No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (4 page)

We stopped in front of Focus Rodriguez’s place, a dry cleaners next to a boarded up hardware store under renovations.  I got out of the car, sniffed the air and found the sidewalk covered with juice traces.

Oooh.  Juice.  For me?  Gilgamesh shouted something that sounded like “Stop” but I rushed into the dry cleaners, through the dry cleaners and into the back room, which wasn’t a dry cleaners back room but somebody’s living room or common room.  People scattered, guns came out, Gilgamesh shouted some warning about an out of control Arm (which induced me to glance around, almost interrupting my stalk, but I didn’t see another Arm).  As I glanced around, I lost the ability to metasense juice traces or juice, so I stopped.  Strange.

The lights went out in my head and I hit the ground.

Gilgamesh: April 11, 1968

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Gilgamesh said, trying to get a word in edgewise.  “I’d already brought her out of her stalk.”

Two Transforms held him, one on his left arm and one on his right.  He wasn’t sure he had ever seen so many drawn weapons in his life.  His Spanish was minimal at best, rusty to boot, heavily accented Cuban, and he didn’t even bother polluting the air with it here.  This wasn’t Miami and the accent here just sounded wrong.  Which left a problem as nobody else spoke English.

Unlike her people, Icon (the Crow name for Focus Rodriguez) wasn’t the least bit flustered.  Slowly but surely, one calm order and one finger point at a time, she directed her people elsewhere.  In a moment, no guns pointed at him at all.

Jewelry and ornaments, all bedecked with what had to be juice patterns, covered the Focus.  One silver cross in Icon’s left hand held his full attention, something about the juice pattern on it shrieking ‘danger’ to him at an instinctive level he wasn’t at all comfortable with.

He controlled his panic and didn’t flee, although following the Skinner’s advice he kept Carol and one other person between him and the Focus.  Which didn’t appear to help the situation much, as he needed to move the two beefy guys who held him, which they found disconcerting.  His movement did quiet his panic, though.

“I metasensed that, and I thank you,” Focus Rodriguez said, in English.  She had no problem picking out his voice amid her panicked mob.  “One jostle from my people would have set her off in some other way.  I had to drop her.”

Probably right.

Icon eventually quieted her people and chased away her Transforms, leaving five normal and well-armed bodyguards with her.  She sat down beside Tiamat and he joined her on the dirty floor, after straightening his new suit (purchased for this meeting, at the Skinner’s orders).

There was no mistaking that Icon wasn’t an ordinary dirt-poor daughter of the barrio.  She wore a black hooded cloak over a dark brown dress.  Dark garnet and gold rings adorned her fingers, dark beads were woven into her hair, and a prominent pewter cross hung around her neck.  Her skin possessed a flawless golden smoothness even actresses couldn’t achieve in real life.  She was lean and healthy, with the muscle tone of an athlete.  Despite the fact that she looked nineteen, she possessed the confident firmness of someone much older.

“Arm Keaton was correct,” Focus Rodriguez said, after examining Tiamat for a minute.  “Arm Hancock’s juice structure is a disaster.”

“We thought we had that fixed, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said.

Icon looked him over.  Disconcerting.  This was no low-end Focus; she was plenty dark and her glow exuded ample strength.  “Then neither Crow nor Arm metasense is good enough to pick up the real damage.  She can speak?”  Focus Rodriguez spoke with a strong accent, not a native English speaker.

“One or two words at a time.”

The Focus bit her lower lip.  “Bad.  The problem, though, is not physical.  It’s mental, psychological.  Arm Keaton was right to suspect this problem.  I can help.”

This was the cue the Skinner had warned him to look for: time to offer the envelope with the payment.  He did so and the Focus leafed through the money in the envelope to make sure the agreed upon price was there.  One part of him sneered at the mercantile aspects of the exchange, but a larger, more empathic part of him saw ‘huge Transform household, nearly all unemployable because they are Transforms’, and understood the significance of Keaton’s payment.

“We’ll bring her conscious, without your strange spell that turned off her metasense,” Focus Rodriquez said.  Gilgamesh nodded and cleaned off the rotten egg effect, not commenting that his trick wasn’t a spell.  The Skinner said his rotten egg effect wasn’t good enough to fool a mature Arm, but in Tiamat’s current condition, his trick would be more than adequate.  The Skinner had been right.

Icon touched Carol with a piece of costume jewelry.  Carol sat up a moment later, radiating hostility until she found Gilgamesh.  She forced herself to relax.  Somewhere inside her was the real Tiamat.  The real Tiamat wanted out.  Carol wasn’t comfortable with the Tiamat part of herself yet.

He did find himself quite intrigued by this Focus, the only one he had ever seen or metasensed who worked analogously to the way he worked.  She studied him just as intently.  He suspected she never before had a Crow to examine up close.  Panic bubbled up, but his hard-earned lessons from the Skinner paid off and he redirected it toward a thorough examination of his tactical situation.  Which sucked, but the attention he paid to his situation worked its magic, and diminished his panic.  He put some work into visualizing Icon as a person, not as the difficult Focus portrayed in the Crow letters.

“Focus?” Carol said.

Focus Rodriguez nodded.  “I can’t help you directly, Arm Hancock.  It doesn’t lie within my powers to physically heal; nor can I modify your juice structure.  However, I can show you where the problem is and you should be able to do something about your problem yourself.”

“Cool.”

“Stare at this and talk to me as best you can,” the Focus said.  She took off her pewter cross and held it in front of Carol’s eyes, which turned vacant.

“Okay.  Shiny.  Cross.  Fingers.  Juice.”

“Bad things were done to you.  They were bad, but you are strong.  You are not imprisoned any more, you can face them.”

“Bad things.  Bad juice.  Bad Focuses.”

“Right there,” Focus Rodriquez said.  Gilgamesh couldn’t metasense the slightest bit of what Icon did; whatever she did remained too complex for him to understand and used so little juice that all he could sense was a faint ‘something’ in front of Carol.  “Right there you made the problem go away, the memories of your imprisonment, and it took you with them.”

“Cruel bitches.  Pain.  Lots.”

“You want yourself back?”

“Yes.  Please.”

“Then you must fix what I am showing you.”

“Afraid.”

Gilgamesh took Carol’s hands in his.  She smiled, appreciating what little comfort he could give.

“Fear means this is important, not that you shouldn’t do it,” Focus Rodriquez said.

Carol leaned forward until the cross nearly lay on her nose.  Gilgamesh sensed her concentration build and metasensed the juice churn inside her.  She burned juice internally again, the trick that still confused the Skinner.  Carol’s burn went on and on, then stopped with a shriek from Carol.  She thrashed away from Focus Rodriguez and himself, bucked and shrieked her way across the floor and over to a wall, where she huddled up into a fetal ball, hands over her eyes, moaning.

“¿De dónde ir el Cuervo…oh, there you are,” Focus Rodriguez said.  Gilgamesh had panicked and hidden himself on the other side of the common room, behind a cabinet, a confuse metasense rotten egg in his hand.  The Focus studied him, now wary.  She hadn’t considered him even the slightest threat beforehand.

“She’s dangerous in this state,” Gilgamesh said.  Tiamat’s glow settled into a new pattern; her emotions roiled with fear, anger, hostility and aggression.

“Not to you she isn’t.  Her real self is back and despite appearances, she is in control.  Crow, she needs you.”

“Ma’am,” Gilgamesh said.  He suspected Icon could parse his glow as easily as she parsed Tiamat’s.  Her attention made him feel naked.

He carefully crossed the room, undamping his glow and making sure Tiamat noticed.  She raised one hand to him before he got half way across the room, and when he reached her and sat, she buried her head in his lap and hugged him tight enough to nearly break his hips.

“Focus Biggioni must die,” Tiamat said, her first complete sentence since her ordeal.

Gilgamesh shivered at the predator in her words.

Yes, Tiamat was back.

Chapter 2

…and the Rev. Loomis has proposed a constitutional amendment banning Transform multi-family households as a way to defend the struggling American family.  Now I know that a lot of people have attacked Rev. Loomis as being Transformophobic, but the real issue — and you have to face the facts — is that Transforms choose to live in sin.

“Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

Carol Hancock: April 12, 1968

“The only thing off limits is anything after they turned the lights out on me,” I said.  I drove, not at all interested in whatever passed as Gilgamesh’s driving style.  I just adjusted how I drove until I found the right place to keep Gilgamesh calm.  Magic, but what wasn’t?

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.  “What Keaton wanted me to do was test your mind.  Is this okay?”

Gilgamesh was a loud ‘Boo!’ from falling apart in utter panic.  I worked on quieting myself to be
pleasant Carol
.  Which wasn’t what I wanted to be doing right this instant.  Back to myself, or back to having more of myself than before, I wanted to go out and be a predator for a while.  A good stalk would quiet my nerves.  I was obligated, though, to be pleasant.  I wasn’t sure why.  More of this ‘logic’ nonsense.

I went with my gut.  “Ask the questions.  Let’s see how I do.”

The answer was: poorly.  My memory was back to Arm normal, but as I feared, my grasp on logic hadn’t improved much.  I now understood simple ‘if X then Y’ style logic, but anything more complex turned into gibberish.  I could do arithmetic in my head but couldn’t connect formulas to objects or concepts.  Triangle areas remained beyond me.  Oh, and I couldn’t read.  I knew this when I figured out that the squiggles on the radio dial and speedometer and the road signs likely meant something.

After those tests I told Gilgamesh I needed to get out of the car and work off some steam.  He didn’t object, but afterwards said that he couldn’t remember me being able to leap as I had when I was bounding around beside the highway.  I suspected his observation meant something, so like with many things that meant something I couldn’t understand, I stuck his words away in my memories for later.

My biggest fear was the size of the tab I was running up with Keaton.  At some point she would demand repayment and I had some bad fears about what she might want.  The wonderful old phrase “I’ll do anything” haunted my thoughts.  I didn’t want to go there again.

“Carol?  I need to talk to you, if that’s okay,” Gilgamesh said.  A panicky whisper, barely audible over the steady freeway hum of progress at 75 miles per hour.

“Sure.”  I had hours of driving to go and any distraction would do.  Getting my mind partly fixed had shaken loose a large number of bad memories, all of which I tried to process.

“I haven’t been talking to you about personal issues, for fear they would upset you, or that you hadn’t recovered enough to, um…”  His voice trailed off.

“Understand?  Cope?”

“Yes.”  He took a deep breath.  “You need to understand that I’ve wanted to talk to you in a calm setting since the beginning, since St. Louis.  Just the fact I’m fulfilling one of my dreams has got me on edge.”

I was beginning to suspect Crows didn’t think like other human beings.  “I understand,” I said.  This talk was important to him.  He had likely been rehearsing since Keaton grabbed him.  Or before.

“First, I’d like to apologize for not being able to participate in your rescue.  I’m just a young Crow.”

I had to laugh.  He could hide from me, find me in the vast expanse of the United States, cope with Keaton and he still needed to apologize.  I remembered some of the story.  “You got me out of captivity without having to be present.  What you did is nothing to apologize for.”

He appreciated the compliment.  “I asked myself ‘what would Carol do?’”

“You organized the rescue.”

“As best as possible.”  He went on to tell an amazing story of how he had juggled his Crow contacts, Keaton and Rizzari, making sure they all had the information they needed at the right time.

“What you did is amazing,” I said.  “I’m not sure I would have been able to do that.”  We eyed each other closely.  Part of our relationship was a juice-based love thing, another was that we made damned good resources for each other’s plans.

In return, I told him about Focus Teas and her schemes.  I didn’t think he liked many Focuses, if any.

Later I sensed him gathering up his courage again.  “There’s one personal issue I would like to discuss,” he said.

Sex.  I carefully guarded my reactions and motioned for him to continue.  I owed Gilgamesh my life, but so far I hadn’t lived up to my end of the bargain.  He loved me, and wanted me, but he held back.  In my current position, with no territory, no resources, and half a brain I would accept pretty much whatever he wanted on the subject.

“I didn’t sleep with you because I didn’t feel it would be right,” he said.  “Nor did I sleep with Keaton.  I understand the two of you think differently about sex than I do, but I’m still burdened with my old fashioned human hang-ups.”

“No problem.  I’m still working on understanding my needs as an Arm.  Some of my choices when I’m high on juice bother me a lot when I’m not.”  I paused.  “But you’re a Major Transform.  I won’t press you on this, but if we’re going to be long-term work partners, the juice will make us sleep together.  We both have our own mind reading tricks, although they’re different, and we won’t be able to hide our wants and desires from each other.”  I wanted to sleep with him as much as he wanted to sleep with me.  He understood, but as far as I remembered, Keaton kept me tightly leashed.

“I have a problem,” Gilgamesh said.  “Early in your recovery Keaton lured me into her bed, with you, thinking that if I slept with you this would help bring you back to yourself.  Uh, this didn’t go well.”

I nodded.  “The shiner and the defensive wounds.  I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame you.  That’s not the problem.  I panicked, bad.  That’s the problem.  For a young Crow like me, well, panic takes a long time to wear off.”

So, we had intimacy issues.  At least my mindless attack hadn’t kept him from cuddling me.  I didn’t think I would have ever come back to myself without his cuddling.

“Again, no problem.  I won’t press.”  Yet.  I was sure he caught the ‘yet’ with his emotion reading trick.  “I’ve never asked and I’m not sure if this is something you can talk about, but when did you first find me?”

“St. Louis.  On September 18
th
.  I transformed, as best as I’ve been able to work out, on July 14
th
.  I still used my birth name and I’d met just one other Crow, Sinclair, when I found you.”

“I need to meet Sinclair and some of your other Crow friends.  After I’ve recovered some more.  If I have to be tied up and muzzled, I still need to meet them.”

“This will be difficult to arrange.  When something is new, it seems dangerous to a Crow.  If what’s new is dangerous, the Crow panics and runs away.  Crows must work hard to learn to do anything new.  I don’t think you’ll need to be muzzled and tied down.  What you’ll need is patience for many preliminary meetings.”

I thought about Gilgamesh’s statement about his transformation.  “I transformed on September 9
th
, so you have a couple of months on me.  Was being a baby Crow as devastating for you as being a baby Arm was for me?”

Gilgamesh closed his eyes, listening to the hum of the road.  “I couldn’t talk to people.  I couldn’t let anyone near me without panicking and fleeing.  I nearly panicked myself to death once when I stumbled over a house cat.  I’d never even heard a hint that male Major Transforms existed.  I thought I had gone insane.”

I took his hand and squeezed.  “I killed my own daughter when I transformed.”

We didn’t talk for the next ten minutes, providing silent comfort to each other.  Gilgamesh was the first Transform I had told about my daughter.

Fate had linked us from the start.  I had been partly joshing, partly reaching when I called us long-term work partners, but in fact we were far more linked than I realized.  The linkage explained some of those screwy extra emotional reactions I had when he was around and when he wasn’t.

He was right to want to take things slow between us.  The last thing either of us needed was to give the damned juice any more openings to mess us up.

“In your letters and stories, I was surprised that when you met Keaton in Philadelphia you didn’t collapse in panic,” I said.  I had fallen into the Crow headspace so much the whispering came naturally to me and my predator effect was gone.

“Compared to the Beast Men who held me, Keaton was comforting and confusing.  Dealing with Beast Men is instinctive for a Crow.  Terrifying, but instinctive.  I seem to understand when I’m in danger from them and when I’m not.  I don’t have these instincts around Arms.”  He paused.  “She did panic me into sicking up on her.  I had been in a state of panic for so long, because of my captivity, that I had in some fashion gotten used to being panicked.”

He didn’t say anything, but I read in him his initial reaction to Keaton: ugly, dour, monstrous.  He hadn’t appreciated the beauty of Arm musculature then.  He did now, although I think his current reaction to Keaton was more ‘handsome’ than ‘beautiful’.

---

“No, Carol.  This is Keaton’s private place.”

Well, yes, but I wasn’t sure why this agitated him.  I mean, it was just torture.  The poor man down there deserved what happened to him.  Probably.  I listened to Gilgamesh, though.  I had come up with a rule: if Gilgamesh gave me advice, and meant it, and I could understand his advice, I should do it.

I used the free time to amuse myself by abusing Keaton’s gym.  I soon figured out how to sprint across the floor, run up a wall, step across the ceiling and grab one of her climbing ropes from the top.  Speed and momentum.  Once upon a time I would have been able to put what I did down in numbers, but now I found things more fun to just do.

Keaton, refreshed, walked into the gym just after sunrise.  I smiled and leapt down to greet her.

She reacted with body language, freezing me in place.  Well, this is what she wanted me to do, and so I did so.  She examined me minutely, asking me questions, and getting the test results from Gilgamesh.

“You’re on your way back for real now, Hancock,” Keaton said.  The love in her voice I remembered from before my trip was gone.  “I’d rate your predatory presence as similar to when I first met you as Larry Borton.”  Baby Arm levels.  Gaah.  “Your ability to read people’s off the charts, as usual.  Your metasense needs work.  Or something.”

“I believe this is a real change from the directed withdrawal scarring,” Gilgamesh said.

I found myself hauled in the air, legs churning madly, and slung under Keaton’s arm.

“Well, your comment definitely got a reaction,” Keaton said, deadpan.  I heard her eyeballs roll in her voice.  I wasn’t sure what I had done or why, but my body overflowed with adrenaline.  I think I had forgotten about Gilgamesh and took his whisper as some sort of attack.  I took deep breaths until the bad emotions cleared out.

“Sorry, ma’am,” I said, still slung under Keaton’s arm like a package.  “Something set me off.”  I went back through my memories until I found the magic moment.  “Somebody did directed withdrawal scarring on me?  Who?”

“We don’t have a clue,” Keaton said.  “According to all the information we have, the only Transform near you while you were in withdrawal was yourself.”

Ooh, a locked room murder mystery.  When I was a normal I loved to read those.  I missed being able to read.

A memory inside of me wanted to free itself.  “Freaky,” I said, regarding the mystery of the directed withdrawal scarring.  “Oh, and if you don’t mind, I have a memory inside of me who wants to talk to you, ma’am.”

Gilgamesh: April 12, 1968

“Go ahead, let’s hear this,” the Skinner said.  She placed Carol on the ground like a toy soldier and stepped back.  He continued to hide behind the rowing machine, a rotten egg in his hand.  Carol had lost track of him after she went berserk, and he had slipped entirely from her mind.

Tiamat’s sanity was only a thin veneer over the Monster within, as he had suspected ever since Focus Rodriguez’s trick brought her back to herself.

Carol steadied herself, and then changed.  One second the new Carol, the next the old scary Tiamat.  The Skinner tensed but held her ground.

“I’m only a memory,” Tiamat said.  “A memory of Carol Hancock, the Arm.  I have no idea who is listening to me, but this information needs to go to the Arm Stacy Keaton, the researcher Henry Zielinski and the Focus Lorraine Rizzari.  I composed this while confined in the CDC’s Virginia Transform Detention Center, while being held in medical quarantine by the CDC.  Currently it’s March 23
rd
, 1968; I don’t know the time of day.  If you want to know how I did this trick, ask Keaton.”

Empathic pain flooded through Gilgamesh, crushing him.  The Tiamat memory held what she experienced at the time and her emotions were horrific.  She was facing her own destruction.  He wanted to comfort her, but there was no way he would be able to comfort a memory.