Viable

The word ‘Multiplex’ had been added after the township updated its lead laws. The once-bright plastic had faded to a dull, chewed-gum beige, mottled from decades of rain. As Scott watched, a European honey bee lazily alighted by a crack in the ‘i’, and crawled inside.

“They said projection room A,” Maya reported, a clipboard clutched in thick gloves as she read through her beekeeper’s veil. “Hope they’re labeled in there.”

“It’ll be the biggest one,” Scott said. “You can see the original structure with the New Deal deco; the expansion from the seventies only doubled the footprint. I’m guessing one main screen for blockbusters, three screens for genre flicks. I worked in a theatre just like this as a kid.”

Maya’s veil tilted to the side. “I never knew that about you.”

Taking the shiny chain off the rusted handles, Scott pushed through the lobby doors. Murky sunlight wheezed through the dusted glass, spiralling motes congesting the cinema’s balding velvet throat. Maya’s veil swept back and forth, protective gear bunching as she hefted the bulky transport box. “I don’t hear buzzing.”

“Not yet,” Scott said, flicking on his floodlight. Blue-white brightness sliced through the untouched gloom. Fading fractals ricocheted off the concession stand, a vacant maze of mirror, chrome, and glass. “We gotta go upstairs.”

Muffled cloth shoe covers ascended the plush carpet steps. Gentle clouds of dust lifted from gloved fingertips, brushing the memory of shine from the dull brass rail. Scott held his breath. Over the hollow drum of his heartbeat, he could feel insectoid vibrations rising in the stagnant air.

“There’s one.” Maya’s veil nodded down the hall. Blithely wheeling in drunken flight was a meandering drone, weaving in and out of the bright path of Scott’s floodlight. Another hovered nearby, its nonchalant demeanor betrayed by the furious blur of translucent wings. Another joined the dance, and then another, the electric hum of multitudes building with each approaching step. Scott held the light high as Maya cautiously pressed against the projection room door. “Jackpot.”

Honey bees covered the walls, pouring in from the cracked crown molding, the main force of the swarm thickly carpeting a precarious cabinet. The rusted lock once secured reels and reels of licensed pictures on limited release, studio property rotting under wax-sealed cells. Busy little workers bumbled and thrummed over trails of sticky resin, tinted sepia to silvered black as honey clung to the unspooled film. 

“Better get your Philip’s head,” Maya advised. “Let’s open her up.”

Black and gold bodies burst from the cabinet in an electric tempest as Scott and Maya pushed the heavy frame away from the wall. Blotchy furrows of mold smeared down the watermarked wallpaper, bitter spores fighting for sustenance under the honeycomb’s cloying sweet scent. Scott squinted through the shadows, focusing on the corroded screws as Maya tromped back down to get the rest of their gear. The buzzing changed pitch and intensity as the colony launched, detecting a threat.

Scott waved away the pelting cloud, moving with steady hands beneath protective layers. Several winged bodies bumped against him, or clumsily clipped the floodlight balanced on the edge of the old projector. As Scott worked on the crumbling screws, the light rolled over and streamed through a narrow viewing window, lancing out over the theatre down below. 

Stepping around the cabinet, Scott peered out to the distant screen as bees looped and swirled through cavernous space. Delicate silhouettes bloomed and converged across the silver suspension, flocking in choreographed patterns of labyrinthian geometry. As Scott watched, sparkling colors exploded through the shadows, the grand scale of aerial splendor overwhelmed his need to breathe.

“What are you looking at?” Maya’s voice sent lightning through Scott’s spine. 

“Me? Fine! What? Nothing!” He blundered away from the window, forcing the floodlight beam back to business. “Help me take off the back.”

The warped panel reluctantly broke free, the bees buzzing in protest as its grip released. Great shelves of comb were exposed, the repetitive hexagons a plaintive gold at the top of the cabinet, descending through the abused film reels into thick black ooze at the base. “Do you smell that?” Maya asked, her veil recoiling in disgust. 

“Kind of metallic. Like a fountain full of pennies.”

“Like blood.”

Scott didn’t agree, but he didn’t argue. He gripped a thick portion of the comb near the tar-black bottom, and Maya wordlessly handled the top. They pulled, sticky globs of honey suctioned to the cabinet and at last squelching free, the heavy sheaf crawling with upset bees whose small world was being ripped apart.

With the deft care of much practice, Scott and Maya slotted the section into their transport box, minimizing cell destruction to preserve as much as possible of the original hive. “Oh, look at this!” Maya said, pulling her gloves away. “Does that look right to you?”

While the heavy shelf was uniform at the dark-stained base, neat hexagons stacked together in methodical symmetry, the golden top of the section was disfigured. Malformed cells branched and spiraled into uncanny shapes, abstract sculptures and mobius strips glistening in coiled stalagmites without a hint of organized intention. “Are they all like this?”

“One way to find out.”

Working together, Scott and Maya went about extracting the hive piece by piece, taking care not to damage the precarious upper balconies that defied the repetitive logic of a collective mind. Their suits were covered with upset stingers, the air thick with chemical distress. “The owner said no one’s been through the place in years,” Scott mentioned. “They had a long time to establish this.”

“Haven’t you noticed?” Maya asked, her veil turned away from him. “No brood comb.”

“None?”

“None.” Maya’s veil shook back and forth. “I don’t think this queen is viable.”

Scott adjusted the gloves over his fingertips. “Won’t know ‘til we find her.”

“I’ve been looking,” Maya insisted. “But this hive is insane. Those structures, the rotted nectar, an infertile queen? What happened to them? Why do they stay?”

Scott didn’t answer. His veil concealed an uneasy glance toward the screen.

There was a special, small box for extracting the queen. It would keep her separated from the worker bees while allowing them to follow her pheromone trail to the relocated hive site. Once she was safely installed, the remaining bees could simply be scooped into boxes and carried out of the projection room, making the theatre safe for renovation. After hours of searching through the cleared-out cabinet, the suffocating room, and the spiraling maze of corrupted honeycomb, that royal box was still empty.

“Stupid bitch!” Maya growled, her veil an inch away from the boxed comb. “You don’t get to ruin the whole hive just because you can’t do your fucking job!”

Scott had been instructed to hold the floodlight steady, and he did his best despite a suit full of sweat. “Take it easy, Maya. It’s not her fault; she’s doing her best.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about us.”

The floodlight shook, and Maya’s veil snapped over a tight shoulder. The bees were wise enough to avoid the searing path of her unseen glare. Well trained in avoiding provocation, Scott tried to stay still and quiet. Then he said, “I…it honestly didn’t occur to me.”

Inside her suit, Maya’s shoulders slumped. “No brood comb.”

“Do you want to take a–”

“No, Scott, I don’t want to take a break.” She tromped across the room, dispersing the bees between them as she snatched the floodlight out of Scott’s hands. “I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want more time. I just want to resolve something. For once.”

She turned away, clutching the floodlight to her chest, and plunged her partner into darkness. Scott drifted toward the projection window, trying to siphon any breeze from the theatre below. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Maya snapped, the floodlight pouring through the peculiar comb. “So if that’s all you have to say, we really don’t have to talk about it.”

“Maya.”

“What?”

Scott pointed through the window, his gloved hand disappearing in the abandoned theatre's abyssal space. “I think she’s on the screen.”

“What?” Maya brushed away a few bumbling flight paths and lifted the floodlight up over the window sill. Scott put an arm around her, keeping her balanced in the narrow frame, and she let him.

A thousand lumens stretched over the vacant seats, bleaching baffling velvet on lofty walls. The cinematic cathedral pulsed with the whirr of wings, invisible hymns crescendoed in telepathic sequence. Bees billowed up from the softened shadows, radial symmetry in kaleidoscopic splendor over the wide silver screen. At the center, the fixed focal point of a million adoring compound eyes, was the sleek black hourglass of the bees’ mad queen. High above the aisles, she danced, an obsidian star in a silver sky.

“She’s vulnerable out there,” Maya breathed. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“It doesn't have to make sense.” Scott looked back toward the cabinet, shreds of technicolor images trapped in faded wax. “They fed her film from the reels. The whole hive consumed these dreams, soaking up the nectar of this place. She abandoned the structure. More movie queen than bee.”

“It’s corrupting the hive.”

“It’s setting them free.”

Scott turned Maya’s shoulders toward him. He pushed back his veil, the floodlight falling on his sweat-soaked face. “I do have more to say. You’re not broken, Maya. That was never your purpose, not for me. You are my queen. You will always be my queen.”

“Put your veil down, dummy.” Maya’s voice was husky. Thick with a feeling she would not name. Scott folded her in his arms as the bees spiraled all around them. The floodlight guttered in the warm dark.

Pushing back from the ledge, Maya smacked the bulb back to life. “I’ll tell the owner we’re amending the contract. If it’s the last generation, she might as well stay.”

“She can write her own ending.” 

The two of them gathered up their gear, leaving the hive behind. As they descended the steps, Scott with his veil tucked under his arm, Maya’s glove brushed a tender spot swelling on his neck. “You got stung.”

“It happens.” Scott pushed through the lobby doors, cool night air chilling his skin. “That’s life.”