Love and Darkness (The Cause Book 2) by Randall Farmer Page A

acquire physical beauty the way the Focuses did, and Arm Sibrian’s appearance was only ordinary at best, except for the magnificent presence of her Arm predator charisma.
    “Time of day is necessary.  There’s…”  Poke.  Gail’s attempted juice pattern to damp her automatic flinch response didn’t work, and she flinched yet again, sending papers flying across the front seat of the car.  Mary’s knife, which Gail didn’t see before or after the poke, drew blood from her leg.  Gail healed the wound closed and growled to herself.  Anti-flinch training, to teach Gail not to give openings to an enemy when surprised.  Gail wasn’t, so far, passing Mary’s tests.  “…distinct patterns to where people are and aren’t by time of day.  At work, at home, shopping.”  Mary’s voice hadn’t hesitated an instant.  Arm self-control was insane, and Gail was envious.  “You also need to factor in rush hour traffic patterns.  If you’re stuck in traffic, you’re not hunting.”
    Hunting.  Mary believed that if Gail accompanied the Arm on a hunt she would better understand Arm psychology and motivations.  Oh, and Mary was low enough on juice to give her problems with Gail’s Transforms, what Mary termed ‘going into a stalk’.  Seeing just one of those gave Gail quite a bit of motivation to help Mary get juice.
    “Do all Arms do this?” Gail asked.
    “When an Arm knows her territory, the information becomes automatic and you don’t need hunting grids.”  She switched out her red pencil for a blue one and drew another set of lines near the river.  She didn’t draw on the Commander’s maps.  She traced her own versions on blank paper and marked up those.  “You just know.  You still take the hunting grids with you, though, in case your juice falls so low you drop into periwithdrawal.  When my juice gets that low, all I’m doing is hunting, and I need the maps because I’m not thinking well.”  Mary’s juice count was nowhere near periwithdrawal.  It was barely under 120.  Gail didn’t ask, as asking would be disrespectful, but since this was the first time she had ever heard of a non-student Arm having a problem around tagged Transforms, she decided that dealing with tagged Transforms was an advanced Arm skill.  “These are the Commander’s maps.  All the other Arm bosses would force a subordinate to make her own maps if given permission to hunt in their territory, but the Commander only keeps her maps around for emergency situations, and so she’s not possessive about them with her tagged subordinates.”  Teacher kept them for when or if she lost her ability to sense juice traces, an ability Gail had discovered only after trading the information on twenty of her tricks.
    “And if I spot an untagged Transform before you do?  Is there some etiquette or protocol?”
    “Your metasense range isn’t…”  Mary stopped and narrowed her eyes at Gail for an instant, a momentary crack in her Arm composure.  Not for the first time for Mary, and Mary was the only Arm Gail interacted with who ever showed cracks in her composure.  “You have a trick.”
    “I have a trick.  If all you need is ‘is this a tagged or untagged Transform?’, and I’m not worried about the spherical, I can focus my metasense into a narrow cone, and…”
    Mary shook her head.  “How far?”
    Gail shrugged.  “It, um, gets random.  I’ve picked out Crow Gilgamesh at a mile and a quarter, when he wanted to get my attention but didn’t want to interact with, um, Arm Keaton.  On the other hand, I once lost contact with Sylvie at two hundred yards in the Detroit Free Press Building, even though I knew exactly where she was.”  Gail loved the Freep’s HQ, an art deco style giant simply crawling with interesting bas-relief figures.
    “I see,” Mary said.  “As far as etiquette and protocol are concerned, that’s part of the lesson and the test.”
    Great.
     
    “At your two o’clock,”