Page 2 of Dark Chains: First Link
"They all looked the same to me. Same dead eyes, same blank faces."
"They didn't look the same at all. They had different facial features, different builds, and different coloring. They had just all assumed the same strange expression, but perhaps that was what they were trained to do. You know, to look intimidating. The one in front, though—" Sullha pulled a clump of seedlings apart and pressed the separated stems back into the soil. "I think it was Yaaf."
Burda sat back on her heels and looked at her. "Yaaf. I remember him. You were inseparable until they took him away."
Sullha swallowed the sudden lump that Burda's words had caused to form in her throat. "Yes."
The woman studied her with the appraising look she used when evaluating plants and people alike. "I doubt any of those things were that boy."
"Yaaf is not a thing, Burda. He's a person. They all are. It's not their fault that they were turned into machines by the training."
"Those eight soldiers were not like anything I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot in my lifetime." Burda shook her head. "Walking in lockstep with the same dead expression on their faces, and only one of them talking while the others just stared? That's not normal, Sullha. Soldiers march in formation, but that's not what they were doing. It was something else, and it was terrifying."
"I know. Tomek was so scared, and I was afraid too." Sullha's jaw tightened. "But I'm still sure that the one who spoke was Yaaf. I recognized him."
Burda paused her weed yanking and leaned back on her heels. "I don't know how you could have. None of them looked anything like any of the boys taken from here. They were so big, so hard, and their eyes were dead."
Sullha dug her fingers into the soil and pulled out a weed, shaking the dirt from its roots. "His face was different, he was taller and broader than I ever imagined he would be, and his features were sharper, harder, but it was still him." She smiled. "He grew up to be so handsome."
"They're all pretty once they turn immortal," Burda said flatly. "But that's only on the outside. They are rotten on the inside. It's like a cruel, deadly joke. The boys we knew are gone, turned into killing machines. Not that they were all good as boys either. Many of them were rotten to the core, which is not surprising given who their sires were." She shook her head. "I didn't even know that nice men existed until they started bringing the smart ones for the breeding."
Sullha grimaced. "They are better than the brutes from before, that's for sure. But some of them are strange."
"At least most of them are not cruel," Burda said. "That's what I hear from the women who still have to endure the breeding. Thankfully, I'm too old for that."
She could say that again.
But right now, there were no visitors to the island because of the construction work, and Sullha didn't want to talk about that.
"Yaaf was never rotten," she said. "He was goofy and kind." She smiled at the childhood memories. "He used to let me win when we raced in the yard, even though he was so much faster than me. He'd slow down just enough at the end, pretending that he was winded just so I could cross first. He made me laugh. He had this way of saying things with a completely serious face that were so absurd that I'd lose it, and then he'd just stand there looking confused about what was so funny, which made it even worse. He also imitated everyone, exaggerating their little quirks."
The memories were so vivid that it hurt. The boy with the serious eyes and the dry sense of humor, the one who had walked beside her in the yard and sat with her during meals and pretended to be bad at math so she would help him.
Then one morning, he and the other boys who'd turned thirteen had been marched away, and she had watched from the dormitory window, not even allowed to say goodbye.
None of them had been allowed to say goodbye.
"That was before the hormones kicked in," Burda said. "Nice boys, mean boys, shy boys, loud boys. It doesn't matter what they were before. Once the change hits and the training starts, they all come out the same. Monsters."
Sullha didn't argue. She'd never been with an immortal male, no woman in the enclosure had. That was the rule, but she'd seen enough of what the human males were capable of, and they were not even half as strong or aggressive as the immortal soldiers who had gone through hellish military conditioning.
The men brought in for the breeding had been bad enough.
Some of them, anyway.
The newer ones, the ones who had started arriving in the last few years, were a little better. She didn't know why they'd changed the type, but where the earlier males had been selected for size and aggression, physical brutes with thick necks and mean dispositions, the recent ones were smarter, leaner, quieter, and some of them were almost gentle. One had even spoken to her afterward, asked her name, and asked if she was all right. She had stared at him as if he'd been speaking a foreign language, because in a way, he had.
The only language males had spoken to her before that was the one she'd been introduced to by Tomek's father.
She didn't even know his name. She had never been told, he hadn't introduced himself, and she'd never asked because the answer would have given him substance, made him more real, and she needed him to be as abstract as possible. A malevolent shadow. Something that had happened to her body but did not live in her mind.
The problem was that the memory of his face refused to cooperate with that strategy. It lived in her nightmares with perfect clarity, preserved by the trauma. The heavy brow. The close-set eyes that had looked at her with gleeful malice.
She had been thirteen.
It was her first time being summoned to the other building.
She'd put on the clothes that had been laid out for her, things that were nicer than anything she'd ever owned, and walked to where she'd been told to go because there was no escaping her fate. The woman who'd escorted her had said nothing because there was nothing to say.
