“It smells of Chimera, as do your wounds.”
Sudden runnels of sweat dripped down my back under the torn sheets bandaging my non-existent tits. Rumor’s observation unnerved me. He sensed too much. At my sudden mood shift, he flew – okay, leapt – to a building farther away, still with the Cheese Steak in his hand. He settled at the edge of my metasense range, and ate. Now we were too far apart to talk. I thought as I ate. I had gone predator at him, annoyed at the acuity of his observations. I hadn’t gone very predator, but even what little predator I showed was too much for him.
Boy, were Crows touchy! Now I knew why none of the rest of us Major Transforms knew jack shit about them: they were all terrified of us. Terrified of normals, too, I bet.
All of a sudden, I knew I needed to continue talking to Rumor. I closed my eyes and meditated, the way I did before an exercise session. I visualized myself not as a predator, but luxuriating in a warm bath, letting my body almost float…
After Rumor finished his lunch, he came back to whispering distance. “I apologize,” he said. “I don’t know what I said to upset you, but I apologize for saying it.”
“Crows watch, don’t they?”
“Some Crows watch the Arms.”
I stood and left the diner, still munching down one last Cheese Steak. “The Chimera paw in my pocket upsets you. You don’t know why I have it there, do you?”
“It implies you defeated a Chimera. Your wounds imply a fight with a Chimera. Yet,” he paused, “why bother with a trophy from a mindless beast? My apologies if you collect such things, madam Arm.”
“It wasn’t a mindless beast, Rumor,” I said, with a snarl. Predator indeed, but I didn’t aim my ire at Rumor. Rage at Enkidu filled me, for the two hundred and thirty second time since the fight ended. Rumor didn’t flee.
“How do you know this?”
“It talked in complete and occasionally intelligent sentences. It wanted revenge for something my teacher and I did to him several months ago. I think there is a distinct possibility it hunted me down…”
Rumor vanished.
Something walked close to me, hidden from view. Something immensely powerful. I ducked into an alley, backpedaled into the back doorway of an old German restaurant, and brought out both my knives. I refused to be defeated without a fight!
“I still mean you no harm,” Rumor said. He was the immensely powerful thing that approached? His power didn’t come from normal juice, but something else, like tamed Monster juice or a derivative. He had been holding back, just like I had been holding back on my predator effect.
“Come no closer,” I said. Demanded. With malice aforethought. As the predator.
“I must see the hand,” Rumor said. “I pledge to harm it in no way and will return it to you within a few seconds.”
The Crow, terrified of me before, was no longer terrified. No, I didn’t read him right. He acted as he needed to while terrified nearly beyond his wits. As he acted, he revealed the trick Officer Canon had used against me, only better: Rumor now hid from my visible sight and my metasense. He stood close enough to me to be practically breathing down my neck.
“What’s it worth to you?” I said.
“I saved your life. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“I’ve restrained myself so you can talk to me and ask your questions. Doesn’t my patience mean anything?” I gave him the full predator, tinged by burning juice. He took two steps back. I heard his steps.
He sighed. “I don’t want to slip up and harm you, madam Arm. Yet your threats move me to protect myself.” He paused and thought. “I have money. Information. I can lead you to a Transform man who will soon be nabbed by Focus Patterson for a fate that makes the predatory kill of an Arm and the softness of a baby’s cheek seem indistinguishable.”
“I’ll take all three.” I would be willing to bargain down to just the juice but I wasn’t giving in without bargaining.
Another sigh. No bargaining. Interesting. “Focus Patterson is the boss Focus of the Focuses in the United States,” he said. So much for Zielinski’s belief in her retirement. “She’s a witch. She’s not to be trifled with. I would say she’s evil, but all Major Transforms are evil. She’s more evil than either of the two of us. Her evil is different, unbelievable.”
I brought out Enkidu’s hand. “I have a question to ask. I’ve seen the trick you’re using now to hide from my vision and metasense before, from an evil Transform who masqueraded as a police officer, trying to recruit me. The question is: did I run into a Crow?”
I heard the faint whisper of Rumor’s breathing as he studied Enkidu’s severed hand. “It’s still alive. It’s in withdrawal, but it’s alive. In about ten days it will hit withdrawal death. Only then will it decay. Only the Major Transform metabolism of a Beast Man can allow his flesh to do such things.” He paused. “Any sufficiently skilled and mature Major Transform can arrange his or her own invisibility, each in his own way. At the present time, in the United States, only Crows and Focuses are mature enough, and of Focuses and Crows, only a few are dedicated enough to learn such skills.” He paused. I cursed my youth and weakness. The lone wandering Arm routine looked more dangerous by the second. I needed to get back to Chicago, dig myself a hole, crawl into it, and improve. “You sensed your attacker’s evil,” Rumor said. “In your view, am I evil?”
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 considered 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 hesitate
d. “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 what 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 sa
id. “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 doubted 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.”
All Beasts Together (The Commander) Page 5