Chapter 37 #2
We had dressed casually for the nursery: soft trousers, sweaters, ordinary bras and underwear, socks, flats. Civilian womanhood. It lasted exactly until the threshold back toward the men’s section.
There a second matron waited beside a bench and a row of hooks. She gave the instruction in the same neutral tone. “Clothing off here, girls.”
Camille sighed like a radical forced to acknowledge gravity. “Of course.”
So we undressed together without fuss, because fuss would only have made it more humiliating.
Sweaters over heads. Waistbands stepped out of.
Bras unclasped. Panties lowered. Socks peeled away.
One by one we laid the garments in labeled baskets and stood naked in the warm air of Project Athena’s female checkpoint, each of us marked by our own recent history.
Camille was magnificent in the blunt, fertile way of late pregnancy, breasts heavy, belly huge and taut, dark triangle between her thighs, body made royal by her master’s use.
Lorna, paler and slimmer, had only the first tenderness of change, but that made her beauty no less striking; indeed the slight roundness low on her abdomen gave her aristocratic severity a strange softness.
Mary, with her red hair and the sweet traces of youth motherhood had not erased, looked to me as she always did now: both companion and temptation.
And I—still slim, still not visibly altered, but no longer innocent even to myself—felt heat flood my face as I looked at them.
Their nakedness affected me not only with comparison and embarrassment but with desire.
Giovanna and Henrik had forced open that chamber in me.
I knew now, with a seriousness that still startled me, how much I wanted women as well as men.
Beauty in another bed thrall translated itself into hunger to kneel with her, taste her, be tasted, be arranged by masculine hands for mutual use.
Standing there among them under the Arctic ice, I had the sudden treacherous thought that I would have liked very much to be sent not to a conference room but to a bed.
Mary caught my eye and smiled faintly, as if she read enough in my blush to tease me later. Camille noticed too, because Camille noticed everything.
“Poor Ilsa,” she said. “Someone’s education has been revealing.”
I made a little helpless sound, which only amused her more.
Then we went on, naked and barefoot, through heated corridors toward the conference room, accompanied by the quiet dignity of the matrons.
The facility’s personnel did not stare. That somehow made it more complete.
We were simply expected, catalogued, and in our proper state for the men whose work this was.
The conference room itself combined the aesthetics of a boardroom, a war room, and a cult chamber.
Screens. Data tables. Steel. Dark wood. A long central display waited under recessed lights, its surface alive with maps, schematics, and columns of numbers that would have looked at home in any multinational planning session if not for the fact that the women who entered had no clothes on.
The men were already seated or standing in positions that made hierarchy obvious without anyone needing to announce it.
Sven at the head. Henrik near him, one hand resting on the back of a chair.
Aksel by one of the displays. Erik with his heavy quietness.
Matthew a little apart, like a soldier attached to diplomacy.
Giovanna seated with a tablet before her, dark and immaculate and not in the slightest diminished by being the only woman on the clothed side of the arrangement.
Sven did not waste time.
“What Ilsa and Mary saw,” he said, “and what the subsequent cross-checking has suggested, has altered our understanding of the geopolitical situation.”
Aksel touched the display. The surface changed. A map of global energy corridors appeared, then a cluster over eastern China, then ownership charts, shipping routes, and more data I could only partly absorb at a glance.
“The organization Ilsa’s and Mary’s visions rendered symbolically,” he said, in his precise dry voice, “has correspondences in the ordinary world. Not proof in the courtroom sense. Not yet. But enough convergence to justify a dedicated response.”
Giovanna added, “The Pretorian Guard has encountered fragments of the same pattern through unrelated channels. Recruitment fronts. Financial anomalies. Certain elite men with a taste for female submission and a practical interest in grids, extraction, and dependency.”
“The Fellowship,” Henrik said.
He looked at me briefly when he said it, and my body gave its familiar humiliating little response to being included by a man’s acknowledgment.
Sven folded his hands on the table.
“The Guard and the Sons of Odin have therefore agreed to a joint initiative based here, at Athena. An intelligence and vision unit.”
Camille, to my left, shifted her weight under the burden of her pregnancy and said, with perfect dryness, “And by intelligence and vision unit, you mean us.”
“Yes,” said Erik. “You and Mary demonstrated great potential when we first made contact with the Guard three years ago. You didn’t see each other in the branches of Yggdrasil, but perhaps that was only because you weren’t looking. We need the benefit of your angle on the v?lur’s sight.”
“And Lorna,” Aksel went on, smiling at his bed thrall, whose cheeks instantly crimsoned at her master’s attention, “has manifested a talent both for real politics and for a specifically political kind of v?lva’s perception.”
He touched something on his console and brought up our names, as linked files: Mary O’Toole.
Camille Dubois. Lorna Norquist. Ilsa Matthews.
Under each appeared biometric summaries, reproductive status, organizational affiliations, and a field marked V?lva Capacity, which I found somehow just as humiliating as my nudity.
“You will function together,” Aksel said. “Observed, managed, and where useful deployed in conjunction with our existing channels. The arrangement is experimental. Its strategic value is potentially high.”
Lorna lifted her chin a little. “Function together in what sense?”
It was Matthew who answered, his Greek profile grave in the cold light of the screens.
“In every sense that produces results.”
That could have meant visions. It could have meant fieldwork. It could also have meant exactly what it sounded like, in a world where men arranged women’s bodies for use first and asked theory to catch up later.
Mary went still beside me. Camille gave a tiny exhalation through her nose. I felt my face warm again.
Sven said, “You have all borne children or are bearing them, including Ilsa, who has only just begun her pregnancy. You have all shown capacities the rest of our women do not possess in the same configuration. You are bed thralls, yes. But you are not merely bed thralls. Together, you form something new.”
Henrik’s mouth moved faintly, into a small smile that brought warmth to my chest.
“So we’ve chosen a new name for you.”
There was a pause in which I became acutely conscious of my own skin, my bare feet on the heated floor, the nearness of the other women’s bodies, the men’s composure, the absurdity and inevitability of naming as an act of power.
Then Sven gave us our new designation, one that sent a thrill up my spine as I wondered what it would mean, to us and to the world.
“You will be the Sisters of Freya.”