Chapter 13 Sullha #2
She arched a brow. "The vegetable garden?"
"Yes." He picked up another okra pod, held it to his eye like a jeweler examining a gem, and set it down with exaggerated care. "I need to make sure you're not growing anything poisonous in here. Hemlock. Nightshade. Weapons-grade chili peppers."
The laugh that came out of her was unguarded and loud. Feyla's head snapped up at the sound, and Mahra stopped weeding and stared.
"Weapons-grade chili peppers?" she repeated, and the absurdity of the phrase coming out of the mouth of an immortal warrior was so like Yaaf that the years between thirteen and nineteen melted away.
In that moment, he wasn't a dangerous stranger in a uniform. He was her old friend.
"I'm happy to see that you haven't lost your sense of humor," she said. "I was afraid that they'd beaten it out of you."
The smile vanished.
It didn't fade or diminish. It was there, and then it was not, like a light switched off.
His face returned to the hard, closed expression that turned his features from handsome to forbidding and made him look like exactly what he was, a soldier who had been forged in a place designed to eliminate everything human.
"They did," he said.
Two words. Flat, quiet, delivered without self-pity or drama, which made them worse than if he'd said them with emotion.
They were a statement of fact, the way someone might say the day was hot or the soil was dry.
A truth that required no elaboration because the evidence was sitting right in front of her.
The silence that followed was loaded with everything those two words contained. Six years of training camp. The violence that had turned a boy into a killer.
They'd beaten the humor out of him. They'd beaten the kindness out of him. They'd beaten out her friend.
And yet, ten seconds ago, he'd made her laugh.
"I'm sorry," she said, because she didn't know what else to say.
He lifted his eyes to her, and the closed expression opened just enough to let something through. A hint of warmth. "Don't be. It was done, and it made me who I am now."
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask if what they'd made was good, but she stopped herself. What could he possibly answer?
They hadn't trained him to be a savior. They had trained him to be a destroyer, and apparently, he was okay with that.
Her heart sank.
"How have you been?" he asked quietly, and the question was loaded with meaning.
He wasn't asking about her morning, her gardening, or the weather. He was asking about the six years since he'd left, and everything that had happened to her during that time.
She wasn't ready to share her experiences with him. Not now, and probably not ever. Repression of what had been done to her was the only way she could stay sane. She didn't want to relive it by talking about it. Everyone knew what happened to girls in the breeding enclosure. It wasn't a secret.
"You know how it is here," she whispered. "It doesn't get easier, but we learn to compartmentalize, to disassociate."
He held her gaze, and she could see him registering the deflection and accepting it.
"Thankfully, there are no visitors to the island right now," she added, and she could hear the hollow ring in her own voice, the practiced casualness that every woman in the enclosure used when referring to the men who were brought in for breeding.
It was a linguistic shield, a way of talking about the unbearable without breaking down.
She forced a smile. "We are on vacation, so to speak."
The words hung between them in the warm, humid air, surrounded by the smell of volcanic soil and ripening okra and the distant laughter of children who didn't yet understand the full scope of the world they'd been born into.
Yaaf looked at her with those eyes that were harder than she remembered and sadder than she'd expected, and she knew that he'd understood exactly what she'd meant by vacation. That understanding seemed to hurt him in a place that the training camp hadn't managed to cauterize.
Feyla and Mahra had gone back to their weeding, but their movements were stiff, and their heads were angled in a way that suggested they were listening to every word while pretending not to.
Sullha didn't blame them. It wasn't every day, or rather any day, that an immortal warrior was crouching in the dirt and working alongside them.
She reached for another pod, tested it, and snapped it from the stem. The routine grounded her. Hands in the dirt, eyes on the plants, steady breathing.
He was still crouching beside her, this boy who wasn't a boy anymore, this weapon who had made her laugh, this stranger whose eyes she recognized, and the air between them was full of all the things neither of them was ready to say.
She didn't know what he wanted. She didn't know why he'd come, or why he'd sought her out, or what the inspections were really about. She didn't know what had happened to the other soldiers who had worn the same expression as he did.
Did all soldiers serving in the same unit adopt the same mannerisms over time?
She didn't know anything, really, except that he was there, sitting in the dirt next to her and picking okra as if the past six years hadn't happened.