A dim glow rose from the space that had opened below, as the rumbling sound grew louder, taking on an insistent mechanical rhythm. Deckard could see now that he had broken through the roof of an arched tunnel, with a parallel ribbon of iron tracks running its length. Some past seismic event had torqued the police station's foundations enough to pry open the cleft through which he'd squirmed; bricks and ragged chunks of concrete lay scattered across the bed of one of the old railway tunnels that ran beneath the massive structure. The glow, rapidly becoming brighter, came from the engine of the rep train approaching around the tunnel's curve. The hot diesel smell, oily and stinging, struck him full in the face, as though the source of all Santa Ana winds had erupted from the earth's core.
The sounds of his pursuers grew closer, perhaps only a few yards back along the gap through which he'd crawled. Those noises were drowned out by the rep train's noise and clatter, now directly beneath him. He squatted down, then got his legs out past the crumbling edge of the hole into the tunnel roof. He held on for a few seconds longer, until the dark shape of the engine was past; then he dropped, pushing himself away from the edge, diving with outstretched hands.
With a jarring impact, he landed on top of one of the freight cars. He clawed for a hold on the wooden slats; through the gaps between them, he could see faces looking up at him. None of the human-like figures, pressed tight against each other inside the car, raised a voice; their blank gazes regarded him without emotion.
He couldn't hold on. The rattling motion of the train peeled his fingertips, wet with his own blood, away from the slat to which he clung. A hard lurch jolted him loose; in the stink and din, his chest and stomach slipped across the freight car's roof. The rep train took another curve in the tunnel; the swaying motion was enough to throw him over the edge.
One crooked arm caught itself in the angle between a vertical slat and slanting cross-beam. His back and shoulder slammed against the freight car's side, knocking the last of his breath from his aching lungs. The tunnel wall, jagged stone outcroppings and rusting stanchions, screamed a few inches away from his head as he fought with animal desperation to latch his free hand on to any part of the car.
His own weight began dragging his arm from its hold upon the vertical slat. His agonized vision took in the freight car's occupants, their naked forms picked out by the engine light bouncing off the tunnel's arched ceiling. Male and female replicants, packed behind the freight car's sliding door, locked with a single steel bolt.
The other cars behind, stretching into the tunnel's darkness, were the same, filled with the rejects from the Tyrell Corporation's production lines-the replicants whose memory implants hadn't taken, the ones who hadn't passed the mental and physical tests that qualified them to be slaves in the off-world colonies. Their creators routed them through a clearing station administered by the police department, checking them off in numbered lots to make sure all were accounted for prior to disposal. Not retirement-an industrial process, quick asphyxiation and smokestacks belching out the odors of incinerated flesh.
He could no longer tell what things he saw before him, and what fear and exhaustion had pulled from his memory, overlaying the rep train's reality with his own past. A slope-jawed face turned away from him, the male replicant's massive shoulders hunched with a sullen, proverbial resentment; his bare arms glistened with sweat. Kowalski-he could remember the face, or one just like it, another unit of the same model. What had the other Kowalski said to him? A long time ago, in another world, up on the streets of the city far above. Wake up — it's time to die…
Another Nexus-6 looked at him for a moment, her gaze reaching past the other replicants' naked shoulders. Dark-haired, long-limbed… her name had been shaken from his skull, leaving only the vision of another one like this, crashing through one plate-glass window after another, blood between her shoulder blades, the bullet from his gun turning her into a wingless angel, a thing that flew amid bright razor crystals…
'Help…' Deckard couldn't tell if that was his own voice rasping from his throat or the memory of his voice. 'Help me…' What he had asked of another one of the replicants. His arm dragged farther from its hold, only the crook of his wrist against the cross-beam keeping him from falling under the wheels clashing sparks from the tunnel's iron tracks.
Another woman huddled in the corner of the freight car. The Tyrell Corporation had given her enough knowledge so that she could be afraid; her face, pressed against the paleness of her arms, was wet with tears. The tangled curls of her brown hair fell across her knees.
'Rachael…' He didn't know if it was her, or if they would have given this one a name yet. He called to her again. 'Please…'
The female replicant raised her head and looked at him. And did not know who he was.
He suddenly felt an arm at his back, clutching him and pulling him up against the freight car's side. One of the replicants-he couldn't see which one-had reached through the slats and grabbed him, kept him from falling. He looked down and saw the tracks cutting by, a few inches from his dangling feet.
Brighter light flooded across him, as the rep train burst from the tunnel's mouth and out into the open. The reddish glow of morning slanted across a barren landscape, darkened with years of soot and spattered oil droppings. Abandoned freight cars and rusted-out tankers formed parallel barricades along the rows of tracks to either side.
Deckard managed to get his free hand between his chest and the slats. He pushed himself back against the arm's grasp; the replicant, still unseen by him, sensed what he was trying to do and let go.
He landed on his shoulder, rolling clear of the rep train's wheels. He kept his face down against the stones and rubble, until the noise of the train had passed and faded into the distance. Cautiously he raised his head, enough to see the last of the cars disappearing with its silent cargo.
On his hands and knees, Deckard managed to focus his vision past the tops of the motionless freight cars to his right. The towers and spires of the L.A. skyline carved the advancing daylight into hard-edged segments. He knew that he was out of the city, somewhere in the industrial wastelands ringing its vast sprawl.
A desiccated, blood-temperature wind rolled across his back. He managed to stand up, the rags of the stolen police uniform gaping over his torn and abraded flesh. Slowly, his feet stumbling against the oil-covered rocks between the tracks, he began walking.
Not north, where his unreasoning heart wanted to start for. But someplace where he knew he could hide.
For at least a little while…
11
She ascended to the appointed place, at the appointed hour. Without effort, almost without will-thermal sensors had registered her presence within the small space, a disembodied voice had asked if she'd wanted to go up to the building's roof, far above the dense weave of structure and light that formed the static ocean of the city. All Sarah had had to do was say yes.
Thus we rise, she thought as she closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against the wall of the elevator's vertical coffin. Not as angels, transparent to gravity, buoyant in God's sight, but as inert, gross cargo, hauled aloft by cable and winch, like stones and dust in a box.
What machine would clasp her in its embrace when her death came, bearing her aloft the way the elevator did now? Nobody, she thought glumly, self-accusingly. Everything she did, everything she was about to do, was designed by her own intent to bring about that exact lonely result. Fate as programmed as a train's iron rails-she figured she'd wind up like her uncle Eldon, isolate in glacial splendor, brooding over a chessboard like an owl watching for mice to scurry across the forest's dead leaves and twigs. Unless…
Unless what? She raised a hand, pressing thumb and forefinger against her eyelids, blue sparks wriggling inside her head. Unless every not-living thing quickened and breathed, all the earth's graves burst like ripe seed pods, and the drowned rose with seaweed hair and pearls in their mouths. It could happen — neither thought nor belief, but what she would have believed if she were still capable of that. Her own resurrection, or the simulation that was as much of one as she could hope for, pushed light through her hand and into her eyes as the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open.
He was waiting for her. On the building's executive landing deck, the private one that had been reserved for Eldon Tyrell, but rarely used. She stepped out of the elevator and strode toward the unmarked spinner and the
