Chapter 27 Sullha
SULLHA
Yaaf was back.
Sullha felt him. It was as if the air compressed behind her, and if she doubted her senses, the startled and fearful expression on Feyla and Mahra's faces confirmed it.
Turning around, she saw him standing at the edge of the vegetable garden, silent and still like a statue.
A very handsome statue.
He looked tense, though. His shoulders were set higher than they'd been during his last visit, and there was a tightness around his jaw that hadn't been there when he'd crouched beside her in the dirt and made her laugh.
He'd been softer then, more like the old Yaaf she remembered from before.
Now he was back to being a stranger who seemed to be more machine than man.
She pushed to her feet and wiped her hands on her coveralls. "Hello, Yaaf."
"Hello."
"Third time in twelve days."
"Should I stop coming?"
"No."
He closed the distance between them in three long, purposeful strides, and even though she knew he meant her no harm, his size alone was intimidating, and she took a step back.
The other two women stilled.
Shifting her gaze from them back to Yaaf, she lifted her hand. "Don't move so fast. You're scaring them."
He halted no more than three feet away from her. "I'm just walking."
"You're striding, and they are not used to seeing soldiers here."
Understanding dawning on his face, Yaaf nodded.
The women's reactions weren't a comment on him personally. It was the accumulated weight of a lifetime of experience that had taught them that males were dangerous. Particularly the big ones like him.
He lowered himself slowly to the ground, not making any sudden movements, and crouched beside her in the dirt as he'd done before.
Was he making himself small so she wouldn't be intimidated?
It was a futile attempt because even in a crouched position, his head was almost level with hers.
Yaaf had always been tall, but back then he had been a scrawny boy with limbs that were too long for his body.
Now, there was nothing scrawny about him.
He was all muscle, and he moved like a panther or a lion.
Not that she had ever seen either in real life, but she'd watched nature documentaries with Tomek, and Yaaf had the same coiled strength, the same fluidity in his movements like those predators.
With a sigh, she returned to her crouched position and continued weeding.
The silence between them thickened. During his previous visits, conversation had come naturally enough, flowing from the shared territory of childhood memories. Today, he seemed distracted, troubled, hard. Intimidating.
Sullha felt compelled to fill the quiet.
"I've been reading a book," she said, reaching for a weed and yanking it out.
"It's a family saga set in England. Three generations of a family living in a big house in the countryside.
The grandmother hates her husband and drinks too much.
The mother has an affair and gets ostracized by the community.
The granddaughter runs away to London and ends up sleeping in doorways. "
Yaaf's expression morphed from preoccupied to attentive. "Is it a good story?"
"I guess. It was probably allowed into the enclosure because it shows how terrible life is in the outside world.
" She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
"The message is supposed to be that it's a cruel and dangerous world out there and that we should be grateful for the walls that protect us, but I can read between the lines. "
She sat back and stopped weeding, even though it gave her hands something to do. She wanted to look at Yaaf's face while they talked, not the dirt or the weeds or the plants. He was so handsome when his jaw wasn't clenched, and his eyes were so blue against his tanned skin.
"And what did you find between those lines?" He followed her example and sat back.
"That the grandmother had the freedom to make her own choices, even if she chose badly.
The mother loved someone she wasn't supposed to and suffered for it, but she loved.
The granddaughter ran away, and even though she was sleeping in doorways, she was free.
She could walk in any direction she wanted, and no one was telling her what she could and couldn't do.
Even the worst life in that book was better than what we have here.
Their circumstances might have been unfortunate, but it was all their doing, the result of choices they were free to make, and not one of them was helpless. "
Freedom. Choices. Helplessness. The words hung in the humid air between them.
Yaaf was looking at her with an intensity that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. It wasn't threatening or intimidating, just focused.
Too focused.
And he didn't say anything in response.
"What's it like outside this island?" she asked, to fill the awkward silence.
His expression changed again. The attentive focus dimmed, replaced by something that took her a moment to recognize as embarrassment.
"I can't answer that," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because I've never left the island."
Sullha stared at him. "You've never been anywhere else?"
"I was born in the enclosure, the same as you, and taken to the training camp at thirteen. After I was done with that, I moved to the barracks on the military side. My world is this island, and it's not such a big place. In fact, it's quite small."
She almost laughed, but it wasn't funny. In a way, they were both prisoners. His cage might be bigger, and their restrictions were different, but they both looked at that same horizon that never changed.
"What do you know about the outside world?" She adjusted her question.
He must at least know more about the world than she did.
"Not much. We were shown maps and satellite images, and I realized that there are many bigger islands in the Indian Ocean alone.
Then there are the continents. The commanders describe the places where our soldiers are deployed, and we are shown movies to absorb foreign languages and local customs so we can blend in when we are deployed.
Now I know what some of the places look like, but that's not the same as standing on a street or walking into a building that isn't on this island. "
The parallel was startling. She had seen some old movies and read some books with descriptions of different places; he had seen movies, satellite images, and deployment reports. Both of them were constructing mental images of a world they'd never touched.
Sullha reached for a weed at the same time he did, their fingers arriving at the same stem within a fraction of a second.
Her fingertips brushed the side of his hand, and the contact sent a jolt through her that was entirely out of proportion to the physical reality of skin touching skin for less than a heartbeat.
She pulled back. He pulled back. They both looked at the weed as if it was poisonous.
"Sorry," she said.
"Don't be."
Her heart was hammering, and the sensation in her fingers where she'd touched him was still buzzing, a phantom warmth that lingered like the memory of a burn.
But it hadn't hurt. That was the confusing part.
Every association she'd had with male touch was painful and repulsive, but this brief contact had been the opposite of that, and her body didn't know how to categorize it, so it was defaulting to alarm.
The silence returned, but it was a different kind now. Charged with the awareness of what had just happened and the mutual decision to pretend that it hadn't.
"If you had the chance to leave," Yaaf said, "would you take it?"
The question was so unexpected that she turned to look at him. He was watching her with that intensely focused expression again.
"In a heartbeat," she said. "But only if Tomek came with me. I won't go anywhere without my son."
"Of course. Aren't you afraid to leave, though? This place is all you've ever known."
She snorted. "Anywhere is better than here. Soon the renovations will be finished, and the visitors will return, and I'll be forced to..." She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to. He understood.
They sat in silence, the meaning of what she'd left unsaid loud in both their minds.
A shadow fell across the garden row. "Sullha," Feyla said. "It's time for lunch."
Feyla and Mahra were standing at the edge of the garden path, their gazes darting from Sullha to Yaaf and back again as if they didn't know how they were supposed to act around an immortal soldier.
On the one hand, he was one of them, born and raised in the enclosure, but on the other, he was a dangerous stranger who had no business being there.
It was highly unusual and, to them, disturbing.
To Sullha, it was invigorating.
"Go ahead," she said. "Save me a plate and make sure Tomek is eating his vegetables. He'll try to trade them for someone else's bread."
"You're not coming?" Mahra asked, her gaze sliding to Yaaf again.
"No."
The two women exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation. Then Feyla nodded, took Mahra by the elbow, and steered her toward the garden exit.