Free In this Night We Own (The Commander Book 6) by Randall Farmer Page A

tell her to, Tonya thought.  “I know you’ve had your problems, but it’s useful, perhaps essential, to have other Focuses to talk to.  I’ll talk to her and have her give you a call.  I’ll call you, too, from time to time, just to find out how you’re doing.  You can call me any time you want to.  Here, let me give you my number.”
    “Thank you,” Gail said.
    “Now, I’ve got the time and the money, so don’t be shy.  I’d like to know what’s happened to you, and how you’re coping.”  The way to win the trust of any Focus who had been through hell was to listen, Tonya knew.  From experience.  And being a ‘lone Focus’ was deadly.  That she also knew from experience.  She still didn’t have any feel for Gail and her household.  They could be, well, anything.
    “I can do that,” Gail said, voice trembling.  “Like all new Focuses, I suppose, as soon as I used up my initial burst of juice from my transformation, I ended up in peri-withdrawal because the Clinic couldn’t get me Transforms fast enough.” Tonya heard kitchen and dining area household noises along with Gail; the young Focus didn’t have an office, just a typical house telephone, not private at all.  From some faint changes in timbre, Tonya suspected Gail leaned against a wall, perhaps underneath a wall-desk.  She wasn’t as ignorant as Tonya feared – for one thing, Gail knew about peri-withdrawal.  “Because of my low juice problems, well, I didn’t think to try moving juice outside the Clinic, which, as Focus Adkins said, had ‘gone bad’, filled with what the Crow, Watchmaker, termed ‘bad juice’.  So everybody suffered, and my inability to move the juice got me started off on the wrong foot with my Transforms.  Once I got outside of the Clinic and metasensed the bad juice, I figured out how to move juice and fixed up all my Transforms.”
    Tonya put down her pencil and took a deep breath, using her charisma for self-control.  Holy Mother of God!  “Focuses can’t normally metasense bad juice,” Tonya said.  Sensing bad juice!  Communicating with a Crow!  Was Gail some sort of Focus-Monster or Sport?  “Do you have any trouble moving juice, now?”
    “Well, yes,” Gail said.  Damn.  Tonya began to plan an intervention, to salvage any of the likely near-Monster women Transforms and near-psycho male Transforms.  “No matter what I do, I can’t keep the juice moving speed down; the damned stuff just moves, whoosh!  And it reacts to every little emotional change of mine.  My research team, uh, sorry, man does that sound pretentious…my amateur researcher team, including me, figured out that many if not all of the household’s juice problems come from me yanking around their juice too quickly multiple times a day by accident.”
    “Okay,” Tonya said.  She noticed her hands were shaking.  Nope, not a Focus-Monster or Sport.  The speed of Gail’s juice moving told the tale: Gail was a top-end Focus, the first Tonya had found through the mentoring program.  Finding one was both inevitable and stressful, and also inevitable that she would be one of her trouble-Focuses.  Young powerful Focuses always made a hash of things.  Even more important, how Tonya handled Gail would set all sorts of precedents for her tenure.  Tonya remembered what she and Polly had been like five months in (enslaved and terrified of their own capabilities), and what Focus Rizzari had been like (vicious brainy tyrant who didn’t think of herself or her Transforms as human).  Powerful Focuses had far more potential problems than the weaker ones, because of what they were able to do to their households and themselves.  Worse, if handled wrong, young top end Focuses also had a tendency to rebel, as had the megalomaniacal Focus Martine DeYoung.  Tonya needed to win this Focus’s trust, regardless of the time cost and phone bill.  “Sorry for the interruption.”
    “No problem, as this leads to, well, my days