figure out why you'd want that to happen.'
Her smile deepened. 'Let's just say that we both learned something. That we might not have, otherwise. You survived, didn't you? So now I can be certain that finding our missing replicant won't be beyond you.' Sarah's manner became brusque, businesslike. 'Go ahead and take the spinner-I figured you'd need it, so I had it… prepared for you. Don't try to leave, to get out of the city. That wouldn't be advisable. The spinner has a perimeter choke. A circle with its center here.' She didn't need to make a gesture; Deckard knew she meant the Tyrell Corporation headquarters itself. 'Try going farther and you'll get a red warning light on the instrument panel. Keep going, and you'll fall from the sky in little flaming pieces.'
It had been pretty much what he'd expected. Why should she trust him? A small, irrational hope flicked off inside him. If the spinner had had no spatial limit, he would've hotfooted it straight north. To Rachael, sleeping and dying and waiting for him. Screw L.A. and Sarah Tyrell and any missing sixth replicant.
'Don't worry,' said Deckard. 'I'll return all your company property to you in good shape. Except for the sixth replicant. It might be a little beat-up when I dump it at your feet.'
'Really?' She raised an eyebrow. 'I'm glad to see you showing such
… enthusiasm for your job.' Sarah turned away and began walking toward the elevator that would carry her down into the corporation's bowels. She stopped and glanced over her shoulder. 'I'll be waiting. I had you coded through the security systems. So you can come straight in… when you're ready.'
He called after her. 'Is that it? I thought you wanted to talk about something.'
'Please…' She pressed the control and the silvery doors parted. 'Let me have a few pretenses, Deckard. I just wanted to see you. That's all.' Sarah stepped inside the elevator and with the palm of her hand kept its doors from closing. 'You were on my mind. Perhaps I just wanted to find out if I were on yours.' She pulled her hand away; the doors slid shut, and she was gone.
A moment later Deckard traversed the night sky, the bright pinprick carpet of the city's lights rolling below him. To either side, police spinners shot by on their own errands, either not picking him up on their radars or getting a VIP readout on their computer screens high enough to keep them sailing past.
The city's towers were well behind him. Deckard looked out the side of the spinner's cockpit and down, and saw darkness, more complete than the cloud-mottled sky. The sideways world, with its fallen buildings and edge- tipped empty freeway, seemed to be within the spinner's circle. That made it easier; he still needed some place where he could pull his act together, think everything through-as he'd been doing before Sarah Tyrell had shown up and spirited him away, for no good reason other than to lay the spinner on him. Off in the distance, a red glow shone, a flickering apparition; somewhere else in the zone, a fire apparently had broken out.
Just beyond the knife blade of steel and concrete that ran a diagonal through the sideways world was the familiar aspect of the safe-house apartment's toppled building. He brought the spinner down low, hovering and then descending vertical into the small cleared space beside it. Once he'd gotten out, boots crunching into the cement fragments and bits of rusted metal that constituted the zone's surface layer, he activated all the spinner's security devices, sealing the cockpit down tight. Parts scavengers were always active at this dark hour, along with randomly motivated vandal types; he didn't want to come back out here and find his transportation stripped. He pocketed the small remote that Sarah had given him, and headed into the unlit apartment building.
The safe-house apartment still smelled like death, an odor that connected with receptors off the olfactory net. A reverse seepage into the walls, like electrical service shut off for failure to pay the bill. That was more or less what'd happened to Pris; not even retired, that bad-faith euphemism, but forcibly unplugged. All the batteries removed, or a new one put in the socket above her eyes, a cold shiny one that sucked up pseudo-life rather than bestowing it. That image weighed on Deckard's thoughts; it made him feel as if he'd spent his whole blade runner career as more of a sinister electrician than anything else.
Former blade runner, he reminded himself as he straightened back up after ducking beneath the apartment's front doorway. That hadn't changed, despite his having been recruited for one more job. He reached behind himself and lifted the door closed. The resistance to becoming a murderer again was even more final than when Bryant had put the pressure on him. Plus there wasn't a big open-ended prospect ahead, of searching and killing and searching and killing, until he'd gone through the whole list of escaped replicants. There was only the one to deal with. And I already know, thought Deckard, standing still to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Who it is.
He stepped through the apartment, hand outstretched to find any of the generator-powered lights. That little geek Sebastian and his friends. had moved everything around; Deckard supposed they had as much right to do it as anyone. He halted, as the sound of something beside his own breathing and stumbling progress hit his ears.
'You make this too easy.' He recognized the voice-it hadn't been that long ago-but had no chance to reply. Another sound, that of something hard and narrow whipping through the air; he doubled over in pain when the object hit him in the gut. Another poke knocked him off his feet.
The lights came on. He found himself, as he gasped for breath, looking up at Dave Holden, standing above him, the leg from the kitchen table in his hands. 'Goddamn it…' Deckard managed to squeeze the words out. 'What the hell… was that for…'
'That was for jerking me around for so long.' Holden put the end of the table leg against Deckard's shoulder, pinning him back down to the wall beneath. 'Not just the last time I was out here talking to you, but all the times before as well.' He jabbed the table leg harder. 'You must've been laughing your ass off, when I walked out of here before.'
Getting onto his knees, Deckard knocked the table leg away with the back of his hand. 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'
'Oh? You will.' Taking a step backward, Holden called out over his shoulder. 'Hey, come on out here. I've had my fun.' He brought his smug gaze around to Deckard. 'This is going to trip you out, buddy. A real blast from your past.'
As he stood up, Deckard could hear someone else emerging from the farther sections of the safe-house apartment. That could be a problem, dealing with two people; he would've been able to take Holden, with or without the table leg between them. His ex-partner looked as frail as he'd had during their last confrontation, with the bio-mechanical heart in his chest audibly clicking and laboring to perform its functions. Whoever it was that'd come out here with Holden, the person had given him a shot of confidence; smiling, Holden threw away his crude but minimally effective weapon.
'Say hello.' Holden tilted his head toward the doorway at the other side of the room. 'I think you know each other. In a way, at least.'
Deckard glanced away from him, in the direction indicated…
And felt the world drop out from beneath himself.
'Jesus Christ-' A shock wave of adrenaline pulsed through him, drawing his spine rigid. Deckard's startled brain spun gearless for a moment.
Ducking underneath the side of the door, a dead thing stepped through, finishing the zipping up of his fly. 'Visitors always come around, you know, when you're indisposed.' Roy Batty straightened up and flashed his manic smile, eyes bright. 'Hey, it's good to see you, too.'
'No…' He took an involuntary step away from the smiling, hands reaching behind himself for balance. 'You're dead… I know it. I saw it happen…' An entire memory reel fast-forwarded through his head, a jumble of water sluicing blood over rusted metal, then a scruffy white pigeon, a winged city rat, climbing into the sky from hands that had fallen open and would never close upon anything again. 'You're dead, Batty…
'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.
