Wither (The Chemical Garden #1)(29)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“Brought my son back from the dead.” He puts his arm around me, kisses my temple right where Linden kissed me last night. But while Linden’s lips had been warm, and his gesture one of comfort, Vaughn’s lips send millions of insects crawling along my spine. This father and son look so eerily alike, and yet I can’t imagine two different people.

But I’m a good wife, a good daughter-in-law, and I blush. “I just want for him to be happy,” I say.

“You should,” Vaughn says. “Make that boy happy, and he’ll give you the world on a string.”

“On a string” being the operative words.

Vaughn wins the game, but my score isn’t much worse than his. I wasn’t letting him win. He did that on his own. “You’re a much better player than you give yourself credit for,” he laughs as we walk back to the mansion.

“Not good enough to best me. But good.”

I look everywhere for the path the limo took, but it’s nowhere to be found.

It’s very clear that I won’t be allowed outside unless I’m accompanied by Vaughn. At least not today. So I find Jenna, who’s curled up in my favorite overstuffed chair, her nose in a paperback with young seminude lovers on the cover; the man is saving the woman from drowning.

“I haven’t seen Gabriel,” she tells me before I’ve even opened my mouth.

“Do you think that’s strange?” I ask, taking the chair next to her.

She purses her lips and looks at me over the top of her book. She nods sympathetically. She has never been one to sugarcoat things.

I say, “Has lunch come yet?”

“Maybe we’ll see him then.” Gabriel is the only one who brings meals to our floor, unless Cecily throws a tantrum that requires more than one attendant to cater to her.

But we don’t see him. An attendant we’ve never seen—a first generation—brings us our lunch, and he doesn’t even know to look for us in the library. He has to ask Cecily where we are, and she’s in such a lousy mood after being woken from her nap that we hear her yelling at the poor man from down the hall.

“Will you quiet down?” I say, as Jenna and I gather in her doorway. The attendant looks frightened of this small pregnant fireball of a girl. But when I look at her, I can only see the bags under her eyes, the purple swollen ankles propped on pillows. “You’re going to hurt the baby if you get yourself all worked up.”

“Don’t lecture me,” she growls, gesturing wildly to the attendant. “Lecture him for being incompetent!”

“Cecily . . . ,” I begin.

“No, she’s right,” Jenna says. She has lifted the lid off one of the dishes, and she’s making a face. “This looks disgusting. What is it, pig slop?”

I look at her, shocked, and she looks right into my eyes. “I think you should go down to the kitchen and complain.”

Oh.

“I’m sorry, Lady Jenna,” the attendant begins.

“Don’t apologize,” I say. “It isn’t your fault. It’s the head cook who should be overseeing these things, and she knows we all hate mashed potatoes.” I lift another lid and crinkle my nose. “And pork. The smell alone will give Jenna hives. I’d better go down and get this straightened out.”

“Yes, of course,” the attendant says, and I think he’s shaking a little as he begins rolling the cart of lunch trays back to the elevator, with me in tow.

“Don’t mind them,” I say, and give him a reassuring smile once we’re in the elevator and the doors have closed. “It’s nothing personal. Really.”

He smiles back, glancing nervously at me in between staring at his shoes. “They said you were the nice one,” he says.

The kitchen has its usual verve, which means Vaughn isn’t nearby. “Excuse me,” the attendant says, “but Lady Rhine is here with a complaint.”

They all turn to look at me standing in the doorway, and the head cook snorts without missing a beat, and says, “This one, she doesn’t complain.”

I thank the attendant for bringing me down here, and someone takes the trays away, and I’m sad to see perfectly good food go to waste, but I came here for a more important reason. I make my way through the steam and the chatter, and I lean against the counter where the head cook is standing over her giant boiling pot. In all the commotion I know she’ll be the only one to hear me ask, “What happened to Gabriel?”

“You shouldn’t be down here asking about him. Only going to make more trouble for that boy,” she says. “The Housemaster’s had his eye on him since your botched escape.”

A fierce chill rushes up my spine. “Is he okay?”

“Haven’t seen him,” she says. And she looks at me with such a sad expression. “Not since this morning when the Housemaster called him down to the basement.

Chapter 17

I’m sick for the rest of the afternoon. Jenna holds my hair back while I retch into the toilet, but nothing comes up.

“Maybe you had a little too much to drink,” she says gently.

But it isn’t that. I know it isn’t that. I back away from the toilet and sit on the floor, my hands dropping hopelessly into my lap. Tears are welling up behind my eyes but I don’t release them. I won’t give Vaughn the satisfaction. “I have to talk to you,” I say.

I tell her everything. About Rose’s body in the basement, and about the kiss with Gabriel, and about Linden having no idea where we came from, and the absolute control Vaughn has over our lives. I even tell her about Rose and Linden’s dead child.

Jenna kneels beside me, dabbing my forehead and the back of my neck with a damp cloth. It feels good, despite everything, and I rest my head on her shoulder and close my eyes. “This place is just a nightmare,” I say.

“Just when I think it might not be so bad, it gets worse. It gets worse and I can’t wake up. Housemaster Vaughn is a monster.”

“I don’t think the Housemaster would kill his grandchild,” Jenna says. “If what you say is true and he’s using Rose’s body to find an antidote, wouldn’t he want his grandchild to live?”

I keep my promise and don’t tell her what I learned from Deirdre—that the stillbirth was no stillbirth at all. But the thought haunts me. I want to think Jenna is right. What reason could Vaughn have for murdering his grandchild? It’s true that he’s only ever had sons—maybe he prefers them—but a granddaughter would at least be useful to him as a child bearer. The daughters of wealthy families even get to choose whom they marry sometimes, and take priority over their sister wives. And Vaughn is all about finding a use for things, people, bodies—nothing is wasted.

But I know, somehow, that Deirdre and Rose were right when they heard that baby’s cry. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that Linden was away when it happened. The thought bubbles up a new wave of nausea.

And Jenna’s voice feels so far away when she asks if I’m all right and says that I look awfully pale.

“If anything bad happens to Cecily or that baby, I am going to lose it,” I say.

Jenna rubs my arm reassuringly. “Nothing will,” she says. It’s quiet for a while after that, and I think of all the horrible things that could be happening to Gabriel in the basement. I think of him being bruised, beaten, etherized.

I can’t allow myself to think he’s already dead. I think of that noise we heard in the hallway when we kissed, and how reckless we were to leave the door open, and the atlas he stole from the library that’s still sitting on my dressing table. And I know this is all my fault. I’ve brought this on him. Before I came here, he was a happily oblivious servant who had forgotten the world. It’s an awful way to live, but it’s better than no life at all. And it’s better than Vaughn’s windowless basement of horrors.

I think of the book Linden read to me while I was recovering. Frankenstein. It was about a madman who constructed a human out of pieces from corpses. I think of Rose’s cold hand with its pink nail polish, and Gabriel’s blue eyes, and the stone-small heart of a dead infant, and before I even realize I’ve moved, I’m vomiting, and Jenna is holding back my hair, and the world is spinning out of control. But not the real world. Vaughn’s world.

Cecily appears in the doorway, pale and bleary-eyed.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you sick?”

“She’ll be all right,” Jenna says, smoothing my hair back. “She’s had too much to drink.”

That’s not it at all, but I say nothing. I flush the toilet, and Cecily pours water in the rinse cup and hands it to me. I take it. She sits on the edge of the tub, groaning as she bends her knees. “Sounds like it was a fun party,” she says.

“It wasn’t really a party,” I say, and swish the water in my mouth and spit. “It was just a bunch of architects displaying their designs.”

“Tell me everything,” Cecily says, a spark of excitement filling up her eyes.

“There isn’t anything to tell, really,” I say. I don’t want to tell her about the dazzling holograms or the suc-culent dessert selection or the city full of people where I considered running away. It’s better if she doesn’t know what she’s missing.

“You two never talk to me anymore,” she says, and she looks like she’s going to get worked up again. It’s like she gets more emotional with each trimester. “It’s not fair. I’m stuck in that bed all day.”

“It really was boring,” I insist. “There were all these first generations showing me their sketches and I had to pretend to be interested. And there was an architect who gave a long lecture about the importance of shopping malls, and we had to sit in these uncomfortable foldout chairs for over an hour. I got drunk just for something to do.”

Cecily looks doubtful for a moment, but then she must decide I’m telling the truth, because her unhappiness seems to fade, and she says, “Well, okay. But can’t you tell me a story, then? What about those twins you used to know.”

Jenna raises an eyebrow. I’ve never told her about my twin brother, but she’s more intuitive than Cecily and she’s probably figuring it out now.

I tell the story of the day the twins were walking home from school and there was an explosion so loud that it rattled the ground under their feet. A genetic research facility had been bombed by first generations in protest of experiments being done to prolong the life span of new children. Cries of “Enough!” and “The human race cannot be saved!” filled the streets. Dozens of scientists and engineers and technicians were killed.