Last time, they got over the fence but Maddie screamed.

And as I assumed, this makes everyone instantly know that’s where Rhine is.

They run and then the fence goes on before Lilac gets down, although she is on their side of the fence when she falls. She throws them the bag – really, considering she was also trying to carry Maddie, shouldn’t that have been handed to Gabriel earlier? Well, maybe it’s pretty small, since they seem to be a good distance yet she throws it all the way to hit Gabriel.

Then she turns to Jared, who is standing on the other side of the fence, asking if she’s broken anything.
“They got away,” I hear her say.
Madame arrives at the fence, stopping just in front of its deadly humming, and cackles. “Stupid girl,” she says.

Um. So, does she know Lilac tried to escape and is laughing at her failure? That still seems less vindictive than I’d expect and Lilac does have a good cover story of chasing them. Is she speaking about Rhine being dumb? Because in that case I wouldn’t expect a laugh at all since the point is she lost her reward.

It feels like everything is taking an eternity to unfold. Jared cutting off the power again and then scaling the fence to retrieve Lilac and return her to Madame, who is laughing like a croaking frog.

Why is she laughing so much?

Also, it doesn’t seem like this is really a big deal. The power must go off occasionally, and if Jared is okay with helping Lilac escape, he just needs to tell her to be by the fence the night he turns it off on purpose.

Anyway it’s super cold and they’re worried they’ll freeze, because apparently no one thought to put on an extra layer before making their escape attempt. They keep moving anyway.

The sign reads: YOUR FORTUNE FOR A DOLLAR OR TRADE.
Nearly every word is grossly misspelled.

Okay, so presumably A can’t be misspelled. UR or YOU’RE is possible, FUR maybe for FOR but seems a stretch, DOLLER is easy, OR variants seems unlikely, and TRADE is pretty straightforward. T-R-AY-D?

There’s only seven words, so even five of the seven isn’t really “nearly every” and there’s only so much room they have for “gross” mispellings. Really, the author should’ve just written what the sign actually was. Also, it’s a weird thing to be putting emphasis on – this is a world with wildly inconsistent literacy, not widespread misspellings. Lots of people still know how to write perfectly, lots of others probably can’t read at all.

Then we jump back in time to Rhine explaining they traveled all night and she spent time fantasizing about wearing that nice sweater of hers because it has still not occurred to her that it was valuable and also marked her as someone worth trapping. No, she just wants to wear it because it was so comfy with the diamonds and pearls.

We learn that the bag contained boots, coats, mushy strawberries, dry bread, water, angel’s blood, and a children’s book for Maddie, aw. Hard to believe that Lilac could throw it so far, though.

Now snow flits along the ground like enchanted dust. The field ended hours ago, turning into empty warehouses and skeletal buildings that had been picked of their insulation and contents. I said that there must be some civilization nearby, because it looked as though everything here had been stolen. Gabriel mumbled that they couldn’t be too civilized.

Both a nice bit of banter and some very good description that also fits well with telling us about how the collapse is going – people are dying out, but not faster than they’re running out of resources.

Anyway, so now they’re in front of the fortune telling door.

when Gabriel whispers harshly, “Are you crazy? What if they want to murder us?”

Yes! Sort of. The bigger objection is that fortune telling sounds very much in theme with the whole carnival thing. That combined with the fact you don’t seem to have gone all that far means it’s quite plausible whoever’s here knows the brothel and its madame. And even if no word’s been put out specifically that she’s looking for Rhine, Rhine is a valuable commodity – someone might just assume, looking at her, that the local brothel will pay for her. There’s also a good chance that their outfits and goods will mark them as escapees, which again is something people will pay for.

Failing that, they might try to sell her to the gatherers herself.

Basically murder is far down on the list of concerns.

Rhine just says that this is their only option. Yes, but only because this dumbass decided the perfect time to run away was in the winter. Also, I think they probably could keep going. They’ve been running all night, so I get that they’re cold and tired, but it’s morning so it’s not going to be so cold and they have a lot of ground to cover. Especially since they’ve been going in a straight line, so they won’t be hard to catch up with.

I’ve just realized what it is about Maddie that always leaves me feeling so unsettled. She reminds me too much of the children born in the lab. The small, malformed ones that clung to life for hours or days, or even weeks, but ultimately died. Her languid eyes just now confirmed it. I always ran past the rooms of those sad, hopeless lives, eyes averted, humming frantically in my head until the moment passed.

There’s actually a lot of psychological research about how people react to the injured and what prompts it. One interesting theory is that people are unsettled and repulsed by misery, and when forced to confront it, help the other person just to make it go away faster. Someone motivated by this is, as it sounds, not altruistic in the least, and if there’s an alternate choice of just avoiding the whole mess, they’ll jump on that option instead.

And that’s some really fitting psychological reasoning for Rhine, who as you may be gathering, is a terrible, terrible person.

The woman standing on the other side of the door is small and hunched. She’s wearing glasses so grimy I can barely see her eyes through the lenses.

So…fake glasses? Because people who use them generally like to be able to see and all that silly stuff.

It’s sort of like cats! Cats, as we all know, enjoy licking the dirt off their fur and into their mouths. A good way to tell if a healthy-looking cat is spending all its time outdoors is to check out the paws – a cat with indoor time and regular meals on demand will be able to keep its feet clean despite those being the things it uses to walk with. A cat spending all its time running around after birds for supper and then sleeping in the dirt will not.

So, there are many reasons why one might be unable to keep their glasses clean. Like the perpetual smoke back at the brothel, which likely made everything grimy, or living out of a backpack, where you quickly run out of clean anything to use to wipe them off. But the nice thing about houses is they keep most of that stuff outside and, if your house has such modern extravagances as running water, bring clean stuff inside at the turn of a tap.

Failing to clean your glasses under those circumstances is really, really weird.

Anyway, she immediately describes Rhine as a “broken empress” which sounds very nice as long as you don’t pause to wonder what on earth about Rhine is empressy and not consorty. She also easily identifies Maddie as not Rhine’s kid – Maddie has her mother’s dark skin, though it is not as dark, and her smooth black hair. so…Lilac’s Indian, maybe? I mean, they’re dark skinned in the not white sense but not so much I’d be using that as a neutral descriptor. I guess there’s variation in skin color, but the ones who come to America tend to be skewed lighter. And she’s a superbaby descendant and actual India is blown up, so she’s probably several generations removed by now, and maybe this varies by region but they don’t seem like particular xenophobic people who would try to keep marrying within the group. And it’s the middle of winter and she really only goes out at night, so she’d be about as pale as she could get.

Maybe the superbabies were just all made to order and her grandparents said jet black with straight hair and no one has any ethnicities left at all.

Huh, that might be why there’s a set of particular deformities, it’s just inbreeding. Superbabies all were a really similar model with some phenotype variations slapped on top. That’d also explain the obsession with making sure the wives are totally deformity free, that’s the sort of cute little cultural quirk you get when you’re trying desperately to handle the fact your gene pool is basically five people but don’t understand why it’s happening. That’s the great capstone to the Handmaid’s Tale – that ultimately the horrible measures they took to deal with the problem weren’t even the right response.

Inside, the small house is impossibly hot, the metal walls reflecting the light from the fire like we’re in an oven.

Metal is a shitty, shitty insulator because it may reflect light but it absorbs heat.

I wonder why there’s no sign of electric heaters? Maybe they were banned with the condoms. If I’m right that electricity is nationalized and freeish, then people would probably have twenty space heaters stuffed in a single room and stuff like that, which would be an enormous waste of power and an even worse fire hazard.

The room is full of random stuff and Rhine guesses this is a sign that more people trade than pay. Okay then why isn’t this woman doing anything more useful with her time?

I look right at her, Maddie’s unusual eyes against mine. I want to think our erratic features allow us some sort of telepathy. Don’t do anything crazy right now, my gaze is saying.

Rhine will just not shut up about how her extremely desirable features are clearly the same thing as deformities that get most kids murdered as babies.

Her eyes are darting to all the things in the room, and the firelight lapping the walls and ceiling. I don’t think she ever stops observing. Her mind is a bird that’s trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

Actually that’s just a thing people learn to do when they’re in dangerous situations. Maddie’s grown up in a chaotic environment where people might hug or kick her just as easily. Even individuals must have been horribly inconsistent, kind to her sometimes and other times cruel because the woman was watching. Sometimes her mother hugs her close and sometimes she’s yelled at and shoved out of the tent.

She’s now outside for the first time seeing things she has no experience with, with strangers who have just brought her to yet another stranger. The two people she relied most are both gone and she saw one of them electrocuted.

Being hypervigilant at this point doesn’t mean her brain is just stuck in flail mode forever.

Rhine offers Maddie a strawberry, prompting a snarl and a reminder to Rhine that Maddie bit her so hard it caused bruising earlier, and actually Rhine human teeth can break human skin without much difficulty so she can’t have been biting all that hard. Be grateful, they also cause really nasty infections if they break the skin.

She rubs some grime from her glasses with both fists, revealing murky green eyes.

Okay let’s just assume here the author has never worn glasses or been around those with them much. It works okay from the dream perspective of eyes being invisible and then visible.

We’re informed that the woman, Annabelle, is first gen, continuing our perfect streak of every goddamn woman in this having no real position of power or any sign of competence. Let’s also add that wow, way to make the misspelled sign make even less sense.

Hm. How about this. The first gens were born artificially and no one ever concerned themselves with how their genes might be inherited because it was a golden age and everyone was sure they’d just keep making babies in test tubes. The collapse hits when they accidentally the entire world, they limp along for a little while but lose the capability to run the test tube babies over time. Unfortunately, pre-collapse, the whole population had been taken over by test tube babies. If there were a couple regular people left, they were probably sterile by the twenty year mark when the second gens turn out to have some broken, broken genes.

This is why there’s apparently a huge education gap among first gens, so you have Evil Mad Scientist eviling it up but his staff has first gens cleaning bedsheets and this woman here can’t even write a seven word sign without fucking most of it up. The initial collapse took out so much infrastructure that even when it becomes obvious that first gens are so much more useful to educate since they’ll live long enough to actually use it for you, people can’t even get themselves organized enough to do that and the lower class ones stay lower class being servants.

In that case, the misspelled sign is meant to be incongruous and show us how terribly society has responded, by failing to properly use all of their dwindling class of first gens.

And in fairness, if you assume we started off with super high technology, that could resolve the problem of there otherwise being no way we’d survive the destruction of the rest of the continents. Assume whatever arbitrary level might be required, then assume the effort to built that up and the damage it took in the whole world getting destroyed knocked us back down a good way, at which point we lost the ability to do superbabies properly, followed by the dying and the further collapse of society.

There’s still the problem that making large-scale superbaby production impossible and making it impossible for anyone including the wealthiest and most educated doctors are very different things. Maybe there was like, one single corporation that knew how to make the superbabies and their CEO blew the whole thing up somehow? See, that’s the problem with getting too close to cutting edge technology. Back when we weren’t too clear how hard cloning and genetic engineering and such would actually be, it was easier to postulate it being lost in a technological crash.

So, let’s shift to them doing something fancy in the epigenetics area, because we still don’t know too much about that allowing more wiggle room, so maybe they’re supposed to have a particular cell structure that’s manufactured in a lab and naturally collapses down to something messed up like a ruined spiderweb when you try to reproduce. There are a large number of natural chemicals we still can’t manufacture in the lab because they just fall apart when we try. They had some sort of really fancy cell-manipulator thing, they don’t have it anymore, directions on how to do it were a corporate secret that got lost in, oh, let’s say EMP pulse from all the nukes and also a whole lot of people got killed including all the ones who invented it. Rhine never says America survived the continent disappearing thing unscathed. We could have lost half our population easily, that’s still 50% more population than anyone else had. Modern society tends toward hyperspecialization already, if that trend continued into future society then a huge disaster would easily cripple things.

Anyway. Annabelle the uneducated first gen eyes the mushy strawberries with interest. Rhine and Gabriel, who are idiots, begin to disclaim the strawberries as terrible and rotten.

“I don’t have anything for a broken arm,” Annabelle says. “But I have something for fevers, if you wouldn’t mind my taking those strawberries off your hands. You said yourself they were rotten.”

Idiots.

I hand over the strawberries, careful to keep the stale bread hidden. Who knows when we’ll be able to find food again.

As I ranted way back when in the Hunger Games, no, some food is more valuable than others. She’s explicitly stated to be surprised by the strawberries because it’s the middle of winter, and also they’re extremely perishable, require a lot of care in harvesting, and don’t have much nutrition in them, so people aren’t going to be cultivating them much and what there is will be pricey.

Gabriel might not understand this, because he grew up in a place where food just appears, but Rhine should. Fresh food at least should be very seasonal, and given how little food there is, even prepared or frozen food likely is – in the present day, companies do stuff like buy up a year’s supply of fruit so they’ll have it ready all year, but brand consistency and availability is probably the least of people’s issues. Do they even have brands? I don’t think Rhine’s made a single mention of them. The entire agricultural system was probably nationalized.

We watch Annabelle eat every mushy strawberry, several at a time, then suck the juice from the cloth, and finally suck each of her fingertips.

But this is good for highlighting the deprivation of the current setting. It’s sort of like in Soylent Green, which everyone just remembers eating people thing but was actually 99% other creepy and really good stuff, there’s this bit where this woman gets a jar of strawberry jam and sits down to just eat it one tiny spoonful at a time. And the detective sees the spoon and takes it as evidence, carries it all the way back to his tiny closet-sized home and pops it in his roommate’s mouth because the other guy’s old enough to remember what food tastes like and can identify it as strawberries.

“That hit the spot. Hardly anything but dehydrated food in the winter.”

Really?

I mean, okay, maybe this particular shack doesn’t have electricity to run a freezer – everything around is stripped, so that could have involved removing the wiring, or just damaged it accidentally because obviously no one will bother fixing that. (Incidentally I bet there are so many deaths every winter because the power goes out and you’re lucky if it only takes weeks to fix it instead of months.) But there’s no canned food either? What about stuff that stores well like onions and potatoes? God, book, do you realize the Host had better research than you? Do you know how much it hurts me to make that comparison?

The woman’s special anti-fever meds turn out to be aspirin, which Rhine recognizes as relatively common but somewhat pricey. Considering aspirin is super easy to manufacture, I’d expect it to be more of a staple, particularly since I’d also expect the market isn’t split by people being able to afford much other medication.

Annabelle is so grateful for the semi-fresh fruit that, in addition to giving Maddie a dose of aspirin, she even offers us a spot on her floor to sleep.

wat.

God damn it Rhine. The strawberries are worth way more than a single pill of aspirin. She even just told you that strawberries are a big deal! A single hit of aspirin isn’t going to do much for Maddie, you should be bargaining for at least a small pile of them. And a spot on her floor isn’t worth anything, that’s just basic human decency – I will grant it’s not like you can dare expect that sort of thing since everything sucks, but you can at least recognize that it’s stingy to make you have to pay for it, can’t you? To make you pay for something that doesn’t cost anything to give?

“Only until noon,” she says. “That’s when I start getting customers.” She adds, “That sure is pretty, dear.”
She’s eyeing one of my necklaces, which bears yellow beads shaped like stars and moons. I pull it over my head and hand it to her without a word.

Christ Rhine why are you such a shitty, shitty bargainer? Did your stupid twin do all of that for you too? You realize this stuff is all you have to offer for everything else you’ve going to need? At least ask for more aspirin. Ask for any other good you think you might be able to trade for later.

Also, Rhine informs us there’s an outhouse around, so apparently running water is indeed too much of a luxury to expect. Why the hell does she live here? It’s not like being middle of nowhere is helping with her customer base either, after all.

Gabriel offers to take watch.

“Shifts,” I agree. My voice sounds a million miles away. I’m not even sure if I’m speaking, or dreaming of speaking. “When you get too tired, move away from me and I’ll wake up and take over.”

This is good because it’s stupid – what sort of person reliably moves away in response to sleepiness – that’s completely understandable because obviously most of her brain is already asleep.

Of course then the book ruins it by reminding us

Living with my brother after our parents died, I trained my body to sleep deeply for an hour at a time, and to be alert for the hour after that so I could keep watch. which no, no that is super dumb.

Then she said that all her time in the wonderful mansion has dulled these instincts, because otherwise she swears she’d be totally alert after getting drugged and then spending the night running in terror.

“Good night,” a voice says.
“Good night, Linden,” I murmur as everything fades away.

…