Gilgamesh nodded and told what he knew about Shere Khan. “Occum’s frustrated, because he can’t keep Shere Khan from sliding farther into beasthood. However, at least he’s able to keep his Beast Men settled in one place and not causing a ruckus. According to his note, whenever Occum turns his back, if the two Beast Men are anywhere close to each other, they fight. It’s a big problem.”
“Dangerous business. Your life could use some settling down as well,” Sinclair said, eyes still wide.
---
Sinclair pointed out a house Gilgamesh could stay in, a rundown place the neighborhood children considered haunted. It and its termites squatted three miles north-northwest of the warehouse where the Arms lived. Only a thin patina of nebulous dross remained in the Arms’ warehouse. The local Crows had picked clean everything else.
At night the Crows roused, coming out of their homes and hidey-holes, moving toward Fairmont Park. Gilgamesh joined them, walking the streets lined by small city houses, all so similar to his haunted house. Around him, the Crows gathered.
Five minutes later, as he walked along a wider road lined with gas stations, Laundromats and corner markets, he met up with one of the unknown Crows, one with the same sort of roiling external dross around him Echo and Thomas the Dreamer possessed. He had guessed right; an older Crow did live in Philly. He trusted Sinclair’s comment that Gilgamesh had nothing to fear from the other Philadelphia Crows, and didn’t run.
“Gilgamesh,” he said, introducing himself as they passed by the Crown Liquor Store.
The older Crow slowed and turned back to where Gilgamesh followed. He was blond, tall, and looked to be in his early twenties, as all Crows did.
“Wire.”
Gilgamesh nodded in greeting. “Why are we going toward the park?” he asked.
The other smiled, just a bit. “Just to talk and compare notes. If you’ve never seen a Crow-moot before, you’ll be surprised.”
He had never heard of the Crow-moot term, but he suspected he had been to quite a few in his wandering. “I met Sinclair already,” Gilgamesh whispered. “Which Crows are which?”
Wire named them as they approached. One of the Crows, Orange Sunshine, held back, agitated.
The ‘Crow moot’ meeting started before they settled down in the park. “Wire, did you see what the Skinner did to the Student after she knocked over a pile of boxes?” Ezekiel asked Wire, a block and a half from the park boundary. “How long will it be before the Skinner kills her?” Wire didn’t answer immediately.
“This is Gilgamesh,” he said, after he leapt over the park fence without breaking stride. “I’m sure you all know of him already.” Wire claimed a park bench a hundred yards inside the park, in a secluded copse of trees. He sat on the back of the bench and waved to each Crow as they came.
Gilgamesh willed his feet forward, unnerved by the other Crows’ knowledge of him.
“This ain’t no place for a fledgling,” Orange Sunshine said, the last of the flock to arrive near Wire’s park bench. “I’m not even sure I want to stay here.” Orange Sunshine matched Gilgamesh’s height, but thinner, with dirty blond hair and gap teeth. He spoke in the quietest whisper Gilgamesh had ever heard.
Ezekiel, who turned out to be a short Crow with dark, curly hair, cleared his throat. Wire hadn’t answered Ezekiel’s earlier question.
Wire quietly laughed. His tall frame loomed over the others as he sat on the back of the park bench. “There isn’t anything we can do about it, even if we wanted to,” he said, finally answering Ezekiel’s question. “Besides, did you metasense what the Student did to one of the Skinner’s victims by herself last week? They’ve driven each other mad.” Wire’s whisper matched Ezekiel’s quiet.
The Crows fell silent for a moment, allowing in the night noises: a small animal in the brush, the rustle of the wind through the bare tree branches, the hum of traffic outside the park. Tolstoy, a Crow with a flat broad face and shaggy brown hair, watched Gilgamesh as Gilgamesh took a place near a tree. “So, how are you here, young Crow?” he asked. He spoke with a strong Eastern European accent, his voice deep and gravelly. “What do you know that you should tell us?”
“I, I,” Gilgamesh tried to answer. Sweat beaded under his shirt and he began to shiver again. New Crows always affected him strongly and this group felt already whole, with him as an outsider. His juice threatened to sick up on him but he forced it back down. It would be humiliating to sick up on himself in front of all these older, confident Crows.
“Let him be,” Wire said. “He needs a little time to settle in.” Then, casually, so easily, he looked away. “Tolstoy, I’ve been thinking about your proposal for classifying juice. I still think there’s only one juice variety. What makes juice appear different is due to the different kinds of Transforms, not different kinds of juice.”
Gilgamesh took a deep breath, relieved the other Crows had turned their attention away from him, grateful to Wire for the change of subject.
“I agree with Wire,” Ezekiel said. “I think what you’re seeing, Tolstoy, is just an echo of the amount of juice each Transform has.”
Tolstoy shook his head. “But then what about gender? The juice inside male Transforms metasenses different than the juice inside women Transforms, even if they have about the same amount.”
Sinclair spoke up this time. “But to me, it’s not the juice which metasenses as different, but the shape of the juice inside each of them and the speed at which the juice moves within them. For lack of a better term, their juice structure. It’s a different axis.” Gilgamesh’s eyes shot open. Sinclair had just claimed to be able to metasense juice movement within Transforms! Was the Crow metasense different for each Crow?
“Different axis or not, what we lack is any way to describe a Transform’s glow,” Wire said. “Every one of us can sense the Skinner and the Student and tell they have a different, uh, juice structure than each other, but their juice structure is even more different than Hera’s, and radically different than a Transform’s. Or us. We need some way to describe these differences.”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine,” Tolstoy said. His voice was deep, but pitched no louder than a whisper.
The Crows fell into a calming silence. Gilgamesh could feel their presence even without concentrating his metasense.
“I have some bad news,” Wire said. “I believe the Student is the California Spree Killer.”
The other Crows, save for Gilgamesh, jumped back. Gilgamesh took a deep breath and steadied himself. It fit, based on his understanding of Tiamat.
“So she has fallen into the Skinner’s madness,” Orange Sunshine said. “She’s younger. She’s going to be crazier, more violent than ever.” He sighed, yet more nervous. “If we only knew more about the Student.”
Ah. Gilgamesh raised his hand, not sure of the protocol. He had told Tiamat’s story before, and he could easily tell it again.
Ezekiel burst out in quiet hysterical laughter at Gilgamesh’s raised hand. Gilgamesh yanked his hand back down and put his head in his hands, turning an embarrassed red. Wire didn’t join in the laughter; he just smiled and tilted his head in invitation.
“I was there at her birth, I believe, or soon after,” Gilgamesh said. “If you want, I can tell you all I experienced. It might take a while, though.”
“I’d love to listen to your story, Gilgamesh,” Tolstoy said. “Don’t mind Ezekiel. I’m sure he’ll want to listen to it as well, despite his ill-mannered antics.”
Wire waved Gilgamesh on. Gilgamesh told the tale, for now leaving out Echo’s machinations and Gilgamesh’s visit to Shadow, Thomas the Dreamer and Occum’s project site.
“You are well worth watching and listening to,” Tolstoy said, when Gilgamesh finished an hour and a quarter later.
“A young hero, a young adventurous Crow, like Sky,” Sinclair said. Proud.
Orange Sunshine, though, had slowly backed away while Gilgamesh told the tale. When Gilgamesh told of the details of Tiam
at’s escape, his story proved too much for the more skittish Crow, who took off running.
“I was afraid he might run,” Wire said, his voice calming. “Orange Sunshine hoped Tiamat would be a nicer, saner Arm. The thought of another Skinner proved too much to handle.” Gilgamesh smiled. Wire had adopted his name for Hancock.
Wire left his park bench with a hop and went over to put his right hand on Gilgamesh’s shoulder. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine. I’m anxious for Tiamat to return, to tell you the truth.”
“Good,” Wire said. “I think I know how you are going to contribute to our group, at least to start with: your stories.”
“Uh…okay. I’ll write them up ahead of time, so I don’t forget,” Gilgamesh said.
He hoped his stories didn’t scare off any of the other Crows. His Tiamat story wasn’t anywhere near his scariest.
Chapter 2
No two Arms are exactly alike. Many make the mistake and think Transform Sickness produces duplicate Transforms, that all Transforms that share the same name and category are exactly alike. No, all the Transforms are as different from each other as each individual human is different from each other – only more so, when you factor in the various enhancements given to them by Transform Sickness. Competition between Arms drives them toward secretive special talents.
“The Book of Arms”
Carol Hancock: March 23, 1967
I returned to Keaton’s warehouse just before midnight. I carefully parked my bicycle out of sight, inside the warehouse entryway, beside the partition of storage boxes separating the main area from Keaton’s ersatz gym.
Keaton’s warehouse was a cavernous place, two stories tall. The near half contained her gym, weights, bars, benches, machines, with gymnastic equipment to the side and rings and ropes hanging from the rafters above. Beyond the gym, wooden partitions marked makeshift rooms, and beyond that was a kitchen and the two real rooms in the warehouse, a bathroom, and Keaton’s office. The cold air stank of sweat, piss, blood, terror, and death. And rotting kitchen garbage. I suspected she hadn’t emptied the garbage since I left. Cleaning wasn’t something she cared to spend effort on.
As soon as I rounded the concealing partition of boxes, I found Keaton in front of me, five feet of bundled muscle, cruelty and aggression. This was it. My body sang with stark terror and I settled into a fighting crouch.
Her eyes narrowed. “Dipshit, if you were going to come back with this sort of attitude, you shouldn’t have come back at all.”
I minutely shook my head and attacked: punches, leg sweeps, the works. I left my knives sheathed, though, and kept my anger controlled.
This wasn’t how to win this fight, but nothing I did would let me win this fight. I knew Keaton would beat the crap out of me no matter what I did, so I wanted the fight on my terms. My mind got me out of the Detention Center. I counted on my mind to get me out of the Keaton graduation dilemma.
Besides, I had developed a taste for fighting over the last few months. It made a great outlet for bottled up aggression.
Keaton couldn’t resist. She thoroughly fought me into submission, not for the first time and likely not for the last. She maneuvered the fight into the main open area of the warehouse, beside the weights and gymnastics equipment, surrounded by the detritus of at least a year of her activities, all haphazardly stacked on top of the remains of the warehouse’s former life. I knew her juice level by the way she fought: mid-low. If her juice count had been dangerously low, Keaton would have attacked without speaking, alerting me that this was no time to raise any topics I cared about. If her juice had been too high, I would endure hours of her petty sadism after she humbled me, all of which she would consider giggly hilarious. My fingernails would need to grow back and my skin strips would need to heal, etc etc, before I got anything rational out of her.
Mid-low juice meant that after I tapped out, defeated, she made me scream for three minutes, working nerve nodules, as a lesson in proper decorum. While she reminded me about my painful life here, I screamed as she wanted while distracting myself with the state of the kitchen, barely visible from my position on the concrete floor. A worse mess you have never seen. I wondered how she stood the reek.
“Dammit, scag, I smell one of your fucking plans, don’t I?” she said, after she satisfied her urges and I gave her my submission signals: racing heart, ragged breathing, adrenaline pouring through me and the smell of fear rolling off of me. Keaton always forced me to go through her degrading humiliation games. Only now, with my acceptance of my own predator nature, did I understand why: to make it clear in both our minds I wasn’t competition.
Back when I first joined her I hated those humiliations, but they bought me my life. I grew used to them, but they still grated, and I knew damned well Keaton enjoyed the fact they grated. I still couldn’t do anything about them. You do what you have to do. I was still alive six months past my transformation, more than you could say about five of the six Arms who transformed before me.
From my usual defeated position on the floor, licking her stinking tennis shoes, I spoke.
“Ma’am, I do,” I said, around my fear. Fear was necessary; if I didn’t drop my aggression and let loose my fear of her, the beating would continue until I lost consciousness. Assuming I could lose consciousness. I had never pushed things that far. “May I have permission to present my ideas, ma’am?” I had thought this through in the airport and realized I could play a very dangerous game: I indirectly controlled, at times, Keaton’s punishment and torture by sending out the proper signals, even if they weren’t real. The trick didn’t always work, but it did give me a way to bargain with her. Until I freed my inner beast before the California spree and started to understand what made an Arm tick, I had only two choices: fight back or instantly submit. Neither involved any real communication.
“Fuuuuck me.” She aimed a kick at my head, which I knew from our months of fighting and submission rituals meant it was time for me to stand. I avoided the kick, got up, and retreated to a bowed position on one knee, still signaling fear, submission and respect. “You and your goddamned ideas.”
“Ma’am,” I said. Paused. “I discovered something inside myself in San Francisco: I don’t tolerate competition. My instincts demand I be the dominant one.”
“Took you long enough, bitch.” I knelt primarily because of Keaton’s height, a touchy half foot shorter than mine. I never got anything from her while standing that she hadn’t planned on giving me first.
“Ma’am.” I nodded, truthfully afraid now. I couldn’t look up to study her reactions, leaving me vulnerable to any verbal mistakes. “I understand you and your actions much better now, as well as my own. I understand why I annoy you and why you do this.” I waved my arms. I meant the beatings and humiliation.
She had to put me in my place.
“Go on.” Angry. Intolerant. Yes, I had made progress, but no, she didn’t like the fact I understood her methods.
Mighty fine line I walked in this dangerous game.
I chose my words carefully. “I believe I know how you might fix the situation, ma’am.” I kept my mind clear of thought-spoken words, as Keaton could read minds. She swore it wasn’t anything supernatural. She said she would be teaching me the mind reading trick sometime soon, so I believed her now.
Keaton tapped her left foot on the floor, impatient.
“If you set a firm graduation requirement for me, ma’am…” I let my voice trail off and snuck a glance up. I didn’t see my death coming toward me, just Keaton, standing, angry and thinking. Two points for me!
“You remember our agreement, Hancock?” Oooh, my name. I had her attention.
“Certainly, ma’am. ‘You’ll obey me absolutely, do anything I ask of you. The only way you get away from me is if I say you’re done, or you die. I’m going to enjoy hurting you. You will not complain.’” Love that Arm memory. I remembered everything, save for when low juice interfered. “Yes, ma’am. I understand
the agreement. In your position I would accept nothing else from a prospective student.”
My comment brought her eyebrows together, or so I imagined. Keaton leaned forward, tensing. Had I been too cheeky? To me, asking for a graduation requirement fit within our agreement.
Barely.
Hey, I’m pushy. Live with it.
“What do you think is appropriate, Hancock?”
She stayed tense, reading my cocky nature, shallowly buried underneath my fear. Her tense hesitation did its trick and I began to sweat fear in earnest, losing, at least for a moment, my hidden cockiness. “Ma’am, that’s not for me to say.”
Keaton relaxed; I had passed her test. “Okay, then, tell me what you’re thinking. Why do you think your idea solves anything?”
This I had rehearsed. “Ma’am. A graduation requirement makes me more officially a student” rather than a bundle of stupid Arm reactions that ran me through a roller coaster of statuses ranging from dangerous threat to barely tolerated slave “and, as a student, I can’t be competition for you. I’m hopeful I will annoy you less in this case.”
“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. How about you?”
What will keep my own urges to be dominant in their proper place? “Ma’am, a graduation requirement will serve to distract me from those improper urges, and will constantly remind me those urges are wrong.”
Keaton sighed, theatric. “Overthought as usual. On your head be it. I’m not promising to be easier on you, understand. I’m just giving you a goal to work for.”
She agreed! “Thank you ma’am. Thank you.” I meant it, too.
I expected some thought before she came up with a graduation goal, but she surprised me, with no hesitation: “How about this, scag: you leave when you defeat me in combat when I’m not burning.”
Now We Are Monsters (The Commander) Page 3
