Deadstock

survivors of that conflict, and others held to the belief that the engagement had never happened at all? Well, those mythical men were gone now, if they had ever been here. Ghosts hung in the air like the cigarette smoke. Ghosts of veterans now dead, and the conjoined ghosts of all the people they had killed. The live souls who hunched over the tables and bar, wearing baseball caps and windbreakers thick with military pins and patches, were embalming themselves with alcohol; ghosts in the making.

Is that what I am? Stake wondered. Is that why I come here?

'Want a shot with that?' Watt asked, scooping up the one munit tip Stake had dropped beside his coaster.

'No thanks,' Stake replied without looking around at him. 'I'm on a job this afternoon. Just killing time.'

'Time's all we got left to kill these days, huh?' slurred a hulk down at the end of the bar. It was a man named Lark. Stake had been trying to ignore the fellow Blue War vet's presence. In the past they had occasionally compared notes, but Stake had found nothing like comfort or pleasure in the exercise. Lark hadn't seemed to like being dismissed, and so it wasn't unusual for him to take a poke or two at Stake before subsiding into conversation with whatever dumpy barroom floozy he could coax beside him with a bottle of Zub.

'Depends on what you do for a living,' Stake mumbled.

'Oh, that's right, you're a private detective. You still get in a little gunplay, do ya, huh? I thought you mostly looked through a camera's sights these days, Jer. Following cheating wives and all that.'

'Yeah. And when you want me to follow your wife, you just call me, okay? I'll give you a discount.'

The woman beside Lark, not his wife, chortled. Lark growled, 'Blast you, Stake! At least I have a wife, you stinking mutant. Who the hell would want you?'

'Ease up, boys,' Watt said disinterestedly.

Lark went on, 'Course, a guy can always pay for it. I expect you had a few blue-skinned prosties in your time, huh? I know I did.' Lark turned his attention to Watt. 'Those Jiini women, man. Beautiful. Beautiful like a cobra is beautiful. But you know what gets a Ha Jiin man the hottest? It's hands, man. They have a fetish for hands. See, in the Ha Jiin culture, aristocratic women always showed off their status by making sure their hands looked dainty and delicate. No calluses, no scars. It got so crazy over the years that these women started dipping their hands into this stuff like liquid nitrogen, to crystallize them. It petrifies them, man, turns them as hard and useless as the hands of a statue. All smooth and white.'

'I've seen a show about it on VT,' Watt told him.

Lark went on as if he hadn't heard. 'See? They're showing they don't need to use their hands. No manual labor for them. So after that practice began, the regular not-so-aristocratic girls started wearing white rubber gloves to at least make their hands look like they're petrified.' He chuckled. 'I tell ya, nothing pops a Ha Jiin guy's cork like having a lady stroke him off with one of those cool white hands, though most guys have to settle for the fake ones. I had me the real deal once.'

'You told me about it,' the Choom bartender grumbled. 'More than once.'

But Stake hadn't heard the story, and he found himself tensing up inside, as if he knew what was coming. As if the woman Lark was referring to was Thi. But it couldn't be Thi. His Thi. She had not possessed crystallized hands, as glossy-and immobile-as alabaster. She hadn't even worn imitative gloves. Her small hands had been only too mobile, and nicked with scars, even with little black hairs on the knuckles; a working woman's hands.

A killer's hands.

Lark continued, despite Watt's words. 'We captured this plantation once. These rich bastards, with their own private army of guards. Well, they didn't stand up to us long. Anyway, the family had a few daughters, and the oldest daughter had those frozen white hands, man, just like her mom, only the mom was old. Those Jiini women are the most beautiful women in the universe, but when they hit a certain old age-bam-they shrivel up fast. Anyway, this daughter… oh. I took her upstairs, and I had me a look at that blue skin. But she didn't like my pink skin, I guess.' He turned to laugh at the woman beside him, but she only gaped at him with a fish-like expression.

Stake was remembering Thi's blue skin. Her eyes, gazing up into his. Her unreadable eyes.

'When I was done with that little blue bitch, I left her alive. But I broke her hands with the butt of my rifle. I broke 'em to pieces, man, you should have seen it. Hell, she didn't need them anyway, did she? Aristocratic little.'

Watt's eyes had followed Stake off his stool, and down the length of the bar. He could have stopped Stake, or tried warning Lark, but he didn't. He didn't like Lark. And he was just a little afraid of Stake. He trusted him not to make too much of a mess.

'.bitch,' Lark said, a second before Jeremy Stake grabbed him by the back of his collar and slammed his face onto the bar. Out of respect for Watt, he didn't smash the vet's face into his glass and spill his Knickerson, but there was still a spurt of blood from the man's split right eyebrow. Stake let go of Lark, watched him thump bonelessly to the floor.

'Fucking barbarian,' he muttered.

'I'll tell him he got too drunk,' Watt sighed. 'Slipped off his stool and bashed his face.'

'I don't care what you tell him,' Stake said. He glanced at a clock advertising Clemens Light beer. 'I gotta go.'

'Hey,' Lark's would-be pick-up griped, 'what are you, some kind of blue-lover? They were the enemy, weren't they?'

'Keep out of it, Joy,' Watt advised her.

'Yeah? Well this guy cost me my next beer.'

'Here.' Stake tossed some munits onto the bar. 'It's on me.' He then went to the door, and after the tomb-like darkness of the Post the brightness of the city made him squint as if in pain.

Stake had anticipated a weapon scanner at the school, particularly as this was an upscale private school, and so he had made sure not to be packing anything today. It wouldn't have gone over well, regardless of the fact that Yuki Fukuda waited for him, smiling, inside the lobby. Visitors, even parents, had to pass through this separate entrance. After having him stand on the scanning platform for a moment, the guard (himself unquestionably armed) waved Stake through. He signed into a log at the reception desk. The woman behind the counter said pleasantly, 'Yuki tells me you're a business associate of her father's, who might have employment for her after graduation.'

She had, had she? Stake smiled. He wasn't sure Yuki would find his line of work very rewarding financially, or very palatable for that matter. He often found it unpalatable himself. Did she have the proper qualifications as a masochist? 'Well, it's never too soon to contemplate the future,' Stake said, setting the pen down on the logbook.

'Thank you. Right through there, Mr. Stake,' the woman said.

Stake passed into the high-ceilinged lobby of the Arbury School. The crest he had seen on the blazers of Yuki and her friends was reproduced gigantically on the lobby's polished floor, like some cabalistic symbol awaiting all manner of hedonistic rituals, orgies of students divested of their primly seductive uniforms. Stake banished that image as best he could as he approached his client's lovely daughter with her bright, shy face.

'Nice to see you again, Yuki.' He shook her tiny hand.

'Thank you, Mr. Stake. It's lunch time. do you want to join me in the dining hall?'

'You don't mind sitting openly like that? What will your classmates think of me?'

'They'll think you're my boyfriend,' she joked, then she hid her giggle behind her hand. 'I'm sorry.'

Stake felt weirdly shy himself. 'Ah, well, if you don't mind people seeing us, then I don't mind. But have you told anybody that your dad hired a man to look for your kawaii-doll?'

'No. If anyone asks, I'll tell them you're a business associate of my father's, who-'

'Who might have employment for you after you graduate. The receptionist told me. Good story.'

'Thank you. Okay, then. This way, please.'

If Stake had felt shy before, he was ready to pull his head into his collar like a turtle when they entered the cafeteria together. It would have been easier, he thought, had the students not all been female. It just felt wrong, as if he had blundered into a convent. Yuki seemed unconcerned about it, and maybe even liked showing off her male guest in some perverse way. He supposed at her age, and in the competitive