But Dave was powerful. Dave could compel minds, manipulate systems, neutralize threats, and Dave wanted to be her friend. Dave's price for escape was the mind merge. What if Mattie's price for the mind merge was the women?
What if she made it part of the deal?
Help us escape, and free the Dormants.
It was a wild idea. Probably impossible. Dave wanted off the island with Dimitri and Petrov in order to maintain his drug supply. Adding hundreds of women to the equation was most likely too big a mission even for the Eight.
But Dave had said he wanted to understand love. Real love. And what was love if not caring about people beyond yourself? If Dave truly wanted to understand it, maybe the lesson started with compassion. With sacrifice. With doing something not because it served his interests but because it was the right thing to do.
The Eight were young, so perhaps their mothers were still alive. Maybe that was the motivation she could feed him? The chance of connecting with their mothers outside of this hellhole and maybe experiencing love firsthand instead of as voyeurs?
How many women were they talking about? She had no idea. She didn't even know where the Dormant enclosure was, what it looked like, or how it was guarded.
She didn't know anything, really. Just that those women existed, and now that she knew of their suffering, she would never be able to forget it and ignore it.
The shower was shut off. A few minutes later, Dimitri emerged from the bathroom in shorts and a T-shirt, toweling his hair. He looked at her and paused.
"You're supposed to be sleeping."
"I'm thinking."
"About Dave?"
"About the Dormant women."
He lowered the towel. "What about them?"
"I don't know yet," she said. "But I have a feeling that they're going to be important."
Dimitri studied her for a moment, then came to his bed and lay down, pulling the blanket up to his waist. Their beds were still pushed apart since her injury, and the gap between them felt both necessary and cruel.
Hopefully, it wouldn't stay there for long.
4
KIAN
Annani was quiet for a long moment, tracing the rim of her cup with her finger. "True love cannot die," she said, so softly that it was nearly a murmur.
The words hung in the air, oddly formal, almost ceremonial. It sounded like a line from a song or an ancient poem, but the way Annani had said it was not poetic. She said it like reciting a prayer. As if she was clinging to it like a mantra, and it was her anchor in the storm.
Kian studied her. "What do you mean by that?"
"I mean that Khiann is alive. I feel it. The bond between us has not been severed, and as long as true love persists, so does the one you love."
It was a beautiful sentiment. The kind of thing that sounded profound and offered comfort. But Kian wasn't sure he believed in it, at least not in the literal sense like his mother seemed to.
He'd been listening to a podcast recently about consciousness as the fundamental reality of the universe, one of those intellectual deep dives that Syssi kept recommending. The argument wasthat consciousness wasn't a byproduct of neurons firing and chemicals reacting, but rather the other way around. That the material world was secondary, derived from a universal consciousness that permeated everything.
In theory, it had all sounded wonderful. If consciousness were fundamental, then love as an expression of consciousness could transcend the physical. It wouldn't be bound by bodies or brains or the border between the living and the dead. It would persist in some form, woven into the fabric of reality.
But after sitting with the idea for a while, Kian wasn't buying it. The philosopher on the podcast had been eloquent and persuasive, but eloquence wasn't evidence. The theory was unfalsifiable, which made it beautiful but also conveniently immune to disproof, and Kian had always been more comfortable with things he could test, measure, and verify.
Still, his mother believed it, and right now that mattered more than whether it was objectively true.
"You might be right," he said.
Annani gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing, but she smiled anyway.
