DEADSTOCK

"So," Nhu pointed at the humble pile of food, some of it purchased at Quidd's Market only hours earlier, "we divide up our food, and the Teratas ration their own stuff, right?"

"No," Javier said. "It all goes in one pot."

"There's too many of us all together!" she protested.

"Well that's the way it's going to be, until we get out of here. Clear? Anybody gets caught sneaking into it, and I don't care if you're a Snarler or a Terata, you'll be eating my bullets instead. Trust me. I'm going to put Patryk in charge of the food."

"Oh, you are, huh?" Satin said. But Mira reached up and put a hand on one of the flippers that would have been a leg, to reassure him. Still, Satin asked, "And why him?"

Javier shrugged. "Because he's got a backpack. And because he does what he's told."

"What about water?" Nhu asked.

"There's ru

Nhu headed into the little kitchen unit of 1-B. "A nice place like this, there has to be a food fabricator."

Mira followed after her, waddling quickly. "I wouldn't do that if I was you."

Nhu flicked on a light, glanced around her, moved to a control strip set into a faux black marble counter top. "Is there anything still in the fabricator stores? Did you try?"

"Of course we tried, but."

Nhu started tapping the keys without waiting for the tiny woman to finish. A screen lit up, showed a menu of meals the fabricator could create from the generic soup in its banks (a raw material that consisted largely of fermented bacteria). She punched up something simple: imitation chili con carne. After a hesitation, then the sound of rushing air, there was a gurgling and a tray was pushed out of the processing unit onto the counter. In a ceramic bowl fizzed a foamy black sludge that smelled like pond algae.

"Oh, wow," Nhu said, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth.

"It's gone bad," Mira said.

"How long has this place been abandoned, then?"

"Well, I think the soup sat in the banks but never got used," Mira replied. "Because I don't think this building was abandoned. It seems to me like it never even opened in the first place."

CHAPTER FIVE

wrapped in skin

On the way from his flat to the Arbury School, Stake became mired in traffic. His battered hover-car was wedged in a stream of vehicles of every sort, some even riding on wheels. He glanced up in envy at the helicars that swarmed more freely above him, though their flight paths were still limited to invisible cha

A movement caught his eye, distracting him from the ba

Stake's heart was jolted. A Ha Jiin, he thought. Thi, he thought.

But it could not be Thi. What were the odds of her being in this city? No, Thi was not on this world of Oasis. Not even in this dimension.

Thi was not the only Ha Jiin woman in existence, was she? Though for him, she might as well have been.

He continued watching the woman on the bike as she worked her way between the idling cars with a stubbor

The Blue War had been the only war that Earth had participated in-thus far, anyway-in which the soil of battle was not only that of an alien world, but an alien plane of existence. The blue-ski

Watching the elusive figure of the woman on the hoverbike recede, Stake vividly recalled in every cell of his being the first time that he and a large group of fellow soldiers had seated themselves inside one of the big metal pods, in two long rows facing each other. Also aboard the transdimen-sional pod was a small team of Theta agents, the research branch that explored and mapped whatever alternate material planes they could pry their way into. This car which now confined him felt like a smaller, more personal version of that pod. And he shivered, as he had then. He shivered, as if again he experienced his body being sifted through the veil, filtered through the very weave of the universe, squeezed out like strings of hamburger to be reconstituted in another realm as far away as infinity and as close as the opposite side of a thin sheet of paper.

Something in the logjam seemed to break, and the river of steel and plastic began to flow forward again. And a moment later, he lost sight of the woman on the hoverbike altogether.

Sitting on a bench outside the Arbury School, under the watchful eye of the guard in the visitors' entrance sca