The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) (6 page)

“Student Meredith Bartlett, ma’am,” she said, eyes firmly on my feet, her voice perfectly deferential.

I got in her face, challenging her.  “Your graduation exercise?”

“Espionage, ma’am, against the Bay Area Focuses.”

With my left hand I yanked up her chin so I could take in her eyes.  The Student Arm managed to meet mine without flinching or challenging.  Well taught.  In a few years this one would be an asset, another of the so-called ‘speed Arms’, joining Rayburn and myself as Arms oriented toward speed and stealth, not going toe to toe with Chimeras in their beasty combat forms.

“Very well.  Don’t fuck up.”  I let go of her chin and she went back to studying my feet, properly terrified.

The living room was stark and empty, except for a white rug and a pile of boxes in the corner.  I sensed another baby Arm, one barely out of her transformation, packing upstairs, but no Keaton.

I felt a presence as I followed Bartlett across the living room, and turned to see Stacy Keaton behind me.

Something was wrong with her.  She stood too still, and the look in her eyes was of death and madness.

Shit!  She was having another psychotic episode, probably due to the pain of abandoning her territory, and she had me trapped in her damned house.  She stood between me and the door, and I would need to navigate too many obstacles to make my way safely out the back.  Bartlett’s eyes grew wide in terror and she ran for the stairs, but Keaton was focused on me, not the student, so I wouldn’t escape that way.

Dammit, I knew when I made the decision to stick by Keaton that I risked another one of those psychotic episodes, but I didn’t think she would actually pick me as her target even if her mind went.  I was too senior, and capable of too much of a fight.  Unfortunately, while I might fight well, I seriously doubted my ability to
beat
her, even with her abilities degraded by psychosis.  She was the oldest Arm, and she was too damned good.  I just didn’t see any good options for running.

I flashed on an old memory, of the first time Keaton came after me in a psychotic break, back when I was a student.  I had tried to run.  I had failed, and paid for my failure with torture and madness and far too close an encounter with death.

No options now.  I pulled my knives and settled into a fighting crouch.

The light of madness disappeared from her eyes and she laughed.  A big, consuming, space-filling belly laugh.  “You a little jumpy there, Hancock?” she said.  She had been faking the psychosis.

“Ma’am” I said, standing up straight and fighting the urge to shake.

“You going to put those knives away?”  This time, her stance spoke of senior Arm, rather than madness, but still threatening.  She still chuckled, but there was an edge to it.

“My apologies, ma’am,” I said, putting the knives away and bowing.  A practical joke.  My nerves would take hours to recover.  I did my best to change the subject. “You’re moving?”

“Kitchen,” Stacy said, motioning with her arm, dominance successfully re-established.  At least she didn’t insist on the full grovel routine.  She was short, barely clearing five feet, with blue eyes, brown hair, and a build to do a male bodybuilder proud.  Of all the Arms in the US, she was the oldest.  Mean as sin, and the jury was out as to whether she was crazy like a fox, or just crazy.  “Cook me one of your dinners and I’ll tell you everything about what’s going on.”  She smiled, a better smile this time, knowing full well I couldn’t ever resist the chance to cook for my long-time Arm boss.  Cooking lived deep in our relationship, way way down at the subconscious juice level.  She had been my teacher when I was a young Arm, the one who taught me how to survive the misery and horror of an Arm transformation.  She still taught.  She had taught every living mature Arm in the US.

Thinking ahead, she had made one of her students buy fresh ingredients, and the kitchen tools hadn’t yet been packed.  Looking at the ingredients, I decided an entire household of Arms would be going off their diets tonight.  I expected I would be doing some sparring and teaching of the current crop of baby Arms later, and I predicted intestinal cramps for all of us.  I smiled at the beef liver, kidneys and blood sausage, and at the reappearance of the Arm boss I mostly trusted.  We were going to have some treats, now weren’t we?

“I actually found Wendy three months ago,” Keaton said, perched on a stool on the far end of the kitchen.  Focus Wendy Mann was Keaton’s favorite local Detroit Focus, until she got ostracized by all but one of the other Midwest Region Focuses as an ‘Arm pet’.  My two top Focuses, Linda Cooley and Gloria Frasier, had been hit by the same tar brush. In Linda’s case the accusation wasn’t true (our business arrangements amplified her household income, instead of supporting her). Gloria just didn’t care, as she despised the local Focuses, blaming them for her kidnapping and stint as a Hunters’ Pack Mistress when she had been a baby Focus.  She had switched over to the International Sisterhood of Socialistic Focuses (or whatever they called the damned thing this year), the popular Canadian alternative to the US Focus Council among the Midwestern and northern Great Plains Focuses.  “She’s in Los Angeles.  I’d been sitting on a decision about whether to move or not, but this pushing the Cause crap made the decision for me.  I’m not going to sit here in Detroit and be your target of opportunity for Adkins.”

Focus Adkins was one of the first Focuses, the behind the scenes leaders of the US Focus organization.  Their affection for Arms varied with the arrangement of social cliques, and they took backstabbing to an art form.  I held a particular grudge against Focus Adkins, who made Detroit her seat of power.

I nodded.  “Makes sense.”  I didn’t see any sign of pain now from abandoning Detroit, though I knew she was hurting.  She had lived in Detroit for too long to be able to leave the place easily.  I did know the home of her heart was Philadelphia, the same way mine was Chicago.  I had claimed many other territories, and had loved them all, but they all came second to Chicago.

I gave her a more in-depth rundown of the North Tonawanda meeting, my mission with Bass, and Bass’s angry departure from the meeting.

“I’m not surprised about Bass’s reaction,” Keaton said, pacing while I cooked.  “She’s never liked constraints, and working with the Cause implies far too many constraints.”  A comment I could make about Keaton herself.  “You might want to contact her again after she cools down.  Helping her solve the mystery of her birth family’s disappearance should be a stronger pull than her dislike of the Cause.”

“Yes, ma’am, if I have the time.”

Keaton growled, and then sighed.  “There are times when I think tags aren’t supposed to work on senior Arm-level relationships,” she said.  “Save for extraordinary circumstances, such as after one of Haggerty’s crazy heroic successes, it’s always ‘challenger loses’.”

I shrugged, uncomfortable with the topic.  Too personal.  “I think it’s ‘challenger loses’, even without the tags, save in these extraordinary circumstances.  Ma’am, do you think you could challenge Haggerty and win, enough to force her to take your tag?”

“Not without one of these extraordinary circumstances.”

“Do you think she could challenge you and win, enough to force you to take her tag?”

“Certainly not.”

Keaton grabbed my shoulder and squeezed.  I turned and she got in my face.  “Do you have a point here, Hancock?”  I carefully put down the kitchen knife in my hand.  To do otherwise might be taken as a challenge.

“Amy’s correct in her statement that we need to better understand Arm tags, and, by extension, what’s really going on in our dominance contests.  Ma’am.”  I wondered if Keaton was going to force me to challenge her, just to give her an opportunity to re-establish her dominance more emphatically.

Keaton read my mind and laughed.  “I don’t have to; you’re about as beaten down as I’ve ever seen you.  I should never have been able to fool you with the psychotic Arm trick.”  I tried to growl, and to my shock, my growl came out as a whimper.  Dammit!  “I didn’t like that damned wager of yours with Haggerty to start with.”  First I had heard, but, well, typical Keaton, always second guessing people.  “Your loss to her is a failure of anticipation.  You were so sure you would win the wager you didn’t come up with any contingency plans to cover the unexpected.”  I didn’t react, even with anger.  I had heard too much of this from Haggerty when she humbled me, after she won the dominance fight.  “It’s the sort of head-blind mistake a
Focus
might make.  I think you’re hanging out with the Focuses and Crows too much.”  At Keaton’s orders.  One of my jobs was to deal with the politics and handle the Focuses and Crows, so she didn’t have to.  She did let go of my shoulder, though.  “You know my opinion of the Cause: those who prepare the most for a human-made disaster are the ones most likely to trigger it.”  Her so-called reason for quitting the Cause, her way of getting back at the Focuses who betrayed us.  A year ago, the Arms and the Focuses had allied in the Great Hunter War, to fight the Hunters, a variety of Chimeras who opposed Arms, Focuses, and civilization in general.  The lunatic Crow Guru Wandering Shade had created them years ago, but with Wandering Shade’s death, they had gone independent, still causing death and destruction among everyone I considered an ally.  Under my leadership, the Arms, Focuses, and allied Crows had chased them out of Chicago, and I had been prepared to destroy them completely when the Focuses, in their entirety, pulled out. With no notice.  I still didn’t know what happened, and I was still pissed.  I had talked to four Focus Council members and two first Focuses, and each one told me that they personally supported the war, and terribly regretted the Council decision to pull out.  They also told me that the first Focuses as a whole supported the war.  And yet, with seven Focuses on the Council, and four supporting the war, the Council still voted to pull out.  I, of course, hadn’t been at the Council meeting to see the dynamics, because I was out in the field conducting a war.

The decision, like almost all Council decisions, had been unanimous.  Keaton, not surprisingly, was pissed as well, as she had also been left stranded against the enemy.  She blamed the Focuses, but she also blamed me.  Those Focuses were supposed to be my allies, via the Cause.  Less than a month later, she officially quit the Cause.

“There are times when I think we should give up on the tag hierarchy for senior Arms, quit cooperating with the other Major Transforms, and go back to doing things the old-fashioned Arm way,” she said.  Blood and violence.  The antithesis of the Cause.  Keaton hadn’t hinted at anything so radical in years.  “I’m not happy with this Eskimo Spear crap.  This won’t end well, but I can’t object to anything that challenges the senior Major Transforms.  I’m real tired of them dropping their shit on me.”  She must have been doing more elbow jostling with Focus Adkins than I realized.  “I also wonder if our real enemy isn’t the fucking Nativists.  Those assholes think they’re going to emulate Romania and kill all the Transforms.  They’re tying their message to racism, Southern exceptionalism and populism, and that combination’s never been good for politics in the United States.”  I nodded in agreement; I had many of the same worries.

I watched Keaton as she paced and wondered again about her anomalous psychotic break.  Back when she first transformed, she had been in the hands of the FBI and they had let her slip into juice withdrawal for two hours, damaging her mind and giving her a propensity for psychotic breaks when she ran low on juice.  This had been a huge problem for me when I went through my training with her, but Transforms were a lot more common these days, and juice was a hell of a lot easier to come by.  Those breaks had become rare, and some of the younger Arms had never even seen one.  And Keaton hadn’t been low on juice when she killed Svensen.

I thought about Bass and her mental manipulation techniques, which gave her the skills to cause such a break.  Except Bass had been tagged at the time, the same as the rest of us, and tags prevented such nonsense.  Some enemy might have learned Bass’s technology, but Bass emphatically denied teaching anyone, and besides, Bass’s technology needed to be used at close range.  Rayburn and I had followed up on all of this and gotten nowhere.

“Ma’am,” I said.  “I think we need to see how this plays out.  For one thing, the first Focuses might easily overestimate their strength and attempt to take out the Council or send thugs after the leading Cause members.  If they do anything so stupid, we’ll be able to get enough support from the rest of the Focuses to take them out.  Something you’ve always wanted, ma’am.”

She shook her head.  “Depending on your enemies to make a stupid mistake is irrational.  Still, pushing your enemies into a position where they have to act, and where anything they do would be a mistake, isn’t.  Let’s see if this ‘push the Cause’ shit actually works as advertised.  Otherwise, we may need to seriously consider going a different direction.”  Ouch.

After the meal, Keaton went into detail about the meeting, grilling me unmercifully.  The grilling lasted all night, mixed in with baby Arm sparring sessions.  Her newest student Arm particularly annoyed me; I hadn’t thought Arms came in
stupid
.

Keaton’s reaction to pushing the Cause bothered me.  This was more than an urge to ditch the Cause, this was a hint she wanted to ditch civilization itself.

---

I sat in my office in my home in Chicago with no light in the room except for the stars through my big plate glass windows.  In my hands, I held a little ivory carving on its chain.  The Nobles had given it to me three years ago, establishing their credibility and buying their way into the fight against Wandering Shade.  They had found it on a quest in the far north, and claimed it was evidence of the ‘predecessors’, as the Progenitors were known before the Crow Nameless learned otherwise.  I had nodded politely and accepted it, more impressed with their fight against an old Monster than their overwrought descriptions of some fantastical ancient Transforms.  For a while, I even wore the little carving, because it was old, and valuable, and a gift.  Then the earthly grip of mundane reality asserted itself, and I put the thing with my other treasures in storage.