Yaaf
The Guardian climbed in after him, folding his bulk into the padded space next to Tomek. He settled, got an arm around the boy, and then took Tomek's small hand in his and shook it, gravely, as if sealing a contract between equals.
"I'm Bowen," he said in the Brotherhood tongue, slow and careful and heavily accented, but clear and grammatically correct.
"You and I are going to be buddies for the trip, and just so you know, I'm very good at being a friend.
Once we are in the village, I'll teach you how to make a bow from a tree branch. Have you ever built a bow?"
Tomek shook his head.
"Do you want to learn to make one and then practice shooting with me?"
Tomek nodded enthusiastically.
"Then we have a deal." He shook the boy's hand again. "And now it's time to close your eyes and dream about pleasant things. When you wake up, the trip will be over, and your mama will be right there to receive you, and she will give you a big hug."
Yaaf felt the thrall settle over the boy. Tomek's eyes drifted shut between one breath and the next, his face going slack and peaceful.
Sullha's entire body was shaking. She'd reached the end of her reserves, expelling the last of it on arguing with Bowen and trying to get into the case with Tomek.
Trembling, she stood rigid at the lip of the case, her eyes fixed on her sleeping son and the large Guardian lying down beside him and tinkering with a breathing tank.
Yaaf acted on instinct, wrapping his arm around her and drawing her into his side.
She didn't stiffen, didn't hold herself apart, pretending like she had been doing for days that there was nothing between them.
She leaned into him, letting him take some of her slight weight.
Yaaf stood very still, not sure what to think about this unexpected gift of trust. After keeping him at arm's length for so long, she gave in to her exhaustion and rested against him.
It melted something in him. Turning something hard soft.
The other seven parts of him retreated, folding themselves back into the quiet recesses of the hive mind, leaving him alone in his own head in a way he hadn't been since they had first merged.
He'd carved a private corner before, a province they respected, but this was different.
This was all of them stepping back at once, deliberately, drawing their attention away and leaving him the whole of his own skull for the length of this moment.
The silence was profound. The solitude of a single mind felt strange.
They'd done it for him, recognizing that this moment belonged to him and Sullha, and them alone.
Another Guardian came over to close the case and seal it once Bowen gave the sign that he was ready.
A third joined to help lower it to the water.
A diver already suited and waiting in the shallows took hold of the towing cable, gave a thumbs-up to the men above, and then the case slipped beneath the surface and was gone, drawn out into the gray water toward the open sea and the submarine waiting beyond.
Sullha's shaking worsened the instant her son disappeared below the water.
Yaaf couldn't bear it. He reached into her mind, smoothing the jagged edges of her fear and laying down beneath them a current of calm, images of the case reaching the sub, of the backup team waiting there, of Bowen lifting the lid and Tomek waking warm and safe and greeted by friendly hands.
"Stop that." She slapped his arm and pulled back enough to glare up at him. "Get out of my head, Yaaf."
"You were afraid. I only wanted—"
"I know you meant well, but it's my right to be afraid for my son. I'm allowed to worry about him. You don't get to reach in and tidy it away because it makes you uncomfortable. Not unless I ask you to do it for me. The choice is always mine."
Yaaf withdrew at once.
He respected what was underneath the chastening. Sullha hadn't asked him to make her feel better, and he shouldn't have done that without asking her permission first. It was her right to feel badly, to carry her own fear in her own way, and there was a strength in that.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. I shouldn't do this without your leave."
"Thank you. It's a mother's right and duty to worry about her child." Once the heat had gone out of her, she slumped against his side once again, her gaze drifting across the shelf to where her mother was being fitted into a set of diving gear by a Guardian.
Leehy seemed perfectly at ease, much more composed than her daughter was.
Sullha's mother stood quietly while the Guardian buckled the harness and checked the regulator, asked questions, and waited patiently for the Guardian to find the correct words in her language to answer her.
She corrected him, politely and with a smile, bearing the strange equipment and the even stranger circumstance with uncharacteristic composure.
Yaaf remembered her from before, specifically the vacant look in her eyes that was nowhere to be seen now.
"Look at her," Sullha murmured. "She's doing all right."
Yaaf nodded. "She is. Who would have thought that Leehy could ever look so alert, so present. She always looked so dead inside."
Sullha looked up at him, and something in her face softened further. "It seems that all she ever needed to wake up from her stupor was a taste of freedom."
Yaaf felt a question rise in him that he had no business asking. "What do you need, Sullha?"
It left his mouth before he could stop it, and he wished at once that he could take it back. He had no business asking Sullha such an intimate question, and he wasn't even sure he wanted to hear her answer.
She did not flinch from it.
She looked up at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before, tender and unguarded, and she lifted her hand and laid it against his cheek, her palm warm against the stubble there.
"You need a shave," she said, and the corner of her mouth curved in a smile.
It wasn't the answer he'd expected, but it undid him anyway. "I can shave if that's all you need. The moment we're somewhere with a razor, I'll shave and present you with a clean jaw. If that's what you want, that's what you'll get."
She chuckled softly, and then her smile faded, and her face turned serious, but her hand was still resting against his cheek.
"I haven't thanked you yet." She held his eyes. "Thank you. For Tomek. For me. For taking the bullets that were meant for us so we could live."
"I would do it again," Yaaf said, and his voice was rough. "Every day for the rest of your life, if it came to that. I would put myself between you and harm a thousand times and think myself lucky for being able to be your shield."
"I know." Her thumb moved against his cheek. "I know you would. And I love you for it." She looked into his eyes. "And for a great many other things."
Yaaf stopped breathing.
She couldn't have meant it the way it had sounded.
That was just a figure of speech of the English language.
I love you for it, meant only thank you.
It wasn't what he wanted to hear. She couldn't have meant it the other way, not after spending days pretending she hadn't heard him tell her that he loved her.
She would not turn now, right after watching her son being taken under the water, and give him the answer he'd always wanted to hear.
He swallowed hard because that was all he could do. Words just couldn't form in his throat. He didn't trust himself to speak because he was terrified of saying something that would break whatever this was.
"You asked me what I needed." She hadn't moved her hand from his cheek, and she hadn't looked away. She was looking at him with the full weight of her attention. "I want to dive with you," Sullha said. "I don't want to be paired with one of the Guardians. I want to be with you."
That wasn't what he'd expected either, and it produced two contradictory emotions that were braided together so tightly he could not separate them.
Disappointment, because some hopeful part of him had been braced to hear her say that she wanted him, the whole of him, and she had said instead that she wanted to pair up with him for the dive.
But under the disappointment was a thrill because she didn't want to leave his side.
Instead of choosing one of the trained Guardians to carry her safely through the water, she had chosen him, who'd never dived before.
"Sullha." He forced himself to be honest because she deserved it even when it cost him.
"I'm not a diver. This is my first time, and all I've been given is a ten-minute crash course.
You would be safer with a Guardian who is experienced and has done this before.
Far safer. I'd never forgive myself if I put you at risk. "
"I'd rather take a risk with you than be safe with anyone else."
This statement could be understood in so many ways, but he couldn't allow himself to read too much into it. She preferred to risk the dive with him than do it safely with a stranger.
That was all. There was no other meaning to it.
"I trust you with my life," she continued. "I want to make this crossing holding on to you."
And then she lifted onto her toes and kissed him.
It was a small thing. Chaste, brief, her lips soft against his for the space of a few heartbeats and no more, nothing like what he'd seen in the dream that had haunted them both, nothing elaborate or hungry.
And yet it held so much meaning. Every word she hadn't said and every word she had, the whole of the shift she'd made somewhere between the blood and terror of the day, was pressed into the simple meeting of their lips.
When she settled back onto her heels, Yaaf found that his single, solitary mind had gone entirely silent, and for a long moment, this mind of his could produce absolutely nothing.
"We'll have to stay close to the Guardians," he managed once his thought process rebooted. "I'll follow their lead. If anything goes wrong, you do exactly what they signal, not what I do, because they know what to do, and I don't."
"I'm fine with that." Sullha slid her hand from his cheek down to his chest, over the stiff, bloodied fabric and the bullet holes, and rested it there, over the place where his heart was. "Close to the Guardians but holding on to you."