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  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?"

  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.