DEADSTOCK

"Aw, he's got to loosen up, huh?" Bistro rubbed his hand up and down her blazer-covered back as if to console her. "It's just a little bit of fun, right? No harm in that."

Yuki heard a car door slam, glanced around to see Nelson Soto leaning against their vehicle with his arms folded, wearing dark glasses and a frown. She couldn't help but smile a little at this, as if his concern for her were of a personal rather than professional nature, but she turned back to Bistro and said, "Let's go over and see what they're doing." She knew Caren hated her, having been friends with Krimson Tableau, but she counted on the girl behaving herself in the presence of her father.

Bistro started to protest, preferring their more personal conversation, but kept up with Yuki as she moved toward the little cadre of teenagers. "Hi, Caren," she said brightly. "I've been chatting with your dad. Pick up anything interesting today?" She pointed to the tiny phone.

Caren's eyes were molten when they shifted her way, and she was ready to growl something nasty for having been disturbed-and by this girl, no less-when she saw her father ambling along behind Yuki with that big goofy grin he wore when approaching an actress on camera. So with strained politeness she said, "Shh. I'm trying to hear her, okay?"

"It's Krimson, isn't it?" Yuki said.

Eyes on Yuki but with her ear focused elsewhere, Caren only nodded.

"If it's for me," Bistro quipped, "tell 'em I'm out!"

The bell sounded. Like programmed animals, the girls milling around outside the school turned and filed toward the entrance, under the similarly watchful eye of the school's security man, inside his weapons-sca

"We were all talking to her," said another girl over her shoulder, more openly helpful, as she started for the entrance. "We all heard her at the same time. Pretty clear, too."

"Well she's gone now," Caren said with a hint of resentment in her tone, lowering the device.

"She must've heard the bell, too," said her father, trying to be noticed.

Yuki said, "Caren, what does she tell you?"

Caren Bistro hesitated to repeat what she'd heard, because of how spooky it was listening to her friend through this instrument, the same one they had once taken turns listening to with giggles of delicious fear. Recently Caren had sworn never again to listen to this or any other Ouija phone, but the first time her phone had rung to let her know a cha

As much as she disliked Yuki, Caren could not bring herself to tell her what she had told Stake: that Krimson had once said, "Yuki's mom is crying." But she did finally admit, "The other day she said something about your doll, Dai-oo-ika. But I couldn't make that out too well. And she said something fu

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'I'm at Steward Gardens. Steward Gardens.' Wherever that is."

Nelson Soto sat with the engine of his hoverlimo ru

In his rearview monitor he now caught sight of a black-garbed figure approaching his limo from behind. He immediately recognized the uniform as that of a Paxton law enforcer. The forcer wasn't going to hassle him about waiting here, was he? Surely he didn't take him for a pedophile stalking pretty teenage girls. Again, not that he didn't allow himself to peek.

Yes, the forcer was coming to talk to him. He rapped with the back of his gloved hand on the driver's side window, which Soto lowered with a tolerant sigh. He looked up at the man. The forcer wore a beetle-like black helmet with its visor down. A voice over a microphone said, "Can you state your business here, sir?"

"Look, I'm just waiting here for the daughter_"

The little gun that came up in the forcer's other hand was not a standard police issue. It was small, silent, fired a bright blue ray beam straight into Nelson Soto's forehead. It cauterized its own path as soon as it burrowed it, minimizing the spilling of blood, but when he slumped back in his seat Soto was just as dead as if Mr. Jones had emptied a shotgun into his skull.

Jones reached in, deactivated the door lock, and ducked inside the car, shoving Soto over to the passenger's side. He shut the door and adjusted every window's tint so they would appear fully opaque from the outside. And then, as Soto had been doing, he sat waiting for the bell.

When Janice Poole looked through the lobby windows and saw Caren Bistro's famous father talking to a tall, long-legged black student, she decided to go outside and chat with him a bit herself. She had watched a good number of his vids, one of them with Jeremy Stake, who had not been cooperative about mimicking the star. Ron Bistro had flirted with Janice before-though, to her irritation, he seemed to much prefer these kids-and if her sullen and distant Jeremy kept evading her as he had been doing, she might just have to give in to Bistro's Everyman charms.

Janice left the building in a stream of departing, chattering schoolgirls, buffeted by them a little. The traffic of teenage bodies grew momentarily congested, and she sighed, trying to remain patient. She craned her neck to see if Bistro were still there. He was, but her eyes flicked to take in another adult figure. A forcer in black uniform and helmet had stepped up to Yuki Fukuda and taken her gently by the arm, guiding her toward the same hoverlimo Janice saw waiting for her every day. From Yuki's body language and expression, even at this remove, Janice could tell the child was confused. The forcer opened a back door for Yuki, then pressed inside after her. When the vehicle started forward, Janice assumed that the usual driver (who was rather cute, if unfriendly) was up front behind the controls.

But Janice could have sworn she'd heard the start of a cry from within the car, just before the forcer pulled the door closed behind him. A cry of surprise or alarm, from Yuki.

Against the wall between the doors of the two shipping/receiving docks, three loader robots were stored in a row, their chipped yellow paint indicating that they'd seen a lot of use before this place had been abandoned. Yuki had thought all three of them were dead, but when her kidnapper moved across the room, she saw the automaton in the center turn its head a little to follow him with its eyes. Its eyes, its whole aspect, seemed to express a great melancholy. The middle robot had the coils of a thick black cable looped around its neck, and a plastic loading pallet leaned up against it. To Yuki, it looked forlorn at being hidden away here. Trapped here. Like herself.

She sat in an old office chair, a small girl made smaller by the great, empty and echoing space that surrounded her. It was as though she drifted far out to sea, clinging to a scrap of wreckage to remain afloat. She was not bound, but she might as well have been. The two men in forcer uniforms had their guns in hand at all times, though they had both removed their helmets-to reveal bald heads and identical faces entirely covered in blue camouflage. One man called the other Mr. Jones. Jones called him Mr. Smithee.