The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine Read online

  “So what do you think of the Adkins household?” Tonya asked as she and her people headed out to their car. They had spent the night in the Adkins’ household’s apartment building ‘In gratitude for the warning about my salt mine project,’ Wini had said when she extended the invitation. Tonya knew the visit would be an eye opening experience for her people.

  Delia, Pete and Danny all looked at each other as they trouped through cold slush in the parking lot. “It was different than our last visit,” Delia said.

  Outside of Wini’s gaze, Tonya’s repressed dark thoughts bubbled to the surface. This entire mess had to be Wini’s fault. Her Attack Focus project had not only attracted the attention of the Arms, it had attracted the attention of the Crows and the Hunters. Her gut told her Rogue Crow would have never blackmailed Hargrove into an attack on Wini if the Attack Focuses never existed. Certainly, Hunter Enkidu’s rampage wouldn’t have happened if the Attack Focuses never existed, as Enkidu’s violence had been sparked by a fight between the Hunters and the Attack Focuses somewhere near Chicago.

  Poor Gail. She didn’t deserve this, and nor did she deserve what Tonya would be doing next.

  It served Adkins right that she lost one of her own Transforms, Tonya thought. At least she paid a little bit for the pain she had caused.

  “Different how?” Tonya said, after Danny slammed the last door on the car, finally responding to Delia’s comment.

  Delia sat back. She was in the seat next to Tonya, right behind Danny, who was driving. Tonya had spent weeks convincing Delia to take the bodyguard training courses. Delia had taken a lot of convincing; she thought of herself as a secretary, not a bodyguard. Eventually, after several reminders about her adventure last year, she had relented. Once she started feeling the improvements in body and mind that the bodyguard training gave, it was for her hard to stop. “Empowering” was the term Delia used. Delia had known academically that as a Transform, she could extend her physical talents far beyond what she had possessed as a normal, but there was a difference between knowing it academically and experiencing it personally. The changes were a tough leap, from ‘doing this will turn me into a fake man’ to ‘doing this will bring me to my full potential as a woman Transform’.

  No Transform could turn herself into an Arm by taking a few self-defense courses and learning how to shoot firearms. However, training a woman Transform with a sedentary background to be able to take apart normal bar bouncers and general tough guys wasn’t hard at all. Tonya was terribly proud of Delia, except that now, with the verve of the recently converted, Delia was leaning on Tonya to do the same. Tonya had demurred with an appalled laugh, saying that she was dangerous enough already, but Delia hadn’t stopped pressing. She was hard to resist, and Tonya suspected she would give in as soon as the next block of relatively free time showed up. Maybe after the wedding.

  “Last time, the talk was all business,” Delia said, after mentally weighing her words, as Winnie’s gate closed behind them with a clang. Tonya breathed a sigh of relief and felt the tension ease in her shoulders at their departure. “This time was far more social. Disturbing, too. There was one woman who gave me a hard time because of your clothes. She said I wasn’t taking proper care of my Focus because you didn’t have nice enough clothes, and I should be dressed in rags before I used up household money that should be used dressing you.”

  “Oh, dear.” Wini’s Transforms were getting worse over the years. Tonya’s outfit wasn’t even close to shabby. The outfit was about two months old and had set the household back over a hundred dollars.

  “They were patronizing,” Danny said, disgusted. He steered the car around the fresh winter potholes with the confidence of long experience and onto the freeway.

  “Oh?”

  “They thought we were soft, greedy, and didn’t take proper care of you,” Danny said. Tonya wasn’t surprised. After discarding Wini’s household model, she had experimented, trying all sorts of different household management strategies. In the process, she had discovered the power of her will and her charisma, practiced it, and taught it to other Focuses. This taught her more about Focus charisma than she had discovered for herself, and she had been willing to let Polly claim the right of discovery. Polly had been the one to give charisma its name, codify its use, make herself Council president, and force the Council into its current configuration as a group of top charismatic Focuses instead of a group of Focuses at their backstabbing best. Only after her early interactions with Keaton and Zielinski did Tonya turn her hybrid juice-mover and charismatic based household into a corporate model. The far more efficient corporate household model was her big discovery and contribution to Focus society. Now, as the official head of the mentoring effort, free of the Patterson tag, and part of Rizzari’s Cause, she was now able to push the benefits of the corporate model far more than before.

  “Did that bother you?” Tonya said. Danny remained silent, his face set hard as he drove.

  Delia laughed and poked him in the shoulder.

  “Ha! You’re used to being the big tough guy. ‘I’m in Focus Biggioni’s household, and tougher than the rest of you combined’. You just don’t like somebody doing the same thing to you.”

  “Hmph,” Danny said, disgruntled. Pete smiled from the other seat.

  Something as significant as a Focus wedding was going to bring people and households in from miles away. She wondered what screwball things would come crawling out of the baseboards.

  “How do you want us arrayed for our next visit?” Danny said, several minutes later as he pulled the car off the freeway, into the more open western Detroit suburbs. Keaton’s place, again.

  “Keep at the edge of her property,” Tonya said. She went through their signals; she didn’t expect any problems, but with an Arm involved, there was always the chance of violence.

  Focuses without households, dammit! Tonya couldn’t fully turn her mind away from the Attack Focus absurdity. Each Attack Focus cost the Transform community twenty some-odd lives. A hundred people died because of this program, Transforms who would have otherwise lived. What could this program possibly be doing that was worth a hundred lives? Just so Wini and her as yet unnamed conspirators would have a clandestine private Major Transform army available? Who were their real targets?

  Tonya clenched her fists and tried to quench her anger. The only target Tonya could think of that made any sense to her at all was other Focuses. Taking the standard tactics of the south region Focuses and stepping it up two or three notches. Turning the UFA into an absolutist military dictatorship.

  The session last night, her ‘messenger price’ conversation with Wini about the Focuses Tonya was mentoring, had made this clear. Tonya had been working for months directing the mentoring program, doing her best to help young Focuses get started. Now Wini demanded access to the most important skills of these new households, and their blackmail secrets as well.

  Tonya had felt like a teenager being dressed down. She hadn’t thought the mentoring effort would turn her into the first Focuses chief spy on the new Focuses, but Faith Corrigan had set her straight in no uncertain terms months ago.

  Faith Corrigan had ordered her to prepare two separate lists. The first was a list of useful skills possessed by the people in the households she had contacted. The first list would go only to the first Focuses. Not to the Council or the Network. Then there was the other list Faith had demanded, a list of all the illegal activities of these young Focuses. The blackmail material. Tonya had kept that list in her safe, and had assumed it would stay there, released only in an emergency, such as a rebellion against the UFA.

  Wini had changed the rules last night. “The second list information is very sensitive, Tonya. Forward that to me as soon as you return home,” Wini had said. “Because of liability issues, destroy all your records of this after you forward the second list to me. That’s an order.”

  Tonya had nodded and ‘yes ma’am’ed, but she had lied through her teeth. She followed diff
erent orders these days, about both lists. She wasn’t about to give the first Focuses exclusive information on anything.

  Tonya knew all about what the first Focuses did and how they operated. She had worked for them for years. Once, she had thought the first Focuses wanted to smooth out problems and keep everything running smoothly. Seeing the Julius rebellion from far too close, she sympathized with their desires. She thought well of herself for helping them. She had spent a lot of effort trying to believe her illusion.

  Wini’s little enclave of opulence, though, pointed to the real reason for the first Focus’s games. Tonya had been working so hard to help those young Focuses. It sickened her to betray them, even slightly, to the first Focuses.

  So many more things made sense if Tonya stopped trying to credit the first Focuses with any motivation beyond greed and self-interest. From the Arm flap to the present, there wasn’t a single activity, a single order that came from the first Focuses that she could firmly say wasn’t wrong.

  She had chosen the wrong side and ended up as nothing more than a cheap flunky of a group of backstabbing, selfish thugs. Patterson’s tag had only made sure she didn’t stray; she had taken the initial steps voluntarily. The pressure to do something about the hole she had dug for herself had built inside her for years, finally culminating in the shucking of the Patterson tag, and it still irked her that it had taken three other Major Transforms and one impossible normal man to help her to shuck that tag.

  Now she was on her way to do something potentially as horrible as anything she had ever done for the first Focuses, to the one person in this mess who didn’t deserve it.

  Tonya stared out the window of the car as Danny drove through the Detroit suburbs. Greasy air and cold dirty rain. She tried to keep her people’s juice levels up, and failed. They watched her with worried eyes and didn’t say a thing.

  “Delia?” Tonya said, but she didn’t turn from the dreary view out the window.

  “Ma’am?” Delia said from the seat beside her.

  “You ever wonder how much you’d be willing to pay for your mistakes?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Tonya wrapped her arms around her torso and shivered. She would do the right thing this time. Somehow.

  “Ma’am?” Delia said, again. “Can I help?”

  Tonya shook her head and wished she hadn’t said anything. “No, don’t worry about it. I’ll be all right in a bit.” If the next meeting went to hell, she pledged she would find a way to make it up to Gail.

  Morality, Tonya thought. An eighteen-wheeler passed them, going the other way, and splashed slush on the window. Nothing ever comes free.

  ---

  “I have a confession, Stacy,” Tonya said. She couldn’t imagine the Arm taking this any way but bad, but she was willing to let the Arm punish her in nearly any way possible save death, or anything associated with one of the Arm’s psychotic states.

  “Confess away.” Keaton paced, unreadable, her mind not on Tonya. Tonya appreciated Keaton’s spare decoration and her indistinguishable-from-nearby-houses restraint. So unlike Hancock. Tonya sat at the end of the white couch, in a pale room, and the place would have offered some peace except for Keaton’s pacing and Tonya’s own nerves.

  Tonya heightened the self-control aspects of her charisma. This could be one of the more foolish things she had ever done, but reawakened to morality, she believed what she planned had become necessary. “Back during the Julius rebellion, it wasn’t Julius’s people who hunted you down and destroyed you and your organization. It was me.”

  “Huh.” To Tonya’s surprise, Keaton didn’t stop her pacing. All Tonya caught of the Arm’s internal reaction was some sort of metasense scan, of a variety Tonya wasn’t familiar with. A scan at her.

  “You knew?”

  “I got the audio tapes of Hancock’s mind scrape of you, remember?” Keaton said, dismissively. “And Hancock’s analysis, as well as Haggerty’s independent analysis. They both read between the lines and figured out the history.”

  Keaton continued her pacing.

  Dammit! Tonya turned away and tried to understand Keaton’s non-reaction, all while keeping a figurative metasense eyeball on the Arm. What was her game, here? Since the mind scrape and Tonya’s shucking of the Patterson tag, she and Stacy had been working together in a far tighter fashion than ever before. Was this nothing more than a desire to avoid rocking the boat, so they could continue working together?

  That didn’t fit with what she knew about Arms.

  “I apologize for my actions back then,” Tonya said, before she had a chance to think about her words. “I keep wanting to say I wasn’t myself, that the Patterson tag was too new and I had no chance at all of fighting off her control, but despite all that, I still blame myself. I blame my own weakness.” She paused, and the Arm continued to pace. “It could have been worse for both of us at the end, you know. You saved us.”

  Keaton grunted again and continued to pace. No other reaction.

  “You knew that, too?”

  “Lori gave me a Focus’s point of view analysis of the Washington disaster,” Keaton said. “If I had slipped up and killed Hank, I would have given you enough psychological leverage for you to charisma me into complete slavery.” Keaton paused, and Tonya didn’t comment on the correct analysis. “Now you’re supposed to say that in the state I was in, there was no thought involved, that Hank’s survival had nothing to do with my actions, but a combination of luck and Hank’s skills.”

  Oh, hell. Now Tonya understood. “You’ve decided to not accept my apology, or grant any form of absolution, and your punishment is to let me stew in my own moral juices over what I did all those years ago.”

  “You don’t understand Arm psychology very well yet, do you,” Keaton said, now emotionally engaged and reacting. She stopped her pacing and sat down beside Tonya, too close, and predator threatening.

  “Given my track record, it’s safe to say I don’t understand much at all about Arm psychology.”

  Keaton barked a laugh and put her hand possessively on Tonya’s neck. Tonya did not let herself react. “Ain’t that the truth. You see, confessing and apologizing to me gives me status, over you and over the other Arms. Only inferiors need to apologize.”

  Oh. “I accept that.” It almost made sense from a Focus’s perspective. “Focuses work the same way, but we’re far wordier about such things.”

  Keaton rolled her eyes and squeezed Tonya’s neck. The grip might almost have been affectionate. Or not. In either case, Tonya expected bruises. “You missed one part of this exchange, though. If you hadn’t confessed, I would have eventually taken it out of your hide. You would have deserved Arm-style physical punishment then, because you would have proven you hadn’t completely shucked your old politics and your self-serving lying to yourself and others.”

  “I do understand that,” Tonya said. “It’s the same for Focuses. Well, save for the Arm-style physical punishment.”

  “No, you bitches just do things like rip each other’s hearts out, or bury each other underground in an attempt to drive other Focuses insane.”

  Tonya nodded. “True. So, what are you worrying about?”

  “Rickenbach. There’s no telling what’s going to happen if we push her too hard. I’m surprised she hasn’t killed anyone in her household by accident yet. She could lay either of us out or ferret out our deepest secrets, if we’re not careful.”

  “You’re overestimating her capabilities.”

  Eyeball roll. “I see you haven’t lost your arrogance, have you? You want to put some money on my little prediction?”

  “Sure.”

  Mind Scrape

  “I know you’re not snooty, but the combination of metasensing and concentrating on your self-control does make you look snooty,” Van said. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets, cold.

  “Juice-based putting on airs? Just ducky,” Gail said. “So, what’s your excuse? I mean, having a pistol in a shoulder holster shoul
dn’t make you give off the ‘mean and tough’ vibe.”

  Gilgamesh repressed his laughter and carefully navigated the car around a group of children walking to school in the middle of the street. Gail knew he hated to drive, but he didn’t trust any of them either, and Gail had decided not to pressure the Crow when he wanted to do something his way. When she remembered. Back at the meetpoint, Kurt had been livid when Van announced he was going with Gail to Keaton’s home, or lair, or whatever it was the Arm called it. Gilgamesh hadn’t commented on the change of plans on their end, but he had conveyed his exasperation clearly. He didn’t appreciate Gail and her household’s tendency toward chaos.

  Gail didn’t care. Van had convinced her of the fiction of the stated reason for this meeting, and she believed he was correct in his assessment of the true purpose. So, yes, they had changed the arrangement.

  The Crow didn’t understand their bantering. How it defused the obvious tension. If Van was right, they were walking into something far more dangerous than Gail’s apology visit to Focus Adkins.

  “It’s unfamiliar,” Van said, about the shoulder holster and pistol. “I have to think about how to stand correctly in this thing.” He paused. “I wonder if this is part of what makes the bodyguards so daunting, the uncomfortable nature of the various concealed weapons they have to wear.”

  Gail snorted. “Only for those who aren’t regularly going out armed.” She thought the beard did the trick; without Van’s current three quarters of an inch of facial hair his attempted bodyguard routine would make him look silly. As it was, his current look, with his well-trimmed beard, his long hair in a ponytail, and his no-longer-rail-thin physique from almost a year of manual labor in a Transform household made him almost romance novel handsome.

  At least she thought so. So did her breasts, and things lower, at least when she wasn’t feeling low on juice. She swore being engaged had reduced the libido-reductions of low juice, which couldn’t be right. That is, unless one believed in the crackpot theory she had run into positing Transform Sickness had evolved and had struck in the past. Which she didn’t.