She reminded him of what Mattie had said about the mothers. That the blankness was armor. That the turning away was a defense. This woman was defending Sullha the only way she could, with a lie that could cost her dearly.
Dave respected that.
"Thank you," Number One said. "We will just look around."
The woman's jaw clenched, but she said nothing and dipped her head as Dave walked past her and continued into the compound.
The information he needed was already in his possession, harvested from the surface of her mind in the brief moment before he had decided not to push deeper. Sullha was in the recreation yard, on the far side of the compound. She had afternoon childcare duties, watching over the younger children while their mothers did other things.
Dave walked through the compound slowly, his eight bodies striding down the central pathway and making an effort not to appear synchronized. Women watched from windows and doorways, some clutching children, others standing alone with expressions that ranged from fear to cold hostility. A few watched with a terrible blankness that Dave recognized because he had seen it on his own mothers' faces in eight sets of childhood memories.
The dormitories were clean but sparse. Through open doorways, Dave glimpsed narrow beds, shared dressers, and children's drawings taped to walls. The drawings were the most human thing in the compound, bright splashes of color depicting suns and flowers and stick figures. The small artists were not very talented.
The girls were allowed to draw. The boys were discouraged from doing anything that was considered feminine, which had been fine with the Eight since none of them enjoyed coloring.
As they passed a dormitory entrance, a small girl of about four peeked around the doorframe and stared at Dave with enormous brown eyes. She didn't run. She didn't cry. She just stared, with the solemn curiosity of a child too young to have learned fear.
They all raised their hands and waved at her.
The girl ducked back inside.
We should stop doing that, the collective thought.We are scaring the women and children.
The recreation yard opened up beyond the last row of dormitories. It was a large, flat expanse of packed dirt with a few structures that served as play equipment. There was a wooden climbing frame, a set of swings with chains that needed oiling, a sandbox that had seen better days. Dozens of children were scattered across the yard, some playing, some sitting in clusters, some arguing over a game of stones.
Dave remembered that game. All eight had played it at times. All it required was four rounded rocks per player and good acting skills.
Several women sat on benches scattered around the playground, but the collective zeroed in on the one with shoulder-length hair that was sitting near the climbing frame. She was smaller than average, looking almost like a child herself, especially since she was sitting with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them.
Sullha.
Number One recognized her before the name attached itself to the face. It was the way she sat, the particular angle of her head when she tracked the children's movements, the habit of tucking her hair behind her left ear with a quick, impatient gesture. She had done the same thing as a girl, sitting on the bench in the yard while the boys raced and wrestled. She watched with the quiet, knowing eyes that had made Number One feel like she could see right through him.
The gap-toothed skinny girl was gone, replaced by a young woman whose beauty was muted by weariness and whose eyes were guarded.
Dave stopped at the edge of the yard, his eight bodies standing in a loose semicircle that was supposed to imply a gathering, and watched her from a distance of twenty meters more or less.
When she finally noticed them, the blood drained from her face. She unfolded from the bench and stood, positioning herself between Dave and the children.
Her sudden movement alerted the children to Dave's presence as well, and they went quiet. Two of the youngest ones pressed against her legs. A boy of perhaps five or six stepped forward and stood beside her with his little fists clenched and his soft jaw set in a futile defiance.
Dave reached into Sullha's mind.
He did it gently, the lightest possible touch, skimming the surface thoughts without penetrating deeper. He didn't want to violate her privacy, only to see if she recognized Number One, only to understand what her life had been like after he'd left.
Her thoughts were a cascade of fear and protectiveness. The children. She had to get the children inside. Who were thesesoldiers, and what did they want? Had someone done something wrong? Were they here to take one of the boys? None of them was thirteen. The oldest was only nine, and they never took anyone under thirteen. But rules could change, and nobody bothered to tell the women when they did.
The boy standing beside her, the one with the clenched fists and the defiant jaw, was only five years old, and he was hers.
The knowledge unfolded in Dave's consciousness like a flower opening in accelerated time. Sullha had given birth to him when she was fourteen. The father had been one of the selected males brought in for breeding, a stranger whose face she remembered with the kind of clarity that trauma preserved. The boy's name was Tomek, and he was everything to her. The reason she had the strength to get up in the morning. The reason she volunteered for childcare duty every day. The reason she hadn't surrendered to the blankness that claimed so many of the other women, the ones who had stopped feeling because feeling hurt too much.
She loved him with a ferocity that burned so brightly in her thoughts that Dave almost flinched from it.
Mattie had been right.
Not all the mothers detested the children that had been forced upon them.
Some of the mothers could still love the result of their own violation. Not all of them, perhaps, and not always in ways that were visible to the children who were eventually taken from them, but the capacity was there, buried beneath layers of trauma and survival instinct and the deliberate suppression of attachment that the enclosure's conditions demanded.
