She heard footsteps on the stairs and recognized the quick, light, slightly uneven cadence, as if Dimitri was taking the steps two at a time but trying to be quiet about it.
He appeared in the doorway, and her first thought was that he looked distraught. He wasn't injured, and he didn't look scared, he just looked stunned.
"Hey," she said. "How did it go?"
He came into the room, sat on the edge of her bed, and ran both hands through his hair.
"You're scaring me," she said. "Talk to me."
"Dave told me things." He dropped his hands and looked at her. "Shocking things about this island that I didn't know before, and then he made a request that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. Bizarre and unexpected don't begin to describe it."
"I doubt there's anything about this island that could shock me at this point. What can be more shocking than an army of immortal warriors that no one outside this place has a clue exists? Or a secret resort that is an enormous brothel with thousands of trafficked women who are serving those warriors and male guests from around the world?"
He chuckled, but he didn't sound amused. If anything, the sound carried a barely concealed edge of hysteria. "You'd be surprised, although this one is a combination of both the army of immortal warriors and a brothel. Turns out that the one we know about is not the only one on the island."
Mattie frowned. "You should start from the beginning."
"Before I do, there is a piece of good news that I want to share with you. Petrov should hear this too, but since he's in his roomand the door is closed, he will have to hear about it tomorrow." He paused, probably for dramatic effect, which was kind of absurd given all the preamble about that shocking thing he was going to tell her.
"Well? What is it?" she asked.
"Dave said that Losham ordered all the cameras in the lab turned off. He did that before coming over to talk to me to keep that conversation private, but he decided to keep the surveillance off, probably because he doesn't want anyone to know what he wants us to work on, particularly the enhancement drugs for humans. Instead, he posted guards outside the building, which is a mixed blessing. It's good because we will be better protected, but it's bad because we will have less privacy. The best part is that Petrov will have no more excuse to torture us with his Russian folk music."
Mattie laughed. "I've gotten used to it and even grown to like it. Not at the decibel level he's playing it, though."
Dimitri grimaced. "I hate those songs. I've always hated them." He let out a breath. "Now comes the less amusing part."
Mattie braced herself and nodded. "Go on."
"Dave shared things about himself. The soldiers who volunteered for Zhao's enhancement program were all very young. Boys, really. After the initial failures, Zhao realized that he would have more success with young, malleable minds. Of the Eight who are Dave, the oldest was twenty-one, and the youngest was seventeen when recruited, and now he's eighteen. They were born and raised on the island, never having set foot off it. They were never deployed, never sent on missions, and their entire world was this rock in the middle of the ocean."
"Was any of this news to you? I mean, you've been working with Dave for a long time now. Surely you knew their ages."
Dimitri shook his head. "The embarrassing truth is that Petrov and I were afraid to ask questions. We went by Zhao's reports, and he only gave a range of the ages of the recruits. I knew they were young, but I didn't know how young. They grew up in something called the Dormant enclosure, which is the most shocking part of the story."
"What's the Dormant enclosure?"
He let out a breath. "Have you ever wondered why there are no immortal females on the island?"
She nodded. "I thought that only males were born immortal." Her stomach dropped as an unsettling thought occurred to her. "Don't tell me that they kill the baby girls like they used to do in China."
"No, but it's almost as bad. They keep females who carry the immortal genes in what they call the Dormant enclosure, which is basically a brothel, but with the added cruelty of being bred to produce immortal warriors for Navuh's army. The girls born to them stay in the enclosure and become breeders when they are old enough. It's worse for them than for anyone else on this godforsaken island. They are imprisoned there, forced to have sex with strangers that are chosen for whatever traits Navuh values, and produce children. All the children are born human, but the boys can be turned immortal. They are taken from the enclosure at thirteen, sent to the training camp, and induced into immortality. After that, they are not allowed to visit their mothers and sisters again. No immortal males are allowed in the Dormant enclosure."
Mattie frowned. "I wonder why. That seems like an unnecessary cruelty."
"Who knows?" Dimitri shrugged. "Maybe they believe that the soldiers become tougher when they have no contact with their mothers and sisters. Or maybe they are afraid that the soldiers will try to set them free. The males are told that females are inferior, and that's why their god supposedly didn't give them the ability to transition. Dave didn't sound like he believed it, and I don't believe it either."
"It's convenient." Mattie felt the anger building in her chest, hot and sharp. "They keep the women powerless by telling them they're inferior, biologically and otherwise, so they don't fight back. They accept their role because they think it's all they're good for."
Dimitri nodded. "That was my read on it, too. Besides, it's irrelevant if they accept their role or not because they are imprisoned and forced to breed."
"How many women are we talking about? Hundreds?"
"I don't know. Dave didn't say, and I didn't think to ask. But it must be a lot, given the size of the immortal army. If the ratio of births is divided almost equally between the genders, as it is with humans, then a lot of girls had to be born in that enclosure. Then again, the women have normal human lifespans, or shorter because of what they are subjected to, and the men turn immortal and rarely die, so they accumulate over the centuries while the women don't."
Mattie pressed her good hand against her mouth, thinking of those women. Generations of them, mothers and daughters and granddaughters, all trapped in the same cycle of enforcedbreeding, their bodies used to produce soldiers for the Brotherhood.
It was her story writ large. Trafficked, used, treated as property. Except these women had been born into it. They'd never known anything else.
