He'd shut them out a half-second before that, and he did not have the heart to tell them what he'd spared them from. Not that it would remain hidden for long. He couldn't keep it bottled up forever. Eventually, it would spill out, and they would know.
As usual, Sullha had pretended none of it had happened.
She was aware of his ability to skim her thoughts, so she must have realized that there was at least a chance of him skimming the surface of her dream, but she'd chosen to ignore it and to pretend that nothing had happened, the same way she'd pretended not to have heard that he told her he loved her.
That was her way of dealing with things that made her uncomfortable. She pushed them into a corner of her mind and locked them down so she wouldn't have to examine them.
He hadn't said anything either because, apparently, he was a coward too.
The collective felt no fear in combat, no hesitation to kill when killing was called for, but none of them knew how to deal with the feelings and the desires of a slight nineteen-year-old woman who was probably just as inept at it as they were.
She was not ready for this.
He was not ready for this.
The Eight weren't ready.
They were all damaged, and the broken pieces of them could not assemble themselves into a whole.
And yet she had dreamt of him with acceptance, warmth, and fearless desire before the dream had turned into a nightmare. Both parts of the dream had been real, the passion and the horror, but he wanted to believe that it was possible to preserve the good and eliminate the bad.
Was he deluding himself?
Was there hope for them?
Yaaf didn't know enough about people and relationships to arrive at a conclusion. He set the question aside, locking it in the same corner of the hive mind he had hidden the dream in, and sealed the entrance.
He joined the collective in time to see Sullha arriving at the playground with Tomek and a satchel slung across her body, a thing sewn from the panels of some old garment.
She could not see him, but she knew he was there.
Tomek was trailing at her side, looking confused. "Why did we come here? We never go to the playground before class because you don't want me to get dirty."
"Instead of looking worried, you should be happy." She ruffled his hair. "Saphira and some of the other mothers are having a meeting about the new schooling program, so the morning class was canceled."
"I'm very happy." He didn't smile, looking at her with suspicion in his dark eyes. "It's just strange."
"I know." She crouched next to him and kissed his cheek. "Go play and try not to get too dirty."
"Why not? If there is no class, I don't need to be clean."
"It's the beginning of the day. If you get dirty now, you will look like a sand boy by the end of it."
That got him to smile. "Okay. I'll be careful, and I'll wash my hands."
"You do that." She sent him on his way, pushed to her feet, walked over to the spot by the wall where she held the evening meetings, and lowered herself to the ground.
As per his instruction, she was wearing her gardening coveralls. That would ease the shroud. The less the collective had to camouflage, the less strain there was on their hive mind. The shapeless work clothes that were altered old fatigues matched the kind of clothing the boys usually wore. It matched what people expected to see on the young recruits. He had instructed all the women to wear coveralls or old fatigues, which was the drab utilitarian clothing half the enclosure wore for labor.
Regrettably, not all of them had the boots to match because the kind of work they performed didn't necessitate them, and they weren't easy to come by. Not that it was crucial for their appearance as recruits. The boys didn't have boots either, and most arrived at the training camp in whatever they owned, which was mainly plastic slippers and rubber flip-flops. They were issued boots there.
The problem would be later, when the collective would shroud them to look like soldiers.
It had been Leehy's idea to snatch actual military fatigues from the laundry's discard heap. Each day, more uniforms that had been too far gone to return to the soldiers were added to the pile of discards, so there was no shortage of them.
The women would wear them underneath the coveralls and mismatched fatigues, and they would sweat through them in the island heat, but the misery would be brief. Once they were on the truck and a mile out, they could shed their outer layer and become soldiers.
The women began to arrive, drifting in with faked casualness that fooled no one. They were so obvious with the padded clothing that made their gait stiff, the eyes that wanted to dart but were being held still by force of will, and the hands that gripped their satchels.
