Sullha
Yaaf was close.
The dream surged up unbidden.
Yaaf's weight, his hands, the sounds he'd pulled out of her.
She sat very still and willed it down.
It had been just a silly dream. It meant nothing. Dreams were the mind's refuse, the day's scraps churned into nonsense while the body slept, and she would not let it change how she reacted to Yaaf, because she couldn't allow him to see the effect that dream had on her.
If she let it show, it would become something that needed to be acknowledged, and she had no intention of ever doing so. She would carry it alongside all the other things she refused to examine, like the thing he'd told her that she'd answered with silence.
They had spent the early hours of the morning as friends and accomplices, and that had been bearable because they'd been busy rushing from room to room in the predawn hours, with Yaaf shrouding them while she woke woman after woman with a hand on a shoulder and a whisper, telling each of them that the day had come, telling them where to go and reminding them what to carry and how to behave.
The sense of purpose and urgency had left no space for awkwardness, but now that the work paused and the waiting had begun, the awkwardness crept back in.
The scent of him. The heat.
She wondered whether he'd eaten.
She had breakfast with Tomek, and the women had all eaten, the meal functioning as one more piece of their cover, but also necessary to sustain them. She didn't know when or where their next meal would be.
Perhaps he'd taken something from the kitchen, lifted bread from a tray with no one any the wiser. Yaaf could do that. It seemed that he could do almost anything, but it still bothered her that she didn't know whether he'd eaten.
"Speaking of invisible immortals," Burda said, "weren't they supposed to get me something?"
The question pulled Sullha out of her thought spiral, and she turned toward the place where she could sense him.
"Yes. It's time. Can you show yourself, Yaaf?"
His appearance was so sudden that the women all gasped. It was like he materialized from thin air, but Sullha knew that it was just a mind trick, and that he had been standing there the entire time, as solid as any of them, manipulating their minds not to see him.
Burda narrowed her eyes at him and tipped her head back, and then she tipped it back even further because he was so tall and she was sitting on the ground.
"Haven't I seen you before?" she asked.
Yaaf inclined his head to her. "You saw me the first time I came, and the second. I made you forget both times. I'm surprised that you remembered anything about me at all. You shouldn't have."
"I didn't. Not until you stepped out of the air and something in your face struck me as familiar." She studied him. "Perhaps it's the boy I remember, and not the man. I knew you as a boy. You were Sullha's friend."
He smiled. "I was, and I still am."
Sullha shouldn't have been surprised by Burda's unfazed response.
The woman was a pillar of strength. Still, anyone would have been troubled by what Yaaf had just admitted.
He'd manipulated her mind twice, and she accepted it with a level eye and not a flicker of fear.
She didn't even remember that she and Sullha had spoken of Yaaf.
Or perhaps she did remember now that his appearance had jogged her memory.
"Show me this device," Burda said, all business now. "You shouldn't dawdle. The sooner you have these women and the children out of here, the safer it is for all of us."
Yaaf drew a small dark object from his shirt pocket and crouched next to Burda to explain how it worked.
It was simpler than Sullha had imagined.
One piece went into the ear, and the other hung around the neck on a string.
It was a matter of pressing here to speak and there to listen.
Burda watched his hands and listened with her chin lifted and her eyes sharp, and when he finished she nodded.
"Try it," Yaaf said. "Place your first call now."
Burda's eyes widened, her bravado suddenly wavering. "Now? Will it be okay with them that I call without being invited?"
"You are invited, and they are expecting your call.
They are twelve hours behind us, which means it's after nine o'clock at night there, but immortals don't go to bed that early.
We need much less sleep than humans, and no one there will have a problem with you calling at this hour.
They need to know that the device works and that you know how to use it. "
Burda nodded, swallowed, and pressed the device as Yaaf had shown her.
"Hello?" Burda said.
Sullha, who could hear only Burda's side, watched the old woman's expression shift from anxious expectation to confusion.
"I don't understand a word of that," Burda said. "Do you speak my language? Because I don't speak yours, and this whole thing is not going to work if you can't speak mine."
There was a pause, and Sullha gathered that whoever answered had switched tongues, because Burda's expression eased, and she nodded.
"Yes, I can understand you now, but just barely. You mangle it badly."
There was another pause, and Burda's mouth twitched. "Well. I suppose you're doing your best. We will manage, you and me." Another pause. "No, no, I know. Yes. The young man here showed me how it works. It's not that complicated if even an old woman like me gets it."
Whatever was said next softened the old woman. Her shoulders came down. She listened and nodded.
"Thank you for this," Burda said. "It is a window to the world, and I never had one of those ever before. Yes. Goodbye for now."
She withdrew the piece from her ear and let out a slow breath. When the smile came, it transformed her face, making it almost youthful.
It was the effect of hope, excitement, of something to look forward to.
"What a nice young man," she said.
Yaaf chuckled. "I assure you, he's not young. He's probably centuries old."
Burda waved a dismissive hand. "He sounded young, and he was polite, once he stopped barking at me in English.
Why did he expect me to understand him?" She tucked the device into her shirt, reaching deep inside to tuck it in her brassiere and patting it flat.
"There. Safe. No one will think to search an old woman's bosom.
" She fixed Yaaf with a look. "He told me to call when I have something worth reporting, and to call at least once a week even if I don't. I will do as he asked.
" She turned to Sullha. "Well, I guess it's time to say goodbye. "
Sullha pulled Burda into her arms, the old woman's frame thin and birdlike inside the embrace, and the tears she had been holding back spilled over and ran hot down her face.
"I'm going to miss you," she said into Burda's shoulder. "So much. I don't know how to leave you here."
"Stop that." Burda's voice came out rough and unsteady, which undid Sullha even more.
"Stop your weeping and get yourself gone.
You have a son to think of, and others depending on you.
" She pulled back, held Sullha by the shoulders, and looked at her, fierce and wet-eyed.
"You will come back for the rest of us. I trust you to do that. I know you will."
It was just talk. The brave hollow promises that people offered each other when the truth was too heavy to bear.
There was no guarantee of any return. They might never be able to come back for Burda or for any of the ones left behind these walls.
But Sullha took the old woman's hands anyway and held them tight.
"I will come back for you," she said. "I swear it. And you have to swear that you will stay alive long enough for me to get you out of here."
"I will do my best." Burda squeezed her hands. "At my age, it's the best I can promise."
The other women came to embrace Burda one after another, and Burda received each hug with a pat on the back and a gruff word, and Sullha turned away to wipe away her tears because she could not watch all of it and stay upright.
That was when Tomek suddenly noticed that the meeting had taken an unexpected turn.
He came running, stood in front of her, and glared at Yaaf.
"Mama." He pressed back into her as if he could push her away from the threat, his eyes never leaving Yaaf. "What is a soldier doing here?"
"It's all right, my love." She wrapped her arms around him, gathering his back against her front. "This is Yaaf, and he's my friend. We were friends as kids, and then he was taken away, but he came back to look for me. He's not like the other soldiers. He's good."
Tomek eyed Yaaf with suspicion. "How did he get in here? The soldiers never come in."
She turned her boy around and crouched in front of him.
"It's a secret." She lowered her voice to the register she used for the stories she told him at night, the conspiratorial hush that turned a thing from frightening to thrilling.
"Yaaf can make it so no one sees him. And today he's going to do something even better.
He's going to take us on a secret trip and hide us with his magic so nobody can see us either.
But it only works if everyone is very, very quiet. "
Tomek's wariness turned to curiosity and excitement.
"He has magic?"
"Yes."
He narrowed his eyes at her. "For real?"
"Yes. Very real."
Tomek looked over at the cluster of women, and at Bianca who was sitting on Rohilah's hip, and his small face creased with calculation. "Is Bianca going on the secret trip too?"
"Yes. Everyone who is here is going."
"And he really can make us invisible?"
"He can."
"With magic?"
"With magic."
Tomek's suspicion was replaced by wonder, and he turned to stare at Yaaf with covetous awe, a boy in the presence of the single most interesting person he had ever encountered.
"Can you make me invisible right now?"
"Soon," Sullha said before Yaaf could answer, and rose and took her son's hand. "Right now, we have to start moving. Remember. We have to be absolutely quiet."
She did not look back at Burda.
She couldn't.
If she looked back, she would not be able to make her feet move, so she fixed her eyes on the playground gate, held Tomek's hand, and waited for Yaaf to lead them out to freedom.
He shrouded them without a word, and she imagined she could feel it settling over them like a faint pressure, a sense of the air thickening.
Then he started walking, and they were all moving, a strange procession of ten women and two small children, led out of their prison by a tall man in a soldier's uniform.
Sullha's heart climbed into her throat and got stuck there.
They marched through the central courtyard, passing women and children, a pair of guards standing at their post by the inner wall, and another pair a few meters farther out.
Sullha walked her son directly across the open middle of it in broad daylight, and braced, with every step, for the shout, the pointed finger, the alarm.
None came.
A Sacred Mother passed within arm's reach, close enough that Sullha could hear the humming.
Her gaze slid over the column of them, found nothing to catch on, and moved away.
Another crossed their path and adjusted her stride without seeming to know why, giving the empty air a wide berth.
The guards by the wall looked out at the courtyard and did not see ten women walking through it.
To them, it appeared as any other ordinary morning in the breeding enclosure.
They were truly invisible.
Yaaf had told her that he could do that, and she'd believed him because she'd witnessed him doing it many times before, but it was still unnerving to walk through a crowd of people, including armed guards who would kill her and her son without a thought, and not one of them turned their heads.
Beside her, Tomek walked with his lips pressed tightly together, his eyes round, and she didn't know whether he believed her that they were playing the quiet game or whether he was afraid because he knew they were all in danger.
Behind her, the women also walked in complete silence, and even Bianca remained frozen in her mother's arms, not a peep or whimper leaving her mouth. The only audible sound was the scuff of their mismatched footwear on the baked ground.
The gates stood ahead of them, the high barred gates she had never passed through before.
As they reached them, they swung open as if activated by magic, and Sullha walked through them with her son, nine women, a little girl, and her best friend who had not forgotten her and had come back to free her.