“Short chats!” Sky’s rejoinder almost sounded like a squeak. “Sorry again.”
“Tiamat and the Skinner were also still exchanging information.”
“You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you,” Sky said. “Accouché! This is why my Canadian Foyer acquaintance wanted me to talk to you. She saw something, dammit.” Pause. “So, tell me already.”
“Can I ask a question, first, about your interest in the Rizzari Housebound?” Gilgamesh said. “I read about your mutie-mill mission, but I can’t imagine the mission was the only reason you visited her.” The exploit that stuck most in Gilgamesh’s mind was the incident with the frozen swimming pool.
Silence.
“The way you wrote about the frozen swimming pool incident makes me wonder if the reason you’re visiting includes romance.”
Yet more French. Then a sigh. “I share her household’s interest in Buddhism, which as it turns out is the key to Transform Sickness. If Buddha was nothing else, he was a Major Transform. My guess is a Crow.”
Gilgamesh sat down. This was stranger than a one-legged man doing the Texas two-step.
“Well, then for whatever reason you often visit there, I’d suggest you take another trip, perhaps today. I think Professor Rizzari’s household is going to need help.”
“What sort of help? And how does this tie into any of your earlier comments?”
“If everything works out correctly, you’re going to break Tiamat out of the CDC research center in Virginia, with Professor Rizzari, her absurdly well trained cadre of Monster hunters, and the Skinner, who will be showing up in Boston hopefully not too many days from now. For safety sake, I might suggest you disguise yourself as one of the Professor’s Transform bodyguards”
Utter silence filled the line. In the distance, Gilgamesh overheard some sort of loud argument going on in a distant apartment. “So, do you collaborate with the Madonna of Montreal or are you a natural?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know who or what you’re talking about,” Gilgamesh said.
“Marde,” said Sky, resigned. “You keep on doing things like this, kid, and you’re reputation among the Crows is going to be as bad as mine, if not worse. Going in on a breakout? I’m not up to something like that. Arms are dangerous companions.”
“You’ve dealt with an Arm before, you should be able to handle it. Did you train with the Housebound’s bodyguards?”
“But of course. Who else would be willing to train a Crow in combat?”
“I’ll owe you one, later. However, we need someone on the inside. Someone to pass along information to the Skinner about what she’s going to run into, especially concerning Transforms.”
Silence. “I’ll spare you the half hour cursing out in my mother tongue you justly deserve. If my gracious lady is going to be forced into this dipsy-doodle, I can’t just sit by on the sidelines. I still owe her and her household for allowing me to talk them into the mutie mill mission.” Sky sighed. “I can make it to Boston by early tomorrow. You, I give the job of talking to Focus Rizzari. She, unlike the two of us, doesn’t generally engage in such activities and is not going to be happy. Besides, she might not hang up on you. I’ll give you her phone number. Use the password Armageddon.”
“Me?” Gilgamesh said. “The last time I tried to deal with a Focus I panicked and got arrested. I just got out of jail today from that fiasco.”
Sky paused. “You have the nerve to send me off gallivanting around with a sadistic Arm on a jailbreak, trusting me not to skunk her when she decides to fillet me for grins, and you can’t put yourself together enough to talk to a Focus over the phone?!? You need to grow yourself a spine, suck.” Slam. Gilgamesh jumped back ten feet. He had never heard a Crow slam down a phone before.
“Well,” Gilgamesh said, once his panic had faded. “Truly an appropriate start for a relationship with a new Guru.”
“Focus Rizzari,” said the voice over the telephone. What a beautiful voice! Sweat rolled down Gilgamesh’s back and slowly dripped into his pants. He had to strain not to revert to Crow slang and call her Housebound.
“Um, yes, we’ve never met.”
Pause. “You sound like a Crow, my friend.”
“Well, yes, ma’am. Ah, you are correct.” Gilgamesh attempted to gather his thoughts. If he wanted to be a more active Crow, he needed to do better than this. “I never successfully talked to a Focus before.”
“We don’t bite,” Focus Rizzari said. Gilgamesh could swear he heard a hungry purr in her voice. Strange.
“You might when I tell you what’s about to happen.” Gilgamesh took a deep breath, attempting to quiet his panic. He would be revealing far too much about Crow espionage and emotion-reading capabilities with what he was about to say. “Are you familiar with the fact the Arm named Carol Hancock got captured by the FBI?”
“You know something about this?” The Housebound’s voice grew hot with sudden intensity. “Something very bad is going on.” She paused. “You’re the Crow who follows Hancock around, aren’t you? I know about you from the Crows.”
Gilgamesh almost ran. This Focus was a horrifically dangerous person. His heart hammered in his chest and he inched the telephone receiver away from his ear.
No! I must control myself! I must!
“Yes, I’m the Crow who follows Hancock.”
“Neat!” She paused, long enough for Gilgamesh to steady himself. “Welcome to the show. Feel free to come visit me. Any Crow friend of Carol’s is a friend of mine.” She paused to collect herself. “The FBI went from having no leads on Hancock to having a strike force on the ground in Chicago, ready to take Hancock out, in just a few hours. They used Illinois State Troopers in the capture, which the Chicago mayor wouldn’t have allowed without leverage applied by Hoover or someone higher up. An uncorroborated tip wouldn’t generate anything like that sort of response – and even if Hancock was being careless, she would have still likely sniffed out any effort at corroboration. I smell enemy Major Transforms at work.” Rizzari paused. Gilgamesh took a deep breath. At least he didn’t need to put as much work into convincing Professor Rizzari that Tiamat hadn’t screwed up, as he did with the Skinner. This Focus had some real good political connections. “Can I ask your name?”
“You care?” Gilgamesh always considered Crows beneath the notice of any Focus. Rats under the floorboards. Cockroaches in the walls.
“Of course.”
“I’m Gilgamesh.”
“The young Crow with an interest in Transform Sickness! Cool! I’ve read your book.”
“You read my book!” Gilgamesh had to grip the table hard to stop himself from running, or flinging the telephone across the room. His heart raced, pounding in his throat. He only sent Shadow his first draft! “I’m nobody. Really nobody.” The last whisper was almost a plea. He felt more panicked than when he talked to the Skinner in person.
“Not to me. I just hadn’t known the young Crow philosopher behind the book was the same Crow who followed Hancock around. I’m sort of a specialist in Crows. For a Focus, that is.” The Lori Housebound paused, and her voice went back to its acquisitive purr. “I must get your address so I can write to you. In any event, I assume you need some advice regarding the situation?”
“Actually, I’m calling you to warn you that you’re about to be recruited by the other Arm, Keaton.” The Crow consensus, relayed to him by Shadow, was that the Skinner wouldn’t succeed on her own, and would turn to Focus Rizzari, Carol’s Focus contact, for help.
“What!” Wonderful. Now he had set her off, too.
“Keaton can’t succeed alone and you possess the only real available army she knows about.”
“Me? What happened to the other Focuses she knows?”
“Hera…uh, I’m sorry, Focus Biggioni, Keaton’s old East Coast contact, is currently helping Hancock’s captors.”
“That bitch,” Rizzari said. Gilgamesh did leap back from the phone. “Sorry.”
Gilgamesh took a
deep breath. “In fact, you’ll soon be getting a new Transform bodyguard. A volunteer from Canada.”
“You’re kidding. You talked Sky into this mess?”
“He seems to think he owes you one.”
“He does, but a suicidal rescue attempt with Stacy Keaton isn’t exactly a trip down Lovers’ Lane.”
Ah hah! He had been right the first time. They were romantically entwined.
“So…why don’t you come along with us?” Professor Rizzari said. “You sound like you’d fit in well with my little collection of revolutionaries.”
“Keaton, um, ordered me to stay behind. I’m too inexperienced and prone to panic.”
“Ouch. Sounds like you have some work to do.”
Didn’t he know it.
Tonya Biggioni: March 23, 1968
Tonya shifted the package to her other arm and rang the doorbell to Deborah’s duplex. Herself. No bodyguards, no entourage, no nothing.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had been out in the open by herself. Deborah and her husband Eric were put off enough already by the entire Transform Sickness business. If she showed up with bodyguards and an entourage, she would never get inside Deborah’s house. Her security people had cased the entire area carefully and she had stationed them just out of sight. This on top of the precautions and ornate games with cars they played to make sure no one tracked them.
Her daughter lived in a little duplex, with dirty brick veneer, and a front yard more mud than grass. Tonya’s stomach fluttered and she told herself firmly that if she could face first Focuses, she would be able to face her own daughter. Inside, she heard murmured voices. Irritated voices. Anger aimed at her.
The door opened.
Deborah Biggioni Johnson was a tall woman, just a hair shorter than Tonya. She held back her dark brown hair with a headband, and her eyes appeared tired. Not surprising in a woman so far along. Tonya glanced down at the extended belly and her expert eye noticed that the baby had dropped. It wouldn’t be long now.
“Deborah,” she said with a friendly smile and carefully muted charisma. She didn’t need any ham-handed charisma, if she hoped to build a lasting relationship with her daughter.
“Tonya,” Deborah said. Not ‘mom’, Tonya noted. “You might as well come in.”
“Thank you. I’d love to.”
Her daughter and son-in-law had furnished their duplex with thrift shop furniture, but their place was immaculately clean. Despite being so far along with her pregnancy, Deborah had put a lot of effort into cleaning up for Tonya’s visit. Her nerves must have been as bad as Tonya’s own. Deborah’s husband, a glowering man just a few inches taller than Deborah, wore an old t-shirt still marked with sweat and a couple of spots of mud. Hmm. Deborah could clean up everything in the house except her husband. The earlier loud voices probably resulted from a discussion over his attire.
He eyed Tonya, not sure what to make of her, the putative mother in law who looked more like his wife’s snooty younger sister.
“I thought you might like a few extra receiving blankets,” Tonya said, offering the package.
“Thanks,” Deborah said, with no enthusiasm. They were gorgeous receiving blankets, made with loving care by one of the women in Tonya’s household. Tonya had done the cross-stitching on them herself. Deborah set the package aside, unopened. “You want something to eat?”
Stilted, so stilted. “No thank you,” Tonya said. Tonya suppressed her reflexes, and didn’t assume they should wait on her. They went on to make small talk, stiff and formal. Tonya stayed polite and kept her charisma under firm control. Deborah and her husband reacted with awkward muted impoliteness, but Tonya never let herself show any sign that she noticed.
A half hour of stiff conversation passed before Deborah finally asked “If you care all that much, why did you leave us?”
Tonya sighed and turned away. Even though she hoped for the question, answering was still hard. “It involves Transform Sickness. Do you want me to explain?”
Eric, Deborah’s husband, snorted. He didn’t like Transforms, didn’t want to hear about Transform Sickness, and had no interest in any excuses based on the disease. Deborah, on the other hand, needed to know.
“Yes.”
A few mounds of old grainy snow remained in the corners of the back yard. Tonya noticed them through the narrow living room window. “You remember my transformation, don’t you, Deborah?”
“I can hardly forget.” She had been thirteen. Her childhood home had been taken over by police, FBI, and all sorts of doctors.
“I was one of the first Focuses they didn’t put in Quarantine. Many people thought household Transforms too dangerous to be let loose , but the government no longer had the money for Quarantine housing. So they did their best to make our home a prison, without the actual prison.” The guards had shot three of her people, on three different occasions, because they thought her people might be going Monster. None of her people even dared raise their voices after the shootings. “They treated even the children as if they might turn into Monsters at any moment. Even you.” Even the children of supposedly inhuman Transforms stayed suspect.
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Deborah said. “Why did you fight with Dad?”
“I wish I had stopped them. I wish I had some good explanation for you. Some real good justification.” Tonya shook her head. “I was a terrible Focus right after my transformation. I didn’t know what to do, and so I did what anyone told me. Too many people gave me orders, and I was too confused and too weak to fight them. That’s the only excuse I can offer. I was a weak little housewife, too used to doing what other people told me. It didn’t even occur to me to try to stop anything.”
“And Dad?”
“I tried to do what your Dad wanted, but he didn’t agree with the doctors.” Claude Biggioni thought of her household as twenty some odd people he would be able to control absolutely, as absolutely as he controlled his wife. She hadn’t been comfortable with his plans, but she was already thoroughly used to his control over her life. Not until the doctors figured out his plans and got involved, did she have the strength to oppose him. “Your father thought that the Focus should use her power to take firm control of all the Transforms in her household.”
Deborah nodded. “That sounds like Dad. Except I can’t see him thinking a woman should have control of anything.”
“The Focus should control the household. The husband should control the Focus.” Tonya didn’t want to say anything negative about the father who brought up her children in the years since her transformation, but Claude Biggioni had always been a cruel man, and fond of control.
Deborah nodded again. “What did the doctors want?”
“The doctors thought things should work the other way around. The Transforms should control the Focus. Nobody thought I, a mere housewife, should be controlling anyone. Your Dad and I fought. When I wouldn’t do what he wanted, he took all of you and left. He made things clear he thought I was bad for all of you. Given my household’s problems, I couldn’t help but agree.”
Deborah leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. Her huge belly hung heavily forward between her legs. Deborah’s husband beside her put his arm around her shoulders. Tonya was glad to see the affection.
“The Transform home was a bad place,” Deborah said. “I remember the nasty guards. Everybody always seemed to be two-thirds crazy. But still, the crazy house was better than losing my mother.” Tears welled up in those warm brown eyes.
“I know,” Tonya said. “I know now. I didn’t know then.”
“What happened after we left?”
Tonya shrugged. “The doctors won. The Transforms took control of their Focus. They couldn’t risk me and they needed to control the way I moved the juice. After a while, I had two rooms of my own, and they never allowed me out. If I behaved, I got food and comforts. If I misbehaved or made a mistake, they locked me naked in the cellar until I was willing to be good again.”
/> “Mother!” Even Deborah’s husband looked appalled.
‘Mother’, she said.
“Couldn’t you get help from the doctors?” Deborah asked.
Tonya smiled. “Complaining to the doctors counted as ‘being bad’.” Eric and Deborah grimaced in horror.
“It’s all right,” Tonya said. “A year later, I got some help from one of the older Focuses.” Wini Adkins. The reason Tonya was willing to overlook Wini’s little quirks. “After her kind advice, I turned the tables and took control of my household.”
“The way Dad wanted you to in the first place. So why didn’t you make up with Dad then?”
“And follow his orders?” Tonya shook her head. “After my year in captivity, after what I needed to do to take control, I don’t think…” Tonya stopped herself before she said something harsh about Deborah’s father. “Let’s just say we weren’t compatible any more.
Deborah nodded. She understood what Tonya didn’t say.
“In any case, I still believed a Transform household wasn’t a good place for you, and you would be happier with your Dad than with me.” Especially given the kind of household Tonya ran back then. Her household hadn’t been a suitable environment for children. She had (how to say it nicely?) overcompensated for her time in captivity.
“You could have asked.”
Tonya nodded. “I should have asked.”
Deborah sat back in the couch and leaned on her husband. “So now you want to have your children back again. But we’re all grown up now.”
“I know. I wish I had been there for you. Of all the terrible things that happened losing you is the thing that hurts most. I remember sitting down in the basement sometimes, thinking of all the ways I’d failed. I was a failure as a Focus and as a mother. I decided to stay out of your lives, so I didn’t ruin them farther.”
Deborah didn’t say a word. She just wrapped her arms around her torso and shivered.
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 18
