JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Over the heavy buzz of youthful female voices, gathering at the ceiling like a solid mass, Yuki asked him, "Did my Daddy show you pictures of Dai-oo-ika?"

"Yes, he did."

"Oh. Well, I have more right here, if you want to see them."

Stake switched to a small cup of miso soup and took a sip while he watched Yuki awaken the computer she wore on her wrist like a bracelet. It was a more feminine version of the one he himself wore. She touched some minuscule keypads, then extended her arm toward him.

The screen was tiny, but when he positioned his eyes directly above it the image was transmitted to his brain in such a way that it filled his vision to the exclusion of all else. In the lower right corner of this enveloping virtual screen there was a sort of window that showed the wrist comp's controls, so that he could still view them in order to operate the device, but it was Yuki's delicate fingers that he saw resting across the keypads now.

She gave him a slide show of Dai-oo-ika in various poses. On her living-room couch, propped up like a sofa cushion. On her bed, slumped against her pillow. In her lap, as she sat grinning in childish pink pajamas with a pattern of cute-eyed jellyfish swarming across them.

"Great king of squid." He had understood the name when Fukuda had shown him his own, more clinical pictures yesterday. Dai-oo-ika looked as plump as a beloved doll should be, but not so inviting to the touch. His Buddha-like body was shiny, glossy, gave the impression of being clammy. His belly was a bloodless white, but his translucent flesh shaded to a grayer color toward his back. There was a scattering of black speckles there, too, and on the back of his hairless head. Two chubby arms like those of a baby, and two even chubbier legs, all ending in webbed paws. From that speckled back sprouted two cute little wings, ribbed rather like the fins of a fish. And the face.

Well, there was no face, really. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth. The lumpen head possessed no features other than an outgrowth of thick tendrils like those of an anemone in the place where a nose and mouth should have been, had Dai-oo-ika been a human infant. These tentacles were ringed in alternating bands of black and an almost metallic silver.

Stake remembered the kawaii-doll of Yuki's friend, Maria. Stellar, it was called. Primitively alive. Eerily squirming. He envisioned Dai-oo-ika, a kindred creature, doing the same. Bio-engineered doll. A golem to take to bed. A homunculus to squeeze and kiss.

"Cute," Stake told her.

She had a proud, tragic sheen in her eyes as she returned her wrist comp to sleep mode. "Thanks. At first when Daddy surprised me with him, I was disappointed that he didn't have eyes, but I think it makes him so helpless and dependent on me. One time when I was hugging him it really seemed like his tentacles were stroking my face!" She made a spidery motion along her cheek with her fingers.

Stake imagined that as a less than endearing sensation. He took another slurp of his soup, then observed, "So it's safe to say that our culprit is right here in this room."

"It has to be one of them," Yuki said in an urgent whisper. "They've all seen me with him. They all envied me for him. It's been a week now, exactly, since he's been gone! And I've only had him for about a month. It's so unfair!" Her voice was near to crumbling. "I always take good care of him; I never ever put him down and turn my back on him. If I can't have him with me, like in phys ed, then I keep him in my locker. And that's what happened! I came back from my shower, and there was my locker-open. And Dai-oo-ika was gone!"

"Does anyone else know the code to your locker, or was the lock forced?"

"It wasn't forced, but it could have been hacked."

"What about maintenance people?" "Um, I don't know, they might have access to the lockers."

"I'll look into that. What about your friends; they wouldn't know the code? The ones I met the other day?"

"Oh… Kaori, Suzu and Maria are my best friends! And they have their own kawaii-dolls."

"But not as good as your doll, no matter how good theirs are."

"No, no, they wouldn't. Besides, what good is a kawaii-doll if you can't show it off to people?" she said with plain honesty. "You wouldn't just hide away with it."

"Unless someone was doing it specifically to hurt you."

"Right. To hurt me." Those oversized eyes under their border of bangs had begun to film over wetly. "That has to be it. Someone so jealous, they wanted to get back at me. I just hope they haven't hurt him. I hope they ask for a ransom or something. I'd get Daddy to pay it, I don't care!"

"So do you know any girls who dislike you? Who are especially jealous of you? How about teachers? Have you had problems with any of them?"

While he conversed with the girl, he let his gaze alight on her face only briefly before it fled to another table, or a supporting column of the room, or the wall of bright windows. If it lingered too long on her face, he would begin to feel the familiar rustle of his cells (even if that sensation were largely imaginary) as his features began to remodel themselves. Again, his eyelids would take on the epicanthic fold, but in imitation of her eyes instead of her father's. The length of time it took for this process was not always the same. Sometimes it was fairly swift, and other times it was more gradual, but unless he was preoccupied he usually had a subconscious awareness of when it was going to transpire, despite the fact that he had no conscious control of his ability. He felt restless with Yuki's own eyes upon him. Had Fukuda told his daughter about his "gift?" Was she even waiting to see it happen for herself?

"A teacher? Oh no, all the teachers like me! I don't have a problem with any of the phys ed teachers who would be in the locker room. But I have had a problem with some of the girls here, in the past few years. It's always like that. Cliques, you know?"

"Sure. Right now-but don't make it obvious- do you see anyone taking extra interest in our conversation? Anyone who's been hostile toward you in the past?"

He saw Yuki involuntarily turn her head just a fraction, but her glistening eyes rolled about in wide, morose arcs. "A lot of people are looking at us."

"Mm," Stake agreed, peering over the rim of his coffee cup as he sipped from it, and taking in the many curious glances.

"Oh," Yuki fretted, "maybe it wasn't a good idea to meet in public, after all! What if we scare the person into destroying Dai-oo-ika, to hide the evidence?"

"I'm sure they wouldn't do that, not with his value. In fact, we might spook them into coming forward and saying it was all just a harmless prank."

Yuki returned her gaze to him. "One of the nastier girls, one of the ones who've been really mean to me, disappeared last week, too. She's in my biology class."

Stake looked directly at her now. "Disappeared how?"

"Well, she had an older boyfriend, and the rumor is she ran away with him because her dad didn't approve. But one of her friends-her name is Krimson-one of Krimson's friends swears she heard Krimson trying to talk to her on her Ouija phone. And that would mean Krimson is dead." Yuki hugged her arms and visibly gave a shudder.

"Huh," said Stake.

Lost in thought for several beats, he frowned toward the floor. He tended to do this a lot. No faces to see down there. It was hard to escape faces in a city. In his apartment he didn't even have pictures of people, whether they be photos or paintings or holoportraits, displayed on the walls. Except for one: a picture of himself. If he came home looking like someone else, staring into this photo as if it were a mirror helped him speed up the process of looking like himself again. In the wrist comp he wore he could store pictures of faces, the countenances of people he might want to metamorphose into for this or that reason, by staring hard at their image. But he had also filed a picture of his own face in his wrist comp. He could gaze at it to hasten the restoration of his neutral appearance (his "factory" or "default settings," as he joked to himself), like a man with amnesia remembering who he truly was again.