"Why did you move the timeline?" The question came out before she could stop it. He probably couldn't tell her, but she had to ask. "Did something happen?"
He just looked at her for a beat, then shook his head. "It's better if you don't know the details. Not because I don't trust you but because if anything goes wrong, the less they can pull out of your head, the safer everyone is." He held her gaze for a moment longer. "All I can tell you is that it's necessary."
Sullha understood.
She already knew too much, and so did the other women. They knew that their sons were organizing this escape, and it put Yaaf and the others at risk.
"So, how are we going to do this?" She slid out of bed and tucked the blanket around Tomek.
"Simple. I'll keep us from being seen the same way I do on the playground. As long as you're beside me, no one will notice us. You tell each of the women to go to the playground right after breakfast so it doesn't look suspicious. They can only bring what they can carry without it being obvious. We will handle the rest."
"Why not wait for breakfast to do that? It will be easier for me to tell the women while they are gathered in one place."
"It will be much more difficult for me to shroud us with so many people around sitting close to each other. Besides, I want them to head out to the playground right after breakfast, which means that they have to bring what they want to take with them to the dining area."
That made sense, and it would also give the women a few hours to process the sudden change so she and Yaaf wouldn't have to herd a bunch of panicky and distraught females.
Yaaf looked at Tomek. "Is he going to be okay by himself here?"
She followed his gaze to her son. He was deeply asleep, one arm flung off the edge of the bed, his face slack and peaceful. If she left now and he woke to find her gone, he wouldn't panic. He knew what to do. He would get up and go to the dining area to look for her, assuming that she was serving the breakfast shift. He wouldn't brush his teeth or wash his hands without her standing over him, but under the circumstances, it was such a small and inconsequential thing to worry about.
It didn't matter.
"He knows what to do if I'm not in bed with him when he wakes up. Sometimes I cover the morning shift in the kitchen, but I usually tell him the night before. He will just assume that I forgot."
"Good." Yaaf stood there as if waiting for her to walk out of the room in her night clothes.
"Wait outside while I change, please."
His eyes widened for a split second. "Right. I'll do that. I'll wait outside."
29
YAAF
Yaaf composed himself before entering the security office that monitored the enclosure. It wouldn’t be the first time he thralled the humans staffing the office, making them report nothing despite what they saw on the feed, and refreshing the recording every hour to replace the previous one with a new one.
He’d done it on multiple occasions to ensure anyone working there was covered. Thankfully, there weren’t many cameras in the enclosure. Only two places were monitored, one being the entry gates and the other the breeding building. The feed from the gates went only to this office, while the cameras in the breeding building, which fed to a special unit outside the enclosure, had been turned off due to inactivity, pending the resumption of operations.
Once he was done with that, he headed to the playground, and as he passed through the walkway gate, he was grateful that it was empty.
He needed time to think.
Choosing a bench in the shade near the wall, he sat down and let himself think about Sullha's dream, but only after withdrawing into the corner of the hive he had carved for himself, the enclosed private province that the others respected.
They were still reeling from what they'd seen before he managed to wall it off, and they were happy to leave him be to think about it on his own.
Thankfully, they'd been privy only to the first part of the dream. They'd witnessed the warmth, the tenderness, the desire. They'd seen Sullha writhing beneath him in evident pleasure, her face flushed, her expression open, unguarded, and full of desire.
He'd been taken by surprise when he'd entered her room. Her mind had been so loud, so vivid, and she was calling his name like it was an incantation, with love she'd never shown in real life, with devotion she didn't feel. He couldn't help responding, reaching toward it like a moth to a source of light. By the time reason arrived, he was already inside the dream, and the seven were already gathering behind him, drawn to the blaze of her emotions, helpless to resist as much as he was.
Yaaf had never imagined her capable of such hedonistic abandon.
He'd been so shocked at what her dreaming mind had been projecting into his mind that he hadn't thrown up the shields immediately. He'd done it after a moment, but he'd been so overwhelmed that the shield had been clumsily constructed, porous, and the impressions had bled through the seams of it before he could shore them up.
The others had felt the warmth, the slick heat. They had felt being desired by the woman he loved. All of it had spilled intothe collective in the seconds before he contained it, and the hive mind had drunk it up before he could turn off the tap.
He'd managed to seal their access to Sullha's dream just before her bliss had turned to horror, before the warmth curdled to revulsion. They knew that what made him unbearable to her was them, but there was a difference between intellectual understanding and visceral feeling.
