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own, Manhattan showed little interest even when the rates offered were rock-bottom. As for offering free population to the Celts, the Deutsches, or the tiny Papal State, Gabriel didn’t even bother to think about it.  All three had run effective extermination programs against Mulls and would regard fresh stocks as anathema. 
    As for the Cossack Region, they had yet to even join the Zone.  Little was known about these handsome, swashbuckling descendants of the Khan who had, centuries before, swept through peasant villages, impaling screaming infants on their bright spears and lopping off the heads of the terrified peasants. Cossack distrust of outside peoples was notorious and legendary even in Gabriel’s time. Who did not remember the bulging, dripping, red sack tossed with arrogant disdain on the cracked pavement outside the E.C. by the Cossack ambassador?  The bag had split, allowing six of its contents, the Toronto Nation Special Ambassadorial Team, to roll and bounce along the walkway until they stopped, eyeless and bloody in the weeds, dark bruised noses ripped and flared like blackbirds’ wings. The Cossack ambassador, black-eyed and erect, his message delivered, had calmly removed a gun from his belt and blown his own brains out. 
    The problem with the Mulls remained. It seemed insurmountable and, as time passed and the cramped Mull-designated areas within Square One bulged at the seams, it was inevitable that something had to give. Already, foraging parties of Mulls were beginning to interfere with the itinerant population of Wildkids, daring to transgress Rule 9 (see endnote 3) , as they searched for supplements to their meagre food allowances. If Rule 9—Outside is Death— could not stop them, what would? These renegade Mulls searched for easy pickings of pre-teen WildKid stragglers who were quickly captured with the offer of food, only to reappear several hours later as someone’s grotesquely-barbequed evening meal in the Mall. It was becoming a problem and Grief Team bands were already reporting losses around the Area 300 along the weed-infested highway known as Number 10. How much longer, Gabriel wondered, before a foraging party of Mulls felt brave enough to probe the main depot at SkyDome and the shit really hit the fan? He felt a shudder run down his neck and along his spine as he sent his chair reeling backwards, along the bank of monitors to those which accessed SkyDome. 
    As he surveyed the pens, he checked his watch. In ten minutes, the Exchange would close and the day’s bidding in the World Trade Zone would end. The Swedes would likely get their price for the contingent of reconstituted blond WK’s, Gabriel thought. It was time to think about slipping down to the grand concourse of the E.C. to do justice to a cup of coffee and a donut. That would suffice until he figured out how to persuade Elias that the Mull situation was rapidly running out of control.
                 

THREE
     
    The Assistant Director of Crematoria, Emmett Strachan, was recalculating the odds for the umpteenth time that he was but a hair’sbreadth away from being in deep shit with the Grief Team. The examination of Gordon Latimer’s files by the Team had been quite thorough. Emmett had never seen anything like it...Gordon’s entire office was gone. Everything! All files purged from his connection to the Stream. Even Gordon’s apartment in F Complex, where Emmett was presently hanging his sorry head in disbelief, was bare. Stripped to the carpet underlay. All appliances, furnishings, fixtures, televisions…everything gone. The round hole in the floor in the small bathroom partition indicated clearly that even the toilet had been deemed worthy of removal. Emmett had cocked an eyebrow at that.
    “Dogs’breath, Gordon, it’s like you never existed!”                   
    Nonetheless, the Grief Team’s reputation for total response was a thing of beauty observed and, to Emmett’s