Yaaf
He’d done it on multiple occasions to ensure anyone working there was covered.
Thankfully, there weren’t many cameras in the enclosure.
Only two places were monitored, one being the entry gates and the other the breeding building.
The feed from the gates went only to this office, while the cameras in the breeding building, which fed to a special unit outside the enclosure, had been turned off due to inactivity, pending the resumption of operations.
Once he was done with that, he headed to the playground, and as he passed through the walkway gate, he was grateful that it was empty.
He needed time to think.
Choosing a bench in the shade near the wall, he sat down and let himself think about Sullha's dream, but only after withdrawing into the corner of the hive he had carved for himself, the enclosed private province that the others respected.
They were still reeling from what they'd seen before he managed to wall it off, and they were happy to leave him be to think about it on his own.
Thankfully, they'd been privy only to the first part of the dream. They'd witnessed the warmth, the tenderness, the desire. They'd seen Sullha writhing beneath him in evident pleasure, her face flushed, her expression open, unguarded, and full of desire.
He'd been taken by surprise when he'd entered her room.
Her mind had been so loud, so vivid, and she was calling his name like it was an incantation, with love she'd never shown in real life, with devotion she didn't feel.
He couldn't help responding, reaching toward it like a moth to a source of light.
By the time reason arrived, he was already inside the dream, and the seven were already gathering behind him, drawn to the blaze of her emotions, helpless to resist as much as he was.
Yaaf had never imagined her capable of such hedonistic abandon.
He'd been so shocked at what her dreaming mind had been projecting into his mind that he hadn't thrown up the shields immediately.
He'd done it after a moment, but he'd been so overwhelmed that the shield had been clumsily constructed, porous, and the impressions had bled through the seams of it before he could shore them up.
The others had felt the warmth, the slick heat. They had felt being desired by the woman he loved. All of it had spilled into the collective in the seconds before he contained it, and the hive mind had drunk it up before he could turn off the tap.
He'd managed to seal their access to Sullha's dream just before her bliss had turned to horror, before the warmth curdled to revulsion. They knew that what made him unbearable to her was them, but there was a difference between intellectual understanding and visceral feeling.
He'd shut them out a half-second before that, and he did not have the heart to tell them what he'd spared them from. Not that it would remain hidden for long. He couldn't keep it bottled up forever. Eventually, it would spill out, and they would know.
As usual, Sullha had pretended none of it had happened.
She was aware of his ability to skim her thoughts, so she must have realized that there was at least a chance of him skimming the surface of her dream, but she'd chosen to ignore it and to pretend that nothing had happened, the same way she'd pretended not to have heard that he told her he loved her.
That was her way of dealing with things that made her uncomfortable. She pushed them into a corner of her mind and locked them down so she wouldn't have to examine them.
He hadn't said anything either because, apparently, he was a coward too.
The collective felt no fear in combat, no hesitation to kill when killing was called for, but none of them knew how to deal with the feelings and the desires of a slight nineteen-year-old woman who was probably just as inept at it as they were.
She was not ready for this.
He was not ready for this.
The Eight weren't ready.
They were all damaged, and the broken pieces of them could not assemble themselves into a whole.
And yet she had dreamt of him with acceptance, warmth, and fearless desire before the dream had turned into a nightmare. Both parts of the dream had been real, the passion and the horror, but he wanted to believe that it was possible to preserve the good and eliminate the bad.
Was he deluding himself?
Was there hope for them?
Yaaf didn't know enough about people and relationships to arrive at a conclusion. He set the question aside, locking it in the same corner of the hive mind he had hidden the dream in, and sealed the entrance.
He joined the collective in time to see Sullha arriving at the playground with Tomek and a satchel slung across her body, a thing sewn from the panels of some old garment.
She could not see him, but she knew he was there.
Tomek was trailing at her side, looking confused. "Why did we come here? We never go to the playground before class because you don't want me to get dirty."
"Instead of looking worried, you should be happy." She ruffled his hair. "Saphira and some of the other mothers are having a meeting about the new schooling program, so the morning class was canceled."
"I'm very happy." He didn't smile, looking at her with suspicion in his dark eyes. "It's just strange."
"I know." She crouched next to him and kissed his cheek. "Go play and try not to get too dirty."
"Why not? If there is no class, I don't need to be clean."
"It's the beginning of the day. If you get dirty now, you will look like a sand boy by the end of it."
That got him to smile. "Okay. I'll be careful, and I'll wash my hands."
"You do that." She sent him on his way, pushed to her feet, walked over to the spot by the wall where she held the evening meetings, and lowered herself to the ground.
As per his instruction, she was wearing her gardening coveralls.
That would ease the shroud. The less the collective had to camouflage, the less strain there was on their hive mind.
The shapeless work clothes that were altered old fatigues matched the kind of clothing the boys usually wore.
It matched what people expected to see on the young recruits.
He had instructed all the women to wear coveralls or old fatigues, which was the drab utilitarian clothing half the enclosure wore for labor.
Regrettably, not all of them had the boots to match because the kind of work they performed didn't necessitate them, and they weren't easy to come by.
Not that it was crucial for their appearance as recruits.
The boys didn't have boots either, and most arrived at the training camp in whatever they owned, which was mainly plastic slippers and rubber flip-flops. They were issued boots there.
The problem would be later, when the collective would shroud them to look like soldiers.
It had been Leehy's idea to snatch actual military fatigues from the laundry's discard heap. Each day, more uniforms that had been too far gone to return to the soldiers were added to the pile of discards, so there was no shortage of them.
The women would wear them underneath the coveralls and mismatched fatigues, and they would sweat through them in the island heat, but the misery would be brief. Once they were on the truck and a mile out, they could shed their outer layer and become soldiers.
The women began to arrive, drifting in with faked casualness that fooled no one. They were so obvious with the padded clothing that made their gait stiff, the eyes that wanted to dart but were being held still by force of will, and the hands that gripped their satchels.
Fortunately, the only ones in the playground were him and a guard whom he'd already thralled.
Yaaf drifted closer to the group and scanned their minds one more time to make sure there were no traitors in their midst.
The teacher walked over to Sullha and sat next to her on the ground. "I told the mothers of the children in my class that I'm taking the day off because of a sore throat."
The collective berated itself for not realizing that Saphira needed a backup story, and they were glad she'd thought of one. They marked it with newfound respect for the teacher, a reminder that the people they were helping had minds of their own and could come up with good ideas.
"Smart," Sullha said. "The rest of us won't be missed because everyone will assume we are somewhere else in the compound doing a different chore. The only one whose absence would have gotten noticed is you."
Saphira leaned closer to her. "You said something about the sons having the ability to make everyone ignore our absence, but I wasn't sure. Can they do that?"
Sullha nodded. "For a time. They can do that effectively while they are near, but once they are on the other side of the island, their influence will fade, so the cover is not going to last long."
Saphira shook her head. "It still sounds like magic to me. I didn't know immortals could do that."
"Neither did I," Sullha admitted. "We live and learn."
"Speaking of invisible immortals," Burda said. "Weren't they supposed to get me something?"
Yaaf touched the new communication device in his shirt pocket. The clan had delivered it as requested, using a drone, which now seemed ironic. They could have sent the device with their Guardians, but then they hadn't planned on letting the Eight know that they were about to infiltrate the island.
It still rankled, despite them understanding the clan's motives. It wasn't a good feeling not to be trusted.
After the Eight had left the mansion, they had stopped by the water tower of the resort and removed the old transmitter. They'd then stopped at the enclosure's water tower and placed the new one there, where it would serve Burda the best.
She still needed him to explain to her how the device worked, and that meant showing himself.
After weeks of moving through this place unseen, the prospect of dropping his cover and stepping into the light felt strange, almost transgressive, but it had to be done today anyway so he could lead them out of the enclosure.