“You tell me,” I said. The only thing that mattered to me was the problem that opened me up to her torture. “She didn’t like the fact Lori’s broken with me. She thinks I should have solved the Biggioni problem already. She didn’t agree with my assessment that the Crow petty cash bin could come out of the research project funds. She’s pissed I’m keeping tabs on Focus Rickenbach in Detroit. And she doesn’t believe the Hunters have the kidnapped Clinic Focus, and she tried to torture out of me where I was keeping this Focus, how I supposedly kidnapped her, and why.” I paused and took a deep breath. “During this last bit of insanity, and because of my, well, impolitic and intemperate responses to her crazy assertions, she dropped my tag and gave me the time limit.” And did the fishhook suspension trick that left my cheeks three times their normal size and my throat raw broken glass from the screaming. She had already broken my hands.
Hank took off his glasses and rubbed them on his nightshirt. “Ma’am, I suddenly suspect something very bad,” he said. He certainly did, I read in him. “If I may ask, when did Keaton tell you to present your research to her?”
“In my visit last month.”
“Which you already said was tense, because in your analysis Keaton had somehow figured out about Tom’s existence before you told her.”
“Uh huh. Where are you going with this?”
“Ma’am, everything involved here except the last bit about the Clinic Focus could be explained by someone getting into my private files at some point in time during the last half of September, and feeding the information to Keaton. In specific, the only person who knew about that last bit of bad juice inside you was me, and nobody but the two of us knew about my speculation about the effect of this bad juice on your composition skills. I kept this only in my private notes, the ones I keep in my safe when I leave work.”
Low juice left my mind slow, but I figured out his point eventually. “Biggioni.” She had never responded after I broke into her office or even after Crow Shadow called her about the sequestered espionage. Other than a polite note I had sent mid-October to demand her surrender, and her polite refusal, there had been nothing. “Dammit, I thought I was the devious one.”
I had a bad case of ‘she had me’ right then and there. What could I do? My next month was booked with this research project crap, if I wanted my tag back. Which I did, thank you very much. Damn the fucking bitch! If I survived the next few weeks, the witch was going to pay. Biggioni had taken me apart after the FBI turned me over to the CDC, and she was taking my life apart in Houston. Nothing she had done so far, save one letter, was at all direct: according to my Crows she had found a way to drive a wedge between Lori and I, according to Zielinski she had set me up with Keaton, and I would bet my next two juice kills she was behind whatever insane rumors were floating around about my grabbing the Chicago clinic Focus. “So, if I’m going to help you on this, ma’am, I’ll need to know what the subject of this research effort is,” Hank said, carefully and casually changing the subject.
I didn’t want to get into the details now, but given the time constraints involved, I had no choice. “It’s a paper about controlling people as an Arm. How to recruit them, and how to keep control of them once you have them, all based on the extensive recruiting I do. Keaton, it turns out, can’t do it.”
Zielinski smiled. The bastard had figured it out already. “Have you caught on to the tag-pulling trick? The tag-pulling trick needs to go into your paper. Arm Tags are two way, even for normals.”
I glared at him but he didn’t back down.
He was the loosest held of any of my people, the only one I trusted out of my sight for more than a few days. Strong willed Focuses and Arms had been yanking him around for over a decade and he hadn’t folded yet. Hell, he was the only one of my people who still had his own agenda and who regularly kept secrets from me. He had me as much as I had him, and I loved him for it. He could probably write the damned PhD dissertation we were talking about in his sleep, though it would be useless to Keaton, coming from the perspective of a normal.
Tom shifted beside me, uneasy. I hadn’t forgotten about him and I hadn’t failed to consider the effect my words would have on him. Even low on juice and tortured halfway to insanity, I never made mistakes like that.
I sat up to face Tom, careful of my hands. This would be hard for him to deal with, but I planned to take him into my confidence. He would need to understand things like this. Now was as good a time as any to start.
A look at his face told me he had figured a few things out.
“I’m exhibit A in your paper, aren’t I?” Obvious, if you had the right sort of mind, and he did. I nodded at him, and he pulled away from me.
“I’m not sure I like this Keaton character knowing so much about me,” Tom said. He looked at me with the unhappy gaze of someone who’s just found out that he’s a pawn on someone else’s chess board. He had been in the Army for twenty years, though. He had been in this position before.
Tom laid his head back against the wall and thought.
“How dangerous is Keaton, really?” he said. The second obvious point.
I shook my head. “You can’t even imagine.”
He didn’t look convinced. There wasn’t enough information in my statement. I rested my elbows on my knees, trying to come up with some way to explain.
“You’re thinking of taking her on, aren’t you?” I said. “You’re thinking you and I and some of the other folks could take her on, and then I wouldn’t have to take this sort of shit from her.”
He shrugged in admission. “It’s a thought.” Over in his chair, Hank snorted, dismissive. He and Keaton went waaaay back. He had shown me his scars.
Tom gave Hank the ‘you pussy’ look. Hank gave Tom the ‘you tenderfoot’ look. They battled wills, silent alpha male style, while I thought some more, trying to come up with a way to explain this to Tom.
“You’ve been in the Army,” I said. “Do you ever get new recruits who want to pick fights way out of their league? They don’t like the way something is done in the Army, so they want to change things. Get into arguments with officers. That sort of thing?”
He smiled, sardonically. “It happens. Generally not for long. The Army has a way of straightening out that sort of nonsense.”
I nodded. “So does Keaton. But I don’t think you’d survive it.”
He leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest.
“So you’re saying that I’m playing out of my league.”
“No, I’m saying that I’m playing out of my league. You’re not even playing the same sport.”
He looked unhappy. “So why in the world do you want her tag back?”
“If I play the game right, she’s the ultimate fairy godmother,” I said. “Hank’s funding comes from her. So does the funding for the non-Houston recruiting I’m doing. All those boxes of pointless information we send her? She and Haggerty, the baby Arm, boil it down into those wonderful red-titled reports I’ve shown you. Half of those strange well-paying out of town jobs that we do come through Keaton, who distributes them to me when she’s not interested in yet another obscure Focus Network job. Every contact I have for cut-rate weapons came from her. And she’s the one who taught me how to rob banks, not attract attention, and live through the process.”
“Ma’am,” Tom said, trying again with more questions. I raised up a bandaged hand and stopped him. He didn’t think what I was getting was worth the pain.
He was wrong. Surviving solo was nearly impossible, as I had discovered so painfully in the CDC. The sort of help Keaton gave easily meant the difference between sane survival and some dark descent into withdrawal or death.
“Shh,” I said. “I’ll answer.” I lowered the hand to my chest, and tried futilely to find a position that didn’t hurt. The muscles of my hands ached with immobility.
“You want to know three things, don’t you? Why she’s dangerous, what hold she has over me, and what the history is that explains what’s happening
now. Right?”
“That about covers it,” he said. He relaxed a little because I understood what he was asking for.
I sighed. “She’s rich. I don’t know how much, but plenty. Multiple millions. She plays patty cake with at least two Focuses who sit on the Focus Council, including Biggioni, and I’m fairly sure that Keaton’s got a good handle on the situation. She’s secretive. Even after all these years, I know little about her, and she knows everything about me. She keeps secrets as a reflex and lies routinely. She’s competent at controlling people. She has at least two significant organizations in different parts of the country. Although I’ve only met one of her people, she knows every one of my people and knows how to get hold of them. She’s made it clear on a couple of occasions that my people are hostage to my good behavior.”
Tom nodded, and looked unhappy. “I’m sorry, Tom,” I said, gently. “She’s my boss because she’s better at being an Arm than I am. There are things that you can do to increase your chances of surviving Keaton, and you need to know what they are. Hank can fill you in. He’s the normal expert at surviving Keaton.”
Tom frowned, now concerned about his own safety. He wasn’t some young kid any more, confident in his own immortality. Danger was real to him and he didn’t like it much.
“There’s more,” I said. “She’s a survivor. The post-transformation mortality rate for young Arms is just shy of 70% right now, and Keaton is the only one who figured out how to survive, and she did so on her own. She’s capable of things that are utterly inconceivable, such as surviving being jumped by two Hunters when she was out with post-kill reaction; she killed one of them and drove the other off.”
“Oh, hell,” Tom said, finally starting to get an idea of Keaton.
“She’s a lot stronger than I am, fights better than I do, she’s more experienced than I am, she has tricks nobody knows of until she uses them in combat, and she knows me much better than I know her. Oh, and she’s a sadistic maniac who gets off on torture and murder, plus she occasionally suffers psychotic breaks where she goes on mindless berserker killing sprees.”
Tom sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I had gotten through to him. There was a chill in the room, Keaton’s cold from a hundred miles away.
I shifted restlessly again. I still couldn’t find a position to ease the ache in my hands, and I was itching to hunt. We were quiet for a few minutes.
“Ma’am,” Zielinski said, showing tension, which was rare for him. “One other thing.”
“Yes?”
“The reading I gave you from my little portable juice meter was after I subtracted out the extra point of bad sludge dross you still carry. Since you’re so close to the line anyway, this might be a good time to try and burn off that last bit of bad stuff.”
“What about a trigger?”
Hank took a deep breath. “Burn it off healing, right in front of the Transform. When you feel yourself going over the edge into withdrawal, then…”
“Then kill. Still hard for you to say, eh, Hank?” Cruel me. He raised an eyebrow.
“Occasionally.” Silence. There wasn’t much more to be said on that subject.
I would do it. I had never had the incentive before, and the idea terrified me, but the thought of what Keaton put me through in that far too long night, showing me all her new torture techniques and tricks, had put the fear of God into me like nothing had ever done before. “It’s almost 5:30, now, right?” I said. Hank checked his watch and nodded.
“Let’s get on the road,” I said. “You two can trade off sleeping in the car. We’ve been in this dump long enough. I’ll fill you in further as we go.”
Hank looked tired, and Tom groaned, but they moved. They wanted out of here as well.
We hit Houston three days later, and made straight for Zielinski’s office. I had found a kill in El Paso on the second day, and managed to hold my temper and my control long enough for Tom and Hank to come up with a kill scenario that didn’t involve the deaths of any innocent bystanders. I had agreed with Hank’s suggestion about burning my juice down to withdrawal, and the trick worked. This was the absolute strangest feeling I had had since I became an Arm, because it felt like burning juice that wasn’t there. The bad stuff was less efficient than normal – I didn’t get anywhere near the amount of healing a point of supplemental juice normally provided. I’m fairly sure I didn’t get even a tenth of a point into my fundamental juice before my control gave and my instincts took over. Voluntarily burning fundamental juice is so painful that you can’t mistake what you’re doing. A little piece of withdrawal for me to jog my memory with.
I didn’t get a chance to play Rogue Arm and cause mayhem and mindless destruction, as my instincts demanded of me. Instead, I started abusing Ila, Frances and Zielinski all day and night as I put together my faux PhD dissertation. I knew I did exactly as Biggioni wanted. I didn’t see any other choice.
I was, however, fucking tired of Biggioni winning.
Chapter 8
The non-aggressive nature of the Crow goes hand in hand with his absurd abhorrence to having others push him around.
“The Life of Crows”
Viscount Robert Sellers: November 3, 1968
When the Nobles, Master Occum and the Commoners left the camp, leaving him behind, Sellers told himself this was all part of the ruse. His plan. He hurt anyway, the cold, lonely feeling of abandonment.
Messing with the juice this way wasn’t safe, he knew. Master Occum had assured him that as a mature Noble, he had a little time before the loss of his connection to the household cost him his humanity. The drumming remained in his mind. He could function despite his lower than normal juice, necessary to convince the dragon Monster of his vulnerability. He would regenerate the lost blood, now spread liberally around the former camp.
He faked the limp. There was only so far he was willing to press this charade, and when they sprung the trap on the Monster, he would need every physical advantage he could muster.
They had convinced Master Occum that the Dragon did indeed possess a metasense, though what variety they had no idea. Sir Dowling believed it was unique to the Monster, or at least unlike any other metasense any other Monsters might have, based on his reading on the subject. His theory was that this Monster’s metasense range was, yes, around three miles, and tuned to the Monster’s likely competition – creatures possessing élan. Which all the Nobles possessed, of course.
Sellers remained curled at the foot of a stunted pine when, an hour and a half after the household’s departure, the dragon Monster started her slow approach. He waited until the Monster was visible before he rose to his feet in apparent surprise, feigning the loss of his own metasense.
To his disgust, the Monster had grown back the mouth tendrils he had bitten off. When she saw and smelled his condition, she charged, thinking him easy meat. As any predator would.
Sellers took the brief second of his supposed surprise to take in her physical appearance as she thundered her massive way toward him. He hadn’t noticed before, but her eyes were vastly non-human, fist sized red lizard eyes filled with gold and green specks, her pupils vertical slits. Given the shape of her skull and brain case, significantly narrower than a human’s and far longer, there could be nothing remotely human left inside her mind. Master Occum was right. Even Suzie, a fully mature Monster when they captured her, had more humanity left in her, had more of a human brain inside. She had remembered she had once been human. She had retained the ability to understand several dozen words. She wasn’t a special case, according to Focus Queen Rizzari; well over half of the older Monsters she had autopsied had brains within spitting distance of the shape and form of their old human brains. She and Master Occum believed that in time that Crow Masters would be able to bring all such older Monsters back.
Nobody would ever be able to bring this old Monster back, though.
Sellers ran through the trees, limping, making sure the Monster noted the faux wounds on his lower tors
o and back right leg. He was the straggler, the one the herd left behind. The easy target for any predator, the way of all nature. The faux wounds were his new trick, his own idea based off Suzie’s suggestion. A Chimera’s ability to change shape wasn’t limited to set human and beast forms. There were all sorts of possibilities, and if he was careful to keep away from his head, a Chimera could play with all sorts of strange shape changes and keep his mind and humanity. No, he didn’t really have so bad a gaping wound in his abdomen that his intestines hung out. It just looked that way. He had grown some ‘extras’.
He needed the faux wounds to make the other changes he had made to his shape believable. No way could he run as fast as normal, with his other changes.
The Monster made no sound as she slowed her charge to a walk, hindered by the effort of navigating through the trees and the bulk of her huge self. Sellers took a path away from the household, and stopped running three quarters of a mile from the dragon Monster. She followed, stalking him, and charged for a second time a half hour later.
Sellers ran again, this time slower, this time letting the dragon Monster charge up to twenty feet from him before she exhausted herself. He ‘collapsed’ several hundred feet farther, and when the dragon Monster moved toward him, at a walk, he limped away, matching her speed…and turning back toward the path the household took, along the top of one of the narrow gravel hills that Master Occum called eskers.
The dragon Monster stopped a half mile from the foot of the esker. Sellers cursed, thinking furiously about what to do. Being prey was unfamiliar to him. He was always the predator, always the one on the stalk. What would prey do? He couldn’t charge back, his instinctive response.
Well, shunned by the herd, wounded, and without a metasense, he might not know about the household’s path until he got too close, and it might spook him. He might panic and do something stupid, such as moving back and forth, instead of away from the dragon Monster. He had stalked prey that panicked when they got boxed in.
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 21
