Dimitri had sounded panicked when Number One had called him after leaving the mansion before dawn to let him know that the plan was to leave today. He'd said that there wasn't enough time to collect everything they needed to take with them, and Number One had insisted that they would have to make do with what they had.
Dimitri had warned him that they would be coming out with a lot of equipment, so it wouldn't be as simple as the three climbing into the truck and the convoy continuing on its way.
The loading was going to take a while, so it was time to shroud again. The Eight spread their thrall around the lab so the guards Losham had stationed on the periphery would look the other way while the scientists loaded their equipment onto the back of the truck.
The five in the Humvee went into the lab, joined by Number Six, and a few moments later they came out carrying boxes. Mattie came out carrying a bag and headed to the back of the truck.
"Oh my." She scanned the interior. "We will need to squeeze in to make room for all the equipment. We packed half the lab." She accepted Number One's offered hand and climbed inside.
"Hi, everyone. I'm Mattie."
"I'm Sullha, and this is Tomek," Sullha said. "Most of the others don't speak English, but I can translate."
Mattie smiled. "We'll have plenty of time for introductions while we are waiting for the ship to sail."
Yaaf was glad that Tomek didn't understand Mattie. This wasn't the time to explain to a five-year-old what was going on.
"We can sit on the boxes," Sullha said. "They can stack them in the middle, and we will lift our legs over them."
"What did you pack?" Number One asked as Petrov climbed into the back of the truck between one load of boxes and the next.
"The reagents, the cooler, the mixing apparatus," Petrov said while arranging the boxes in the middle between the twobenches. "The doses we have prepared are only good for up to forty-eight hours even when refrigerated. After that they degrade. The clan won't have everything ready for us within that timeframe because they don't even know what we need. If you want to remain coherent past two days, we need to keep producing stuff for you in transit, so we bring the laboratory, and we set it up wherever we can."
The collective felt a ripple of unease move through all eight threads at once.
They had only forty-eight hours' worth of premade doses. If for some reason Petrov and Dimitri couldn't make more, if they were not somewhere safe within forty-eight hours, somewhere Petrov and Volkov could unpack the apparatus and mix a fresh batch, the collective would begin to lose coherence. The careful architecture that held the eight of them together would start to fray at the seams. They had felt the edge of it before, when a delivery was held off to experiment how long they could go without it. Their thoughts had begun to slip, becoming less cohesive, and slowly madness had crept in. They never wanted to experience that again, and certainly not on a ship at sea with frightened women and children depending on them.
"The cargo hold is not ideal for the work," Petrov said. "But we will make it work if we need to." He turned to look at the women as if he was just now noticing them. "Hello, ladies. I'm Doctor Petrov."
The introductions fell to Yaaf and Sullha.
Asira and Saphira understood a little English, but the others didn't, and none of them spoke Russian. Volkov, Petrov, and Mattie knew only a few words in the island's dialect.
Sullha translated from English to the island's language, and Yaaf the other way around, and in this stitched-together fashion it was done.
Once all the crates were loaded, they headed to their next stop, which was the hotel.
While the truck was idling at the service entrance, Number Eight and Number Four headed to the main security office to thrall everyone there to ignore any anomalies during their shift and to refresh the recordings hourly. Given the number of immortals they would have to cover, this would drain the collective’s reserves even more, but it was unavoidable.
Number Two went to get Anita, and Number Six and Number Seven raided the hotel kitchen storeroom for provisions that would last them four days. They didn't know how long they would be at sea before the clan collected them, and four days was the collective's estimate of the outer boundary.
Bread, hard cheeses, canned goods, and water were packed into boxes that were manageable enough for the women to carry.
The truck bed grew crowded, and as the space filled up, the women drew up their legs and rested their feet on the boxes.
When Number Two and Number Four arrived with Anita, she was walking between them on her own, but her eyes were unfocused. There had been no time to explain things to her, so they'd had to thrall her. She had been asleep, still under the thrall they'd laid on her the night before, and they'd woken her only enough to walk. A fresh thrall had been laid on top of the old one to keep her compliant.
Anita climbed into the truck with Number Four's help, sat where she was instructed, and gazed at nothing with the placid blankness of the thralled.
32
SULLHA
The older Russian sat beside the woman from the hotel, his arm wrapped around her shoulders and her head resting on his arm. Sullha couldn't look away even though she felt like she was intruding.
Doctor Petrov hadn't spoken much, and what he had said came out sounding either flat and dry or slightly mocking, but she had a feeling it was an attempt at humor rather than putting anyone down.
The woman was very obviously thralled, and he seemed worried for her, checking her pupils and holding her wrist between his fingers to feel her pulse. He reached over and adjusted the strap of her dress that had slipped down her shoulder and then looked away, seeming embarrassed.
