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

  “Notmonster.”

  Keaton shook her head. “You work out.” She turned to the gym entrance. “Gilgamesh.”

  There! That was so neat to see him appear and disappear like magic. I started to work out. This I knew. I didn’t even have to think. I just exercised until I exhausted myself and couldn’t move. A few minutes later, I started up again. Exercising felt good. I could exercise like this all day and night, as long as I got food.

  As I worked out Keaton got in Gilgamesh’s face. “That was one sorry ass bit of panic, chickenshit. What the fuck have I been teaching you?”

  “Find a place to hide so I can defend myself and fight back, if appropriate,” Gilgamesh said, stressed. Of course, he had a Keaton in his face. I would be stressed, too.

  “And where did you end up this time?”

  “Kitchen, northeast corner.”

  “Where you didn’t have line of sight to toss any of your rotten eggs at the problem. I swear, a blind lame housecat could do better.” Keaton tapped her foot. “Let’s try this again. Boo!”

  She hit him with Arm predator, threatening death, from two inches away from his face. I couldn’t follow his movement, but found him a moment later behind a dumbbell rack with a tennis ball in his hands.

  Needless to say, this bit of entertainment totally confused me. I treated what followed as if I watched a Saturday morning cartoon in a foreign language.

  “Better,” Keaton said, and then charged him yelling “Yaaah! Yaah!” He found another place to hide. This went on for several minutes, his hiding and her charging, his stress level growing, until he did something that left a yellow stain in the air.

  “You sicked up?” Keaton said. “You’re off your game today, kiddo. Clean that shit up, dammit.”

  “Wait,” Gilgamesh said, raising his hand. “Carol sensed my sick-up.” He closed his eyes. “The juice component to it, my guess.”

  “Which is too faint for me to pick up at all,” Keaton said. “Yet another potentially beneficial change. This is starting to freak me the fuck out.”

  I wondered what in the hell either of them was talking about and why Keaton sounded like she had been hanging out with the hippies. Keaton frowned at me and produced a leather belt from where it had been hiding on her arm and snapped it on her hand. “Remember this?” she said to me.

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t had to use this form of inducement yet to keep you moving,” she said. “Does that need to change?”

  I shook my head ‘no’. This was a point of honor with me. I could repeatedly push myself to utter exhaustion, in proper Arm style, all on my own, thank you very much. I went back to my exercises and tuned out Keaton and Gilgamesh’s discussion about my capabilities I couldn’t understand anyway.

  Yup. I remained a work in progress.

  Gilgamesh: April 9, 1968

  “Listen up,” Keaton said. She strode over to Gilgamesh, a scary panic-inducing buzz-saw of a dwarf, radiating annoyance. “I want your panicky self back after dinner. We need to spend some quiet time trying to figure out what’s going on with Hancock.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, but the Skinner, an angry sneer on her face, had already turned back to the gym and Carol’s never ending exercises.

  He slipped out of the house, picked up a set of keys from the garage, and slowly jogged back to his apartment. The farther he got from the Skinner the more the stress eased, but he couldn’t totally relax. His Tiamat remained in the Skinner’s care and the Skinner had made perfectly clear, repeatedly, that if he didn’t help her with Tiamat’s recovery he would no longer be welcome in the San Francisco area.

  Being an Arm pet wasn’t anything like he had imagined. The Skinner hadn’t laid a finger on him that he hadn’t invited, and she made no effort to confine him. She wasn’t a pleasant person, at least not often; she sneered at him, belittled him, and repeatedly insulted and humiliated him. Several times he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the Skinner’s true feelings toward him – she thought he was a disgusting pervert with abhorrent personal habits bad enough to make even her cringe. None of Sky’s warnings about lusty Arm sex, beatings or shackles, had been correct.

  Nor had Sky mentioned anything about ‘his’ Arm spending her evenings in her workshop basement torturing one poor man after another. Or making love to another Arm, which Gilgamesh found impossibly distracting.

  Worse, for some crazy reason the Skinner had decided it was her duty in life to improve Gilgamesh. Thank God she hadn’t tried to make him into an Arm; what she did to him was nothing like what she had done to Tiamat. She hadn’t bothered to ask his permission. Scary smart, she understood what he needed without quizzing him. Panic training – not to teach him to avoid panicking (though some of that happened naturally), but what to do when panicking. The Skinner thought panic was useful.

  Oh, and running. She had convinced herself Gilgamesh could run about as well as she could without burning, and in her drill sergeant manner she found a way to prove her supposition. She didn’t say a thing, she just ran behind him and radiated her emotions.

  About the emotions…the Skinner had figured out the great Crow secret of metasensing emotions before she even lured him in, either from her meetings with him or from her dealings with a supposedly disguised Sky. Not surprisingly she turned his trick against him every chance she could.

  So far, he found himself quite impressed with the Skinner. At least as long as he kept from thinking about what happened every night to her torture victims. And the fact he helped her hunt down her prey to keep her juiced up and safer to him.

  On the way into his apartment Gilgamesh collected four days of mail. He dropped the stack on the kitchen counter and dealt with other issues, such as the smelly kitchen garbage he needed to toss. He showered, changed clothes, and finally went through his mail, separating out the bills into one pile and the Crow letters into another.

  Two caught his eye: one from Sky with no return address, written in a shaky version of Sky’s normally exquisite cursive, and another from of all people Shadow, Thomas the Dreamer and Innocence.

  He winced at the latter letter and opened it first. The letter was short and direct.

  Dearest Gilgamesh,

  You recently accrued a significant debt of obligation toward several Crows who aided you in the shepherding of the rescue of the Arm known to you as Tiamat. Your current proximity to her and one other Arm is well known to us. We three, acting in legitimate concert, and speaking for all Crows, have purchased this debt of obligation. We now formally reclaim it, by assigning you, Gilgamesh, the task of informing us the identity of the entity or entities who are hunting down Crows, colloquially termed Crow Killer. Good luck.

  Gilgamesh looked at the letter, and at what the letter said and didn’t say. The artfully crafted letter wasn’t in Shadow’s style. They knew he was an Arm pet. Several other terms stood out as noteworthy, none in his normal vocabulary, all of which shivered his juice: ‘shepherding’, ‘legitimate concert’, ‘formally reclaim’, ‘informing us’ and, of course, ‘debt of obligation’. They were well used terms these others knew well, even if he didn’t, as potent as the more common Transform terms of pheromone flow, stripping, pumping, dross, Arm and Housebound.

  Someone was having a party and hadn’t invited him. The party likely started around 1952 or so and had been going ever since. The hundred and fifty to two hundred Crows in the United States were enough to form a strong society, save for the fact the upper end of this society must have decided not to include the young Crows in the real deal and kept the good stuff for themselves. There must be a large number of real old Crows. Shadow was one of them, and the question remained on Gilgamesh’s tongue: how old was Shadow, anyway? What could the older Crows do? How limited were Crow capabilities?

  Or: how unlimited?

  Gilgamesh wished he understood more about Focus society. If he did, he might be able to extrapolate and compare. He needed another Crow, to bounce ideas back and forth wit
h. The assigned task was, at least at first glance, a death sentence. As a young Crow, he possessed none of the physical benefits or dross manipulation talents of an older Crow. This should be a job for an older, more active, more talented Crow, like Sky. Selecting him made no sense. He wondered if the job was nothing more than a fancy death sentence, an attempt to properly and politely rid the continent of one particular too-troublesome Crow.

  Perhaps his pseudo-Guru Sky could help. He opened Sky’s letter and read.

  Gilgamesh:

  I’m barely able to write and I’ll have more to write later, probably much later. I did help Kali rescue your Tiamat, but I’m not sure if Tiamat can recover. I’m sorry. I’m in a bad way, not from what the Walking Nightmare did to me, but from the nearly living evil gristle dross suffusing the place. If I can trust what I experienced, I got attacked inside the Detention Center by Focus Pissed Tuber, and she’s powerful, evil, nasty, understands far too much about us and our fine feathered compatriots, and is out to get us. Oh, she wasn’t physically there. Worse, Focus L was there with me, didn’t sense a thing and strongly disagrees, saying Focus Pissed Tuber is a weak Focus, save politically. So be careful! There’s far more going on than meets a young Crow’s eyes.

  Sky

  Gilgamesh figured out, a couple of minutes later, ‘Focus Pissed Tuber’ must be the nasty Focus who lived in Pittsburgh. He paced his apartment and tried to figure out what to do. He didn’t want to skip out on Carol; his Tiamat had improved, but hadn’t recovered yet, and she still needed him.

  Gilgamesh was as juiced up as he had ever been, every last ounce from Arm dross, over eighty percent from spicy Arm dross. High on juice, he was significantly smarter than normal, his memory better and his ability to understand things while meditating far more extensive than before.

  For instance, he now knew somebody who thought of his or herself as a religious icon (or so this person appeared in his meditations) watched over both himself and Tiamat. He hoped this watcher meant well.

  He also realized he couldn’t trust the other Crows.

  He felt bad for contemplating holding back information from Shadow. Because of the evil canker among the leading Crows, he couldn’t take the chance Shadow was the bad one. Often, he feared there might be more than one bad one. Sometimes, when his thoughts turned particularly bleak, he looked at the misery of so many of the Crows he knew and wondered how necessary their misery was. Again, he had no evidence the misery of so many Crows was intentional on anyone’s part, just a nagging suspicion his nerves wouldn’t let go.

  Shadow was his friend, and helped him, and Gilgamesh liked Shadow, but friendship was no guarantee that Shadow’s interests were anything like his own. The only thing he understood, now even more than ever given the official letter he just received, was that Shadow was part of the hidden Crow leadership. Perhaps Shadow was as wonderful and good-hearted and helpful as he seemed.

  Gilgamesh wouldn’t bet his life on it.

  He would rather bet his life on the Arms. Not counting book learning, he had learned more from the Skinner in his short time as her ‘pet’ than he had learned from anyone else, save perhaps Wire. Assuming the Arms didn’t turn on him, he was safer with them than anywhere else he had ever been.

  However, no Crows had been willing to talk to him civilly, face to face, since he left Shadow. His loneliness weighed him down more as each week passed.

  He steadied himself against the kitchen counter, and took some time to call Sky’s phone in Toronto. Nothing. He tried Focus Rizzari’s household and the person who answered told him Sky no longer lived there. He did convince the stern phone lady his call was important enough to transfer, after a five minute wait, to Focus Rizzari’s work phone.

  “Yes?” Pause. “Gilgamesh, right? I’ve been waiting for you to call me.”

  Here we go again. “You have? Uh, I need to talk to Sky, uh, and…”

  “You need his advice. I understand. Sky warned me that you’re his student, sort of, and would be needing help,” Focus Rizzari said. She always seemed to live five steps ahead of him. He couldn’t imagine what she must be like in person. He suspected he would find out soon: his mission almost required him to interview Focus Rizzari, and the phone wouldn’t give him what he needed. “He’s not available. Somehow he blew out his mind in our little, um, mission. He’s stashed somewhere safe with a talented medical friend of mine, and…”

  “You have him with Dr. Zielinski? I’ve heard nothing but praise about him, and I’m sure the Good Doctor will be able to figure something out.”

  Focus Rizzari laughed, perhaps recognizing the Crow’s new name for Zielinski. “You are a rather feisty Crow, aren’t you?”

  “I try.”

  More laughter. “So, I understand it’s not safe for either of us, but perhaps I can help. I’m frankly so pee owed at the Transform leaders, both Focus and Crow, that I’m no longer interested in following the normal rules.”

  “I find myself in much the same pickle,” Gilgamesh said. “I’ve recently accumulated a large stack of problems. First off, the senior Crows have given me a crazy mission far too dangerous for a young Crow like myself. Second, I’m sort of stuck here as an Arm pet of Stacy Keaton, helping her put Carol back together. Third, I keep seeing things when I meditate and it’s beginning to scare me.”

  The sound of a pen clattered on the other end of the line. Focus Rizzari didn’t respond.

  “Focus?”

  “With a stack of problems like yours, you’d better call me Lori. Do you need rescuing?”

  “No, no, nothing like that, Lori. Did Sky ever tell you anything about his Arm captivity?”

  “Uh huh. The Arm who owned him, who he referred to as ‘Arm’, always kept him shackled when it was just the two of them. Later, when they were part of the Lost Tribe, the hold was emotional. Threats against his friends. Neither ever trusted the other.”

  “This is more like a common cause thing,” Gilgamesh said. “With veiled threats and emotional manipulation. I’m not shackled or otherwise physically restrained. I swear I’m being out-thought, though, by a master manipulator.” Which bothered him. He survived as a Crow by being able to outsmart the opposition. Not this time. Not when the Skinner was the opposition. The damned Arm was good enough to keep him guessing on even such a basic question.

  “This sounds like the Keaton I know. She teaching you anything?”

  “Yes, Lori. Did the two of you hit it off, then?”

  “Not even slightly.” Lori sighed. “Anything for the Cause, though. And if you can look past her sadistic psycho tendencies she’s not half bad as a companion. She’s also a compulsive information trader and she’s real smart, not at all what I expected.” She paused. “About your other topics? Although I check this phone and my office for bugs regularly, neither of those topics is safe to talk about over the phone. I’ve kicked over too many hornet nests recently to safely speak about such topics, and I suspect you have, too.”

  “True,” Gilgamesh said, hearing a familiar code. Lori worried about the Feds as much as she worried about the senior Focuses. She was far more active in the outside world than he was. “I’m just not sure what to do about anything.”

  “Crow society is based on favor exchange and implied tests. I doubt you’ll get anywhere trying to decipher the secret Crow capabilities without personal visits to the senior Crows. My guess is that any Crow who’d panic at the thought of such a visit isn’t worthy to learn the big secrets.”

  Gilgamesh laughed. “After what Keaton’s put me through, I don’t think panic is going to be anywhere near as much of an issue as it used to be.” He thought for a moment, realizing what her comment about the senior Crows implied about herself. “And I accept your invitation to come visit as well, Lori, as soon as I’m free to travel.”

  ---

  “I didn’t do anything,” the Skinner said. She metasensed as harried, distraught, and angry, a typical Skinner mix of good and bad. “She was trying to tell me some
thing, right after dinner, and couldn’t even get a word out. She ran here and collapsed.”

  Gilgamesh found Carol curled up on the floor of the garage, clutching like a lover the ratty shit-ruined blanket from her first three days here. Gilgamesh looked at Carol, and back at the Skinner, who twitched the affirmative. He went and held Carol. She broke down in sobs.

  She had held it together all day, but without him, the first time she ran into a challenge she broke down. Gilgamesh sympathized, given the letters in his pockets. Carol wasn’t Tiamat yet.

  Carol grabbed Gilgamesh’s arm and studied its wounds. “Mine?”

  “Yes,” Gilgamesh said. He had tried to defend himself from her.

  Carol wiped her eyes and studied his face. She slowly raised her hand and touched the shiner around his right eye. “Mine?”

  He nodded.

  “Crap.” She laughed. “Stupid Carol.” Gilgamesh’s eyes opened wide, happy. Down to one or two words, Carol still exercised her wit.

  “It was my fault,” the Skinner said, to Tiamat. “I thought the Crow would make a good bed partner for you. You weren’t ready.” Gilgamesh didn’t want to think about the episode in question. Nope, not at all. Of all the stressful panicky things that had happened while in the Skinner’s estate, the bed event had been the worst. After the bed fiasco, though, the Skinner had gone so far as to be pleasant, which she needed to be, to talk him down from his hiding place on the mansion’s roof. He hadn’t realized she had ‘pleasant’ in her.

  “Oops,” Carol said. A hint of a smile crossed her lips.

  Keaton rolled her eyes. “Yah, ‘oops’. That’ll teach me to over-scheme. I should leave that to the two of you.” She looked at Gilgamesh. “Normally you look better after a few hours away from here.”