The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine Page 11

  “So be it. We don’t have the luxury of having only perfect people in the Cause.”

  She nodded and looked over at the cowering rapist with a look of determination. Five seconds later the normal fell to the ground, limp. Dead.

  The amount of juice she used was so small it was beyond my ability to metasense. For the first time, I began to wonder what in the hell I had awakened, here, in Lori.

  This was just the first day.

  We didn’t let Lori get any sleep until the second night, and only the meager amount of sleep an Arm needed. Lori had come to my place, originally, to make up with me and to have me seduce her. She did not like it one bit when I refused to be the seducer. If she wanted my love, she would have to seduce me. She couldn’t. More truth she didn’t like.

  I did let her seduce me into sleeping with her. Not sex, only juice cycling. It wasn’t as intense as it had been at her place, the first time, because I wasn’t panicked and stressed. After a few minutes, instead of feeling like a never-ending juice draw from my prey, the juice transfer made us into one, utter bliss of a separate sort.

  Needless to say, all of Lori’s wounds of the previous two days were gone after our three short hours of rest, as was a small but noticeable amount of my juice.

  No problem. Keaton and I repeated the damage the next day, and the day after. The forge was hot, but by the end, even the sword Keaton and I were forging was enjoying the fire.

  The Cause Meeting

  Hancock’s California palace awed Tonya. The Houston place had been too much. This place was ridiculous. Tonya still didn’t understand why Hancock was willing to invite them here. Only once, as Keaton was leaving Philadelphia, had Keaton ever revealed the location of her lair. Didn’t Hancock care about the security risks? There was something screwy going on with this Arm, and Tonya hoped she wasn’t overreaching. Next time the Feds caught her, they were going to kill her immediately. She had seen the FBI memo.

  Tonya feared Hancock had succumbed to hubris. The laurel wreath upon her brow, metaphorically placed there by the Transform community, made her a Transform celebrity. The Commander. Slayer of Rogue Crow. Healer of Focus Rickenbach. Savior of an entire wedding reception worth of Focuses and Transforms. The potential for hubris was large.

  Slayer of Innocence as well. Tonya smiled. She directed Frank and Billy, her new traveling bodyguards, to join with the others. Two other sets of bodyguards were there as well. After a moment of thought, she decided one set were Carol’s guards – she recognized one of them, the weasel guy, Ricky.

  She walked in, and one of Carol’s people greeted her, a woman who introduced herself as Ila. New as a guard, Tonya read. No, not guard. Officer. She held herself with the air of someone recently promoted, unsure of herself, but with potential to keep climbing. Interesting. Ila led Tonya to the dining room, in use as a meeting room, with one last chair open for her, and not at the head of the oversized table.

  The biggest surprise was the attendance of Duke Hoskins, Earl Sellers, and their Master, Crow Occum, joining the expected Crow contingent of Guru Shadow, Gilgamesh and Sinclair. Crow Occum was physically twisted, warped almost out of human shape, with bandy legs and powerful arms and shoulders. According to Lori, the damage was something done to him by the senior Crows.

  There were some serious grudges sitting here at this table.

  Keaton was there, on crutches, her regenerating leg extending awkwardly down to her lower calf. Carol, of course, sat at the far end of the table, but not at its head. Lori sat beside her, at the head of the table, un-Lori-like in appearance. Closed, unreadable, with sunken eyes, black-smudged from lack of sleep, hair shortened and frizzy, and a miniature set of almost Arm-like muscles evident on her spare frame. Scary, intense, hard-edged and hard used. Dressed in black, practically death incarnate. Another Arm sat at Carol’s side, Haggerty by name if Tonya remembered correctly. Haggerty looked like Lori’s big sister, huge, muscular, similarly beautiful, dressed in the same death incarnate clothing style as Lori and just as hard edged and hard used. Haggerty would have made a hell of a Focus. Tonya didn’t know anything about her as an Arm. Secret agent Zielinski, dangerous, sad and angry, sat in a wheelchair next to Haggerty, and she knew his wheelchair confinement would be bringing back some of his foul old memories. Tom, Carol’s normal second in command, sat on Carol’s right. Ann Chiron sat at his side. The only other Focus at the table was Focus Thelma Laswell of Houston. She too looked tougher than before, not from Arm-abuse, but from responsibility. If Tonya’s spies were correct, Laswell was now in charge of all three Arms’ money-laundering operations.

  Tonya sat. Ila came by with a stack of papers, professional looking reports, regarding the Cause. The one on top was a detailed explanation of the functioning of a Noble household.

  “Sorry, folks, my plane was delayed,” Tonya said.

  “No problem. Did you get any further word about how the first Focuses are reacting?” Lori asked.

  “Yes. Wini Adkins gave us all a glowing report, and they’ve decided to stand back and watch without interference. They also shelved their plan to unseat Polly, Bentlow, Webb and I. Polly is talking about getting representatives of the Arms, Crows and Nobles on the Focus Council as non-voting members, and I’m fairly sure, after talking to several other Council members, there won’t be much of a fight over that. For the moment, we’ve won. On the other hand, I also heard a rumor that the idea of a Focus tax – official up front and expensive dues to the Council – is back on the table.”

  “The consensus here is to take things slow, and not push the Cause too aggressively,” Lori said. “I represented your position as desiring to go slow as well. Did I overreach?”

  “No, not at all,” Tonya said, and then gulped. Lori had rolled her. She hadn’t planned on being so forthcoming about Polly’s plans or the firsts. In her head to head charisma matches with Lori over the years, every time Lori had caught up to her, Tonya had managed to find some way to get back ahead. Lori had never found a way to get ahead of her before, and certainly never to the point where she had rolled Tonya. Then Tonya saw it, a minor tell, the precision of Lori’s hand motions, added to Carol and Stacy’s obvious approval of what Lori was doing. The bitch Arms had been training Lori! Hard, hard training, it looked like.

  What did they do to you, Lori? Tonya thought.

  What needed to be done, Lori answered, wordlessly.

  Hell. Lori hadn’t been able to do this trick before. The Arms must have been honing Lori’s metasense as much as they had been honing her charisma. Tonya focused in on Lori’s fingernails, knowing what Keaton’s training often led to. Indeed, they were mostly gone, with just a start of new growth at the base.

  Tonya wanted to curse. She had underestimated Hancock from the beginning, she had kept underestimating Hancock, and even after Hancock saved the damned wedding reception, she still underestimated Hancock. Arm training for a Focus! Who else might have thought something so insane would work? And so quickly.

  Galling.

  “I also think we need to consolidate our winnings,” Tonya said, giving in to the inevitable.

  “Wonderful. There are a few things along those lines I’d like to get to later today, including a question I have about how legal we are going to be able to keep ourselves, and Carol’s idea about having the Arms paying Focuses instead of the reverse.” Lori turned to the large Crow contingent, thankfully not including Sky. “Guru Shadow? You have news?”

  He nodded. “I have verified that none of us are facing any retribution over the death of Wandering Shade from the more senior Crows,” he said. “However, I was not able to negotiate a consensus change on the issue of Crow training of Chimeras. Such training is still to be labeled ‘experimental’, which leaves it vulnerable to a revoking of approval at any moment.” He paused, and Tonya felt the anger wafting off the two Nobles and Crow Occum. “I, with Crow Master Occum’s help, will be training more Crow Masters. The process of training Crow Masters is not codified, yet
, and should legitimately be considered experimental, but I do have three Crow volunteers for this training, each with different levels of commitment, expertise and experience. One is with us: Sinclair.” Sinclair kept a straight face, and nodded acknowledgement.

  “Wonderful – and good luck, Sinclair,” Lori said, a real smile on her face. “Do you have any idea how long this will take?”

  “None at all,” Shadow said. “All three Crows involved possess at least some aptitude for symbolic juice and dross manipulation, what we term Shaman skills.” His comment brought a thin smile from Arm Haggerty. “All three will need to unlearn what they have already been taught, and of the three, the most mentally flexible is our friend Sinclair.”

  “I hope I’m not being too optimistic, ma’am, but I believe I’ll be able to master the basics within six months,” Sinclair said. “I’m a younger Crow than the other two, and have less to relearn.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to seeing a second Noble household by the end of the year, if all goes well,” Lori said. “Feel free to ask around for help. Inferno has quite a bit of experience helping the Nobles, and Crow Master Occum.”

  “I’ll keep your offer in mind,” Crow Sinclair said. If Tonya read him correctly, he was quite anxious to get back to his training.

  She just hoped the senior Crows were more forgiving of pushy underlings than the first Focuses.

  “There is one other important issue I need to bring up,” Tonya said, after extracting implicit permission from Lori to raise a point. “We’re going to need to put some work into protecting and guiding Focus Rickenbach. In a few years, she’s likely to be one our more important assets.”

  “How good is she, anyway?” Hancock said. She still lusted for a Focus able to feed Arms juice.

  “I did some thinking on the subject, and I’m convinced she has about the same innate potential as Polly,” Tonya said. “She has no weaknesses I can tell, save for lack of training and experience.”

  “Even with her joke of a household?” Keaton said, shaking her head. “Focus households always mirror the strength of their Focus, in my experience.”

  “It’s still a young household, but Stacy, think – how many other Focuses’ Transforms have you ever known who would volunteer to be juice-sucked and die for a worthy cause?” Keaton sat back, frowned, and then nodded. “The problem we’re going to be facing is that she’s different, as is her household. We can’t step in too often, or too hard, or we’ll end up creating a rebel; yet if we don’t interfere, we risk having other Focuses destroy her because, in her, they see a threat.”

  “What are you suggesting, then?” Keaton said.

  “Talk to her,” Tonya said. “Drop hints of things you might be willing to have her involved with, and let her take the bait. I’ll make sure I’m around when her charisma comes in; that’s the most dangerous time for any powerful Focus.”

  “For the time being, I think I should keep my distance,” Lori said. “I’ve seen how she idolizes you, Tonya, and a variant on your household would fit her well. On the other hand, I and my household are just too different.”

  Tonya caught Carol and Stacy exchanging glances, easy to read as a ‘please?’ from Hancock and a ‘she’s my Focus, keep your hands off’ from Stacy.

  Gilgamesh wiggled his juice and caught her eye. “Crow Whisper nerved himself up to make contact with Gail. We should be able to funnel advice through him, if we need to.”

  “Great,” Lori said. She looked around the table. “Next?”

  The meeting helped, Tonya decided, but she did worry about what this would do to her household’s bank account. The Cause, if anything, was wordy.

  Bothering Focus Webb (Carol Hancock’s POV)

  “Keaton orders you to do insane things like this all the time?” Gilgamesh said. He had both of us covered from metasense detections as we snuck into the apartment’s grounds. Jealousy of Shadow and Sky, who were able to mask the metapresence of those with them, drove Gilgamesh into learning how to do this trick, himself. He wasn’t happy having to test it out in real life, though.

  “Essentially. In addition to the cash rewards involved, what I get out of these deals is Arm training. Earlier on, she provided a large amount of monetary support as well.” Gilgamesh and I were being careful to tell each other more about our day-to-day business as Major Transforms. We didn’t want another professional mess like the one that ended up with Gilgamesh and I on the outs, on which I blamed our ignorance and excessive secret-keeping.

  We were already inside Focus Webb’s outermost layer of security, such as it was. We carried no weapons more potent than our battle knives. Gilgamesh and I were doing the stealth routine. We crept around the back of the rear apartment building, skulking past the garbage cans.

  “Lori wanted to train me in combat, as well. She kept getting distracted, though.”

  “Distracted? Lori? Never!” I said, giving Gilgamesh a silly grin. I would need to watch myself, or I would also end up distracted by Gilgamesh. I wasn’t overly worried. As an Arm, I had plenty of experience mixing business with pleasure. Now we just needed to find someone able to teach Lori the same. Damn, that Focus was dangerous!

  Other than messing up the personal lives of every Crow and Arm she dealt with, Lori was doing fine as the behind-the-scenes leader of the Cause. Even if Inferno had a hard time coping with their now somewhat darker leader-Focus. Tonya bitched and moaned and wiggled, but she did represent us well on the Council and to the media.

  Unfortunately, the Feds weren’t listening. In fact, they weren’t happy with Transforms this year, and it wasn’t all just the Battle in Detroit. The current administration was all gung ho about law and order, and had started to turn all Transform problems into law and order problems. Some of the suggestions coming out of the White House were flat out scary, and the Focuses were scrambling, trying to get their political support in order. Rabblerousing Arms, Crows and Nobles had better stay quiet, the Council said, or we’re all going to be dead or in internment camps.

  Still, I sensed our momentum growing. We had won on both the physical and political level. Rogue Crow was dead. The Focus Council and the Focus Network now recognized both the Crows and the Nobles as positive contributors to the Transform community. The Cause was public among the Transforms, and had a seat at the table at the Focus Council. We had finished the heavy lifting – now, everything else was just details. For the moment, even the first Focuses were part of the Cause.

  Until the next big crisis hit, of course. I still dreamed of the holy grail of Arms – unlimited juice from a Focus. As everyone predicted, Gail couldn’t reproduce her trick, and had no idea how she had done it. But she had. All it takes is once to prove the possible. I wanted to try some more experiments with Gail, but Tonya objected, saying Gail was too young. Worse, Detroit was Keaton’s territory, and so Gail was hers, and she ordered me to keep my damned hands off her Focuses. Someday, though, either with Gail or with some other Focus, I was going to track the grail down and claim it.

  Fanatic? Me? After a lot of thinking, I decided the Cause was my personal redemption. I had taken Inferno’s foundation as my own, and what I had done with the Inferno house cause was to introduce it to the rest of the world, sell it and promote it. Oh, I knew I had a long way to go. You need to start somewhere, though.

  I had gone far into the world of cruelty, madness and sadism as a young Arm, and the Cause had allowed me to pull myself back. It amazed me how everything worked together, as my top recruits, Hank, Ying, Tom, and Ila, pulled me away from my internal beast as hard as my connections to the other Major Transforms pulled. They all contributed, from my intimate connections with Lori, Gilgamesh and Sky, to my more business-like connections to Guru Hephaestus and Focus Laswell, to my edgy dealings with Focus Biggioni and Gurus Shadow and Arpeggio. Yet, this was no conspiracy. Each of them worked on their own, for their own reasons. The way it fell together so synergistically reminded me of the way I had viewed the world as magic, before
my mind had recovered from the withdrawal effects. Yes, I had fallen into thinking of things using Lori and Hank’s superorganism theory, despite the fact I found the juice-based nonsense disquieting.

  “It’s a breach of decorum,” Gilgamesh said, bringing me back from my internal reverie, as we made it around the apartment building. I barely heard his voice from two feet away.

  “Focus Webb is supposed to be a hot shot Focus, ahead of Tonya talent-wise, and she’s got the lamest excuse for security I’ve seen yet. She’s got to beef this up. This just isn’t safe, for her or her household.”

  Webb had money, I’ll give you that. Her Focus household was upper middle class, and not internally stratified. From what I had seen, everyone got treated exactly the same, down to the same furniture. The same good furniture. Focus Webb did not use Crows, yet, for dross maintenance. Her system, of building high-class apartment buildings, moving in, building the next, selling the old one, had worked for at least four years. Why fix something that isn’t broken?

  No security, though.

  No dealings with any other Major Transforms other than Focuses, and save for her local Focus clique in San Diego, few dealings with any other Focuses. Everyone willing to talk about her regarded her as frosty.

  Each Saturday evening, the whole household held a group dinner on the lawn in the courtyard of their complex. Gilgamesh and I had snuck in and now mingled, just another pair of Transforms. I messed with minds so people thought they knew us. Gilgamesh handled our metapresences. There was Focus Webb herself, having a deep philosophical conversation with her husband, on the nascent women’s rights movement. Oblivious to an Arm and a Crow, now with food-laden paper plates in our hands, about to sit down beside them and introduce ourselves.

  I carefully met the eyes of the person sitting at Focus Webb’s right, a normal household member of no particular import. I want your seat! Mine! No juice involved, just an Arm’s understanding of human psychology. The normal gave me a dirty look, and vacated the seat.