52 pages • 1 hour read
Sally GreenHalf Bad
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3: Chapters 23-34Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Second Weapon”
Part 3, Chapters 23-30 Summary
This summary section includes Chapter 23: “The Choker,” Chapter 24: “The New Trick,” Chapter 25: “The Routine,” Chapter 26: “Lessons About My Father,” Chapter 27: “Fantasies About My Father”, Chapter 28: “Thoughts About My Mother,” Chapter 29: “Assessments,” Chapter 30: “Punk.”
The narrative returns to the day after Nathan made his escape attempt from the cage. His keeper, Celia, has fitted a band around his throat with a stronger poison. Nathan knows a new escape attempt would cost him his life. The boy’s latest trick to get through his captivity is to find what he can enjoy in individual moments. He learns to focus on his breathing while running or on his fingers while doing push-ups. He says, “Celia. I admit she’s hard to enjoy, but sometimes I manage it. We talk. She’s different from what I expected. I don’t think I’m what she expected either” (157).
Nathan’s daily routine never varies. There are physical exercises and jogging, plus chores around the property like feeding the chickens, chopping wood, cooking, and cleaning. Celia is also giving Nathan self-defense lessons. They start with hand-to-hand combat and then graduate to wooden sticks that substitute for knives. In the afternoons, Celia schools Nathan by reading to him and quizzing him on the contents. She seems to favor Russian authors who write about gulags. Nathan has never mastered the ability to read easily, so he listens instead. He is also allowed to sketch pictures.
Celia gives Nathan more information about Marcus as well. The Blood Witch has killed large numbers of Fairborn Witches and some Blood Witches, who were his enemies. From some, he collected their Gifts by eating the hearts of his victims. Since his natural power is to shapeshift into animals, he often assumes the guise of a large cat or lion for such attacks. Despite this gruesome description, Nathan insists that he will never kill his father, no matter how he is coerced to do so.
Nathan is also instructed in the history of witches. According to the origin myth, there was a healer named Geeta who had two twin daughters. The younger of the twins was named Eve, and she was evil. Her elder twin was good and was named Dawn. Dawn is the ancestress of the Fairborn Witches, while Eve established the line of Blood Witches. Nathan questions this version of the story since it was invented by Fairborns.
The Fairborn faction looks down on Blood Witches because of their anarchic tendencies and their refusal to assimilate into fain communities. For their part, Blood Witches disdain the Fairborns and think their powers are weakening from living among the fain. Celia mentions Nathan’s male ancestors, all of whom died violently. She considers the boy’s female ancestral line to be irrelevant. Privately, Nathan vows to find some joy in life before he comes to the same dismal end as his male relatives.
While Nathan spends in his cage, he fantasizes about being reunited with his father. In other fantasies, he sees his mother alive and his parents together. Nathan lives happily with them forever. He also has multiple erotic fantasies involving Annalise. Nathan’s progress is now assessed monthly instead of annually. Celia records his physical skills, height, and weight. She takes photos for the benefit of the Council. Nathan is then tested on intelligence, memory, and math skills. His reading and writing are still appalling. For Nathan’s 16th birthday, members of the Council will pay a visit to observe him rather than relying on Celia’s monthly reports.
The day before the Council visit, Nathan is allowed inside to wash up. He shaves his head in a Mohawk and pierces his lip and ears to achieve a punk look. Celia thinks he looks ridiculous and insists that he make himself more presentable. That evening, he draws a sketch of her. It’s one of many, and she usually burns them. He then tries to sketch Marcus instead. Celia seems inclined to save this picture. Nathan asks if Celia would execute him if the Council ordered it. She indicates that she would, and the thought unnerves him.
Part 3, Chapters 31-34 Summary
This summary section includes Chapter 31: “A Hunter,” Chapter 32: “Gran,” Chapter 33: “Visitors,” and Chapter 34: “Codified.”
On the morning of his 16th birthday, Nathan receives a visit from members of the Council. Annalise’s uncle, Soul O’Brien, heads the group. He is accompanied by a scientist named Wallend and a Hunter named Clay. Clay’s mother was killed by Nathan’s grandmother Saba. Nathan is instructed to run the outer circuit and then fight Celia. She wins. This cycle repeats multiple times, and Nathan sustains many injuries. He is ordered to heal himself, and the visitors are impressed by his speed at healing. That evening, Celia explains that Nathan’s mother was extremely good at healing, so he must have inherited some of her Fairborn abilities, which is a point in his favor with the Council.
Autumn and winter pass with the usual routine, and Nathan begins to anticipate the arrival of his 17th birthday. He asks Celia who will give him his gifts and wonders if it will be his grandmother. Celia casually informs him that Gran passed away a month earlier. Nathan is enraged that nobody told him. He smashes a kitchen chair and gets locked back up in his cage.
A few weeks later, more visitors arrive unexpectedly—a group of Hunters, including Kieran O’Brien. They tell Celia that Nathan is to be transferred to the Council because all Half Codes need to be codified. The officials don’t explain what this means. Celia is upset at not being informed of this change. She removes Nathan’s collar and grudgingly lets him go to London.
At Council headquarters, Nathan arrives to meet with Soul O’Brien. He briefly glimpses Annalise as he waits in the hall. She seems glad to see him before being shepherded off in another direction. Soul is now the deputy Council leader and tells Nathan that he would like to give him his gifts if the boy agrees to serve the Fairborn cause. Nathan refuses, knowing that he would be ordered to kill his father. He is then locked in a cell overnight.
Nathan is sick and restless at being forced to stay indoors, but he manages to get through the ordeal. The following morning, he is taken to an examining room where Mr. Wallend will tattoo him with his status. The process is excruciatingly painful as his hands, feet, and neck are marked with the letters “B 0.5.” Wallend explains that the marks cannot be removed even if Nathan tries to heal them.
The boy is then taken to a cell that looks like a recovery room. He has managed to smuggle a nail from his cage that he now uses to pick the lock on his shackles. Then, Nathan pretends to have a seizure, and Wallend comes rushing into the room with a guard. Nathan is able to overpower them both and makes a run for it. Once he escapes the building, he winds up in an alley, unsure where to go.
Part 3: Chapters 23-34 Analysis
This segment describes Nathan’s remaining years in the cage. Part 3 resumes immediately after Nathan’s abortive escape attempt in Part 1. His keeper fits him with a band around his neck instead of his wrist, and it secretes a much more powerful poison. Any attempt at escape would be fatal this time. Since much of this section covers a description of Nathan’s daily routine during a span of two years, it focuses more heavily on Nathan’s inner emotional state and his relationship with his keeper. Significantly, the reader isn’t given the witch’s name until page 158. Prior to that point, Nathan describes her as tall, powerful, and ugly. From this point forward, he refers to her as Celia.
Captor and captive fall into a comfortable routine. While Celia certainly functions as Nathan’s jailer, she is also his teacher. Aside from training the boy in martial arts, her chief purpose seems to be indoctrination. Once again, the theme of Separating Good from Evil is explored. Celia reads a long list of Marcus’s past crimes: “Marcus is forty-five years old now, and so in the twenty-eight years since he received his Gift that averages between seven and eight killings a year” (164). He has acquired a prodigious number of Gifts by eating the hearts of other witches. It seems clear that Nathan is intended to view his father as a demonic being who deserves to be hunted and killed.
Aside from Celia’s propaganda related to Marcus, she also offers some negative commentary about Blood Witches, which Nathan summarizes:
Today Bloods mock Fairborn Witches for living closely within fain communities, for pretending to be fains. They see Fairborn Witches as becoming weaker, more fainlike, needing guns to kill, using phones to communicate. And Fairborns hate Blood Witches for their anarchy and lunacy. They don’t integrate within fain communities but don’t have a community of their own. Their marriages never last, often ending in abrupt violence. They usually live alone, hate fains and fain technology. Their Gifts are strong (170).
To some degree, this description of the differences between Fairborns and Blood Witches also speaks to the theme of Wild Versus Tame. Fairborns view Bloods as uncivilized, while Bloods view Fairborns as weak. Wild animals are always stronger than tame ones. In fact, it might be argued that the very strength of Blood Gifts is a reason for Fairborns to fear and try to eradicate them.
A similar dichotomy between good and bad, tame and wild, is repeated in the witch-origin myth that Celia recounts to Nathan. Geeta’s docile healer of a daughter is Dawn, and she establishes the Fairborn bloodline. The other daughter is the intractable, curse-wielding Eve. She is the wild child who becomes the ancestress of all Blood Witches. The story is replete with moral judgment that casts Fairborns as virtuous and Bloods as vicious. The teenage Nathan scoffs at the accuracy of the myth, but Celia piously retorts, “It’s our history” (170). Fairborns wish to control the moral high ground, and the best way to do so is to establish their origin myth as genuine history that offers a justifiable explanation for genocide.
Nathan’s confinement in a cage isn’t simply an attempt to control him physically. He becomes a captive audience, subjected to intensive indoctrination in Fairborn values. At one point, Nathan seems willing to succumb to this interpretation of reality when he thinks about his mother and the reason for her suicide:
She loved someone who killed men, women, and children, who killed the father of her children. She loved someone who ate people. And when she looked at me, her child—Marcus’s child—and saw I looked like him, did she wonder what I’d be capable of? (177).
In retrospect, Nathan’s time in the cage can be seen as a prelude to the Council’s real agenda for him. They want him to identify with the Fairborn cause. To this end, they tattoo him with an identification code indicating his Half Blood origin. While the reader won’t learn the real reason for the tattoos until a later segment, the very act of labeling Nathan yet again is an indicator of how desperately the Council wants to exert total control over his actions and his mind.
