A Method Truly Sublime (The Commander) (29 page)

“It’s a present to you,” Lori said.  “You came in with a non-lethal attention-getting device, Arm Keaton.  I figured I’d give you a similar gift.”

Keaton dropped Lori, breaking the skin contact, which turned off the metasense linkage.  Lori landed on her feet cat quiet on the asphalt pavement and turned to face the Arm.  Sky practically heard the gears turning in Keaton’s head as Keaton studied Lori.

“You’re coming with me to break Hancock out of the CDC research facility.  I need eight of your best shooters.  We’re leaving in ten minutes,” Keaton said.

“Let’s go back to my place and talk this over,” Lori said.

“We’re not going anywhere near your goddamned fortress until you agree,” Keaton said.  Keaton was mightily pissed, barely holding on to her temper.  Sky quailed when h
e metasensed the contamination in Keaton’s glow – something horribly unhealthy for an Arm.  Keaton was part Monster!  How did something like that happen?  Didn’t she know how to care for herself?

“We’ve got a problem, Ann,” Sky said.  “Keaton’s part Monster.”

“What does that mean?”

“Shhh,” Sky said, trying to listen to the conversation between Lori and Keaton
over the sound of crickets and distant cars.

“What’s in
this for me and my household?” Lori said.

“You get to live.”

Keaton reached to grab Lori, but Lori wasn’t there.

NO!  Sky wanted to shout.  Bad move.  Don’t run from an Arm!

Instead, Lori was everywhere.  She did some juice pattern thing duplicating her in a ring around Keaton, at least to Sky’s metasense.  She didn’t run away, exactly.  He had no idea how this trick appeared to Keaton.

“Try again,” Lori said.

Keaton stood stock-still and tried to penetrate the illusion.  After ten seconds, Keaton turned to walk back toward the Inferno estate.  “Okay,” Keaton said.  “I’ll just start cutting throats, starting with your people outside.  I’ll stop when you agree.”

Lori didn’t follow Keaton or say anything.

“Now you’re supposed to say ‘Touch my people and you’re dead’,” Keaton said.  “What kind of a wimp Focus are you?”

Lori still didn’t say anything.  She let Keaton stomp another ten paces, around the garage and through the covered passageway toward the street and Inferno household before she spoke.  “I’ve got a ten thousand dollar bet riding on you,” she said.

Keaton stopped and turned back to glare at Lori.  The illusions were gone.

“The household bodyguards think they can take you out before you can kill six of them.  I bet them ten thousand dollars you could kill more than six of them before they took you out.”

They stared at each other from fifteen meters apart for about thirty seconds.  “Now you’re supposed to say that you can kill me where I stand before I can do anything,” Lori said.

Keaton studied Lori some more.  “You’ll help me for free,” Keaton said, “because you’re so attracted to Hancock that you can’t bear to see her destroyed.”

Sky’s eyebrows raised.  Lori was attracted to Hancock?  He knew Lori thought Hancock’s glow was seductive, but was she actually attracted to her personally?  How did Keaton figure this out?  Reading people wasn’t an Arm trick that Sky recognized.

Uh, oh.  If Keaton could read people
, she would be able to figure out Sky was a Crow from the reactions of the people around him.  Worse, it was too late to do anything about this disaster.  He had already done his time with an Arm!

“Destroyed?” Lori said.  Sky winced at the emotion that leaked into Lori’s voice.  Keaton had found the lever she needed.  No, no, no!  Never give a lever to an Arm.  That’s how you become an Arm pet!

“She’ll never get out of there alive.  The first Focuses almost got her as a baby Arm in St. Louis by interfering with her juice draws.  Now there’s much more incentive, since none of Hancock’s protectors are in charge of the situation and because they don’t like what they’ve seen in Hancock.”

“Assume you have a point there about my attraction,” Lori said, walking toward Keaton.  The damn
ed Arm
had
Lori.  Sky wanted to jump up and down and curse.  “How do you get my household’s cooperation?”

Keaton continued to study Lori.  “Cash. 
Cash will validate their theory it’s possible to associate with an Arm.”

“That will work.”

“You and they will take my orders,” Keaton said.  They walked back to the household together.

“Never.”

“You can’t be imagining that I’m going to take your orders?”

“I’m the senior Major Transform here.  Of course I’m in charge…”

No!  No!  No!  Sky put his head in his hands and wanted to cry.

“I choose the people,” Keaton said.  Lori had introduced Keaton to Ann and the rest, and the negotiation over price turned out to be quite easy and quite large: fifty thousand. Sky was appalled.  Were all the Transforms in the States millionaires?  Arm, dammit, shared his tendency to acquire belongings from the town dump, though once acquired, she would never let anything go.

Everyone
remained outside in the cold night, sitting in the chairs by the pool.  “I choose the numbers.  You provide two volunteer Transforms, one for me and one for Hancock.  You don’t want either of us to be having to fight the urge to juice suck the rescue crew, especially Hancock, who has no restraint at all when she’s low on juice,” Keaton said, her eyes narrow and face stone cold.  She stood.  “Break out your heavy weapons and let’s go.”  The last time Sky had been around an Arm this angry, seventeen people had died.

Keaton
didn’t appreciate Lori’s inevitable need to challenge her on everything.  Sky attempted to retreat inconspicuously into his chair.

Several people stood, responding instinctively to Keaton’s order, but Lori stayed firmly seated.  “Hey!” Lori said.  She sat stiff in her chair and her face flushed an angry red.  Keaton had gotten thoroughly under her skin.  Not good, not good.  He remembered the first time he
experienced Lori angry and irrational; in the end she had shot at him.  “Those are my people, darn it,” Lori said.  “I know their capabilities.  You don’t.  My call.  And what’s this about volunteer Transforms?  I’m not asking my people for volunteers to be juice sucked, sugarpie.”

“Listen, Focus,” Keaton said.  She stood and leaned over Lori, a hand on each arm of Lori’s chair and her face only inches from Lori’s.  They were both short little things, staring into each other’s eyes as they growled, though Keaton out massed Lori at least two to one.  They barely looked like they belonged to the same species.  “I hired your people.  I make the call.  Get the fuck out of my face!”

Now Lori stood, pushing Keaton back, with her nose practically touching Keaton’s.  “You overbearing twit, you have no conception of the strengths and weaknesses of my people.  We’re not your personal slaves, and you can take your dominance fetish and stick it up your backside ‘til it comes out your nose.  You’ll just get them all killed.  They are
not
your personal toys!”

Keaton’s brows came down
, initiating a moment of stillness.  Sky didn’t believe Keaton could become colder, but she did.  No one breathed and even the air seemed dangerous.  Oh, my love, Sky thought, don’t you understand how dangerous it is to make an Arm this angry?  An Arm will go to insane measures to win a dominance fight.  You don’t gain anything by trying to be as crazy as an Arm.

Give up.  Just let her win.  Don’t push her to be as irrational as you are!  Sky was afraid it was already too late; Lori wasn’t looking at him
, anyway.

“They’ll follow my orders, and you
’ll follow my orders, and I don’t want to hear any shit from any of you,” Keaton said, her voice soft and deadly.  Sky shivered.  The other members of Inferno backed up warily.  Lori, though, didn’t blink.

“You don’t get to get my people killed because you’re ignorant of my household and too arrogant to admit it.”

Keaton didn’t say anything at all in response.  She just grabbed hold of Lori’s juice, threatening to suck.  The ultimate weapon, because Lori wouldn’t dare respond in kind.  If she did, it would be madness, mutual assured destruction.  It was madness enough for Keaton to grab hold of Lori’s juice, but Keaton was angry enough to take big risks.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Lori said.

“Try me, bitch.”

Lori slapped a tag on Keaton and pulled back, idiocy and irrationality combined in one.  “I’ll see you in hell.  Let go of my juice!”  Sky watched in appalled horror.  What fools! 
If either pulled back, they would be able to avoid disaster, but each of them counted on the other to back off.  Neither would.  A game of Major Transform chicken, one both would lose.

“Whatever you just did is something you’re really going to regret,” Keaton said.  A knife appeared in Keaton’s hand.

The knife dropped from Keaton’s hand to the slate patio and Lori laughed.  Her mad laugh.  Uh oh.  “It’s way too late for you to try anything physical on me.”

“You don’t stand a chance, bitch,” Keaton said.  “I don’t care if I go all the way over into Monster.”

“You won’t live to be one,” Lori said.

His love and the Arm had both lost their minds.

Inevitably, Keaton began to draw Lori’s juice from her.  Lori grabbed juice back through the tag, mutually assured destruction in action, the fabled Focus-Arm death spiral. He shivered, forcing down his panic.  He wanted nothing more than his little closet in Toronto right then, far from both hyper-aggressive Arms and insane Focuses.

Neither Keaton nor Lori were young Transforms and the death spiral took a long time.  Their
glows began to fray around the edges, but ever so slowly.  Dominance fights between Arms and Focuses didn’t work like this!  Only Beast and Arm did the dominance thing and those had been entirely physical.

Tim grabbed at Sky and pulled him back.  Ann and Sadie stepped back as well.  The deck chairs lay in scattered disorder on the patio.  Keaton and Lori stood nose to nose in the center of the wreckage, glaring and fighting each other for the
ir juice.

“You’re too stupid a Focus to live,” Keaton said
, with a snarl.  “I wasn’t asking your household for volunteer Transforms.  You’re the idiot Focus, dammit.  Go grab some Transforms from a clinic.”

“You’re living in a dream world, Keaton,” Lori said.  Lori didn’t snarl, she sneered.  “You’ve just earned yourself a very messy death.”

The struggle for the juice continued, intent and deadly, visible to no one but the participants and Sky.  The others watched warily, recognizing something horrible was happening, but not sure what.  Their juice structures frayed further, and Sky expected them to collapse any moment, but both Keaton and Lori possessed the willpower to keep the fraying under control.  So far.

“I’m
not the one who’s going to be dying,” Keaton said.  Snarled.

“If you would stop being so goddamned arrogant and just listen to me, we could make this work,” Lori said.  “I’m not Tonya.  I can do things she’s never dreamt about in her wildest dreams.  She can do things that would leave me puking on the ground in disgust.”

“Huh.”  Keaton put a burst of effort into sucking Lori’s juice.  Lori grabbed the juice right back.  The fight hurt just to watch, and Sky barely restrained the urge to skunk the both of them.  In their current state, he feared his
help
might kill them.  Whatever possessed him to fall in love with a lunatic, anyway?

“I can’t help you if you won’t listen to what I have to offer.”  Nose to nose, glare to glare, Lori
refused back down, even as her juice structure shivered in impending collapse.

“You don’t have anything to offer.  You’re holding back.”

“Because if I didn’t hold back, you’d be
dead
, you fool.”  Lori’s voice rose to a screech.

“Show me.  Anything,” Keaton said.  “You’re lying to me.”

Lori brows came down farther as she pulled back her own juice.  “Look at your hands.”

Keaton glance
d at her hands with her peripheral vision.  Keaton’s hands repeatedly finger-counted: one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five.  “Does that look like anything Tonya could do?”  Lori had taken over a part of Keaton’s mind, and overrode Keaton’s voluntary nerves.

“Damn,” Keaton said.
“Okay.  You’ve convinced me.  You’re not Tonya.  What worth are you in a fight?”  Blessed Buddha, sanity!  Maybe there was hope after all.  Sky found himself curled on the ground with his arms around his knees.  Tim knelt beside him, holding on to him.

“Consider the knife you dropped,” Lori said.

“I didn’t drop any knives.”

Lori flickered her eyes from Keaton’s hands to the ground. 
Keaton followed with her eyes, sucked air, and tried to move her legs.  They barely twitched.  “I’m not going to surrender, Rizzari,” she said.  Sky thought he heard a hint of desperation in Keaton’s snarl.

“I don’t want your surrender.  I just want you to listen.”

“Fine.  I’ll agree to listen,” Keaton said.  “Start talking.”