It wasn't his habit to peek in Aundrea's pocketbook, but he had suspected her of smoking drugs with Sissy, whom he knew to be an avid drug smoker. He had on occasion inspected the contents of her bag over the past two years of their relationship, but had never found anything especially upsetting until this morning while she was in the shower of the small apartment they shared.

He had never suspected that Josh might be attracted to Aundrea, have feelings for his girlfriend, whom he expected to marry one day, until he read: "I won't rest till your in my arms, I want to hold you 4ever without a care, Aundrea is the person that I live for, I want to lie down with her bare, I would kiss you till the end of time, Theirs no way to say my love in this rhyme."

He had ripped aside the shower curtain, thrust the note under Aundrea's nose despite the water that fell upon those exposed words and her exposed body. He wanted to bellow at her immediately but his mind scrambled on a muddy hillside seeking handholds, as he sought the appropriate lyrics from the jukebox of his mind.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed the note from him, tearing it in doing so and making it even wetter. Her mind, as well, staggered a moment under the pressure to search speedily through its gray file cabinets, but after several beats she screamed at him, "I love you, lover, but I love my friends, too; there are more people in my life than just you!"

"Friends!" Karlos roared before he could censor himself. But who was she kidding? For one thing, the lyric she quoted was misleading-it was from a song in which a girlfriend chides her boyfriend for trying to keep her away from her girlfriends. This was no girlfriend...this was a guy. And that soggy sc.r.a.p in her hand was very clearly not a friendly sentiment but a love letter.

"If you cheat on me, cow, you'll be sorry for that!" Karlos channeled the rage of the ever-enraged Enigman. "I'm no fool to be walked on-I'll cut off his hard-on as food for your cat!"

Aundrea squeezed the note into a small ball in her fist and shrieked, "We have to have trust cuz if we don't then we're through; but let me be me because I am not you!"

Trust, his mind echoed now, as he testily pa.s.sed a tray of food to the pilot of the helicar. He had to trust her that she would only be friends with Josh, not respond to his amorous feelings? Wasn't that asking for more than was reasonable? That little b.a.s.t.a.r.d...he had thought Josh was one of his friends. She shouldn't continue to talk to him. It would only encourage him. If only he could get her to quit PetZone...but he feared that if he pushed her too much he'd push her away entirely. But Josh! Josh was an overgrown kid...always quoting some stupid humorous song out of the blue just to sound outlandish or goofy. He was nineteen! Josh. l.u.s.ting after his girlfriend all this time. And she had kept his note, hidden it away.

Karlos searched his home music files, roughly tapping his tattooed control keys. He found the track he wanted- w.a.n.ker, also by Mystery Worm-and sang along to it in a sepulchral German accent inside the BurgerZone drive-through booth.

"He's nothing but a waaaan-ker He only wants to spaaaank her Warm his worm inside her head I live to make that w.a.n.ker dead..."

Josh now had himself believing his own poetic avowals of love, but truth be known (if only to himself), he hadn't experienced any feeling stronger than friendship for Aundrea until she had expressed her own interest in him. What he had hoped for since becoming aware of her interest, and what his poetic lines had helped to achieve, was this: Aundrea's pale skin bared and warm against his. It had been over a year since Melanie but at last he was sheathed again inside female flesh.

Aundrea was on hands and knees, and he was behind her, hands gripping her smooth, full a.s.s cheeks like the sim-actors did in the p.o.r.n vids he watched on the net. Her long purple hair hung down in her face, and at his request she wore only her fake purple cherub wings. As he pumped into her he recited, "On purple wings...uh...you take me high...oh G.o.d...soaring free across the...sky...uh..."

"Deeper, deeper," Aundrea gasped, quoting Chandra Shankar, "I want to feel you f.u.c.k me in my heart!" The song was called f.u.c.k Me in the Heart.

His parents were away for the day. Aundrea and Josh were in his bedroom; posters of music stars and naked women and naked music stars covered the walls. Exotic swords and knives were displayed in wall-mounted cases and cabinets in those spots not plastered with posters...each shining blade a mirror of Josh's hard, busy phallus. On his music system played some steamy tracks by Maurice M. D. Aundrea's clothes were carelessly flung into a chair, half-covering her pocketbook.

And in her pocketbook was a small remote transmitter that Karlos had slipped in there this morning when she'd been taking a shower.

In his apartment, Karlos listened to the transmissions via the chip in his head that never stopped playing something of some kind, even when he slept at night. Right now he was hearing Maurice M. D., but also s.n.a.t.c.hes of 5Guyz and Chandra Shankar. But it was like karaoke, because those weren't the voices of 5Guyz or Chandra. Even when dancing, 5Guyz and Chandra never sounded that breathless.

Aundrea had indicated to him this morning, by sullenly pa.s.sing him a note, that she was going to a movie today with Sissy. He hadn't bought her story. He hadn't bothered checking with Sissy, though-he knew she would have been instructed to cover for Aundrea.

The remote transmitter hadn't cost him much. Though his paycheck was meager, less than hers, he still had enough money saved up for another purchase, and he set out to make it with Mystery Worm and Enigman alternating in his skull.

In Enigman's song Wh.o.r.ekiller, the woman-hating singer reached new levels of fury as he related an allegedly true account of his murder of an unfaithful ex-girlfriend he wouldn't name. Karlos listened to this song now as he drove in his beleaguered hovercar (which occasionally dipped so low that its belly sc.r.a.ped the road). He didn't know now whether the song echoed his rage, or if he was letting Enigman decide his course of action for him.

Either way, the words in his head were like a possessing demon, urging him to slake his thirst for revenge. He had always had music in his head, even before the chip: remembering songs, even rousing movie soundtracks, running it all through his mind in school, at work. But now it filled his brain like a balloon fit to burst. Filled it with all the rage and pain of every jilted, cheated lover in every sad and lonely song. It was like all those millions of songs played simultaneously, in one howling cacophony.

Josh himself was very much into weapons, had a collection of knives and swords including an expensive Ramon long sword his parents had bought him as a graduation present. He had given Karlos the number of a black market dealer a long time ago, when Karlos had considered buying a gun just because this was Punktown. Today, he had dug that number out of his computer files. Called it. Been given an address...

The dealer's home was a parasitic structure built on the flat roof of a larger tenement building, with something of the appearance of a wasp's nest. Near the door to the stairs when Karlos emerged onto the roof was a dead youth, sprawled naked in the sizzling summer heat. He'd been a c.o.kehead, quite obviously; scrawnier than a skeleton, eyes bulging like cue b.a.l.l.s in his (her?) sockets, and a thick metal tube jammed permanently into the rotted-out cavity that had once been his nose. With his distaste for drugs, Karlos felt no pity for the thing, only concern that there might be more of its dangerous kind about. He felt further justified for wanting to see this weapons dealer. It was a world of hunger, and hunger made for hurt.

The somewhat globular structure had no windows, and after he'd circled it, he found no doors. Just creases and wrinkles in the rough gray skin, but Karlos stepped back sharply when one of the creases stretched into an opening and the bony, segmented black leg of a giant insect pushed its way out like something freeing itself from a coc.o.o.n. The something was a Coleopteroid...essentially, a beetle that stood on two hind legs and thus came up to Karlos's shoulder. Of its six, tendril-like upper limbs, two had been amputated and replaced with more anthropomorphic mechanical arms better suited for a humanoid-oriented colony. Karlos had never seen one before, but he knew the Bedbugs came here from another dimension, and that they earnestly worshiped the dark G.o.ds that Mystery Worm only sang about.

"Are you Karlos?" asked the creature, its voice translated through a device that seemed surgically affixed to its chest. Or thorax. Its lidless, unmoving eyes gleamed blue-black in the molten sunlight. When he answered with a nod, it gestured for him to follow it back inside the nest. It courteously let him slip inside first, holding one lip of the entrance aside for him.

Within it was dark and even hotter than outside, with thick papery walls having been formed to subdivide the interior into several chambers. The small structure conjured in Karlos's mind the image of a t.i.tan heart, extracted and left atop this building to wither and mummify, all its blood turned to dust, leaving only the invading organism which had killed it and continued to dwell inside.

There was a table near the door-slit, and the beetle flicked on a lamp with a dim violet glow. From one of the other rooms it brought a box, which it then rested on the table. When the lid was opened, the box revealed several rows of handguns cushioned like jewelry in recessed foam.

"Looking for anything in particular, Karlos?" the creature's too-human, too-pleasant voice asked.

He only shrugged, but his eyes had latched onto one of the pistols immediately. It was a large-framed snub-nosed revolver, an archaic but ominous device, glossy black ceramic and looking like something that had been amputated from the Coleopteroid's body as well. He lifted it out of the foam hollow, bounced its light weight but sinister form in his hand. He turned to point it at the purple-glowing lamp, then bent close to the light to read the words inscribed in the metal. It was, as he'd thought, a Decimator .300-close to the more powerful Decimator .340 with its phallic eight-inch barrel, with which Enigman claimed to have murdered his ex-girlfriend.

Though currently another artist played in his head, Karlos's brain played back a line from Engiman recorded indelibly in his memory: "Had her in my sights, and she cowered in fright; put her arms around her head, like that would stop my lead; started begging not to kill her, while I aimed my Decimator; like a target on her heart, when I blew her chest apart..."

"A good weapon with the right ammo," his host a.s.sured him, clicking a tendril arm's chitinous claw against the truncated barrel. "Not accurate, of course, with the chopped barrel, but with plasma rounds or even solid stuff, very devastating at close quarters. There's a body outside...just an addict...would you like to take the gun outside and try it out?"

Karlos lifted a sluggish head, the beetle's translated words finding their way very slowly through the two songs running simultaneously in his skull.

Thinking that Karlos simply hadn't heard him, the extradimensional repeated, "There's a corpse outside...on the roof...would you like to test the gun on him, using various types of ammo?"

Karlos stared mutely at the beetle several moments more. And then he shook his head, looked down at the hollow in the box of guns, and replaced the snub-nosed revolver.

That dead thing out there might have been a woman for all he could tell. The hair that hadn't already fallen out was straggly, long. Its b.r.e.a.s.t.s might have withered away. But it might once have been pretty. It might once have been someone like Aundrea...

Somehow, through the clutter of throbbing noise, his brain was able to flash him one quick picture of Aundrea's big, foolish grin when she was happy, when he'd made her laugh.

He pushed out of the nest with its smothering darkness, squinting in the harsh light, ignoring the beetle as it anxiously called after him, plucked at his shirt with a pincer.

As he walked back to the stairwell, he glanced down at the crumpled scarecrow body. Death sculpted in flesh, not music. Bone, not words. It was real, not an abstraction. It was ugly, and a waste, and it cut like a laser through the noise, the voices, the tumult. Karlos descended the stairs. He would confront her, yes. But with words, and emotions, not bullets.

He tapped his arm, banished the music. For a few minutes his head fizzed with immense emptiness and all he heard was the hollow clanging of his own footfalls, as if it were the sound of him wandering lost in his own skull. He must think...must find just the right words, the perfect lyrics to express his pain to her as never before.

But not an angry song.A love song.

"Will you be mine and mine alone," Josh recited, lying in his bed while he watched Aundrea dress. She had had to remove her wings to replace her bra and T-shirt. "Or when the sun finds me again, will I find you've already flown?" He held out his hand to her and after she sealed her slacks she took hold of it and squeezed, rubbing her thumb across the top of it.

But she gave him a sympathetic look that to Josh felt almost pitying and said, "I can't promise you my heart when my mind is undecided and my soul is divided and I feel so torn apart."

Josh propped himself up on one elbow. He was too lacking in confidence to debate with her as aggressively as he wanted-perhaps he would wait to express his fullest feelings in a letter-but he had to say something. He was feeling more and more earnest about his emotions by the moment. He was truly and deeply falling in love, he believed. And he certainly didn't want this to be the last time he had her in his bed. "How long can a person be torn between two lovers when one plus two is three?" he quoted Rickee Ortiz meekly, but with a repressed desperation.

Aundrea sighed, turned slightly away from him to slip her wings back on. Josh noticed that some flecks of purple glitter and one sequin had dropped off and scattered across his floor. She said, "Please don't pressure me, love, to follow the path you choose; if I surrender to your dreams or you give in to mine, both of us will lose."

Josh wanted to sigh, too, but he dared not. He lowered himself to his back again and gazed up at his ceiling...but he felt Aundrea's eyes on him and became self conscious about his nakedness. Keeping his eyes off her, ashamed and hurt and a little angry, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and rose so as to dress.

"Let's go grab a burger," Aundrea blurted out abruptly and jovially, singing the jingle for the BurgerZone VT ads, "A Fishsand and some fries! An extra-large bag of dilkies and a choc-o-late surprise!" She darted over to him and pounced on his bare back, piggy-back style. He tried to grab onto her legs to hold her up but they both toppled to the bed, Aundrea laughing loudly and a smile coming even to Josh's lips.

He must keep on waiting, he thought. Waiting and hoping to be the one who won her...

The dashboard monitor showed Karlos a static-shot, flickering street map, yet he was grateful that his...o...b..ard computer system was still functioning at all. He himself had never been to Josh's condominium before, but when he'd asked his navigation system to set the course it had done so, though his hovercar's autopilot mode was not up to the task by itself. He followed the directions while playing actual, audible music over his car's entertainment system, rather than piping it straight to his brain chip.

He had found a song that suited his mood, his feelings. Normally he wouldn't have listened to Del Kahn, who was now in his early forties though still quite popular with those who had grown up with him, but he'd half-remembered a song he'd heard his father play, and he was listening to it now for the third time in a row.

Kahn sang the song in a subdued, deep voice. The barren instrumentation consisted of little more than a beat like a melancholy stroll, and almost church-like organ music that several times in the song lifted with a kind of false hope before falling short of its pinnacle and returning to a morose undercurrent. The song was called Green Bird.

"Your pet bird was small and green And when he died, we walked on down To a graveyard, large and gray On the furthest edge of town.

We walked and walked, sad and slow Til we found a name that fit A gravestone for a man named 'Green'

We felt that was appropriate.

I watched as you knelt and dug A little hole, to make his bed I thought, I hope I'm that loved When it's my turn to be dead.

By the winter, you had gone Something happened, something died I wondered what I could have done To make you want to leave my side.

I walk this graveyard path alone Looking for a name that fits For a man who's a lost fool For a man who's broke to bits.

I find a gravestone, carved with 'Green'

I kneel and scoop some dirt in hand Let it trickle to the ground Our love is buried where I stand."

As the organ music trailed off, Karlos swiped a tear from his cheek. He didn't know exactly what part of the song he might want to quote to Aundrea to express his pain...perhaps he wanted to recite it to her in its entirety.

He played it again from the beginning, memorizing the words.

Josh's hovercar rested in the driveway of his parents' condominium in Woods Court on the outskirts of Punktown, where the cosmetic and widely s.p.a.ced trees that lined the micro-neighborhood's streets hardly lived up to the moniker. Aundrea was poised at the pa.s.senger's door, her hand on its latch, waiting for Josh to enter his vehicle and unlock her side. As she stood waiting, she saw a reflection in the window of a figure moving up behind her and turned toward it sharply, letting go of the door.

"Please hear my words, they're the only gift I bring," Karlos told her, spreading his hands out from his sides, his eyes pained, "the message of my meaning is in the rhymes I sing."

"Dung, c.r.a.p and s.h.i.t!" Aundrea cried out, as Gala Dali did at the start of her song Flush You. It was a currently popular expression of surprise or dismay, or both.

Josh looked up across the bonnet of his car and saw his rival there. It was as though a lightning bolt pierced him through the crown, pinning him to the street as his every nerve was flooded with its charge. He knew Karlos's temper. Even though he'd known he was taking this risk all along, he hadn't faced the possibility head on...had hoped Aundrea would split from Karlos before such a confrontation could occur. His first impulse was to run back to his condo's door, but if Karlos had a gun he could pick him off easily. And hadn't Karlos asked him not long ago for the number of the black market dealer he had bought some of his more exotic swords from? That dealer, whom he never would have dealt with himself had he known that he was one of those scary Coleopteroids, no doubt had plenty of frightening firearms to sell. And he remembered it was a gun that Karlos had expressed interest in buying...

He ducked lower behind his car and finished unlocking its door, while Aundrea kept Karlos occupied. He could hear her shouting again as she backed away from her approaching boyfriend.

"Stop stalking me, f.u.c.ker, I'll call the force down here," she yelled, scrambling backward around the tail of the hovercar, to where Josh was. Josh would protect her from whatever her volcanic boyfriend might do. "You aren't some mighty hunter to hunt your little deer!"

Karlos was upset that Aundrea would quote such a song at him; j.a.pan Black had written it about her ex-husband, who despite a restraining order had followed her around on tour, menacingly obsessed with her. He had ultimately raped her and then killed both her and himself in her hotel room. The song was Stalker.

Following her around the end of the car, still holding out his arms helplessly, Karlos despaired. This hardly seemed the best way to quote the entire Del Kahn song to her. He needed her to be receptive, to sit with him and listen to what he had to say, to consider his feelings deeply. The ugliness of the scene put him at a loss. Maybe he should have abandoned his attempt to surprise her in the act altogether, when he'd decided not to buy the gun. He could have let her know later that he knew all about her and Josh. But he had so wanted to demonstrate to both of them, in person and simultaneously, that he was aware of their deceit.

"Please hear my words," he repeated, feebly.

Aundrea's progress was halted when she b.u.mped into Josh, who had dipped inside his car and then emerged again.

Karlos faced both of them now. His anguish at gazing into Aundrea's face was replaced with hatred for his supposed friend. He stopped advancing, immobilized by the knot of emotions.

Josh pushed Aundrea to one side, out of his way, and from behind the purple wings strapped to her back appeared a Tikkihotto dagger with a long blade nearly as slim as a spike. He rushed forward to meet Karlos. They briefly thudded together.

The skewer went deep, up under his ribs. Karlos gave a little grunt and took a few steps back, looking down at his chest. The handle of the knife, bound in strips of black leather, protruded from him surreally. The entire length of the blade was neatly hidden inside him.

Josh had been too terrified, too sickened to draw the knife out and strike a second blow. He scurried backward and this time collided with Aundrea, almost knocking them both down. Aundrea was screaming. She grabbed onto his shoulders and dug her fingers in as if she meant to tear the flesh from the bones beneath.

Together, they watched Karlos stagger against the car, grabbing onto it to keep from falling. He gave a little cough and blood bubbled over his lip. His jaw slackened and a wave of it flowed over his chin.

He wove drunkenly, directed his dazed eyes toward his friends again.

Words gushed like blood through his mind. Lyrics of a dozen songs overlapped, distorted, tripped over each other in an effort to rise with biting lucidity from his reddened lips. Rhymes to communicate his outrage, his terror, his agony, the realization that his life was ending. Something that would crush them forever under its emotion. Shame them. Curse them. Words they would play back again and again in self-punishment.

But as his hands slipped off the car and he crumpled, he gave only a half-choked cry that was thoroughly incoherent. Inarticulate. It would have to do.

Aundrea continued her keening wail. Josh began to emit a series of whimpers. Despite this, for one moment of terrible clarity, they all knew exactly what the other was expressing, as if for the very first time.

PERFECTLY BEASTLY.

Yu heard Peck screaming above him on the fifth floor. "d.a.m.n it, Russet, shoot that thing on the stairs and get up there to him!"

Over his headset, Yu heard his partner reply, "I don't know if it's the Ophluu or one of his animals..."

"To h.e.l.l with the animals! Listen to him! Go!"

"They're endangered, Yu-we have our orders!"

"Peck is endangered! Never mind, you prissy little puke, I'll go to him myself!" Yu stabbed the key to summon down the elevator. A labored rattling like a washing machine full of wrenches came from behind the door. d.a.m.n old tenements.

"Don't abandon your position until more back-up arrives! We have to keep that lift covered!"

"You come cover it; I'm going up."

"Listen..."

"Bite it."

"Listen, Yu..."

"Listen to what?"

"Peck," said Russet, from the fourth floor. "He isn't screaming any more."

Yu listened. The younger man was right: no more screams were being broadcast from Detective Raymond Peck's headset. But in straining his ears, Yu thought he heard an odd rustling, as of dry autumn leaves across a sidewalk. Then, a wet sloshing sound, close to the police officer's mike. What the h.e.l.l kind of thing was there with him? Was it merely nosing around or attempting to speak over the mike...and if it were that, was it surrendering, or mocking the other two law enforcers?

Detective Yu Li had never met, nor even seen a picture of, an Ophluu. Neither had Russet. Paxton-nicknamed, not necessarily with fondness, Punktown by its inhabitants-was an Earth colony on the planet Oasis, but a melting pot for a vast variety of beings representing every whim and invention of nature and evolution. Though Yu had no doubt at least glimpsed most of these species, new ones were ever venturing to Punktown for the first time. The Ophluu was one such race. He had never been called to examine an Ophluu corpse, had never arrested an Ophluu law-breaker, and had never even heard of their kind before this afternoon. Both detectives had no idea what the criminal they had come here to confront looked like.