Today, we continue with Operation I Hate Mail For Some Reason.

“Is it strange that I feel better going into a den of rebels than I did when I had to entertain the women of the Italian royal family?”

Maxon laughed. “Only you.”

You and every other MC in this genre.

It helps that we already know these rebels are completely harmless.  I mean, they’re the “we only steal books” rebels, and they’ve outright said they aren’t going to hurt you, and also in general their ‘rebellion’ has been pretty neutered, so yeah.

It was hard talking over the rumble of the engine and the squeal of the wheels

Aspen is a really shitty driver, methinks.

After making out in the back of the truck (because when is it ever not makeout time, apparently), they finally arrive.  They sit around and talk about the PAL’s attack, and despite the fact that the whole reason they came out here was to get ‘the real information’…it’s all exactly what we already knew.

The August asks for weapons, saying that they could fight the other rebels if only they had more than bricks and rakes.  …but isn’t that what the PALs have, too?

Honestly, my deep-seated suspicion of August isn’t being helped by this.  He comes in as an admitted rebel and with no proof of his good intentions and already he’s lured the prince into a vulnerable position and is asking for arms.  This is starting to look like a con game played against an especially trusting mark.

Honestly, I don’t even understand the whole rebel-vs-rebel thing.  Mostly because they’re talking about it like it’s happening in a vacuum.  I know the army is tied up in some war that we haven’t heard about for a whole book and a half now, but is there no police force?  Neighborhood watches?  Mercenaries?  Don’t even try to tell me that private security companies are gone. 

Maxon does not, it turns out, agree to give them guns, but only because he can’t figure out the logistics of it, but he says he’ll try to get someone to train them.  Then they leave.

Outside there’s a crowd of hungry people trying to steal food from the truck, but of course the truck is empty.  One of them recognizes America, and then a fight breaks out.  One of the hungry guys has a gun, too.  How did they get guns but the ‘nice’ rebels with (supposedly) tons of local support are completely armsless?

America gets grazed by a bullet, and she describes the initial injury as “I felt something funny in my arm”  …wow, you can just feel the tension and pain dripping off the page, can’t you?

She climbs over a wall and runs away, but the rest of the boys are stuck in the fight, so she’s on her own.  As she’s hiding, she runs across a homeless girl who decides to help her.

The homeless girl points out that only rebels have guns, which means that the guys in the alley were either PALs, or Augustus is a big fat liar.  Naturally, I lean towards the latter.

The girl’s name is Paige, and she gives us her whole backstory before informing us that she’s now a prostitute.  She says this because she assumes that America is homeless, too, and in need of work, so she’s offering to let America into their prostitution ring.

America, ever our flat little pancake of a protagonist, barely has a thought for that.  Mostly she just goes “aw, she seems nice.”  Jesus Christ on a cracker, book.  It’s bad enough that you keep throwing in heavy shit just for the sake of darker and edgier, but you’re not even doing anything with it.  (I do really like Paige’s practical attitude towards it, though.  It sucks and she cries a lot, but at the same time, it’s just something that sucks, it doesn’t have that “oh my good, my soul was sucked out by a penis and now I’m shattered” attitude of so many prostitute stories.  But at the same time you can read her attitude as pretty heartbreaking because she talks about all this bad shit that’s happened to her like it’s just what she expects.  It’s only when America shrugs it all off that I get really angry.)

America hesitates long enough for the boys to find her in the truck, and they take Paige along with them back to the palace.