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.
Lost in her own thoughts, Yuki said, 'My mother died when I was just a baby, you know.'
This comment, seemingly out of the blue, caused Stake to meet her eyes again. 'I'm sorry. I lost my mother when I was just a child, too.' He regretted his own admission as soon as it left his lips. Why tell this young girl such a personal thing, regardless of what she had revealed to him? He didn't elaborate on his mother, and thankfully she didn't ask him to.
Yuki continued, 'My mom. I think… I think I've heard her, too.'
'Heard her? You mean, on your Ouija phone?'
Yuki nodded, doing her best to keep a cap on her emotions. 'I swear it's her voice. She's trying to tell me something. Something important. But I can't hear her well; just little bits and pieces, really far away, and full of static.'
'Huh,' he said again.
'Please don't tell my father I told you that, okay? He hates those Ouija phones. I don't want to upset him. He loved my mom a lot.'
Half a sob gushed out, and Stake found himself reaching across the table to take her hand. He was a bit embarrassed when he realized what he'd done, but here he was, so he gave it a comforting squeeze. Yuki looked down at their joined hands tearfully, then smiled up at his face.
'People will really think we're boyfriend and girlfriend, now,' she joked, trying to restore her composure.
'Well, I'm honored if they'd think that.' But he felt it was prudent to let go of her hand now.
'You're cute, you know?' she confessed, and giggled behind her palm. 'I'm sorry.'
He was more embarrassed than ever; her compliment caused him to feel flattered and self-conscious and bewildered all at once. No one had ever said that to him. 'Cute, huh?'
'Yes,' Yuki told him. 'You have a face like a doll.'
CHAPTER FOUR
permutations
'Close the window, close the window-don't let them in!' cried the distorted voice from the room beyond this one.
'Clara!' Tabeth yelled, pulling a gun out from underneath her white leather jacket.
'Oh God!' Nhu blurted, jumping back from the window through which the four gray arms had dragged their friend and fellow Folger Street Snarler.
'Don't hit Clara!' their leader, Javier, barked as he saw Tabeth aim her pistol outside. He dashed forward to join her.
From the other room, the owner of the frantic voice rushed forward impulsively, a whitish blur in the murk. This was what Mott, still poised around the edge of the doorframe behind Patryk, had been waiting for. He reached around Patryk with his own handgun, and squeezed its trigger at the ghostly shape responsible for the death of his close friend, Hollis, who lay near his feet with blood coming in a tide from a head broken open like that of a doll.
Tabeth had begun firing outside only a microsecond before Mott opened up with his gun. Javier, caught between the two sounds, spun around toward the latter, thinking that the shots might be coming from the same person who had-acciden-tally, they claimed-killed Hollis. But he saw Mott's extended arm, his handgun bucking.
'Mott, hold your fuckin' fire!'
'I got him,' Mott said, his Choom face a caricature of an insane grin. He lowered his gun as ordered, but he gloated, 'I got that piece of dung!'
From the room beyond, terrible screams and confused shouts. Screams of pain from the one who'd been hit, or screams of despair from that person's comrades, whoever and however many they were.
From where she stood, though a bit removed from it, Nhu could see out the window. She could see what was happening to Clara. She shrieked. Her shriek dipped and rose again when she saw Clara's body flinch as it was inadvertently struck by one of Tabeth's projectiles. But considering what those two gray figures were doing to her, Clara had to be dead already. If not, then getting struck by Tabeth's bullet was a blessing.
'Oh. oh.' Tabeth said, lowering her gun. Bile rose into her throat.
Big Meat had his gun pointed toward the window now, as he surged toward it with Tiny Meat clinging to him, Tiny Meat letting loose a fusillade of high-pitched obscenities. Big Meat pushed past Tabeth, who had gone into stunned mode at having hit Clara. At having seen those things
But Nhu was already darting back toward the window, into Big Meat's range of fire, and he barely checked his trigger finger. Tiny Meat barely checked the spray of acidic bile from the bone nozzle in his face. 'Out of the way!' he screeched.
They could see the two gray entities-now gray and red-drop the thing that had been Clara, turn their heads in unison, and break into a sprint toward the open window. The way they were running, it appeared that they would dive straight through it, side by side, like two trained dogs through a hoop.
Nhu was good with anything technological, but her fingers froze a moment above the buttons on the sill, as if she had never encountered so simple a thing as the controls to raise or lower, tint or make opaque a window. A mad thought sprang into her head: what if the beam from Patryk's goggles had damaged the controls? Disabled them? What if the window wouldn't close?
Javier saw the gray things coming. Like Big Meat, he was pointing his gun out there but afraid to hit Nhu, and instead of moving forward to push her out of the way or aim past her, he commanded, 'Close the window!'
The faceless beings had almost reached it. Though their smooth, abstracted bodies were devoid of muscular detail, Javier still saw in their body language that they were tensing themselves up to spring at any moment.
Nhu's index finger jabbed a button on the control strip. The window began to lower with the barest whisper.
One of the gray beings sprang. Then the other.
A thud against the safety pane. Palms spread across it with a splat like suction cups, first one pair and then the other. Palms that squealed down the surface, smearing red. The pane was still lowering. There was a gap at the bottom. One of the suction cups came off the window, flashed down and slipped under the lowering edge. A gray hand like a giant spider clawed at the air.
Big Meat lunged forward. Now he pushed Nhu out of the way. But it was Tiny Meat who jetted the groping hand with his bile, even as the edge of the window pinned the wrist against the sill. The gray flesh sizzled, bubbled. Dripped something clear instead of crimson. Fingers were reduced to nubs. There should have been bone inside those fingers, revealed by the acid. There wasn't.
Holding his breath against the strong chemical smell of Tiny Meat's bile, Javier rushed forward also now that Nhu was out of the way. Not waiting for Tiny Meat's bile to finish dissolving the hand, he pointed his gun at it and fired. The foaming blob splattered into chunks. Was gone. And the window completed its serene downward passage, meeting the sill and sealing. Locked. Glancing back to make sure her fellow gang members were done spitting and shooting, Nhu moved in and touched the button that activated an alarm on the window, should the things manage to force the pane open somehow with those three remaining, spread palms. She imagined, though could not hear, the squeaking sounds they made against it. She tried not to see the faceless faces behind those palms. Or the streaks of her friend's life fluid.
'It's still tinted one-way,' she said numbly, straightening. 'They can't see us.'
'How do you know?' raged Tiny Meat. 'Blasting things don't have eyes, anyway, but they saw Clara!'
