Page 100 of Dark Chains: First Link
"I need to go," he said. "But I'll be back."
"I know."
He stood, lifted the books, and tucked them under his arm. She stood as well, and the top of her head barely reached his shoulder, but despite her diminutive stature, she possessed strength he knew he could lean on.
"Goodbye, Sullha." He stayed where he was, not wanting to leave yet.
"Goodbye, Yaaf. Don't forget to release everyone from your thrall. It's a wonder that Tomek didn't think to come looking for me yet."
She was uncomfortable about her son being thralled not to see her.
Number One nodded, and as he walked away, the thrall over the playground dissolved gradually, each person's perception returning to normal without any sense of discontinuity. To them, nothing had happened. Sullha had been sitting on that bench all along. They just didn't think to look her way.
When he walked out the front gate, the seven were waiting by the Humvee. Number One climbed into the vehicle and the others followed. Number Seven took the driver's seat and started the engine.
The Humvee pulled onto the road, and as the concrete walls of the enclosure receded in the rearview mirror, the collective turned over the revelation that had changed everything.
The path forward ran through Number One and his growing feelings for Sullha, through the warmth of her hand on his. She had offered it in comfort, but it was received as something more.
The merge with Dimitri could wait, and perhaps it would never be necessary.
But for this new path to work, Number One would need to become Yaaf again, at least in part, and that was a prospect that troubled the collective more than the operation they were planning to pull off, but most of all, it terrified Number One.
Separation, even partial, meant silence where there had been seven additional voices, and emptiness where there had been fullness, and the vast, echoing loneliness of a single mind trapped inside a single skull.
The collective had no answer for that. Not yet.
But the warmth of Sullha's touch still resonated through all of them, and it was enough.
For now.
