The air smelled of flowers and earth and the faintly chlorinated water of the fountain.
It was a slice of pretend paradise, so different from the breeders' enclosure that Number One visited almost daily now. This place was empty, but it hadn't been truly alive even when the lord and ladies had still been living there. It had been a theater, an elaborate performance.
There had been nothing real about it.
3
SULLHA
As the afternoon heat began to ease, the children who'd spent the last hour hiding from it in the shade of the compound wall and the mango trees lining it were venturing back onto the climbing frame. The sun was still bright, though, painting the concrete paths the color of honey and smoothing out the peeling stucco of the dormitory buildings.
From Sullha's spot on the bench, the place looked almost pretty, but only if she squinted hard and looked at it from a certain angle. A slight shift to the right or the left revealed the uglier spots she tried not to see, so she just looked straight ahead and focused on the best sight in the entire world.
Tomek had climbed to the top of the frame and was now hanging by his knees from the highest bar, his arms dangling and his dark hair falling away from his face.
"Look, Mama! I'm upside down!"
He was showing off for his friends, and it was a little dangerous, but Sullha fought the impulse to call him down.
She smiled. "Yes, you are, sweetheart! Just be careful up there!"
"Yes, Mama."
He was five. He could hang upside down if he wanted to, and if he fell, the sand under the climbing frame would catch him. She'd checked the quality of the padding herself, making sure that the children were safe and their landings were soft.
It reflected her philosophy about most everything she did.
The best she could do was provide gentle landings wherever she could put them. But today she wasn't thinking about landings of that kind. Today, she was thinking about landing somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn't the enclosure or the island. Somewhere where there would be no more visitors to serve, and where Tomek could grow up free and choose his own destiny.
There was a book on her lap, one she'd read so many times that she could recite it from memory, and she had no intention of even opening it. She'd brought it as a prop, a justification for sitting on the bench that faced the gate, where the sun wasn't in her face so she could read.
She was waiting for Yaaf.
Yesterday, he'd brought her books as a present, but she'd had to give them back because she couldn't keep them, and then he'd asked about his mother, and she'd been forced to be the bearer of bad news.
That conversation stayed with her, more so than all her other conversations with him. She kept turning it over and over in her head, until the edges wore smooth, looking for parts she had gotten wrong and things she could have said differently.
She should have prepared him for the news, softening it as she went, so that when it finally came, he was ready for it. Butshe hadn't known that he hadn't been informed of his mother's death, and he'd caught her by surprise with his question, so she hadn't had the right words prepared.
Yaaf had gone so still, and then she'd put her hand on his without thinking, offering comfort the way she would have done with any of the women in the compound who needed consoling.
His hand had been warm and still beneath hers, and he had not pulled away from her touch.
They'd had a moment, but perhaps she was reading too much into it.
With a sigh, Sullha dragged her attention back to the yard.
Tomek had dismounted from the bars and was arguing with Roshav about something, and they were both gesturing wildly with their hands. Pol was sitting on a rock near the sandbox, his face screwed up in concentration, ignoring the squabble while stacking pebbles into a tower. Sensa wasn't paying the boys any attention because she was busy bossing around three younger girls in a game whose rules didn't make any sense, probably because she was inventing them on the spot.
There had been a time when Sullha's mother would have enjoyed the yard on an afternoon like this. In fact, Sullha had only ever seen her smiling when she'd watched the children play, but even then, it would be fleeting, and the dead expression would soon return. Her mother hadn't visited the play yard in years.
Sullha shook her head, pushing away the thought, but it came back.
Her mother now worked in the laundry, and she lived in a dormitory with other older women who had been reassigned.The laundry was the resting place for most of the women whose bodies had finished being useful for breeding, and who were too dead inside to do anything else.
The work was grueling but mentally undemanding, and since more than ten thousand warriors had their dirty uniforms and linens delivered to the enormous laundry to be washed, dried, ironed, and folded, it provided plenty of work for hundreds of women.
It was better now that machines did the heavy lifting, but it hadn't always been like that. Burda had told her that when she was young, women had stood at deep sinks, fed sheets into the rollers, and hung the wet things on long lines strung behind the building to dry.
