A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (28 page)

Tears ran down my face.

He breathed.  I breathed.

A pain spike ran through him.  I felt
his pain.

I entered the world of dream while still awake.  The white princess played pinball.  Today I
saw her haunted and evil sea-green eyes.  The pinball changed from chrome steel to white burning fire and chased me still.  Around the evil white princess the Madonna stalked, the Christ child in her arms today
my
male Transform.  Today she couldn’t even fight the evil white princess.

I thought without words, just emotions.  I wanted the Madonna to win, to banish the evil white princess and take the waking dream world away from me.  Without words I did something I would have never thought to do if I had words to speak – I burned juice in the waking dream to get my way.
  Not much.  A little.

A little proved enough. 
The last thing I saw of the dream world, before it vanished, was from my place in the arms of the Madonna.  She marked my forehead with the sign of the cross…and I came back to myself.

I remained in my cell, pressed up against the Monster-proof net.  The closed circuit television still showed the volunteer Transform and he remained in peri-withdrawal.  I rode the A-Train on the fast track to hell, and there would be no escape.

T
he Madonna had blessed me, though, and the incessant whispering had gone away.

Without warning
, I shivered in fear, realization and exultation.  Thousands of pieces of disparate information suddenly congealed into one true fact: the person behind this torture understood Arms, thoroughly and completely.  This wasn’t some random Focus bitch with delusions of grandeur that got her rocks off torturing her household.  This Focus bitch not only knew how to break people, she knew how to handle Arms.  A Focus bitch who understood our strengths and weaknesses.  Who handled Arms, in specific, one Arm.  Who broke Transforms for a living.  No, the mastermind behind this wasn’t Focus Patterson.  Only one Focus bitch on the entire planet would be able to pull this off and I knew who she was.

“You’re dead, Biggioni!” I shouted.  She was Zielinski’s nightmare, Teas’ leading candidate for being Officer Canon, and if my detective work was correct
, Keaton’s secret Network contact in Philadelphia.

Sometime in the past, she had broken Keaton to the reins. 
This time she got me.

“You’re dead!  Dead!  Dead!”

Exhausted, I sank to the floor of the cell, still clutching the Monster-proof fence.  Words left me again; again I fell into the mind of the volunteer Transform.  No waking dream this time.  Only the Arm emotions and Arm instincts remained.  As I clutched the Monster-proof fence I drew juice, and drew and drew and drew and got nothing.

Tonya Biggioni: March 23, 1968

“So what did the Arm do when the Transform got into range and it wasn’t given to her, Hank?” Tonya asked Zielinski
, over the phone.  She had returned from Deborah’s around seven and now tried to catch up on all the business she had ignored to make her trip to Queens.

Her
wonderful trip to Queens.  Every time she thought about the trip, a happy glow washed through her.  Deborah had actually invited her to visit when the baby was born.  As often as Tonya wanted.  She had even considered the possibility of coming to visit Tonya.

Tonya found it
tough to concentrate on business this evening.  Her mind kept lingering on Deborah’s smile, and imagining the face of a newborn grandchild.

Luckily, Tonya
found Zielinski at their shared office at the CDC.  The phone connection was bad, unfortunately.  She suspected the FBI had the phone bugged, as well.  Back to the real world, the world of nasty people doing nasty things.

She and Hank
remained on a first name basis, despite what Tonya did to the Arm.  Zielinski didn’t approve, and his revenge consisted of milking Tonya for every bit of information.  Tonya found it difficult to cut him off.

“Hmm?” he said, not answering her question.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, over the faint static of the long distance connection.

“Hank, you’re not fine. You’ve been acting oddly since I set my plan in motion.  Is what we’re doing with the Arm bothering you?”

He paused, and Tonya would
pay almost anything to see his face right now.  “No, no, I’m fine,” he said, but his voice sounded forced.

“It does bother you,” she said.

“Does it bother you?”

All right, so maybe she was probing a little too personally.  But, “a little,” she
said.

“Why?”

Tonya rotated the empty cup of cocoa in her hands and looked out the window of her home office.  Adjusted the juice flow yet again.  She was embarrassed about how badly the juice had been flowing in the past week.  Too much stress.  Too long in this house.  “What I put into motion here is a terrible thing to do to a person.  Just because it’s justified doesn’t mean what I’m doing isn’t terrible.  The lesser of two evils is still evil.”  She paused for a moment.  “I keep thinking we’re missing something.”  The evidence showing the Arm was the person behind the tagged Transform killings and kidnappings refused to sway Hank.  He had tried hard to convince Tonya of the Arm’s innocence and failed.  Specifically, he couldn’t understand the kidnappings.  They didn’t fit what he understood about Arms.

Tonya would prove him wrong soon enough, as soon as the Arm broke and stopped lying.

“Do you wish you hadn’t given the CDC this plan of yours?” Zielinski said.

Tonya licked her lips.
“No.  This needed to be done.”  She couldn’t tell him about Wini’s pressure.  “I feel bad, but that’s nothing to how I would feel if more people died because I hadn’t done this.”

Zielinski didn’t respond.

“So, your turn,” Tonya said, returning the question, knowing she showed too much of her bitch side.  “What bothers you about this?”

“We don’t
understand what we’re doing,” Zielinski said, after a pause, over a burst of phone static.  “I’ve harped on this before.  Hancock shows many anomalous reactions to low juice.  There’s no predicting what might happen.  She could easily go into withdrawal unexpectedly.  Also, if you’re really trying to figure out a way to get us all past the upcoming Transform Sickness demographics bomb, killing the Arms isn’t going to help.  If the Arms and Focuses declare open season on each other, neither of you is going to win.  And Keaton is going to take what you’re doing as a provocation.”

Tonya drummed her fingers on her desk and chewed her lower lip.  “You’re not making
this any better.”

“Ummm.”

“But you know,” Tonya continued, “sometimes you just have to make the best decision you can with the available information. Then we just have to pray that we’re making the right one.”

“I hope you’re good at those prayers.”

Tonya grunted agreement.  He must be depressed over something, his big weakness.

“I’m interested in what the Arm will tell us when she eventually does talk, though.  We’re looking for the information about the people she’s killed, but think about what else she might know.”  Tonya envisioned Rizzari’s embarrassment over her mistaken vetting of the Arm.  “How
did she live?  Who did she deal with?  How did she decide who got to live and who got to die?  How did she and Keaton stay underground so successfully so long?  She must be dealing with other people, but somehow she managed to hide from the Network for months.  We didn’t think that was possible, especially for a young Arm like her.  Why didn’t anyone report her?  How did Keaton stay hidden in Philadelphia, right under my nose, for so long?  Dammit, Hank, Keaton trained a new Arm right under my nose for nine months, with the new Arm making the typical young Major Transform many mistakes, without my picking up even the slightest clue.  I think when we start getting the truth from her, the truth will shock everyone.”

Zielinski didn’t answer.  Tonya suspected that her attempt to break through his depression
didn’t have the effect she intended.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Tonya
said, standing and stretching.  The phone came skittering across the desk to follow her.

“I’m fine.
You need to know something, Tonya.”

“What?”

“Some time after the closed circuit television screen turned on to show Carol the live picture of the volunteer Transform she shouted your name.  Somehow, even with the low juice effects on Carol’s mind, she figured out you were the one behind the plan.”

“My god.”

“She threatened your life, actually.”

Tonya sat down, heart pounding.  “Thanks for telling me this.”

“Any time.”  Zielinski hung up.  There was an air of finality in his words.

Sky: March 24, 1968

Sky picked up the Arm at full range and gave the signal.  They
had discussed Arm psychology for hours and finally came to the conclusion that if Lori left herself a target, instead of doing the standard Focus ‘hide behind walls of bodyguards’, Keaton’s curiosity would be piqued and she wouldn’t follow through with her veiled threat to go after the household.

They
discussed other possibilities for Keaton’s approach, including the option she might dress up as a male and ring the front doorbell.  The odds were Keaton would still be in a bad mood after failing to penetrate the CDC by herself.  Sky assured them that in this case, Keaton would be too aggravated to pull off the front doorbell approach.

Everyone agreed that Keaton would approach at night.

Lori meditated on a bench beside the swimming pool, dressed in a bikini.  She had dozens of tricks mentally prepared for the encounter, based on Sky’s prediction that Keaton’s first task would be to establish her dominance over the household.  Sky advised everyone to let the Arm be dominant, but Lori refused.

Lori’s cold words chilled
Sky, and secretly warmed the hearts of her leadership team.  “Inferno is my household, and nobody this side of God is going to take Inferno away from me.  Ever.”

None of them predicted Keaton would stop cold
, just under a half kilometer out.

“What’s
the Arm doing?” Ann asked Sky.  Ann, Sky, Sadie and Tim waited outside for Keaton, near the main house, under the moonlit shadow of the wall in the obstacle course. Armed, but at Sky’s insistence, with their weapons holstered.  Connie waited inside the house, with the rest of the guards, weapons drawn.  The non-combatants huddled down in the basement-level fallout shelter, safe.  At least they were on their way to the basement when Keaton stopped cold.

“Trying to figure out what’s going on,” Sky said.  At half a kilometer, Sky could do far more than just see Keaton; he
metasensed her emotions and read her lips.  She was angry and cursing furiously.  “I think we spooked her.  Our arrangement’s a mistake.”  He wanted permission to signal the Arm and tell her to come in to discuss things, but the Inferno leadership wouldn’t listen.  Lori believed if Sky revealed himself as a Crow, that would complicate the situation far too much.

“She’s dumping her heavy weapons into her pack and hiding the pack.  She’s going to come in fast,” Sky said.

“What do you mean, fast?” Tim said.

“You’ll see.  A half kilometer is sprint distance.  An Arm should be able to hit a hundred kilometers an hour peak for about fifty or a hundred meters, if she wants to.”

“That’s not physically possible!” Ann said.  “You sure?”

The
leadership cadre’s minor level of trust in him was at least better than before.  None of the Inferno leaders credited half the things he told them about Arms or Beast Men.  His stories were impossible.  These sheltered Transforms had no concept of how far a mature Major Transform could push her juice metabolism, especially in cold weather where the big problem the big tricks caused – excess heat – could be dumped in so many inventive ways.

“Here she comes,” Sky said.  “A-a-and there she goes.”

Keaton barreled in, leaping hedges and walls like hurdles.  She couldn’t hit the Arm maximum sprint speeds because of her hurdling, but she moved fast enough for anyone not a Major Transform to lose her as she moved.  Sky didn’t lose her because of his prior experience.  On the way through, she grabbed Lori like a teenager grabbing a sack lunch on her way to school, and didn’t stop running until she and Lori were both well out of Lori’s metasense range of her household, in the winding driveway behind the garage of yet another local mansion.

Sky listened.  He hoped Lori wouldn’t pull too many
surprises and get the Arm aggravated enough to try to kill her.

“What the fuck are you doing to me?” Keaton said, a knife at Lori’s throat.  Sky had no problem hearing Keaton at two hundred and fifty meters
as the two women confronted each other on the sheltered driveway.

Dammit!  Sky saw immediately what Lori
did and why she had been meditating ahead of time.  She had tuned her metasense to Keaton, the ‘we are one’ trick she and Sky had discovered less than twenty-four hours ago.  A curiosity gambit might well have worked on Hancock, but from what Sky read in Keaton’s emotions, she was an entirely different rotten kettle of fish.