Delia flickered her eyes over to Hancock, still around and still wearing her Focus Forbes disguise. “They have reason.”
“Yes, they do,” Tonya said, and sighed. Social obligations called.
“Time to circulate,” she said to her people.
Time to go make herself available to every Focus with a grudge, cause or problem. Which, if past experience held true, was about three quarters of them.
“Tonya, what the hell is the Council doing about this whole Transform selection issue?” Beth Hargrove said. “We’ve been hearing about it for years, and we still get whatever scum the doctors decide to curse us with!” Tonya shrugged. Hargrove had been pestering Esther about the problem ever since Esther got put on the Council, back when Hargrove had been a yearling Focus. Now, since Tonya was available, Hargrove had decided to pester her too.
Tonya waxed noncommittal. To fix the assignment problem would involve butting heads with the government. The Transform community didn’t have the strength to do so, yet.
“Tonya, you’re head of the mentoring program, aren’t you?” Allison Silvey asked. Tonya had no respect for Allison, and thought she could take lessons in willpower from a diseased slug with a bad case of nervous exhaustion. Tonya nodded as an answer. “There’s a situation in Cleveland I think you ought to…”
“You’re in Cleveland, Allison,” Tonya said, interrupting. “Why don’t you deal with it? It would be good practice for you.” Allison gave Tonya a stricken glare, which Tonya ignored as she walked away.
“Tonya, who is this Focus Ima Daly, and why is she up for election as Treasurer?” Addie Hocutt asked.
“She’s the short stout blonde Focus you got into an argument with two years ago at the Midwest Regional summer meeting,” Tonya said. “Remember?” She repressed the urge to tell Addie to go bark at her mistress’s feet if she wanted any further information. Addie, the Midwest Region VP and Adkins’ chief toady, should already know the information already.
“Tonya, I’m trying to get a loan from the Council. I know they don’t usually do loans, but can you help…” Pauline Singer, Esther’s newest spy, was one of the basket case Focuses Tonya had been forced to deal with as head of the mentoring program. Despite the fact Pauline had transformed almost three years ago. It had cost Tonya far too much political capital to convince Esther and Wini that Pauline shouldn’t be paying Esther 10% of her household income as, essentially, protection money. Worthless protection money, besides. From what Tonya had heard, Pauline was still owned by Esther.
“I’ll pass along a recommendation,” Tonya said. Despite the help she had given Pauline, Tonya didn’t hold out much hope for this Focus.
“Tonya, what was the Council doing in the March meeting? I couldn’t make any sense out of the mimeographed meeting notes, and Esther’s not being very cooperative about answering questions.”
Tonya smiled back at the Focus, the only one at the wedding she hadn’t identified yet. “You are?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, it’s the car accident again,” the Focus said, with a sickly smile. “Cynthia. Cynthia Rejmaniak.”
Oh my god! “Cyn! No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I apologize. I’ve heard so much about the accident, and I’m simply amazed that you’re back on your feet.” The car had been totaled, everyone dead but Cyn. She had lost two of her Transforms and a normal. The Focus had suffered extensive third degree burns, more than thirty broken bones, and her face had been caved in.
“Hey, I’m used to it. I’m still in shock over the fact I have feet to walk on again.” Cyn came up and gave Tonya a hug. The hospital had amputated her legs after the crash, not being familiar with Focus physiology. Cyn had grown them back over the next four months.
Cyn was a different person now. She had always possessed a trim and beautiful body, slim waist and impressive bust line, but her monster of a nose and scraggly teeth had ruined her appearance. Her face was narrower now, her nose small and comely, her teeth fit her mouth, and if Tonya could trust her memory, Cyn’s hair had grown back three shades lighter than the dirty blonde it had once been. Cyn had always been one of the more brilliant Focuses, not much in the way of charisma or political sense, but a hell of a bean counter. In the six years since her transformation, she had put together a large real estate agency in Kalamazoo. Her household brought in nearly as much money as Mercury Catering and she paid nearly as large a successful Focus tax as Lori. For several years, Tonya had been half-seriously pushing Cyn to move to the Philly area, but hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Time to expand the list of Focuses who owed her favors. Pick up some Focuses outside the Philly area beholden to her. There was no telling when favors like this might come in handy, especially given Tonya was part of the Cause. Cyn was a Focus well worth wooing.
“You really want the story?” Tonya asked. Cyn nodded. Almost by magic, out-of-the-loop Focuses gathered round – Beth Hargrove, Wendy Mann, and Linda Cooley for starters. Beth waved Gail over, and Gail brought Grace Johnson. Quiet as a mouse, Gwen Larson, the only Canadian Focus at the wedding reception, slid over as well. Gwen was not a UFA member, but as head of the Ontario ISF she had the political credentials of a Council member. She was here despite her rocky relationship with the Council and especially Wini, which made Tonya wonder who she had arranged to protect her.
Tonya also noticed with interest the Focuses who didn’t come over – Polly, of course, and Wini, who hadn’t moved from her corner table, still ringed by her well-armed bodyguards. Judith Stell couldn’t escape Wini bending her ear, no great shock there. Lori was with Sky and oblivious to the reception. Katie Anderson glared at Tonya and backed away, likely unhappy about being ordered to talk to Polly and Tonya. Both Allison Sylvie and Pauline Singer came close enough to identify the topic of discussion, and then backed away as fast as possible. Neither of their reactions surprised Tonya.
Tonya told the story of Polly’s Council coup that resulted in the formal recognition of the Crows and Chimeras. To her surprise, Connie Webb had led the charge and taken control of the argument, burying the rest of the Council in tightly knit facts that, not surprisingly, would have stood up in the most difficult of corporate legal cases.
Over the course of the meeting, Tonya had made friends with Connie. Tonya had never felt close to the west coast Focus before, and thought her little more than a tough, aloof, and testy minor league corporate lawyer, out for herself and no one else. For one thing, she hadn’t known Connie was a space fanatic, and had two household members who were engineers working at JPL. Connie was going to take her entire household to Florida to watch the launch of Apollo 11 in just a month or two, and so couldn’t make the wedding.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Tonya said, after she was finished with the gory details of the March Council meeting. “Enjoy the reception!”
After the Battle in Detroit
The Consequences of Volunteering
“He’s here!” Sylvie said.
Gail woke up and moaned. Tried to remember…what? Wedding, reception, fight…and being shot. And here she was, with Sylvie, Helen and Melanie, all three of them naked in what should have been her wedding bed, in her and Van’s apartment bedroom in her household’s new home. Doing the same writhing thing they did after she transformed into a Focus. This time she was completely naked. Something was wrong, but that wasn’t it. Nakedness didn’t bother her much anymore.
She turned, and found Sylvie’s nose an inch from her own. “Who’s here?”
“Gilgamesh.”
“In this room?” Gail said, reaching for sheets and finding none. The bedroom was a cozy place, lined with shelves full books, with news magazines piled high on the nightstands. Van’s desk in the corner overflowed with papers and open books. But there were supposed to be sheets on the bed.
“No. In the building.” Their new apartment building, still filled with echoes of hammers and saws.
“How do you know that?” This was crazy, but what in her life wasn’t crazy? Sylvie
didn’t have a metasense. And she had been here in the writhing mess.
Sylvie shrugged. “Let’s get up.”
They did. Only Helen was embarrassed enough to have to explain. “Anything to help you heal, Focus.”
Gail checked herself over. Far too many angry red dimples covered her torso and arms, marble sized and larger. Healed bullet wounds. Her body below her neck faintly tingled, and her hands seemed to have lost most of their dexterity. Spine wound, miraculously mostly healed. The bones hadn’t healed back quite right yet – they seemed spongy. Her belly ached, as empty as it had been in her days on the Ebener farm. “I should be dead.”
“The Commander saved you,” Helen said.
Sylvie took Gail’s hands. “Then Matt…volunteered.”
That’s what was wrong. No Matt Narbanor. No John Bracken, either. She knew about John’s death, though. He had died when she had.
“Volunteered?”
“To help the Commander.”
Oh. He had volunteered to be juice sucked Arm style. Gail turned away from her three attendants and fought to control her emotions. She won, barely, and the juice didn’t waver. She would have a good cry later, hopefully out of range of her Transforms.
What had he been thinking? Hell! What had she been thinking by stepping between the assassins and Tonya?
He had just followed her example.
Her juice control wavered for a moment as she realized the consequences of her actions: she had just led her household down a new and dangerous path. Only they had already taken a few steps down that path already. With much smaller sacrifices.
All of this, all of this tidal wave of emotions and understanding, caused her to catch her breath and start to sweat. I’m somebody. The juice didn’t waver, though.
React later.
Business now.
“Clothes, everybody,” Gail said. “Diplomacy time.”
“You knew?” Gail said. She and her attendants chased everyone out of the small entry foyer that served as a meeting place for her household. It was a friendly sort of place, and the household had filled it with some pretty nice chairs from the Wheelhouses, who couldn’t find room for them anywhere else, and some not so nice chairs from the Attendales, who had the same problem. Vera had taken to bringing flowers home from her office, where they thought fresh flowers in the reception area made the place seem welcoming. A florist delivered a new arrangement twice a week, and instead of throwing the old arrangement out, Vera brought it home. They made Gail’s household seem welcoming too, even a couple of days past their prime, but not this set. Vera had been too busy mourning her husband to worry about flowers, and the flowers in the vase were dead.
Gilgamesh nodded. “I saw you had recovered enough to come out of the juice grope and healing trance. My job here is done.” He looked sad and metasensed much sadder, his soul a limp balloon.
“Juice grope? Your Crow names are just so atrocious,” Gail said.
“Actually, the name’s a Gymnast special.”
Focus Rizzari. His sort-of love. Whatever relationship he had with the older Focus was far too complex for Gail to parse, even with her ability to read emotions. She was glad she didn’t have anything like Gilgamesh’s attachments messing her up, although she did have an ache in her soul she couldn’t put a finger on. A longing for an angel or somebody like an angel.
“You were watching to make sure I healed? For who?”
“Hera and the Lieutenant,” Gilgamesh said. “They couldn’t stay in Detroit, for many reasons, most of a political nature I couldn’t quite grasp.” Reasons he resisted grasping, as they sickened him. “In any event, Focus Rickenbach, you handled the rest of your healing without any problems.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said. His sadness accentuated a meekness, a formality and a great deal of vulnerability in the older Crow that Gail hadn’t noticed before. “The threat of Rogue Crow is over. The Arm, Tiamat, killed him. The threat of the Hunters is mostly over and may be completely over; not a single Hunter survived the fight, but several bodies, including that of the oldest Hunter, Enkidu, weren’t found afterwards. Unfortunately, the surviving Nobles insist that Chimeras can recover from what was done to many of the Hunters.”
She had missed seeing or even metasensing the Hunters. “Which of the Nobles died?” Gail asked.
“Count Horace Knox. His body got tossed by a Hunter into a burning car.” To Gail’s surprise, Gilgamesh reached over and took her hands in his, then somehow, with what had to be Crow charisma, induced Helen, Melanie and Sylvie to grab hold of her hands as well. “I need to tell you what happened in the fight after you fell,” he said. “About what Reverend Narbanor’s sacrifice bought us.”
He told the story. Gail and Melanie held back fountains of tears, but Helen couldn’t and Sylvie didn’t even try. She had been silently weeping ever since Gilgamesh told her he was leaving Detroit.
“The entire world of Transforms knows of Reverend Narbanor now,” Gilgamesh said.
Gail nodded.
“And if we have our way, the entire world of Transforms needs to know about you, Gilgamesh,” Melanie said. The ache in her eyes never left her face. “He didn’t say, Gail, but after the Commander left the ballroom to fight, Gilgamesh took over command of the defenses and kept us alive.”
“Thank you,” Gail said.
“You’re welcome,” he said, whispering. “You still have my contact information?” Gail nodded. “I’ll write. I know what it’s like to be a Major Transform nobody can understand. Words help.”
Gail blinked and Gilgamesh was gone. Helen wiped her eyes and scanned around suspiciously, thinking dark and violent thoughts. Sylvie dove into Gail’s arms and bawled like a child, her heart broken. Melanie flat out ran away, the thoughts in her head edging toward self-harm, perhaps suicide.
Gail had to do something, fast, before her household fell apart and she had to do the dictator thing to put it back together. “Sylvie, Focus Rizzari is carrying Gilgamesh’s child. His heart is elsewhere,” Gail whispered.
Sylvie dried her eyes, backed away and glared hotly at Gail. Angry at the damned Crow.
This danger was over. One down, thirty or so to go.
Around the corner to her right, Kurt and Van peeked in, wondering if they could help. Gail waved fingers and invited them in.
On to the next problem. After she got some food.
The apartment roof was a favorite getaway spot of many people in her household, and right now Gail found Melanie in one corner, Roger Grimm in another, and Vera Bracken in a third, each pretending to ignore the others. Roger, traumatized and feeling diminished by the wedding fight, Gail’s wounds, and his wife Helen’s reactions, was contemplating leaving his wife. Not seriously; he just needed to get back to his job and lose his worries in an engineering problem. Vera was mourning the loss of her husband. Her grief felt natural and healthy, or at least as healthy as any grief felt to Gail these days.
Melanie, though. She stood at the edge of the roof and stared over the ledge at the narrow patch of grass below with a disturbing intensity. “Hey there,” Gail said, her voice as subdued and non-threatening as she could manage. “What’s the problem?” Melanie half turned to Gail and eyed the ledge again. Gail read too much in Melanie’s evaluating glare. Melanie feared a four story fall wouldn’t be enough to do herself in.
“Nobody told you?” Tears washed Melanie’s face, and she winced, hating herself for her tears on top of everything else.
Gail shook her head.
“My boyfriend David, he…”
Gail understood immediately. She grabbed Melanie’s hands and turned the hesitant, sobbing woman toward her. “He was a spy.” A spy for Focus Anderson, the Focus whose people had shot her and John Bracken, and according to Van and Kurt, far too many other people.
Melanie nodded. “I screwed up. He was so Christian, and friendly, and romantic, and he, he…he used me.”
“I missed it
, too, and I’m the one who can practically read minds,” Gail said. She put things together from Gilgamesh’s stories. Anger at her own failure and weakness as a Focus filled her voice, and she pushed on. “If you want, I can tell you how he was able to fool all of us.”
Melanie, confused, nodded.
“Focus Anderson was an old enough and talented enough Focus to use her charisma to get him to spy on us, and the wedding plans, without David even knowing he was doing so.” Gail wanted her charisma to come in, under her control. When it did, she would make sure this sort of thing never happened again.
“I should have known, anyway, Gail,” Melanie said, between clenched teeth. “I’m not good enough to remain in this household. Let me go. I’ll take my chances at the Clinic.”
Melanie blamed herself for Gail and Kurt’s injuries, John Bracken’s death, and Reverend Narbanor’s sacrifice. She wanted Gail to punish her. She needed Gail to punish her, and, knowing Gail wouldn’t, wanted to punish herself by leaving the household and letting fate and luck determine whether she would live or die.
Dammit! Gail knew she had to do something.
“You don’t have to go to any Clinic,” Gail said. For one thing, she knew that several of the Focuses who had attended the wedding had openings right now. “I can untag you and give you a choice. I’ll find out which other households lost Transforms, and set you up with one, if you want.”
“I want,” Melanie said. “Do it.”
Gail did, and Melanie reacted to the untagging the same way Sylvie had during Gail’s first untagging test. Gail managed to shuffle to the side fast enough to avoid Melanie’s projectile vomiting; once Melanie’s initial reaction passed, Gail knelt down beside the young woman and hugged her. “I don’t want you to go,” Gail said.
Melanie didn’t say anything. She just shivered in Gail’s arms, in the early afternoon May heat. “This helps,” Melanie said, several minutes later. “Being untagged helps me think.”
The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Nine Page 7