"So he had locked her in the closet. Some of his people, ignorant and fearful, could not quite believe her illness was not contagious. Badger locked her away from them for her own safety. She had seen for herself how eager they were to get her out of their sight."
Keira has leukemia. Somehow the cancerous cells in her bones are incompatible with the alien life forms, so they are afraid of her. The people on the ranch lock her up out of fear. Eli still infects her, however. With the biological changes brought by the infection, she is eventually cured.
"They had clearly feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed."
The people of this dystopian setting have divided into to classes -- the elite and the poor. The former were motivated by their hedonistic natures to band together into exclusive communities to which they strictly adhered. After money circulated within those communities for a couple generations, the rest of the country had been impoverished. These people were the religious fanatics who tried to keep themselves pure from their indulgent neighbors.
"'It was an old passion,' he said. 'I haven't touched a violin for months. I didn't know what that would be like. '
'What is it like?' she asked.
He began to walk so that she almost missed his answer. 'An amputation,' he whispered."
Blake has led a lonely, melancholy life since his wife's death. With Keira's illness he is at his wit's end. He no longer has time for his personal goals and passions but dedicates his time to work in order to pay for her medical bills. This has caused some deep pain for him because he once dreamed of becoming a violinist, his true passion.
"'You're bright,' Lupe said to her softly. 'Very bright, but stubborn. You think you can choose your realities. You can't.'"
Blake wants to ignore Ingraham's infection. He doesn't want to believe it's possible that disease could have infected so many of his close friends. Lupe is more practical. She recognizes the danger of allowing yourself to intentionally believe something false; it leads to cognitive dissonance and most likely schizophrenia eventually.
