Focus Rizzari snapped her fingers.
The misery stopped. Gone.
Gail looked up at Rizzari from the floor through the blood and tears covering her face and shuddered.
“You’re weak, you’re unreliable, and you’re incompetent,” Focus Rizzari said, in that same soulless voice. “Now close your eyes and extend your metasense. You are going to attempt to create a basic juice pattern even you should be able to manage.”
Witch. Gail shuddered again at Rizzari’s inhuman eyes, as dead and cold as Teacher’s eyes. The tears didn’t stop, but did slow to a trickle. She shivered as she closed her eyes.
---
“What is with this shit, anyway?” Gail’s miserable few minutes of self-hate still ate at her. Hating herself so much frightened her, and the mistakes Rizzari brought forward remained in her mind.
“What shit?” Sylvie said, as she pounded on Gail’s back, attempting to pound the tension out of her as she lay on the living room floor in Gail and Van’s apartment. Over at the kitchen table Kurt and Van discussed Transform Sickness demographics, something about exponents and non-linear terms.
“All this shit. Here we were, portraying a nice ordinary Focus household and keeping our heads down, when all of a sudden, every mean bitch Major Transform in the entire country decides they want to come through and crap on me. I mean, Teacher is bad enough. How many Focuses have an Arm beating up on them three times a week, anyway? But now we have Lady Death stomping through, and she has a whole new way of crapping all over me. Why the hell is everyone picking on us now?”
“I thought they were teaching you,” Sylvie said.
“Teaching? Hah! Teacher’s just getting off on some mental masturbation exercise. I don’t know what Rizzari’s up to, except that she’s as bad as Teacher for dishing out the abuse.”
“Well, that’s not exactly fair,” Sylvie said. “I don’t know about Focus Rizzari, but you’ve certainly learned a lot from Commander Hancock. Your juice control’s become rock solid, your charisma’s like a knife, and you’ve got, pardon, a hell of a lot more focus than you had before. Not to mention what the training’s done for the rest of us.”
“Hey,” Gail said, twisting around to face Sylvie and undoing the effects of a good five minutes of vigorous pounding. “I thought you were on my side.”
“You’ve got a responsibility. You said so yourself. We’re looking for that breakthrough. You didn’t think we were going to get there without going through some rough spots, did you?”
Oh, hell. Sylvie had bought the message in Gail’s takeover speech, and now she expected Gail to salute the same flag.
“Gail, I’m serious,” Sylvie said, leaning forward and resting her elbow on Gail’s lower spine. “Have you paid any attention to the demographics?”
“What demographics?”
“The Transform Sickness demographics. Have you looked at how the numbers are growing? We all know the numbers are increasing each year, but what we didn’t know was the part about how the rate of increase is increasing. Ten years from now, half the country will have TS. Do you have any idea what that’s going to do the country? The world? Unless somebody makes some breakthroughs, people will die in wholesale lots. The Black Death’s going to look like a picnic in the park.”
Kurt nodded, distracted from his conversation with Van. “Right now, ninety percent of all Transforms don’t survive their first month, and many of them kill a bunch of other people on the way down. Think about what this will do to society. Monsters all over the place, everybody dying. The End.”
Gail shook her head. “TS can’t get that bad. There’ll be a vaccine or something.”
“Not going to happen,” Kurt said. “In the first place, a lot of the current transformations are induced directly from juice exposure, not caused by the disease vector. There’s enough ambient juice around by now that nobody can avoid it any more. A vaccine won’t do a thing to stop the induced transformations. Worse, they’re a decade away from a vaccine, and by then it will be too late.” They had been a decade away from a vaccine for Gail’s entire life. “This is happening fast. The world isn’t going to wait a generation or two to change. The transformation’s happening now, and will get worse every year.”
Crazy stuff. She looked over at Van for some voice of sanity. He shrugged.
“You can’t argue with the numbers,” Van said.
Gail shifted Sylvie off her and sat up, cross-legged, on the floor. “Where did you get all this?”
“Focus Rizzari’s people,” Sylvie said. “They figured this stuff out years ago, and they’ve been working on solutions ever since. Their Cause. Did you know, every single one of the people in that household is a volunteer? Out there in the East Region, if you want to fight for the future, you can sign up to join Focus Rizzari’s household. Only she has so many volunteers these days she has a waiting list.”
Dammit, Gail thought, this will teach me not to pay attention to East Region Focus politics. “Focus Rizzari’s people. Her people are selling you on their version of The Cause?”
Beth Hargrove, Gail’s very first Focus friend, had made a comment long ago: ‘You want cold, wait until you meet a Focus who has a mission.’ Gail hadn’t understood before. Now she did. Goose pimples sprung up on her arms, mixed in with a slight dampening of fear sweat. Gail thought of the Cause in terms of Transform rights, and recently, cooperation with other Major Transforms. Not as a way to come up with a slim chance to avoid the end of civilization.
“Gail, it’s the same cause,” Sylvie said. “Just listen to them. They’re pushing the same goals, except they’ve been doing so for years, and they have expert scientists and researchers working on the problem. Just listen to them.”
Gail closed her eyes in silent prayer. Rizzari and her people had taken her household away from her in just a few hours. Should she fight back?
Not if what her people learned was correct.
She wasn’t sure what she should do.
---
“Focus Rizzari,” Gail said, carefully polite. Rizzari still wore the same black cloak and her same look of disapproval. She didn’t answer, but only turned her face to where Gail sat across from her and waited. Gail took a breath and made a determined effort to control her shiver and her temper both.
“Focus Rizzari, several of your people have been talking to my people. I’d like to ask you about that.”
Rizzari looked at Gail for a long moment, as if deciding whether she answered worms or not. “Why not ask them? They’re the ones talking to your people.”
Gail took a deep breath and tried again. She kept her temper under her control, not wanting anything to do with another self-hate session.
“Yes, ma’am. But they all seem to hold the same position, so I thought this might be your position also, and I’d like to learn from you.”
Rizzari smiled faintly at the flattery and didn’t look impressed.
“Anyway, several of my people are now worried that Transform Sickness is going to become a pandemic, a plague, in the next few years, and millions will die.”
Focus Rizzari nodded. “Yes. The numbers are clear. This is why we’re pushing the Cause right now. We know Focuses can support more Transforms, with the help of other Major Transforms, but we don’t have much time to figure out how.”
Gail crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “We? That’s you and Commander Hancock?”
“Arm Haggerty, the Hero, is the mind behind this.”
“Is Tonya Biggioni involved in this?”
“She’s providing us political cover at the national UFA level. There are others.”
“Like me?”
Focus Rizzari gave her an icy stare. “You’re not playing in the same game. For one thing, you lack the commitment.”
Gail took a breath and kept her voice even. “You seem to have a particular dislike of me. Can you explain what bothers you so much about me?”
“There’s a long list,” she said. Gai
l winced inside at her cold tone, but held a look of polite interest on her face, a skill she learned at Teacher’s hands. “Potentially, the fate of millions of people depends on you, and you’re a weak reed. You have no sense of responsibility to the rest of the world, you’re concerned only with your own inconvenience, you make no effort to contribute without being prodded, or to learn the proper skills. You whine, and your thoughts don’t extend beyond the realm of politics. You and your household are parasites within the Transform community, making a minor show of supporting Transform rights and doing little else. I have a great deal of contempt for people who hold a position of responsibility and handle it carelessly, with no concern of how many other people they damage by their selfishness.”
Ooh, wow. She had asked, and Rizzari certainly didn’t hold back. “I’m good at politics,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “I’m good at helping new Focuses put households together. But I’m no researcher, ma’am.” Besides Transform rights, she spent the rest of her time mentoring new Focuses and advising them about Focus politics. How to keep their heads down and their households out of trouble. When to push and when not to push. “You really believe that what I’m doing here is critical, despite my journalism and political background?”
“Yes. If the project succeeds, the number of lives you’ll affect is uncountable. If the project fails, and we can’t tell whether it failed because of a design flaw or because of your incompetence, we’ll have to start over. Start over, mind you, after wasting enough time to jeopardize the benefits of success, if the project is indeed possible.”
Gail shook her head, withdrawing yet again from the preposterous claims. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“This is the flaw I most dislike. It makes no difference to anyone on earth whether you asked for this or not. Not a single one of us who’s making a difference, normal, Transform or Major Transform, asked for our responsibilities. But you, potentially the strongest Focus on the planet, continue to whine and suck out the marrow of the Transform community, stuck in your own selfishness.”
She almost lost her temper and responded in anger, especially with the crack about wasted potential. Gail pushed down her response, hard. This wasn’t the time for temper.
“I don’t buy this. You and Commander Hancock come in with all this talk of great causes, but it’s just an excuse to beat up on me. She likes this sort of thing. Hell, she gets off on pain. That’s sick.”
Focus Rizzari leaned forward. “Yes, Commander Hancock enjoys hurting people. So tell me, exactly what relevance does this have to do with anything?”
“You’re not the one she’s beating up on. When she beats up on you like she’s beating up on me, than come back and tell me it isn’t relevant.”
Focus Rizzari smiled, for the first time since she entered Gail’s household, and a moment later broke into a laugh. “When I got my training, it took both Stacy and Carol at once, and what they taught was so far beyond what you’re getting you can’t even imagine. Don’t sob to me about what Carol’s capable of. You haven’t come close to her limits.”
Gail’s eyebrows came down and she set her mouth. “Did you know she’s torturing my people? She can’t torture me anymore, so she’s using them as proxy punching bags. If you think this is tolerable behavior, there’s something wrong with you.”
“So your people are inviolate? Is that your excuse? You can commit to a cause, but your people can’t? I hope the generals in the US Army don’t have your philosophy, because if they aren’t willing to sacrifice their people when necessary, the Army wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. Sometimes a leader has to be able to sacrifice others. This is one of the harder parts of leadership, and you fall down when leading people gets hard, every time.”
“No.” Gail shook her head. “I don’t have the right to feed people to Hancock so she can get her jollies by torturing people.”
“Does Hancock know more than you do about how you need to be trained?”
Gail refused to answer the rhetorical question.
“If something needs to be done, then you need to make it happen. Either lead your people the direction you want to go, or find some people already going that way and sign them on board. Anything else is just an excuse. You can’t hide behind your people. Either you have a responsibility or you don’t, and if you do, then you do what’s necessary to make it happen.”
“The ends don’t justify the means.”
“It depends on the ends, and the means.”
Gail knew in her heart that Rizzari was wrong, but she didn’t have an answer for her arguments.
“If Carol is torturing your people, why?” Rizzari said. “What does she hope to achieve?”
“She’s getting off on it!”
“Bullshit! Carol likes her torture, but that’s not ever why she does things. Why is she causing pain? And if you can’t figure out some real reasons, I’m going to think even less of you than I do already.”
Gail glared. Rizzari had gotten under her skin again. She wanted to smack the self-righteous little bitch, but didn’t dare let her anger loose.
“She wants to control me.”
“Wrong again. She has many ways to control you. Why did she choose this one?”
“She thinks torture makes people tougher,” Gail said, through a clenched jaw. “She wanted to stick me with some tough decisions so I’d learn how to make them. She wanted to force a crisis in my household so I’d take a stronger leadership role. She wanted to teach me how to support my people when they’re in trouble. She wanted to give my people some experience with torture so they know how to deal with it, and she wanted to teach them to trust me in a crisis.”
Focus Rizzari smiled. “Well, there we are, then. Did her plan work?”
Damn the woman! “Yes,” Gail said. She hoped Rizzari didn’t ask, but the truth was that once she became reliably able to support her people when Teacher tortured them, they dealt quite well. Torture sessions were now a status symbol among the more macho members of her household. She had a waiting list of volunteers.
Torture was still wrong, though.
“Later this evening,” Focus Rizzari said, “I’m going to schedule a session for you with a few of my people, and they’re going to explain the future of Transform Sickness, and exactly what we all have to look forward to. Seven years from now, you’re going to watch the news, and with every death they report, you’re going to wonder if you might have saved them. By then it will be too late. If you want to shirk your responsibility, there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but I will at least make sure you fully understand what you’re doing.”
Rizzari smiled then. “If you choose then to deny your responsibility, what I did to you yesterday will be nothing compared to what you’ll feel when the world starts going to hell. Because you’ll hate yourself then for good reason, and your pain will never ever end.”
---
“Why me, Lord?” Gail prayed, in the silent sanctuary of St. Paul’s. “Why me?” She knew she was an exceptional Focus, but she was still a kid, not even thirty yet, and hadn’t even been a Focus for five years. Why had she been called on to endure this sort of misery?
Rizzari’s household called itself Inferno, and they, not the Focus, chose the name. Independent cusses, the lot of them. Their presentation had been very convincing. They had all the facts and figures to back up all of Gail’s gut worries. Gail had suspected the world was going to hell. Rizzari’s people owned the accounting books on the end of the world.
Worse, all they offered were scant chances, scary chances. The project Inferno worked on, now almost complete, had nearly ruined them as a household, leaving many of the Transforms with shredded juice structures. Their work made Gail’s training look like a trip to a preschooler’s amusement park. Rizzari had one of her Crows living in the Inferno household while she was gone, specifically there to fix the withdrawal scarring and accidental élan contamination resulting from their juice efficiency experiments.
&
nbsp; The entire household had turned themselves into lab rats. To Gail’s utter astonishment, Focus Rizzari hadn’t initiated the project, but three Transforms and one disassociated normal they called Dr. Bob did, the day after Focus Rizzari and her fighting people returned from helping the Arms chase the Hunters out of the Midwest. Torture us for a good cause, they demanded of their Focus; Focus Rizzari had meditated for nearly a week, wrestling with her conscience, before agreeing. So far, only one of her household members had died. Several had been maimed badly enough to need to be transferred out of Rizzari’s household.
Hearing about the death brought tears to Gail’s eyes, and a sense of having fallen through the ice to the frigid waters below.
Worse, Rizzari’s people couldn’t tell if her work with Teacher would succeed, or would matter on the larger scale even if it did succeed. All they could say was if her work proved compatible with what they were doing, great things would happen. If.
Rizzari wanted her to sacrifice herself and her household for no more than a hope. Rizzari and her household had already made that choice; they had even showed Gail the Inferno induction ceremony, how they made someone a member of Inferno.
The ceremony was a funeral. They literally pledged their lives to the Cause.
They thought her work with Teacher had a better chance than most ideas, though, to produce something positive. They knew about her reputation as one of the top, or the top, Focuses in raw power. They expected her to earn that big red ‘S’ on her chest pretty damn quick. They counted on her…and they trusted Zielinski with their lives.
The bastard had been sending them detailed reports on Gail’s progress the entire time.
Gail wished God would answer back to her sometimes, but if he did, she didn’t hear. All she gained was a sense of perspective. God looked at a bigger picture, and he valued all his children. He sent Jesus to die for his children.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 40
