“To the left. Fast and quiet.”
They slipped out into a pale gray corridor that had all the nuance and distinction of what she imagined the cult members to have: everything buffed to a low polish, no ornamentation, the ceiling, walls, and floor covered by late-sixties-era linoleum squares, the seams of which were showing fine lines of glue that had discolored into a mustard-yellow seepage. Fluorescent lights were set in bald panels every six feet along the ceiling, and many of the tubes were blinking or burned out. Underfoot, the tiles had been worn in two distinct lanes running parallel to each other.
From people walking in lines or in pairs.
The sense she had of entering a foreign world was reinforced as they came upon a door with a handle just the same as the first. A fake wood placard had been stuck on the panel at eyeball height, the white letters etched into the plastic reading, “Modesty Comes First.”
Off in the distance, there was an odd, disquieting hum.
Duran looked around with a frown. Then he shook his head.
“Let me go in first,” he said as he curled his hand onto the lever.
She glanced behind them. No one was in the corridor. Nor were there people moving around, at least not that she could hear or sense, and she wondered just how huge the facility was.
Duran moved in quick silence, opening the door and disappearing into an interior that, going by the sign, gave Ahmare images of old Kotex pad ads, and bathing suits that had skirts and built-in bras, and pantyhose that were more like compression stockings.
Maybe this was where the human race sent their maiden aunts when they couldn’t stand the whisker-chinned, lipstick-smudged kisses for one more holiday season—
What the hell was that hum?
Duran popped his head out. “There’s something wrong here.”
“You think?” she muttered to herself.
He pulled her inside, and she gasped, nearly jumping back out into the corridor. The vast room, which had to be forty feet long and twenty feet wide, was swarming with flies—no, not flies, moths. A thousand pale-winged moths were in the air, fluttering in disjointed flight paths, knocking into each other, billiard balls without the felt and the pockets.
Batting them away from her face, the smell was horrible, like the sludge of a late August riverbed, stagnant, wet, rotting.
She flapped her hand around again, even though it was useless. There were too many—
“Is this the laundry?” she said.
“Used to be.”
There were industrial washers and tumble dryers on one side. On the other, racks and racks . . . an entire department store of racks . . . on which hundreds of maroon wool robes hung in various stages of decay. The moths were living off the fabric, chewing holes that were ever expanding, leaving bolts of shredded material in their wake.
It was an entire ecosystem, the result of two moths, or three, being imported into the environment, whereupon housekeeping had been set up and the Mr. and Mrs. had Left It to Beaver like a trillion times.
Duran went over and pulled a robe free. The wool powdered in his hands, falling onto his boots, autumn leaves without the season or the tree, just the molting.
“Unwearable.” He dropped the shawl collar. “I’d assumed we’d be able to camouflage ourselves and thus integrate into the congregation.”
Ahmare felt the hand of death tickle the back of her neck. “Do you think we’re going to need to?”
As Duran went back out into the corridor and held the door open for Ahmare, moths escaped like a puff of smoke from a burning room, flitting out in a scatter. He almost felt like shooing them back in so they weren’t left out of the party.
On his nod, he and Ahmare doubled back the way they’d come, proceeding along one side of the curving corridor, crouched but moving at a steady pace with guns up. As they passed by the entry where they’d come in and ran into nobody coming to check why the door had not been fully closed . . . as they approached the cafeteria’s kitchen and there were no lingering smells of food being cooked or having been eaten . . . as silence and stuffy air were the only accompaniment to their infiltration . . . a terrible conclusion began to form in his mind.
And he fought it.
Fought it like he should have been battling the Dhavos’s defenders.
When they came up to the intersection of the next spoke, the one that ran north-south, he leaned out and looked around. No one. No one talking. Walking. And not just because of the ablution ceremony.
“This way,” he said.
As he spoke, he could hear the rage in his own voice, and his body started to tremble with aggression.