No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (2 page)

I didn’t understand.  That was okay.  I understood I had mental problems.

After breakfast was the gym.  The gym was on the first floor in the wing that led toward the back. The room once had been a large high-ceiling family room, now stark and plain, with immaculate off-white mats to contrast the iron gray of the weights.  Keaton set up a buffet table, brought out some books and papers, and spread them out.  “Your experiences in withdrawal reset your Arm physique…and stop cringing when you hear the word ‘withdrawal’, Hancock, you’re an Arm!”  She pointed.  “This curve was from your first time through, which when you finished maturing you would have hit 295 pounds.”  I never got there, but I got close.  “I topped out at 265 pounds, a little less bulky on a much smaller frame,” Keaton said.  “Now, this is your current curve.”

I looked at it and didn’t understand a thing.  I met Keaton’s gaze and put that in my mind.

“Hmm.  Okay.  You’re going to top out at 180 pounds this time.  According to Zielinski’s old paper on the subject, that means you’ve replaced a lot of slow-twitch muscles with fast-twitch muscles.  You’ll be a lot quicker than you used to be, you’ll have less endurance, and be significantly less strong.  At your current weight, you should be able to lift about 300 pounds on your bench press with your Arm muscles.  You can’t do 150 now.  We’re going to fix that, but it’ll take time.”

The numbers didn’t make any sense.  Her words were gibberish.

“New problem,” Gilgamesh said.  His whisper contained no panic, far more confident than he had ever been when I heard his voice before.  He had followed us into the gym, but I hadn’t noticed.  There he was!  Over in the corner.  Dressed in workout gear.  I wondered why.  “Carol’s incapable of even basic logic and mathematics.  She can’t tell that 180 is smaller than 295.”

I nodded.  They were just numbers.  Arbitrary codes with minimal meaning.

“Crap,” Keaton said.  “Can’t speak, can’t do logic, but to my metasense I’d swear she’s back to normal.  We’re still fucked.”

Her words made me wonder, though.  How did Gilgamesh figure out my thoughts?

I ached to speak, a hard need.  Something moved inside me, not physical, not mental, but something in-between.  “Magic,” I said.  “Gilgamesh.  Magic.”

Keaton’s eyes opened wide.  “Yes!” she said, snapping her fingers.  A happy noise.

“That was more than strange,” Gilgamesh said.  “Just before she spoke she burned juice.”

I sat down, confused, and put my head in my hands.  Too much strangeness.  Gilgamesh knew about the big Arm secret of burning juice?  How did he know I burned juice?  Was his metasense that good?

“This is new,” Keaton said.  She wasn’t worried that Gilgamesh knew the big secret.  He showed no signs of torture.  Perhaps he was innately deferential to her dominance?  I wished I knew how I figured things out.  Had to be this ‘logic’ thing that no longer made sense to me.  “Burning juice is a physical trick, or at least it is for me.  The question is, then, whether this is another of her post-withdrawal changes or some trick she figured out while in Chicago?”

Such as this.  Keaton’s ‘logic’ went over my head.  Annoyed, I leapt up and hopped on top of a cabinet that held gym supplies, and leapt over to one of the two ropes.  “Unsafe,” Keaton barked out with her drill sergeant voice.  Not at me, so I ignored her.  I climbed up the rope, upside down, until my feet met the ceiling.  Gilgamesh vanished for real this time, taking cover outside the gym.

I hissed and growled down at the room.  Angry and frustrated, I wanted to bite something and thrash it.  Some creature’s neck would do.

Keaton walked over to the bottom of the rope and glared up at me.  “Get the fuck down from there and lose the Monster attitude,” she said.  Her voice brooked no delay and I followed her orders.  Only her orders hadn’t been given in her drill sergeant voice.  I knew they were orders, though.  I didn’t know why.

I met her gaze, quizzical.  “Monster?”

“Your predator effect doesn’t come across as Arm, but as Monster, when you do that,” Keaton said.

This was good and bad.  Keaton didn’t think of me as an Arm but as a Monster.  I wasn’t competition.  My memories flagged this as ‘good’.  However, I flagged Monsters in my memories as ‘bad’, as in ‘to be slain on sight’.  Keaton didn’t appear ready to kill me, though.  I didn’t understand.

“Notmonster.”

Keaton shook her head.  “You work out.”  She turned to the gym entrance.  “Gilgamesh.”

There!  That was so
neat
to see him appear and disappear like magic.  I started to work out.  This I knew.  I didn’t even have to think.  I just exercised until I exhausted myself and couldn’t move.  A few minutes later, I started up again.  Exercising felt good.  I could exercise like this all day and night, as long as I got food.

As I worked out Keaton got in Gilgamesh’s face.  “That was one sorry ass bit of panic, chickenshit.  What the fuck have I been teaching you?”

“Find a place to hide so I can defend myself and fight back, if appropriate,” Gilgamesh said, stressed.  Of course, he had a Keaton in his face.  I would be stressed, too.

“And where did you end up this time?”

“Kitchen, northeast corner.”

“Where you didn’t have line of sight to toss any of your rotten eggs at the problem.  I swear, a blind lame housecat could do better.”  Keaton tapped her foot.  “Let’s try this again.  Boo!”

She hit him with Arm predator, threatening death, from two inches away from his face.  I couldn’t follow his movement, but found him a moment later behind a dumbbell rack with a tennis ball in his hands.

Needless to say, this bit of entertainment totally confused me.  I treated what followed as if I watched a Saturday morning cartoon in a foreign language.

“Better,” Keaton said, and then charged him yelling “Yaaah!  Yaah!”  He found another place to hide.  This went on for several minutes, his hiding and her charging, his stress level growing, until he did something that left a yellow stain in the air.

“You sicked up?” Keaton said.  “You’re off your game today, kiddo.  Clean that shit up, dammit.”

“Wait,” Gilgamesh said, raising his hand.  “Carol sensed my sick-up.”  He closed his eyes.  “The juice component to it, my guess.”

“Which is too faint for me to pick up at all,” Keaton said.  “Yet another potentially beneficial change.  This is starting to freak me the fuck out.”

I wondered what in the hell either of them was talking about and why Keaton sounded like she had been hanging out with the hippies.  Keaton frowned at me and produced a leather belt from where it had been hiding on her arm and snapped it on her hand.  “Remember this?” she said to me.

I nodded.

“I haven’t had to use this form of inducement yet to keep you moving,” she said.  “Does that need to change?”

I shook my head ‘no’.  This was a point of honor with me.  I could repeatedly push myself to utter exhaustion, in proper Arm style, all on my own, thank you very much.  I went back to my exercises and tuned out Keaton and Gilgamesh’s discussion about my capabilities I couldn’t understand anyway.

Yup.  I remained a work in progress.

Gilgamesh: April 9, 1968

“Listen up,” Keaton said.  She strode over to Gilgamesh, a scary panic-inducing buzz-saw of a dwarf, radiating annoyance.  “I want your panicky self back after dinner.  We need to spend some quiet time trying to figure out what’s going on with Hancock.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, but the Skinner, an angry sneer on her face, had already turned back to the gym and Carol’s never ending exercises.

He slipped out of the house, picked up a set of keys from the garage, and slowly jogged back to his apartment.  The farther he got from the Skinner the more the stress eased, but he couldn’t totally relax.  His Tiamat remained in the Skinner’s care and the Skinner had made perfectly clear, repeatedly, that if he didn’t help her with Tiamat’s recovery he would no longer be welcome in the San Francisco area.

Being an Arm pet wasn’t anything like he had imagined.  The Skinner hadn’t laid a finger on him that he hadn’t invited, and she made no effort to confine him.  She wasn’t a pleasant person, at least not often; she sneered at him, belittled him, and repeatedly insulted and humiliated him.  Several times he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the Skinner’s true feelings toward him – she thought he was a disgusting pervert with abhorrent personal habits bad enough to make even her cringe.  None of Sky’s warnings about lusty Arm sex, beatings or shackles, had been correct.

Nor had Sky mentioned anything about ‘his’ Arm spending her evenings in her workshop basement torturing one poor man after another.  Or making love to another Arm, which Gilgamesh found impossibly distracting.

Worse, for some crazy reason the Skinner had decided it was her duty in life to improve Gilgamesh.  Thank God she hadn’t tried to make him into an Arm; what she did to him was nothing like what she had done to Tiamat.  She hadn’t bothered to ask his permission.  Scary smart, she understood what he needed without quizzing him.  Panic training – not to teach him to avoid panicking (though some of that happened naturally), but what to do when panicking.  The Skinner thought panic was
useful
.

Oh, and running.  She had convinced herself Gilgamesh could run about as well as she could without burning, and in her drill sergeant manner she found a way to prove her supposition.  She didn’t say a thing, she just ran behind him and radiated her emotions.

About the emotions…the Skinner had figured out the great Crow secret of metasensing emotions before she even lured him in, either from her meetings with him or from her dealings with a supposedly disguised Sky.  Not surprisingly she turned his trick against him every chance she could.

So far, he found himself quite impressed with the Skinner.  At least as long as he kept from thinking about what happened every night to her torture victims.  And the fact he helped her hunt down her prey to keep her juiced up and safer to him.

On the way into his apartment Gilgamesh collected four days of mail.  He dropped the stack on the kitchen counter and dealt with other issues, such as the smelly kitchen garbage he needed to toss.  He showered, changed clothes, and finally went through his mail, separating out the bills into one pile and the Crow letters into another.

Two caught his eye: one from Sky with no return address, written in a shaky version of Sky’s normally exquisite cursive, and another from of all people Shadow, Thomas the Dreamer and Innocence.

He winced at the latter letter and opened it first.  The letter was short and direct.

Dearest Gilgamesh,

You recently accrued a significant debt of obligation toward several Crows who aided you in the shepherding of the rescue of the Arm known to you as Tiamat.  Your current proximity to her and one other Arm is well known to us.  We three, acting in legitimate concert, and speaking for all Crows, have purchased this debt of obligation.  We now formally reclaim it, by assigning you, Gilgamesh, the task of informing us the identity of the entity or entities who are hunting down Crows, colloquially termed Crow Killer.  Good luck.

Gilgamesh looked at the letter, and at what the letter said and didn’t say.  The artfully crafted letter wasn’t in Shadow’s style.  They knew he was an Arm pet.  Several other terms stood out as noteworthy, none in his normal vocabulary, all of which shivered his juice: ‘shepherding’, ‘legitimate concert’, ‘formally reclaim’, ‘informing us’ and, of course, ‘debt of obligation’.  They were well used terms these others knew well, even if he didn’t, as potent as the more common Transform terms of pheromone flow, stripping, pumping, dross, Arm and Housebound.

Someone was having a party and hadn’t invited him.  The party likely started around 1952 or so and had been going ever since.  The hundred and fifty to two hundred Crows in the United States were enough to form a strong society, save for the fact the upper end of this society must have decided not to include the young Crows in the real deal and kept the good stuff for themselves.  There must be a large number of real old Crows.  Shadow was one of them, and the question remained on Gilgamesh’s tongue: how old was Shadow, anyway?  What could the older Crows do?  How limited were Crow capabilities?

Or: how unlimited?

Gilgamesh wished he understood more about Focus society.  If he did, he might be able to extrapolate and compare.  He needed another Crow, to bounce ideas back and forth with.  The assigned task was, at least at first glance, a death sentence.  As a young Crow, he possessed none of the physical benefits or dross manipulation talents of an older Crow.  This should be a job for an older, more active, more talented Crow, like Sky.  Selecting him made no sense.  He wondered if the job was nothing more than a fancy death sentence, an attempt to properly and politely rid the continent of one particular too-troublesome Crow.

Perhaps his pseudo-Guru Sky could help.  He opened Sky’s letter and read.

Gilgamesh:

I’m barely able to write and I’ll have more to write later, probably much later.  I did help Kali rescue your Tiamat, but I’m not sure if Tiamat can recover.  I’m sorry.  I’m in a bad way, not from what the Walking Nightmare did to me, but from the nearly living evil gristle dross suffusing the place.  If I can trust what I experienced, I got attacked inside the Detention Center by Focus Pissed Tuber, and she’s powerful, evil, nasty, understands far too much about us and our fine feathered compatriots, and is out to get us.  Oh, she wasn’t physically there.  Worse, Focus L was there with me, didn’t sense a thing and strongly disagrees, saying Focus Pissed Tuber is a weak Focus, save politically.  So be careful!  There’s far more going on than meets a young Crow’s eyes.