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

and sister. She talked about you too. She said she didn’t want you to find out, that she wanted to shield you from it. It was while she was here that she spotted a picture of Genevieve. This picture of Genevieve.’

He picked up a small, framed photo of a baby that was tucked into a corner alongside many other framed pictures of Genevieve as a child on a sideboard. It was a picture of her as a newborn, in a mass of white blankets.

‘I know that—’ I said suddenly. The words rush out of me. ‘I know that photograph, I’ve seen it before.’

‘Your father took the picture when Genevieve was still with you, when she was just born. He sent it to me with one of his letters. Evie was only five when she was born, she couldn’t remember her clearly from then. But she had just been going through your father’s photographs. She saw straightaway it was the same baby. And next to all the other photographs of Genevieve, growing up, she put it together and challenged me. I didn’t deny it. I could see that she knew it was her; there was nothing I could say that would make her think otherwise. But I told her that maybe I could help her get Jakob back. That there might be a way – if she could keep Genevieve’s origin a secret. He wasn’t an XC or I would not have been able to help, he would have already been with his new family. He was, like your daughter, part of a quota to be adopted.’

‘Sold, you mean,’ I say sharply.

‘Like I said,’ he continues, ‘to keep your daughter comes at a cost. Part of it is knowing this terrible truth, and the bigger part is hiding it. I chose to keep my daughter. I chose to live with it.’

‘She’s not yours,’ I almost choke on the words. ‘She’s not your daughter.’

He speaks the next words so softly they are almost inaudible, but they are lined with a steel I recognise in myself. ‘She is now.’

‘So if I don’t say anything, Mimi stays with us?’

‘Yes,’ Jonah says. ‘Another child will be found.’

I swallow hard. I feel the shadow of that other family – the other mother I will be consigning to this fate.

‘And all I would have to do is to stay quiet, stay out of the way?’

‘Knowing what you do, you will have to become part of OSIP. That’s what happened to me. Once I confronted them about Genevieve, I was forced to become part of it – if I wanted to keep her. And now she’s grown up, I want her to have the chance to be a mother. I can keep it out of my public life – the work I do for them is private – but you will most probably have to become an enforcer. You will have been provided for, by OSIP, and so you will become its feeder.’

‘Couldn’t we just stop this? Couldn’t we tell everyone what they are doing? If people knew…’

‘People do know. I knew, Evie knew, there are many more. There’s a reason everyone’s playing along. They’ve all got someone to lose. And they choose them. I’ve seen some people come close in the years I’ve been working with OSIP, threatening to come clean. Their children would have been extracted, however old they were. And it doesn’t stop once they’re grown up. If it’s not your children, it’s your grandchildren.

‘You will never have a day when you are not monitored – but if you play by the rules, you will keep her. Many are able to live like this. Many are able to bear it.’

‘Like Evie.’ Suddenly I see the past aglow with these entangled threads, they are binding weeds, strangling everything.

‘Do all enforcers know?’ I ask. ‘Do they all know what they are doing? Do they know what they are part of?’

‘Mostly not, no – but there will be a few. They will have a son or a daughter who will be taken from them if they speak up. They will be someone who knows too much but who has something to lose, a reason to stay quiet.’

‘Someone like me,’ I say.

‘Someone like you.’

THEN

The next time it happened, we were in a play park. The time after that, we were stopped while walking over to Santa’s.

Going to a playgroup. In our favourite café. The service station restaurant we happened to stop in.

Mimi became ill with another two sickness bugs and we logged them with OSIP as we had done before. The moment that we sent them through from my workSphere, an IPS sprang up immediately, for not isolating her enough.

We stopped going out after that. But she became ill again with what seemed to be another stomach flu. I took her to the hospital this time because I was worried we were not doing enough. The doctor diagnosed her with an intolerance to gluten. I asked whether we might be able to appeal against the IPS for not isolating her, as her previous illnesses were likely to be connected to her gluten intolerance, but was told that any IPS connected to health could not be appealed.

The IPSs built, they mounted. They stood upon one another’s shoulders and so they seemed taller, a tower that disappeared into the clouds. We tried to be hopeful. We tried to change, be better. We tried to second-guess our mistakes, to become psychics of our own actions. We tried to not stop trying, although every day a stagnancy grew within me, a sense of hopelessness that was becoming alive.

One day, we ventured out to Marina’s house as Santa was staying with her. We walked with Mimi in the pram. We’d packed every conceivable clothes change, we’d checked the pushchair several times before we left. Thomas was convinced, I remember, that nothing could go wrong. We would walk to Marina’s and Mimi would sleep from the motion and then once there, we