Page 34 of Dark Chains: First Link
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if what they'd made was good, but she stopped herself. What could he possibly answer?
They hadn't trained him to be a savior. They had trained him to be a destroyer, and apparently, he was okay with that.
Her heart sank.
"How have you been?" he asked quietly, and the question was loaded with meaning.
He wasn't asking about her morning, her gardening, or the weather. He was asking about the six years since he'd left, and everything that had happened to her during that time.
She wasn't ready to share her experiences with him. Not now, and probably not ever. Repression of what had been done to her was the only way she could stay sane. She didn't want to relive it by talking about it. Everyone knew what happened to girls in the breeding enclosure. It wasn't a secret.
"You know how it is here," she whispered. "It doesn't get easier, but we learn to compartmentalize, to disassociate."
He held her gaze, and she could see him registering the deflection and accepting it.
"Thankfully, there are no visitors to the island right now," she added, and she could hear the hollow ring in her own voice, the practiced casualness that every woman in the enclosure used when referring to the men who were brought in for breeding.It was a linguistic shield, a way of talking about the unbearable without breaking down.
She forced a smile. "We are on vacation, so to speak."
The words hung between them in the warm, humid air, surrounded by the smell of volcanic soil and ripening okra and the distant laughter of children who didn't yet understand the full scope of the world they'd been born into.
Yaaf looked at her with those eyes that were harder than she remembered and sadder than she'd expected, and she knew that he'd understood exactly what she'd meant by vacation. That understanding seemed to hurt him in a place that the training camp hadn't managed to cauterize.
Feyla and Mahra had gone back to their weeding, but their movements were stiff, and their heads were angled in a way that suggested they were listening to every word while pretending not to.
Sullha didn't blame them. It wasn't every day, or rather any day, that an immortal warrior was crouching in the dirt and working alongside them.
She reached for another pod, tested it, and snapped it from the stem. The routine grounded her. Hands in the dirt, eyes on the plants, steady breathing.
He was still crouching beside her, this boy who wasn't a boy anymore, this weapon who had made her laugh, this stranger whose eyes she recognized, and the air between them was full of all the things neither of them was ready to say.
She didn't know what he wanted. She didn't know why he'd come, or why he'd sought her out, or what the inspections werereally about. She didn't know what had happened to the other soldiers who had worn the same expression as he did.
Did all soldiers serving in the same unit adopt the same mannerisms over time?
She didn't know anything, really, except that he was there, sitting in the dirt next to her and picking okra as if the past six years hadn't happened.
14
YAAF
"We are on vacation, so to speak."
The words were like fuel poured on fire.
He knew what she meant, and something hot and corrosive rose in his chest, flooding his veins with a chemical urgency that the collective immediately registered.
Calm down, Number Three thought.You're spiraling.
The collective mind tried to absorb the rage and dissolve it, but Number One wasn't ready to let it go.
Vacation meant the men weren't coming. It meant a reprieve from being summoned to the breeding building and forced to service a stranger. It meant a temporary pause in the systematic breeding that had defined Sullha's life since the same day he'd been marched away, and she'd been left behind to enter her own type of hell.
Thirteen wasn't a birthday most children in the enclosure ever looked forward to. Many of the boys thought that becomingsoldiers would bring them glory and looked forward to their transition, but they were not happy to leave their mothers and sisters behind, knowing that they would never get to see them again.
Release your anger, Number Five thought.You are going to frighten her.
I'm not saying anything to scare her.
