In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Read online

  Gail looked at his drawn face in sympathy. He didn’t respond.

  “I shouldn’t have told you this, should I?”

  “No, it’s all right, this is the sort of moral burden Ministers were made for. I think. Um,” he said. “It might, ah, might be a good idea if we didn’t pass this on to everyone else, though.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So what did you want to ask me?” Narbanor said, his voice strained.

  Gail bit her lip at Matt’s reaction, his very Transform reaction. If she had the brains of a rutabaga, she would have kept her mouth shut. Too late now, though.

  “A part of me wants to do the right thing and stop dealing with her,” Gail said. She turned away. “Another part of me wants to be her friend, and wants her to be my friend, because she’s sharp and sassy and reasonable. I don’t know what to do, Matt.”

  Narbanor looked away from her, his face still drawn. He watched the rain drip against the window glass for a long time. Finally, he turned back to her.

  “I would really like to give you advice,” he said, slowly. “But I don’t, ah, don’t think I can give you any unbiased suggestions. This one seems to hit a little too close to home for me. I apologize, but I don’t think you should get your advice from me.”

  Gail nodded again. “It’s all right. I never should have asked a Transform.”

  Narbanor smiled a bit. “But we could pray together, if you’d like. God’s wisdom is a lot greater than mine.”

  Months ago, Gail would have hated the idea, but she was grateful for it now. Desperation had brought her back around to religion again, to Narbanor’s relatively liberal Methodism, rather than the strict church of her parents. She needed all the help she could get, and something larger to lean on.

  They knelt and prayed. Narbanor didn’t ask that she make her decision one way or another, but asked only for wisdom, and help making the right decision. She was calmer when they finished, but she still didn’t know what to do.

  The rain drizzled down inside Gail’s coat, and plastered her hair to her head. She paced, alone, at the far end of the Ebener’s property, out of range of her household, so she could think, and stew, and fume, without hurting them.

  The grass was high again, and drenched. Mud covered her feet up to above her ankles, and her pacing soaked her all the way through.

  Tonya did wrong, and she shouldn’t condone Tonya’s actions. Tolerating bad behavior was nearly as bad as the behavior itself, and she had condemned that sort of hypocrisy most of her life. How could she not reject that behavior, in every way possible?

  Except every time she tasted her bit of rational analysis in her gut, it tasted like a two-year old’s temper tantrum.

  Rejecting Tonya would reject Beth. She had already rejected Focus Adkins. Where would these latest rejections leave her? The rain dripping down her nose was one answer. The other? This would hurt her household.

  Tonya had been pleasant to her personally. ‘Pleasant’, though, wasn’t enough to justify ignoring Tonya’s behavior, but she had done business before with people she disagreed with on moral issues. Her parents, for two.

  Gail stuck her tongue out in disgust at herself. ‘Doing business’ sounded like nothing more than a smarmy rationalization. She walked in the rain, around in a long oval at the far end of the Ebener’s yard, while her thoughts wound in circles in her head.

  She didn’t have anybody to ask, except God. So she prayed. She prayed as she walked, desperately hoping for some insight, some help. Instead, she realized that all she was doing was looking for an excuse. She didn’t want to lose Tonya.

  Such a bleak realization, to recognize the hypocrisy in herself.

  Her realization did clarify the question.

  Sylvie’s words echoed in her mind: ‘Give up this damned saint thing you’re stuck on, and move the damned juice. Do whatever it takes.’

  And ‘If you’ve got anything you think is as important as moving the juice, you’ve got your priorities screwed up.’

  And, from Van, after she got home from visiting Beth: “Gail, you’re the one who told me the Clinic pamphlets and the common public knowledge on Transforms was worthless. You should have trusted your own judgment and gone on this visit without any preconceptions.”

  As Sylvie’s and Van’s voices ran through her mind, for a moment, just for a moment, she saw, not the rainy field she stood in, but places beyond. Evil court jesters, formal gardens, religious icons, nightmare beasts, mythological Gods and Goddesses, and Tonya, kneeling, holding her own still beating heart in her hands, an offering to the green eyed Valkyrie who towered over her. The blood drained out of Gail’s extremities, instant aching pins and needles at the shock of the sudden insane vision that filled her mind. Gail screamed bloody murder, and kept on screaming until her screaming banished the unwanted vision. She fell to her knees, shaking, icy cold, barely able to breathe, hands wrist deep in the mud.

  “What. The fuck. Was that!” she said, nowhere near as loud as she wanted. She didn’t have enough breath to scream again. She did turn back toward the house, where she swore half of her household now ran toward her, as fast as they could kick their way through the mud.

  She only had a moment of freedom left, and in her last moment of freedom she made her decision. The crazy hallucination, prompted by stress, lack of sleep and who knew what else, had been a quick kick in the head reminding her of her hard-learned lesson that she didn’t understand shit about what was going on with the Transforms, and possibly neither did anyone else. There was no way she had the right to draw a moral line in the sand based on her own half-assed guesses and suppositions. She had always been a good judge of people, and Beth was a good person, and Tonya sure sounded like a good person, worthy of the benefit of the doubt. For the good of the household, the now sodden mass of people gathered around her as she knelt like a loon in the mud, worrying about her, for the good of the household she couldn’t draw a moral line in the sand yet.

  Gail metaphorically put on her reporter hat and vowed to apologize to Tonya.

  ---

  “Tonya?” Gail said, over the phone. She had returned to the Ebener’s bedroom, after begging for and getting a far longer shower than she or anyone else was entitled to. Morning came, without sleep. The Ebener’s bedroom was a dim place, even in the morning sun.

  “Gail?” Tonya said, from the other end, surprised.

  Gail had thought a long time about what she should say. Reporter, she reminded herself, think like a reporter!

  “I called you to apologize,” she said.

  Tonya made a small prompting noise, surprised again.

  “I was completely out of line yesterday, and rude besides. So I want to apologize. Look, I’m really sorry. I’ve got some reflexes left over from before I transformed, and I haven’t gotten the hang of this Focus business. You’re a lot more experienced than I am, and I shouldn’t be making judgments when I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m hoping you’ll just chalk this up to my youth and inexperience and forgive me.”

  There. She got the apology out. The apology sounded reasonable because it was reasonable. She might have even believed the apology herself if she hadn’t been dissembling out her ass.

  On the other end, Tonya sighed.

  “Actually, I owe you an apology,” she said. “I get sensitive about the ‘Wicked Witch of the East’ thing and how it ties into some personal stuff you don’t need me coming down on you for, and I over-reacted.”

  “Oh God,” Gail said, with a gasp. “You know about the name?”

  “I could hardly avoid knowing about a name like that.”

  “Oh,” Gail said. “I’m sorry.” She had been caught in some kind of group disapproval of Tonya, and so now she felt guilty. She hated the groupthink quicksand. She mentally kicked herself even harder, because she had missed the possibility of the groupthink issues the second she started to think of Tonya as ‘evil’, or even ‘interviewee’.

  “It’s all righ
t. I should be used to it by now. Don’t worry, your apology is accepted if you’ll accept mine, and we can both forget the entire thing.”

  “Yes,” Gail said, “and thank you. I am sorry.” This was part one of what she called to do. “Um,” she continued, going on to part two, “I don’t suppose you’d give me your side of the story?

  “The taming Transforms thing, you mean?”

  “I mean, if it’s not too personal,” Gail said, fighting peanut butter mouth. This was as hard as the time she had buttonholed one of the U of M Regents in the Alumni banquet she had crashed. She wondered if Van would be as proud of her for this as he had been after she had quizzed the Regents in person.

  “No, no, it’s not too often that someone asks. Mostly they just assume,” Tonya said. Exactly. Everyone deserved the chance to give their side of the story.

  “Have you ever had a difficult Transform in your household?” Tonya said.

  “No, not really. The worst household member, the guy who made off with the household’s money, was a normal.”

  “Transforms can be bad people, too,” Tonya said. “Criminals, wife beaters, child molesters, even violent sociopaths and psychopaths. Destructive people who hurt the other people in your household. Or someone who has specific Transform problems, like a juice junkie, someone who won’t do anything at all unless he’s pumped to the stimulation optimum.”

  Covered in sudden goose bumps, Gail shook her head and spoke into the unseeing phone, her voice much softer. “No, no people like that.”

  “You’re lucky,” Tonya said. “Not all households are. Think about what you’d do if the guy who made off with your household’s money had spent it, was still there, and still needed your juice support to survive.”

  Gail ground her teeth. “With my temper? He’d be dead before I had a chance to think.” She sighed. “Then I don’t know what I’d do.” She suspected she would end up beating herself up for months.

  “That’s one way that disaster could turn out,” Tonya said. “The other is the bad person gets a lever on you and functionally starts calling the tunes in your house. Either way, this is something for you to think about ahead of time. You’re not at your capacity for Transforms and you may end up with a bad person. There’s no telling what your next Transform will be like.”

  Gail didn’t have a good response, and didn’t like to think about who she might acquire next. The thought of finding some murderer within her own household was unnerving. ‘Give in’ or ‘kill the bastard’ were two terrible options.

  “Focuses deal with it as best they can. But there’s a pattern when the bad ones come through.”

  “A pattern,” Gail asked. “What kind of pattern?”

  Tonya didn’t answer for a moment, and then, “Are you sure you want to know this?”

  “Yes,” Gail said. Of course she did. Never in her whole life would she answer no to a question of ‘did she want to know something’.

  “All right, if you’re sure,” Tonya said. “Because mostly it’s the young Focuses. Focuses who are building their households who end up with most of the new Transforms. They most commonly end up with the bad ones.”

  “Um hmm.” Item number 21 on her list of problems was ‘no control over who the authorities put in my household.’

  “The young Focus almost always tries to handle the problem herself,” Tonya said. “Only a few understand how. Most young Focuses just aren’t prepared to deal with the dark side of human nature. Sometimes they get hard and cruel, as you intimated you would, but those cases don’t involve me. It’s the more gentle ones that call me and they call me when it’s gotten out of hand. When this one person is hurting the entire household, and they’re at their wit’s end. When children are being hurt, the bad Transform is threatening the Focus, or the household is falling apart. When the problem becomes a matter of survival.”

  “So what do you do to help?”

  “I take their problem Transforms into my household and I teach them a new way,” she said.

  “You make it sound so easy.”

  Tonya’s voice smiled. “You expect me to torture them, to destroy their minds and personalities by abusing them more than they can stand.”

  “Um, well, that’s what it sounded like,” Gail said. She wondered what else Tonya could be doing.

  Tonya sighed. “I wish I could tell you that I never hurt them. What I do is far more complicated than simple torture.” Ah, of course. Everything was always more complicated when someone wanted to justify awful behavior. She didn’t say anything, though, and Tonya continued.

  “People are complicated creatures, and they usually don’t hurt others unless they have a hurt inside of themselves. So part of what I do is to find that hurt and heal it.”

  “So you’re saying you’re like a psychologist,” Gail said, trying to figure out Tonya’s trick, and still hoping that the answer would be different from the one she feared.

  “Well, sort of. A psychologist has to depend on the person’s willingness to change. I have the juice to work with.”

  “Oh,” Gail said. The juice weapon made this unfair.

  “If you add juice to the places that hurt, give them pleasure where they are used to pain, that heals something inside of them. At the same time, they have some bad habits they’ve developed, to compensate for the places they’re vulnerable, and for those, you impose discipline.

  “So for instance, say you have some man who steals from other members of your household. You juice him up and talk to him when he’s relaxed and vulnerable, and find out what hurts inside of him. Maybe he had a troubled childhood. Often, he’s never had anyone who cared for him. You give him a way to win your love and approval, and reward him when he shows the kind of behavior you want to see. Encourage him to tangle with the demons in his head and reward him when he does, even a little bit. Draw the juice down when he does something you want to change. You only try and change a few things at any one time, or you risk making him worse. Eventually, the man will change. The juice is too fundamental. Over time, his mind will adapt and develop new responses. They’ll be functional responses, and he’ll be much happier, with much of the pain inside him gone, and ways to win approval that actually work. But you have to pay close attention and be consistent, never lose your temper and never get mad.”

  Tonya’s description of how to condition another human being in such an icy, clinical way, bothered Gail. She realized, with a cold chill, Tonya wasn’t just explaining, she was teaching. She thought Gail ought to know this sort of thing, to use on her own people. Gail shuddered. She would never be able to tell anyone in her household about this.

  Tonya Biggioni was giving her lessons in taming Transforms. Holy goddamned fuck!

  “So this works, whether or not the Transform is cooperating?” Gail said, trying not to sound unnerved. She thought her voice came out sounding thinner than she intended.

  “A Transform can’t fight the juice,” Tonya said. “It’s too basic. I hear a lot about how awful it is to manipulate someone through the juice, and yet, no one seems to consider that every Focus does so.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gail said. “What do you mean?” Back in the kitchen, Betha warned Elaine not to go into the bedroom, and Gail noted the diaper sack in the corner. Elaine and her baby shared a corner of the bedroom these days, to keep the baby away from the cold nights. Elaine wanted to come in to change the little boy, but she would have to wait.

  “Think about it,” Tonya said, bringing Gail’s attention back to the phone. “Every Focus in the country, in the world, manipulates her people’s juice level. Maybe she doesn’t do it on purpose, but the juice manipulation still happens. Juice responds to a Focus’s emotions. Every Focus has an effect on the minds of her people. Just because the Focus isn’t aware of the manipulation doesn’t mean the manipulation doesn’t happen.”

  “That’s awful,” Gail said, appalled at the thought.

  “A lot of Focuses don’t understand. A lot wo
n’t understand. They disapprove of what I do because I understand what I’m doing, and I use it consciously to help people, while all the while they’re doing the same thing unconsciously, and they use their unconscious manipulations to hurt people.”

  Gail thought of her own people and the hurt she had caused them. All of a sudden Gail found the tables turning on her. She wanted to run, or to say something angry and condemning. For once in her life, though, good sense ran ahead of her mouth. She also noticed the juice whooshing into her juice buffer, and hurriedly whooshed the juice back to where it belonged.

  “Think about what you’re doing,” Tonya said. “The everyday activities, of each Focus, does make a difference. Do you want an example?”

  No, Gail didn’t want an example, but Tonya continued anyway.

  “Let me give you the simplest case,” she said, inexorable. Tonya knew she was saying things Gail didn’t want to hear. “What do you do to your people when they come near you? Do you juice them up? If you do that consistently, they’ll come to love you. If you do this, but are inconsistent, they’ll come to depend on you.”

  Gail didn’t do any such thing. She refused to manipulate her people with the juice weapon.

  “Or,” Tonya said, her voice harder, “do you strip people when they come near you? If you strip them consistently, they’ll hate you. If you do it inconsistently, they’ll fear you.”

  A sudden stab of guilt ran through Gail. She remembered the way her people paled at her presence and tiptoed around her, in constant terror of her temper.

  The inconsistent juice-stripping was part of her problem, part of what was wrong with her household.

  Tonya didn’t stop.

  “That last is the cruelest kind of household,” she said, each word a gentle arrow into Gail’s heart. “That kind of fear is dehumanizing, and it leads people to desperation and despair. Even the household of the harshest dictator is more pleasant, if she gives her people some consistency, and some way to please her. A household ruled by fear is nothing more than an exercise in cruelty and destruction.”