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.
