Yaaf
Getting the women out of the gate was the easy part. The hard part had been thralling everyone on the way out, not only to ignore them now but to ignore their absence in the days to come.
The human guards on the inner wall waved the column through without a second look, seeing only what the collective wanted them to see.
The immortals on the other side of the gate reacted the same way, but those guards were bored, and a fresh draft of adolescents shuffling past them was an opportunity to have some fun at the expense of the boys.
Back then, he hadn't understood why they were being abused so badly, what the purpose of it was.
It had taken the collective's combined thinking power to realize that the goal was to strip them of any feeling of empathy, of basic decency, and turn them into monsters who relished brutality and slaughter.
"Fresh meat for the grinder," one of the guards said.
"Soft mama's boys." His companion spit on the ground. "Don't worry, they'll beat the crap out of you and turn you into men. Just try not to piss yourselves. You'll get beaten bloody if you do."
"Go on, then, and cry for your mothers now," the first one called after them. "Because if you cry there, they'll beat the tears out of you as well."
"You should know," the other guard said. "The commander broke both your arms and didn't let the medic set them right just so he'd have to break them again to set them."
The horrified expressions on the women's faces reminded Yaaf of his own and that of his friends when they'd been marched to the transport truck and followed by similar commentary.
Yaaf ignored the guards' taunts, the women's spike of terror, and kept the column going until they reached the waiting military transport.
He helped Sullha up into the truck bed first, then handed her Tomek. Saphira and Asira got up next, so they could help the others. The women sat on the two long parallel benches, pressing their backs against the canvas sides. He swung up after them and let the canvas flap fall.
Number Six was behind the wheel of the transport while Number Seven was behind the wheel of the Humvee, driving the other five parts of the collective, so none of the sons were in the back of the truck for the women to reunite with.
Still, Yaaf had expected the mothers to ask about their sons, but none of them had said a word so far.
The women were too frightened and overwhelmed to think about anything beyond their next breath, and in a way that was good, because now was not the time for family reunions, and certainly not the time to explain the collective. The Eight who were one.
The truck pulled out from under the shade, and the heat under the canopy thickened, the canvas not allowing the breeze to chase it off. The women were sweltering in their two layers of clothing.
"It's only a few minutes until the tunnel," Yaaf said. "The entrance is about a mile ahead. Once we're inside it, you can take off the outer layer, and it will be cooler."
The chances of anyone stopping them inside the tunnel to inspect the cargo were slim. If an inspection were to happen, it would be at either end, and they could handle it.
Their convoy was slow-moving, but it still took less than five minutes to reach the entrance. As soon as the cross-island tunnel swallowed the convoy, the temperature dropped significantly.
"You can take off the outer layer now," he said.
The women set to it in the swaying truck, peeling out of the work clothes they had layered over the stolen uniforms, unfolding sleeves that had been rolled to the elbow and trouser legs that had been cuffed at the knee, shaking out the creases as best they could in the cramped bed.
The transformation was crude, but it was good enough.
Shrouding would do the rest.
The problem was that shrouding couldn't hide Sullha from Yaaf's eyes or stop her scent from filling his nostrils.
He was struggling to keep his impassive expression so she wouldn't get scared or overwhelmed.
She needed to believe that he was okay with being just her friend, and that he didn't expect anything more between them.
Unlike the other women, she wasn't changing out of her coveralls, and he wondered what she was waiting for.
She looked at him over Tomek's head. "I can't get changed with him sitting on me."
"I can hold him for you," Yaaf offered.
She hesitated, but he didn't wait for her to decide and lifted Tomek from her lap, moving him onto his own. The boy came, stiff and unwilling. He sat on Yaaf's knee as if he was sitting on top of a volcano that was about to erupt at any moment.
"There is no reason for you to be scared of me," Yaaf said quietly. "I don't bite."
His words were meant to ease the boy, but they did the opposite.
Tomek turned to look up at him with wide eyes full of terror and lifted one small finger to point at Yaaf's mouth.
"Yes, you do," Tomek whispered. "You have fangs."
The boy was right, Yaaf realized as he ran his tongue over his teeth. His fangs had descended without him noticing. It wasn't in response to danger, because nothing so far had been threatening, so it could be only in response to the other trigger.
His attraction to Sullha must have been the catalyst, and his body responded as any immortal male's would, but his mind hadn't been tracking it.
The collective registered the finding with interest.
The venom glands had engaged, and the fangs had descended, the body readying itself for something that the mind had not consciously initiated, and it was notable that this response had fired while the other, more obvious one had not.
The collective wasn't distressed by the mismatched response, only curious, and wondered what it meant for the future of Yaaf and Sullha's relationship.
"One day you will have fangs too," he told the boy. "When you turn immortal. They are very cool."
"I don't want to have fangs," Tomek said, but it didn't sound convincing.
"They come with a lot of other benefits. You will get stronger, faster, you'll see farther and hear better."
"That is cool," Tomek agreed. "Do you like being a soldier?"
That wasn't an easy question to answer. "I like being able to protect the people I care about, like you and your mother. But I want to be more than just a soldier. I want to be all the things I could be."
From the corner of his eye, Yaaf could see Sullha watching him with a frown.
Tomek's posture relaxed, and he started swinging his legs back and forth. "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Mama says that all boys have to become soldiers when they are thirteen, and that I need to be prepared."
Yaaf felt like drawing the boy to his chest, wrapping his arms around him, and telling him he wasn't going to become a soldier if he didn't want to, but it was too early to make such promises. As long as they were still on the island, Tomek's freedom to choose his destiny was not guaranteed.
"Perhaps you won't have to become a soldier." Sullha reached for her son. "The future is not set in stone."
The boy settled on her lap, much more comfortable sitting on his mother than on Yaaf, but he no longer looked at him with as much suspicion and apprehension as before.
Yaaf leaned back against the canvas side and closed his eyes.
The Eight hadn't slept at all last night, but that was okay. They could handle a few days without sleep.
He opened them when the truck stopped in front of the lab and went to lift the tarp in the back.
Dimitri had sounded panicked when Number One had called him after leaving the mansion before dawn to let him know that the plan was to leave today.
He'd said that there wasn't enough time to collect everything they needed to take with them, and Number One had insisted that they would have to make do with what they had.
Dimitri had warned him that they would be coming out with a lot of equipment, so it wouldn't be as simple as the three climbing into the truck and the convoy continuing on its way.
The loading was going to take a while, so it was time to shroud again. The Eight spread their thrall around the lab so the guards Losham had stationed on the periphery would look the other way while the scientists loaded their equipment onto the back of the truck.
The five in the Humvee went into the lab, joined by Number Six, and a few moments later they came out carrying boxes. Mattie came out carrying a bag and headed to the back of the truck.
"Oh my." She scanned the interior. "We will need to squeeze in to make room for all the equipment. We packed half the lab." She accepted Number One's offered hand and climbed inside.
"Hi, everyone. I'm Mattie."
"I'm Sullha, and this is Tomek," Sullha said. "Most of the others don't speak English, but I can translate."
Mattie smiled. "We'll have plenty of time for introductions while we are waiting for the ship to sail."
Yaaf was glad that Tomek didn't understand Mattie. This wasn't the time to explain to a five-year-old what was going on.
"We can sit on the boxes," Sullha said. "They can stack them in the middle, and we will lift our legs over them."
"What did you pack?" Number One asked as Petrov climbed into the back of the truck between one load of boxes and the next.
"The reagents, the cooler, the mixing apparatus," Petrov said while arranging the boxes in the middle between the two benches.
"The doses we have prepared are only good for up to forty-eight hours even when refrigerated.
After that they degrade. The clan won't have everything ready for us within that timeframe because they don't even know what we need.
If you want to remain coherent past two days, we need to keep producing stuff for you in transit, so we bring the laboratory, and we set it up wherever we can. "
The collective felt a ripple of unease move through all eight threads at once.
They had only forty-eight hours' worth of premade doses.
If for some reason Petrov and Dimitri couldn't make more, if they were not somewhere safe within forty-eight hours, somewhere Petrov and Volkov could unpack the apparatus and mix a fresh batch, the collective would begin to lose coherence.
The careful architecture that held the eight of them together would start to fray at the seams. They had felt the edge of it before, when a delivery was held off to experiment how long they could go without it.
Their thoughts had begun to slip, becoming less cohesive, and slowly madness had crept in.
They never wanted to experience that again, and certainly not on a ship at sea with frightened women and children depending on them.
"The cargo hold is not ideal for the work," Petrov said. "But we will make it work if we need to." He turned to look at the women as if he was just now noticing them. "Hello, ladies. I'm Doctor Petrov."
The introductions fell to Yaaf and Sullha.
Asira and Saphira understood a little English, but the others didn't, and none of them spoke Russian. Volkov, Petrov, and Mattie knew only a few words in the island's dialect.
Sullha translated from English to the island's language, and Yaaf the other way around, and in this stitched-together fashion it was done.
Once all the crates were loaded, they headed to their next stop, which was the hotel.
While the truck was idling at the service entrance, Number Eight and Number Four headed to the main security office to thrall everyone there to ignore any anomalies during their shift and to refresh the recordings hourly.
Given the number of immortals they would have to cover, this would drain the collective’s reserves even more, but it was unavoidable.
Number Two went to get Anita, and Number Six and Number Seven raided the hotel kitchen storeroom for provisions that would last them four days. They didn't know how long they would be at sea before the clan collected them, and four days was the collective's estimate of the outer boundary.
Bread, hard cheeses, canned goods, and water were packed into boxes that were manageable enough for the women to carry.
The truck bed grew crowded, and as the space filled up, the women drew up their legs and rested their feet on the boxes.
When Number Two and Number Four arrived with Anita, she was walking between them on her own, but her eyes were unfocused.
There had been no time to explain things to her, so they'd had to thrall her.
She had been asleep, still under the thrall they'd laid on her the night before, and they'd woken her only enough to walk.
A fresh thrall had been laid on top of the old one to keep her compliant.
Anita climbed into the truck with Number Four's help, sat where she was instructed, and gazed at nothing with the placid blankness of the thralled.