"My subconscious seems to know when it's something beyond my reach. I don't try to turn into a Bedbug," he said, referring to the bipedal insectoid race, from an alternate dimension like the Ha Jiin. "I won't even try to mimic a Tikkihotto." This of course was one of the handful of alien races that were truly humanoid, but whose "eyes" were squirming nests of clear ocular filaments. "I could reproduce their faces in general, but because their eyes are so different my gift shuts down and refuses to try."

"Okay, so if your gift is controlled by your subconscious, can't your subconscious be controlled by drugs? Or a chip? Or even therapy?"

Stake met her eyes. "Why? Are you anxious to lose your toy?"

She arched a brow at him. "I'm only saying, why didn't you ever do that?"

"I guess I feel this is who I am, now. It came in handy during the war. Comes in handy in my job. And, I suppose it makes me feel a bond with my mother. She was a mutant, too."

"You don't think there's something masochistic about not dealing with it?"

"What do you mean?"

She held up her hands to ward off potential anger. "Never mind. I'm being too personal, maybe. Things always deteriorate when men and women stop fucking and start talking instead." She sighed. "I'm not good with long-term relationships."

"Me neither," he muttered. Though he resented the way she had used him tonight, at least she had wanted him in some way. He had found it difficult to meet a woman who wanted anything from him at all. If she wanted his money, that made it easy enough, in a brief and barely satisfying way.

"Has anyone ever played these games with you before?"

"Well, I once had a woman hire me to find her missing husband. It turned out he'd been murdered by a business associate. She was devastated; especially because she'd doubted him by thinking he'd run off with another woman. A few months after I found him, she contacted me again. She, ah, paid me to take on her husband's appearance. We met a few times for sex." He shrugged. "Then, about a month after we stopped that, I heard she committed suicide."

"Wow."

"I wondered, for a while, if I made her problem even worse, by doing what I did."

"Oh no, don't say that. She was badly messed up already. You take on people's faces, Jeremy, but I think you take on their pain a lot, too."

Again, he met her eyes. It was a more insightful and sensitive observation than he would have expected from her.

In a moment, however, she was back to being the playful Janice, smirking and asking, "Did a man ever pay you to impersonate a lost female lover?"

Stake confessed, "I guess the last time I met with John Fukuda, when I was leaving him, I was kind of afraid of that. Afraid he might ask me to take on his dead wife's form. He'd been looking at me very strangely through lunch. Especially after he'd had a few drinks. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Then again, he'd talked a little about his twin brother, earlier."

"Mr. Fukuda did adore his wife, from what I hear. But I don't think he'd accept a man as a substitute. He's very much a fan of the ladies."

"You sound like you speak from experience." Stake had finally come out with it.

Again, the smirk. "Jealous?"

"Curious. It didn't develop into anything major?"

"I guess we're both too restless, he and I. Restless in here," she tapped her chest, "instead of here." She reached over to touch his cheek.

Stake thought of the Ha Jiin clerical caste, with their vortex faces and the smaller vortex in the center of their chests. "I'm restless in both places."

She slipped under the sheet with him, but thankfully kept on her robe, content to lie on her back and stare absently at the VT screen. "How is the Fukuda case coming along?"

"I brought up Tableau Meats to him. The possibility that Adrian Tableau's daughter might have stolen Yuki's doll out of hatred, because their fathers are rivals. I'm going to follow that angle for now. In fact, I think I'm going to try to meet with Tableau in person."

"Who knows, maybe he'll even hire you to look for Krimson. Or would that be a conflict of interest?"

"Technically, maybe not, but I think I'd have to decline at this point if he asked."

"So, how much do you know about John's meat company? The former Alvine Products? It has quite a history behind it."

"I know the basics of the scandal."

"Oh, I was fascinated with the whole thing when it came out."

Like Tableau Meats, Punktown's other large meat supplier, Alvine had been in the business of manufacturing livestock-or deadstock, as Fukuda had told Stake they were nicknamed. Battery animals, as they were more formally referred to by bio-engineers. Chickens without pesky heads or feathers, rapidly grown by the thousands in great tanks of nutrient solution. Headless cattle with rudimentary limbs. Hogs that were little more than pink blobs of meat for the harvesting. Tikkihotto hetreki, which were like giant sloths, and llama-like reptiles called glebbi, from the planet Kali. In fact, the top executives of Alvine Products had been Kalian; apparently the leaders of a bizarre religious cult.

"They were growing an army of monsters, right there along with the meat," Janice related. "Spawn of Ugghiutu, they called them. Ugghiutu is sort of the Kalian God and Satan in one body. Supposedly, Ugghiutu is one of a whole race of god-like beings called the Outsiders, who once ruled the universe but got shut out of our dimension and put into a sort of suspended animation. So there are these really fanatical schism groups of Ugghiutu worshipers who try to call Ugghiutu out of his sleep. They want to bring about an apocalypse to end our reign, and return Ugghiutu and I guess the other Outsiders to power."

"So what kind of monsters were these things, anyway? The place was so badly damaged in the big quake."

"Yeah, that's how it all came to light with Alvine, because of the fire fighters and rescue teams going in there. Anyway, who can tell what would have happened if they'd unleashed all those creatures. No one seems to know just what they would have been like when they were fully grown. The leaders of the cult were either killed in the earthquake themselves, or hunted down by another sort of cult called the Children of the Elders, that seems to be at war with the Outsiders cult."

"Jeesh. So strange," Stake mused. "But why would Fukuda go to the trouble of rebuilding the same structure and assimilating their business, instead of just starting up another similar company elsewhere? I should think that he'd want to distance himself from all that. Controversy can be good publicity, but we're talking about something people put in their bellies, here."

"Well, John's a bit on the mysterious side; do I need to tell you that? Mainly, I think he was just fascinated by the whole thing with Alvine Products himself, given his profession. They were obviously doing some very strange experimental stuff behind the scenes in Alvine." She turned toward Stake meaningfully. "I've been thinking of that a lot since you and I first talked about Tableau Meats."

"What are you thinking?"

"Yuki's doll. It's a belf. A primitive life form John created for her."

"Yes."

"And his name, Dai-oo-ika. In Japanese it means-"

"'Great king of squid,'" Stake cut in.

"Yeah. Well, like I said, they didn't find out much about what the cult was growing at Alvine; what the things would have ultimately developed into. But some rescue workers were killed inside by a couple of these monsters. They were on fire and all crazed."

"One guy was eaten," Stake said. "I read an interview with a rescue worker who saw it happen."

"I read that, too. It sounds like he wasn't eaten so much as absorbed, in something like phagocytosis."

"Which is?"

"The way an amoeba eats. Hell of a way to die, huh?"