The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (53 page)

“Riiiiight,” Beth said, shaking her head.  “So what’s the problem?”

“Focus Rizzari doesn’t think much of me.  In specific, she doesn’t think I’m committed to the training.”

“Well, the fact she had to come to you instead of you going to her implies that.”

“Beth, I would have gone to her!  They didn’t give me a choice!  It’s all too fast.”  Gail let her anger slip through, then covered herself after she finished speaking, forcing the anger back down.  “Sorry.”

“Who’s ‘they’?  If I can ask,” Beth said.  Worried.

“Focus Biggioni, for one.”

“Her, again?”  Beth said, and then thought for a minute or so.  “Going around Esther’s back?  You shouldn’t be telling me any of this, Gail.  I smell some nasty bitch patrol politics at work.”

Gail nodded.  Esther Weiczokowski was the UFA Midwest Region representative, Tonya’s peer.  Beth wanted Gail to go after Esther’s Council seat, despite her lack of support from Wini Adkins, the Region President.  “It’s not what you’re thinking, but yes, there’s upper-end politics involved.”

“They want you and your household, then, and you’re not sure you can commit everyone on a chance at something?”

“You know me too well, Beth.”

“And you came by to talk to me because you’ve decided you’re going to commit, and wanted to run this by me first because you’re afraid you’re being an idiot.”

Yes, Beth knew her too well.  “Yes.  I’m afraid.”  She paused.  “No, I’m terrified.”

Beth took Gail’s hands in hers.  “You can’t even tell me what’s really going on.”  Gail nodded.  “Is the benefit worth the risk?”

Gail nodded again.

“Do it,” Beth said, her voice now a whisper.  “You know my feelings about what you’re meant to be doing.  Dammit, we need everyone with potential like yours to be doing their utmost for the cause.  Do it!”  Beth paused, and looked into Gail’s haunted eyes.  “How long have the two of us been going to the sham Midwest Council meetings, sitting in the seats in the back of the room, and grousing about being cut out of any real decisions?  Neither of us is going to get out of those back seats without taking some big risks.  I may not have the potential to change the world that you do, Gail, but if there’s anything I can do to help, once you can tell me what the hell is going on, that is – I’ll help.”

“Really?”

“Really, Gail.  Go get ‘em, girl!”

---

“Focus Rizzari,” Gail said as she entered her office.  Rizzari turned toward Gail with her eternal disapproving stare.

“I’m in,” Gail said.  Rizzari raised an eyebrow and put her pencil down beside her small HP-35 scientific calculator.  Underneath lay a legal pad filled with scientific squiggles and hairy calculus far beyond Gail’s understanding.  When she averted her eyes, she swore the characters wiggled menacingly.

“I’m in,” Gail said again.  “Whatever you all think is necessary, let’s do it.  Full speed ahead.  Toughen me up, torture me, I’m ready.  If we don’t have much time to work with, then we’d better get a move on.”

Focus Rizzari’s frown of disapproval faded into a look of surprise, and then, for the first time, an honest smile took its place.

“Well then, welcome aboard.  Sit down.  Let’s talk.  I have some things to show you.”

---

Focus Rizzari’s mental illusion receded and Gail shook her head.  “Lori, I hope you don’t ever expect me to be able to duplicate these illusions.”  Her hands shook.  She had followed some of Focus Rizzari’s illustration of juice pattern inner workings, enough to know her work with Zielinski was on the right track.  But the illusion itself?

Focus Rizzari laughed.  “You were supposed to be focusing on the content of the illusion, not its substance.  You’re hopelessly indefatigable.”

“But how?  How is such an illusion even possible?”  She had known Focus Rizzari’s talents lay far beyond hers, but this was
ridiculous
.

“Mental programming.  The content is in my memories.  Programmed illusions are a relatively simple outgrowth of the secret trick you use to give yourself photographic memory.  The trick illustrates what I put in panel 3 of the training illusion, the piece about the correspondence between computer programming and advanced juice pattern design, mirroring the way the Crows’ advanced dross construct design mirrors higher mathematics.”

Gail’s shaking hands found each other in her lap and she sat up straight, almost knocking a brace of pizza squares off their plate and on to Focus Rizzari’s pad of menacing scientific doodles.  How did Focus Rizzari know about Gail’s photographic memory trick?  “Oh.”  Focus Rizzari smiled a shy smile at her.  “
Oh!
  Because you use something similar.”

“A trick I developed the same way you did, via force of will, long before I mastered juice patterns.  Which raises a thorny question: how many of your secret tricks are you willing to show me?”

Gail opened her mouth to say ‘none’, and then shut her mouth with a snap.  “If you buy into Dr. Zielinski’s hypothesis that everything a Focus does is a juice pattern, then, well, sure, everything,” she said, hesitant and terrified.

“He’s wrong, but he’s not far off,” Focus Rizzari said, and patted Gail’s knee.  “Let’s start small.  What in the hell did you do last night with Carol, anyway?  In the Dreaming.”

“Uh, oh, right,” Gail said.  She reddened and turned her eyes away from Focus Rizzari to study a stack of boxes in the northeast corner of her office, all containing duplicate kitchenware.  “Uh, I think I helped.”  Focus Rizzari made ‘more, more’ hand motions.  She was so tiny she even fit properly in Gail’s undersized office.  “Okay.  You know Teacher’s been under attack in the Dreaming?”

“Uh huh.”

Good.  Focus Rizzari, with her talents, had to be good at the Dreaming, though she had never identified herself to Gail.  “She, uh, pulled on my tag and whoosh I was there and whoosh we were fighting the, uh, chokeweed dream symbol, and…”

“We?  Carol was active in the Dreaming?”

“Yes.”

“Whoh.  That’s great!”  Now Focus Rizzari smiled, ear to ear.  “What happened next?”

“The chokeweed dream symbol turned into the Evil White Queen.  She grabbed both of our hearts out of our chests, Teacher went dormant, I grabbed our hearts back and chased off the Evil White Queen.”  Gail turned even redder.  “Are we even supposed to be talking about this in public?”

“We’re not in public
any more
.  Metasense around your office.”

Gail did.  Both of their guard retinues had gone elsewhere.  Nobody knew where they were, and didn’t care.  “You’ve got us warded by one of your insanely powerful juice patterns.  Check.”  Focus Rizzari made the ‘more, more’ motion again.  “There may be a problem.  Our hearts ended up mushed all together and I just sorta divided them up fifty fifty when I put them back.  I’m not sure what this symbolically represents.”

“The ‘mushing together’ represents an Affinity link,” Focus Rizzari said.  “Something Sky and I still can’t fully describe at the biochemical level.  Yet.  From a practical standpoint, you and Carol are going to feel a strong emotional attachment to each other.”

“I thought we already did,” Gail said, and reddened.  “It’s going to get worse?”

“Uh huh.”

Gail reddened to a fine full flush.  “What did the Dreaming fight look like to you, Lori?  I’m assuming that since you knew about it, you witnessed the encounter somehow.”

Focus Rizzari ran her hands through her short dark hair and took a deep breath.  “Promise me you’ll keep this to yourself, at least until we get a chance to talk with Carol and Amy.”  Gail nodded.  “Shorn of all symbols, this is what I witnessed: you attacked the spell causing Carol’s nightmares, in the process revealing the person who created the spell, Focus Patterson.  She appeared in the Dreaming to defend her spell, you attacked her, won, which is a pretty nifty trick, I must say, and then banished her and the spell from Carol’s mind.”

Gail leapt to her feet in panic and gasped, almost banging her head on the chair sticking out of the furniture stack beside her desk.  “
Her
?  We’re up against
her
? 
She
’s the enemy behind Teacher’s troubles?  We’re dead!  We’re all dead!  There’s no way…”

“Sit,” Focus Rizzari said.  Gail sat and blinked.  Charisma.  Focus Rizzari’s charisma was
still
unstoppable.  “Calm down.  There’s a lot you need to know.  The Evil White Queen isn’t Patterson’s only Dreaming identity; you likely run into her more commonly in her political action identity, the White Witch.  This isn’t the first time Patterson’s gone after Carol’s mind, and it won’t be the last.  I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you’ve been on Patterson’s radar ever since the day Carol saved your life.  Patterson believes the Commander, if left free to act, is the one fated to kill her, and Patterson’s doing her level best to turn this bit of insane magical nonsense into a self-fulfilling prophesy.”  Pause.  “Now you’re going to call Carol and tell her everything you told me, including what you did last night that showed that the Progenitors are not our enemies.”

“Call?  She’s in New Orleans, and…”

Focus Rizzari held up her hand to stop Gail’s words.  She took out a crumpled up drawing of a touch-tone telephone and laid it out on Gail’s desk.  “You wanted to see some of my tricks?”  Gail nodded.  “Well, here’s one that always freaks people out: call
this
number.”  Rizzari closed her eyes, put her hand over the drawing, and after a short pause, tapped out ten digits on the phone picture.  She called out the number, Gail dialed…

…and, after two rings, Teacher answered.

I am way too outclassed
, Gail thought, as Teacher started up the expected over-the-phone mind scrape.

Gilgamesh: August 17, 1972

“Get
out
of here,” Focus Daumerie snapped at the cluster of people huddled around her.  “Shoo.  Out.  Go, go, go.”  She waved her hands at them.

“Really,” Sinclair said.  “I’ll be all right.  I’m sorry I screamed.  I just didn’t expect this to work.”  He lay on one of the three beds in the small bedroom, and his face was pale.  Gilgamesh didn’t believe for a moment Sinclair’s momentary metasense reacquisition hadn’t hurt.

He looked at Tiamat, who looked back at him.  She shrugged and backed out of the small bedroom.  Gilgamesh followed and the two members of Focus Daumerie’s household came after, into the narrow hall.  Back in the room, he metasensed Focus Daumerie bending over Sinclair again, and the incomprehensible movement of juice.  Sinclair twitched, but this time didn’t scream.

Outside, up on the roof, Duke Hoskins paced.  Metasensed.  Sniffed.  “They’re coming today; we have to get Master Sinclair fixed now or we won’t have the chance,” he had said, kicking off their frenetic morning.

“Where now?” Gilgamesh said.  The Duke still didn’t know who ‘they’ were.  Annoying and terrifying.

Focus Daumerie’s prep cook now maitre’d answered them.  He served as the house medic as well.  “We have a small parlor down the hall.  I can chase everyone else out.”

The parlor was barely big enough for three delicate, old-fashioned chairs.  Gilgamesh waited in motionless meditation, Tiamat paced, dodging undersized furniture, and Hoskins, still up on the roof, sank deeper into his metasense scan.  The tableau reminded Gilgamesh of those four different times before his transformation when he had waited for his children to be born, trying to control his impatience in a waiting room, while others did the real work elsewhere.  He even felt other presences around him, watching, and keeping him company.  He hoped the results were as happy this time.

“Carol, we may have a problem,” Gilgamesh said, not bothering to open his eyes in his meditative metasense scan.

“Hoskins’ attackers?”  The floor creaked under her feet as she turned.

“No.  Something worse.  There’s a Crow wandering around out to our west, out in Kenner, partially masked, and wearing my metapresence signature under the partial masking.”

“He metasenses as you.  Great,” Tiamat said.  She came close and loomed over him.  “Who?”

“Someone we thought of as long dead uses this trick, if you want to believe Dynamo,” Gilgamesh said.  “Echo.  Anyone who gets past his metasense shielding metasenses himself.”

“Fuck,” Tiamat said.  “He still a mercenary Crow, working for the highest bidder?”

Gilgamesh nodded.  “Supposedly based out of Flagstaff, Arizona, according to Dynamo.”

“I think I ran into him in Detroit,” Tiamat said.  She paced in a small circle, nervous, before she stopped to fidget with a gaily painted metal alligator.  “I think he might have been involved in the fake Monster setup.”

“We need to do something about him,” Gilgamesh said.  Of the Crows Gilgamesh despised, Echo headed the list.

“Tell me the instant he makes any move toward us.  I’m not letting him kidnap you again.”  Which he had done, once, in the run-up to the Battle in Detroit.  Gilgamesh readied his anti-Crow golf bombs, just in case.

Echo, however, stayed five miles away.  Gilgamesh eventually figured out Echo sat in a car, likely doing nothing more than keeping track of them.  Gilgamesh sunk his mind halfway into the pheromone flow, keeping track of Echo both through his metasense and through the flow.