No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read Free Page A

level growing, until he did something that left a yellow stain in the air.
    “You sicked up?” Keaton said.  “You’re off your game today, kiddo.  Clean that shit up, dammit.”
    “Wait,” Gilgamesh said, raising his hand.  “Carol sensed my sick-up.”  He closed his eyes.  “The juice component to it, my guess.”
    “Which is too faint for me to pick up at all,” Keaton said.  “Yet another potentially beneficial change.  This is starting to freak me the fuck out.”
    I wondered what in the hell either of them was talking about and why Keaton sounded like she had been hanging out with the hippies.  Keaton frowned at me and produced a leather belt from where it had been hiding on her arm and snapped it on her hand.  “Remember this?” she said to me.
    I nodded.
    “I haven’t had to use this form of inducement yet to keep you moving,” she said.  “Does that need to change?”
    I shook my head ‘no’.  This was a point of honor with me.  I could repeatedly push myself to utter exhaustion, in proper Arm style, all on my own, thank you very much.  I went back to my exercises and tuned out Keaton and Gilgamesh’s discussion about my capabilities I couldn’t understand anyway.
    Yup.  I remained a work in progress.
     
    Gilgamesh: April 9, 1968
    “Listen up,” Keaton said.  She strode over to Gilgamesh, a scary panic-inducing buzz-saw of a dwarf, radiating annoyance.  “I want your panicky self back after dinner.  We need to spend some quiet time trying to figure out what’s going on with Hancock.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” he said, but the Skinner, an angry sneer on her face, had already turned back to the gym and Carol’s never ending exercises.
    He slipped out of the house, picked up a set of keys from the garage, and slowly jogged back to his apartment.  The farther he got from the Skinner the more the stress eased, but he couldn’t totally relax.  His Tiamat remained in the Skinner’s care and the Skinner had made perfectly clear, repeatedly, that if he didn’t help her with Tiamat’s recovery he would no longer be welcome in the San Francisco area.
    Being an Arm pet wasn’t anything like he had imagined.  The Skinner hadn’t laid a finger on him that he hadn’t invited, and she made no effort to confine him.  She wasn’t a pleasant person, at least not often; she sneered at him, belittled him, and repeatedly insulted and humiliated him.  Several times he caught, out of the corner of his eye, the Skinner’s true feelings toward him – she thought he was a disgusting pervert with abhorrent personal habits bad enough to make even her cringe.  None of Sky’s warnings about lusty Arm sex, beatings or shackles, had been correct.
    Nor had Sky mentioned anything about ‘his’ Arm spending her evenings in her workshop basement torturing one poor man after another.  Or making love to another Arm, which Gilgamesh found impossibly distracting.
    Worse, for some crazy reason the Skinner had decided it was her duty in life to improve Gilgamesh.  Thank God she hadn’t tried to make him into an Arm; what she did to him was nothing like what she had done to Tiamat.  She hadn’t bothered to ask his permission.  Scary smart, she understood what he needed without quizzing him.  Panic training – not to teach him to avoid panicking (though some of that happened naturally), but what to do when panicking.  The Skinner thought panic was useful .
    Oh, and running.  She had convinced herself Gilgamesh could run about as well as she could without burning, and in her drill sergeant manner she found a way to prove her supposition.  She didn’t say a thing, she just ran behind him and radiated her emotions.
    About the emotions…the Skinner had figured out the great Crow secret of metasensing emotions before she even lured him in, either from her meetings with him or from her dealings with a supposedly disguised Sky.  Not surprisingly she turned his trick against him every chance she