This is the sequel to Wither, the story about how rapists are precious and fragile and just don’t know what they’re doing and anyway it’s not really rape, and is there ever a lot of not really rape in it. What I know about this book is just that apparently people have been searching  “was rhine raped in fever” according to my stats, so I’m thinking there’s going to be a lot more of that this book.

Like last book, there’s an arty little line. Whatever else you can say about them, they’re definitely arty books.

Also, there’s a bunch of praise for Wither, with a lot of different people talking about how harrowing and elegant it is, how creepy and yet romantic.

When last we left our protagonists, Rhine had finally managed to wander away from precious Rapist-chan and his evil daddy who’s trying to cure people of the death virus thingy that also somehow has to do with genetic engineering, because. She took with her her servant crush but abandoned her surviving “sister”-wife, Cecily, there in the process, and worse, Cecily also helped them escape in a very obvious manner. Rhine felt no guilt about this then, so we can assume she won’t be caring about it in this book either. As Seeds of Wither showed, the author won’t admit just how fucked up things are, so we can also assume my guess for the fallout is wrong and Cecily will be happy with her rapist and his father who’s already killed one of the wives for much less than what she did, or at least her misery will be low-key enough the author can ignore it.

Like the last book, Fever actually begins quite well.

WE RUN, with water in our shoes and the smell of the ocean clinging to our frozen skin. I laugh, and Gabriel looks at me like I’m crazy, and we’re both out of breath, but I’m able to say, “We made it,” over the sound of distant sirens. Seagulls circle over us impassively. The sun is melting down into the horizon, setting it ablaze. I look back once, long enough to see men pulling our escape boat to shore. They’ll be expecting passengers, but all they’ll find are the empty wrappers from the packaged sweets we ate from the boat owner’s stash. We abandoned ship before we reached the shore, and we felt for each other in the water and held our breath and hurried away from the commotion.

That’s an actual intelligent plan. They had a problem and they dealt with it, by doing something quite risky that was necessary.

Perhaps we’ll manage to keep up this standard. Now that Rhine’s finally managed to leave Rapist-chan, there’s no longer need to invent excuses for why she’s dragging her feet, and she’s currently with her boyfriend, so while I’m sure there’ll be rape and elements of defending it as not rape, I do hold out hope that maybe, this time Rhine will at least be allowed to try to escape rather than telling me about how innocent and cute rapists are.

Our footprints emerge from the ocean, like ghosts are roaming the beach. I like that. We are the ghosts of sunken countries. We were once explorers when the world was full, in a past life, and now we’re back from the dead.

And on the brighter side, this book continues to be prettily written.

Rhine guesses the boat must have sent a signal once it got close to shore. I can’t think of why you’d set something up to do that instead of always sending a signal, so this suggests that they can only send short-range signals. I don’t think poorly explained nuclear war would explain that, so perhaps it’s the government setting up jammers for some reason. Failing that, it may be that boats aren’t allowed to venture too far out even when pursuing a theft, so the other boats had to wait for the stolen one to venture back to the coastline before they could do anything.

And it’s good that it’s Rhine thinking this, it suggests that maybe, she’ll be the one more in her element and Gabriel will have to rely on her, since he spent his whole life a servant and doesn’t know anything about the world outside.

“Someone paid a lot of money to make sure that boat is returned to them, I bet.”

Or, perhaps sending boats out costs too much money. Maybe the boats just remain guarding the border and will go a short distance for some money, but actual pursuit costs a lot.

Anyway, this is leading into us finally learning the state of police in this world. Rhine says that her parents told her they used to exist, but she can’t believe them.

Now there are only the private detectives who are employed by the wealthy to locate stolen property, and security guards who keep the wives trapped at luxurious parties. And the Gatherers, of course, who patrol the streets for girls to sell.

Which addresses some questions at the cost of turning the others into plot holes. If gatherers are legal, why don’t they just grab girls wherever they are, instead of needing to catch them unawares? If everything else is legal, why don’t the angry brothers and husbands blow up the gatherers’ vans whenever they’re seen driving to find new victims? Why would gatherers have a distinctive outfit in either case? And if there are no police, why would you ever kill the girls who aren’t picked? That’s gone past cruel into wasteful. Bullets aren’t free.

How does society function if there’s no law at all? Supposedly there’s jobs that people do for actual money, and I don’t think something like this could manage anything more complex than a feudal setup of you work and you’re given food and shelter – honestly, even that requires more stability than it sounds like we have.

(How do even those private detectives work? Without police, who determines if the property is stolen? All the private detectives can actually do is determine the current location of an object, whether or not their employer was the original owner is a separate issue, and they’d have to steal it to get it back regardless.)

What we should see is a corporate setup, where employees are provided basic food and housing, higher level employees get more perks, and the company runs a local police force to keep crimes in their area down. That could easily coexist with the wealthy families having their own private fiefdoms – they’re either counting as a small company in their own right, or are the owners of an actual company and their house is just an extension of the overall sphere it controls.

If they’re all working together, then escape is going to be difficult, but if they’re not, it should be easy – once you’re outside the local area a kidnapper controls, you’re safe. At worst, they might think to investigate a girl’s former home in case she goes back, but otherwise no one seems to be keeping track of people’s movements. In fact, they may not even know where she lives in the first place, there’s been no mention of taxes or papers or anything like that. And without police, no one really owns houses in the first place.

Gabriel’s upset because she’s bleeding, probably from a sharp rock or something, but Rhine explains it’s minor.

I roll up my sleeve so that the blood doesn’t ruin the white cabled sweater that Deirdre knitted for me. The yarn is inlaid with diamonds and pearls—the very last of my housewife riches.
Well, those and my wedding ring.

And hm. What value do these things have? I’m assuming the knitted sweater is probably pretty ruined already from the seawater, but pearls should be okay for a while and diamonds will last much longer, so she has a reasonable amount of wealth if, and only if, there’s anyone to buy. It’s quite possible the richness and luxury of the rapist’s house is in part because the market for such things has completely collapsed.

(We’d know if only she said at the time she was picking her outfit based on what had the most gems sewn into it, but that seems unlikely – she had a lot of gems on a lot of things yet it seems the only part of her outfit with them is the sweater.)

And, of course, if it’s not ruined by seawater it’s probably most valuable whole, but should she manage to find a buyer, it’d likely also alert her kidnapper to where she is now.

They’re soaking and it’s cold, so they need to find shelter. They can see a road in the distance but that’s about it.

I think soon it’ll be dark enough for Gatherer vans to start patrolling the area with their lights off. This would be the perfect place for them to hunt; there don’t appear to be any streetlights, and the alleyways between those buildings could be full of scarlet district girls.

Why would they need to sneak up on those girls? They’re already selling themselves for a meal, why aren’t any of them willing to sell themselves to be a rich man’s wife? And why do they only seem to work in darkness? They could just use tranquilizer darts to go after particular targets. Take a bunch of photos, let the rich guy pick which ones he wants, then go back and shoot the targets.

Gabriel tries to bandage her hand with seaweed, which I don’t mind because we know he doesn’t know anything, and Rhine recaps the plot badly:

This time yesterday I was a House Governor’s bride. I had sister wives.

No, you had a single sister wife. Jenna died a little while ago, murdered by your precious rapist-chan’s father. I’m sure you remember that happened, you went on to call Cecily a monster and say it was all her fault Jenna was dead and talk about how miserable you hoped the rest of her life was.

At the end of my life, my body would have ended up with the wives who’d died before me, on a rolling cart in my father-in-law’s basement, for him to do only he knows what.

To dissect and use to find a cure. You’ve admitted this is your problem with the man, Rhine, there’s no need to waffle about it now. The bigger issue would be the murder, but you decided to blame a fourteen year old girl for his actions there.

I thought the freedom would excite me, and it does, but there’s terror, too.

That’s kind of what excitement involves, Rhine. Also, one of her concerns is what if rapist-chan’s evil mad scientist father finds her, and considering he previously actually had her, I don’t see how she’d be any worse off.

They see a giant spinning wheel that’s all lit up and neither know what it is. Gabriel suggests they go for it like moths to a flame, and Rhine says “We can’t just go wandering off into lights. You don’t know what’s over there.”

Gabriel asks her what the plan is, then – good, Gabriel, let’s continue this letting her take charge on the basis she’s the only one who has any idea how things work, and not go all Peeta about things.

Unfortunately, Rhine has worn out her limited competence. It’s getting dark and she doesn’t know what else to do and at least there are lights over there, eerie as they may be, spinning like that. I do mean literally worn out – she seems like she’s just so exhausted she’s picking the obvious thing because at least it’s a goal. She must be physically exhausted after jumping into the freezing ocean and fighting the waves to swim to shore, and her laughter at escape means she likely spent the last few hours terrified she’d be caught, which is exhausting in this own way. With that in mind, it makes sense to have her first response is to say it’s absurd to do this, but she can’t muster the energy to think of what else there is and so ends up going with it.

The streets are full of trash, something rustling in a mound of it, and a single flickering streetlight has come on.

Who runs things now? I’ve been assuming there was a reasonably strong government that was doing its best at triage and keeping the lights on even if it didn’t have the resources to do much, but in that case, they’d still have laws. Does nothing get picked up and it’s only the reduced consumption that keeps the streets from being completely buried in trash? Where’s the electricity coming from, are there private companies and if so, who pays for the infrastructure like this to be on the grid?

Especially when it seems no one’s there to appreciate it. She says there’s no houses, only large buildings that are crumbling away, long abandoned.

“Funny, isn’t it?” I say. “Scientists were so determined to fix us, and when we all started dying, they just left us here to rot, and the world around us too.”

You’ve got issues, Rhine.

They continue on to the lights. Approaching, they hear bizarre music, something hollow and brassy masquerading as cheerful. and beyond the chain link fence currently blocking their progress, are tents and candles – that’s kind of weird, they’ve got the electricity to light up a Ferris wheel but use candles to light where they sleep?

Then they’re attacked by a swarm of people. Rhine fights back along with Gabriel, but it doesn’t do either of them any good.

We’re being dragged toward that spinning circle of light, where an old woman is laughing, and the music doesn’t stop.

And that’s the end. Not bad, but as I warned at the beginning, the start of last book was deceptively good as well. It would be a mistake to let our guard down.