Last time, Rhine’s too stupid to try to actually investigate her surroundings, so they decide to mooch off an orphanage.

Maddie clung to the table when Claire offered to lead us on a tour of the house. Maddie was absolutely unwilling to budge, when a moment before that she wouldn’t let go of me. I will never understand that girl. I left her sitting there, gnawing pensively on cookies.

So this whole book so far Maddie’s been magical intuition girl, but this time when she rejects their host and hides under the table it’s because she’s just weird. I guess now that there’s other people around for Rhine to pay attention to, she’s decided she no longer needs to bother with some “special bond” she has with the deformed girl.

They do have room for the two, somehow – they’ll be sleeping on a comforter in Silas’ room, because Claire gets the whole attic to herself, and Maddie can just burrow into one of the piles of kids on the other beds.

She assumes we’re married, glancing at my wedding band

No one thus far has thought anything of only half the couple wearing a ring. I wonder if it’s normally something only women wear. Since there’s no abortion, maybe gatherers are less likely to take you if you’re in a relationship and might be pregnant – but then, that should mean all women wear rings. I’d think it was more likely that rings get associated with the harems and fall out of favor among the ordinary second-gens.

Silas seems less than enthused when he crosses the threshold and sees that Gabriel and I have taken over his space, but all he says is “Dinner is in a few minutes. After that, feel free to wash up.” He wrinkles his nose, like we’re the most offensive creatures on the planet.

Well, you left Grace behind and you’re currently mooching off an orphanage, taking over his already tiny room in the process. So you are pretty awful.

I’m wearing pajamas that are threadbare, but well-fitting and comfortable. I’m trying not to think of the white sweater Deirdre made for me on Madame’s hunched, wrinkled body.

I can’t properly ragequit one of these, so I’m going to just stop and do something else for a while.

Rhine apologizes again to Gabriel.

Gabriel rustles beside me. “Sorry for what?”
For what? I don’t know, exactly. I can’t say that I’m sorry for bringing him out of the mansion with me, because the thought of being alone right now is crushing. And I’d only be worrying for his safety, all alone in Vaughn’s basement of horrors, among the corpses of my dead sister wives.

But Cecily and the other servants, fuck them.

Furthermore, to the best of her knowledge Gabriel was entirely safe. Evil Mad Scientist seemed to only mess with the wives. Gabriel’s beating and later reassignment were just because of her, so with her gone, life would’ve gone back to normal for him.

Rhine finally realizes that she does have ideas about where to investigate – namely, check the factories where he worked to find out if he said anything about leaving. I’d like to hope that she’s also aware of other things, but she then thinks that this is really unlikely because Rowan didn’t talk to anyone but her. Then head back home and at least see if someone can give you the date of the house burning. Knowing how long ago he left might also help you ask around the factories – and, if it turns out he burned the house down but still stuck around the factories a while after, then he might still be in the area. You don’t know if he burned it down because he was planning to leave or because he was just upset.

“Okay,” Gabriel says. “I’ll go with you. But for now try to get some sleep, okay? You’re starting to worry me.”
And because he does me the courtesy of playing along, letting me hope for something that is clearly futile, I pretend to sleep.

So basically this relationship is turning into Katniss and Peeta, only without the social strain because instead of it being fighting it’s the way their relationship should always be, yay.

Then later that night Silas shows up and asks if she lied about Grace. Rhine tells the details and reassures him that she was close to a guard so she’s sure Grace is still safe.

“How was she?”
“Brave,” I say. “Smart.” I decide not to mention the angel’s blood.

Why? Even accepting that addict girls are worthless and disgusting, she’s not a drug user. She just used it on Gabriel, and if they really would have tried to keep him unconscious with blunt trauma, he’d have almost certainly died and at best would have horrible brain damage by now. The fact your boyfriend can apparently get addicted to anything isn’t her fault.

He hesitates. “Did she mention me?”
“She didn’t mention anyone. I didn’t even know her name was Grace.”
I know I should be kinder, but it’s the truth.

Wait, what?

This seems relatively kind. She didn’t mention Silas, but it was because she didn’t talk about herself at all.

Lilac—or, Grace—is not the twelve-year-old girl that was Gathered away seven years ago. Time may have let her retain some of her old traits, and her pretty face, but it has changed her. If only one year away was able to turn my life upside down, seven could obliterate a girl entirely.

Oh, that’s what you mean. Her failure to tell people she barely knew about her past was because like all sluts, she’s used goods and no one should care about her.

I wonder if we’ll ever get an explanation of how much rape is acceptable before you turn into an empty shell. If she’d only been raped a couple times, maybe it’d be acceptable to still treat her like she was a person. But, like the author has made sure there’s no icky thirty year olds running around, I suspect we’ll never actually see such an edge case, because rape does ruin you so it’s easier to have you completely ruined and forgotten about.

I’ll dream of catching rainbow trout while coasting on a ferry that takes me toward Liberty Island at high noon

I guess rainbow trout is popular because it sounds evocative. It shows up in Crossed as the symbol of surviving nature too. Note that the ocean-dwelling one isn’t actually rainbow, only the stream one, so her description of rainbow scales is completely off. (And that’s a camouflage thing, so even assuming a lot of weirdness resulted in stream colors in the ocean population, it’d have been selected out again.)

Rainbow trout are actually native to the other ocean, but idiots have introduced them lots of places they shouldn’t be, so I suppose it comes down to if you think they’d weather a series of implausible disasters better or worse than the natives.

The salmon types might actually have generally done much better, come to think of it – maybe the ocean fish generally died but the hatchlings in streams were protected. On the other hand, somehow the area near the coast is toxic and fishing boats have to go out pretty far to get less toxic fish, which makes it sound like the interiors are the problem.

But she doesn’t dream about this and instead it’s darkness and burnt smells.

In the morning, she can hear Claire already up.

What must be going through her mind, to know the fate of her missing daughter? Seven years is a long time. Long enough to presume a person dead. Long enough for the shock and the hurt to scab over. I still miss my parents, every day, but I’ve stopped seeing their faces in crowds. I’ve stopped expecting them to come back to me somehow. How must it feel to discover a loved one presumed dead has been alive the whole time?

…happy?

I mean, in Grace’s case she’s in a bad situation, so I guess that’d make you a bit conflicted, but she seemed okay enough with things. And given she was friends with the head guard who also controlled the fence, I really think she could’ve escaped before now if she’d wanted to – especially since they had a lot more motivation to try to recapture Rhine and knew the exact direction they were running, yet totally failed at it. I’d guess she was staying because she was afraid of getting recaptured by gatherers more than anything. Which is a bit confusing too given how easily Rhine got back home – all she’d need to do is also bring some money and she could’ve hopped right onto a bus.

Besides, surely the bigger issue here is Grace not knowing what happened to Maddie, who was really sick and in the hands of people she knows nothing about. She doesn’t even know where they’d go – she didn’t give them any clue that they should go to the address in the book, and Rhine could easily have handed it over to fortune-telling lady like she did their other valuables without even seeing that.

She goes down to breakfast which is apparently delicious and where on earth are they getting the money for all this?

This orphanage, apparently unlike Gabriel’s, does have a TV that shows news and stuff, and it’s about the labs.

There are some supporters, of course, but the news favors the angry opposition. For instance, the first generation woman who has buried all six of her children, having conceived them with the hope that there would be a cure in time.

Man, the first gens are assholes. No one made her have kids before there was a cure and the fact she personally doesn’t have kids right now who’d benefit doesn’t mean she should oppose it for everyone else.

Of course, such dickishness is not restricted to the older gen, since Silas also thinks it’s dumb to try.

The news story changes to a segment about President Guiltree’s lineage, how more than a century ago, citizens could vote for their president. It worked for a while, so the story goes, until opposing sides began battling among each other. Now the presidency is inherited.

Okay, so a lot of insanity happened even before the first gens, let alone the collapse.

You know what might explain everything? Oxytocin.

I joked earlier about the superbabies being designed to be supercapitalistic and someone suggested maybe they actually were set to have more sociopathic tendencies to be more successful.

But there’s another thing that seems like an even better idea in theory, and it’s oxytocin. Oxytocin is that happy love chemical! That happens to make you violently hate everyone you aren’t bonded to. It’s the chemical that makes you turn away the stranger at your door to starve. It also appears to be primarily involved in sexual relationships with a side of general group bonding, which would explain why Rhine attaches immediately to Gabriel and Linden while the people she’s around most of the time who seem far more interested in her wellbeing, the other wives, get a far more muted response, and may also explain why she seems to have mostly viewed Cecily as competition.

Anyway maybe that’s what made the Dem/Repub fights go insane and why whoever managed to claw victory out of that figured the solution was to double down and be even more tribal and insular with a monarchy. Oxytocin makes you want to lynch the other guys.

And given how utterly fucked up their society is, it makes sense they must have been fucking with people’s heads well before the superbabies. Maybe women being chattel actually well predates the collapse, possibly as some other stupid thing they did, and the oxytocin was in part an attempt to improve that.

The shortened life spans of the new generations threaten this tradition, but Guiltree seems to think he can solve this by having as many children as possible. The fact that all of his children are sons is also suspect. Many have speculated that he is running his own private genetic lab to manipulate the gender of his children.

Well, I did explain why all boys makes no sense if you’re trying to preserve the human race, but it’s hard to say here.

Rhine seems to believe the only way you can choose gender is a “genetic lab” that “manipulates” the DNA and not screening sperm or selective abortions or having girl babies and trading them for boy ones, and apparently this is common speculation, indicating no one else around knows any better either. So this suggests I might be right that their sex cells are just producing a single clone cell and it’s just no one’s noticed because they’re all really fucking stupid. The president just happens to have such a large family and also be getting so much attention people think about it and also is rabidly hated (Some speculate that he already has the cure, though I don’t see why he’d keep that a secret.) so people will look for anything they can find to use against him, while, say, that other women with the six kids may well have had all girls, but no one thinks anything of it.

On the other hand, if the general population are this stupid, who’s to say the president isn’t? So while it’s blindingly obvious more boys are not the solution to the extinction of the human race, people in this book are certainly capable of missing even that.

Silas says, “They should leave well enough alone,” to no one in particular.
I spin around to face him. “You call a death sentence ‘well enough’? There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a cure.”

Huh. Rhine seems to be finally moving away from the suicide cult.

Silas snorts, turning up his nose at me as he crosses to the fridge, takes out a carton of milk, and drinks straight from it.

It’s really weird. There’s waffles and maple syrup and toast and jam and milk, like there’s no longer any problems with food. It’s almost like she’s back at the mansion in resource terms. I guess we could just assume that Claire is somehow independently wealthy, but even Evil Mad Scientist had an actual job he went to.

“Rebuilding that lab will create jobs, and that’s all the good it’ll do. After that it’ll do nothing but give people hope.”

So apparently he means literally the building of it involves jobs but apparently there’s no jobs to be had in the running of it.

Rhine just argues that hope is great so fuck you.

There are talented scientists, talented doctors, and maybe hope isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s what keeps us together.”

“Unless it involves dissection, of course. Then it’s evil and must be opposed at all costs.”

Rhine flashes back to her bullying Cecily by telling her there’d never be a cure and they’d all die especially Cecily and her baby.

I wish I could undo that; I’d been so stricken by grief that for a while I’d forgotten myself. It goes against everything my parents fought for.

Yes that’s what was wrong with bullying a fourteen year old. Good job, Rhine, you are truly a moral paragon.

His eyes are languid like the eyes of Madame’s girls. There’s a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire. And I can see that he’s given up.

So like lighthouses, the author doesn’t really get what wildfires are and apparently thinks they’re extremely long-lasting things that take a while just to get going.

He just calls her princess again, because this book is about people calling Rhine royalty. Eh, it’s more fitting than empress.

He then says it’s good the lab blew up and Gabriel, seeing her eyes go red, drags her off before she remembers how to make sounds. She paces and moves her mouth for a bit before managing to snarl out that it killed her mom and dad.

And they were doing such good things in the meantime! They were caring for newborns, and taking in pregnant girls who had nowhere to go, and—” My voice cracks.

Well, they appear to have been drugging those girls unconscious to stop them from fighting, and we don’t know what they were doing to those babies. But if we assume that was just nonsense and maybe all they did to the babies was sequence DNA then yes, generally positive.

“They didn’t want this for Rowan and me. My brother—he’s smart. They were teaching him to become a scientist, but after they died, he gave up.

“My job was just to look cute and remind him I’d die if he didn’t figure it out in time!”

When Gabriel and I announce our plans to head into the shipping district, Claire doesn’t question it. Silas mumbles something into his tea about how he’ll never see us again. He thinks we’re abandoning Maddie.

How is that worse than their current plan of ignoring Maddie while mooching off the orphanage themselves? You’d think Silas would be muttering about how he hopes he never sees them again.

She makes her way through every building and finally find someone who remembers:

a first generation man with freckled skin, a hairnet, and a stained shirt with the word “supervisor” on the chest

Hm. No way of telling how far up he is particularly, but he seems like he’s not particularly high on the management ladder, so once again, a first gen doing a job you could easily train one of the second gens to do.

He goes on an angry tirade about how Rowan—he’s made up a less-than-charming nickname for him—worked for him right up until he stole one of the delivery trucks with a rather expensive supply of canned soups inside it.

Hey, someone did it! And…there appears to be no way of preventing this at all, so I’m not sure why it isn’t commonplace. Maybe it’s a cultural thing where they raise the kids to assume the adults will always catch them and don’t publicize crimes much, leaving people with the impression they don’t have other options.

I wonder if he sold the food for something or if he’s just going to live off it for a while.

This was months ago, of course, and apparently Rowan was acting really weird and muttering all the time.

I try to reconcile my brother with the person this man is describing. Rowan always had a quick temper, and if he was particularly upset, he would mutter under his breath the things he wished he could have said to fix the problem. Mostly unkind things, but lucid at least. He would only stop when I put my hand on his arm, talked softly to him. After the Gatherer broke into our home, my brother was furious for days. Pacing. Worrying. And just when I thought he was calming down, he shattered a window with his fist. But I never considered how deep his anger could go, or if his tirades could stop making sense if he went about it long enough.

See, a more reasonable person might think that the issue is that something worse happened so his reaction is worse. Also, if punching out a window is normal behavior for him then I don’t see why you’re having any difficulty reconciling things, and also it makes a lot more sense now for you to worry he’d react with anger to anything.

(Also there’s no sign he’s not lucid in his mutterings, the guy didn’t say anything about what the content actually was.)

Just as he had always been there to protect me, like that night the Gatherer held a knife to my throat, I had always been there to calm him back down. I was the only one who could do it.

Because that’s what women do, they sooth the violent men and it’s their fault if anything bad happens.

A lead anchor of guilt sinks in my stomach. He’s out there somewhere because I couldn’t reassure him. I couldn’t bring him back from the darkness beyond the edges of his own mind.

I’m torn, though – on the one hand this is bullshit, but on the other, in an unusual twist, Rhine actually did have multiple chances to send him a message that she didn’t take for no reason.

At least she’s currently semi-competent, so she asks about what the truck looked like.

The man is all too happy to show us his delivery trucks, and to end the tour of the parking lot with “If you ever see that kid again, tell him he’d be an idiot to show his face around here.”

Wait, what? If they find the criminal that robbed him, they should warn him he could get in trouble? Why not offer a reward if they catch him? Getting him should be particularly important because the last thing this guy wants is for anyone else to think stealing a truck is a good idea.

Anyway, she sleepwalks through the next few days cooking supper and washing dishes and dusting trinkets that are all over the place and have somehow survived swarms of children and lack of space. Oh, also Silas likes to make out with girls in the shed.

Then latter she stumbles and Silas catches her – new love interest? probably just a bit, with his endgame OTP being Grace – noting she’s dizzy and has been all day. She tries to put him off because, she thinks to herself, it’s not an illness but insanity.

a creeping form of madness? Like how the tendrils of ivy probed their way up the exterior of my brick house (the one that is now uninhabitable), I am being overtaken.
How can I explain that the reason I fell was because of the aftershock of a laboratory explosion that killed my parents years ago?

Well, that’s pretty. Melodramatic and ridiculous, but pretty.

A little later, though…

I touch the skin under my nose, trying to find meaning in the gesture. When I move my hand away, it’s smeared with blood.

Oh no, it’s the nosebleed of doom! She’s gonna die.