Fukuda faced his guest again. "At the end of the day I customarily use the gym here for an hour. Would you mind accompanying me? And you're welcome to use the equipment, too, while we talk."

"Um… it's fine to talk there. Any place you like."

"Very good. I'm a creature of habit. Habit is the closest I can come to self-discipline," he joked.

"Can you give us a ride to the Canberra Mall on the way home, Daddy?" Yuki spoke up.

"Yes, yes, very well. If you don't mind waiting another hour. Why don't you girls go sit in the cafeteria or something?"

"Okay, Daddy."

"And I wish you'd stop using those morbid phones," he added, but with a weary sigh rather than disgust. "This way, please, Mr. Stake."

"Nice to meet you girls," Stake said, his eyes drawn back to Kaori with her Ouija phone cupped to her ear. She was intent on whatever it was she was hearing, ignoring the conversation of the living people.

The fitness center of Fukuda's company consisted of two floors, and its facilities included a swimming pool, though it was currently hidden by its retractable cover. The windows looked out upon the central garden where the girls had formerly been sitting. Popular music played over a sound system.

Whether it had been arranged this way or not, Fukuda and Stake were the only two people currently in the gym. Fukuda had quickly changed into a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers in the men's locker room, though Stake hadn't even removed the jacket of his rumpled, mustard-colored suit. He sat on the edge of a weightlifting bench, watching his client pump his legs in an elliptical walker. He saw that Fukuda's arms and leg muscles were rock hard. Most of those people who could afford them took nonprescription meds to control their weight, but many others like Fukuda preferred to shape their bodies through a more personal process. They no doubt found the ritual of exercise rewarding in some very primal way; maybe it put them more in touch with themselves. Was it a source of pride, a narcissistic achievement, a self-intimacy like masturbation? Personally, Fukuda's pedaling looked quite boring to Stake, mindless, like a hamster racing in a wheel.

At thirty-three, Stake figured himself to be at least five years younger than his client. Others found his age hard to pin down. He was of average height, and average weight without the intervention of either exercise or meds. Because of the blending of races over many generations, most people of Earth ancestry had dark hair and dusky skin. Stake's short hair was dark, and his skin was somewhat olive. But upon very close examination, despite a normal smoothness of texture, his skin had an oddly grainy look, as if pixilated. There was a blandness to Jeremy Stake's face that made him more than nondescript; he was almost unfinished looking. There was something both eerily infant-like in his face, and mannequin-like. A drunken young woman he had once tried flirting with in a bar had asked him if he were an android. It had killed his own half-drunken lust for her.

Fukuda was looking over at him, and Stake knew his host was speculating on his appearance. Stake straightened his slouched posture, hoping the man didn't think him lazy for not joining in his workout.

"I heard about you from one of my people," Fukuda explained in a voice only slightly strained. "Do you remember a Troy Leman?"

"Yes. He had me follow his wife. I figured there might be a connection between you two, when you told me who you were."

"Her boyfriend attacked you, and you took care of that situation very, uh, adeptly. Clearly a case of justifiable homicide." He smirked. "But an ice swan?"

"It was a Christmas party, in a posh hotel. I didn't have my gun on me at the time."

"I see. I appreciate resourcefulness. Well. I have a security team here, Mr. Stake, but this is out of their range of expertise. It's investigative skills that I mostly require. Still, if you need me to give you a little extra manpower, by all means just ask. But I was impressed that you're able to handle things on your own when they get ugly."

"You don't expect this to get too ugly, do you, sir? I mean, it's got to be another kid at school who stole this thing, from what you told me on the phone."

"That is the obvious answer. But even then things could become unsavory, getting the doll back. You don't shy away from the unsavory, do you, Mr. Stake?" "Unsavory comes with my job description, Mr.

Fukuda."

Fukuda slowed his pedaling to the point that he could step down from the walker. He switched to a crunch machine, set the weight level, gripped its handles, then began sitting back and forward, back and forward, breathing in and out accordingly. In between that, he managed to go on, "Security at Yuki's school is tight, as it well should be, but I'll make some calls so that you'll have access to question teachers and even students, discreetly, should you need to do that. I have influence there."

Stake didn't doubt it, from the looks of this building. This business. But its exact nature was still somewhat unclear to him. The private investigator glanced toward the windows, that massive double-helix sculpture looming up from below. "What do you do here, sir, if I might ask? Do you make. toys?"

Fukuda laughed, and stopped pumping his body like a bellows to look over at his guest. "Yes, we make toys, Mr. Stake, but I'm not a toy maker. This isn't the North Pole." He laughed again. "Fukuda Bioforms designs and manufactures a wide variety of bio-engineered life forms, for any number of purposes, depending on our clients' needs. Everything from microscopic, organic and partly organic nanomites for the repair of people and machines alike, to very large organisms such as deadstock."

"Deadstock?"

"Sorry; it's an unappetizing slang we use for comestible battery animals."

"Ahh. Livestock. Deadstock. I see. A fitting name for a lot of chickens and cows with no heads or limbs."

"Do you know we bought out Alvine Products after that scandalous situation they had a couple of years ago? We rebuilt their facility and grow our own meat products there, now."

"Oh yeah, Alvine. They turned out to be owned by a religious cult. They weren't just growing deadstock, but some kind of army of. monsters, too. They thought Armageddon was coming."

"Something like that. It was run by Kalians. Religious fanatics. There was an attempt to cover it all up, afterwards, and I have to say I've helped to blot out that facility's history myself. It's all in the past now and we don't want to be associated with those former activities. No Armageddon army for us." He chuckled.

"But you do make toys, too. Living toys, like that girl Maria's doll, there. And like your daughter's 'great king of squid.'"

"Dai-oo-ika. He is a one-of-a-kind. I suppose it was naive of me to think that no one would dare steal him. Even at a good school like that, people are people. Of course, Yuki was envied for Dai-oo-ika, and envy in little girls can fester into very ugly shapes."

"What do you estimate his… its value to be?"

"There's nothing like him, so even if you look at the collector's guides for kawaii-dolls, it's hard to say. But comparing him to other one-of-a-kind dolls, even a conservative estimate would put him in the tens of thousands of munits. Maybe a hundred thousand munits or more."

Stake whistled. "For a toy."

"Not just any toy. A kawaii-doll. And a custom-made kawaii-doll. But it isn't so much the money, at the end of the day, is it? The thing is, this creature belongs to my daughter." For the first time, Fukuda's face looked hard. He at last betrayed the cold force that a person needed in order to raise up a business of this size. "Whoever did this has made my daughter unhappy. And my child is everything to me, Mr. Stake."