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 andfrowned 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 lordwas 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 repeatingthe lord is in his apartmentto 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.
