A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (12 page)

The damned whispering
didn’t ever stop.  I even tried talking to the whispers but didn’t get a response.  I was fucking tired of the whispers calling me a murderer, thank you very much.

One source of help came by at midnight to talk to me.

“Focus Teas,” I said, and stopped my lunge set (at one hundred thirty five).  “Why don’t you come join me in here?”

“I would if I could,” laugh.  “Your door is sealed at night and takes three people to open, and they all need to know the codes.”  Focus Teas came up to the Monster-proof net.  “You look a lot better.  Your juice reactions are just amazing!”

Yet more good intel.

What I
had caught when Teas interviewed me earlier dampened my already low enthusiasm for working with her.  I had peered into her dark heart and she was a betrayer.  She betrayed her bosses, her friends, likely even her own Transforms, on a regular basis.  Worse?  She often betrayed herself.  She was far too whimsical to be trustworthy.

She also spewed information like a fire hose.

“So,” I said.  “How are you going to get me out of here?”

“Oh, there are several ways,” she said.
  Laugh.  “The easiest would be to have you sign a contract with the Federal Marshals to be a consultant.  You’d be working with me and for me, of course.”

Oh.  The final authority over my disposition
would be with the Federal Marshals, not the FBI, and Teas had the Federal Marshals under her petite cultured thumb.

“What if the Feds get sticky about letting me go?”

“That’s always a problem,” laugh.  “I might be able to talk them into simply releasing you.  If not, there’s a scheme we’ve used with Focuses before, similar to how you shipped a dead male Monster to a mutual friend of ours.”

Perhaps two fire hoses.  She implied
Focuses escaped from places this secure in the past, some Focuses changed identities (which I hadn’t expected), and she and Focus Rizzari exchanged information.  I sure as hell hoped Lori understood how dangerous it was to dance with this betraying twit.

“I’m not setting myself up to be autopsied, Sarah!”

“Oh posh and twaddle,” Teas said.  Laugh.  “Pain’s just the way the universe reminds you you’re a damned Major Transform.  You’d survive being ‘dead’ and formaldehyde’s a good preservative.  Besides, doctors are far easier to influence than Federal agents.”

Thanks for the tip.  I will admit I practically lost
my composure with her formaldehyde comment.  To put this in Keatonic terms: how fucking much could I survive, anyway?

“Why don’t we work on having you talk them into letting me go,” I said.  “Say, tomorrow.”

Now she got nervous.  “One thing, though,” she said.

“Yes?”

“You have to let me tag you.”

“Huh?
  But Focuses can only tag Transforms.”

“A Focus can tag anything, even the furniture.”  Laugh.  “
One of my discoveries.  I’ve made a lot of them.  Now, I wasn’t the first of the Focuses who figured out a Focus could tag other people besides her own Transforms.  Focus Patterson did, when she found a way to tag an already tagged Transform and not displace the existing tag.  I did the rest.”

Well.  The high secrets of the ruling first Focuses on display
, just for me.

“But tagging an Arm?”

“No problem.”  Laugh.  “I’ve even seen it done.”  Pause, at my quizzical look.  “Of course this was a disaster, because poor old Focus Peoples didn’t know to stop the automatic juice-sequestering response, but we can handle the problem with a simple juice pattern, one even I can do.”

What in the bloody blue blazes was a juice pattern?  My instincts said ‘spell’, as mythologically Focuses were supposed to be witches, but I hadn’t carried Lori and Ann’s myth hypothesis to that level of absurd conclusion.  This was getting a little freaky, unless Lori knew about juice patterns, because she could do them.

Heh.  I’ll bet she did.  Given her personality similarities to yours truly, I bet she was extremely good with them.

“I’m sorry, but none of this is making any sense to me at all,” I said, prompting Teas for yet more information.

“Focus Peoples was one of our gang of Focuses,” Teas said.  “Here, in the bad old days.”  This Detention Center.  Yikes.  “I transformed in February of ’57 and the Feds brought me here shortly afterwards.”  Shit.  She had been a Focus for over eleven years!  No wonder she rolled me with her charisma when I didn’t resist.  “Focus Peoples transformed a year earlier.  In late ’57, the Feds brought us Mary Chesterson.  We didn’t understand what to do with an Arm back then; we thought she was a failed Focus of some variety.  We had several failed Focuses here already, some of whom we only later realized were actual Focuses screwed by the juice.  Focus Holder for one.  Anyway…”

Teas
got wound up when she got going.

“You know the drill.  Chesterson couldn’t move juice, just take it from Transforms and kill them.  Based on
my work – I was always experimenting back then – I suggested that since we could tag anyone, one of us should tag Chesterson and pass her juice.  Focus Peoples volunteered and the tag succeeded.  That is, she tagged Chesterson, but the tag drove Chesterson crazy, psychopathically enraged.  You see, once she tagged Chesterson, she accidentally stripped Chesterson of all her juice.”

“Justifiably enraged, then,” I said.  I, on the other hand, wasn’t going to reveal anything I didn’t think necessary to reveal.  I recognized the no-juice state as the same one I
fell into in Pittsburgh.

“Anyway, Chesterson grabbed Focus Peoples and took back her juice.  Only Chesterson
took the juice Arm style, taking Focus People’s fundamental juice and killing her.  Of course, we didn’t understand anything about what happened at the time, as we didn’t even understand the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice, or even what a Focus’s juice buffer was.”

“So Chesterson went Monster?”

Teas shook her head.  “Nope.  I saw what was going on, and me and my people pulled them apart in a few seconds.”

She believed
her words, but to me they sounded strange.  “When I draw juice, it’s instant.”

Teas nodded.  “
When Chesterson drew from Transforms, she took juice instantly.  However, a Focus can fight back and slow the process down.”  She sighed.  “Chesterson went crazy with grief and killed herself later the same day.  Anyway, when I felt Focus Peoples dying I tried to grab her household with a mass household tag.”  Focus Teas lifted up her dress to show me a still vivid red welt that stretched for over a foot, from the top of her left hip to just below her right breast.  “What I’d tagged was Focus People’s household juice buffer, but as I’ve already said we didn’t know those terms back then or what in tarnation was going on.  I couldn’t hold what I tagged and the buffer destabilized, turning into bad juice right in front of me and partly inside of me.  This disaster nearly killed me, and as you see, I still wear the scar.”

I wonder if
her scar grew feathers, scales or funky hair.  Fresh bad juice was just another term for fresh Monster juice.

I did wonder
about the truth of the story.  The scar was real and did feel odd to my metasense.  Teas believed everything she said.  However, I didn’t trust her knowledge or her judgment.

“Wow! 
Amazing!  It’s a wonder any of you survived when none of you knew what was going on.”

Teas nodded.  “Several of us didn’t.”

“This doesn’t give me any warm fuzzies about being tagged by a Focus, though.”  To put it mildly.

“Carol,
this is a matter of safety.”  Laugh.  “You’ll be around tagged Transforms every day.  I suffered through two ‘Arm accidents’ with Chesterson and I’d rather never suffer another.  Besides, Transforms are people with rights as well.”  For Teas, a stretch.  I did
not
want this twisted bitch to own me.  Not that I had much right to complain.  Glass houses…  “If you’re about to have an accident, I can keep you from…”

I could only keep up the act so long.  “You’ll stop me by sending me into withdrawal, the same way you punish your own Transforms?  Forget it.  I’d rather rot here the rest of my fucking life.”

Teas didn’t stop her panic run until she reached the back of the viewing area.  “Dammit, Carol!  There’s no need to get all nasty.”

“That’s my juice you’re so casually threatening!”

She pulled herself together, although it took a minute.  “Okay, okay, I understand the ‘mine’ business.  Chesterson was the same way.”  She paused and tucked her hair back into place.  “You think about this, ‘kay?  You’ll have to trust me that I won’t use the tag as an everyday leash.  Doing so wouldn’t be right.  You’re another Major Transform.  But I need the tag for emergencies.  Our deal depends on the tag; I won’t help you without one.”

“I’ll think,” I said.  Damned straight I
would think.  I didn’t relax my predatory pose one bit.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Teas said.  She and her crew of spooked bodyguards departed, leaving me to wonder whether I
had screwed everything up with my threat display, and whether I would be able to keep from killing Teas for being an annoying callous bitch even if she did get me out of here.

Gilgamesh: March 16, 1968

Gilgamesh squatted by a phone booth outside a Safeway in Oakland, attempting to quiet his terror.  He made the phone call, waited through the rings, and firmly managed to not sick-up.  Shadow finally picked up.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Gilgamesh said.  “How are things going?”

“Fine.  Tiamat’s been given juice and is being treated much better.”  Shadow paused.  “You sound a bit panicked.”

“Uh huh.  The Skinner’s in my apartment.”

“Hmmm.  That would bother any of us.  I’m surprised you’re not here on my doorstep.”

“Me too,” Gilgamesh said, faintly annoyed at Shadow’s sarcasm.  His hands still shook.  “Things were going so well, then…
she
stopped sending me messages, about 30 hours ago.  Now this.”

Shadow’s earlier comment finally hit his brain.  Tiamat
got juice!  Gilgamesh hadn’t expected her to get juice.  He expected them to run Tiamat into withdrawal and dispose of her afterwards, the reason he thought he worked with a deadline.  If the authorities gave Tiamat juice, that meant someone wanted to recruit her and turn her into a resource.  The information also explained why the Skinner was giving him the run-around.  She probably viewed this as a test, whether Tiamat could arrange her own escape.

“Well.  What are you planning on doing?”

“Before I called you, I believe the answer was: panic, more panic, then panic some more,” Gilgamesh said.  “However, knowing Tiamat’s been given juice changes everything.  I think the Skinner knew this, and she’s playing with me.”  He paused.  “I must assume the Skinner knows my scent.”  Likely on the damned apple press statue.  He thought he had been careful enough, but there was a reason this was the Arm who had survived.  “However, despite her best efforts, she can’t damp her glow enough to hide from me, save perhaps in skyscrapers.  I think I’m going to play back.”

“Gilgamesh!  That’s utterly crazy!” Shadow said.  “You’ll destroy yourself in panic if you get into some sort of dominance game with an Arm.”

“She doesn’t respect me.”  He couldn’t blame her.  He was the one huddled by a phone booth, chased out of his own apartment, so terrified he feared he might wet his pants.  “I need to earn her respect somehow.”  Otherwise he ought to give up and go find some damned Focus household and nibble on their dross like a nervous rabbit.

“If she
knows your scent she can run you down!  You must leave town.”

Gilgamesh grinned.  His panic receded.  How very Crow of Shadow to suggest such a thing.  “I learned a big secret in Philadelphia,” he said.  “It’s on page 7 of chapter 14 of my book.”  He had sent the last chapter
of his first draft to Shadow a week before Tiamat’s capture.

“
Oh,” Shadow said, easily recalling the passage.  “This is, um, very like Sky, you know.”

“Thanks,” Gilgamesh said.  Shadow hadn’t meant it as a compliment.  Gilgamesh took it as one, anyway.

Gilgamesh rang the public phone in his apartment complex lobby.  It rang twenty three times before Rafe, the overweight apartment manager picked up.  “Star Star Rentals: hourly, daily, weekly and monthly!  Cash in advance only.”

“Message for unit 4, please.”

“Whadda yah want me to do?”

“Knock on the door to unit 4 and say there’s someone who wants to speak to the teacher’s pet.”

“Crazy sonofabitch.”  Rafe didn’t hang up, went and delivered the message.

The phone picked up a little over a minute of panic suppression later.  “Here.”

The voice was male, unknown.  Metasense, though, informed him
the voice belonged to the Skinner.

“It’s me.”

“Huh.”  Pause.  “You’re calling from my place!”