In Carrie, he had molded a mind that was perhaps too much aware. Too sharp.

She was, unlike her sister, her own person and no one else's. She respected her father, even loved him and allowed herself to go along with his desires, but that intimate bonding that had so affected Sherry had never taken hold with her. At the center of her soul burned the conviction that what she did with her father was wrong, that ultimately she would have to escape, flee their hermetically sealed box and break out into the world beyond, a world that till now had filtered to her only through books and her father's lectures, both of which were available in abundance.

Her feet skipped lightly over the rough terrain, the bottoms turned slowly thick and hard by endless summers of climbing up and down the mountainous landscape, of racing through the limitless forests, of wading through the rocky stream beds with their frigid crystal waters… she was a child of a natural environment. It was perhaps the greatest gift her father had given her and she was so much at one with the land around her that she probably wasn't even quite conscious of it.

She knew only that her solitude was the most precious thing she had. She sought it out often.

Particularly in the past several months. That was the reason for the locked door. Let them think she slept late. By the time she returned, her father would be in the laboratory cooking up God knows what and Sherry would be blissfully involved with whatever satisfied her.

No one would notice her returning, and if they did, no one would question her.

Life in the house, to be honest, was boring. How Sherry could spend day after day, week after week, year after year mindlessly catering to the quirky whims of an old man rapidly going senile was totally beyond her ability to fathom.

Well, maybe that wasn't fair… Lucus was sharp as a razor… something about him just didn't go down quite right, and she couldn't have said what it was… she only knew that as she grew older, the calm complacency of her older sister seemed to be more and more an act worthy of loathing… was it his eyes, the way he would look at her sometimes when she would go to him, stand before him naked, waiting for his wishes to become apparent?