The Boundless Sublime (40 page)

Lib’s eyes met mine, and I knew I was right.

‘My mother,’ I said. ‘How long?’

Lib took a breath. ‘A while,’ she admitted. ‘Daddy leaves the Institute sometimes, during the day, or after Family Time. He goes to the Red House, or to fast food restaurants. He likes cheeseburgers.’

I felt a wave of loathing rise in me.

‘Your mother first came here when you were at the casino. But she already knew Daddy. He had been going to see her for some time. I think since you and Fox …’ She trailed off.

I’d been right, then. He’d been planning this for months. He knew I was going to leave. He never trusted me. Not after what happened with Fox.

I handed the glass back to Lib. ‘Help me get out of here.’

Lib hesitated, then ducked her head. ‘It’ll be quiet tomorrow,’ she murmured, not meeting my gaze. ‘It’s election day. Daddy is sending everyone to hand out water at the polling places. I’ll make sure the door is unlocked.’

Election day? That meant the next day was a Saturday. Mum had said the Boundless Family would happen on Sunday. But why did Daddy want everyone out of the Institute? Did he have to prepare something, and he didn’t want anyone to see?

Lib’s hands were shaking and her eyes kept darting around, as if she was sure we were being spied on.

‘You— you have to help him. Help him get out.’

‘Him? Him who?’ Did she mean Daddy?

A small, choking sob escaped Lib’s throat. ‘Fox,’ she whispered.

I felt blanched white with shock. Fox was dead. Like Anton. Cold and dead and gone. Extinguished.

‘Daddy has him locked in his laboratory,’ said Lib. ‘In C Block, next to the Monkey House.’

My ears buzzed and my vision blurred for a moment. Had I heard correctly? I grabbed Lib by the arm, digging my fingers into her thin flesh so that she gasped out loud.

‘Fox is alive?’ My heart was beating so hard and fast it was making my teeth chatter.

She swallowed a few times to try to calm herself. I’d never seen anyone so consumed by terror.

It had been weeks,
weeks
, since I’d seen Fox. Had he been locked up this whole time? I remembered my own incarceration, how easily the pieces of myself had been stripped away. How eagerly I’d grasped Daddy when he came to rescue me. How easily my spirit had been broken.

‘Lib, why are you telling me this?’

Lib closed her eyes, and pain flashed across her face.

I stared at her, and things started to fall into place. I remembered Pippa standing up and following Daddy to the Sanctum after Family Time. I remembered how plump she looked in her sparkly top at the casino. I remembered her desperate eyes as I squeezed the handles of the boltcutters, and severed her finger. I remembered her fingers fluttering nervously over her belly.

‘Fox is yours. Your son.’

Lib nodded.

‘The Monkeys,’ I said. ‘Are they all Daddy’s?’

Lib bit her lip. ‘Not all. Sometimes women come to us with small children, or already pregnant. But … most of them are his.’

Fox’s parents weren’t dead at all. All that time Fox had spent longing for his mother, she was right there, sitting next to him at Family Time, handing out his supplements.

‘All this time,’ I said. ‘All this time you let him believe he was an orphan. You watched Daddy hurt him. You let him be locked away in a cell and tortured …’

Tears welled in Lib’s eyes.

‘How could you do it?’

Lib gave a great shuddering sigh. ‘When I met Daddy, I was broken. My life had been a string of men who wanted to use my body and cast me aside. But when I met him … Well, you know how it is.’

I did know how it was. I knew how powerful Daddy could be.

‘I didn’t expect to fall pregnant … I mean, obviously Daddy and I were …’ Lib waved a hand. ‘But it didn’t
feel
sexual. It was part of the technic. A ritual. I never imagined it could produce a baby.’

She grasped her hands together, knuckles white.

‘Things were different back then – it was eighteen years ago. Stan inherited the Red House from an aunt and we all moved in, like a real family. I gave birth there, surrounded by the others, with Daddy holding my hand. It felt so pure and perfect, bringing an innocent, uncontaminated life into the world.’

The faintest smile passed across Lib’s face, and my heart broke a little for that hopeful, deluded young woman. The smile quickly faded, and her voice shuddered as she continued.

‘After he was born, Daddy told me …’ She paused and took a gulping breath. ‘He told me that my bond with the baby was just a flesh urge. Like sexual desire. If I gave in to it,
I’d be giving in to my body, and I’d never be sublime. He said I had to be separated from the baby. He didn’t let me give him a name. He didn’t let me breastfeed. He gave the baby to one of the other women to look after. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and listen to him cry, and I’d sob and sob, my breasts leaking milk everywhere. It was proof that Daddy was right. I didn’t have control over my body. I resented the baby for taking me over so completely. I stopped trying to see him. I stopped thinking about him. Instead I thought about Daddy. Everything became about Daddy.’

I knew how easy it could be. After all, hadn’t I given up Fox too? Hadn’t I forced myself to forget about him? Believed Daddy’s stories of betrayal? Thrown myself completely into the Institute, and my quest for sublimation?

‘It wasn’t long before other children came. The Red House became too crowded, so Daddy found this place. I don’t know how. I … know he had money, somewhere. When we moved here, he set up the Monkey House. He started talking about how children don’t have the spark yet, how they were blank slates. He made us shave their heads, and stop referring to them by names or personal pronouns.’

I remembered the blank faces of the Monkeys when I’d been trying to find an escape route. I remembered the one Monkey who was always out of place. The one who’d helped me. I wondered who her mother was.

‘It makes things easier. That’s why he does it. It’s easier to let your child go when they don’t have a name, or a gender, or any features to distinguish them from the other children. They have a good life. They have healthy food and fresh air and they play all day. Could I have offered Fox such a life if I’d been on my own? Would he have been as happy?’

‘What about when he left the Monkey House?’ I asked. ‘When he joined the rest of you? With a name?’

‘I wasn’t even supposed to know he was mine,’ said Lib. ‘Daddy doesn’t let us think that way. The Monkeys are orphans, rescued from the toxicants and made pure. He is their saviour. They don’t have mothers. So Fox was just … Fox. I watched him, yes. More closely than the others. I think deep down I was proud of him. That he was so sensitive. So thoughtful. But I didn’t allow myself to
feel
anything. Because if I had, I would have also had to feel the shame. The guilt. Because I gave him up. I abandoned him.’

Lib’s body shook as she broke into sobs. ‘I only wanted him to be safe. I thought he’d be safer here than out in the world. The world had been so cruel to me. At least if he was here, I knew Daddy would look after him.’

‘But he didn’t,’ I said. ‘Daddy didn’t look after him.’

Lib closed her eyes. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘He didn’t.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to her. ‘It was my fault. I … he never would have behaved that way if it wasn’t for me.’

Lib’s mouth hardened into a thin line. ‘You weren’t the one who beat him,’ she said. ‘Daddy was so angry. I’ve never seen him like that before. He locked you away, and swore that he’d make you pay.’

My stomach turned as I thought of my mother with Daddy.
I think she’s seeing someone
. That’s what Aunty Cath had said. Had Mum done it?
Received
from Daddy? I pushed the thought away in disgust.

‘And Fox?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘I believed Daddy at first – that Fox had been an agent for the Quintus Septum. But you hear things. One of the Monkeys let something slip, and I realised he was still here. Still alive. I begged Daddy to let him out.’ She winced, and I remembered her black eye. ‘He told me if I didn’t forget about Fox, he’d kill him. So I stopped trying to save him. I let Daddy think I’d forgotten.’

Lib took a shuddering breath. ‘I know what you must think of me. I don’t expect you to understand.’

But I did understand. Daddy was powerful. The tug of his charisma was so strong it was impossible not to get pulled into his orbit. My rage at Lib dissolved into pity. She was … what? Fifty years old? And what did she have to show for her life? Lies, guilt and loss. I wondered if she would ever escape. If she would ever be able to look Fox in the eye and tell him the truth.

Fox.

Fox was alive, and I had to find him.

22

I waited through the dark silence of the night. I waited as birds began to chatter, and engines rumbled into life. I heard voices from outside, the crunching of feet on gravel.

I heard footsteps approach, and the lock on my door clicked open. Then the footsteps faded away.

I waited as everything grew quiet once more.

Then I moved.

The door swung open, and I stepped out into the corridor, listening for the faintest sound.

Nothing.

Outside, the Institute was silent and empty. The big doors to C Block were open, and all the boxes of water bottles were gone.

I crossed the courtyard quickly, and skirted around to the Monkey’s entrance. I tried the handle, and to my surprise it turned. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

At first glance, the room looked like a primary school classroom. Children sat at low tables, drawing on large sheets of butcher’s paper with coloured pencils. But it wasn’t a classroom. The Monkeys were dressed in their usual white shifts, with their pale stubbly heads. Their faces were calm – blank, even. And every single one of them was drawing the same
thing. A man with bright blue eyes, white hair and spectacles. Daddy. I looked around the room. It was papered with drawings of Daddy, stuck clumsily to the wall with masking tape. There would have been thousands of them.

It was a shrine.

They’d all looked up as I entered. Eight pairs of eyes were trained on me, wide and unblinking, like the countless blue eyes that papered the walls. With their shaved heads and shapeless white tunics, they looked like ghosts.

The tallest Monkey stood up and put her hands on her hips. ‘You again,’ she said. ‘You can’t be here.’

I remembered the promise I’d made to Val.

‘I’m here to help you,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to get you out of here. I’m calling the police. Someone will come and take you away from here, and everything will be all right.’

The Monkeys didn’t look at each other or speak. But as one, they laid down their pencils, pushed back their chairs and crawled under the table, crouching low and wrapping their little arms around their heads as if they were expecting a bomb to fall.

I got down on my hands and knees and crawled under the table too.

I touched one Monkey on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay. I’m sorry if I scared you. I promise I’m here to help. But you have to help me first.’

The Monkey didn’t respond. It was as if they had been turned to stone. I wasn’t even sure if they could hear or see me anymore.

I crawled out from under the table and realised that one of the Monkeys was still sitting at the table. It was the freckled girl. The one who ate Val’s snow peas. She was drawing intently.

‘Hey,’ I said gently.

The sound of her pencil scratching over the paper was the only sound in the room.

‘I’m looking for Fox,’ I said. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’

The girl put down her pencil and reached for a different colour.

‘Can you hear me?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

The girl’s expression didn’t change. I looked down at her drawing, and was startled to see it wasn’t a picture of Daddy. It was a picture of the beach – yellow sand and blue waves, with colourful bathing boxes lining the shore. I watched as she added some shells dotted along the shoreline.

At last she looked up.

‘Are you going to kill us?’ she asked, her voice perfectly calm.

I took an involuntary step back and raised my hands. ‘What? No. I’m not here to hurt you at all. I’m here to
help
you.’

‘Daddy told us that one day people will try to take us away,’ the girl said. ‘And that they will pretend to be nice, but really they are monsters wearing the skins of nice people, and that if we go with them they will take off
our
skin and boil our bones into soup.’

‘I promise I’m not a monster,’ I said. ‘You know me. You’ve seen me here before.’

The Monkey nodded. ‘You’re the Scintilla,’ she said. ‘Daddy says when you arrive we must be careful, because the end is close. He says if we are careful and hide from the monsters, we’ll get to be part of the Boundless Family.’

‘What is the Boundless Family?’ I asked.

The girl narrowed her eyes. ‘You should know. You’re the Scintilla. Unless you are a monster wearing the skin of the Scintilla because you boiled her bones.’

I took a deep breath. ‘You know what? I’m not a monster, but I’m not the Scintilla either. I’m just a person. My name’s Ruby. Do you have a name?’

The girl shook her head. ‘I’m Monkey.’

‘Okay, Monkey. Do you want to play a game?’

‘Daddy says games aren’t fun anymore. Daddy says we have to stay hidden. Daddy says we aren’t hungry.’

I glanced down at the children, crouched and utterly still under the table. They were so different to the giggling, scampering Monkeys I’d seen when I’d first arrived at the Institute. What had he done to them, to make them like this?

I looked down at the girl’s drawing. ‘That place,’ I said. ‘Do you remember it?’

‘It’s not a real place,’ she said. ‘I dreamed it.’

‘Are you sure? You haven’t been there? A long time ago?’

The girl gave me a little sideways frown, as if she thought I was crazy. ‘It’s not a real place,’ she said again.

I knelt down on the floor beside her. ‘It is a real place, I’ve been there.’

The girl’s eyes widened, then she shook her head.