No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) by Randall Farmer Page B

would be perpetually angry, too.
    Keaton kept talking, staring off into the sky, reminiscing.  “About a month after they broke me they decided I wasn’t dangerous anymore and I got more freedom, including access to a weight room left over from the place’s prison days.  Whenever I couldn’t stand the boredom any longer I’d get the guards to take me there and I’d pump iron.  They thought I was crazy, but I’d do it for hours at a time.  I didn’t have anything else to do and after a while my exercises started to feel good.
    “Two and a half months in they screwed up getting me a kill by two hours.  It took me a week and two more kills to put my sanity back together enough to be functional.  As the two of you are well aware, those two hours of withdrawal left me with a nasty problem I’d love to fix but have no idea how.”  Keaton smiled her sardonic smile, but I think even a normal would have spotted the fact her smile was false.  She used the false smile to paper over a gaping raw spot in her soul.
    Gilgamesh coughed, barely audible.  Keaton turned to him.  “Ma’am?” he whispered.  She motioned for him to speak.  “I have reason to believe that some leading senior Crows, such as the three who signed my mission letter, have the skills and knowledge to fix your problem.”
    “You can metasense the problem, then?  What is it?”
    “It’s…”  Gilgamesh paused.  “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I understand Wire’s technical explanation enough to translate, but I think in your terms your withdrawal scars left an opening which attracts bad juice to you, leaving you over the long haul with Monster juice in your juice structure.”
    “Who’s Wire?  You’ve never talked about him before,” Keaton said, demanding.
    Gilgamesh shivered and held my hand tight.  “He…  This is painful, ma’am.  Wire was a trainee Guru in Philadelphia and for several months, my teacher – until the Beast Man you killed in Philadelphia, Grendel, killed him after Grendel and Enkidu captured Wire, Tolstoy and myself.”
    Keaton hissed.  “He was my Crow the same way you’re Carol’s?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Fuck,” Keaton said, barely audible.
    She went back to watching the stars and didn’t say anything for another five minutes. I watched her put away her rage until she buried it from view.  Not gone, but waiting for some appropriate time to be let loose again.
    “After I recovered, I was no longer broken to their will, but they didn’t realize it.”  Now there’s an Arm trick I didn’t suspect.  I had been worrying Biggioni would be able to come to me at any time, threaten my juice supply, say ‘heel’ and I would heel.  I guessed the juice lever only worked if you actually supplied the juice.  “I took Special Agent Warshauer as a lover and convinced him I was being horribly mistreated.  He slipped up a few days later and let me take his weapon, after which I convinced him to let me escape.”
    She held him at gunpoint and forced him to let her out.
    “I didn’t know shit about how to escape, so I couldn’t shake the manhunt.  We got jumped by two cops just outside the Mead’s outer perimeter.  Both of us got shot up and Warshauer died.”
    Thus the reason McIntyre became her Ahab.  I hadn’t realized his hatred was personal.
    “I went berserk and killed the cops, moving faster than I’d thought possible.  I’d discovered the burn.  My discovery almost killed me before I figured out how to stop the burn.”  She laughed, a laugh of pain and loss.  This was where Keaton became hard.  I wondered if she had cared for Warshauer, and suspected she had.
    “I was on the run for nine months after my escape.  At first, I tried not to kill or even hurt people, but I made mistakes.  I stole when I needed to.  I used cash for everything, disguised myself as well as I knew how.  I figured out how to pass myself off as a man.  I took kills whenever I found them, but