Chapter 37 Yaaf
YAAF
"Italked to Asira." Sullha moved the books to one side and angled her body toward him. "I arranged to be assigned to the same kitchen shift so I could strike up a conversation without it seeming weird. We talked, and she invited me to her room in the dormitory."
"What's your assessment of her?"
Sullha's mouth curved. "My assessment. You sound like you are debriefing a spy."
"I didn't mean it that way."
"I know. It's just funny coming from the boy who used to put beetles in my shoes so he could play hero when I screamed."
The memory surfaced in Yaaf's individual consciousness, vivid and warm. They had been eight, the beetle had been enormous, and she hadn't screamed. She had calmly removed it from her shoe, studied it, and then handed it to him, knowing that he had been the one who had planted it there.
"You never screamed at anything," he said.
"I screamed at plenty of things. Just not at beetles.
" She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
"Asira can be trusted. She draws really well.
Her dormitory room is covered wall to wall with portraits of real people and imagined landscapes.
She creates entire worlds on paper with colored pencils. "
"That's nice, but how does it tell you she can be trusted?"
"Because she doesn't just endure. She has hope. She creates, so she's still fighting, even if she doesn't know what she's fighting for."
The collective found the assessment reasonable.
It was not a rigorous intelligence assessment, but Sullha couldn't have provided that even if she tried.
What she had done instead was to use her human insight, something that the hive mind lacked.
Dave could read surface thoughts and detect lies, but they couldn't evaluate character.
That required a different kind of perception, one rooted in empathy rather than analysis.
"I trust your judgment," Yaaf said.
Sullha smiled, and her eyes seemed brighter. "She drew Tomek's portrait. He was enchanted with her. She's good with children."
"Did you tell her anything?"
She looked offended by the question. "Of course not."
"Good. What about Vinnah?"
"I haven't met her yet. Her next kitchen shift is next week, and I'm working on getting assigned to the same one."
"Why so long?"
"Kitchen rotations are scheduled in advance, and I don't have your talent to manipulate people's minds. I can't go to Hillah and ask her to change Vinnah's shift. I can only change mine."
That made sense.
There was another question that had been nagging at him since his first visit to the enclosure, but he'd avoided it because asking it felt like opening a door he wasn't sure he wanted to open. He needed to know, though, and it was cowardly to keep postponing it.
"How is my mother doing?" he blurted out before he could stop himself.
Sullha went still for a moment and then turned to face him.
The look in her eyes made his gut twist. It was the same as when she'd talked about the years before Tomek. Profoundly sad. "I’m so sorry. I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"Your mother passed away over two years ago."
The words reached him, traveled through the node that was Number One, and entered the collective consciousness where they were processed by eight minds simultaneously.
His mother was dead.
The information should have been absorbed the way all information was, cataloged, assessed for relevance, and filed away, but he couldn't do that. It cut through him so deeply that even his other seven parts couldn't mend the wound.
It shouldn't have affected him like that.
He remembered his mother's face in the softened, imprecise way that childhood memories were preserved, and none of them were good. She had not been affectionate, she had not told him she loved him, and she had performed just the basic duties of a mother because she had to.
She'd always made him feel like he was a painful reminder of what had been done to her.
None of that mattered now, though.
What mattered was that she was gone, and he hadn't known, and nobody had told him, and the years during which she had still been alive, and he could have perhaps found a way to see her, were gone too.
The collective tried to absorb the pain, to disperse it across eight minds the way they attenuated anger and fear, but this was different. This was grief, and it couldn't be diluted. It spread through the collective like ink through water, coloring everything it touched the color of mourning.
"I'm so sorry." There was a sheen of tears in her eyes. "I assumed the boys who were taken away were notified when someone in their family passed away."
"The soldiers aren't told anything about the families they leave behind. We stop being sons and brothers the day we walk out the gate. We become soldiers."
"I'm sorry. I should have thought of that."
He hated that she felt the need to keep apologizing. She hadn't done anything wrong.
"It's not your fault, Sullha. How did she die?"
"She got sick. The doctor came, examined her, and said there was nothing he could do."
Nothing he could do.
It was a lie. The Brotherhood had resources, but they didn't want to waste them on a woman in the enclosure who had already given the Brotherhood what they wanted and couldn't give more because she'd gotten sick. They had just let her die because she had been of no more use to them.
The rage that surged through him this time was different from the anger he'd felt before. It was older and colder, and it came from the part of him that was still Yaaf, the boy who had been taken away from everything he knew and forged into a killing machine.
Mattie had told him that his mother had probably pushed him away to protect herself, but he hadn't understood it then. Couldn't. He understood it now.
The collective held his grief with care, seven minds surrounding the eighth's pain and providing structure for it. They were not trying to fix or erase it, but they were making sure that it didn't destroy him.
You didn't know, Number Three thought. There was nothing you could have done.
I could have asked, Number One thought back. I could have asked about her the first time I came here. I came to see Sullha, and I didn't even think to ask about my mother.
"I'm sorry," Sullha said again. She reached over and placed her hand on his.
The contact was light. Her fingers rested on the back of his hand, her palm warm, dry, and small against his. It was a gesture of comfort, nothing more, the same kind of gesture she might have offered anyone who was hurting, but the effect on Yaaf was disproportionate to the small touch.
A warmth spread from the point of contact up through his arm and into his chest, where it settled against the cold grief, not erasing it, but existing alongside it.
The collective registered the sensation.
The warmth was not just Number One's. It transmitted through the shared consciousness the way all sensory experiences did, but instead of arriving as raw data to be processed and filed, it arrived as an echo.
A resonance. Seven other minds felt what Number One was feeling, not as intensely, not as directly, but unmistakably.
It was the closest thing to emotion that the collective had ever generated from its own experience rather than observing it in others.
That's what we've been looking for. Number Eight was the first to articulate the thought, which rippled through the collective and was met with immediate recognition from the seven other nodes.
The sensation of Sullha's hand on Yaaf's was not an expression of love, but it was a precursor. A seed. The first green shoot pushing through soil that had been packed too hard and too long and had been too dry to sprout anything until it was tended to by a skilled gardener.
The mind merge with Dimitri was no longer necessary.
If Yaaf could love Sullha, and if that love was experienced through the collective, the way the warmth of her hand was being experienced right now, then the merge with Dimitri was not required. The Eight could feel love without borrowing it from someone else.
The realization changed the trajectory of everything.
The collective had pursued the merge as the only viable path to experiencing love from the inside.
They had studied Dimitri and Mattie's relationship from the outside, cataloging its manifestations, analyzing its chemistry, and concluding that the only way to truly understand it was to connect directly to a mind that felt it.
But the path to love didn't have to run through a borrowed connection.
It could run through Yaaf.
He was already feeling things for Sullha that he hadn't known he was capable of.
The warmth, the protectiveness, the way his thoughts drifted to her anytime he could allow himself to detach from the collective and spend a few minutes thinking on his own.
The thoughts were not the muted, analytical observations that the hive mind typically produced.
They were personal, individual, originating from the node that still carried the memories of the girl he'd grown up with and who had been his best friend.
For Sullha to truly love Number One, he may need to become Yaaf again, Number Eight thought. At least partially, or just some of the time. She can never love all of us. Can never accept the collective.
The problem was real, and it had no easy solution.
Sullha's hand was on Number One's because Yaaf was sitting beside her on a bench while seven other bodies waited outside the gate. She was comforting a male who had just learned his mother had died, not interfacing with a collective consciousness that processed her touch as data.
If she knew the truth about what he was, the hand would withdraw. The comfort would end. The warmth would evaporate.
The separation can be achieved, Number Five thought. It doesn't have to be complete. It could be partial, just a loosening of the connection, not a severing. Enough for Number One to function as an individual in Sullha's presence while still maintaining the link to the rest of us.
Those were the desperate thoughts of a conjoined mind that had found what it had been looking for and didn't want to let go.
It didn't matter if Number One was just Yaaf when he was with Sullha. At some point, he had to tell her about the other seven and his connection to them, and she would withdraw because it would frighten her.
Because it was unnatural.
Number One looked down at Sullha's hand on his. Her fingers were small and calloused from garden work, and there was soil under her fingernails. She hadn't pulled her hand away, and he hadn't pulled away either. The moment stretched between them like the silence when there was nothing left to say.
"Thank you," he said, to fill that silence.
She withdrew her hand, slowly, as if she was reluctant to break the contact but knew it had already lasted too long.
He looked at the playground, where Tomek was now sitting in the sandbox with two other children, constructing something with wet sand and upturned plant pots.
Sullha seemed to understand that he needed a moment because she didn't fill the silence with more words. She just sat beside him on the bench, watching the children play, and let the quiet do what it sometimes did better than words.
After a while, Number One gathered himself.
"I need to go," he said. "But I'll be back."
"I know."
He stood, lifted the books, and tucked them under his arm. She stood as well, and the top of her head barely reached his shoulder, but despite her diminutive stature, she possessed strength he knew he could lean on.
"Goodbye, Sullha." He stayed where he was, not wanting to leave yet.
"Goodbye, Yaaf. Don't forget to release everyone from your thrall. It's a wonder that Tomek didn't think to come looking for me yet."
She was uncomfortable about her son being thralled not to see her.
Number One nodded, and as he walked away, the thrall over the playground dissolved gradually, each person's perception returning to normal without any sense of discontinuity. To them, nothing had happened. Sullha had been sitting on that bench all along. They just didn't think to look her way.
When he walked out the front gate, the seven were waiting by the Humvee. Number One climbed into the vehicle and the others followed. Number Seven took the driver's seat and started the engine.
The Humvee pulled onto the road, and as the concrete walls of the enclosure receded in the rearview mirror, the collective turned over the revelation that had changed everything.
The path forward ran through Number One and his growing feelings for Sullha, through the warmth of her hand on his. She had offered it in comfort, but it was received as something more.
The merge with Dimitri could wait, and perhaps it would never be necessary.
But for this new path to work, Number One would need to become Yaaf again, at least in part, and that was a prospect that troubled the collective more than the operation they were planning to pull off, but most of all, it terrified Number One.
Separation, even partial, meant silence where there had been seven additional voices, and emptiness where there had been fullness, and the vast, echoing loneliness of a single mind trapped inside a single skull.
The collective had no answer for that. Not yet.
But the warmth of Sullha's touch still resonated through all of them, and it was enough.
For now.