Focus Pitre blinked and tilted her head to the side, almost unnoticeably. This wasn’t what she was interested in.
“Ah. Sorry,” Hank said, and decided to try a more personal viewpoint. “Focus Rickenbach’s marked by the relative youth of her transformation, and is socially part of the younger generation. Not a hippie, but, uh, liberated, as they’re calling it now. Pushy, as comfortable in torn blue jeans and tee-shirts as in a formal evening gown, and…” Hank went on in this vein for a goodly long while, describing Gail’s personality, at least from his perspective. He very carefully laid out both her strengths and her weaknesses. “After Focus Rickenbach decided to discard Focus Biggioni’s suggestions on how to handle me, Focus Rickenbach and I came to an understanding – I’d stay out of her hair if she stayed out of mine. I agreed not to contest her taking the Littleside research group from me, and she agreed not to play any more Focus games with my head and my juice.” Hank suspected Gail would tell that part of the short tale quite differently, but on that subject, he had every confidence in his own slant. “Later, she transferred me to Inferno, I suspect due to a Dreaming suggestion by the Commander.”
Focus Pitre turned and stared at the sitting room wall for several minutes. “Is that what you wanted?”
Hank wondered who she talked to. Chevalier? There was nobody there, and despite his hard work, he couldn’t use the Inferno superorganism to borrow metasense on a regular basis.
He waited.
To his surprise, when the someone became visible, the someone was Arm Keaton. Presumably Keaton. Her hair hung down to her shoulders, she seemed feminine, and she exuded a musky odor that might be perfume or might be natural. Bare feet and dangerous sex appeal. Well, she had warned him about that.
“Hank, quit your fucking worrying,” she said. “I’ve already made arrangements with Webberly.” Yup, Keaton.
He hadn’t even thought about the potential for territorial conflict, and he should have. Instantly. He had grown used to being out of the Arms’ orbit. He wondered how much trouble he was in.
The big surprise was Denise’s attitude. Keaton had abused her and broken her, and he knew Denise held no affection for the Arm. Or hadn’t, at least for the old Keaton.
“Neither you, nor Webberly nor Carol has ever seen anything in Hank to indicate that Patterson did anything to him with the juice,” Keaton said, to Focus Pitre. “My memories indicate otherwise, but those are very old memories, and some of my memories before Gilgamesh skunked me in the Philadelphia Massacre are suspect. I think Patterson’s marking got ripped off when the government injected him with élan back when they tried to assassinate him.”
“That would make sense,” Focus Pitre said, edging from businesslike to friendly toward Keaton. “Dr. Zielinski’s name first appeared on Shirley’s ‘to be taken care of’ list just after then.”
Hank’s stomach clenched. What were they talking about? Or, in particular, were they talking about what he thought they were talking about? He wanted to grab his knees and shriek “No!” at the top of his lungs. Instead, he pulled on Mimi’s charisma and ordered himself to behave.
Keaton sat in the chair next to Hank, and grabbed his eyes with her predator. “Webberly’s downshifted tag isn’t enough.” Keaton grabbed Hank’s right arm and forced him to his knees. “Say it.”
“Ma’am?”
“Yes, I’m tagging you. Then I’m going to turn it into the Commander’s tag. Say it.”
“I’m yours.” Hank boggled for a moment. Keaton? Keaton could do this?
“You’re mine. What, you think I’ve been sitting on my ass regarding this new tagging technology? So far, I’ve identified over a hundred different tag varieties, now that I know what to look for. Some of them are just utterly silly.”
“With Tonya and Shadow’s help, I suspect,” Hank said, putting things together as he climbed back up into his chair. Denise gasped at Hank’s words and tone, pitched in his slightly insubordinate voice, and likely with a little Arm charisma in it.
Keaton yanked his tag, a ‘behave’ warning, and chortled. “So Anne-Marie was right, and Hank here has been hiding his light under a bushel basket. Denise, his reputation for being able to move mountains is well deserved.”
Tonya and Shadow may have thought they gained a friend and peer – nope, what really happened was that Keaton had gained more tools and weapons through their affinity links. Keaton had a much better grasp of reality than either Tonya or Shadow. “This doesn’t feel like the Commander’s tag,” he said, this time pitching his voice in a more proper junior Arm to senior Arm mode. He knew not to take anything Keaton did at face value, nor to underestimate her capabilities. She always worked hard on expanding her personal capabilities and supply of hidden tricks, far more obsessed with self-development than the other Arms he knew well.
“Huh. You’re going to be just as deadly as a Transform as you were as a normal – you shouldn’t be able to notice things like that.” Keaton licked her lips. Red, full, very feminine lips. “This tag’s an improvement. This is the tag an Arm gives a trusted independent Transform leader. You should be able to get a lot more done of our sort of work. When you need to.”
A subtle test of Carol, as well. Hank shivered. Was Keaton going to…
“Nope,” Keaton said, interrupting his thoughts about Arm dominance games. “We don’t think about such things, remember?” He nodded. Given his status and aspirations, a more Arm-like mental attitude about thoughts of advancement would indeed be more appropriate. Too many of the people he dealt with these days would not appreciate his long-term goals and aspirations.
Keaton turned to Denise. “Have you decided?”
“Yes, Stacy. I need all the support I can get,” Denise said. Keaton then had Denise kneel and say the magic words and take Keaton’s Arm tag, Major Transform style. Keaton tagged Denise last fall, so this had to be something different.
“Don’t try for the details, just mirror back the tag I gave you,” Keaton said, and a moment later, “I’m yours, as well.” Well, that was something he never thought he would hear from Keaton.
“Good,” Denise said. “I was hoping you had some way of helping me with this. I certainly don’t understand all the tag nuances you’ve come up with.”
“What sort of tag, ma’am?” Hank asked Keaton.
“Second order subordinate full tag. My link with Denise is going to be subordinate to Webberly’s, and is based on the Commander’s authority.” Webberly was still going to be pissed as hell about this, as Arms didn’t share Focuses. Keaton ranked her, though, and this did appear to be something new and different. Besides, Hank didn’t see what Webberly would be able to do about it even if she objected.
Keaton stared at him, predatory but not particularly hostile. “Now you’re supposed to grill me about Patterson, Hank.”
Sweat started to drip down Hank’s back. He could swear Keaton was worse than ever, even without the feel of an Arm two steps from the edge of insanity. “If I may, ma’am. Patterson?”
A picture appeared in his lap faster than he could see, likely put there by Keaton. He looked at it, and shivered. Yes, he remembered this Focus. Pale eyes, pale hair, sleepwalker face, a ghostly Focus he had met only once, back when he first started working with Transforms. Called in to the Virginia Transform Research Center, back in ’58. About three months before the breakout. He was already…
Or had he? Dammit! Had Patterson put that in his mind?
“Yes, Hank. She tagged you as a normal, using techniques we still don’t understand, and used you as part of the breakout group,” Keaton said. “She took your natural proclivities to help Transforms and amplified them. According to Denise, she was calling you and getting verbal reports from you all the way through to the fall of ’66.”
Hank buried his head in his hands. He hadn’t known, or even suspected, that the pale Focus was Patterson. She had told him not to think about her, and even after all these years, he found it hard to concentrate on those m
emories. What few memories remained. Phone numbers of unnamed Network contacts. Conversations regarding the Arms he worked with to unfamiliar people. Things he had done without once questioning what he was doing.
“I know those black moments of despair,” Denise said, comforting him with extra juice through her tag on him. “All of us do, all of us twisted by Shirley Patterson. I fear for the ones who remain tagged by Shirley even after her death, and fear for what they might do.”
Hank took his head from his hands and looked up. Of all things, his muscles ached. He must have been sitting here for a very long time. Someone had played with his memories. Keaton was gone, and he guessed she did a short mind scrape before she left. Nothing to be done about that. “I didn’t lose the tendency to depression after I lost Patterson’s tag.”
“I understand,” Denise Pitre said. “All of us who’ve been freed from Patterson’s long term control have that tendency, or a similar one. Misuse of juice causes permanent mental damage.” She paused for a moment, reading him and his reactions, Focus-style. “What helps you?”
He laughed bitterly, and started to talk about his coping techniques. Burying himself in his work. The adrenaline rush of interacting with Arms. Sparring with a Focus trying to roll his mind. “My coping techniques cost me my marriage, though.”
“Better than your life,” Denise said, and faintly smiled. “I think of it as an alcoholic must – one day at a time. Juice support helps. Getting my tag situation with Stacy regularized helps a lot. I think the simple Arm dominance tag was interfering with my coping techniques – unlike you, I’m not a very good candidate for becoming a predator, or even an apprentice predator.” She laughed, the first time Hank had ever heard that, and he laughed as well. He feared she was correct about him being a very good candidate for apprentice predator, one of the reasons he had accumulated such a horrific karmic debt. As Kim, the unfortunate young woman Transform, pointed out to him before her death.
They chatted for a while longer. Denise gently informed him that as a Transform, his amplified emotions put him at greater risk of depression than ever before. He told her what it was like for him in low juice and periwithdrawal, and she warned him that borrowing Major Transform emotional states through the superorganism could amplify his tendencies toward depression even more.
“One last thing,” Denise said. She pushed a box over to him, a box that had been sitting on her desk. “This is for you.”
Hank furrowed his brows and opened the box. Inside was a china teacup, Chinese style with no handle. On one side were Chinese characters Hank didn’t recognize, and on the other, a yin-yang symbol. “The Madonna of Montreal asked Stacy to give you this, and to say this represented the answer to one of the problems vexing you.”
“Huh?” he said, looking more closely at the cup, this time for symbolic meanings. Unlikely. The teacup was worn and likely lifted from a Chinese restaurant. “Oh, crap!”
Now he got it. How could he have been so stupid!
Probably because he had been so obsessed with thinking about his own tricks.
“Hank?”
“Let’s go talk to Mimi,” he said. He helped Denise stand, not that she needed it, but to help him slow himself down. He had never gone on one of his manic tears around Focus Pitre, and he didn’t intend to start now.
---
“Hank, we are in the middle of a conference on regional defenses,” Connie said, and gave him one of her patented exasperated looks. A small conference, Connie with Rose, Count Dowling and Chevalier, in Connie’s oversized office in their converted nursing home. She had decorated it with prints of famous sculptures on the walls, and four small pieces of Crow-produced dross artwork – found art, such as a ten inch wide steel pulley – that gave off a sense of natural beauty.
“Hmph,” Hank said. “If you’d invited either of our Focuses, I wouldn’t have been able to finalize my latest project, and thus wouldn’t have been able to interrupt you.” A day earlier and Keaton would have likely been at this meeting, too, annoying the crap out of Rose.
Connie glared at him. “Hank!”
He glared back. It was one thing to exclude someone who actively wanted someone else to handle house defenses – Denise – but another to exclude someone who wanted to learn everything – Mimi. If pressed, he would even admit to being unhappy at his own exclusion.
“I was going to run everything by Mimi later,” Connie said, twirling a pencil in her hand, her agitation coping mechanism. “Take more time and fill in more details.” She leaned back in her reclining leather boss-chair and gave Chevalier an apologetic hand-wave for Hank’s interruption.
“Good,” Hank said. “I still have something very important to show you. In fact, it might even count as something the rest of you might be interested in.”
“I’m sure it’s a hoot,” Count Dowling said, very softly. He was a little furry today, his claws no longer retractable and his nose a bit more bear-like than human.
“Come now, Your Grace,” Chevalier said. “Dr. Henry Zielinski is a very serious man, and his presentations, although at times quite erudite, are always entertaining and informative.”
“Well, don’t dumb it down for my ears,” Dowling said, with a half grin.
“In this case, your grace, you don’t need to worry,” Hank said. Although he hid the fact well, likely as a defense mechanism against the other Nobles, Count Dowling was, in his own way, quite brilliant. “It’s a practical demonstration.”
In a blink, Rose grabbed one elbow and Connie the other. “Let’s go,” Connie said. “No time like the present.” Rose vibrated with energy, wire-taut. Hank found himself finally starting to get comfortable with Arm Webberly and her moods, though it took longer than he expected. She was only the third mature Arm he had spent any serious amount of time with, and she was quite different than either Hancock or Keaton. She didn’t express her emotions as visibly as Carol, which made identifying Rose’s moods that much more difficult, and she didn’t have Stacy’s need for constant play-acting and personae masking, so it had taken him a great deal of time to stop the instinctive ‘what does she really mean’ that he always needed to do with Stacy. With Rose, such analysis was a waste of time.
The predatory nature was the constant, though in his somewhat more limited dealings with Arms Haggerty and Sibrian, he knew there were Arms that didn’t do the predator all the time. Rose’s moods were all shades of serious and professional. Unlike with Carol and Stacy, she kept her personal life completely separated from her professional life, but like Carol and unlike Stacy, she was willing to share the non-Transform aspects of her professional life with those like himself. A recent information trade came to mind; he had taught her about offshore bank accounts in return for information on preferred modern methods for slipping contraband weapons and technical equipment into the country.
“I take it there’s something special about practical demonstrations, Guru Chevalier?” Count Dowling asked. His clawed feet clicked on the linoleum floor of the hallway, and Hank noticed he was barefoot.
“Got me, your grace. About practical demonstrations by the Good Doctor, that is. I’ve never seen anything but his most theoretical. I just despise differential equations…”
Chevalier continued to chatter with Count Dowling as Hank trooped them to his office at the far end of the former nursing home. Mimi and Denise were waiting for them, along with Daisy, who was handling the technical equipment, and Sadie Tucker, there for emotional support, in her current position as Inferno’s Focus counselor. Hank went over to a table laden with documents and medical supplies.
“If you recall, Connie, we received a box of copied documents in February from the Director, the third set of four that had been gleaned from Patterson’s compound. There was a section involving, here, ‘emergency support activities’,” Hank said, picking up the top piece of paper in his working stack. “In this section, there was a sub-section involving ‘emergency Transform augmentation using St. Judith mimics’
. Although the document was written in Pattersonese, Denise here has an idea about what they were talking about.”
“Good, good, but what does that have to do with us? We don’t have a dross-embalmed élan-activated household,” Connie said.
“Of course, but this document involves techniques for work outside of the compound, with multiple Focuses, something that hadn’t clicked in my mind until yesterday.” And the gift of a teacup with a yin-yang symbol on it.
“Focuses and élan?”
“If you recall, transferred juice picks up a little élan if you transfer it too many times from one Focus to another. It turns out there’s a use for mildly contaminated juice.”
“Ah, I see, Dr. Zielinski,” Chevalier said. “Focus juice movement always produces dross, but if you pass it back and forth between the Focuses, you don’t allow the waste products to escape – and you get élan, at least for a little while.” He paused. “I take it you have a practical use for this?”
Hank nodded. He took out a scalpel, and cut his arm, as shallowly as he could. Might as well be him. He had years of practice as Carol’s practice dummy, and this time, he wouldn’t be doing anything with the juice himself. Rose glided forward, with a sniff or two, attracted to his blood in a standard Arm fashion. Probably instinctively pulled to heal him, as well.
“Okay, here goes,” he said.
Mimi and Denise stepped forward, linked hands, quickly moved juice back and forth between them, then moved the tainted juice into Hank. They focused on a mental pattern, one that had turned out to be both instinctive and simple. The cut instantly stopped bleeding, and in a moment, started to scab over.
“There,” Hank said, feeling a little woozy. Hungry, actually, which he should have predicted. Physically, his body did the healing work, and this was the third of these minor healings this afternoon. Sadie shook her head slightly at Hank – she had already warned him he was pushing himself too hard.
“I’ve seen your borrowed healing trick before, Hank,” Connie said. “What’s different about this?”
An Age Without A Name (The Cause Book 5) Page 17