Free The Shadow of the Progenitors: A Transforms Novel (The Cause Book 1) by Randall Farmer

that never would lay flat, and silent brown eyes hiding a thoughtful mind.  “I believe it’s in her subconscious.”
    I frowned.  Shouldn’t the subconscious part of the tag degrade first?  “Okay.”  So what, I didn’t say.
    “I believe if you tag her in a ceremonial fashion, something to engage her subconscious, the tag will stick until Gloria consciously removes it, because the tag will reside in her subconscious.”
    Oh.  Just like with a non-Transform.  “We can do a ceremony.”
     
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    The juice flashed in my mind and vanished.  I smiled in pleasure, but Glen, our test subject, screamed.  “You snagged his juice!” Gloria said, twitching in my arms and echoing Glen’s scream.  Glen thrashed to the edge of Gloria’s single bed and huddled against the wall in a fetal position.
    The seconds ticked by as I leaned against the wall on the other side of the room, lost in the ecstasy of the juice draw.  “It wasn’t a full drain,” Gilgamesh said.  From metasense invisibility.  From the next room over.  I had never seen him move so quickly.  Crows never dealt well with surprises.  “He’s three points into withdrawal.  Give his juice back to him and he’ll recover.”
    “His tag’s gone!” Gloria said.
    I moaned in pleasure and attempted to clear my head.  Yes, I hadn’t taken all his juice, despite the fact that from my point of view, I drained him dry.  I didn’t feel good enough to have taken all his juice.  Nor had I been touching him.  Was this the answer?  Partial draining, done at range, using the Transform’s Focus as a conduit?
    Arms normally can’t grab juice at range, but I had been holding Gloria.  I apparently used her range.
    Glen continued to scream.  Gloria had chosen him for disciplinary reasons, reasons I concurred with.  I felt her re-tag Glen and restore his juice.  Glen stopped screaming and fell unconscious.  He didn’t feel right to my metasense.
    “Status,” I said, finally able to overcome the pleasure of the juice draw.
    “You mangled his juice structure,” Gilgamesh said, still in the next room.  “You got too much of his fundamental juice.”
    Well, duh, that’s because us Arms can’t tell the difference between supplemental and fundamental juice.
    “Is this what you wanted?” Gloria said between her tears, horribly confused.  “I thought we were working on you duplicating the way I move juice to a male Transform?”
    “We were.”  With Gloria tagged and sharing her metasense, I still couldn’t sense the difference between fundamental and supplemental juice.  Or metasense a Focus’s household juice buffer as anything more than an undifferentiated blob.  “I was attempting to will my way into the juice buffer and doing my best not to drain you.”
    The tag prevented the latter, giving me a mental hotfoot every time I touched her personal juice supply.  When we had tried this before we figured out the stable tag procedure, I had drained her, killing her.  Luckily, after I opened myself up to her, she had done the Focus-juice-magnet trick, even while clinically dead, and gotten her juice back.  Focuses are severely tough and difficult to kill, even the ones who moan about hangnails and stubbed toes.
    Gloria hugged Glen and started bawling.  “How bad off is he?” I asked Gilgamesh.
    “He’ll recover, but he’s going to have brain damage.”
    Damn.
    I sensed Gilgamesh approach, and I hugged him.  Right now I wanted comfort, and sex, and I had comfort to give.  I feared Haggerty was right, and I did need to work with more powerful Focuses, Focuses stout enough to keep me from sucking down one of their Transforms by accident.  We all expected mistakes like these.
    Gloria wasn’t strong enough for this test.  I had several more tests to do, after Gloria recovered, but I was beginning to doubt Gloria was a strong enough Focus to move juice to an Arm.
     
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    Visualize.  Locate.  There!  Finally!  A