Last time, they built themselves a bird cage and climbed in.

I didn’t let myself look outside of my cage. Rather than the rustles and the murmurs, I focused on the brass music playing in the distance. After a while it all blurred together. There were scarves hanging on the bars, brushing our skin. Gabriel kissed me, and I parted my lips, closed my eyes. It felt like one short, murky dream. Several times he whispered for me to wake up, and I opened my eyes to see the dark concern in his. I remember saying, It’s okay.

So to answer the looming question of Was Rhine Raped in Fever? Not yet. It sounds like all they did was kiss. Which, in turn, makes Rhine’s issues with it being the worst thing ever less sympathetic – I thought they were being asked to put on a porno. With all the horrible things that could happen, being watched while you kiss your boyfriend just doesn’t register that high. This would be horrible in a book that was normal and she’d just been kidnapped for this purpose, but here it means she doesn’t get raped, which really makes it seem like a lot lesser an evil.

Anyway, for some reason she’s exhausted and days go by with her barely conscious. It sounds like she’s drugged but Gabriel doesn’t seem affected and also, drugging her into a stupor seems like it’d be damaging her value far more than just prostituting her normally. So I guess it’s just Rhine giving up as she does best.

Gabriel finally throws cold water on her face.

“We have to leave. It has to be now,” he says. I try to focus on his face. “You’re becoming one of them.”
I blink several times, trying to wake up. Our blankets are drenched. “One of who?”
“One of those awful girls,” he says.

Oh and here I thought he was being concerned for her wellbeing given she’s all but catatonic but no, he just doesn’t want her turning into an ugly slut. Those other girls displaying symptoms of depression and drug use are just so awful and we hate them for being awful.

Naturally, Rhine’s only objection is that no, trying to escape will just get them caught. Lilac shows up right then to agree and also highlight how super right she is that they’re being watched. After Lilac leaves, he insists they need to hurry up, and Rhine forces herself to wake up and talk to him about it. Unfortunately they can’t come to any useful ideas for dealing with the fence. What about throwing fabric over it to try to insulate yourself? And there’s all these tents around…

Then she falls back asleep and is woken by Lilac to be told Madame wants to see her. She’s given a sari to wear and Lilac explains that Madame only lets a girl wear one when she wants to show her off.”

That sounds to me like the woman’s decided that it’s worth it to prostitute Rhine to the especially wealthy. Rhine just blithely asks who she’s getting shown off to.

That’s another strange thing about this place— nobody ever wears shoes.

Um. Well, yes, that is strange, but why? How come? Where’d your shoes go? Why didn’t you mention that earlier?

And also, Maddie’s following them. And when Rhine looks, she moves her finger in the air like she’s trying to write something, but Rhine doesn’t know what.

Jared opens the fence, and he watches me the whole time, like he’s taunting me. Like he’s saying,Go ahead and try it .
But, just like the first time Linden took me outside of the mansion for that expo, I don’t run. Something in me argues against it.

The author wanting to drag this out as long as possible, or the author recoiling from the idea of her protagonist having agency?

Anyway, the man she’s meeting is a gatherer. Well, that went from bad to worse.

Nobody is sure exactly why the Gatherers chose the color gray for their jackets and vans. Sometimes the vans are poorly repainted, the windows globbed over with dribbling gray, the tires splashed with it. The jackets are not all uniform—I know that much. They are also hand-dyed, all different cuts and styles. The Gatherers are their own underground group, and while some say they work for the government, one thing that’s certain is that they travel in packs; they find one another, form a shelter somewhere, and wait for opportunities. Maybe they split the money they make off us, and use it to fuel their vans, load their guns, indulge themselves in liquor and whatever else they want.

Well, that sure took a plot hole and then poked it a few times to make sure we noticed it.

Maybe the author is working up to some explanation for this that’ll probably not really plug the hole, and that’s why she’s drawing attention to the oddity right now. Or maybe this is just her idea of dealing with it – admitting that it doesn’t make sense and trying to pretend that’s intentional.

Or maybe it’s even purer than that. This whole book runs on dream logic – maybe there’s some reason there why they should be sloppy, mismatched grey. That’s what it seems is behind the idea of the wet feathers leaving trails of dye on her. It certainly fits the anarchy of the setting and the crumbling and inconsistent everything that is the outside world and the stupid futility of their actions for them to have no real uniforms and clumsily painted vans that once had some other purpose.

And it’s a bit scarier this way. A uniformed gatherers mean there’s some organizing intelligence behind it all – not a nice one, but something there, some underlying reason. Here, it’s almost like it’s something inherent in the world, that you can just wake up one day and start dyeing your clothes grey because that’s what people do before they kidnap girls. There’s even more obviously no real point to the color when it’s so haphazardly implemented.

This setting would be really good for a world where people unleashed viruses, plural, as their attempt at social engineering, and the gatherers are some mad offshoot of that, like so many things. Imagine a story set in a world where society has been warped like that, where everyone is somewhat to very off as madmen’s pet plagues pull their minds in different directions.

Or just go straight Lovecraftian – the stars have shifted. Horrors murmur half awake beneath the waves and the mere whispers have broken the human psyche over their knee. If you are someone who would kidnap girls and murder the extras, you are someone who wears grey and runs with the pack of your own kind. A murderer can wear what he likes, a guard can wear what he likes, a rapist what he likes – but for some reason, that particular profession cracks your personality apart and shapes you into another grey-dyed cog. Why? Because. Somehow that’s the pattern of this particular madness, and there doesn’t need to be any reason we can understand in it.

Rhine rambles, presumably sarcastically, about how the man smells of sweat and how it must be such hard work kidnapping them all, especially “those of us” who struggle and fight back. You flatter yourself, Rhine.

I’ll forgive her slow realization that she’s to be sold, though – we can explain that as denial. It’s only when they start discussing price that she admits it and at the same time, realizes Maddie was telling her to run.

I can’t! Gabriel is still a prisoner here. Madame will kill him; I’m sure of it. Kill him when she realizes she can’t turn him into one of her bodyguards. He doesn’t have it in him to hold a girl against her will—to carry a gun, much less shoot one.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

But claims of her boyfriend’s ethics aside, this still wouldn’t be true – the girls don’t seem like they’re being held against their will, and while the guards may double as that, they do seem to be mostly there to deal with external threats. If nothing else, Lilac has made it clear they periodically do kill men, and she did not mention that the same ever happened to the girls. And even if this was their purpose, one boy one way or another means so little – how long would it take anyone to figure out Gabriel wasn’t willing to kill escaping girls?

Besides, it’s not like he’d stay. If Rhine escapes, then he no longer has to worry about coordinating his escape with her, he can just make a break for it as soon as he gets an opportunity of his own.

I should have seen it coming, really. What use does she have for yet another girl? All the girls in this place are wilted, dried out, used up. There’s a whole tent just for the ones that are in all stages of the virus, and she offers them to her customers at a discount. The men leave them, wiping the blood of the dying girls’ kisses from their stubbly mouths.

That’s as horrifying as it is a blatant lie. Her whole thing is about offering an illusion, hiding the gruesome reality away. Rhine even explicitly asked this – will you charge money over my dying body – and was told that of course not, men are coming here to forget that inevitable part of life. She even already has discounted cheap girls, the ones with bad teeth. No one would be beating down the door to fuck a bloody corpse, and if they really wanted it, I’m sure there’s no lack of dying but desperate girls outside. Hell, just kidnap and murder someone if you’re so into guro, it’s sure not like anyone would care. Or join up with the gatherers and fuck the inevitable corpses.

There aren’t “stages” of the virus either, it pretty much just kills you. Rose was an anomaly for living months after the disease hit, and we just had her own short story where she made it clear that the bloody death stage of it happens quite fast. So how on earth does someone fill a “whole tent” with all these girls, when Rose went from feeling sick but outwardly fine to dying over the course of a day at most? I really can’t imagine getting raped is going to improve their longevity.

How long has it been since she had a healthy girl, whole and fully conscious, with clean teeth and all?

Both the Red girls are explicitly stated to be this, as is Lilac, and since the Blues are distinguished by their bad teeth, that implies the rest of the girls are in at least decent condition.

“This one is a goldenrod,” she cries, like that should mean anything to him. “She is a gem. She will make you a fortune in return.”

So why isn’t she selling Rhine directly? This seems to be more weirdness of the gatherers – somehow, are only they allowed to sell girls? Does everyone else have to go through them?

“Her ring alone is worth what I’m asking!

What?

Then why hasn’t she taken the damn ring! Why isn’t she looking for a reward from the owner, who’s obviously willing to pay far more to retrieve his runaway property if he can drop that much on just a bauble?

Anyway, the guy becomes sick of bargaining and…pulls a gun, saying either he gets the girl for free or he kills her so no one can have her at all. The gatherers don’t seem like they’ve got anything much like human thought processes, do they?

Jared pulls a gun in response, then Maddie attacks the gatherer, whose gun goes off at Jared so Jared shoots him.

“Bastard.” Madame spits on the gray coat. The Gatherer’s eyes are open and staring at her bare feet as she stamps out her cigarette. “One of the best customers. I give him all my best girls

Why?

Why would a man who’s constantly kidnapping girls be at a brothel all the time? And if he was, why wouldn’t he be a patron of establishments that buy girls? It’d be easy there to work out an arrangement where he gets free run of the brothel girls as part of his payment for delivering new ones.

Plus you’d expect the ones that buy girls would have prettier, healthier girls than the carnival here, which seems to just be a collection of any girls that wandered in needing a place to sleep. The ones that buy girls probably just shoot them when they turn into withered old hags of eighteen.

It’s also a bit hard to believe that someone insanely paranoid about spies-who-are-thieves to the point she sees them where there are none would let a guy whose entire job is stealing girls into her area and then show off her best girls. I could see her being willing to contact one since she’s decided to give up Rhine, but having one around all the time is a lot harder to believe.

Meanwhile, Jared is comforting Maddie and we’re told that a lot of the people are fond of her. But then Madame turns on him, saying the gatherer wasn’t actually doing to shoot.

How will I explain his death to his pack?

So they operate individually, including going to a heavily armed place willing to pull out a gun in order to get their hands on a valuable individual. But they avenge death as a group – even though everything about this says the guy was going to take Rhine’s fee for himself. And also, Rhine’s understanding of it is they don’t even have a defined group but can fall in with any local bunch. Here again, they just don’t seem to be operating along normal lines.

Anyway, Madame is angry and starts attacking Jared, because this book is always happiest to hate women while talking about the poor men.

I mean, it’s actually an okay point – Jared is much bigger and stronger than she is, but doesn’t fight back because she raised him. It’s just that naturally this involves lots of talking about how he looks so tiny despite his size. Rhine has no disbelief that Jared, who has power she doesn’t, fails to use it, she automatically sees things from his point of view, despite having no ability whatsoever to do that when dealing with girls in the same situation as her.

He’s her technological genius, her favorite, and Madame is so broken from losing her child that even for him she hates where she should love. Hates brutally.

Furthermore, Rhine’s inability to empathize with anyone lacking a dick leads us to weird, weird places like this, where the woman’s completely understandable abuse – he shot someone with well-armed friends while she was trying to get the guy to instead give her lots of money, and she’s delusional enough to insist she was in control – is because she’s fundamentally broken and just subs in hate for love.

If this was actually true, we’d see it in her being cruel for no reason – snapping at the kids who try to curry her favor, hitting people who’ve done nothing but what she wants.

Maddie finally attacks Madame for attacking Jared, which is a big mistake, since it lets her redirect her anger to someone who’s not her favorite and actually can be better blamed for the whole affair anyway – Jared was already shot, so negotiations had collapsed by the time he fired (it seems he’s really getting blamed for pulling the gun out at all). But, the shot appears to have been an accident because Maddie attacked and startled the guy. If you look at it as inevitable the gun would go off, as Jared likely does, this saved his life by throwing the gatherer’s aim off. If you’re sure the gun wouldn’t fire at all, Maddie is the one who pushed things to their final conclusion.

This also shows the general weirdness of this book – it just explained the woman supposedly runs on redirecting love into hatred, but in actual behavior, she leaps at the chance to abuse someone she hates instead. The characters behaviors are consistent and very human, the book’s explanations of what’s supposedly happening range from inhuman to inexplicable.

But, while Jared isn’t willing to fight back when she attacks him, attacking Maddie gets him into action, pulling Madame back. Lilac and the rest of the girls have somehow arrived by then, but wasn’t this all taking place outside the gate? Lilac grabs Maddie and she and Rhine run back into the carnival. Dammit, Rhine, the one time you could have used your selfishness to further the plot and escape.

She leads us, running, past the incinerator, which hums so loudly, it shakes my bones. Madame is so proud of that grotesque thing; it’s welded together by street signs and bits of metal that advertise prices for popcorn and something called cotton candy. It makes popping sounds as though something is alive in there, hurling itself against the metal walls. Makes ze messes easier to clean , Madame said.

But really, what a great movie setting this would make. The camera panning over the looming furnace covered in rusted signs with the remains of cheery pictures. Also it sounds like it’s only being used to burn bodies? Why would you do that.

What was going through that madwoman’s head when she said those words? Was she thinking that she’d like to throw Maddie inside that machine’s gaping mouth, listen as the child’s screams became nothing but the mechanical popping and humming?

Probably not?

Her abuse of Maddie is disturbing but it doesn’t seem particularly focused. Should you attempt to kick a small child to death because you think she got you in trouble? No. Does it mean you were always planning to kill her? Also no – as far as we can tell, she’s in charge, if she wanted to murder Maddie the girl would’ve already been thrown in there.

Her venom might even be worse than Vaughn’s.

And here we go.

My father-in-law was cold-blooded. He murdered my sister wife. But his approach was sinister and scheming, an approaching fin in murky water that you wouldn’t see coming until the water had turned red around you.

You spent your entire stay there terrified of the sight of the man, and at some point he terrorized Jenna enough that she went back on her promise she’d never sleep with Linden and had all the sex he wanted – and considering how depressed Jenna was, it’s likely he didn’t just threaten to kill her to motivate her that much. And when he murdered Jenna, he dragged it out – every description you’ve given of “the virus” on Jenna, how she rotted slowly from the inside out? That was him. He did that, not the disease.

Also, he was implicated in murdering a child too – specifically, Rose claims he killed her newborn baby just to get back at her for originally not wanting a child. So he’s killed more people in worse ways for more trivial slights.

I never saw a fire in his eyes like there was in Madame’s as she pummeled and kicked that little girl. She was enjoying herself.

And that’s very wrong. But how is it more wrong than calmly poisoning someone so they die an agonizing death because they’re not fawning enough over your son? Than killing an infant just to punish their mother for disagreeing with you? And don’t tell me he didn’t enjoy all that. Being calm doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy it.

She wanted Maddie dead.

The biggest difference between the two of them is that she wants Maddie dead, while he’d have actually killed her long ago, and without needing any more excuse than she didn’t serve his purpose.

Maddie looks at me, irises the color of moonlight on snow. Almost not enough blue in them to make them stand out from the whites.

Okay, she really shouldn’t be able to see anything with eyes like that. And I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t be able to have eyes like that – too little blue in the eyes doesn’t get you a whitish blue, because the underlying color is pink from blood vessels. That’s why albino rats have pink eyes. In order to have eyes with a lighter iris, she’d have to be producing a white pigment, and humans don’t do that.

Or at least not without genetic engineering.

See, even just blue eyes actually can let in too much light and you’ll end up going blind later. So what if you added in an extra pigment underneath? White wouldn’t get in the way much of different eye colors, and if you’re manufacturing a completely new pigment, it’d presumably be unaffected by things like albinism, where otherwise a lack of pigment in the eye causes blindness (specifically, the nerves of the eye grow in response to light in the womb, and without pigment to channel them, they just grow randomly).

Anyway, big alterations of the superbabies like that would explain how you’d get big bunches of kids with what appears to be a very similar genetic disorder. Naturally evolved DNA is tested over time for stability. Directly sticking stuff in has been found to be more likely to mutate. It might even be as simple as an issue of location – some areas of DNA are more prone to damage. Maybe this is what happens if the white-pigment gene gets duplicated a bunch of times, there’s so much extra white that it washes out the usual color, or just that the cells producing pigment spend so much time on it they don’t produce much of the normal stuff. And maybe the section that tends to duplicate is bigger than just the white-pigment part, so there’s some other more important genes getting overexpressed to cause the behavioral changes.

Depending on how much the superbabies were altered, they might have an extra chromosome carrying all their new stuff. And if additions to existing DNA are unstable, an entire chromosome of that would likely be far more so. Extra chromosome weirdness might have in turn required the sex cells to be altered to clone rather than recombine properly, although in that case they’d have known that they were altering the kids way too much to be sure it’d work right.

Rhine, being uneducated in her parents’ work, just explains she thinks the deformed kids are creepy because they have faraway looks. What about the deformed kids who were creepy because they were born inside out? I’m just saying, you’d think someone growing up seeing lots of malnourished teens giving birth would have a better standard for creepy. Especially when you remember abortion is banned, so no matter how obviously fatal the birth defect or even how very dead and rotting the baby may be, they’re going to have to deliver it.

There’s even a popular theory that they can see ghosts. shut up Rhine that’s not a theory that’s not even a hypothesis that’s a superstition.

Once again, Rhine looks into someone’s eyes and suddenly realizes that holy shit that’s a person like me. I mock, but it is a good direction for her to go in, and admittedly, her life before was sheltered and focused on being afraid of others, so maybe it makes sense.

Anyway, Lilac examines Maddie and says Jared will be here soon for first aid, and indeed he is. As she sees them examining Maddie, she seems to realize that she doesn’t need to be there and she switches to worrying about Gabriel and how they need to escape, so she starts walking, to the shock of Jared and Lilac, who can’t believe how insane her actions are.

But their voices are too small and far away to stop me. I hoped before, stupidly, that playing by Madame’s rules would give me an opportunity to escape. Just as I played by Vaughn’s rules when I was trying to escape my marriage to Linden.

No, Rhine. Stupidity was thinking it’d work the first time. Trying it here is the definition of insanity.

But I could never have predicted the evil that chars those two souls. The bodies Vaughn collects. The maniacal delight in Madame’s eyes as she closed in on Maddie for the deathblow.

Rhine, god, listen to yourself. You are drawing a comparison between two people, a comparison you’ve drawn repeatedly, while claiming you totally couldn’t have predicted that they share traits.

Also will you get over the damn dissection already? HE KILLS PEOPLE THAT IS WHAT’S EVIL ABOUT HIM.

I see it now. There are no rules. It’s survival of the fittest.

You’ve just totally lost it, haven’t you.

Jared, further showing he’s a pretty decent guy, grabs her to try to stop her from doing this, so Rhine elbows him in the gunshot wound. He manages to grab her again, still without harming her. Why can’t the shitty love triangle be with him this book and not Rapist-chan?

He attempts to reason with her that saving Gabriel will work a lot better if she’s not caught while the woman is in a murderous rage. I do worry she’d just kill him – well, would worry in Rhine’s position, I’m kind of agnostic about Gabriel’s survival personally – but Jared seems to know her better, so I’ll defer to him on this. And it may be that if nothing else, she doesn’t seem like she discards her pieces lightly either. Rhine is missing, but she’ll come back for Gabriel, so killing him now is dumb.

“Did you know?” I say. “Did you know that she was planning to sell me?”
“I don’t pay attention to how she does business.

What an expectable rationale. Jared is not a particularly good person by normal standards, but his flaws make sense and he seems to mean well.

But actually, now that I think about it, what’s Rhine got to be mad about? She’s repeatedly longed for the mansion and seems to regret leaving, and when faced with a tiny preteen girl talking hopefully about birthing hips (sounding just like Cecily, no less…), says that oh boy maybe the girl really will get lucky enough to be stolen by a gatherer and picked by some rapist, yay!!! If it’s acceptable for everyone else, you can’t demand they think it’s horrible for you.

He adds: There’s something about you that she thinks will make her a lot of money. which it totally her special eyes that everyone knows are valuable despite no one managing to articulate why in our hearing. If there’s an actual reason, you’d have expected it to come up in the discussion with the gatherer.

Somewhere behind me Lilac is calling out to Jared, saying that something is wrong, that Maddie’s coughing blood.

Welp. That should really be fatal. Author’s probably thinking of it as shorthand for serious business injuries, though.

A good substitute for this is for the person to have bit their cheek or tongue, resulting in blood in their mouth that makes people panic thinking it came from their lungs without actually involving their lungs being fatally punctured. But the way it’s playing out makes it seem she’s only just developed the blood. Hm. Let’s say she’s kept her mouth shut this whole time and then just suddenly coughed, spitting up the blood from her cut tongue.

Regardless, Lilac is quite reasonably freaking out about this and calling for Jared, and Rhine agrees that him going back to try to help Maddie and not dividing his attention on her is right. If you’ve got to pick, focus your attention on the person trying to live and not the one committing suicide.

Gabriel is half-awake in the green tent, his eyes wild and blue. When he sees me, he struggles to regain awareness. “They injected me with something,” he says, slurring the words. “‘Time to die,’ they said. The horses all began to blur.”
Madame must have been planning this. Incapacitate Gabriel so that he would have no way of saving me.

What?

I don’t even know, really. Rhine seems to somehow know Gabriel wasn’t just poisoned, even with him saying that’s what happened. It’s like she realizes the world is contrived to keep bad things from ever actually happening to her. She’ll be scared when the danger is vague, but when it’s explicit, she knows that well, obviously the author can’t possibly let that happen.

She tries to get him up, rambling internally about the howling wind and her sudden convinction that I am certain she is running toward us, and then it will all be over. I don’t know how, but it will be over. See? She’s only afraid when she has nothing concrete to go on.

Then she realizes the screaming she hears isn’t wind but the other girls. Gatherers come to attack? It does seem plausible that might be the answer – I’m not seeing how she can escape on her own at this rate, but maybe she’d make it out in the chaos. Or maybe someone’s murdered the woman.