DAVE
The hotel suite was quiet except for Anita's breathing and the low murmur of the comms.
She was asleep on the sofa, curled on her side with one of the brocade cushions under her cheek, her green wrap dress smoothed down over her knees and her gold sandals set side by side neatly on the floor where Number Five had placed them after she'd kicked them off.
She'd come at nine, escorted by the same handler as always, and they'd played three hands of Crazy Eights and eaten most of the fruit and some of the cakes.
Sometime in the second hour the effects of the drug she'd been pumped with before coming started to wear off, and she'd grown lucid and melancholy and asked if it was okay if she lay down.
They'd said yes, and she'd fallen asleep.
After six visits, all lasting until morning, the pattern was established, and no one wondered about her being requested anymore.
It had become routine.
In a few days that routine would change a little and then a lot. They would request her for two full days, so no one would come to collect her while they took her to the ship along with the other women.
Naturally, she didn't know that, but the Eight had no doubt that she would have said yes if they'd asked, and not just because Petrov wanted her freed. She just wanted to be free, and once she was free, she would decide if she wanted Petrov in her life.
Number Three was sitting with his feet on the desk, his hands behind his head, and his eyes closed.
He was listening to the comms, but since there was nothing interesting happening tonight, he was mostly listening to static and thinking about his mother, and the collective was trying to give him space to do so in his own private corner of the hive mind, but without much success.
Number Three's thoughts were louder than most and ignoring them was next to impossible.
The night watch report interrupted his musings, and then the harbor traffic control logged the supply ships.
A patrol on the resort perimeter called in an all-clear.
It was an ordinary night on the island, everything was calm, and everyone believed that their lord was sequestered in his harem and his eldest son was holding the seat.
Soon, though, Losham would lose the benefit of their thralling and the story would fall apart. Thankfully, he was no longer threatened by his brothers and could hold the reins of power even without the fiction of Navuh's imminent return.
Or so the Eight hoped.
They had done all they could to help, and they were leaving the island with a clear conscience.
The plan was simple on their end, or as simple as they understood it, and it ran on a timeline that still had a few days in it.
The chests came first.
The excavation crews were a day or two from breaking through to the chamber, and once they did and the chests were free of the rock, the Eight would compel the crew to haul them up and load them onto the supply ship.
They would supervise the extraction and delivery, employing Losham's authority and their compulsion, and call it a routine cargo movement that no one would or could question.
Once the chests were safely stored in the ship's cargo hall, the Eight would drive a transport truck to the enclosure and bring the women and the children out masked as fresh recruits, boys of age heading to the training camp.
The problem was that new recruits did not belong on the resort side.
Once the truck entered the cross-island tunnel, the women would change out of the plain transfer fatigues into the guard uniforms they had pilfered from the laundry, and the Eight would effect a new thrall to reflect their new disguise.
They would come out of the tunnel as soldiers carrying supplies, stop by the lab, load the scientists and Mattie, continue to the hotel and load Anita, and then everyone would board the ship and join the chests in the cargo hold.
Three days, give or take a day, with not much to do other than listen to the comms through Number Three's ears and play cards through Number Four's eyes and hands.
Number One was thinking about Sullha in that private corner he'd carved out for himself.
These days, that was all he was thinking about, or rather the growing part of him that was Yaaf was doing all that thinking and the others were letting him, because there was nothing to be done about it and because his preoccupation was contained. It no longer leaked out the way it used to.
He'd told her that he loved her. He had not meant to, and she had not responded, and he had carried her silence for days like a pebble in a boot. It chafed, it irritated, and the others were absorbing what they could of it.
In three days she would ride out of the enclosure in the back of the truck with her son, and after that there would be a ship, an ocean, and a new world, and there would be time to talk and explore.
That was what Number One held on to. There would be time, and honesty, and whatever she could give him, even if it was only friendship.
It would be enough.
It had to be.
Number Three felt it first, his feet coming down from the desk. It came up through the floor, a deep rumble that traveled through the structure of the hotel, through its foundation and walls, a thud that was felt in the chest more than heard.
The water in the pitcher on the service cart swashed. A cake slid off the top tier of the stand and landed on the carpet.
An earthquake? the collective thought.
Anita stirred on the sofa, murmured something that sounded like a complaint, and continued sleeping.
The channel, which had been carrying the harbor controller's bored recitation of a fuel manifest, cut off mid-word and then erupted with voices speaking over each other.
Someone demanding to know what that was.
Someone reporting a tremor on the resort side.
The sector duty officer cutting through, sharp, ordering the channel held and reports by sector.
Could it be the mansion? Number Five thought. It felt the same way when the booby traps were triggered.
"The chests," Number One said. "I hope they are still intact."
They needed to deliver those chests to the clan. That was what would buy them the clan's help. They couldn't afford to fail.
If the chamber was buried again, the chests pinned under a fresh mountain of debris, it would set back the operation by many days, even weeks. The timeline they had built the escape on depended on the chests coming up in a couple of days, but now it might be pushed back.
"Perhaps it was an earthquake," Number Three said. "Some are suggesting that it was."
He didn't sound convinced, and neither was the collective. Earthquakes were common, and they knew precisely how they felt. What had just happened wasn't that.
"They are sending guards," Number Three said as if the rest of them hadn't heard it through his ears.
Number One's phone started ringing.
"It's Losham." He answered the call. "Are you calling about the tremor?"
"You felt it." Losham's voice was tight. "It came from the mansion. I'm afraid there was another collapse, and that it wasn't caused by structural weakness or my father's traps."
"Then what could have caused it?" Number One asked.
"Someone is making a move."
"What do you mean? Who could be making a move and why?"
"Think. The other main contenders for the seat of power are dead, and the seat is mine, but it didn't have a chance to get warm yet.
Every junior brother now thinks that it's theirs for the taking.
An explosion in the mansion is either a provocation, a probe, or a cover.
Someone wants to create chaos, a reason to put men on the streets and around the mansion, and once they have men positioned and control a situation that I didn't create, they remove me in the confusion and blame whoever brought the building down. It's what I would have done."
The collective absorbed the reasoning and found it sound only from Losham's vantage.
This wasn't a coup. The collective was almost certain of that.
"I need you to get there," Losham continued.
"I cannot go myself, and I need someone there who answers to me and only to me to report what's going on.
Go now, before the night patrol turns it into a circus.
Find out if it was the basement, and if it was, what brought it down, but regardless of what you find, you tell everyone that it was a structural collapse and it will be handled in the morning.
If this was an attempt by one of the idiot junior brothers, I don't want them to gain anything from it. "
"We will go at once," Number One said. "And we will report what we find."
Number Five walked over to the sofa where Anita was still sleeping despite the commotion.
They couldn't just leave her alone in the suite and risk her waking up and going back to the brothel on her own. It wasn't safe.
They needed to thrall her to keep sleeping until they returned.
The Eight laid down the suggestion over her dreams. Sleep. Stay. Wait for us to come back.