Sever
The third and final novel in Lauren DeStefano’s breathtaking dystopian romance series, The Chemical Garden TrilogyTime is running out for Rhine.With less than three years left until the virus claims her life, Rhine is desperate for answers. Having escaped torment at Vaughn’s mansion, she finds respite in the dilapidated home of her husband’s uncle, an eccentric inventor who hates Vaughn almost as much as Rhine does.Rhine’s determination to be reunited with her twin brother, Rowan, increases as each day brings terrifying revelations to light about his involvement in an underground resistance. She realizes must find him before he destroys the one thing they have left: hope.In this breathtaking conclusion to Lauren DeStefano’s The Chemical Garden trilogy, everything Rhine knows to be true will be irrevocably shattered. But what she discovers along the way has alarming implications for her future – and about the past her parents never had the chance to explain.
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For
Riley,
Isaiah,
Isabella,
Hailey,
Cameron,
Mary,
Cooper,
Eliot,
and
Raina,
Who have a lifetime
Of roads before them
I must lose myself in action,
lest I wither in despair.
âAlfred, Lord Tennyson
Table of Contents
1
IN THE ATLAS the river still flows. The thin line of it carries cargo to a destination that no longer exists. We share a name, the river and I; if thereâs a reason for this, it died with my parents. The river lingers in my daydreams, though. I imagine it spreading out into the greatness of the ocean, melting into sunken cities, carrying old messages in bottles.
I have wasted too much time on this page. Really I should be in North America, charting my way from the Florida coastline to Providence, Rhode Island, where my twin brother has just bombed a hospital for its pro-science research on embryos.
I donât know how many are dead because of him.
Linden shifts his weight restlessly. âI didnât even know you had a brother,â heâd said when I told him where I was going. âBut the list of things I donât know about you is growing longer every day, isnât it?â
Heâs bitter. About our marriage and the way it ended. About the way itâs not really over.
My sister wife looks out the window, her hair like light through autumn leaves. âItâs going to rain,â she says quietly. Sheâs here only at my insistence. My once-husband still doesnât quite believe she was in danger in his fatherâs, Vaughnâs, home. Or maybe he does believe it; Iâm not sure, because heâs barely speaking to me these days, except to ask how Iâm feeling and to tell me Iâll be discharged from the hospital soon. I should consider myself lucky; most of the patients here are crammed into the lobbies or a dozen to a room, and thatâs if theyâre not turned away. I have comfort and privacy. Hospitalization of this class is reserved for the wealthy, and it just so happens that my father-in-law owns nearly every medical facility in the state of Florida.
Because there is never enough blood for transfusions, and because I lost so much of it when I sawed into my leg in a maddened delirium, it took me a long time to recover. And now that my blood has regenerated, they want to take it a bit at a time and analyze it to be sure Iâm recovering. Theyâre under the assumption that my body didnât respond to Vaughnâs attempts to treat the virus; Iâm not sure what exactly he told them, but he has a way of being everywhere without being present.
I have an interesting blood type, they say. They wouldnât have been able to find a match even if more people donated their blood for the meager pay the hospital gives.
Cecily mentioned the rain to distract Linden from the nurse who has just sterilized my arm. But it doesnât work. Lindenâs green eyes are trained on my blood as it fills up the syringe. I hold the atlas in my blanketed lap, turn the page.
I find my way back to North Americaâthe only continent thatâs left, and even it isnât whole; there are uninhabitable pieces of what used to be known as Canada and Mexico. There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but theyâve all since been destroyed by wars so distant theyâre hardly spoken about.
âLinden?â Cecily says, touching his arm.
He turns his head to her, but doesnât look.
âLinden,â she tries again. âI need to eat something. Iâm getting a headache.â
This gets his attention because she is four months pregnant and prone to anemia. âWhat would you like, love?â he says.
âI saw brownies in the cafeteria earlier.â
He frowns, tells her she should be eating things with more sustenance, but ultimately succumbs to her pouting.
Once he has left my hospital room, Cecily sits on the edge of my bed, rests her chin on my shoulder, and looks at the page. The nurse leaves us, my blood on his cart of surgical utensils.
This is the first time Iâve been alone with my sister wife since arriving at the hospital. She traces the outline of the country, swirls her finger around the Atlantic in tandem with her sigh.
âLinden is furious with me,â she says, not without remorse, but also not in her usual weepy way. âHe says you could have been killed.â
I spent months in Vaughnâs basement laboratory, the subject of countless experiments, while Linden obliviously milled about upstairs. Cecily, who visited me and talked of helping me escape, never told him about any of it.
It isnât the first time she betrayed me; though, as with the last time, I believe that she was trying to help. She would botch Vaughnâs experiments by removing IVs and tampering with the equipment. I think her goal was to get me lucid enough to walk out the back door. But Cecily is young at fourteen years old, and doesnât understand that our father-in-law has plans much bigger than her best efforts. Neither of us stands a chance against him. Heâs even had Linden believing him for all these years.
