All Beasts Together (The Commander) (7 page)

I was tempted to lie, just to
find out if I could get away with it.  On the other hand, he wasn’t hostile, and if my senses didn’t lie he was no more evil than I.  “No.  You’re on the side of the angels.  I’m surprised to find there’s another side, that’s, well, darker than I am.  I’m not exactly Gandhi material, you realize.”

“Neither am I,” Rumor said.  “The hand?”

I held Enkidu’s hand out for him to take.  For a moment, I saw Rumor: tall, lean, like a college basketball player.  He and the hand vanished for all of five seconds.  Then the hand flew through the air back to me.  I snagged it and made it disappear in my suit coat.  Rumor hissed.

“Crows are prey to Chimeras, aren’t they?” I asked.

“You are a wonder for one so young, madam Arm, but you must understand that every Transform is prey to Beast Men,” Rumor said, suddenly and strangely formal.  “Let us leave this alley.  There is a man several miles north of here who sits waiting for you.”

My voice caught in my throat at
his phrasing.  “Just another trap for me, isn’t it?  Focus Patterson has him staked out like a sacrificial goat, waiting for this dumb Arm to come by and grab him.”

“Yes.” 
He chuckled.  “She already hates my guts, but I’m better at hiding than she is at finding me.  I’ll remove the Transform from the trap without her watchers ever noticing.  I need to cover you, though.  If you can stand the thought.”

“You do this often?”

“She stays out of my city, I stay out of her compound.”  Another chuckle.  “Both of us violate this modus vivendi whenever we desire.  If I get my hands on her, she’s dead.  If she gets her hands on me, I’m dead.  Or captured and enslaved.”

“Thank you for saving me from enslavement
.” I meant it from the depths of my heart.  After Keaton, avoiding enslavement was high on my list of priorities.  “I’ll let you cover me.”

I sensed
a faint juice tingling, well outside of my capabilities to understand.  Or notice any difference thereof.  “That was it?”

“You sensed nothing?”  Rumor cursed.  “The culmination of my talents as a Crow and you can’t even sense it!  I am outraged at the irrationality of the universe.  What use is my ability to create beautiful dross constructs if only Crows can appreciate them!”  He continued to mutter for many minutes.  Rumor was a strange creature.  Just like all the other Major Transforms I
had run into.  “Will six hundred dollars be sufficient to send you on your way?”

Oh.  The money.  Six hundred was not what I consider
ed a major payoff, but I had no more knowledge of Crow economics than Crow personal capabilities.  “Yes,” I said.

Rumor left the money on the ground and then hesitated.  “I have one more piece of information for you, madam Arm.  A gift.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Someday, you should attempt to have your
glow healed.  Dross infests your glow, and the dross has damaged you; old damage, a year or more old.  You’ve tried to eliminate some of that dross recently, but you didn’t get all of it.  You’re still infested.”

‘Glow’ had to be my juice structure, but w
hat the hell was dross?  And how had I gotten contaminated by it?  If the damage was a year or more old, I must have gotten it from the St. Louis Detention Center.  How had I eliminated any of it?  Did this have something to do with the strange effects I had at the edge of withdrawal earlier today?  His comment didn’t make any sense.

“What
is dross?” I asked, but Rumor was five hundred feet ahead of me, leading me to my kill.  I followed.

Rumor’s last words to me were, “If you ever find a Crow in distress, remember my help for you, and be kind to him.  It’s not safe for you to come back to Pittsburgh until you’re a mature Arm.  Seek me out if you come back.  I’ll have more information to trade.”

I boosted a car, stuck the Transform in the trunk so I could juice suck him later in safety, and got out of town.  I had some serious Network ass to kiss.

Carol Hancock: September 26, 1967

Late the next day I pulled into Boston, ate several dinners, enjoyed life for a few minutes, and waited until dark.  Precisely at 7:50 PM, I broke into Dr. Rizzari’s Boston College lab, a place I had visited once before when even more injured.  I had several things to show Dr. Rizzari, perhaps enough to buy off the Network, and my way off their shit-list.  I thought I knew anger from dealing with Keaton, but Dr. Rizzari had damned near melted my brain over the phone when I told her what I had done.  I hadn’t been able to get hold of Zielinski, my real Network contact.  That worried me more than I cared to admit.

I wondered what precautions a Focus would take when meeting an Arm.  I expected bodyguards, half a dozen veteran ex-Marines.  With
M-16s and bazookas.  I expected shackles, cages of bulletproof glass, something.  I imagined an entire work crew setting up her lab for the meeting.  Focuses had to be terrified of Arms.  We were predators.  They protected our prey.

Instead, the
lab stood empty and unlocked, smelling of not too old blood, fresh antiseptics and preservatives.  Chemicals had corroded spackles into the linoleum floor and odd machines and metal tables lined the walls.  I recognized the gas chromatograph from my last visit.  I still didn’t know what it did.  My very own autopsy table still sat in the center of the room, the same as my last visit.  Battered metal folding chairs leaned against the far wall.  The only light came from an emergency light in the hall.

When Dr. Rizzari
arrived, I let my mouth hang open.  After the riot act she read me over the phone, I expected this Focus to carry herself like the queen of the world, with a servile ten-person entourage and wearing a white fur cape.  Instead, she first appeared to my metasense jogging and chatting with her entourage of five.  Three of her entourage were women, two of them bodyguards, which shocked me, as I had never seen women bodyguards before.  The third woman caught grief from her Focus for how slow she jogged and gave the same right back for being overworked.

They
had been exercising.  This Focus wore no white fur cape; she dressed as a young man, in black athletic shorts and an athletic T-shirt.

Rizzari’s
bodyguards were all Transforms, none of them normals.  Most Focuses used a mixture of normal and Transform bodyguards, at least based on my limited experience.  Dr. Rizzari’s Transforms also showed the effects of something akin to military training, which I also thought strange.  I read ‘informed terror’ in the four bodyguards and checked to make sure they couldn’t see me.  With a jolt, I realized the fear was by their choice, part of their preparations.  I couldn’t terrify the already terrified.  I would bet my non-existent life savings they wouldn’t freeze if I attacked.

I watched the bodyguards move down the dark hall and whistled
under my breath.  They were clearly ‘better than normals’.  How much better I could only guess.  Far less enhanced by their transformations and training than a trained Arm, of course, but I didn’t know Transforms could get
anything
out of their transformation.  It made sense to me, though, and I raised my estimation of this Dr. Rizzari.

I froze in place
when the Focus’s bodyguards set up a perimeter outside Dr. Rizzari’s lab: facing out, not in.  What were they doing, if they weren’t protecting her from me?  I tried to read the tiny Focus and got nothing save with my metasense.  She hid her emotions better than Keaton did.  Her face was as blank as the night sky.

Left with no other options, I studied her with my metasense.
I had never encountered anything so icy cold before as her metapresence, or so aching with power.  In addition, her juice structure was nearly as damaged as Keaton’s and my own.  I had studied other Focuses, before, from a distance.  None of my observations had ever hinted that Focuses might get into Arm-like scrapes.

Yah, Zielinski had been right. 
I should be able to deal with a Focus like her.

“Arm Hancock,” the Transform woman said, as she studied me intently, her eyes flickering from my head to my feet, and all areas in between.  “May I present Dr. Lorraine Rizzari, Focus, professor of microbiology.  I’m Ann Chiron, her aide.”

Dr. Lorraine Rizzari, Focus,
gave me a quick once-over, and stepped forward to shake my hand.  “Call me Lori.” We felt each other’s juice as we shook hands, presumably a Focus ritual.  It seemed us Arms counted as human, at least in Lori’s book.  I fought for control, overwhelmed by the presence of a real honest-to-God Focus.

Lori
was a beautiful woman.  Four foot eleven, with short black hair cropped close to her head and spicy brown eyes full of fire.  She was trim and energetic, with a gymnast’s body and a bounce of energy in her step.  She acted as if her petite little body would mow down anything in her path.  Behind her ice queen persona and disconcerting icy metapresence, she had a cayenne pepper soul so hot it would burn your mouth.

No
Arm would ever want to hurt a Focus.  It would be unbearable.  No wonder the Arm who had killed a Focus for her juice had committed suicide.  She must have felt like she had killed her own spouse.  No mystery either why Keaton was so tolerant of the Focuses she dealt with.  As Keaton had intimated, they were our sisters.

Things would be different, though, if I were
low on juice and acting stupid.  Make that, lower on juice and acting stupider.  I might make mistakes.  Before I met Dr. Rizzari in person I had never imagined a Focus might be dangerous to me
as a Transform
.  The danger came from her household, right?  Stupid assumption on my part; a Major Transform is a Major Transform. My gut told me Dr. Rizzari had the power to take me apart if she wanted to, somehow.  Were all Focuses so dangerous?  I hoped not.

“Shall we,” Ann Chiron said
, pointing to a small table and two chairs.  Ann was a short sturdy woman in her mid to late twenties.  Not fat.  Just sturdy.  Not an athlete, but not sedentary, either, despite her Focus’s comments.  She reminded me of the sturdy French peasant women I had read about and seen artist’s renditions of.  Round of face, gallic nose, black hair, a twinkle in her eye.  She should have been terrified of me, but wasn’t.  She should have been servile toward her lord and master Focus, but wasn’t.  She was, well, complex.

I felt
odd to be standing next to my prey as if she was an ordinary human being.  No, not prey.  She was a tagged Transform.  I couldn’t even
think
of her as prey, not after shaking hands with Dr. Rizzari.

Disconcerting.

“What are you, Ann, another doctor?” I asked.  Her aura of confidence, and her brass with her Focus boss, both reminded me of Hank.

“Heaven forbid.  But I
’ve picked up enough medical skills to get a nurse’s license cold.  My professional training was as an anthropologist.  Before I transformed.”

I sat down on one of the rusted metal chairs and Lori sat down opposite me.  My chair creaked.
Hers didn’t.  Showed what a hundred extra pounds will do.

“As much as I might find this distasteful to point out, we need to get one thing straight, Carol,” Lori
said.  “You can’t do anything to me, physical or otherwise, fast enough to keep me from killing you – like this.”

She did something to my juice, to a piece of juice so small I barely
sensed what she did.  I took a moment to figure out the details: she had taken that piece of juice and made it no longer mine.  A piece of fundamental juice. She possessed the power to rip me into a Monster in an instant.  I worried I was in the lair of a madwoman.

No.  I trusted my instincts.  Lori was no more a madwoman than I.  She
merely informed me she wasn’t defenseless.

I sighed.  No more of a madwoman than I. 
How’s that for a scary thought?  I hadn’t yet met anyone Zielinski worked with I would call sane, including myself.  Someday, I would meet his dreaded Focus Biggioni, the contact with whom he was most wary.  Biggioni had to be a flaming loonie.

At least I wasn’t hallucinating right now.  That would be embarrassing.

“I also know that if I were to attack you, you would drain me of my juice,” Lori said.  “The end result would be death for both of us.  Hopefully, neither of us wants that outcome.”

I didn’t say a thing but I agreed with what she said, for logical reasons as well as emotional ones.  I d
oubted I could hurt her right now, but circumstances might be different a day from now.

When I read her,
I got nothing more than she showed me. Zielinski had said his skills at covering his reactions came from necessity, from having to deal with Focuses.  Now I understood what he meant.  Keaton’s lessons in reading people and preventing people from reading me taught me tricks not specific to Arms.  All female Major Transforms were capable of such skills.  From Rumor’s talents, I suspected all the Major Transforms, male or female, possessed this capability.  I hoped Lori’s talents fell on the far end of the bell curve, because if all Focuses were as good as Lori, us poor Arms were severely screwed.

“Secondly,” Lori continued, “whatever we say here and agree to here stays private.  The only people who will know what happened are the Focus you wronged and another Focus who is, essentially, the boss Focus for our area.”