No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Page 4

  “I didn’t sleep with you because I didn’t feel it would be right,” he said. “Nor did I sleep with Keaton. I understand the two of you think differently about sex than I do, but I’m still burdened with my old fashioned human hang-ups.”

  “No problem. I’m still working on understanding my needs as an Arm. Some of my choices when I’m high on juice bother me a lot when I’m not.” I paused. “But you’re a Major Transform. I won’t press you on this, but if we’re going to be long-term work partners, the juice will make us sleep together. We both have our own mind reading tricks, although they’re different, and we won’t be able to hide our wants and desires from each other.” I wanted to sleep with him as much as he wanted to sleep with me. He understood, but as far as I remembered, Keaton kept me tightly leashed.

  “I have a problem,” Gilgamesh said. “Early in your recovery Keaton lured me into her bed, with you, thinking that if I slept with you this would help bring you back to yourself. Uh, this didn’t go well.”

  I nodded. “The shiner and the defensive wounds. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t blame you. That’s not the problem. I panicked, bad. That’s the problem. For a young Crow like me, well, panic takes a long time to wear off.”

  So, we had intimacy issues. At least my mindless attack hadn’t kept him from cuddling me. I didn’t think I would have ever come back to myself without his cuddling.

  “Again, no problem. I won’t press.” Yet. I was sure he caught the ‘yet’ with his emotion reading trick. “I’ve never asked and I’m not sure if this is something you can talk about, but when did you first find me?”

  “St. Louis. On September 18th. I transformed, as best as I’ve been able to work out, on July 14th. I still used my birth name and I’d met just one other Crow, Sinclair, when I found you.”

  “I need to meet Sinclair and some of your other Crow friends. After I’ve recovered some more. If I have to be tied up and muzzled, I still need to meet them.”

  “This will be difficult to arrange. When something is new, it seems dangerous to a Crow. If what’s new is dangerous, the Crow panics and runs away. Crows must work hard to learn to do anything new. I don’t think you’ll need to be muzzled and tied down. What you’ll need is patience for many preliminary meetings.”

  I thought about Gilgamesh’s statement about his transformation. “I transformed on September 9th, so you have a couple of months on me. Was being a baby Crow as devastating for you as being a baby Arm was for me?”

  Gilgamesh closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the road. “I couldn’t talk to people. I couldn’t let anyone near me without panicking and fleeing. I nearly panicked myself to death once when I stumbled over a house cat. I’d never even heard a hint that male Major Transforms existed. I thought I had gone insane.”

  I took his hand and squeezed. “I killed my own daughter when I transformed.”

  We didn’t talk for the next ten minutes, providing silent comfort to each other. Gilgamesh was the first Transform I had told about my daughter.

  Fate had linked us from the start. I had been partly joshing, partly reaching when I called us long-term work partners, but in fact we were far more linked than I realized. The linkage explained some of those screwy extra emotional reactions I had when he was around and when he wasn’t.

  He was right to want to take things slow between us. The last thing either of us needed was to give the damned juice any more openings to mess us up.

  “In your letters and stories, I was surprised that when you met Keaton in Philadelphia you didn’t collapse in panic,” I said. I had fallen into the Crow headspace so much the whispering came naturally to me and my predator effect was gone.

  “Compared to the Beast Men who held me, Keaton was comforting and confusing. Dealing with Beast Men is instinctive for a Crow. Terrifying, but instinctive. I seem to understand when I’m in danger from them and when I’m not. I don’t have these instincts around Arms.” He paused. “She did panic me into sicking up on her. I had been in a state of panic for so long, because of my captivity, that I had in some fashion gotten used to being panicked.”

  He didn’t say anything, but I read in him his initial reaction to Keaton: ugly, dour, monstrous. He hadn’t appreciated the beauty of Arm musculature then. He did now, although I think his current reaction to Keaton was more ‘handsome’ than ‘beautiful’.

  ---

  “No, Carol. This is Keaton’s private place.”

  Well, yes, but I wasn’t sure why this agitated him. I mean, it was just torture. The poor man down there deserved what happened to him. Probably. I listened to Gilgamesh, though. I had come up with a rule: if Gilgamesh gave me advice, and meant it, and I could understand his advice, I should do it.

  I used the free time to amuse myself by abusing Keaton’s gym. I soon figured out how to sprint across the floor, run up a wall, step across the ceiling and grab one of her climbing ropes from the top. Speed and momentum. Once upon a time I would have been able to put what I did down in numbers, but now I found things more fun to just do.

  Keaton, refreshed, walked into the gym just after sunrise. I smiled and leapt down to greet her.

  She reacted with body language, freezing me in place. Well, this is what she wanted me to do, and so I did so. She examined me minutely, asking me questions, and getting the test results from Gilgamesh.

  “You’re on your way back for real now, Hancock,” Keaton said. The love in her voice I remembered from before my trip was gone. “I’d rate your predatory presence as similar to when I first met you as Larry Borton.” Baby Arm levels. Gaah. “Your ability to read people’s off the charts, as usual. Your metasense needs work. Or something.”

  “I believe this is a real change from the directed withdrawal scarring,” Gilgamesh said.

  I found myself hauled in the air, legs churning madly, and slung under Keaton’s arm.

  “Well, your comment definitely got a reaction,” Keaton said, deadpan. I heard her eyeballs roll in her voice. I wasn’t sure what I had done or why, but my body overflowed with adrenaline. I think I had forgotten about Gilgamesh and took his whisper as some sort of attack. I took deep breaths until the bad emotions cleared out.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I said, still slung under Keaton’s arm like a package. “Something set me off.” I went back through my memories until I found the magic moment. “Somebody did directed withdrawal scarring on me? Who?”

  “We don’t have a clue,” Keaton said. “According to all the information we have, the only Transform near you while you were in withdrawal was yourself.”

  Ooh, a locked room murder mystery. When I was a normal I loved to read those. I missed being able to read.

  A memory inside of me wanted to free itself. “Freaky,” I said, regarding the mystery of the directed withdrawal scarring. “Oh, and if you don’t mind, I have a memory inside of me who wants to talk to you, ma’am.”

  Gilgamesh: April 12, 1968

  “Go ahead, let’s hear this,” the Skinner said. She placed Carol on the ground like a toy soldier and stepped back. He continued to hide behind the rowing machine, a rotten egg in his hand. Carol had lost track of him after she went berserk, and he had slipped entirely from her mind.

  Tiamat’s sanity was only a thin veneer over the Monster within, as he had suspected ever since Focus Rodriguez’s trick brought her back to herself.

  Carol steadied herself, and then changed. One second the new Carol, the next the old scary Tiamat. The Skinner tensed but held her ground.

  “I’m only a memory,” Tiamat said. “A memory of Carol Hancock, the Arm. I have no idea who is listening to me, but this information needs to go to the Arm Stacy Keaton, the researcher Henry Zielinski and the Focus Lorraine Rizzari. I composed this while confined in the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center, while being held in medical quarantine by the CDC. Currently it’s March 23rd, 1968; I don’t know the time of day. If you want to know how I did this trick, ask Keaton.”

&nb
sp; Empathic pain flooded through Gilgamesh, crushing him. The Tiamat memory held what she experienced at the time and her emotions were horrific. She was facing her own destruction. He wanted to comfort her, but there was no way he would be able to comfort a memory.

  “My cell has been dark for four days, my estimate. They’re trying to break me by using the juice weapon. With patience, they will succeed. I’ve come to the conclusion there’s a good chance they’ll either kill me outright or drive me into withdrawal to break me to their service. One of the top-end Focuses is orchestrating this; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I end up as a totally new me serving said Focus. So, if I’m your enemy, please just subdue me and if you can, find a way to bring me back to myself.

  “Anyway, while incarcerated here I had several clandestine meetings with Focus Sarah Teas. She attempted to recruit me to her service, but stuck in a kicker: I had to accept her tag. Voluntarily. She said Focuses could tag anything and proved her assertion with several interesting tricks. I didn’t accept her offer, not trusting her or her boss, who I feared was Shirley Patterson, the behind-the-scenes boss of the first Focuses. Her demonstration did get me thinking, though, about tags. So much of what a Focus can do is funhouse mirrored in our Arm capabilities, so I had to investigate. Examining Teas’s furniture tag – don’t ask – I realized I’d already used the Arm version of the tag on my Chicago lover, Bobby. The tag was triggered by a ritual of Bobby saying ‘I’m yours’ and me responding ‘you’re mine’. Yes, a normal triggers this version of the Arm tag; however, physical contact with the Arm is necessary. I never mentioned this to my boss or my researcher because the amount of juice used was small and the effect was mildly embarrassing – making me more tolerant of Bobby. This version of the Arm tag isn’t infallible; once when Bobby screwed up and I was low on juice the tag had no effect on me.

  “I experimented on myself and on objects to figure out the limits of Arm tags. I’m convinced one Arm can tag another; I believe the tag must be voluntary for both Arms, and the tag’s effect will be to amplify and formalize the status of the dominant Arm over the lesser Arm. A lesser Arm in a tagged situation should not grate on the nerves of the dominant Arm unless she willfully wishes to challenge her boss. I also tagged myself and discovered that by doing so I gained greater control over myself, similar if not identical to what I would gain from one to two hours of meditation and self-visualization in preparation for combat or hard exercise.

  “Which leads me to my conclusion: the purpose of the Arm tag is to be a shortcut. If there’s anything an Arm tag can do that can’t be done in a much more time consuming way, I haven’t found it yet. Furthermore, the Arm tag should allow the Arm to set up a formal dominance hierarchy, providing a concise solution to the mission Focus Rizzari gave me regarding how the Focuses should deal with the Arms: all the Focuses have to do is negotiate in good faith with the dominant Arm; whatever agreements are made would then apply to the lesser Arms as well.

  “This is all I know. I do have one message for Stacy Keaton: if you don’t already know this, the Major Transform I refer to as Officer Canon orchestrated my takedown. Thank you very much for your time.”

  The old Tiamat finished and became Carol again, who immediately dropped to her knees, skittered over to the Skinner, and lay her head on the Skinner’s feet.

  “You don’t have to do that, Carol. The current you hasn’t given me any offence.”

  “Ma’am. Was this real?” Carol said. “Oh, this is so confusing.”

  “I suspect you burned juice to fix the memory in your mind,” the Skinner said. She moved her foot from under Carol’s head and sat down beside her. “A trick I haven’t yet mastered, exactly the sort of silly trick I’d expect the old you to think up.” She motioned to Gilgamesh, who sighed, put away his rotten egg and came out from behind the rowing machine to join the Arms on the floor.

  Carol sat up and took his hand. He was ready to leap out of his own skin, edgy and closing in on the horrible climax stress state. Too many strange things! Too much stress in general.

  “Do you remember how to do any of this?” Keaton said.

  Carol nodded. “I do now. If you want I can tag an object. It’s utterly pointless.”

  “Try one of your knives.”

  Carol pulled a knife from its sheath along her right thigh and moved juice. She put the knife on the floor between the three of them, where its barely visible juice seeped away into a minute amount of dross over several minutes.

  “Huh.”

  “Ma’am,” Carol said. “May I request that you tag me?”

  “Do the trick again with the knife,” Keaton said. Carol did so. “Gilgamesh, pick up the knife.”

  The juice seepage stopped when Gilgamesh picked up the knife. He studied what Carol had done, but his metasense found so little juice in the knife he couldn’t make out any details. Keaton thought. “It marks him as yours but doesn’t change him,” the Skinner said, definitive. “Useless in our current situation.” She sighed. “But another piece of evidence in favor of the Myth Hypothesis; with a lot of Arms and Focuses in a tribal setting this would be quite useful.”

  She looked back at Carol. “I thank the former you for her insights and her experimentation. However, I want to think about this Arm tag concept for a while before I make my decision about whether to tag you or not,” the Skinner said. “Besides, you’re not getting on my nerves yet.”

  “Ma’am,” Gilgamesh said. He foresaw several bad possibilities.

  Keaton looked at him and nodded. “I agree; you’re right to fear what this might do to you, kiddo. No tag experimenting.”

  Gilgamesh relaxed. The last thing he wanted was any Arm juice experimentation on him with unknown juice technology.

  “Now scat, both of you,” Keaton said. “I’ve got far too much to think about.”

  Carol Hancock: April 13, 1968 – April 14, 1968

  “Ma’am?” I asked, after the afternoon exercise session was over and I had exercised myself into exhaustion. I had lost track of Gilgamesh again. Also, I had been filled with worries ever since Focus Rodriguez made me whole. “Do I have permission to ask a question?” Keaton nodded. “Are you going to keep me here? Forever?” The thought of leaving her terrified me. The thought of staying here terrified me. As with most things now, the question confused me.

  Keaton leaned on the leg press machine next to me. “As soon as you’re recovered enough to hunt on your own, you’re gone. The three of us have a lot to talk about before then.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Right now I want to show you something.”

  I nodded. Keaton motioned to me and I followed. Keaton had brought in a box from her workshop. She opened it and brought out a machine. She set it up, drew a blood sample, mixed it with chemicals from three vials, and dropped it in the machine. A little while later, a thermal printer spat out nearly illegible numbers on the greasy paper you get in library copiers and medical devices. “See this number?”

  “Yes. I still can’t read, ma’am.”

  “Okay. Take my word for it, you’d be surprised if you were able to read it. It reads 99. This hunk of crap is accurate to only a point and a half, but you get the picture. Your juice count is about 99.”

  “Ma’am? I’m acting different.” A juice count of 99 used to have me crawling the walls in the need for juice.

  “Yes. You need to know this. Since your rescue, you seem to be rather oblivious to low juice until you get down to about 94, and then low juice hits you real hard. You go nuts. You’re going to need to re-learn how to sense your own juice numbers.”

  “Go nuts?”

  “That is, do anything for juice. Including trying to juice suck your superior, namely, myself. Or Gilgamesh. Tagged Transforms wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Gilgamesh? I would end up with nasty Monster juice. Ewwh. Oh, and I might injure him, too. That probably wouldn’t be good.

  “Ma’am, I went after one of Focus Rodriguez’s tagged Tr
ansforms when I wasn’t low on juice.”

  “Then you have a bigger problem than I realized,” Keaton said. “We can work on that tonight. Now, dinner?”

  Time for me to cook. I smiled, got up, bounced into the kitchen and started preparing. I loved to cook. I would cook all day and night if allowed. I had already cooked so much for Keaton she had to buy three more freezers.

  I served the lobster and beef with scalloped potatoes Florentine, fresh asparagus and beets, homemade bread, with an almond torte and a chocolate cheesecake for dessert. I swore that my dinner nearly brought tears to Keaton’s eyes. Gilgamesh, who had appeared from wherever he disappeared to, looked panicked at my preparations.

  I expected Keaton to take me out and beat some tagged Transform control into me immediately after dinner, but Keaton had other plans. We did a quick workout, and then she rolled a television out into the living room. Keaton sat in her throne-like easy chair while Gilgamesh and I nestled against each other with our backs to the pale couch. “They’re going to be talking about us, tonight.”

  I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. NBC was doing a special on the Arm Flap, as they called it. “The Arm Flap: The United States government captured and tortured an Arm to death; the only other surviving Arm has declared war on the government because of the ill treatment of her comrade.” The opening shot was of an aerial view of a smoldering ruin of a building surrounded by rolling hills.

  Wow. The amount of crap the media had figured out was amazing. They knew who I was, who Keaton was, who Focus Goddamned Biggioni was, who Fucking Agent McIntyre was and who fucking Assistant Director Patrelle was. I scratched off one of the names on my mental target list, Security Director Leeson. He had died in the explosion that destroyed the Detention Center. So very sad. They even mentioned Henry Zielinski without calling him a pervert or an evil mad doctor. P.S. only the latter was true and I loved him for it.