Once We Were Human

by Randall Allen Farmer

  Chapter 8

  “The tragic events in Las Vegas have been linked to the escape last year of the rogue woman Transform Stacy Keaton. This one-woman crime spree has now been linked to forty-two deaths and the theft of just over a million dollars in cash and jewelry. The FBI has questioned several members of the Transform community and has gotten nowhere. Several members of Congress are calling for the reintroduction of the Transform Quarantine to prevent such rogue Transforms in the future.” [UPI report on May 12, 1964]

  Gilgamesh: November 3, 1966

  A Crow whisper!

  Gilgamesh panicked, and as a tidal wave of fear flooded into his body, he ran. The whispered voice had come from his left, across the street and down a walkway to one of the hospital’s emergency exits. Close. There hadn’t been a Crow in metasense range before, but now Gilgamesh sensed him. Gilgamesh turned into the first alley he came to, a delivery driveway for a professional building, and slowed to a stop.

  The panic vanished. Surprised, Gilgamesh flattened against the brick wall of the building, kicking aside a beer bottle in the process. He wondered if this sudden loss of panic was some sort of attack

  Or perhaps he was just a mite too paranoid. Gilgamesh couldn’t decide.

  “I mean no harm,” Gilgamesh said, to be safe. Hell. This had to be another of the older Crows, like Echo.

  “I know. Come over here, so we can talk.” Confused, Gilgamesh wondered if he should run, even though he wasn’t panicked anymore. He decided against it, despite the strange way the panic had left him. He didn’t pick up the same feeling of nasty from this Crow he had picked up from Echo. He crossed the deserted road and cautiously entered the narrow walkway. The alley was a dark place, surrounded by tall hospital walls on three sides.

  “My name is Rumor,” the Crow said, once he came in sight of Gilgamesh’s night vision. Rumor was a tall man, six two or so, athletic, with piercing eyes. A powerful aura of calmness surrounded him. He looked out of place among the trash and dirt of the neglected walkway, wearing a trench coat over a businessman’s suit and a fedora on his head. Old fashioned. Unlike Gilgamesh in his light jacket, he looked dressed for the cold weather.

  “Gilgamesh.” Gilgamesh came two feet into this other Crow’s crevice and stopped. The stars twinkled brightly in the clear air above, but their light didn’t make it into this shadowed chasm.

  “Ah, yes. Merlin heard of you through Sinclair.” Gilgamesh frowned. He met Sinclair long before he had taken his ‘Gilgamesh’ name. “How’s life treating you?”

  Soft voice, confident. Rumor was forward for a Crow, Gilgamesh decided. “I could use a little more dross.”

  “I’m on a mission regarding that subject; that’s why I’m so forward for a Crow,” Rumor said.

  “You read minds?” Surely not.

  “I read juice, and juice mirrors the emotions. If you know what to look for.” That made sense. ”Unfortunately, I’m not going to answer any of your most pressing questions. I’m a firm believer in the school of hard knocks. Each Crow needs to make his own way in the world, discover his own place in our Transform society. My way is harsh, but Crows are one with nature. The need for us is not as great as the number of Crows. No Crow has ever killed another Crow, either.”

  Gilgamesh licked his lips and pondered the Rumor’s words. Rumor was a strange Crow, filled with strange ideas. Terrible, terrifying ideas. To such a Crow, Gilgamesh was but a pawn, a flea.

  His annoyance at his status didn’t stop him from trying to figure out what was going on. “Your mission is to warn me against the blot of dross to the southeast,” Gilgamesh said, tilting his head to indicate that direction.

  Rumor nodded. “Sharp as a tack. You’ll indeed need watching. I see you didn’t need my warning at all.”

  “What caused the blot?”

  “A fearsome ancient Focus, one of the first, lives within it. Several Crows have gone into her black stain over the years. None has ever returned. Many find the black stain alluring. I warn them away.”

  Rumor had the pattern of the blot within him, as well.

  “You feed on it.” Gilgamesh certainly had no cause to complain of any other Crow’s choice to take dross from dangerous sources.

  “Yes. There’s enough dross for twenty Crows like myself.” No other Crows lived here, though.

  “I have no home. Can you teach me how to take the old Focus’s dross?”

  “I could, but I won’t,” Rumor said. He paced back and forth across the width of the grimy walkway. The huge weight of dross on him churned, and flickered through a series of half-realized patterns Gilgamesh barely sensed. Rumor was clearly doing something with dross, well beyond Gilgamesh’s comprehension. “Come back in three or four years, Gilgamesh. Then I’ll teach you, if you’re still interested. Or find another home, and never return. Either way, this is no place for a young Crow such as you.”

  Yes, Gilgamesh realized. Rumor was right. Pittsburgh was no place for a young Crow like himself. “Thank you. It was nice meeting you,” he said. “You quieted my panic, didn’t you?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Of course,” Rumor said. “Anything else wouldn’t have been polite. We need the panic to flee from the many dangers of our world – Arms, Beast Men, first Focuses, doctors, the more powerful Sports, Monsters, the FBI and local police, withdrawal Psychos, perhaps even the Lost Tribe of Canada or the Purifier of Europe – but it can impede conversation between Crows.”

  Gilgamesh nodded; Rumor’s name was no accident. He turned to make his way out through the dark streets, mind working to remember the many foreign references Rumor had mentioned. To his surprise, Rumor paced him. They walked silently, twenty feet from each other, as Gilgamesh headed south again, through the old residential area back toward the river and the freight yard beyond it. They were approaching the edge of Carnegie-Mellon when Rumor spoke again.

  “I do wonder, though, who you ran into who gave you that?”

  “Which ‘That?’” Gilgamesh asked back.

  “You couldn’t tell what I did?” Rumor asked, and sighed. “Have you run into any other senior Crows recently?”

  Ah. Confirmation. Rumor was a senior Crow. “I don’t believe so. I did run into a Crow by the name of Echo, who chased me out of St. Louis. He wanted to make sure the Arm held in the St. Louis Detention Center died.” Echo’s banishment still irritated Gilgamesh.

  “He did? That’s disturbing news,” Rumor said. “I have a friend who’d like to hear your story. Thomas the Dreamer. Would you mind visiting him?”

  “Cabin in Maine, right?” Gilgamesh asked.

  “Not at the moment. He’s in Kingston, New York, along the freight line between New York City and Albany. You show up in Kingston and he or one of the other Crows there will find you.”

  “What’re multiple Crows doing in Kingston?” Gilgamesh asked.

  No answer. Rumor was gone. Gilgamesh continued to walk and didn’t stop until he left town.

  It would be nearly half a decade before Gilgamesh had the skills to understand how Rumor had driven him away.

  Carol Hancock: November 4, 1966 – November 9, 1966

  Doris met my eyes and cleared her throat as she delivered my breakfast to me in my corner of the Detention Center commissary. I nodded, waited a moment, and ran my fingers under all my dishes.

  The note was under my bowl of oatmeal. Sharp and alert, only three days past my draw, I kept the note in my palm until I got to the weight room. There, I read and ate the short letter.

  Carol

  Your sister received your note. She was not amused. All is not lost, though, and negotiations are occurring. Be wary of sudden diarrhea and be prepared.

  Paul Klee

  Dr. Zielinski. I recognized his pseudonym from the damned art book I had grabbed from him. He was the only one of my current acquaintances who knew the names of German abstract expressionist artists. The meaning
of the note took a few moments to parse. My ‘sister’ was Keaton, she didn’t want to help me, but Dr. Zielinski thought he might convince her to change her mind. Sudden diarrhea – sudden runs? Be prepared? Ah. I shouldn’t escape on my own. Instead, I should be ready for Keaton. Assuming Dr. Zielinski convinced her to help.

  Which meant I had damned well better be ready to escape when the time came. I had no idea what Keaton would need me to do, but from what I had seen of her, I needed to be ready for as many contingencies as I could think up. Dr. Zielinski had warned me that Keaton would never want to speak to me again, so even though it sounded like Dr. Zielinski might be able to patch things up with her, I doubted the next time we met she would be in a good mood.

  The note was good for my spirits and I spent a bunch of time during my morning exercises smiling about good ol’ Dr. ‘James Bond’ Zielinski. Where and how had he learned all this crap? I had a sudden inspiration that not only had he known about the first Focus’s breakout from Quarantine, he had helped.

  On other fronts, I decided my self-imposed morning exercises were keeping me from getting worse. Unfortunately, every time I went through low juice I stopped exercising and the muscle pain got worse. Each draw took me another step farther down the ladder of destruction. I hoped Keaton showed up sooner, rather than later.

  At lunch, Doris sat down with me to talk. She wanted to quiz me over the note, which we couldn’t do, not openly.

  Eventually, Doris asked “We know you’ve had such a hard time here recently. Is there anything special you’d be interested in having us do for you?”

  Meaning ‘if you’re going to escape, how can we help?’ I had been waiting for her question, an integral part of my plan.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the staff who’ve had such a hard time, not me, especially with my growling and snarling at them when times are bad. I think the staff here deserves a party.”

  “A party?” Doris asked. She peered at me with owl eyes, confused.

  “Oh, yes. I’m your first Arm,” and if they were lucky, their only Arm ever, “and you’ve gotten me through the worst of my transformation. Handling me has to be rough, hard on morale, and a party would be just the thing to pick things up. Not only that, it has to be a surprise party, say with one day notice.”

  My request was perfectly stupid and female. No idiot male FBI agent would even bother to transcribe this.

  “Oh, I understand,” Doris said, and smiled. She thought I would use the party as cover for my escape.

  “A late afternoon party, so both the day and night shifts can participate,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I even have some menu ideas.” Doris’s eyes widened as I read off my list from memory, and after the fifth item, Doris began to take notes. She had no idea how many parties I had planned and hosted in my former life. What I didn’t know about food wasn’t worth knowing.

  I had planned the menu for this party with great care. The menu had enough sugary sweets and heavy dishes laden with starches to put an entire US Army battalion to sleep.

  “Last, you need some of the special punch you told me your daughter made for her high school graduation,” I finished. Her daughter had secretly spiked the punch with a quart or two of vodka.

  Doris nodded and smiled.

  This was going to be fun.

  Patrelle’s sadistic tests continued. The day of the note they had me fight a starving grizzly bear. With my bare hands. Me without the least idea about how to fight. Know what? I did the same as I did to the dogs. Then I sent the grizzly after the FBI. They shot the bear without hesitation. Later, I realized how stupid I had been, from an SPCA standpoint as well as “don’t reveal your tricks to the enemy”. Said grizzly bear was the last wild animal I saw at the Detention Center.

  It didn’t seem to bother the staff when I barked at the FBI. They wanted to do so themselves.

  Three days after the grizzly bear test, my captors stuck a short wooden pole in my hands and had me fight a well-padded martial arts master, a Marine. He beat the crap out of me for two hours, and I carefully didn’t let the rage take me. Instead, I studied his moves, especially his hands and feet, and carefully didn’t copy them. I figured that by the end of the fight, I knew enough about this pole fighting business to beat a teenage boy. If he had asthma.

  The FBI was using me to teach them what an Arm could do. I fought back by screwing up their tests as best I could whenever I could hold in my rage. More, though, I used the FBI to teach me about myself.

  An Arm had to be some kind of athlete. I’d seen women athletes perform in the various Olympic Games, and although I hadn’t thought much of their career choices, I’d come to grips with the fact that Transform Sickness didn’t do much in the way of asking permission. If I lived and got out of here, I expected Keaton would put me through athletic training far worse than she put me through as Larry Borton.

  I found ‘Arm as athlete’ a far better answer to ‘What is an Arm?’ than ‘killer’. Perhaps God made the Arms to be bodyguards for the leading Focuses or something. The answer didn’t satisfy me, but I liked it better than my earlier answers.

  After the Marine had finished with me, and I lay on the ground staring up at the clear November sky and bleeding, McIntyre came up to me to sneer. “Loser, you might as well pack it in and let the center use your room for what it was intended. What Santa is giving me this year is a chance to piss on your grave, you grotesque parody of a human woman.” He stuck his head down close to mine. “Given your recent fine cooperation, though, I’d rather you died cleanly than give the Director here a reason to jack off.”

  I agreed, but again my instincts counseled against answering McIntyre, so I said nothing.

  The next morning, Doris met my eyes and cleared her throat as she delivered breakfast. Under the oatmeal bowl I found a Xerox of a part of the first page of a government document, regarding the financials for the ‘Arm Carol Hancock Project’. The salient information was near the top: ‘Project Termination Date: 12/21/1966’.

  A deadline, by more than one meaning of the word.

  Handwritten in smeared pencil was the following: ‘You’ve got to get out of here! What more can we do to help?’

  I had a list. I wrote down a few pieces of information I needed on the back of the note during my exercise session in the morning, and returned it at lunchtime.

  For now, I had to wait on Keaton. I hoped she decided I was worth saving.

  Gilgamesh: November 5, 1966

  Gilgamesh rolled off the freight train at about three in the morning. He expected to metasense Crows in number, but sensed nothing. Not even any dross. The town was lit up around him against the low clouds and the rain had stopped, but the ground was still damp from earlier. He slipped into the shadows and headed in towards town. Rumor had said to go east to Kingston, and Gilgamesh had sometimes wondered the wisdom of his decision, but truthfully, he didn’t have anywhere better to go.

  “Over here,” a voice whispered. Gilgamesh jumped and skittered behind the back of an Esso station. Nothing from his metasense. No idea where the voice came from.

  “In the car.”

  Gilgamesh carefully looked around the area and found the car in question, lights off, chugging quietly in the night about five hundred feet away from the gas station. The car was practically invisible in the shadow of the racks of pipe in the storage depot by the road. Gilgamesh, even though he knew where the man in the car was, still couldn’t metasense him.

  The man wanted Gilgamesh to join him in the car. The idea terrified Gilgamesh.

  “I don’t do cars,” Gilgamesh said, an answering whisper.

  “You don’t do cars?” His whisper voice echoed oddly against the ranks of bulk freight ready for transfer on to the trains. “You’re in danger here. This place is too open.” Okay, he was a Crow. No one else would have heard Gilgamesh’s whisper from so far away
.

  Well, there’s always a first time, Gilgamesh decided. He jogged over to the car, past pipes, coal, and crates of what he suspected were household appliances. Dogs guarded this particular lot, but they ignored Gilgamesh. He approached within twenty feet of the car and slowed. Cold sweat covered his body and his knees grew weaker with each step. Three steps farther and he stopped. He couldn’t force himself any closer to the car. “Sorry,” Gilgamesh said, bracing himself against a chain link fence.

  For a moment, the Crow in the car looked at Gilgamesh with wide eyes. He nodded and exited out of the car. “I can protect you if you can stand being close to me.” The car was the only vehicle on the desolate industrial street. The other Crow huddled close to the fence, as if it would shelter him.

  “Protect me from what?” Twenty feet was such a small distance. Gilgamesh wondered if he should have come so close. At least the clouds hid the moon, giving the night a comforting darkness.

  “We have a Beast Man in the area,” the Crow said. He was an inch shorter than Gilgamesh, slightly stouter, with short-cropped black hair and dark eyes. He looked black Irish or Welch, and so confident while standing on the cracked sidewalk. “I’m protected from the Beast Man’s metasense, but you’re not. You’re Gilgamesh, right? I can protect you if you walk with me.”

  “Yes, I’m Gilgamesh,” Gilgamesh said, and walked over to the Crow. Given a choice between an unknown Crow and the threat of a Beast Man? No contest. He would chance the unknown Crow.

  At least this unknown Crow, unlike his car, didn’t feel like a threat.

  “I’m Vizul Lightning,” the Crow said, as Gilgamesh came close. “Guru Thomas and the rest of them are about five miles away. We can walk.”

  “Okay,” Gilgamesh said, wondering if Vizul meant the same thing Echo had when he called his boss a ‘Guru’. Disquieting, but certainly more interesting than Gilgamesh’s first guess that ‘Guru’ was Echo’s boss’s first name. “So you’ve seen a Beast Man?”

  “Me? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m just here to help Occum,” the Crow said. Gilgamesh metasensed the same sort of roiling cloud of foggy dross on the Crow that had covered Echo back in St. Louis. No hint of fierce, though. “None of us have seen or metasensed this beast yet, but reliable reports have him in the general area. Hunting the Catskills, it seems.”

  Gilgamesh licked his lips and relaxed. “Uh, aren’t the Catskills miles away from here?”

  “The last report had the Beast hunting near Indian Head Mountain, about five miles north of Woodstock, which is itself about five miles from here,” Vizul said, and pointed off to the northwest. “We’re all in grave danger.”

  Ten miles didn’t seem particularly close to Gilgamesh, certainly not close enough to be termed ‘grave danger’. On the other hand, Gilgamesh knew Arms, not Beast Men, and as Beast Men were supposedly able to metasense Crows…

  Gilgamesh found his metasense focused to the northwest. Presumably, Beast Men were as dangerous as the rumors said. “So why are all these Crows gathered here?” Gilgamesh asked. The last place he would choose to gather was a town right next to a Beast Man.

  “Occum thinks he can tame the Beast Man, if he can get close.”

  Gilgamesh stopped his sudden panicked run after a half dozen steps. He didn’t remember starting to run; his feet had taken off on their own. Vizul stopped and waited for Gilgamesh to come back. “Taming a Beast sounds suicidal,” Gilgamesh said, sheepishly. He guessed Occum was another Crow.

  “Hey, you’re not going to get any arguments from me. But Occum’s a beast tamer; he’s tamed just about everything up to and including Monsters. In fact, Occum has a bright idea that Beast Men ought to be easier to tame than Monsters. If you can believe Occum, he wants to use tamed Beast Men to help him tame Monsters.”

  “If Beast Men are anything like Arms, I don’t think ‘taming’ is the right attitude,” Gilgamesh said. “From what I’ve observed, Zaltu – Stacy Keaton – is the sort who will try and tame you.”

  Now Vizul ran. Gilgamesh found it easy to keep up with Vizul. The other Crow wasn’t much of a runner, sedentary and citified, perhaps, at least for a Crow.

  At least they would get to wherever they were going faster this way.

  Vizul led him to a vacant farmhouse at the base of the hills that marked the edge of the Hudson River valley. They had to dart over two freeways to get to the farmhouse, nicely situated about a mile and a half from the nearest freeway and far from any concentrations of people. Vizul and Gilgamesh trooped through hundreds of yards of harvested cornfields, peppered only with pale brown stalks left over from the harvest. Closer to the house, there were apple and pear trees, and even a cluster of blueberry bushes. Gilgamesh followed Vizul around the bushes and found a man and a woman chatting on the back porch steps. The woman stroked a small tiger striped cat who purred happily in her lap. A Coleman lantern on the railing provided light. They metasensed as normals and Gilgamesh held back, wondering why Vizul would lead him here. Then Gilgamesh noticed, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get a good view of the man’s face. Gilgamesh saw him, but his features refused to stick in Gilgamesh’s memory. Now that was an interesting trick.

  The man had to be a Crow.

  “Hello,” Gilgamesh said. The man and the woman looked up at him. Gilgamesh resisted the urge to step backwards.

  “Vizul, could you grab the camp stool for our new friend, please?” the man asked, and motioned to Gilgamesh. “I’m Thomas the Dreamer.”

  “Gilgamesh.”

  The woman waved. She was on the stout side, in her early thirties, with shoulder length light brown hair held back from her face by artlessly placed bobby pins. For a moment, Gilgamesh wondered why she seemed so plain, and realized she wasn’t wearing makeup. Noting her calf-length, red-checked A-line dress, he decided she was one of those artsy loose women who hung around with Beatniks. “Sadie,” she said.

  Vizul disappeared into the house with a confident bang of a screen door; re-appeared with the aforementioned stool, sat it down about five feet away from Thomas, and vanished back into the farmhouse. The sky was no longer black, showing the first hints of sunrise in the east. It would be a cool, crisp day. Beautiful. The cat left the woman to investigate Gilgamesh. He must have approved, as he proceeded to wind his way between Gilgamesh’s legs. Gilgamesh did his best to ignore the cat.

  “Sir, what’s the smell?” Gilgamesh asked. “And the snoring?” Someone in the house was snoring thunderously. “Have you captured the Beast Man already?” If so, Gilgamesh was about to see how fast he could run.

  “Oh, that’s Brunhilda,” Sadie whispered. “She’s Occum’s latest Monster.” Sadie’s voice was expressive and powerful, even as a whisper. Gilgamesh pegged her as a singer of some variety. He wondered how she had gotten involved with this group of Crows. He doubted she was a local; she spoke with a noticeable Long Island accent and knew to whisper around Crows.

  Gilgamesh gingerly sat on the stool, nervous to be so near to a Monster. And a woman. Well, if this Thomas Crow wasn’t panicked, he didn’t need to be, either.

  “Rumor sent me,” Gilgamesh said, to Thomas. “He said you’d want to hear my story. I found his suggestions hard to resist.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Thomas said. “That’s our Rumor. Is it true you transformed only four months ago?”

  “Three and a half,” Gilgamesh said. “Is that a problem?”

  “No. Not at all,” Thomas said. Suddenly, little blue robin’s eggs appeared, a lot of them, floating all around Gilgamesh. They vanished. Gilgamesh jumped up, stopped and sat back down. The cat, offended, skittered a few steps away, and sat on its haunches to watch the fun. “How many did you metasense?” Thomas asked.

  Gilgamesh furrowed his brow when he realized he hadn’t seen the eggs, and had only noticed them with his metasense. He hadn’t known Crows could create illusions or that his metasense cou
ld sense lifelike images. “I don’t know, sir,” Gilgamesh said. “I lost track at fifty-eight.”

  Thomas the Dreamer nodded, and someone softly whistled from inside the cabin. “Okay, how about this?” Thomas said. A dozen more eggs appeared on the ground at Gilgamesh’s feet. “How many of these can you move at once?”

  “Move?” Gilgamesh asked. Thomas nodded, and Gilgamesh took a closer look. Each egg was indeed its own thing of dross, separate from the others. Gilgamesh had never tried to move dross before, save when he fed. He tried to move one to the side. Nothing. He tried two. Still nothing. He tried to move them all. Nada. He shook his head, focused on one of the eggs, and bent his will and his capability to gather dross into the ability to move it.

  The egg moved toward Gilgamesh and vanished. He had taken it as dross. “Sorry, sir,” Gilgamesh said.

  “That’s okay. Next, can you command Sheila, here?” Thomas asked, and pointed to the cat.

  “Command?” The question sounded absurd, but Vizul had mentioned that Occum could tame animals. Gilgamesh didn’t know where to start. He tried mental commands, but the cat simply sat. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re even talking about.”

  “No need to apologize. I was just testing you to find out what sort of skills you have. All us Crows are a little different in what we can do,” Thomas said. It took all Gilgamesh’s will not to run. Thomas the Dreamer was friendly and kind, as advertised, but he was still terrifying to be anywhere near. He knew so much! “So, why don’t you tell us why Rumor sent you to me?”

  “While I was living in St. Louis, taking dross from Tiamat – the Carol Hancock Arm, who’s confined in the Detention Center in St. Louis – a Crow by the name of Echo came by and told me I was interfering in other Crow’s business by taking dross from the Detention Center. Echo, who later represented himself as working for a senior Crow named Guru Chevalier, said that ‘all Arms died’ and if the Carol Hancock Arm escaped, he would betray her to the authorities, and threatened to help the police hunt this Arm down.”

  “You know the other Arm, Stacy Keaton, is rumored to be involved in the new Arm’s detention?” a voice asked from the farmhouse. Gilgamesh guessed it was from the same person who had whistled earlier.

  “Yes. Zaltu’s terrifying, but she can’t metasense me,” Gilgamesh said. Like the voice of Thomas the Dreamer, this Crow’s voice was comforting and kind, and again, terrifying, for what he knew and implied. Although Gilgamesh didn’t have the feeling Thomas could ‘read his mind’ as Rumor had, he did have a sort of itchy feeling this hidden Crow had no problems reading Gilgamesh’s mind.

  “My name is Shadow, son,” the voice from the cabin said. “You’re one of mine, like Occum, though the question at hand, which is one of propriety, falls into Thomas’s domain. Someday you need to come visit me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gilgamesh said. So both of the East Coast senior Crows were involved with this Beast Man affair. Gilgamesh took a slow breath and tried to relax. ‘One of mine’ sounded promising and disquieting. What sort of Crow dealt with Crows who mastered Beasts and Monsters, or dealt with Crows who dealt with Arms, like himself? From his conversations with Midgard, Gilgamesh guessed this Shadow Crow liked things interesting.

  His nerves only held a moment, but broke when he noticed dross pooling at Sadie’s feet. So much for calm; the sudden appearance of dross was too much of a surprise and he was under too much stress. He panicked and ran. He was only able to stop himself after fifty paces.

  “What’s the problem?” Thomas the Dreamer asked in his calm voice, still sitting comfortably on the porch.

  Gilgamesh found himself in the harvested field again, among the dry, brown stalks. “I thought you were steadying me, the way Rumor did in Philadelphia.”

  Thomas shook his head. “None of us have been able to learn Rumor’s trick. Come on back. Shadow here’s just having a bit of stress tonight, after he got a surprise metasense glimpse of the Beast Man, and he’s reverted to the behavior that earned him his name.” Gilgamesh didn’t move. “With his tricks, Shadow’s metasense range is about nine miles, at least outside of New York City. The Beast Man is nowhere close, now.”

  “That isn’t the problem, sir,” Gilgamesh said. “It’s just, um, I’ve never dealt with a Focus before.”

  Sadie frowned. “I’m not a Focus, Gilgamesh. I’m a woman Transform.”

  Gilgamesh crept back, his face red, and sat back down on the stool. “I humbly beg your pardon, then, ma’am. You’re producing dross and I sensed it gathering around your feet.”

  “You sensed the dross?” Thomas asked. “Through my protections? I find myself intrigued. Can you tell why Sadie’s producing dross?”

  Gilgamesh took another metasense glance at Sadie. Now he knew what to look for, he vaguely metasensed she was a Transform through what Thomas the Dreamer called ‘his protections’. “Sadie, ma’am, you appear to have a juice flaw, just under your ribcage on your left side. It’s about four inches long, and my guess is your juice flaw is related to an old wound. I’ve seen that on Tiamat.”

  He heard some rustling from inside the cabin. There goes Vizul Lightning again, Gilgamesh decided.

  Sadie’s eyes opened wide, but she didn’t run (Thomas the Dreamer didn’t even twitch, not that Gilgamesh had expected him to). “I got the wound eight months ago while Monster hunting. The Monster’s claws didn’t touch me, but she used a short range juice weapon to knock me out.” She smiled. “Now you’re supposed to say ‘Monsters can’t do anything like that’, just like the other Crows have said.”

  Gilgamesh shook his head. “The media and academic information on Transforms is either incomplete or a lie. I’m not surprised.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  Gilgamesh shook his head. “All I can do is sense these strange things,” he said. “I can’t do anything as a Crow besides gather dross. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, he’s yours, Shadow,” Thomas the Dreamer said, and sighed, an overly expressive ‘I don’t understand and I’d rather not understand’ sigh. “Back to the real question. Gilgamesh, what is your concern for the fate of this Arm?”

  Gilgamesh looked around uneasily. Tiamat was a killer, and he knew he should condemn her for it, but… “I would rather she lived,” he said in a small voice.

  Much to Gilgamesh’s surprise, Thomas the Dreamer didn’t seem bothered by Gilgamesh’s support of a killer. “Why?”

  Gilgamesh had thought about his reaction to Tiamat a lot during his meanderings since St. Louis. He took a breath and wrapped his arms around his torso. “Because it isn’t her fault that she’s the way she is. Because she provides huge quantities of wonderful dross. Because she’s another Transform. Because… because nothing they say about Transform Sickness is right, and I don’t believe they know what they’re talking about with Tiamat either.”

  Gilgamesh shivered, but Thomas the Dreamer nodded. “As it happens, I agree with you, though it took me far longer than it’s taken you to learn such wisdom.”

  “What?”

  Thomas ignored Gilgamesh’s interruption. “I’ve been considering the question myself as we discussed other subjects. I believe Echo is in the wrong. Nothing good comes of betraying other Major Transforms; I know this personally. Among the senior Crows, we do have an agreement not to interfere. In fact, that’s why I’m here, to judge whether what Occum is proposing to do with this Beast Man counts as interference. Tentatively, I have judged his actions are not interference, as this Beast Man can speak but a couple of words and is a menace to all. You’re not the first to notice that the Arms are much more civilized than Beast Men and can talk and pass as human – and, yes, I understand how the common wisdom on the subject has been skewed by those who consider Arms to be mindless Monsters. Gilgamesh, you are free to stop Echo.”

  Gilgamesh nodded, delighted and surprised that Thomas agreed with him. He thought further and leaned
forward with a frown. “Thomas, sir, I’m not capable of stopping Echo. He said ‘scat’ and I ran. He seemed to me to be a very dangerous Crow.”

  “Chevalier’s cheating again, pushing the limits,” Shadow whispered, from inside the house.

  “And you’re not?” Thomas said, to this Shadow Crow. “Also, not proven. But, old friend, I do have a test. Gilgamesh, did Echo do something like this?”

  Suddenly, Thomas was fierce. Gilgamesh skittered back off the stool several steps, and nodded.

  “How very unfortunate,” Thomas said, his voice sad. The fierce went away, and he was the calm, unmemorable Thomas the Dreamer again. “Shadow is right. Chevalier should not be tricking up a follower who cannot himself do such things. Such a trick is against many of our agreements.”

  “If you would be so kind, Guru Thomas, perhaps it would be prudent for you to aid Gilgamesh in a similar fashion, as to balance the situation,” Shadow said. “As you correctly said, with your wise comment earlier, nothing good ever comes of betraying other Major Transforms.” It took Gilgamesh a few moments to parse Shadow’s oddly formal request. If Gilgamesh understood the intimations, Shadow had suggested that he, Gilgamesh, be ‘tricked up’ so he might right this wrong. Being tricked up actually sounded like fun, if he could avoid the panic long enough to receive said trick.

  “And, friend Shadow, how many agreements will I break if I similarly aid Gilgamesh?” Thomas asked. He drummed his fingers on the porch step. “Yet, you’re right. It’s proper for Echo to be stopped. Gilgamesh, come back and have a seat.”

  Gilgamesh did.

  “If you wish, I can help you against Echo. Unfortunately, we’re busy here and none of us can go with you. Nor are there enough other Crows at my, ahem, command that I can send anyone else with you.” The last sounded like a joke, though it was hard to tell what with not being able to see Thomas’s face. “Would you be willing?”

  “Yes,” Gilgamesh said. “I’m not sure what you’re asking of me, though.”

  “I can make you immune to Echo’s trick, and give you a similar method of chasing him off,” Thomas said. “However, my trick will look like dross to you. With your youthful lack of control, you can’t draw any dross until you’ve settled the affair. You’d drain away my trick. It won’t last more than a month in any event.”

  “I’m not sure I can last a month without dross,” Gilgamesh said. He was already down low enough so the fresh dross by Sadie’s feet enticed him. “Other than that, I’m in.” Striking back at Echo would suit Gilgamesh fine.

  “Take what you want from here, first,” Thomas said. “Take a walk with Sadie.”

  Gilgamesh blinked and Sadie smiled.

  “So,” Gilgamesh said, as he poked at a rusted wheelbarrow in the half of the barn that still had a roof. “You have a Focus, don’t you?”

  Sadie settled gingerly on the still-sturdy remnants of an old-fashioned wooden barrel. “Of course I do, silly. This juice leak isn’t anywhere near large enough so that I could go without a Focus.”

  “So this Focus knows all about Crows?”

  “She’s never met one in person,” Sadie said, a tiny smile on her face. “That’s my job. Oh, don’t worry. I’m perfectly good at keeping Crow secrets.” Pause. “So, what can you tell me about yourself?”

  They talked.

  Three hours later, with an impossibly complex cloud of dross hanging off him like a backpack, Gilgamesh was on a freight train, en route back to St. Louis. By way of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland…

  Dr. Henry Zielinski: November 6, 1966

  Dr. Zielinski shuffled papers in his office at Harvard Medical, anxious after finishing his daily teaching responsibilities. Focus Ackermann had passed on the word that someone among the first Focuses had made sure he wouldn’t get a surplus Clinic Transform to pay off Keaton. He saw no way to prevent Hancock from dying, or preventing his career, circling the toilet for the last time before the final plunge, from perishing as well.

  His phone rang and he answered it. “Dr. Zielinski, this is Lori,” the voice on the other end said. Focus Rizzari. He hadn’t expected to hear from her so soon. “I know this is short notice, but could you come by my lab tonight? I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  “No problem,” he said. He would do anything to avoid the damned paperwork, especially paperwork this unpromising. This was the second go-round on his St. Louis expenses, after the Dean had refused to cover the department’s normal share of his travel money.

  He found Focus Rizzari’s lab in the basement of the Biology building on the Boston College campus. Beside the door were several cheery drawings done by young children, and above the drawings, “Dr. Lorraine Rizzari”. He knocked, and a woman bodyguard opened the door for him. She stayed in the room with them. Not the same woman bodyguard as before. This one wasn’t even a Transform.

  “Come on in,” Focus Rizzari said, without even a glance in his direction. She and a woman assistant were on the other side of the room, studying a set of three X-Rays hung in front of a light. Another bodyguard, male and likely a Transform, sat in a far corner and gave Dr. Zielinski the eye. Dr. Zielinski walked over, took a quick peek over the shoulders of Focus Rizzari and her assistant, and identified what they were looking at as X-Rays of a Monster. Focus Rizzari quickly took down the X-Rays and stuffed them into a large folder.

  The lab was about as Dr. Zielinski had expected for a microbiologist: glassware, distillation tubes, microscopes and the like. He hadn’t expected the autopsy table, an oversized model with shackles, built for Monsters, some of whom maintained disturbing and dangerous involuntary reflexes even after death. That is, if they didn’t turn into poisonous sludge immediately.

  Eventually all dead Monsters turned into poisonous sludge. Perhaps Focus Rizzari was attempting to figure out why.

  “Come on over and sit down,” she said, and led him over to her old, stained lab desk.

  He settled into the chair opposite. “I hope this isn’t too much of an inconvenience for you,” Focus Rizzari said, as she pushed her microscope over to the side, to join the racks of slides and the remains of a sandwich.

  “No, not at all,” he said. He had researched Focus Rizzari after their first meeting, and found he had been thoroughly wrong about her. Far from being a ‘nothing Focus’, she had turned out to be the vice president of the Northeast Region Focus Council. Not only did she have excellent Focus charisma, but she also had her charisma so fully under her control he hadn’t caught a whiff of it when they had met the first time.

  He had also learned she was a rebel, which didn’t surprise him given the content of their earlier conversation. She had been pushing the issue of male Focuses – Crows – for years. As usual, for reasons he still didn’t understand, the other Focuses had reacted with their standard hostility.

  “What can I do for you, today, Focus Rizzari?” he asked.

  “Lori,” she said, and took a deep breath. “How’d you like to get involved in the potential capture and taming of a Chimera?”

  He paused momentarily, surprised at Focus Rizzari’s words. “What possible use could I be?” he asked.

  “I need warm bodies. Warm bodies with guns, to be exact, more than I have available in my household. The people who are going to be attempting to tame the Chimera are Crows, and I’ve been called in to help. They need people to help them hem in the Chimera so he can be approached and tamed using some secretive Crow talents.” Dr. Zielinski frowned at Focus Rizzari’s glib words. He had the sudden feeling he had stepped from one world into another. “I did some research on you, as you’d suggested I do,” Focus Rizzari said, “and I happened to find out who you work with.” She tapped a manila folder in front of her with a blunt fingernail.

  “You want me to get the FBI involved?” he asked.

  “Not officially. You’re known to have quite a few mercenary friends, beyond your FBI contacts.”

&nb
sp; Dr. Zielinski sat back, rested his elbows on the chair arms, and put his fingertips together under his chin. His fake ‘mercenary friends’ were a cover for his involvement with Stacy Keaton. However, he knew Tommy could pull in quite a few people, both from inside and outside the FBI. Not only that, but there was opportunity here…

  “How secure is your lab?”

  “We sweep for bugs regularly,” she said, surprised at the question.

  “I also have a project with a problem,” he said. He would have to trust Focus Rizzari’s security. “You likely know by now that I’m involved with new Arms. The newest Arm, Carol Hancock, is being held in St. Louis against her will. The FBI, or at least one of the nastier parts of the FBI, is going to kill her or let her fall into withdrawal and die unless my allies and I find a way to spring her. For reasons you can likely guess and I can’t speak about, I need an unclaimed Transform, near death.”

  Focus Rizzari’s eyes widened with the look of someone who had stepped into a new world, one she had never imagined. Dr. Zielinski smiled. “Your mercenary connections, I presume,” she whispered.

  She knew of his connection to Keaton. That surprised him. “Yes. However, be forewarned. You don’t want those mercenaries anywhere near your project. They’re impulsive and prone to dominance fights that, for what you’re working on, would be impossible to avoid.”

  “Rats,” she said. Dr. Zielinski heard rustling and a murmured ‘shi-it’ from behind him. Focus Rizzari’s Transform bodyguard had figured out the unclaimed Transform he needed would to be fed to an Arm for juice. “I’m not sure it’s worth the life of a Transform to save an Arm, even one who’s going to die. I’m not convinced the Arms are worth saving.”

  Focus Rizzari’s assistant pulled up a chair and sat down, uninvited. She was a plain looking young woman, sturdy and intense, with unkempt black hair and poorly applied makeup. Dr. Zielinski leaned back, surprised at her forwardness. “Bullshit,” the young woman said, to Focus Rizzari.

  Focus Rizzari glared at her assistant. The assistant glared back. The faint scent of juice in use caught Dr. Zielinski’s nose, and he realized Focus Rizzari’s assistant was a woman Transform. Not bodyguard quality. To his surprise, the woman didn’t back down in the face of her Focus’s irritation. “Lori, if my hypothesis is correct, Arms are essential and we should do everything we can to get more of them functional. Stacy Keaton is not, in my opinion, a good example of what an Arm should be.”

  Her hypothesis? Dr. Zielinski studied the woman. She was unexceptional, save for the way she talked. A Midwesterner. He couldn’t figure out why someone like her lived in an East Coast Focus’s household or why she had a hypothesis.

  Focus Rizzari didn’t respond and continued to glare at her Transform. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” Dr. Zielinski said, after shifting his position to attract their attention.

  “Ann Chiron,” the woman Transform said, her eyes not leaving Rizzari. He guessed she had been stripped, her juice lowered precipitously into a low juice state. Painful enough to force a Transform to behave. Rizzari’s standard Focus trick didn’t work on this woman. “I looked over Dr. Zielinski’s file, just like you did. He needs to know this.”

  “He’s going to laugh at you if you even hint at your idea,” Focus Rizzari said. “Your hypothesis is too wild to present without proof.”

  “It’s too wild for a hard scientist, but my background’s in anthropology,” Miss Chiron said. “In my field, we get to wave our hands all the time.” Aha! Another academic, though if she was reduced to being Focus Rizzari’s aide, she had been hit by the ‘Transform Sickness Kills All Good Careers’ malady. On the other hand, the odds against having two woman academics randomly landing together in one household were substantial. Something fishy was going on with this Focus Rizzari, more than he had been able to find out.

  “You make a fool of yourself, then,” Focus Rizzari said. She leaned back in her lab chair and gave Ann a wicked smile.

  Miss Chiron turned to him, more relaxed now, and presumably no longer stripped of juice. “Dr. Van Reijn’s hypothesis mirrors mine. I’m positive that Transform Sickness has appeared in the past, because it’s in our myths. Gods, goddesses, monsters? They’re all Transforms, or, more exactly, they’re myths based on dim recollections of Transforms. What’s an Arm if not one of the fighting woman goddesses? What’s a Focus if not a mother goddess? Crows are wizards, Chimeras are gods and heroes. Or werewolves.”

  “Intriguing,” Dr. Zielinski said, as he scrambled for something polite to say. “Like your Focus, I can’t say your hypothesis does much for me, but you should pass it along to Dr. Van Reijn. It does fit with his work. On the other hand, I do agree with your assessment of Arms. There’s something important they’re needed for, we don’t know what it is, and we can’t ignore it. We can’t afford to ignore any of our resources in our fight to cope with Transform Sickness.”

  Focus Rizzari straightened her chair, crossed her arms and glared at them. Myths? What a load of manure! The household dynamic illustrated here by the interaction of Miss Chiron and Focus Rizzari was new to him, though, and had his full attention. “Alright, then, now that we’ve got that bit of unpleasantness behind us – Dr. Zielinski, given your background, why are you having trouble obtaining a surplus Transform, anyway?” Flustered by Miss Chiron’s interruption, Rizzari slipped and let loose her charisma. As he had feared, Rizzari’s charisma was almost as potent as Tonya’s.

  He sighed. He could do without the top-end charisma. It gave him a headache every time. “The upper echelons of Focusdom have given up on Hancock. They don’t think she’s worth saving. They’ve shut off my supply of surplus Transforms.”

  “You disagree with their assessment?”

  Dr. Zielinski nodded. “Yes. Absolutely. The other Focuses are making the mistake of confusing the young Arm with the old one they already know, forgetting that new Major Transforms are always a bit squirrelly when they’re getting their feet underneath them. As they too once were.” As Focus Rizzari once had been; about a year after transforming, someone had put a note in her file saying she was harsher than she needed to be with her household Transforms. Coming from Focus Schrum, such a comment said a lot.

  Focus Rizzari studied him intently as he spoke, reading him to see if he lied or shaded the truth. It was as if she was absorbing his thoughts, though nothing in the chemical bag of tricks of a Focus allowed any such thing. She clearly wasn’t using a standard charisma trick, as most Focuses would under these circumstances, but one of the advanced tricks the more talented Focuses rarely admitted they knew: the juice pattern.

  Dr. Zielinski was impressed, and for the first time in a long time, found himself attracted to a Focus. Physically. Not a normal response, as nearly a decade of dealing with Focuses had long since immunized him against their icy charm. He doubted the attraction was intentional on the Focus’s part, either for purposes of manipulation or for amorous reasons, as Focuses didn’t have enough juice flowing through them to generate anything close to a normal libido. Some Focuses were much worse off than ‘low libido’; he had run into Focuses who wouldn’t even allow themselves to be touched by anyone outside their household. Dr. Zielinski ignored his response and gave thought to why he might be attracted to a Focus. They were all either fools or backstabbers, or both. He couldn’t come up with any quick answers.

  “Remind me to talk to you about post-human morality someday,” Focus Rizzari said, deadpan, apropos of nothing. Dr. Zielinski carefully didn’t react. “Some other day. About our mutual problems? I’ll provide you your Transform if you’re willing to throw in with our little bit of Chimera-taming nonsense.” Focus Rizzari paused and caught his gaze again. “I should warn you that what I come up with will probably not be what you’re expecting.” She smiled at him, not the smile of a seductress but the smile of a practical joker who was about to pull the rug out from under him.
He had a bad feeling she had noted his moment of interest in her.

  “Thank you,” Dr. Zielinski said. What in the bloody blue blazes was post-human morality, anyway, he asked himself. Sublimated sex?

  “It’s been entirely my pleasure,” Focus Rizzari said, and on that cryptic bit of politesse, she bid him adieu.

  Even afterwards, driving away in his Mercedes, he couldn’t tell whether Focus Rizzari hated his guts, loved him dearly, or something in-between. Many of the leading Focuses hid their feelings and only showed what they wanted to show, but he had been around the block with Focuses enough he could usually pick up something. Not from this one. Focus Rizzari had to be one of the most closely guarded Focus he had ever run into.

  He knew the usual reasons, but in Rizzari’s case it wasn’t innocence, fear, or megalomania. By process of elimination, it had to be the other reason, one he had seen only a couple of times among the more stony of the Focuses.

  It was scars.

  Gilgamesh: November 8, 1966

  Gilgamesh shook in his hideout under a railway trestle bridge south of St. Louis. Not from cold, but from panic.

  He had been able to talk to Rumor, Vizul Lightning and Thomas the Dreamer with only minimal problems. He could even talk to that strange woman Transform, Sadie. He wondered what possessed him to think he might be able to confront Echo. He couldn’t even reveal himself to the man.

  Tiamat depended on him for her very survival. The other Crows depended on him to handle a Crow who broke the rules. Gilgamesh depended on himself, because he didn’t think he could live with himself if, equipped with all the tools he needed to save Tiamat, he couldn’t summon the courage to do it. He imagined the rest of his life as a homeless vagabond, scrounging after little remnants of dross, always remembering Tiamat’s endless sea of dross and knowing he lost both that and her because of his own cowardice.

  Every time he pulled up the memory of Echo in his mind, his bowels loosened in mind-numbing terror and he wanted to weep. He had started to have nightmares. He startled at every noise outside his little hideout, afraid Echo had found him. The panic was nearly as bad as it had been right after his transformation.

  Tiamat wasn’t dead yet. Today she had fought for hours against a weapon-wielding opponent. Gilgamesh didn’t know what sort of weapon her opponent had been using – perhaps a stick – but he beat her repeatedly. In the end, she lay on the ground for nearly three hours before she got back to her feet.

  Her life was misery.

  So was his.

  Tonya Biggioni: November 9, 1966

  The evening was cold and damp, and the station manager kept Tonya waiting for half an hour after the broadcast ended before finally showing up to negotiate her contract for the next year. If she had been given some warning the man wanted to discuss her contract, she could have sent Marty. Then the manager made her wait. ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ for an entire half hour.

  Tonya stalked across the wet parking lot, fuming about the profligate abundance of idiots in the world. Half way from the broadcast center to her car, Tonya caught a metasense flash at the edge of her range. Keaton.

  Tonya stopped and scanned for trouble. The area around the parking lot seemed normal enough. A dented Chevy with peeling paint pulled into the parking lot, splashing through puddles on the way; the station’s janitor, coming in for his evening shift. Two men in suits, leaving late, argued advertising rates while standing in the shelter of the center’s doorway. A mother escorted her long-haired, short-skirted daughter down the sidewalk over towards the Woolworth’s. All normal evening’s business, nothing abnormal at all. Tonya motioned to her bodyguards to follow her, and went out toward the street, where she sensed Keaton. When she reached the spot up the block where Keaton had been, Keaton edged into her metasense range another hundred yards away, this time to the left and down a dark side street. Tonya sighed, and followed. Three more times this happened, and Tonya began to worry about treachery. She instructed her bodyguards to be ready to fight.

  One hop later, Keaton stopped and waited for her in a real estate office, closed for the night. Tonya knocked, an absurd bit of politeness given how she had gotten here. Still, with Keaton, one didn’t take chances.

  “Come in, but leave your fucking trigger happy fools outside.”

  In Keaton’s voice Tonya heard ‘anger at the world’, not ‘anger at Tonya’. Tonya decided Keaton didn’t plan treachery. This was Keaton doing inexplicable Arm things Focuses didn’t have the instincts to understand. Tonya instructed her bodyguard detail to wait outside and carefully entered the real estate office.

  The office was dark, lit only by streetlights and headlights of cars through the dusty windows. It was a cheap place trying to look elegant, with thin carpets and creaking floors. “Say hello to Focus Biggioni, David,” Keaton’s voice echoed out of the darkness. Tonya found the Arm sitting on the red vinyl sofa in the small waiting area, with a man kneeling at her feet. A car passed and the headlights strobed across the room, temporarily illuminating them all. Tonya recognized the man: David Moore, a plumbing contractor her household often provided with subs. She had asked Keaton to help her collect money from him. He hadn’t been paying her subs.

  “Focus. Tonya, it’s not my fault!” Moore said, a horrible lie. He was terrified, shaking. Despite the dark, Tonya saw bruises on his face and blood on his clothes. “I had to.” Truth this time.

  Tonya shivered, vindictively glad to see someone who had hurt her suffering. She liked the raw side of power too much, she knew. But she had always loved power. She wasn’t proud of the fact, but she couldn’t argue with her love.

  Moore’s ‘I had to’ didn’t make sense. She walked over to Moore, grabbed his head, and gazed into his eyes. Contact! Now she could use her charisma on him. Keaton rose silently from her spot on the coach and disappeared into the shadows. The skin on Tonya’s back crawled to have Keaton behind her.

  “What did you do?” Tonya asked.

  The man shivered and sweat dripped down his bruised cheeks. “She ordered me to. The other Focus. She ordered me to never speak of it. I can’t.” He smelled sick, ill with extreme stress, more than she would have expected even under the circumstances. Some sort of war raged in his own head.

  Her household was in danger! Adrenaline surged through her, and she was ready for a fight. “What was the Focus’s name? What did she look like?”

  “No name. Beautiful. I don’t remember what she looked like.”

  Tonya leaned on her charisma to the fullest, nearly enough to ruin a man, enough to give him nightmares for life. “Tell me what she had you do.” His eyes peeled back in utter terror. She felt the presence of the other Focus in Moore’s head, the remnants of the other Focus’s commands, resisting Tonya’s charisma. Futilely resisting.

  “She had me arrange for her to talk to your subs. She talked with them for a long time, alone, without my presence. I’m sure they told her everything they knew about you and your household. After she finished, she paid me and told me to cut off contact with you in such a way that you’d never do business with me again.”

  Tonya staggered, figuratively punched in the stomach. Some Focus had grabbed leverage on her. Not her boss Suzie, though, as Suzie didn’t have enough charisma to cloud Moore’s mind like this. It might have been a Focus working for Suzie.

  If she hadn’t had Keaton collect the bill, she would have never found out. Tonya wondered how often this had happened in the past.

  Her instant instinctive reaction had been right: her household was at risk. Old instincts surfaced, dormant since her pre-Keaton Monster hunting days. Back then, she killed to protect her people from the Monsters they hunted. The killing ate holes in her soul, but even so, she would do it again.

  This man was a victim, a normal, not a Monster.

  Still, he endangered her household. She couldn’t allow that. Nor was he much of a victim; if he ha
d been forced against his will, the Focus wouldn’t have had to bother with the payment. The situation was a gray toned mess. Damnation!

  Tonya dropped the man’s chin. “Forget the bill collection angle, Stacy,” she said. “I don’t want to alert whoever’s behind this that we’ve stumbled on her scheme.”

  “I sure as hell hope you’re not going to object to what I want to do to this fucking thing,” Keaton said from behind her.

  The Canadian had warned her about choices of this nature. She didn’t understand the larger stakes here, though, beyond ‘her’ versus ‘everyone else’.

  No. Not true. Truthfully, the situation was more like ‘her and Keaton against everyone else’, if she let Keaton carry through with her threat. Normally, Tonya would assure Stacy that she would handle it alone. Her charisma was good enough to send Moore running to South America or Africa, and ensure he would never return. It was what she should do to assuage her meager conscience. However, the Canadian had said ‘the obvious choices may not be the correct choices’.

  Damn it! Tonya wished the Canadian wasn’t so consistently correct.

  She considered the angles. Strategically, ‘Tonya and Keaton against everyone else’ would be better than ‘I’ll take care of the problem my way, thank you very much Stacy’, and keeping the Arm at, well, arm’s length. With this, she would plant the seed of ‘harm the Focus, harm me’ in Stacy’s mind – or, in this case, ‘infiltrate the Focus’s household, you degrade my Arm security’.

  Choosing this path would gain Tonya a closer ally.

  “No, I don’t object,” Tonya said, with a cold internal shiver. Tonya needed all the allies she could get, and the Canadian said she needed to reach beyond her usual habits. An Arm was certainly a heck of a long way from Tonya’s usual political Focus allies.

  Yes, this time they had to do it the Arm’s way. Stacy had been the one to discover the problem. Tonya had given the Arm the dubious benefit of deciding this idiot’s fate when she hired her. Now, Stacy had offered that choice back to Tonya.

  The Arm had been testing Tonya.

  “You don’t?” Stacy stalked into Tonya’s view again, licking her lips. She gave the man a loving look. “Hot damn. Reality sinks in to the Focus, for once.” Stacy paused. “You might want to leave, Tonya.”

  Tonya nodded, and backed away. “One last thing,” Stacy said. “Hank’s got me a surplus Transform.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t know. But I suspect we’ve made more enemies. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  Tonya nodded and left. Moore screamed, and Tonya reflexively glanced back into the dark room. Keaton was skinning a strip of flesh off the man’s right arm. Tonya winced and quickly turned away, but the shut door didn’t stop the screams, not given Tonya’s acute hearing. As pleasant as Stacy had been with her recently, the Arm still was a violent sadistic killer. Tonya couldn’t allow herself to forget that, not with her own dark urges pulling her in the same direction.

  Tonya still heard Moore scream until the sound faded into the distance. She shouldn’t have glanced back.

  She hoped she made the right choice.

  She knew it wouldn’t be her last difficult choice.

  She hoped she would still be recognizably human when the crisis ended.