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  "Well, yes and no." Batty's image-Deckard wasn't sure yet whether it was real or an hallucination-gave a judicious shrug. "A copy of me is dead-hell, lots of copies are-but I'm not. The original has proven to be somewhat more durable."

  "That's the truth, Deckard," With his hands free of the table leg, Holden had dug into his jacket pocket and come up with the same gun he'd had before. "Or at least I think it is. For the time being. This guy's the templant for all the Roy Batty replicants. Including the one you met up with before."

  The explanation made sense, of a sort. Looking closer at the figure standing before him, Deckard could see that the man appeared older than the one that existed in his own memory banks. Both bio- and chronologically older, hands bonier, a little loose flesh around the tendons of his neck, lines that came with the passage of time set into his face. A Batty replicant would never have reached this stage; the built-in limitation of a four-year life span precluded it. Unless-he supposed it was a possibility-something had been done to prolong its existence past that hard cutoff point.

  Whether the Roy Batty in the tilted room was human or not-that wasn't something he was worried about now. The shark of again seeing that smiling face had passed. What concerned him was the gun in Holden's hand, and the cooperative air between the two men.

  "What's the deal?" He looked from one to the other. "I have a feeling you didn't come out here just to say hello."

  "That's the truth as well." Holden kept the gun pointed at him. "We're taking you in, Deckard. We're going to hand you over at the police station downtown."

  "On what? Administrative charges?" If these two didn't know about Pris having been human, and his being tagged for her murder, he wasn't going to tell them. He couldn't believe that these two loose cannons were in on the LAPD loop; maybe they could be bluffed. "So I made unauthorized use of a department spinner when I split town-that's not a hanging offense. They can reimburse themselves out of the money I left in the pension plan."

  "Can the bullshit." Holden shook his head in evident disgust. "Replicants don't have 401-k's."

  "What're you talking about?"

  The two men shared glances and a smile between them, then looked back at Deckard.

  "You're a replicant. You know it, and now we know it. Retirement for you is a whole different sort of thing."

  "Actually, Roy, I'm not entirely sure how we should proceed here." With his free hand, Holden scratched his chin. "Why are we bothering to talk with this schmuck? He's a replicant-we've already established that-so why don't we just ice him now? We can drag his dead carcass into the station just as easily. Easier, as a matter of fact."

  "Don't be stupid." Batty looked annoyed. "It's not just that he's an escaped replicant here on Earth. He's the only lead we've got on the conspiracy against the blade runner unit. If we snuff him before we can shake him down for what he knows, how're we going to find out who was behind setting you up, and killing Bryant, and all the rest of that stuff?"

  "Oh, yeah. Right . . ." Holden appeared confused, his gaze wandering to some abstract point near the apartment's uppermost wall. His face and throat had drained white, as though whatever repair work the doctors might have done on him was now beginning to come apart. "Wait a minute."

  "We can't even take him in to the station until we find out more shit." Even more insistent, Batty's voice prodded the other. "We have to find out who in the police is tied up in this. Otherwise, we could be walking into there and handing him right over to the people he's been working with. Then they'd ice our asses."

  "I said, wait . . ." With his trembling, upraised hand, Holden tried to ward off the other's arguments.

  Deckard looked from one to the other. Geriatrics, he realized. Like having been captured by a mobile wing of the nearest old folks' home. "You people are completely screwed up." He took a quick couple of steps and picked up the wooden table leg that Holden had tossed aside. Before the other man could react, he turned around and knocked the gun from his hand. The partial impact was enough to send the enfeebled Holden sprawling.

  The other one was faster. He sensed Batty launching himself from across the room; a split second later .a forearm was against his throat and the man's weight on his back. Locked together, they toppled and crashed into the wall beside the door.

  A hand brought up by his chin was enough to peel Batty's choke-hold away. The lined visage snarled at Deckard as he got his palms against the other's shoulders and pushed him away. Deckard shook his head. "You're too old for this nonsense." He raised his knee against Batty 's abdomen, prying away the clawing grasp of the withered hands and throwing him on top of Holden's dazed, prostrate form.

  "Fuck you-" Batty scrabbled toward the gun a few feet away.

  In an instant he'd estimated his chances of reaching the gun before the other man or getting it away from him. Deckard turned and dived for the apartment's entranceway, yanking open the door and tumbling out into the unlit hallway just as a bullet ripped out a section of plaster above him. He got to his feet and ran.

  "Shit-" Outside the building, he discovered that the pocket of his long coat had been ripped loose in the struggle with Batty. The remote for the spinner's security devices was gone, probably somewhere back inside the safe-house apartment. He slammed his fist against the curved glass of the cockpit, but nothing happened.

  Noises came from the front of the building. He glanced behind himself and saw that both Holden and Batty had emerged. Some kind of scuffle had broken out between the two of them; Deckard could hear them shouting, faces close to each other. As he moved around to the other side of the spinner, he saw Holden grab for the gun in Batty's hand; they wrestled briefly, before a shot snapped through the night air. Holden fell against the side of the building, clutching at the bright smear of blood that had erupted through the torn shoulder of his jacket.

  "Deckard! Stop!" He heard Batty shouting as he pushed himself away from the locked spinner, turned, and ran. Another shot kicked up a spray of concrete chips and dust at his feet. "Come back here!"

  Your ass. He kept running, picking his way as quickly as possible across the jagged terrain. Fragments of starlight penetrated the clouds overhead, turning the low jumble of broken shapes to tarnished silver.

  Perhaps he was dying. It was hard to tell. Right now, his head felt as though it were about to explode, not with pain, but with the rush of energy that had welled inside him, from the moment he'd stood back up in the safe-house apartment. That bastard knocked something loose, thought Holden as he lay against the wall of the deserted apartment building, one hand clutched to his bleeding shoulder. Some governor mechanism for the clattering heart in his chest had gone awry; his pulse seemed to be racing twice as fast as it ever had before.

  The wound was more of an annoyance than anything else; Holden managed to get to his feet, swaying a little. But it would serve his ex-partner right if the blow from the table leg and its consequences were what enabled him to catch up and nab Deckard, beat his head a few times against the stony ground before deciding what to do with him next. If his own heart didn't swell up and burst before then, like an overheated engine flying to pieces with its internal violence. Deckard had taken advantage of him during a temporary moment of weakness, when the biomechanical heart and lungs had been chugging through a low point in their cycles; now the sonuvabitch would have to deal with the old Dave Holden. Better than old, he thought grimly.

  Bracing himself against the wall for balance, he spotted something on the ground before him; his artificial heart surged when he saw what it was. The gun-he'd gotten it away from Batty, but the other man had twisted it around and squeezed off the single round that had dropped him. Then the sonuvabitch must have been in too much of a hurry, chasing after Deckard, to stop and search around here for it.

  Holden bent down to pick up the gun. And realized his mistake immediately. When his head went below the level of his heart, the amped-up wave of blood dizzied him. To blackout: he fell, fist grasping tight around the gun's
handle.

  On the spinning earth, he could feel the gun sweating against his palm. He managed to lift his head for a moment; the edges of his gaze turned red as he scanned the limits of the angular landscape.

  Motion against stillness. He'd sighted Deckard; even better, he saw that there was no place farther to which the replicant and ex-blade runner could get to. Deckard had traversed enough of the rubble-strewn ground to hit smack against the abandoned freeway, turned onto its side by the long-ago earthquakes. A blank wall trisected by lane divider dashes reared up against the night sky, with a humanlike figure small against its base. Another figure appeared, running, quickly eating up the distance between Deckard and itself. The shock of white hair was enough to identify Batty.

  "Don't bother, Deckard-you're not going anywhere!" Batty's gloating call cut through the night air.

  As Holden watched, vision wavering, the figure in the long coat started climbing, hands clawing at cracks in the freeway's vertical surface, boots scrabbling at crumbling projections of cement or ends of metal reinforcement rods. Deckard had already worked himself up to the center lane by the time Batty sprinted across the last few yards.

  "Don't . . . kill him . . ." Holden's voice came out as an agonized whisper. "You've got to keep him . . . alive . . ." Gun in hand, he pushed himself up from the ground, to his knees.

  That was his last effort. Holden sprawled forward, seeing nothing. Feeling only the cold weight of the gun under his fingertips and the razor-edged stones pressing against his face.

  Into his eyes fell dust and grit, knocked loose from above by Deckard's progress toward the freeway's upper edge. Batty reached for the next hold and pulled himself up, threads of blood trickling from his abraded fingertips to the tautened cords of his wrists.

  Against the clouds that had shrouded the night sky, he'd momentarily lost track of Deckard; only when he got his hands onto the top edge, scrabbling one knee and then the other up onto the horizontal surface, did he catch sight of him again. As Batty crouched, he spotted Deckard running along the narrow ribbon. The freeway's understructure had broken away during the original quake, leaving a sheer drop into darkness on either side of a meter-wide span.

  Batty saw a dark space open up before the figure in the long coat. A section of the freeway wall had previously disintegrated, leaving an abrupt cliff front on either side of the gap. Deckard halted, nearly toppling from the crumbling brink; he glanced over his shoulder at Batty, then drew back for a running leap.

  That hesitation was enough; Batty dived, one outstretched hand grappling Deckard's foot just as it lifted from the edge's flat surface. They fell together, Batty's shoulder hitting the concrete as he crooked his gun arm around Deckard's knee. Rolling onto his back, Deckard shoved the butt of his hand against Batty's forehead, pushing him back and toward the edge's limit.

  From beneath them came snapping and grinding noises. The impact of their bodies was more than the freeway section could withstand; the network of cracks along the vertical surface suddenly widened, boulders of cement crumbling away from the mesh of rusted metal beneath. Batty felt the gulf open beneath, the dark air made tangible with the grey dust filling his mouth and nostrils. The collapse of the freeway section yanked Deckard's ankle from his grasp; he rolled onto his shoulder, his arm desperately reaching, hand locking on to an angled stub of rebar sticking out from the ragged precipice above him. Twisting his neck, he saw the concrete and interwoven metal tumbling to the ground below with a crescendoing, bass-heavy roar.

  Batty held on, his other hand reaching up and grasping the freeway's narrow edge. He pulled himself onto it, chest scraping across the rough surface. The collapse of the middle section had peeled with it another layer of the remaining vertical wall, leaving a tightropelike span only a few inches wide. Kneeling, with one hand gripping the edge for balance, he looked across the now wider gap as the dust sifted out of the moon's thin radiance.

  He could see that Deckard had managed to hold on as well, catching on to the far edge of the gap and scrambling up onto the ribbon of horizontal, empty space falling away to either side. He watched as Deckard got to his feet, one behind the other, arms outstretched to darkness, carefully backing away from the gap, then halting.

  There was nowhere else for Deckard to go. The section of freeway edge on which he stood was less than two meters long, a narrow island rearing up from the rubble and ancient debris below. He looked over his shoulder at the sharp drop behind him, one heel right at the crumbling rim, then back across the unbridgeable gap between himself and his pursuer.

  Another rumbling noise moved through the air, the monsoon clouds gathered so low as to almost press upon Batty's shoulders. He could taste the electricity discharged and crackling in the atmosphere.

  "Don't go away, Deckard-" A shout, and then a smile that Batty knew would be even more disturbing to the trapped figure opposite. "I'll be right there."

  Dragging himself up the side of the crevice, after the vertical wall had given way beneath him, left Deckard gasping for breath. His pulse hammered in his throat as he looked across the breach of empty space, toward the figure on the opposite freeway section. A few drops of rain, warmed to the temperature of the blood in his veins, spattered against his face as he watched Batty take a few careful steps backward.

  He can't . . . impossible. Fragments of thoughts were all that Deckard's brain produced. It's too far --

  Batty stripped off his leather jacket and tossed it away. The sparse, hot rain mingled with the sweat on his shoulders and chest; the smile diminished as Batty's gaze narrowed, seeking out and locking on to Deckard's. The face was still ancient, lined and chiseled by time, even as the revealed body seemed to grow larger, the corded and veined muscles swelling with some deep vital influx. The drops of water collected in the hollows beneath Batty's cheekbones, then curved along the angles of his jaw and into his throat as he leaned forward, one hand reaching before him, as though the untremored fingers could grip the humid air itself.

  Thoughts dissolved to wordless memory flash inside Deckard's skull, as he saw Batty running toward him. Another time, another place. In the city's depths, far above its darkly luminous streets; another vault of empty space carved out of the night by the lashing rain. The past merged without seam into the present as he watched, his own breath lodged fistlike in his throat, as the glistening form, human yet not, sprinted along the concrete ribbon. A last footfall at the crumbling rim, then Batty launched himself across the dark gap.

  The past moment and the present, and none at all, time halting with Deckard's pulse. Sudden lightning lit up the heavy undersides of the storm clouds, the blue-white illumination transforming Batty into an angel of steel and diamond, held aloft from the dull earth's gravity by its own fierce, eternal falling.

  Deckard shook himself from the image's spell, scrambling backward, one foot misplaced and slipping off the edge. Pebbles of cement pattered down the wall as he caught himself hard on one knee, both hands clutching at the horizontal surface beneath his chest.

  "Got you-" Batty's voice sounded from above him; at the same moment the other's hands grabbed the front of Deckard's shirt. Rain oozed from the wadded cloth and ran over the knuckles of Batty's fists as he lifted Deckard from the narrow concrete. He smiled, his bright gaze shining up into Deckard's dazed eyes. "You weren't expecting that." Batty jerked his arms, wrists pressed against each other, his doubled fists knocking Deckard's chin back. "Am I right?"

  He made no answer, but rammed one knee against Batty's gut, hard enough to break the hold at his throat. Batty staggered backward, arms flailing, catching himself just before the crevice gaping behind him.

  Deckard twisted as he fell, his spine hitting the edge of the concrete, shoulders leaning back onto empty air. Before he could scrabble away, Batty was on top of him.

  "Good job-" The words slid through Batty's clenched teeth. "You know . . . you really are one of the best." His hand gripped tight on Deckard's throat. "I hate to have to kill you.
"

  Blindly, Deckard clawed at the concrete edge pressing into his back. A stone weight fell into. his fist; he whipped his arm up in a roundhouse arc, the chunk of cement slamming into the corner of Batty's temple.

  The blow rocked the other man back, his grip loosening on Deckard's throat. He took one hand away and touched the rain-diluted blood streaming down the side of his face. Batty nodded appreciatively. "That . . . really hurt . . .

  Deckard managed to push his shoulder blades a few inches farther along the edge. He cradled the cement chunk in his fist, warily eyeing the figure crouching above him. The realization had rushed upon him. "You're . . . you're the sixth replicant . . ." He saw it now; there must've been two Roy Batty replicants among the escapees. "Aren't you? You'd have to be . . ."

  The oozing blood leaked into the corner of Batty's smile. "No . . ." He slowly shook his head. "I don't think I am."

  "But . . . the way you jumped . . ." Raising his head, Deckard pawed the rain away from his eyes. "It was too far. That was the way he did it . . . the other Batty. The one . . . that died." He peered closer at the face, the white hair plastered onto its wounded brow. Impossible to tell if the appearance of age had been a shuck, something to lull his quarry into complacency, or whether a deep reserve of energy and will had surged up inside Batty, transforming him to some ancient, maddened glory. "So you must be another replicant . . . just like it was . . ."

  "No." Another shake of the head. "It's like I told your friend. I'm just very, very good at what I do. That's why I was hired for this job." Batty's smile faded. He turned his head, gaze shifting toward the dark. "Besides . . . if I were a replicant . . ." His voice grew low and brooding. "That would mean . . . that certain people had lied to me.