A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (43 page)

Ouch.  Keaton’s critique was far too accurate. 
One of Tonya’s biggest mistakes in this mess was not taking the time to sit Zielinski down and have him tell her the medical details behind his claims about Hancock.  She even picked up on echoes of Hank and Lori in the way that Keaton spoke.

“I admit I made mistakes,” Tonya said.

Keaton wasn’t finished.  “You owe me, bitch.  Hancock fell into withdrawal for over a day.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“No, this was the fault of your goddamned political supporters,” Keaton said.  Stopped.  Tonya took a quick peek and noted they stood on the top of a house overlooking an eighty foot drop into a rocky stream bed.  “You were just
following orders
.”  Utter contempt.

“I didn’t interfere with the Transform
the Feds wanted to feed to Hancock.”  Tonya paused, and continued, much quieter.  “I was ordered to break her, though.”

“You’re nothing but a tool.  My tool, now, for what you put Hancock through.”

Like hell.  A gust of sudden anger snuffed out Tonya’s good intentions, fueled by hours of film about Keaton’s relationship with Hancock.  “You’re one to talk.  After what you put Hancock through during your so-called training, you don’t have any cause to complain about the hell anyone else puts her through.”

Keaton snarled and tossed Tonya to the roof of
the house, hard enough to bounce.  Tonya scrambled hard to keep from sliding off the sloping roof to the ground two stories below.  Before she clawed her way to her feet, Keaton got in her face, hand clenched tightly on Tonya’s throat as the Arm lifted her to head level.

“Fucking bitch!  What the crap did you think you were accomplishing by your little Arm-breaking exercise, anyway?  What the fuck danger did Hancock in Chicago pose to your prissy little Philadelphia household?”

“The Council thought – and I thought – she was behind the wave of Transform killings and snatchings.”  Tonya took a deep breath and forced her anger down with her charisma.  “I was wrong,” Tonya said, as contrite as she could force herself to be.  With her charisma tuned to Keaton.  “I’m willing to make amends for my mistakes.  Are you?”

Keaton snarled
again and threw Tonya out over the chasm, over a hundred feet below.  Shock and terror filled her: she would survive the fall, but her healing trance would knock her out for hours, if not days.  Scavengers would get to her long before anyone would come by to save her.  Two words into a Hail Mary, though, Tonya felt a hand tightly grab her right ankle, nearly dislocating her hip.  The world careened sideways and stopped when whatever held her landed in a tree.  Then her hip dislocated.  Tonya muffled a scream, and waited, head down, now about fifty feet above the rocks.

“You’re my tool until Hancock’s fixed, bitch.  Understand?”

“Yes,” Tonya choked out.  “I’ll help in whatever way I can.”

Keaton flipped Tonya around to land back on the Arm’s shoulder, hard enough to knock the wind out of Tonya.  “I don’t want any more of your goddamned fucking backtalk concerning my training
techniques, bitch,” Keaton said.  “Not word one.  I can learn too, dammit.”

And that, Tonya knew,
would be the only acknowledgement she would get from Keaton about the mistakes in her earlier treatment of Hancock.

Keaton leapt from tree to tree
and dropped back to the ground on the other side of the streambed.  After they crossed to the other side of the greenbelt Tonya saw a homestead with a ‘For Sale’ sign out front.  Some hippie psychedelic VW bus sat in the driveway, reeking of juice.  Inside the house Tonya sensed a Focus, three Transforms, a goddamned Crow, one Transform zombie, and the remains of an Arm.  Tonya fixed her hip, healed her cuts and scrapes, and readied herself for the new and likely hostile audience.

Sky: March 27, 1968

When Kali returned a few minutes later with a Focus in her arms, Sky did a cursory check of the Focus when she
got within a kilometer and almost fainted.  The Focus held a faint echo of the juice pattern the white Focus had!  Sky yelped and ran, panicked, though not for more than five steps.  Lori ran him down and grabbed him with a bear hug.

“Stop!” Lori said.  “Let it wash through you,
Sam
.”

Sky stopped.  Lori was
smiling at him
and Sky didn’t have the heart in him to fight off his love’s charisma.  If Kali came back with the white Focus, though, Sky decided he would blow his cover and skunk the lot of them.  He let Lori gaze into his eyes as he thought; he couldn’t say a thing because Kali was too close now, coming across the back yard of the vacant house carrying her burden.  Lori didn’t catch exactly what he left unsaid, but at least she became far warier than before.

This Focus Biggioni was
not
, thankfully, the white Focus.  For one thing, she was no pale ice queen, but an olive skinned black haired beauty of southern Italian extraction who would look wonderful marinating in a martini glass.  Beautiful, and sad.  Instead of a miasma of corruption surrounding her, a miasma of guilt surrounded her.  In fact, Sky remembered meeting her, not too long ago, after the mission to…

Some sort of mission or other.  He couldn’t remember.  Sandbagged by low juice and faulty memories.  Remembering her from some other meeting even before th
en, but he couldn’t say where.

Kali dumped Focus Biggioni at their feet.  “Seems as though Tonya here has realized the error of her ways.”  The Focus
appeared to be a bit worse for wear, but nothing more than a few cuts and scrapes.

Biggioni glared at Sky.  Oh, right.  His dross constructs
giving him the appearance of a tagged Transform didn’t work well right now, did they?  He wondered what Kali metasensed.  Likely something entirely different.

Lori caught the byplay, but Kali didn’t, as she
was bringing Hancock down from the bedroom.

“Focus Biggioni,” Lori said.  “You’ve met Tim before.  Let me introduce the rest of the people with me: Tina Williams, Eileen Stevens, and Sam Illison.”  As always, Lori was fast on the uptake.

Tonya rose unsteadily to her feet and nodded.  Kali had beat up on the Focus already, which didn’t surprise Sky.

Kali stalked over to Biggioni, Hancock in her arms.  “See what you’ve done?  See how she wants your juice?  Why shouldn’t we feed you to her?”

Tonya shrugged, sad.  “You could.  If you don’t and you get her enough of the right sort of juice, there’s a chance she might recover.  You did.”

Keaton’s eyes narrowed.  “Bitch.  That’s a fuck of a slim chance and we’re going to have to take a fuck of a lot better care of her than the care I got if we expect to see a sane personality at the end of it.”

Tonya nodded.  “As I said.  A chance.”

Lori cut in.  “A chance?  What kind of chance?  What
is this going to do to her in the long run?”

Tonya
glanced around and spotted the volunteer Transform.  “The first thing she needs is juice. Why don’t you let me pick up the tag on that volunteer?  I can feed Hancock juice through my juice buffer, like I fed juice to you, Stacy, after you poached that Transform from me last year.”

Sky sucked breath, waiting for Lori to explode.  Tonya had ignored Lori’s question
as if Lori wasn’t even present.  Lori didn’t explode.  Instead, she ate her anger and clenched her teeth.

Ah.  Tonya was one of Lori’s famous ‘better Focuses than I am’ superiors.  Or did he already know that?  Sky hated the effects of low juice.

Kali laughed.  “Don’t bother covering your reactions.  I know how painful this is, Tonya.  Get used to it, because I’m going to have you doing this trick for the next week.”

Tonya shrugged.  “Yes, it’s painful,” she admitted.  “So?”

“Your fancy pain blocking tricks won’t work on that,” Kali said.

“Pain blocking?”  Tonya smiled.  “Mature Focuses deal with pain in many different ways.  My methods don’t include blocking pain, just accepting
the pain.  Don’t worry, if you’re looking for this to be some form of punishment, I’m willing to scream for you.”

Focus Biggioni was as far around the bend as Kali. 
She was also the pawn, in some fashion, of the white Focus.  He swore she wore some form of tag.  What sort of Focus could tag another Focus?  Had the world gone totally insane?

Sky bit his tongue.  If he started talking
, he would never stop.  His thoughts whirled around in his brain so quickly and chaotically he was afraid to utter a word.

“
He’s my Transform,” Kali said, her voice almost a hiss.  “You can’t have him.”

Tonya laughed, the mocking laugh of the arrogant.  “I can fix that problem for you if you want, Stacy.”

Kali growled and stalked off.  Then she stalked back and put Hancock at Tonya’s feet.  “I’m going to go entertain myself with Tina.  At least wait until I’m upstairs.”  Kali turned to Tina and gave Tina a more than inviting look.  Tina smiled a rather goofy smile and followed Kali into the house and up to the upstairs bedroom.

“You let her have sex with a Transform of yours?  Aren’t you afraid she’ll slip?” Tonya said, talking to Lori.

“She slips, she dies,” Lori said.  “Having a pleasant week, Tonya?  How are you doing on finalizing a deal for a new residence for your household?  What did you-know-who do to Focus Abernathy, anyway?”

“You want to release the tag on th
e Transform or should I just grab it from you?” Tonya said, a glacier to Lori’s person-sized body of ice.

Biggioni was
indeed the queen of the Focus bitches.

“He’s yours,” Lori said.

Without warning, the small businessman, in the now very bedraggled suit, stood and walked over to Hancock and gave her a big hug.  Moments later, he twitched and died.  It would not be all right in the end, and Mary would have to suffer without him.  Tonya’s expression didn’t change.  “She’s full up, now.”  Tonya inspected Hancock, checking the Arm’s pulse, peeling back her eyelids to eyeball her pupils, poking and prodding Hancock’s muscles.  All the while, Hancock rubbed herself up against Tonya, moaning.

Lori’s face had gone ashen.

“What, you wouldn’t be able to control Hancock trying to draw juice from you?” Tonya said, to Lori.

“No, ma’am,” Lori said, fallen under Tonya’s control.  “Not without killing her.”

“Learn.  Come over here and I’ll show you how.”

Lori followed orders.  The lesson was painful, at least in the twisted way Tonya taught it.  Lori learned
the trick in just under an hour.  Sky didn’t understand a thing about the lesson; he barely metasensed juice patterns at the best of times.  Tim and Eileen fetched water and food for everyone from the cooler in the van, humble and fawningly servile.  Sky sat back and watched the master at work, one pissed-off Focus bitch abusing her charisma in ways Sky had never imagined before.

“So, Focus Biggioni,” Sky said, after Lori had
mastered Biggioni’s lesson and slumped back exhausted at Sky’s side.  “Do you think you might be able to fix me and whatever stupid problems I have once I start talking I can’t stop my mind whirls madly and the words tumble out I’m full up with bad juice and…”

“Shut.  Up.”  Tonya glared at him.  He shut up.  She wrote him a note, showed it to him,
and made the note disappear.  Parlor magic.  Up her sleeve.

Crow:

You are breaking your agreement of August of 1963 by visiting the United States.  Return to Canada or face the consequences.  As punishment for your flaunting of the agreement I want a full description of how you are managing to fool the Arm.

“No, and no,” Sky said.  “You know why as well, because of…”

“Hush,” Tonya said.  He stopped talking, again, trivially
frowned at
by the glacial Focus bitch.  Tonya turned to Lori.  “You’re taking some large risks falling for this one.  Annoying the wrong people again.  No, don’t answer me.  I know you’re doing this on purpose and I’m not interested in knowing why.”

Lori looked halfway ready to punch Tonya in the face.

Tonya, unappreciative of Lori’s response, turned back to Hancock to inspect her blisters and skin rashes, now healing visibly by the minute.  She inspected the progress of Hancock’s other healing, paying close attention to Hancock’s left shoulder.  Sad.  Very sad.  When Kali returned, Tonya was sitting beside Hancock and stroking her face; in response Hancock hummed in pleasure.

“If you need,” Tonya said, “either I or Lori can handle Hancock now.”

“You taught her?” Kali said, looking at Lori.

Tonya nodded.

“I’ll take care of Hancock,” Kali said.  “My responsibility.”

“Yes.”  Tonya paused.  “Th
is would be for the best.”

Kali
eyed the crew.  Eileen knelt at her feet and offered her a paper plate with a sandwich on it.  Keaton took it.  “You rolled them well.”

“I’m not in the best of moods, as you well know,” Tonya said.  “My empathy is reserved for the Arm.  She’s the one I hurt.”