The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (49 page)

“I thought you weren’t any good at this,” Lori said, half smiling.

“I’m not.  Some symbols are obvious, though.”

“All right then, what are the other bad symbols?”

“Corruption.  Rot, decay.  Those are always bad.  Children are bad.  They’re associated with guilt and failure.  People who died due to attacks on me, or through my inaction, as in my nightmares, are also bad.  If you want, we can go through the dreams one by one, and I’ll explain the symbols.”

Lori glared at me.  “You said you weren’t any good at this.  You can interpret your dreams perfectly well for yourself.”

I shrugged.  “Well, save for the nightmares, they’ve been pretty straightforward recently.”

She ran her hand through her black hair.  Focuses had such beautiful hair, but Lori didn’t have patience with that sort of vanity and kept hers short.  “All right, you’ve got your dreams pretty well understood, so maybe it’s time to go on to the next step.  After dream interpretation, you go on to directed dreaming.  You should be able to start picking up information about the world at that point.  After that, you may be ready to try meditation.  That’s the big step, because that allows you to tap into the larger superorganism juice flow of all the Transforms in the world.  I figure, with good progress, you should start to see some results from meditation within the next six months to a year.”

I just looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“I’ve been doing meditation for almost a month now.”

“Don’t tell me.  You’re picking up information already.”

“All right, I won’t tell you.”

She dropped the journal onto the bed.  “Hell.  You’re a natural.  Figures.”

She might have been right, save for a little setback when the Feds captured me.  I still hadn’t returned to my former ease of dreaming.

“When do I get to the signing and talking parts?”

Lori gave me an amazed ‘I can’t believe you’re talking about this out loud’ look.  “Gail, right?”

I nodded.  “I think she’s a bit advanced in her Dreaming skills for a Focus of her age.”

“Not really,” Lori said.  “For a Focus with as much potential as Gail, she’s a bit slow.”  Pause.  “Unless she’s hiding her tricks when she interacts with me, which is about what I’d expect from
her
.”

I began to understand where Lori’s annoyance with Gail came from.  “So what
do
you look like in the Dreaming?” I asked.

She went back to her enigmatic smile.  “Among Focuses, it’s not considered polite to ask about such things.”

“I’m an Arm.”

“Still.  So, tell me about Gail’s household.  What sort of training have you been doing…”

I sighed and let Lori change the subject.

---

“You sure you’re not annoyed with me for the tagging experiments?” she said, about a half hour later.  We had moved from my bedroom to my kitchen area, where I cooked for her and her bodyguards.  I loved to cook for Lori; the joy with which she devoured my concoctions made me gooey in all the right places.

“Positive,” I said.  “Something bothering you?”

Lori nodded.  “I’ve been thinking about your little Bass problem, and your upcoming visit to Focus Daumarie’s, and I think I’ve figured out the pathway Bass or Amy’s theoretical unknown enemy used: the olfactory channels, the same as Daumarie uses for her best tricks.  If you don’t mind me getting personal, I’ve noticed you depend a lot on your sense of smell in a tagging situation.”

“Oh,” I said.  “That makes sense.”  One of the ways I read someone was by their odor, and understanding someone as you tagged her was essential.  “Tagging Bass was anomalous and foul; normally, tagging an underling Arm is a pleasurable experience.  Putting juice into odors, though?”

“Some Focuses, Crows and Chimeras use the trick.  Why not the Arms?”

Because I didn’t like being the target of such an attack, that’s why.

I kept my snark to myself.  When Bass came by for our first scheduled face-to-face meeting, at the end of August, I was going to take her apart, tag or no tag.

“I’ll be ready next time,” I said.  If I burned a tiny bit of juice into my sense of smell at the proper moment, the trick wouldn’t stand a chance.  “I promise.”

Lori took a mouthful of the eggplant Kashmiri korma and smiled at the taste.  Her smile turned to a frown a moment later.  “I know you’re always on the lookout for problems and danger, so don’t take this wrong.  I think you’re in more danger right now than you have been since the Wandering Shade days.  I know I am.  As we all suspected, pushing the Cause is forcing our enemies out in the open.  The only question I have is whether they’ll hit me first or you first.”

“Do you have any idea of who?”

“No,” Lori said.  “For some reason, the usual suspects are hiding our enemies from me in the Dreaming.”  ‘The usual suspects’ being Focus Shirley Patterson and her cronies.  They knew far too much about us, they didn’t like us, and since they were Focuses they only acted indirectly, through politics and the Dreaming.  Normally, what they hid were their political machinations, not the rest of our enemies.  “Which is strange, as normally they would never help such people as the Hunters or the senior Crows.  Or Bass, if she’s one of the enemies.”

“She can’t be.  I have her tagged,” I said.  “I talked to her over the phone, two days ago.  She was pleasant, and reported progress on the jobs I assigned to her.”

Lori shrugged.  “Don’t let your guard down.  We’re all going to get hit, soon, likely multiple times.”

Probably while I was in New Orleans, which was acting like a giant target for every enemy of the Cause in the entire country, perhaps even the Progenitors, if they turned out to be enemies.  Those attackers would encounter a little surprise if they tried to attack me there.  “To echo Haggerty: bring’m on.”  I smiled into Lori’s eyeball-rolly thought of ‘Arms’.  “Attacking us will identify them as enemies.  Then
we’ll
have someone to attack.”

Lori shook her head and attacked my saag paneer with gusto.

---

Gilgamesh expected to make the trip down to New Orleans in Sumeria, but I refused.  I didn’t have the days to waste.  Instead, we left the RV in Detroit and Hoskins, the Crows, my little surprise and I took a plane.  And, no, I wasn’t shocked when I found out Lori hadn’t visited with Gilgamesh when she came to Detroit.  He still held out hopes for a miracle, a last minute reprieve, but I knew ‘over’, and they were over.  Those long, miserable months of learning how to save Transform lives together had tied Sky and Lori too tight.

Hoskins nursed a few bruises when he joined us on the plane.  I rode him unmercifully about his wounds, while trying my best to conceal my own, and he returned the favor.  The sparring match had turned out well, surprising me.  The bouts had been damned near even, and though I took two out of three, the fight lasted nearly two hours.  My best sparring in months.  I invited him back any time he was interested, to spar some more.  I found that I liked him a lot more than I had before, when the only time we saw each other were those tortuous Focus Council meetings.

Hoskins wasn’t happy to lose, though he took the losses well.  Too many losses, too recently – humiliated by Chevalier and his Crow goons, put in hock to a third tier Focus, and losing a sparring match to the number three Arm.  His only recent success had been a draw against a not particularly old Hunter and a win against a Hunter who had let his mind go, but only with Gilgamesh’s help.  Hard on the pride, but worse, his losing streak said unpleasant things about the future relationship of the Nobles to the rest of the Transforms.

I sympathized, yet I was profoundly glad someone else got to be the last Major Transform variety to get off the ground.  Being third was bad enough, and us Arms still suffered the damned Focuses’ feet on our collective necks.

The weather in New Orleans hit me like the air of an indoor public swimming pool when we deplaned: high summer, incredible heat and humidity.  The scent of the air was the same warm, humid abundance of growing things I remembered from when I lived in Houston, mixed with the ozone smell of air pollution and the distant reek of refineries.  I kept a close eye on Sinclair, who wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable traveling with an Arm.  Or flying.  The Focus waited for us at the restaurant.

“What is that smell?” I asked.  “Something’s been burnt.”

“That’s a roux,” she said.  “It’s supposed to be burnt.”

I raised an eyebrow.  This might be interesting.  “Tell me about this roux.”

---

I stood in the center of the kitchen and sniffed, while all around me the household stood frozen, as if they expected me to kill them if they twitched.  So many scents, months of kitchen smells.  Fresh food, old garbage, each tiny odor gave me a picture of this Focus’s restaurant.  If I was going to teach this Focus about cooking, I would be living off my nose for the next week.

After Lori’s observation, I decided to do some experimentation in the nose department.  Ever since Zielinski came up with the preliminaries on the physical changes in Arms, I had been waiting for the proper moment to try this.  If Arms could change physically, based on psychological factors, that seemed like something an Arm could gain control over by burning juice.

I adjusted my attitude and burned a tiny bit of juice.  I couldn’t tell for sure, but my sense of smell did seem better.  I sniffed again, and the scents came clear.  Maybe not everything, but enough for now.

“You need to upgrade your suppliers,” I said to Helen and her crew of kitchen staff.  “Every ingredient in here is too old, and you can taste the age in the food when you’re done.  That fish is days old and so’s the shrimp.  You shouldn’t settle for anything that hasn’t just come off the boats.  Helen, I know charisma isn’t your specialty, but you should still be able to sweet talk a couple of fishermen into saving aside the best of their catch for you every day.  Same thing on the produce.  Buy fresh every day and sweet talk the suppliers into doing special favors for you.”

Helen nodded thoughtfully, and the rest of the staff stared in terrified fascination.  I heard the door open in the dining room and I looked at the clock.  5:13.  The first trickle of the dinner-time rush.

I did another metasense scan of the area for enemies, and still found none.  “All right, show me how you’re fixing your dishes.”

“No, no.  Get that counter clean.  You’re not done until everything is so clean it sparkles.  Good food comes from a clean kitchen.  You don’t need old dirt contaminating your dishes.”  The young man who wiped down the counters jumped, afraid I would kill him on the spot.  Not me.  I had hunted before I left Detroit, and I was having such a good time my predator barely showed.  I even managed to forget the impending attack for a few minutes.

The rest of the kitchen staff looked on attentively, with wide eyes and a little bit of awe.  Around eight, I figured I had picked up enough to take a turn at the stove.  Around nine, the compliments started coming in.  By ten-thirty, the rest of the cooks just stood back and watched in awe.

Damn, this was fun.

“Helen, can you stay up a little late and work with me?  You ought to be able to do what I’m doing, and we need to figure out how.”

Helen’s eyes were no less wide than the rest of her people.  She nodded.

“Relax.  Relax and let me hold you.  No, you’re tensing up.  Relax.  There you go.  Now, extend your metasense into me.  You want to pick up my senses.”

“How do I – oh, no, wait, I think – ooh, that’s magnificent.  It’s so different.  You metasense so far,” Helen whispered, enclosed in my arms.

“Okay, now, picking up the metasense is a start, but that’s not what you’re looking for.  You want to pick up my sense of smell.  Just relax and open your mind to odors.”

“Smell.  Yes…”  She inhaled through her nose, and nestled farther into my arms.  I cut off the juice cycle that was trying to start between the two of us.  I liked her, but juice cycling was a little too much intimacy with some Focus I only met today.

“Oh!” she said, startled.  “I think I picked up your eyesight.  It’s beautiful!  Everything seems so sharp-edged and brilliant!”

“That’s good, but you need smell.  Try again.”

Still no attack, so on Tuesday night I took Helen and her entourage to The Commander’s Palace.  I had to laugh at the name.  I might have begrudged them the title, but the food they served was so good I was happy to share my name with them.  The place was the best restaurant in New Orleans, and had been for decades.  While we waited in the formal dining room, with its wood paneling and two-tiered chandeliers, Helen regaled me with the unofficial list of different varieties of gumbo: creole, Beau Bridge, Cane River, z’herbes, etc., and all the possible ingredients, spices and thickeners.  I particularly looked forward to a gumbo Helen promised me, made with squirrel, rabbit and alligator.

Helen sipped the gumbo, rolling it around in her mouth, and then nodded.  “Yes, I think I can taste the difference.”

I nodded back to her.  “The flavors balance.  It’s just a little milder than yours and the taste of the ingredients comes through.  The strength of the roux and the spice from the hot sauce complement each other rather than conflict.”