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“Thank you very much for your help, sir,” Gilgamesh said. Out of the corner of his eye, he could swear the waves in the Georgia seascape over on the wall moved, amid the high cry of seagulls. Gilgamesh had been shocked to hear that before Gilgamesh’s discovery of his rotten eggs, and the spreading of the rotten egg technique, Merlin hadn’t been able to stabilize dross constructs on mobile objects. Merlin still struggled with the trick, needing complex dross constructs of amazing difficulty to duplicate the simple capabilities Gilgamesh found within himself.
“No, thank you, Gilgamesh. I don’t get many visitors here, and I could hardly turn down an admirer, even if he can’t tell real art from a velvet Elvis. Now remember, your dross constructs should be beautiful. Works of art. Not engineering blueprints.”
“Engineering blueprints are beautiful.”
“Hah. You just take care of yourself. You’ll make a fine Guru if you can keep from getting yourself killed.”
Gilgamesh looked away, unsure of himself. “So, even though I’m not so good with the standard Guru-level dross constructs, do you think I’ve learned enough?”
“You’ll do fine. If you traipse all over the country with a Beast Man, or a Noble, or whatever you call him, and fix Sinclair, you’ll be more of a Guru than half the Gurus we already have. Intricate dross constructs aren’t everything. Just show a little restraint sometimes. You’ll live longer.”
“Thank you, Merlin. For everything.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. You’ve learned too much flattery from your giant friend here. But listen. Thomas the Dreamer’s people should be safe for you. That means Rumor and Vizul Lightning besides myself. But Chevalier’s people will all be trouble, and it’s not clear whether the second Mentor who cast Sinclair out was Arpeggio or Snow. That means stay far away from Pokeweed and Phobos, and be very careful if you talk to Zirkil or Hephaestus.”
“Thank you,” Gilgamesh nodded, sad. Save for Snow, he once counted the other Crows Merlin mentioned as his friends.
“Now go. Write letters. I want to hear all about your progress.”
“I will.”
Gail Rickenbach: July 14, 1972 – July 15, 1972
Sleep didn’t fully flee when Gail awoke, flying from her bed. By the time her body thumped up to the wall, though, her eyes were open. Eyes open, she faced the most terrifying excuse for a woman she had ever encountered. Adrenaline from the nose-to-nose confrontation cleared away her last vestiges of sleep.
“Time to wake up, little Focus,” the woman said, with a predatory smile. Carol Hancock. Arm. The Commander.
“Carol? What do you want?” Gail said, whispering around the Arm’s hand on her neck. Over in the bed, Van sat up to see the bare shadows of the confrontation.
“Oh, fuck,” he said. Her husband hated extreme chaos and any form of anarchy, and when the Arms took an interest in Gail, they both inevitably ensued.
The Arm ignored him and smiled wider at Gail, who remained pinned to the wall. “You’re going to do exactly what I tell you, aren’t you, little Focus?”
Gail nodded quickly, still shocked and unnerved by the abrupt awakening. This wasn’t how the other kinds of Major Transforms normally dealt with her. Arms and Nobles were unfailingly polite, and the Crows always treated her like royalty. This wasn’t just impolite, this was insane!
“You, Van. I’m taking your wife here away from you. I’ll give her back eventually.” Van gulped. Gail’s stomach churned when she realized the Commander knew the name of her husband. “In the meantime, you just sit tight and wait. Put ‘Deal with the Commander’ down on your duty roster under ‘Gail’.” She wriggled and shrank back, or attempted to, when she realized the Commander knew not only that Van was the current household leader, but also how he ran things. Well, this explained what the Commander had been doing for the past week. “Don’t even think about doing anything stupid.”
Gail’s heart raced in stark terror at the Arm predator effect. Being an Arm’s prey was a new and unwanted experience.
Van nodded, caught in the grip of the same predator effect holding Gail. The Arm eased her grip on Gail’s neck but didn’t back away. Gail settled down to her tiptoes. She coughed and tried to gather her wits and found that she had to look up several inches to see into Carol’s eyes. Again she attempted to back away, but she found no room to escape.
The Arm stroked gently along Gail’s cheek with her other hand, and slowly licked her lips. Gail damned near pissed herself. The Arm smiled and whispered “Come with me.”
Gail nodded. The Arm picked her up and carried her like a baby, her head held tight against the Arm’s neck. The Arm took Gail into the next room, and sat down on the living room couch in Gail’s small apartment, still holding the Focus in her arms. Gail tried to wiggle loose once the Arm sat down, but the Arm didn’t relax her grip, and Gail found herself embarrassingly stuck.
Carol Hancock was a tall woman, unnaturally gaunt, with the well-developed muscles of a professional male athlete, nothing like Stacy’s male body-builder physique and presence. Her lean and long face held hungry blue eyes and bloodless pale lips, topped by mouse-blonde hair cut very short. Her juice structure remained as beautiful, alluring, and entrancing as ever.
Today, utterly terrifying, as well.
Like any Arm, the Commander was a predator. A predator who preyed on human beings, but a predator Gail owed her life to. Time to be polite. “Can I get up now, ma’am?” Gail said. The Arm didn’t say anything and didn’t let her go. Instead, she stroked Gail’s face again, gently touching eyes and cheeks and mouth, carefully brushing Gail’s long hair back from her face. Gail shivered at the touch, but the Arm didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m going to train you,” the Arm said, never stopping her gentle stroking. “Teach you so you can give me juice. First, I’m going to give you physical training, because everything works better when your body is in peak condition. Then you’re going to learn how to move juice for real. Later, you’re going to learn some advanced capabilities, and in the process we’ll figure out how you can give me juice. I’m also going to teach you a few other things I believe Focuses should know. When you finish my training, you really will deserve to wear that big red ‘S’ on your chest.”
This matched up with Tonya’s orders, if she ignored the hyperbole, so Gail nodded. Still, she wished the Commander would let her down and back away. The Arm was far too close. Gail’s stomach knotted up tight at the smell of her, and at that invasive dangerous touching.
“Open yourself to me,” the Arm told her. “I’m going to claim you as mine. This won’t hurt, but you’ll feel a change in your juice.”
“Why?”
“So I can train you. You’ll be mine. Say it.”
Incomprehensible Arm nonsense. “I don’t understand,” Gail said. Protesting and bargaining in the face of that heart-pounding terror took all her courage.
“You need to acknowledge me as your superior, so I can train you. I claim you as part of my territory. As part of my territory, I’ll be less likely to hurt you and yours by accident. Much less likely.” The Commander’s roving stroking hand stilled in a grip around her chin almost painfully tight.
Gail pulled together in her mind what little she knew about Arms. This had to be the Arm tag, the thing keeping Arms from beating up on each other over imaginary slights and gaffes. Territory, though…
“You’ve claimed Detroit?”
Up went one expressive eyebrow. “And now I’ve claimed you.”
“Tell me you’ve done this with other Focuses.”
“Two so far.”
Gail caught a metasense signifier of Chicago and Linda Cooley in Carol’s juice structure as she spoke. Gail almost laughed in relief; anything Linda survived would be easy on her. “All right,” Gail said.
“Say it. Say you’re mine. Call me teacher.”
“All right, all right. I’m yours, teacher.”
“Mean it.”
Mean it? Shit
, how the hell was she supposed to mean it?
Teacher. Carol was going to teach her. Fine. But moving juice to an Arm meant experimental shit, and from her own experiments, she knew you didn’t casually experiment with the juice unless you courted a messy death.
On the other hand, without such risks, how else could the Major Transform community advance? She had stepped in front of a hail of bullets to protect Tonya, once, simply because Tonya had been the only leader Focus who had been willing to help Gail figure out how to be a Focus. Well, here was the Commander, the Arm known for being the most helpful of the Arms to the Focuses and the Crows.
Time to volunteer again.
If she could just think! She wiggled again, attempting to pull loose, with no more luck than before. “Let me loose,” Gail said, using her Transform rights speaking voice. Charisma. No effect. “I can’t even think when you’re so close. How can I open myself up to you when you’re messing with my Focus instincts?”
“You’re going to open yourself to me in the worst possible circumstances, because then this will stick. Think of this as a ceremony, an introduction to my world.”
Gail shut her mouth with a snap. Carol knew exactly what she was doing to Gail, and did so intentionally. Well, now she had ample personal proof about how talented the Commander was, now didn’t she?
Hell.
“All right, I mean it.”
“Say the words.”
Damn, this was hard. Gail wished the Arm would quit touching her.
“I would like to be yours. Will you teach me? Teacher.”
The Arm nodded, and then drew her finger down the center of Gail’s face, from brow to chin. As she did so, Gail felt something shift inside of her, something down deep in her juice structure.
So that’s that. Once the words involved the juice, everything became real. She didn’t really feel any different and her juice level hadn’t changed. She did some deeper thinking and examination.
The Arm’s incessant touching wasn’t as irritating as before, for one.
The Arm was also less terrifying, the second change.
Now, finally, when it didn’t matter so much, the Arm dumped Gail off her lap.
“Exercise time,” the Commander said. “Put some workout clothes on. And do something with your absurdly long hair.” Gail jumped to do both at once, without thinking, instinctively obeying the Arm.
Instinctively obeying? Well, that was, appallingly, the third.
They ran. They ran in the depths of the night, in the dark and dangerous streets of Detroit. Gail followed the Arm, huffing and puffing and wishing her bodyguards were with her. Gail hated running.
The Arm consistently led them down the poorest and most dangerous streets in Gail’s Detroit neighborhood. Gail supposed Hancock was about as good a bodyguard as anyone. She just wished she trusted the Arm more.
Well, she doubted Hancock had saved her life in the Battle in Detroit just to get her killed today.
She hoped.
Five miles. Gail was in good shape as far as Transforms or even Focuses were concerned, and she regularly ran as part of her personal workout routine, but this Arm acted super-human. She wasn’t even sweating.
Gail puffed to a walk. “Enough. I’m pooped. I never run this far.”
The Arm looked at Gail with an expression of stinging icy contempt.
“Fifty paces at a walk. Then run again.”
Gail winced and wondered how much more of this the Arm expected of her. She had long passed the point where her well-trained Transform bodyguards could have kept up. Teacher led her through another mile, alternating walking and running before Gail pooped out again. This time, she lacked the energy to make herself start running again after the fifty rest paces.
“Run, little Focus,” the Arm whispered in her ear. “Now that it’s hard, now’s when it matters, now’s when your juice will improve you. Run. Run until you fall in exhaustion, and then run again. Run.”
Gail ran.
She fell, and skinned her knee on the asphalt pavement. Tears streamed from her eyes, and a piece of broken glass sliced a gouge in her palm. Anger warred with exhaustion. How could anyone treat her like this? She tried to follow the orders, but she was a Focus, not an Arm.
“Get up, little Focus.” The Arm’s withering contempt rubbed her anger raw.
“Go to hell,” Gail said, through gasping breaths. She sat back on the road, too exhausted to move. She no longer knew how many miles she had run.
“Is this too hard for you, little Focus?” The Arm’s voice remained cold and mocking.
“Leave me alone.” Tears streamed down her face and she wanted to scream. Around them, boarded up businesses gave an air of trapped desolation to the city streets. A rat crept near the garbage cans of a nearby alley, crawling over the legs of a drunk who slept under a box next to the reeking cans.
“So now it’s time for the tantrum, is it? Do you have two-year-olds at home you can take lessons from?”
“Dammit! Leave me alone! My legs are on fire! I’m worn out!” The words came out at a shriek, through gasping pants for breath. The tears came faster, and she shook with the mix of fury and fatigue. Damn the bitch! The Arm had no right to treat her this way. She was an exceptional Focus with years of experience, and the bitch had no right to expect her to be an Arm. She was a Focus, and Focuses deserved at least some respect!
“Oh, the little Focus has a temper.” The Arm’s mocking voice made Gail want to scream. Of course she had a temper. That’s what she was most famous for. “What’s the problem, little Focus? I’m not treating you the way a Focus ought to be treated?”
Gail glared at the Arm and nodded.
“How is a Focus supposed to be treated?” the Arm asked. “Did I miss the kowtowing part? Did you expect me to put you up on a pedestal? Is that what you deserve?”
“I’m not ask…”
“With all that work you do for Transform rights, I expected better of you. Or are you just another hypocrite, a big white bwana looking out for the helpless darkies? Equal rights for Transforms, except that some Transforms are more equal than others. Noblesse oblige, from the noble to the lowly commoners.”
Gail stared up at that Arm in shock. “It’s not like that!”
“Bullshit, Focus. You curl up and collapse when the going gets hard, and you whine because life isn’t supposed to be hard for a Focus. Everyone is supposed to respect you because you’re a Focus. You have your little group that kowtows all day and tells you how perfect you are, and you believe their shit. The first time someone treats you differently, you can’t cope. Well, get used to this. If you want my respect, in my world, you need to earn it.”
Gail’s gaze narrowed, the anger inside her flinging her to her feet.
“Who the hell made you so perfect? Who gave you the right to judge how I cope? Let’s see you deal with trying to manage a household, before you tell me…”
Gail’s voice drifted off into silence. Nobody to talk to. No Arm. Not just a little gone. Gone, gone. Nowhere in Gail’s metasense range.
“Fuck!”
Something clanged, and Gail snapped her attention over to where a rat had knocked the lid off one of the garbage cans. The drunk next to the garbage can groaned and rolled over. She was out on the streets in the worst part of Detroit, at night, without her bodyguards.
Shit. She trotted out of the street, taking shelter in the darkness near one of the boarded-up buildings. She metasensed and listened. No Transforms, but the streets weren’t as empty as she might like.
She really hoped the Arm hadn’t left, and that she watched from just out of Gail’s metasense range. Stranding a Focus alone on the mean streets of Detroit would be an insane thing to do.
Yes, she expected special treatment, or at least sane treatment. People’s lives did depend on her.
She edged farther into the darkness to avoid a car, a run-down Ford with engine trouble carrying four young black men. Despite noticing her they didn’t stop
.
The next car might be different.
She began to run, not nearly as exhausted as she thought.
By the time the cop dropped Gail back at the corner of Park and Meadows Gail was so mad her head throbbed. She stopped and got a grip on herself before going back in range of her household. Even so, the juice levels of her household dropped precipitously.
A few steps farther she spotted the brilliantly glowing metapresence of the Arm, waiting for her in her own apartment. Inside Gail’s household. Without Gail. A predator in the midst of her prey.
Sylvie waited for Gail in Gail’s living room. Gail concentrated her metasense and picked out Van and Kurt there with Sylvie. The juice level of her household plunged farther. Gail took off at a run.
“Gail,” Kurt said. He rose to his feet when Gail burst into the living room. Sylvie, sheet white with low juice, sat over on the couch. Van sat on the chair opposite with dark hollows of worry under his eyes.
The Arm stood in the back of the room, leaning against the wall with her arms folded. None of the others noticed her.
“Gee, I guess you weren’t as exhausted as you thought, Focus,” the Commander said. Sarcastic bitch.
Kurt had his gun out and aimed before she finished with the first word. Sylvie did the same a second later, made slow by low juice. Van reacted a moment later, pawing air. Despite his bodyguard training, he tended to mislay his weaponry.
The Arm didn’t move. “Tell your bodyguards to put their weapons away,” she said, her voice ripe with threat. Gail’s own face paled, remembering Gilgamesh’s words of warning about her household members. They stood in a motionless tableau, the Arm relaxed and dangerous, the two guards with white faces aiming pistols at the Arm.
“Kurt, Sylvie, put the guns down!” Gail said. Neither obeyed her, both fixated on the Arm. The Arm cocked her head at Kurt.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 19