“Einstein,” she said, snagging a scraggly-looking older adolescent as he slammed out of a bedroom at a run with a load of records in his arms.
“What?” He looked around as if he hadn’t realized we were there.
“Ask Gracie if she’ll send some food to the library. Meat.”
“Got it. Meat to the library.” Whoosh and he was gone. I wondered if he would still remember by the time he made it down the stairs. Lori just rolled her eyes and shook her head.
We passed the apocalypse clock on the way, stationed prominently on a narrow table in the main hallway and counting down its endless count. I checked the latest date. June 27, 1977, the day the number of induced transformations passed the number of disease-caused transformations and the transformation of humanity became unstoppable.
I nurtured more pessimism than the clock, as I considered the transformation unstoppable now. Under no circumstances I could imagine would humanity manage to kill every Transform of every variety in the world, which was the only way to halt the slow accumulation of ambient juice in the atmosphere. That would require killing every Monster hiding out in the Himalayas, not to mention the Rockies, the Alps, the Andes, or the bottom of the damned ocean. Oh, and every Transform, every Major Transform, and me. Unlike the enthusiastic intentions of some of the more murderous normals, the death of large numbers of the most conveniently accessible Transforms would only slow the process down, not stop it, and then no experienced Transforms would be available to support the transforming multitudes. The death rate would be even higher.
Eventually, 86% of humanity would transform, 90% of those would die, a few would become Monsters and eat the survivors, and the few who survived their transformations would not be replaced when they died because Transform women weren’t fertile. The Apocalypse. The end of the world.
The only solution I knew was to make the Cause succeed.
Haggerty did the right thing by pushing the Cause, no matter the cost. With the lever of the Eskimo Spear, she had done what I couldn’t and got the Cause moving again. She won our dominance fight honestly, by proving herself the more worthy leader, and I couldn’t argue. With all her faults, we needed her. I wouldn’t win a dominance fight against her until the world I cared about needed me more than they needed her.
Sky waited for us at the doorway to the library, dressed in his normal casuals, a checked shirt and corduroy pants. Despite the sweltering August heat. “Mademoiselle Arm,” he said, formally. Then he bowed to me, did some sort of Crow prestidigitation, and made a single red rose appear out of nowhere. As usual with the extremely talented Sky, I couldn’t tell if he made the rose visible out of invisibility, or whether the rose was a dross-based illusion. “I have the report you requested. I’m afraid your Arm Duval is going to need a little work down in the basement.”
Basement work meant a different thing to Sky than to Keaton, but I still winced. Duval had been foolish enough to take Monster juice sometime in her past, along with all her other mistakes. I had suspected as much. The confirmation came through Newt from Rain, the Crow who followed Duval. I didn’t expect I would ever meet Rain. He was a young Crow, scared shitless of me, especially since he metasensed me break Duval. Negotiations continued among the six of us, including Sky and Webberly, as both Duval and Rain would do better if they talked to each other, but Rain remained terrified of all of us.
“Will you be able to handle the procedure?”
“Yes, Arm Hancock, but we should delay the process until Rain can cope. I’d like to teach him how to do the work himself. If he can catch the dross before it congeals into tarry gristle, even a young Crow like him could keep her clean.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. The Crow – Arm symbiosis was both easier and harder than the Arm – Focus symbiosis. Instead of ‘one big thing’, we accumulated a large number of little things. They added up. “I’ll have to tell Webberly.” The Crow who followed her, aptly named Mouse, had Gilgamesh’s training but remained hesitant to talk to Webberly save over the telephone or in letters.
Sky smiled and looked away, coy, fetching, and far past the panic afflicting young Crows. About a year ago, Sky had figured out that if he was going to win Lori’s hand for good, he would need to make nice with me as well. I was the Arm in Lori’s life, which meant I would end up being the Arm in his life. Thus the crap with the red rose. Sky was an incurable romantic, unless it was hockey season. Then he turned into an absolutely normal beer-guzzling Canadian.
His eyes were hollow and purpled again, matching Lori’s. “You’re killing yourself, Sky, with this damned tag attunement project of yours.”
“Tuning, not attunement. Affinity tuning as well, Lori’s and my bond with each other,” Sky said. “Both ways, Major Transforms to each other, Transforms to each other, and all to the Major Transforms. Progress, my dear Arm, is being made.”
I shook my head. I would figure this out when he and Lori finished; their damned project had different terms for the same things every time I talked to them after Amy dragged this insanity public. I didn’t like the idea of throwing Affinity into the mix, ‘Affinity’ being the strange juice-level love Lori and I possessed. Nobody understood what allowed the Affinity trick to work. Or how to make Affinity stick. At times Affinity worked instantly, at other times, slow and growing. Sometimes we wielded Affinity, yet at others Affinity wielded us, working automatically.
Sky handed me his report on Duval. “I shall bid you fine ladies farewell,” he said, and sauntered off. Lori and I looked at each other and grinned. None of us, not a single one of us, knew what it would take to actually bind a Crow to a Focus for real. Sky and Lori had a partial Affinity bond to each other, but so did Gilgamesh and Lori, and Gilgamesh’s and Lori’s Affinity bond was stronger. Children were in the mix as well, children by both of them, though supposedly Focuses, like all Transform women, were infertile. What a painful mess.
Lori and I went into the library, hand in hand, for some necessary bonding time of our own.
Einstein did remember, and I feasted on cold pork chops as we sat at the table in Lori’s library. A feast for the stomach and a feast for the eyes. Lori was beautiful, even for a Focus, though in the old days, she had tried for severe, not beautiful. Short and cute and a bundle of energy in a gymnast’s build. Black hair and brown eyes and small pointy face. I could watch her endlessly. She sat across from me at the table, with the Eskimo Spear mounted on the wall just above her head. I sighed, disgusted.
“You know, for something so difficult to acquire, you’d think the Eskimo Spear would actually be useful for something besides making my world miserable,” I said, waving my hand at the Spear.
Lori turned around to look back at the Spear and then shrugged. “We’re working on it. Still. Ann has another idea she thinks might work out, multi-Transform meditation.”
As I stared at the Spear, I felt a tingling in my metasense. I frowned and concentrated, finally locating the tingle coming from the little Monster carving on my chest.
Fuck!
I barely sensed it, emanating on the Crow bands, at the very edge of my ability to detect, and very faint. Presumably, the little Monster was responding to the presence of the Eskimo Spear. What it meant, I had no idea.
“Carol?” Lori asked.
I sighed and explained, knowing what was coming next.
Lori’s eyes lit up. “So what happens when you move closer? Does the metapresence get stronger?” Yup, she wanted to experiment.
I wanted nothing to do with this. I hated strange juice effects, especially strange juice effects that edged over into magic, and the potentially hostile Progenitors and their mysteries didn’t make me happy either. The whole situation made my skin crawl, and right then I would have willingly given up on my whole visit with Lori just to escape this.
Unfortunately, I knew very well that if I backed away from this particular mystery, Haggerty would filet my ass into hamburger. This was exactly the sort of thing she wanted people to inve
stigate, and I would piss the hell out of her if I didn’t follow through. Not something I wanted to be on the wrong end of. In addition, I did actually support her overall goals.
So, no choices. I moved closer. The little Monster carving didn’t do anything different as far as I could tell, but the emanation was so faint I might have missed a subtle change.
Lori and I spent the next hour experimenting. We found nothing at all useful. If I left the room, a couple of minutes later the emanation faded away. Otherwise, nothing we did made any difference. The Eskimo Spear never reacted to the carving in any way. Sky, hauled in from some kind of juice tuning work I didn’t understand, didn’t sense anything that made any sense to him.
Finally, we, meaning Lori, decided we should keep the carving here in the room with the Spear for a while and see if the passage of time made a difference. I expected this experiment to be as productive as the others. At least this one let me get back to the pork chops.
“So, how goes your latest Focus experiment?” Lori asked, with an odd tone to her voice.
“So far, just fine. I’ve only worked with her a few times, though.”
“But you’re getting along all right? You like her?” When Lori first met Gail, at Gail’s wedding, she had actually needed to restrain herself. As a young Focus, Gail had been the proverbial bull in the china shop, much worse than Gilgamesh and I. I wasn’t sure if they had met, since.
“Yes, I do, actually. She’s young, but she has a lot of passion and idealism.” I smiled, glad to be distracted from the Spear. I didn’t share my awe over Gail’s magnificent juice structure. “She’s cute.” Not unlike a certain other Focus sitting right in front of me.
Lori looked away, unhappy, and her reactions suddenly made sense. I laughed.
“You’re jealous,” I said.
“I am not jealous.” She glared as she spoke.
“Hah.”
“I am not jealous,” she said, exasperated.
“You’re going to have to get used to it,” I told her. “Remember the numbers.”
Her eyes went wider for just a second, before she glared harder. She understood immediately, of course. It was one of the reasons I lo— respected her.
“One Arm for every twenty some-odd Focuses, more if you count the mortality rate,” I said, rubbing it in with a grin. “I’ll get to insist on faithfulness, the Focuses don’t get any such thing.”
“I am not jealous.” Lady Death crept into her persona, radiating darkness like a reverse light bulb.
“Ohhh,” I said. “Of course not.”
“But you can tell that little Detroit princess of yours that if she hurts you, I’m going to use her guts for suspenders.” Lady Death indeed. No brag, coming from Lori.
I laughed so hard I needed to put the pork chop down. “I think you’re mixed up about who’s likely to hurt who. I’ve gotten her pretty firmly under my control.”
“Good. Keep her there. Don’t let her out from under your thumb until she knows how to behave herself. Back when I was about her age as a Focus, I nearly killed Keaton out of sheer annoyance, remember, and Gail’s as powerful now as I was then, just in different areas, some unique to her.” I barely avoided snorting at her comment. I thought she seriously overestimated Gail.
Lori said her comment with a fierce and only half-serious glare on her petite pixie face, and I felt the heat tightening between my legs. Four days past kill, my numbers only average, and still, I wanted to crawl into bed with her and make beautiful juice art together. Or just cycle juice. Or, finally, some good old fashioned sex.
The misplaced reactions were just confusion on the part of my poor abused body. Hank’s damned aborted draw experiment yesterday messed with both my mind and my control. Her juice tickled along my metasense, beautiful and inviting. I wanted her juice, and my nerves ached for the delight of the juice flowing in.
I dropped my fork as I stood, and the chair fell backwards. I turned away to stare at a shelf of books, my fingernails gouging holes in my palms. Medieval history, the War of the Roses, twelfth century Wales, French feudalism.
“Carol?” Lori asked, all concern.
“Back off,” I said, my predatory Arm snarl. She went silent. Vulnerable. Flush with abundant juice.
Vulnerable. Hah. I smiled to myself, bitterly. Maybe the older lust wasn’t so bad after all.
I was going to have to be very careful around Gail. An accident would be a very bad thing.
“We still have some work to do around Focus-Arm relationships,” I said, after the long moments necessary to bring all my lusts under control. I turned back to her, hoping that my face no longer showed my emotions.
“Can I ask what that was all about?” Lori said. Honest concern filled her eyes, and no fear at all.
“No.”
Lori raised an eyebrow and waited patiently.
“Maybe someday,” I said. “Not today. If you want to know the trigger, talk to Hank about yesterday’s tests.”
She nodded and accepted my non-explanation.
“Have your people gotten anywhere on the Chrysanthemum issue?” I asked. I had requested her help after my Toxicol bounty.
“Chrysanthemum is currently registered in Delaware, and is supposedly owned by the First National Bank of Nashville,” Lori said, happy to talk business. “Only the paperwork’s all fraudulent, the bank accounts referenced are to people who aren’t business owners and who have never heard of Chrysanthemum, and the addresses given are to organized crime fronts who specialize in white collar crime. Oh, and they do pay taxes, but not much.”
“They’re far too active. There’s got to be something.”
Lori shook her head. “Sorry, nothing.”
“So, are you willing to help Gail out?” I said, frustrated and desperately wanting to put the Chrysanthemum issue to bed. Haggerty had no interest in following up on either United Toxicol or Chrysanthemum, and I feared we were missing something important by not following up. I hated the sense of hidden enemies lurking in the background, waiting, ready to pounce. Last time I felt the sensation this bad, I had ended up captured by the FBI and sent into withdrawal. “Do you have any pointers on what a talented Focus might be expected to learn?”
Lori leaned away from me after my latest growl of frustration. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. What can I teach my student?”
Lori raised an eyebrow, but she accepted the change of subject. “What are you teaching her already?”
“Hank’s got her started on juice patterns.”
“He does? He’s far enough along with his new synthesis to produce some results?” I saw dreams of complex juice patterns and armies of witches dance in her eyes.
“Close. He’s planning to finalize his research by using Gail as a test subject. My big idea this time is to combine the juice pattern and juice-to-an-Arm projects to see if they can synergize. I expect he’s got several more months before it’s ready for public distribution.”
“Still,” Lori said. “I never believed he’d actually succeed. It’s such a complex project, and will make a huge difference if he can actually get this to work.” Hank would be getting a very long phone call from Lori just as soon as I left. “So what else are you going to be teaching Gail?”
“Physical training and remedial self-control,” I said.
“That sounds like a good start. The physical training will open her up to learning new things, and will directly increase her juice manipulation potential. Self-control is critical for doing advanced juice patterns. I have some recommendations for ways to help Focuses develop the needed self-control.”
I smiled a half-smile. “The Arms do have some experience with the teaching of self-control. Between your ways and mine, I suspect that we can put some steel into that Focus.”
She nodded. “The next most important area to work with is her Focus charisma. From what I know of her, that’s her strength. I can show you how to do advanced char
isma training.”
“She has a very strong presence,” I said. “As good as a Focus twice her age, but she doesn’t use her charisma well, at least not around me.”
“Well, that’s what training is for, isn’t it? Next would be juice manipulation. At her age, she should be able to maintain her household at good juice levels with only minor maintenance, but that’s a control issue, so I expect trouble there. She ought to be able to separate her emotions from her household’s juice level most of the time. Again, that’s a control issue. She ought to be able to independently manipulate juice levels in over a half-dozen of her people with ease, for long periods of time. Another control issue.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “A lot of control issues there. She can do all of the things you mentioned, but only if she isn’t stressed. I’ll need to work her hard, there.”
“Yes. Also, you’ll want to develop her metasense. Accuracy, sensitivity, scope.”
I nodded. “I’ve picked up hints about her metasense, and I think it’s pretty good. I’m not sure how good, though.”
“I’ve got some metrics you can use. Metasense can always get better.”
“I’ll want details on all of this,” I said.
“Yes, just a minute. I have a whole series of research papers on this I can give you.”
“You publish this sort of information?”
Lori rolled her eyes. “Hah! Best I can do is to pass this on to the Focuses I train directly.”
I leaned back in my chair and polished off the last of the pork chops. “You’re asking for trouble if you pass these on to me.”
She shrugged with a cynical smile. “Just consider this more pushing the Cause.”
“I won’t make any promise about who I’ll spread the information to.”
“I wouldn’t expect any such thing.” The smile never wavered. Focus politics. Subtle challenges to the powers-that-be in the Focus organization. Focus power games were far more shadowy and nebulous than the clean dominance struggles of Arm relations, but I understood them, at least as well as any non-Focus could. As the originator of the Cause, Lori was the most public of her generation of Focuses, and she constantly challenged the Focus leadership.
The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) Page 22