JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

There were neighborhoods in the city of Paxton where the police did not readily go-if at all. Tin Town, for instance, or Warehouse Way; the former given over mostly to mutants and the latter to squatters in its nominal disused warehouses. Sometimes fires in such regions were even left to burn themselves out, despite the fact that the city firefighting units were mostly automated in nature.

Beaumonde Square, however, was not one of these shunned sectors of Punktown, as the megalopolis had come to be known over the years since Earth colonists had built it upon the humble foundation of the native Choom city that preceded it, like a great cathedral atop an ancient pagan altar.

No, Beaumonde Square was one of the more affluent areas of the city. In its environs were Paxton University and the Beaumonde Women's College. There were plazas and narrow streets either retaining the cobblestones of the original Choom lanes, or replicating that quaint effect. Neatly spaced trees fronted rows of upscale shops, as did stone benches upon which to sip one's cappuccino. There was Quidd's Market, with its countless booths offering food from a cross-section of Punktown's many sentient species, human in aspect or otherwise. The mall-like structure's central rotunda was meant to represent this planet Oasis, raised in an invitation to the first colonists, and to lure them to the market to do business. Money had paved the streets of Beaumonde Square as surely as its cobblestones, from the start.

But even the sorriest of Punktown's citizens who had legs to walk with could plant their feet on those cobblestones. Law enforcers-or forcers, as they were simply called-did not shy from this nexus of streets, and rousted as many troublemakers as they could, but the crime in Punktown was of legendary proportions. Its war zones often chased their inhabitants out into the less anarchic sectors, the way over-development had once sent coyotes, deer, and bears into suburban neighborhoods on Earth (back when there had been such animals, outside of zoos). Of course, many times it wasn't that these blighted people were fleeing a portion of the city gone so rotten as to be all but unlivable. Sometimes they were merely curious; daring explorers, like those first Earth colonists. But even they had been likened by some to the initial cells of a cancer.

Brat Gentile had taken the Red Line to Blue Station, and the Blue Line to Oval Square. From there, he had gone up to street level, and soon found himself on Beaumonde Street itself.

Despite having bought his white leather jacket only a month earlier, he gazed longingly into shop windows at automatonic mannequins as they struck a succession of programmed poses in even more updated varieties of this popular style. But admiring these items of clothing, Brat had to snort in disgusted amusement. So the youths of Beaumonde Square were trying to look like gang kids, huh? Wearing cloned leather jackets like these, and trendy rubber swimming caps on their heads like the pink cap Brat wore, and using the gangstyle lingo. To him, they were like a local moth he had seen in a VT program, which had spots and markings on its abdomen to imitate the face of a snake.

Then again, his resentment toward the more advantaged citizens of Punktown, seemingly instilled in his very cells since birth, had been tempered in recent months by his relationship with Smirk. Smirk, as he had nicknamed her, didn't live in Beaumonde Square herself, but her family could have if they'd cared to. That she had come into his life, and fallen in love with him him still amazed him to the point of confusion.

But that she had now disappeared confused him even more.

He wandered more or less aimlessly, letting the last of his anger drain from him. He had asked his two best friends from the Folger Street Snarlers to accompany him in his exploration this afternoon, but they had made their vague excuses. They didn't care for Smirk: distrustful, because of her money. They'd hinted that she was just playing at being dangerous, wearing him on her arm like these uptown kids wore their gangstyle fashion. Well, Brat suspected his friends were secretly envious of his golden girl, too. Finally he had even asked his ex-girlfriend, Clara, to join him on this excursion, but she claimed to be babysitting her sister's kids today. He had doubts about that excuse, of course. Why should she want to help him find his current girlfriend? But to Brat, she should think of him as a fellow gang member first, and a former boyfriend second. So much for the loyalty of friends. Fuck them. All gang affiliations aside, Brat had no problem going solo when he had to. Sometimes he even preferred it that way. Yeah. Like a shark, on one of the nature programs he and his brother Theo had enjoyed as boys and still liked to watch together in the apartment they shared with Theo's wife. He didn't doubt that Theo would have joined him today, but he and his wife were off in the city of Miniosis for a while, staying with her family. Over the phone, he had told his brother about Smirk and Theo had been concerned, so Brat knew Theo wouldn't have let him down like his friends had.

In all fairness, though, he had to admit that it would have helped if he'd been less vague with them about Smirk's disappearance. But then it was vague enough, still, to him.

Brat went into one end of Quidd's Market and came out the other end with his fingers greasy from a bag of fried dilky roots he'd polished off, an ice cream cone now in his fist. His mission hadn't blotted his sense of curiosity, nor his hunger. He still had the ice cream in hand and was beginning to gnaw the cone itself when his wandering legs finally brought him to Steward Gardens.

That was the name given on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved on a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.

"Huh!" Brat said as if in surprise, though he had come here in search of a place by that name. As if he hadn't truly expected to find it. As if this place-and Smirk's voice on the phone-had only been figments of a dream.

"I'll be at Steward Gardens," she had said to him, her voice all but lost in a storm of static. "He'll bring me. Steward Gardens."

He had shouted into the phone, pleaded for more, but there was only the static after that. He? Who was he? Someone who had kidnapped her? When the chill had left Brat's flesh, he'd had the notion to turn on his comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. He hadn't found much, but he had learned its whereabouts. Beaumonde Street.

Now that he had in fact located the place, he didn't know what to make of it.

Punktown was filled from one border to the other with as many diverse buildings as it was varieties of intelligent beings. There were certainly far more unusual, inventive edifices in this city. For instance, he liked to stare at the exterior walls of the library on the subterranean or B Level of Folger Street, into which were set sizable aquarium tanks swarming with jellyfish from a number of planets (an especially mesmerizing sight when he was high on purple vortex). A skyscraper one could see from the upper level of Folger Street was lit at its summit with a flickering green flame, like a titanic candle, though he didn't know whether the flame was fed by gas or merely holographic.

This building was less showy, more somber. Still, it held his eye and made him run his gaze over its surface, into its more shadowy corners and creases. He found himself drifting nearer as he unconsciously nibbled his cone. How much should he search for her now? How wary should he be of kidnappers? She'd be here, she'd said. But not yet?