Fukuda startled him by reaching out and taking his chin. It was not a forceful gesture, but Stake complied with it and let his client stare directly into his face. "Amazing," Fukuda said in a tone of fascination.
With every moment since they had been alone together, Jeremy Stake's eyes had subtly grown narrower. They had even, at last, developed a fold of skin over their inner corners in what is called the epicanthus. Thus, his eyes had become slanted, like Fukuda's. Even his muddy irises had grown darker, nearly black. His lips thinner. His skin more taut over his cheekbones.
"You don't do this on purpose, then?" Fukuda marveled almost boyishly.
"No. Some can do it at will. Not me. I have no control over it, except to look at someone. Or not look at someone."
"Caro mutabilis, isn't it?"
"It's in that broad spectrum. But my specific disorder is called Caro turbida," Stake explained. Even his voice was oddly undistinguished, unaccented, like a machine's. "It means 'disordered' or 'confused' flesh."
Fukuda lowered his hand, and nodded as if with satisfaction. "Frankly, Mr. Stake, it's another of the attributes that compelled me to hire you."
Stake was uncomfortable talking about it. He was always uncomfortable talking about it. "If you don't mind, sir, how about that juice?" he said.
CHAPTER TWO
steward gardens
The nine members of the Folger Street Snarlers ascended from the subway station at Oval Square, bumping elbows with other pedestrians and glaring into faces, puffed up and bristling, because they had come in search of their missing brother. Brat Gentile.
They split up into three groups of three, so as to spread out and cover as much ground as they could, not knowing precisely where Brat may have gone yesterday-knowing only that he had been headed for Beaumonde Square because he had asked Clara, his once-girlfriend, and his two best friends, Hollis and Mott, to accompany him there to help look for his current girl, whom he apparently felt was to be found there. These three friends had banded together in their search for him now. They all three experienced an unpleasant mix of guilt and, knowing something bad might have happened to him, shameful relief that they had not joined him yesterday. But whatever the risks, they had to find him now. Still, they felt better knowing that they were here in numbers, and fully armed inside their lumpy white leather jackets.
Hollis was black, with white Maori-style tattoos on his face, and wearing a purple rubber swimming cap. Mott was a Choom, Oasis's dominant native race, human in all regards except for a mouth that sliced back to both ears, his jaw heavy with multiple rows of molars. Instead of a swimming cap, and instead of the crew cut most Choom males favored, he wore his hair plaited into tight braids clinking with red glass beads and little polished ornaments carved from bone. Clara was pretty in a sneering and surly way, her long curly hair dyed a metallic crimson, and as one of the Snarlers she was just as quick with a gun or knife as her two comrades.
They sauntered ferally through the length of Quidd's Market, pausing here and there just long enough to buy some meat on a stick or little white bags of exotic candy. As they continued on, Mott bit into a chocolate, saw that its center consisted of live bluish grubs, and tossed his own little white bag into the next trash zapper he came to. There was barely a hiss as the bag of candy was disintegrated.
Hollis laughed, slapped him on the back, and proffered his own bag of candy.
"Stop playing, you stupid dung-dongs," Clara chided them. She was scanning every face behind every one of the counters, swiveling her head from left to right and back again, as if to intimidate one of these people into giving away a suspicious mannerism. She had disentangled herself from Brat romantically within the past year. He was just too childish, too insecure, monumentally irritated with each slight real or imagined, but she had never wanted anything bad to happen to him. She still had feelings for him, and this situation stirred up an eddy of bittersweet memories.
They were just emerging from the end of Quidd's Market, into the brisk late autumn air, when Hollis's hand phone beeped. He slipped it out of his leather jacket's pocket, and saw the leader of the Folger Street Snarlers, Javier, on its tiny screen.
"We found something," Javier said grimly. "Where are you?"
"We just came out of Quidd's Market."
"Good. We're right down the street from you. Come to an old apartment building called Steward Gardens. You can't miss it."
Javier Dias was wiry, tightly wound, with a pompadour of curly black hair he never hid under a swimming cap, and he talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness. At twenty-five, he was overripe for a gang leader, like an alpha lion getting too aged to master its pride, but no younger male would try to supplant him. It didn't usually work that way. Usually, a maturing gang leader might try to get in with one of the big crime syndys. Or he or she might even settle down, get a legit job, like Brat Gentile's own brother Theo had a few years ago.
Theo had been a Snarler himself, up until then. Theo was married now, with a decent occupation, and a year younger than Javier. Well, often a gang leader wouldn't live much longer than twenty-five to have to worry about plotting long-term goals.
When Clara, Hollis, and Mott had joined him, he pointed to the last apartment door on the right-hand side, ground floor, of the building the sign out front had labeled Steward Gardens. There was a silver 12-B against the black metal, but besides that they could see an insignia in glowing green paint on the door, partially covered over with their own gang insignia in red paint: a stylized dog's head baring its fangs.
"What's that sign he covered?" asked Big Meat, another member of their band. All nine of them had converged at this spot. "Another gang?"
"They probably saw him painting over it, and jumped him," said Mott, through clenched rows of molars grating against each other menacingly.
"A gang tough enough to jump one of ours, here in Beaumonde Square?" Big Meat said.
"Hey, there are gangs everywhere. This is Punktown," Javier said.
"Brat did this, too." It was Clara. She was pointing toward the groin of a life-sized but oddly incomplete-looking gray statue standing in an arched nook beside the door. There was one of these statues standing between each of the apartment doors here, but this was the only one with a big red penis painted on its crotch.
"What's that smell?" Mott asked. Then his eyes went wide. "That isn't…"
"Follow me," Javier commanded.
At the back of the building, he led them toward a large rusting trash zapper with a red-glowing function bulb on its side. Clara cupped a hand over her lower face. "Oh God," she moaned, when she saw a mound of leaves beside the zapper. The rotting stench emanated from there.
Javier kicked through the leaves, and a dead pig-hen tumbled toward them, flopping and broken. "It's these. A lot of them. But we thought it was him, too, so we came back here to look. When I poked in the leaves, I found this." From out of his pocket, their leader produced a semiautomatic pistol, small but mean looking. "This is Brat's gun. I know-I gave it to him for his birthday a couple years ago."
"It is," Clara hissed, staring at the weapon. "It is his."
"Someone got him. someone got him." Hollis began pacing back and forth furiously, scuffing up leaves. He inadvertently uncovered a dead pig-hen himself and his boot sent it into mock flight.
A small creature like a monkey had been clinging to Big Meat's shoulder all this while. He was Tiny Meat. They were brothers that complemented each other symbiotically, working in conjunction like this on their own world. They had glossy helmet-like skulls, scarlet in color, but their faces were wrinkly masses of flesh like the caruncle of a turkey, as if badly sculpted out of raw hamburger. Their squinted eyes seemed lost in the heaped red tissue, but a long bone-white tube extended from the chaos by way of a nose. Due to his diminutive size, Tiny Meat's voice was high and squeaky, and as he shifted excitedly from one to the other of his sibling's shoulders, he said, "Look at this place-it's a fucking squatter's wet dream! If a gang jumped our boy, it's for sure they're holed up in here! We need to get inside and blast these fucking punks!" Tiny Meat had a vicious temper and was not to be messed with; even his big brother was cowed by his anger at times.