“Let me get this straight: you encountered a male Monster” as the Feds termed the Chimeras “and afterwards you killed a tagged Transform. Why was this an accident?”
The Arm nodded, her head unsteady. “I was wounded and nearing withdrawal. I fainted at point A, and woke up at point B standing over a Transform’s corpse. I knew I was in deep shit and wanted to make things right with the Focus. I had a number to call in case of emergencies.”
“This Focus Biggioni?”
She shook her head. “Hank didn’t give me her number. He didn’t trust Focus Biggioni with my life.” Tonya wanted to celebrate. Hancock hadn’t explicitly mentioned that Tonya had been Keaton’s Network contact.
“Whose phone number did he give?”
“Dr. Lorraine Rizzari, in Boston.”
“You met her?”
The Arm nodded. “Dr. Rizzari raked me over the coals for what I’d done and punished me.”
“Punished you?”
“Yes. She made me give her my prize Chimera hand! I’d paid blood for that!” Tonya gasped. Rizzari’s real punishment to the Arm had been the ‘give us leverage on the Arms’ task, which if the Arm had completed, would make her a traitor to her own kind. Tonya didn’t want the mission publicized. Instead, Leeson got a typical bit of Arm insanity.
The Arm inexplicably began to cry. “Enkidu’s hand was still twi-twi-twitching,” the Arm said, through the sobs.
“Did Dr. Rizzari call the police to apprehend you or attempt to detain you for capture by an officer of the law?” Ellicot asked.
“Rizzari? If she tried anything like that, I would have ripped her in half. She’s about five foot tall and a third of my weight. She would blow away in a strong wind.”
True, very true. The Arm covered up for Rizzari, nevertheless. Tonya guessed Lori had gotten under the Arm’s skin as much as the Arm had gotten under Rizzari’s.
Tonya was watching a tape of the doctors’ moronic questioning when Pete came in. Pete carried his tape with him and Tonya had the aide shut off the projector as soon as she metasensed Pete.
“You got it?” she asked.
Pete didn’t look happy and went all formal, doing the bow routine. “I got all sorts of information, Ma’am, but I’m not sure it’s the answers you want.”
“Tell me.”
Pete shook his head. “No, Ma’am. Ma’am, you need to see it on the tape.”
Tonya’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, fearing the worst. She inclined her head toward the projector. “Load it up, then, and let’s see what you got.”
She sat back as the never-ending clicking of the film through the projector started again. Tonya was starting to hear it in her dreams.
The Arm, curled in a fetal position, held her arms over her head, and answered questions with her eyes closed. Her left shoulder had acquired a lump, as if her left arm was no longer in the socket. Dammit, the Arm should be just fine, not looking like she cycled through peri-withdrawal symptoms.
Leeson brought Pete into the room, just within range of the camera.
“Ask your questions,” Leeson told Pete. “She’ll answer.”
“Please,” the Arm begged. “Please. I need juice. You don’t understand how bad this is. I’m answering your questions. I’ll keep answering your questions. Just, please, get me juice. Please…”
Leeson cut her off. “You’ll get juice when you answer our questions.”
“Please…”
“Shut up and answer the questions. Ask your questions, Vinote.”
Pete looked uncomfortable, but he took a breath and ignored the state of the Arm in front of him.
“I want information about the Transforms you’ve killed that were part of Focus households,” he said.
“Frank Kensington, a lawyer out in Pittsburgh. I killed him in the fall of last year.” Her voice, never more than a whisper, drifted off.
They had covered Kensington already, so Pete moved on. “Who else?”
“No one,” Hancock said, whispering hoarsely.
Pete frowned. “No other household Transforms?”
“No.”
“What about Keaton? What do you know about the household Transforms she killed?”
“She didn’t kill those Transforms. Period.”
Tonya felt like someone had flushed her innards like a toilet. It was one thing for Shadow and Lori to predict these answers and another to hear the answers in person. Right up there with phone calls announcing the death of a parent or the doctor when he says you have the Shakes. Lightheaded, Tonya leaned forward in her chair, silently urging the screen version of Pete to probe further, to find her a way out of this morass.
Pete frowned for a moment and asked: “How do you know? What about Transforms you might have taken by mistake?”
“No,” the Arm still insisted. “Transforms metasense different when they have a Focus. You can’t kill one without knowing it.”
“Different how?”
“They have the pattern of their Focus imprinted on them,” she said, so softly Tonya could barely hear her. Tonya’s eyes went wide and she sucked in her breath. This Arm was talking about some completely new metasense trick, one she hadn’t been able to squeeze out of Keaton. For years, Tonya thought that Keaton knew who her people were only because she had told her. The bitch, getting Tonya to tell her what she already knew.
“This pattern is something you can metasense?”
“Yes.”
“Frank Kensington is the only Transform you’ve ever killed who had a Focus?”
“Yes.”
Tonya caught Pete muttering an obscenity under his breath. She had the urge to do the same. The answer wouldn’t change and Tonya would stay screwed.
Putting her own worries aside, the Arm’s answers did still leave a question: if not Hancock and not Keaton, then who? The entire reason Tonya cooperated with the Feds with this interrogation was to keep her people alive and stop the killing and kidnapping of tagged Transforms. As the Crow said, this situation was going down the toilet. No. Not yet. They just need to ask the right questions. Giving up on this was too premature. There still had to be a way…
“Okay, what about Keaton? Tell me again about the household Transforms she’s killed.”
“None.”
“How can you say ‘none’? I thought she didn’t tell you what she was doing?”
“She didn’t. Please, I need juice…”
“Answer the question,” Pete said, interrupting, as hard as Leeson.
There was a pause, as the Arm gathered herself again. She struggled to even speak. “She didn’t believe in taking household Transforms. I’ll answer you. Just tell me what you want me to say.”
“What do you mean, ‘she didn’t believe in it’?”
“Early on she told me taking tagged Transforms was too dangerous, but later I figured out that the real reason she kept avoiding tagged Transforms was she wanted to cooperate with the Focuses. What do you really want?” Tonya shivered. The Arm called them ‘tagged Transforms’, a bit of Focus terminology. She hadn’t expected that.
“I want to know who’s been killing household Transforms and I want to stop them. Tell me that, Hancock.”
The Arm didn’t answer for a very long moment, and then, excruciatingly slowly, she sat up on her bench. Blood seeped through her prison pajamas as she moved, and leaked from the cracks between her fingers. The joints in her fingers were swollen, her fingernails were falling off, and her lips were cracked and bleeding. The Arm’s mouth moved and Tonya heard the barest whisper of her voice, but couldn’t make out the words through the poor sound of the film. She looked over at Pete.
Pete’s mouth was tight. “She was pleading for juice,” he said.
It was a long process before the Arm’s ruined body finally sat upright. Another long moment before she spoke, her voice barely a croak.
“Water,” she said.
A guard fetched a water bottle, and extended it to her on the end of a pole. Hancock t
ook the bottle, her hand shaking so badly she spilled more than she drank.
“I could give you better answers if I had juice,” she said, looking at Leeson. She spoke slowly and she stumbled over her words. “I can’t think. I can barely stay awake. With juice I would be able to tell you everything, and I know more than any of you suspect.”
“Just answer the questions,” Leeson said.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You think I’ll fight you again if you give me juice, but you don’t understand how bad this is. I couldn’t ever face this again. I’ll give you much better answers if you give me juice.”
“I said, answer the questions.”
“Please, sir, I’ll do whatever you want…”
“Are you being difficult, Hancock?” Leeson said, his voice soft and threatening.
“No, no, never.” The Arm’s hoarse voice rattled with panic and Tonya thought she might fall over again, but she steadied herself. Sweat dripped down the Arm’s face, along the pallid, blistered skin. “I can only speculate about who’s killing your Transforms.”
“Speculate then.”
“I’ve told you how many times I’ve run into Chimeras and their households,” she said, her voice rasping. “Those Transforms, their half-Monster women, have to come from somewhere.”
The Arm took a wheezing breath and kept going. “A Chimera can take juice from any Transform. Or Major Transform.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Some of them can talk, and I think they’re organizing for some sort of war. Their leader, who they call Wandering Shade and I know of as Officer Canon, I think may…” The Arms voice broke off in sobs as she twitched violently enough to remove skin where the shackled met the skin. Peri-withdrawal pain, it had to be. “Ah, I think, think, Officer Canon may be a renegade Focus. I think she’s plotting a revolution against the Focus Council. She was there when I was shot!” The Arm broke down in a coughing fit.
“You really believe all this crap?” Pete said.
The Arm shuddered and shivered for nearly two minutes before she recover enough of her strength to answer. “Yes, yes. Please, I need juice. I’ve answered your questions. Please…”
Tonya raised her hand to stop the film and put her head in her hands.
The realization finally hit her.
She had organized the institutional torture of this woman because she thought the Arm had been killing her people. The Arm, Hancock, hadn’t been. If Tonya had listened to Rizzari, believed Rizzari, this might have never happened.
This was a betrayal of her own kind, and not the first time other Major Transforms had betrayed the Arm. The Crow was right. Hancock was another Major Transform. Tonya should have never trusted the word of doctors and civil authorities, the eternal enemies of the Transforms. She had picked the wrong side in this fight. She should have been defending the Arm, not stabbing her in the back.
For several long moments, Tonya drowned under the sudden onslaught of horror.
The Crow was right. The Arms weren’t killing her people. All this time, they had been blaming the Arms, and they weren’t the killers. The Arms thought the killers were a renegade Focus and her pet Chimeras, Chimeras controlled using a secret first Focus technology, directed withdrawal scarring.
How would she tell the Council? What would she tell the Council?
In a moment, she got a grip on herself. The Arm was still a killer. She hadn’t killed all those Transforms, but she had killed one of them. However, how long would Tonya be in prison if someone exposed her own misdeeds? Six months ago, Tonya had covered up Keaton’s killing of a Transform in Tonya’s own household. Tonya could have trivially killed Keaton, and come out a national hero. Why didn’t she do so? Tonya had dismissed mundane morality when she learned how to be a real Focus. There was no other way to control her own life.
No, the conflict in her head wasn’t so simple. This wasn’t just the pain of guilt. This wasn’t just the horrendous damage Hancock’s destruction would do to the Network. This wasn’t just the damage she caused Hancock.
The conflict in her head revolved around a question she barely allowed herself to ask: Why had she been ordered to do all these things? An even more horrible thought came to her: What if Wini Adkins set all this up just to get the Arm out of Wini’s territory? What if Wini is the Major Transform who’s gone renegade?
The authorities questioned the Arm for only ninety minutes after Pete’s last question. The Arm answered every question they asked her, except one. Tonya wouldn’t have believed the Arm would be even remotely capable of resistance, but she was. The Arm had some lover she wanted to protect, and she pleaded to protect him almost as hard as she pleaded for juice.
The fact the Arm had a sex partner she loved shocked Tonya. How? Arms couldn’t care for people. What sort of man would even be willing to sleep with her, of his own free will?
While Leeson hammered her about her lover, the Arm passed out. Leeson and the doctors tried to wake her, but they couldn’t. According to the doctors, despite the Arm’s symptoms, she retained enough juice to keep going for another four or five days. Perhaps longer. The coma wasn’t fake; the doctors guessed dehydration. They stuck her full of IVs, saline and glucose, but she didn’t awaken. After the authorities alerted Tonya to the situation, she sent along a note to Dr. Jeffers saying she had seen this before and the Arm would quickly recover once she got some juice. Dr. Jeffers sent back a note concurring with her analysis, and saying that getting the Arm juice was now their number one priority.
Just after the Arm fell into her coma, word came in from the FBI. Special Agent Bates had captured Zielinski at the airport several hours previous while Zielinski waited for a flight to Boston. Tonya was surprised. Secret agent Zielinski should have been trivially able to avoid the FBI and go underground. Bates’ involvement stank as well. Did Zielinski try to get himself arrested? This smelled to Tonya almost like a plan.
The phone rang in her office while the doctors continued to attempt to rouse the Arm out of her coma. Tonya picked up the phone.
“Private,” the melodious calming voice said. Tonya obediently waved her people out of her borrowed CDC office.
“Yes?”
“Time to go home, Tonya. You’ve done your job and all is well.”
“But… But… I need to make sure the Feds do their job and Hancock gets juice. I don’t trust their competence.”
“That’s all been taken care of. You have no need to worry.” Pause. A heavenly choir sang hosannas and Tonya felt herself spiritually uplifted. “As usual you will forget this phone call ever occurred.”
Tonya smiled and hung up the phone. She looked around her office and wondered where her people had gone. It annoyed her so much when she lost track of things like this.
“Everyone!” she said, loud. Delia and the crew came streaming in from outside the office. “We’re done here today. Pack up. We’re heading home.”
Marty came over and gave her a funny look. “Ma’am? Weren’t we going to stay until the Feds got the Arm juice?”
Tonya frowned. She vaguely remembered something along those lines. “I’ve just been reassured that everything is all taken care of.”
“The phone call? Was that what the phone call was about, ma’am?” Marty said.
Tonya frowned again. “What phone call?”
Interlude: March 25, 1968
In a small Transform clinic in Charlottesville, the phone call came just as they loaded Gordon Wilhame into the ambulance.
“Stop! Stop!” the nurse called as she ran out into the crisp predawn darkness of the parking lot, holding onto her hat, her skirt flapping in the wind. The doctor turned away from the men loading Gordon’s drugged and unconscious body into the ambulance.
“They found a Focus! He needs to go to Jacksonville, not Washington!” the nurse shouted as she came closer.
“You’re sure?” the doctor asked.
“I’m sure. We got a call from Doctor Absoth. He found out through some Focus Adkins that
the Focus there got a female Transform, and so she now has an extra slot for a man.”
The doctor’s face broke out in a slow, illuminating smile, and he waved his hands at the men loading Gordon into the ambulance.
“Sorry, boys, but the FBI doesn’t get this one. He’s going to Jacksonville.”
The glowing smile never left the doctor’s face and he looked down at the unconscious man. “It turns out you’re going to live after all, Gordon.”
Part 3
Rescues and Recriminations
Emptiness here, Emptiness there,
but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes.
Infinitely large and infinitely small, no difference,
for definitions have vanished
and no boundaries are seen.
– from the Hsin Hsin Ming
Chapter 11
In 1967 2 Arms transformed in the United States. Both died within 3 months of their transformation.
“Understanding Transform Sickness as a Disease”
Sky: March 25, 1968
Did Keaton ever do anything that didn’t break a half dozen laws? Sky couldn’t figure the Arm. So reasonable one moment, so psychotic the next.
They found the CDC complex out in the middle of nowhere, in the back of beyond, in an off-the-beaten-path area seventy-five kilometers to the west northwest of Washington DC, near the comatose town of Round Hill. The authorities had probably decided to put their fancy medical centerpiece out in the forested hills of Virginia for reasons of safety, back when Transform Sickness was new. Keaton’s chosen route to Round Hill went through Scranton, avoiding the metropolises between Boston and Washington – just in case anyone watched. Keaton needed to exercise every hour or so, a significant inconvenience, and so they stopped in numerous small towns, parks and wild areas for that purpose. Somewhere northeast of Scranton, their vehicle of choice, a VW van painted in flowers, asterisks and peace signs (all in bold primary colors), needed gas. They stopped to let the Arm exercise again, about two miles past the gas station, in an empty roadside park along the twisty two-lane truck route they had been following, US 6.
A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) Page 24
