In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 10

  “So are you as nervous as I am?” Gail said. Tact and subtlety had never been her strong suit.

  “What?” Beth said, surprised. After a little thought she smiled with the tiniest hint of a blush, and took a quick glance at the floor between them. “Well, yeah.”

  “Me, too,” Gail said, a real smile coming through. Unlike Focus Adkins or Focus Biggioni, Beth talked like her, munging her syllables together in the usual fast-talking Michigan fashion. Welyah. Meetoo.

  Beth laughed, and pushed her sparkly hair back from her eyes. “Well, I never met you before, you know. We have only four Focuses here in Detroit, and I’m the youngest. Out of the blue, Tonya calls me up, Tonya Biggioni yet, good Lord, and wants me to mentor you because Wini Adkins wasn’t doing a good enough job. Yikes! That’s the sort of Young Focus League business I’d expect to hear about from Lori or Linda, not from goddamned Tonya freaking Biggioni. I mean, I’ve only been a Focus for five years!”

  Gail laughed too, caught in Beth’s laughter. “Well, I’ve only been a Focus for a little over five months, so you’re well up on me.” Gail wondered who Lori and Linda were, or what the Young Focus League was.

  “So what happened between you and Wini?” Beth said. “Sit down and tell me the story.”

  “She said what?”

  Gail stood and did it proud, with her nose in the air, and with a mincing, superior voice that pronounced every syllable in every word. “You are a fool, and too young and stupid to be a Focus, young lady.” She sniffed a little sniff, and her nose went up higher. “When you’ve screwed yourself up so badly that nobody else can even begin to help, then you’ll come crawling back to me. If they let you out of your closet.” Now she added a little hip wiggle and a toss of the head. “And maybe, just maybe, I’ll consent to help you out.”

  Beth laughed so hard that Coke came up her nose, and she gasped and coughed and laughed. “She didn’t really say that.”

  “Well, loosely translated,” Gail said, laughing as she sat back down and took another sandwich from the stack.

  “Loosely translated! Listen, I’ve got to tell you about the Christmas party we had last year. The party was at Wini’s household, and you wouldn’t believe…”

  “Oh, no. Everybody has a miserable time of it at first. You should have seen the mess I made. Back when we were at the damned Detroit Clinic, and everyone was so miserable, you remember how that goes? One of my people, one of the normals, decided I might feel better if I drank myself into a stupor. I was so miserable I was willing to try anything. But, get this, he also thought a party would be good for the rest of the Transforms, too, and so here everyone is, and alcohol isn’t allowed in the Clinic, so they’re smuggling in this huge supply of vodka, God knows why vodka, but they brought in must have been twenty of these huge bottles of vodka, and he figures they need something to mix it with, so they’re bringing in Coke, and fruit, and God knows what all else, but I swear they brought in some of everything anyone’s ever mixed with vodka in the entire history of mankind.

  “So they’re smuggling all this in up through the window to the second floor, and they’ve got this little rope pulley they’ve set up, and they’ve got look-outs posted for the nurse, and I swear any time you thought they’d finally brought everything up, there’d be some other guy at the bottom with another load.

  “So everyone starts drinking, even the normals because they didn’t want to be left out, except for the Everetts, who are wonderful, but I swear they’re older than God and they were standing in the hall going ‘you youngsters’ and wagging their fingers at us. Both of them. They looked like some kind of puppets with the string cut, you know, bobbing up and down, up and down. Have you ever seen somebody actually wag their finger? Nobody does that. But there they were, up and down, up and down.

  “So then…”

  “So she says ‘Well, I’m not bad looking, you know.’ Here we have this guy who’s run off with our entire bank account, and she thinks he likes her because she’s ‘not bad looking’. What do you say? Stop being an utter dumbass? Make use of the brains God gave a gingersnap? She thought he was in love with her!”

  “Hell, I don’t know what to do. They’ve been married for twenty years, and now the marriage is falling apart, because she’s a Transform and he can’t cope. Their kids are all upset because they hate this whole Transform thing, and they hate where we’re stuck living, and now their parents are fighting. Hell of a thing for all of them, and I can’t think of a damned thing to do.”

  “Yeah, I remember my first real trouble with one of my people. I didn’t have anybody try and steal anything, but I did have this one guy that was pissed, just pissed, about what I did with his juice supply. He thought I was controlling his mind. Every time I yanked around his juice supply, he thought I was picking on him on purpose, like this was all some huge plot on my part to screw with his head. And of course I was brand new and had no control over the juice, so every time somebody blinked near me I’d start sucking away his juice supply, and being young and new I’d never notice until it was too late.”

  “So what happened?” Gail said.

  “Well, things kept getting worse and worse. One day, I saw him coming, and I was tired already, and he’d been ranting at me for weeks, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. So when he came toward me, he was real mad looking, so I thought he was going to scream at me again, and I took his juice down. Not on purpose or anything. I was just upset with him, and so his juice came down, without me even thinking. You know how that goes.”

  “Uh huh. So what did he do?”

  “You would not believe. He got so mad I thought he was going to explode on the spot.” Beth paused for a long moment. “The bastard hit me.”

  “He hit you? You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not kidding. He didn’t stop, either. Crazy mad. He kept pounding on me, and screaming, and I was screaming and drawing his juice down to dangerous levels, much faster than I’d ever moved juice before. People showed up quick to help me, but it seemed like hours. I got bruises like you wouldn’t believe and broken ribs and a couple of broken fingers. I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  “Oh, wow. That’s awful. So what did you do?”

  Beth was quiet for a minute and her cute freckled face turned solemn.

  “I didn’t know what to do. So, I didn’t do much of anything. Except I couldn’t hardly give him juice anymore. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t give him more than the bare minimum he needed to survive. Every time I saw him, or thought about him, I remembered him hitting me, and my ribs cracking, and what he did to my face – and I would strip him bare, undo whatever I’d done to keep him alive that day. He never left peri-withdrawal the entire time.”

  Beth was silent again, and stared at the hanging sheets as if she had forgotten the world.

  “So what happened?”

  Beth didn’t turn her head.

  “He lasted nine days,” she said, quiet. “Then he killed himself.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Beth turned back to Gail. “Five years, and his suicide still bothers me. Except the next man I picked up was Archie Sarabia, and he’d have died back then if I hadn’t had the free slot. Archie’s wonderful, the nicest man you’ve ever met. Was it so awful that lunatic died, if Archie got to live instead?”

  Gail leaned forward in her chair, appalled and sad. “That’s a really tough question.”

  “I know,” Beth said. “This is the part of being a Focus that’s really scary.”

  Gail nodded, twisting the question in her mind, and imagining herself in Beth’s place. Not only was the situation far too easy to imagine, she feared her own reactions would have been far more violent. She remembered when Tonya had asked ‘did anybody die?’, and how she hadn’t believed that might be a real concern. God! The way this Transform stuff messed everyone up in so many different ways still gave her the creeps.

  “But that’s enough awfu
l stuff,” Beth said, with a shake of her wavy red hair. “We’ve gotten way too serious.” Gail could almost metasense her putting on her good cheer like a set of clothes. “So, what do you do with yourself when you’re not being a juice jockey?”

  “…besides that, there’s the regular lunatics. You’re beautiful, and you stand out, and so you attract all sorts of attention from the lunatic fringe. You gotten any hate mail yet?”

  “What? Hate mail?” Gail said.

  “No hate mail? Somebody in your household is probably filtering your mail for you and getting rid of that sort of junk. You want to lose sleep, read some of that stuff. You’ll understand why you need bodyguards. I wouldn’t recommend reading the crap, though. You won’t be able to move the juice for days.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit. We’re targets. Back early this year Focus Adkins’ household actually got attacked by an unknown something and one of her woman Transforms got kidnapped. A bigger mess you’ve never seen, because Wini has lots of political pull. We had FBI crawling around for weeks. FBI! They never did find the lady.”

  “That’s horrible!” Gail said. Perhaps that was why Adkins had been such a bitch to her, if she had lost one of her favorites. The attack made her seem a little more human. Still, that didn’t excuse her ‘enslave the Transforms’ philosophy.

  “You know,” Beth said, slowly, “of all the things about my transformation, having people do me favors might have been the hardest thing to get used to.” Gail nodded. She had a hard time with anyone in her household doing favors for her, just because she was ‘the Focus’. They wanted special treatment, and what they did made them seem like young children to Gail.

  Gail nodded. “I don’t like the favors, either.”

  “Yah huh.” Beth gave her a knowing look. “I was a normal girl, nineteen years old, working in my parent’s pickle plant. Small high school valedictorian, but my family didn’t do college. I wasn’t particularly good looking, but I was engaged to be married. Just like everyone else, you know?”

  Beth rested her elbows on her knees and looked down. Outside, the moving van came back with another load and Gail heard the clack and clamor of unloading start again. Beth took a roast beef sandwich out of the cooler and took a huge bite.

  “Then my transformation came and my entire earlier life was gone, no family, no fiancé, no friends,” Beth said, talking around her mouthful of sandwich. Gail felt Beth’s memory of her loneliness, echoes of Gail’s own, a Focus trick she recognized from dealing with her own Transforms. She almost shot to her feet in surprise at being able to read another Focus so easily, until Gail remembered item number 23 on her scribble pad. She had done the same in her meeting with Focus Adkins, but hadn’t realized what was going on. “All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe without affecting a dozen other strangers. Every word I said, every stupid thing I thought, every move I made was important. The most ordinary things I did without thinking meant life or death to the people in my household. Their whole lives revolved around me and I hated the attention. I couldn’t get rid of it.”

  Gail thought about her own household. She hurt people when she lost control of her emotions and yanked the juice around. She had become the proverbial five hundred pound gorilla, only clumsy.

  “Once I figured out how to get the juice flowing properly my people started to do favors for me,” Beth said. “They wanted to make me happy so I would make the juice flow better. I hated their never-ending bribery. Every time someone came through with, you know, ‘Oh, Beth, let me do this for you,’ or ‘Oh, Beth, here’s something you might like,’ or ‘Oh, Beth, I’ll be glad to do it, if you want me to,’ I wanted to scream. I couldn’t get away from them and I couldn’t get them to treat me like a person. Just a normal person.”

  Gail nodded again, and made little prompting noises. This sounded so familiar. Almost. Beth kept going.

  “So then finally, like, I figured it out. I was the center of their lives, their lives did revolve around me, and I couldn’t do anything to change the fact. I’m not a normal person anymore and the little things I do, do matter. They do me favors because if I’m happy, then everyone gets to be happy. Special treatment for me makes sense for them, because my happiness and comfort is important to the lives of everyone in my household.”

  Gail stopped nodding. She found herself pulling back, and in. This sounded like rationalization to justify special favors and privileges. Unjustified superiority. Putting on airs. Artificial class distinctions. This all reminded her of the first time she found out about the sort of tracking and honors classes they did in High Schools outside of Michigan. Ewwwwh.

  Beth wasn’t looking at her, though, and didn’t stop talking.

  “Despite my better wishes, I started accepting the favors. Just to make things easier. I’d smile and try to appreciate them. I got the horrible guilts, and I was sure bad things were going to happen. But nothing did. My people just kept doing things for me. I kept on doing my best to enjoy them, be happy, and make the juice flow better. However, there’s something wrong if you think you deserve this. Life shouldn’t work like some darned fairy tale. But once I let them make me happy and comfortable, the juice did flow better.”

  Beth looked over at Gail when she finished, obviously waiting for a response. Gail didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t like this either, do you?” Beth said.

  Gail stood up and walked over to the open window. Just past noon, the sun shone hot in the bright late-summer warmth. Below, the workers were sweating.

  “For me, the juice flows too quickly,” Gail said. “The least bit of emotion and whoosh, I’ve shorted someone down to low juice yet again. No matter what I try, I can’t seem to keep from hurting people.”

  Beth didn’t answer. Gail looked over at Beth, worried, and spotted a similar expression of worry on Beth’s face. “I’ve heard of your problem. For you, the favors would help you keep your emotions out of the juice moving.”

  “It’s still not right,” Gail said, in a whisper.

  Beth looked up at her with raised brows. “Ideals.”

  Gail didn’t understand, and shrugged.

  “I noticed how many sandwiches you ate,” Beth said. “You aren’t eating well at home, are you?”

  Gail winced again, and shrugged. She had seen herself in the Ebener’s mirror, and rail thin was a good approximation of her appearance. The transformation seemed to think she should have a Barbie-doll figure, and despite the fact her Girls had definitely turned into Women, being able to see the skin so tightly wrapped around her bones was more than a little disconcerting.

  “Money’s tight. Nobody gets enough food.”

  “Gail, you can’t control the juice when you’re hungry, not as one of those Focuses with the whoosh! juice moving problem. Especially when you’re hungry for a long time. I’ll bet if you ask your Transforms, every one of them would be willing to give up some of their food to help you control the juice.”

  Gail didn’t move from the window.

  “Taking their food isn’t right,” she said.

  Beth didn’t answer. She just sat and waited. After a long moment, she shrugged.

  “Well, this is too serious again,” she said. “Let’s think about something else. Have you thought about taxes?”

  “So what about places to live?” Gail said. The sandwiches were gone, and the afternoon sun shone in through the window and they were still going strong.

  “Well, besides being a bitch and a half? It’s always a problem,” Beth said. She was sipping on a bottle of Mountain Dew.

  “Yeah. But what are we going to do? We don’t have any money, or any ideas about how to get around the money problem.”

  “Well, it’s a bitch and a half. It’s always a problem,” Beth said, smiling at her own repetition. “You’re going to be sweating the housing issue for the rest of your life.” Beth put her feet up on the table, and rocked her chair back and forth on its hind legs.

  “That’s
not a big help.”

  Beth snorted. “If I had a good answer to the housing problem, do you think I’d be living in a run-down warehouse?”

  “It’s better than an open field,” Gail said, and took a sip of her own drink, a Coke. The caffeine didn’t do anything for her anymore, but she still liked the taste and the fast calories.

  “All right, all right. Mostly, you get creative and you do a whole lot of work. We found this place because Phil did some research down at City Hall. I can give you the department info. I swear we live off those plat maps. Anyway, he noticed a screw-up in the zoning around here. Usually warehouses and such are zoned light industrial. Somehow, this parcel got zoned mixed-use, which includes residential. So we checked the place out real thorough, contacted the owner, and, presto, a home. I figure they’ll eventually straighten out the zoning and we’ll be forced to move out, ‘cause we’re Transforms, but it’ll take them a while. In the meantime, we’re paying rent instead of a mortgage, so we don’t have to worry about re-sale costs. So maybe we’ll be able to pile up a little money for the next time we’re forced to move.”

  “Okay, so what do I do?”

  “Huh. I think I would start by going over every single person in your household. Think about it real hard – ‘how can this person produce a place to live for the household?’ You might come up with some ideas. Get your whole household thinking up ideas, because you never know who might come up with something. Then you do research, like the plat maps, that sort of thing. Then you get creative.”

  “Creative? Like creative how?”

  “Lots of things. You wouldn’t believe what some households come up with. Warehouses, old hotels, old churches, entire apartment buildings. Some households go gypsy.”

  “Gypsy?” Gail chewed on Beth’s suggestions in her mind, but she couldn’t come up with any instant solutions.

  “That’s when the whole household lives on the move. A way of life thing. Like circuses, for instance. I think every traveling tent circus in the entire country is a Focus household. A Focus makes a damned good circus performer if she puts her mind to it, and Transforms aren’t half bad, either. There’s one Mexican household over on the West Coast who does migrant labor. Now there’s a poor household for you. There’s another household travelling around with those motorized amusement park rides.” The bitch Focus Cottsfield’s household, Gail knew. “There’s another that does a traveling tent revival. One of the Transforms in the household is a real charismatic preacher, and they do pretty well.”