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Tableau looked back at her with his teeth clenched together. 'What do you know about what he knows?'

'Daddy.'

Tableau whipped his head around to peer down the stairwell again. 'Krimson?' he blurted.

Jones looked at his employer, surprised.

'Krimson!' Tableau shouted. He started forward, but Jones blocked his way with his arm.

'Sir, what is it?'

'What is it? Didn't you hear her call to me?' 'Your daughter?' 'Yes-down there!' 'No, sir, I didn't.'

'Krimson!' he shouted again. 'Are you down there?'

'Daddy.'

A person, little more than a shadow, shuffled just barely into view at the bottom of the stairs. The person was shortish in stature, and had a feminine outline; she looked, in fact, like she wasn't wearing any clothes. She lifted her arms up toward them. Toward Adrian Tableau.

'Daddy.'

This time even Jones heard the barest whisper of a teenage girl's voice in his head. Behind him, Yuki mewled; she'd felt the word scuttle across her brain like a centipede, as well.

Tableau lurched against Jones's arm, but he grabbed onto his employer and held him back more forcefully. 'Don't, sir.'

'Let me go, you fuck!' Tableau raged. 'That's her! It's Krimson!'

'It isn't,' Jones said. 'It isn't her.'

The figure below them took several steps closer to the foot of the stairs, still extending its arms in a beseeching gesture. It had stepped into the faltering light. For a moment, the light almost kicked in at full force. It briefly reflected on smooth, gray flesh, and glistened on a long cord that trailed behind the figure, from the base of its spine like an immense tail that ran off into the darkness. The tail was striped in black and silver bands and slithered with a sideways motion of its own, as if it were the body of a giant snake. Or an immense tentacle, tethering the female figure to something unseen.

'Oh God,' Tableau moaned, when he saw the apparition had no eyes, no mouth.

'What is that thing?' Smithee said, craning his neck to see over their shoulders. 'What the hell is down there?'

With shocking speed, the figure lunged onto the steps, began running up them. Tableau was strong, but Jones was stronger; he flung the man aside to tumble across the floor. He then slammed the door shut, and Smithee threw himself at the metal surface just as Jones did. The two clones pressed their shoulders against it with all their weight.

Crouching beside Tableau, too terrified to attempt flight, Yuki screamed when she heard the thing on the other side of the door hurl itself against the metal. It banged a fist, or maybe even its head, against it repeatedly.

Lying on his back, Tableau let out a strangled scream of his own and clutched his head, which was filled to bursting with the word, 'Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…'

'Open the door,' Smithee barked at Jones. 'We've got to shoot it!'

'No, no, don't!' Tableau cried out.

'It isn't her!'

'It is. It's part of her, part of her, inside something else,' Tableau sobbed. Blood started to trickle from his nostrils. He thought the seams of his skull were spreading apart.

Then suddenly there was no more pounding. No more wailing in a familiar voice inside their heads. The presence had withdrawn. But for the moment the two security men kept themselves pressed to the door, not trusting the silence.

'Krimson,' Tableau groaned, still lying on the floor despite the voice having left his skull. 'Krimson.' The teasing manifestation of his daughter, meant to convince him that she was still alive, now only confirmed to him in some mysterious and terrible way that Adrian Tableau's daughter was dead. Dead.

'That's something of Fukuda's down there,' Jones said. 'It has to be.'

Tableau finally dragged himself back to his feet. 'He can tell us what it is when he gets here,' he panted. 'Right before I shoot his blasting eyes out.'

'No,' Yuki Fukuda bawled. 'No… nooo…'

Even as he called Krimson Tableau's flesh ghost back to him, Dai-oo-ika couldn't be sure if he had sent her out, or if her own absorbed essence were responsible. In his present state of flux, he was still something of an alien to himself. Whatever the case, he had modified one of the Blank People he had assimilated so as to render the girl's form. But now that form came walking back to him, dragging behind its umbilicus-which was actually one of the tendrils that composed Dai-oo-ika's face, much attenuated.

The female figure crawled up the hillock of his great belly, then embraced him as her new father. And began to sink away into the primordial ooze of flesh from which she had come, in a kind of reverse birth. He broke off the end of his tentacle from her spine, and the appendage contracted to the same length as the rest.

Another figure entered the room. One of the last remaining Blank People. This creature, too, approached its master so as to add its flesh to his own. Its contact as it crawled upon him was an irritating distraction, however, and he almost swatted his supplicant off him like an ant. He was being bombarded with too many confusing feelings, sensations. He had previously sensed the creature above him named Adrian Tableau, the one that his extended essence had just ventured forth to meet. And now he sensed another familiar presence up there. Not familiar to some ill-digested splinter of another creature's mind, embedded in his own. No, this presence was familiar to him. But it was an echo from another, earlier life or incarnation. This echo was as distant and muffled as the voice of a child's mother as heard from beyond the womb, a voice remembered by a mere fetus of the god-like being he was close to becoming.

Still, the voice Dai-oo-ika had heard inside the muffling womb of his head haunted him deeply.

'No,' that familiar voice had bawled. 'No… nooo…'

As the four of them made their way toward the smaller lobby structure that connected Steward Gardens' two wings, they passed the last few mannequin beings walking in the opposite direction. On impulse, as the last creature approached him, Adrian Tableau lifted his handgun and fired three rounds in rapid succession into its rubbery gray head. The two clones were startled and Yuki yelped. The thing dropped at their feet and flopped in a dying convulsion.

Tableau glared at his companions. 'All right- come on!' With his pistol he motioned for them to continue onwards. 'Fuck Fukuda's toys.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN reunions

James Fukuda parked his hovercar to the right of the building. His was the only vehicle in this lot, which curved around to the apartment complex's rear-though he had seen one lone helicab perched atop the roof, as he had approached Steward Gardens along Beaumonde Street.

It had been quite a while since he had entered these grounds, and their neglected state depressed him. Some small animal scurried ahead of him through a tangled underbrush that had once been a neat row of hedges, geometrically perfect in shape. He recalled the plans for these gardens as designed on computer, and as they had appeared when finished, back when Steward Gardens had had a future. In a way, it had never even had a past. It was a stillborn thing. Something that made him feel sadness, embarrassment, even loathing. Could Tableau really appreciate the humiliation of forcing him to come here and face this place again? Face who he truly was, and why he had locked that person away for the past four years, just as the doors of this place had been locked up?

But they were not locked, he saw. The front doors were wide open, as was every window of both wings, gaping blackly like rows of eye sockets in a titanic skull. But stranger still was that every one of the bio-engineered 'stewards' was missing from its nook between the apartments' outer doors. When had that happened? Could thrill-