In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (26 page)

“What?” I said, sitting up in surprise.  The sudden movement jolted my hands and left me gasping for a moment as the pain ran through me.  I pushed the pain away.  “A PhD dissertation?  How the hell am I supposed to do a PhD dissertation in one month?  I never even finished college.  My composition skills sort of atrophied, if you recall.”

Hank shrugged and didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.  If Keaton wanted a PhD dissertation, little details like my lack of higher education wouldn’t bother her a bit.  I either did the work or became Rogue Arm with a vengeance.

“Fuck,” I said.  Again.  I had thought, before, that I had a difficult problem, not an impossible one.

“I have a few examples back home and I can get more for you to look at.  You can decide if this is what Keaton is looking for.  If so, though, I can help you.  You wouldn’t be the first graduate student I’ve advised.  Working in Arm time, with your capabilities, you should be able to properly collate and synthesize your existing research and complete your work within a month.”

I lay back down on the bed, careful of my hands, and thought.  This did sound like the sort of thing Keaton wanted.  I bet Hank made a hell of a good dissertation advisor, as well.

“You mentioned some other issues, ma’am?” Hank said.  “Is there anything in there we need to worry about?”

“You tell me,” I said.  The only thing that mattered to me was the problem that opened me up to her torture.  “She didn’t like the fact Lori’s broken with me.  She thinks I should have solved the Biggioni problem already.  She didn’t agree with my assessment that the Crow petty cash bin could come out of the research project funds.  She’s pissed I’m keeping tabs on Focus Rickenbach in Detroit.  And she doesn’t believe the Hunters have the kidnapped Clinic Focus, and she tried to torture out of me where I was keeping this Focus, how I supposedly kidnapped her, and why.”  I paused and took a deep breath.  “During this last bit of insanity, and because of my, well, impolitic and intemperate responses to her crazy assertions, she dropped my tag and gave me the time limit.”  And did the fishhook suspension trick that left my cheeks three times their normal size and my throat raw broken glass from the screaming.  She had already broken my hands.

Hank took off his glasses and rubbed them on his nightshirt.  “Ma’am, I suddenly suspect something very bad,” he said.  He certainly did, I read in him.  “If I may ask, when did Keaton tell you to present your research to her?”

“In my visit last month.”

“Which you already said was tense, because in your analysis Keaton had somehow figured out about Tom’s existence before you told her.”

“Uh huh.  Where are you going with this?”

“Ma’am, everything involved here except the last bit about the Clinic Focus could be explained by someone getting into my private files at some point in time during the last half of September, and feeding the information to Keaton.  In specific, the only person who knew about that last bit of bad juice inside you was me, and nobody but the two of us knew about my speculation about the effect of this bad juice on your composition skills.  I kept this only in my private notes, the ones I keep in my safe when I leave work.”

Low juice left my mind slow, but I figured out his point eventually.  “Biggioni.”  She had never responded after I broke into her office or even after Crow Shadow called her about the sequestered espionage.  Other than a polite note I had sent mid-October to demand her surrender, and her polite refusal, there had been nothing.  “Dammit, I thought I was the devious one.”

I had a bad case of ‘she had me’ right then and there.  What could I do?  My next month was booked with this research project crap, if I wanted my tag back.  Which I did, thank you very much.  Damn the fucking bitch!  If I survived the next few weeks, the witch was going to pay.  Biggioni had taken me apart after the FBI turned me over to the CDC, and she was taking my life apart in Houston.  Nothing she had done so far, save one letter, was at all direct: according to my Crows she had found a way to drive a wedge between Lori and I, according to Zielinski she had set me up with Keaton, and I would bet my next two juice kills she was behind whatever insane rumors were floating around about my grabbing the Chicago clinic Focus. “So, if I’m going to help you on this, ma’am, I’ll need to know what the subject of this research effort is,” Hank said, carefully and casually changing the subject.

I didn’t want to get into the details now, but given the time constraints involved, I had no choice.  “It’s a paper about controlling people as an Arm.  How to recruit them, and how to keep control of them once you have them, all based on the extensive recruiting I do.  Keaton, it turns out, can’t do it.”

Zielinski smiled.  The bastard had figured it out already.  “Have you caught on to the tag-pulling trick?  The tag-pulling trick needs to go into your paper.  Arm Tags are two way, even for normals.”

I glared at him but he didn’t back down.

He was the loosest held of any of my people, the only one I trusted out of my sight for more than a few days.  Strong willed Focuses and Arms had been yanking him around for over a decade and he hadn’t folded yet.  Hell, he was the only one of my people who still had his own agenda and who regularly kept secrets from me.  He had me as much as I had him, and I loved him for it.  He could probably write the damned PhD dissertation we were talking about in his sleep, though it would be useless to Keaton, coming from the perspective of a normal.

Tom shifted beside me, uneasy. I hadn’t forgotten about him and I hadn’t failed to consider the effect my words would have on him.  Even low on juice and tortured halfway to insanity, I
never
made mistakes like that.

I sat up to face Tom, careful of my hands.  This would be hard for him to deal with, but I planned to take him into my confidence.  He would need to understand things like this.  Now was as good a time as any to start.

A look at his face told me he had figured a few things out.

“I’m exhibit A in your paper, aren’t I?”  Obvious, if you had the right sort of mind, and he did.  I nodded at him, and he pulled away from me.

“I’m not sure I like this Keaton character knowing so much about me,” Tom said.  He looked at me with the unhappy gaze of someone who’s just found out that he’s a pawn on someone else’s chess board.  He had been in the Army for twenty years, though.  He had been in this position before.

Tom laid his head back against the wall and thought.

“How dangerous is Keaton, really?” he said.  The second obvious point.

I shook my head.  “You can’t even imagine.”

He didn’t look convinced.  There wasn’t enough information in my statement.  I rested my elbows on my knees, trying to come up with some way to explain.

“You’re thinking of taking her on, aren’t you?” I said.  “You’re thinking you and I and some of the other folks could take her on, and then I wouldn’t have to take this sort of shit from her.”

He shrugged in admission.  “It’s a thought.”  Over in his chair, Hank snorted, dismissive.  He and Keaton went
waaaay
back.  He had shown me his scars.

Tom gave Hank the ‘you pussy’ look.  Hank gave Tom the ‘you tenderfoot’ look.  They battled wills, silent alpha male style, while I thought some more, trying to come up with a way to explain this to Tom.

“You’ve been in the Army,” I said.  “Do you ever get new recruits who want to pick fights way out of their league?  They don’t like the way something is done in the Army, so they want to change things.  Get into arguments with officers.  That sort of thing?”

He smiled, sardonically.  “It happens.  Generally not for long.  The Army has a way of straightening out that sort of nonsense.”

I nodded.  “So does Keaton.  But I don’t think you’d survive it.”

He leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest.

“So you’re saying that I’m playing out of my league.”

“No, I’m saying that
I’m
playing out of my league.  You’re not even playing the same sport.”

He looked unhappy.  “So why in the world do you want her tag back?”

“If I play the game right, she’s the ultimate fairy godmother,” I said.  “Hank’s funding comes from her.  So does the funding for the non-Houston recruiting I’m doing.  All those boxes of pointless information we send her?  She and Haggerty, the baby Arm, boil it down into those wonderful red-titled reports I’ve shown you.  Half of those strange well-paying out of town jobs that we do come through Keaton, who distributes them to me when she’s not interested in yet another obscure Focus Network job.  Every contact I have for cut-rate weapons came from her.  And she’s the one who taught me how to rob banks, not attract attention, and live through the process.”

“Ma’am,” Tom said, trying again with more questions.  I raised up a bandaged hand and stopped him.  He didn’t think what I was getting was worth the pain.

He was wrong.  Surviving solo was nearly impossible, as I had discovered so painfully in the CDC.  The sort of help Keaton gave easily meant the difference between sane survival and some dark descent into withdrawal or death.

“Shh,” I said.  “I’ll answer.”  I lowered the hand to my chest, and tried futilely to find a position that didn’t hurt.  The muscles of my hands ached with immobility.

“You want to know three things, don’t you?  Why she’s dangerous, what hold she has over me, and what the history is that explains what’s happening now.  Right?”

“That about covers it,” he said.  He relaxed a little because I understood what he was asking for.

I sighed.  “She’s rich.  I don’t know how much, but plenty.  Multiple millions.  She plays patty cake with at least two Focuses who sit on the Focus Council, including Biggioni, and I’m fairly sure that Keaton’s got a good handle on the situation.  She’s secretive.  Even after all these years, I know little about her, and she knows everything about me.  She keeps secrets as a reflex and lies routinely.  She’s competent at controlling people.  She has at least two significant organizations in different parts of the country.  Although I’ve only met one of her people, she knows every one of my people and knows how to get hold of them.  She’s made it clear on a couple of occasions that my people are hostage to my good behavior.”

Tom nodded, and looked unhappy.  “I’m sorry, Tom,” I said, gently.  “She’s my boss because she’s better at being an Arm than I am.  There are things that you can do to increase your chances of surviving Keaton, and you need to know what they are.  Hank can fill you in.  He’s the normal expert at surviving Keaton.”

Tom frowned, now concerned about his own safety.  He wasn’t some young kid any more, confident in his own immortality.  Danger was real to him and he didn’t like it much.

“There’s more,” I said.  “She’s a survivor. The post-transformation mortality rate for young Arms is just shy of 70% right now, and Keaton is the only one who figured out how to survive, and she did so
on her own
.  She’s capable of things that are utterly inconceivable, such as surviving being jumped by two Hunters when she was out with post-kill reaction; she killed one of them and drove the other off.”

“Oh, hell,” Tom said, finally starting to get an idea of Keaton.

“She’s a lot stronger than I am, fights better than I do, she’s more experienced than I am, she has tricks nobody knows of until she uses them in combat, and she knows me much better than I know her.  Oh, and she’s a sadistic maniac who gets off on torture and murder, plus she occasionally suffers psychotic breaks where she goes on mindless berserker killing sprees.”

Tom sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.  I had gotten through to him.  There was a chill in the room, Keaton’s cold from a hundred miles away.

I shifted restlessly again.  I still couldn’t find a position to ease the ache in my hands, and I was itching to hunt.  We were quiet for a few minutes.

“Ma’am,” Zielinski said, showing tension, which was rare for him.  “One other thing.”

“Yes?”

“The reading I gave you from my little portable juice meter was after I subtracted out the extra point of bad sludge dross you still carry.  Since you’re so close to the line anyway, this might be a good time to try and burn off that last bit of bad stuff.”

“What about a trigger?”

Hank took a deep breath.  “Burn it off healing, right in front of the Transform.  When you feel yourself going over the edge into withdrawal, then…”

“Then kill.  Still hard for you to say, eh, Hank?”  Cruel me.  He raised an eyebrow.

“Occasionally.”  Silence.  There wasn’t much more to be said on that subject.

I would do it.  I had never had the incentive before, and the idea terrified me, but the thought of what Keaton put me through in that far too long night, showing me
all
her new torture techniques and tricks, had put the fear of God into me like nothing had ever done before.  “It’s almost 5:30, now, right?” I said.  Hank checked his watch and nodded.

“Let’s get on the road,” I said.  “You two can trade off sleeping in the car.  We’ve been in this dump long enough.  I’ll fill you in further as we go.”

Hank looked tired, and Tom groaned, but they moved.  They wanted out of here as well.

We hit Houston three days later, and made straight for Zielinski’s office.  I had found a kill in El Paso on the second day, and managed to hold my temper and my control long enough for Tom and Hank to come up with a kill scenario that didn’t involve the deaths of any innocent bystanders.  I had agreed with Hank’s suggestion about burning my juice down to withdrawal, and the trick worked.  This was the absolute strangest feeling I had had since I became an Arm, because it felt like burning juice that wasn’t there.  The bad stuff was less efficient than normal – I didn’t get anywhere near the amount of healing a point of supplemental juice normally provided.  I’m fairly sure I didn’t get even a tenth of a point into my fundamental juice before my control gave and my instincts took over.  Voluntarily burning fundamental juice is so painful that you can’t mistake what you’re doing.  A little piece of withdrawal for me to jog my memory with.