Page 5 of Dark Chains: First Link
Intent to do what?
Should she be even more afraid than usual, or hopeful?
She had no capacity for either. Hope was a dangerous thing in this place, and she had so much fear festering inside of her that adding to it could be detrimental to her health, despite her youth. Most women in the enclosure died early.
Burda was a tough cookie who'd survived by sheer determination.
Sullha had Tomek, and she needed to be there for him, not as an empty vessel with vacant eyes but as a mother who was present, who felt things, who laughed at jokes, got angry at injustice, cried when crying was warranted, and told him stories about a world she had never seen.
"Mama!" Tomek ran toward her, holding up his dirt-caked hands like trophies. "I finished!"
"Show me."
She stood and let him lead her to his section, where eight sweet potato slips stood in a reasonably straight line, each one planted at approximately the right depth, the soil around them loosened just enough.
"Pol helped me," Tomek said.
Pol, sitting at the end of the row, looked up with mild surprise at being credited for assistance he had not provided.
"You did a wonderful job." Sullha knelt to adjust one slip that was leaning sideways. "These are going to grow into big, strong plants, and in a few months, we'll dig up the sweet potatoes they produce and bring them to the kitchen. They'll be delicious."
Tomek beamed. His smile was the thing that kept the blankness away. It was the torch that burned in the corridor of her mindwhen the darkness crept in, and she protected it as fiercely as she protected him.
She wished she could raise him to be good. Gentle. Kind. The sort of boy who let his friends win races and made them laugh with absurdities delivered with a straight face.
The sort of boy Yaaf had been.
But she couldn't do that. She needed to raise him to be strong. Quick. Resilient. Smart enough to know when gentleness was safe and when it was a liability. She needed to give him armor that looked like skin, so the commanders would see a tough exterior and not realize that he still had a soul.
It was an impossible task.
Every mother in the enclosure who still cared about her son faced the same heartbreaking contradiction. How was it possible to prepare a child for a world designed to destroy everything decent ever taught to him?
Yaaf had been barely recognizable, taller, broader, harder. Every last shred of softness had been beaten out of him. He looked like a weapon wearing skin. But there had been something in his eyes.
A recognition. A hint of familiarity.
3
MATTIE
The phone rang.
Mattie stopped breathing. She didn't make a conscious decision to do it, her lungs just seized up, as if her body had concluded that the sound of her exhaling might somehow travel through the phone and alert whoever was on the other end that the call wasn't coming from the legitimate owner of the device.
It rang twice.
The room was silent except for the sound of eleven hearts beating at various speeds. Not that she could actually hear any other than her own, even though they were all crammed into the small bedroom, but she was certain that hers was the fastest.
Dimitri stood next to Petrov, who was occupying the only chair in the room and holding a notepad and a pen in his hand. The man believed that if something wasn't written down, it didn't exist.
The rest of them were seated on the two beds that had been separated and pushed against the walls in preparation for this call.
Mattie's thigh was pressed to Number One's, but neither of them was paying it any attention, she because she was nervous, and he because nothing fazed Dave.
The Eight were as calm as always, as if this one phone call wasn't about to change all of their lives. They watched Dimitri with identical focus, and they were so still that if Mattie hadn't known better, she would have thought they were statues. Even their breathing sounded synchronized, slow and controlled, as if Dave had dialed down every nonessential function to channel everything into listening.
The line rang a third time.
