Page 74 of Dark Chains: First Link
"To humans, yes. Regular immortals can thrall most humans, but they can't thrall other immortals."
"Then how are you going to thrall the immortal guards outside the gate?"
He looked at her, and something in his expression changed again. The careful composure that he'd been maintaining since he'd arrived loosened, and he seemed both uncertain and smug, which was a contradiction in terms, but that was what she read on his face.
"I'm not a regular immortal, Sullha."
"What do you mean?"
He looked down at the weeds in her basket, took one out, and started twisting it between his fingers.
"I'm enhanced. About a year and a half ago, the Brotherhood started an enhancement program and asked for volunteers. They were looking for young immortals, and they promised to make us into super soldiers, stronger and better than all the others. A group of us volunteered. The scientist who designed the program didn't know that the ability to thrall or compel other immortals would be one of the side effects. Not everyone in the program experienced that particular effect, but my teammates and I did, and we took it to another level."
Sullha's mind raced. He was probably talking about the other soldiers who had walked with him into the enclosure the first time he'd come, their expressions nearly identical and their movements synchronized. The thing that had been nagging at her since that first visit, the wrongness of it that she couldn't articulate, suddenly had a name.
They'd been enhanced. Whatever that meant.
"Is that why you all looked the same?" she said. "I mean, your expressions and the way you moved?"
"Yes."
"What did they do to you?"
His hand closed around the weed, crushing it.
"The procedures involved drugs that changed our neural pathways. Made us stronger, expanded our senses, and enhanced our cognitive processing. But the side effects were terrible. Many of the volunteers became unstable. Violent. They had to be eliminated." He said the words without emotion, but the absence of emotion was itself telling. "Those who made it through decided to rebel."
Her eyes widened. "So, that was what the rebellion was about."
He nodded. "All of them were eliminated except for the eight of us. We were spared so that further experimentation could be performed on us. The original scientist was killed during the rebellion, either by his own hand or by the rebels. New scientists were brought in to replace him, and they designed a new drug regimen that keeps us more stable. But the drugs combined with the isolation changed how we think, how we process information, how we experience the world. Some of what we lost, we're glad to be rid of. Some of it..." He trailed off, looking at the squashed weed in his hand. "Some of it we miss."
She wanted to ask what he'd lost. She wanted to ask whether he'd suffered, whether he'd been afraid, and whether he'd had a choice. She wanted to ask why he was telling her this, why he trusted her with this information.
But the question that came out was the one that mattered most to her.
"So, you can thrall the guards outside the enclosure wall and the ones in the harbor?"
"Yes."
"And anyone who tries to stop us?"
He looked at her, and the ghost of a smile returned. "Yes."
Sullha looked at this man who had once been a scrawny boy with long legs and an infectious smile, who had been taken from her at thirteen and turned into something that even the other immortals feared. Who had come back and sat with her in a garden patch and made her laugh once again with absurdities delivered with a straight face.
Who offered her impossible hope.
He was telling her that he could reach into the minds of the males who kept her behind these walls and controlled her life and make them forget she existed.
The enormity of it pressed against the inside of her chest, expanding like a breath held too long. She didn't know what to do with it. Hope was dangerous in this place, and what Yaaf was offering was the most dangerous kind. The kind that had a plan behind it, a structure, a possibility that it was more than just wishful thinking.
"I'll find out about Asira and Vinnah," she said. "Give me a few days."
He nodded. "Be careful."
"I'm always careful."
He stood, brushing the soil from his knees, and looked down at her. The height difference was vast from this angle, but it didn't frighten her.
