Number One. The clan. The Eight. The words arrived and rearranged everything. She understood, all at once, that she had been a heartbeat from putting a round through the chest of a friend.
Someone who could help them.
The relief came so hard and fast that her knees nearly buckled.
She let the weapon drop, the muzzle swinging down toward the dust, and she stood there with the emotional storm of almost having killed the wrong soldier, breathing like she'd run a mile, while around her the Guardians' hands came back to them and Pavel sucked in a sharp breath beside her as whatever had held his arm let go.
"We're coming down," Number One said. "Please don't shoot us."
She wanted to ask what he'd meant by coming down when the first soldier stepped off the edge into the open air and dropped the twenty feet or so, landing in a pile of debris, absorbing the impact as if he was made from rubber and not bones and muscles.
24
DAVE
Number One landed in the debris, absorbed the impact through bent knees, and straightened. The other seven followed one at a time, dropping the twenty-odd feet from the lip of the breach into the basement.
They gathered on the basement floor and took inventory of what they had walked into.
The reckoning had begun the instant the compeller's command rolled over them and failed, and it hadn't stopped since. It ran underneath everything now, beneath the introductions, the wary lowered weapons, and the cold parallel computation that the collective conducted in the background.
The clan had run its own secret operation because it didn't trust them with the chests.
While the Eight had been under the impression that the chests were theirs to deliver, the clan had assembled a strike team and infiltrated the island, probably through the cove and the secret tunnel. They'd most likely learned about the underwater accessfrom Navuh, who the collective had no doubt was in the clan's hands.
They never intended for them to deliver the chests.
The sense of betrayal was like a slight bitter taste in the collective's mind, but since their emotions were muted, it didn't really hurt.
The deception was elegant.
The Eight had been told to extract the chests and load them onto a ship, and the clan would receive them at sea. The collective had built their entire operation around it, had timed the women's extraction to it, and had planned on arriving at the rendezvous with the chests as the proof of their goodwill, the gift that bought them sanctuary.
The clan had deceived them, which meant that what was inside those chests was extremely precious to them and they feared that the Eight would use it as a bargaining chip to extort more than had been promised. The clan had just needed their input about the progress.
Perhaps they used us as a contingency, Number Five thought.A fallback in case their team failed. We were the redundancy, not the plan.
We were never the plan, Number Two thought.
The collective held the assessment and examined the offense. They could understand the clan's motives, but they had assumed that they were trusted when they hadn't been.
Somewhere beneath the cold calculation, in the place where the part of them that was still eight separate minds kept its residue of need, they had wanted the clan to look at them andsee allies rather than instruments. They had delivered three assassinations to strengthen Losham's position, had helped him maintain the fiction of Navuh's presence, kept two scientists and women from the breeding enclosure poised for liberation, and they had wanted that to be enough to earn a measure of faith.
It hadn't been enough, though. The clan's representatives had said all the right things, given them praise and assured them of sanctuary, while building a second team to do the one thing that actually mattered, because the clan did not trust eight enhanced soldiers with whatever precious cargo the chests contained.
Number Eight's anger surfaced first, as it always did, a hot spike that the others moved to absorb before it could ignite in the rest of them.
They lied to us.
They withheld information from us, Number One corrected.
The distinction mattered, and the collective felt the truth of it settle through the hive mind. They hadn't told them falsehoods. They'd told a partial truth and withheld things.
A lie of omission is still a lie, Number Eight thought.
We lied as well, the collective answered.We've been lying to Losham for weeks.
Number Eight's anger had nowhere to go after that, because it was true.
