Last time on Wither, Jenna started withering.

The baby’s crying and Cecily can’t comfort it. I think the idea here is evil mad scientist is evil because he’s stolen the baby’s love from her?

“What is it?” Cecily says. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the virus,” Vaughn says. I suppose he’s trying to sound remorseful but all I see is a giant cartoon snake flicking his tongue.

That’s all you ever see. You don’t need to even bother telling us at this point.

Rhine says it’s impossible…so, it’s a new strain? I really don’t get these people. They let someone cough blood all over everyone, but break out the hazmat suits for the dead body. Now they’re faced by someone who seems to have a worse version of what they apparently think is contagious, and they’re not at all worried?

Cecily asks if he can fix it.

“I’m afraid it’s not there yet,” Vaughn says. “But maybe we can prolong her life span until then.”

Cecily loses it and starts screaming about why hasn’t he found it yet.

She believes Vaughn spends all those long hours working on an antidote in the basement, and that soon he’ll save us all. I wish I believed that too.

Well, what do you think he’s doing? Half the time you won’t shut up about how awful it is he’s cutting bodies up to find the antidote, and then the other half you insist he isn’t bothering to do anything.

Their voices spin and spin, and her sobs splash around me like waves, and I can’t stand it. I want them both to go away. Vaughn and his little pet.

At times the narration is so disjointed I really do wonder if we’re supposed to view her as unreliable. Cecily is currently screaming at him about why he can’t save Jenna, but Rhine’s saying she hates Cecily for being his lapdog.

Rhine climbs into bed and when evil mad scientist leaves, so does Cecily.

Her dramatic crying is shaking the mattress, and I snap at her, “She’s sleeping. Don’t wake her up.”
“Sorry,” she whispers, and lays her head on my shoulder. There’s not a sound from her after that.

You’d think eventually the author would get bored of punching bag Cecily, but no.

I wake up gasping. The dampness on my neck is Cecily, pressed against me, sweating and crying and drooling. Her lips are moving, trying to make words. Her eyebrows are pressed together.
Down the hall the baby is crying and crying, and Cecily’s shirt is stained with breast milk, but she is never allowed to feed her son.
…
“What’s happening? Are you feeling better?”
The baby is still crying, and she looks to the doorway.
“I have to feed him,” she says, stumbling and hitting the door frame on her way out.
“Something’s not right with her,” Jenna says.
“You’re just now noticing?” I say, and we both laugh a little.

…I’m going to assume this is black humor instead of the alternative.

Jenna says it doesn’t hurt, she just can’t feel anything. Then she says she’s forgetting her sisters, and that in her dream, Rhine and Cecily were in their places. Then she asks how their plan worked, and she says she found him and they’ll leave in a month.

But maybe I can stay awhile longer.”

Jenna first tells her no, she should go, and then that she’ll be dead before Rhine leaves. Rhine tries to convince her, and Jenna says they’ll both get what they want.

In the days that follow, Linden starts spending time with Jenna. But it’s not like the time he spent with me after my escape attempt, or Cecily while she was in labor. Jenna has never established herself as his wife in any emotional capacity. He sits on a chair or on the divan, never on the bed with her. He doesn’t touch her.

Small mercies. But given Rhine should know by now that Jenna can’t even stand to be around him, I don’t know why – no, I answer my own question. Nothing the rapist demands from them is considered excessive, be it sex or refusing to leave someone in peace for the last days of her life.

I can’t help but think their conversations are the obligatory terminal discussions you’d expect to find in a hospital. Like he’s granting her last wishes. Like he’s trying to get some closure before she goes.

Her last wishes are to die in peace and probably for everyone else involved in kidnapping her family or exploiting her to die in a lot of pain. Also, you may notice here how the book has skillfully shifted to focus to the rapist, who is the one magnanimously granting her what she wants and whose feelings of closure we should concern ourselves with.

One day he mentions Jenna said she had sisters.

“She tells me they died, though. Some kind of accident,” he says.

I suppose you could try to fanwank an explanation here, that Jenna isn’t telling the truth because she assumes Rhine must have some reason for keeping the rapist in the dark and doesn’t want to jeopardize anything, but in that case she’d just not mention it at all.

So it’s the same idiot ball that keeps Rhine from mentioning it.

But even then, it’d be so easy to just not bring it up. So there’s some point. Rhine suggests it’s spite – She will die, and he will never have known her at all. – but again, better accomplished by not mentioning them at all. So I think the true purpose must be to remind us that the rapist is so very innocent and it’s so unreasonable to hold a grudge, with the explanation just there to try to paste over the resulting plot hole.

“I’ve never really understood that one,” Linden says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “But I know how fond you were of her.”
“‘Were?’ I still am,” I say. “She’s still here.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”

An interesting little crack in the nice guy façade. Though naturally, neither Rhine nor the book see it that way: He is so painfully clueless.

That’s not how I usually talk about people like this, who only notice the suffering of others as it relates to themselves – he’s not very attached to “that one” but he supposes his favorite will be upset and probably won’t smile cutely as much. Still, if only it would die already, it’s getting tedious.

She thinks that after she runs away, evil mad scientist will say she died and give him ashes, and he’ll rape Cecily until they have lots of babies.

And then they’ll both die, and Vaughn will replace them easily enough, because he’s a first generation, and who knows how long he’ll live.

This is an interesting point – it doesn’t seem like any of them have died of old age yet, and certainly the female first-gens are capable of manhandling the new wives easily. On the other hand she describes him as decrepit and corpse-like, and there’s been no mention of them looking significantly younger than people their age in pictures and video from before the superbaby thing, so presumably their lifespan isn’t that much longer.

Linden and Cecily. They’ve both been so isolated that they don’t even know what they’re missing. And that is for the best. They’ll say good-bye to Jenna and to me, bury us in some dark place in their hearts, and carry on for the remainder of their short lives. They’ll find happiness in holograms and illusions.

Except Cecily isn’t happy. She hates the fact she can’t play a normal piano, she hates being kept inside, she hates that she can’t play real games. Although Rhine periodically whines, it’s Cecily who’s consistently objected to the unreality of their imprisonment. She’s going along with things because she was promised that she’d be happy if she did, not because she actually is happy with any of it.

Both Jenna and Rhine are pleased with their physical surroundings, but Cecily complains. She knows exactly what she’s missing but she was promised her new life would make up for those losses. And it should be pointed out that while she may have been excited about sex, pregnancy and a child, she has yet to express any happiness at them – she speculated on how magical sex would be until she actually had it, and we’re told the rapist stopped having sex with her while she was pregnant and she seems to have been completely fine with this until it became an issue of if he was interested in her, at which point she insisted they’d have lots of sex after the baby. She’s desperate for the rapist’s attention, but the narration also makes it clear she’s bored to tears by his actual conversational skills.

She’s not happy. She’s trying very hard to to be.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

Fuck you too, Rhine.

The best part is, you know, she’s barely fourteen now, and Rhine still sees no problem writing her off as completely worthless. While she falls over herself to make excuses for the poor rapist, she keeps acting as if Cecily, raised in an orphanage, is a privileged little shit who just doesn’t know the real world.

When she goes back up after supper, she sees Jenna sitting up holding the baby.

I wonder if she cared for her sisters this way before they were murdered, the way she has cared for Cecily. The way she has cared for me.

Considering she’s gone beyond caring for into sacrificing, yeah, probably.

She gives Rhine the baby and goes back to her room so the coughing won’t wake it.

Afterward, Rhine goes back to her room to sob and scream about everything she’s lost.

I miss him. I haven’t allowed myself to truly miss him in a long time, but now I can’t help it. A floodgate has opened. And I’m so tired and so lost, and I don’t know if I’ll ever truly be able to escape. I don’t know how I’ll be able to open the iron gate with its pointed flower. I wipe my tears on Gabriel’s handkerchief, which I’ve kept hidden in my pillowcase all this time. In the darkness I feel the embroidery, and I sob until my throat is raw, and I just hope, hope, hope that I’ll make it home.

This is a rare moment the original plot resurfaces. This really shouldn’t be happening now, though, 11? months in and most of the way through the book.

Cecily wakes her up the next morning to say Jenna’s worse. Rhine makes sure to say that Cecily is a melodramatic brat before saying that this time it’s actually true.

Cecily wants to get evil mad scientist and Rhine says no.

“There’s nothing he can do for her that we can’t do ourselves,” I say

Well, nothing except the massive medical knowledge that kept Rose alive months past the usual date.

Rhine does not appear to be lying here because she assumes Jenna would rather die in peace, this just seems to be the same as her insisting the guy won’t find the cure. The fact Jenna hates him is reason to keep him from bothering her, but there’s no suggestion this outweighs any help he could give, it’s that there is no help so why bug her with him?

Jenna does manage to wake up.

Can we get you anything?” I say.
“A tunnel of light,” she says, and I think she’s trying to smirk.
“Don’t say things like that,” Cecily says. “Please don’t. I can read to you if you’d like. I’ve gotten much better at it.”
Jenna opens her eyes long enough to watch Cecily flip through one of the many books piled on the nightstand, and then she laughs again, and it’s more painful to hear than before. “That one’s not exactly death bed appropriate, Cecily.”
I can’t stand this. I look at Jenna and all I can see is this thing that’s killing her. This voice doesn’t even sound like hers.
“I don’t care. I’ll read it anyway,” Cecily says. “There’s a bookmark in the middle, so I’ll start there. You should at least get to see how it ends.”

I really like Cecily.

It’s not just that she’s a nicer person than she’s given credit for. It’s that she’s the only one who seems fully realized. Cecily has temper tantrums, she’s impatient, but she’s never intentionally inconsiderate and she’s better at noticing than you’d think. Even when the book tries to show her being demanding of the servants, she’s quick to tell Rhine not to bother getting something for her, so it’s not simply a power trip or laziness, and she never seems unreasonable – picky, at most, and bear in mind for most of the book she’s been pregnant and for all of it she’s been incapable of getting, let alone cooking, her own food. There’s some scattered references to her having rages and throwing things at the servants, and…she’s a kid under a lot of stress, of course she would. (And we never see any of those outbursts actually happen, only complained about after the fact, and given how nasty the servants are toward her, I’m inclined to think there was probably some actual reason. We know Gabriel was habitually delivering her breakfast ice cold for the sake of chatting with Rhine.) She’s devoted to the rapist and gets little to nothing in return. She wants friendship and the others ignore her, but she never seems to hold a grudge, she just comes back again later.

And she really tries. She’s oblivious at times, but she never ignores someone. Look at what happened – Rhine yells at her for crying loudly, and she goes dead silent. She’s not trying to pass the baby off but doing her best to care for it, even when it means getting up all night. Then now she tries to find something here for Jenna. She doesn’t decide to talk on her favorite subjects or say she’ll share one of the books she reads, instead going for the books Jenna’s reading. For most of the story she’s been frustrated at how hard it is for her to read and trying to get others to read for her, and the first thing she offers Jenna is to read the book for her because Jenna can’t.

Jenna says to just go to the last page because she doesn’t have time, and then starts vomiting blood.

They take over caring for her. Although they let people in to try to give her medication, when Jenna proves unable to swallow anything they keep them out.

Eventually, the rapist shows up. Rhine says he must recognize the smell from Rose’s death.

But he doesn’t approach this wife. I know Jenna always kept an emotional distance from Linden, that their marriage was purely sexual, but I wonder if Linden was partly to blame for that too. After losing Rose, he didn’t want to love another woman he would outlive.

…No, Rhine, I think it’s because he’s a rapist who got her sisters killed and locked you all up.

And it wasn’t “purely sexual”. That implies some level of mutual relationship. Their marriage was him raping her often and sometimes many times a night.

Linden looks so piteous and apologetic, standing there

Shut up, Rhine.

He offers to send servants and Cecily tells him to keep everyone out instead.

“Can’t I do anything?” he says.
“No,” I say.
“No,” Cecily echoes.

The book’s been going back and forth on the whole sister thing – Rhine’s internal monologue is terrible – but in terms of just actions, they are close and this chapter showcases it particularly well. They huddle on the bed together and refuse everyone else.

Much like the sister wife thing in general, I’m not clear what the author’s going for here. It’s obviously not much of a real sisterhood relationship – Jenna is only there to help Rhine rather than being protective toward both, and Cecily’s nice gestures are stomped on constantly by the book. I wonder if it’s something distantly related to the manpain issue – by saying they’re close, she can make whatever’s happening to one of the other girls be about Rhine. Come to think of it, I think Rhine’s the only one who doesn’t get a bed huddle, instead having the rapist attached to her side the whole time when she was injured, which would make sense if that’s the reason.

Jenna mumbles in her sleep:

“It’s not safe for you here,” she says. I don’t know if she’s talking to her sisters, or to us.

…A dramatic line, but an obviously false one. Jenna believes they’re safe, because she wasn’t trying to help them escape – she only helps Rhine eventually due to Rhine convincing Jenna it’s what she really wants (and probably because it’s clear Rhine was going to make an attempt regardless, so it’s better if Jenna covers for her), and she’s made no mention of taking Cecily along.