Page 3 of Dark Chains: First Link
She'd known that day would come, and she'd thought she was prepared, but she hadn't been.
He'd been told she was a virgin. It hadn't been a surprise, and yet he hadn't even tried to be gentle. He hadn't tried to make it bearable. He had taken what he wanted from a child's body with the enthusiasm of a man unwrapping a gift, and the sounds that came out of her had meant nothing to him except confirmation that he had been given a special treat.
She wondered what he had done for the Brotherhood to earn a thirteen-year-old virgin.
Afterward, she'd gone back to her room on shaky legs, still bleeding, and had lain on her bed and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling had stared back, and neither of them had had anything comforting to say about what had just happened.
Six weeks later, she'd missed her cycle. Two months after that, the compound's doctor confirmed what she'd already known.
The monster had given her a child.
Sullha blinked and looked across the garden to where her son was now on his seventh sweet potato slip, his small hands dark with soil, his face scrunched in concentration. He was talking to Pol, who had abandoned the beetle and was watching Tomek work with the same intensity he'd previously shown the bug.
Thankfully, Tomek looked like her. He had her nose, her chin, her unruly hair. The same slightly-too-narrow face and the same brown eyes that people said were too intense. He had inherited nothing visible from that brute, and Sullha was so grateful for that that she sometimes whispered her thanks to whatever forces governed genetics, because looking into her son's face and seeing that other face looking back would have broken her.
2
SULLHA
"Tomek is a good kid." Burda pulled out a stubborn root and tossed it onto the weed pile.
"He is."
"And that's all that matters."
Sullha let out a breath.
Burda could see through people. She just had a gift for that. It was almost as if she could read people's minds. Perhaps it came from decades of watching everyone in a place where the range of available experiences was narrow enough that the subtleties became magnified.
"I was just thinking about how glad I am that he looks like me."
Burda's expression softened, which was a rare occurrence. "He's your boy through and through. He's also going to be a handful when he's older."
"He's already a handful."
"A bigger one. He's smart, and smart boys in this place..." Burda trailed off, but the sentence didn't need finishing.
Smart boys had a harder time because the available schooling was too basic, and there was nothing to challenge them. Besides, in the training camp he would need more than smarts to survive.
"I need to teach him to fight," Sullha said.
"He's five."
"And he'll be six, and then seven, and then the years will accelerate the way they always do, and suddenly he'll be twelve, and I'll have one year left with him, and I'll wish I had started sooner."
Burda was quiet for a moment. "You have a point. But you could teach him to be smart about fighting. When to duck, when to run, when to pick a fight, and when to walk away. That's more useful than knowing how to throw a punch."
"He needs to know how to do both."
"Indeed." Burda yanked out another weed. "The world is unkind to gentle souls."
The world. As if the enclosure and the island beyond it constituted a world. As if there weren't an entire planet out there that none of them had ever seen, with cities and oceans and mountains and all the things that existed only in the few books that had been allowed into the enclosure.
To Sullha, the outside world was a fantasy she rarely allowed herself to even think about. It was better to focus on what was real and immediate—the soil, the plants, the children, the daily rhythm of meals, chores, and sleep.
"I wonder why they came," Burda murmured under her breath. "The inspection excuse was thin."
Sullha had been turning that question over for days, but she couldn't come up with anything that made sense. "Maybe it's a new protocol. We've heard rumors about changes on the island. All the renovations that are going on."
