All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (22 page)

“He’ll recover.”

I had never met Arpeggio, but after this chase with Hephaestus, I felt like I knew him already.

“Are you willing to give your word you’ll behave?” Arpeggio said.

Even after all this Crow-fighting, I suspected he could lay me out cold with nothing more than a whistle.  According to Hephaestus, Arpeggio directed dross with song.

Unlike regular Crows, Crow Gurus were able to challenge.  “I just rescued your ass,” I said as I sat up, cradling my injured arm.  “Why wouldn’t I behave?”

“In this she is akin to Kali,” Chevalier said.  “Far too full of herself.”

Chevalier was the first Crow I talked to who I instantly disliked.  However, he wasn’t here.  Arpeggio was.  I refocused my diplomatic skills, such as they were at the moment, on the present-in-the-flesh Guru.

“That was Shadow, wasn’t it, Guru Arpeggio?” I said, in my calmest Crow voice.

“It appeared so.”  He finished with Hephaestus, came over to me and motioned for me to lay down again. He started to bind the remains of my right arm as I desired, cleaning the bad juice off of me at the same time.  “He also metasensed so.”

“He didn’t speak as Shadow speaks,” Thomas said.  “He sounded to me like he was someone else.”

“Are we talking something screwy like a Crow with a multiple personality disorder, Guru Thomas?” I said.

“That’s the simplest answer,” Thomas said.

On the wall, the picture of the old-style youth woke up, wearing short pants, suspenders, and a beret.  “Dear me!” he said.  “Did Focuses do this?”

Ah.  Innocence, the senior Crow Gilgamesh said was the worst of the senior Crows in his hatred and fear of Focuses, and who had supposedly withdrawn from the world to meditate.

“Dear Innocence,” Arpeggio said.  “It wasn’t Focuses.  It was Shadow, who’s revealed himself to be Wandering Shade.”

“That cannot be!” Innocence said.  “Not my student and friend Shadow!”

Chevalier snorted.  “You’ve defended his insanity for far too long, dear Innocence.  You must face the reality that he’s ruined himself.”

Innocence fled, hand over his mouth, from the picture, which returned to being a painting.  I suspected Innocence wasn’t much of a Crow.  From anybody’s point of view.

Arpeggio finished binding the remains of my right arm.  I sat up and confronted the moonscape and this world of moving pictures.  “Thank you, Guru Arpeggio.”

“She can be polite,” Chevalier said.  “I like that.  She also came here to rescue a Crow.  I like that even better.  Nor is she frothing at the mouth or making ridiculous demands.”

“Sir, yoo hoo, I’m sitting right here.”

Three senior Crows sighed in unison.  “Tiamat, I must apologize,” Chevalier said, acting as if his earlier words were a preamble to a much longer drawn out speech that I so rudely interrupted.  “My espionage mission to keep tabs on Gilgamesh, to help him, appears to have blown up in all of our faces.  In recompense, I will no longer oppose any of your actions aimed at Rogue Crow.”

“Neither will I,” Arpeggio said.  He squatted on his heels and watched me warily.

I looked at Arpeggio and didn’t like what I sensed.  Yes, he did Crow fierce better than any Crow I had ever seen, but I knew guilt when I saw it.  I flickered my eyes at Gilgamesh, who pretended to be unconscious, and silently implored him to give me a hand.  He uncurled and skittered over to me.  To behind me.

I read the truth in Gilgamesh’s actions.  “You bought Gilgamesh from Echo.”

“I paid his ransom,” Arpeggio said.  “Echo was in the wrong.”

“Guru Arpeggio was going to free me,” Gilgamesh said, in a whisper.  “But only after an extensive interview.  You know the type.”

A Crow mind scrape.

“You owe me,” I told Arpeggio.  I don’t know how I kept my currently well justified Arm temper in check, but I did.  “I know what I want, too.  I want you to free Guru Hephaestus from your orders to not ally with me.”

Arpeggio snorted and stood.  “A worthless payment.  He already disobeyed that order.”

Yup.  Crow.  Couldn’t bargain worth shit.

“Tell Tiamat what I want, boss,” Hephaestus said, a whisper so tiny I thought it was a rustle of snow the first time through.  “And what you’re willing to do to help.”

Arpeggio shrugged and sat down in a well-used leather easy chair.  “What my friend Hephaestus is referring to is what he likely was going to try to extract from you in return for his own help in this sodden disaster,” Arpeggio said.  I couldn’t keep a frown off of my face, but Arpeggio held up his hand.  “He’s caught the action bug from you, and he thinks you’re making a cruel mistake by leaving the captive Focus, Frasier, in the hands of the Hunters.”

“She’s not being rescued because it’s too dangerous,” I said, standing myself.  I refused to negotiate from the floor.  “Look at what happened here today.”  I waved my good arm at the blood soaked carpet.  “Tell me how not-dangerous this is.”

“I can give Guru Hephaestus and you protections potent enough to hide you from Rogue Crow and his Hunters.  He’s Guru enough to guide them, ongoing.  They won’t last through any sort of battle, of course.” Of course.  Crows!  “But it shouldn’t take a battle for you to corral a young Focus and free her.”

Who was paying who, here?  I gave this some thought, and realized that, yes, if I showed up one day and presented Focus Frasier to the Focus Council, that would be quite a coup for our side.  My deed would also mightily brass off Odin and Shadow.

If I rescued Frasier just before the wedding, it might induce Shadow and his Hunters to react in a stupider manner than their current activities.  “I’ll need to talk to my boss about this, but unless I’ve missed something important, I think we have a deal.  Not that I’ll be able to do anything about it for a while, given what remains of my right arm.”

“Understood,” Arpeggio said.

Hephaestus nodded in agreement.

“So,” I said, turning to include the talking pictures.  “Can you do anything about Rogue Crow, now revealed to be Shadow?”  I said.  Gilgamesh wiped his nose and moaned quietly.

“We will need to discuss this among ourselves,” Thomas the Dreamer said.  “I’m sure you can understand.”

They didn’t know what to do.

I very much understood the feeling.

Gail Rickenbach: January 29, 1969 – January 30, 1969

“I think that’s the place,” Vic Crawford said, pointing out the apartment building coming up on their right. The building sat in a bleak section of inner Detroit, an area filled with housing projects, broken down apartments, misery and despair. Rats and underfed dogs scrabbled among broken bottles and rotted trash, and children with cold eyes watched them drive by.  Only a little snow covered the street margins, the result of a mid-winter warm snap that had deluged the Detroit area in cold rain for the past week.  Gail dreaded this meeting, and the ambience of a cold January early evening in inner city Detroit didn’t help.

The apartment building was small, three stories of five apartments each, the apartments themselves no more than a single room, the building surrounded by a chain link fence topped by barbed wire. Hard-edged men, some of them Transforms, stood guard at the gate and on the roof, watching the neighborhood with cold suspicion.

Vic pulled the car up to the gate and consulted quietly with one of the guards, a broad-shouldered Transform in his forties who looked at everything as if it might spring up at any moment and attack his Focus.  They were expected, the details worked out first through Beth Hargrove, then through a formal and strained phone conversation between Gail and Focus Adkins herself.

Vic passed the guard’s inspection, and the guard opened the gate and let them into the small parking lot. The lot had room for only ten cars, fewer cars than apartments, but even those ten spots remained unfilled. The only cars were a couple of sedans, a station wagon, a pickup truck, and an expensive Oldsmobile that looked like it had gotten lost on its way to some suburban garage.  Vic parked the car beside the Oldsmobile, and the guard hurriedly followed them, unwilling to leave them unescorted. Whether from courtesy or suspicion, Gail couldn’t quite tell.  She guessed suspicion.

Gail fought terror, attempting to ignore her fears and keep the juice steady.  She didn’t succeed.  Focus Adkins’ household held the ambience Gail imagined of a Nazi death camp, far worse than Focus Mann’s place, so steeped in bad juice that the foulness was everywhere, even in the parking lot.  Gail told herself to stop going down this line of thought; she was here to make peace with Focus Adkins, not judge her.  Punishment of some sort was coming.  The thought made Gail shiver.  Beth had spent days trying to calm Gail’s nerves, trying to distract her with talk of politics or Focus gossip.  Beth’s distractions hadn’t worked.  Even the Nixon administration and their antics didn’t distract Gail.  They had cut off federal funding to all Transform Clinics, saying just because Congress appropriated the money, this didn’t mean the administration had to spend it.  Gail expected the Supreme Court would toss Nixon’s trick so hard it bounced.

Punishment.  Gail shivered again and hoped she was doing the right thing.  Tonya warned her that making up with Wini Adkins would be rough.  Surrender, and then negotiate.  Her household needed all the help they could get, and no fights they could avoid.  She most certainly needed the senior Focus in Michigan supporting her rather than working against her.

Whatever it took.  As long as she, not the household, paid the price.

They had arrived at exactly 7:00 in the evening, the time Focus Adkins had chosen.  The sun was long down and the temperature rapidly fell.  The overcast sky threatened snow again.  Gail let Kurt hand her out of the car, and Vic and Sylvie followed.

“Focus Rickenbach, welcome,” the guard said, with no welcome in his voice at all.  He was a big man, his face closed and unyielding.  Not hostile, particularly, but Gail had the strong sense of a mind as fenced as the household.  Gail reeled in her metasense; not only did the bad juice of this place hurt, but it moved and reacted to Gail almost as if alive.

“If you’ll come with me, I’ll lead you upstairs,” the guard said.  Although Gail and her people were supposedly here for a social occasion, the guard omitted many of the niceties.  Gail had been surprised to learn from Beth that Focus Adkins had been actively working against her.  Focus Adkins wasn’t an enemy she could afford to have.  Back when she was young and naïve, Gail thought Adkins had written her off as a lost cause, never to think of her again.  The fact Adkins’
hadn’t
forgotten told Gail quite a bit about how the older Focuses operated.  That and a non-negotiable demand regarding an inspection team of Adkins’ that would be investigating Gail’s household from top to bottom next week.  Full disclosure.  No more hiding of Kurt’s side business.

Sylvie stayed at Gail’s side in her position as Focus’s aide, while Kurt and Vic were her main bodyguards.  The guard led them up the steel and pitted-concrete stairs.  As they passed by the first floor, Gail saw and heard rows of women working at sewing machines.  Even at 7:00 on a Friday night, they still worked.  Gail hesitated a moment, to look in through the window of one room.  There were six women there, both Transform and normal, and a couple of teenagers fetching and carrying for them.  They worked with a mindless monotony, sewing child-sized shirts and pants and dresses.  The Transforms had the glassy-eyed look of low juice, at the mindless work optimum, something Gail had discovered while experimenting with juice manipulation with Sylvie.  Not low enough to incapacitate, but low enough to sap the will and the mind.  A Transform might work indefinitely at the work optimum, if the task was mindless enough, too drained to do anything else.

Their Focus did this to them intentionally.  Gail managed not to puke.  Barely.

Said Focus waited for Gail in a room up on the third floor.  The intense pressure of bad juice fled as soon as Wini Adkins came into sight.  Somehow, Adkins had control over the bad juice in her household, a chilling realization Gail buried deep in her mind.

“Come in, Focus Rickenbach,” Wini Adkins said.  She was a woman of medium height, several inches shorter than Gail, with beautiful chestnut hair.  She dressed like a modern queen.  Gail caught Focus Adkins’ disapproval in her tight-lipped frown, but forced herself to smile at the welcome anyway.

“I’m sorry I made a mess of things when we first met,” Gail said, a remorseful expression on her face she had practiced in front of a mirror for hours to perfect. “I was so ignorant at the time.  I’ve learned better.”

Focus Adkins looked over Gail’s bodyguards, and Sylvie.  “So, you have learned some discipline.  Have you eaten?” Adkins said, leading Gail into a fabulous room, opulent with the splendor of expensive good taste.  Antique Queen Anne chairs, crystal vases, and cherry end tables vied with an exquisite sofa and an oriental rug for extravagance in excess.

More opulence lay beyond the door that connected through the wall to the next room over, and through the next door beyond that.  Gail realized with a shock that Focus Adkins claimed three full apartments in this tiny fifteen-room complex for her personal use.

Gail didn’t let her reaction show, using Tonya’s Transform Doublethink principle to fill her mind with appreciation of the beauty of the place.  Focus Adkins carried herself regally because, to her people, she was their queen, with all the perks one could imagine from her elevated station.  Judgment would have to wait until later.