I had missed something important here, and knew I had. No matter how deep I scraped Bass’s mind, though, I wasn’t able to find what I had missed, or why she considered this a victory, other than the obvious conclusion that under my control she would no longer be an addict. In the end, I walked away in frustration.
---
I made the approach in the early AM, sated after a fresh kill and after-kill sex, all in a vain attempt to wash the foul taste of Bass’s tag out of my mind. Gail’s house guards were, as expected, no problem. The light in Gail’s room clicked on just after I got within her metasense range, though.
Both Gail and Van sat up in bed, staring at the window where I entered, Van more bleary than Gail. I damped down my annoyance, given how my metapresence masking tricks were supposed to be able to fool anyone this side of a Crow Guru.
“Teacher?” Gail said.
“You’ve seen Arm dominance contests.” At least one; she had been part of Keaton’s retinue when Haggerty last challenged her. Gail nodded. “Among Arms, your ultimatum note is an invitation to a dominance contest.”
Gail frowned, an ‘oh, rats’ frown instead of a ‘oh fuck I am dead’ frown. I raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean we’re going to have to fight for real?” I didn’t respond. “If we fight for real, do I get to use Focus tricks?” Focus tricks which terrified her to even think of using on an ally.
Hank had been right. Gail’s mousy ‘I am a nothing pointless Focus’ persona was mostly an act.
I leapt from the window to the edge of their bed, looming over them. “Not if you apologize and retract the note.”
At which point the absurdly unexpected happened: Van cleared his throat, Gail reached over to her thrift-shop nightstand, plucked a ten dollar bill from the drawer and gave the ten to Van. Oh.
“How do I state what I said in my note in ‘Arm’ without triggering a dominance fight?” Gail said.
I flickered my eyes at Van, who didn’t catch my signal. I made the signal more slowly and more explicitly. Van’s eyes lit up. “You grovel,” Van said, turning to Gail. “Don’t make eye contact. State your case. Baring one’s throat while laying your foot on one of the Arm’s boots is traditional.”
Gail frowned, and her mental ‘I am so not doing that’ signal came through strong enough for Van to read.
Focuses. None of them understood the power of groveling. Groveling not only made an Arm pay attention, it obligated the dominant Arm to play nice, or at least nicer, with the groveler.
I pulled on Gail’s tag to distract her, hopped into their bed and nestled myself between them. “I’m willing to cut Focuses a little slack on the subject,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me the reasons behind your note.” The last I said, breathlessly, into Gail’s ear. She attempted to wiggle away, but I didn’t let her.
“Owwh!” Gail quit wiggling and forced herself to relax. “The pain training’s too fast. It’s interfering with some of my Focus tricks, including some important ones I don’t make public.”
“Hmph. Okay,” I said. “See how easy that was?”
“Ma’am, this isn’t something a Focus would ever admit to a Focus peer or superior,” Van said, to me. “It shows weakness.”
Twisty Focus bitches. “I have her tagged. I’m teaching her. I expect weakness.” Van readied a redundant follow up comment to emphasize his point, but I cut him off by saying “Luckily, I’ve run into this before.” I kept my mouth near Gail’s ear. “Tell me the secret trick of yours this is interfering with and I promise I’ll take it into account in my training.”
Even Focuses understood the ‘you have to give to get’ principle. “Teacher,” Gail said, all formal and charismatically dampening her own arousal. “I can’t escape your image in the Dreaming for days after one of those sessions.”
“More.”
“The Dreaming’s important to me.”
“Why?” The Dreaming was a useless pile of shit, contaminated by all the world’s senior Focuses.
“The people I talk to, um, there, um, is how I get most of my information about Transform politics and the like. One of the ways I protect my household.”
I didn’t flinch. My juice may have wiggled, but I didn’t flinch. ‘Talking’ in the Dreaming was a senior Focus trick, one I had heard of as a rumor. None of the Focuses with that trick would talk to me about it. “Interesting. So you can communicate in the Dreaming? How?”
Gail reddened in embarrassment. No, she didn’t like to show off, even to her teacher. This foible was part of what held her back. I put this on my mental list of things to fix.
“Sign language,” Gail said, now whispering. “I haven’t progressed past sign language yet.” A little niggle of worry crept into my head, along the lines of ‘what am I doing teaching someone like her?’ Right then, snuggled there between Van and Gail in their bed, my time with Gail and her household turned from being a mere research project to one of my political seduction projects. I needed Focuses of her ilk and their households as allies.
“You keep tabs on Focus Adkins in the Dreaming?”
“Uh huh,” Gail said. “As best I can.”
“If you figured out a danger to me in the Dreaming, would you tell me?”
“Uh, if you want, Teacher.” She paused and recovered a bit of her poise. “I will.”
“Good,” I said. “Keep tabs on me in the Dreaming, if you can.” I paused, and received another nod. “So, do you understand why the pain training’s so important?
“You’re toughening me up,” Gail said. She arranged the bedcovers to better cover her nakedness. “I have no idea why.”
“Beyond the fact that our experimentation might turn painful, I’m also toughening you up so you won’t break if the bad guys grab you and attempt to torture your secrets out of you,” I said. “You have lots of secret tricks.”
Gail nodded.
“You’re going to soon have many more, and these are going to be important to more than you.” I paused. “By the way, you should be begging me for this pain training. It’s a way of protecting your household.”
“People do that? Torture on that scale?” Gail said. “Adkins tortures, of course, but I’ve already had her torture me, and even without the pain training I didn’t spill.”
“Let me tell you a story,” I said. I pulled them close and restrained myself from any sexual adventures, and restrained my mild and familiar annoyance regarding the appearance of a notebook and pen in Van’s hands. “You see, my PIs finally located the perp behind the Phoenix Church Massacre…” I told them the Bass tagging story, emphasizing Bass’s torture tricks and not getting too much into the guts and gore aspects of Bass’s appalling lair.
Besides the queasy stomachs and utter disgust, their reactions weren’t quite what I predicted.
“You tagged her?” Gail said. “I’m sharing a tag with that mass murderer? Ewwwh!”
“All of us Arms are mass murderers,” I said. “We don’t survive if we don’t. Knowing where to draw the line, though, has always been a problem for all the Arms. Bass? She just went too far.”
Gail continued with the cat barf disgust noises.
“Ma’am,” Van said. “I have a question, and I don’t want to offend.”
“Ask away.” He, at least, understood deference. Likely from living a life unable to fight his way past schoolyard bullies.
“Why did Arm Bass do the massacre?” Pause. “Ma’am.”
I froze.
“Teacher?”
“I never asked,” I said. I should have asked. I had planned on asking.
I hadn’t asked, even during the mind scrape.
Gail shivered in fear. “She tricked you, Teacher.”
Van cleared his throat.
“Teacher, she may have pulled a juice trick on you, ma’am,” Gail said, now very deferential and pulling on the tag.
I would have laughed if she and Van weren’t correct. Even if by laughing I showed weakness. The two of them were just so cute.
<
br /> “This I will have to think about,” I said. I refused to admit to anything else.
Gail paused for several minutes, working up her nerve. “There’s one other thing I need to ask, then. Teacher, I’m going to need to be out of town next weekend, so I won’t be able to make our usual weekend training sessions.”
Focuses! “No,” I said.
Gail sighed. “I’ve been slacking off on my Transform rights responsibilities, and I can’t afford to do that anymore. There’s a rally I’ve just got to make this Saturday, and then a meeting with a bunch of the Transform rights Focuses afterwards.”
“You have a sadly mistaken understanding of your priorities, Gail,” I said. I worked the predator into my soft voice, and both Gail and Van fruitlessly attempted to wiggle away. “This training is your first priority, and your other responsibilities are nothing but distractions. I want your life, your attention, and your full effort, and nothing less will do. Too many people are depending on this, and you don’t get to duck out.”
“I must,” Gail said, now turning on the Focus charisma. “I owe them. They depend…”
“That’s bullshit, Gail,” I said. I wiggled out from between Gail and Van, to perch on the end of her bed again and glower, the predator. Focus pushiness tried my patience. “What we’re doing is a higher priority. Send Sylvie and Van instead. With bodyguards.” Van mouthed a ‘me?’, but wisely didn’t go farther. He needed to learn that interfering in the affairs of Major Transforms came with a price.
The fact he didn’t argue implied he already knew the lesson.
Gail’s face reddened, this time with anger, and she readied another twisty Focus argument. “In addition, as a penalty for attempting to use your Focus charisma on me, and for not knowing when to stop arguing and negotiating, we’re going to go running. Now. Six laps around the Birch Hill golf course.”
She got out of bed and into her running clothes, but not before opening her nightstand drawer and passing another ten dollar bill to Van.
I didn’t even want to know why.
---
The next day, I sat at the Railway Diner, around the corner and down the block from Gail’s apartment complex. The place was small and shabby, with tired waitresses and a working man crowd, but the cook made the most wonderful apple pies. Hot and rich, with good fresh apples and a hint of nutmeg. I considered recruiting the cook sometimes, just for those pies.
I sighed. I shouldn’t. A single slice of apple pie wouldn’t cause me too much trouble with my muscles, but a cook on staff who could make them for me would leave me spending my life with the weights trying to work it off. I liked apple pie. Even after Hank’s pointed comments about what I did to myself by eating each measly slice of pie.
Just an evening snack before my Gail-training. Right? Naw. I watched Gail and her household, Crow-like, mesmerized. Gail’s household was beautiful, beautiful even for a Focus household. All Gail’s fault, too, imprinting her own complex and seductive structure upon the Transforms of her household.
I needed the distraction. Distractions helped me forget the bleak things, the lost baby Arms, Bass’s seductive madness, Keaton’s loose grip on reality, the plotting of the Crows, the damned Hunters, the fate of the world. Chicago, always Chicago. I had lost too much, recently, and the pain never seemed to heal. My dreams continued to bother me. I now recorded my dreams, even the nightmares, and I finally knew what the nightmares were about: they were of people I killed, and they haunted me.
I didn’t know what to do about Bass. I didn’t understand the trick she used on me, and felt damned vulnerable because of it. Intellectually, I knew I out-powered her, and her little games shouldn’t matter in the long run, but she was the number four Arm to my number three and my Arm instincts were damned panicky about the challenge from below. My best current plan was to go after her again when she reported in for her next monthly visit, this time ready for her tricks. With some meditation and preparation, I should be able to power through such subtleties.
Right.
My plan sucked. I knew it. I just couldn’t come up with something better.
I turned my mind to Gail’s household. Something in her household nagged at my subconscious. Beautiful? Yes. Perfect? No. Gail ruled her household by making them work for their leadership, which upped the stress and caused far too many confrontations. No high-end Focus household would be able to survive such chaos. On the other hand, Gail possessed more people with high-end leadership experience, both normals and Transforms, than any other Focus household I had ever encountered.
The delayed pain management training was up for tonight. My loins warmed to the thought, stirring the beast inside, the dark part of me aroused by pain. I enjoyed teaching, but the pain exercises were by far the best. There was something indecent about enjoying my job that much. I thought of her pain, her pale face and stubborn will as I hurt her. The way she called me ‘Teacher’, and let herself be mine. The way her mind slowly changed under my molding. The way I need have no guilt at all over what I did to her, because I only did what I needed doing.
The stuff of wet dreams and bedtime fantasies. The merest thought aroused me, stirring the twisted places of my mind.
Many, over the years, have asked why I didn’t kill Bass when I discovered her Buchenwald. I normally temporize and say killing her wasn’t my place, but I lie. The real reason? To me, her lair just wasn’t the horror of evil everyone else makes it out to be.
I am not a good person. The depths of my soul are black indeed. If Bass hadn’t kept those children, separated off for her psychological and interrogation experimentation, I wouldn’t have lost my temper, just extracted payment.
Gail worked her way into my heart, I knew. Every time I hurt her, every time I fed my fantasies by what I did in reality, she wove her way deeper into the dark places.
Once, many years ago, back when I recruited Tom, I let him gain a grip on the dark places in my mind. I hurt him, molded him, made him mine, and then when I finished, I was astonished to find I had fallen in love.
No longer so naïve, this time I knew exactly what I nurtured as she grew her roots into my heart. By my choice. As long as I kept teaching her, every day she worked her way farther in.
Did I want to love her? Of course I did. Did my choice scare me? Of course. I wasn’t a fool. Gail was no normal, but a powerful Major Transform with only a year or so less time under her belt than me.
Someday soon, she would figure out how I felt about her. What happened then was anyone’s guess. There was nothing at all cold and clinical and scientific about human hearts.
Ah, if I had only given thought to why I fell for Lori without any of the pain and molding, my future and everyone’s future would have been so much easier. But I contemplated none of that now, and I had no desire to consider the nature of our shared darkness. Some precipices are best left unseen.
---
Gail screamed. All around in the apartment complex, Transforms shivered in their rooms and attempted to endure the misery their Focus passed on to them. I twisted her arm farther against her dislocated shoulder, and she screamed louder.
I saw the change as it happened. Just a faint shiver in the juice, too subtle for my metasense to fully comprehend. Gail never stopped screaming, but slowly her household’s juice flowed back to normal. Miserable Transforms picked themselves up and started laughing and hugging each other.
I twisted her arm one more time, this time settling the shoulder back into position. She screamed again, but her Transforms’ juice never wavered. I let her go.
She lay on the floor panting for a minute, and then sat up.
“Yes!” she said. Her face was haggard with pain, but her eyes sparkled. “I did the pain thing! All of a sudden, I controlled my will, and the juice, not my body! Do you see?”
I nodded and smiled at her, delighted at her success and wanting to haul her off to bed. “I saw.”
“Really! The pain didn’t stop or anything, it’s just that, sudd
enly, I didn’t care! You know what a miracle this is? I never realized how much my body controlled my decisions. It was like, you know, I had been some kind of animal, and I’m not, at least not anymore. Like, I’ll bet this will help when I’m tired, or hungry, or in other crazy situations.” She paused and met my gaze, amplifying my lust. “Why now, though?”
I laughed, for I did understand. “Because you’re a standard twisty Focus, that’s why.” I smiled at her frown. “When I agreed to allow you to negotiate the timing of the pain training, your subconscious decided you were in charge. For a Focus, that makes all the difference in the world.” Even if she wasn’t really in charge. A good lie went a long way for, well, all Major Transforms.
Gail’s frown turned to a smile, and she hugged me. Dammit! She wasn’t ready for me to seduce her.
“We’re going to continue training it for a while longer,” I said. “You’ve made the breakthrough today, but you need to get good at this, good enough to be able to depend on this trick even in the most stressful of circumstances.”
Gail hesitated for a moment before nodding decisively, a mental image of Bass torturing her to death playing in her frontal cortex. “I want to be good at this. I had another thought, though. I’ll bet I can come up with something similar that works on emotions. Then I don’t have to let my emotions get the better of me, and I can keep the juice in my household steady even when I’m mad, or upset, or something.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I suspect you’ll find you’ll have more difficulties managing your emotions with juice patterns than your physical reactions.”
“I want to give this a try, though.”
I smiled a bit. “Very well. I will comply.”
She hesitated again. She had been expecting to work on that on her own, with the option to quit whenever she wanted. No such luck.
“One other thing that you haven’t thought of yet, but will shortly. I’ve been punishing you with physical pain when you screw up. Now that you have some control over that, it won’t be nearly as effective, so we need some other method.”
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