Delirium recap

In a United States where love is diagnosed as a disease and every citizen is given a procedure at eighteen that removes the ability to feel it, seventeen-year-old Lena Haloway is counting the days to her own operation. Her mother died of the disease and Lena wants nothing more than to be safe and ordinary. At her evaluation she notices a young man watching her, and when he turns up again he is Alex, a guard at the laboratories who claims to be cured. He is not: he is an Invalid, born in the Wilds outside the fences, living in the city under a dead boy's identity with a forged scar. Alex shows Lena the country beyond the border, they fall in love, and everything she believed about the disease and the government stops holding. She discovers that her mother was not a suicide but a prisoner in the Crypts for years, and that she escaped. With Lena's procedure days away, she and Alex plan to run for the Wilds. They are caught, Lena is locked up, and their escape ends at the fence, where Alex stays behind so that Lena can get over it.

In this United States, love is a diagnosed illness, amor deliria nervosa, and the government cures it: at eighteen every citizen undergoes a procedure that removes the capacity to feel it, after which they are evaluated, assigned a match, a college and a number of children, and released into an orderly life. Seventeen-year-old Lena Haloway lives in Portland, Maine with her aunt Carol, her uncle William and her cousins. Her mother died when she was six, of the disease, after three procedures failed to take, and the family has been under a shadow ever since. Lena wants the cure badly, because being cured means being safe and beyond suspicion. On the day of her evaluation, where a panel of examiners decides the shape of her whole future, the session is thrown into chaos, and in the middle of it Lena catches sight of a young man on the observation deck who is watching her and laughing. The evaluation has to be rescheduled, and Lena goes home with her results unsettled and her attention caught.

It is Lena's last summer before the procedure. She runs every morning with her best friend Hana, who has begun edging toward things that are not permitted: unapproved music, unsupervised parties, questions about whether the cure takes away more than the disease. Lena is nervous about all of it, aware that her family's history means the regulators watch her more closely than they watch Hana. She sees the young man from the evaluation again, and this time learns his name, Alex, and that he works as a guard at the laboratories. He has a procedure scar behind his ear, so by every rule Lena knows he is safe to talk to. He goes out of his way to find her, tells her things about the city she has never been told, and Lena, who has spent her whole life being careful, keeps going back.

Alex takes Lena through a gap in the border fence into the Wilds, the country outside the cured cities, which she has been taught is empty and poisoned. It is neither: there are settlements out there, and people living uncured. Alex tells her the truth about himself. He was born in the Wilds, he has never had the procedure, his scar is a forgery and his identity belongs to a boy who died. He came into Portland to live among the cured and has been doing it for years. Everything Lena has been taught about the disease, about the Wilds and about the people who run her city turns out to be arranged rather than true. She is frightened enough to leave, and she comes back, and after that she and Alex begin meeting in the places the patrols do not go.

Through the rest of the summer Lena and Alex meet in secret, and Lena falls in love, which she recognises symptom by symptom from the description of the disease she was raised on. She stops recognising herself: she lies to her aunt, skips work, and starts noticing how much of the city's order rests on fear. Her rescheduled evaluation gives her a date for her procedure and a match, a boy called Brian Scharff whom she has met once and is expected to marry. Meanwhile the city tightens. Raids and inspections become more frequent, regulators appear on the streets in numbers, and a girl from Lena's school, Willow Marks, is caught with a boy and dealt with in a way that leaves nobody in any doubt about what happens to people who are found out. Hana, meanwhile, is going to parties Lena will not go to, and the distance between them grows.

Lena finally tells Hana the truth about Alex, and the friendship strains rather than mends. Hana takes her to one of the unapproved parties, and the regulators raid it: dogs, floodlights and men with batons come through the crowd, and the young people there scatter into the dark. Lena is hurt getting away and it is Alex who finds her and gets her clear. The raid changes the temperature of the whole city. There are arrests, there are lists, and there are questions about who was there. Lena's family becomes suspicious of her, her aunt watches her constantly, and the procedure that was a distant certainty is suddenly very close. Alex begins talking about not going back at all, about crossing into the Wilds and staying there, and Lena, who a few months ago wanted only to be cured, starts listening.

Lena learns what actually happened to her mother. She was not a suicide. She was taken and held for years in the Crypts, the city's prison and asylum, in a cell where she counted the time by scratching the wall, and she got out: she escaped, and nobody in the family was ever told. Lena's understanding of her own childhood, of her aunt's silence and of what the government does to people who cannot be cured comes apart at once. She and Alex settle on a plan: on the day before her procedure they will go over the border fence together and live in the Wilds, and Lena will leave Portland, her family, and the safe unremarkable life she was going to have. The city is watching more closely than they realise, and the days before the date run out faster than they can prepare.

Lena is caught before she can go. Her family boards her into her room and her procedure is moved up to the next morning, on the understanding that the operation will put right whatever she has become. Grace, her small silent cousin, is the one who gets her a way out. Alex comes for her, and the two of them run through Portland with regulators behind them, heading for the fence and the Wilds. They reach it with the pursuit almost on them; Alex gets Lena up and over and then stays on the city side to hold the guards back. Lena runs into the Wilds with gunfire behind her, alone, uncured, with nothing but what she is wearing, believing that Alex has been killed and knowing that Portland is closed to her for good.

After the raid Lena is boarded into her room at her aunt's house and her procedure is brought forward to the following morning; her family has decided the operation will fix what she has become. Grace, the small cousin everyone treats as simple, gets a message to her and helps her, and Alex comes for her. The two of them run through Portland with regulators behind them, heading for the border fence and the Wilds beyond it, where they had planned to disappear together. They reach the fence with the pursuit closing. Alex gets Lena up and over, and then stays on the city side to hold the guards off so that she can run. Lena hears gunfire behind her as she goes. She lands in the Wilds alone, uncured, with nothing, believing Alex is dead and knowing she can never go back: Portland is closed to her, her family will be told what she is, and the only life she has left is on the wrong side of the fence.