"Javier," she said again, and this time even though he recognized her voice, he realized he was not hearing it with his ears. It was bypassing his ears to go directly to his brain. But she could do that, right? She had her gifts, didn t she? "Don t come any closer," the voice in his mind continued. "I don t want you to see me."
"Mira… I got to get you out of here!"
"I can t leave, Javier."
She took a few stiff, waddling steps toward him to lessen the space between them just a little. He saw that she held something in one hand. She was dragging a length of rope or cable. He grasped that it was secured to her. She was bound. Still a prisoner.
No, not bound. It tethered her, yes, but now Javier understood the rest. He understood because he saw Mira s silhouetted flesh glisten around the edges as it moved against the pallid light. The light glistened on the silver and black striped cord, too, though he still couldn t tell if it were attached to her front, like an umbilicus, or her back. For a moment, because it was uneven and distorted by the ribbed walls of the flesh chamber, a little of the light had slid around the side of her face. It was dark in here, yes, so it might only have been an illusion that she had no face. Might have been, but he doubted it.
"You son of a bitch," Javier said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. His tightening fingers made indentations in the clay he held. It began to mimic the lines in his palm, like imitation flesh patterning itself intimately after his own. "You son of a bitch."
The familiar outline came to a stop. "It's me, Javier. He took me. He s taken others, too. He swallowed his own mother."
"You re one of those things!" Javier shouted. "Like the Blank People!"
"You want to destroy me. Good. You have to destroy me, Javier. You have to set us free. Even he wants to die now."
"Who are you talking about?"
"The Outsider. He swallowed his mother. He swallowed her fear and it hurts him. He s confused. He s. lost. He wants it all to end, Javier."
"This is a trick."
"You must do what you came to do. I didn t come to stop you. I only came to say goodbye."
It was Mira. It was a trick, yes. A forgery. But it was still Mira at the same time. He knew it. He just didn t want to believe it. And yet, he was also desperate to believe it.
"I m sorry I didn t save you," he croaked. Tears had started from his eyes.
"You can save me now. Please hurry. Part of him wants to die. Part of him wants to stop hurting. But part of him wants to destroy. Destroy everything. And that part is growing. Soon, that s all of him that will be left."
The outline extended both its short arms, like a child asking for a hug. A lover asking for a parting embrace. But Javier knew, without her voice in his mind even having to tell him, what she really wanted him to do.
He closed the distance between them. As he came, he thumbed the pouch s strap off his shoulder. He got just close enough to pass the pouch of explosives into her waiting hands. He did not want to brush her imitation flesh. He did not want to see her face any more clearly. He backed off quickly once she had folded the pouch against her chest.
"Thank you, Javier. You have to go now. Please hurry."
"I m sorry, Mira," he said, backing off further for the doorway behind him. The night and the rain.
"Don t be sorry. It will be okay now."
He paused at the very threshold again. "Love you." He d never said it before. To a girlfriend, to his mother, to any of the Snarlers.
The one buried light flickered out. The voice flickered out in his head, but he heard in a trailing, ghostly whisper, "I love you, too."
The others had just managed to get Satin inside the car when Javier arrived and let himself into the driver s seat. Patryk, Barbie, and Theo piled in, and the hovercar lifted from the wet pavement.
"Where were you?" Barbie asked.
"Inside. I left my bag in there. We got to get out of here, fast."
She saw the remote gripped in his right hand as he started the vehicle moving with his left.
The remote had an impressive range, its signal not scattered or impeded by the rain or intervening structures. The lime-green car had left the parking lot of Steward Gardens. It had returned to Beaumonde Street and sailed further down that affluent boulevard until they d lost sight of the building in their wake. Only then, when he could no longer see it, did Javier push the key on the remote. He didn't point it behind him; he didn't have to. He didn t even turn his head to look.
But the others looked back, astonished by their handiwork.
Over the tops of the office blocks arose a miniature mushroom cloud, growing fast as if nourished by the rain, like a towering tree with a storm-churned head of leaves. Even with the hovercar making no contact with the street itself, they felt the vibration of the blast ripple through it, rattle them in their seats.
The column subsided quickly, its ominous head dissipating, but before it did it billowed and seethed against the black sky, like a gray mass of formless flesh.
EPILOGUE
limbo
It made Jeremy Stake angry to find a message from Thi Gonh on his wrist comp, once he was conscious enough to realize that he lay in a hospital bed. Once he had remembered her face, hovering over him, inside the lobby of Steward Gardens.
It made him angrier still that it was not even a recorded message with her face, her voice, addressing him from the wrist comp s screen. Instead, it was a written message. And to further his disappointment, the English was just too good, indicating that she had used a Ha Jiin-to-English translation program to compose it. To him, it did not sound like her at all.
"Ga Noh,
I am back home now. Before I left the doctor told me you would be well.
I hope you understand why I could not stay. I had to lie to my husband about where I was going.
I told him it was business on Oasis about our farm. I don't know if he believes me.
I hope you understand why I watched you for several days but never let you see me. I have already dishonored my husband with my deception. But I was concerned when I saw your face on the phone screen. I followed you a while and you seemed okay. I was going to leave but I am glad I remained a little longer. I was pleased that I could help you fight your enemies.
If you need me again please you must be honest next time and tell me."
"Okay. I need you," Stake whispered as he read the words. He read on, gazing directly down at the device so that its screen filled the front of his mind itself. The words would leave their afterimage there, etched into his brain like a stinging tattoo.
"Once you took care of me. I was happy to repay that debt…"
"Debt," Stake echoed bitterly.
".and I would repay it again a thousand times.
Be well Ga Noh.
Your Ban Ta, T "
For a few moments he had to digest the Ha Jiin words "ban ta," which she had not translated to English. But Stake knew perfectly well what they meant. Henderson had told him, long ago. He just wanted to be sure he was reading them right, be sure that they would not change when he looked back at them. So he read them again and again.
"Ban ta," Henderson had told him, meant, "your lover."
Stake closed the message and lay back heavily on his pillow. Then he reached out and beeped for a nurse.
"Yes?" a dry voice asked from a speaker. He didn't know if it were a human or a robot. Not that it made much difference, he'd found from previous hospital stays. A tough business at times, being a soldier. And a hired investigator.
"When can I get out of here?" he asked. And in a low murmur, he added for his own benefit, "I need a drink."
But he found he wasn't angry anymore.
Bass-heavy music thudded from a jukebox, a sports program played on one giant VT screen and a muted soap opera (watched avidly by several drunken gray-haired men) on another. Neons glowed fuzzily through cigarette smoke, and a genie-like holographic woman belly-danced inside a large plastic bottle advertising Knickers
on beer. Stake seated himself on one of the stools at the bar.
Without having to be asked, Watt pulled a tap with his insect-like prosthetic arm to fill a glass with Zub beer and placed it in front of him. "You doing okay, man?" the Choom asked him gravely.
"Never been better. I think I ll take a shot today, Watt."
"Hey, Stake," slurred a hulk down at the end of the bar. Still no one had told Lark that Stake was responsible for his own recent trip to the emergency room. He momentarily diverted his attention from the alcohol-dazed woman on the stool beside him. Stake had to admit she was attractive for a mutant, except for having one bulbous eye four times the size of the other. Defiantly, she called further attention to their mismatched state by wearing too much makeup around them. Lark went on, "What the hell did you come home in one piece for if you re going to get yourself all shot up now?"
"It s something to kill the time."
"Well, I hear that. Time s all we got left to kill these days, huh? But next time you run into some trouble on the job, you call your buddies down here at LOV 69, will ya? We'll cover your ass. Right, Watt?"
"I d be more afraid of taking a stray bullet from you than from someone else," Watt told him.
"Aw, blast you, ya fuckin wanker."
Lark turned back to the woman weaving precariously on her perch, her larger eye looking especially glassy and bloodshot, and Watt pulled a Clemens Light for another veteran.
Stake was halfway into his own beer when his wrist comp alerted him to a call. His heart quickened, but it was not her, of course. From the little screen, Janice Poole smiled up at him. He did not engage the screen so that it filled his mind, this time. "Hey," he said.
"Where are you, mister? I hear you left the hospital this afternoon."
"I m having a beer at my Veterans Post."
"Sounds exciting. How do you feel? I came to see you yesterday but you were out of it."
"I feel fine. A little stiff."
"Stiff can be good. I ve missed you."
"Sorry. Things have been busy lately."
"Yeah." Even with her image this small he could see the skeptical expression on her face. "Well, Yuki s father called me a few minutes ago. He s the one who told me you d been discharged. I think he was checking to see if you were with me. He probably needs to talk to someone."
"I m sure he does. He s called me a couple times but I didn t answer. I guess I m not ready to talk to him yet."
"Well, he told me a little of what happened." Janice shook her head. "She was so dear. It's too terrible, Jer. Too terrible."
"I wish I could have saved her."
"Fukuda told me you did what you could. He said you were very brave."
"That's generous of him."
"That place where Tableau had Yuki… did you see on the news it blew up? Good thing you have an alibi, being in the hospital, but I guess the authorities have already questioned Fukuda about it."
"I ve got some questions about that myself."
"Well, he told me he has no idea how it happened, and he said he ll submit to a truth scan to prove he had no hand in that. I hope not, because a couple of people in surrounding buildings were killed in all the damage."
"That's awful. But it could have been worse. Much worse." Stake did not elaborate further. Did not mention Dai-oo-ika. His personal theory, because traces of explosive material had been mentioned on the news, was that Thi Gonh had used more of her military expertise. In that regard, he was glad she was off Oasis and back in her own dimension. If he himself were truth scanned as part of the investigation-which he deemed likely-he hoped her name never came into it. "Have the forcers spoken to you yet about Tableau?"
"They saw me in the hospital right before I left. They know me and all the respectable private dicks in town; they know I'm not some mad dog. They give us a bunch of dung but in secret they love us, because we tackle a lot of headaches that they don t have to deal with except in the aftermath. But I m sure I ll still be seeing some mess before it all gets filed away."
"I ve heard Tableau had syndy connections. Not afraid of that?"
"Nah. He wasn t in bed with them to the extent that they d come after me, I m sure."
"Well, I hope you re right." Janice shifted to a brighter tone in an attempt to restore their spirits. "So, my dear, are you interested in my own brand of nursing? I can be quite the nursemaid. It s better for you than that beer you re sipping. And maybe you can put on your Dr. Lambshead mask for me, hmm?" Lambshead, MD was a popular VT show, popular largely because of the sexy young actor who played the titular skilled physician, treating (and romancing) a multitude of sentient races on a far-flung space station.
"Maybe another time. Like you said, Fukuda needs to talk, so I guess I should return his call."
"I get the message, Jer."
"Janice."
"You know, there s nothing wrong with being attracted to someone because of their personal attributes. Because they re funny, or they re gentle, or good in bed, or you like red hair or green eyes."
Or blue skin, Stake thought. He cut in, "But Dr. Lambshead s attributes are what you d be seeing, Janice. What are my attributes? Am I me to you, or just a channel remote?"
"Oh for God s sake, Jer. You know I care about you. But if I do find your gift exciting, so what? What s the alternative for you. a woman who finds it freaky and disturbing? Does it really hurt you that I became attracted to you because of that?"
Ga Noh, the Earth Killer had called him. Wasn't it much the same? Hadn t she become attracted to him because of his gift, as well? But, Stake thought, it had also been different. For Janice, he was a malleable toy. To the Ha Jiin woman, he had been, as Henderson told him, "A chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god."
"Janice. I ll call you. I will. But right now. right now I just need some me time."
She sighed. "Whatever you say. Call me if you get lonely. We all get lonely, Jer. I know I do." And with that, she vanished from the wrist comp s tiny screen.
Stake gave a sigh of his own. Time for that shot. He tossed it back in one throat-searing swallow.
Before he started another beer, and forgot who it was he meant to call, Stake finally contacted Fukuda. The man picked up immediately. His miniature face showed a wan smile. "Well, hello. Welcome back from the dead."
An odd thing to say, Stake thought. Or at least, uncomfortable, given the circumstances. "Janice Poole said you were trying to reach me."
"I just wanted to know how you were, mostly."
"Care to join me for a few beers? I m at the Legion of Veterans Post 69, on Diode Avenue."
"I m on my way, then."
"Better hurry. I have a head start."
"I won t be long."
"Great. See you then, Mr. Fukuda."
The anemic smile faltered a bit. "You can call me James." Then he signed off.
When James Fukuda entered LOV 69, he found that Stake had moved from the bar to one of the tables for more privacy, and that he was drinking a coffee instead of beer. "Have you quit before I could start?" he joked.
"I m just waiting for you so I can start again," the detective told him.
"Then I ll get this round." Fukuda went to see Watt about two fresh drafts.
When they sat across from each other, they formed a silent and uncomfortable diptych. Stake expected Fukuda to ask him about the Ha Jiin woman who had come out of nowhere to get them safely from Steward Gardens. Fukuda, Stake was sure, expected and dreaded the subject of Yuki. But that part was inevitable, wasn t it? So he thought he might as well broach it first.
"Mr. Fukuda. James. I m so sorry about Yuki. I ve been wondering if it wasn t my fault. If I hadn t come in there guns blazing like a cowboy."
"No. No, Jeremy, please. At that point there was no other way. They were about to torture her, weren t they? At least she had a chance at being rescued, that she never would have had if Janice hadn t told you she d been kidnapped. But maybe it would have been better that w
ay. You wouldn t have been so seriously injured. And I would have perished alongside Yuki, as I deserved."
"Don t say that. You gave her a brief life filled with love. You don t deserve to die for that. The men who deserved to die are dead."
Stake said that, but even he had to admit that- his methods aside-Tableau had only wanted to find the daughter he loved. And his security men had only wanted to do a good job for the man who had given them a life after the war for which they had been manufactured. Still, Stake had no room for remorse. After all, every enemy he had ever killed had been a child at one time. At some point, all life was innocent.
Fukuda said, "Maybe it was wrong giving her that life. It was a selfish thing, done to alleviate my guilt. I brought a human being into existence just for a way to redeem myself. But at the time, I told myself it was for Yuriko. That was why I made her my daughter, not my lover. I didn t want to lust for her again. My lust for her was what killed her the first time. But it didn t matter, in the end, did it? I still got her killed anyway. It may not sound scientific for the owner of Fukuda Bioforms to say, but it makes me think that she was not fated to be reborn. That I was trying to cheat her destiny."
"Who can say? I don't know if I believe in destiny. But once I didn t believe in ghosts, either."
"The owner of Fukuda Bioforms." Fukuda echoed his own words with a tinge of bitterness, staring off at one of the large VT screens as it played a commercial that managed to seem loud even with the sound muted. "There is no redemption for me. I think I can come to peace with that, in a way. That s my destiny."
Stake tried not to look at Fukuda s face for too long. On top of everything else the man was feeling, he didn t need to see his brother resurrected in front of him once more. So staring through his beer glass, the seething bubbles like cells on a microscope's slide, Stake said, "You know, any time people purposely conceive children, they really do it for their own pleasure. Not to further the human race or anything noble like that. Well, excepting our biological programming to further the race, misguided as those instincts may be. But anyway, like I say, that impulse is no less selfish than what you did in creating Yuki. Right?"
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