Last time on agency is for boys, Rhine failed to fight back in any way whatsoever.

I am a corpse on a rolling cart.

Well, at least we know that no matter how weak she gets, Rhine’s still got energy for melodrama.

Apparently she was in much worse condition than it seemed, because there’s people swarming around with IVs and breathing masks for her. And she gets a glimpse of Cecily and baby, because apparently helping Rhine escape means she gets even freer run of the house. But hey, when has this book made sense?

“I warned you not to run,” Vaughn says. He is a black bird in my dream. His talons break skin. Blood rolls out of my arm. I lie very still so he will think that I am dead. There’s no sport in carrion, and I will not let him enjoy my defeat any more than he already is.

Rhine’s only concept of fighting back is to become even more passive. Also, she’s an idiot.

Anyway, Evil Mad Scientist is not a bear and so isn’t fooled by her brilliant play dead strategy. He explains that she’s really fucked up because actually he let her escape so that Rapist-chan wouldn’t care about what happened to her, so now she’s his personal property.

Well, I guess that does answer the question of why a servant would help a wife escape on the orders of another wife. Did Cecily even give the order, or did Evil Mad Scientist just tell the guy to say it was Cecily? It also answers the question of how the author steeled herself to allow Rhine even the pitiful amount of control she had in her escape attempt – it was actually a guy all along!

You belong to me.
No matter how deep the dreams bury me, there are those words. On street signs. Sung from the lips of Madame’s weary girls. Murmured in the rustle of October leaves. They bloom from lilies that shoot open their starfish petals.

This is some nice writing, though.

Anyway, so she’s in bed and random people she doesn’t recognize are all over but she’s barely conscious. Bedpans are involved, which I think is our first reference to non-vomit body fluids.

It’s impossible to measure time; there is a fake window on the wall, the only thing in the room besides the machines, and it is always glowing with a fake sun, illuminating a field of fake lilies.

That’s kind of weird but certainly fits the whole theme of fake/real Rhine’s got going.

This is worse than death, the rest of my days ticking away in a malaise of needles and loneliness.

Or maybe you’re just really sick at the moment, Rhine. Evil Mad Scientist’s outline of what was going on suggested you’d need intervention to not die, and also he has a clearly defined goal he’s aiming toward. If he just liked to do experiments on people in general, then I could believe this was the rest of your life, but he’s going to have to make you get better at some point if his theory is this is somehow an inoculation.

I begin to envy the dead girls the Gatherers couldn’t sell. It would be easier for my brother to find my body, to mourn but carry on knowing what happened.

This book has repeatedly defined what happens to the girls around what it means for those around them, and it’s creepy. I’d like to think this is just Rhine being out of her head and screwed up, but this came up earlier with the idea it’s better not to bring Grace back because her mom’s already let go of her and it’s easier just to accept her death. Even Rhine’s desire earlier to find her brother was weirdly tempered by concern about what his feelings might be when she returned.

there’s a little girl standing on the threshold to my room. She’s wearing a flimsy hospital gown, like mine. Her eyes are like Jenna’s after she died. Hollow and gray. There’s no semblance of youth in her face. Her skin is yellowed, her arms bruised from the injections.

This sounds exactly like something Rhine would hallucinate (among other things, if you’re giving people lots of injections, you install a port in them, you don’t just keep jabbing until you’ve collapsed every vein they’ve got. This is what someone afraid would imagine, not how a scientist would do things) but Rhine explains that no, definitely real.

“Deirdre,” I whisper. The first word I’ve spoken in a thousand years. “Not you, too.”
“Your room is so bright,” she says, and I can hear my faithful little domestic in that weary voice.

It’s kind of awkward how much I hate the characters of this. I mean, Rhine’s in such a horrible situation. And yet, she takes time out of her busy misery to say shit like this.

Here we have some miserable little girl who’s looking like she’s on death’s door. And all Rhine can think of is how this is her faithful little child slave. Now how will Deirdre make her pretty things? Evil Mad Scientist has broken her property

Also, for some reason Rhine’s room is the only one lit up? So that’s either special treatment or special cruelty. There’s probably no meaning behind it but whatever dream logic gave the author the idea.

At least Rhine’s aware that this is bad and struggles a bit because she maybe wants to help? I guess Rhine can want to help in situations where she can’t, because that’s a lot more convenient than if she could actually follow through and have to do it. Poor Deidre gets Rhine some water.

I’m not surprised by how greedily I drink; when the attendants give me water, it’s only teaspoons at a time. Dehydration must be a part of the experiment.

That makes no sense, Rhine.

Something awful has happened to her, and it’s my fault because I left her behind.

This does, though! Rhine left everyone behind. For some stupid reason, she’s kept justifying her escape not by saying she didn’t want to be a wife or she wanted to find her brother but by the fact she was terrified of Evil Mad Scientist, and yet her actions were to leave everyone else so she could kiss Gabriel and find her brother. And now she’s finally realizing this was wrong.

Deidre hears something so she runs off, telling Rhine to dream of nice things.

I dream I’m wearing the sweater she made me.

SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR FUCKING SWEATER.

At least she also dreams Deidre’s there at a beach seeing starfish, so she remembers that much about what someone other than her wants.

Deidre comes back later to loosen her restraints.

“There’s a trick to these,” she says when she realizes I’m awake and watching her. “You can move them up to the next notch, and they’ll still look tight enough, but you’ll be able to wriggle your hands and feet through. The attendants come on a rotation, so we know to be in our beds in time. Your schedule is erratic, though. It’s hard to know when they’re coming for you.”

So…who undid the restraints originally, and how has no one screwed up yet and been seen? Especially if Rhine’s on an erratic schedule, because all it’d take is someone coming to poke Rhine and seeing an empty bed or one of the others around. And if they can all wander around but accomplish nothing, why bother restraining them? You can’t keep people lying on beds too long or they’ll get bedsores and die.

Her soft hair is rumpled and matted, her neat braids gone.

Also, why isn’t her head shaved? What sort of evil mad scientist is he?

Deirdre, I think. What has he done to you? She’s only a child—nine, ten years old, but she’s as haggard as a first generation in the worst shape, her skin yellowed and pruning at the elbows and fingertips, the bones in her face sharp and too defined.

I’m pretty sure we were told her actual age before now and it was younger. Also, although what Rhine’s saying sure sounds like she’s just confusing illness for age, actually she’s right on the money.

(Also: Vaughn could lie to his son and say that, in my absence, Deirdre would be better employed elsewhere. Linden wouldn’t even question it. He trusts his father. even though there’s no evidence Rapist-chan gives a fuck in the first place. It’s far more likely the lies are to prevent the servants from trying to escape.)

“Early treatments, I think,” she says. “Soon he’ll try artificial insemination,” she adds timidly. “From what I understand, the Housemaster thinks he’s found a way to speed up fertility and gestation, so girls can bear children before natural puberty.”

First up, he doesn’t need to figure that out, it’s called hormones and we know about it already. Second, this is so fucking stupid. Not only should this not matter when he’s trying to solve the death issue so there’s no need to try to claw out a year or two of extra childbearing, but the girls are already spending almost half their lives fertile. Deal with the fact most of them aren’t getting pregnant, like Rhine and Jenna, and if they are they’re only having one kid or so. Getting a ten year old pregnant and getting one or two sickly babies out of her before she dies is less productive than ensuring girls are pregnant from fourteen to twenty. (Also, he could be aiming for twins or triplets or something – if he could get the nineteen year olds to all get pregnant with sextuplets or something, we’d finally be looking at positive population growth.) Instead of spending his time on inventing new drugs and paying masses of workers, he could just set up a rape factory. Call it a brothel and it’d even pay for itself.

Also, note he’s extra evil for the artificial insemination. Rapist-chan would just be sticking his dick in the nine or ten year old, which is so much better because it’s how you’re supposed to do it. Rape is natural, not splitting the kid in half is filthy science.

Better yet, he can’t even get this right. She says Lydia, who Rose had “sent away”, has been done here for ages getting what’s probably homeopathic aging treatments instead of hormones like any non-idiot would use and the most Evil Mad Scientist accomplished is one time she almost didn’t inevitably miscarry.

Then people come in to check on her and find her blood pressure is too high, which is maybe because she’s all upset. More likely it’s actually bad because she’s obviously pretty stressed so they should expect that to raise her heart rate.

They’re running some kind of test. I feel like something less than human. An experiment. A cadaver.

So…now you’re admitting that bodies aren’t people and it’s okay to experiment on them? Or what?

I hear one of them saying, from very far away, “What do you suppose he’ll do with her eyes after he’s done with her?”
Something new is swimming in my veins after that. And that’s when the real nightmares begin. Faces, mutated and decomposing as they lean over me. Ghosts hurrying in the hall, whispering my name. A tide of blood splashing across the tiles. Linden, standing in my doorway. His sad green eyes are trained on me.
“I thought you didn’t love me anymore,” I whisper, and he turns into dust.

I’d assume the first bit is also nightmare stuff, because that makes no scientific sense but does work with Rhine’s own weird corpse-defiling fears. But I don’t think that’s the intention at all.

Her “faithful little domestic” keeps visiting but Rhine’s super out of it.

I suppose she gets used to this, because eventually her sweet stories take a dark turn. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you,” she whispers. “I lost another pregnancy.”
I cannot even find the strength to open my eyes, but I think if she knew I could hear her, she wouldn’t be saying this.
“Lydia died this morning. I watched her bleed out. And the Housemaster was there when they wheeled her away.”

In a way, I guess it makes sense, in that nothing anyone does makes sense.

The human race is dying off? Kidnap lots of girls so a few guys can have trophy wives and kill most of them. Have nothing but sons. Let children freeze in the streets. So of course pouring resources into forcing early pregnancies that mostly just kill the girls is the only thing anyone would bother trying, because everything people think is a “solution” has to make the birth/death ratio significantly worse.

Maybe that’s the virus. Skin Horse has a storyline where there’s a virus that transmits itself in part by screwing with people’s decisionmaking, so that really terrible ideas seem extremely good. Maybe the anti-science crowd kind of knows this and that’s why they’re so sure trying to fix it will just fuck things up worse, even though being infected themselves they naturally express these feelings with explosions that make things worse.

We also finally find out why Evil Mad Scientist murdered that baby: Its ears were shriveled, and its face was—wrong somehow. Malformed.” which mind you, sounds like what babies generally look like if you’ve never seen a newborn. Also, more evidence everyone is an idiot about deformity, unless Evil Mad Scientist was just so excited by the idea of a malformed baby he killed it so no one would get in his way studying the kid. Anyway, somehow the idea of Rose giving birth with only Evil Mad Scientist there is so hideously awful Rhine can’t listen any more, because that’s totally more upsetting than forced pregnancies and miscarriages until you die. It’s probably because Rapist-chan loved Rose and things only matter if it upsets him, because she mentions that while explaining this is the most awful thing ever and it otherwise makes no sense to include.