“As the years went by, I became a better Focus,” Tonya said. “Or at least I think I have. I never became a better mother. I can’t ever get your lost childhood years back. The best I can do is hope to get to know you again as adults…and be a good grandmother. Will you give me that chance?”
The tears in Deborah’s eyes spilled over, and trickled down her cheeks. “Really?” she whispered. “You want to come back?”
“I do,” Tonya said, her voice equally soft.
“Okay,” Deborah said. “Okay.”
Henry Zielinski: March 23, 1968
Zielinski startled at the knock at the door. “Maid service.” Since his room had fresh towels and a turned down bed, this had to be Keaton.
He unbolted the chain and let in the Arm. She wore a hotel maid’s outfit, disguised as a dumpy old immigrant woman with a noticeable Slavic accent. Keaton zipped in and turned the television on, high. Keaton went so far as to drag a legitimate maid’s cart outside the door, bringing a smile to his face. She dumped towels and sheets on the bed, and shut the door behind her.
Zielinski winced. “No bugs,” Zielinski said. “Just checked a half hour ago.”
“Never too cautious,” Keaton said, and started stripping. Zielinski smelled juice and in a moment, saw blood. Keaton had four visible gunshot wounds, and he suspected more. “I failed to get in. The place is fucking impossible.”
He spread the towels on the bed and got out his kit. “Ma’am. Do you want me to sew you up?”
“Huh.” Keaton lay down on the towels. “They know I’m here, and Carol’s going to break soon, so it won’t be safe for you here much longer either.”
He nodded and started the surgery. “Crap, Stacy. This one bounced through your intestines.”
“You think I don’t know that? This sort of shit is why us Arms learn to tolerate pain, remember?”
He blinked. He had half-expected Keaton to get in his face and threaten him. “You just got juice, didn’t you?”
“All my secrets are out,” she said, her voice a perfect mimic of Carol’s. He knew Keaton’s moods; with her high on juice, he would need to stay perfectly professional if he wanted to avoid a trip into Keaton’s bed, where she would half kill him with overly aggressive sex. “There’s at least two hundred Feds guarding the outside of the place, some from agencies I’ve never seen before. Some bright boy even strung a loose net of concertina wire twenty-five feet in the air right across the most obvious place for someone with post-human skills to pole vault the outer fence. I’m fucking running out of tricks to try, Hank.” On the other hand, Keaton didn’t seem lusty right now, probably because of her wounds.
“There’s the one I mentioned in the last set of documents I left for you,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’m not going to mess with your abdomen. Anything I do down there would likely cost you more time than using your juice for the healing.”
“I concur,” Keaton said. “You’re talking about recruiting Focus Rizzari and her household army?”
“Uh huh.”
“Recruiting anyone for a suicide mission sounds expensive.”
“Why suicide mission?”
“Because neither of us can get into the actual Detention Center building, dammit. Who knows what sorts of goddamned traps will be waiting for me if I somehow manage to get in to that juice-fouled place?”
He taped a gauze bandage over the last of Keaton’s wounds. “I thought the information I gave you would be enough.” He had managed to squeeze information on the building’s interior from five different CDC people and from Paul Gauthier. He even dug up two old sets of blueprints for the place.
“Gauthier was clear they’d made some recent changes.” Keaton sat up, gathered the bloody towels into a trash bag, sealed it, and started to dress. She looked him in the eye. “You’re sitting on something. Spill.”
“I have a work-around idea,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m talented enough to pull it off, though.” His record on such field missions was bad.
He went over to his briefcase, opened it, pressed the hidden under-the-leather latches to pop open the thin hidden compartment, and took out a picture and a badge. He showed them to Keaton.
“Don’t look at me. I can’t pretend to be five nine.”
She was pulling his leg. The picture was of Richard Bentwyler; the badge a CDC high security badge for the dearly departed Dr. White. “I don’t have the skill to forge a badge of this quality, or the supplies to pull off the disguise,” he said.
“If you get both it won’t be good enough. Even if you get in and out alive they’ll eventually catch you on the cross-check.”
He nodded. “This is a long shot…and a one shot. However, my attempt would fit into the scheme Tommy and I concocted. I’d rather not do it if I don’t need to, to tell you the truth.” A familiar sense of inevitability settled on his soul; dealing with Keaton always brought out this side of his personality, and this skill set.
“Let me think about this for a moment,” Keaton said. She started to pace, oblivious to the pain her pacing certainly caused. She stopped. “Listen up. It’s too risky for me to contact you again and I’m running out of time. If I’m going to deal with Rizzari and deal with the bouncing abdomen bullet the hard way I better get me some more juice, and quick, before I get my ass to Boston. I have my kit with me and I can forge the badge, but I don’t have the time to do it here and now, and so the only way I can get this to you is by a dead drop. I’ll use the usual, at Conners’ Grocery.” Taped to the back of a newspaper box. “I’ll reactivate my account with my old answering service lady out here. You tell her what you can; if you come up with anything too lengthy use the drop. I’ve got enough makeup supplies on me for the rest.”
Zielinski nodded. Once he got the badge, he would be on his own. “I won’t be able to guarantee the timing,” he said, nervous. He had hoped Keaton would either shoot down his idea or come up with something better and less risky. The number of ways this could go wrong, not counting his likely amateur screw ups… “I’ll…”
Keaton walked over to him and pulled his chin down to meet her gaze. “It needs to be quick. Drop something nasty in Bentwyler’s coffee or something. You can do this.”
He grimaced at Keaton’s rough charisma, noting the fact he did feel more confident about his abilities. “Yes, ma’am.” He sighed, inwardly; the last time she did this to him he hadn’t been able to make telephone calls for a month. “This will still take some time to arrange.”
“You have until the morning of the 25th.” One and a half days. He had better get back to the CDC administration building and start his preparations. “Good luck, Hank.” She dropped a paper bag to the floor, likely filled with her disguise props, and finished dressing. Back in her maid disguise, Keaton shuffled out of the room, closed the door behind her, and rolled the maid’s cart away.
Sky: March 23, 1968
Sky rolled his beat up Chevy Impala into Boston as a few snowflakes began to fall, well into the night. He hummed a popular song from a couple of years ago, about the sun looking like a red rubber ball. No Crows wrote that one, he figured. He parked the car in the public parking at the arboretum, sensing for Crows. Not a one. His route took him past Occum’s place, and Occum was home with his tamed beasts. No other Crows in town.
Didn’t take long for the Crows to spread the word the Skinner was coming to town. He admired the American Crows for their information skills, at least. They certainly knew how to spread the dish.
With a skip in his step, Sky walked quickly to Inferno, pondering what he should say to Lori this time. Probably best to start with an apology for calling her bodyguards the Transform Gestapo. Oh, and apologize for the incident where Ann tried to jump his bones after Lori got stuck doing some Focus political stuff on a Saturday. Then there was the hockey game. He didn’t want to even think about the hockey game.
The Arm hadn’t arrived yet, thank heavens. Sky circled Inferno. Lori normally spent the night at her lab
during the week. Sky would go to Boston College next, if she wasn’t at home. As he had guessed, though, she was at home, quite awake. Alone in her library. The only other people awake in Inferno were the house guards. Even the enemy surveillance team was absent.
Well, Sky, how about a little adventure? Could he get past the house guards? Avoid Lori’s metasense?
A good test for the upcoming jaunt.
The roof was unguarded. He would be able to get to the main roof using the obstacle course route he used before. Getting to the obstacle course without stumbling on one of the guards meant going through the neighboring estate. They used guard dogs. Guard dogs, though, would be no problem.
Sky neutralized the dogs and slid along the wall until he stood opposite the obstacle course. He waited until both guards faced the other way, before he leapt the fence. Two moments later he hung on the wall in the obstacle course on the side facing away from the main house. He waited until the guards’ facing opened up a sense hole before making the big leap, the longest of the set, over to the guesthouse roof. Next a scuttle over to the garage, then a short leap to the main house roof. If you want to Crow-proof a house, don’t build it out of brick. Brick made the climbing too easy. He clambered down the side of the house to get at an attic vent, the one he had set up for easy entry and exit for his Crow jaunts.
There he stopped.
Someone had installed a lock and deadbolt on the attic air vent. Neither had outside keyholes. Sky closed his eyes and stuck his nose up against them, sniffed. Ah, mademoiselle Foyer, you did this with your own loving hands. He picked up something else as well, a juice pattern. Should he try for a different way in? Or should he just touch the locks and trigger the juice pattern?
Any other way in would involve actual risk to his fair body. Not worth it for a prank. He touched the juice pattern with a finger. In a moment, he metasensed Lori on her way up the stairs, into the attic, and over to the locks. She was wired. Sky had never seen her so charged up. He was either a very dead Crow, or about to get the best sex of his life.
Lori stopped just before she opened the locks. She stripped off what she wore, and changed into something else, something thin and fishnet and likely mail order because it was otherwise banned in Boston. Ah, make that the latter, not the former.
Then she opened the locks, sprung the attic vent, grabbed him, and shut the attic vent all at Arm speed. Not surprising to see that from Lori any more. He had sparred with her enough to know a great many of her little tricks and enhancements, some she had trained years to perfect. Nose to nose, Lori started speaking zip zip zip, her juice flowing through him and his juice going through her not under any sort of control at all.
“Oh I’m going to go and get to do something about Carol she can’t be the one doing the Transform killings Sky and Keaton actually called ahead and talked to me and she’s worried someone is after the Arms too because she spied on Carol and decided Carol wasn’t being too stupid and there had to be outside Major Transform interference and someone’s been after her as well out west and Keaton was being nice but there was more than a hint of a threat that if I didn’t cooperate she would go after my household and we’re going to have to spar on her level and my level and it’s going to be horrifically dangerous and I’m going to go with everyone on this trip and the reason I don’t do adventures isn’t because I’m not adventurous but because I’m horribly dangerous and did I ever tell you what a beautiful juice structure Carol has and how we can’t let anything happen to her beautiful juice structure?”
Then she kissed him and the world went hazy and spun and the juice moved doing something he had never experienced before and they shared senses seeing Crow and Focus all at once and oh shit oh hell there they went making a baby.
---
“Lori!” Connie Yerizarian said, and put her head in her hands.
“I couldn’t help it. Juice. Tension. Major Transforms not knowing what we’re doing. Accept it. Accept my apology,” Lori said. Dawn was several hours away. To say they – Sky and Lori – had awakened the entire household would be an epic understatement.
Lori remained huddled in his lap, both of them under a comforter, in the corner of the leather couch in the library. Ann, Tim, Sadie and Connie faced them, on chairs they had dragged over.
“This changes everything,” Tim said. “With you pregnant, there’s no way we can let you go in on Hancock’s rescue. Even if the Arm insists.”
“No.”
“No?” Connie said. “I thought we were going to treat this as house business.”
“Pardon me,” Sky said. “I thought Major Transform diplomacy and the like was my gracious lady’s area.”
“You shut up, troublemaker,” Sadie said. “You aren’t even a part of this household.” Sadie practically spit out the last, the poet currently of the opinion Sky had used his sexual charisma to lure Lori into bed against her own will. Today’s adventure hadn’t won Sadie over from his earlier misdeeds. More like the opposite.
Connie grabbed Sadie by the shoulder and whispered into her ear. Sadie frowned and crossed her arms, but she didn’t say anything more. Connie turned back to Sky and Lori. “We discussed this and decided the Arm is going to ask us to provide a Transform army. There are twenty-seven of us in the household capable of participating in a military field operation outside the compound. Forty-two if you count people dragged along for logistics and support, essentially the entire household. Which makes this house business.”
“True enough. But whether I go or stay is my business,” Lori said. “The same for Sky.”
“Wait!” Ann said, interrupting what looked like to be an angry tirade from Connie. “Normally I’m the one who argues against splitting hairs and for following house precedents, but I think you’re both making a big mistake, here. Connie, go get yourself something to eat. Bring back enough for all of us. Give yourself a chance to calm down.” Ann paused for a moment. “Sadie, you go with Connie.”
“You’re going to pull rank?” Connie asked.
Ann nodded. Connie stood. “What are you going to do while I’m gone, anyway?”
“Talk to Sky.”
Sadie stalked out, not saying a word. Connie shook her head and followed.
“Okay,” Sky said to Ann. “I didn’t understand a bit of what you’re talking about.”
“You aren’t supposed to,” Ann said.
Sky turned to Lori. “What’s going on?”
“House politics.”
“Eh, useful,” Sky said, and Tim sniggered. Sky turned back to Ann. “How do I make things better?”
“Show some commitment.”
“How? Sorry, but I get pissed sometimes when one of you just goes and drops something you should have told me to start with.” Half an hour ago, Sky had discovered Lori maintained a Crow identity. She had joined the letter circuit as the sarcastic and mean-spirited Polaris. He was still pissed as hell about the Polaris issue. He and Lori had such volatile personalities, so imperfectly repressed, that it amazed him their relationship had lasted this long.
“Look, Sky. You’re a wonderful person in theory, but in practice, you’re flat out impossible to deal with,” Ann said. “No one trusts you worth a damn. I certainly don’t. Based on your previous actions, as soon as I look the other way you’ll be back in Toronto. If we’re going to prepare for some sort of nasty job with an Arm, we need to talk about a bunch of private things. Household secrets. We can’t do this with someone who isn’t part of our household sitting around and listening. You have to commit to being part of the household if you want to make things better. Otherwise, you need to get out of range. Go spend some time with Occum until we set everything up.”
“Isn’t this personal, between Lori and I?”
“I’d love to give you room to work this out, but your and Lori’s antics early tonight have taken away the option.”
Hell. Sky turned to Lori, and looked her in the eyes. Utter blankness. “Love, what do you want to do?”
> “I was thinking we could go rent a hotel room and have them call us when the Arm shows up. Connie thinks she has things under control. Let’s see if she’s right.” Lori lowered her gaze at him, and Sky’s mind filled with thoughts of cool sheets and hot desire.
“My love, although Connie and Sadie are not my favorite Transforms, you are consigning one or both of them to being an Arm’s juice supply.”
“I do believe in freedom of choice,” Lori said. “Sky, my household leadership won’t take Arms seriously until they learn a few hard lessons on the subject. I can only protect them if they want me to protect them. They’re good enough to balk the best Focuses around. Until they experience an Arm up close and personal, they aren’t going to believe they can’t balk Arms the same way.” Lori paused, and turned up the heat with her charisma. “Besides, we have a few issues to discuss, ourselves, love.”
Sky turned back to Ann. “Have you ever met an Arm?”
“Yes. Hancock,” Ann said. “Have you?”
“I lived with an Arm for two years.” More, if you count the Lost Tribe days, which he didn’t. He still didn’t understand half the things they did or encountered as the Lost Tribe.
Ann gathered herself. “You’re saying, in your professional opinion, we don’t stand a chance without a Focus around to protect us. What can an Arm possibly do to pose a danger to us? I’ve seen Hancock, and I wasn’t that impressed.”
Gahh. It would take less time to describe twenty-five centuries of philosophical discussion on the Eightfold Way. “You expect her to come in and say, what, ‘Hi, I would like to hire you to help me rescue another Arm?’”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
Sky laughed. “No Arm can stand competition; they must be dominant, the person in charge.” Lori frowned. Sky winced inside. “The Arm will case your household until she identifies the leader. She will kidnap the leader, take the leader out of range of the rest of you, and break her one way or another. Then, having your leader under her sway, the Arm will give orders to the leader. You will follow said orders. Or die.”
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 19
