Page 69 of Dark Destiny: A New Thread in the Tapestry

By ten o'clock, Sullha's living room was full of women.

They came for their English lessons with their notebooks and pencils, and with complaints that English was an impossible language to learn and that it sounded like people were chewing on noodles while speaking.

The lesson was real, and Sullha had made a list of twenty new words she was going to teach them today. But she had invited guest speakers who were going to change these women's lives.

"I brought hibiscus tea," Zohara said. "I found it in the village store." They didn't need it anymore, but there was something nostalgic about drinking it, a taste of the old rebellion.

Tomek had been bribed into Leehy's room with cartoons, a cup of chocolate milk, and the promise of the playground after lunch. Since it was the same bribe Sullha used when she needed him occupied so she could run her English classes, he didn't think anything about today was special.

When Margaret arrived, she wasn't alone. The clinic nurse was with her, which made the whole thing feel much more official.

"What's going on?" Mirumah asked. "Why are Bowen's mate and the other woman here?"

"Guest speakers," Sullha said.

"This is Hildegard." Margaret introduced the nurse. "She works with Doctor Bridget and is better qualified to answer your questions. She knows much more than I do."

Sullha translated.

Mirumah frowned. "What does she think we want to ask?"

Sullha took a deep breath. "There's something Margaret told me a week ago, and I've been summoning the courage to tell the rest of you. It's a good thing, but it's not easy to relay, and I'm not really qualified to provide all the answers. I asked Margaret to come and explain it, and she brought Nurse Hildegard because she doesn't feel she's qualified enough either."

"Qualified for what?" Baruha asked.

"We can become immortal. We were led to believe only our sons could transition into immortality. We can be immortal too, and so can our daughters, but we have been denied that."

For a long moment, no one moved. The only sound was the cartoon music coming from Leehy's room because the door wasn’t closed all the way.

"Who told you this?" Zohara asked.

"Margaret. And Hildegard is here to answer what she can't." She took a deep breath. "So, this is how it works." She continued to tell them what she'd learned from Margaret and what she'd already told her mother.

Shaking her head, Zohara set down her cup. "Of course, they told you that. Think, Sullha. They want willing women in their beds, which is a huge improvement over how we were treated in the breeding enclosure, but it's manipulative of them to feed us such an outlandish story just so we would ask for it. They probably think that they are more civilized because they don't just take what they want, but if they think we are going to fall for that, they don't know who they are dealing with."

Baruha laughed. "You are talking crazy, Zohara. Look at us." She swept a hand over herself, then over the rest of them. "Who is going to want this? The males here all look young and beautiful. They are not short of willing women. If you've been watching any television since we got here, you must have realized that women in America don't need much convincing to jump into bed with good-looking men?"

Mirumah pursed her lips. "They didn't even want us as breeders anymore, and some of us are still fertile. We are just no longer young and pretty."

Margaret and Hildegard looked from one speaker to the next, trying to understand what everyone was saying, then turned to Sullha for a translation.

She translated it for them without sugarcoating a word.

"I was not young when I met Bowen," Margaret said. "I already had a grown daughter, and I didn't look as good as I look now." She waved a hand over her face and body. "Life hadn't been kind to me either, and it showed. But the Fates brought Bowen and me together, and the pull was immediate and undeniable. We fell in love, we became intimate, and I transitioned. It can happen to you too. I know that none of you ever dreamt that it was possible, but you can have immortality, and you can have love. Everything you were told about females being unworthy of immortality was fabricated by a male who knowingly lied to you because he needed you human and fertile. Human women can bear many children while immortal women rarely conceive. You weren't unworthy. You were inventory."

Sullha translated, and she didn't try to find a softer word for inventory. It was already a more palatable one than breeding stock.

"Ask her about the syringe," Leehy said.

Sullha had forgotten about that. "My mother raised a valid point." She addressed Hildegard. "Can the venom be extracted and injected with a syringe?"

"We tried," the nurse said. "It doesn't work. If the venom doesn't enter a live blood vessel right away, it turns inert once it leaves the fangs."

Sullha translated.

"What about the other component?" Leehy pressed. "Can it be extracted and injected?"

Hildegard's answer was thorough, clinical, and involved words Sullha didn't understand and some that she didn't have the words for in her own language. She did the best she could with the vocabulary she had.