"She loved my mother's ring?!" Saveah screeched.
Zasen clasped her shoulder, trying to calm her down, but his eyes were on me. "Ayla, this is a Dragon ring."
"No, it was my mother's," I assured him even as Saveah kept going.
"It was my mother's first!" She grabbed the small gold ring and clenched it tightly in her fist. "She was killed by Moles when I was just a baby. We never found her body! One day she was telling me stories, and that night she was just gone! Don't you get it? They stole this. They took it the way they take our people! This ring is still registered to Tiesha the Serpent! It's hers, Ayla. Hers! Not yours!"
But I felt like I couldn't breathe. My ears wanted to ring, but instead they were muffled, like there was too much pressure in my head. One thing stood out in all of that, and I shook my head in disbelief, staring at Saveah with wide eyes and my mouth hanging open.
"Tiesha?" I asked.
"That's my mother's name," Saveah snapped.
"Mine too," I breathed as my legs began to feel weak. "Tiesha Ross, married to Thadius Ross."
It wasn't a normal name. It wasn't a common one. My mother had worn that ring her entire life, refusing to give it up. I remembered it as a pendant, hanging from a cheap piece of twine around her neck, and she had never taken it off.
"Oh, shit," Kanik breathed.
I watched as Saveah's face changed to match mine. She shook her head, but for me, so many pieces were falling into place. As the tidbits of memories slammed into me, my skin went numb. My legs buckled. The pain in my hip only added to all of it.
I dropped, crashing to my rump on the floor, but I didn't even care. The tailless woman in the street had been dragged by a Mole who said he was going to save her. The women in quarantine had looked so different. One even had black hair! They'd never been allowed out.
How many people had lost loved ones to the Moles? But it wasn't just the tailed bodies they took. The guys had said that sometimes tailless women disappeared too. They were just gone, presumed dead the same way the men were.
But they weren't dead. That wasn't what the Moles were doing with them. All those stories my mother had told me growing up? They hadn't been about Heaven. They'd been about here. About a magical and amazing place called Lora, except that had been my childish brain trying to interpret her strange - Vestrian - accent on the word.
Lorsa. Lora.
"They're taking women," I breathed. "My mother was a Dragon?"
"Oh, shit," Saveah said, dropping her eyes back to the ring. "Tiesha was your mother's name?"
I nodded. "And she was not allowed to be with the other women. They said the Devil had taken her, and she wouldn't be allowed out of quarantine until she pushed off his influence."
"Did that happen often?" Zasen asked. "Ayla, did women ever come out of quarantine?"
I shook my head. "Rarely. I only remember one, and she was just a girl when she went in, or so they said. The priest said she was cured on her twentieth birthday."
"But," Saveah pressed, "Tiesha? Ayla, this is important. Your mother's name was Tiesha? Not something similar? It was that? Exactly that?"
"Yes," I breathed. "They always said her madness wouldn't pass to me, but that's because I'd never been to the surface. That is why the name of this town was so familiar! I remembered it wrong! I'd thought she'd called it Lora, but I was just a baby back then. Lorsa! The stories she told me about a place where we could one day be happy? It was here, Zasen! Right here!"
"Oh, fuck," he breathed. "Your mother was a Dragon."
My mind was still stuck on the memory of my mother, though. She'd had my older brother while in quarantine. Then me. Then two more children. She'd died in there, bleeding to death after her last child. It had all been normal in the compound, the sort of thing we took for granted, but what about those other women? What about the one in the cell beside her with the jet-black hair? What about Callah's mother? Or Tobias's?
My own mother's hair had been the darkest gold I'd ever seen, or so I'd thought. All of the Righteous were blonde. All of the Righteous had blue or grey eyes. The women in quarantine hadn't.
That was why my mother's funeral had been private. By blaming the Devil, they'd made the rest of the community scared of getting close. By talking about their madness as if contagious, they had ensured the secrecy of what they were doing, but how did they explain it away? How had I not known? Why hadn't I even suspected?
Because the Moles had lied. They'd told us one thing and then had been doing something different where the women wouldn't be able to find out. They'd kept us ignorant, beating us until we followed their traditions, and punishing anyone who dared ask questions.
They. Had. Lied.
About all of it. About God, about the Devil, about why we were even down there! My entire life had been built from lies, and I hadn't suspected a thing. None of the women had! Not even when our own mothers were part of that lie! Not even when they tried to tell us the way mine had!
"Zasen," I said, lifting my eyes to look at him, Kanik, and Saveah in turn. "You know how you wanted to know everything about the compound?"
"Ayla, it's okay," he said.
I just swallowed, the weight of this realization pressing on me so hard. "I know more than I realized. I know what they're doing. They aren't just taking Dragons to eat. They're taking Dragon women to breed! They're stealing from the surface so they never have to come aboveground and lose their power over us. Over the women!"
"And our mother?" Saveah asked timidly, her fingers gripping the ring too tight.
"She had four children," I said, refusing to let my grief into my voice. "I was the second. The fifth killed her. When my father visited, she screamed. She always screamed."
"Shit..." Kanik breathed. "Because sex hurts."
"He raped her?" Saveah asked.
I nodded. "Yes. He said it was her duty, and I didn't know any better. I sat in the hall, listening to her scream, only knowing she was going to have another baby and I'd have to leave."
"So I have three more siblings?" Saveah asked.
"Two boys. Two girls," I said. "My brother is older, then me, then another brother, and our sister was last. She looks like our mother."
Saveah reached out to grab the edge of the counter. "And Mom's gone?"
