The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (39 page)

“I thank you for your kind invitation, but I think I’ll stay where I am for the moment.”  Oh.  He didn’t trust Teacher.  Interesting to find a Crow who trusted Keaton more than Teacher.  “If I told you the other Crow had your meta-signature, would you panic?”  She mentally translated Newt’s ‘meta-signature’ comment as ‘metapresence’.

“Uh, probably, as that’s a senior Crow trick,” Gail said, remembering information from her many long conversations with Gilgamesh.

“Then I won’t say, not wishing to panic you,” the Newt said from his perch a thousand feet away.  “I do wish you a better night of exercise than you’ve had so far.”

Gail turned to Teacher.  “I’m not liking this, you know.”

Teacher shrugged.  “We’re going to go back the way we came and continue our running, only we’re going to head off toward this more distant Crow.  I want to see how senior a Crow we’re facing.  Let’s see if we can get him to run.  You understand the goal of the fake Monster trick?”

“The Crow wanted to get you on camera killing an innocent.”

Teacher shook her head.  “That’s just the start.  This is an attack on the Cause.  Someone doesn’t like what I’m doing with you and wants to stop us.”  She led Gail back over the fence and back to Sturtevant, where they resumed their running.  Gail’s gut said Newton now trailed behind them.

The juice to an Arm project had been dangerous from day one, but Gail thought of the danger in terms of political trouble from Focus Adkins, Hunter-style rampage trouble, or trouble from various law enforcement agencies.  She prepared her people accordingly, with an emphasis on house defense and running from danger.  She had never thought of danger in terms of capers and tricks.  How easy would it be to entrap one of her people into doing something stupid?  Far too easy.  Her mind ran through idea after idea on how to stop something like this, none of which satisfied her.

Distracted, she didn’t notice the wear and tear of the running, or the fact her automatic healing finally kicked in.

When they finally turned toward the second Crow, Gail’s itchy feeling from the second Crow vanished, and never returned that evening.

---

“Relax,” the slow voice said.  Gail did her best, lying on the floor of her office with the door securely locked.

The pain started in her shoulder, sharp and stabbing, as if Teacher had driven a knife all the way down into her lungs.  Gail gasped, but then controlled her reaction and didn’t show any more.  She attempted to relax again and force the pain away.

“Pull on the juice, let the juice insulate your will from your body,” Teacher said.  Gail tried.  The pain hurt, but she could deal.

Then Teacher did something and the pain increased tenfold.  Gail screamed and thrashed.  She tried to fight free of Teacher’s grip and the pain, but Teacher held her tight, and the pain went on and on.

“Draw on the juice,” Teacher said, but Gail barely heard her over her own screams.  The pain didn’t stop, terrible and consuming.

The pain stopped.

Gail collapsed on the floor, gasping and shaking.  After a moment, the tears started coming.  A part of her just couldn’t understand how something could possibly hurt this much.

She wasn’t done crying when Teacher put a gag in her mouth and tied the gag behind her head.

“Mgmph!”

“You can’t hear my instructions if you’re screaming, and you don’t have enough control to keep quiet.  Get ready, because we’re doing this again.  Draw on the juice this time.  Willpower won’t be enough, I promise.”

“
Mgmph
!” Teacher smiled her nasty little smile at Gail’s gagged screams.

“You have a long way to go before you’re toughened up, Focus.  Try to learn something, because we’re doing this exercise for the next two hours.”

Gail knelt at the alter rail at St. Paul’s Methodist Church, just outside downtown Detroit.  The moon shone through the stained glass window of Jesus ascending into heaven, and illuminated just the head of the left-most angel.  The inside of the church was dark, and she was the only one there.

She prayed.

This church had been her home once, back in the early days after her transformation, after Trisha’s boyfriend ran off with their money, and they had no money and no hope and a winter coming on.  The bishop had taken pity on them and let the whole household live here over the winter.  She remembered back then, when the household refinished the antique pews and the very antique alter rail where she knelt.  Back when Matt Narbanor had been pastor, a different lifetime, back before the Battle in Detroit.

She wished he still lived.  He would listen to her troubles, and then pray with her.  Now, she prayed alone.

The church remained silent in the darkness. Gail was glad.  Even her bodyguards left her alone and stood guard outside the sanctuary.

She missed Matt Narbanor a lot, even more so now.  The replacement pastor wasn’t the same.  He was one of the normals in Grace Johnson’s household, three months out of seminary.  He was one of many who had heard the call to the ministry after Matt’s heroic death.

He wasn’t Matt, though, and not hers, and he didn’t have Matt’s years of wisdom and experience.

She prayed.

How did things get this bad? Too much, too fast.  Self-control.  Athletics.  Combat and weaponry.  Juice handling under stress. Complex juice assignments over multiple different people for extended periods of time.

Even a little progress on the juice pattern thing.  She had identified several of the components and could create them on command.  She had even shown Zielinski one of her secret juice tricks, the photographic memory one, and they managed to represent the trick with a juice pattern diagram.  He still didn’t realize how many similar tricks she knew, terrified to show anyone but her science people.

So her reward? Torture!

She had called Tonya, not as much to complain but in search of some solace.  Help in coping.  Tonya told her that she needed to learn the pain trick, and how each Focus mastered the pain differently.  “Everyone who deals with Arms gets tortured by them one time or another,” Tonya said, voice deep and sad.  “Arms won’t even start to respect you unless you can sneer at torture.”

Gail prayed.

She prayed for forgiveness, for strength, for patience, for safety for herself and her household.

As she prayed, her sensitive gut decided to churn.  Crow.  Watching her from somewhere nearby.  She stood, forgetting her prayers.  Uneasy from the encounter with the fake Monster, and with an unusually unhappy gut, she decided this Crow was an enemy.  She didn’t like the sensation of a watching enemy, but didn’t know what to do about the problem.  She strode to the back of the church where her guards waited.  They heard her footsteps, and John Guynes opened the door for her.

She had almost felt on the brink of an answer in the dark church, but there would be no more prayers this evening and the answer slipped away.  She told John to take her home.  In the car, restless and uneasy, she considered her misery and the surrounding sense of threat, and resolved to tell Teacher to slow down, or else she would have to quit the training.

Carol Hancock: July 26, 1972 – July 31, 1972

I picked up the next from the inbox, Tom’s latest report on my people’s moneymaking efforts.  Yes, the mansion they found held the loot we wanted to steal, but he smelled a trap, and wanted me to take a look.  I penned a ‘drop it and go on to something else’ note and picked up the next.

Late afternoon sun shone through four narrow windows onto leather guest chairs and an oriental carpet.  I had finally managed to set up my new home in Detroit to my specifications, including a nice, big office, with an oversized oak desk.  A credenza stood ready to accumulate a new set of files and records.  I planned to be substantially more careful about making backup copies this time around.

I missed Chicago, and felt vaguely unfaithful to it by settling here, but I had made my decision, and Detroit didn’t deserve a half-assed commitment on my part.

Better drapes wouldn’t hurt, either.

I flipped through Ila’s report on the Focus politics of the Midwest region, speed-reading the highlights and thinking about other things.  Gail’s ‘we need to slow down or else’ ultimatum bothered me.  Why did she send this to me in writing instead of in person?  What sort of top-end Focus wouldn’t attempt to use her charisma to get her way?

What sort of Arm was I to even consider a positive response to such a demand?  Had she gotten to me personally?  Bah.  I was still going to beat her into next week for having the temerity to even think of giving me an ultimatum.

The next note was from Hank, and germane.  ‘Carol, after Gail was able to follow my technical discussion during the meeting in your War Room after the tagging ceremony, I decided to do a bit of poking around, and I’ve found out some disquieting news.  Gail’s household has what they term the ‘science department’ or ‘science directorate’.  The orange haired woman leads the team; she, improbably, has a Chemistry BS.  Her husband has an Engineering MS.  Van, Gail’s husband and History PhD, is on the team and he’s been cross-training in all the Transform Sickness issues for three years, as has Gail and her aide, Sylvie (my source for this, through Jeannie).  They know about my papers and can talk intelligently about them.  Sylvie said they understand the danger of what they term ‘the Bitch Patrol’, and implied Gail is sitting on hundreds of Focus tricks she’s terrified to use in public.  Gail told me she has perhaps a half dozen of these.  We need to be very careful, both…”

He continued for three pages of potential problems and suggestions for how to deal with them.

Gail held back on me.  Her ultimatum note implied she was over her initial terror, and thought she had a way of fighting back if I didn’t comply.  Hmph.  Not much on the tactical or strategic combat sense, unless…

Right.  Think like a Focus.  She’s saying we needed to renegotiate.  This wasn’t an Arm-style dominance challenge.  I picked up the next item from my inbox, an interim report from the detective agency Amy and I were using to identify the perp behind the Phoenix Church Massacre.  The cover of the overly long report said they had nothing, but I leafed through the report, anyway.  What was nothing to a PI might be something to me, and of the unknowns stalking me and causing me problems, the Phoenix Church Massacre perp bothered me the most.

Why now, for Gail?  As usual, thinking like a Focus hurt my brain, but I did work out the answer: Gail connected pain, in her mind, to Focus bitch Adkins.  So her twisty Focusy hindbrain thought of this as a social and political attack on her, as I had just said ‘we are doing this next’, without elaborating on the reasons why.  I sighed.

Students should follow orders without those pesky ‘why’ questions.

Gail wasn’t a baby Arm, though.  I would need to talk her into…

Wait just a second.  I banished the Gail thoughts from my head and focused on the PI’s report.  Page 8 contained an eyewitness description of ‘her boots were covered in ugly fat lizards’, while on page 28 the PIs reported the FBI investigation team concluded the perp wore woman’s size 6 boots.

Bass.  Those were her size 6 armadillo intaglio cowboy boots, and the eyewitness had been a terrified fool who didn’t know an armadillo from a lizard.  All vestige of ‘Focus thinking’ fled my mind and body as I growled in response to Bass’s game and all her kind notes and evasions since the Eskimo Spear presentation.  She more than challenged me, she
attacked
me.

All other priorities dropped from my mind in the face of the challenge.  For this, she would suffer.

---

I scoped Bass’s lair out with my field glasses.  Her home was a non-working ranch just outside of Ft. Worth, a desolate place if I had ever seen one.

Bass was going to pay for her actions, and pay big.  She owed me.

I was pissed.  Oh, more than pissed.  Livid.  No, worse than livid.  There weren’t words to describe how angry I was.  She had
played
me.  Her rampage in Phoenix cost me lives and territory.  I would take all this from her, including all the reasons behind her actions.

I approached Bass’s place from downwind, and the closer I came, the worse the place stank.  I wondered what she was doing here to cause such a reek.

Her spread included an old single-story ranch house, a barn and an equipment shed.  The dirt driveway led through grass dried by the hot Texas sun to a crushed limestone parking area lined with long-dead leafless bushes.  A wild overgrowth of salt cedar and mesquite hid the buildings from the road.  Closer in to this threatening and inhospitable place, I separated the smell of death from the other smells, the fear of victims, old blood, and pain.

This was no mere ‘Arm basement’ where she tortured a few victims to chase the twisty bugs out of her head.  This was
industrial
.

I had never suspected.  I don’t think any of us had, save for Amy and her wild theories about Rayburn, Bass and Keaton.

I put down my field glasses for the last time and walked unhidden toward Bass’s house.  Unhidden, but disguised.  I wore the metasense image of Arm Bartlett, juniormost Arm, and non-threatening.  One of Bass’s people greeted me before I knocked.  I metasensed Bass walking, not running, up from the oversized basement she had added to her Buchenwald.