Free Once We Were Human (The Commander Book 1) by Randall Farmer Page B

sensitivity of her own.  She did have enough capacity to support this woman.
    Tonya wanted to weep; the doctor had been right.  Now that she was part of Tonya’s household, Tonya could sense her juice level.  She had been due to become a Monster in six hours.  Tonya fixed that in an instant.
    Transform Sickness didn’t normally behave like this.  The Shakes had come up with a nasty surprise for them.  Again.
    “I think it’s time you unshackled this woman,” Tonya said, meeting the eyes of the doctor and the two policemen beside him.  This time, she wielded her charisma like a club.  The researchers didn’t know much about how Focus charisma worked, except they theorized it involved chemicals called hormones and pheromones.  All Tonya cared about was when she said ‘jump’ in that tone of voice, men did.
    The men freed the woman from her shackles in moments.
    “Hon,” Tonya said to the woman, “what’s your name?”
    The woman sniffled and Danny lent her his handkerchief.  She blew her nose and dried her eyes.  “Delia.  Delia Vinote.  Alice ’s my sister.”  Delia looked like she was in her early twenties, sturdy and not at all like she had recently come down with a deadly disease. 
    “Did you have a bad illness in the past month?” Tonya asked.
    “No, no ma’am.  You a Focus, ma’am, like on the television?”  Delia looked Tonya over and her eyes widened.  “You’re the Focus on the TeeVee from Philly!”
    Tonya nodded.  She was, alas, a minor local celebrity.  Anything to bring in extra money for the household.  Prejudice made jobs scarce for Transforms, and so everyone did what they could.  The local CBS network affiliate paid her a tiny salary to be their resident expert on Transform Sickness and Transforms.  Once or twice a month she had a few minutes on the local news.  The exposure generated an astonishing amount of hate mail and death threats, but the money helped and as a Focus she needed the bodyguards anyway.  She certainly wasn’t the first Focus who had been attacked in public.  Nor would she be the last.
    “No sickness at all?” Tonya asked, eyes on Delia.  Tonya could use her years of experience and a Transform trick or two to tell truth from falsehood.
    “No, that was Alice.  We thought she had the flu.  My hands didn’t start shakin ’ ’til after Pete and, and…” Delia glanced over at the remains in the clearing.  Her voice trailed off and her eyes teared up again.
    Truth unfortunately.  This was bad.
    A person could become a Transform in one of two ways.  The first, the normal way, was for a person to catch Transform Sickness.  He became sick, he transformed, and he either found a Focus or if the world was kind he died. 
    The other way a person could transform was via an induced transformation.  On those rare occasions when a woman began a Focus transformation, several women around her would transform as well, with no sickness at all.  There were all sorts of good biological reasons for this, which weren’t relevant right now, because no Focus transformations had happened anywhere near here. 
    Delia had made an induced transformation anyway.
    Two years ago Lorraine Rizzari, a Focus colleague of Tonya’s, had made an impassioned presentation before the local chapter of the national Focus organization.  She asked the Focuses to be on the lookout for obscure cases of induced transformations.  Rizzari, then a PhD student, had come to believe atypical induced transformations were possible, and had been looking for evidence to back up her theory.  She had theorized that induced transformations were a significant and steadily more common source of transformations and would eventually outnumber those caused by disease. 
    Right now, fewer than 4000 Transforms lived in the country.  Rizzari’s thesis was that within the next couple of decades, induced transformations would significantly increase and Transforms would number in the tens of