Page 98 of Dark Chains: First Link
"Why so long?"
"Kitchen rotations are scheduled in advance, and I don't have your talent to manipulate people's minds. I can't go to Hillah and ask her to change Vinnah's shift. I can only change mine."
That made sense.
There was another question that had been nagging at him since his first visit to the enclosure, but he'd avoided it because asking it felt like opening a door he wasn't sure he wanted to open. He needed to know, though, and it was cowardly to keep postponing it.
"How is my mother doing?" he blurted out before he could stop himself.
Sullha went still for a moment and then turned to face him.
The look in her eyes made his gut twist. It was the same as when she'd talked about the years before Tomek. Profoundly sad. "I’m so sorry. I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"Your mother passed away over two years ago."
The words reached him, traveled through the node that was Number One, and entered the collective consciousness where they were processed by eight minds simultaneously.
His mother was dead.
The information should have been absorbed the way all information was, cataloged, assessed for relevance, and filed away, but he couldn't do that. It cut through him so deeply that even his other seven parts couldn't mend the wound.
It shouldn't have affected him like that.
He remembered his mother's face in the softened, imprecise way that childhood memories were preserved, and none of them were good. She had not been affectionate, she had not told him she loved him, and she had performed just the basic duties of a mother because she had to.
She'd always made him feel like he was a painful reminder of what had been done to her.
None of that mattered now, though.
What mattered was that she was gone, and he hadn't known, and nobody had told him, and the years during which she had still been alive, and he could have perhaps found a way to see her, were gone too.
The collective tried to absorb the pain, to disperse it across eight minds the way they attenuated anger and fear, but this was different. This was grief, and it couldn't be diluted. It spread through the collective like ink through water, coloring everything it touched the color of mourning.
"I'm so sorry." There was a sheen of tears in her eyes. "I assumed the boys who were taken away were notified when someone in their family passed away."
"The soldiers aren't told anything about the families they leave behind. We stop being sons and brothers the day we walk out the gate. We become soldiers."
"I'm sorry. I should have thought of that."
He hated that she felt the need to keep apologizing. She hadn't done anything wrong.
"It's not your fault, Sullha. How did she die?"
"She got sick. The doctor came, examined her, and said there was nothing he could do."
Nothing he could do.
It was a lie. The Brotherhood had resources, but they didn't want to waste them on a woman in the enclosure who had already given the Brotherhood what they wanted and couldn't give more because she'd gotten sick. They had just let her die because she had been of no more use to them.
The rage that surged through him this time was different from the anger he'd felt before. It was older and colder, and it came from the part of him that was still Yaaf, the boy who had been taken away from everything he knew and forged into a killing machine.
Mattie had told him that his mother had probably pushed him away to protect herself, but he hadn't understood it then. Couldn't. He understood it now.
The collective held his grief with care, seven minds surrounding the eighth's pain and providing structure for it. They were not trying to fix or erase it, but they were making sure that it didn't destroy him.
You didn't know, Number Three thought.There was nothing you could have done.
