saw during the cow incident. She feels attracted to him. Although he has the neck scars that show he is cured, he pays attention to her in a way that makes her nervous. He asks her to meet him at the beach, and Lena almost does it. At the last second however, she changes her mind and goes home.

Lena decides to forget about Alex. She wants to spend her summer having good, clean fun with Hana. Hana, however, wants to rebel a bit. She invites Lena to an underground party where they can hear live music that is very unlike the censored songs they normally hear. Because of her family history, Lena has far more experience with the consequences of rebellion. The two girls fight, and Hana suggests that Lena is too weak to rebel. Lena hears this comment as a challenge. That night, she sneaks out of her house and finds Hana at the party.

To Lena’s shock, the party is co-ed. Uncured boys and girls drink alcohol, dance, and even touch each other—all highly dangerous, forbidden behaviors that are likely to infect them with amor deliria nervosa. Even though the music is beautiful, drawing Lena in, the whole scene is too much for her to handle. She refuses to stay and hang out, and Hana refuses to leave. Lena leaves on her own, feeling that her friendship is crumbling. On her way out, she runs into Alex, who confesses that he has been admiring her from afar from a long time. He has seen her out running, and he thinks she looks like a happy, uninhibited person. Lena, who does not consider herself pretty or remarkable in any way, is flattered that someone would pick her out and pay attention to her. Even though she knows it is wrong, she lets Alex dance with her and agrees to meet him at the beach the next day.

On their date, Lena tells Alex about her family history. For some reason, the cure for amor deliria nervosa did not work on her mother, even though the scientists performed the operation three times. Lena’s early life was infused with love—a fact that she knows is shameful. When the scientists scheduled her mother to undergo the operation a fourth time, with no anesthetic, her mother committed suicide by jumping off a cliff into the ocean.

Lena expects Alex to be disgusted by this story, as most people are, but he seems to feel sorry for her instead. She confesses that she sometimes imagines her mother swimming away to the Wilds instead of dying. When Lena mentions the Invalids beyond the city’s borders, Alex stiffens up. He confesses that he is not who she assumes him to be. He is an Invalid who was born in the Wilds, and both of his parents are dead. He came to the city at the age of ten in order to help with the resistance, which is larger and more powerful than the government admits. The cure scars on his neck are fake; he has never undergone the cure. When she hears this, Lena panics and runs away.

For days after this experience, Lena checks herself for signs of the delirium, but she seems to be okay. Lena resolves to be a model citizen, to carry herself with the imperturbable demeanor of a person who is already cured. She works at her uncle’s store during the days, and she spends evenings with her family. Once she goes for a run and finds a note from Alex—“I’m so sorry. Please forgive me”—in a secret spot they have discussed. She makes no effort to reply. Instead she prepares for and takes her repeat evaluation, hiding herself beneath an acceptable demeanor and answering all the questions perfectly. She receives good scores, an acceptance to college, and a list of the four boys considered appropriate for her to marry after graduation. They are all middle class and unremarkable, like her. She ranks her choices arbitrarily and soon afterward receives word that she will spend the rest of her life with her third choice, Brian Scharff.

One day Lena runs into Hana, with whom she has not spoken since the night of the party. It turns out Hana has been trying to get in touch, but Lena’s aunt Carol has not passed on the messages. Lena knows this is probably well-intentioned on Carol’s part. The girls will both soon be cured, and their friendship will not matter so much afterward. Still, Lena is relieved to have her friend back in the meantime. Hana confesses that she is going to another party tonight, but Lena refuses to go along.

Lena’s sister Rachel and her husband, David, come over for dinner that evening. Lena used to idolize Rachel, but their relationship has cooled since Rachel was cured. After dinner, everyone hears a raid approaching. Raids happen every few months. Groups of part-time police officers, called regulators, search houses at random in order to look for evidence of sympathizer activity. They often hurt innocent people, too, so their arrival is always frightening. The regulators pass by Lena’s house, but she worries that they will find Hana’s party and arrest the attendees. She sneaks out and makes her way to the house where the party is taking place. Just before she warns everyone that it is a raid night, the regulators burst in.

The regulators set dogs on the partygoers and beat people at random with nightsticks. Lena joins a stampede toward the doors, but just when she thinks she can get free, a dog bites her. A regulator stands over her, smiling, obviously relishing her pain as he raises his nightstick to beat her down. Just then, Alex appears and rescues her. He leads her outside and helps her hide in a bad-smelling shed. While he doctors her leg, Lena tries to come to grips with her new understanding of her world. After the ferocity of the regulators’ attack, she can no longer assume that the authorities are the peaceful protectors she has always believed them to be. The only person at the party who protected anyone was Alex, an Invalid and an outcast, a boy who stands in opposition to everything she has been taught as truth.

Lena and Alex spend hours hiding in the shed. She asks him to tell her more about his life, and this time she accepts him for who he is. She realizes that the government lies about almost everything—so she reasons that the government’s claims about amor deliria nervosa may be lies too. When she and Alex kiss, she decides she does not care if love will kill her. The feeling is too wonderful to resist.

The next day, Lena calls Hana to see if she is okay, but Hana does not answer her phone. Lena has to work at her uncle’s store, and Alex comes in to buy something while she is at the register. She hates pretending not to know him, so she arranges for him to sneak into the back room. As she waits for him, Hana comes in crying, upset about the regulators’ attack on the party. When Alex arrives, Hana senses that he and Lena are in love. Lena tells the whole story, including the part about sneaking out to the party to warn Hana of the raid. Hana becomes an ally and offers to act as an alibi whenever Lena sneaks out to meet Alex.

For the next couple of weeks, Lena spends a great deal of time with both Alex and Hana. Delirious with happiness in both her love affair and her friendship, she tries not to think about the upcoming operation that will cure her of her attachments to other people. Instead she focuses on having good experiences now. She gets so deeply involved in her relationship that she manages to avoid thinking about her upcoming marriage to Brian Scharff. When Aunt Carol announces that Brian and his mother are coming over to meet Lena, she balks and says she does not want to see him. Carol insists, and Lena has to sit through an embarrassing afternoon with a nerdy, sickly boy she has no interest in marrying. He is not a terrible person, though. When he and Lena speak alone, he confesses that he can tell she is infected with amor deliria nervosa. He was infected before his cure as well, but he feels better and happier now. He promises that Lena will soon feel better, too. Lena does not want the cure anymore, but she knows that Brian is trying to be kind. She touches his hand, and then she realizes that Alex is watching from across the street. Alex runs away looking hurt and confused, and Lena thinks she may have lost him forever.

That night, Lena goes to find Alex, and it turns out he is not angry. He suggests running away to the Wilds, and she confesses that she is afraid. All her life, she has feared love not only because society says it is wrong, but also because her mother committed suicide. She describes her mother more closely, and Alex goes pale. He recognizes the description—and he thinks she may still be alive.

The next day, Lena and Alex meet up at the crypts, a prison complex where criminals, mentally ill people, and rebels are locked up for life. Alex, who has a job as a security guard, bluffs his way inside and shows Lena the solitary confinement ward where the worst rebels are kept. There has recently been an escape. One woman prisoner who could not be cured of the delirium scratched the word love into the wall thousands of times during her years of imprisonment. She spent so much time at it that the guards stopped paying attention, and she was eventually able to tunnel out. Lena looks into the cell and sees a dagger-like pin that her mother used to wear. Alex was right. Lena’s mother is still alive, and free—but Lena has no idea where she is.

After seeing this, Lena decides she has to run away with Alex. She knows she will never be able to come back to the city afterward. Unlike Alex, a nobody who was able to falsify papers for himself, she will be known and at risk of execution by the authorities if she ever returns. She decides it does not matter. Aside from Alex, the only people she cares about are Hana and her little cousin, Grace, who has also lost her mother. It is not practical to take Grace along, but Lena invites Hana to come. Hana, however, cannot bring herself to give up her comfortable life and embrace the unknown.

As they prepare to run away, Lena and Alex use an abandoned house as a hideout for their supplies. One night they arrive to find the gate locked, and they realize too late that they have been discovered. They run away in opposite directions, but a regulator clubs Lena in the head and knocks her out. She awakes back at home. Aunt Carol, Rachel, and several regulators demand that she tell them who infected her. They drug her at night and keep her tied to her bed as they make arrangements to get her cured early.

The situation improves slightly when Hana comes to visit and agrees to take Alex a note. That night, Lena wakes up to find that Grace has sneaked into the room and untied her hands. Lena goes to the window and sees Alex coming on a motorbike. She leaps out the window, and they speed away with the regulators in pursuit. On the way, Alex makes Lena take over the driving. He says that when they arrive at the fence that marks the boundary of the city, she has to climb it without waiting for him. He promises that he will be right behind her. Lena does as he tells her, but when she gets over the fence, she sees that he has not followed. He has been shot, and he is covered in blood. He mouths a final word to her: “Run.”

Lena does what Alex wants, understanding that he sacrificed himself in the hope that she will live. As the story ends, she is still running, unsure what her future will hold but secure in the idea that love is stronger than any force of separation.