“Yes, of course. Focus Adkins, the same…”
The scream probably woke people in the next county. The next thing Tonya knew, she and her chair were both on the floor, and Carol was plunging her knife into Tonya’s heart over and over and over again. “You knew! You fucking bitch, you knew!”
Oh well. At least her death had been sudden and unexpected.
Metasense: down.
Sight: down. The world was a comfortable black place.
Sense of touch, taste, and smell: down.
Instant calories to pull on: minimal.
Brain: mostly down.
State of trance: heavy.
Juice supply: way too low from her first set of healing to support a total switchover to juice metabolism.
Healing: up. Stressed. Bypassing the heart while continuing to supply oxygen to the brain and juice to the heart area was almost impossible.
Prognosis: fatal. Insufficient juice. Might as well pack it in, Tonya. Time to go spend the rest of eternity with Jesus. Or the other fellow, considering what crap you’ve done with your life as a Focus…
Hearing: up. Last sense to go. Always was. Might as well listen.
“Dammit, Carol, you…”
“Shut up, Hank. You were asleep. You didn’t get to hear what she said.”
“That one of the first Focuses made sure you went into withdrawal?” Pause. “Predictable, based on what we learned.”
“Well, fine, you figured it out. I still believed my withdrawal was a mistake, not something they arranged on purpose. Dammit, I thought I had better control. She might even have survived it if I hadn’t kept on chopping. Sorry.”
“Sorry? She deserves a better eulogy than that. Something poetic, about overwhelming hubris and power corrupting absolutely.”
“Guys, I think you’re forgetting something. Focuses are pretty tough.”
“Lori, I pureed her fucking heart.”
“You did worse to Rogue Focus.”
Theatrical sigh. “You’re saying Focuses are tougher to kill than Arms?”
An echoing theatrical sigh. “I’ve seen your wounds from time to time, but I have no idea what it would take to actually kill an Arm. I do seem to recall an incident where a young Arm got fixed up in my lab by Henry here, while complaining about three days strapped to a rack with her intestines hanging out of her body, then getting her abdominal organs randomly shoved back inside her body and her abdomen stitched up with non-sterile fishing line. The young Arm seemed to recover fairly well.”
Oh, so that’s what really happened. Keaton could be such a bitch at times.
“So, what, Biggioni is lying there bled out on my beautiful new carpet, all pasty white, eyes open, not blinking, not breathing, no vital signs, and she’s alive?”
“She’s breathing.” Trust Zielinski to check.
“Now what. We wait?”
Sounds of rattling and moving around.
“I’m sorry, Tiamat and Lori, but by my estimation, she will go into withdrawal in about ten minutes, at which point she will indeed die. Unless…”
“Unless what? You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“You have plenty of juice to burn, Tiamat.”
“I just killed her. I’m sorry I did so, but I’m not sure I’m sorry enough to save her.”
“What do your instincts say, Carol?”
“Dammit! Okay. Fine. I’m going to stick my tongue in her chest cavity and lick her heart back to life. Satisfied?”
She is going to heal me with her tongue? Oh for enough juice to run my eyeballs and visual cortex, Tonya thought. Dammit, Gerry was right.
“I have some bad news, Commander,” Tonya said, after much time and healing had passed. “I thank you for the help in healing. But, pardon the complaint, if I don’t get lots of food to burn so I can recreate some blood, I’m going to be spending the next day or two in a healing trance so deep I don’t think I’m going to be answering any questions.”
“How do you kill a Focus?” Carol said, unhappy, likely about being called ‘the Commander’.
Fuck this shit, Tonya decided. She let the deep healing trance take her.
Baby food? What?
Tonya opened her eyes to find Hank Zielinski spooning baby applesauce into her mouth and doing some trick with her throat so she swallowed. “I’m back,” she said, more of a gurgle than a sentence. She sat again in the now blood-soaked chair. This time, instead of the ties on her arms and ankles, there was a single tie under her breasts, to hold her up.
“Good,” Hank said. “I’ve got some real food for you.”
“I can’t wait.” Her voice was barely more than a croak, and she sounded like death warmed over. Hah! Of course. That’s what came of being warmed up from death, after all. “Where is everybody?”
“Carol’s cooking…”
“What sauce are you going to serve her with?”
Hank stopped, took out a tiny flashlight and shined it into Tonya’s eyes, one after the other. “You told a joke. That’s very unlike you.”
“I always get giddy after I die,” Tonya said, deadpan. “It’s not something I do every day.” The room was so bright it made her eyes hurt, and for a moment she thought Carol was going to do interrogation with spotlights, but then her brain kicked in and she recognized low juice effects. Damn did she feel miserable. She hated dying.
The east sky was brightening, so she hadn’t been out long. She sniffed, not daring to turn on her metasense. She checked out the local scents, suddenly feeling naked. “Where are Lori and Gilgamesh?”
Clank. Zielinski’s face closed up tighter than the ass on a brass monkey. Oh ho!
“How low did Carol take her juice count, anyway?” Tonya said.
“Low enough so that she’d better stay in the kitchen and cook rather than deal with you in person, especially when you’re behaving this way.”
Tonya sat, boggled, as her own low juice effects faded. How could that be? Ah, yes, she remembered. The normally annoying Focus juice magnet effect had stolen far too much of someone’s juice buffer – likely Lori’s – while Tonya was out cold. Tonya’s household juice buffer held enough juice for her to heal herself fully, without food. She felt the buffer juice dribbling into her personal juice supply rather quickly, enough to get her functional again, albeit at her normal low juice state. In a few minutes, she would be back.
With a repressed chortle of glee, Tonya realized she could flip the situation. Hancock had finally made a mistake, and she had to…
Cold steel lay itself against her temple. Without moving her head, she swiveled her eyes sideways. Hank Zielinski was holding a gun to her head.
“Bad move, Tonya,” Hank said. “Have some more baby applesauce. Or a few doughnuts.”
“I’ll take the doughnuts.” Hank reached out a foot, snagged the doughnuts, and brought them close enough for Tonya to reach them. Damn Zielinski! Tonya cursed, mentally. Damn me for underestimating him, yet again. “Why the gun?”
“You were thinking far too long about juice levels when you should have been thinking about food. Listening to your Focus instincts.”
“What about you?” I’m your friend. You have no problems with me. I’m helpless.
“You tell me. Think about what’s going to happen if I take the gun away from your head without Carol telling me to.”
Actually, Tonya was having a hard time figuring out anything right then. Hank was right – she wasn’t thinking, she was just acting on her instincts. She needed more food, dammit! The doughnuts were hardly enough. She closed her eyes and thought: how would Keaton make sure Tonya did not get out of this mess and roll her?
Ah.
“Carol hears you take the gun away from my head or whatever, and opens up on me with a machine gun or something similar from the other room. Overt uses of my charisma will just get me killed again.”
Hank grunted.
“I trust you answered her question about killing Focuses?”
“Of course. The traditional method for dealing with witches still works.”
“Why are you in such a foul mood over all of this?”
“You’re threatening Carol. Carol told me exactly what you would try to do if I let you, and told me to figure out how to corral you since, ahem, ‘I was so damned good at resisting charisma’. So I did.”
“Why would you care if I threaten Carol? She’s got you juice-bound somehow. Can’t you taste your freedom?” I can free you! I’m that good. Trust me!
Hank bent down to Tonya’s ear, and whispered. “What will you give me to keep me from pulling this gun from your head and looking like I’m slavishly following your orders? Think fast, because I’m afraid your time is almost up.” He started easing the gun away from her head.
Damn! “Okay, I give,” Tonya said. She sighed in disgust. Zielinski had definitely gotten better over the years, and the combination of Hancock and Zielinski was deadly. “I surrender. Feed me and I’ll stop misbehaving. I’m not acting rationally if I’m stupid enough to try and take you on, Hank.”
As she ate doughnuts, Tonya wondered if she should turn Lori and Gilgamesh against Carol, as Carol had given her a lever to do so – neither of them would enjoy having to go out, find and grab a Transform and bring it back to be killed. After five minutes of detailed plotting, Tonya remembered that any such plan would count as a betrayal, and not be at all helpful for her in this situation. She banished those thoughts as best as she could.
Worse, Tonya had done nothing since getting healed to prove herself worthy of trust or being freed, alive. Submit, she ordered herself. Surrender! So you got cut up a little – get over it! It isn’t as if it hasn’t happened before!
Gilgamesh: December 11, 1968
“We can try the holding tank in Deer Park,” Gilgamesh said. He wasn’t sure why, but the heavily industrialized district near the Houston Ship Channel had a significantly higher rate of transformations than the rest of the city. Enough so that each of the small towns to the east of Houston supported an undersized Transform Clinic.
The large South Main Transform complex was empty. A problem.
In all of Houston they had only found one untagged Transform, a man, not enough for Tiamat’s needs.
“Gilgamesh, the place on Montrose where we found the first guy – something’s wrong with that place, isn’t there?”
Gilgamesh nodded. “Gristle dross, half alive. It happens.”
“The place attracts new Transforms?”
“Yes. Whatever Focus lived there abandoned the place years ago, but it’s hungry. It’s the haunted house myth come alive due to Transform Sickness. About every six weeks a new untagged Transform finds the place and decides to live there. They last about twice as long, too.” The house had sat abandoned, even by the normals, for years. The weeds in the yard were almost head high.
Said haunted house Transform was tied up in the back of Gilgamesh’s pickup truck, under the tarp, amid copious apologies by Lori, who thought it a problem she couldn’t tag an Arm’s food supply and walk him around, controlled.
“This is very strange,” Lori said. She fidgeted on the truck’s uncomfortable bench seat, trying to find a comfortable position for her pregnant body, and once settled looked over at Gilgamesh. “Focuses never get to hear about such things, do they? All the interesting stuff happens in the world of Crows. All those tall tales I get in my Crow letters are actually real, not fiction?”
“The proper Crow answer, Lori, is non-fiction writing is impossible. Even the most dedicated observer ends up writing fiction.”
“Original sin,” Lori said.
Gilgamesh furrowed his eyebrows at the strange juxtaposition. “Fiction results from the subjectivity of the human brain.” What did that have to do with original sin?
Lori nodded. “The myth-origin of original sin interpreted as the remembrance of the changeover from animalistic objective thinking to human-style subjective thinking.”
“That sounds like Tim.”
Lori smiled. “Subjective thinking allows self-reference, self-knowledge. The knowledge of good and evil, let us say.”
Ouch! Gilgamesh knew some Crows heavily into psychology who would have a field day with Lori’s comment. “Are you okay?” Lori metasensed funny, somehow, to him.
“I’ve got to take a breather,” Lori said. She turned and met his eyes, imploring something.
“Are you having a physical problem?” Gilgamesh’s worst fears right now involved Lori going into labor in the middle of a juice hunt. He pulled the truck over and into a dirt path leading into a vacant lot. He had the sudden urge to show Lori Hephaestus’s dross art statue of Arpeggio, but he wasn’t sure the Arpeggio statue fit the mood of the day.
“Moral problems. I’m having problems with the idea of hunting down juice for an Arm. I’ve done this before, for Stacy, but…” Lori turned away. Grabbed her elbows with her hands and leaned her head against the side of the pickup. Closed her eyes.
“If it’s any consolation, I’m fighting Crow panic myself.”
“It’s not the action, it’s the target. Carol.”
Ah. This problem again. Despite all the talking they had done on the subject, Lori still had a hard time with Tiamat’s predatory activities. Tiamat’s juice appeared from nowhere. Intellectually, Lori knew what Tiamat did, but emotionally? Nah.
This Transform would die so Tiamat could live. About every week or two, another died. Regular as clockwork. He had the urge to tell Lori one was nothing; see one after the other after the other, week upon week, never ending, dying for Tiamat. Then complain.
However, Lori was a Focus, responsible for the lives of Transforms, not their deaths. Arms lived such a different life, a life that hurt Lori to think about. No, this was nothing about which he should chastise Lori.
“I’m also not happy about the fact Carol didn’t think we were capable of watching over Tonya,” Lori said. She motioned to him, and they got out of the truck to stretch their legs. The morning sun crept above the horizon to illuminate what looked to be another gorgeous Houston day. Grackles collected in the nearby trees, chirping and swarming in endless cycles of launch, circle and land again. Houston attracted prodigious flocks of grackles this time of year and the noise was deafening. “Not happy that she’s right. That in my condition I can’t stand up to Tonya’s charisma. That she and Henry can.”
“Tiamat’s a brutal realist. The life of an Arm doesn’t give them any leeway for misconceptions and white lies. Self-deceit leads to mistakes, and even the slightest mistake can be fatal to an Arm. About the biggest insult you can toss at an Arm is to call her a sentimentalist.”
Lori tried to laugh, but her laugh came out more of an anguished sob.
Gilgamesh put a hand on Lori’s shoulder. “Hey. You’re supposed to be my strength. I’m the young Crow, you’re the older Focus.” Lori shivered under his hand and turned toward him. Without even thinking about it, Gilgamesh found Lori in his arms, found his mouth on hers. She needed kissing. She didn’t back away when he kissed her.
Much the opposite. She leaned into him, her body hot and tight up against his. Gilgamesh pulled away from the kiss.
“Don’t stop because of me,” Lori said. Her voice now vibrated with deeper registers added to her normal alto, sound colors that almost scared Gilgamesh. She reached her hand behind his head, and pulled him back toward her. Met his eyes. Hers were hypnotic. “Oh,” Lori said. “I hadn’t ever looked before.” She had noticed his eyes, so dark brown they were almost black.
They kissed again.
“Business,” Gilgamesh said, many moments later. “Tiamat needs juice.”
Lori sighed. “And I’m pregnant all the way out to here and way too uncomfortable for what I need right now.”
They climbed back into the truck, and drove off through the riotous grackles to check on the Deer Park holding tank, chatting with each other. It didn’t take long for Lori to get Gilgamesh to promise an extended visit to
Boston after the baby was born.
Gilgamesh had the appalled feeling he had been more than propositioned, he had been proposed to.
Tonya Biggioni: December 12, 1968 – December 13, 1968
Carol stopped pacing and sat down to think, stone faced and unreadable. Tonya waited, patiently, for the verdict on her life. Which had to be ‘death’. The information she had provided over the last two days had been good, but not earthshattering. Carol’s questioning was organized, complete and showed proper caution. Tonya couldn’t figure out whether Carol’s techniques, mimicking Tonya’s own, were a conscious effort on the Arm’s part or whether they were natural. Either way, she had earned Tonya’s respect many times over.
The opposite wasn’t true. Too much of what Tonya had revealed translated to ‘this bitch will do anything to hold on to power’, which hadn’t impressed Carol in the slightest.
Last ditch schemes played through Tonya’s mind – she would go down swinging. Her best idea was to take down Carol, forcing Lori to do the dirty work, playing on a Focus’s reluctance to physical harm to another Focus. Luckily, Carol’s place held little bad juice, which would…
“Carol, I’d like a shot at Tonya first,” Lori said. “Before, well, you know.”
Bingo.
“Whatever.” Carol didn’t even look up from where she currently sat, on the floor with her back against the overstuffed chair. She never seemed to stay in one place for more than a few minutes.
Lori stood, with effort, trying to flatten her outfit around her pregnant belly. She came over, slowly, and dropped half a dozen juice patterns on Tonya, which Tonya didn’t attempt to block. Tonya gasped in pain. Lori had dropped her right to the edge of withdrawal.
“So you’ve gotten sadistic as well?” Tonya said. She huddled down, hand over her eyes to block the light. Lori’s control over the juice, legendary among all Focuses, had left Tonya with no supplemental juice, at least as far as she could tell. This low, even Tonya’s metasense was unavailable.
In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) Page 37
