Chapter 28 Sullha
SULLHA
Sullha waited until Feyla and Mahra were out of earshot, which took longer than it should have because Mahra kept glancing over her shoulder.
"I wonder what they are thinking about your presence here," she said.
"Did they ask you about me?"
She chuckled. "They were too afraid to even mention you. Perhaps they think you are an apparition, or that we are having a forbidden affair behind the okra."
"Are we?"
The question was so unexpected and so deadpan that Sullha couldn't tell if Yaaf was joking. She stared at him, and then the corner of his mouth twitched. Just barely, just enough for her to realize that he was indeed joking.
Yaaf, her Yofi, the boy who used to say absurd things with a perfectly straight face to get a laugh out of her, was still in there.
"You're terrible," she said.
The twitch became the ghost of a smile, there and gone. Then his expression sobered, and the intensity returned to his eyes.
"Can you keep a secret?" he asked in a low voice.
The shift in his tone made her stiffen. He wasn't joking anymore. Whatever he was about to say was serious.
"Of course I can."
"I need you to swear on it."
"Swear on what? Mortdh?" She couldn't keep the contempt out of her voice. "I don't believe in a god who declared that women are inferior and undeserving of immortality."
What she'd just said was blasphemy, and if any of the guards heard her, she would be whipped. But Yaaf wouldn't betray her, and all she saw in his eyes was approval.
"I agree with you. About Mortdh, that is. He's a false god."
Her eyes nearly jumped out of their sockets at that. "I hope you know to keep your ideas to yourself. They will execute you if they hear you say things like that."
"I only share my thoughts with my closest friends. Those I know would never betray me."
She smiled. "Then if you trust me with that, you can trust me with your other secret."
"I still need you to swear on something that matters to you. Swear on Tomek's life."
That had been the wrong thing to say.
She narrowed her eyes at her old friend. "I will never use my son's name as collateral for a promise."
Yaaf's jaw tightened.
"Sullha, what I need to tell you is important." He sounded exasperated. "I need to make absolutely sure it will not get out. Otherwise, people will die."
He was deadly serious.
"Your secret is safe with me." She put her hand over her heart. "I swear it on my eternal soul."
He studied her face, searching for something, and whatever he found must have satisfied him, because he leaned closer to her, close enough that she could smell the soap and motor oil scent that she was beginning to associate with him.
"I have an escape plan," he whispered. "My friends and I are getting off this island, and we want to take some of the women and children from the enclosure with us. You and Tomek are at the top of the list."
The words entered her ear, traveled to her brain, and stopped there, refusing to connect to anything that made sense.
Escape?
The word existed in her vocabulary the way the English countryside existed in her reading.
It was a concept. A thing that happened in other places to other people.
Not something that could apply to her, to this compound, to the women she lived with, and the children they were raising behind a three-meter concrete wall.
"You can't tell anyone," he continued in a whisper. "Not yet."
She nodded, because her throat was too tight to let out a sound.
He pulled back and looked at her, gauging her reaction. She didn't know what her face was doing, but it probably looked stunned because that was what she felt.
"I need your help with something," he said, his voice still low but no longer a whisper. "Do you know a girl named Asira? She should be around seventeen. And an older woman named Vinnah?"
Sullha's brain was still trying to recover from the explosion that the word 'escape' had detonated, but Yaaf's question gave it something concrete to grab on to.
"Asira and Vinnah. The names sound familiar, but I can't associate a face with either of them.
Twelve hundred women might not sound like a lot, but I don't know each and every one of them.
Why do you ask? Do they have anything to do with your plans? "
"Asira is the sister of one of my friends. Vinnah is the mother of another. We want to include them, but we need to know if they can be trusted to keep quiet."
She searched her memory, trying to match the names to faces. She knew all of the women by sight and a fair number by name, but she didn't know everyone.
"I can find out more about them."
Yaaf nodded. "That would be great. Just do it discreetly."
"Burda knows everyone. I'll ask her. She's reliable, and she won't betray my trust. She might ask why I want to know, though, so I need to come up with a good excuse."
"I've met the woman. She's protective." He smiled, and the warmth of it reached his eyes in a way that transformed his face from a forbidding soldier to her old friend. "I knew I could count on you to help lead the rebellion."
She frowned. "You haven't said anything about a rebellion."
"Figure of speech." The smile faded, and the seriousness returned. "I want to save as many women and children as I can, Sullha. But I'm limited in how many I can take. The more people are involved, the higher the risk, and if we fail, the consequences will be deadly."
She swallowed hard. Was freedom worth risking Tomek's life? Was saving him from the training camps worth the risk?
"How are you planning to do this?" She kept her voice low. "You can't just walk hundreds of women and children out the gate."
"We can't save all of them. Not this time. Only some." He paused. "I don't have a full plan yet, but it will probably involve thralling guards and getting on a departing ship."
She stared at him. "Thralling? What's that?"
"Entering someone's mind and adjusting their thoughts. Making them see what you want them to see, remember what you want them to remember, or forget what you want them to forget."
The concept was staggering. She knew that immortal warriors were stronger and faster than humans. But the idea that they could reach into someone's mind and rearrange the contents like books on a shelf was something she'd never heard of or even imagined.
"Can all immortals do this?" she asked.
"To humans, yes. Regular immortals can thrall most humans, but they can't thrall other immortals."
"Then how are you going to thrall the immortal guards outside the gate?"
He looked at her, and something in his expression changed again. The careful composure that he'd been maintaining since he'd arrived loosened, and he seemed both uncertain and smug, which was a contradiction in terms, but that was what she read on his face.
"I'm not a regular immortal, Sullha."
"What do you mean?"
He looked down at the weeds in her basket, took one out, and started twisting it between his fingers.
"I'm enhanced. About a year and a half ago, the Brotherhood started an enhancement program and asked for volunteers.
They were looking for young immortals, and they promised to make us into super soldiers, stronger and better than all the others.
A group of us volunteered. The scientist who designed the program didn't know that the ability to thrall or compel other immortals would be one of the side effects.
Not everyone in the program experienced that particular effect, but my teammates and I did, and we took it to another level. "
Sullha's mind raced. He was probably talking about the other soldiers who had walked with him into the enclosure the first time he'd come, their expressions nearly identical and their movements synchronized.
The thing that had been nagging at her since that first visit, the wrongness of it that she couldn't articulate, suddenly had a name.
They'd been enhanced. Whatever that meant.
"Is that why you all looked the same?" she said. "I mean, your expressions and the way you moved?"
"Yes."
"What did they do to you?"
His hand closed around the weed, crushing it.
"The procedures involved drugs that changed our neural pathways.
Made us stronger, expanded our senses, and enhanced our cognitive processing.
But the side effects were terrible. Many of the volunteers became unstable.
Violent. They had to be eliminated." He said the words without emotion, but the absence of emotion was itself telling.
"Those who made it through decided to rebel. "
Her eyes widened. "So, that was what the rebellion was about."
He nodded. "All of them were eliminated except for the eight of us.
We were spared so that further experimentation could be performed on us.
The original scientist was killed during the rebellion, either by his own hand or by the rebels.
New scientists were brought in to replace him, and they designed a new drug regimen that keeps us more stable.
But the drugs combined with the isolation changed how we think, how we process information, how we experience the world.
Some of what we lost, we're glad to be rid of.
Some of it..." He trailed off, looking at the squashed weed in his hand. "Some of it we miss."
She wanted to ask what he'd lost. She wanted to ask whether he'd suffered, whether he'd been afraid, and whether he'd had a choice. She wanted to ask why he was telling her this, why he trusted her with this information.
But the question that came out was the one that mattered most to her.
"So, you can thrall the guards outside the enclosure wall and the ones in the harbor?"
"Yes."
"And anyone who tries to stop us?"
He looked at her, and the ghost of a smile returned. "Yes."
Sullha looked at this man who had once been a scrawny boy with long legs and an infectious smile, who had been taken from her at thirteen and turned into something that even the other immortals feared.
Who had come back and sat with her in a garden patch and made her laugh once again with absurdities delivered with a straight face.
Who offered her impossible hope.
He was telling her that he could reach into the minds of the males who kept her behind these walls and controlled her life and make them forget she existed.
The enormity of it pressed against the inside of her chest, expanding like a breath held too long.
She didn't know what to do with it. Hope was dangerous in this place, and what Yaaf was offering was the most dangerous kind.
The kind that had a plan behind it, a structure, a possibility that it was more than just wishful thinking.
"I'll find out about Asira and Vinnah," she said. "Give me a few days."
He nodded. "Be careful."
"I'm always careful."
He stood, brushing the soil from his knees, and looked down at her. The height difference was vast from this angle, but it didn't frighten her.
"Thank you for trusting me," she said.
He looked at her for a moment, and there was a flash of warmth in his eyes. "If I can't trust my oldest friend, who can I trust?"