“I’ll take a bit of that stuff you’re giving out,” he said, and held out his hand. He was a brightly striped fellow, broad of thorax and blunt of face, with a high, proud plume. Pastry crumbs were in his fur and Flora knew his kin was Poplar.

“Don’t take all day,” he drawled. “We’ve the honor of the hive to perform; we need all the sustenance we can get.”

“It is late. You will not be flying today.”

He stared at her in amazement, then turned to his fellows. “Why, this old crone keeps our schedule of love, brothers!” He stuck his hand into one of Flora’s panniers and groped for pollen. “And tidbits for herself!” Flora gripped his arm and removed it from her pannier. The young drone shook her off.

“Insolence! Send her for the Kindness!” He looked for support.

“Oh, leave the old husk alone.”

The drone that spoke was small, his fur twisted with propolis wax into outlandish dandified patterns. Flora smiled.

“Linden. I looked for you—”

Sir Linden straightened his ruff.

“That is my kin, but I have never seen you before.”

“How can you say that?”

Sir Linden turned to the young Sir Poplar. “I warned you we should not come here—it is full of addled females.” He gestured at Flora. “And by the state of that one, she’s not long for this world—so we shall pardon her.”

The young drone glared at Flora. “She shall kneel and beg forgiveness, or I will strike her down myself.”

Linden shoved him so hard he fell over, then stood above him.

“Ha! Brother, you must work on your balance to seize a princess.” He gave the fallen drone his hand and hauled him up. “A goblet of nectar will fix it, and I know where the best is to be had.” Avoiding Flora’s eyes, Sir Linden led the younger drone away. She watched them go, then felt all her sisters’ eyes on her.

“Who else has heard of sickness in the Nursery?” The words came from Flora’s mouth without warning, but as she spoke them she felt her anger rising. News of the smallest incident traveled rapidly in the hive, so it was unthinkable that the bees had not heard of the plagued brood. “Is that why my kin-sisters have been sacrificed yet again? There is sickness, but we may not speak of it? We must let it spread unchecked, until there is not one sanitation worker left to carry out the bodies?”

She looked to the foragers for support, but none of them would meet her eyes. Instead, all the sisters began hurrying out of the Dance Hall.

“Sisters!” Flora cried. “Why do you go? Hear me!”

Alone in the great chamber, Flora felt their abandonment as keenly as a physical wound. To fly alone was one thing—but to be isolated within the hive, to be shunned and denied—

The terrible taunts of the Minerva spider ran through Flora’s mind. Madness. Sister against sister. Disaster. Her antennae throbbed as if they would burst and to comfort them she pressed her head into the old wax floor to breathe the smell of home. As she drew in the thousand strands of its bouquet, a new scent fled between them. Any other kin would have missed it, but Flora was a forager from Sanitation. Fast as thought she read its molecules—and knew it for what it was.

A fatal sickness lurked in the hive, sheltered in the body of a single sister.

Thirty-Five

OUTSIDE THE DANCE HALL HUNDREDS OF BEES BUSTLED across the coded mosaic of the lobby. Motionless, all her senses trained on locating the odor of sickness again, Flora stood in their midst searching for it—but it had vanished into the scent tapestry of the hive. Using all her skills from foraging, she summoned back a trace of its elusive molecular structure.

It aped a flower, with a top note sweet like petals, but its disguise lacked definition. Foragers would not pursue it for it had no smell of food—and sanitation workers would ignore it, for its superficial sweetness held it apart from the smells of hive waste.

The sound of incoming foragers’ engines broke Flora’s concentration, then a group of young receivers ran past toward the landing board, kin-scents streaming in excitement. By the time their wake had cleared so had every last atom of the scent, as if it had its own intelligence and was evading capture.

Frustrated, Flora ran up to the midlevel of the hive. At this time of day the worker dormitories would be unused, and there, in relative stillness, she could try to revive the data before its essential nature faded. To her surprise, as soon as she entered the main lobby, the scent revealed itself again. Its thin, twisting core was the same, but under its superficial floral disguise, it was changing. It was beginning to copy the scent of the comb itself—and when it succeeded, it would become undetectable.

Not caring about the risk to herself, Flora sucked the odor into her spiracles as hard as she could. Every instinct told her this was the foulest kind of impurity, gathering strength every second as it adapted itself to the bouquet of the hive. Soon its faint, twisting core of corruption would diffuse so completely that every sister would naturally breathe it—and each body become host to its foul purpose.

Flora concentrated all her strength on the hidden core structure. It was the merest thread of corruption, as if she flew high above some long-dead creature—but it grew stronger as she approached the dormitory. Ready to encounter some wretched sister festering in a corner, Flora burst through the doors and ran between the rows of berths searching for her—but all were empty and clean.

The trail of scent had vanished again—except for a few molecules clinging to the blank wax of a dormitory wall. Flora raised her antennae and felt all over for hidden panels and entry tiles—but the walls were plain and true, laced only with the kin-scent of honest sisters’ bodies.

Flora ran back out into the lobby. She stood between Pollen and Patisserie, the Chapel of Wax, and the entrance to the Drones’ Arrival Hall, now completely repaired and smelling strongly of the new propolis carvings. Inside was the usual fuss as a new drone was helped from his emergence chamber, and she sealed her spiracles against the cloudy pheromones before they could distract her. Ahead were the big double doors of the Category Two Nursery, and a faint, peculiar odor hung about them, but it was stale and not the live and wily scent she hunted.

Like the humblest sanitation worker searching for the next load to clear, Flora knelt and touched her antennae to the gutter. The voices of her sisters and the pulsing in the floor-codes fell away. One faint scent remained—the sickness. If she tried to grab it with her conscious brain it slipped away, but if she breathed it in softly, she could advance on it. As if turning for home at the end of a distant forage, Flora switched all instinct to her inner compass, and began to walk.

She did not know where she went, nor did she rouse herself from the semitrance she moved in. She was only dimly aware of her sisters’ exclamations as they swerved away, or that her antennae twitched in pain as she burst through every scent-gate in her path. She walked on, closing on the foul scent that ate its way through one more beautiful.

Something struck against Flora’s chest and stopped her. Six identical Sage priestesses blocked her way, each dressed in high ceremonial robes. A dark group of police stood behind them.

“What is your business?” the priestesses asked in their choral voice.

“I—am from Sanitation. I search for the source of sickness.”

They gazed at Flora, fast tremors running up their antennae as their minds conferred.

“So it is true.” The single voice of a priestess was full of sadness. “And we can wait no longer.”

Her words struck at Flora’s heart, for now she recognized where she was, a place she had not seen since her eviction by Lady Burnet’s jealous will. She stood at the beautiful carved doors to the Queen’s Chambers again—and pressing against them from within, like a demonic cloud, was the odor she tracked.