"Good afternoon," Number One said, and all Eight smiled at Mattie, which still looked creepy even though they did it every time now.
She smiled back and gave them a little wave hello. "We heard it was an eventful day."
"It was." The Eight took their places on the plastic chairs along the wall. "A section of the basement collapsed, and the mansion suffered a lot of damage. More so than from the original explosions."
Petrov swiveled his chair around. "That bad, eh?"
"All the progress from the past weeks has been undone. Everyone was evacuated from the mansion, Commander Yereth has secured the site, and the engineers are conducting a structural assessment before anyone is allowed to re-enter."
Dimitri brought the tray of syringes to the usual table and put on his gloves. "How long before they can resume digging?" He swabbed Number One's arm and positioned the needle.
"Losham is assembling several new crews. Immortals, this time, will be working around the clock. He wants to accelerate the timeline because he doesn't want to disappoint his handlers."
"I assume that he hasn't told you that," Dimitri said. "You read his mind?"
"Yes." The answer was a statement of fact, not an admission of guilt.
Dimitri wondered if the Eight ever felt guilty about anything they did, or was the hive mind so secure in its ability to always make the right decisions that guilt was not part of the equation.
"The compulsion to continue excavating is in direct conflict with the physical impossibility of doing so," Number One continued. "Losham is being pressured from all sides, but he's holding on."
"Poor Losham," Petrov said from his workstation, with zero sympathy in his mocking tone.
Dimitri administered the injection and moved to Number Two. "The collapse changes things for us. The clan won't move on anything until those chests are found. If the excavation is stalled for weeks, we're in limbo."
"That's bad," Mattie said from her chair. "It could be weeks before the clan is willing to help us, and we don't have weeks. Losham's brothers are getting more suspicious by the day, Dimitri's fangs are coming in, and the situation is deteriorating."
Dave's eight pairs of eyes moved to her, then to Dimitri, then back. The collective's processing pause was brief.
"You are speaking as if contact with the clan has been established," Number One said. "It has not."
"No, but we have an idea about how to do it." Dimitri glanced at Mattie, then at Petrov, who nodded. "The only logical way to contact the clan is through Losham’s phone, the one the clan calls him on. We steal it and make the call ourselves. We establish direct contact."
The Eight went still.
"Please explain," Number One said.
"To start with, you will need to thrall the operators in the surveillance control room to turn off the feed from Losham's bedroom. If the control is at the mansion proper, you will have to do it locally at the house. I don't know if all of you need to do this together for it to be effective, or if you can split up, but splitting up would make everything work faster. After you are done with that, one or more of you enter Losham's bedroom at night while he sleeps, either through the window or the front door, depending on the surveillance situation. You thrall him into deeper sleep, take the phone, and bring it to the lab. We make the call, and after it's done, the phone goes back, and Losham wakes up none the wiser."
When he finished, the Eight were silent for a long moment, staring at him without actually seeing him.
"That is excellent thinking," Number One finally said. "We should have thought of it."
"You were focused on the larger strategic picture," Dimitri said. "Sometimes the obvious solution gets overlooked when you're calculating all the probabilities and contingencies."
"That is generous of you to say, but the truth is that we have limited experience with improvisation. Our training was in combat, not in intelligence work."
Dimitri smiled. "You are all so young that you haven't gotten much training in combat either. But then you started at thirteen, so I guess that's enough time."
"It is," Number One said. "It also means that we didn't study anything else beyond that age, and even before that, our schooling was basic. When we get out of here, we will seek knowledge. Our mind is hungry for more."
The intense way they were all looking at him made Dimitri uncomfortable. Was knowledge one of the things they hoped to absorb from him during the mind meld? Not just to understand love?
Theoretically, by absorbing his knowledge, they could learn how to prepare their own drugs so they wouldn't need him and Petrov. They could very easily leave the island by themselves and leave him, Mattie, and Petrov behind.
Could that be their ultimate goal?
All that talk about love could have been a smokescreen, and Dimitri had fallen for it because he was consumed by his love for Mattie, and to him, that was the most vital thing in the world.
