Page 68 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

"Our hearing is excellent," Yaaf said. "But that is not how I heard your question."

"Then how?"

"I heard it in my mind. In our shared mind."

The silence wasn't immediate. It spread out, table by table, conversation by conversation dying, until the only sound left in the party room was Bianca murmuring to her rabbit.

Sullha's stomach dropped.

25

YAAF

Why?Dumuz said inside the hive mind, and under the single word ran a current of dread so strong the other seven braced against it.You could have stopped at superior hearing ability. Look at her face; she's in shock.

Asira just got me back. Camdor's fear was sharp.If our mother panics and pulls her away from me...

Thank Mortdh, my mother is not here for this.Bardov's thought arrived wrapped in relief, and then in shame because he'd invoked the name of the false god out of habit.

Beneath the individual streams of thought, the deliberation over what to do next was running faster than speech, faster than thought, faster than anyone in the room could have followed even if they could have heard it.

The admission had been made, and it could not be taken back. Well, it could because they could thrall the memory away, butYaaf was not sorry about his decision to come clean. It needed to be done.

Not all of it, Dumuz said.

Yaaf shook his head.We tell them all of it.

It's too much, Dumuz insisted.They can't absorb all of that at once.

Yaaf let out a breath.We have nothing to be ashamed of. What we are is not less than what they hoped to find. It is more.

His answer to Mirumah had not been a slip. The spokesman's reflex had prompted the response, but he could have stopped at excellent hearing. He hadn't stumbled into the wrong fork. He had taken it with his eyes wide open.

How much is all of it?Ravsoh shifted the conversation to the practical.

I'll start at the beginning, so they can understand how we got to be the way we are. Us volunteering for the program, the enhancement protocol, the rebellion, the isolation, the merge.Yaaf sorted through the inventory at the speed of thought, and the collective sorted with him.

The thralling was already known. The compulsion was already known. The women owed their freedom to both, and every one of them had seen the guards let them walk out of the enclosure, seeing exactly what the Eight had wanted them to see.

Not the skimming of surface thoughts, though. Not yet.

Agreement moved through the link, the individual ripples settling into stillness. Eventually, the mothers would connect the dots. If they could enter another's mind to thrall them, theycould also enter it to read surface thoughts. But it didn't need to be spelled out explicitly today. There was a limit to what their families could absorb in one day, and there was a big difference between learning that the Eight shared their thoughts with each other and learning that no thought in the room was private from them. The first was an oddity. The second was a dangerous weapon.

"I should start at the beginning," Yaaf addressed their stunned audience. "To understand how we got to be the way we are, you need to hear what was done to us, why it was done, and what emerged at the end. It is not a short explanation, and parts of it are not easy to hear, so you should brace for the uncomfortable."

Chairs shifted, and Mattie leaned toward Sullha, whispering something in her ear, and then Sullha turned to Mattie and began to quietly translate what he had said.

"Like all boys from the enclosure, we were taken to the training camp at thirteen," he continued. "We all went through the same brutal regimen that turned us from boys into hardened warriors. Then, almost two years ago, they asked for volunteers for a new program. We were told we would become an elite unit, that we would become stronger, faster, sharper. The pride of Lord Navuh."

"Did you?" Mirumah asked.

"We did. But we paid a hefty price. The enhancement was done with drugs that changed how our brains worked, and many of the volunteers became unstable and uncontrollably violent. The damage was irreversible, and they had to be eliminated. There were many of them."

Zohara's hand rose to her mouth, and Baruha reached over and gripped Asira's wrist.

"What the Brotherhood didn't realize in time was that not only the violent ones were resistant to control. The rest of us were no longer as easy to brainwash into blind obedience, and since we were stronger and had abilities the regular soldiers did not, some of us decided to rebel and take over the island. You didn't witness any of it behind the enclosure walls, but half the resort was ruined, and no visitors could be brought to the island, for which many of the enclosure's women were grateful."

"We heard rumors," Rohilah said quietly. "We didn't know it was such a big thing."