Page 1 of Dark Chains: First Link
1
SULLHA
The sweet potato slips were stubborn little things, limp and pale and looking like they'd given up on life before they'd even started it, but Sullha had learned a long time ago that appearances were misleading. The most fragile-looking plants were often the toughest once they took root, and the ones that appeared strong and vital sometimes wilted at the first sign of heat.
People were the same way.
"Not so deep, Tomek." She crouched beside her son, guiding his small hand as he pushed a shoot into the dark soil. "Just enough to cover the roots. If you bury it too far, it will not be able to breathe."
"Plants don't breathe," Tomek said with the absolute conviction of a five-year-old.
"They do, actually. Not the way we do, but they take in air through their leaves and their roots, and if you pack the soil too tight or plant them too deep, they can suffocate."
He considered this with the grave expression that he wore whenever new information challenged his existing worldview. Then he loosened the soil around the slip with his fingers, very carefully, the way she'd shown him.
"Like that?"
"Perfect."
The other little ones, who were learning to plant vegetables in the children's section of the garden, were exhibiting varying degrees of enthusiasm. Sensa appointed herself supervisor and was correcting everyone else despite having planted her own slips upside down. Rinn preferred eating dirt to gardening in it, and little Pol was sitting at the end of the row, staring at a beetle.
Sullha let him stare. He would plant when he was ready, and if he wasn't ready, she would do his row after the others went to lunch.
The vegetable garden occupied a long strip along the eastern wall of the compound, shielded from the worst of the afternoon sun by a row of mango trees that were older than anyone living in the enclosure. The soil here was good, dark and volcanic, and with enough water and attention, almost anything grew. Sweet potatoes, peppers, okra, beans, leafy greens, and herbs.
Old Burda, who had been managing the garden for as long as Sullha could remember, was working on her knees in the pepper section three rows over, her gray-streaked hair tied back with a strip of fabric and her hands caked in soil up to her wrists. She had been doing this for decades, and her fingers seemed to work on their own, finding weeds to pull before her eyes did.
Occasionally, she would cast smiles at the children, which she rarely bestowed on adults. She was a bossy, crusty woman, butshe had to be to survive to old age in the enclosure. Her pride in the garden probably had something to do with her resilience, giving her a sense of purpose in addition to supplementing the kitchen with fresh produce that hadn't arrived on a boat after having ripened during transit.
Importing produce to a tropical island seemed ironic. It could have been self-sustaining if the Brotherhood had invested in growing anything other than its army of immortals, but this garden was the only one of its kind, and thanks to what grew here, the food coming out of the enclosure kitchen was probably better than any other in the Brotherhood's domain.
Well, the truth was that Sullha couldn't really be the judge of that because she had never eaten anywhere else. She and the other women were not allowed to venture outside the breeding enclosure walls, but it made sense that food made with fresh produce would taste better than food made with something that had been in transit for days or even weeks.
Today, though, those mundane matters took a back seat to the questions that had been burning in her mind since the soldiers' unexpected appearance. She needed to talk to someone about them, and no one was better than Burda.
After checking that the children were occupied, she moved closer to the woman, who was kneeling in the row next to her.
For a few moments they just worked side by side, neither of them speaking, Sullha thinning the herb seedlings that had sprouted too close together and Burda continuing her weeding.
The silence between them was loaded, or maybe that was just Sullha's impression.
Four days had passed since the soldiers had come, eight armed males with nearly identical expressions on their eight different faces. They had walked through the gate as if that was an everyday occurrence and turned the compound inside out without touching a thing. Immortal males were not allowed inside the enclosure. Even when the soldiers came for the boys, they waited outside the gate for the human guards to bring them out.
They had scared her half to death.
She'd thought that they had come for Tomek, probably because that was the thing that scared her the most. She dreaded the day he would be taken from her. The fear had been so overwhelming that she hadn't stopped to think that they never took five-year-olds and that they must have a different reason for intruding on the playground.
The explanation they provided for their unusual visit was that it was an inspection. They'd claimed that they'd been tasked with inspecting the compound, but immortal soldiers had never done that before. So why now?
"The children are busy," Burda said without looking up from her weeding. "Say what you've been wanting to say since you got here."
Sullha glanced over her shoulder. Tomek and Pol were discussing something with animated hand gestures, the other children were absorbed in their work or their play, and the nearest adult was Feyla, who was harvesting okra at the far end of the garden and was well out of earshot.
"I recognized one of them," Sullha said quietly. "Or at least I think I did. He looks so different now."
Burda's hands paused for a fraction of a second, then resumed pulling weeds. "Which one?"
"The one who did all the talking. The one in front."
