“No superorganism use,” Rose said, still eyeing the cut. “This is purely a Focus talent.”
“Wait, wait,” Connie said, waving her hands. “Focuses can’t heal.”
“They can now,” Hank said. “It takes two.”
“Holy shit,” Dowling said, and Connie whistled appreciatively. Rose nodded thoughtfully with a speculative look in her eyes.
“A long time ago, I was called to a Council meeting in Kansas City,” Denise said, gently patting Hank’s now-healed arm and then tucking it in to his side. “I was there to witness Focus Weiczokowski’s ascension to the Council, and so Patterson and Adkins could lean on me to take the at-large seat that eventually Cathy Elspeth took. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you about these little ceremonies, but in the old days, Patterson, Adkins and Schrum severely worked over any of the second generation Focuses they’d chosen to sit on Council. They’d been putting Weiczokowski through the ringer, working on her mind and body – and the last bit was a gruesome test of loyalty and faith. They gave Focus Weiczokowski a huge knife, a sword actually, and ordered her to disembowel herself. ‘If you have faith, you know we won’t let you die…’ Not only did they have her disembowel herself, once they got Esther started, they, um, made sure she kept going until she’d severed one of those important arteries that goes to the heart, and she bled herself out.”
“Horrific,” Chevalier said.
“Focuses can survive such wounds with ease,” Count Dowling said, quietly. He sounded like he spoke from personal experience.
“True,” Denise answered. “However, they didn’t want anyone but the participants and witnesses to learn about their ceremony, so a long recovery was out of the question. Also, the younger Focuses didn’t realize they could heal from damage that severe – at the time, the first Focuses kept that secret from everyone except their immediate friends and flunkies. What Patterson, Adkins and Schrum did was join hands as a group and heal her immense damage, so at the end of the ceremony, Focus Weiczokowski could walk out and join the Council meeting as if she’d never been hurt at all.”
“I see,” Chevalier said. Connie looked paler than normal. Hank recalled a few of Lori’s horror stories. Years ago, Lori had pushed the subject of the existence of male Major Transforms just a little too hard and Schrum and Patterson slapped her down. Among other things, they dropped far too much élan into Lori’s household juice buffer, which nearly killed her. Connie must have heard those stories as well.
“They ever do anything like that to you, Denise?” Connie said.
“Yes,” Denise said, whispering back. “I don’t want to talk about it, though.” Chevalier took Denise’s hand, and she smiled at him.
“In any event,” Denise said, “I knew it was possible for Focuses to heal others, despite the common wisdom on the subject. I just didn’t know how, or how much of what I saw was real, and how much was illusion.”
The room quieted, while all of them thought dark thoughts.
“We probably shouldn’t have given Focus Adkins to Focus Webb,” Connie said. Hank nodded in response. After seeing Adkins’ and Fingleman’s households take down Webb’s household, he was sure they shouldn’t have given Webb both of them. “Makes me wonder if Focus Adkins is at all salvageable, after participating in barbaric rites like that.”
“Am I salvageable?” Denise said. “I was there for that ‘rite’. In the breakout I did much worse.” Denise had confessed her misdeeds to Sadie and him, not too long ago. The two of them agreed it might be best not to pass the information about her past activities to the others. Denise hadn’t been a breakout leader, but she had been fighting for the lives of her Transforms as well as her own.
Sadie gasped, and Connie covered her mouth, eyes wide. Then the Inferno house president came over and hugged Denise. “Of this I have no doubts.” She stayed by Denise’s side, holding her close.
“There may be more to this than the obvious uses,” Rose said, sensing a good moment to interrupt. “I just had a thought about the Hunters and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of them. I’ve seen how well Nobles can heal, but consider this – what if the Hunters’ Pack Mistresses, with their access to élan in large quantities, can group-heal as well?”
“What are you suggesting, Arm Webberly?” Chevalier said, and then rubbed his chin in thought. “Ah, yes, it becomes clear. Heads and the Law, and some of the more disquieting reports from Chicago about the most recent conflict there. All a Pack Mistress needs to remake a Hunter is a head and some spare body parts to work with. Not even Chimera parts. Not even the Chimera’s élan. In most cases, the Hunter’s original mind and ego would go, of course, but with the Law as a scaffold…”
“Hours later out pops a Hunter, without having to wait for such delicacies as standard healing, training or civilizing,” Count Dowling said, a distant look in his eyes. “Obscene. Disss-gusting. Any chance we can pick up that technology?”
---
After the Major Transforms left, Hank sat in the impromptu lab he had set up here in the old nursing home – in the nurses’ office and clinic, of course – and ate his second lunch. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been this hungry before in his life.
Work was good, having Dowling rub his bald spot for good luck as the Count left the room was better, but to make his day, he could use some mundane companionship. Walk the grounds with Vera Bracken, for instance, talk about inconsequentials. Household gossip. Settle the horrors in his mind. It was really too bad Vera remained in Chicago.
He couldn’t help suspecting that he had somehow betrayed Keaton to Patterson long ago, when he first began helping her out. Or that until the assassination attempt, he had betrayed Carol’s secrets to Patterson as well.
Worse, he nurtured a creeping suspicion that he might have killed the Arms in his care at Patterson’s orders, and then ‘forgotten’ his actions. The one he suspected the most was Rose Desmond. That death shouldn’t have happened. It…
“Hi,” a quiet voice said. “Depressed again?”
He did a quick turn and found Focus Rizzari standing by his side. Petite, black hair, gymnast’s body, and stunning beauty. He took a deep breath and tried to quiet his suddenly fast beating heart. “You shouldn’t be showing yourself to me, Focus,” Hank said.
“You’re one of the few who’s going to know,” she said. “And my name’s Lori. Remember?” She had changed, enough to startle him into formality. She had grown her hair out up north, and wore designer clothing for once. He couldn’t not notice her current beauty. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes – despite everything else that had happened to him, she was his Focus.
“Sorry,” Hank said. “Old habits, still a new Transform.”
She gave him a quick hug and sat on a stool. “Quit that. I got to see that presentation you gave a little while ago. It’s really too bad your audience didn’t appreciate exactly how important that discovery is.”
“They looked rather appreciative to me.”
“They aren’t Pack Mistresses, which save for the inevitable need for new terminology, is what I am these days.”
“You’re doing juice music with élan now?” The last time he had any chance to talk with Lori for any length of time had been a month before the Pittsburgh conflict, before she mastered juice music. Lori’s extreme Focus capabilities always startled him when she hit him with something new she mastered on her own, without any of his input.
“Yes,” Lori said. “Only minor deviations were needed, and yes, when we have a bunch of free time, I’m going to let you do a full exam on me. My real problem is that I know I’m missing ninety-nine percent of the possible things I could be doing. You just showed me another.”
“Glad to be of some help. Where’s the rest of the crew? I assume they’re around somewhere,” Hank said. He really wouldn’t mind a long sit-down with Carol to quiet his anxieties and to spring some of his new ideas on her.
“Here and there. Carol’s down in San Diego to look at Focus Web
b and see if she can come up with a cute trick to help with that situation. Mizar – Beast, that is – is looking at the local Focus households and trying to make sense of them. Sky’s bending Crow ears in San Francisco. What the hell happened up in Seattle?”
“Damned if I know. All of a sudden, Haggerty and her crew got more closed mouthed than normal for about a week. Then they vanished off the face of the planet.”
“I mean Crows. Something happened, Crow political stuff, but the Crows aren’t talking,” Lori said. “We had Thomas the Dreamer, Merlin, Arpeggio and Arête up there, and one of them, Arête, was involved in the Crow end of the fracas in Pittsburgh, on the other side. Something important’s going on.”
More intense. Impossible to believe, but Lori was more intense than before. This wasn’t what Hank expected from the trip up north. “Chevalier was involved in Sinclair’s casting out as well, but he’s been cooperating with us. By the way, how in the hell are you able to mask yourself from both Crow Mentors and Arms at the same time?” Hank said.
“I got better,” Lori said, not showing the least bit of her usual embarrassment on the subject. “Much better. Wait until you get a look at Carol.”
Hank couldn’t stop a deep shiver. “Is she going to stop by? I have something important for her, something I’d rather tell her in person. You’re going to want in on it as well.” What he wanted to say was ‘What have you done with my Arm!’, but he controlled himself and kept that hidden inside.
“Something besides this and your superorganism work? You’ve been a busy man, Hank.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, and felt the hungry pull of Focus charisma to tell more. “I’m now an official juice junkie, alas. You want breakthroughs, keep me juiced. Pumped rather high, most of the time.”
“And when work time is over, the Focus takes you back to normal, and you get depressed. Dammit, Hank, you’re smarter than that. You know what sort of trap this is,” Lori said, grabbing his shoulders and staring into his eyes. “Hank, Hank, Hank… You’re burning yourself out.”
He shrugged. “Chevalier’s opinion is that I’m not going to last very long as a Transform,” Hank said, not a subject he was fond of talking about, but Lori deserved to know. Especially after her charisma prods. “Perhaps a year, perhaps two. Then I either figure out how to use juice healing to keep myself going or I go Commoner, some place where élan stabilization is built into the system.” At which point, I clean kitchens for the rest of my days, unless someone is able to fix the male commoner mental support issues, he didn’t say.
Nor did he mention the third option, which was dying.
Lori grabbed his hands and looked into his eyes. “I’m a Pack Mistress and I can support you without any IQ loss. You and two other male Transforms. Mizar’s family is coming at the Chimera household problem from a radically different direction, and we have radically different problems than the Nobles and Hunters. In specific, we don’t have the mistake problems. Instead, we have numbers problems. It’s not safe, though. We’re all warriors in our family, and you’re not.”
“I can shoot,” Hank said. He had always wanted to join a Chimera household, even as a normal, to get himself involved with the myriad Chimera household problems, one of the largest unresolved mysteries facing Transforms.
“Yes, but can you hit a target?” Lori punched his right arm and did something to his juice. “There. A mystery for Inferno to solve. Where did Hank get this really weird tag that Focuses can’t metasense unless they’re top-quality witches, but shines like a small sun to Crows and Chimeras?”
“Gee, thanks. What am I going to tell Count Dowling and Chevalier?”
“Dowling and Rose are going to be in on the secret, eventually, and depending on Sky’s report, Chevalier might be as well. Be patient.”
---
“Dumb move, old friend.” Hank’s eyes opened, but it wasn’t his eyes he saw with. He was back on the damned mound of corpses. The voice was the Madonna’s. She had been showing up in these special vivid dreams every few weeks since Pittsburgh. He never forgot a one of them.
“Which one?”
“Showing off the Focus healing techniques. Mimi is a fine person, but she’s a blabbermouth, and some of the people she confided in – in the Dreaming – decided to tell some other people who are in with the Hunter Pack Mistress crowd. Behind the tree where the light shows only in the afternoon it is still morning. They told Hecate, and now Hecate has you on her list, right there with Mimi and Denise. I’ve told Mimi dozens of times to lay off the intemperate conversations, but she’s irrepressible.”
“But our side needs those techniques!” What the hell did she mean about the tree?
“They need you alive far more than that.”
Not this again. “Can you lay off with this? I can’t come up with everything, and nothing can be as big as you’re implying.” And he was running out of time, unless Lori’s ideas panned out.
“Talk someday with Haggerty’s group. You’ll see what I’m hinting at. No one else will, though.”
Just great. The Madonna’s meddling was going to give him nightmares for weeks. “You ever talk with Madame Sophia?”
The Madonna’s distant voice laughed. “No, but sometimes I help her subconscious stack her tarot deck when she needs a little extra help.”
Unbelievable, simply unbelievable. They worked together. It really was a conspiracy.
Mizar (3/16/73)
“So, why am I here?” the tall man asked. Sky had borrowed him from this Inferno household they were supposed to not bother yet. Despite the fact they had all trooped through Inferno’s current physical residence several times.
The tall man wasn’t even a Transform. His orders, though, were to take this normal man seriously.
“I need to talk to you,” Mizar said. The tall man’s name was Van Schuber. Van was another one of Carol’s people, the estranged husband of Focus Gail Rickenbach. Carol seemed to have an immense collection of interesting people. Mizar didn’t understand how she managed it. “Gail and Carol both recommended it.”
Van shook his head. They sat in a coffee shop named Honey’s, a local chain that had a penchant for assuming you wanted honey on or in everything they might serve. Mizar didn’t mind. Pancakes with honey sounded good to him. “Sky told me who you are, sir.” He paused. “What’s on your mind?” Van was a tall man, at least for a normal, with a ponytail and small round glasses. Thin and wiry, not a fighter at all. According to Carol, he was a writer, a scholar, a PhD in History, and a crack diplomat.
“I’m looking for some insights into the local politics,” Mizar said.
“Well, the state governor is a former actor, Ronald Reagan,” Van said. “He’s serving his second term, re-elected in…”
Mizar shook his head and interrupted the young man. “Transform politics.”
“I can help you with that, sir, but I think ignoring normal politics is a mistake,” Van said. A waitress came by and slipped a cup of black coffee in front of Van. No milk, no sugar, and definitely no honey. The waitress’s eyes were vaguely glazed over, under the sway of Sky’s Crow illusions. “Because of the numbers, because the normals outnumber us by so much, Transform politics almost by definition follows normal politics. Save for in the old Confederacy States, most Transform households are allied with the local Democratic Party machines, or attempt to be. It’s not that they give active support, but they’re less hostile, and…”
“The local Transforms interact with normals?” Mizar was shocked. This didn’t meet his expectations at all. Or his desires. Normals weren’t to be trusted. They chased you and hunted you down like a wild animal.
Van nodded, now becoming a little panicked around the edges. His eyes frantically flickered across the coffee shop, looking for Sky. For help. Sky didn’t appear. Or say anything.
“We aren’t in hiding, and, yes, I do consider myself part of the Transform community,” Van said. “All Crows and most Focuses can metasense me as a normal livin
g in a Focus household.”
“As can I.” Mizar sighed. “So, the authorities aren’t hunting you down, you don’t live in secret from them, and you get along with them?”
“All but the last is true,” Van said. “Some authorities hate all the Transforms. I can’t say we’re a well-liked minority among the rest, but enough authorities have realized that Transform Sickness is unstoppable, and that they, and their children, will likely someday become Transforms. It’s forcing them to think on the subject. For good and for ill.”
“Regardless, the Hunters are coming,” Mizar said. “To help save the local Transforms, I need to know more about the Focuses and their allegiances. I haven’t been able to make any sense of their politics, unlike what I was able to do in Chicago.”
Van smiled. “Yes, sir.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and then rattled off a long list of California Focuses, both the local ones Mizar had already observed, and those in other parts of the State he hadn’t gotten to, yet. Mizar wasn’t yet familiar with the local region names or even some of the city names, but they were at least interesting. Some were, though, not obvious at all. What, pray tell, was the ‘Inland Empire’, anyway?
Far too many of the Focuses didn’t get along with each other, and Van was quite thorough about his analysis, pinning most of the issues dividing the Focuses as personal differences. Mizar smelled hidden faction politics at play, though.
“Given what the Hunters did in Calgary and Chicago, I believe we do need to worry about what the Hunters might do to the normals, and their reaction,” Van said. “Our food, our jobs, our ability to live out reasonable lives all come from the normal community, sir.”
Mizar snorted. “Losing normal civilization and starting over would be a good thing,” he said. “This place is foul. The people are nasty. The air stinks. It’s too noisy, and the car traffic is atrocious.” His family flew here on a private jet airplane, one Carol hired using some of her many obscure contacts. That had been exciting, but the endless slow car travel afterwards hadn’t been. “Even if the Cause saves three quarters of the populace from this ‘Transform Apocalypse’ thing, it’s still a good opportunity to start over.”
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 18
