“We never planned to have children. It doesn’t matter.”
Gail laid her head down on the bed again, still stunned. She thought Van wasn’t interested in marriage, that living together would be enough for him. Certainly not now that she was a Focus, a juice-bound bitch from hell.
She thought living together was enough for her. Until Van proposed. Now her heart fluttered, and she found it difficult to breathe.
“Yes,” she said, tears gathering at the edges of her eyes. “Yes.”
Carol Hancock: December 1, 1968
I approached Keaton’s door with a curious mixture of terror and triumph in my heart. Terror, because if things went bad I wouldn’t likely be leaving this place a free Arm, if I left at all. Triumph, because despite the fact I disobeyed Keaton’s orders with wild disregard, I had done the impossible.
The big question was: how much did Keaton know about my actions in Chicago? Once upon a time, I thought she had me under constant surveillance and my organization completely infiltrated. Her tortured insistence that I had kidnapped Focus Frasier blasted my supposition into dust. I had no doubt she had at least some of my operation infiltrated, though.
I knocked and waited. Eventually, Haggerty roused herself from the library and let me in. She looked worn and exhausted, not from Keaton’s ministrations but from overwork.
“Ma’am, come in,” Haggerty said. Pause. “Would you like some help with your materials?” She was still working with a canned script as far as her interactions with me. Her mind wasn’t here; she had some insanely complex project in progress and the going looked tough.
“Yes, please, Student,” I said, archly polite. I sensed a bit of anger hidden in her at the word ‘Student’, though. Yup, nearly graduation time for this Arm. Her all-consuming project had to be her graduation exercise. I could sympathize if I exerted myself, but I had bigger problems. Like, my fucking life on the line.
That little emotion I buried.
Haggerty and I toted my presentation and attendant documentation into Keaton’s living room, where I waited. And waited. And waited. Keaton was on the phone, and although I couldn’t make out the words I sensed her emotions, a roller coaster of anger, lust, greed, and friction, all cycling around and around, Ferris wheel fashion. She had to be talking to a Focus. I sympathized, well, as much as I could without a tag.
Keaton appeared two and a half hours later, glared at me, and sank in her throne-like easy chair. I read her as low on juice, and she carried scars on her left arm and lower right leg, which I dated as from within the last two days. This wasn’t good.
“What the fuck is this?” she said, after she glanced at my presentation setup. I will admit, based on her orders, my display-board title: ‘Focus Biggioni’s Disinformation Campaign and its Consequences’, or the blown-up picture montage of Focus Frasier in captivity, Odin’s pack before they charged, and Wandering Shade’s demon bear illusion had to be mind-blowing, if not insulting.
“I am, right now, not a tagged underling of yours,” I said. Keaton sprang to her feet and readied a charge. I responded by turning on the tape recorder, playing Geraldine Caruthers’ description of our espionage mission.
Keaton listened to the first 90 seconds of the Caruthers monolog before rushing me in a full Keatonic rage. I didn’t flinch when she held a knife to my throat and growled. She didn’t understand my game, but I did have her off balance.
Which was what I was doing.
“On September 16th of this year, operatives hired by Focus Tonya Biggioni broke into Zielinski’s office, cracked his safe without a trace, and photographed the documents, including his current personal journal,” I said. “From this Tonya learned about my last point of embedded sludge dross and Hank’s opinion of its effect on me: that my composition skills had atrophied, stuck at pre-High School levels. She also learned about my unfinished recruitment of Tom Delacort, the Crow ‘cash bin’ project that was at the time not yet fully implemented, the fact I hadn’t done any investigation of the kidnapping of Focus Frasier of Chicago, and Hank’s own observations about an episode that occurred just after he’d been removed from the Addison Penitentiary, where Sky maneuvered me into raping him to quiet me down. Using this information, she fed you and Lori slanted information about my activities, some of which were total fabrications. I would like the time to present a detailed and full accounting of these events in the context of Focus Biggioni’s misinformation campaign and what I’ve done to rectify the situation.”
Drops of blood dripped down my neck as Carruthers’ voice droned on in the background. Keaton’s face bored into my eyes. I read her anger, not as easily as when she held my tag, and because she no longer held my tag I wasn’t able to read anything else about her. Today I was her equal. I challenged her, in her territory, in her home, because two Arms can’t be equals. Soon, one of us would be the boss of the other. The odds strongly favored Keaton.
What, though, did Keaton want? Did she want me tagged again? Would she need to establish her dominance the hard way? I had given a lot of thought to the events of the first tagging. I had physically challenged her, back then, and won, or so I thought. Instead, she beat me psychologically, forcing her will upon me with ease. Thus, and yes I hate the word ‘thus’, there were far more aspects to Arm dominance contests, in the context of tagging, than raw fighting skills, and under many circumstances the non-combat aspects of Arm dominance would prove to be more important than the combat aspects.
What I said to Keaton with my preamble, at its most bald emotional level, was: “You’ve been played, loser.” She could deny reality and try to fight me physically, but the ‘denying reality’ part would weaken her. I felt stronger because I knew Biggioni had played her. If Keaton slipped up, she would come out of this wearing my tag.
I would really like that.
On the other hand, she had just tortured me into imbecility a mere month ago. What such torture does to an Arm mind can’t be described in words, and I hadn’t fully recovered. Suffice it to say the torture session was my weakness and Keaton’s strength. If she found a way to conjure up anything, even the smallest moment, from the torture session and link my current psychological state to what I experienced then, I would lose.
Letting me walk out of her torture session without a tag had been a mistake, a big mistake. I realized this only after I sent Caruthers and Vinote back to Philadelphia, because only after such a success could I understand my real position. Victory, to an Arm, meant stature, and the insane ‘Commander’ bullshit helped as well, even if (or because) I denied it. Because I didn’t have Keaton’s tag saying ‘you are low in stature’, instead I had a little voice inside me that kept repeating ‘you’re the boss Arm now’, based on my successful espionage mission.
Oh, and, of course, neither of us understood the full power of the Arm tag or the correct way to settle a dominance contest. Of which this one was only the second, ever, between us.
Keaton slowly backed away, wary, in a fighter’s crouch. “So what’s it going to be?”
“I’d prefer to give my presentation, Stacy.” Cold, hard and calculated, words I expected to trigger a charge by Keaton and the start of a dominance fight with no pre-ordained outcome. My terror said I would lose, but my triumph said I would win.
Keaton didn’t charge, despite her low juice and the edging of madness into her eyes. Perhaps she had her own internal voices to cope with. Hell, I knew she had her own internal voices to cope with.
Instead, she sheathed her knife and stood up straight. “I’ll give you one chance,” Keaton said, fully confident of whatever position she had decided. “You’ve won back the right to wear my tag. Accept that, or accept the consequences of refusal.”
Haggerty took that moment to flee Keaton’s house, climb on a motorcycle, and drive off, as if the demons of hell barked at her feet. Under less stressful circumstances I would have laughed.
I gave the situation some close analysis. Keaton would no more apologize to me than Bi
ggioni would. Annoying, but that’s the way of the world of Arms. As I had told Tom, when all was right with Keaton she was the ultimate fairy godmother. When things went to hell, I got tortured.
Truth was, I didn’t have Biggioni beat. By loose analogy, I didn’t have Keaton beat, either.
I really didn’t have a choice; I couldn’t afford to risk a loss now. I made my intellectual needs stifle my emotional need to dominate. “I will accept your tag, ma’am, if you will agree to listen to my presentation.” Sorry, folks. I am an Arm, and I am an asshole. I had to negotiate. Even if I risked hell, or given the circumstances, a raw long painful death.
Of all things, Keaton rolled her eyes. “You nitwit, of course I’m going to listen to your presentation. Get over here and say you’re mine.”
I did so, and she tagged me, and all was well.
To this day I still don’t know how much Keaton played me in this confrontation. The only thing I ever established, later, was that she already knew, coming into this meeting, about my kidnapping of Caruthers and my trip to Chicago. She didn’t know the details of what happened in Chicago, though, until I told her. She had interviewed Hank, over the phone, while the Crows protected him, and gotten his side of the story, for good or for ill. He hadn’t told all, that was clear.
Despite all this, she too ended up calling me ‘the Commander’ by the end of the year.
---
“An apology will no longer suffice,” Keaton said. I had given my presentation and we had gone over the damned thing, in at times terrifying detail, for five hours. I cooked Keaton dinner, closer to Eissler’s diet (or a bear’s diet) than what I had cooked for her before – barely cooked salmon, barley flavored with butter and nuts, thin slices of calves’ liver, with a dozen hard boiled eggs and a large quantity of whole milk. A cheese plate with nuts for dessert. Zielinski, after weeks of analyzing his data from Eissler, had concluded that a normal’s diet was a slow poison for an Arm, and we needed to minimize starches and stay away from sugars and processed food. He expected this to produce some as yet unspecified health benefits, probably around muscle development. We were predators, he said. We needed to eat like predators.
I still planned to avoid raw hamburger.
Keaton had also cadged five points of juice from me, a theoretical bit of tag work I knew was possible but had never experienced. The juice ‘donation’ was pleasurable for both of us, a pleasure neither of us could admit because of the past month’s difficulties.
Keaton paced. “I respect the game Tonya played, but now she owes me as well. I will not accept a mere apology. I want something more tangible.”
“Ma’am, yes. I agree whole-heartedly. What would you like? Her head on a platter?” Right now, a dead Biggioni was about what it would take to satisfy me. My espionage triumph in Chicago was supposed to get her to cough up a public apology. As Lori feared, though, Biggioni had covered up the events and still refused to admit the Hunters held any Focuses. Which meant, as Lori predicted, her rebellion was back on its feet and rolling forward, all gained by revealing Biggioni’s broken word. “My suggestion is to kill her after she’s lost her Council seat to Focus Rizzari.” After a goodly amount of physical and psychological torture. I wanted her to beg me to end the ruins of her life when so little was left of her that it didn’t matter whether I complied or not. I wanted to see lots of bare bone, and the final madness in her eyes.
“No. I want her alive,” Keaton said. I didn’t sigh in disgust, but I wanted to. “Let me tell you about my coming move to Detroit and how that ties into this mess.”
With those words, and the unexpected story that followed, Keaton again showed me how inexperienced I was in paddling through the stygian depths of Focus politics.
Which led me to my next suggestion about what I wanted from Biggioni. Which Keaton agreed to, and which became my plan and my orders for the next month.
Part 4
The Commander
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
Chapter 10
Crows retreat into the arts and sciences when stressed.
“The Life of Crows”
Gail Rickenbach: December 2, 1968 – December 3, 1968
“Tonya, I’ve got a little announcement you might be interested in,” Gail said, the grin coming through into her voice.
“You do? What sort of announcement?” Tonya said, from the other end of the phone.
Gail had been busy as a prom queen during pledge week the last few days, and today, Sunday, was her first chance to call. She and Van had gone up to Flint yesterday to tell her parents, and stopped by Swartz Creek on the way home to tell his parents. Then the calls to Beth, the start of the planning, the picking of a wedding date and the choosing of the bridesmaids and groomsmen. Friday night they had been out at Van’s graduation party.
The graduation party had been a disappointment. The party had been fun for a while, announcing their engagement to their old friends, answering questions about being a Focus, and being the center of attention. Too many hard questions spoiled the fun, along with too many things she couldn’t explain to their old friends, and too many changes in her since her transformation. She and Van weren’t the pencil twins any more, not with her current womanly figure. She had grown an inch taller since her transformation, something only Van’s younger sister Daisy had noticed. Her old friends also rolled their eyes at her bodyguards, and couldn’t understand why Sylvie kept checking on her, bringing her food and seeing if she needed anything. They noticed the hard-eyed wary way Kurt watched everyone in the room, even though he wasn’t on bodyguard duty that night, and the way everyone except Van took her suggestions as orders…and how Van presented her to his old friends as a sort-of tamed tiger he was in abject awe of. Once they started making earnest simplistic suggestions about solving the prejudice against Transforms Gail had her bodyguards take her home.
“Van and I are going to get married,” Gail said.
“You’re what? Gail, that’s wonderful!” Tonya said, delighted. “Have you picked a date?”
“Not yet. But it’ll probably be this May or June.”
“Oh, this is fabulous. It’s so wonderful to see someone getting married instead of getting divorced. I’m so happy for you. I’ve got to meet this paragon of virtue of yours.”
“Not that virtuous,” Gail said with a laugh, and then stopped. Much as she liked Tonya, this was a little personal.
“How not virtuous?” Tonya said, overly interested. After Gail didn’t answer immediately, Tonya pressed on. “You got the advice on the subject from Beth, didn’t you? I won’t bite.”
“Um, well, I never had to kick him out of my bed…”
“…like some Focuses you heard about? That’s nothing to be ashamed of. How non-virtuous? Come on, Gail – cough up.”
Tonya wouldn’t give up until she had all the details. Gail flushed red as she explained.
“Wow! Welcome to the club,” Tonya said. Gail sighed. “You definitely need those tricks if you expect to make a marriage work. They might have even been enough to keep my marriage alive if my ex hadn’t been a misogynistic ass who couldn’t stand women with authority. I still would like to meet Van, though.” Gail heard the smile in Tonya’s voice. “There’s about a million reasons why he might have left you after your transformation, and only a few of them are bedroom issues. There’s only one reason why a man would stay with you and want to marry you, despite your transformation, though. Love. Men like him are exceptional. Real exceptional.”
Gail’s flush faded, as she basked in the warm glow of Tonya’s approval.
“I’m so happy I can’t keep from bouncing, Tonya. So of course the whole household is high as a kite, my juice buffer’s scraping bottom, and we’ve practically been having a continuous party since we announced. Yesterday we took a day trip up to Flint to tell my parents. My father practically died w
hen I told him how many people would be at the wedding.”
“Your father is planning on paying for the wedding?”
“Yup,” Gail said. “We made up, and they’re finally accepting the fact that I’m a Focus. After the amount of grief he’s given me about getting married, he wouldn’t dream of not paying. My parents are so old fashioned; paying for a daughter’s college education was a stretch and helping me out as a Focus was well beyond their comfort level, but paying for a wedding is something they had in their budget since the day I was born. Besides, they’re both so happy they’re glad to do anything.”
“I imagine that’s a big load off your mind not to worry about the wedding costs.”
“Oh, absolutely. I’ve already had a bunch of people volunteer to help, like Grace has someone in her household who can do a cake, and Beth has a photographer, and of course Matt’s going to do the ceremony. However, every household in the city is going to attend, plus my relatives and Van’s relatives, and lots of our old friends. There’ll be hundreds of people.”
Tonya chuckled. “You don’t know how big an affair a Focus marriage is going to be. Especially if you’re having a proper wedding in a nice church. If you need any help, just ask. Don’t forget to send me an invitation, too. I know of a few people I want you to meet, as well.”
“You, too? You’ll come?” Gail said, astonished. “Can you travel?”
“Because of my position on the Focus Council, my household is set up for travel,” Tonya said. “And Detroit isn’t far.” Tonya continued in a pained whisper. “Unlike West Region Council meetings.”
“Oh, wow. I’d love to have you come.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Wonderful. Fabulous. This is going to be so groovy.”
Tonya laughed. “You enjoy yourself. I’m sure the wedding will be perfect.”
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 31
