Requiem recap

Told in alternating narration by Lena and Hana. Lena is in the Wilds with Raven and Tack's group, with Julian beside her and Alex, back from the dead, refusing to acknowledge her and spending his time with a girl called Coral. Hana is in Portland, cured, engaged to Fred Hargrove, the city's new mayor, and unable to shake either her dreams or her guilt: before the raid, she gave the regulators Lena's and Alex's names. The government is bombing Invalid settlements and the resistance is bombing the cured cities. Lena's group reaches the crowded stronghold at Waterbury, which is destroyed from the air, and the survivors head north toward Portland for a coordinated uprising. Hana learns what became of Fred's first wife and what her marriage will require of her. The resistance breaches Portland, Raven is killed in the fighting, Hana turns against Fred and helps Lena, Grace is brought out, and the wall around the city is pulled down. Lena and Alex reconcile, and the ending is left deliberately open.

Previously: in a country that treats love as the disease amor deliria nervosa, everyone is cured at eighteen and then assigned a spouse, a job and a number of children. Lena Haloway of Portland wanted the cure until she met Alex, a laboratory guard who was secretly an Invalid living under a forged identity. He showed her the Wilds beyond the border fence, she fell in love, and she learned that her mother had not killed herself but had been imprisoned in the Crypts for years and had escaped. Caught the night before her procedure and freed with her small cousin Grace's help, Lena ran for the fence with Alex; he got her over it and stayed behind, and she believed the guards had killed him. In the Wilds she was found half dead by Raven and taken into a homesteader camp, where a brutal winter killed the child Blue and drove the survivors south. Placed in New York by the resistance under a false name, Lena was assigned to watch Julian Fineman, son of the head of Deliria-Free America. The two were kidnapped, Julian's father left him to die, and Lena went back for him; they escaped together and Julian was disowned by the movement. Then Alex walked in, alive, and looked straight through her.

The book alternates between Lena and Hana. Lena is with Raven and Tack's group in the Wilds, moving constantly because the government has stopped pretending the Invalids do not exist and started hunting them. Julian is with her, still learning how to live outside a city and completely committed to her. Alex is with the group too, alive and unrecognisable in temperament: cold to Lena, careful never to be alone with her, and increasingly in the company of a capable, friendly girl called Coral. Lena says nothing about any of it. In Portland, Hana is cured and about to marry Fred Hargrove, the young new mayor, into the best life the city has to offer. She should feel nothing much about it. Instead she is sleeping badly, dreaming, and finding that the flat calm the procedure promised keeps failing to arrive.

Hana admits to herself what she has been circling: before the raid that ended everything, she was the one who gave Lena's and Alex's names to the regulators. She did it out of fear and jealousy in the weeks before her own procedure, and the cure has not made the fact of it any easier to hold. She begins looking into what happened to the people she informed on. Out in the Wilds, the campaign against the Invalids escalates: settlements are burned and bombed, camps break up and re-form, and the resistance answers with attacks inside the cured cities, which gives the government exactly the justification it wants. Lena's group joins the general movement toward a larger gathering of resistance camps, travelling in worsening conditions with the tension between her, Alex and Julian unresolved.

The group reaches Waterbury, a crowded resistance stronghold swollen far past what it can feed or shelter, full of people who have lost homesteads and are waiting for someone to tell them what happens next. The resistance's leadership is divided over how far to escalate, and the bombings in the cured cities have hardened opinion on both sides of the fence. In Portland, Hana's wedding preparations continue, and she learns that Fred was married before her and that his first wife did not simply disappear. What she uncovers about how that marriage ended tells her precisely what kind of man she is about to be joined to, and what a wife of his is permitted to be. She is cured, she is supposed to be indifferent, and she is not.

Waterbury is destroyed from the air. The stronghold is bombed with thousands of people inside it, and the survivors scatter into the countryside with nothing; the losses are heavy and largely people who had already lost everything once. What is left of Lena's group, with Alex, Julian, Raven and Tack, comes together again afterwards and turns north toward Portland, which is both Lena's home city and one of the government's strongest points. The resistance is no longer trying to survive on the margins: the plan taking shape is to go into a cured city and open it. In Portland, Hana is married into the mayor's household and begins moving through the city with the freedom that gives her, using it for her own purposes.

Hana goes back to the street she and Lena grew up on and finds Grace, Lena's small cousin, living badly in a household that blames her for what Lena became. Fred, meanwhile, orders services cut off to the parts of Portland he considers sympathetic to the Invalids, punishing whole neighbourhoods to force them into line, and Hana watches her husband do it. Outside, Lena's group nears the city and links up with the wider resistance, and Lena comes face to face with her mother, Annabel, who survived the Crypts and has been working with the resistance since she got out. The reunion is nothing like the one Lena imagined as a child. The uprising is set: resistance fighters will move on Portland from outside while the city's own discontent is turned loose from within.

The attack on Portland begins. The resistance breaks through the perimeter and the fighting spreads into streets Lena knows by heart, past her school, her old house and the laboratories. The city's regulators and police are overwhelmed in places and brutal in others, and civilians are caught in the middle of it. Raven is killed in the fighting, a loss that guts Tack and takes from Lena the person who taught her how to survive at all. Hana, inside the city and no longer prepared to be the mayor's wife, moves through the chaos on her own account. Both narrators converge on the same few hours, and the outcome of the whole thing turns on whether Portland's people join the assault or wait for it to be put down.

Portland falls open. The wall around the city is torn down, the cured order breaks in the streets, and what replaces it is nothing anyone has planned: the government is not simply defeated, and the resistance is not organised enough to govern. Hana breaks with Fred and with the life arranged for her, meets Lena again, and helps her; Grace is brought out. Lena and Alex, after a book of not speaking, find their way back to one another, and Julian comes through what he chose. Raven is dead and many others with her. The book ends without resolving the war, on Lena's conclusion that the walls people build to keep out whatever frightens them are the thing that has to come down, and that pulling them down has only begun.

The resistance attacks Portland and gets inside, and the fighting reaches the streets Lena and Hana grew up on. Raven is killed in it, which takes from Tack and from Lena the person who had held them together since the Wilds. Hana, who has spent the book discovering what her cure did not remove and what her marriage would make her complicit in, breaks with the life arranged for her and helps Lena when it counts, and Grace is got out. By the end the wall around Portland is being pulled down, the cured city is open, and nobody on either side knows what comes next: the government has not simply been replaced, and the country beyond the fences is not organised enough to replace it. Lena and Alex find their way back to each other, and Julian survives what he chose. The book closes without settling the war, on Lena's conviction that the walls people build to keep out what frightens them are the thing that has to come down, and that the tearing down has only started.