A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (27 page)

“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 th
is 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 th
e 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.”

“I don’t believe an Arm can do
any such thing if we’re trying to stop her.”

“Ann,
I
could do that, and I’m a
Crow
, dammit!”  Sky paused.  “I just did.  Tonight.  Tell me, how do you think I got here?  I didn’t knock on the front door.”

Ann pursed her lips, realizing the obvious.  “
Nonsense.  If Arms are so powerful, why don’t the Arms have the Focuses enslaved?”

“Eh, why should I tell you?
” Sky said, openly pissy now.  “Perhaps I have some secrets I’m not willing to divulge because you’re not a part of my household.”

Ann frowned, not saying a thing.

“Ann,” Lori said. “Normally I don’t like to pull rank as a Focus, but seriously, the reason why the Arms don’t have the Focuses enslaved is because a Focus, wielding a household, is more powerful than an Arm.  Only a few Focuses, myself included, have the spine to stand up to an Arm without a household backing them up.”

“You think Inferno can’t stand up to an Arm without you?  I thought the whole point of the way you have things set up…”

“You will be able to stand up to an Arm, but only after you figure out how.  Taking many casualties in the process.  Sacrificing fellow housemates,” Lori said.  “We’re dealing with an entirely different question, though: setting up a working relationship with an Arm we’ve never dealt with before.”

“What do we do about Sky?”

“How about just accepting him as he is?” Lori said.  “For one thing, assume whatever Sky wanted to learn about the household, he’s learned.  He’s the foremost Crow as far as metasense and enhanced normal senses are concerned, if I’ve figured out what passes for Crow society enough to make such a judgment.  Forget about our precious secrets and go on.”

“Thank you, my love.  Someday, I’d like to know how you figured th
is out, since I haven’t exactly blabbed any such thing.”

Sky thought for a few moments more.

“Ann doesn’t trust me, my love,” Sky said.  “I’m not sure I blame her.”  Sky paused, thought for a moment.  “I’m moving to Boston.”

“You are?” Lori said.  “Why?”

“You.  A baby who’s going to show up in about nine months.  Things like that.”

“Can you move in?  Live here?”

“I’ll live in a nearby culvert.  Let the rain and snow fall on me as they will.  Hide from the scary squirrels and field mice.  Such things don’t bother a Crow.  We eat garbage, remember?”

“You’re welcome to move in.”

“I can’t.  Not full time.  Crows need space.”

“There’s got to be a way.  Otherwise the goal we’re working towards doesn’t make sense,” Ann said.

“Perhaps there is,” Sky said.  “Does this mean we know all the answers we need already?  Certainly not.”  He took a deep breath, and rested his left hand on Lori’s chin.  “The idea of marriage between a Crow and a Focus appeals to my instincts.  I would normally love to drag this out in a more romantic setting, my love, but would you marry me?”

“No.”

“Eh?”

“Although to make you happy, I’ll answer ‘yes’.”

“I’m lost,” Sky said.

“I’m arguing semantics, my love.  Marriage is a word loaded with many meanings and virtually none of them mean a thing to either of us.  I was raised Catholic.  Shall we do a formal Catholic marriage then?  Do you want to trust the juice not to destroy us while we’re trying to carry out any of the standard Catholic marriage vows?  You think Buddhist
would be any better?”

“Point to you,” Sky said.  “I propose to you that we raise our children together, openly, within your household.”

“I accept your proposal.”

The juice moved.  Sky blinked.

“You knew that was coming, didn’t you, my love?”

“Of course.”

“What did we do?”

Lori closed her eyes and leaned against his shoulder.  “I think we’ve just arranged to share our metasense when we’re very close to each other.  I can sense dross now.  Who knows what else will fall out of this?  We just made permanent whatever we did in the attic, something new and unexpected: not a tag, not charisma, not a juice pattern, but something else we haven’t
run into before.  Welcome to the household, Sky.”

Sky shivered, glad to be under the comforter.  Too fast!  Too fast!  Letting the juice ‘just do things’ was too risky.

Still, Sky suspected he had just participated in one of those appalling Transform discoveries that ended up changing everything for all the Transforms.  Eventually.  The fact he could practically metasense Anne-Marie watching and cheering him on, through the Dreaming, didn’t help, either.

Chapter 9

In
1967 40 new Focuses were registered in the United States.  It is estimated there were in actuality 45 Focus transformations.

“Understanding
Transform Sickness as a Disease”

Carol Hancock: March 23, 1968

I
had lost track of time, but enough time had passed to take me down to low juice levels.  The evidence?  The return of my rashes.  I couldn’t trust my own juice count sense – too much juice monkey.  I had also figured out a long-shot way to get the information out about my discoveries: I burned the information into my memories using a couple of tenths of a point of juice I couldn’t spare.  If I got out alive, no matter how bad off I was mentally, my burned-in memories would someday surface.

I woke up from a half sleep half meditation when something flickered on my metasense.  A Transform!  Untagged.  Male, with low juice.

I barely believed my own metasense.  Were they about to back down from their bluff?  The Focus bitch who thought this out had a good plan, but giving me a Transform so early would ruin everything.  They must have gotten cold feet, afraid I would press myself into withdrawal.  These people were too weak.  I let anticipation build inside.

They wheeled the Transform around the Detention Center building, down into the guts of the place, the basement, where they stopped.  Dammit.  I was up here, on the second floor.

Ah. I got it.  They put the Transform in my old cell. 
My turf
.

A moment or two later I
caught the scent of the Transform through the building’s air circulation system.  Oh, the Transform smelled wonderful.  Perfect.  I guessed they were pissed at me for destroying my current cell and would be moving me back to my old fouled place.  I would cope.  I could cope with nearly anything if they got me more juice.

The floor rumbled underneath me and it took me a moment to figure out why.  They were opening the heavy rolling doors.  I wondered if they were about to apologize or conduct some sort of formal interrogation.  I
imagined their tactics: “Here’s your juice.  You want the juice, you’ll have to tell us everything, no games.”  This was the trick I had anticipated, the trick they needed to push me over the edge and break me.  Only they had jumped the gun by at least a day.

Nevertheless, t
his would be bad.  I wouldn’t have to fake being broken.  Hell, I already was, at least somewhat.  However, I would be able to hold out and still keep my secrets.

The rolling doors finished their rumbling open…and everything remained dark.

Nothing.

More nothing.

Then a hum and a flash, the light of a television screen coming on, blinding bright after so long in the dark.  A television on the other side of the Monster-proof fence.  I blinked tears out of my eyes and glanced at the screen.

The Transform.

My Transform.

Holy mother of God.

I closed my eyes and meditated.  Minutes passed
and became a half hour.  Nothing changed.  No contact.  Every minute I fought to maintain my control and composure, but as each minute passed, the stark realization that they would be waving my juice supply in front of my nose, and nothing more, sank further into my soul.  Drop by drop, each of the hard lessons of control I learned from Keaton and on my own in Chicago frayed away from me.  Outwardly, save through my inaction, I betrayed nothing of this.  I refused to shatter, refused to contemplate showing any sign of surrender.  I wanted to pray but refrained, still unwilling to deal with the avatar of Satan pretending to be God here.

The minutes continued to pass.  Despite my meditation, I became hyper-aware of my prey, all aspects of his
scent and his emotions.  He was in agony.  Lost, not knowing what was happening to him.  He was a good man, a normal man, an average man, caught in the bloody gears of hell.  No Focus awaited him.  Death was his only option, and unless I came to him, his death would be painful and horrifying.

Hours crept by.  To me, minutes became hours.  My control continued to slip, until only a barest thread of control
remained.

H
ours later, the Transform slipped into peri-withdrawal and began to twitch and moan.

My gut fell in free fall, as if kicked out of an airplane.  Words left me, thoughts left me, leaving nothing but raw emotion.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off the television.  When the Transform moaned, I moaned.  When he twitched, I twitched.  He went from being
mine
to being
me
.