She looked down at the cratered toast as if seeing it for the first time. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Tell me what's on your mind."
"I've been thinking about what Dave told you last night. About the Dormant enclosure."
Dimitri nodded. Last night, when he'd returned to their room, he'd told her about Dave's bargain, the mind-merge proposal, and the revelation about the Dormant enclosure and what had been happening there. She'd listened in silence, her face cycling through horror, fury, and finally a cold determination that he was learning to recognize as the precursor to action. Now she was going to tell him what that action would be.
"What about it?" he asked.
"Those women are prisoners, Dimitri. They're being used as breeding stock, and nobody on this island cares because the system was designed to make them invisible."
"I know that."
"Dave's mothers might still be in there. Eight women who gave birth to the boys who became the Eight and raised them until they were thirteen."
"Mattie—"
"What if we made it part of the deal?" She leaned forward, her good hand flat on the dresser. "Dave wants the merge with you in exchange for escape. Fine. But what if we added a condition? What if we told him that freeing the dormant women has to be part of the bargain?"
Dimitri stared at her. "Have you lost your mind?"
The words came out harsher than he'd intended, and he watched her expression harden.
"No, I have not lost my mind."
"Mattie, we can barely figure out how to get three people off this island without being caught and killed. Three people. You, me, and Petrov. That's already an operation with a thousand points of failure. And you want to add what? Hundreds of women? Thousands? Women who are guarded by an army of immortal soldiers in an undisclosed location?"
"I didn't say we need to free all of them at once."
"You didn't say how you planned to free any of them at all."
Her jaw tightened. "I'm still working on the details."
"There are no details to work on because the premise is impossible." He ran his hand through his hair, frustrated with himself for being so blunt but unable to find a gentler way to say it. "I understand why this matters to you. The women in that enclosure deserve to be free. Every decent person would agreewith that. But wanting something doesn't make it achievable, and we are not in a position to mount a rescue operation on top of an escape that we haven't even planned yet."
"Dave has the capability. He can compel guards, manipulate systems?—"
"Dave's abilities and talents have limits. The Eight are powerful, but they are not omnipotent. And even if they could somehow neutralize every guard at the enclosure and stop the army of immortals from pursuing the freed women, then what? Where do they go? They've been imprisoned their entire lives. They have no survival skills outside that enclosure, no identification, no money, no contacts in the outside world. We would be taking them from one impossible situation only to dump them into another."
Mattie's eyes were bright, but he didn't know if she was fighting back tears or the urge to argue. He knew that she wanted to push back and make him see what she saw, but she was smart enough to recognize his objections had substance even if she hated them.
"I'll think about it," he said more gently. "I'm not dismissing the idea outright. But there are other considerations I need to examine first, and right now the priority has to be the three of us getting off this island alive."
She held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded. It wasn't an agreement. It was a temporary ceasefire, and they both knew it.
"Fine," she said. "Think about it."
In the silence that followed, Mattie went back to picking at her mutilated toast, and Dimitri finished his coffee. The air between them was charged with the kind of energy that meant the conversation would be revisited.
He stood and gathered the trays. "I need to go downstairs and prep Dave's morning dose. Will you be all right up here?"
"Actually…" She looked up. "I want to come down to the lab."
"No."
"I'm not asking to operate heavy machinery, Dimitri. I want to sit in a chair and be present. I hate being cooped up in this room, and if I stare at these walls for one more hour, I'm going to lose what's left of my sanity."
"You need to rest. Your hand needs time to heal."
