Last time, Rhine is still at the orphanage. And she still hasn’t been raped! This book continues to scrape gloriously by.
BY MID-FEBRUARY the air starts feeling warmer. The fine layer of frost melts, giving the grass a freshly watered look, and softening the earth.
So we’ve got another bunch of time passing while Rhine accomplishes nothing. She’s sitting now thinking about the beautiful orange blossoms at Rapist-chan’s house.
I can no longer discern which thoughts are useful and which are dangerous; all I know is that I’m sick of being stagnant. So, not knowing what else to do, I start walking.
Well, that’s…good? I don’t see why you couldn’t do this days and days ago, though.
I’m wearing a brown-and-pink-striped sweater that itches everywhere. It was not made especially for me. It is not inlaid with pearls and diamonds.
I quote because you wouldn’t believe me if I just said she wouldn’t shut up about the fucking sweater. You’d think I was exaggerating. It’s too stupid to be true. But I’m not. It never, ever stops.
Then Silas shows up with his white-blond curls and general good looks and she talks about how he’s sleeping with so very many girls. Where is this going.
He once again suggests she’s planning to run off, because that is absolutely something it makes sense to be concerned about. She talks about how if he expresses concern for her health she’s going to run down an alley because that also makes sense. Also, she’s been seeing weird lights at the edge of her vision for a while.
He asks if Gabriel’s her husband. The whole thing plays out bizarrely, because the author seems to have forgotten that husband means nothing in this setting but the man who paid for other men to kidnap you.
“It’s like there’s an invisible cord on that wedding band, and it doesn’t lead to him. It’s like you’re tethered.”
This is totally unnecessary, because we already know all this. If Rhine had been suppressing it better, this might be an interesting moment, but just paragraphs ago she was whining about her fucking sweater for the thousandth time.
But then – suddenly, Rhine seems to realize what the book is actually about, not what everyone pretends it is.
“I ran away,” I say. “I was Gathered, and I escaped, and I came home, and my family was gone.”
And then she keeps going in her head.
I don’t realize how badly I’ve needed to say those words until they’ve left my mouth. They hang in the air. And all I want now is to be away from them. To leave the truth behind. Because if I can’t do anything about it, I certainly don’t want to face it.
It’s Rhine actually being a person. And she’s torn between impulses, that she’s finally managed to say it out loud and yet she wants to go back to denying it all.
SO she walks away toward the river.
it’s too late. I’ve already seen the dead girl lying faceup in the shallow water, her eyes full of clouds.
And then there’s a return to the hallucinogenic description we haven’t seem for some time.
There are so many bright pieces of light that it hurts my eyes. I just stand there, mouth shut, staring through them. I do not see this girl’s features, the color of her hair. A bizarre thing happens. I see her bones instead. I see right through her skin, to the blood and tissue that’s blackened and still. I see the torn muscle that used to be her heart. That’s where the Gatherer’s bullet hit.
Silas gets her away and sits her down on the curb and listens as she starts to talk. She tells him about how she was one of the three chosen and the rest were shot. He says she should avoid ditches.
“Maybe it should have been me,” I say.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I never wanted to be married,” I tell him. “One of my sister wives did. The other—she could at least acknowledge that it was better than death, and she accepted it. But I. . . threw it back. I could have been murdered right there in the lineup, but for some ridiculous reason I was chosen, and I threw it back.
And this. This is so horrible but for once it’s meant to be. Someone else died because she was picked instead. How do you live with things like that?
“Maybe that girl chose death over imprisonment,” he says. “Maybe she looked right down the barrel of the gun and said ‘Screw you.’”
“Doubtful,” I say.
“Stop it. So you ran away. You don’t deserve to die for that.”
Which is perhaps the best thing that’s been said in this series.
Rhine thinks about her memories of being a wife and how this girl didn’t get that because she died and now she’s going to rot away to a skeleton and then her skeleton will crumble away.
she’ll be nothing but pieces, in a heap of other pieces, on their way to becoming ash.
And for once this disjointed ending really works – ash is burned and she’s picturing decomposition, but ash is what she’s been concerned about this book and ash is what the man earlier said she’d become, so when she’s trying to picture the end of something, it makes sense that’s what she’d end up with.
Rhine starts apologizing to the dead girl and Silas realizes trying to reason with her will do no good, so he drags her up and says they need to go do stuff, and it sort of works, but she still imagines the corpse saying she should’ve been the one who died and when supper comes she finds she can’t eat because everything looks like the body. She says she’ll take a quick shower but the heat makes her so dizzy she has to sit, and then she starts shivering and she stays like that until long after the water’s run cold. And when she comes out at last, Claire finds she has a fever.
Gabriel takes her to lie down and she tells him about how the dead girl was looking at her. She spends the night sleeping fitfully and having nightmares of darkness.
They feed her applesauce but she’s even worse and throws it up immediately.
she gives me a look so worried that all the light drains from the room. I stare at her as the shadows engulf her dark face, leaving nothing but the whites of her eyes.
I’m aware of Maddie and Nina frequenting my doorway, holding hands, thinking themselves unseen while I’m in this hazy state. Nina whispers something, and they skitter away like cockroaches.
This book is really best when it’s not entirely lucid.
She manages to get a bit better later and her fever breaks. She asks Silas if he blames himself for Grace.
“We were fighting. We fought all the time. But that morning was different. Ominous. I still remember how blue the sky was. Is that strange? We were walking to school, and I looked up into all that sky and I felt like something had changed.”
“I don’t think that sounds strange,” I tell him.
“She tripped on a tree root that had grown over the sidewalk. She dropped her books, and she was swearing as she picked them up. I laughed at her. She shoved me. The truth of it is, I wanted to kiss her, but I knew she wouldn’t let me. So I said something stupid instead, but I don’t even remember what it was. She ran ahead of me. ‘You’re an idiot, Silas!’ she said. That was it. She turned a corner, and I never saw her again.”
“She might have let you kiss her,” I offer.
Silas laughs. “That’s your response?”
I take a moment to think about it. “Yes.”
“Kiss or no kiss,” Silas goes on, “I never even saw the van. I never heard a scream.”
But we’ve had a pretty good run of this, so it has to end. Silas says he doesn’t know her now, she’s really a different person, then that he shouldn’t go to find her, because she’s already nineteen and it’d just be worse to bring her back only for Claire to lose her again.
Rhine thinks that’s wrong, but then her thoughts double back and she thinks that well, her brother burned their house down, so maybe it’s better to let go, and then that she just doesn’t know. Her ears are ringing and she’s confused, but then she does come down and say she knows he’s wrong, but she doesn’t have the energy to argue. So it’s terrible but less than it could be.
Then Gabriel comes back for the night.
I say, “When I’m feeling better, maybe in a day or two, I’m going to start looking for my brother. I don’t think I’m going to find him. There are a hundred trucks like the one he stole. But I’ll hate myself if I don’t try.” Because what Silas said is true: the not knowing is what stings. I can’t live with that. It might be too late for Grace, but there is still time to find my brother.
…and well, so much for that. At least Rhine’s planning to do something. But things are done with Grace, because she’s used goods and the narration can only care about people like that for just so long.
Gabriel finally says that he didn’t come with her because Jenna said so or because he felt he had to follow his girlfriend, but because the way she talked about the world made him want to see it himself.
So overall, this chapter was actually surprisingly good despite a terrible start.