In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6)

by Randall Farmer

  They had failed.

  ---

  “So, what, are you going to challenge me over this?” Hoskins said, disgusted and grumpy. He gnawed on a haunch of moose, hunted down by Pam, Suzie and Sir Dowling, and followed the hunk of muscle with a thick slab of belly fat. After they slowly dragged themselves back to the camp, everyone turned despondent over their second failure. Master Occum started to mutter and grumble about having to move the camp to a more defensible location than this random pit stop in the north woods. He expected Monster problems, soon. The dragon Monster continued to hunt them, moving and waiting.

  “No,” Sellers said, though the thought of a challenge did warm his heart. He had come out of the fight less wounded than the Duke, who had already molted his greater claw, his way of healing his upper body. The replacement, formed from the interior of the old claw, glistened in the moonlight, soft and fresh. There would be no more fighting until the new molt hardened. “What I want is my full title.”

  Earl, that is. Viscount meant ‘heir of an Earl’, dropped on him because of the still existing flaws in his man-form. The criticism made him want to snarl. Ear lobes. All because the angle his ears made with the side of his head remained doggy, with nothing resembling an ear lobe.

  Hoskins tore off a strip of moose flesh and swallowed it whole, hide included. “If your plan works, you’re an Earl,” Hoskins said. “You get to be the bait, though.”

  Carol Hancock: November 2, 1968 – November 5, 1968

  I huddled in the bottom of the phone booth and listened to the ring echo through the receiver, the receiver swinging freely at the end of its cord. With my mangled hands, I couldn’t hold anything. I had to dial with my tongue. I was in deep deep shit again; Keaton had tortured me for the first time since I was her student in Philadelphia.

  Answer, dammit, I wished at the phone. Answer, answer, answer! Outside the phone booth, the first edges of the sun peeked above the horizon. The phone rang again. Still no answer. I shivered, and wanted to scream with frustration.

  “Hello?” Tom. I leaned back against the glass wall of the booth with a gasp of relief.

  “Tom, it’s me.” I adjusted my voice to force some semblance of my normal tone. A quaver in my voice remained, beyond my control. I couldn’t control much right then. I wanted to cry with relief just to hear his voice.

  “Boss, you sound terrible,” he said, puzzled and uneasy.

  “I need you to pick me up,” I said. “I’m outside the San Jose International Airport, but I can’t fly. Get here as fast as you can.”

  “Ma’am, what’s wrong?” His voice sounded harder and more competent now. He recognized an emergency.

  “Just get here. Bring Zielinski with you. Tell him…” Oh, hell, my voice was shaking. I started again. “Tell him this was a bad one. He needs to bring supplies for setting bones.” I told Tom to rent a car, and gave him directions to my exact location.

  “Got it.”

  “Good.” I thought of another thing. “Whatever you do, don’t go into San Francisco. Just get here. Hurry.”

  The day was absolute hell. I spent it curled in a field behind a gravel yard, praying no one would notice me, thinking of all the instructions I should have given and forgot about. The pain was miserable and I had to work to avoid burning juice to ease the pain.

  No food. A day without food is enough to make me groggy and lightheaded, and I was. I had burned juice during Keaton’s all night torture. Damaged and low on juice, I couldn’t fight off the cold, which left me freezing in the not especially cold November rain.

  Tom and Hank pulled behind the now-closed gravel yard in a rented Oldsmobile a little after nine. I came toward them as soon as I spotted them in the car, staggering with weakness. Tom pulled the car to a halt that threw stray bits of gravel into the air.

  “Carol!” Hank said, as he rushed from the passenger side even before the car stopped. He couldn’t see me for the mud and the dark.

  “Get me out of here,” I said, my voice hoarse. “South to Los Angeles, and east on I 10.” Hank bundled me into the back seat of the car and Tom pulled away as Hank shut the front car door. As soon as we got out of San Jose I let myself collapse. I hated being this vulnerable around anyone, but these were my own people. This was why I had them.

  “Ma’am, I brought some candy bars with me. Are you hungry?” Zielinski said. Damn, he brought food! I was ravenous. For foresight like this, I promised myself I would spend hours with him as a test subject for his research.

  “Yes,” I said. Usually, I would have smelled the food, but my nose wasn’t working well now. Hank rooted around in his bag and leaned over the seat with a Hershey bar in his hand.

  “Here. There’s a few more if you want them. Also, I brought a bottle of apple juice.”

  The first food he gave me as an Arm had been orange juice. The symmetry brought tears to my eyes. Right now, I understood to the bottom of my soul how, from his perspective, he owned me. I had no complaints on that score right now. This ownership felt proper, despite being intellectually and absurdly non-Arm. “Yes, I want all of it. But you’re going to have to feed it to me.”

  Hank looked down at my hands, but it was too dark for him to see them. He frowned.

  “Could someone fill me in on what’s going on here?” Tom said, in a carefully controlled voice.

  “Later,” Zielinski said. “Ma’am, I hate to ask, but how much juice trouble are you in right now?”

  His words brought on my juice monkey, my vision narrowing and my metasense extending futilely out, searching for a kill, or even a juice trace.

  “Real bad trouble,” I said, slowly. “That’s the next thing on the list after you patch me up. Now shut the fuck up for a while and find us a place to spend the night.”

  It was after 10 PM before we pulled into the Sunset Motel, outside of Salinas, hourly rates available. Neon lights cast rainbow shadows into the car as we passed a couple of underfed hookers on the way into a run-down parking lot filled with expensive cars and two big rigs. We paused for a brief discussion, where Tom explained to Hank that Hank had to be the one to check us in. Most likely the motel wouldn’t make trouble about a black man, but Tom didn’t want to take chances.

  The room itself was a cheap plastic affair, with a sticky carpet and rubber sheets, and furniture made of plywood. I swore viciously when Hank bumped my hands as he helped me into the room. He led me directly to the bathroom. Tom stalked around as if he was ready to kill something. The food and drink left me in much better shape, the benefit of being an older Arm. Young Carol, well, young Carol would have been in a healing coma and, thus, baggage.

  “Ma’am, we’ve got to get you cleaned up before I can do anything for you.” I was covered in mud and blood and little stalks of long dead weeds, and he had seen enough of my hands to know they were useless.

  “Fine,” I said. The movement brought the pain back and I snarled like a wounded beast. “Just do what you need to do.” With the pain and the low juice, I wanted to kill someone. Badly.

  Zielinski took a breath. “All right, brace yourself, ma’am. Here goes.” He started cutting off my clothes, efficiently and quickly and he joggled every wound there was to joggle as he did so. I swore a steady stream of blistering invective. Outside, Tom paced and swore as well, frustrated at the lack of room in the tiny bathroom.

  After my clothes were off and discarded, I got in the shower, and the shower hurt like hell, too. Once I was as clean as falling water could make me, Hank helped me out to the room, to the big bed with its rubber sheets, where I collapsed with a gasp.

  Tom got his first good look at me when I came out of the bathroom. He stopped, frozen.

  “Holy fuck,” he said, a soft and heartfelt whisper. “What the hell happened?”

  I didn’t answer. Tom turned to Hank.

  “Somebody did this to her. Dammit, that’s intestine there, and bones! What the hell is going on here?”

  Hank looked from me to Tom, his expressio
n sad.

  “Answer me, damn it!” Tom said. “You know who did this to her.”

  “Keaton,” Hank said, after a long pause, and with a grimace. “Stacy Keaton did this.”

  Tom put his hand to his forehead and rubbed as he stalked back and forth in the room. “We need to do something about her,” he said. “But first, you fix Carol up as best you can.”

  Stupid talk. Tom knew a little bit about Stacy Keaton, but he didn’t have any idea about the dangers of opposing her. I didn’t have time to explain now. He also wasn’t Hank’s boss, but Hank wouldn’t fight Tom for telling him what he would be doing anyway, so he ignored him. Instead, Hank poked and prodded and checked me, while Tom paced and simmered and I tried not to scream.

  “What are those things in your cheeks?” Hank said, several minutes later.

  “Straightened out fishhooks.” My voice was thin with pain.

  He ran his hand over his toupee, trying not to admire Keaton’s inventiveness. “I stitched up your abdomen, no problem there, and none of your ribs were broken. The fishhooks and the hands are going to be the big problems. I can cut the fishhooks out, but I have a mild preference for leaving them in, ma’am, so your body can eject them over the next several days as your cheeks readjust. If you’d like, I can clip them close to the skin so they aren’t bumped as easily, and then you can let your body do its work.”

  “Fine, we’ll do that.”

  “The hands are my priority, ma’am. Most of the bones are broken, and some of them started to knit and will need to be re-broken before I can set them properly. Worse, I’m not going to be able to set all the bones. There are too many of them. The best I can offer is to open up your fists and shape your hands into as normal a shape as I can manage. Then I’ll splint them for the trip home and plaster them later and we’ll let them heal as they are. The hands should be partially functional when the casts come off, and the bones will realign into their correct positions over time, if we can get them close to start with.”

  I nodded, grim. “If that’s what we need to do, that’s what we’ll do.” During my day in the mud and rain, all I had thought about was amputation. Getting my hands fixed? Impossible.

  Hank did his impossible work, painfully and expertly, over the next several hours.

  Outside, a car door slammed and a car started up, with the roar of an engine with enough horsepower to fuel the car and its owner’s ego, both. The tires squealed as it exited the lot. Hank snored, restless in the chair beside the bed. He shifted, and turned his head to the side, fitfully asleep. Tom lay more quietly, and more deeply asleep, warm against my side. My own eyes ached and drooped. I wouldn’t sleep tonight. Too many people, too close. Too much pain and too much juice monkey. Too much recovery. I thought about chasing Tom out of my bed, but I doubted being alone would help, and I found something comforting about having my people close to me when I was weak. Instead, my mind went over and over what happened to me, trying to figure out why, any reason, for Keaton’s over-the-top reaction. This wasn’t a psychotic break; the bitch had been high on juice. The only thing I understood was the trigger, the opening for what should have been far milder punishment.

  “Hank,” I said, a whispered desire for a distraction. Zielinski shifted and made grumbling sleepy noises, but he lifted his head and looked at me blearily. Beside me, Tom’s eyes opened, awake also.

  “Hmph?”

  “I have a little problem that maybe you can help with,” I said.

  Hank shook his head and attempted to wake up.

  “What kind of problem?” His voice was hoarse with sleep, and he coughed to clear his throat. Outside, another car pulled into the lot. I heard car doors slam, and the low voices of negotiation.

  “Before I broke you out of stir, Keaton assigned me a research project. I’ve been working on it ever since, but when I tried to present my results, it didn’t go over well,” I said.

  Zielinski looked down at my hands, and then to the rest of me. “This kind of ‘not go over well’?”

  “Yes, this kind of not go over well.” Growl.

  Beside me, Tom groaned and put his arm over his eyes. “She tortured you because she didn’t like the results of a research project?”

  “That and half a dozen other things I’m trying to sort out.”

  “Dammit, the Arm tag was supposed to prevent this sort of nonsense,” Zielinski said.

  “The research project was my personal failure, the opening that let her do this to me.” I paused. “She didn’t drop my tag until later, when she couldn’t torture the answers she wanted out of me.”

  Zielinski froze when I mentioned the dropped tag. “Ma’am, we’re in big trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Fuck yes,” I said. “You’re working for Rogue Arm now. We’ve got until December 1st to fix this, or she’s going to hunt us all down and kill us like rabid dogs.”

  Tom pulled himself up to lean against the headboard, muttering obscenities. Even so, he didn’t understand how bad off we were. Zielinski ran his hand through his toupee, and I felt his knowledgeable disquiet and near-fear through his tag. “Sounds like a clear priority, then. Ma’am, back to this research project. Did she object to the results or the presentation?”

  “The presentation,” I said.

  “So what was the presentation?”

  “Fifty typed pages.”

  “Any particular format?”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand him, but from his comment I suspected he might be thinking along the same lines as Keaton had, when Keaton complained of fifty pages of random maunderings.

  Hank sat up, more awake now. “For instance, was there a table of contents? Was your report divided up into sections with headers, or was it a continuous stream of writing, such as you would find in a novel.”

  I winced, seeing the problem for the first time. One of my more intractable problems caused by my withdrawal was my composition skills. Since I didn’t have much call for my old College-level composition abilities, recovery to my former level of expertise had fallen into the great round tuit hole. “This was more of the novel style. Written by a distracted adolescent who had ten other assignments to complete.” I had tried to assuage Keaton’s predicted ire with quantity, not quality. For which I had paid in blood and pain. If that was the real problem. Her reaction still felt over-done. Since she had never before called on me to provide her with any such project results, how was I to know what she wanted?

  Just saying…

  Hank nodded and his face flushed. He knew what the problem was, and considered himself at least partially responsible. “So what do you think she’s looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “Something better.”

  Hank leaned back and thought for a moment, and got a twinkle in his eye.

  Oh, this was just great.

  “This research you’re working on, would you say that you were gathering results from work other people have done, or were you figuring out something new?”

  “New,” I said.

  The twinkle in his eye got brighter and I saw a hint of a smile.

  “You were working on this for six months, you said. At Arm speed. Is it fair to assume you collected a significant amount of material?”

  I nodded.

  “And have you done any research on what other people have done in this area also?”

  “Yes,” I said. His smug glow of secret knowledge began to irritate me.

  He smiled, broadly. I forgot my irritation, because I sensed he thought he had a solution.

  “So what if you gave her a much better organized paper? With footnoted references to the other work on the subject? Documenting your own experiments and results, giving conclusions? And identifying areas for further research?”

  I nodded. “That sounds better.”

  “Is she going to want you to justify your results?” he asked. “Walk you through the paper while she tries to find weak spots and flaws in your work?”
/>   “Yes.” With Keaton, it would be a full interrogation. “You’re sitting on something. Out with it.”

  He looked at me and steepled his fingers. “What I described is a classic style of presentation, for people who are doing ground-breaking research. It’s done all the time, and the format and the practice are well developed.”

  I raised an eyebrow. He smiled.

  “It’s called a PhD dissertation. Complete with oral exam.”

  “What?” I said, sitting up in surprise. The sudden movement jolted my hands and left me gasping for a moment as the pain ran through me. I pushed the pain away. “A PhD dissertation? How the hell am I supposed to do a PhD dissertation in one month? I never even finished college. My composition skills sort of atrophied, if you recall.”

  Hank shrugged and didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. If Keaton wanted a PhD dissertation, little details like my lack of higher education wouldn’t bother her a bit. I either did the work or became Rogue Arm with a vengeance.

  “Fuck,” I said. Again. I had thought, before, that I had a difficult problem, not an impossible one.

  “I have a few examples back home and I can get more for you to look at. You can decide if this is what Keaton is looking for. If so, though, I can help you. You wouldn’t be the first graduate student I’ve advised. Working in Arm time, with your capabilities, you should be able to properly collate and synthesize your existing research and complete your work within a month.”

  I lay back down on the bed, careful of my hands, and thought. This did sound like the sort of thing Keaton wanted. I bet Hank made a hell of a good dissertation advisor, as well.

  “You mentioned some other issues, ma’am?” Hank said. “Is there anything in there we need to worry about?”