No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read online

  Zielinski gave her his best knowledge on the subject. Carol nixed Chicago, her former territory – Keaton had forbidden her to hunt in Chicago for a year. “Sure, my territory was a higher love than the love of a normal, but a normal can admit they’re yours. No city can do that. Yet,” Carol said, in answer to his question on the subject of Chicago. Interesting.

  They discussed options until she served the meal. Carol provisionally settled on Houston and its new and booming medical center sparked by both NASA and Transform Disease research money.

  “You’re not going to be able to publicly run the place, Hank,” Carol said, shoveling through a huge piece of chocolate cake and five scoops of ice cream. Fred had overeaten and groaned on the couch. Zielinski sympathized. If he stayed around Carol too long, he would end up gaining weight himself. “Hank Zielinski is dead. You died in the prison breakout.”

  “I won’t be very effective to you in this scenario,” he said. “Who I know is nearly as important as what I know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Focus Rizzari, for one, already knows. Because this mission came from Stacy, she’ll know. Erica Eissler must be told, as well.” Zielinski tried to think through the difficulties of anonymously running a research organization. He would need to use a fake identity, which meant he wouldn’t be able to personally publish papers. That would gall.

  “Fine. I’ll decide if anyone else gets to know.”

  “Ma’am, I have several colleagues at the Harvard Medical School…”

  “No.

  He walked through several medical researchers he knew, but Carol wouldn’t approve a one. She was amused by Dr. Riddelhauser, though, saying she had met him and found him eminently recruitable. Worst, she nixed any contact with Van Reijn, though Zielinski decided he would be able to go through Rizzari for what he needed.

  After dinner, and another of Carol’s sessions with Fred, she agreed to another series of tests, these more active. Afterwards he sat at the dining room table and frowned. She sat across from him, and seemed pleased to have someone of his talent – whatever talent of his still survived – working on her side, for once.

  “How fast are you, Carol?” he said.

  “For grins, I chased cars like a dog one night and really freaked out some townies in California,” she said. “I topped out at about 40 miles an hour in a sprint without burning juice, but I could hold 30 miles an hour for five minutes. With burning juice I’m faster and have more endurance. It’s unreal to be able to pass cars.”

  All her physical changes appeared to have balanced positives and negatives.

  “What’s more important, ma’am, right this instant. Your body or your mind?”

  “Mind.”

  “Okay. Let me think for a few minutes.”

  He did so, tapping his pencil restlessly on his scattered notes. “You have several mental problems I recognize as similar to some old case studies I read about long ago, about normals who had physical objects shoved through their heads. However, instead of having one of these ‘holes’, you have many. On the other hand, you have some benefits these normals didn’t have. You can heal.”

  “I haven’t healed from them yet.”

  “Ah, but I have a suggestion. You can burn juice into non-physical abilities, such as metasense and Arm charisma?” Which Keaton hadn’t been able to do last time he ran the older Arm through tests of this nature.

  “Yes,” Carol said, with a growl. She had been cogitating on this problem on her own and hadn’t gotten anywhere.

  “I would like you to try something. Concentrate on a specific mental lack and burn juice. You should know when you’ve gotten it healed, if this works.”

  “What if the problems are psychological or juice reinforced by my withdrawal scars?” Carol said.

  “In the first case nothing will happen; in the second you’ll end up having to burn far too much juice to fix them. We’ll be able to figure out which case if we do the test.”

  Carol agreed to the testing; Zielinski came up with three pages of mental problems to work on. She stared at the list bleakly. Zielinski was tempted to do the same. She would need to do an impressive amount of work before he got his functional Carol Hancock back again. He hoped she wanted this as badly as he did.

  She did, and they started work immediately.

  They retrieved her ability to read within an hour.

  Her ability to write came back fifteen minutes later, but her composition skills plateaued out at the 4th grade level, much to her disgust.

  A combination of burning juice and questions about word meanings recovered her vocabulary to college grad levels.

  Carol’s ability to handle nested compound inferences (if he said “the sun rises in the east, there are mountains under where the sun rises, there is gold in the mountains” Carol could not figure out which direction to go for the gold) came back after two hours of slow juice burning, leaving Carol goggle eyed and falling into a stalk whenever he or Fred moved. Zielinski gently suggested she go out and hunt. She did.

  After she came back from her successful hunt the next morning, oozing lust, she said, “The world isn’t magic anymore.” He didn’t understand what she meant, but she seemed extraordinarily pleased.

  While hunting she had cataloged her new talents. “I have a new Arm charisma trick Keaton wants. For instance, one day I told someone to go take a flying leap – and he did.” She demonstrated this with Raindorf several times. Drill sergeant charisma, he named it. He had seen Keaton use this occasionally, but from what Carol said the older Arm didn’t know how to turn the trick on and off. Carol also explained her ability to metasense juice traces – traces all Transforms left as they passed. “It worked on Sky’s fancy fake Rizzari tag but not Sky himself. Goddamned Crows.” Her comments didn’t surprise him.

  He couldn’t keep a smile off of his face. For the first time ever, he had the active cooperation of a mature Arm.

  The phone rang while Carol made Raindorf scream in some sex game; Zielinski cheerfully remained ignorant of the details. He hesitated and almost didn’t answer the phone, but as he stood with his hand over the end table a wave of annoyance whispered through him. Someone, likely a specific distant Focus he now suspected watched over Carol full time, had metaphorically kicked him in the head.

  “Hello?”

  “Henry. I was hoping you’d pick up.” Lori. No, they hadn’t given Focus Rizzari this phone number. This must be one of her many nasty tricks, similar to her disquieting map scrying trick.

  “What’s the problem?” Tell me it’s not Sky, Zielinski thought.

  “One of my spies at Boston Medical just phoned me. They just picked up an Arm in a transformation coma. What do you want me to do?”

  “Hold your horses!” Carol said, loud, from the bedroom. “That’s my job. Keaton’s orders. Baby Arms are hers.”

  “We’ll secure the place, mess up the records, and await your arrival,” Lori said. “Watch out for assassins. There’s at least one squad of first Focus hirelings who’ve taken up shop near Inferno.”

  Sounded like the Rizzari rebellion was starting to heat up. This wasn’t going to be fun, Hank predicted.

  Carol Hancock: June 1, 1968 – June 2, 1968

  I sat in a room in the Boston Transform Clinic, thinking and waiting. Lori’s people had secured the building but, wisely, kept their distance. So did Lori. She shielded herself from my metasense, but I sensed her anyway. Best we not meet face to face right now.

  It was the depths of the night, three hours before dawn, and the cool night breeze rustled the room’s curtains through the barred window. I had already removed the bugs from the room. I had left Zielinski and Raindorf in charge of the get-away vehicle. I was somewhat cranky, as I would have rather been getting rid of more of my mental quirks, although I wasn’t sure how much the fact I had somehow misplaced all my knowledge of European geography mattered.

  It took Hank fewer than twenty minutes to start uncovering the holes in my mem
ories. Damn but he was good; I hadn’t suspected I had any. Nothing earth shattering had been lost, but losing anything was an affront to my delicate Arm sensibilities. Worse, a fair number of the memory holes dealt with events after my recovery. I had to fix this problem, before it turned expectedly fatal.

  Amy Haggerty lay sleeping on top of the covers before me. She was nineteen years old and she went to school at Boston College, where Lori taught. Lori had actually taught Amy ‘Intro to Biochemistry’, and considered Amy a ‘standard brilliant student’. Lori’s comment made me even crankier. Amy’s hair was long and brown and her face was heart-shaped and pixie-like. She was slender and tall. Looking at the length of her long legs, taller than me. She looked a lot like the person I had pretended to be on so many occasions. I wondered if she wore love beads or protested the War.

  She was beautiful. With her heart-shaped face and slender body and long legs she probably turned the head of every boy at school. She would have made a hell of a Focus.

  I hated her on sight because she was an Arm and I didn’t have her tagged. Instincts. Baby Arm or not, she was a threat.

  I growled. There were times I hated my instincts. Although my instincts made for good reflex actions in some situations, this wasn’t one, so I put work into curbing them while practicing my patience and maturity.

  Hank and I were having an argument about tagging normals. I had a quickie recruitment blow up in my face, a second set of muscles to spell Raindorf. Muscles took my tag and later shot at me when he thought he had a chance. For his efforts he got to swim with the fishes, as I had picked up his betrayal through the tag before he pulled the trigger. Hank believed that to tag a normal you needed to have them all the way down to their soul; I couldn’t order a normal’s juice to reinforce my tag because he didn’t have any juice. In my arrogance, I countered that if I had his mind his soul had to follow.

  I decided, while looking over the baby Arm, that Zielinski was right. The tag wasn’t a panacea.

  I shifted in my chair and read her chart again. She had come out of her transformation coma 4 hours ago and slipped into a restless sleep after eating. I made a mental note to have Zielinski test to see if I had lost my normal Arm photographic memory for text, or whether this was a fatigue symptom.

  Haggerty’s eyes opened. She took a minute to register my presence and then she sat up with a start.

  “What? Who are you? Did you unchain me? What are you doing in…” She stopped talking and her eyes went wide.

  “Wow. You’re an Arm,” she said. “So this is what I’m going to look like someday.”

  Damn, she was fast on the uptake. I remembered what Zielinski said about only the smart ones making Major Transformations. I hadn’t met a Major Transform yet who was a real dummy, with the exception of some Focuses I had avoided in Chicago, who had taken too much abuse and lost their minds.

  I stalked over toward her. She flinched back on the bed, away from the apparent danger I represented.

  She kept talking. “Can you help me?”

  Great. She had the sensitivity of a cabbage. I had hit her with my full predator effect and she still yammered away. Smart, but dense.

  “Please? I think they’re going to kill me. I really need some help.” She whispered now. “Please?”

  She retreated all the way to the head of the bed. I took her chin in my hand and pushed her head back against the wall.

  “Tell me what you think is going on,” I said, whispering back, inches from her face. My instincts raged at me to hurt her. I followed Zielinski’s advice and firmly pushed them down.

  “I made a major transformation and because my attendants died, I think I’m an Arm,” she said. Sweat began to roll down her face. “I’m being treated harshly, as if the transformation is my fault, so I think they’re either going to kill me outright or they’re going to just let me go into withdrawal. Either way I’m going to die.” She swallowed.

  “You are an Arm,” I said.

  Her chin quivered for a moment but she found her control and stopped the quiver.

  “Do you know how Arms get juice?”

  “The fascists in the media say you have to kill a Focus’s Transforms by the dozens to get juice, but the SDS says that’s just propaganda and there are so many unclaimed Transforms that America could support twenty Arms.”

  “The SDS? They’re just another group of fools who would like to get the Arms on their side so they can use them as unpaid muscle,” I said. The SDS leaders who I used as my information sources hadn’t been happy to make my acquaintance. After Keaton finished with them, they would never mistake the Arms for potential followers again. “Arms are nothing like what people think we are.”

  “Then what are…”

  “You do have to kill Transforms to get juice, about one every week as a baby Arm,” I said, interrupting her. I hit her with my full predator effect again. “We’re predators. Juice does not volunteer. You have to hunt down your prey. I’m not taking you from here if you’re going to fight me about that. It’s not worth my time.”

  Hank had pleaded with me to let him grab Haggerty, as he knew how baby Arms thought. I had him pretend to be a baby Arm so I could see what I might be facing.

  Yes, I do suspect I had been this bad.

  Haggerty’s face paled. She swallowed again. “I’ll do it if I have to.” She paused. “Surely there’s a better way, though. Have you examined…”

  I clamped my hand around her throat and cut her off. I dragged her off the bed, tossed her into the hospital chair and stepped back from her.

  “Shut up. You have a good option and many bad options, Haggerty. The good option is this: I know someone who is willing to teach you how to be an Arm. She will enslave you because you don’t know what to do with your capabilities – you’re as dangerous to yourself as you are to anyone else. She will torture you because that’s the only way to get the attention of a young Arm. She will teach you, because being an Arm is far more complex than being one of the other Major Transforms. You have essentially a zero chance of survival without her teaching. If you learn to be an Arm to the exacting specifications of your teacher, you can graduate and go out on your own. The bad options? You die at your own hands, the hands of some clumsy doctors, some sadistic Focuses, or the hands of the FBI.

  Haggerty lifted her chin up. “Option one. You lived through Stacy Keaton’s training, so there’s at least a chance I will, too.”

  I hadn’t mentioned Keaton. More SDS garbage; the darker side of the SDS thought Keaton was their messiah. Still, Haggerty had made the right decision. I hadn’t when Keaton had approached me.

  I looked at her and nodded slowly. I picked her up by the neck and hit her in the stomach so hard that I knocked the wind out of her and broke three ribs. I dropped her back in the chair trying to get her breath back, tears leaking out of her eyes. I stood over her, watching her, and let the predatory smile come over my lips. She turned to me when she could breathe again, and gasped. “Why?”

  I moved my hand along her cheek and she flinched.

  “You won’t give me any trouble, now will you?” I said, my voice soft.

  She shook her head.

  “You will do everything that I want. You will obey my every order. If you cause me trouble in any way, I will hurt you. Again. Worse. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, tears still leaking from her eyes.

  We had an understanding.

  Then we left the clinic together.

  ---

  Me and my entourage arrived at Keaton’s house at about eight at night after a long circuitous trip through four cities on three different air carriers and a stop at my safe house in Oakland to pick up Frances. No Gilgamesh, alas. No Keaton at her house. I had called her four times and gotten nothing. I was about to take my frustration out on my companions when Keaton appeared in my metasense about six hundred feet down the road. In the house next door, Keaton’s house of pain. I hadn’t realized I could pick up ‘pissed Arm’ through
my metasense, but I did now. She stood on the front porch, arms on her hips, and steamed.

  I examined the situation, weighed options, and came to a decision. I tossed Raindorf the car keys, a wad of twenties, and told him and Frances to check into a nearby motel and stay out of trouble. In Keaton’s mood, she would chew them up like hamburger. I turned to Hank, signaled him to stay with me, and grabbed my problem child by the shoulder. We strode across the lawn, around a fence, and down the hill to Keaton’s house of pain.

  When I reached the front porch I bowed deeply, went down on one knee and reaffirmed that I was hers, my hand still holding tightly to the shoulder of my problem child. “Ma’am, I beg your pardon for dropping in on you unexpectedly. I wish to formally present to you former doctor Henry Zielinski, the newly transformed Amy Haggerty, who I absconded with four hours after she awoke from her transformation coma, and my first box of pertinent personal information on her.” Care of the efficient Inferno household. I was running up a large tab with them. They hadn’t been happy when I told them I wouldn’t be giving them their Doc Pain back, either.

  I did like the nickname they gave Zielinski. Inferno had class.

  My new charge’s jaw dropped at my groveling, but I didn’t care. There were priorities, and my relationship with Keaton was more important than Haggerty’s delicate sensibilities. Besides, she would learn how to bow and scrape soon enough. If Keaton didn’t kill her first.

  Zielinski simply nodded to Keaton. Keaton wiggled an eyebrow back at him in return. Wonderful. The Society of the Dancing Eyebrows. I knew way too many members.

  “Thank God,” Haggerty said, practically throwing herself at Keaton. “This bitch Arm’s been abusing me ever…”

  Slam. Punch. Haggerty tumbled in a tangle of arms and legs, to land half-conscious against the far railing. Twenty-five feet, the full length of the front porch. Damn. I owed Hank a grand. I had predicted Keaton wouldn’t toss her more than twenty feet.