DEADSTOCK

"I was skeptical about them before, too, but-"

"Enough about the damn seance phones or whatever the blast they call them!" Tableau began to pace. They all waited, watching him. When he faced Fukuda again, he said, "Krimson is dead; I have no doubt about that now. I saw her ghost a little while ago, in fact, right here in this building. It was some kind of belf thing with no face. But it was her. Her spirit was inside it-I felt it. Now I think it s time for you to explain that to me."

"Explain? I don t know what you re talking about!"

"Your brother owned this place, correct? That s what your kid told us."

"Yes, but." Fukuda broke off, and then he opened his mouth and nodded. "Oh, wait. What you saw, it wasn t your daughter. I designed a whole crew of belfs for these apartments. They were to be servants and bodyguards. Some of them must still be around. They look like the thing you described. Gray, with no real face. That s what you saw, not your daughter."

"Yeah, yeah, we saw those things. This one was different. And I heard my daughter s voice up here!" He tapped his temple with his fingers.

"You re distraught. You imagined it. You have to calm down and think rationally, Tableau! What you re doing here is not only dangerous to me and my daughter; it s dangerous to you! Look, you haven t hurt either of us yet. I swear to you, I won t tell a soul that you took us here. Why don t you go to the forcers and tell them your suspicions about me? Let them handle this, as you should have from the start. They can give me truth scans, memory scans, I ll consent to anything. They ll prove to you that I m i

"Forcers," Tableau snorted. "I did a little time as a kid. I ve had my share of forcers. And I know too well that truth scan or no truth scan, if you put a little padding in a forcer s wallet he ll tell me your grandma built a time machine and assassinated what's-his-face, James F. Ke

Mr. Jones spun around, eyes hardened. He had released one of Fukuda s arms in order to pull his beam gun out of its holster. The others all looked at him and saw that he was facing the open front doors. Upon entering the lobby they had tried to close them, but the keyboard hadn t responded. The building s power system was apparently out of joint.

"What?" Tableau asked.

"I thought I heard something out there," Jones said in a low, ominous voice. He kept Fukuda close to him, in case he needed him as a hostage. Or a shield.

Tableau glared at Fukuda again. "You did come alone, didn't you? Because I'd hate to have to tell my man Mr. Smithee, there, to slice off your little girl s nose instead of her toes."

"I came alone, I did, I swear."

Because the clone called Smithee held a gun against Yuki s flesh, Jeremy Stake had intended to shoot him first. But it was Adrian Tableau whose eyes abruptly turned in his direction. Adrian Tableau who spotted Stake at the far end of the gloomy lobby, by the entrance to the rear hallway of A-Wing.

"The fuck you did!" Tableau snarled, swinging his gun around to point across the room.

Stake s gun was already pointed.

Tableau was a veteran of the streets. But Stake had also, in his way, been a soldier of the streets before becoming a soldier in another dimension. Their guns seemed to fire simultaneously, though the hired detective actually got his shots off first.

Two of the Darwin's solid .55 slugs struck Tableau in the head; one through his left eye and out the back of his skull, the other crushing his nose and deflecting downward to emerge through his lower jaw. Virtually faceless, he still managed to squeeze off one last wild shot into the ceiling as he crumpled to the lobby floor.

Smithee had maintained his crouch beside Yuki, and in fact she sat between him and the gunman. He hunkered down even more, but lifted his pistol from her foot and began firing across the room.

Stake had started to duck back around the corner of the hallway entrance, but the clone had had his military training before he was even out of his nutrient bath. One of the ray bolts hit the detective in the lower left abdomen and went straight through his body like the solid shaft of a spear. Stake fell before he could make it to the entrance, going down hard on his back. He growled at the searing pain, but had still managed to hold onto his pistol.

Smithee had tracked Stake s falling body with his gun, but before he could fire more ray bolts a bare foot stomped him hard in the temple. In his squatting position, the blow actually sent him off balance and knocked him onto his side-dazed despite the genetically engineered thickness of his skull.

"Back off, Stake!" Jones yelled across the lobby, jabbing his own handgun s barrel into James Fukuda s ear.

Mr. Smithee lifted his head, quickly regaining his senses, and his eyes blazed up at Yuki Fukuda. "Bitch!" he hissed, moving his gun to aim at her again. But not at her foot this time.

At her face, glistening with tears.

"Please," Yuki sobbed, "don't!"

Dai-oo-ika had been flexing new muscles, reaching out with all the new flesh he had nourished himself on. Not the many pairs of gray arms; those were no more. He was reaching out with all of his body at once. He had found he could make his entire substance soft or firm at will. He could flow almost like a fluid, boneless, and then go solid as stone. He extended himself in all directions simultaneously, until no one room of the building s basement contained him. He now filled every room, like a flood of concrete that had been pumped in and then hardened. But he was not something to fit a mold, to be contained. This was just an eggshell. Soon he would reach out beyond its fragile barriers, shatter and emerge from it. A temporary coffin beneath the earth, from which he would arise, reborn, as his worshipers had predicted.

And yet, as if to distract him from that great destiny, as if to hold him back, there was that echo growing more and more familiar with each reverberation. He could not hate it, however much it impeded him. In fact, it inspired a perplexing emotion in him. A confusing yearning, as he heard the voice inside his mind say, "Please… why don't you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don't you just ask her what happened?"

And he flinched-a quivering vibration that radiated throughout all his sprawling flesh like the ripples from a stone flung into a lake-when that same voice sobbed, "Please… don't!"

Suddenly, he not only heard the voice (mother, mother, mother's voice) but saw the speaker as well; through gauze or a fog, but he saw her. The sweet face that had once leaned over him, planted kisses on his chubby belly. His god. The god's god. And he saw other creatures, somewhat like her but different. He saw one of these creatures pointing an instrument at the mother-goddess. A hurting instrument, like that creature had fired into his belly in the city below the city, when he hadn t yet understood his hunger.

Mother.

Dai-oo-ika flexed his muscles again. Began to soften, so as to reach out further this time.

"You're unemployed now, Jones!" Stake shouted, as he struggled to get his legs under him. He only fell onto his back again, and a wave of grainy black static passed over his vision. His next comment, little more than a gurgle between his clenched teeth, barely carried across the lobby. "This is over!"

"I don t happen to like being unemployed, Corporal Stake," Jones called back, and he increased the pressure of the gun barrel inserted in James Fukuda s ear. He threw a quick look at Smithee, who still had his handgun trained on Yuki s beautiful face. "Maybe you d like to become unemployed, too, huh? I think that s only fa-"