In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (39 page)

“I mean you, not the household.”

Gail sighed.  This, however, was why she had chosen Sylvie.  “I’m still always tired,” she said. “I have a nagging headache that comes and goes, and the headache makes me testy and emotional at times.  It’s often difficult for me to summon the energy to do anything.”  She could live with her problems.  Life wasn’t good, but it wasn’t unlivable.  Her life was better than before.

“Don’t forget you can come talk to me whenever you’re feeling down.  I’m here for you,” Sylvie said, giving Gail another long hug.  “So, what do you think about what Bart did with the money?”

Gail welcomed the subject change.  “It surprised me how much they extracted from people’s savings, but I think it’s a good thing.”  Bart had gotten people to sell their old homes and add the take to the household kitty, despite their hard feelings on the subject.  He wasn’t her favorite person in the world – not as her one time jailer – but he was a competent household leader.  Certainly better than anything she could have done.

“Yah,” Sylvie said.  “None of us want to repeat the six months we spent living in a field.”

“The hardest part, for me, is the divorces,” Gail said.  The Carlows, Bartuschs and Faulkners had all divorced.  Gail hadn’t been able to save a one of them.

“You’re worried about Van, aren’t you,” Sylvie said.  “Don’t be.”

She picked up something from Sylvie she hadn’t expected.  “Okay, what are you sitting on?”  Sylvie and Van had been dating when Sylvie had introduced Van to her, followed immediately by a plea from Sylvie to take the overly serious Van off her hands.  Sylvie hadn’t wanted to hurt Van’s feelings.  Gail had pounced, hard, and returned the favor by introducing Sylvie to Kurt, who she had dated several times.

Sylvie shook her head.  “Nope.  I’m not saying another word.”

“I was thinking,” Van said, after the party, his voice soft in the quiet darkness of the room.  Beth’s bedroom suggestions had worked.  Sort of.  Gail had actually gotten interested, actively interested, in sex, for the first time since her transformation, enough to get her to try some of the things she had learned about sex from the Grimms.  No orgasm at the end, though, curse her damned transformed body.  Frustrating.

The room was the church library and they had the place to themselves. The household insisted. Gail felt guilty, but not too guilty, as the church gave the household square feet to spare.  It was so nice to have a private room for the two of them. They had a real bed for once, and other furniture as well.  All better than their two cots in the leaky muddy-floored tent on the Ebener farm.

Gail brought herself back from metasensing the doings of her household to look at Van. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet, but she would stay with him until he drifted off, and then slip away. She had worn him out.  Several times.

In the late evening, when everyone else was asleep and she was still awake, she would go down to the beautiful old sanctuary and pray. The sanctuary was a peaceful place, and all alone in the darkness, she found that prayers came easily to her there. She was embarrassed, a little bit, because she always knew she should pray more often, ever since she started going back to church, but it took Beth’s purely practical motivation to convince her to get down on her knees. She hoped God understood.

“What were you thinking?” she said, voice equally soft.  She nestled her head into his shoulder.

“I was thinking about what I should do, now that I’ve finished my PhD.”

“Hmm? What did you come up with?”  She knew he had been worrying this problem, off and on, for months.

Van shifted to face her.

“Have you ever thought about the beginning years of Transform Sickness?”

Gail raised an eyebrow. “What about them?” The sky had cleared, and moonlight reflected off the new snow into the room.

“I’ve heard some of the people from the other households talk. There were all sorts of things going on back then. The research, the early Focus households. It sounds like there was a lot going on as people tried to understand Transform Sickness, and the original Focuses tried to establish households. The Feds kept the Transforms in quarantine back then. I’ve been hearing stories about how the early Focuses coordinated an organized revolt to get their households out of quarantine.”

“Umm-hmm,” Gail said, twirling his chest hair with her finger.

“So I was thinking that might be an interesting subject to write a book about.”

“What?”

“It’s a little out of my specialty, but it’s still history,” Van said, intent. “Nobody’s ever written a book on the subject. I checked. I think I could do it. If the Focuses will talk to me, I could get hold of information unavailable to the other historians. Tell the Focuses’ story, what they were doing and thinking. Nobody’s ever done anything like this.”

“Oh, wow. That’s great,” Gail said, caught by Van’s vision. “Since more people keep catching Transform Sickness every day, people are going to start to be interested in things like this. You’re in a perfect position to do it.”

“So you agree?” Van said. “You’ll support me on this?”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s a wonderful idea.”

“I’m going to need your help,” he said. “Those Focuses won’t talk to some random normal, and I’ll need better Focuses than the ones you’ve talked to in the Young Focus League.”  She had talked to the head of the League, Linda Cooley of Chicago, who sounded like an unworldly radical leftist airhead.  Van had been even less impressed.  “I’ll need you to introduce me and convince them to talk to me.”

“Right, right. This doesn’t work if you don’t have the information from the Focuses who were there. I can make some calls. We ought to find a few of them willing to talk to you.”

“You mean it,” Van said. “I can do this book. Some publisher out there somewhere will be willing to publish something like this.”

They talked into the night, then. About his book, his idea. Plans and hopes and dreams. Gail lay next to him and it warmed her down to her toes to hear him happy and planning for the future.

They drifted off, eventually, and lay close and silent. The moon slipped behind the church, sending the room into darkness. After a long time, Van spoke again.

“I was thinking about another thing,” he said.

“Hmm?” Gail said, drifting and relaxed, almost asleep herself.

“We seem to be pretty settled now. Neither of us is in school,” Van said, his voice soft in the darkness. “What do you think about getting married?”

“What?” Gail said, and startled up in the bed in shock.  This was what Kurt and Sylvie had been hiding.  Van would have never brought this up without running the idea by them first.

“I can’t promise an income,” he said. “This book idea might never produce any money at all.”

Gail shook her head. “I never expected you to support me.  But…” she paused, a little in fear, a little in self-anger, “you know I can’t have children.”

“We never planned to have children. It doesn’t matter.”

Gail laid her head down on the bed again, still stunned. She thought Van wasn’t interested in marriage, that living together would be enough for him.  Certainly not now that she was a Focus, a juice-bound bitch from hell.

She thought living together was enough for her.  Until Van proposed.  Now her heart fluttered, and she found it difficult to breathe.

“Yes,” she said, tears gathering at the edges of her eyes. “Yes.”

Carol Hancock: December 1, 1968

I approached Keaton’s door with a curious mixture of terror and triumph in my heart.  Terror, because if things went bad I wouldn’t likely be leaving this place a free Arm, if I left at all.  Triumph, because despite the fact I disobeyed Keaton’s orders with wild disregard, I had done the impossible.

The big question was: how much did Keaton know about my actions in Chicago?  Once upon a time, I thought she had me under constant surveillance and my organization completely infiltrated.  Her tortured insistence that I had kidnapped Focus Frasier blasted my supposition into dust.  I had no doubt she had at least some of my operation infiltrated, though.

I knocked and waited.  Eventually, Haggerty roused herself from the library and let me in.  She looked worn and exhausted, not from Keaton’s ministrations but from overwork.

“Ma’am, come in,” Haggerty said.  Pause.  “Would you like some help with your materials?”  She was still working with a canned script as far as her interactions with me.  Her mind wasn’t here; she had some insanely complex project in progress and the going looked tough.

“Yes, please, Student,” I said, archly polite.  I sensed a bit of anger hidden in her at the word ‘Student’, though.  Yup, nearly graduation time for this Arm.  Her all-consuming project had to be her graduation exercise.  I could sympathize if I exerted myself, but I had bigger problems.  Like, my fucking life on the line.

That little emotion I buried.

Haggerty and I toted my presentation and attendant documentation into Keaton’s living room, where I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  Keaton was on the phone, and although I couldn’t make out the words I sensed her emotions, a roller coaster of anger, lust, greed, and friction, all cycling around and around, Ferris wheel fashion.  She had to be talking to a Focus.  I sympathized, well, as much as I could without a tag.

Keaton appeared two and a half hours later, glared at me, and sank in her throne-like easy chair.  I read her as low on juice, and she carried scars on her left arm and lower right leg, which I dated as from within the last two days.  This wasn’t good.

“What the fuck is this?” she said, after she glanced at my presentation setup.  I will admit, based on her orders, my display-board title: ‘Focus Biggioni’s Disinformation Campaign and its Consequences’, or the blown-up picture montage of Focus Frasier in captivity, Odin’s pack before they charged, and Wandering Shade’s demon bear illusion had to be mind-blowing, if not insulting.

“I am, right now, not a tagged underling of yours,” I said.  Keaton sprang to her feet and readied a charge.  I responded by turning on the tape recorder, playing Geraldine Caruthers’ description of our espionage mission.

Keaton listened to the first 90 seconds of the Caruthers monolog before rushing me in a full Keatonic rage.  I didn’t flinch when she held a knife to my throat and growled.  She didn’t understand my game, but I did have her off balance.

Which was what
I
was doing.

“On September 16
th
of this year, operatives hired by Focus Tonya Biggioni broke into Zielinski’s office, cracked his safe without a trace, and photographed the documents, including his current personal journal,” I said.  “From this Tonya learned about my last point of embedded sludge dross and Hank’s opinion of its effect on me: that my composition skills had atrophied, stuck at pre-High School levels.  She also learned about my unfinished recruitment of Tom Delacort, the Crow ‘cash bin’ project that was at the time not yet fully implemented, the fact I hadn’t done any investigation of the kidnapping of Focus Frasier of Chicago, and Hank’s own observations about an episode that occurred just after he’d been removed from the Addison Penitentiary, where Sky maneuvered me into raping him to quiet me down.  Using this information, she fed you and Lori slanted information about my activities, some of which were total fabrications.  I would like the time to present a detailed and full accounting of these events in the context of Focus Biggioni’s misinformation campaign and what I’ve done to rectify the situation.”

Drops of blood dripped down my neck as Carruthers’ voice droned on in the background.  Keaton’s face bored into my eyes.  I read her anger, not as easily as when she held my tag, and because she no longer held my tag I wasn’t able to read anything else about her.  Today I was her equal.  I challenged her, in her territory, in her home, because two Arms
can’t
be equals.  Soon, one of us would be the boss of the other.  The odds strongly favored Keaton.

What, though, did Keaton want?  Did she want me tagged again?  Would she need to establish her dominance the hard way?  I had given a lot of thought to the events of the first tagging.  I had physically challenged her, back then, and won, or so I thought.  Instead, she beat me psychologically, forcing her will upon me with ease.  Thus, and yes I hate the word ‘thus’, there were far more aspects to Arm dominance contests, in the context of tagging, than raw fighting skills, and under many circumstances the non-combat aspects of Arm dominance would prove to be more important than the combat aspects.

What I said to Keaton with my preamble, at its most bald emotional level, was: “You’ve been played, loser.”  She could deny reality and try to fight me physically, but the ‘denying reality’ part would weaken her.  I felt stronger because I knew Biggioni had played her.  If Keaton slipped up, she would come out of this wearing my tag.

I would really like that.

On the other hand, she had just tortured me into imbecility a mere month ago.  What such torture does to an Arm mind can’t be described in words, and I hadn’t fully recovered.  Suffice it to say the torture session was my weakness and Keaton’s strength.  If she found a way to conjure up anything, even the smallest moment, from the torture session and link my current psychological state to what I experienced then, I would lose.