All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) (23 page)

“I ate an hour ago, but I thank you for the offer,” Gail said, still all smiles and pleasure.

“Well, I imagine you wouldn’t object to dessert, then,” Adkins said. “Claude, tell Dee in the kitchen to send something up for us.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Claude snapped, with an eager agreement.  His spine straightened the instant Wini looked at him, and he watched her with an expression near to worship.  Wini was pumping him.  By the man’s expression of devoted worship, Gail guessed this was normal.  Adkins made her people love her by manipulating their juice supply, a method, according to Tonya, used by many Focuses since the early days.  For all Gail knew, given how early Adkins transformed, she might have actually invented the method.

“Take Focus Rickenbach’s men with you.  Give them the tour,” Focus Adkins said to Claude.  Beth had warned her that Focus Adkins would separate Gail from her bodyguards, and they would get to stand guard duty with Adkins’ people.  Gail found it hard to let her protection go, in one of the first situations where she needed them.

Focus Adkins turned to Gail.

“I know you want to talk to me about our previous difficulties, so I’ve cleared a room for you just down the hall.  I trust you have no problem?”

“Oh, that would be wonderful.  Thank you so much,” Gail said.  Her cheeks were beginning to ache from the social smile.  This wasn’t an expression she used much.

“Excellent.”

Claude attempted to escort her people away.  Kurt turned to Gail, unhappy, unwilling to leave her alone in this strange place.  Gail made a tiny hand motion, and Kurt subsided and went with the guard, along with Vic.

Focus Adkins didn’t miss the hand gesture.  She nodded approval, both for the hesitation and the obedience.  Gail was here for Adkins to judge her, she and her people, and everything they did would be weighed in the balance.

“Come, sit down on the davenport and let’s talk,” Adkins said, after she led Gail down the hall to the aforementioned room.  The comment wasn’t phrased as an order, but Gail recognized an order when she heard one, no matter how phrased.  “I have a household meeting at eight, and my people would be terribly crushed if I didn’t attend, but we have a few minutes before then, and we can talk more afterwards.  Would that be all right?”

“No problem,” Gail said. “That sounds perfect.”  Adkins sat down on an elegant chair, and Gail took the end of the couch, amazed at the beauty in Adkins’ sitting room.  Gail had spent too many years living with plywood and cheap vinyl as a student, and living in tents and mud as a Focus.  She had forgotten people lived like this.

“You need to join us for the household meeting, Focus Rickenbach.  Given your discussions with Wendy on household management issues, I suspect you’ll be very interested,” Focus Adkins said.  Gail expected more lectures, but Adkins seemed more interested in showing than telling.  She couldn’t escape this household meeting.

“Thank you.  I’m definitely interested.”

“Good, good. Now tell me about the household you’ve set up in this church of yours.  I want to hear all about what you’ve done.  We can save the unpleasant things until later.”

Adkins’ people had moved all the furniture, except for two chairs, out of the dining apartment.  Despite the floor space, there still wasn’t enough room for all the people who attempted to squeeze in.  People stood in the doorway, and in the bathroom, and peered in through the large, plate-glass window.  An air of excitement, of breathless anticipation, filled the area.

An air of fanaticism, too.  The crowd was edgy, an air of something dangerous, only barely contained.  Sylvie sensed it, too, and stayed protectively close to Gail.  Gail eyed the crowd warily while she sat in the smaller of the two chairs and attempted to project an air of regal calm.

She remembered the old stories of the Quarantine.  Wini Adkins had been one of the Focuses who led the breakout, and these were the people she had led.  Looking at them now, Gail understood how these people managed.  So much focused fanaticism seemed capable of anything.

Not just the Transforms.  The normals picked up the tone of a household and adapted themselves, or if they couldn’t adapt, they left.  They worshipped their Focus and would do anything for her.  They would die for her, all of them, if necessary.  Gail understood how Transforms might be willing to die for their Focus, but she had a hard time understanding how normals could become so fanatic.

Focus Adkins lived in three rooms filled with expensive furniture, while her people bunked fifteen to a room next to her.  To her people, this was how things should be.  They were proud of themselves for the comfort they maintained for their Focus, and they were convinced they were happy with the way they lived.

Gail winced at the household’s living arrangements, but seeing the fanaticism, she realized they hadn’t been forced.  Adkins had saved them from the hell of Quarantine, from clinics and detention centers as bad as the clinic where Gail had been stuck after she transformed, and a decade later they still worshipped her.  Gail tried to imagine what it must have been like back then, and how hard it would have been to coordinate the escape of twenty Focuses spread out all over the country without giving any hint of their intentions to the authorities.  An organized effort of hundreds of ordinary people over many months.

People didn’t do things like the Quarantine escape and remain ordinary, because ordinary people didn’t do such things.  Not only were Adkins’ people fanatically loyal to their Focus, but they were also fanatically loyal to each other, for the same reason combat veterans stayed loyal to the men who shared their foxhole.

Gail remembered the guard when they came in, and the way he hadn’t been nervous of her, and she understood why.  She was no threat to him, and never would be, because no path in the universe would place him at her door.  His Focus and his household defined his world, and the rest of the world, the other, lived on the other side of the barbed wire fence surrounding their household.

She looked over at Sylvie, who wore a puzzled air on top of her uneasiness, as if she saw something more in this place, something she might want herself.  Gail would have to have a serious talk with Sylvie later.

The path of the fanatic was a powerful lure.  Gail understood this from her associations with the anti-war protesters, especially the ones trying to convince themselves they were communists.  The path gave such benefits: freedom from doubt and uncertainty, absolute trust in some authority, and the chance to throw away your own self-interest for some higher cause.

Hardly human at all.

What did the authorities create by treating the first Focuses that way?  What monsters did they breed?  Gail took mental notes in her head by the score, as Van would want to know everything she learned.

The meeting started at quarter after eight, silence falling when Adkins raised her hand.  The air waited with anticipation.

“I’d like to welcome a special guest tonight,” Wini said, speaking from her much larger throne.  “Focus Rickenbach and I will be meeting afterwards.  I hope you will all make her and her people feel welcome.”

Silence followed a murmur of greeting, as they waited for her to say something.  Shit!  The crush of people and emotion in the room unnerved Gail, and she feared whatever she said would come out badly.  Gail took a deep breath and tried to master the graceful reserve Beth and Tonya projected so effortlessly.  She decided to base what she said off what she had seen and figured out.

“Thank you all for welcoming me into your household,” Gail said with a gracious smile.  “It’s always an honor for a young Focus like myself to be invited to visit another household, and it’s a special honor to be welcomed by a household with such an exceptional history and by a Focus as exceptional as yours.”

Another low murmur, this time approval for Gail’s kind words towards their Focus.  Silence again followed.  Focus Adkins smiled at Gail’s words, but Gail sensed a little surprise in Adkins’ emotions.  She had expected Gail to embarrass herself.

“And now,” Focus Adkins said into the silence, “discipline.”  Tension gelled the air so hard it almost shivered.

As Focus Adkins led Gail back upstairs, Gail thought about both the beneficiaries of Adkins’s evening rewards and the subjects of her discipline.  Adkins had disciplined three people, two normals and one Transform, and they all wept piteously and begged forgiveness for their minor sins.  The Transform now endured the misery of low juice, the two normals were bound, blindfolded and locked in two of the many unused bathrooms.  Adkins sentenced one of them to three hours alone, and the other, nine.  A sensory deprivation technique, used as punishment.

The rewards reached more people, almost a third of the household.  They paired off in a room set aside for the purpose, downstairs, the passion of the Transforms’ good juice counts enough to carry them all along.  All overheated intensity, all focused at one place and time.  Gail took special care that she did
not
boost Sylvie enough to make her interested in such activities.  Not in this place.

They sat.  “I’ve seen you understand the depth of your earlier indiscretions.  I have no need for further apologies.  However, discipline must come to Focuses as well,” Adkins said.  Adkins’ smile was one of anticipation.  “I think you’ve earned about six hours of discipline.”

“Ma’am?” In an instant, Gail’s anticipation turned to terror.  Focus Adkins was far more terrifying than Arm Keaton or Crow Gilgamesh.

“Focuses are dependent on their Transforms.  You need to learn what it feels like to lose them, without any distractions from a Hi-Fi or color television.  Come with me.”  Adkins stood and waved her hand to Gail to follow, and as Adkins did the full brunt of the bad juice of her household returned, giving Gail a headache bad enough to make her see spots.

Gail followed, her knees weak, and Adkins led her out of the apartment complex, into the junkyard beyond, and to a large shed in the far back of the junkyard.  One of Adkins’ people unlocked the shed for them, and inside, in the cold night darkness, Gail found a chest, a coffin of sorts, lying on the ground in the shed.  Adkins herself opened the chest.  All for the good of the household, Gail told herself.  Her stomach churned so badly she wanted to throw up.

“Inside,” the older Focus said.  Gail spotted various ropes and cloth inside the chest and hesitated.  What were they going to do to her?  Then she understood, based on Adkins’ punishment of her own people.  Sensory deprivation, outside of metasense range of all Transforms, not that Gail hadn’t long past reeled in her metasense to lessen the bad juice miasma of this place.  Gail took a deep breath and climbed into the chest, wondering how many Focuses had seen the inside of this chest over the years.  The chest reeked of fear and bad juice.

Adkins’ people bundled her up, binding her so she couldn’t move.  Then Adkins and her people closed the lid on the chest, closed the closet door, and went back to the apartment proper.

Gail tried to understand what would happen to her, in the close darkness of the chest.  Six hours.  Six hours, alone.  Once Adkins returned to her apartment, though, the hammer of bad juice subsided, along with Gail’s fears.  The coffin was cozy, but not suffocating, as air flowed in from some unseen vent.  In fact, as the hours passed, Gail found the darkness, the aloneness, to be relaxing.  Oh, Gail could understand how a claustrophobic Focus might consider this punishment, especially if she struggled with her own inner demons.  Gail suspected Beth would be burbling for days from a place like this.

On the other hand, Gail liked close confined places, and given how much she wrestled with her own internal demons, being confined did not add to her psyche’s burdens.  As a child, she had often built nests in quiet locations of her house to escape her parents’ notice.  She hadn’t done anything of the sort in years, not since she went to college.  She had forgotten how she enjoyed this sort of thing, even while bound up and seemingly forgotten.

After a while, Gail swore she saw new things in her reeled-in metasense.  Moving lights of various colors, some big, some small.  Beautiful!  Some, like fixed stars in the distance, didn’t move, but shone, distantly, wondrously.  One of the lights talked to her, asking her to come visit, and trying to tell her about some angel or savior or something she needed to watch out for and help.  Gail could almost see the place, a city on a wide river, cold and wintry, a city townhouse, on an old-fashioned cobblestone street.  Strange.  Around her sprang up a garden, hidden in the thick fog of an early morning.  A restful garden, filled with flowers and fountains and peace.

Gail lost herself in the wondrous rapture of the garden, freeing her metasense and taking everything in.  She had to set up a place like this casket for herself, she decided, dark and quiet and away from the distractions and responsibilities of her household.  Gail didn’t mind the temporary loss of contact from her Transforms.  On the contrary, six hours was hardly enough!  Of course, she would have to say nothing of her enjoyment to Focus Adkins.  If Adkins thought this confinement a form of punishment, well, then, Gail would act punished.

All too soon Gail metasensed Transforms moving back within range, including Sylvie.  Sylvie was beside herself in fear and Gail pumped her a bit, trying to comfort her, and convince her that her Focus did just fine.  As Adkins approached, the bad juice rolled back with her, and Gail reeled in her metasense.  Adkins’ people slid the chest out of the shed, opened it up, and lifted her out of the coffin by her arms.  The brightness hit Gail like a hammer – they had set up bright lights in front of the shed, just for this purpose.  Gail’s eyes poured tears, and with her arms held by two of Adkins’ people, she couldn’t cover her eyes to protect them from the light.