Nothing. Hancock ignored the order as if Tonya hadn’t exerted her will. The edges of panic from Hancock’s predator effect started to seep into Tonya’s mind.
No! She refused to give in to any such insanity. She focused her will again and walled the creeping edges of gibbering panic away from her.
“My boss and worst nightmare is named Susan Schrum. She’s a first Focus, the East Region President, and she holds more blackmail information on me than you and Gilgamesh do. I believe she’s working a game to politically break me, and she’s a person we need to talk about. Like the other first Focuses, she has little personal power, but her mind is twisted and delusional...”
The knife pressed on Tonya’s throat, Hancock’s face in hers. “Submit!”
Well, if direct orders didn’t work, how about emotional manipulation? Tonya projected charismatic calmness through the charismatic link. I’m not your enemy! You’re in control! “I have submitted.”
Yes. Hancock was calmer. Not much, but a little.
The point of the knife pierced Tonya’s skin. “If you want to live, show proper respect. Say ‘yes, ma’am’, bitch.”
Like hell. Tonya sent a shiver through Hancock’s juice, ready to pull the Arm’s supplemental juice into Tonya’s juice buffer in an instant, if the knife didn’t back off. A trivial trick, with Hancock so close. Eyes locked, nose to nose, now their wills truly dueled. Honor your agreement! Mind scrape, not beheading!
Hancock countered with the panic of her predator effect, but the predator wasn’t enough this time. The Arm backed off, taking her knife from Tonya’s neck.
Tonya had won. Finally. Now, free me!
Again, nothing. Impossible. Hancock’s will was hers! This should be working. It clearly wasn’t. Tonya hadn’t won.
“Touch my juice again and the agreement is off,” Hancock said.
“I agreed to a mind scrape, not torture.”
Hancock paused, and reached behind her. She showed Tonya a walkie-talkie. “How much do you love your Transforms?”
Hancock was devious and slippery, given to intricate plans. This threat was obvious and well thought out. Tonya slammed down on her emotions, afraid she might have already given away too much in the instant she recognized the threat. The attachment of a Focus to her Transforms was both a strength and a weakness. Many Focuses couldn’t stand the idea of sacrificing their own Transforms. Tonya had done so many times in the past, on Monster hunts. She hated doing so; the stress such sacrifices caused was why she had dropped Monster hunting four years ago. Tonya had no doubt that Hancock’s thugs could take out Tonya’s entourage.
Again, she had to speak a truth. “As much as a military officer loves his trusted subordinates.”
“I can feel your charisma, but it isn’t powerful enough to control me,” Hancock said. Tonya carefully didn’t react to Hancock’s terrifying statement. Only a handful of Focuses were good enough to sense Tonya’s charisma in use, and Tonya couldn’t roll one of them unless the situation gave her the necessary opening. “My people are under orders to kill your people unless I countermand it. Displease me in any way and I’ll give the order to have them killed. Early.”
A part of Tonya wanted to beg for the life of her people. Focus instincts, strong instincts. Many a Focus would break at this point, or worse, lose control and attack if she could, or threaten if she could not. Break in this way, and Hancock would end up with a tame pet Focus.
Tonya ignored the threat entirely. She had no choice. Such an outcome wasn’t acceptable.
The real threat was Hancock’s quite un-Focus-like charisma.
“You may never fully trust me, Carol, but I’m here to try and make it right between us. I was wrong in what I did, and now I must pay.” I’m telling the truth!
As she was. This amplified her charismatic message immensely.
Hancock kept eye contact with Tonya by her own choosing, ever the predator, steady in her anger, but no longer spilling over into rage. Tonya didn’t begrudge Hancock her anger, considering what Tonya had done to her. However, if Hancock gave into her rage and killed her, Hancock would never get the information she needed, and Hancock wanted the information. Tonya began to see how her own charisma interacted with Hancock. She could push Hancock in a direction she leaned towards, but not at all in any other directions.
Mutual rolling, as Hancock had once done with Teas. Still, Tonya could take control if she got just a little opening…
“You believe that by paying this debt you can convince me to be a good little Arm, disobey Keaton, and kneel to your Council? You’re insane,” Hancock said.
Time began to run out, in the form of blood in Tonya’s lungs. Soon, the damage would force her into a full healing trance.
“My orders, yes. However, I no longer believe in those orders,” Tonya said. “I’m looking for a solution that saves face on all sides. I’m hoping for a solution where the Council believes we can deal with you directly but doesn’t interfere with your relationship with Stacy. I doubt either of us knows yet what this solution is, but I’m confident we can work together and find one.” Believe me! Believe me!
“You don’t understand me at all,” Hancock said.
As she spoke, Hancock revealed her inner thoughts to Tonya. Yes, Hancock had a very different outlook and personality than Keaton. Betrayal, just a game for the mercurial Keaton, wasn’t a game for Hancock. Hancock took betrayals personally, the same way Keaton reacted to any sort of explicit threat. Going behind Keaton’s back would be betraying her agreements with Keaton, which Carol wouldn’t do. Tonya would have to be very careful in her future dealings with Hancock not to betray her – at least, never again. There was a kind of comfort in that understanding: this Arm was trustworthy.
Without warning, the knife vanished from Tonya’s chest, as did the restraints from around her ankles and wrists. Hancock stood back, aloof, disdainful of Tonya and her physical weakness.
Why now? Tonya hadn’t commanded this. Then she understood. Hancock had revealed herself to Tonya on purpose, and released her when Tonya sensed Carol’s inner self and approved.
Carol had won the charisma duel.
Tonya’s failure deflated her, yet another failure in her recent litany of the same. Of all the appalling things, Carol had seduced Tonya into liking her. That was Carol’s weakness: she wanted people to like her. Too bad Tonya learned of this too late to use her weakness against her. This wasn’t anything she could ever tell anyone else without betraying the Arm and earning a death sentence in the process.
Tonya would have to surrender for real. She didn’t have any other choice. Her life now depended on her knowledge.
Shaky, trembling, Tonya levered herself up to a sitting position. Real dangers lay ahead. Carol’s rage at the depths of betrayal involved in Focus politics might still cost Tonya her life.
---
Carol started the interrogation exactly as Tonya expected. “You ignored Caruthers’ evidence about the captive Focus, giving new life to Lori’s rebellion and hurting your own cause. Why?”
They were in Carol’s living room; Tonya sat bound in a heavy high-backed chair in the middle of the room. A tarp covered the chair, to keep Tonya’s blood from ruining it, and another one protected the carpet underneath. Carol sat directly opposite Tonya, her knees only inches from Tonya’s. The others surrounded them in chairs and sofas, watching with tense, closed expressions. Sitting up straight allowed Tonya to stay conscious, running only a light healing trance.
“Orders.”
Carol grimaced. “Explain, dammit.”
Tonya paused and licked her lips, and studied the situation. Carol was leaner than the last time Tonya met her. Withdrawal had changed her. The cartoon caricature muscles were gone and she looked a lot more human. The snake eyes, though, her cold, blue-grey dangerous eyes, those remained the same.
“After the Arm flap, Focus Polly Keisterman, the Council President, lost whatever remaining trust she had in me,” Tonya said. “To
keep me busy and out of her hair, she assigned me two killer projects, one to take over the Focus mentoring program, and the other, to reel you in so that the Council could deal with you directly, not through Keaton. Polly’s lever on me is that she’s protecting me from the first Focuses, who fear I’ve grown too powerful. When I presented the Caruthers evidence, she refused it, instead reiterating the recent order that she and first Focus Schrum had given me after the Detroit Chimera rampage: to immediately finish reeling you in, one way or another.”
“So you’re essentially owned by Polly right now.”
Tonya nodded at Carol, her head woozy with the motion. Carol understood power.
“How did you get from those orders to surrender?”
Tonya decided she had to gamble. “On the 3rd, young Focus Rickenbach of Detroit called me, asking me what she was supposed to do about contacts she’d been having with Keaton, Gilgamesh and Crow Whisper. I gave her the Council approved nonsense answers and she called me on it, which led into a discussion of my dilemma about you.” Carol, Gilgamesh and Lori exchanged glances. Tonya read that the three of them were in some way protecting Gail, in conjunction with Keaton. Tonya had won her gamble; their mutual protection of the young overpowered Focus made them allies. “The young Focus pointed out to me that my situation was identical to a problem she had with first Focus Wini Adkins, and suggested I follow the advice I’d given to her: surrender and negotiate. Which is how I got here.”
“How is this going to satisfy Polly?” Carol said.
“I need to win your trust enough so that we can negotiate an end to this.”
Carol snorted. “You haven’t even earned your life, yet, bitch,” Carol said. “Keep talking.”
“Tell me,” Carol asked, a few hours later, “how do the first Focuses operate? You’ve said they have little personal power, unlike the best of the later Focuses. Their charisma is tied up in self-control, their juice-manipulation abilities are ruined by bad juice issues, blah, blah, blah. How do they still control the Council and the Focuses?”
Tonya was out of her healing trance, at least for now, and was ravenously hungry. The late afternoon sun made the room too bright, and she was glad her chair faced away from the west window. “The first Focuses use four basic weapons to keep power – blackmail, resource allocation, information allocation and assassination.” She chewed on her lower lip, more than a little embarrassed to be admitting this. “They use their power over resources and information to reward those they favor. They attempt to get blackmail handles on everyone, friend and foe. They assassinate those who get in their way.”
“They’re going to try and stop my rebellion by force, aren’t they?” Lori said, shifting positions to ease the back pain caused by her pregnancy. She didn’t look happy. “I thought you were bluffing when you told me that.”
“No bluff. Every day your rebellion continues the danger to you and your household grows. Your analysis of the Julius rebellion, believing that if you didn’t use force, the Council would act similarly, was and is incorrect. If their other three weapons fail, they will eventually kill you and everyone in your household. It’s been done, and covered up, before.”
Lori shivered, overcome by Tonya’s words. The younger Focus wasn’t able to hold the stony expression on her face and showed emotion, fear for her household, in this case a quite reasonable and rational fear. Carol noticed and didn’t approve.
“Remember the day Keaton broke you?” Tonya said, to Carol. Perhaps if she drove another wedge between Lori and Carol, Lori would whisk her out of this disaster. “When you realized your idea of bad was only an illusion, and badness became real?”
Carol attempted to do the Arm stone face routine, but didn’t succeed. The Arm wanted to despise Lori’s weakness, but made excuses in her head for the younger Focus anyway. “You’re right. I had no idea how foul the first Focuses are.” She glared, angry, at Tonya. “This doesn’t excuse your actions.”
“Of course not,” Tonya said. She had sold her soul to the first Focuses for power. She still didn’t see any way out from under their thumb.
“What is it about your boss, Schrum, that has you and Teas so pissed?” Carol said. She now sat in an overstuffed chair on the other side of the room.
Tonya bared her teeth and hissed. “Everything.” If she ever got a chance to wring the sadistic bitch’s neck, it would be the happiest day of her life. Carol motioned for her to continue, and so Tonya leaned forward as far as her bonds allowed. “I’ll give you a for-instance: Suzie recently ordered me to finish fixing my current set of recalcitrant Transforms, with a three month deadline. Three months. Three months isn’t enough time to do the job right. The only way you can ‘fix’ a Transform in three months is to run him through a meat grinder, break his mind and will, and ruin him. I take a lot longer than three months and I do the job right. I may be rough, but the people I work with are better for my work when I’m done with them. Schrum just wants me to chew people up. Destroying minds gives her a thrill. She’s always been sadistic, and this is just one example. I could go on for hours.” Tonya could hear the anger in her own voice and quit trying to cover it up. She had invested so much time and effort in those recalcitrant Transforms over the years, healing and helping and civilizing. It offended her profoundly to see her good work turned into a sadistic exercise for Suzie Schrum.
“Schrum lives in a trailer park just outside the New York metropolitan area. She treats her people worse than she treats her dogs, and she treats her dogs like shit. For instance, she regularly drops her people into withdrawal as punishment. Ask Hank if you want to know the technical details. She’s also a student of exactly how long a Transform can stay in withdrawal without suffering permanent debilitating damage. Schrum also knows exactly how long it takes in withdrawal to induce exactly what damage, and what external stimuli is needed to create the specific damage she wants, using what I term directed withdrawal scarring. Her people are more than just terrified of her, they’ve invented their own language to describe what she does to them. They call it ‘the wet’. I don’t know why.
“You remember Focus Abernathy’s Mutie Mill episode? Focus Abernathy mysteriously disappeared after Lori exposed it. I believe Schrum was responsible; when she threatened me, she told me I wouldn’t be the first Focus she’d driven into withdrawal and fed to her dogs.”
“She needs to die,” Carol, Lori, Gilgamesh and Hank said, simultaneously. Hank gave her an accusatory look afterwards, but no, Tonya hadn’t been using her charisma at all. Their reaction was a natural, likely juice amplified, response to Suzie Schrum. She had had the same response herself, many times.
Zielinski snored in a corner and Carol finished heating up another prepared meal on her stove. They, that is, everyone but Tonya, went through prepared meals at the rate of about one every three hours, but Carol said she liked to cook, and cooking provided a good method to focus her self-discipline. She froze what she didn’t eat, for times like these. Carol owned many freezers.
Hank got to sleep, the rat fink.
“So,” Carol said, after she returned. “What exactly is the relationship between the first Focuses and the Network?” She leaned back in her chair and ate a helping of what smelled like delicious lasagna. The rich odor of tomato and cheese and herbs drifted by Tonya’s nose, and her stomach tried to rumble hungrily. She ruthlessly clamped down on the response.
“They don’t trust the Network, even though they created it and Michelle Claunch, one of the first Focuses, controls it,” Tonya said. Her eyes were gritty with exhaustion and she ached from the long immobility in the chair.
Carol nodded and took a sip of her iced tea. Iced tea in December. Had to be a Houston thing. “They created the Network when they were getting themselves out of government confinement. They must have had a bunch of good contacts, even back then in ’58.”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean about them not trusting it?”
“The Network is too large for them
to trust. It also gave Claunch too much power. In the two years before your capture, in the closed session of every Council meeting, we had to deal with requests coming from the first Focuses to trim back the Network. Harass various Network friends who were ‘getting ideas’. Those orders stopped after the CDC Arm Flap.”
“They used my capture to harm the Network on purpose? The mind boggles.” Carol stood and paced behind Tonya, restless. Tonya’s skin crawled to have Carol behind her, but she muffled the reaction, along with all the others. A few hours ago, they had decamped to the house gym so Carol could both exercise and interrogate. Now they were back in Carol’s living room.
“What sort of harassment?” Carol said.
“For instance, they don’t want the Network’s researchers looking into certain Transform topics, such as multi-Focus juice manipulation. Even the mention of the possibility of multiple Focuses working together gets the strongest form of action orders.”
Carol stopped and leaned her folded arms on the back of Tonya’s chair. She tapped a finger on the top of Tonya’s head. “When ‘southern extremists’ firebomb a doctor for treating Transforms, how often is this the first Focuses pruning the Network?”
Tonya named five occurrences: names, dates, who was hired to do the jobs, and for how much. One of the hired assassins was Stacy Keaton, back when Carol was in Keaton’s care.
“Fuck. I might end up being hired to take out my own researchers?”
“Yes. I trust you know how to fake deaths?”
Carol ignored the question and went back to her pacing. Stopped. “Check me on this – if they were reigning in the Network when I was in the CDC, they needed publicity, which they wouldn’t have gotten if my incarceration hadn’t turned into a fiasco. I went back and read the newspaper reports, and one of the things the media kept bringing up to show the incompetence of the CDC was the fact they drove me into withdrawal by being stupid. Yet, all the CDC had to do was procure surplus male Transforms, which shouldn’t have been a problem. Unless someone interfered.”
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 36
