"That's the spirit." Petrov raised his mug in a mock salute, then turned back to Dimitri. "So. What happened last night with Dave that caused the long face and made you turn off Lyudmila Zykina?"
Dimitri pulled up a stool and sat.
He started with the mind-merge proposal in exchange for the escape offer and continued with the conditions that Dave had laid out. He told him about Dave's wish to experience love from inside Dimitri's consciousness, and Dimitri's fear that the temporary connection to the collective would not be temporary, and he would be stuck being the ninth part of Dave.
Petrov listened without interrupting, which was unusual for him.
Then Dimitri told him about the Dormant enclosure.
Petrov's face went through a series of transformations as Dimitri spoke. Skepticism first, then something harder, then a disgust that settled into the deep lines around his mouth and stayed there.
"Boje moi." Petrov set his coffee down and stared at the far wall for a long moment. "How long has this enclosure existed?"
"Dave didn't say. But given the number of immortal soldiers on this island, it could be centuries, even millennia. Who knows how old these immortals are?"
"How many women are we talking about?"
"Dave didn't say. Could be hundreds. Could be thousands."
Petrov turned to look at Mattie, who had been listening from her chair by the window. "What do you think?"
Mattie sat up straighter. "I think we need to make freeing those women part of the deal with Dave."
The silence that followed was the kind that happened when someone voiced something that sounded completely insane, but it was said with enough conviction that it couldn't be dismissed offhand.
Petrov looked at Dimitri. "The merge idea is crazy."
Dimitri nodded.
"The escape is tempting."
"Very."
"And the idea of freeing the dormant women is…" Petrov turned to face Mattie directly, "also insane. Completely. It is not doable."
Mattie's spine stiffened. "Why not?"
"Why not?" Petrov laughed, a short, sharp bark of dismay. "Because there are three of us,devochka. Three humans, well, two and a half since Dimitri has become one of them, against an army of immortal warriors. We are in a laboratory on an island from which no one has ever escaped, planning an escape that by any reasonable metric should be impossible. And now you want to add a humanitarian rescue mission to the agenda?"
"It doesn't have to be all of them at once."
"It doesn't have to be any of them! What has to happen is that we survive. That's it. That's the entire plan. Step one: don't die. Step two: escape. Step three: continue not dying somewhere far from here. Adding 'liberate an entire population of imprisoned women' between steps two and three is not an addendum, Mattie. It's a suicide note."
Color rose in Mattie's cheeks. "Those women have been trapped there for centuries."
"And they will continue to be trapped there whether we attempt a rescue and fail, which we will, or whether we escape and try to get help from the outside. The second option gives them a chance. The first option gives all of us a shared grave."
"Dave has the power to?—"
"Dave has the power to compel a handful of guards at a time, or maybe a few more than a handful, not an entire army. Andeven if he could, what then? Where do you take hundreds or thousands of traumatized women who have never seen the outside of a compound? How do you transport them off an island that is surrounded by an ocean? Do you have a fleet of ships hidden somewhere that I'm not aware of?"
Mattie opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Her jaw was set in the stubborn line that Dimitri had learned meant she was refusing to concede even though she understood the argument.
"Dave's mothers might be in there," she said. "That's personal motivation for the Eight. It makes the escape more likely to succeed because they would have something beyond just experiencing Dimitri's emotions. They would have their own reasons to commit fully to it."
"That's a fair point," Petrov admitted grudgingly. "Using the mothers as leverage to ensure Dave's commitment is clever. But there's a difference between using the idea as motivation and actually attempting the rescue. One is a strategy. The other is madness. Dave can't do this even if they want to. It's beyond their capabilities."
Dimitri was so happy that he wasn't the one who was saying those things to her.
