Last time, more of the same.
This chapter is really depressing. Rhine’s getting wheeled out for some new test, and Cecily spends the whole time with her even though she must be terrified too.

“The Housemaster would have your head if he saw you down here, child,” one of the attendants tells her, and she scowls.
“I’m no child. And my father-in-law will do no such thing,” she says pertly. “Because he won’t know.”
“Who keeps letting her down here?” the attendant says.
“Can’t very well tell House Governor Linden’s bride how to behave,” another says.

Not that the book gets this.

I mean…god, imagine being in this situation. There used to be three of you, and he killed one and the other one’s getting tortured to death in the basement. You eat dinner with the two men every night as he talks about how his son really should get more wives, and you know you’re just as replaceable as the rest. All he has to do is trap you in the basement and tell Linden you ran away.

But she still goes down there, a place Rhine was terrified of even when it wasn’t full of tortured girls, even though she doesn’t have any protection from the same fate, because she cares about Rhine so much.

I can just move my lips enough to get out my sister wife’s name one last time, and she’s there.
Cecily climbs onto the bed and inches behind me so that her knees straddle my body, my back against her stomach. She puts her chin on my shoulder, and suddenly I can feel the heat of her cheeks, can imagine them turning red the way they do when she’s about to cry. It takes me a while to realize that the words she’s whispering over and over are “Be brave.”

And she can’t even do anything. She’s terrified and she’s seeing horrible things happen and there’s nothing she can do to stop them. So she goes down there anyway because she thinks maybe she can keep them from hurting Rhine more than they need to.

She pets my hair, and the voice in the ceiling says, “Keep the subject’s head still.” So she does. She holds my temples in her palms. The attendant reaches over me and draws down some sort of helmet device that will prevent my head from moving—not that I can move anyway. He secures it over my head and locks my chin in with a strap. “Move her back three quarters of an inch,” the voice says. The attendant obliges.
“Is it going to hurt?” Cecily asks. I want to tell her that I can’t feel my body at all, so I doubt it, but I can’t move my tongue to form the words. The attendant doesn’t answer.
“Lady Cecily, if she’s moved during this procedure, she could be blinded. Do you want that?”
She listens this time. She climbs off the bed. “I’m right here with you,” she says

The focus of the chapter is what’s happening to Rhine, which is some giant needle getting jabbed in her eyes because science. But all Rhine’s done for chapters is have stuff happen to her. Cecily could escape this. And she doesn’t. And here she is helping them because she has no power to stop them and it could be even worse if she tries to do anything more. And then she stays with Rhine the whole time, talking to try to distract her.

When it’s over, the helmet is removed, the tape pulled from my eyelids. My head drops lifelessly to Cecily’s waiting palm. She is still telling me about what would make a kite fly

She doesn’t have to be here. She’s risking so much and seeing such horrible things and she can’t even tell herself she’s making a difference, and she doesn’t seem to even consider doing otherwise.

But she can’t stay forever. She has to leave before the smarter of their owners returns.

“They tell me you didn’t make a sound during the retinal procedure,” he says, stroking my cheek like I’m some sort of pet. His hand is cool. I don’t tell him that I would have screamed during his procedure if only I’d been able.
…
“I told them, of course you didn’t. You have always been the epitome of grace.”

I’m not sure what the author means here. She keeps having this guy give Rhine undeserved credit, and here Rhine’s even pointing out he’s wrong.

“Grace,” he repeats, “and class. You’re steely. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“That’s a new one,” I say. My brother always called me too soft.

You’re really neither. You have no steel, but normally soft involves an emotional component.

He explains the insane torture science was to record footage from inside the eye. You know, maybe this does make sense if you assume no one remembers how science works. He’s just trying everything he can think of. He’s sure her eyes are important, so maybe the structure of them is? Anyway, he says that there shouldn’t be anything more like that and even says she can eat solid food soon.

So…at this point it’s not even clear if he was doing evil science to her or if all this was actually treatment for her homeopathic virus symptoms.

She thinks about the super delicious pancakes at the orphanage and how she should have enjoyed her time and freedom back then more.

Since she doesn’t answer Evil Mad Scientist says maybe they’ll wait on solids because he’s petty, maybe? He adds that he’s glad her heart’s improved.

“One of the perks of dying young,” I say dryly, “should be that my heart won’t have a chance to go bad.”
He laughs, sterilizes my forearm, and draws a vial of blood. “I couldn’t have anticipated your reaction to any of your treatments, darling. You are something of an enigma.”

Yeah, this doesn’t make much sense. He’s got an existing treatment that he plans to make work on everyone. But also Rhine is special for some reason so the treatment doesn’t work right on her. So…why is she a good test subject?

Rhine explains to the reader that Cecily just yanks out her IVs all the time, which lets her sleep normally and stuff. So that’s yet another thing that she’s getting credit for when apparently she has nothing to do with it.

His green eyes are bright, though, like Linden’s reveling in his latest sketch at the very end, when everything comes together even better than he’d hoped. My husband is a prodigy, and Vaughn knows it. That’s why he keeps him so blind.

But anyway back to poor Rapist-chan who is so great and yet so impotent in ways that are not at all his fault.

Rhine asks if Evil Mad Scientist dissected his first son. Obviously.

And do you know what I found?” He looks at me over the edge of the notebook. “Nothing. Absolutely no indication that anything was amiss. A vital, young heart. Excellent body mass index—he was a swimmer and quite the runner. Healthiest kidneys I’d ever seen.”

Okay, that’s outright terrifying. Doesn’t make sense with Rhine’s claim Jenna’s symptoms were that of the virus, because her whole body was falling apart, of course. But wouldn’t this be terrifying, if people just die for no reason, and no one can find any cause? That would also fit better with the fact no one’s made any progress in figuring out what’s wrong.

Rhine is disgusted by the idea anyone could cut up their son “Like he was nothing?” to which Evil mad Scientist points out that people don’t devote their lives to finding why people die because of how very little they care about those people.

“It just so happens he was everything. And I’d failed him. As a father, as a doctor. I owe it to Linden to do better.”

The first gens must be so messed up by now. Like a lot of this book, there’s elements where this really works, but it’s not really the focus. You have the first gens choosing to live in separate communities, the fucked up couple we saw, the references to riots…A whole generation of parents who saw their children die and saw the ending of the human race, they’d get pretty weird. And faced with the mayfly kids dying and dying and dying, you can see how they’d start to view them as disposable. You can’t really do anything wrong by them, because they’re just going to die anyway, and if you cure it, then you’ve have saved everyone, so, really, what’s grinding up a few hundred bodies in your science machine if maybe it’d help?

Rhine asks if he’s experimenting on Rapist-chan, and Evil Mad Scientist says she should just go with the fact he’s totally going to fix everything with her unwilling cost. Also, the new drugs won’t give nightmares, which turns out to be true, but now she’s super bored, because Rhine is never happy.

I had thought Vaughn was feeding me these drugs to torment me, but maybe he had only meant for them to keep me company.

No I’m pretty sure it was for some sort of actual purpose.

I look at the IV line lying on the mattress where Cecily pulled it from my forearm. She’s stalling for time. She thinks that if she can keep me lucid, she can find a way for me to be free. She doesn’t understand how impossible freedom is.
After a while I wriggle one of my hands from the restraints using the trick Deirdre taught me, and I fit the IV back into place.

The one action Rhine’s taken, and it’s this.