JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Stake had started to duck back around the corner of the hallway entrance, but the clone had had his military training before he was even out of his nutrient bath. One of the ray bolts hit the detective in the lower left abdomen and went straight through his body like the solid shaft of a spear. Stake fell before he could make it to the entrance, going down hard on his back. He growled at the searing pain, but had still managed to hold onto his pistol.

Smithee had tracked Stake s falling body with his gun, but before he could fire more ray bolts a bare foot stomped him hard in the temple. In his squatting position, the blow actually sent him off balance and knocked him onto his side-dazed despite the genetically engineered thickness of his skull.

"Back off, Stake!" Jones yelled across the lobby, jabbing his own handgun s barrel into James Fukuda s ear.

Mr. Smithee lifted his head, quickly regaining his senses, and his eyes blazed up at Yuki Fukuda. "Bitch!" he hissed, moving his gun to aim at her again. But not at her foot this time.

At her face, glistening with tears.

"Please," Yuki sobbed, "don't!"

Dai-oo-ika had been flexing new muscles, reaching out with all the new flesh he had nourished himself on. Not the many pairs of gray arms; those were no more. He was reaching out with all of his body at once. He had found he could make his entire substance soft or firm at will. He could flow almost like a fluid, boneless, and then go solid as stone. He extended himself in all directions simultaneously, until no one room of the building s basement contained him. He now filled every room, like a flood of concrete that had been pumped in and then hardened. But he was not something to fit a mold, to be contained. This was just an eggshell. Soon he would reach out beyond its fragile barriers, shatter and emerge from it. A temporary coffin beneath the earth, from which he would arise, reborn, as his worshipers had predicted.

And yet, as if to distract him from that great destiny, as if to hold him back, there was that echo growing more and more familiar with each reverberation. He could not hate it, however much it impeded him. In fact, it inspired a perplexing emotion in him. A confusing yearning, as he heard the voice inside his mind say, " Please… why don't you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don't you just ask her what happened?"

And he flinched-a quivering vibration that radiated throughout all his sprawling flesh like the ripples from a stone flung into a lake-when that same voice sobbed, "Please… don't!"

Suddenly, he not only heard the voice (mother, mother, mother's voice) but saw the speaker as well; through gauze or a fog, but he saw her. The sweet face that had once leaned over him, planted kisses on his chubby belly. His god. The god's god. And he saw other creatures, somewhat like her but different. He saw one of these creatures pointing an instrument at the mother-goddess. A hurting instrument, like that creature had fired into his belly in the city below the city, when he hadn t yet understood his hunger.

Mother.

Dai-oo-ika flexed his muscles again. Began to soften, so as to reach out further this time.

"You're unemployed now, Jones!" Stake shouted, as he struggled to get his legs under him. He only fell onto his back again, and a wave of grainy black static passed over his vision. His next comment, little more than a gurgle between his clenched teeth, barely carried across the lobby. "This is over!"

"I don t happen to like being unemployed, Corporal Stake," Jones called back, and he increased the pressure of the gun barrel inserted in James Fukuda s ear. He threw a quick look at Smithee, who still had his handgun trained on Yuki s beautiful face. "Maybe you d like to become unemployed, too, huh? I think that s only fa-"

The first beam, a blue so intense it left a brief afterimage on Stake s eyes, entered the rear of Mr. Jones s skull and emerged from his forehead, like a ray blazing from some mystical third eye.

The second blue beam went in one of Mr. Smithee s ears and came out the other, as if he were merely an insubstantial, holographic image in its path.

"Christ," Stake hissed, his eyes going from Jones to Smithee and back to Jones again, in time to see the security chief s own eyes roll up white and his body go slack, falling away from Fukuda like a marionette with its strings cut.

The gun flipped over in Smithee s hand, the trigger guard still looped around his finger, and swayed there a moment before it slid off and clunked to the floor. Black wisps curled out of both ears, and his nostrils besides. Then he crumpled and lay curled at Yuki s half-unshod feet.

Stake rolled onto his side in another effort to regain his footing, for an unthinking and instinctual moment desperate to reach the cover of the hallway again-expecting a third sapphire ray beam to come streaking his way next. And this person, whoever it was, was an even better shot than Smithee. This time he wouldn t get it in the side, but straight through the melon. Someone outside those open front doors; a damn good shot……a trained sniper…

Stake snapped his eyes at those open doors. His mind clicked into focus…an Earth Killer.

Despite his agony, and inspired by his intuition, Stake managed to get onto hands and knees, and from there shakily to his feet. One hand now pressed against the hole burned through him and the other lugged the Darwin, which felt much heavier than it was. His eyes were on the front doors as he began trudging toward James and Yuki Fukuda, but he saw no one outside in the darkness of falling night.

That cab, he thought. Number 23.

The sound that Jones s keen ears had heard out there.

"Thi," Stake whispered, staggering, trying to maintain consciousness.

Yuki rose from her chair as if invisible ropes that had bound her there now dropped away, severed. She stepped around Smithee s fetus-curled shape as James Fukuda rushed to her, and he seized her in a painfully tight embrace. Kissed the top of her head again and again.

"Daddy," she wept against his chest.

"Baby," he chanted, as if more to himself than to her. His own falling tears slid away into the midnight river of her silken hair. "Baby. My baby."

Stake saw them and held off from approaching any further, letting them have their moment. Despite being doubles, impostors, shadows of their true selves, their emotion was as real as anything he had seen or ever was likely to see. He envied them for it.

At last, Fukuda loosened his arms from around her, and smiled wearily over at Stake. He began to say something, but a look of concern came over him when he saw Stake weaving there unsteadily, his hand clamped to his side, his complexion almost gray. Fukuda s concern for the man was mixed with another disturbing emotion. He saw the barest reflection of his own features still clinging to the private investigator s countenance, as a result of their conversation over their vidphones.

"You re hurt," he said, taking a step toward him.

Fukuda s eyes were on Stake-on his brother s fading, possessing spirit-and Stake s eyes had turned again toward the open front doors, the camouflaging darkness of night. Was she watching him still? Watching over him?

Neither saw the silver/black-striped appendage until it had lashed out of the gloom and slapped itself around Yuki s waist. Her cry, however, quickly regained their attention.

None of them could understand what it was, at first; not the two men who saw it nor even the girl in its embrace. A gigantic python, coiled around her, was the first thought that came to Stake in his delirium. The great tentacle ran almost the full length of the lobby, from where it had emerged: the same hallway from which he himself had entered the lobby just a little bit earlier.