The Boundless Sublime (23 page)

I don’t know how many days passed before the door finally opened. It could have been as few as six, or as many as sixty. But it did open, and a huge figure filled the doorway, silhouetted in blinding fluorescent light from the corridor.

It was Val. I was surprised he was still alive. I was surprised anyone was still alive in the world.

He stepped into the room, and light spilled in after him. I cowered away from it. Val raised a finger to his lips, urging me to stay silent. He reached into his pocket and pulled
out a handful of snow peas, placing them carefully on the floor between us. Val bent over and removed the tape from my mouth, more skin coming away with it. I said nothing. I didn’t want to hurt him with my words. I wasn’t sure I even knew how to make words anymore.

I groped towards the food with cracked, peeling fingers, and raised a snow pea to my mouth. My tongue felt enormous. I tried to bite down, and one of my teeth wobbled dangerously, as if it were no longer anchored to my jaw. I gnawed at the snow pea with my back molars. The roughness of it cut my mouth. I tried to swallow, but I’d forgotten how. I gagged and spluttered. Val waited silently while I choked down the green pods. The food was alien and strange, sliding down my throat, coating my shiny, pink insides.

Val leaned over to replace the tape over my mouth. I tried to show him with my eyes how grateful I was, how much I appreciated his kindness. He didn’t look at me as he left, and I welcomed the return of the darkness as the door closed behind him.

I curled back into my corner, and slipped into a dreamless sleep.

Val came regularly after that. I didn’t know how often. Every day? Each time he brought something – snow peas, strawberries, diced carrot. Sometimes he brought a handful of supplements and a glass of sulphurous water. The pills were difficult to swallow, and I retched as I tried to choke them down, spilling water all over myself.

I knew better than to talk to him.

I knew what I was. What I deserved.

When he came in I crawled to the back of the room and hunched down on the floor to show him respect. I didn’t try
to meet his eyes. To touch him. I scraped myself against the floor and waited until he’d gone before I gobbled up the few meagre offerings he left behind.

Perhaps this was how my life would be, now. Perhaps I would live here forever, in this tiny room.

There were worse ways to live.

Finally, Zosimon came. He crouched down beside me, unperturbed by my filth. He pressed a cool cloth to my forehead, raised a glass to my lips.

‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right. I promise. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’

He brought in a tub of water and carefully sponged me. He dressed me in clean, dry clothes, and fed me thin juices, wiping my mouth to catch any spills. He spoke to me in soft tones. He forgave me for letting my body take over. For what I’d done to Anton and Fox.

Under his gentle care, I was finally elutriated. For days, he nursed me back to life, whispering secrets about the future, about the Scintilla. About how when I became sublime, he and I would float right up into the sky, boundless and golden and shining from within. I drank in his words, my eyes never leaving his face. He was everything.

‘It’s time for you to rejoin us,’ he said at last. ‘We need you, Heracleitus. Darkness is coming, and we need you.’

I nodded, my eyes swimming with tears of gratitude. ‘Thank you, Daddy.’

13

He led me from the tiny room along the corridor and out into the courtyard. The light was blinding. It pierced my skull like a white-hot knife sliding in through my ocular cavity. I’d forgotten the world was so big. So open. I was afraid the sky might swallow me up. Daddy took my hand, as if he could sense my fear.

‘It’s okay,’ he murmured. ‘Daddy’s here.’

His dry hand engulfed mine, and his strength flowed into me. He took me to the Inner Sanctum and sat me down on one of the large soft cushions. He passed me a smooth object, and I stared at it for a moment before recognising it as my phone. The hunger I’d felt for it had gone, the addiction broken. Now I regarded it with a mix of disgust and confusion. How had this simple, flat device had so much power over me? How had I let it enslave me? Let it fill me with poison and toxicant lies?

‘Speak to your mother,’ said Daddy. ‘She will be eager to hear from you.’

I switched the phone on, and my fingers moved over the screen robotically, my body remembering what my mind didn’t. I lifted the phone to my ear. I could feel radio waves and electricity seeping in through my skin, making my pulse slow and my teeth ache. I longed to be rid of it.

‘Ruby? Is that you?’

I didn’t know how to answer. I wasn’t Ruby. I was Heracleitus.

‘Ruby, I miss you. But … maybe you’re doing the right thing. Maybe you need to be there right now.’

I barely recognised her voice. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a mother. Why did I need a mother, anyway? I had Daddy. I looked up at him, and his blue eyes crinkled at the edges as he smiled, encouraging and strong. Calmness radiated from him, and I let it wash over me, erasing my fears and doubts. I breathed deeply, and could smell turned earth and green leaves.

‘I understand,’ said the woman on the other end of the phone. ‘I – I trust you. I trust that you’ll come home when you’re ready.’

Home
. The word niggled at me, worming its way in through Daddy’s barrier of calm. I ended the call, unsettled. Daddy reached over and grasped both my hands in his. I noticed that he had dirt under his usually perfect fingernails.

Darkness is coming.

‘Well done, Heracleitus,’ Daddy said, his voice low and intense with emotion. ‘You truly are extraordinary.’

Was I?

‘Do you remember when you first spoke to your mother?’ he said. ‘When you were newly arrived at the Institute? She was nearly hysterical with worry over you, and there was nothing you could say to make it better. But this time, you deployed my technic. All the powers you have gained as you approach sublimation. And your mother responded. She was calm, trusting. You told her the truth and immediately she accepted your avocation.’

I couldn’t even remember speaking. But I must have done. Daddy was right. I was growing powerful. I was becoming sublime. Daddy was proud of me.

We went back into the courtyard, and I was struck by the beauty of the Institute. It had seemed so drab when I’d first arrived. So stark. But now I saw it for what it truly was. The concrete block walls of A Block and B Block stood strong and true, and the soaring timbers of the warehouse made it look like a cathedral. Everything was beautiful. Everything had meaning.

I looked over at the kitchen garden, and saw broken stalks and mounded earth. I frowned. It didn’t seem the right time of year for such a big harvest. The vertical herb gardens were bare, and some of their support beams had fallen down.

Darkness is coming
.

Daddy placed his palm on my back and steered me towards the space where the rest of my family was gathered, waiting. I felt a surge of love to see them all again. Lib, her face stern. Stan, bouncing on the balls of his feet and nodding as he listened to something Welling was saying. Newton, her long black hair coiled in a braid. Pippa, blinking sleepily in the morning light. Implacable Val, who had brought food when I needed it most. Other friends I had come to know over my weeks in the Institute, each one wise and beautiful and precious in his or her own way.

And Fox.

I glimpsed him and turned my eyes to the ground as emotions flooded through me. Relief. Longing. Shame.

I had to be good. Daddy’s hand was still on my back, and I focused on that, on the strength that flowed from him into me. I had to win back his trust.

The morning sun struggled over the wall of the Institute and washed me in warm light. I closed my eyes and turned my face up to it, letting the sunlight soak into my skin. I was being bathed in living actuality. It filled my body with a satisfaction that no meal had ever done. I understood, now, how
Daddy did it. How he lived on air and sunlight. It was better than anything I’d ever tasted. It was transformational.

Opening my eyes, I saw Fox again, only a few metres away from me. He looked thinner, his cheekbones more angular, his lips a little less full. But his eyes were the same, and their yearning was as painful to me as Daddy’s boot had been, sinking into the soft flesh of my belly. My skin flushed with heat, and the satiety from the sunlight began to fade, as an aching, gnawing hunger clawed its way into my chest. I bit down hard on my lower lip, and my mouth flooded with the metallic tang of blood. The pain gave me the strength I needed to tear my gaze away.

I looked over my shoulder at Daddy. Daddy. Who had saved me. I had to be strong for him.

He dropped his hand from my back. ‘You have found wisdom, Heracleitus,’ he murmured. ‘I am so proud of you. Your courage, your determination …’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘You truly are my daughter.’

I felt myself swell with pride, and the hot flush faded from my skin.

‘I’m so glad you have returned to us,’ said Daddy. ‘I will need you by my side for the coming war.’

War?

‘They’re coming, you know. They’ve been waiting for centuries. Millennia. But now they come.’

I swallowed down my questions. I’d get answers soon enough.

‘Yes, Daddy.’

Nobody commented on my return, but several people smiled and nodded, and their unspoken support warmed me to my core. I looked to Lib, but she narrowed her mouth into a flat disapproving line. I wondered if she knew what I’d done. With Fox. No wonder she was disgusted with me.
With my weakness. But I’d changed, and I’d prove it to her. I’d prove it to them all.

Daddy looked different, too. His white tunic was dirty. His hair, usually neatly plaited, hung loose and wild around his shoulders in steely tangles. His glasses were smudged and sat slightly askew on the bridge of his nose. It made him seem almost elemental, as if the sheer raw power of him couldn’t be contained by his frail meat body. My breath caught in my throat, and I was filled with awe.

‘They are coming,’ he said again, raising his voice so everyone could hear.

We waited for him to continue. I felt a chill spread through me – a heavy feeling of dread.

‘The Quintus Septum.’

The words were meaningless to me, but the foreboding in Daddy’s voice was enough. A low murmur spread through the group.

I could still feel Fox’s eyes on me. My skin prickled, but I kept my own gaze on Daddy. I had to let Fox go. There had been a time when the mere thought of his name would thrill me to my core, flooding my body in waves of longing and anticipation.

No longer.

I understood now why Daddy had punished us. Why what we’d done was wrong. My heart had been so full of Fox that I had no space for the sublime. Fox was a distraction of the flesh, dragging my actuality down into leaden toxicant mortality.

I had to learn to resist my body – its pull, its mechanical urges. Locked away in the tiny room, I had begun to push the lead from my body, down through my feet into the earth where it belonged. Now my mind was becoming sharp, and I was learning control. I was elutriated. Clear, hollow, pure.

‘Some of you will know of the assault that occurred on the Institute last night.’

Something prickled along my spine. Assault?

‘The walls of the Institute were breached, and two agents from the Quintus Septum broke in. They destroyed our crops before heading to C Block. It was at this point that I was alerted to their presence and drove them off. But it is my firm avocation that their true target was the Monkey House. They sought to steal our children. To poison them and torture them in order to reveal our secrets.’

I pictured the innocent Monkeys. Scampering all over the Institute, laughing and playing. Their lives had been so simple and carefree. Who would want to end that?

‘The Quintus Septum have declared war on us,’ said Daddy. ‘We knew this was coming.’

Fear rippled through my brothers and sisters, but I steeled myself against it. Fear was a weakness. I felt only certainty. Daddy would save us. Under his guidance, we would fight this new enemy, and we would triumph.