No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (27 page)

“Fuck.” Keaton paced.  “I can live with this insanity if I can just burn enough of this shit off to regain my ability to sense tagged Transforms at range again.  It would be nice if I could stop the muscle nodule development, but that isn’t fully necessary.”  Starvation and excessive exercise.  A pain in the derriere, but not risky.

“Don’t forget that there may be some hidden problems, as well,” Zielinski said.

Keaton nodded.

“Have you and Hancock discussed her research idea?” she said.

Zielinski’s breath caught.  He hadn’t dared ask what they had decided.  “Yes.”

“She’s going to be officially in charge, but I want you to be actually in charge.”

He clamped down tight on his reactions.  “How do I arrange this?”  Without getting his throat slit, he didn’t have the nerve to ask.

“The usual.”  Meaning he would need to manipulate Hancock into letting him make the scientific decisions.  Just the usual tightrope of razor blades associated with dealing with Arms, nothing out of the ordinary…

“There is one thing I feel necessary to point out, ma’am,” Zielinski said.

“Stacy.”

“Stacy,” he echoed, and controlled his urge to smile.  He knew Keaton hated the formality, which put her in a bad mood, and her bad moods made everyone be even more formal.  So on and so forth.  “Ma’am Hancock…”

“Puh-lease.”

Oh.  Right.  “Carol got bad juice when she took the Monster, back when she was with you.  Some of her Chicago quirks might have been due to this bad juice.  On the other hand, she spent enough time in withdrawal…”

“Damn,” Keaton said, quietly.  “Undoubtedly correct.  However, the CDC gave her juice in the same CDC Detention Center that gave me such trouble.  She could be having more bad juice problems right now.”

“I’ve seen nothing to indicate anything of the sort.  On the other hand, I haven’t been able to come up with a normal baseline on Carol, yet.  She’s still recovering from withdrawal.”

Keaton nodded.  “Keep your eyes out for anything suspicious.  I’ll give you some back door methods of getting in contact with me, through the Network.”  Zielinski nodded back.  “So,” she continued, “would access to a two million dollar offshore bank account suffice as payment for a day of your work?  The account dedicated to this research effort?  Of course, since Hancock doesn’t have a clue about how to deal with bank accounts in the Caymans, this will all be in your hands…”

Keaton never spared any possibility to yank Hancock’s chain.  What a mess!  Of course, he had been dealing with such minor illegalities for years, with the significantly smaller anonymous grant support he formerly picked up.  In fact, he wondered if some of his anonymous grants had come from Keaton…  He raised an eyebrow at Keaton, who did the stone face routine.  Bingo!

“I don’t believe that Carol will have any objections.”

“In any event, I’ve got a whole bunch more tests I want you to run on me,” Keaton said.  “After that, perhaps you can do some experimenting on Eissler’s advice about making Arms happy,” she said, with a broad leer.  “And, if you’ve been a good boy, I’m going to give you a good long session with my pet talking Monster, Jane.”

Here we go again, Zielinski said to himself, with a repressed wince and a surge of excitement.  Another way for Keaton to yank Carol’s chain.  She would
not
be thrilled.  On the other hand, he would get a better crack at the Monster…

While he worked on Keaton’s problems, he spent some time thinking.  Keaton and Hancock’s relationship had definitely evolved for the better.  However, he picked up on another element, something new and difficult for him to comprehend.  It seemed to confirm Eissler’s impenetrable comment about Arms and territory.  He swore the Arms now treated him as a piece of
shared
territory – impossible at first glance, as Arms didn’t normally share.  What did this mean?  What did this imply, for Arms?

Finally, when he finished everything that Keaton wanted from him, he let himself smile.  There would be a research organization, and his life was about to become truly meaningful again.

Chapter 8

We understand how most churches do not want to offend anyone at any cost, but we still must ask ourselves a few questions.  How is it that all of a sudden and all at once, the churches started expressing a strong desire to bring Transforms into the fold?  Why would they ever take such a deep financial risk?  Why are they even considering Transform pastors?  Is there a conspiracy?  If so, who is behind it?

“Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

Sky: June 5, 1968 – June 8, 1968

Sky woke in his Inferno attic home, not sure how he got here.  A dross sign in his mind said ‘repressed memory, on purpose, do not touch’, so he ignored the sign, remembered, and winced.

A curse.  One Arm after the other.  He might as well learn German, fly to Munich and ask Eissler to do him violently.

No Lori.  Hmm.  Must not be a weekend.  He metasensed a Focus in the house, though, in the library with Connie and Tim.  He glanced at the Apocalypse Clock by way of Tina, who was standing next to it.  8:50 P.M.  He must have slept for hours.  Days, maybe.

He found some mostly unsoiled clothes, trying to remember how long since he had slept in the Inferno attic.  Six weeks?  Seven weeks?  His clothes smelled musty.  He had lost weight.

He raided the kitchen, unnoticed, and parked himself in the entertainment room to take in some television.  A Beverly Hillbillies rerun, which meant this was Wednesday.  Sky winced and watched anyway.  As he sat he remembered his work and discussions with the Good Doctor, and idly fixed Transform glows, about as mentally stressful as knitting.  Of all the unexpected things, his work attracted first Shelly Darcie, and Rose Marie, and a bleary eyed Ann Chiron, all of whom cuddled up with him without noticing his presence.

That night he lay on the roof and studied the clouds and stars.

As he slept, Anne-Marie danced with him, which broke his heart.

By day he put on a groundskeeper crew uni and tended estate.  He loved to work with his hands and body, and his mind wasn’t up to doing anything else.  The Good Doctor was right.  Every Transform in Inferno carried extensive glow damage.  Worse, he had even started to think in Philadelphian technical terms: ‘juice structure’, ‘metapresence’, the alphabet of ‘bands’, ‘flows’ and ‘blockages’.

In the evening he started work on Sadie, the worst of the lot.  She came over.  Sadie had been around too many Crows for the Crow ‘don’t notice me’ tricks to work on her.

“Don’t say I’m here,” Sky said.

Sadie shook her head and touched his lips, quieting him.  “Bad Crow.  Bad Crow.  You’ve changed, though, Bad Crow.”  She led him off to a dark corner of the great room.  “Tell me what you’re doing, Bad Crow, or…” her voice elided from poetry to prose “…I swear I’ll strangle you with your own intestines.”

“I’m fixing your juice structure,” Sky said.  “No more dross leakage.  With your extensive C-band damage, you should be having memory problems, you know.”

Sadie cocked her head to the side.  “This is the first time you’ve ever acted like a real Crow.  Quiet.  Unnoticeable.  Impossible not to cuddle.  Distracted in mind, not all here.  Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Not chatty, either.”

He nodded again.

“Okay, fix away.”

The fix took him four hours, huddled together in a secluded corner of the dark great room.  Painful for Sadie, but she wanted this.  She no longer hated him.  He asked why.

“Your background ‘make all women interested in you’ trick is gone,” she said, her voice a hushed Crow whisper in the darkness.  “That and losing the non-stop blather makes you easier to like.”

Hmph.

“The non-stop blather will be back after I recover,” he said.  “I recently got abused by half an Arm and had a total panic flashback to the Hancock Rescue.”

“Which half?”

“The mindless instinctive half.  Hancock did the dirty work.  She hasn’t fully recovered, either.”

The bustle of Lori arrived earlier on Friday than he expected, mid-afternoon.  For some reason she spent an hour re-tagging her Transforms.  She grew angrier and angrier, until she cornered Sadie and forced the obvious out of her.  Lori sensed as different.  Emotionally and as a Focus.  Almost as if someone had rewired her juice structure.  Or he could metasense more details.

“That’s strange,” Sky said.  He crawled out of his attic hole, found a pile of newly washed clothes, and changed.  He sniffed.  He hadn’t showered since immediately after he had been raped.  “I’m synching with Lori’s metasense without touching her.”  His realization was worth a head-scratch.  No wonder he sensed more about Lori’s juice structure.  Then he saw…

He panicked and found himself on the roof of Bob’s barn.  He refused to move until Lori hunted him down.

“Sky?  Would you mind telling me what in the bloody blue blazes you’re doing here and what you did to my household?  Why did I need to retag them and why can I suddenly support an extra triad?”

He curled tighter into a fetal ball.

Lori sat beside him and touched him.  Recoiled.

“It’s gone,” she said, surprised, instantly going from angry to sad.

He didn’t answer.  He knew full well what was gone.

“Sky, please.  I need to know what’s going on.  With this crazy rebellion of mine eating all my attention, I don’t have time to play twenty questions with a Crow.”

“Tell me about the rebellion, what’s going on,” Sky said, an archetypical Crow whisper.  “Help me, please, for I’ve seen too much.”  He stayed curled up, fetal.

Lori leaned back on the roof and studied the clouds.  “The rebellion’s become a game of shadows and spite,” she said, resigned.  “I’m under investigation at Boston College for supply theft and taking bribes to change grades.  Complete drivel.  The IRS is auditing Inferno and Charade, Flo’s household.  I’ve got a total of twelve votes pledged in my attempt to unseat Biggioni, only every one of them is getting hinted at that if they do vote for me, the same thing will happen to them that’s happening to me.  Or worse.  I put together a whispering campaign against Biggioni, based on what I know she did; although everything is all true, the tales are so fantastic my whispering campaign sounds like a smear campaign.  I know, Focuses.  And, yes, you’re right, they’re responding even better to what I’m saying because it sounds like a smear campaign, and poor old Tonya’s phone’s no longer ringing with Focus issues or Network problems.  I’ve shut her down, properly shunned.  Three of my people have been contacted with bribery offers if they’ll turn on me.  One of the offers came in person, to Steve; he fought the person, got arrested, I got him out, what a mess.”  Lori’s anger rose with each word she spoke, though this time the anger wasn’t aimed at him.  “Half the time I’m afraid Flo’s going to crack under the pressure and desert the rebellion, the rest of the time I’m afraid I’m going to crack and start killing people.”

She paused and breathed deeply.  “Thank you for listening.  Keeping all of that bottled up inside makes me want to scream, sometimes.”

They listened to the night sounds together for a quarter hour.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, when his instincts told him to speak.  “A peace seeps in after all my major low juice episodes.  A tiny rebirth.  A reattachment to the immanence of the world.  All the lies stripped away, the naked truth revealed.  Over time, all my old flaws will reappear, some sooner, some later.  Mademoiselle Focus, I spent three weeks bouncing on the edge of withdrawal.  The world is a snowflake, a different snowflake every time.”

“You took my household away from me!”

“Hold your household looser, love them more, and they will always come back.”

Lori pounded her tiny fist on the Bob’s Barn roof.  “I took my household back, but I had to retag half my Transforms to do so.”  Pause.  “Do it again.  I don’t care how much this hurts.  Whatever insanity you did
just saved three lives
.”

“I didn’t do anything.  Big.  A little trash cleanup, the lot of all Crows.  I just found different trash this time,” Sky said.  He uncurled and sat up, shifting so he wouldn’t slide down the shingles on the pitched barn roof.  Lori looked and metasensed unhinged.  As she should be.  “I danced with Annie in my mind.  Sadie’s dross leak lost you that triad of yours you once could support.  The leak’s fixed now.  The rest probably doesn’t matter.”

Lori blinked.  “Oh.  The timing’s a little off, but a four month delay from Sadie’s Monster wound and the loss of the triad isn’t outside of the realm of possibility.”  She didn’t fully believe him; she didn’t trust his analysis and thought more was going on.  He didn’t care.

“You should find life easier around your own Transforms as well,” Sky said.  “Sadie’s dross leak probably affected you like a splinter on the bottom of your foot.”

“I’m better than that,” Lori said, stone faced.  “A trivial annoyance at worst.”

Sky snorted.  “You don’t believe you have a sub-conscious mind, do you?”

“Of course I believe…  Oh.  But conquering…”

“Worthless.  As worthless as taking a picture of me, setting it on your desk, and calling it love.”

Lori turned away.  “I’m sorry, Sky.”  Pause.  “The spark is gone.”  The spark of love.  The gift of the juice that had given them love.  The loss had been what panicked him.  “The spark’s been gone since the Hancock Rescue, but I hoped the loss was just temporary, that once you were back here the love would come back.  That horrid place did something to me and when I fixed myself and you, you, dammit!”  Her voice tailed off.

“I became just another Transform to you.”  The love between them had come from the juice.  Then they had walked into corruption and been corrupted and now the little spark of love from the juice was gone.  All that was left was real love, and it wasn’t enough.

She nodded.  A brother, not a lover.

“I understand.  We can work through this.  Start over.  If the spark never returns, so be it.”

“There’s another problem,” Lori said.  “You, uh, I met Gilgamesh and, uh, this happened again.  The spark.”

Sky leapt to his feet, asphalt shingle crumbs skittering down the roof from his motion.  “Gilgamesh?  Gilgamesh!”

This was beyond insane.  This was insulting.  He took a five step running leap and practically flew over to the estate’s pool, where he dove in and curled up, fetal, on the bottom.

---

“I’m surprised you’re not leaving,” Connie said.  Lori was still asleep, in her own tiny room, sleeping off her Friday night juice binge.

Sky sat on the back patio, nurturing an iced tea with a lemon stuck on a parasol.  Connie, Tim, Sadie and Ann had joined him.  Both Tim and Connie were practically bouncing out of their flip-flops over the change in his and Sadie’s relationship.

“I have a proposal,” Sky said, serious, actively exuding fierceness.  Losing Lori to a poser like Gilgamesh had, once he worked through the heartache, let him find his spine again.  “Your household needs a Focus.  I can’t move juice, but I can be the on-site Major Transform you need to help you with your dainty stealth missions and dirty trick squads.  You’re in a war, my friends, and this is
my
type of war.  I think it’s time to get Focus Schrum cited for violating zoning restrictions and for animal cruelty.  If you catch my drift.”

“Why are you talking to us?” Ann said.  “You did draw us over here on purpose.”

“I’m talking to you because you’re the ones I’m making the offer to.  The, um, Rizzari rebellion will not succeed without Inferno’s help.”

Connie nodded.  “You can’t work this way,” Tim said.  “The Focus will kill you for even thinking about this little takeover attempt of yours.”

Sky smiled.  “That’s true.  That’s why you’re going to propose it to me, I’m going to refuse, you’re going to continue proposing, often with non-leader Transforms around.  Only after a few days of this browbeating will I reluctantly agree.”

That drew a big smile from all four Transforms.  Sky lowered his eyebrows and continued to glower, fierce.

“I think I like the new Sky,” Ann said.  Hinting, flirty.  Ah, tonight’s bed partner.  Sky repressed a smile and continued to glower.

“I think I do as well,” Sky said.

Marde-sucking Gilgamesh might have won over Lori, but he hadn’t conquered Inferno, as had Sky.

Let the best Crow win.

Carol Hancock: June 6, 1968 – June 14, 1968

“Hank, how are you doing so far?”  I had moved my operation from Oklahoma City to Austin after finding far too many Chimera traces outside the Houston city limits.  We were living out of a hotel room on South Congress, a funky part of Austin with enough hippies and freaks for me to blend in easily. I found the ‘blending in’ easier now, because of my less inhuman weight and muscles.

“I’ve put together the disguises you asked for,” he said.  He spread papers across the tiny hotel table.  “The ones for me, as well.”  He remained grumpy about the need for a disguise, but he slowly acquiesced to the necessity.  He also remained a little edgy over his recent personal session with Keaton, but high as a kite over the research project.  Keaton had sworn him to secrecy on the technical details of his little session with her, but I knew if I pressed, he wouldn’t be able to refuse me.  I had enough sense not to force him.