And the younger one, Doctor Dimitri Volkov, sat with the young blond woman tucked against his side, and the way he held her was a thing Sullha had no framework for. He was handsome in the cold, flawless way of immortals even though he didn't act like one, and Mattie was beautiful in a very human way. He was curved around her as if he was protecting something rareand precious with his body, and Mattie leaned into him with complete trust.
Sullha had never seen males and females interact like that. She had seen some of the mothers love their children, and she'd read about soldiers' love for their country. She'd been taught to obey Mortdh's teachings, but love was not part of the Brotherhood's ideology. She'd never seen this kind of soft, gravitational lean of two people toward each other, the tenderness. She had never even read of it, because the books permitted in the enclosure had not been about love in a relationship between men and women. Only duty and obedience. Family and honor. There were stories of sacrifice and devotion, of strife and war, of deceit and murder. There hadn't been anything in any of the books she'd read about a man looking at a woman the way Dimitri was looking at Mattie, because those who governed the enclosure did not want the women to know that such a thing existed.
Women who didn't know such tender feelings were possible could not grieve their absence, could not wish for it, could not even imagine it.
It had been deliberate. A caged bird with no concept of freedom didn't know what freedom felt like. Just as a woman who had never known love would have no choice but to accept a reality where men were universally cruel and a woman's role in life was to submit and suffer under the authority of men. That was what they had been taught and what their life experience had proven. They learned a better way could not exist. But now, as the women watched Dimitri gaze adoringly at Mattie, love and respect for her shining through like a beacon, and Doctor Petrov's worried fussing over the thralled woman, they were witnessing an entirely different dynamic between men andwomen. One they never knew was possible. It was staggering to take in.
The preoccupation with the two couples kept her mind from spiraling into panic, but when the truck slowed and then stopped, fear surged, drowning out everything else.
The sounds and smells coming from outside the canopy indicated that they were at the harbor, and she knew that even though she'd never been there.
The irony wasn't lost on Sullha. She lived on an island but had never visited the ocean, had never dipped her toes in the sand or in the water. She'd lived her whole life in the enclosure.
A bird in a cage.
For one stupid moment, she missed the safety of that cage, perhaps because she was about to leave the protective canopy of the truck, walk out into the open, and board a ship, in daylight, exposed.
"It's time," Yaaf said quietly, lifting the canvas flap and letting the light pour in. "Stay close, stay quiet, and I mean silent because we are not shrouding for sound and you don't sound like males. The shroud will alter your appearance, making you uninteresting to look at. No one will pay attention to you as long as you don't talk or do something that doesn't fit this image or this place."
"What about the children?" Rohilah asked in a whisper. "Are you making them look like soldiers as well?"
"No. Since you'll be carrying them, we will make them look like cargo."
The women still didn't move. They sat frozen on the benches, staring at the bright rectangle of open air as if it were the jaws of a beast.
“The guards in the security office have been dealt with,” Yaaf said. “They will not report anything.”
The women still didn’t move.
Sullha understood the paralysis because she felt it too, and Yaaf’s words were not enough to reassure any of them.
"Can you do something to make them relax? To calm them?" she whispered to Yaaf. "Just a little thrall to take the edge off the fear."
He winced. "We can't. We can't spare the energy. We need every bit of what we have left to hold the shroud."
That made sense even though she didn't understand anything about the mind manipulation Yaaf and the other seven did. They were powerful but not omnipotent, and they needed her help.
She turned to face the others. "I know you're afraid because I'm afraid too, but Yaaf and his teammates are going to hide us the same way they hid us in the enclosure. No one paid us any attention through all of our meetings, and the same will happen here. We walk out, with Rohilah and me carrying our children and the rest of you carrying the supplies. We follow Yaaf in a straight line, we don't talk, and we don't look anyone in the eye. We're simple soldiers following our commander, putting one foot in front of the other. We don't think past the next step. You've come this far, you can do this as well."
A few of them nodded, others swallowed, and the scientists and Mattie started to rise.
Sullha gathered Tomek up against her chest and accepted Yaaf's helping hand to climb down into the light.
The harbor was vast and bright and loud with the ordinary commerce of a working dock. Men were moving, machinery groaning, the smell of diesel and salt and fish, and Sullha walked into the middle of all of it with her son clamped against her chest, and she did not look up or sideways. She kept her eyes on Yaaf's back, and she put one foot down and then the next, exactly as she had told the others to do, and she did not think past the next foot.
Yaaf's teammates were behind them, carrying boxes too, but she didn't look back to confirm what she sensed. She was too frightened to look, and beneath the fear was the other reason, the one she would not examine, which was that if she looked at their faces she might recognize them from the dream.
Tomek clung to her, his arms locked around her neck, his face pressed into her shoulder.
"This is the secret trip that Yaaf promised," she breathed into his ear, barely making a sound. "Remember? We're going on a sailing trip in a big ship."
"I'm scared," he whispered back.
"I know, my love. I know. It's okay to be scared, but you need to stay quiet."
He nodded, his little nose rubbing against her sweat-slicked neck and his slight body trembling against hers.
They crossed the dock, passing armed men who did not see them, or rather, paid them no attention, because Yaaf and theothers were thralling them to ignore the procession going up the gangway.
