Last time on Fever, Rhine still has one, still pretending she’s okay by the magic of willpower. Enthralling!

Rhine is willpowering through her fever more. She’s talking to Silas while doing chores and notes that she’s decided to be okay about all the girls he’s fucking.

The girls come willingly, even eagerly, and I’ve decided that they’re nothing like those in the scarlet district, enduring men for profit. Rather, Silas and his adoring female cavalcade have decided that they will seize whatever thrills they can find in their short lives. And how can I fault them for that?

While I think this is a wasted opportunity to showcase how Rhine’s perspective on sex and enjoyment should be far more messed up from living on Rapeworld, hey look, they’re not slutshaming today! Have a cookie, book.

Rhine also again thinks of Maddie and her special perspective on everything and how oh wouldn’t it be great to see the world through her eyes. No. No it wouldn’t. Autistic kids are not too far up their own asses to pay attention to you, they’re too busy seeing everything to respond to it. Looking away from things is something you only do when you’re extremely aware of things in the first place.

Here’s a really simple rule of thumb: ignoring stimuli generally means a lack of attention. Trying to escape it means you’re paying a lot of attention. A blind kid doesn’t look away from anything. A deaf kid doesn’t cover their ears. And a kid who’s completely lost in her own head doesn’t scream bloody murder when you take her from her mom.

We’re not done fetishizing the tiny tims.

Nina plays like an angel. Her left arm, bearing only the shriveled idea of a hand, rests at her side, while her right flies over the keys, evoking a fluttery sound like gasps or bullets. Maddie is under the piano on all fours, her hair in her face, her shoulders hunched, eyes wild. She’s a beast without its herd, as brave as she is small.

Where would we be without crippled little angels teaching us important lessons about life and acceptance? Curing the diseases, probably.

Then Rhine passes out from being sick.

Small, cold fingers trace my forehead. Maddie. How could Madame show violence to this harmless little creature?

Because she kept biting people. Mental illness isn’t all cute quiet babies that sit around so you can demonstrate how magnanimous you are when you feel like it. And when you make a point about how it’s wrong because they’re so cute and sweet, you’re saying it’d be okay if they weren’t – like if you remembered that Maddie wasn’t so harmless, it’d have been okay to snap her arm.

Anyway, Rhine gets dumped back in bed with an ice pack and when she wakes up she’s told that was a seizure, maybe.

“I guess it would interest you to know that it not only doesn’t sound like a seizure, but it doesn’t compare to anything I can find.”

Lying on the floor is called fainting. It’s pretty well known.

Think, I tell myself. Surely the daughter of two scientists cannot be bested by this.

Oh, wouldn’t that have been nice.

But I was never as brilliant as my mother and father.

But really, it’d be totally OOC to have it any other way at this point.

Rhine says they have to go find her brother, which Gabriel points out is insane. Of course, his idea of not insane is heading back to Evil Science Mansion. Rhine says that no, she means her brother might be able to solve this, because she says so, and Gabriel points out that even if this was true they don’t know where her brother is, but they do know where one mad scientist is.

I know that my madman father-in-law can work miracles just like he can murder an infant—or his son’s defiant bride. How did I come to be at the mercy of such a man? What horror did I commit in a past life to warrant his interest?

I think this is the first reference we have to any religious beliefs at all. I don’t think it means anything, I think the author just dropped it in because it’s a common thing people say. Still, it’s interesting to think of what it might mean. How might the idea of reincarnation interact with the creation of a new, better lifeform? They would have been the first souls able to incarnate in superbaby bodies. What does that mean?

I pretend that I’m back in the mansion. Not as Vaughn’s prisoner but as Linden’s wife.

STOP DOING THIS

I am sandwiched between silk sheets, amid down pillows. My sister wives are sleeping across the hall. Be still. Listen. I can hear them breathe. And Gabriel has just brought breakfast for me, before the sun is up, while the empty hallways are filled with ticking clocks and plumes of smoke from incense sticks that have just extinguished themselves after burning through the night. Later there will be trampolines and orange blossoms and bright orange koi flicking their tails to delight me.

Fuck you.

in my mouth there’s the coppery, bitter taste that tells me I am going to be sick.

This doesn’t seem like a very accurate description. Coppery is more of a blood taste. And it’s really more of a sickly-sweet, slick taste that’s before throwing up. You can wash it out with bitter tea.

She goes to take aspirin, because yeah pills on an empty stomach will work wonders for your nausea.

Then I close the cabinet door, and a blond corpse meets me in the mirror. She is a zombie from the film at the Florida cinema, a sickly shade of gray, with hollow eyes, pale lips, and thinning hair.

Well, that’s worrying, but may I also note that this does not sound like the description of Jenna’s death in the least? She was more of a bruised fruit sort of death. Rhine’s got no bruises even when she’s falling over, there’s none of the blood on her lips, no cough… Whatever she has doesn’t seem to resemble the “virus” in the least. It does resemble someone sick with the flu who isn’t eating, though.

I look out at the bleary sepia-toned houses on this street. The malnourished, skeletal trees. The wilting brown grass. And I know I’m where I was meant to be. I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.

You know what was an interesting game? The Last of Us. The behavior of the people in it had all sorts of issues, but I really loved the visual design. When you leave the populated cities the area beyond is flush with growth and beautiful, even though there’s horrible monsters to contend with. The human race is dying but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world is gone, and why should it?

And really…they’re next to the ocean with a steady fertilizing rain of ashes, with the ambient warmth of a city and the leakages from all those cracked sewage pipes. Plants should be growing fine. If there’s way too much ash and pollution, then plants would start to starve from lack of light, but that aspect never seems to feature. From Rhine’s talk of her mother’s garden, plants grow fine if you take care of the soil end of it properly.

Then a black limousine pulls up!

I suppose a child has been purchased; I think there are other orphanages on this block.

Wait, what?

Okay, first off, if there’s other orphanages right around here, shouldn’t you have mentioned it? Do the kids play together or are they evil orphanages who would steal the kids and you’re supposed to keep an eye out? Why does it matter if there’s others if the limo is pulling up in front of your orphanage in particular?

But anyway, it’s Evil Mad Scientist. Rhine asks how he found her. Probably reports of some two-colored eye girl wandering around with a wedding band, Rhine, you’re kind of an idiot like that. He doesn’t answer, probably because he agrees with me.

There’s a clicking noise, and then a flame appears in Vaughn’s cupped hand. It takes a moment for me to realize that he is not holding fire itself, but rather a small candle. He moves toward me, and I inch for the door, but he stops a couple of yards away.
“Fire is such a clever little thing,” he says. “Especially for clever girls who can think of a good use for it. Setting fire to some curtains to create a diversion, perhaps?”

So, she realizes he’s threatening arson, and for some reason she can’t just start screaming bloody murder given it’s not like you can do much fast with a candle. Remember there is no police force, if they want they can beat him to death in the street and leave the body for the corpse collectors. He’s probably got bodyguards, but he’s an old guy, one good bat to the head or knife to the throat and he’s down, at which point there’s no one paying those guys to keep fighting.

He tucks a wisp of hair over my shoulder. His eyes hold that kindness again; I first saw it one afternoon when he walked me through the golf course. It startled me then like it startles me now, the way my sole enemy can at once transform into a version of his mild-mannered son.

See, a person who wasn’t an idiot would take this as a clue Rapist-chan isn’t actually showing kindness. Instead, it just reminds her of how much she misses Rapist-chan and she wishes he was the one to come to drag me back to that prison because Rhine just takes it as given that her precious Rapist-chan would be similarly unmoved by the fact she doesn’t want to be there or the fact burning down orphanages to get his way has some moral issues. It’s always interesting the things this book admits by accident.

So she decides not to scream because then people might come and help and then the candle of power would burn the place down. And she decides not to ask to leave a note because she likes fucking with people I guess.

I don’t move, and Vaughn doesn’t try to pull me. I know he won’t shove me kicking and screaming into the back of that limo. It’s not his way. But I also know he is confident that, one way or another, I will wind up there.

See, you should be able to use that. Now, I know you’re sick, so punching him wouldn’t work so great, but this is an old guy. Just tackle him. You’ve demonstrated you’re still capable of toppling, and old people don’t really have the best balance. And I know you’re impossibly tiny and thin to fit American beauty standards and haven’t been eating recently, but you probably still weigh like what, at least sixty, seventy pounds? His hip will snap like a stale pretzel against the uncaring concrete from your combined weight. Now, he’ll be howling on the ground, so his driver will come out to pull you off before you can finish the job, at which point Gabriel and Silas have poked their heads out to see what’s happening, and the guy can’t stop all three of you from getting to Evil Mad Scientist in time to stomp his windpipe in or whatever.

Now, if he had a posse of bodyguards behind him? Yeah, you’d be totally fucked. But he doesn’t. This should be a show of gross overconfidence on his part, but it’s not because you’re accepting he’s totally right you can’t do anything.

“Any unexplained symptoms? Fevers?” He strokes my hair away again, holding up the thin blond pieces that have fallen out between his fingers. My breath catches. That lone pang of longing for Linden to be here instead of his father has doubled, tripled, transformed into something ugly.

God, Rhine, I could forgive you your useless fatalism if only you would just shut the fuck up about Rapist-chan.

Anyway, time to finally hear what’s going on

“Your immune system is shutting down,” he says. “Right now your antibodies are moving through your bloodstream, trying to combat a foreign bacteria that isn’t there. Perhaps you’ve tried medication. That will have the same effect, which is to say none at all. Your nerves are losing sensation. Extremities inexplicably numb, especially upon waking.”

Um…okay. So her immune system is shutting down, as illustrated by it going into overdrive after a nonexistent bacteria.

I mean, you can do some good stuff by fucking with the immune system. We all know AIDS, which turns the immune system off so you die of some other disease. On the other side of the coin is the 1918 flu, best known for its connection to the whole bird flu scare. It sent the immune system into overdrive, which was why, paradoxically, the people who died of the disease were the youngest and healthiest. Point is, though, you don’t do both at once. Also, an immune response to a nonexistent threat is more like lupus, which looks less like a skinny sexy corpse and more swollen joints.

“Darling.” He chuckles. “You did this to yourself. You’re in withdrawal.”

And that makes even less sense. Dammit, Evil Mad Scientist. I look to you for sanity.

Rhine gives him a vacant stare that’d make a goldfish wonder what was wrong with her.

“Really?” he says. “A girl as smart as you?”

So I guess the narration is set on her somehow being intelligent even as it refuses to let her show any sign of it. That or he’s being a million times more sarcastic than she thinks and she’s too dumb to get it.

Anyway, remember the candy she liked? The blue ones, which kept showing up with her meals even when Gabriel was reassigned, were some weird thing

An experiment to test chemical dependency and bacteria resistance.

Oh, it’s technobabble time.

“It’s revolutionary,” Vaughn raves. “The only way to break your dependency would be to gradually reduce the doses. But to cut it off all at once? A fascinating thing happens. The body begins to shut down much the way it would in the latest stages of the virus. It’s uncomfortable at first—nausea, headache—but then the body begins to lose sensation, the pain receptors in the brain are deadened. It’s a bit like dying of hypothermia.”
Jenna. The word creeps up my throat, but I don’t say it aloud. He’s telling me that this is how he killed Jenna.

That isn’t like hypothermia and neither does it make any sense he killed Jenna like this, because Jenna’s symptoms were the virus and yours are the flu.

“I’m proud of it,” Vaughn says. “The concept is quite primitive. To prevent contraction of the flu, one would receive a flu shot, which is, in fact, a small dose of the flu itself. And so my thinking was simple: Replicate the symptoms of the virus and administer them slowly, over several years, until the body works up an immunity.”

Oh dear lord he’s inventing homeopathy.

Anyway Rhine collapses because he’s confirmed what she was already 1000% certain of so it’s a huge shock.

“You were the perfect candidate,” Vaughn says. “I’d thought Cecily at first, being young as she is, but her body chemistry would already be changing with the pregnancy. I thought it best to leave her alone. You, however—” He laughs. “Linden told me you were uncooperative about consummating your marriage.

There’s this moment of hope where you think maybe he means his son just mentioned that he hasn’t slept with Rhine and he’s the one who thinks of it this way.

I’ll give you a moment to cherish this hope before we continue.

He asked for my advice on the matter, and I told him he should let you be.

So there we have it. Why didn’t he rape Rhine? His dad suggested he should wait it out. No morality involved.

Just knowing that this conversation took place makes me feel sure I’ll vomit.

And doesn’t this sound hopeful?

To think that all those nights with Linden, when we held fast to each other to quell our separate pains of loneliness, were shared with my scheming father-in-law. To think our kisses were analyzed, our touches and glances just notes for Vaughn’s mad experiments. I feel invaded.

Yeah, the fact he was considering raping you is clearly not what you should be focused on. No, what’s horrible is his dad advised him otherwise because his understanding of people was canny enough to know that Rhine wouldn’t have sex with him anytime soon in that case. Because you know what’s like rape? Analyzing people. What’s not like rape is someone being bothered you’re “uncooperative about consummating your marriage” and considering forcing you. Nothing violating there.

Would it even have been rape? Maybe that’s Rhine’s objection. She sure seems pretty wishy-washy and keeps talking about how great the guy was, so maybe if he’d made any move she’d have been fine going along with it, she just couldn’t take any initiative because then she’d be a fallen woman like Cecily.

Anyway, Rhine being stunned by the fact that OMG he’s so so evil and she super extra hates him means she’s even easier to walk into the car because fighting back is for boys.

I stare into the car, at the wraparound leather seat that held my sister wives and me before we knew one another’s names, when we were three frightened girls spared a gruesome death but sentenced to lifelong imprisonment. And there, beneath the sunroof, is where Linden and I sipped champagne and sagged against each other, warm and drunk and hiccupping with laughter after his first expo.

Linden was actually in the car both times, Rhine. It’s kind of a crucial bit of information, so I’d like it if, for fucking once, you could remember that he’s the one who was there getting those other girls murdered and you three imprisoned.

knowing all the while that it will be the last ride I ever take. That something much worse than marriage awaits me this time.
“You’re still wearing your ring,” Vaughn remarks as he settles in beside me. I barely feel the pressure from the syringe he jabs into my forearm.

But don’t worry, she accidentally throws up on him before losing consciousness! That’s sort of like having agency.

So, was Rhine raped in Fever? It’s looking like nope. She’s now in Evil Mad Scientist’s evil clutches, and he just explained he doesn’t want her pregnant. Because he’s evil.