The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1)

by Randall Farmer

  Now, under Haggerty’s frenetic command, Lori pushed the Cause faster. Dangerous, yes, but the wider Lori spread her knowledge and skills, the stronger the Cause would be.

  Lori nodded as she watched me work out the implications. Yes, leverage against Suzie Schrum, Wini Adkins and their cronies would be an excellent idea.

  “I’ll want all the information you can give me.”

  “Every last paper and note.”

  “So a Focus can actually use her juice buffer to supply juice for herself?” I said, flipping through papers and attempting to ignore the two-year-old pulling on my hair. Despite the years of rumors and exaggerations, I had never metasensed the trick in person.

  “Yes, but buffer access is an advanced trick. I only know of three Focuses in the entire country, all advanced witches, who can – plus Her Nibs.” The latter was the Focus Shirley Fucking Patterson, the leader of the first Focuses, a Focus so terrifying anyone with any brains stayed out of her home city, Pittsburgh. “Gina, come over here to Mommy.”

  “No.” Little Gina climbed further up my shoulder, using my hair as a handhold. All right, I acknowledged, not two, two and a half. You could tell by the tone of the ‘no’. Cloud sat under the table cutting an old copy of Time magazine into small pieces, and William gnawed toothlessly on a piece of Melba Toast.

  “She’s fine,” I said, referring to the two-year-old, and then: “You know, Gail did the buffer access trick when she gave me juice.”

  “Did she?” Lori had been pre-occupied at the time, being dead and all that.

  “Yes. I drew from her, not her juice buffer. I didn’t metasense how she did the trick.” All Focuses with households supported juice buffers, the repository of their household’s supplemental juice. According to Lori’s papers, normal household juice buffers contained hundreds of points of juice. The two-year-old yanked out a fist-full of hair.

  “You’re sure she isn’t bothering you?”

  “No, it’s fine, really.” I shifted forward slightly, so the teetering child didn’t fall.

  “Gail can’t duplicate the juice buffer access, can she?” Lori now radiated worry vibes.

  “No, she only did so once, in the middle of a crisis. I doubt she even remembers doing the trick.” Massive trauma always gives us Major Transforms situational amnesia, and at the time Gail more closely resembled hamburger than a human being.

  “Hmm, so she’s going to have to learn the trick the hard way. That will take work, because she doesn’t have the basic witch skills or instincts.”

  I also had some work to do, I realized, because the ability to abort a draw had suddenly become no longer optional. Not with the insane amount of juice held in a normal household juice buffer. I remembered the chaotic scene back in the Battle in Detroit, when Gail was dying and I healed her. She offered me her juice, and I took it all, no more capable than I ever was of refusing juice when offered. I burned the juice as I drew, using the energy to heal her. I kept none of the juice for myself, and even burned about twenty points of my own juice in the frantic struggle to keep her alive.

  I boggled to realize exactly how much juice I must have burned in Gail’s healing. If I accidentally drew that much juice for myself, I would be so far into Monster I would never come back. Or, if Hank and Eissler were right, the extra juice would spill out of me, wasted. Blech. I’m not sure which would be worse.

  “You can draw from your buffer, correct?” I said, remembering ancient conversations.

  She smiled a half-smile and didn’t answer.

  “Can you teach the trick?”

  “Teaching the trick is, unfortunately, specifically forbidden. The trick is the one thing I’m forbidden to teach.”

  Unfortunate, and a pain in the ass to work around. I looked at her, though, speculating. “You know, since you already know the juice-buffer trick, we might try…”

  “No.” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not volunteering to be your lab rat. Put this together with Gail and then come see me.”

  I looked at her, a little surprised at the resistance. She glared at me with crossed arms. William started to crawl up her leg, and she reached over and pulled him into her lap.

  Little cues shifted into a pattern.

  “You’re pregnant again!”

  She shrugged, but couldn’t hide her tiny smile.

  “Well, congratulations. Who’s the father?” Focuses were supposed to be infertile, but every time Lori got snuggly with a Crow, out popped a baby nine months later.

  “That’s a little personal, isn’t it?

  “Hah, it’s Sky again.”

  She set that cute little mouth and tried not to give away the answer. Unsuccessfully.

  “It is Sky. When’s the baby due?” I looked her over and put together the signals. “Looks like you’re about two months along. February?”

  “Yes, okay, yes. Now will you stop asking nosy questions?”

  I laughed and stopped her daughter before she ripped out another handful of hair. “Never.”

  “All right, can you metasense it? I’m giving Angie a little extra, and drawing down Carl and Abby.”

  I stood behind Lori and held her in my arms, letting my metasense ride hers and sensing things impossible for an Arm. The children were long ago put to bed.

  We had shared metasenses before, many times, but this was the first time inside of Inferno. I laughed inside at the crazy world of a Focus household, with all its tight complexity. No more complex than an Arm’s world, but different. Even better, with Lori I metasensed the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice, the all-encompassing presence of the juice buffer, and the ambient juice of the household itself.

  “Yes,” I said, as I resisted the reflexive linking of our juice structures into the revolving cycle of juice-stoked delight. This was business, not pleasure.

  A very pleasant business.

  She wiggled free of me, and reluctantly, I let her go. The beauty of a Focus’s metasense perceptions faded.

  “There,” she said. “You should have enough information to keep Gail busy for months. Follow along with her metasense and keep an eye on how she manipulates her household’s juice.”

  “Thanks.” Poor Gail wouldn’t know what hit her, except that she would be learning like she never learned before. “You’ll come in to help later? She’s going to need witch training pretty soon if she’s going to have to teach herself how to access her juice buffer.”

  Lori nodded and looked away. I realized she wished I had let the pleasure of the juice flow run through us.

  Now she tells me. She could have let me know at the time. I stepped forward. If she was willing, I certainly wouldn’t refuse.

  She backed away.

  Hell. I wished she would get her signals straight.

  “Juice cycling might be bad for the baby. First trimester,” she said, but she looked away when she spoke. I sighed inside, irritated. She never could decide how much intimacy she wanted. Approach, back away, approach, back away. She drove Sky and Gilgamesh to distraction with her mercurial moods.

  “So, last time we talked you were complaining about nightmares. Are you keeping a record of your dreams yet?” Lori said, changing the subject.

  “No.”

  “Carol,” she said, exasperated. Over the dreams, but also because she thought I pushed her too hard. I supposed we each had our own point of view.

  She did have a point, though. The juice flow between us got deeply intense, a lot like the sensations from a kill. Somewhat like sex, as well. I had learned to deal with the sensations years ago, but they were a bit much for a Focus to deal with, especially this early in a pregnancy. Transform Sickness was dangerous.

  Damn.

  “If we’re going to get anywhere with these nightmares of yours, you really need to record your dreams,” she said.

  I shook my head. “Posterity does not deserve my dreams. I’m happy to let them sink back to wherever they came from with as little notice
as possible.” Those damned dreams had been responsible for my ‘Commander’ title, they were supposed to be owned down to the trim and stitching by the Madonna of Montreal, and I had been wary of them ever since. Why was she sending me nightmares now, though? Or had someone else slipped into my dreams?

  “Carol! Look at all of the effort you’re putting into training up some Focus. You ought to work on your own skills.”

  “I do work on my own skills. I’m pretty damned good these days, too.”

  “You should work on your dream skills. Dreaming is a medium level skill for all the Major Transforms, and you need to develop your dream capabilities. If you take control of your dreams, you might be able to block out these nightmares.”

  “Oh, really? In the first place, they’re not my dreams. In the second, they’re rotten dreams, and in the third, I’m lousy at interpreting dreams. I don’t do mystic symbolism crap.” I also refused to dwell on the weakness of my logic.

  “Well I do. If you record them, I’ll help you interpret them.”

  I stared at her. She batted her eyes, cute as a gumdrop and as sweet. All my gushy little instincts came leaping out, ready and eager to make her happy.

  “And you can quit with the Focus charisma. It doesn’t work.”

  She sighed, and the charm faded back to normal.

  “You really should, you know. They really are your dreams; the Madonna doesn’t have enough time to mess with your dreams unless it’s important. Besides, dream reading gives you big picture information, and there’s quite a long way you can push the use of dreams, if you try. You tap the undercurrents of the other Major Transforms. Strategic. Your specialty. You’re crippling yourself if you pass that up.”

  Hell. Both charisma and logic.

  “All right, all right. I’ll work on them.”

  We sat in the library, silently watching out the window as the sky lightened to the east. There was something friendly about the dark room after a long night. The little Monster carving still glowed its little metasense glow, no different from earlier in the day. I ignored it.

  “So Keaton’s still firm about ditching the Cause?” she said, quiet in the dim light.

  “Mm hmm. She’s tired of our lack of progress, strikingly similar to Amy’s bug up her ass about research, but in the direction of politics.” I paused. “And don’t ever mention to either of them this comparison.”

  Instead of laughing at my wit, Lori shook her head, and fell silent, radiating sadness. Something about Stacy’s actions bugged her down deep, deep enough that I wasn’t sure she realized how much she was bothered. Or why.

  “What about you?” I asked, after a long, awkward pause. “What’s going on in your end of the Cause?”

  She shrugged. “You know, the usual. Progress is steady, but slow. In addition to the dangerous household tuning work, I’ve been training Focuses. I had another Focus graduate the level five training a week ago.” Lori had recently organized her training into levels, one through five, with five as the highest. Haggerty was into codification. “I’ve got thirteen students, mostly beginners. I’ll probably lose three or four of them when they figure out that the first Focuses disapprove. Tonya’s making sure that at least some of the younger Focuses get started off right, and she’s pulling in a few of the mentors, too.” Both Lori and Tonya needed to work carefully, because of the first Focuses. The firsts ruled the Focuses from behind the scenes using blackmail, assassination, and threats. They didn’t like to see their subjects gaining power. They considered signs of independence a threat to their position. They were an evil crew of bitches, and I wished they weren’t the primary power among all the Transforms, but the predators didn’t have the numbers and experience, and the Crows weren’t big on confrontation.

  Me? I liked most Focuses, even the downtrodden ditzes. However, I held a grudge against one particular first Focus. Years ago, Wini Adkins had decided the world needed one less Arm, and her machinations sent me into withdrawal at the hands of the FBI. There were a lot of people involved in that affair that I had plans for, and Wini Adkins and FBI Special Agent Patrick McIntyre topped the list.

  I put aside my hate for another day, though. Right now, I watched the sun rise. “Are you pleased with your progress on the political end of things?”

  “We’re treading water,” Lori said, and stared into space for a moment. “We need something showy, something positive to grab everyone’s attention. More substance, less hot air. Is that the idea behind combining the juice pattern work with the juice from a Focus project?”

  I nodded, pointedly not thinking about how such a synergistic success should allow me to flip dominance with Haggerty and put some balance back into the Arm end of the Cause. “I’d really like something to tie in the male Major Transforms, get them involved somehow.”

  “Okay,” Lori said. “Based on what you said, Hank’s going to be able to go live with the juice pattern codification project soon, at the latest within four months. Given Gail’s native talents, you’ll either be able to succeed with the juice moving project within four months or decide it won’t work with her. Consider: Sky and I are within a couple months of the next stage of our process: tuning tests outside of Inferno. We’re not going to be able to keep our success secret.”

  Damn. I smiled.

  “Carol, you’re our strategist. Can our small successes be turned into one big success, and can we come up with anything else to add to them from Amy’s stinking pile of manure?” ‘Manure’. I filtered and prioritized Amy’s project list for my people, but Amy didn’t count Lori as a part of my organization, so Lori got to deal with Amy directly. As a professional researcher, Lori didn’t care for Amy’s scattershot approach.

  I thought for a minute, though I would have never uttered the words ‘stinking pile of manure’ about Amy’s work. You never think about your boss’s actions in such a fashion. Amy came up with a lot of good ideas. I just wished they would synergize with each other into some sort of consistent strategy. Instead, her approach was to throw ideas at a wall and hope something stuck.

  The goal of Lori and Sky’s project involved improving Focus efficiency, resulting in more Transforms living in Focus households.

  Improving a Focus household.

  If a Focus could give juice to an Arm, Arm psychology would make the Focus part of the Arm’s territory. Whether the Arm bossed the Focus or not, the Arm in such a circumstance would be highly motivated to defend the Focus.

  A close Arm ally would count as an improvement of the Focus household.

  When Zielinski’s juice pattern codification project succeeded, we would have a way to more quickly and efficiently train Focuses to defend themselves. Get enough bodyguard cadres from enough Focus households, and you had an army.

  Better defended Focus households would also count as an improvement of the Focus household. Armies? Not so much.

  “Lori, how much benefit would there be to the implementation of your tuning project if you had the results of Zielinski’s juice pattern project to work with?” This was way outside of my ability to judge.

  Lori closed her eyes and thought. “The differences are subtle, but because the tuning project has so many different sub-parts, the effects would add up across the sub-parts to be very significant. Best outcome? Added Transforms supported. Multiple triads of lives.”

  Lives. Lives would grab the attention of any Major Transform, especially the Focuses. Definitely an improvement to the Focus household. “It’s all one, then,” I said, putting the puzzle pieces together in my mind and trying out proper titles and catch phrases until I found the ones I wanted. “What we’re doing is redefining the Transform household. The overall title of the little pieces is ‘the household redefinition project’.”

  “Yes,” Lori said, a big grin growing on her face. A household redefinition project would be big enough to count, I hoped.

  Hope doesn’t win battles, though. “I don’t know of anything else along those lines that might be part of a
household redefinition project, but I’ll keep my eyes open. Why don’t you come over here and we can put our heads together on this.”

  Lori and I had occasionally used a witch trick of hers that allowed us to walk around in our minds, to help us put things together and brainstorm. Juice illusion based, under Lori’s control, of course, but I was comfortable with the process.

  Lori shook her head. Still distant.

  “Why?”

  “You know. Lady Death. Deep inside, I worship your Armness, the darkness you hide inside you. I have for years. What Sky and I have been doing has brought out Lady Death far more than I’d anticipated, and I’m trying to put her back where she belongs. If we get inside each other’s heads…” Lori let the sentence hang in the air. We both understood Lady Death’s capabilities, based on what we experienced in the Clearing of Chicago. This was a legitimate worry.

  “I’ve been having a little trouble myself with my own darkness.” I flashed for a moment on my torture session, when I broke Duval. “It’s the stress, or something in the air. An explosion waiting to happen.” Prompted by Lori, I examined her for her various tells, and noticed the telltale signs of Lori’s darkness. Problem Transforms were so much easier to deal with when they were dead. Teaching was so much easier if you broke your student’s mind and put her back together the way you wanted. Subduing enemies too difficult? Just rip the juice right out of them. They died so nicely. Enemy armies bothering you? Just ride along behind Haggerty while Haggerty did her motorcycle acrobatics and create a wave of death, using the juice liberated in one death to power the next.

  Lady Death remained important and useful, if we needed her, but Lori’s violent side wasn’t appropriate inside a Focus household.

  “Heaven help you if my darkness ever gets loose again,” I said. With mine luring her on, she would never be able to control her own.