All That We Are (The Commander Book 7) Read Online Free Page A

eyes widened and he leaned forward as the stone-faced Haggerty told her story.  The tale itself was amazing, involving Haggerty sneaking into the abandoned salt mine lair of these no-household Focuses, rifling their records and escaping unharmed.  The salt mine Focuses excelled at hand-to-hand combat, manipulated juice in a non-standard fashion, and possessed various non-standard methods of increasing their juice production.  They had excellent Focus charisma, which they bent toward recruiting normals, not influencing other Transforms. More interesting to him was the way Haggerty told her tale: as an adventure, with herself as the do-gooder hero at the story’s center.  Haggerty was a different Arm than Hancock and Keaton.  He caught Keaton’s resigned annoyance; she hadn’t been able to beat this non-Arm-like attitude out of Haggerty.  Hank suspected she had tried.
    “According to their records, these no-household Focuses have been selectively recruited from Clinics across the country at the rate of one a year, starting in ’64.  The one Ma’am Keaton sensed in ’64 was new at her trade; the reason why the others have not been sensed is, I believe, because they’ve gotten better at masking their metapresence.  I found them quite difficult to metasense, even when I was looking at them.  They too have a master, referred to in their records as ‘the Teacher’.  Who this Teacher is, I wasn’t able to discover.  In addition, and much to my surprise, two of these no-household Focuses and their troops had a near-fatal encounter with a Hunter and his pack in Gary, Indiana, on November 12 th of last year.  According to their records, a different member of their group had learned by unknown means about Ma’am Hancock’s espionage mission against the Hunters.  They as a group decided to interfere, along with their troops, with a goal of disabling Ma’am Hancock’s vehicles before they reached their targets.  The implication I took from this is that these no-household Focuses can hide themselves from Arms and Crows, and know they can, but that they cannot hide from Chimeras, and didn’t know they couldn’t.”
    Hank glanced over at Carol, who as he expected looked most annoyed.
    After Haggerty finished the talk and opened it up for questioning, there were the usual Arm-rude questions about the details and inane digressions that often ended up as subtle digs at Carol by Keaton, and vice versa.  He took notes, not tremendously interested, instead watching the audience.  Carol was eating this up, as was Connie Yerizarian, Inferno’s household boss, but the Crows had lost interest early on and spent the time signaling and speaking voicelessly with each other.  If he read their expressions correctly, they were telling dead Focus jokes.
    “There’s one thing I didn’t follow,” Lori said, about twenty minutes into the questioning.  “Why did the salt mine Focus that, um, Ma’am Keaton metasensed metasense differently enough to fool her into thinking she was a different form of Major Transform?  I’ve metasensed several new Focuses and they didn’t metasense differently, nor do Focuses who temporarily lose their household juice buffer due to one accident or another.”
    “There is no definitive answer to that question,” Haggerty said.  She turned toward Stacy.  “Ma’am?”
    “Go ahead and speculate,” Keaton said, waving her hand in the air.
    Haggerty reached into her materials box and dragged out a presentation board from the bottom of the stack.  Hank read it and sat up straight, as this built on some work he and Gilgamesh had been doing.  Gilgamesh and Sinclair noticed and sat up straight, as well.  Sky and Midgard continued with the dead Focus jokes, oblivious to the radical theory Haggerty had so casually set on her easel.
    “These no-household Focuses manipulate juice differently and they experience the world differently,” Haggerty said.  “I’ve put together a theory Ma’am