There’s the way we’re getting the usual set up of emotional female vs logical ie intelligent male. There’s the way that, yet again, in a book that’s all about women being powerless and forced into sexual relationships, the book only ever talks about women using sexual power against men.

There’s the way they’re on a tight time schedule and she just mentioned that they could be found at any time.

Eventually, they stop kissing.

“Rhine. It’s too dangerous. The Housemaster will do anything to protect his son. If he catches you running away, he’ll murder you and make it look like an accident.”

That’s the “logic” she’s so worried about?

What’s he protecting the rapist from? Losing Rhine? Then it doesn’t matter if she disappears or dies, she’s still gone.

Now, if you’re going to argue he’s petty and vicious enough to get revenge on Rhine for running away…

“His son is all he has. He had you and your sister wives brought here just to console him while Lady Rose was dying. Don’t think he wouldn’t destroy you before he lets you hurt him again.”

Nope, you seem to be stuck on the idea that killing her will somehow not count as losing her.

In a shocking turn of events, Rhine is smart enough to realize the flaw as well.

If you value your life, you won’t run again. That’s what Vaughn said to me after my botched escape attempt. But he also said I was more special than I realized, that Linden’s spirit would be destroyed if he lost me. And despite all the horrible things I think of Vaughn, I do believe he cares about his son. There’s no accident he could stage that would make Linden accept my demise. Linden would never forgive his father if something were to happen to me on Vaughn’s watch.

A bit overstated – there’s actually little shown of the rapist’s relationship with his dad, all we know is evil mad scientist seems very attached to him and that the rapist didn’t care about the baby being dead on his dad’s watch or his wife’s claim it was murdered.

A pang of guilt rushes through me, and with some effort I force it away. I don’t belong to Linden. I don’t want to hurt him, but that’s just the way it has to be.

Uh, no. The fact you don’t belong to him is why you shouldn’t feel the slightest bit of guilt and should want to hurt him. Because he believes you’re his property. And that’s bad. It’s not that it’s wrong because you’re the special virgin exception and poor Linden-chan just didn’t realize that unlike other girls it isn’t okay to kidnap and rape you. It’s always wrong.

Anyway, Gabriel decides to try to escape with her, probably because he realizes she’s leaving either way and also he’ll never get laid if he doesn’t.

Look, he really doesn’t seem half as awesome as the book seems to think he is. So far his high points are that he brings her candy and spends time talking to her. That’s less than the other girls have done for her.

We work out the details in hushed voices, pressed close to each other in the darkness. On the last Friday of each month, at about ten p.m., he takes the bio waste out the back exit, to the dump truck that Housemaster Vaughn orders in. He’ll watch the truck leave, and then he’ll follow its path through the hologram trees and wait for me.

See! I said he already knew the way out.

Even assuming that Gabriel is so boring he never bothered looking to see where the trucks were going and somehow remained completely ignorant, he could have found the exit any time he felt like it by just following one of the many trucks.

Gabriel is concerned about getting through the gate. Indeed, the smarter option would be to leave early, so that they’re by the gate when the trucks start arriving.

“While we’re out, I’ll make a note of the roads. I’ll look for someplace we could go once
we’re out.”

Aside from the repetitiveness, I’d like to say this is confirmation that the kidnapping/murder/rape thing is legal because she doesn’t seem to think the police are an option, but Rhine has so far refused to bother telling the rapist she isn’t there willingly, asking him to send a message to her brother so he at least knows she’s not dead, or suggest a trip to New York under any pretense, so she may be avoiding the police out of the same idiocy.

Rhine finally goes back up to the wives’ floor, where she’s explaining that a candle caught on a curtain.

Linden pats her shoulder reassuringly, and I can see her struggling not to push him away.

Well, there’s some confirmation for my theory Jenna hates all sexual contact. This serves to make past events even worse.

Evil mad scientist just stares at Rhine while saying that they shouldn’t leave candles out. Then Cecily notices her eyes because Rhine didn’t think to take the contacts out. So all her side of the plan did was make her look ever more suspicious. She tries to explain it was for the party.

The baby starts screaming so evil mad scientist takes him from Cecily to calm him down. He says the kid is hungry but when Cecily asks to feed him he says they have a wet nurse.

That’s actually a good thing. Besides, again, the fact she’s thirteen, she’s had a rather bad pregnancy followed by an even worse birth. The fewer demands on her, the better.

Cecily is upset about the kid getting taken, but she seems to be still spending a lot of time with it, so it’s probably her own worries about not being a good mother and not evil mad scientist playing keepaway with the kid.

The prep squad trio of servants gets her ready for the party and mentions there may be cameras, so Rhine promptly regresses to hoping her brother can see her despite planning to escape in a month.

In the back of my mind I worry that I’ll be returning to an empty house, that’s he has gone to look for me, or, driven to extremes by grief, he has moved away, too pained by the memories to stay. We’ve seen it happen. Families have moved away once their sisters and daughters have been taken.

Why do people put up with this in the first place?

Also, why is she only now thinking about this? We spent months upon months of her just sitting around thinking how pretty everything was.

We find out that actually, Cecily is now fourteen.

unlike Jenna who aged quietly, she made a big deal of it. There was a sheet cake covered in frosted leaping unicorns, and the attendants had to sing to her

the attendants had to sing to her

Rhine is angry a fourteen year old wanted to celebrate her birthday. She feels it is an imposition upon the innocent servants, taking up valuable time they could be using to call Cecily an annoying brat and spit in her food.

Anyway, they leave for the party and she pays close attention to the city once they get there.

Linden is smiling brightly.
“What?” I say.
“You. You’re so excited.” He tucks an over-sprayed curl behind my ear. “It’s just kind of cute.”
His comment takes me by surprise. Here he is admiring me while I’m thinking of nothing but how to get away from him and never look back. I feel so guilty that when he kisses my cheek, I reward him with a smile of my own.

She feels guilty that she has to plan an escape from him because he keeps her prisoner.

Also, she sees boats in the distance because they’re really close to the sea. The ocean helps moderate temperature fluctuations, so they shouldn’t be having extreme weather.

The rapist explains that he’s been on a boat only once and he was really seasick so that’s why he never learned to swim and always avoided water.

Because those are totally the same thing.

I try to hide my horror.
Vaughn so carefully controls his son, that he can’t even allow him to enjoy the illusion of a real ocean in the pool. I have my doubts that the seasickness story is even true. In fact, his childhood illnesses and supposed frailty seem like things Vaughn concocted to keep his son from venturing far.

Except you haven’t been able to shut up all book about his delicate bones and frail frame and how he looks like a kid! If there was any real evidence evil mad scientist was smothering his son, which there isn’t, it would probably be that because he’s so frail and sickly and prone to problems whenever he leaves the house, his dad became overprotective. Not that his dad was overprotective therefore he fabricated illness.

Rhine promises to teach the rapist how to swim so he’ll never be scared of drowning before remembering that she’ll leave before it gets warm again, how sad.

Also, she notices how uncomfortable the rapist looks as they reach the party so she lets him get used to things before asking to dance. Then they dance and he’s awesome.


a camera pans over us. I try to let it get the best possible shot of my eyes.

This is better than the ongoing subplot in the Hunger Games, at least. There’s no sign she’s being vain about this at all, she just wants to be identifiable.

This party is even better because fewer men kiss her hand and none of the wives talk about pregnancy.

One of the second-gen wives says she was a friend of Rose. She then spends the rest of the conversation saying she’s so glad the rapist is happy again.

Rhine does remember to get some éclairs for Cecily, which is nice of her, although it seems silly when she could just ask the cook to make her some. I suppose it’s really more about making her feel like she’s included in the party. The rapist goes off to see his kid and she visits Jenna.

I tell her about the icicles, and the snowy hologram, and the food. “The chocolate-dipped strawberries were worth dying for,” I swoon. “They had a huge fountain just bubbling chocolate. I wish you’d been there.”

This doesn’t make sense either, because again, they could just have those made here. Bubbling chocolate fountains aren’t even particularly classy, expensive things.

Suddenly, Jenna starts coughing up blood. I guess the virus isn’t quite so on the dot, then.