"James's miscalculation was in hiring that inept little team who worked with me on the encephalon, and on the servants' receiver chips. You get what you pay for, and they were cheap because they were young, cocky and inexperienced. There was glitch after glitch. James ended up suing them. Meanwhile, he was paying very sizable taxes on this property, owing money to its builders, and so on. I managed to stay out of the lawsuit for the most part, but James resented me for that. For not suing those idiots, myself. He accused me of 'sneaking out' of the whole mess. Turning my back on him. And now, four years later, with multiple lawsuits unresolved and liens by the town, the place is in legal limbo. A fly trapped in a web of red tape, even though the spider itself is dead."
"And so how did James die?"
John held up a finger, asking for patience. "James had one more reason to resent me. Envy me. My wife, Yuriko. A beautiful, beautiful woman. Sweet. Graceful." Fukuda drew in a long breath. "One afternoon, James came to my apartment while I was away. He tried to seduce my Yuriko. She resisted. And in a fit of anger, James killed her."
"My God." Stake wagged his head. "I'm so sorry."
"I came home while he was still there. In fact, I heard the shot and rushed in. I grappled with James. I got the gun out of his hands. And then I shot him. I'm the one who killed him. My own twin brother." The man had been avoiding Stake's eyes, but now he looked up at them at last. "I don't think anyone would blame you for that."
"Well, the law thinks otherwise about such things. So I used my influence, my money, to cover up the situation. Yuriko was killed in a home invasion by an unknown party. James was killed in a hovercar wreck, his body badly burned, a week later." Fukuda smiled tremulously, held out his wrists in front of him. "Care to arrest me now, detective?"
"I'm not a forcer. And like I say, I can understand what you did. Finding your wife that way."
"My wife." Fukuda averted his gaze once more. "I tell you, I worshipped her. We had only been married two years. We had dreamed of having children."
"Dreamed? But, what about Yuki?"
"Do the math, Mr. Stake." He snorted a little laugh. "I never had a daughter. There was, and is, only Yuriko."
"What are you saying? That Yuki's. a clone?"
"Given my resources, how could I resist it? But despite how much I mourned her, despite my agony at not having her beside me, I couldn't bring myself to try to duplicate Yuriko exactly. How could the unique woman I loved ever truly be replaced? If one is to believe in the soul, then I felt Yuriko's soul had ceased to be. At least in this plane. The being I created from her-it was Yuriko, but it was also its own self. So in a kind of compromise, I reasoned that if something were to remain of Yuriko, it should be an offspring of sorts. The child she did not live long enough to give birth to. Though, of course, Yuki is more of a twin than a daughter. And more than a twin, too." Fukuda faced Stake with sudden sharpness, as if he'd been accused. "She is my tribute to Yuriko. But you aren't to think that I have ever acted in any indecent way toward her. I have never even been tempted. I've raised her as my daughter. That is the only way I see her, now."
"But she doesn't know any of this."
"No. I accelerated the clone to the age of twelve, four years ago. I thought it was a good age. A child old enough to be self-sufficient, and yet a charming companion for me. Old enough to resemble her mother. But still innocent. Anyway, I had a history built for her out of photographs and vids that are actually of Yuriko, expensively falsified records, and even by infusing her with memory-encoded long-chain molecules in a brain drip-a method for providing a clone with instant learning. Instant memories, real or imagined."
"I know," Stake said. It was how the cloned soldiers he had fought beside had been trained, enabling some-like Sergeant Adams of the 5th Advance Rangers-to outrank him though only several years old, physically.
Fukuda went on, "No, Mr. Stake, my dear child knows none of this. And she doesn't know that the woman she's been hearing on her Ouija phone, trying so urgently to speak with her, is actually herself."
"It isn't fair, you know. Not to tell her." An angry spark was lighted in Fukuda's eyes, but a rising tide of tears extinguished it. "I will tell her, one day. When she's old enough to fully understand. And forgive me."
"I'm sorry. That wasn't my place to say."
"Don't apologize, Mr. Stake. I'm the one who should be apologizing to you, for keeping this from you. But at the same time, for unburdening myself to you. Forgive me. Please. Forgive me."
Stake was shocked, then, when John Fukuda took several unsteady steps toward him and grasped one of his hands in both of his. He squeezed it, staring into Stake's face, only a short distance away.
And then Stake understood. By now, he figured he must look nearly as much like Fukuda as his brother James had. He knew that just then, it was not he who Fukuda was begging forgiveness from-but from the twin brother he had murdered four years earlier.
"I forgive you," Stake croaked softly.
Still clutching his hand, John Fukuda burst into sobs.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
all of them
Javier Dias had awoken to a raging headache and tears and curses and missing friends.
Now on his feet again, he took in the faces of the survivors: Patryk, Nhu, Tabeth. And of the Tin Town Terata, there were Mira Cello, Satin, Haanz, and Barbie. Eight. But the question was, how many of the Blank People were on the other side of the basement door?
"Maybe all of them," Barbie said in the overlapping voices from two of the smaller of her five jumbled faces. "I mean, maybe there's a way they can get inside the cellar from outside. So that would mean all of them could come through that way."
"She's right," Nhu said, pacing madly up and down the dimly lit hallway with tears shining on her cheeks. "We can't risk opening that door again."
"But how would they be getting in there from outside?" Javier asked. "Patryk, you see anything?"
Patryk was examining the blueprints for Steward Gardens again on Nhu's wrist comp. "No. But I'm not sure of how well I understand everything in the blueprints."
"I don't think they have access from outside," Mira said to Barbie. "That dead homeless guy we found in here when we first broke in-do you remember where we found his body? In the hallway right above us." She pointed toward the door to the stairs. "He must have woken these things up somehow, by poking around down here. Maybe tampering with the brainframe to turn the utilities on. He managed to lock some of them in the basement, but others caught up with him and killed him, or else he just died from his wounds."
"Yes." Barbie nodded her amalgamated heads. "Yes, that makes sense."
"But even if there's only a limited number of them left in there," Tabeth said, "we don't know how many. And if we try to go back inside, we'll probably end up like our friends."
"We'll go in shooting like crazy," Satin growled. "All of us shooting in there at once."
"No!" Nhu cried, pacing, pacing. "I won't do it! You saw what happened! We have to go out one of the windows-it's the only way!"
"And you saw what happened to Clara," Tabeth reminded her. "Almost all the Blank People are still outside. That much is for certain."
"But it's only a short run to the street. Do you think they'd all take the risk of leaving the property like that? By the time they responded, we could be on Beaumonde Street already!"