Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (ready to read books .txt) 📕

the terms by doing that. But I can understand it. And due to our history,’ he motions between him and me, ‘I can overlook it.

‘You said you would do anything for your daughter? What if I told you that you can have her, that you could keep her – but you will need to live with a lie. A lie that you would need to protect. Could you do that?’

‘Of course I could – I’d do anything. I could do it.’

Suddenly, Jonah jumps up from his stool to standing in one movement. He turns and walks away from me a few paces. Behind his back, his fingers continue to interlace, in and out, rhythmically tapping over one another again and again.

He pauses at a framed picture of him and Genevieve, together. Genevieve is young, maybe three or four, bundled against him in a heap. His arm is locked around her.

‘You know all about Genevieve from my life document.’

Again, he speaks so softly, his voice has such a delicate quality, that I lean in to hear.

He turns back towards me, his eyes burning.

‘I love my daughter very, very much.’

I nod furiously. I’m looking, searching, for any connection between us.

‘She’s an XC baby,’ he says. That’s when I hear it. The smallest tremor, the slightest waver. It starts so imperceptibly small; a hairline crack that you might not notice at all if you weren’t paying attention. ‘XCs born so the mother does not have to go through induction.

‘The latest science. Cutting-edge technology. It would change everything. You could have a child without any cost to its mother. If it weren’t so expensive they would roll it out to everyone. Maybe it would get there one day. No more inductions. No more pain. Can you imagine that?’

I can hear him speaking these words but there’s something missing. I struggle to hear it, to make myself aware of it. It’s the crack. But it’s widening, lengthening, deepening. There’s a blackness beneath it.

‘But… but…’ Jonah stops entwining his fingers. They are motionless, slack at his side. I think of a branch lying torn from the tree, its leaves shed, black and still. ‘But… it didn’t work.’

I look up sharply.

‘It’s never worked. There’s never been an XC baby.’

I let the words sink into me. There’s never been an XC baby. I can feel them prickling me, jabbing at me, insistent. Picking a scab but the skin beneath it is raw and bloodied and sore. There’s a roaring in my ears, a pulse that throbs, a rushing that swarms through me.

Jonah continues to talk and his words run over me like water over stone.

‘It just never worked. At times it seemed like they might be close, I think it really could happen, one day, but in the meantime they learnt that there were people who would pay, who were looking for an alternative to induction.’

‘But there isn’t,’ I said. The words are on my lips before I know what they mean.

‘That’s right. Induction remains the only way to conceive today.’

‘So the XCs, the XC babies they are, they have to be…’

‘They are the extracted children.’

* * *

It chokes me.

Jonah fades into a blur.

I stumble from the stool as though I could wake myself from a lurid dream. That I could ground myself somehow to the swaying, skewered reality that I’m presented with.

A face sweeps into my mind. But it does not belong to Mimi. That surprises me. I want to think of her, I want to hold her, I just want her now. If I could hold her then I could protect her from this. But another vision, a beautiful, perfect face comes to me.

It’s Tia, I think of Tia. Her wide, darkly fringed eyes exploring my own. The last time that I saw her shiny, ballooning cheeks down-turning into a wail, over the shoulder of the enforcer who had plucked her from the floor. They disappeared around the corner; they were not seen again.

‘Every extracted child? How can – the custodians – how do you—’ There are too many questions to ask, too many insults I want to throw, too much despair; they pile into one another, they fill my mouth with revulsion.

‘How do I carry on? Knowing what I know?’ Jonah finishes for me. ‘I’ve asked myself this… I… I ask myself this.’

He pauses, looks around him as though he can find an answer there. Then he catches sight of the photo of Genevieve and him when she was just a toddler. I think of the numbers, how most children are only extracted as babies.

‘That’s why they usually extract when they’re young.’

Jonah dipped his head a little in accord.

‘And all the stuff about gestational periods and building their microbiomes…’

‘Yes, that’s part of the cover. The reason why XCs are in essence older babies to their XC parents. And living in the quarters, birth parents do not cross paths with their child again.’

Everything was unravelling, spooling outwards, further and further.

‘The compounds…’

‘They don’t exist.’

‘Mimi,’ I murmur. She’d be too old to be pass as an XC baby. Where might she have ended up if they’d taken her?

‘Your daughter’s around one now, isn’t she?’

I nod.

‘The world the way it is, there’s always a market for children even if they are not newborns.’

‘She’d be adopted?’ The word sounds strange on my lips; I thought its use was defunct in our society.

‘It happens for some people who can’t afford XCs but are rich enough to be living outside of the quarters.’

‘But what do they think happened to their birth family?’

‘That there’s been a maternal death, most commonly.’

I close my eyes; I try not to imagine it but my mind is flooded with images of Mimi, given over to strangers telling her to call them mummy and daddy, wondering where we were and why she’d been sent away. I wonder how long it would take for her to forget us.

‘I didn’t know when I first had her,’ he murmurs. His eyes flick again to the photograph of Genevieve. ‘But she got