Edge Of Human

12

"I'm real sorry about that." Fussy and nervous, a voice that suited the man, or what was left of him. "Sometimes Pris just goes off that way-even with me. She's got like you know? — a hair-trigger temperament. That probably indicates some sort of deep-seated anger inside her."

"You could say." Lying on a bare mattress inside the safe-house apartment, Deckard watched as Sebastian-a bio-engineer who'd formerly freelanced for the Tyrell Corporation; he remembered the police file on the guy-busied himself making coffee. A complicated process: the teddy bear, eyes tarnished as the buttons on its nineteenth-century waistcoat, had to back up to the sideways-mounted sink, while the triple amputee in the papoose carrier used the end of the counter as a flat surface for the grinder and French press. "Maybe she remembers me." Deckard rubbed his bruised throat. "Maybe she remembers me blowing her away. That might do it."

"Gee… I don't know." Sebastian struggled to press the plunger down. "I can't exactly be sure what Pris does remember." Black coffee grounds were scattered all over, from the spilled bag of expensive welfare-drop rations. "Sometimes I wonder if she remembers me. And I'm the best friend she ever had-even when she was alive." He finished pouring, then held out the cup on a cracked Meissen dessert plate. "Squeaker, would you take this over to our guest?"

The miniature soldier, the spike-helmeted figure that Deckard had first encountered in the safe-house apartment, grudgingly brought the coffee to him. It gazed balefully past its stretched nose, still regarding him with suspicion; the soldier's memory seemed unimpaired, at least. Deckard pushed himself into a sitting position and took the cup. "How much of her cerebral functioning were you able to save?"

"Oh, most of it, actually." Sebastian sipped from a demitasse. He appeared ancient as a baby bird, almost incapable of feeding itself, the skin of his hand and face translucent, crumpled parchment. "But those Nexus-6 circuits are real fiddly. It's basically an unstable design, with a lot of kludges and work-arounds. I warned Mr. Tyrell about putting 'em out on the market; I told him there'd be trouble. You start havin' to do recalls and boom, your profit margin's all shot to heck. Just the return shipping costs alone, from the off-world colonies…" A shudder ran through the abbreviated torso in the papoose carrier. "You can't just stick a postage stamp on 'em and send 'em home, you know."

"That's true." The coffee was hot and bitter on Deckard's tongue. "They tend to get into trouble."

"Yeah…" Sebastian took another sip. "But like I said, it's mainly the flaws in the Nexus-6 design. They're susceptible to having visions and stuff. Nearly as bad as real humans."

"Whatever." Didn't seem a point worth discussing. Through the doorway into the even dimmer back sections of the apartment, the mobile scarecrow that'd been the replicant Pris sulked and glared at him, its eyes two red embers somewhere below its albino fright-wig. His skin still prickled tense at the sight of her, a response triggered by the memory of her nearly killing him, riding his shoulders and slamming her fists into the sides of his skull, then twisting his head around like a broken doll's. "You must've moved fast, to get your hands on her at all." The last he'd seen of her, before this encounter in the safe-house apartment, she'd been flopping around on her back, spitting and shrieking in her death throes, the bullet from his gun having torn open her midsection.

"I sure did." Sebastian nodded. "I loaded her up in my van, from the police morgue-I had a pass for doing that. They'd already done their tests on her, so I didn't think they'd mind anyway. Not that I was going to stick around and ask 'em. I figured there'd be an arrest warrant out for me pretty soon. 'Cause I snuck out of a police-custody hospital, my own self-they thought I was dead when I got found up in the Tyrell private suite, most likely since I look so decrepit and stuff, but I'd just kinda passed out, is all; they got my heart started up again, out in the ambulance. But I figured the police probably had me down as having helped Batty get in to kill old Mr. Tyrell. So I just took Pris's body and my little pals, and lit out for this zone. Where they wouldn't be able to find us."

"Good thinking. Accessory to murder's a hard rap in this town. Especially when the evidence is on tape."

"It's a bum rap, is what it is." An indignant expression settled across Sebastian's watery eyes. "I would never have hurt Mr. Tyrell; I know he wasn't a very nice man and all, but he was my friend. Sort of. That's why I tried to warn him. That something funny was going on." Sebastian's voice grew excited. "When Roy and I were coming up in the elevator, to Mr. Tyrell's personal suite-I was supposed to tell him that I'd figured out my next moves, in the chess game we'd been playing. Well, Roy'd figured 'em out; I just repeated what he told me. Only-I bet it's on the securitysystem tape-when I was supposed to say 'Checkmate,' instead of that I said, 'Checkmate, I think.' That's how I was trying to warn Mr. Tyrell that something was wrong, without letting on to Roy that I was doing it."

The words came out in a babbling rush. "You see, 'cause I didn't know it at the time," Sebastian went on, "but it was like a famous chess game that Mr. Tyrell'd set up-the one that's called the Immortal Game, between a coupla old-time grand masters, way long ago-Roy told me about it, when he showed me the moves I should make. All that chess stuff was part of his memory implant, some of what Mr. Tyrell himself had programmed inside Roy's head. I could never've figured 'em out on my own; Mr. Tyrell knew I couldn't play chess on his level. So when I said I think, he should've known I didn't get the moves out of a book, and that somebody else must've told me, and that person was probably with me right then, so he should've called the corporate security folks instead of letting us in, 'cause I knew Roy was up to no good-'

"Okay, okay, I believe you." Deckard held up a hand against the barrage of words. He actually had no idea what the other man was talking about. "Look, it doesn't matter. I didn't come out here to arrest you or anything."

"No?" Sebastian peered closer at him. "I thought maybe you were, because of Mr. Tyrell getting killed, and me breaking in here-I'm sorry about that. I only did it because I found this place with all the locks and everything working, and it didn't look like anybody was living here."

"Don't get into a sweat. You're welcome to it. Just someplace that I used when I was out in the field, hunting down replicants that might've slipped over into this zone. It's nothing special."

"'Hunting down replicants… '" Sebastian's eyes widened in sudden fright. "You didn't come around looking for Pris, did you? Just 'cause I… I saved her? She's already been dead once. You're not going to kill her again, are you?"

He doesn't know, thought Deckard. He still believes she was a replicant. All that talk about the difficulties with the Nexus-6 neurocerebral wiring confirmed that Sebastian hadn't heard the results of the bone marrow analysis tests on Pris; he'd already cut himself out of any Tyrell Corporation-related loop by then. Hunkered down here in the sideways world, he'd have no way of knowing. And no way of finding out-the bone marrow tests were the only way of determining a physiological difference between a replicant and a human.

Weird how things worked out-in the safe-house apartment, Deckard had found himself in the company of the one person who didn't think he was guilty of murdering a human being. The one person who had the most right to think of him as a murderer.

"You must've loved her." He felt sympathy for the truncated man. "Very much. To… put her back together the way you have."

"No…" Sebastian shook his head. "I love her. Right now, the way she is. Nothing's changed. Not for us, at least. And I know, deep down, Pris loves me."

The wraithlike creature, red-eyed and with a blazing corona of white hair, had heard its name spoken, the name it had answered to when alive. It slid into the apartment's kitchen, keeping its back close to the walls and a wary gaze on Deckard. It stepped next to the animated teddy bear, bending down to be as near as possible to Sebastian, its dried-leather face touching his wrinkled, babyish one. Its idiot eyes remained locked on the figure on the other side of the room.

"You see?" Sebastian couldn't keep from bragging about his own cleverness. "It wasn't easy, but I managed to keep the important parts going-she knows who I am and stuff." With his one hand, he tenderly stroked the white hair. "She really is inside here. Even though I had to strip out a lot of the soft tissue from the rest of the body." He spoke matter-of-factly, as though describing the repair of a broken radio. "I had a lot of my tools and spare parts with me already, so I was able to get the sensor-activator relays and the muscle-surrogate motors wired in without too much trouble. But she's still pretty much a high-maintenance item; she can't really take care of herself. She needs me. So when I was done getting her up and running, I did what I had to, on myself."

He looked down at his own body, what was left of it, in the papoose carrier. "The doctors back in the city had told me that this pseudo-progeria I got-accelerated old age, you know? — that it could be slowed down, even halted for a while, by reducing the demands on the core system. It's mainly a progressive collapse of the circulatory and nervous systems. So I had to whittle away at myself, the way I did on Pris. I figured all I really needed was one hand-as long as I had my little pals to help me get around." He patted the teddy bear on its woolly head; it looked over the epaulet on its shoulder and gave him a steel-toothed smile. "We get along all right, don't we, Colonel?"

"Did it work?" Deckard used the empty cup to point to him. "I mean

… on your condition."

"Don't really know." Strapped to the back of his buttoneyed companion, Sebastian gave a lopsided shrug. "But I'm still here, aren't I? Surrounded by the folks who love me." The other of his creations, the miniature soldier with the spike helmet and long nose, had come into the kitchen and pressed itself close to him, forming a family tableau. "That's all that matters, isn't it?"

He supposed it was. There was nothing he could say to contradict the other man. Carved down to a one-armed torso, with a couple of toy dwarfs for companions, and the female creature he was in love with reduced to a murderous skeleton-Deckard envied him. Loving the dead, loving the bits and pieces left behind, even just memory-maybe that was what defined human. For the dead, he wondered, or for us? Deckard didn't know.

For a moment, as he had watched Sebastian with the resurrected Pris, a dim spark of hope had flickered inside him. Maybe Sebastian could do the same for Rachael; not keep her from death, but bring her back in some altered but still recognizable form. Just as quickly, the spark had turned to a cold cinder. Even if it were possible, he knew it was nothing that he wanted, nothing that he could endure. Better to have your memories, and your grief, than to be haunted by an animated corpse wearing a mask of the beloved's emptied flesh. The poor bastard, he thought as he regarded Sebastian. The little man, or what remained of him, didn't even know how screwed up he was. Just as if some crucial perception of reality had been cut away, along with his other limbs. Just things he'd found he could live without.

Though maybe… he could get me off the murder rap. Deckard mused as he sipped the last of the cold coffee. Maybe he could take the Pris-thing, the animated corpse, to the authorities and say that he hadn't killed any human, after all; here it was, still walking around. Or she was, sort of. He discarded the idea. The Pris-thing wouldn't be a very convincing demonstration of his innocence. One look at her, or it-at what she'd become-and they would just take him out and shoot him, throw his body out in the street. From sheer disgust.

He abandoned any more speculations. Deckard supposed it didn't matter, anyway. All that he knew, or cared about, was that he was still a long way from the one whom he loved. And who was dying.

"Here's the deal." The freight spinner swooped in low over the towers of L.A. "First, we find Deckard. We grab him and-"

"What, we have to go all the way up to Oregon?" Holden looked over at Batty in dismay. "What kind of plan is that?"

"Oregon?" The spinner's controls shifted beneath Batty's hand. "What're you talking about?"

He shook his head. More evidence that he was dealing with somebody on the verge of senility. "That's where Deckard went," he explained patiently. "Bryant told me that, while'I was still in the hospital."

"That was then. I'm talking about now." Batty looked down at the city. "Right now, Deckard's here in L.A."

"Bullshit. Why would he come back?"

"He didn't come back, he was brought back. By persons unknown; probably not a police operation. One of my buddies back there at the Reclamation Center heard it on the departmental grapevine and clued me in. Deckard was hauled out of whatever little hiding place he had up north and flown in here."

Holden studied the figure beside him in the cockpit. "Who's got him now?"

"Nobody." The spinner had been put into a big-loop holding pattern; Batty leaned back from the controls. "He either got away or he was let go. One way or the other, we have to find him."

"Why?"

"I thought you were smarter than that." The thin edge of the smile returned to Batty's face. "Haven't you figured it out? Deckard is the sixth replicant. The missing one."

Holden was tempted to say "Bullshit" again, but a thread of doubt slipped into his thoughts. What if Batty was right? "You better give me your logic on this."

"It's simple." Batty's smile broadened. "What's the one kind of replicant that a blade runner replicant-such as yourself-couldn't be assigned to track down and retire? Another blade runner replicant. It would give the whole game away. If you found yourself face-to-face with your own double, or the double of somebody else that you'd always thought was also a human blade runner… come on." Batty tapped a finger against his brow. "You wouldn't have to be a genius to start figuring out that something funny was going on. You'd start asking questions, or keeping 'em inside your head, and pretty soon the people in charge are going to run out of bogus answers to fob off on you. Then you're dangerous; that's when they have to pull the plug on smart-ass little replicants who've learned too much."

He might be part right, thought Holden. Even if Batty's completely cracked regarding my human status… he could still be right about Deckard. That struck him as completely plausible the more he mulled it over. He'd never liked the other blade runner; he'd always found Deckard to be cold and disagreeable, with an irritating batch of moral poses about their jobs. He should've quit the force sooner rather than go as long as he had, bitching about it the whole time.

Or Batty was completely wrong. Deckard and I might both be human — that idea had some attractive qualities to it. Simplicity, for one; he could see that as soon as somebody started doubting outward appearances, the surface levels of reality, then that person had entered an infinitely expanding maze, where nothing was really what it seemed to be. That was how people wound up in the same lunatic condition as Batty. Who was probably one step away from thinking that he himself was a replicant. Of course, if he is, thought Holden, then

…

He shut off that line with a tight mental clamp. Right now, it didn't matter. Capitalizing on what Batty had just told him was the primary objective he had to keep in view.

"If Deckard's in L.A., then finding him is no problem." Holden filtered an easy confidence into his voice. "I know where he'd go.",

"Yeah?" Brightening, the other reached for the spinner's controls. "Lay it on me."

He gave Batty the directions; a moment later they were hovering over what had once been the city's Los Feliz district.

"Aw, man." Batty shook his head in disgust. "This is your big brain wave? You figured Deckard would just go back to his old apartment? Nobody's that stupid. Look, you can see the police have already been here and checked out the area."

Holden glanced out the side of the cockpit and saw yellow strips of POLICE INVESTIGATION-DO NOT CROSS strips, now torn and trampled into the windblown dust by the ground vehicles that had converged on the apartment building, then left. "So?" He shrugged. "The police-those grunt cops-they don't know what I know about Deckard, He and I were like brothers. Blade runners."

"Spare me."

"Just take this thing down. You'll see."

The locks on Deckard's front door had been punched through, the tempered steel beneath the numbers 9732 dented and wrenched back. Took Batty a few minutes to fiddle the police seal without triggering an alarm signal to LAPD headquarters. He shoved the door open, and he and Holden stepped inside from the unlit, silent corridor.

"What'd I tell you?" Batty scanned across the search wreckage that lapped up against the replicas of Frank Lloyd Wright's original faux Mayan wall panels. "There's nobody here. If there had been, the cops would've tweezed him out a long time ago."

Holden said nothing, but walked farther into the apartment. He knew his way around; he'd been here a couple of times before, from a period predating his and Deckard's mutual agreement that two blade runners sitting and drinking in the same room was a bad idea.

The piano bench had been knocked over by the cops who'd ransacked the place. Old brown-edged sheet music lay scattered across the floor, along with the photographs, framed and unframed, from that distant world of the past. Sweet-faced women gazed up with somber understanding from the black-and-white depths.

He found what he'd figured would still be there, what Deckard had shown him once, fastened to the underside of the bench with a strip of wide packing tape. He pulled it free and gripped it tight in his fist.

"Whattya got there?" Batty had had his back turned, but had heard the ripping sound.

"Hey-what's that?"

Holden ignored him. He walked toward the bathroom at the rear of the apartment. "I'll show you in a minute."

"You'll show me right now."

He could hear Batty following him. Without switching on the light, he knelt down and snapped one end of the object, Deckard's spare set of handcuffs, onto the metal pipe behind the toilet. He stood back up as Batty appeared in the doorway. "Look right here," said Holden, pointing.

Batty stepped past him, bending down and peering to see. In one quick move Holden stepped back and grabbed the other man's head with both hands. He brought his knee up sharp into Batty's face, knocking him back with a spray of blood from the nose. Dazed, Batty lolled back-without resistance as Holden lifted him upright by the padded collar of his jacket. A hard punch to the stomach dropped Batty to the floor.

He found himself panting and dizzy, the bio-mechanical heart in his chest racing from the sudden flurry of exertion, the new lungs laboring for breath. Taking a step back, out of Batty's reach, he watched as the other man groggily shook his head, blood streaming to his chin. As though a switch had been thrown in his brain, from impaired to full functioning, Batty suddenly snapped into motion, springing from the bathroom floor and instantly being jerked back by the handcuffs fastened to his wrist and the toilet pipe.

"You sonuvabitch!" Kneeling, his face reddening with fury, Batty clawed his free hand a few inches short of where Holden stood. "Get these things off me! Right now!"

"Sorry…" Holden retreated to the hallway of Deckard's apartment. "Can't do that. I've got a private appointment to get to." He turned away, striding toward the front of the apartment and the door out to the building's corridor.

"Holden!" Behind him, Batty thrashed and shouted, voice echoing in the bathroom's tiled confines. "I'll fix your ass-"

He could still hear the other man screaming violent curses as he slammed the front door shut. Despite the pounding of the machines inside himself, he broke into a quick trot for the elevator. He didn't know how long the cuffs would hold Batty; the man had looked enraged enough to pull the pipe right out of the wall. Holden punched the ground-floor button and leaned against the elevator's inside wall, a squadron of black spots swarming in front of his eyes.

A couple of minutes later he was aloft in the freight spinner, banking it in a tight curve, then accelerating in a straight line. To where Deckard would actually have gone to hole up.

As the spinner climbed above the city, Holden could see a flash of hot sunlight reflected from the ocean off to the west. At the horizon, a dark mass of clouds had begun to form.

They heard the door being broken in. The teddy bear raised its head as though sniffing the air for the source of the commotion; the spike-helmeted soldier moved in front of Sebastian, a defensive barrier against whatever might come through the kitchen doorway.

From instinct, Deckard reached for a weapon at his hip-and found nothing. Turning, he pulled open one of the counter drawers and extracted from it a paring knife with a cracked handle.

The sounds of someone moving through the front part of the apartment, a passage made more difficult by the rooms being tilted onto their sides-a figure appeared at the doorway, bending down to look in on them.

"Holden…" Surprised, Deckard nearly dropped the knife he held. "What're you doing here?"

"You mean, why aren't I stuck in a hospital somewhere, with tubes running in and out of me." The other man ducked his head past the door frame and dropped into the kitchen space. He glanced at the knife in Deckard's hand. "Nice to see you, too." His gaze swept across the figures in the room. "Christ, what a welcoming committee."

"They're a family." Deckard set the knife down on the up-ended section of the counter. "We should be so lucky."

The Pris-thing fastened its red-eyed glare on Holden, then hissed, spine arching catlike. Sebastian's single hand stroked the thing's shoulder. "Now, Pris, there's no call for that. This gentleman's not gonna hurt you-"

"What the hell-" Loathing wonder was visible on Holden's face.

"Don't sweat it," said Deckard. "She's his old girlfriend. One of the escaped replicants. She's been… recycled. Sort of." He nodded toward the figure on the back of the teddy bear. "Sebastian's clever that way."

"Pris! Wait! You don't have to-" The voice from the amputated torso rose into a wail as the corpse of his love darted away from him, disappearing into the dark recesses of the safe-house apartment. Sebastian's arm reached futilely for the skeletonized figure, already gone from sight.

"Nice going, Dave." Deckard peered closer at the figure in front of him. "You know… I figured you'd probably be dead by now. Or something."

"Yeah, well, that was the plan. But I got a new lease on life." With the flat of his hand, he thumped his chest, turned pale, then recovered. "Feel like a new man. Part of me, at least. No thanks to that pile-of-shit Bryant." Holden's expression darkened to a scowl. "Bastard set me up. I'm going to make sure he goes into major payback mode."

"Wait a minute." He didn't know what exactly his ex-partner was talking about, but one thing was clear. "You don't know, do you? Bryant's dead."

The info rocked Holden back against the wall. Deckard could almost see the gears spinning in the other's head as he tried to incorporate the new datum into his thinking.

"He's dead…" Holden lifted his hand, as though there were a veil before him that he had to part in order to see clearly. "Did he just pop off from a heart attack, something like that? The fat pig was overdue for one."

"There was blood all over his office. Or there had been-I saw the stain on the floor. However he went, it didn't look like it'd been an easy process. Or pleasant."

"Jeez…" Holden shook his head. "That kind of puts everything in a different light. Because if Bryant got blown away, then…" He lifted his gaze, then took a step closer to Deckard. "Look, I realize these people-or whatever they are-might be your friends and all." He kept his voice softened. "But you and I have got some heavy stuff to talk over."

"Hey, you don't have to worry about us." From the other side of the kitchen, Sebastian called over to them. He looked sullen and teary-eyed. "We know when we're not wanted. Come on, fellas. Let's go see what Pris is doing."

"Didn't that guy used to work for Tyrell?" Holden craned his neck to watch as the animated teddy bear, with Sebastian in the papoose carrier, clambered toward the rear of the apartment. The spike-helmeted soldier gave a dirty look over his shoulder, then disappeared with his companions. "You shouldn't be hanging around with people like that-not unless you got them thoroughly checked out. What're they doing here, anyway?" Holden gestured around the tilted walls. "Did you let 'em in here? This place was supposed to be just for blade runner operations-'

"Simmer down." Deckard leaned against the end of the counter. The knife was close at hand; his old partner was starting to sound deranged, and looked agitated enough to flip out. "They're harmless."

"'Harmless' — that's a good one." Holden's gaze narrowed. "Nothing's harmless in this universe. That's one thing I've learned. You should've learned it by now, too."

"Maybe I did. Maybe I forgot."

"Well, that's where you went wrong, then. That's how you got all screwed up, Deckard. Falling in love with replicants…" Another shake of the head. "Trusting them. You're a fool. What you should've realized a long time ago is that the only person a blade runner can trust is another blade runner."

"Then I'm off the hook. I'm not a blade runner anymore."

"Correction. Once a blade runner, always one. There's no quitting this job-not while you're alive, at least. Look what happened when you tried."

He could see where this was going. "I get the impression you're about to ask me to trust you."

"As I said-I'm the only one you can trust."

"I don't know…" Seemed a grim prospect. "If I'm going to break this trusting habit of mine, maybe I should go one-hundred-percent cold turkey. Starting with you."

Holden peered around the edge of the kitchen's doorway, making sure that Sebastian or any of the others wasn't listening in, then turned back to give Deckard a hard stare. "Joke away, asshole. Long as you don't mind laughing in your grave. Because that's what it comes down to. There's somebody who doesn't want us blade runners alive. Probably more than one somebody; a whole conspiracy. High-level and mean. Whoever they are, they've got the resources to take us out, one by one-until they're aren't any more of us."

"Maybe you'd better get that gear inside you checked. Lack of oxygen to the brain can trigger paranoid delusions."

"Equipment's running fine." Holden dug out a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, lit up, and took a drag. A moment later blue smoke hung in the kitchen's air; some filtering mechanism inside his chest could be heard revving up. "What needs adjustment is your brain. You don't seem to understand yet: somebody's gunning for us. For all the blade runners. They set me up last year for a hit, they got our boss Bryant… and this whole business of you being dragged back here to L.A.; that's probably got something to do with it as well." Holden's gaze shifted as he followed that line of thought. "Probably because as long as you're running around alive, even up north in the boonies, you're still a loose end for them. The conspiracy isn't just to kill off the individual blade runners, it's to shut down our whole operation. Wipe it off the books completely."

"Come on." A wearied sigh escaped from Deckard. "Easier ways to do that, Dave. Christ, every year Bryant had to fight to keep our unit alive in the departmental budget. If these conspirators are so high-powered, why couldn't they just pull the money plug on us? Every blade runner in town would've wound up washing dishes down at the nearest noodle bar. Not like we've all got exactly ace job skills."

"Speak for yourself-" The cigarette nearly dropped from Holden's hand as he started coughing, a nicotine hack that doubled him over for a moment. He looked old and grey when he straightened back up, the pump in his chest visibly laboring for air. "Look, that's all beside the point, anyway. How should I know why they want to kill us rather than just dumping us out on the street? Maybe there's something we all know, something that's part of the job, and as long as we're alive there'd be the possibility of us spilling it. Maybe they want to eradicate the blade runner unit right out of human memory, as though it never existed-they can't leave us walking around, then. Christ, Deckard…" The cigarette made a fiery comet trail as Holden angrily gestured. "If I knew what they wanted, why they're trying to kill us off, I'd goddamn be in on the conspiracy."

"There's something else you don't know, Dave." During the other's rant, he'd looked up at what had been one of the kitchen's walls; now he brought his gaze back down. "About me."

"What's that?"

"I don't care." Deckard looked him straight in the eye. "I don't care if there's a conspiracy to kill off all the blade runners. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't; I don't know. But I've got my own business to attend to. I left this city with somebody-and it was easy to do it. Getting killed was just about the only thing left here for me. Somebody's still trying to kill me? I'm shocked, Dave, really shocked. Get real." He folded his arms across his chest. "I've been dragged back here, and I've got one more job to take care of. All I want is to do it and get the hell out of here again. Somebody's waiting for me."

"A job, huh?" Holden studied him. "The only thing somebody would want you to do is to hunt down replicants. That's all you're good for. This little job… it wouldn't have something to do with another one of that batch that escaped before, would it? A sixth replicant?"

"What do you know about that?"

"Oh…" Holden shrugged. "Maybe all kinds of things. Things that you don't know, Deckard. That's why you should come in with me on this. You don't stand a chance, otherwise."

"Forget it." He shook his head in disgust. "I've got a better chance of finding and retiring it than I would have with a patched-up loser like you hanging around."

"Wait a minute-"

"No, you wait. Because I don't have time for your bullshit, Holden. You're not even interested in finding any sixth replicant. You've got this conspiracy trip-wired into your head now, and you can't get it out. That's not my problem. I'm not interested in breaking up conspiracies, saving the blade runner unit, whatever. That's all stuff in your world. Mine's not big enough for that sort of thing. Not anymore."

"You stupid sonuvabitch." A carrier wave of pity, mixed with a higher cutting frequency of loathing, radiated from Holden. "It's not as if you have a choice about what world you live in. What makes you think they'll let you go crawling back to whatever hole you've dug in the ground? Even if you manage to ice their missing replicant for them. You'll know too much; they won't let you go."

Deckard hesitated, then pulled back from the needle that the other man had inserted into his thoughts. "I'll make it. Whether they want me to or not. Like I said: somebody's waiting for me."

"Big talk, Deckard." A sneer twisted the corner of Holden's mouth. "And a long walk. The only spinner outside is the one I came here in. Don't-" His hand darted into the same coat pocket that'd held his cigarettes, this time extracting a small chrome gun. He smiled. "Just in case you had some idea about-shall we say? — borrowing it from me."

"Thought had crossed my mind." Deckard looked closer at the weapon in the other's hand. "Where'd you get that? Not your regular piece."

"I'm making do with whatever I can find these days. It belongs to a mutual acquaintance of ours-the same one I got the spinner from. He left it in the cockpit." Holden nodded slowly.

"You'd be amazed if I told you who it is."

"Don't bother. I told you already. I'm not interested in this stuff."

"You're screwing it up, Deckard. For all of us." Holden's voice tightened. "We've got a chance if we stick together. If we don't, we'll get picked off, one by one."

He shrugged. "You look out for your ass. And I'll look out for mine."

"Okay, jerk-" The machinery that'd been stuck inside Holden sent an angry surge of blood into the man's face. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Eyes closed, leaning back against the up-ended kitchen counter, Deckard listened to the other's racketing exit from the safe-house apartment. A few minutes later he heard the distant noise of a spinner lifting from the rubble outside the building. Then everything was quiet again.

For only a moment. The silence was broken by a knock at the apartment's front door.

No one came inside. Deckard waited until the knock sounded again. He pushed himself away from the counter. Making his way through the tilted rooms, he grasped the doorknob and pulled.

Rachael stood in the corridor outside, bending her head down to look past the top side of the doorway.

No — He pushed the memory trip out of his brain. It's not Rachael.

"I thought he'd never leave." Sarah Tyrell turned her head to look down the dark, empty corridor, then brought her gaze back to his. She smiled. "May I come in?"