Pandemonium recap

The story runs in two threads. In the earlier one, Lena crosses into the Wilds after Alex's death at the Portland fence, is found half dead by a woman called Raven, and is taken into a homesteader camp where she is taught to survive under the rule that the past is dead. A brutal winter kills the youngest of them, and the survivors walk south to New York. In the later thread, Lena lives in the city under a false name as a cured student and works for the resistance, assigned to watch Julian Fineman, son of the head of Deliria-Free America, who has agreed to undergo a procedure that will probably kill him. A DFA rally is attacked and the two of them are seized and imprisoned underground. In captivity Julian's certainty collapses, his father refuses to save him, and Lena, who was supposed to feel nothing, escapes and goes back for him. They get out, Julian is disowned by the movement, and the two of them come together. In the final scene Alex walks in, alive, and does not acknowledge her.

Previously: in a United States that classifies love as the disease amor deliria nervosa, every citizen is cured at eighteen by a procedure that removes the ability to feel it, after which the government assigns them a spouse, a career and a number of children. Seventeen-year-old Lena Haloway of Portland, Maine wanted the cure: her mother had died of the disease and the family lived under the suspicion that came with it. Then she met Alex, a laboratory guard with a procedure scar who turned out to be an Invalid, born uncured in the Wilds beyond the border fence and living in the city under a dead boy's identity. He showed her the settlements outside, and everything she had been taught came apart. Lena fell in love, discovered that her mother had not killed herself but had been imprisoned for years in the Crypts and had escaped, and agreed to run with Alex into the Wilds. They were caught, Lena was locked in her room with her procedure brought forward, and her small cousin Grace helped her get free. Alex got her over the border fence and stayed behind to hold the guards off. Lena ran into the Wilds hearing gunfire, alone and certain he was dead.

The book alternates between two times. In the later thread, Lena is in New York City living as Lena Morgan Jones, a cured student with forged papers and a false scar, placed there by the resistance. Her assignment is Deliria-Free America, the movement demanding that the cure be given to everyone and given younger, and specifically its founder's son, Julian Fineman, who speaks at its events. She is competent, watchful and closed off, and nothing about her resembles the girl who left Portland. In the earlier thread, that girl comes over the border fence half dead, with no food, no shelter and no idea how to live outside a city. She collapses in the Wilds and is found by Raven, who drags her back from the edge of dying and takes her into a homesteader camp, where the first rule she is given is that whoever she was before does not exist any more.

In the Wilds, Lena slowly recovers and is put to work. The homesteaders live in an abandoned building on scavenged supplies, and everyone earns their place; Raven runs it with hard rules, Tack does the work nobody wants, and among the others are a small girl called Blue and a friendly older boy called Hunter. Lena is not allowed to grieve out loud, and learns to hunt, to walk long distances, and to stop expecting anything. In New York, Lena attends a DFA rally where Julian speaks. He tells the crowd he will undergo the procedure himself despite a condition that makes it likely to kill him, offering himself as proof of the movement's conviction. The rally is attacked by Scavengers, a violent faction from outside the cities, and in the chaos Lena and Julian are both seized and taken.

Lena and Julian are held underground in the tunnels beneath the city, locked in a cell together with no idea what their captors want. Julian has never spent a day among the uncured, and being shut in with one who argues with him begins to unpick the certainty he was raised on; he starts asking questions rather than reciting answers. In the earlier thread, winter closes over the homestead. There is not enough food and no medicine, people get sick, and the camp is reduced to endurance. Blue dies in it. The loss finishes whatever was left of Lena's old self, and when Raven decides that the camp cannot survive where it is and that they must walk south, Lena goes without arguing, because there is nothing behind her worth turning around for.

The march south is long and takes more from the group; by the end of it Lena is somebody who can keep walking through anything. They reach New York, where the resistance takes them in, and Lena is given papers, a name that is not hers and a place inside a cured city as an agent. That is how she came to be watching Julian Fineman. In the tunnels, captivity drags on. Demands are put to Julian's father, and the answer that comes back is that Thomas Fineman will not trade anything for his son: a boy who dies for the cause is worth more to Deliria-Free America than a boy who is ransomed. Julian is told he is going to be executed. Lena, who was sent to observe him and nothing else, finds that she cannot leave him where he is.

Lena gets out of the cell and, instead of running, goes back through the tunnels for Julian. They escape together in the dark with the Scavengers behind them, and along the way Lena stops pretending: she tells him she is uncured, that she came from the Wilds, and that everything the DFA taught him about people like her is wrong. Julian, whose father has just left him to die for the movement, has nothing to defend any more. They come up out of the tunnels into the city together, hunted by both sides, and by the time they surface Julian has refused the procedure he had publicly promised to undergo, and Lena has broken every instruction the resistance gave her.

The resistance recovers them and gets them off the streets. In the aftermath it becomes clear how little of what happened was chance, and how completely Thomas Fineman was prepared to spend his son: a martyred Julian served the movement better than a living one, and the DFA moves quickly to write him out. Julian is publicly disowned and treated as dead by the organisation he was raised to represent, which leaves him with no name, no family and nowhere to go except with Lena and the people she works for. Lena, who has spent a year following Raven's rule that the past is dead, admits to herself that she has chosen something for the first time since Portland, and the two of them come together.

Lena and Julian settle into the resistance's safe house with the DFA hunting them both and the movement's grip on the cured cities tightening. Julian has cut himself off from everything he was raised in and has only Lena and this side of the fence now, and Lena, who arrived in the Wilds a year ago with nothing, has become someone who makes her own decisions about who she keeps. Then Raven brings a new arrival into the room, and it is Alex. He is alive: he did not die at the Portland fence but was taken, held, and has come out changed. He looks at Lena as if she is a stranger and says nothing to her at all. Everything Lena built out of believing him dead, including Julian, is standing in the room with her when he walks in.

Lena and Julian get out of the tunnels together, and Julian, who was raised to believe the cure was the only safe future, chooses her and the uncured world instead. His father does not take him back. Julian is publicly disowned by Deliria-Free America and written out of it, which leaves him with nothing except the resistance and Lena, and the two of them are together at the close. Lena has stopped being the survivor who does what Raven tells her and made a decision of her own for the first time since she came over the fence. Then, in the last moments of the book, Raven brings someone into the room: Alex, alive. He did not die at the Portland fence. He was taken, held, and has come out of it, and when he looks at Lena he behaves as though she is nobody to him. The reunion Lena spent a year mourning for arrives with everything about it wrong, and it lands on the same day she committed herself to Julian.