Dark Chains: First Link (The Children Of The Gods #107)

Chapter 1 Sullha

SULLHA

The sweet potato slips were stubborn little things, limp and pale and looking like they'd given up on life before they'd even started it, but Sullha had learned a long time ago that appearances were misleading.

The most fragile-looking plants were often the toughest once they took root, and the ones that appeared strong and vital sometimes wilted at the first sign of heat.

People were the same way.

"Not so deep, Tomek." She crouched beside her son, guiding his small hand as he pushed a shoot into the dark soil. "Just enough to cover the roots. If you bury it too far, it will not be able to breathe."

"Plants don't breathe," Tomek said with the absolute conviction of a five-year-old.

"They do, actually. Not the way we do, but they take in air through their leaves and their roots, and if you pack the soil too tight or plant them too deep, they can suffocate."

He considered this with the grave expression that he wore whenever new information challenged his existing worldview. Then he loosened the soil around the slip with his fingers, very carefully, the way she'd shown him.

"Like that?"

"Perfect."

The other little ones, who were learning to plant vegetables in the children's section of the garden, were exhibiting varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Sensa appointed herself supervisor and was correcting everyone else despite having planted her own slips upside down.

Rinn preferred eating dirt to gardening in it, and little Pol was sitting at the end of the row, staring at a beetle.

Sullha let him stare. He would plant when he was ready, and if he wasn't ready, she would do his row after the others went to lunch.

The vegetable garden occupied a long strip along the eastern wall of the compound, shielded from the worst of the afternoon sun by a row of mango trees that were older than anyone living in the enclosure.

The soil here was good, dark and volcanic, and with enough water and attention, almost anything grew.

Sweet potatoes, peppers, okra, beans, leafy greens, and herbs.

Old Burda, who had been managing the garden for as long as Sullha could remember, was working on her knees in the pepper section three rows over, her gray-streaked hair tied back with a strip of fabric and her hands caked in soil up to her wrists.

She had been doing this for decades, and her fingers seemed to work on their own, finding weeds to pull before her eyes did.

Occasionally, she would cast smiles at the children, which she rarely bestowed on adults.

She was a bossy, crusty woman, but she had to be to survive to old age in the enclosure.

Her pride in the garden probably had something to do with her resilience, giving her a sense of purpose in addition to supplementing the kitchen with fresh produce that hadn't arrived on a boat after having ripened during transit.

Importing produce to a tropical island seemed ironic.

It could have been self-sustaining if the Brotherhood had invested in growing anything other than its army of immortals, but this garden was the only one of its kind, and thanks to what grew here, the food coming out of the enclosure kitchen was probably better than any other in the Brotherhood's domain.

Well, the truth was that Sullha couldn't really be the judge of that because she had never eaten anywhere else.

She and the other women were not allowed to venture outside the breeding enclosure walls, but it made sense that food made with fresh produce would taste better than food made with something that had been in transit for days or even weeks.

Today, though, those mundane matters took a back seat to the questions that had been burning in her mind since the soldiers' unexpected appearance. She needed to talk to someone about them, and no one was better than Burda.

After checking that the children were occupied, she moved closer to the woman, who was kneeling in the row next to her.

For a few moments they just worked side by side, neither of them speaking, Sullha thinning the herb seedlings that had sprouted too close together and Burda continuing her weeding.

The silence between them was loaded, or maybe that was just Sullha's impression.

Four days had passed since the soldiers had come, eight armed males with nearly identical expressions on their eight different faces.

They had walked through the gate as if that was an everyday occurrence and turned the compound inside out without touching a thing.

Immortal males were not allowed inside the enclosure.

Even when the soldiers came for the boys, they waited outside the gate for the human guards to bring them out.

They had scared her half to death.

She'd thought that they had come for Tomek, probably because that was the thing that scared her the most. She dreaded the day he would be taken from her.

The fear had been so overwhelming that she hadn't stopped to think that they never took five-year-olds and that they must have a different reason for intruding on the playground.

The explanation they provided for their unusual visit was that it was an inspection. They'd claimed that they'd been tasked with inspecting the compound, but immortal soldiers had never done that before. So why now?

"The children are busy," Burda said without looking up from her weeding. "Say what you've been wanting to say since you got here."

Sullha glanced over her shoulder. Tomek and Pol were discussing something with animated hand gestures, the other children were absorbed in their work or their play, and the nearest adult was Feyla, who was harvesting okra at the far end of the garden and was well out of earshot.

"I recognized one of them," Sullha said quietly. "Or at least I think I did. He looks so different now."

Burda's hands paused for a fraction of a second, then resumed pulling weeds. "Which one?"

"The one who did all the talking. The one in front."

"They all looked the same to me. Same dead eyes, same blank faces."

"They didn't look the same at all. They had different facial features, different builds, and different coloring.

They had just all assumed the same strange expression, but perhaps that was what they were trained to do.

You know, to look intimidating. The one in front, though—" Sullha pulled a clump of seedlings apart and pressed the separated stems back into the soil. "I think it was Yaaf."

Burda sat back on her heels and looked at her. "Yaaf. I remember him. You were inseparable until they took him away."

Sullha swallowed the sudden lump that Burda's words had caused to form in her throat. "Yes."

The woman studied her with the appraising look she used when evaluating plants and people alike. "I doubt any of those things were that boy."

"Yaaf is not a thing, Burda. He's a person. They all are. It's not their fault that they were turned into machines by the training."

"Those eight soldiers were not like anything I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot in my lifetime.

" Burda shook her head. "Walking in lockstep with the same dead expression on their faces, and only one of them talking while the others just stared?

That's not normal, Sullha. Soldiers march in formation, but that's not what they were doing.

It was something else, and it was terrifying. "

"I know. Tomek was so scared, and I was afraid too." Sullha's jaw tightened. "But I'm still sure that the one who spoke was Yaaf. I recognized him."

Burda paused her weed yanking and leaned back on her heels. "I don't know how you could have. None of them looked anything like any of the boys taken from here. They were so big, so hard, and their eyes were dead."

Sullha dug her fingers into the soil and pulled out a weed, shaking the dirt from its roots. "His face was different, he was taller and broader than I ever imagined he would be, and his features were sharper, harder, but it was still him." She smiled. "He grew up to be so handsome."

"They're all pretty once they turn immortal," Burda said flatly.

"But that's only on the outside. They are rotten on the inside.

It's like a cruel, deadly joke. The boys we knew are gone, turned into killing machines.

Not that they were all good as boys either.

Many of them were rotten to the core, which is not surprising given who their sires were.

" She shook her head. "I didn't even know that nice men existed until they started bringing the smart ones for the breeding. "

Sullha grimaced. "They are better than the brutes from before, that's for sure. But some of them are strange."

"At least most of them are not cruel," Burda said. "That's what I hear from the women who still have to endure the breeding. Thankfully, I'm too old for that."

She could say that again.

But right now, there were no visitors to the island because of the construction work, and Sullha didn't want to talk about that.

"Yaaf was never rotten," she said. "He was goofy and kind.

" She smiled at the childhood memories. "He used to let me win when we raced in the yard, even though he was so much faster than me.

He'd slow down just enough at the end, pretending that he was winded just so I could cross first. He made me laugh.

He had this way of saying things with a completely serious face that were so absurd that I'd lose it, and then he'd just stand there looking confused about what was so funny, which made it even worse.

He also imitated everyone, exaggerating their little quirks. "

The memories were so vivid that it hurt. The boy with the serious eyes and the dry sense of humor, the one who had walked beside her in the yard and sat with her during meals and pretended to be bad at math so she would help him.

Then one morning, he and the other boys who'd turned thirteen had been marched away, and she had watched from the dormitory window, not even allowed to say goodbye.

None of them had been allowed to say goodbye.

"That was before the hormones kicked in," Burda said. "Nice boys, mean boys, shy boys, loud boys. It doesn't matter what they were before. Once the change hits and the training starts, they all come out the same. Monsters."

Sullha didn't argue. She'd never been with an immortal male, no woman in the enclosure had.

That was the rule, but she'd seen enough of what the human males were capable of, and they were not even half as strong or aggressive as the immortal soldiers who had gone through hellish military conditioning.

The men brought in for the breeding had been bad enough.

Some of them, anyway.

The newer ones, the ones who had started arriving in the last few years, were a little better.

She didn't know why they'd changed the type, but where the earlier males had been selected for size and aggression, physical brutes with thick necks and mean dispositions, the recent ones were smarter, leaner, quieter, and some of them were almost gentle.

One had even spoken to her afterward, asked her name, and asked if she was all right.

She had stared at him as if he'd been speaking a foreign language, because in a way, he had.

The only language males had spoken to her before that was the one she'd been introduced to by Tomek's father.

She didn't even know his name. She had never been told, he hadn't introduced himself, and she'd never asked because the answer would have given him substance, made him more real, and she needed him to be as abstract as possible.

A malevolent shadow. Something that had happened to her body but did not live in her mind.

The problem was that the memory of his face refused to cooperate with that strategy. It lived in her nightmares with perfect clarity, preserved by the trauma. The heavy brow. The close-set eyes that had looked at her with gleeful malice.

She had been thirteen.

It was her first time being summoned to the other building.

She'd put on the clothes that had been laid out for her, things that were nicer than anything she'd ever owned, and walked to where she'd been told to go because there was no escaping her fate. The woman who'd escorted her had said nothing because there was nothing to say.

She'd known that day would come, and she'd thought she was prepared, but she hadn't been.

He'd been told she was a virgin. It hadn't been a surprise, and yet he hadn't even tried to be gentle.

He hadn't tried to make it bearable. He had taken what he wanted from a child's body with the enthusiasm of a man unwrapping a gift, and the sounds that came out of her had meant nothing to him except confirmation that he had been given a special treat.

She wondered what he had done for the Brotherhood to earn a thirteen-year-old virgin.

Afterward, she'd gone back to her room on shaky legs, still bleeding, and had lain on her bed and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling had stared back, and neither of them had had anything comforting to say about what had just happened.

Six weeks later, she'd missed her cycle. Two months after that, the compound's doctor confirmed what she'd already known.

The monster had given her a child.

Sullha blinked and looked across the garden to where her son was now on his seventh sweet potato slip, his small hands dark with soil, his face scrunched in concentration.

He was talking to Pol, who had abandoned the beetle and was watching Tomek work with the same intensity he'd previously shown the bug.

Thankfully, Tomek looked like her. He had her nose, her chin, her unruly hair.

The same slightly-too-narrow face and the same brown eyes that people said were too intense.

He had inherited nothing visible from that brute, and Sullha was so grateful for that that she sometimes whispered her thanks to whatever forces governed genetics, because looking into her son's face and seeing that other face looking back would have broken her.