Now we rested, training, variously, predator effect and Focus charisma. Gail’s performance while I had been gone, rolling my Arms, indicated the need. Unfortunately, I suspected that Gail got the most out of this session. Damn, she was deadly with her charisma.
Gail even looked like a baby Arm these days. She was muscled like an Olympic athlete under her halter top and shorts, a small basketball player or a tall gymnast. She still looked female, and I suspected she always would, but she now far exceeded even the most talented of Inferno’s Transforms in her muscular development. Except for the hair and the unearthly beauty, she might have been one of Keaton’s students, at about six months or so.
Well, except for her lack of a killer’s eyes, and the fact the only wounds she carried were a few minor cuts and bruises, and she lacked the air of someone living on the edge of madness, as Chrissie Duval did. Instead, she carried with her the raw chaos of her household and its dozens of projects and the crazy people her household attracted. I was still attempting to get my mind around the idea of Daisy Schuber, Gail’s sister in law and legitimate Arm groupie, and Hank-class brilliant PhD student at U of M. Who I swore picked locks as well as I did. She now lived in Gail’s household because she thought the place relaxing. Utterly insane. And she was just one of a dozen or so hangers-on who floated in and out, most not even realizing I was an Arm.
Gail grinned. “Fantastic! You got it this time.” She relaxed in her chair, and Haggerty smiled a small smile of relief. “I really am thirsty, though. Would you mind?”
Haggerty was halfway to the kitchen when Webberly’s snicker alerted her. Sibrian managed to keep her face straight and Whetstone remained too intimidated by the older Arms to think anything humorous. Me, I wanted to pound my head on the wall.
“Fuck,” Haggerty said. “I fell for it again, didn’t I?” Gail just grinned. Our favorite Focus was having far too much fun with this entire exercise.
Then her face fell to a woebegone expression of disappointment, and she batted her eyes and took on the aspect of a Hallmark angel. “I really am just trying to get a glass of water. Can you get it for me, Rose?”
“Get your own water, Focus,” Webberly said.
“Nope,” I said. “You missed on that one, Gail. Your signals weren’t consistent and there was no subtlety.”
“Oh, hell. I think I’m getting tired. I’m sorry, but I do need to get home early tonight. I’m going to have to take a pass on this evening.”
I gave her a smile of my own, a smile with a little predatory edge. “You’re going to need to do a lot better than that if you expect to roll me, Focus. You still owe me three more hours in the gym.”
Gail frowned. “Gym time? Hank sent over nearly fifty pages of new juice patterns he wants me to work on, and I need to get a start on them.” There was more than a hint of annoyance in her voice, annoyance edging toward challenge.
“Four hours,” I said. Her incessant juice pattern practice was making her a better witch, true, but I wasn’t happy with the slow speed of her physical improvement, and her juice pattern practice generated enough dross to push Gilgamesh to his Guru limits.
She wrapped her arms around her torso, stared up at the ceiling, and didn’t answer. She wanted to challenge me.
I waited. She relaxed, slowly, the challenge easing out of her before she spoke. “Teacher, why? If it’s the dross issue, well, I can move my juice pattern practice outside of my apartment complex.”
Better. “Until we hit your structural limits, your physical improvements are what’s behind your improving capabilities of natural juice regeneration as well as your native resting juice count.” Not that I could metasense this. My information came from Rizzari Super-Focus 101, part of Lori’s training program for aspiring witches. “This affects more than you. We’re also attempting to change what Focuses think of as the ‘proper Focus’. If we succeed, in the future the first thing we’re going to do with baby Focuses is the same thing we do with baby Arms – get them exercising. Not for the combat benefits, which for a Focus will be secondary, but for the juice benefits. Consider how much better your early career as a Focus would have been without the constant low juice headaches.”
“Fine. Yes, Teacher.” She wasn’t sold, but she did let loose a few giggles. “Sorry. I keep thinking about what Allison Silvey’s reaction is going to be to all of this. She considers being sedentary as one of her life goals.”
“Carol, I need to talk to you alone.” Haggerty caught me just after late dinner.
I nodded and then indicated the war room. In a house full of Major Transforms, its soundproofed walls provided the only privacy available.
“Do we have a problem, ma’am?” I said.
Haggerty stood over by the newly mounted wall map of the US. She had her arms crossed, and glared at the floor.
“Not we, me,” she said.
I frowned, worried. “Is this something to do with Gail?” Amy had been getting more uneasy each time Gail rolled her.
She turned to me and took a deep breath. “Not Gail. Polly Keistermann. When I’m following one of Gail’s orders, it makes me happy in a strange way I can’t describe…the same way doing favors for Polly makes me feel.”
Holy crap. “You’re on a first name basis with the president of the Focus Council?” Keistermann had the best Focus charisma of any Focus I knew, and that included Tonya Biggioni and Lori Rizzari.
“Well, you know,” Haggerty said, looking down again. “She’s on Long Island, I claim New York. Most of the time. I visit her, and, well, Sinclair and Duke Hoskins’ barony. We talk. And other things.”
Haggerty was visiting Polly Keistermann and screwing Duke Hoskins. I wanted to hit something. “You never said anything about this before,” I said. I kept my voice respectful. It took work.
“She asked me not to.”
“She asked you not to. So now you’re thinking she’s been rolling you with her charisma.”
“I don’t know for sure. It might be a possibility.”
Might be a possibility. Might? If Polly Keistermann had Amy Haggerty in her hands, she was rolling her so many different ways she would make a hooker blush.
This was a fucking mess. I would need to do the impossible: a mind scrape of my Arm boss. Was this enough meat to be worth a challenge? I salivated at the thought, but not only didn’t this feel good enough, if I failed my failure would legitimize Polly’s ownership. I couldn’t risk that.
“Ma’am, I think we need to have a long talk. Right after exercises and I send Gail back home.”
The long talk lasted the rest of the night, and was as bad as the worst of the mind scrapes I had been through with Keaton. We closeted ourselves in the war room, and Haggerty fought me every step of the way. I soon recognized Polly’s fingerprints by how hard Haggerty fought me when I got close.
Focuses play with the mind and Polly Keistermann was a master. Haggerty couldn’t even talk about her conversations without sweating, and to get her to talk, I had to set up a situation by which if she didn’t talk I was disobeying her orders. “Ma’am, I can’t ask the next question unless you give me an answer to the preceding question” was the simplest gambit I used. I said “Ma’am, I’m willing to stop if you want to stop” many times, nearly always followed by some variant of “If you stop you’re disobeying my orders to get to the bottom of this” from her, followed by some variation of “then what did you talk about on your June 8th visit?” from me.
Dragging this information out of my boss was like pulling her soul out by the roots. She swung at me several times, drew her knives on me, screamed at me to shut the fuck up, and called me every obscene name in the English language plus a few imports from elsewhere. I used every Arm trick I knew, from the leverage of my tag to my ability to read her, and some tricks I invented as I worked. “Ma’am, see this knife?” A knife I stuck in my chest. “These are your words.” If played right, an Arm boss will feel her subordinate’s pain. In this circumstance, the trick did get h
er attention.
In the end, I succeeded. I hoped I got everything, but there was no way to know for sure, not with Haggerty as my boss. At the least, I got everything I could trick Haggerty into remembering.
Haggerty had been Keistermann’s for almost two years. She did whatever Keistermann wanted of her, including the damned Eskimo Spear quest, and answered any questions Keistermann asked. She regularly updated Keistermann on everything she knew about the activities of the Arms.
Haggerty saw no conflict between her Arm responsibilities and spying on the Arms for Keistermann. Even when I explained the conflict of interest to her, she didn’t see the problem. Keistermann’s work. I took an hour to pry that loose.
When we finished Haggerty was exhausted, humiliated, and angry, and I was a bloody, low juice wreck, barely holding in my temper and giving off far too many inadvertent dominance signals.
Of all my discoveries, one bit angered me the most: Polly dearest had planted the seeds of the push the Cause crap in Amy’s mind, and had been using the Arms, or at least Amy and my Arms, as fronts for her own hidden agenda.
Using every charismatic wile at my disposal, I made Amy face everything Polly had done to her. She was, after that long night, free of Polly’s control.
If it had been me, I would have been furious at Keistermann. Haggerty was furious, but not at Keistermann. She thought that Keistermann was a senior Focus, and this was how senior Focuses behaved. She had liked Polly before, and she still did. She blamed only herself, for her weakness and failure.
I tackled Sibrian the next night, a much easier task. Keistermann had only just started to work her, and she was cleaner, both because of less contact and better natural resistance. So much for my comments about Mary not having contact with top end Focuses, though. She had also gotten to cope with Lori on one of her fanatic research benders and Tonya on a tear, in addition to Keistermann. What she lacked was contacts with Focuses acting in any other role other than cast iron bitch.
Webberly, Whetstone and Duval turned out to be clean, though, save for their interactions with Gail. I was going to be irritated if some damned senior Focus had co-opted them as well.
Dolores Sokolnik: October 2, 1972
“It’s a trap,” Bass said.
“Explain.” Ma’am Keaton glared at them. She had been in a dark mood ever since Arm Haggerty refused to help her analyze the otherwise incomprehensible Crow research materials, wanting something in return larger than Ma’am Keaton wished to give. Instead, Ma’am Keaton now laid this impossible burden on them.
Something felt wrong here, something Del didn’t quite understand. The only thing she could articulate on the subject, but didn’t, for political reasons, was the strange fact that when Ma’am Keaton forcibly humbled Ma’am Bass two weeks ago, Ma’am Bass came out only barely humbled.
“This Crow, Shadow, chose what to put in this box of research materials,” Bass said. “He didn’t need to include any information at all on the first Focuses and their games. He’s manipulating us into doing what he wants.”
Five Arms gathered around the table in Keaton’s training complex, all whom had read the box of research materials in its entirety. From what Ma’am Rayburn had told Del, Ma’am Keaton never gave away information like this, normally only passing out choice tidbits as the need arose. Besides Ma’am Keaton, Ma’am Rayburn and Bass, Ma’am Billington also attended. Del, as usual, knelt on the floor at Ma’am Keaton’s feet.
Ma’am’s Rayburn and Billington sat beside each other to Ma’am Keaton’s right, leaving Bass alone to Ma’am Keaton’s left. Del wondered if the choice of seats indicated anything.
“So you’re suggesting we don’t act on the information because of the source?” Rayburn asked.
“I’m suggesting the Crow left out certain crucial information and added bogus information.”
“Crap. I think it’s obvious that he left out crucial information. I believe it’s also obvious that he lacks crucial information,” Ma’am Keaton said. “He says nothing about any of the first Focuses who live west of the Mississippi, except for Fingleman. He’s as much in the dark as we are, regarding them.”
“That’s not many,” Ma’am Billington said. “There’s Denise Pitre, whose organization we’ve already broken into, in San Jose. Cathy Elspeth in Salt Lake City. Donna Fingleman, in Portland Oregon. Carrie Sue Sandstrom, in Dallas. Vivian Titus, in Kansas City. Of those, only Fingleman is considered one of the ruling firsts.”
“He doesn’t want us going after the Nobles, because the Nobles are his pet project,” Bass said. “He’s manipulating us.”
“How could he know we even thought about going after the Nobles?” Ma’am Rayburn said. “Ma’am Keaton got this information in trade before you came by and won your tag.”
“Look at this shit!” Bass said, ignoring Rayburn’s far-too-accurate logic. “Their documents confirm our worst fears about their espionage capabilities. I’m sure they’ve been spying on our meetings. They’re likely spying on us right this instant.”
“The fact that Shadow’s information is primarily from the eastern United States implies he’s at odds with the west coast Crows, and lacks access to the west coast Crow records,” Del said. “Assuming he didn’t specifically leave out information from west of the Mississippi on purpose.”
Bass clenched her teeth, and Ma’am Keaton nodded.
“What about the rest of this political information?” Ma’am Keaton said.
“Well, this gives us confirmation of the Crows’ legitimate grievances against the first Focuses,” Ma’am Billington said. “The first Focuses did assassinate two Crows during the Quarantine breakout. They kept up the same scummy behavior since, too. Four times, in Crow Shadow’s knowledge, they’ve assassinated Focuses in their own organization! The first Focuses deserve whatever anyone does to them. They’ve forfeited all their rights by their actions.”
Del couldn’t help but nod. Shadow’s information was quite damning. Before, she didn’t understand why the half-assed rebellion hidden underneath the Cause focused on taking out the first Focuses. Now she understood, and agreed with the call. From her perspective as a former history teacher, the first Focuses were little more than paranoid bush-league totalitarians, complete with rigged ‘elections’, secret police, informants, blackmail, and assassinations, even supporting multiple independent groups working on identical secret projects as a way to defeat toadyism. The first Focuses were a hazard to all Transforms.
“I find myself more than a little hot over what they did to Focus Mann,” Ma’am Keaton said, referencing one of the few nuggets of information she had managed to extract several weeks ago. She was still angry. “Wendy’s mine, dammit. They did the deed slick enough to convince me the Arm Pet shaming was a spontaneous reaction by the younger low-end Focuses. Shadow’s information indicates they personally orchestrated that whispering campaign about Arm Pets. For that, the first Focuses are going to pay.”
The other Arms, Del included, echoed Ma’am Keaton’s righteous anger. When an Arm claimed something as hers…
“There’s another potential implication that follows,” Arm Rayburn said. She leaned forward with her elbows on the table and talked directly to Ma’am Keaton, ignoring the other Arms. “Wasn’t the Focuses’ military betrayal during the Hunter war supposedly a spontaneous rebellion of the Council Focuses against the first Focuses? Shadow’s notes indicate Focus Schrum was inordinately pleased about the Council’s rebellion, strange, since she personally gave them political cover from the other first Focuses. I’m hypothesizing she or her immediate boss, Focus Patterson, orchestrated the Council rebellion simply to save the Firsts from our ire.”
All the other Arms nodded, even Arm Bass.
“That does follow, but to get proof of that, we’d need to mind scrape Schrum and Patterson,” Keaton said. “Patterson loves this sort of convoluted shit; I’ve told you the sick mind games she’s played with Tonya and me.” They all nodded.
“
I also found something else troubling about the Crows. Did any of you see it?” Ma’am Keaton said. Everyone, including Del, shook their heads. “We knew him as Rogue Crow, Wandering Shade and Innocence, but the Crows referred to him as ‘Crow Killer’. Several of the important Crows, including Shadow and Thomas the Dreamer, suspected ‘Crow Killer’ was a faction of Crows, not a single Crow, and ‘Crow Killer’ represented the resurfacing of an old Crow internal conflict. If you read between the lines, they felt vindicated, not chagrined, about how the affair turned out. To me, they were convinced their supposition was right: Crow Killer was a Crow faction, and when Wandering Shade died, only the faction head fell. Folks, this means there’s a Crow faction still supporting the Hunters. They’re playing both sides of the fence, with us in the middle. We can’t trust the Crows on this.”
“That would also explain why the Nobles didn’t participate up front in the Clearing of Chicago,” Ma’am Rayburn said, settling back into her chair, her point made. “I thought the excuses they used, their claims of weakness and annoyance over not being given command, were rather limp.”
Bass grimaced. “This proves my hypothesis is correct, and we need to count all the other powerful Major Transform groups as enemies. Consider our so-called friends! The Focuses of the Cause are a downtrodden weak minority. The Nobles are duplicitous and useless. The Crows who deal with us belong to a weak minority with their heads on the chopping block. Fuck them all. They’re not worth having as allies or saving from destruction.”
“Ma’am, I don’t see any other choice,” Ma’am Billington said. The lowest ranking Arm here besides Del, she spoke carefully, watching each of the other Arms in turn. “We need to go after all of them if we’re to gain the freedom of action we want. I just can’t see how we can survive doing so.”
“We hit them one at a time,” Ma’am Rayburn said.
“We need to coopt the Nobles,” Bass said. “Their leadership is the most open to external manipulation. They’ll get us the subordinate allies we need.”
Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) Page 17