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objection.
    The psychology of the Crow tag involved ‘having each other’s backs’.  Of course he would want to serve as backup in a situation like this.  I wouldn’t need him if this was what it appeared to be, a confrontation with another Arm – but what if this was a scam?  Who was to say this wasn’t Chevalier fooling our metasenses?  Or a new and unexpected Hunter trick?  Or, worse, Bass and Crow Echo, who possessed the capabilities to run this scam whenever they wanted.
    Backup would increase my survival odds if this turned out to be a trap.  And if Echo was involved, Gilgamesh would get a chance at the revenge he had been lusting after for months.  He wouldn’t be turning down a chance at Echo, no matter how slim.
    I rinsed him off and carried him out of the shower.  “Stay safe and bring your weapons,” I said, throwing on my gear at Arm speed.  As we dressed, the unknown parked her car about a half mile from my house and came in on foot, at a slow walk, and not directly toward my current residence.  “New Arm contacts often turn bloody.”
     
    My name is Carol Hancock, and I’m an Arm.  I’m a Major Transform and a victim of Armenigar’s Syndrome, and to stay alive I need to kill Transforms for juice every two to three weeks, juice being the substance all Transforms produce and require.  Arms don’t produce enough juice.  Crow Guru Gilgamesh, my lover and close companion, is a male Major Transform juice-byproduct scavenger, and professionally paranoid.  I’m often called the Commander because of my military command talents, talents I didn’t get to use as often as I wanted to these days.
    Gilgamesh and I currently walked on the thin edge of disaster, as my Arm boss, Stacy Keaton, had turned on the Focuses, the third variety of Major Transform, the variety that keeps the male and female Transforms alive.  At the moment, Keaton was gunning for the ruling first Focuses, a move against a deserving group of scumsuckers that would have made all the other Major Transforms happy, except for their legitimate fear that they would be Keaton’s next target.
    Unfortunately, while we plotted our violent attack on the first Focuses we turned our backs on the Cause, the effort that we hoped would save us from the coming Transform Apocalypse, when nearly everyone would transform and civilization would fall.  We also turned our backs on the threat from the rival Hunter civilization; they wanted to enslave the lot of us.  Even worse, Keaton’s top strategist at the moment, Arm Bass, was a mortal enemy of mine.  Cunning and devious, I wouldn’t put it past her to arrange an attack on me of this nature.
    We were all in deep deep shit, and there was nothing I could do about it at the moment.
     
    I walked out of my remodeled warehouse as the other Arm entered my metasense range.  The blustery northeast wind almost lifted me off my feet, my current Chicago stronghold in the Rogers Park neighborhood being close enough to Lake Michigan to be subject to its stiff wind.  I glared at the flakes of blowing snow and snarled, but as usual my predator effect didn’t part the flurries.  This year’s hard and early winter refused to retreat, and the temperature had dropped close to zero again tonight.  I would be stuck in this shit location for another week before I moved into a real house and turned my warehouse into a backup residence.
    I focused on my metasense, attempting to get a good read on the Arm intruder.  She stopped her approach when I walked ten paces from my home, remaining in Leone Beach Park.  She had gotten me with her metasense, despite my standard metasense masking tricks.  Not shabby.  The fact she didn’t charge meant this wasn’t an overt Arm-style dominance challenge.
    My Rogers Park home wasn’t what it appeared to be on the outside, that being a grimy unmarked two story former warehouse and storefront complex a block from the ‘M’ line.  Inside, I had set up the place as a