Chapter 19 Dave
DAVE
The Dormant enclosure was just as sprawling as the collective memories of the eight who were Dave had suggested, but their childhood perspective had been limited to the sections where children were permitted.
From an adult's vantage point, the enclosure was a self-contained settlement.
The dormitory buildings, single-story and as basic as the soldiers' barracks, were arranged in rows along paved pathways.
A central courtyard held a covered communal kitchen and dining area that was open sided to let the breeze through.
The kitchen had long counters for serving food, and the simple tables and benches of the dining area were shaded by a broad metal roof.
During storms, heavy-duty roller curtains were dropped to block the onslaught.
Beyond the dormitories, a recreation yard stretched to the far wall, bordered by low benches and a few scraggly trees and bushes that provided patches of shade.
It wasn't a prison in the traditional sense.
It was more like the penal colony Dimitri had told Dave about, the place the Russian government had sent him to as punishment for crimes he had not committed.
The Russians no longer called them gulags, but according to Dimitri, the official name was the only thing that had changed.
Prisoners were still shipped to remote camps in Siberia, still forced to perform hard labor under brutal conditions, and still treated as expendable resources rather than human beings.
The Dormant enclosure operated on the same principle.
It wasn't punitive like the gulags, but it was confinement dressed up as purpose, cruelty, and violation justified by the end product.
The women produced warriors the way Dimitri's fellow prisoners had produced timber and gravel.
They had no choice, and no one with the power to stop it cared to end the practice.
It was the cornerstone of the Brotherhood's operations.
Without the breeding program, there would be no new warriors to grow the army.
Other than the massive wall separating the enclosure from the rest of the island, there were no cells, no bars, and no chains.
The women moved freely within the compound, and the children ran and played in the yard, seemingly carefree, but Dave knew better.
The children knew, at least the older ones, but this was their world, and they didn't know anything better.
This was their normal.
But there was nothing normal about eight immortal warriors inside the enclosure, walking in formation with nearly identical expressions on their faces.
The Eight tried to make it look less disturbing by assuming more individual facial expressions, but it was difficult to do while thinking with what was basically one mind.
The women nearest the gate saw them and froze for a moment before scattering to gather children and steer them toward cover. The response was coordinated without being organized, the instinctive behavior of a population that rightfully considered male visitors as trouble.
Within less than a minute, the central courtyard was empty except for Dave.
Number One stopped walking and looked around at the vacant pathways, the abandoned benches, and the curtains being drawn across dormitory windows.
"They're terrified of us," Number Eight said.
"This is to be expected," Number One said.
"We are eight armed immortal warriors who are not supposed to be here.
" He glanced at the other seven as if he needed to gauge their response.
"Let's try to act more like individuals.
We are scary enough without the added strangeness of our collective.
Voicing our thoughts makes it seem as if we are conversing. "
A woman emerged from behind the kitchen building. She was an older-looking human, with gray streaking her dark hair and a wary expression on a face that reflected the hardships she had lived through.
She walked toward them slowly, her chin raised, her hands visible at her sides, trying to project confidence, but her eyes betrayed her fear. The woman had probably assumed the role of intermediary for the others, which was admirable given how terrified she was.
She stopped some distance away from them and regarded them with dark, assessing eyes. "Your kind is not supposed to be here. What do you want?"
"We are conducting an inspection on behalf of Lord Losham," Number One said. "We mean no harm to anyone. We are just observing."
The woman's expression didn't change, but something flickered behind her eyes. Disbelief, maybe. "Then go ahead and observe." She waved her hand around.
"I'm looking for someone," Number One said. "A woman named Sullha. She's nineteen."
The woman's mouth narrowed. "Why?"
"I knew her when I was a boy. We were friends before I was taken to the training camp."
His reply was met with silence. The woman studied Number One's face, searching for something, though Dave doubted she would find it. The training camp and the enhancement process had changed them beyond recognition. There was nothing left of the boys they had been.
"There is no Sullha here," the woman said.
She was lying.
Dave didn't need to probe deeply to know it. The lie sat on the surface of her thoughts, thin and transparent, driven by her protective instincts. Beneath the lie, the truth was simple. She knew exactly who Sullha was and where she could be found.
Dave could have pushed. A flicker of compulsion and the woman would have told him everything, guided him to the right building, the right room, the right person. But something in the way she stood, chin up, hands steady, lying to protect a girl she cared about, stopped him.
She reminded him of what Mattie had said about the mothers. That the blankness was armor. That the turning away was a defense. This woman was defending Sullha the only way she could, with a lie that could cost her dearly.
Dave respected that.
"Thank you," Number One said. "We will just look around."
The woman's jaw clenched, but she said nothing and dipped her head as Dave walked past her and continued into the compound.
The information he needed was already in his possession, harvested from the surface of her mind in the brief moment before he had decided not to push deeper.
Sullha was in the recreation yard, on the far side of the compound.
She had afternoon childcare duties, watching over the younger children while their mothers did other things.
Dave walked through the compound slowly, his eight bodies striding down the central pathway and making an effort not to appear synchronized.
Women watched from windows and doorways, some clutching children, others standing alone with expressions that ranged from fear to cold hostility.
A few watched with a terrible blankness that Dave recognized because he had seen it on his own mothers' faces in eight sets of childhood memories.
The dormitories were clean but sparse. Through open doorways, Dave glimpsed narrow beds, shared dressers, and children's drawings taped to walls.
The drawings were the most human thing in the compound, bright splashes of color depicting suns and flowers and stick figures.
The small artists were not very talented.
The girls were allowed to draw. The boys were discouraged from doing anything that was considered feminine, which had been fine with the Eight since none of them enjoyed coloring.
As they passed a dormitory entrance, a small girl of about four peeked around the doorframe and stared at Dave with enormous brown eyes. She didn't run. She didn't cry. She just stared, with the solemn curiosity of a child too young to have learned fear.
They all raised their hands and waved at her.
The girl ducked back inside.
We should stop doing that, the collective thought. We are scaring the women and children.
The recreation yard opened up beyond the last row of dormitories.
It was a large, flat expanse of packed dirt with a few structures that served as play equipment.
There was a wooden climbing frame, a set of swings with chains that needed oiling, a sandbox that had seen better days.
Dozens of children were scattered across the yard, some playing, some sitting in clusters, some arguing over a game of stones.
Dave remembered that game. All eight had played it at times. All it required was four rounded rocks per player and good acting skills.
Several women sat on benches scattered around the playground, but the collective zeroed in on the one with shoulder-length hair that was sitting near the climbing frame.
She was smaller than average, looking almost like a child herself, especially since she was sitting with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them.
Sullha.
Number One recognized her before the name attached itself to the face.
It was the way she sat, the particular angle of her head when she tracked the children's movements, the habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear with a quick, impatient gesture.
She had done the same thing as a girl, sitting on the bench in the yard while the boys raced and wrestled.
She watched with the quiet, knowing eyes that had made Number One feel like she could see right through him.
The gap-toothed skinny girl was gone, replaced by a young woman whose beauty was muted by weariness and whose eyes were guarded.
Dave stopped at the edge of the yard, his eight bodies standing in a loose semicircle that was supposed to imply a gathering, and watched her from a distance of twenty meters more or less.
When she finally noticed them, the blood drained from her face. She unfolded from the bench and stood, positioning herself between Dave and the children.
Her sudden movement alerted the children to Dave's presence as well, and they went quiet. Two of the youngest ones pressed against her legs. A boy of perhaps five or six stepped forward and stood beside her with his little fists clenched and his soft jaw set in a futile defiance.
Dave reached into Sullha's mind.
He did it gently, the lightest possible touch, skimming the surface thoughts without penetrating deeper. He didn't want to violate her privacy, only to see if she recognized Number One, only to understand what her life had been like after he'd left.
Her thoughts were a cascade of fear and protectiveness.
The children. She had to get the children inside.
Who were these soldiers, and what did they want?
Had someone done something wrong? Were they here to take one of the boys?
None of them was thirteen. The oldest was only nine, and they never took anyone under thirteen.
But rules could change, and nobody bothered to tell the women when they did.
The boy standing beside her, the one with the clenched fists and the defiant jaw, was only five years old, and he was hers.
The knowledge unfolded in Dave's consciousness like a flower opening in accelerated time.
Sullha had given birth to him when she was fourteen.
The father had been one of the selected males brought in for breeding, a stranger whose face she remembered with the kind of clarity that trauma preserved.
The boy's name was Tomek, and he was everything to her.
The reason she had the strength to get up in the morning.
The reason she volunteered for childcare duty every day.
The reason she hadn't surrendered to the blankness that claimed so many of the other women, the ones who had stopped feeling because feeling hurt too much.
She loved him with a ferocity that burned so brightly in her thoughts that Dave almost flinched from it.
Mattie had been right.
Not all the mothers detested the children that had been forced upon them.
Some of the mothers could still love the result of their own violation.
Not all of them, perhaps, and not always in ways that were visible to the children who were eventually taken from them, but the capacity was there, buried beneath layers of trauma and survival instinct and the deliberate suppression of attachment that the enclosure's conditions demanded.
Sullha loved her son, and the thought of losing him terrified her. It eclipsed everything else in her mind.
Number One took a step forward.
Sullha pulled Tomek behind her. "He's too young," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word, but held. "The rules say thirteen. He's only five."
"We're not here for the children," Number One said.
She didn't believe him.
"We are not here to take anyone," Number One repeated. "We are conducting an inspection. That is all."
Sullha's eyes moved across the eight of them, searching each face for the lie.
Her gaze lingered on Number One a fraction longer than the others, and something crossed her expression.
Not recognition. She couldn't possibly recognize the boy she'd known in the enhanced soldier standing before her.
But something. A flicker. A half-formed sense that this particular face was connected to a distant childhood memory.
It was enough. Dave pulled back from her mind and stepped away.
All eight of him turned and walked toward the compound's gate, leaving Sullha standing in the yard with her son pressed against her side and the other children clustered behind her like chicks behind a hen.
They stopped by the guards, thralling them to not think about Dave's visit, to push it to the back of their minds as a foggy memory they weren't certain of.
With that done, they got into the Humvee.
Number Seven started the engine.
"There are about twelve hundred women in there," Number One said. "Maybe more. And children. Hundreds of children."
The collective processed the number in silence.
Twelve hundred women. Hundreds of children.
The scale of Mattie's request, which had seemed abstract when discussed in the lab, now had faces and dormitories and a boy named Tomek who stood in front of his mother with his fists clenched because he thought he could protect her.
"We need to return here," said Number Eight. "Make a better assessment. We can't leave anyone behind."
His statement carried an emotional charge that rippled through the collective like waves created by a pebble cast into water.
Number Eight, the youngest, whose memories of the enclosure were the freshest, whose mother, Vinnah, hummed when she thought no one was listening, didn't get to see his mother.
They hadn't found Vinnah today. They hadn't looked for Asira, Number Four's sister. They had found Sullha and her son, and that had been enough to tip the scales.