Dave walked to the end of the secondary pier, where the surveillance cameras were angled toward the loading areas, and a blind spot approximately three meters wide offered privacy from electronic observation. All eight bodies gathered at the pier's edge and looked out at the ocean.
The water stretched to the horizon in every direction. Flat, featureless, and enormous. Neither Dave nor the eight immortal soldiers that Dave comprised had ever crossed the vast expanse.They had never set foot on a vessel that might carry them beyond the island's shores.
The rest of the world was on the other side of that water.
"Mattie's demand," Number One said.
Speaking was not necessary. The collective communicated internally, without words, without the cumbersome mechanics of language. But Dave had discovered that externalizing certain thoughts and hearing them spoken sometimes helped clarify ideas that were too entangled for the hive mind to break up. It was the mental equivalent of writing something down. The act of expressing forced precision.
"She wants a liberation," Number Three said.
Our mothers, Number One thought.Eight women.We can do that.
"Nineteen people instead of eleven," Number Five said. "The logistics shift from difficult to very difficult."
The logistics are solvable. The transport problem is the same regardless of numbers. We need a vessel. Whether that vessel carries eleven or nineteen is a matter of capacity, not of kind. The real complication is the second extraction point. The Dormant enclosure is a separate compound, separately guarded. Adding it to the escape plan means two operations running simultaneously, which doubles the points of failure.
The harbor's noise became a muted backdrop. The sounds of machinery grinding, men shouting, and a crane swinging a cargo net over the side of the docked supply ship were familiar and meaningless. Dave's consciousness filtered them out.
"Mattie isn't wrong, though," Number Seven said.
The statement drew no immediate response. The collective started processing it before Number Seven had spoken. The thought preceded the speech, and the hive mind was turning it over, examining it from eight simultaneous perspectives.
"The women are prisoners like us," Number One spoke for them as usual. "They were born on this island and have never known anything else. We and the other warriors are at least free to roam the island, and from time to time, units are sent on missions. Even the brothel women have it better because they had lives before, memories of freedom to sustain them. The Dormants have nothing to compare their existence to, which makes their captivity the worst of us all."
That is not our concern, the collective thought.
It wasn't. Mattie has made it our concern.
She cannot make something our concern simply by declaring it a condition.
"She can," Number One said. "Because if we refuse, she will advise Dimitri against the merge, and she has more influence over his decisions than logic or self-interest. If Mattie says no, Dimitri says no. If Dimitri says no, we stay on the island."
Another silence. This one had the texture of discomfort, a shadow of resistance in the flow of shared consciousness. The collective did not experience discomfort the way its individuals used to do. There was no racing heart, no sweating palms. There was instead a processing friction, a slight drag in the current, as if eight rivers flowing into the same channel had encountered an obstruction and had to alter their course to compensate.
The obstruction was not Mattie's demand. The obstruction was the word that had been sitting at the center of the conversation without being spoken.
Mothers.
We remember them, the hive mind thought.
When the eight minds had started to merge, the memories had started to merge as well. Eight childhoods, and eight variations on the same fundamental experience. A large sprawling compound with sections that children were not allowed in. Mostly, they remembered the other children they had played with. The mothers who had watched over them collectively, the ones who assumed the roles of teachers. The older ones who cooked and were kinder. It hadn't been a bad life for the children, at least not until the soldiers had come for the boys, and then they'd discovered what real hell was.
All eight bodies shivered at the memories. A lot of bad things had happened to the young boys at the training camp. Bad things that they preferred to forget.
Compared to that, the Dormant enclosure had seemed like a dream of heaven.
So what if their mothers hadn't hugged them or kissed them or told them that they loved them?
Perhaps it had been better that way. Otherwise, the shock of the brutality of the training camp would have been even worse.
But memories were not objective recordings. They were interpretations, filtered through the consciousness of children who lacked the framework to understand what they were observing. A boy of five or eight or twelve, raised in a compoundwhere love was not often expressed, would not recognize it even if it was subtly present. He would not understand why his mother's face was blank when she handed him his food, why she often stared at nothing, and why she turned away when the soldiers came.
Mattie had offered a different interpretation. That the blankness was not indifference but armor. That the turning away was not rejection but the only defense available to women who knew their sons would be taken and who could not bear to love what they were certain to lose.
It was her interpretation, a hypothesis of someone who had grown up with love and couldn't understand its absence. But it was plausible. After all, she was a woman. She understood other women better than they ever could.
"We can take our mothers to Annani's clan," Number One said, voicing what the collective consciousness had thought a moment ago. "They won't be abandoned."
