"I don't fault them for it, though," she said. "It makes life tolerable for them. I envy them for being able to believe that what's being done to them has some divine meaning, that itserves a higher purpose. It's much easier to live with it like that than knowing it doesn't."
"True," Burda agreed.
"I wish I could do it," Sullha said. "But I could never be one of them and pretend to believe in all that nonsense."
"Pretending is easy." Burda chuckled. "It's the believing that is hard." She pointed at the remaining cookie on the plate. "Eat it before the boy eats it for you."
Tomek had been eyeing the second cookie with interest, and Burda's comment broke whatever calculation he had been making about whether he should reach for it despite offering it to her previously. He looked at Sullha hopefully.
"Half," she said. "We split it."
Surprisingly, he shook his head. "You should eat it. The cookie will make you happy."
She leaned down and kissed his cheek. "You make me happy." She broke the cookie along its uneven edge and gave him the larger piece. "And watching you enjoy the cookie makes me happy too."
He took what she handed him and regarded her with those big eyes of his that sometimes looked much older than they should. "Maybe you should taste it first and then decide if you want me to eat the other half."
She folded his little fingers over the half cookie. "It's yours. Enjoy."
"Okay." He opened his fingers but didn't eat. He was waiting for her to take a bite of her portion of the cookie first.
He'd noticed that she'd been upset, but he didn't know what was troubling her, and that was confusing to him. He didn't know about Yaaf because Yaaf thralled him not to see him.
A realization suddenly coalesced inside of her as if her mind had been working out a puzzle without involving her in the process. What if Yaaf was a figment of her imagination?
The thought had arrived from somewhere Sullha had not been guarding, and once it was there, she couldn't swat it away.
Yaaf had thralled everyone who had seen him and his teammates to forget that they had ever seen them. The other women at the playground, the children, the guards, even Burda. None of them remembered that he had been there. He had told Sullha so himself, and she had no reason to doubt it because the woman across from her right now, who knew everyone and missed nothing, had not made a single reference to the soldier who had been visiting Sullha almost daily.
Burda had no memory of him at all.
Tomek did not remember him either.
Which meant that Sullha was the only person who could confirm that Yaaf existed.
What if she had made him up?
What if the loneliness and the slow erosion of hope and the years of fantasizing about a different life had finally produced a coping mechanism that her mind had not been able to distinguish from reality?
What if she'd conjured a childhood friend out of desperation for connection, given him a face and a voice and a body, and then, because the conjuring had been too obvious, had layered on theimplausible detail of him being part of a collective of minds to make the fantasy feel real?
It almost made sense.
The romantic interest explained why she had needed to invent him in the first place, the thralling explained why no one else could corroborate Yaaf's existence, and thecollective mindtwist explained why she could not have feelings for him other than friendship.
There was one big problem with that theory.
Sullha had a good imagination, but it wasn't that outlandish. She could construct entire worlds inside her head and imagine cities and mountains and snow, but she would never have invented something as strange as eight minds in one body. Her imagination ran toward freedom and ordinary experiences. It did not lean toward the bizarre. The detail was too peculiar, too specific, too uncomfortable to be something she had generated inside her head for her own comfort.
Yaaf was real.
He was real, and he was also one part of a coalition of eight, and even though she couldn't verify anything about him, she had to live with the knowledge that her sanity depended on holding tight to a memory that no one else could confirm.
"Mama."
"Yes, baby."
"You are not eating your cookie."
