All That We Are (The Commander Book 7)

by Randall Farmer

  “That matches Tonya’s instincts,” Keaton said. “There’s still something wrong about all of this, though.”

  Gilgamesh nodded. “I fear so as well.”

  “In the mood I’m in now, that might not be the wisest idea you’ve ever come up with,” Keaton said. I nodded. We had just finished stuffing Bass with as much food and water as her stomach could hold, and I would soon have the task of locating juice for her. I had dumped her in the corner beside the dumbbell rack, where she would theoretically heal for a while. Keaton’s basement showed fresh bloodstains, about par for a Keaton basement.

  “Nevertheless, I think I need it, ma’am.” I knelt in front of her, avoiding the puddle of blood and water that had dripped off Bass.

  Sky had recovered enough from the stress to switch into one of his hyper chatty moods. “You’re crazy! You’re both crazy! There’s no need to volunteer to be punished, Carol!” He needed to keep out of this argument. If he didn’t watch his mouth, Keaton would flay him just for getting on her nerves.

  “It’s not punishment, dipshit,” Keaton said to Sky. I nodded. “She has nothing to be punished over. This is some form of therapy.” She turned back to me and growled. “What form of therapy this is, you need to tell me about, now.”

  I left her spittle on my face and explained. “I need pain to clear my mind of distracting thoughts, ma’am,” I said. As Gilgamesh said, something was going on here I was sure I could figure out if I could just clear the stray thoughts from my head about the Chimera fight, ‘the Commander’, my myriad responsibilities and my fears about Gilgamesh. Keaton peered at me from several angles before she nodded.

  “A game of numbers, then?”

  Perfect. Damn, I wished I could have come up with a better way of clearing my mind. Unfortunately, ever since I had been a baby Arm under Keaton’s training, pain had always worked the best. I nodded in return.

  “Well count me out,” Sky said. He stalked off, clomping up the basement stairs and out of Keaton’s house, muttering in French, likely about crazy Arms. He practically dared Keaton to grab him and thrash him, but she showed admirable restraint and forced herself to stay still. After he was gone, she turned to Gilgamesh and Hank.

  “Scat.”

  “Ma’am,” Gilgamesh said. He backed off two paces, and then stopped, overcome by a bit of insight. “Ma’am, I need this as well.”

  She looked him over, curious. “You mean watch, not personal pain, right?”

  “I can metasense, and through empathy, share Carol’s pain, and I’ve done so before,” he said. “I need to clear my thoughts. I’m tired of not understanding what’s going on here in Detroit.”

  But this was private! Well, no, I told myself. Not to Gilgamesh, who had meditated through my pain many times before. I gave my non-verbal assent to my boss.

  She shook her head. “Gilgamesh, think a minute about what you’re asking.”

  “I have,” he said. “Ma’am, I have something to offer, a minor bit of information I recently learned, which has been troubling me.”

  Keaton paused and thought. “You have a deal. What is it?”

  “I recently learned that all of Guru Shadow’s students share the same visualization of the pheromone flow, the Crow version of the Dreaming.” The game board. “I asked around, and that’s true of Guru Thomas the Dreamer’s students as well. It’s not true of Guru Merlin’s students, though.”

  Interesting, and a strong piece of evidence that Shadow was one of the secretive boss-Gurus. The only problem was we had other evidence indicating he wasn’t.

  Keaton turned to Hank. “If you give me the same song and dance about wanting to stay, Hank, I’m going to find us a stout Focus so she can figure out who has us controlled.”

  “No, ma’am, nothing like that,” he said. “May I have permission to go through your library?”

  “Only if you tackle that stash I got from my West Coast researchers,” she said. “It needs filing.”

  “I’d be glad to, ma’am,” Hank said. He left, happy to be gone. It took work for him to ignore someone else’s pain.

  “You, student,” Keaton said, grabbing Bass’s attention. Bass blinked blearily, halfway into a healing trance. “Watch. Given what’s happened to you, pain management is something you need to learn, and fast.”

  Bass nodded and didn’t say a thing.

  I sat on an incline bench while Keaton worked on my hands and feet, going from one to the other, careful today not to cause extensive damage, just extreme pain. Neither of us was high on juice after the Bass rescue, and if I had to do much healing I would start having low juice problems.

  “Eight!” Pain numbers, just like when I had been a student. The feedback made Keaton more precise.

  Not so long ago Keaton had done this for real, as punishment. Intent mattered. The fact this was as much fun for her as it would be for me and one of my victims also mattered, but in a positive way. It helped me focus.

  “Six.”

  There’s a nerve near the base of the wrist that if you press on it just so, after you’ve cut into the muscle, it’s like sticking an icepick in your brain. Keaton found it. “Nine!”

  I get no pleasure out of my own pain. For me, pain is a tool. I first used pain, on myself, to master my own juice-sucking urges and keep my juice monkey down so that I could transport a captured bit of prey to give to Keaton as my graduation present. I’ve used pain many times afterward for other similar tricks. What I wanted right now was to drive absolutely everything out of my mind, save my worries about what was going on in Detroit. Gilgamesh shared my worries and he did the same, using my pain. He sat across the room, eyes closed, cross-legged and meditating.

  “Five.”

  I let the pain rip my distractions right out of me. Part way through I realized Keaton had gone into her own meditative state, letting her sadistic pleasure distract her from her own worries. From above, I heard Hank bark some excited comment about ‘they didn’t know what they were looking at’, followed soon after by rustling of papers, car keys, and the door as he exited Keaton’s place.

  I would get his story later. Now, his antics were but a distraction.

  “Six.” And out it popped. Adkins. Damn. It was all about Adkins.

  “Tell me,” Keaton said. I had healed the minor physical damage and taken a long shower to settle my nerves. Now the three of us were back in the living room, with Bass serving us. Bass could barely hobble, but she managed. Luckily for all of us, Bass knew her way around a kitchen, even missing one hand.

  “It’s a trap,” I said. “Adkins is using the wedding as much as we are.”

  Gilgamesh nestled himself beside me, on Keaton’s couch. He had seen or figured out the same thing I had in his own meditations. “At some point, ma’am,” he said, to Keaton, “when you’re wounded, weak and distracted, Focus Adkins is going to have her salt mine Focuses grab you. Perhaps you and Carol both.”

  “Then she’ll tag you,” I said. “Or you and me. We’ll be hers.” This was the same game Focus Teas had once tried to play on me, trying to maneuver me into taking her tag. The first Focuses wanted us literally controlled, under their thumbs. Focus Adkins had been gnawing on this plan for a long time.

  “She’s been setting this up for a long time,” Gilgamesh said, echoing my thoughts. “Pushing all of us, including Focus Biggioni.”

  “Yes,” Keaton said, rolling a knife in her hands. “She got Tonya involved by maneuvering the Council into making Tonya the head of the Focus mentoring effort, then cutting off Focus Rickenbach from her local Focus friends, making sure Focus Rickenbach would end up close enough to Tonya by the time that mess was over that Tonya would end up at the wedding. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adkins didn’t end up tagging Tonya as well. From a first Focus perspective, one of them has to. Tonya’s too much a danger to them, now, to stay free.”

  “Focus Adkins thinks Focus Rickenbach’s a threat to her, so she’s been manipulating Focus Rickenbach’s life indirectly
,” Gilgamesh said. “Focus Rickenbach is bait. For us. Young and irresistible to us and our rebel ways. We can’t help but pay attention to her.”

  Keaton nodded. “According to Tonya, Focus Adkins is a master of parlor psychology and normal-style manipulation,” Keaton said. “She’s manipulated Focus Rickenbach and her household the same way she teaches other Focuses to grab control of their household: hit them hard early with punishment, allowing her to control events by lowering the stress level when it’s to her advantage. I’m guessing Adkins let up the pressure at exactly the right time to trigger Rickenbach’s fiancé to propose to her.”

  “She hammered me the same way by sending me into withdrawal when I was incarcerated,” I said. “Then she stopped. She must think I’m full of it now, cocky and stupid.”

  I refused to think about the idea that she might be behind ‘the Commander’, though. Way too far-fetched for me. However, the first Focuses had been unexpectedly cooperative and willing to deal during the Rogue Focus takedown. I smelled Adkins there. The cooperation was part of Adkins’ set up.

  “She’s almost certainly the one who lured me to Detroit with the armaments bribe, even though it came through official and anonymous channels,” Keaton said. The knife flipped through her fingers at Arm speed. “Right now she’s being extremely nice to me, hiring me for unthreatening local jobs in the established fashion. She wants both of us to relax.”

  “She expects us to be guarding the wedding,” I said. “Hell, she may even hire us to guard the wedding.”

  The knife disappeared. “She already has.” I glared at my boss. She gave me a sheepish shrug. “It seemed benign at the time, and good cover for what we already planned on doing.” At the time, our plans had been an attack on the Hunters in Chicago before the wedding.

  “I’m willing to bet that if you went back to the ‘attack the Hunters in Chicago’ plan, you’d find one problem after another getting in your way,” Gilgamesh said.

  I nodded.

  “Ma’am,” I said, going formal and pulling on Keaton’s tag. “We. You, that is. Must expose Focus Adkins and her salt mine Focuses before the wedding, the sooner the better.”

  “Expose to who? The Council will just sweep it under the rug if we tell them.”

  I licked my lips. “The media, the Feds, or both.”

  “That’s a line that we haven’t crossed before,” Keaton said. “We depend on the Focuses not exposing us. If we do that…” Keaton made a throat cutting motion.

  “Set somebody up,” Gilgamesh said. “A non-Transform.”

  Keaton and I looked at each other. “How Crow,” Keaton said. Not a compliment, but I could watch the idea grow in her until she liked it. “You know, I think I can make that work.” She paused. “You’ve come to some conclusion about the Commander problem as well, Carol.”

  I nodded. “I’m going to do what I’m going to do, and if this crazy shit fits, fine, if not, fine. I’ll be ‘the Commander’ to whoever wants me to be.”

  “Then, Commander, you need to get back to Houston, continue recruiting and find a way to expose this Crow spy in your ranks.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “…and figure out what Hank’s up to this time? Please?”

  Henry Zielinski: January 4, 1969

  Keaton’s little black book, version 4 or so, had her usual list of contacts and places where she maintained ongoing accounts. He memorized the address of the one he needed, exited her private office, and grabbed a set of car keys from the rack. His glasses fogged up the minute he left Keaton’s Detroit house and his eyes teared from the bright sun. His confused body thought it still should be night, from not enough sleep and too much time trying to keep up with Arm sleep schedules. He wasn’t sure he had gotten eight hours of sleep total in the last three days, and most of his sleep was in a moving vehicle. Another heart-rending scream from Carol followed him, and it did him no good to reflect on the reasons Carol had invited this bit of sadistic Arm insanity. His damned tag wanted him to intervene, which if he did would stretch Stacy’s tolerance past its current and low breaking point. He needed to get away.

  He did hope Carol was too busy to notice his access to Keaton’s private office. This bit of long-standing Keaton trust would be hard to explain to his day-to-day boss.

  Cosgrove Printing and Copying turned out to be a dinky place that had seen much better days, located a block west of Woodward, just northwest of downtown. He parked, stuck a few dimes in the meter, dodged the piles of black slush along the curb and walked in. He stopped. Transforms. He knew the faint smell of juice anywhere.

  He glanced around, recognized nobody he knew, and took in the ambience of the place. Innovative was the word that crossed his mind – they had a United Parcel Service outlet here, as well as a rack of post office boxes, copying machines, a mimeograph machine, and farther back a small offset printing press behind a glass wall. They sold fancy paper and signage, packing boxes and labels, and advertised ‘one day business cards’. Nothing obvious, though, shouted ‘Transform establishment’.

  Hank dodged stacks of cardboard shipping boxes to reach the front desk, got a key for the key-operated copying machine, and went to work. Keaton’s well-bribed researchers had spotted what he noticed, but hadn’t understood, or even made any smarter inferences about it other than ‘amygdala abnormalities’. He was fully convinced now he and Lori were chasing something real. The Focus needed this information; thus his copying. Not wanting to interfere too much, he would send the information without comment. Lori might have to make a few visits to these…

  “Dr. Zielinski, what in tarnation are you doing here?” a woman’s voice whispered into his ear. Hank’s heart thudded, ripping him out of his reverie. He turned, to find himself staring down at a Focus he recognized. He forced down his panic and dug up the name.

  “Focus Hargrove, you must be mistaken,” he said. “My name is Dr. Frank Madison. I believe the person you mentioned passed away some time ago.” Hint. Hint.

  Focus Hargrove nodded and her mane of red curls sparkled as she moved. “Okay, Dr. Madison,” she said, and twinkled. “Now, if you’d please answer my question, I’ll let you get on your way.” Her cheery voice couldn’t hide the stress behind it and the skin behind her freckles looked pale and tired.

  Hank took a quick look around Cosgrove’s and winced. Yes, those were Focus Hargrove’s bodyguards, and they weren’t in a happy mood. Coming out of the back room, the one with the small offset press, was another Focus and her bodyguards, a taller Focus he didn’t recognize. Blue jeans, scarf blouse, and honest to God beads in her long chestnut hair, she might have starred in movies as the archetypical hippie. The infamous Gail Rickenbach, obviously. Luckily, she remained lost in quiet conversation with a chubby young blond Transform woman.

  Cosgrove’s was one of Hargrove’s businesses, Hank realized. He hadn’t had any contact with Focus Hargrove in the past three years, but he knew her from one of Tonya’s earlier projects, to identify and use strange Focus skills. The project had been swiftly shot down by the Focus Council and hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks, just enough to give him all sorts of ideas he had never been able to follow up on. Focus Hargrove had the ability to diagnose simple illnesses among her Transforms with her metasense; with a little bit of juice pattern training she should be able to diagnose normals as well, and with some medical training diagnose more than simple illnesses. The Council had shot down all of his other ideas, as well.

  “I’m here to make some copies of some research notes,” he said.

  “Why here?” Hargrove backed her comment with her ample charisma. Hank’s sinuses started to pound. Yes, there had to be trouble brewing, if the normally breezy Hargrove was acting like a paranoid Focus bitch.

  “Are you familiar with a new Major Transform who recently moved to Detroit?”

  “Her?” Hargrove said, her one word comment holding a mixture of disgust and fear.

  He had guessed correctly; Keaton had contact
ed Hargrove. He nodded, answering Focus Hargrove’s question. “She has an account here, and since I’m only visiting Detroit she gave me her permission to use her account.”

  Hargrove frowned. “She’s patronizing my business? Strange. I hadn’t thought She liked me at all.”

  “Let me guess: she was cold, business like, uninformative, and wanted your bodyguards to know what she looked like to avoid problems.”

  “Yes.” Pause. “You’re implying this means she likes me?”

  “Quite a bit,” he said, although ‘like’ might have been too strong a word. ‘Respected in some strange way’ would have worked better. “Even from a Focus’s perspective, she often comes across as distant, cold and impolite.” Putting it mildly. “If she was indifferent, she would have insulted you to your face. If she was hostile, she would have either ignored you entirely or threatened you and yours until you did what she wanted.”

  Focus Hargrove shook her head. “Huh. I wonder if She might be willing to help me with a nasty problem. Could you take a message to Her, requesting a meeting, Dr. um Madison?”

  “If it’s appropriate. She’s inundated with a lot of tricky business right now. What sort of problem is it?”

  She gave him a frank ‘I’m not going to tell you’ look. Behind Hargrove, he caught the hippie Focus giving him the eye. She wanted to butt into the conversation, which given the clatter of the shop and her distance from them would take Biggioni-quality ears for her to hear and understand, but held back. Not out of politeness, but out of fear.

  Mental gears clicked in his head, and Hank made the connection to Loess’s journal. The four of them had gone over it on the plane flight to Kansas City. He cocked his head and gave Hargrove the look. Yes, she might easily be ‘Sparkles’, the blackmail target Focus.