This chapter, they arrive in New York. I’m as shocked as you are.

She says they’re not far from her home and can get there tonight. Assuming the subway is still running – yes, it wouldn’t make sense it wasn’t flooded into uselessness, but neither does it make sense the rest of the buildings are still standing if it’s flooded – it shouldn’t take long to get back home or be particularly dangerous. Failing that, I also don’t think walking would be that dangerous – it’s cold and we’ve seen virtually no sign of non-rape flavored crime. Rhine alone would be in danger from the gatherers, but they never seem to fight with other boys.

But Gabriel is against it.

Guess whose opinion wins!

We have enough money for a night in the motel that faces the bus station, its neon M flickering, its L out entirely. It’s not ideal, he says, but it’s safer than taking our chances at night.

Yes, the kid who knows nothing of the world knows motel prices and exactly how dangerous a city, which he’s never encountered before, is. Also, a motel that’s likely full of new and confused travelers who don’t have anywhere better to go but do have at least a handful of cash on them will absolutely not have anyone preying on them.

He doesn’t need to say anything more than that. I know exactly how dangerous the venture would be.

Well thank god he was here to mansplain how your home works, then.

Rhine also does not point out that they have limited funds and unlike Gabriel’s past experience in the mansion, food and supplies won’t just appear. When they arrive, assuming they don’t find Rowan hanging from the rafters, there’ll be one worker trying to support the four of them. Assuming Rhine can easily find a new job, it’ll pay a pittance anyway, and Gabriel likely will need some time to learn the ropes before he’s particularly employable. There’s also the issue that one of them may not be able to work because they’ll have to stay with Maddie.

If Rowan isn’t there with a steady job, then the money is all they’ll have until one of them can get a job. Gabriel, being her new owner, will probably have the same insistence that Rhine stay near him and get a job paying a pittance while he works, but unlike Rowan likely can’t get a decent job himself or possibly any job at first, and they still have to figure out what they’ll do with Maddie. Plus, Rhine is obviously going to want to head out to look for Rowan, assuming there’s no corpse, which means no job at all and spending more money on travel.

Also, Rhine was warned by the magic tarot cards something is up and has been having nightmares he’s already gone. Even last book she worried he might have eventually left. She should want to get home now.

But no. Gabriel has spoken.

I can tell by Gabriel’s breathing that he isn’t asleep, but he says nothing, lying in the darkness. I know he’s exhausted, that he’s being strong to help me hold it together.

Oh, for a return to “It’s my responsibility to find a way to escape!” I mean, sure, I expected it’d come to naught, but at least she has the right outlook. At least there was lip service given to the idea that maybe she was important for reasons other than physical specialness, that maybe she could actually do something herself.

He tells her she should sleep.

Lots of things are on my mind. My brother. The state he’ll be in. This sick feeling of dread that won’t go away. The world hanging around my mother’s neck, and the feeling that, somehow, her death passed that world on to me.
I don’t know how to explain these things in a way that makes sense. Maybe that’s because they don’t. So, without saying anything, I get into the bed beside Gabriel.

Yes, this sums up my issues nicely.

Gabriel is a thrashy sleeper, but apparently the withdrawal subplot is finally, finally over. God, what was the point of that?

Gabriel lets me take a shower first, and when I turn the knob, the pipes shudder and the water comes out yellow. After nearly a year as Linden Ashby’s bride, the reality beyond the holograms and bright gardens is bleary.

Yellow water just means rust you spoiled baby.

Whether or not it’s safe to drink is a concern. Old pipes use lead soldier to hold them together, and you don’t want that. But a high particulate content can actually be a positive sign in such a case – the harder the water is, the less it has room to leach lead out.

Only my wedding ring seems to shine.

When are you going to take that off?

This is home, though, and as I struggle to wash my hair under the thin trickle of water, I’m smiling.

Here’s the author’s attempt at a balancing act. On the one hand, she obviously thinks the mansion cage was awesome and the outside world sucks. But she realizes Rhine has to have some motivation to want to come back here. So this is how it’s handled – Rhine says nothing positive about it, but does insist it’s great in some nebulous way.

We’re close enough to my neighborhood that we can walk.

But no word on what would happen if they weren’t, so I guess the subways continue to be an uncollapsed waveform.

She tells Gabriel the grey “snow” is actually ash and he gets all freaked out.

“Is it safe to be breathing it in?” he asks.
“You get used to it,” I promise him.

Actually there is no safe level of particulates in the air. As I recall, at the final minimum, going down to zero got another average of five months of life for everyone. And that’s the invisible stuff.

Which is why this wouldn’t be happening. America’s already solved the problem of air pollution – you make the smokestacks extra high so it takes long enough to come back down that it’s someone else’s problem. And if that’s too much trouble to bother with, you stick them in the corner of the city where the wind blows out rather than in. Since it’s right next to the water and apparently they don’t care about the environment, they could also try bubbling it through the water – it’s heat the stuff, but no one can eat the fish so who cares if they’re all dead?

And while I could see general pollution standards being relaxed a bit (what does it matter if it’s cutting ten years off a normal lifespan when they’ll never live near that long?) the point at which you’re blanketed in ash is the point people are dying before twenty. Even assuming they think child mortality is hilarious, this isn’t even an effective way of doing it – you’ll get far more sick kids than you will dead ones. Time after time people have shown that the economic cost of sick workers is enormous, and that’s before getting into of further compromising the immune systems of your city-dwelling population. (This was my one big issue with the Captain America movie – they present it as Steve, the one sickly guy in all of muscular healthy America, not Steve, an example of what city living and the Great Depression had done to a huge chunk of our population.) No, if they want to cull their population, there are so, so many better ways of doing it, and ones they’re obviously fine with given they murder deformed kids.

I’d also like to add that I refuse to believe there’s enough people being burned to blanket the city. Death camps had to have regular shipments of new people to keep the ashes flowing, and also, New York is pretty rainy, which will keep flushing the stuff away.

She then shows him the ocean, which is all sucky and grey. Interestingly, there’s no mention of the smell of the ocean, which she should have been breathing in long before she got there. Also, grey oceans still look pretty awesome. It’s the ocean, after all. Maybe not as perky as inviting blue, but certainly quite impressive.

She goes on to say that a hundred years back this was the East River, but the ocean’s expanded so that’s gone. And so the book accidentally admits that Rhine’s namesake river’s destruction means it’s also gone, not “free” and “everywhere” and other positive words.

A hundred years ago there was nearly twice as much land to our country. Some of it was ruined by warfare, but most of the land loss was natural, the land deteriorating slowly and sinking into the ocean.

And yet Florida’s still there.

Actually, I’ll take this as evidence that “Florida” is actually much, much farther north than actual Florida is, and the rest of the states have been adjusted around as well. Trying to keep the fifty states around in word if not in fact seems like the sort of denial these people would love.

Also, Rhine may be confused about the exact method.

Let’s say that we nuked everything good and then poisoned it with something else for good measure. The land, lacking any plant or fungal life to hold it together, and also with the rocks and stuff all fractured, would erode rapidly. Over the last hundred years, more of it has slipped under the water, causing the ocean to continually rise with it.

(Of course people keep implying that there’s some reveal that fixes the problem that nuking the world down to the last sandbar is not a survivable event, and if the answer is that actually those continents are still there, then now it’s pick your plothole – either we accidentally the entire world or we somehow lost half of America to magic erosion.)

Anyway, she doesn’t tell him all this. Instead, she points to Lady Liberty, who somehow has managed not to be kidnapped herself.

(This also suggests they aren’t resource strapped, since that’s an awful lot of copper sitting there…)

“You could get a better look if you wanted to put five dollars into one of these telescopes.”

I think this may be the first example of actual prices in this book. That seems really high for a collapsed world, but it’s the future, so we have no idea what inflation’s turned five dollars into.

No, wait, there was the dollar-for-a-fortune thing, so yeah, doesn’t make sense.

Gabriel recognizes the statue, so Rhine, who likes muddying things, immediately suggests it was a book he saw it in.

He stares a moment longer, and then he shakes his head, clearing the dazed look from his eyes. “Must be. In my orphanage, I guess. I don’t remember much about my time there.

Obviously he was actually in New York.

I was still young when I went to auction.”
He was nine years old when his orphanage decided to auction him off for profit to the highest bidder so that he could live the rest of his lifetime in servitude.

Considering your “little domestic” was six and some of the others were even younger, no, that’s not young at all. God, you are such self-centered assholes.

Also, does she understand orphanages cost money to run? Where exactly is your sneering about “for profit” coming from? It’s presumably how they pay for the food and housing for the kids. It’s awful that little kids are being raised to be little servants, but there’s no sign the orphanages are being malicious about it. They did pretty well teaching Cecily to read for her age, and it’s not like they had to since she ended up sold as a breeder. And she knew how to play cat’s cradle and the piano, and no one had raped her before this. That’s a lot considering how awful this world is.

As we press on, I tell her about the billowing black clouds that erupt from funnel-shaped factories, how they are producing everything from plastics to smelted iron to food.

Seriously this would be killing their population. No. We figured out this was a problem and we figured out the solution, we’d still know it now.

The trees are small and bare, confined to cedar patches in the sidewalks.

Unlikely.

Small trees are the result of recent planting. In modern cities, a lot of the trees are small because there’s new development going on, so older ones have to be taken down. I don’t think that happens any longer – at the least, Rhine’s never said anything about there being construction jobs. At times, they might need to cut one down, but who’d have the energy to plant a new one? Or even remove the stump? If there’s anything resembling planning left in this city, I’d think these patches would’ve been replaced by bushes or maybe hollowed stumps filled with flowers or something. Otherwise, they should have given way to weeds – and hey, dandelions are plenty cheery.

Pine trees would also be a good idea – they’re fast growing. Trees are important as windbreaks in cities.

They aren’t the brilliant orange blossoms of the mansion, nor are they the blood-red petals of the rose garden, but still I’ve missed them.

Actually, book, people often like smaller trees on their own merits. They’re friendlier.

She’s also missed the “coppery” air – seriously, can no one smell seawater? It’s so distinctive. You can smell it long before you get near to the actual ocean – and the mix of buildings everywhere.

Then she thinks about her father’s postcards of twentieth century Manhattan. The author really doesn’t seem to get that the setting doesn’t make sense as the near future. We’re in the twenty-first right now. Why is there nothing mentioned from then?

We take a turn down a decline, at a brick crater that was a church when my parents were children

No explanation here. Presumably it was bombed for some reason, since there’s not much else that changes building to crater.

She then ends up on her own street, and we hear about her first actual neighbor:

that robin’s-egg blue colonial with the collapsing porch, and the high oak tree where the man in the smallest house ties his barking collie, thinking that tiny creature will keep him safe from thieves.

Why does he tie it up then?

Also, either Rhine has some high standards for dogs or that must be a toy collie. Collies are herding dogs, they have a certain size requirement. (And really, why a collie and not a mutt? Are people still maintaining pedigree at the end of the world?)

And there is the three-level brick house where my little neighbor girl used to live, her window so close to mine that we could reach out our arms and touch.

Still no mention of anyone else, so it sounds like she and her father were the only occupants and that it’s currently empty. That more than anything proves this whole place is collapsing – property no long has owners or value.

And then her own house is burned down, because magic and prophesy are just such great things to throw into your scifi dystopia.

Rhine strong female characters it up and faints.

I blink, and Maddie is sliding a wet leaf along my jaw. She plucked it from one of my mother’s evergreen shrubs that have all managed to stay alive beneath the kitchen window. They don’t die as easily as flowers; you can grow them nearly anywhere. My brother says they’re like weeds that way. But after our parents’ death, even he didn’t have the heart to uproot them.

What?

What the fuck.

“These don’t take effort to grow therefore I will tear them up and leave only bare ground!”

Suddenly I’m starting to understand how half of America could have eroded into the ocean.

What the fuck.

I tread carefully, upsetting the cockroaches that spread out and rustle in the shadows.

As I’ve said about cockroaches, they really need people. In a healthy city there’d probably be enough ambient heat for them to hang out here, but I don’t think that’s the case in this world.

She also finds there’s all these papers in the front that’d been burned. She uncrumples one that was spared:

crossbred flowers
cilium
eggshells and chloroform
my sister’s ideas
greenhouse gases
my
mother’s hands
one hundred days
but still no sign

I wonder if the hundred days is supposed to make it seem like Rhine didn’t completely fuck up by failing to tell Rapist-chan about her brother when she had the chance. I think that might have been more than three months in.

Rhine recalls her mom telling her “Always look after your brother. He isn’t strong like you are.” and explains that she didn’t realize this was true because Rowan was inherently better in every way, then, for the sake of the lucky readers who have somehow managed not to notice that’s been repeated constantly, walks us through how very much better:

Rowan was stronger than me. Of course he was. He was always taller, and he could bend tree branches down so I could pluck their best autumn leaves. He could hold a fishing rod against the resistance of a struggling catch without letting go and losing it to the ocean.

So it seems another thing our magic virus did is make kids finish puberty before they were born, meaning boys are always stronger than their female siblings and those siblings never get their growth spurts first.

my mother told me, “A different kind of strength, love. You have a different kind of strength.”

That’s right, Rhine gets to have the “strength” of making strong people feel better, just like a good female character could. It’s sort of like how she talked about how she and the other wives had the amazing “power” of flirting with their owner so he’d allow them trivial things.

Maddie then goes into the basement.

Rats. Dozens of rats, lying everywhere. On their backs, on their sides. Some in lakes of blood and others decomposed to near nothingness. All of them dead. And scattered among them are rotted stems and wilted flower petals. I’m so horrified that I don’t even hear Gabriel’s reaction.
My brother had concocted his own poison to take care of our rat problem, but I had only ever seen it kill one or two at a time. And then there are the flowers. Lilies, shriveled like earthworms. The ones from my mother’s garden. Every spring I would try again with seeds I bought at various markets in Manhattan, and even from flower shops out of state if my brother’s deliveries took him away.
The only seeds I didn’t dare to try were the ones that my mother had kept in a pouch in her dresser drawer. They belonged to her, and I felt I had no right planting them.

Even for this book, the organization of this is just weird, running from one thought to another. There’s rats! That apparently could not learn from the fact they were surrounded by other dead rats! And blood lakes! And for some reason lilies thrown around! That have something to do with her mom’s seeds maybe!

(Lilies are a bulb. You’re supposed to take them inside in the winter so they don’t freeze, not grow them from seed.)

So Rhine runs out and starts digging up their hidden stash in the yard, seeing as she does so that her brother dug it up already.