"Let's see where they're going," Jones said, leading the party back the way they had come.
"If those things have done something to my daughter… " Tableau began, but he didn't complete the unthinkable thought.
The four of them descended to the ground floor, but there was one level lower than that. The basement. Mr. Jones hesitated, looking down into the stairwell. Had the three mannequin-like beings gone down there?
"I think we'd better stay up here," he said guardedly, straining his hearing toward the gloom below. The basement level emergency lighting was stuttering, nearly dead. "Fukuda will be coming to the front entrance."
"But if those things are down there, they might have my daughter," Tableau said, pressing close beside him. He held Yuki behind him by her wrist.
"When Fukuda gets here, maybe he can tell us where she is, specifically."
"He doesn't know!" Yuki spoke up.
Tableau looked back at her with his teeth clenched together. "What do you know about what he knows?"
"Daddy."
Tableau whipped his head around to peer down the stairwell again. "Krimson?" he blurted.
Jones looked at his employer, surprised.
"Krimson!" Tableau shouted. He started forward, but Jones blocked his way with his arm.
"Sir, what is it?"
"What is it? Didn't you hear her call to me?" "Your daughter?" "Yes-down there!" "No, sir, I didn't."
"Krimson!" he shouted again. "Are you down there?"
"Daddy."
A person, little more than a shadow, shuffled just barely into view at the bottom of the stairs. The person was shortish in stature, and had a feminine outline; she looked, in fact, like she wasn't wearing any clothes. She lifted her arms up toward them. Toward Adrian Tableau.
"Daddy."
This time even Jones heard the barest whisper of a teenage girl's voice in his head. Behind him, Yuki mewled; she'd felt the word scuttle across her brain like a centipede, as well.
Tableau lurched against Jones's arm, but he grabbed onto his employer and held him back more forcefully. "Don't, sir."
"Let me go, you fuck!" Tableau raged. "That's her! It's Krimson!"
"It isn't," Jones said. "It isn't her."
The figure below them took several steps closer to the foot of the stairs, still extending its arms in a beseeching gesture. It had stepped into the faltering light. For a moment, the light almost kicked in at full force. It briefly reflected on smooth, gray flesh, and glistened on a long cord that trailed behind the figure, from the base of its spine like an immense tail that ran off into the darkness. The tail was striped in black and silver bands and slithered with a sideways motion of its own, as if it were the body of a giant snake. Or an immense tentacle, tethering the female figure to something unseen.
"Oh God," Tableau moaned, when he saw the apparition had no eyes, no mouth.
"What is that thing?" Smithee said, craning his neck to see over their shoulders. "What the hell is down there?"
With shocking speed, the figure lunged onto the steps, began running up them. Tableau was strong, but Jones was stronger; he flung the man aside to tumble across the floor. He then slammed the door shut, and Smithee threw himself at the metal surface just as Jones did. The two clones pressed their shoulders against it with all their weight.
Crouching beside Tableau, too terrified to attempt flight, Yuki screamed when she heard the thing on the other side of the door hurl itself against the metal. It banged a fist, or maybe even its head, against it repeatedly.
Lying on his back, Tableau let out a strangled scream of his own and clutched his head, which was filled to bursting with the word, "Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…"
"Open the door," Smithee barked at Jones. "We've got to shoot it!"
"No, no, don't!" Tableau cried out.
"It isn't her!"
"It is. It's part of her, part of her, inside something else," Tableau sobbed. Blood started to trickle from his nostrils. He thought the seams of his skull were spreading apart.
Then suddenly there was no more pounding. No more wailing in a familiar voice inside their heads. The presence had withdrawn. But for the moment the two security men kept themselves pressed to the door, not trusting the silence.
"Krimson," Tableau groaned, still lying on the floor despite the voice having left his skull. "Krimson." The teasing manifestation of his daughter, meant to convince him that she was still alive, now only confirmed to him in some mysterious and terrible way that Adrian Tableau's daughter was dead. Dead.
"That's something of Fukuda's down there," Jones said. "It has to be."
Tableau finally dragged himself back to his feet. "He can tell us what it is when he gets here," he panted. "Right before I shoot his blasting eyes out."
"No," Yuki Fukuda bawled. "No… nooo…"
Even as he called Krimson Tableau's flesh ghost back to him, Dai-oo-ika couldn't be sure if he had sent her out, or if her own absorbed essence were responsible. In his present state of flux, he was still something of an alien to himself. Whatever the case, he had modified one of the Blank People he had assimilated so as to render the girl's form. But now that form came walking back to him, dragging behind its umbilicus-which was actually one of the tendrils that composed Dai-oo-ika's face, much attenuated.
The female figure crawled up the hillock of his great belly, then embraced him as her new father. And began to sink away into the primordial ooze of flesh from which she had come, in a kind of reverse birth. He broke off the end of his tentacle from her spine, and the appendage contracted to the same length as the rest.
Another figure entered the room. One of the last remaining Blank People. This creature, too, approached its master so as to add its flesh to his own. Its contact as it crawled upon him was an irritating distraction, however, and he almost swatted his supplicant off him like an ant. He was being bombarded with too many confusing feelings, sensations. He had previously sensed the creature above him named Adrian Tableau, the one that his extended essence had just ventured forth to meet. And now he sensed another familiar presence up there. Not familiar to some ill-digested splinter of another creature's mind, embedded in his own. No, this presence was familiar to him. But it was an echo from another, earlier life or incarnation. This echo was as distant and muffled as the voice of a child's mother as heard from beyond the womb, a voice remembered by a mere fetus of the god-like being he was close to becoming.
Still, the voice Dai-oo-ika had heard inside the muffling womb of his head haunted him deeply.
"No," that familiar voice had bawled. "No… nooo…"
As the four of them made their way toward the smaller lobby structure that connected Steward Gardens' two wings, they passed the last few mannequin beings walking in the opposite direction. On impulse, as the last creature approached him, Adrian Tableau lifted his handgun and fired three rounds in rapid succession into its rubbery gray head. The two clones were startled and Yuki yelped. The thing dropped at their feet and flopped in a dying convulsion.
Tableau glared at his companions. "All right- come on!" With his pistol he motioned for them to continue onwards. "Fuck Fukuda's toys."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
reunions
James Fukuda parked his hovercar to the right of the building. His was the only vehicle in this lot, which curved around to the apartment complex's rear-though he had seen one lone helicab perched atop the roof, as he had approached Steward Gardens along Beaumonde Street.
It had been quite a while since he had entered these grounds, and their neglected state depressed him. Some small animal scurried ahead of him through a tangled underbrush that had once been a neat row of hedges, geometrically perfect in shape. He recalled the plans for these gardens as designed on computer, and as they had appeared when finished, back when Steward Gardens had had a future. In a way, it had never even had a past. It was a stillborn thing. Something that made him feel sadness, embarrassment, even loathing. Could Tableau r
eally appreciate the humiliation of forcing him to come here and face this place again? Face who he truly was, and why he had locked that person away for the past four years, just as the doors of this place had been locked up?
But they were not locked, he saw. The front doors were wide open, as was every window of both wings, gaping blackly like rows of eye sockets in a titanic skull. But stranger still was that every one of the bio-engineered "stewards" was missing from its nook between the apartments' outer doors. When had that happened? Could thrill-seeking youths be responsible for spiriting away so many of them?
The side path he had taken from the parking lot joined the main walkway to the front doors. When he came to the fountain he paused to glance back at the street, the traffic flowing past, cars containing people bent on their own destinations, troubled with their own problems. He did not know that when a gang girl named Nhu and a mutant named Haanz had recently died in this yard, none of the people speeding by who had happened to look over and glimpse their strange deaths had bothered to call the forcers, even with communication devices right before them on their consoles or around their wrists. This was Punktown, after all.
Still watching the distant movement of the street, Fukuda felt that this was the last time he would ever see the world outside this building again. All along he hadn't realized the true destiny for this place, but now he understood. He had built Steward Gardens like pharaohs had once built pyramids for themselves. As a tomb.
He smiled bitterly when he recalled his brother John's mockery, comparing James with his army of quasi-alive statues to the Chinese Emperor Qinshihuang, who had filled his tomb with an army of 8,000 terracotta warriors. No wonder the encephalon had never worked right, no wonder this place had been cursed, when John had agreed to help him but had done so without faith, without enthusiasm, without the support he should have shown for his twin brother.
James shook his head. Shook away the anger. Hadn't he left it in the past yet? Hadn't he accepted that the anger should only be at himself? Couldn't he learn that lesson at last, before he went inside to meet his punishment?
Before he could will himself to go inside, however, someone came outside to meet him. Perhaps the person had been watching him from within, and grown impatient.
Though he was dressed in a forcer's uniform, and though the Blue War clones with their blue-mottled faces all looked the same, Fukuda knew from past experience that this was Adrian Tableau's top security man, Mr. Jones. The one who had tortured him, and the one he had tortured in turn.
Jones had a gun in one hand, and beckoned Fukuda with the other. "Mr. Fukuda," he said calmly, "would you please come this way? We've been expecting you."
Once he hit Beaumonde Street, it hadn't been hard to find. There was a name on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved on a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.
Jeremy Stake noted that there was one vehicle parked in a lot to the right of the building, and a helicar on its roof. It didn't surprise him that Fukuda had reached this place before he could, but he swore under his breath anyway. His hoverbike had been delayed by the snags in traffic, but he prayed that Fukuda's larger vehicle had been delayed even worse, shortening the time between their arrivals.
Stake overshot the building and continued on to an office block next door. He left his bike in its lot, thinning out as evening set in, and jogged back toward the apartment complex on foot. He entered its unruly grounds as warily as if he were creeping through a jungle of blue vegetation, bent low and darting from cover to cover. He moved in on the left flank, not wanting to come straight at the front doors. Every window stood open. That was odd, but it would grant him a stealthier entrance.
As he got closer to the building, he glanced up at the darkening sky several times, expecting to see a helicab with the number 23 on its belly floating above him, but he had lost sight of it when he had entered Beaumonde Street. So, had he only imagined that it was following him? Paranoia, perhaps, but he couldn't blame himself for that.
The Darwin .55 was out of its holster and nosing ahead like an anxious bloodhound.
When he reached the building itself, Stake squatted below the window of one of the apartments, poked his head up gingerly to peek into the unlit room beyond. Judging the room to be empty, he hauled himself over the sill. He was inside.
The door leading out of the apartment and into the hallway was open. When Stake stepped into the murky corridor, he saw that every one of the inner doors for the apartments had come open, like the windows. Open like the eyelids of a corpse. He detected a distant shouting that the hollowed-out husk of the building caused to echo.
He ran lightly in that direction.
"Let me go to my daughter!" Fukuda exclaimed, as Jones held him back. Tears had filled his eyes at the sight of her, sitting in one of the front lobby's chairs, again unbound but with one of Mr. Smithee's hands resting heavily on her shoulder. "If you've hurt her in any way…" he began.
Smithee grinned. "You'll do what?"
"Daddy," Yuki was sobbing, holding out one hand to him. "Daddy."
"Did you check him for weapons?" asked Adrian Tableau.
Jones nodded. "Nothing. Not even the syringe he injected me with last time." Jones showed an unsettling smile to the man whose arm he gripped.
"You injected me with it first, you fucking belf!" Fukuda snapped back at him. He saw a look come into Jones's eyes like that of a leopard before it springs onto its prey, but he shifted his anger to his business rival. "I'll tell you what I told your toy soldiers the last time, Tableau. I had nothing to do with your daughter's disappearance! I hired a man to look for Yuki's kawaii-doll, as I'm sure these thugs have told you. And I admit my investigator did track your daughter down to an apartment in Subtown, on Folger Street. The apartment of her boyfriend, named Brat Gentile. He was the last person to see her, not me. They slept together, his brother told my man, and when he woke up your daughter had disappeared."
Adrian Tableau came close to Fukuda, his lower jaw thrust forward. "I've heard this boyfriend dung before. If my daughter had a boyfriend I'd have found him by now. And even if she did, who's to say you didn't snatch her as soon as she left this alleged Subtown apartment? Or are you suggesting this boyfriend did something to her?"
"You ask him about it! He's gone missing now, too, so he's the one you need to be looking into."
"Oh, I'll look into it, all right. But right now I'm looking into you."
"I'll talk to you all you want, but you have to let Yuki go. She's a child! She's innocent!"
"A child, like my Krimson?" Tableau suddenly bellowed, spittle flying in the other man s face. "An innocent, like my daughter? Oh, we can t let anything bad happen to your daughter, can we?" Tableau looked past Fukuda toward Smithee, gave a barely perceptible nod. Fukuda turned his head to see Smithee drop down into a crouch beside the weeping teenager. He removed the shiny black shoe from her right foot, as gently as a shoe salesman. He then pinched the edge of her navy blue knee sock, and began rolling it down, exposing her hard youthful calf.
"Stop it! Stop it, you fuck!" Fukuda roared, trying to throw himself at the man, but Jones pulled him back and now took hold of his other arm as well, wrenching them both behind him.
"Don t," Yuki cried, but she only watched helplessly as Mr. Smithee pulled the balled-up sock off her foot.
"Mm," Smithee said, running one finger along her wrinkly sole as if to tickle her. "Cute." Next he wiggled each toe, starting with the biggest. "This little piggy went to market. This little piggy went home." When he came to the last and tiniest toe, he didn t let go, held it by its plump end. From his holster he drew his pistol, which he pointed at the base of the toe, the muzzle brushing cold against her skin.
"No, no, no, no!" Fukuda screamed.
"Oh, it won t bleed much," Smithee assured him. "The beam will cauterize the wound. But her foot won t be so pretty afterwards, I m afraid. Especially if the next little pi
ggy goes to market. And the next. And the next."
"Please," Yuki begged, "why don't you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don t you just ask her what happened?"
"Yes, yes, do that!" Fukuda blubbered. He wished he hadn t stomped Yuki s phone to pieces after all. Wished he had it in his jacket pocket right now.
"I m not here to play with blasting toys!"
"I know you don t want to try that approach, because then it means she s dead. But if she is dead then you ll want to know why, and you could hear that from her own lips!"
"Her own lips? Her own ectoplasm, you mean? Listen to you, Fukuda. And here I thought you were a man of science."
"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 innocent! And if I m not innocent, then they ll punish me, won t they? I ll go with you willingly-right now!"
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