Polly? Focus Keistermann, the president of the Council? Too many high level Focus politicians realized Gail existed these days. This wouldn’t help her sleep at night.
The content of Focus Rizzari’s comments disconcerted her as much as the context. The trick of drawing juice from her own buffer was a critical skill, and one Gail worried about figuring out on her own. With Rizzari’s instructions, she might learn the trick in a matter of days.
Things sped up again.
Gail nodded. “I’ll call Dr. Zielinski. The sooner as he can draw up a Zielinski diagram of the buffer-access juice pattern, the sooner we can get started.”
Lori raised an elegant narrow eyebrow on her severe face. “Yes, of course. I’m going to need to see his recent codification developments. Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple juice pattern.”
Gail nodded. “Let’s go talk to him.”
Littleside was quiet as they walked toward Zielinski’s office. The halls were wide, and the antiseptic hospital scents hadn’t yet overcome the construction odors. The place was beautiful, full of light and shiny new equipment.
“There’s another Focus here,” Focus Rizzari said.
“Already? Beth must be an early riser.” Focus Rizzari’s metasense range was longer than hers, but Gail picked out significantly more detail.
“Hargrove? What’s she doing here?”
“I invited her. As a friend of mine, she was in as much danger in Detroit as I was, so I talked her into coming here,” Gail said.
“Hmm.” Rizzari sank back into her unreadable mode, her face utterly blank. “Who’s the normal with them, and why does she metasense like she’s been sleeping with all the world’s Major Transforms?”
“Van’s sister Daisy,” Gail said. “She’s here as an informal PhD candidate in Transform biophysics and biomechanics. She’s a Major Transform groupie, but she’s also quite, um, smart.”
“If she wasn’t Hank wouldn’t let her clean his test tubes, much less study under him.”
They walked into Zielinski’s office, a big, beautiful place filled with dark furniture and heavy medical tomes. He and Beth sat with their heads together at his worktable, going over a Zielinski diagram. Daisy ran some sort of test on a portable device, one of four new to the office. The intense concentration on her face and the manual in her lap meant this was another of Dr. Zielinski’s crash courses.
The mouth-watering odor of warm bread and cinnamon rose from a plate of cinnamon rolls from Beth’s kitchen, and Gail’s stomach rumbled. She had grabbed a quick breakfast, but it didn’t remotely satisfy in the face of the warm cinnamon rolls that always followed Beth around.
“Knock knock,” Gail said. Beth and Dr. Zielinski looked up.
“Focus Rizzari? Neat!” Beth said. “Now the gang’s all here.”
Rizzari raised an eyebrow. “She’s helping you?” she said, to Dr. Zielinski.
He nodded. “Just getting Beth started on the basics. I’m going to need to incorporate your level one and two training into my program, Lori. Turns out Beth is catching on to the new method much faster than you did, Gail.” Gail winced at Zielinski’s casual idiocy. He must have introduced himself to Beth as himself, instead of his Dr. Smith identity. Overwork, perhaps?
Nah. Reading Beth, she realized that Beth knew him from before as Zielinski. Now that was a story worth extracting.
“What goes into level one and two?” Gail said, grabbing a cinnamon roll from the plate.
“Meditation, acceptance that standard juice moving involves use of juice patterns, and changing your mental image of what you’re doing when you move juice into a juice pattern visualization,” Rizzari said.
“Which meditation form?” Gail asked. “Guru Gilgamesh showed…”
Focus Rizzari waved her hand and cut her off. “Focus style meditation. Compassion and contemplation of the juice buffer.”
Gail sighed. Yet another Major Transform who didn’t see the benefit of using multiple meditation forms.
Focus Rizzari and Gail sat down on the other side of the table from Dr. Zielinski and Beth. Focus Rizzari asked Beth to do several simple exercises, and meditated, concentrating on her metasense. “Some of my level one and two training is redundant.”
“I was afraid of as much,” Dr. Zielinski said. “Can you give me a hand figuring out which parts are relevant?”
She nodded.
Gail sighed. “How much am I going to need to go back and relearn?”
“Hopefully, not much,” Rizzari said. “From what I’ve seen, you’ve picked up most of level one and two capabilities already, the hard way. Some you picked up by necessity when you devised your ahem secret tricks. Some I taught you. Some of the advanced compassion meditation techniques, the ones that Hank here winces at when I mention, are most likely the only ones you’ll need to learn.”
“You’re still convinced that compartmentalization is necessary?” Dr. Zielinski said.
“Absolutely,” Rizzari said. “Compartmentalization isn’t anything remotely normal, but for a Focus, it’s the only way she can get a grasp on the sheer complexity of juice patterns. Using your music analogy, Gail, what you’re doing now is playing a single instrument. Compartmentalization gives you the whole orchestra.”
“Oh ho!” Gail said as she licked her fingers. “Complexity. That’s the part I can’t seem to get a handle on, Focus Rizzari.”
“Lori,” Focus Rizzari said. Neat, Gail thought. She had been afraid that with Carol breaking off with Lori, they would need to start over in their relationship.
Gail nodded at Lori. “So what is compartmentalization, anyway? How long does it take to learn?”
Beth laughed, and pushed the plate of cinnamon rolls over to Gail. “You’ll need them. Compartmentalization is how you train your subconscious mind to do juice pattern work on its own, and you do so by learning how to use your household juice buffer as an added part of your mind. The damned trick took me months to master. You’ll probably master compartmentalization tomorrow, Gail.”
“Beth!” Gail sighed again, and shook her head. She grabbed another cinnamon roll and turned to Lori. “Okay. Hit me.”
“First, think of…”
Gail paid strict attention as Lori started to explain the first of the three intricate juice buffer-based meditation techniques Gail needed to learn. She suspected this would be a long day.
Carol Hancock: November 10, 1972
“What do you have for me, Mary?” I said. Her red clothes faded into the darkness but her bright smile didn’t. I tried to shake the rust out of my mind. Mary Sibrian had somehow found me while I cased Adkins’ place. I enjoyed Adkins’ twists far too much; one of her people had screwed up horribly, sending the wrong bribe to the wrong city councilman, and Adkins hammered the poor schmuck unmercifully. Mary had arrived in Detroit at about 10:00 in the evening, prostrated herself at the edge of my range, and waited patiently until I showed.
“There’s someone I think you might want to meet, over in Inkster.”
Inkster was less than ten miles from my current location, so we ran. I picked up the prize on my metasense a quarter mile out, but when we reached the underpass where the prize was stored…
“Hey! He’s not restrained!” I said, knives falling into my hands. Chimera, or to be more technically appropriate, Beast Man. Not a Noble or a Hunter.
Mary was unfazed. “Commander, meet Hector, Hector, meet the Commander.”
“I abase myself before you, ma’am,” he said. He knelt on the concrete, mostly hidden in the shadows of the underpass.
The damn thing wore Mary’s tag.
“How in the hell did you do that!” I said, referring to the tag. Four months ago, Haggerty assigned her my long running task of capturing a Chimera for Zielinski and crew to take apart. That is, a bad guy we wouldn’t feel remorse over killing.
A car passed by us, oblivious. Mary’s doing. “They’re people, too,” Mary said, catching my mood and not answering my question. “I’ve a
lready worked out a deal to send Hector here to Occum once you and the Doc are done with him. The old Crow’s going to owe us a big one.”
“Humph.” Mary was supposed to be working on Keaton’s crap, but knowing Mary, she got distracted when she scented junior and hunted him down. I metasensed him again, noticed some puzzling things, and then rubbed my forehead, hard. “Say, Mary, is it my imagination, or is Hector here a little different?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mary said, and smiled. “He’s only a little over two weeks into his initial transformation. My tag is helping him preserve his humanity.”
Zielinski would be ecstatic. “Good job.” I would be paying Mary off for years. Every time I assigned this disaster of a project to someone, the potential reward went up. “Take him to Chicago for me, won’t you? Then don’t you have some investigating to do?”
“Done,” Mary said. “There’s nothing to either Teas or Elspeth besides household bodyguards and low-rent mindbent hirelings. Taking down Gail and her people would be harder. Plus I extracted a baby Arm out of Bakersfield last month. I’ve started to do some backup work on Focus Schrum, just in case Amy misses…”
I cut Mary off with the wave of my hand. Amy would shit kittens if Mary started to investigate Schrum, but that was pure Sibrian – if you didn’t keep her busy, she would try and help you with your job, too. Always so eager to please, but Amy’s tolerance didn’t run that way. I reached into my pack. “Here’s some more Network idiots to investigate.” Investigating the Network ate up too much of my time.
“No problem,” Mary said. She kept a close eye on Hector, a real close eye, far too friendly. She didn’t have any of the natural fear I had developed of Chimeras of any stripe, and she regularly hung out with Nobles, which I thought strange.
I nodded to Mary. I was sure the extra work wouldn’t be a problem. If she could keep her mind on the assigned tasks and not get distracted, that was.
Tonya Biggioni: November 12, 1972
“Focus Biggioni,” the voice on the other end of the line said. Tonya took a moment to place the voice, and then she caught her breath. Shadow. Why would he be calling her?
“This is Focus Biggioni,” she said.
“We should talk. Meet me at the Marix Restaurant in an hour.”
“What? Why? I’m not exposing myself to Schrum’s spies without a reason.”
“Ah, my apologies, Focus Biggioni. I didn’t realize you hadn’t negotiated your way out of your troubles yet. My condolences, then, and I will contact you another day.”
“Wait!” Oh, hell, he knew about what was going on. If he had even the slightest willingness to help, she needed to talk to him.
“Yes, Focus Biggioni?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I look forward to it.”
Tonya laid the phone down in the receiver, carefully and gently. A friendly contact from a senior Crow Guru wasn’t something she encountered every day. Or ever. Despite the danger, she would come running. The edge of desperation was making her rash, an unfamiliar feeling.
“Focus Biggioni, I’m so glad you could make it.” Shadow took her hand in his and sniffed it, and she politely sniffed his. Crow courtesy. He was seated in the dimly lit booth with Earl Sellers and a Crow she didn’t recognize. Oh. The Crow was Occum, and he hid under at least two layers of disguise.
“Crows Shadow and Occum, Earl Sellers,” she said, exchanging a sniff of the hands with Occum and Earl Sellers also. The Earl exuded a wild masculine and predatory odor. It was a jolt to see him sitting quietly in a restaurant.
“Have a seat,” Shadow said. His voice was gentle and non-threatening. “I ordered a few appetizers. Try some of the stuffed mushrooms, they’re quite good.”
Tonya glanced around at the restaurant. “This hardly seems the place for a private meeting.”
“The patrons will hear only the sounds of mundane, everyday conversation. You don’t need to worry.”
Crow tricks, what the Crows termed dross constructs. If not for the fact that both Lori and Gail had taught themselves to sense them, she would have denied their existence. She wasn’t a Crow expert, she couldn’t sense dross, and didn’t understand how to judge the potency of such things.
“Sit,” Shadow said.
Tonya sat on the other side of the oversized booth, with Danny on one side and Ben on the other and ate mushrooms with two Crows and a Chimera. They made small talk.
Small talk! The world was collapsing around their ears and Shadow wanted to make small talk. She wasn’t sure if this was some Crow courtesy, or an attempt to emulate Focus courtesies to put her at ease.
She made small talk. In the politics of the Cause as well as in the non-rebellious politics of the Council and whatever passed as such for the Crows, she was in the position of weakness, outranked by Shadow. She followed Shadow’s lead and stayed attentive. Although Shadow remained as reserved and polite as he always did in his observer status at the Council meetings, the other two radiated unease. Crow Master Occum, always garrulous, disliked any Focus not named Rizzari and he felt like a Crow about to flee in terror. She had met Earl Sellers only once before, at the Battle in Detroit. Although the second ranking Noble, he wasn’t a politician nor used to being out in public. She caught him eyeing the restaurant’s silverware with a puzzled expression in his eye. Based on her conversations with Duke Hoskins, the Noble politician and Council observer, she suspected both Occum and the Earl were on a proving quest, to prove they could deal with a high-ranking Focus without causing a scene.
“Will you listen to a business proposal, Focus Biggioni?” Shadow said, eventually.
“Of course, Crow Shadow,” she said, carefully gracious.
“Recently, my faction of the Crows decided to become more active, for reasons I won’t go into here but suspect you can figure out.” Ah. This was part of his opposition to Chevalier’s Crow faction. Tonya nodded, pleased.
“As such, I’ve decided to work more closely with the Focuses, or at least a subsection of the Focuses who seem to be more reasonable and well inclined to Crows.”
“Now?” Tonya couldn’t help but ask. They were either in or edging toward a Major Transform civil war, and the Crows had decided this was the time for business negotiations?
“Yes. A coincidence, but a well-timed one. Your recent difficulties make the younger Focuses much more attractive as business partners.”
“Make us more attractive?”
“Less like the pawns of the first Focuses,” Shadow said. “The Firsts are too dark for us to deal with in a rational manner. I will admit that I find you considerably easier to deal with when you are outside of the darkness of the Firsts.”
Tonya shut her mouth, as it had fallen open at Shadow’s first statement. She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended, but given her ‘recent difficulties’, she decided flattered would be a wiser choice. “Thank you,” she said, and put a false smile on her face. “The first Focuses are often difficult to deal with in any manner.” She paused and nibbled a stuffed mushroom. They were indeed good. “So, how familiar are you with our ‘recent difficulties’?” There were so many of them, as the Arms ate away at the foundations of Focus power. She had been calling her contacts in the Network earlier in the day, only to find the best and brightest had decided to side with the Arms.
He smiled slightly. “Enough to understand that they are difficult. I wish you well breaking free of the first Focuses, and fervently hope what takes their place exhibits the wisdom you do in your dealings.”
“What do you want from us?”
“What do we want? Why, a business relationship. We Crows would like to make ourselves known to all the Focuses. We offer services for a price. Housecleaning, other cleanup of bad dross, finding of lost Transforms, household defenses, and Crows willing to ally with appropriate Focuses. Among other things. We’re looking for an agent among the Focuses. Will you be willing to be our agent?”
Tonya shut her mouth before she said somethin
g stupid, and thought. This was a response to Arm Haggerty’s push the Cause project, and, typical for the Crows, a bit slow. However, even the mention of Crow-Focus alliances showed a lot of political progress. The relatively recent announcement of Sky and Lori’s household tag tuning project’s success likely influenced the timing of Shadow’s offer. She sensed levels of politics she didn’t possess the knowledge to understand.
She would agree. How could she not? Any link to a potential ally, however tenuous, was worth cultivating. “Why me, though, and not Focus Rizzari? She’s more familiar with the Crows of the Cause than I am.”
Shadow’s expression hinted at a smile. “Focus Rizzari is a known quantity. You are not.”
“A test?” She eyed first Crow Master Occum, then Earl Sellers. “I would say there’s a lot of testing going on at this table. I’ll admit I’m not used to being tested.”
“It’s good for us to face new tests,” he said, including himself among those being tested. “Do you like the brochures? I took the liberty of assuming your agreement and gave your name as a contact.” He brought out full color mockups of several brochures, laid out by an expert and professionally done. One was an introduction to Crows, another an introduction to the dross, but most were sales brochures. Housecleaning, and why every household needed it, Crow consulting services, even a brochure for Focuses with an interest in art.
The Focuses duplicated the minutes from the Focus Council meeting on a hand-cranked mimeograph machine. The comparison threatened to give her a headache.
“These are beautiful,” she said, gracious from long experience with graciousness when she would rather hit something.
Earl Sellers leaned forward and grabbed Tonya’s attention, as if he was in his canine combat form and his ears had pricked forward. “It’s hard to fall from the mountaintop,” he said. His voice carried deep masculine resonances of both wisdom and sadness.
Tonya drew herself up in offense, shocked at the personal comment, but the Earl’s eyes held sorrow, not threat. The other two, Occum and Shadow, studied her with care.
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 28
