"We don't have one. We make decisions together."
"Do you vote on them?"
He tilted his head as if the question didn't make any sense. "We don't need to vote. We are all in all of the time. We are one."
She could understand camaraderie, but that sounded like much more than that. It was strange.
"How does that work?"
He opened his mouth and closed it again.
"It just works," he said. "It's hard to explain."
Sullha watched his face.
She had always been able to read him, even when he was trying to hide things. He hadn't been able to lie to her to save his life. His ears used to turn red when he tried.
His ears were not red now.
His training had seen to that. But there was something in the set of his jaw that was the same, the pull at the corner of his mouth that appeared when he was holding something back.
"You're hiding things from me," she said.
"I'm telling you what I can for now."
She nodded even though it hurt. He could trust her, he had to know that.
"You'll tell me later?"
"I will."
He went quiet, and it told her that whatever was on the other side of what he was not saying was a big deal. Something he thought she wasn't ready for.
Her first reaction was a flare of anger. She was nineteen years old. She had given birth at fourteen. She had survived the breeding building and her mother's silence, and there was not much left that she was not ready for.
She pushed the anger aside.
He'd come to her, and he'd kept coming. He'd just walked through a yard full of women and children and thralled all of them into not seeing him, so he could sit with her and talk to her like they were the only people in the world.
Whatever he was holding back, he was not doing it out of a lack of trust. She had a feeling that he was keeping it back because he thought she couldn't handle it, that it would hurt her, and he wasn't ready to do that because they had just reunited, and he didn't know how strong she was.
"All right," she said.
"All right?"
"You'll tell me when you are ready. I'll wait."
He looked into her eyes. "You're the only person in the world who would answer me that way."
"I'm also the only person in the world that you're talking to other than your seven teammates. So that's not much of a sample."
She didn't know what prompted her to say that or why she believed it to be true; it was just a hunch. There was a lonely quality to Yaaf, a sense of isolation, and she recognized it for what it was because she felt the same.
5
MATTIE
Dimitri intercepted Mattie when she was coming down the stairs.
