In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) (48 page)

“Original sin,” Lori said.

Gilgamesh furrowed his eyebrows at the strange juxtaposition.  “Fiction results from the subjectivity of the human brain.”  What did that have to do with original sin?

Lori nodded.  “The myth-origin of original sin interpreted as the remembrance of the changeover from animalistic objective thinking to human-style subjective thinking.”

“That sounds like Tim.”

Lori smiled.  “Subjective thinking allows self-reference, self-knowledge.  The knowledge of good and evil, let us say.”

Ouch!  Gilgamesh knew some Crows heavily into psychology who would have a field day with Lori’s comment.  “Are you okay?” Lori metasensed funny, somehow, to him.

“I’ve got to take a breather,” Lori said.  She turned and met his eyes, imploring something.

“Are you having a physical problem?”  Gilgamesh’s worst fears right now involved Lori going into labor in the middle of a juice hunt.  He pulled the truck over and into a dirt path leading into a vacant lot.  He had the sudden urge to show Lori Hephaestus’s dross art statue of Arpeggio, but he wasn’t sure the Arpeggio statue fit the mood of the day.

“Moral problems. I’m having problems with the idea of hunting down juice for an Arm.  I’ve done this before, for Stacy, but…”  Lori turned away.  Grabbed her elbows with her hands and leaned her head against the side of the pickup.  Closed her eyes.

“If it’s any consolation, I’m fighting Crow panic myself.”

“It’s not the action, it’s the target.  Carol.”

Ah.  This problem again.  Despite all the talking they had done on the subject, Lori still had a hard time with Tiamat’s predatory activities.  Tiamat’s juice appeared from nowhere.  Intellectually, Lori knew what Tiamat did, but emotionally?  Nah.

This Transform would die so Tiamat could live.  About every week or two, another died.  Regular as clockwork.  He had the urge to tell Lori one was nothing; see one after the other after the other, week upon week, never ending, dying for Tiamat.  Then complain.

However, Lori was a Focus, responsible for the lives of Transforms, not their deaths.  Arms lived such a different life, a life that hurt Lori to think about.  No, this was nothing about which he should chastise Lori.

“I’m also not happy about the fact Carol didn’t think we were capable of watching over Tonya,” Lori said.  She motioned to him, and they got out of the truck to stretch their legs.  The morning sun crept above the horizon to illuminate what looked to be another gorgeous Houston day.  Grackles collected in the nearby trees, chirping and swarming in endless cycles of launch, circle and land again.  Houston attracted prodigious flocks of grackles this time of year and the noise was deafening.  “Not happy that she’s right.  That in my condition I can’t stand up to Tonya’s charisma.  That she and Henry can.”

“Tiamat’s a brutal realist.  The life of an Arm doesn’t give them any leeway for misconceptions and white lies.  Self-deceit leads to mistakes, and even the slightest mistake can be fatal to an Arm.  About the biggest insult you can toss at an Arm is to call her a sentimentalist.”

Lori tried to laugh, but her laugh came out more of an anguished sob.

Gilgamesh put a hand on Lori’s shoulder.  “Hey.  You’re supposed to be my strength.  I’m the young Crow, you’re the older Focus.”  Lori shivered under his hand and turned toward him.  Without even thinking about it, Gilgamesh found Lori in his arms, found his mouth on hers.  She needed kissing.  She didn’t back away when he kissed her.

Much the opposite.  She leaned into him, her body hot and tight up against his.  Gilgamesh pulled away from the kiss.

“Don’t stop because of me,” Lori said.  Her voice now vibrated with deeper registers added to her normal alto, sound colors that almost scared Gilgamesh.  She reached her hand behind his head, and pulled him back toward her.  Met his eyes.  Hers were hypnotic.  “Oh,” Lori said.  “I hadn’t ever looked before.”  She had noticed his eyes, so dark brown they were almost black.

They kissed again.

“Business,” Gilgamesh said, many moments later.  “Tiamat needs juice.”

Lori sighed.  “And I’m pregnant all the way out to here and way too uncomfortable for what I need right now.”

They climbed back into the truck, and drove off through the riotous grackles to check on the Deer Park holding tank, chatting with each other.  It didn’t take long for Lori to get Gilgamesh to promise an extended visit to Boston after the baby was born.

Gilgamesh had the appalled feeling he had been more than propositioned, he had been proposed to.

Tonya Biggioni: December 12, 1968 – December 13, 1968

Carol stopped pacing and sat down to think, stone faced and unreadable.  Tonya waited, patiently, for the verdict on her life.  Which had to be ‘death’.  The information she had provided over the last two days had been good, but not earthshattering.  Carol’s questioning was organized, complete and showed proper caution.  Tonya couldn’t figure out whether Carol’s techniques, mimicking Tonya’s own, were a conscious effort on the Arm’s part or whether they were natural.  Either way, she had earned Tonya’s respect many times over.

The opposite wasn’t true.  Too much of what Tonya had revealed translated to ‘this bitch will do anything to hold on to power’, which hadn’t impressed Carol in the slightest.

Last ditch schemes played through Tonya’s mind – she
would
go down swinging.  Her best idea was to take down Carol, forcing Lori to do the dirty work, playing on a Focus’s reluctance to physical harm to another Focus.  Luckily, Carol’s place held little bad juice, which would…

“Carol, I’d like a shot at Tonya first,” Lori said.  “Before, well, you know.”

Bingo.

“Whatever.”  Carol didn’t even look up from where she currently sat, on the floor with her back against the overstuffed chair.  She never seemed to stay in one place for more than a few minutes.

Lori stood, with effort, trying to flatten her outfit around her pregnant belly.  She came over, slowly, and dropped half a dozen juice patterns on Tonya, which Tonya didn’t attempt to block.  Tonya gasped in pain.  Lori had dropped her right to the edge of withdrawal.

“So you’ve gotten sadistic as well?” Tonya said.  She huddled down, hand over her eyes to block the light.  Lori’s control over the juice, legendary among all Focuses, had left Tonya with no supplemental juice, at least as far as she could tell.  This low, even Tonya’s metasense was unavailable.

Lori shook her head.  “I have to.  What I’m about to do is dangerous.”  Carol snorted, no longer convinced that anything a Focus considered dangerous was worth her time.  Lori had Tonya’s full attention, though.

“Sky is convinced you wear Patterson’s tag.  It’s taken me two days of work, but I’ve finally identified the thing.  What I found doesn’t look like a standard tag to me, but something else, something vile.  Care to comment?”

Tonya’s mind spun as goose pimples covered her arms and legs.  Tagged by Patterson?  Tonya turned to Lori.  “Impossible.  You’re wrong.  This can’t be!”  Tonya’s voice went high with terror and she didn’t attempt to control her voice.  The Council forbade Focus – Focus tags!

Lori knelt down in front of Tonya, with a pregnancy ‘oof’, and touched Tonya’s forehead.  Anger rippled through Tonya; she would rather die than be enslaved by Lori.  “Sure it can,” Lori said, mistaking Tonya’s political comment for a technical observation.  “I’ve used tagging as a weapon against Monsters and all of the Major Transform varieties, but I’ve never run into a variety able to last beyond a moment or two on a Major Transform.”  That would serve Sky right, Tonya decided, the Crow most likely to have been Lori’s target.  Lori’s head-butting sessions with Keaton must have been livelier than either reported.

“Normally, to last, a tag recipient must agree,” Carol said.  Lori had awakened Carol out of her judgment meditation, and the Arm walked over to stand beside the much smaller kneeling Focus.  “I can’t metasense anything taglike in this morass of a juice structure, though.”

“I certainly wouldn’t agree to anything like being tagged,” Tonya said.  Something started to move inside her mind, a vile snake filled with hunger.  “I…I…  You were right to do this to me, Lori.  There
is
something.  Only low juice is keeping me from acting on this sudden compulsion to destroy you.”  Panic entered her voice.  “Something is wrong with me.”  None of them spoke for about a minute, but Carol did nod in response, a moral judgment rather than a comment about the tag.

“The tag’s right here,” Lori said, frustrated, pointing at Tonya’s heart.  Figures, Tonya thought.

“Unfortunately, I have no idea what Patterson’s tag looks like,” Carol said.  “There’s nothing but smears, and none of them look like any of the tags I metasensed in Pittsburgh.”

The younger Focus paused and bit her lip, thinking.  “I can point it out to you if you want, Carol.”  Carol nodded, sat behind Lori, and boosted her onto her lap.

“This is the metasense sharing trick?” Tonya said, looking up.  They nodded.  “It’s also forbidden.”

“Well, then, don’t look,” Carol said.  The two of them studied Tonya for several minutes.

“Yes.  It
is
some sort of perverted tag,” Carol said, disgusted.  “It reminds me of a cross between Teas’ object tags and the air tag she did that she said was a juice pattern.  It
is
nothing like the tags I metasensed in Pittsburgh.”

This just kept getting worse and worse.  Teas, the utter fool, should never have shown her crazy tricks to anyone, especially an Arm.  She probably even taught Carol enough to be able to recognize juice patterns.

A quick stab of pain ran through Tonya’s head, accompanied by the stench of rancid meat. A tidal bore of agony followed, so strong Tonya saw spots.  She grabbed her head and screamed.  “Something’s attacking me!  In my mind!”

Something tried to claw its way out of Tonya’s own mind, and force her to attack Lori and Carol.  Tonya’s will to resist melted out from underneath her by the second.

“It’s the tag.  It can’t do anything to you…” Lori said, and then stopped.  She fell into some meditation mode.

“It’s got Lori!” Carol said.  She was on her feet now, with Lori in her arms, probably ready to run Lori out of Tonya’s range if anyone thought that would help.

“No, she’s fighting back,” Gilgamesh said, standing and edging away cautiously.  “There’s a knot of sludge dross, about the size of a ping-pong ball, in Focus Biggioni’s brain.  Just behind her metacampus.  I know this sounds impossible, but whatever’s going on is coming
through
the knot, from somewhere else.”

“Little help, people,” Lori said, whispering.  “I can’t hold this long.”

Zielinski got up, quickly, and picked up one of Carol’s many weapons, a snub-nosed semi-automatic.  He knelt and aimed the weapon at Tonya, while patting blindly for something better.

Most of Lori’s household juice buffer now sat in Tonya’s, which left Lori almost nothing to play with in her personal juice supply.  “Take.  Carol’s.  Juice.”  Tonya croaked out.  The thing inside her wanted her to shut up.  Tonya fought the foreign
thing
with what remained of her will.

“Do it,” Carol said, to Lori, without the slightest bit of hesitation.

Lori worked, Carol’s juice flowing into Lori’s personal juice supply.  Carol trusted Lori with access to her own juice, Tonya realized.  So much for the wedges she had driven between them.

Tonya’s will to resist collapsed, exhausted.  Juice flowed into Tonya from her own household juice buffer, not of her doing, as this was beyond her capabilities.  Her metasense clicked on.  “Jesus, attend me!” she said, someone else controlling her voice.  Her head turned to look at Zielinski.  “
Kill them all!
”

Zielinski didn’t move from his crouch, ignoring her charismatic command as if she hadn’t spoken.  Strange.  Not his resistance, but that whoever controlled her might think she had a chance with someone like Zielinski.  Focus Doctors were notorious for their charisma resistance and Zielinski was practically a legend.  He was ready to put a bullet through her brain the second Carol gave the order.  Or fell.

Carol dumped Lori on the floor behind her and whipped out her knife, but her knife went skittering across the floor.  The something now controlling Tonya had numbed the Arm’s hand.  “Free!” Tonya’s controller said, using Tonya to spew out a juice pattern aimed at everyone in the room, ripping off tags and ongoing charismatic controls.

“Now you’re
mine!
” Tonya said, the thing inside trying an impossible juice-amplified charismatic control.  Lori screamed as Tonya sensed Lori’s will become hers.  Carol winced at the same time, half frozen in place, the control attempt failing to penetrate Carol’s mind.

A vomit inducing spasm whipped through Tonya, some Crow trick, disrupting her controller’s takeover attempt.  Tonya’s head turned to find Gilgamesh, hidden now behind a couch.  He had rolled a tennis ball over at them.  “Die!”  Gilgamesh screamed and fell from a nasty juice pattern Tonya found herself creating, but as Gilgamesh fell he pounded another tennis ball on the ground.  The world filled with light, dazzling Tonya’s metasense.  The thing controlling her faded into the background, unable to work through her dazzled metasense.  The thing’s juice patterns dissipated as well.