24. Sullha #2
"Perfect." Yaaf folded himself down onto the floor, sitting cross-legged beside her five-year-old son.
He bent his head over the cars, listening to Tomek explaining the racing rules, which were long, contradictory, and heavily weighted in Tomek's favor.
"That's cheating," Yaaf said.
"It's not cheating. It's my race, so I make the rules."
Sullha pressed her lips together to hold the laugh in and glanced at her mother.
Leehy was watching Yaaf, but not in the glossy unseeing manner she looked at most things. Her eyes were focused, moving from him to Tomek's bright face and back, and there was approval in her expression, which Sullha had never seen on her before.
Leehy caught her looking and turned away. She headed toward the food table, and the moment was gone.
Mattie clapped her hands. "Food is ready, please fill your plates."
Bowen translated, and people started drifting toward the food table, including Tomek, who collected his cars, stuffed them in his backpack, and handed it to Sullha. "I'm going to eat, Mama. Can you hold it for me?"
"Of course, sweetie." She shouldered the backpack. "Nana can help you fill your plate."
When he joined Leehy in line at the table, Sullha and Yaaf were suddenly alone.
Yaaf held out his hand, and as she put hers into it, his fingers closed around hers, warm and familiar.
A hand clasp was all they could have in a room full of mothers and Guardians and her son and her own mother. It wasn't remotely enough, and as his thumb moved once across her knuckles, her breath turned shallow.
"You look amazing," he said in a near whisper.
She smiled, feeling suddenly shy. "It's the dress. The sandals. The hair products."
He shook his head. "It's you. You are radiant."
"Mama!" Tomek arrived with a full plate. "You need to stand in line. Nana says that if you don't, all the food will be gone before you get any."
Sullha looked up at Yaaf. "We should do as he says."
"We should." He was still regarding her with that heat in his eyes that was making her weak in the knees.
Once everyone had plates piled with food, people sat in the groupings Mattie and Anita had prepared and got busy eating and chatting, and for a while it was perfect. But then things started to unravel.
Even though the Eight weren't sitting together, their synchronized movements were very notable. They all lifted the same hand to their mouths at the same time, put it down in the same manner, and reached for a glass of juice at the same time.
The mothers began to notice that there was a slight delay before their sons answered their questions. Sullha saw it in their questioning expressions and looks exchanged between Zohara and Baruha across the tables.
Then Bianca swept her arm out, toppling her cup, and as the cup skidded and tipped off the table's edge, the two soldiers nearest to her moved at the same instant, two hands shooting out in perfect mirrored symmetry, and one caught the cup a hand's width from the floor while the other was already there beneath it. Not a drop had spilled.
Bianca laughed and clapped.
Rohilah thanked them.
But Mirumah's eyes moved from one soldier to the other and narrowed. And Karina, who missed nothing, set her fork down.
Sullha was the only woman in the room who knew the why, and it was lodged under her sternum like a stone. It was only a question of when the seams burst open.
She got up and went to the side table where the coffee stood, mostly because Yaaf was there, refilling his cup.
"They are starting to notice," he said quietly without looking at her.
"They need to be told."
"I know." He took the cup from her and refilled it. "You said you had a list of questions for me."
She laughed under her breath. "If I start on the list, we will be here until tomorrow. I'm saving them for a real visit. When we have some privacy."
He looked around the room. "This is probably all the privacy we will have as long as we are here and the visits are supervised."
He was most likely right, and it made her heart sink because she'd imagined them spending time alone with each other.
She turned the cup in her hands. "I'll ask you one. The smallest." She looked up at him. "You are smiling in the photograph on my phone. You almost never smile. Who took it and chose to put it in the directory?"
Something eased in his face, a relief because it was really an inconsequential question.
"Bowen took our pictures and told me to smile for you."
"Sullha!" Mattie's voice sailed across the room, bright and terrible in its timing. She needed translation for something, and she needed it now.
Yaaf's smile said later .
Sullha crossed the room to Mattie.
"I need you to ask if any of them have allergies. There are nuts in the cake."
"I've never heard of anyone with allergies in the enclosure. But I'll ask."
As she'd expected, no one had any known allergies, or even knew what allergies were. There was no word for that in the island's tongue.
Mattie started cutting the cake.
"We were given special training," Yaaf suddenly said, seemingly to no one.
Mirumah, who was sitting with Dumuz on the other end of the room, turned to look at him with a frown. "Why did you answer for my son?"
Yaaf winced. "My apologies. I'm usually the spokesman for our group. It's a reflex to answer questions no matter which one of us they are directed at."
Mirumah still seemed troubled. "How could you have heard my question over all the noise in here?"
"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.