In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 6

  “Mmm.”

  “So tell me, I get the impression Wini Adkins wasn’t 100% helpful,” Tonya said.

  “I guess you might say that,” Gail said, followed by a minute laugh. “She showed up at seven in the morning the day after I woke up as a Focus, called me a stupid young fool and wanted to teach me how to torture my people. Then she disappeared and I haven’t seen her since, for which I’m eternally grateful.”

  Tonya winced. This sounded like a bit much even for Wini, although Wini could be a cast-iron bitch when she wanted. Strange, though. Even Wini’s pathetic charisma should be able to make a baby Focus hop.

  “Gail, I’m really, really sorry about that. Every young Focus is supposed to have some older Focus helping her out. Our mentoring system doesn’t always work well, but things shouldn’t ever be this bad.” Given what Tonya had seen of Corrigan’s former organization, far too many Focuses had been falling through those cracks in the past few years. “How are you doing?”

  Gail didn’t answer for a long moment. When she did, her voice was almost reluctant.

  “Based on what I’ve figured out, I’m not sure I want some other Focus helping me out. I certainly don’t want any other Focuses giving me quote unquote suggestions that turn out to be orders.”

  Okay, pissed off Focus here, with more problems than an early encounter with Wini. “I’m here to listen, answer questions, and give advice, if you want, Gail,” Tonya said. She heard complete disbelief in Gail’s breathing. “And, yes, I am a Focus, and…” making a guess Gail already knew, based on her ‘figured out’ comment and the ‘journalism major’ quote on page 3 of Gail’s file “yes, I’m on the Focus Council. We’re not all ogres. I won’t lie to you, though, some of us are utter bitches.”

  “Thank you for being honest with me,” Gail said, voice still flat with repressed anger. “I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, though. If your organization leaves me and my people alone, I’ll leave you alone as well.”

  Tonya’s eyebrows shot up. “You think you’re protecting your household?”

  “Damned fucking straight.”

  There had to be a way to salvage this debacle. Gail was an instant away from hanging up on Tonya, turning the difficult into the impossible. Tonya decided to try turning the young Focus’s over-protectiveness into a positive. “Then in my mind you’re a real Focus. A peer. Keep that in mind when judging the actions of other Focuses and their people.”

  “Adkins and Cottsfield were being nasty to protect their people?” Gail snorted. “Their slaves?”

  Cottsfield? Dammit, why Cottsfield? Talk about bad luck. “Yes. Focus Adkins is a power among Focuses, and would rather her neighbor Focuses, like yourself, followed her lead on all things. When she protects her political power, she protects her people. Focus Cottsfield, on the other hand, is a politically weak and marginal Focus who can’t afford to do anything except keep her people fed without risking further political problems. If she dealt with a Focus like you, and made any mistakes, it would be a disaster for her household.” No need to sugarcoat things for this newbie Focus. Someone willing to go nose-to-nose with a known Council Focus over the telephone, at five months in, was no easily flustered sheltered wallflower.

  “Oh,” Gail said. “Okay. I got it. The ‘protect the household’ thing is something all of us Focuses get. I shouldn’t be surprised, given the number of lies and omissions we’ve documented in the pamphlets the Transform Clinic gave me. I guess I shouldn’t come down on Focus Cottsfield too hard, given my own strong feelings on the subject.”

  The ‘we’ in Gail’s statement had Tonya’s interest, as well as the word ‘number’. Also Gail’s omission of Wini from her faux apology. “So, how are you and your household doing?”

  “Things could be better,” Gail said. “We’re living out in the open, on a farm, except for a few people in a small farm house. We were saving up to find a place to live, but – ah – but the man who was managing the household’s money…” She stopped then and took a breath. Tonya sensed the effort it cost Gail to control her voice. “Anyway, he ran off and took all our money with him a little ways back,” she said. No sobs, but Tonya did hear in Gail’s voice the tears rolling down her face. “We’re doing some scrambling, trying to figure out how we’re going to cope with winter – we do live in Michigan. That’s our major worry at the moment.”

  Tonya’s heart ached for her. So young, so ignorant. “Oh, Gail, I’m so sorry,” Tonya said. “So very, very sorry. Did you report the theft to the police?”

  “Yes, the next day. They don’t think they’ll be able to find him. They said, even if they did, they doubted they’d find our money. My people’s life savings was in that bank account and it’s all gone now.”

  Tonya tried to think of what to say about such a disaster. She couldn’t fix the young Focus’s problems. Only Transforms should have their hands on the money, until the Focus knew whom to trust. Transforms should handle all significant household business, because only the Transforms were committed to the success of the household. The normals always had other options. She remembered the old joke about bacon and eggs for breakfast – the chicken is involved, the pig is committed. The normals are involved, the Transforms are committed.

  Not advice this touchy new Focus would want to listen to right now.

  “I’m so sorry.” She couldn’t come up with anything else to say.

  Gail laughed a bitter laugh. “We screwed up, and since I’m the Focus, I guess it’s ultimately on my shoulders that we screwed up.”

  This Focus didn’t sound like a screw-up, though, just ignorant.

  “Is anybody dead?” Tonya said, already sure she knew the answer. She put a mental checkmark in her mind next to Lori, and her comment about an Arm in her household. The more she butted heads with Lori, the more impressed she got.

  “Well, no,” Gail said. “Not yet.”

  “Is anybody crazy?”

  “Noooo.” She snorted. “Though I’d hate for me and my Focus attendants to get a psych evaluation. We’ve had a few tough moments that, fifty years ago, would have gotten us locked away for hysteria.”

  Tonya repressed a chuckle. This one was a strong one. How strong, though? How hard had she been on her people? How many did she have tied up all day, living off spoon-fed baby food? “Well then you’re doing better than quite a few new Focuses. Especially attempting to run a Focus household based on those ridiculous government pamphlets. Deaths aren’t at all unknown in new Focus households.”

  “You’re serious, Focus Biggioni? People dying?” Tonya could almost fill in the blanks – there are Focuses with that level of uncontrol? Tonya smiled. Gail’s was a comment she would have made, at a similar stage in her career.

  “Absolutely serious. Call me Tonya.” The least she could do was offer her friendship to this touchy yet ignorant young Focus. “You should hear some of the things that happened in the early years. When you rip people loose from their existing lives and throw them all together into a new one, with no moorings to hold on to, you can get all sorts of strange things. Did you ever read Lord of the Flies?” Or talk to Focus Young of Denver, who Transformed five months ago and who believed in Transform natural selection with herself as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ to the tune of five dead Transforms so far?

  “That’s a scary thought, Tonya,” Gail said, a lot friendlier than she had been a few minutes earlier. “I guess there’s more room to screw up than I’d thought.”

  “Being a lone Focus is tough. Look, I’ll tell you what I can do. I’m going to put you in touch with Beth Hargrove. She’s another Focus in Detroit, she’s been a Focus for about five years, and she was nineteen when she transformed. She’s a friendly, outgoing person, and I think you’ll like her. I think you’ll find her a lot easier to deal with than Wini Adkins. Does that sound acceptable?”

  Tonya was only medium impressed with Beth Hargrove. Beth would do better with a little more steel in her spine, but she was young, friend
ly and intelligent. And any help this new Focus would take would be an improvement over her current situation.

  “Do you think she’ll want to talk to some beginner juice jockey?”

  Juice jockey? No contact with other Focuses, just past her transformation, and the one thing she learns is the slang. “Certainly she will.” Especially after I tell her to, Tonya thought. “I know you’ve had your problems, but it’s useful, perhaps essential, to have other Focuses to talk to. I’ll talk to her and have her give you a call. I’ll call you, too, from time to time, just to find out how you’re doing. You can call me any time you want to. Here, let me give you my number.”

  “Thank you,” Gail said.

  “Now, I’ve got the time and the money, so don’t be shy. I’d like to know what’s happened to you, and how you’re coping.” The way to win the trust of any Focus who had been through hell was to listen, Tonya knew. From experience. And being a ‘lone Focus’ was deadly. That she also knew from experience. She still didn’t have any feel for Gail and her household. They could be, well, anything.

  “I can do that,” Gail said, voice trembling. “Like all new Focuses, I suppose, as soon as I used up my initial burst of juice from my transformation, I ended up in peri-withdrawal because the Clinic couldn’t get me Transforms fast enough.” Tonya heard kitchen and dining area household noises along with Gail; the young Focus didn’t have an office, just a typical house telephone, not private at all. From some faint changes in timbre, Tonya suspected Gail leaned against a wall, perhaps underneath a wall-desk. She wasn’t as ignorant as Tonya feared – for one thing, Gail knew about peri-withdrawal. “Because of my low juice problems, well, I didn’t think to try moving juice outside the Clinic, which, as Focus Adkins said, had ‘gone bad’, filled with what the Crow, Watchmaker, termed ‘bad juice’. So everybody suffered, and my inability to move the juice got me started off on the wrong foot with my Transforms. Once I got outside of the Clinic and metasensed the bad juice, I figured out how to move juice and fixed up all my Transforms.”

  Tonya put down her pencil and took a deep breath, using her charisma for self-control. Holy Mother of God! “Focuses can’t normally metasense bad juice,” Tonya said. Sensing bad juice! Communicating with a Crow! Was Gail some sort of Focus-Monster or Sport? “Do you have any trouble moving juice, now?”

  “Well, yes,” Gail said. Damn. Tonya began to plan an intervention, to salvage any of the likely near-Monster women Transforms and near-psycho male Transforms. “No matter what I do, I can’t keep the juice moving speed down; the damned stuff just moves, whoosh! And it reacts to every little emotional change of mine. My research team, uh, sorry, man does that sound pretentious…my amateur researcher team, including me, figured out that many if not all of the household’s juice problems come from me yanking around their juice too quickly multiple times a day by accident.”

  “Okay,” Tonya said. She noticed her hands were shaking. Nope, not a Focus-Monster or Sport. The speed of Gail’s juice moving told the tale: Gail was a top-end Focus, the first Tonya had found through the mentoring program. Finding one was both inevitable and stressful, and also inevitable that she would be one of her trouble-Focuses. Young powerful Focuses always made a hash of things. Even more important, how Tonya handled Gail would set all sorts of precedents for her tenure. Tonya remembered what she and Polly had been like five months in (enslaved and terrified of their own capabilities), and what Focus Rizzari had been like (vicious brainy tyrant who didn’t think of herself or her Transforms as human). Powerful Focuses had far more potential problems than the weaker ones, because of what they were able to do to their households and themselves. Worse, if handled wrong, young top end Focuses also had a tendency to rebel, as had the megalomaniacal Focus Martine DeYoung. Tonya needed to win this Focus’s trust, regardless of the time cost and phone bill. “Sorry for the interruption.”

  “No problem, as this leads to, well, my days as a sort-of enslaved Focus,” Gail said. “There we were, fresh out of the clinic, and…”

  ---

  It was midnight before Tonya hung up the phone. When she did, she leaned back in her chair and rubbed her temples. Gail was so deep in the hole she couldn’t even see the surface any more. She was so ignorant she didn’t even know how deep she was, even with her list of problems. Nor did she know the worst of her problems. Pissing off Wini Adkins was her worst problem, and if true, she would need to mortgage her soul to buy herself clear. A Focus like that should never have someone like Wini as a mentor.

  “Delia,” she said. “Delia, I need you to send out a letter for me.”

  Delia came in from the room across the hall, and Tonya handed Gail Rickenbach’s file to her.

  “Copy this, and then send the original to Gail Rickenbach. Make sure you take out everything but the first page. It needs to go out in the morning’s mail.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll get it,” Delia said, but she didn’t leave.

  “What is it?” Tonya asked.

  “Are you done for the night, ma’am?” Delia asked. “You should rest.”

  “Maybe in a bit,” Tonya said. There were still a hundred things to do.

  Delia’s eyes were sad and wise. “You’re tired,” she said, “and worn out. Take a rest. It can wait ‘til tomorrow.”

  Worn out. That was a euphemism, and Tonya checked the juice counts of the household around her.

  “Oh, no. I’m sorry Delia,” she said as she fixed the juice flow. The juice wasn’t off by more than a little, but Tonya didn’t like to slip even that minor amount. Maybe she was more worn than she knew. “Just give me a few more minutes and I’ll be done. Go to bed yourself. I’ve kept you up far too late.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Delia smiled.

  Tonya shook her head sadly as Delia left, and thought of the youthfully talented Gail Rickenbach and the other two screwed up Focuses that she had discovered. She hadn’t expected it to be this bad. Now she only hoped not to find too many more.

  Gilgamesh: August 22, 1968 – August 24, 1968

  “What was that?” Carol said, slipping a little Tiamat into her voice as she sat up. Gilgamesh fully woke after a fitful hour of sleep, tired, worn and sated. Distant breakfast smells wafted through the air conditioning ducts and the windows of Carol’s oversized bedroom showed the light of the early morning sun.

  He hadn’t had to ask, just think the thoughts, to get Carol to slip in a little Tiamat into their lovemaking. The edge of fear, in bed, turned him on. The power of an Arm being an Arm was his dirty secret, his fetish, the dangerous edge that had held him to Tiamat in St. Louis, Philadelphia and Chicago long before they had ever even spoken.

  The sex was as good as he hoped it would be. He still tried to think what he could give Carol in return, what would be safe and what might turn out to be a stupid Crow-dross trick to play on a lover. Crow sex tricks didn’t make it into any of the Crow letters.

  “Uh,” Gilgamesh said, excavating himself from the soft blankets. He thought, trying to get a handle on Carol’s emotions. Worried, edgy, befuddled, and a bit angry. She thought he might have tried something. “I was having one of those dreams,” he said. “Earthquakes, storms, game board pieces, snippets of flower gardens, lab equipment, and snow covered pine trees. Nothing made sense, but I do suspect someone was trying to tell me something.” No matter what he tried, in any of his meditation modes or in his preparations for sleep, he couldn’t get the pheromone flow, as many other Crows named it, to be anything other than a chaotic mess. “Ah,” he said. “Perhaps the information was in what was lacking. I’ve never had such a strong dream that didn’t include Beasts.” What did that mean?

  “Dreaming. Right,” Carol said, flopping back down on the bed in disgust. “I haven’t had anything this coherent since my incarceration.” When she had invited the Madonna of Montreal into her dreams, to chase off the Patterson image. “I really hope this isn’t some lingering effects from what Rogue Focus did to me, because this one was more than a little
Freudian. The parts that made any sense, anyway.”

  Gilgamesh grunted and wiggled, trying to twitch away some aching back muscles. Carol sounded like she was slowly coming out of what Kali called the chaotic dreaming phase. He couldn’t help but be a little jealous. “What did you see?”

  “Two women. Monsters? I’m not sure. They appeared on my, um, bed and started fighting me and each other. They wore black feather coats. Their weapons were bed toys, except the bed toys kept changing shape and becoming children. Then the Madonna appeared, giant sized, and swung a pillow at the lot of us, sending me and my opponents flying off the bed.” Carol paused. “That’s when I woke up.”

  “What were you fighting with?”

  “I was unarmed. Whenever I tried to pick up one of my knives, it skittered away from me.” She grimaced. “Being unarmed is bad. The rest doesn’t make any sense at all.” Another grimace. “Yet another stupid needless distraction,” she said, her voice low.

  “I disagree,” Gilgamesh said. “Even if we can’t figure out its exact meaning, there is one thing we can say about the meaning of these dreams: we need to look out for trouble.”

  “I’m always looking out for trouble. As are you.” He didn’t respond. She sighed. “Okay. I’ll look harder. Be more cautious. That’s not the only hint I’ve gotten recently that it’s a good time to be cautious.” She flipped him over on his stomach and started to rub his back, knowing exactly where to rub to work out the aftereffects of the previous night. He practically purred in response.

  Carol wasn’t selfish in bed. She didn’t need to be, to be dominant.

  ---

  “Gilgamesh,” he said, as the two Crows approached. One continued forward, but the other held back. They met at the current common Crow meeting place in Houston, a set of vacant lots near a bayou a half mile south of the South Main Transform Center, just past midnight. Gray clouds hovered above, threatening rain.