Edge Of Human

13

They came to burn.

Nothing fancy; wood and rags didn't require anything more than a simple flammable liquid, an accelerant to get things started. "Put them over there-" The leader of the team pointed to a clear space several yards away from the cabin. "There's some other things we have to take care of first."

The other men, in coveralls marked on the shoulders and breast pockets with the Tyrell Corporation logo, began stacking the red canisters on the ground, their boots crunching through the layers of dead pine needles. An owl, startled from its diurnal slumber, flapped noisily away, its broad wings drawing a curtain across the sun for a moment.

Shading his eyes with one hand, the team leader watched the bird's flight; the creature disappeared under the denser canopy of the forest farther down the mountain ridge. The trio of spinners in which he and the others had come up from the south reflected sunlight from their metal flanks. No effort had been made to conceal the corporation's emblems; up here, there was no need for a covert operation. The one person who might have seen, and noted their identities, was engaged elsewhere, down in the city where they had received their orders.

"Should we go in?"

A voice beside him; the team leader turned and saw his second-in-command, patiently waiting. The gasoline cans had been arranged in a neat, shiny pyramid. We brought too much, thought the team leader. He'd known how small the ramshackle cabin was, but hadn't worked out in his head the practical consequences of that fact. A tiny space, bound by thin, mossy walls and a sagging roof; barely large enough for the lives it'd held. The plural was somewhat inexact, he knew. A life, the man's, and a partial one, the woman's, constricted by sleep and death intertwined. A single can of gas and a match would've been enough. Like torching a doll house, a fragile plaything, a bubble in the great, hard world that surrounded it.

The inside of the cabin's window was covered by a tattered cloth. He'd already gone up to it, right after they'd first brought the spinners down from the sky, and brought his face close enough to the cold glass to catch a glimpse of the interior darkness. And the objects therein: an out-of-date calendar on the rough-splintered wall, a wooden chair toppled over on its back, an ancient stove black with soot. And something else, even blacker, an oblong shape resting on crude, low trestles: a glass-lidded coffin, its occupant unviewable from the window's angle.

He knew she was there, though; he had seen her the last time he'd been in this place, when he'd been the second-in-command and Andersson had been the team leader. They'd all worn unmarked gear then, just their name tags, no Tyrell logos on themselves or the spinners. And they'd come at night, shadowy predators, waiting until their employer had finished her business with the man inside the cabin, then swooping in and carrying him away, as the owl did with the mouse in its claws.

"There's nothing left to do out here," said the second-in-command. The other men stood around, waiting. Patiently-they were regular Tyrell employees, security division, paid by the hour and not by the mile.

"All right." For a while, it'd seemed to him as if this place, the small forest clearing with the cabin at its edge, were deep in some sort of magic time, without clock or event. Suspended, like the living and dying of the woman in the transport module, between one sleeping breath and another, this day's heartbeat and tomorrow's. "Might as well get it over." Maybe if he'd come here alone he could've taken care of everything that needed to be done, by himself. As it was, with all these others around him, there was no way the spell could remain unbroken. "Come on."

The team leader pushed the cabin door open, letting the afternoon sunlight spill across the bare planks of the floor. He stepped inside, letting the rest follow him.

Now he could forget their presence. In hers; he stood beside the black coffin, looking down at the woman who rested there. Under the glass, the curls of her dark hair spread out across the silken pillow. Eyes closed; lips slightly parted, as though waiting for the few molecules of oxygen that sustained her or a kiss; hands pale with stilled blood, folded beneath her breasts.

He could have kissed her. The impulse to do just that, to lean down and press his lips against the cold glass, a few inches away from hers, had moved inside him before. When he'd come up here with Andersson on that other job, just a couple of days ago, when they'd taken the sleeping woman's true lover away with them and back to L.A. He hadn't done it then, because he'd known that Andersson wouldn't have understood. Or worse, would have-he knew that Andersson had loved this woman, but in another form; the same face, but not mired in death.

That'd been while Andersson himself had still been alive. of course; he'd been among the security detail back at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters who'd scraped Andersson's broken body from the base of the slanting towers. He knew what had happened, though it wouldn't be mentioned in the official explanation. Andersson had loved the living woman, and had died for that sin. That mistake. Maybe those who loved the dying, the dead, would find eternal life thereby. In his own motionless heart, the team leader wondered how poor Deckard was doing.

For a moment longer he stood gazing down at her. Then he stepped back and gestured to the other men. "All right. Pick her up and take her out of here." It was what he wanted, but it was also part of the orders he'd received from the sleeping woman's double. He watched as they picked up the black coffin by its recessed handles, lifting it from the knocked-together wooden trestles. "Careful…"

They carried her outside, away from the cabin, toward the spinners. A moment later the men returned, this time with the canisters of gasoline in their hands; the team leader hadn't had to tell them to do that. Or the rest; they were on program now.

When the cabin's interior was soaked, the men splashed more gasoline on the outside, then poured a trail on the ground to where the team leader stood. He lit a match and dropped it at his feet. The fire, a hot shimmer in the daylight, ran from him and dived into the darkness behind the cabin's open door. A moment later the fire shouted from the single window, its bright fingers spreading apart the walls and roof.

They watched the cabin burn, until the charred boards collapsed in upon each other. It took only a few blasts from the extinguishers they brought out from the spinners to end 'the fire's short life, grey smoke unfolding into the sky. Then they finished up the rest of what they had to do.

From the cockpit of one of the spinners, the team leader looked down at the black mark on the earth's surface. The spinner lifted higher, and the cabin's burned remains were lost among the surrounding trees. He turned around in the seat, closing his eyes, keeping them that way until he could see the sleeping, dying woman's face again. All the way back to Los Angeles.

"Quite a place you've got here." She looked around, as though completing a realtor's assessment of a valuable property, estimating its worth on today's market. Sarah had stepped into the room, the disorder of its sideways condition having no visible effect on her. She radiated a cool assurance, money more powerful than gravity. "Distinctive."

"We like it." Deckard as gracious host. "It's those homey touches that're so important."

"I can imagine." Swathed in her coat, the fur collar turned up against her bound hair, she seemed insulated from the still heat collected between the safe-house apartment's inverted walls. She turned her inspecting gaze toward him. "For Christ's sake, Deckard-you look like a scarecrow." She reached over and fingered the torn sleeve of the stolen uniform. "If the LAPD decided to go into beanfield management, they could stick you on a cross out there. You could frighten off the birds all day long."

"There are worse jobs."

She followed him into another section of the apartment, ducking her head to get past the sides of the doors. To one of the bedrooms; it must've been a child's at one time, before the seismic events that had turned everything around. Faded curtains with a still visible pattern of baby ducks and chicks hung askew over the boarded-up window. He felt Sarah watching him as he lowered the door of the closet and dug out some of the clothes he'd stashed there. Spares; operations in this zone had often taken days to complete. Holden had kept some clothes here as well, his finicky tailored suits carefully hung in a plastic garment bag smelling of cedar extract. He didn't see the bag now; he pulled himself back out of the closet, his own things draped over one arm.

Keeping his back to her, he stripped off the uniform jacket and the shirt beneath, things of cloth and leather, stained with his own blood. He didn't flinch, as though the nerve endings were already dead, when he felt her hand touch the wounds across his shoulders.

"You should take care of those," Sarah's voice had softened just a little. "You wouldn't want them to get infected."

Somehow the apartment's bathroom had wound up not just tilted onto one side, but turned 180 degrees around, the ceiling light fixture now in the middle of what had become the new floor. Deckard knelt down by the remains of the sink, letting a trickle of water fall away from the cracked porcelain and into his cupped hands. Carefully he sponged away the dried blood from his torso and arms, using the wadded-up rag of the cop's shirt to dry himself. A piece. of the broken mirror was large enough to see himself in: a face made lined and older-looking by exhaustion, eyes even older by witnessing. The water was translucent pink on his hands when he took them away from his brow and deepened sockets.

He dressed in the bedroom, knowing that she was still watching him. The new clothes were only slightly musty from their long stay in the closet; he buttoned the tight-checked shirt's collar up against his throat, the top button digging at his abraded fingertips. The long coat was identical to the one he'd worn before; he'd bought them both at the same time, from a Paraguayan haberdasher working out of the dense warren of linty cubbyholes in the old Cooper Building downtown. He slipped it on, though he knew how stifling hot the safe-house apartment, and all the Santa Ana-battered world outside, was right now. The blood he'd lost from all the tiny marks on his skin might have been enough to take his core body temperature down a couple of degrees. Or else it's from her, thought Deckard. The woman brought her own winter along.

"Very nice." Sarah spoke from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her leaning back against the bedroom wall, arms folded across her breasts, a judgmental smile. "Is this the man I fell in love with? The other I, that is. Rachael. Is this the way she first saw you?"

"I don't know. Maybe she did." He picked up the last of the things he'd taken out of the closet. "Maybe she didn't see anything at all. Just a cop." His hands worked the rough wool necktie under his collar, then started fumbling the knot together. He could feel Sarah watching him. "Why did you come here?"

She regarded him for a moment. "I thought I should check up on you. Deckard. See how you were doing."

That was the problem with working for other people. She probably wanted the head of her sixth replicant on a stick. "How'd you find this place?"

"It was easy. Your old friend Holden-he has a nice new heart-and-lung set pumping away inside his chest. The unit was manufactured by one of the Tyrell Corporation's medical subsidiaries; there's a lot of crossover work between manufacturing replicants and human prosthetics." A smile. "We knew for whom that particular one was intended. They're all custom jobs; they have to be. So a miniature transmitter was put in it, way down inside where the valves go clickityclick. Anywhere Dave Holden goes, we know about it. I know about it. That's all that matters. That's why I wasn't worried about being able to find you again. No matter where you got to. I figured Holden would always be able to find you. Blade runners know each other, don't they? Your minds work the same way."

"Maybe," said Deckard. "Up to a certain point. But I didn't go with him-did I? He had business with me, too. An offer; like being partners again. But I didn't pick up on it."

"Why not?"

"Nothing I was interested in. Besides-" A shrug. "I already have a job."

"Oh?" Sarah raised an eyebrow. "I appreciate your loyalty. But then… you're motivated. Aren't you?"

Something caught his eye. He turned his gaze away from her and saw that it was the broken mirror inside what had been the apartment's bathroom. He could see his own splintered, fragmented reflection, an image that'd been cut up, pieces scrambled together, then sorted out and poorly reassembled.

His brooding was interrupted by a sudden noise, a hissing intake of breath, pitched high and loud enough to be a cry of dismay. At the same time, something grabbed his arm, two hands squeezing tight into the heavier fabric of the coat's sleeve. He looked beside him and saw Sarah, drawing behind him as though for protection, an expression of loathing and disgust on her face.

"What the hell is that?" She took one of her hands away from his arm and pointed.

In the bedroom doorway, the rectangular opening turned on its side, crouched Pris. Or what remained of her, what her lover Sebastian had been able to salvage. The emaciated figure, flensed to the bare minimum inside the ragged leotard, balanced itself with one bony hand against the door frame; the red eyes, dots of fire beneath the uncontrolled shock of white hair, had already scanned across the bedroom space. And fastened onto the other female creature held by it.

"Don't worry." Deckard watched as the Pris-thing unfolded itself spiderlike into the bedroom. "It won't hurt you." The head stayed low, the stare of the red eyes sweeping to either side as it cautiously advanced, as though looking for any possible threat, before returning to Sarah.

"You're right about that." Her other hand let go of his arm, and she began rummaging in the deep pockets of her own coat for something.

"Pris! Pris!" Sebastian's piping voice echoed down the hallway outside. "Don't go in there! Leave those folks alone-"

Beside him, Sarah raised her arms, both hands locked together. He saw what she had pulled out of her coat, the black metal filling her doubled grip.

At the same time the Pris-thing rose up in front of Sarah, spine telescoping like a machine rearing into place. The hissing breath changed into a gasp of wondering surprise, eyes widening to reveal more of the fiery lenses inside the skull. A trembling arm, a skeletal hand reaching its white fingertips toward the face of the woman, drawn back by instinctive aversion. Its mouth opened wider, a word, a name, struggling to bridge some fragile synapse and emerge onto the rattling leather tongue…

He tried to stop Sarah, to grab her arm and pull it away, but he was too late. The smallest motion of one of her fingers was all that was required. The recoil pulsed through her braced stance, pushing her back against his side for a moment. Muzzle flash eclipsed the Pris-thing's ravaged face, only inches away from the black hole at the end of the gun. Even before the afterimage had begun to fade from his sight, he could see the lightweight creature hoisted by the bullet's impact, desiccated splinters spraying from the shattered cheekbones and brow, the spinal column arching into a bow as its shoulders were flung back onto a bed of empty air.

In the doorway, Sebastian screamed. His single hand and forearm had lifted him higher onto the back of the teddy bear, so he'd been able to see everything that'd happened. The toy soldier shoved past the bear, then stood rooted in place, eyes and nose following the Pris-thing's trajectory as it slammed into the angle of two walls.

Nausea rose in Deckard's throat. The last time Pris had died, when he had killed her, the body with its ripped-open gut had flopped and spasmed on the floor, shrieking not so much with pain as with the release of the fierce energy unspent. This time around, the twice-dead Pris lay crumpled like a rag doll, torso folded at the hinge of the lower back, disjointed hands sprawled behind, head bowed forward as though to reveal the red fissure beneath the albino golliwog hair. The red eyes had already dimmed to black dots, any remaining battery cells shorted out.

"You didn't have to do that." The nausea had mutated to a heavy sadness, a stone in his chest, as he'd watched Sebastian crawl from the back of the kneeling teddy bear toward the broken corpse.

Sarah turned a level gaze at him. "Yes, I did."

On the other side of the room, Sebastian had reached the dead thing, had gathered it into the embrace of his single arm, and now rocked back and forth with it. Tears ran along the wrinkles of his face as an anguished keening issued from low in his throat. One of the teddy bear's paws stroked Sebastian's shoulder in a futile effort at comforting him. The toy soldier completed the pieta arrangement, the point of its antique helmet bending low over the corpse's blood-spattered feet.

Deckard crossed the room and looked down at the other man. "Can you…" He gestured at the body. "You know… put her back together?"

"Don't be stupid-" Sebastian gulped back his sobs, enough to speak. "Look. Her brain… it's all tore up. I can't fix that. Nobody can." He leaned the side of his face against what remained of hers. "She's dead. All dead." His tears mingled with her drying blood. A blind gaze swept across the room, a spark of red showing far inside the unfocused eyes. The corpse's clawlike fingers scrabbled at the wall beneath, as though some residual life force had dribbled out of one of its batteries.

"How touching." Sarah's voice, her cold words. Glancing over his shoulder, Deckard saw her returning the dark bulk of the gun to her coat pocket. "Perhaps now we could get back to business."

He stood in front of her. "It recognized you. Didn't it?" He peered into her eyes, as though trying to catch some betraying response without benefit of a Voigt-Kampff machine. "What was that about? When it saw you, it knew who you were."

"I doubt it." No blush response, no flutter of the pupil. "It probably thought I was Rachael. It must've thought it had spotted another replicant like itself."

No. Like she'd thought herself to be. He'd started to correct Sarah, to remind her of what she already knew-that Pris had been human-but had stopped himself from speaking. The distinctions were blurring again. He'd killed, murdered a human being named Pris, who'd convinced herself that she was a replicant; if he'd had a chance to run the empathy tests on her, she probably would've failed them. What had she been after Sebastian had kept a spark going in her addled brain, made her capable of moving again? Alive or dead, human or replicant? He didn't know. He supposed he had arrived at that state Isidore had talked about, back at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. Of not even being able to see the difference anymore.

Other thoughts remained unspoken, barely formed. If it'd been Rachael, not Sarah, that the Pris-thing had recognized… where would that have been from? Maybe some memory of the assembly line at the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters, all the Nexus-6 models, the Prisses and the Zhoras and the Roy Battys, all warehoused together before being shipped off-world. That was wrong, he knew immediately; there had never been any Pris model replicants. Only in her mind. Maybe it'd been out there, thought Deckard, in the U.N. colonies. Maybe Pris had managed to convince other human beings that she was a replicant, and had served time along with a Rachael model in a sanctioned military brothel. The image made him squeeze his eyes shut tight, as though he could blot it out from his own brain. It might not be true, anyway; hadn't Sarah told him that Rachael hadn't been a production model, but a one-off, a single creation for Eldon Tyrell's purposes? She could've been lying about that; there was no way of knowing…

Out of the darkness behind his eyelids, a memory flash. Not that long ago — I saw her. He saw her again now, the face in the rep train, that other darkness beneath the central police station. Huddled with the other replieants, the discards of the industrial process that had created them. Weeping with a terror that'd had no way of expressing itself except the trembling of her naked shoulders, the tears leaking salt into the corners of her mouth. So there were others like her, like Rachael. There had to be. If what he'd seen was true, and not just some fevered vision drawn from his own exhaustion and fear.

"So what's it going to be, Deckard?" A knife or Sarah's voice. "Shall we talk?"

He opened his eyes. And looked at her. Or at Rachael, or the one who had wept behind the locked gates of the rep train's rattling freight car. The memory overlays faded, one veil after another. Until he saw clearly again.

"No…" A sigh, indicator of the weariness that had wrapped itself around him again. "I don't have time. I've got a job to do." Behind him, he sensed Sebastian's and the others' presence, the various living and not-living forms, the dead tucked close in its lover's embrace. "We don't have anything to talk about."

"You're wrong. We have everything to talk about. At last." She regarded him with the same fiat, level gaze. "I'm trying to make it easier for you, Deckard. I want you to come with me, right now. Outside, to my spinner. As charming as the hospitality here has been, I'd really prefer to have our little discussion elsewhere."

"Why should I?"

"Because you don't have a choice." Head tilted against her coat's fur collar, Sarah Tyrell regarded him. "You come with me now, or I leave by myself. And I notify the police of where you're hiding out. I could do it from the phone in the spinner-it wouldn't be more than a few minutes until they got here." She glanced at the figures on the other side of the room. "I imagine they'll clean up the rest of this mess here as well."

"Come on." He returned her gaze with distaste. "This poor bastard hasn't done anything."

"That doesn't matter. He can be picked up and screwed with until he might as well be guilty. You know how it works, Deckard; you've done the same. Of course, if you don't want that to happen…

She had him, and he knew it. The time when he would've been able to tell her to go to hell, when the threat of bad shit happening to other people wouldn't have mattered to him that was long past. She's trading on that fact, thought Deckard. He could almost admire the accuracy of her perception. She knew that he'd already become less of a blade runner… and more of a human being. Which made him, to her, more exploitable.

"All right." He glanced over at Sebastian, then decided against saying anything to him. There wasn't anything. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of the long coat. "Let's go."

Holden had rummaged through the freight spinner's cockpit until he'd found what he wanted, needed, had known would be there. The gun had been the first find, and the best; it'd come in handy talking with that idiot bastard Deckard.

I should've killed him, thought Holden. Right then and there. That had been his original intention; disgust at what a pussy Deckard was being had overwhelmed him, though. Plus, there'd been others inside the safe-house apartment, like that sawed-off Sebastian, riding around on the back of his wind-up teddy bear. Who knew whether the little basket case might be packing something? Holden shook his head; he knew he'd still have to be extra cautious, at least until he got his full strength back.

And his regular gun. The one he'd found in the freight spinner was all right for now. It was smaller and didn't weigh as much as the big black cannon that served as standard blade runner equipment. Which was a good thing; he'd started to feel a little weak and breathless, as though the implanted heart-and-lungs set was crapping out under the load he'd been putting it through. All this running around, adrenaline jazz, couldn't be good for a man in his condition. His old gun would've pulled him over like an anvil strapped to his shoulders.

The other handy thing he'd found, underneath the pilot's seat, was a pair of Zeiss binoculars with resolution-enhanced optic-feedback circuits. The help screens at the upper right corner of the vision field had all been in German, but he'd still managed to get the device up and running. And focused on the toppled building that contained the safe-house apartment.

Behind a low rise of concrete rubble, he'd stashed the freight spinner safely out of sight. Inside the apartment, his former partner Deckard probably thought he'd gone on, winging back into the center of L.A. His pissed-off-and-shouting behavior, that'd concluded their little conference, had been at least partially an act, designed to make Deckand believe that all he wanted to do was lay down as much distance as possible between the two of them. He wasn't through with Deckard yet, not by a long shot.' And from the looks of it, neither were some other people.

No sooner had he gotten the freight spinner hidden than he'd spotted the next visitor. She must've been there all the time, waiting for me to leave — lying on his stomach, elbows braced against the ragged concrete edge, Holden trained the binoculars on the woman as she went into the sideways apartment building. Too late to get a glimpse of her face, but the sleek arrangement of her dark hair, and the fur coat-in this heat? It must've had one of those cryonic linings-all spoke of money. Like I'm surprised, he thought bitterly. It would be just like that weasel Deckard to have belatedly learned the art of selling out to the highest bidder.

He'd searched through all the bins and equipment caches of the freight spinner's cockpit, looking for some kind of long-range microphone, something he could've used to eavesdrop on what was going on inside the safehouse apartment, but had come up empty-handed. It would've taken powerful, professional quality gear to get anything, he knew; when the place had been taken over for use by the blade runners, with no connection to the LAPD, they'd all chipped in to trick out the windows and exterior walls with sound-deadening insulation. So creeping up and laying his ear on the building wouldn't have done any good, either.

They're up to something in there. Frustrated, Holden rolled onto his back, setting the binoculars on his chest and trying to get the mechanical heart's pulse back down by sheer force of will. It wasn't obliging. "Goddamn," he muttered aloud, glaring at the empty sky. He might've strained the equipment, perhaps irrevocably; he felt worse now than when he'd left the Reclamation Center out in the desert with Roy Batty. Miserable cheap gizmos-he wondered what bargain-basement gear the LAPD had requisitioned for cases like this. For all he knew that quack doctor-cum-garage mechanic had implanted a rusting tin can and a couple of balloons left over from some kid's birthday party.

Taking deep breaths, he managed to get the black spots wandering in his sight-bad warning sign of anoxia, brain strangulation-to fade to grey and even disappear. Mostly. He turned back onto his elbows and swept the binoculars' view toward the other spinner, the one the woman, whoever she was, had arrived in. She'd left it in plain view on the other side of the apartment building.

The bar code on the spinner's fuselage came into focus. He tripped the binoculars' reader function; a few seconds later the LED display flashed the minuscule words SECURED REGISTRATION; NO INFO AVAILABLE ON THIS VEHICLE. He wasn't surprised; a late-model, high-thrust job like this one had to belong to somebody who could buy the pull to keep it off the databases.

Invariably a way; words of wisdom. Holden dialed in higher and higher rez levels, until he was looking right into the intake manifolds of the expensive after-market turbos that'd been mounted on the spinner. The sunlight slanted into the curved titanium mouths, just enough for the binoculars to pick out the manufacturer's serial numbers. Repeating the string to himself, he slithered back to the freight spinner and keyed up the control panel's computer. A moment later he had the info he'd wanted: the after-market gear had been purchased with the appropriate U.N. acquisition order by Ad Astra Transport Services. He didn't need to look them up; he knew that the company was the shipping wing of the Tyrell Corporation. Its logo, a tacky Soviet Realist image of a stylized male figure lifting a ribbon-tied package to an anonymous planetoid, was on the sides of all the container trucks taking sleep-frozen replicants to the San Pedro docks, for delivery to the off-world colonies.

So, Tyrell… that's interesting. Holden tried to dredge up what he could from his own, pre-Kowalski memory banks. Eldon Tyrell was dead-Bryant had told him that while he'd been in the hospital, bubbling and gurgling away-but wasn't there a daughter or something, who would've been his heir? No, a niece: that was it. Maybe this was Ms. Tyrell, the new head of the replicant-manufacturing industry, who'd zipped out here in the company spinner to talk with Deckard. She'd known where Deckard was; so he must've gotten in touch with her and told her to meet him here, or she'd met him before. No way she would've been able to find the hiding place by herself.

So that meant this woman-and by extension the Tyrell Corporation itself-was in cahoots with Deckard. Who was supposedly an ex-blade runner, or at least had previously been represented to be a blade runner-Holden wasn't sure anymore about that. The Tyrell Corporation and the blade runner unit had always been two mutually antagonistic forces, inasmuch as the corporation was always engaged in creating replicants that were increasingly closer to passing for human-how much longer would it have been until there'd been Nexus-7 or Nexus-8 models running around? — and the blade runners were just as dedicated to finding them and exposing them as replicants. One of those locked-in predator-and-prey relationships, where each side could take turns being either the wolves or the sheep. So what's Deckard up to now? wondered Holden. Sleeping with the enemy?

His musing was cut short by a sound he didn't need high-powered eavesdropping equipment for, loud enough to penetrate through the safe-house apartment's acoustic insulation. He ducked instinctively as the gunshot reverberated over the concrete rubble on all sides of the freight spinner. One shot, then silence again; Holden cautiously raised his head above the level of the cockpit panel and looked out toward the toppled building in the distance.

Even more interesting-he speculated as to who had shot whom. Deckard didn't have a gun, he was fairly sure, but that didn't matter. He could have gotten whatever weapon the woman had been carrying away from her. Unless she'd come here with the specific intent of plugging Deckard, and had just done so. Conspirators falling out? — it wouldn't be the first time.

Whatever had gone down inside the safe-house apartment, he knew the smart thing for him to do was to lie low and go on watching. There was somebody walking around in there with a loaded gun. He had one as well, but in his present physically depleted state, he wasn't sure he'd be able to lift it up and get a shot off without a disastrous wobble to his double-handed grip. Even the binoculars seemed to weigh a ton, as he crawled back out to the top of the ridge and aimed them at the building.

What the… He peered harder into. the eyepieces, as he spotted two figures coming out. Deckard and the darkhaired young woman he figured was the new owner of the Tyrell Corporation. Neither one had shot the other-they both looked reasonably intact. What the hell did that mean? Still conspirators? Hard to tell from the habitually sour expression on Deckard's face what the degree of cosiness between the two people was… though the woman looked somewhat satisfied with herself. Deckard had taken on the appearance of his old self, a memory flashback to his days of officially being a blade runner, having changed from that ratted-out cop uniform to plainclothes, including another one of those long coats he'd always been so fond of.

He watched through the binoculars as Deckard and the Tyrell woman got into the hot-rodded spinner and took off. The temptation hit him, to scramble into the freight spinner and tail the other craft, but he thought better of itthey'd have spotted him right off.

For a moment longer he watched the spinner, a black speck at the head of a fiery trail, fading from view above the mirror-radiant towers of the city. The Santa Ana winds had died away, leaving the atmosphere still desert-hot, but hushed with an almost subliminal, subcutaneous trembling, as though charged with some urgency beyond verbalization.

Balancing himself with one hand against the ground, Holden got to his feet, then straightened up. And immediately regretted it; a wave of dizziness washed across him, as unsettling as if another earthquake had struck the zone. Artificial heart pounding in his chest, he bent over, palms against his knees; something had lodged in his throat, around which he could barely breathe. It seemed to take the last of his strength to cough it up. When he opened his eyes, he saw a wet red spot on the concrete rubble in front of him.

"Goddamn…" Tentatively he poked at his breastbone with the fingertips of one hand, trying to determine if he had broken something loose on the implants inside him. He swallowed the salt taste in his mouth rather than risk spitting it out. Everything seemed to be working; he could breathe, and the heart was still beating. He tried to remember whether a particular loose, rattling noise was something he was imagining, or whether it had always been there and he just hadn't noticed it before.

One thing was certain. He felt weaker than before, closer to the edge of collapse. Great timing, he thought bitterly. What he needed to do-what his stressed-out body told him he should do-was go lie down in some dark quiet place, until his new heart and lungs had finished knitting themselves into his corporeal fabric. But there was no time for that. Things were happening too fast for him to take a break, no matter how badly he required one. The spinner carrying Deckard and the Tyrell woman had vanished from sight, taking them to another locus of conspiracy. Maybe they'd finished up here, the two of them having cooperated on the shooting of some third party in the safe-house apartment…

He forced a deep breath into the lungs' machinery, trying to get his brain clear and functioning again. Work it out, he commanded himself. Who had Deckard and the Tyrell woman killed in there? The only other human being had been that little geek with all but one of his limbs sawn off-Holden tried to remember the guy's name, but couldn't. Granted, the triple amputee had seemed to be an annoying little bastard, but that by itself wouldn't have been sufficient motivation for icing him. There must've been another, more compelling reason. What?

The little guy had worked for the Tyrell Corporation; that much he remembered for sure. Doing… bioengineering. Holden nodded, as if he could suddenly see the guy's entire police file in front of him. Specifically, replicant design. Even more specifically: work on the Tyrell Corporation's Nexus-6 models. That was it.

So he must've known something. Not just something, but a lot. The little one-limbed guy had been up to his weepy-looking eyeballs in the design and production-every detail-of the Nexus-6 replicants. Knowing too much about something like that-something that other people wanted to remain a secret-was always a good way of getting yourself eliminated.

It came to him then, a sudden illumination, as though the dark clouds he'd seen massing over the Pacific had sent down a sudden bolt of lightning. Of course, thought Holden. That's what the little guy in there knew. And that's why they had to kill him…

The problem was, the realization didn't do him any good if he was in no shape to act upon it. Another realization, not quite as welcome, shoved aside his other thoughts. He needed help; he couldn't go it alone, as much as he would've wanted to.

Holden glanced upward. The sky was empty again, the spinner with Deckard and the Tyrell woman long gone, its red trail evaporated. He turned and walked toward the freight spinner, carefully and slowly, husbanding his strength for the confrontation he'd already set his mind upon.