Page 93 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

"That's none of your business." Yaaf lifted one corner of his mouth in a sardonic smirk. "We don't answer to you anymore."

Navuh bit the bait. The collective read it in the set of his shoulders, in the way his hands closed on the large wheels of his chair, in the two seconds of silence while five thousand years of instinct assembled themselves behind his eyes.

"Tell me how you left the island!" The command came, wrapped in compulsion like a lance.

The collective felt it. They remembered this power. On the island, it had been everywhere, a pressure everyone was so used to that they no longer felt it, and the memory of it lived in all eight of them, the same way the memory of the sealed lab cells with glass fronts did.

What arrived now was barely a wave, and yet they had no doubt that he had thrown everything he had into it. The wave spread across the surface of the collective and found no seam, no purchase, and sluiced off them like water off a tiled wall.

The eight of them examined what was left of the most feared power in their world with mixed feelings. It wasn't fear, and it wasn't triumph. It was uncomfortably close to pity.

That's all of it,Number Five sent.That's everything he has. A fraction of what he was. A tenth. Maybe less. The fall broke more than his spine.

He's recuperating,Ravsoh cautioned.He'll grow stronger. This is his floor, not his ceiling.

Let him grow.Yaaf let the collective's verdict assemble itself. The evidence was conclusive and the merged mind didn't sentimentalize.He can climb all the way back to what he was, and it won't matter. We transcended.

"What did the clan promise you to betray the Brotherhood?" Navuh finished, and his voice rang off the concrete.

Behind his chair the goddess stood very still.

Let's give him his false victory,Yaaf sent.It will be all the more devastating when he realizes he was played.

Eight faces slackened on the same beat. Eight pairs of eyes went glossy and distant. It took effort to perform it perfectly enough to be believable, because real thralled men had micro-tremors and drifting focus, and the collective had enough experience to reconstruct every detail.

Navuh bloomed.

He straightened, and his chin lifted. The defeated resignation was gone, and his eyes filled with light. For a moment, Lord Navuh sat in that corridor in all his old glory, resurrected by nothing but the belief that eight weapons were at his disposal again.

It was unsettling to watch his reaction. The calculation moving behind his eyes, the flick of his gaze to Daniel's holstered weapon, to the phone pocket, to the cuffs on his own wrists, the future he was assembling out of their perceived obedience.

Testimony,Camdor said.Witnessed and entered.

Not yet,Yaaf said.

He let his mouth open, close, open, the hesitation of a man fighting compulsion and losing. "We can compel now. We compel through thralling, not sound waves. We just walked onto a departing ship in front of a hundred men, and not one of them noticed us, because we compelled them to look the other way."

He watched the triumph fade from Navuh's face.

"That's impossible," Navuh said. "No one can compel through thralling. Besides, compulsion is inherited, not manufactured in a laboratory."

"Oh, but it is possible." Yaaf smiled.

The Eight dropped the act as one.

Eight faces clearing on the same heartbeat, eight postures straightening in perfect unison, the synchronicity they'd spent weeks suppressing for the comfort of mothers and Guardians now displayed at full amplitude, aimed, for the first time since the escape, as a weapon.

The light drained from Navuh's eyes, his shoulders drooped, and what had inflated a moment ago collapsed the instant he realized that his last weapon had fired into his own chest.

The collective felt no triumph, but it felt satisfaction.

That was the only revenge we'll ever take, Number Three sent.

It was enough,Bardov answered.

Yaaf stepped aside. The other seven moved with him, clearing the path to the other elevator that had just arrived, and as the goddess pushed the wheelchair forward, all eight of them dipped their heads to her. Not to him. To her, deeply and deliberately, the respect of eight males who knew exactly what she was and what she'd endured and what she'd witnessed a minute ago.

Areana met Yaaf's eyes for the briefest moment, and there was accusation in her eyes that the collective deserved.