Hey! Since I seem to be running low on fics to work on, so I decided to start another one. Like many Chemical Garden trilogy fans, I was left with more questions than answers after reading Sever. (And I despise that title and the cover. I mean, Sever? Really? I don't even understand why it's called that even after reading it.) I didn't like the absence of Maddie, the sparseness of Gabriel's appearances, and the entire characterization of Rowan. Of those three things, the last bothered me the most. I mean, Rhine works so hard to return to Rowan, and then he's a total jerk? Uh, no. Therefore, I toyed around with the idea of Rhine being reunited with Rowan in Fever and came up with these. This disregards about the last half of Fever. (Don't worry, you'll know where I am when you start reading.)

People used to call New York the city that never slept. That was back before the world was destined to die, when there were glittering skyscrapers and people buzzing throughout the streets. My dad used to tell us of streets filled with taxis, the drivers shouting in foreign languages, and hot dogs and roasted peanuts being sold on every corner. Things are different now. There are no glittering skyscrapers, only dark drab buildings that have long lost their luster. Taxis, when they're even on the street, cost an arm and a leg to ride in. People try to avoid the streets if they can, particularly girls. There is too big of a risk of being Gathered and sold into prostitution or marriage.

Gathered. I can't even think the word without thinking of my sister, Rhine. A year ago, Rhine left the house (without my permission), probably to donate blood or something for research, and never came home. This was my worst nightmare, the very reason I had never wanted my sister to leave the house. Rhine had always been considered very beautiful by my friends and various strangers growing up, and that combined with the unusual eyes we shared would make her very valuable to Gatherers.

After our parents died, Rhine and I had a system. I took care of her, made sure there was food on the table, and set up an alarm system to scare away thieves and Gatherers. My sister had always been the emotional one. She wouldn't get out of bed for days after our parents died, and seeing a young thief's dead body on our front porch made her sob uncontrollably. "Your problem is that you're too emotional," I had told her more than once. "You care too much." She would always give me this look like, 'How can I not care?' I guess in this way my sister took care of me too.

After our parents' deaths, my heart turned to stone, my long-held dreams of saving the world evaporated. Now I didn't care if the world wasted away. In fact, sometimes I fantasied about helping along. I was dreaming of bombs and fire as my gentle sister tried to revive our mother's garden. If I was a hurricane, wild and angry, Rhine was the calm waves of the river she was named after. She was the only person who could calm me, gently coaxing my anger away like a breeze blowing away leaves.

And now it was just me. I had known it would be like this eventually. The now screwed-up genetics of my generation had ensured that my sister would die at twenty and myself five years later. I didn't like to think about this. Rhine was my twin, my other half. I was the dark and she the light. It would feel like half of me was missing. I hadn't planned on losing her like this, however, suddenly and four years too early.

I was worried the first night Rhine didn't come home. The second night, I was frantic. The third night, I was angry. I was angry at my sister for being stupid enough to leave the house, angry at myself for not protecting her better, and angry at the world for making her prey. Prey for scientists, so desperate for a cure they would experiment on anyone that they were willing to pay for things as simple as blood or as complicated as a living human. Prey for Gatherers, who could sell her into prostitution, to scientists, or to a man to become his trophy wife or baby machine.

I spent five months driving around to the seediest parts of the East in a stolen delivery truck, desperately searching for my sister. Deep down, I knew Rhine was too pretty to be one of these girls in a brothel. Someone must've bought her to be his wife, which meant she could be anything. Still, I kept looking, clinging to the hope that I would see a familiar pair of mismatched eyes.

It was on one of those trips that I met Sara. She was walking along the road in a nearly abandoned part of New York. All dark hair and dark eyes and smiles, she didn't look anything like Rhine, and yet something felt familiar. I offered to give her a ride, which she surprisingly accepted. She asked what I was doing so far from the city. I said that I was looking for my sister, who I suspected had been Gathered on the street. Her eyes turned dark, and then she started telling me how her little sister, only twelve years old, had been taken by Gatherers. Sara told me how she was part of the naturalists now. I listened as she described their plans, what they wanted to do to get attention. As we were pulling into the city, she asked me if I wanted to join.

My anger had grown tremendously without the presence of my gentle sister to pull me back. I wasn't content with the world drowning in its own rot. No, I wanted it to burn. I joined Sara and her friends. There weren't a lot of us, but there was enough to make some noise. My first act as part of this rebellion was burning my childhood home. I didn't want anyone else living there, but I couldn't stay there myself. Rhine was gone, I told myself as I lit the match and threw it in the house. She's not coming back. I made sure everything valuable was safe before I burned it, mostly the chest of our parents' things kept in their backyard. I took their notebooks and whatever things of value I could find and, on impulse, my mother's flower seeds.

I threw myself into this new life. My background as the son of scientists made the others suspicious of me at first, but some of that knowledge I had picked up as a kid came in handy. I was able to make explosives, better ones than they were able to buy. Because of this, I gained a certain position within the group. The leader was a guy named Joseph. Sara was his second-in-command. Since they both liked me, I wasn't well liked within the group.

Our base was a rickety little house near what used to be the harbor. Most of the people came and went. The permanent residents included me, Sara, a kid in charge of supplies named Mac, and Joseph's cousin, a boy about six or seven years old who was mute and deformed. The boy liked staying in the house, and no one ever bothered him. The demonstrations we orchestrated were pretty low-scale: explosives wrapped around trees during speeches, small fires, etc. We were part of a larger operation in New York. Our assignment was to raise tensions but stay unnoticed.

This was my life now. Well, at least it was until a particular demonstration where I saw my sister...