Chapter 2
DAVE
The tunnel terminated at the roundabout, and Number Seven turned the jeep around so it would be ready for the trip back.
Eight pairs of boots hit the concrete in sequence.
Number One entered the code at the door and executed the sequence the collective had committed to memory. The indicator light shifted from red to green, and the door clicked open.
They stepped into Navuh's private apartment, and the grief in Number One's chest receded even though there was nothing in the familiar space that should have soothed his pain.
The soft earth tones and pinks, the overstuffed armchairs, and the balcony opening onto the interior courtyard of the pyramid were all frozen in time, a memorial to the lives that had been lived between these walls.
There had been love here.
The collective could sense it now that they knew what to look for.
They wouldn't have thought Lord Navuh capable of such emotion, but the evidence was right there.
"Should we search the apartment again?" Number Six asked.
"No," Number One said. "There was nothing here before, and there is nothing here now."
Number One glanced at the ornate book that had been left on the table beside the armchair.
Sullha would have loved such a book regardless of what was written on its pages, but she couldn't keep it in the enclosure, so there was no point in bringing it to her. Once they were free, though, he would get her a bookcase full of beautiful books.
A whole library.
"We should start with the ladies' level," Number Three said. "The staff who tend the bedrooms go there every morning. Encountering the empty rooms day after day might have weakened our compulsion."
Had the staff begun to question why the gowns never moved, and the beds were never slept in? If there were cracks, they would find them there first.
The Eight took the stairs down to the second level.
Nine suites, arranged around the interior courtyard, each with its own balcony. Gowns in the closets. Perfumes on the vanities. Embroidered slippers tucked under the beds.
A maid was in the third suite when they arrived, smoothing the coverlet on a bed that nobody had used in weeks. She looked up when Dave entered, and her expression went through the sequence of changes Dave had expected.
First, a small hitch of surprise, because other than the lord, immortal males were not supposed to be in the harem. Second, the smoothing of surprise into placid acceptance, because the thrall and compulsion they had laid down on her weeks ago told her to ignore and forget their presence.
Third, nothing. Her mind returned to the coverlet and the invisible wrinkles she was chasing out of it.
The thrall and compulsion were holding. Dave could feel it the moment they brushed her mind. It was not cracked, and it was not fraying, but it was thinner than they wanted it to be.
They deepened both.
The maid did not react because the thrall mixed with compulsion ran below the surface of her attention, writing itself into the part of her mind that she experienced as her own ordinary thoughts.
The lord was in his apartment. Lady Areana was with the other ladies in the dining room.
The lord did not wish to be disturbed. This was how it had always been. This was how it would continue to be.
He added one more layer, at Losham's request.
If anyone asked about the lord or the ladies, she would answer without hesitation that they were well and that the lord still preferred solitude and seclusion. She would not think that unusual. She had always answered such questions that way.
The maid smoothed the coverlet one last time and then moved to dusting the furniture, unaware that anything had happened.
They worked their way around the second level, suite by suite.
Two more maids, both caught mid-task, both refreshed without noticing.
One of them paused after Dave had finished and frowned for half a second, the way a person might frown at a fragment of a thought that had almost surfaced and then sank back, and then she returned to her cleaning duties.
Number One reinforced the redirect.
Done with that level, they entered the service elevator down to the servants' level. The cab was small and industrial, and their eight large bodies barely fit inside. Thankfully, the ride down was short.
The doors opened onto the utilitarian corridor Dave remembered from the first visit. White walls, gray floor, and the smell of laundry soap. Three humans looked up.
This time, no one screamed.
Their gazes slipped off the Eight soldiers as if they weren't there, which was precisely what they had compelled them to do the last time they were here.
The humans returned to what they were doing, and the Eight spread out.
This was the part of the operation where the hive mind could spread its wings, so to speak, its eight bodies moving through a small self-contained population and touching every mind.
Number One took the kitchen. Number Two and Number Three took the laundry.
Number Four and Number Six took the staff rooms, where two women were off shift and sleeping.
They thralled them through their dreams without waking them.
Number Five took the storerooms and the elderly cook's pantry.
Number Seven stayed near the elevator in case anyone tried to move between floors.
Number Eight handled the seamstresses' workroom, where three women sat at a long table mending uniforms.
They weren't taking any chances. The compulsion had to be strong, and it had to hold, which required a more focused attention than what they did during their rounds among the soldiers, even though these were humans and not immortals.
It was a slow process, but there weren't that many people in the harem, and after an hour, they were almost done.
Number One found the maid with the birthmark in the third staff break room he checked.
Pari. The collective remembered her name.
She was sitting at a table with a cup of tea and a paperback book that had been read so many times that the spine had split and the pages were falling apart.
She looked up when Number One entered, and her expression did the same triple-motion the first maid's had done upstairs. Surprise, smoothing, nothing.
He remembered her. Pari was twenty years old, with a pretty face that was marred by a birthmark.
Her mind was an open book. She had been the one who had told Losham that Areana and Navuh were exclusive, and that the other ladies had openly taken human lovers, and that Navuh had claimed every male child as his own.
The information had changed Losham's understanding of his own origins. He was most likely not Navuh's son.
Number One sat down across from her and brushed her mind.
He found nothing that should not have been there.
The story of Lord Navuh and his ladies was filed in her mind exactly as Losham had designed it and Dave had implanted it.
The lord was recovering from a severe emotional outburst. The ladies were with him.
Pari brought trays up three times a day, left them outside the doors, and retrieved the empty dishes in the afternoon.
She had never actually seen any of the ladies since the episode, but then she rarely had before.
The food was always gone when she returned.
He reinforced the structure, smoothing over the faint edges where the lack of any actual sighting of the lord or the ladies was beginning to register as strange. He wrote in a fresh layer of everything.
It is as it always has been, and I feel no need to question anything.
Pari turned another page.
He watched her for a moment longer.
She reminded him of someone.
The other maid on the first visit had stepped forward because she was afraid. Pari had come forward because nobody had ever asked her anything, and she wanted to be useful. There was no fear in her. Only a person who had been overlooked her whole life and was briefly surprised to be seen.
That was why he was making sure the thrall on her was watertight. People like her were watchful, and they questioned things. Her thrall would fray the fastest.
The last one on the level was the old cook, a stocky guy with arms that were as thick as most men's thighs and a bad temper. His thrall was the cleanest of any of them. Number One touched it, found nothing to repair, and withdrew.
Some people were simply too unflappable to question the story they had been given.
The cook had probably been repeating the lord is in his apartment to himself all day for weeks without ever once examining whether that was true, because the man had spent his life not paying attention or examining anything too closely. It was a survival trait.
The Eight reconvened at the elevator.
They rode it up and walked the corridor of the second level again on their way out to do a second sweep. It revealed nothing but three maids working without question or concern in their minds.
In Navuh's apartment, Number One paused at the balcony for a moment and looked at the beautiful courtyard below.
The lighting was calibrated to mimic a soft morning sun, the fountain was running quietly, and the garden beds were manicured, all to please the ghosts of the ladies and lord who used to live on the first and second floors of the harem.
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.