Read The Bees: A Novel for Free Online

electrical pulses from thousands of bees rippled against her, but Flora ignored them all. The pulsing track alone held her focus, clear and simple across the perilously busy lobby, where she had to slow down because of the tempest of data underfoot.
    A rush of workers came through in a tumult of scent and Flora lifted her head—then the rhythm of the foot-current drew her on. She trudged past the doorway of a great hall from which came the cheering of many voices, and some vast, foreign scent blew through the air, but the stimulation was too much and she shrank low to the ground to keep going.
    She found herself walking in a group of bees who were also carrying pungent loads, and realized one was speaking to her, trying to stop her. Flora looked dully into the dark face of a sanitation worker urgently trying to guide her through a doorway. Flora stepped through and found a clear space on the floor. The simple scent tiles prompted her to lay down the dead Clover’s body, and immediately another worker took it away. Hands pushed her back out into the corridor, where she joined another stream of sanitation workers. They marched in silence with their dark heads lowered, their aspect no longer dirty and vile, their scent a comfort.
    There were no chiming bells to mark time in Sanitation, only the differences in the smell of the dirt they cleaned, and the very basic food they ate. There was no chatter or gossip because none of the cleaners could speak, so they derived companionship from laboring together and pressing close to share their scent.
    Like the rest of her kin-sisters, Flora worked in a dull haze, interspersed with pauses for Devotion. When the fragrance of the Queen’s Love rose through the vibrating comb, the sanitation workers stopped wherever they were and cried out in slurred reverence, and Flora felt a moment of blissful relief from the constant pain in her head. Then they all went back to work, and her consciousness shrank back down to whatever task was at hand.
     
    S ISTERS OF ALL KIN were born and died by the hundreds every day, so collecting the dead was a common occupation for sanitation workers. As she carried body after body, Flora grew familiar with the routes down from the top and midlevel of the hive to the morgue and waste depot on the third and lowest level. Certain routes were blocked by kin-sensitive scent-gates, which stopped the floras from unauthorized visits to holy areas of the hive, like the Nursery on the midlevel or the Fanning Hall and Treasury on the top level. After being buffeted back by the powerful scents once or twice, even the slowest sanitation worker like Flora learned not to try that way again. But sometimes on the midlevel of the hive, drifting scents of the Nursery tugged at her brain. The longer she stood there, the more they distressed her, until she blundered away groaning.
    Despite their status as lowest of the low, even in the kin of Sanitation there was a hierarchy of ability. Certain floras could leave the dull thudding foot-tracks and collect waste from difficult areas, and these sisters were also used to make short waste-disposal flights with corpses or particularly foul-smelling loads, dropping them a hygienic distance from the hive. The second group, to which Flora belonged, experienced such agony in their antennae if they diverged but one step from their ordained track that the outer limit of their roaming was down to the morgue or the freight holding area, both on the lowest level of the hive and near the landing board. Sometimes Flora would pause there, where the vast, foreign scent of air swirled so strong about her body that her wing joints trembled with a strange sensation—but to dwell on it was to invite pain, and to return to her duties, relief.
    Each sanitation detail had a supervisor from a higher kin, for they were not to be trusted on their own. Today, Flora’s supervisor was a Sister Bindweed, a long, narrow bee with sparse fur and a brusque, absent