Last time, Rhine still hasn’t been quite raped in Fever.

Sometime after dawn we board a bus that will take us to Pennsylvania. After that we’ll have enough money to take another bus to New Jersey, and from there, Manhattan.

So there’s reliable bus routes. And you can’t buy a ticket for multiple buses at once, meaning that anyone traveling a long distance will carry all the money on them. And there’s no sign of armed guards. Why does no one ambush them?

I think this part is really an extension of how this isn’t a setting with worldbuilding for its own sake. The only areas developed are those related to the gothic romance aspects. The only thing to fear in this world is being kidnapped to be a rich man’s bride (and killed if you aren’t good enough). There’s a faint awareness that there’s other crimes possible, probably, but they just never come up – Rhine’s house is full of alarms for intruders, but the only one that ever comes is a gatherer. No one’s tried to accost them for their money, not even when Rhine was decked out in pearls and diamonds. In this book, Rhine is first trapped in a brothel and then when she later trusts strangers, the threat is again sexual. (And is it a coincidence that the whole “ghost bride” thing would be considered quite harmless through a Victorian lens, and that’s how Rhine and the narration treat it?)

You can do interesting things with more cozy catastrophes. I’ve read scifi in settings where everything’s just falling apart slowly, and there the fact there’s little crime is more an issue of crime being a matter of energy. Done right such settings can be extremely creepy because you can’t pinpoint exactly what’s wrong and there seems no hope at all of a solution – solutions require change and the energy to enact it, and these are settings where everything is winding down to the grave.

But that’s not this setting at all.

This setting is made up of abandoned children, who are healthy and strong right up to the sudden end. It even has a bad gender imbalance, and history has shown that men are more likely to be violent rioters to start with and get a lot angrier when there aren’t women around. A world where young men temporarily outlive what few women aren’t stolen and usually murdered isn’t even a powder keg – I’m picturing something like the second half of this. There should be constant, bloody riots dotting the continent – especially since there’s no police force, let alone an army you can send in to try to keep a lid on things. I mean, who could you recruit? You have nothing to offer the soldiers because they’ll die in a few years and you’re a first gen with a half dozen wives just to rub it in further, so any attempt to arm and train them will likely lead to them deciding they’re better off using their new aiming skills to return your bullets to your face.

The only hope anyone would have of keeping control would be the orphanages keeping the kids busy and indoctrinated to obedience, but they seem to be doing their work grudgingly given how many kids are running around free. The gatherers should be employed to grab anyone not under the government’s thumb. And honestly, I think you’d still quickly end up with angry young men burning the whole system down. Maybe if you turned the places into rape farms it could work.

Rhine dreams about a normal world with people of all ages, and that she’s holding the world card. The only problem is she can’t find her brother and thinks she got there too late. So since apparently fucking magic now, I’m thinking Rowan might suicide/commit suicide by gatherer or rich guy’s guard before she can find him. You know what’d have avoided this, Rhine? Fucking telling Linden-chan that you’d like to tell your brother you’re okay. Fuck, if you were so worried about admitting to the whole kidnapped thing, because I don’t know maybe you didn’t want to hurt his precious little feelings, you could just say you want to write the guy to say you’re so very happy. You could even lie and say it wasn’t your brother if you expect Linden to freak out at the idea of you knowing any male individual at all – I’m sure your brother would still understand it was from you if you addressed it to your big sister Rowan. At least he’d know you’re not dead.

But really, why are there no phones?

Anyway, Gabriel “keeps watch” the whole bus ride, because remember Rhine is useless now. Also, if you have to keep an eye on the other passengers to not get your throat slit in your sleep, you’re probably doomed either way.

At least Rhine stays awake for the second bus ride.

The seat in front of us is empty, so Maddie makes a game of hooking her knees over the back of it and hanging like a bat.

This is an interesting note because it suggests that the bus is relatively full and the previous one perhaps even more so. It’s possible Rhine just isn’t reporting that because Maddie’s too nervous to venture away, so even if the bus is only half full, if someone’s in the seat in front Maddie would have stayed put.

It seems to entertain her, at least, even if she is annoying some of the first generations that are eyeing her. I can feel the stigma they’ve placed on Maddie. And on me, and on Gabriel. For our youth. For our looming deaths. As though it’s our fault we were born into this world.

I really don’t find this believable.

There are situations where adults start to demonize the young, admittedly, and it does tend to be connected, ironically, to there being a shortage of children. But children in this are doomed mayflies who’ll never supplant the first gens, and when we hear of riots we hear of it being first gens. The second gens seem inexplicably content with their lot, happy to deliver snacks to the first gen’s pointless restaurants. There don’t seem to be even the few bad eggs required to generate a stereotype. There’s also the fact that almost all of them will have lost children, which generally makes people feel attached to kids.

Perhaps they view them as an unwanted drain on their resources, like people resenting a disabled child they’ll have to care for all its life.

Rhine decides not to annoy them because if people pay attention maybe Evil Mad Scientist will be able to find them, so she decides to read to Maddie, first the book and then a pamphlet.

Would there still be pamphlets? They’re a disposable thing, and you’d think by now there wouldn’t be so much of that left. Plus they’re made so disposable to make them easy to update, and how much does the world change these days?

We read about how many miles it is from a top-rated hotel to the water, and where to get the best seafood.

There’s also the fact there should be little competition left. Rhine’s talked about how there are celebrations among the wealthier members of society for any new building that goes up, which is not usually how, say, a car dealer responds to someone else entering the business. Between the lack of people with money to take part in them and the lack of people left to run them, how many hotels can there be left?

Then Maddie goes back to the names on the book and traces them. Rhine assumes it’s probably just a secondhand thing.

Still, I ask, “Maddie, who is that?”
Of course she doesn’t answer.

What, have pencils disappeared to the same place as phones? SHE CAN WRITE.

She wakes up Gabriel as soon as the bus comes in, annoying him.

The next bus leaves in ten minutes

Having enjoyed some bus travel myself, this is perhaps the most unrealistic part of the series. Buses having short connection windows they actually make? In winter? That’s ridiculous even in a world that isn’t suffering an apocalypse.

Rhine’s been saying Gabriel looks better and she thinks he’s detoxed at last.

he traces his finger along the curve of the seat before him. His lower lip is held between his teeth, and pink with color again. Fine brown hairs along his face have frizzed like tiny baby versions of my own curls.
I watch his finger move, first along the edge of the seat but then away from it, making shapes, charting paths.
“Where are you?” I ask softly.
“Sailing,” he answers. “Right here are the
waters of Europe.” I lean close to him, my chin on his shoulder, and I watch. “This is the North Sea, and then here is Germany.” He trails his finger down, down. “And the Swiss Alps.” He is remembering Linden’s atlas. I can see it in his faraway expression, not lost to drugs but to something captivating. Lost like me when I am dreaming of what the world once was, what it should be.
“I’m following the Rhine River,” he says.
“Am I there with you?” I ask.
The concentration leaves his face. He looks at me, and I raise my head from his shoulder.
“You’re everywhere,” he says.
“Because there is no more Germany,” I say. “No more Swiss Alps.” Just bits of river broken off into the choppy sea; like Gabriel said, everywhere.

Yeah that absolutely sounds 110% the talk of someone sober.

Now that I think about it, this is really my problem with the whole detox subplot. Like I was saying back when Rhine was maybe drugged at the carnival, the writing is so much better from that angle. Having secondhand updates on Gabriel’s delusions isn’t interesting and just serves to undercut the imagery Rhine provides, particularly when the book insists on drawing a comparison. If the real reason Rhine was seeing Evil Mad Scientist as a snake or bug is because drugs, then that tells us nothing about either of them. It’s also at odds with the writing in general, since Rhine was talking the same way about the carnival right from the start, with the whole “bug girls” thing. And possibly as a symptom of the author’s shift and a need to mark Rhine as lucid, the later chapters have been lacking a lot in that sort of imagery, and god knows I’m not reading this book for its tight plotting.

This sort of conversation is a welcome return to the unnatural dreamy haziness that marks Rhine’s world, but it’s now awkwardly fit in – after all the emphasis on lucid vs hallucinating, stuff that straddles the boundary doesn’t work well, and Rhine stating that no he’s fine and this has nothing to do with drugs can’t change that. And it’s not even particularly noteworthy by the standards of last book, where this was how everything was written and then it improved from there.

Maddie, who is not used to being made to sit still, begins crawling under the seats, much like the way she crawled from tent to tent at Madame’s carnival, stealing berries from the garden and biting the ankles of customers. Gabriel and I do nothing to stop her.

Okay, so hanging on an empty seat bothering no one directly is a problem because it might attract attention, but crawling under seats is fine because you remember she likes to bite ankles is okay.

Rhine explains that she figures Maddie will throw a tantrum if they try to stop her, despite not doing so last time, therefore she doesn’t care how annoyed other people might be.

Some of them don’t seem to mind her; they say “Hello, little one” and “What an unusual ribbon,” meaning the length of toilet paper she took from the bathroom and fashioned into a sorry-looking flower for her hair.

That’s actually pretty impressive. Toilet paper is thin and can’t take much abuse. Maddie’s got surprisingly good fine motor skills for someone with mismatched arms.

Then again she was surprisingly good at hanging by her legs for someone crippled, so.

Rhine daydreams about atlas maps and then her mom tucking her into bed and how she had a carved wooden globe necklace that might be a plot point later.

I remember a time when I found my mother sitting on the bottom step, just staring into her open hands like they’d failed her.

This, though, is a good moment. I mean, I’ve been complaining about it making no sense, how much worse would be for people actually trying to find the solution? Science was able to improve human life when they were born, and now it’s somehow failing to find a way to just get back to normal.

And it’s all the worse when these are their only children. She had them late in life, presumably thinking she’d have found the solution before they grew up.

It’s going to take a lot of convincing for my brother to accept Maddie. He’ll want to stick her into an orphanage, which is a death sentence, since she’s malformed. He’ll say she’s not our problem. Then again, maybe he’ll be so happy to see me that he’ll let it slide.

Right, the book does need to mention here how Rhine’s brother is an asshole and Rhine has no power in the relationship. No wonder she adapts so well to Rapist-chan, women having no power but what men give them out of affection is how she grew up.

It’s interesting that she doesn’t consider what her brother’s reaction to Gabriel is. Her lack of outside friends even back in the first book suggested he could be possessive, and he’s sounding much worse this book. Also, if they’re staying together, then three people bringing in income (and a second boy, who Rhine says are able to get better work, as well as doubling the locations she can get a job while still being in the same area since Rowan doesn’t want her working on her own) should make caring for a single child easy. (It’ll also mean three people taking shifts guarding, so they’ll all be better rested.

Or he’ll be infuriated by my absence.

Rhine’s got issues. She deflects this whole subject by telling Maddie they’ll figure something out, which given how smart Maddie’s been, she probably knows is ominous.

Manhattan is in the distance, all gray, like a thought starting to emerge.

Still, decent imagery to close on, at least.