a couple of small brown vials, antiseptic liquids that had dried up despite their seals; a plastic bottle of aspirin with nothing but white dust inside; a few once-sterile bandages, now suspiciously stained with age. A paper label had been inexpertly glued to the inside of the lid; if it had had instructions or words of medical advice, they had long since faded away.
I should’ve let the guy have it, thought Deckard. Instead of getting into a hassle with the twitchy stim- deprived case who’d been trying to lift the little metal box from him. Then it would have been his problem, about what to do with it.
Deckard cocked his wrist, preparing to flip the ancient first aid kit into the farther reaches of the alley, then hesitated. For some reason, Sebastian had wanted him to have it, had hurried to shove it into his hands when the pocket universe had started to fade away. And the box had come with him when Deckard had fallen back into this world. If nothing else, it made for a strange, sad remembrance of the age-wrinkled figure and his retinue of somber toys.
He tucked the box into his jacket pocket and stood up. The empty vials rattled against the metal, an erratic, hollow rhythm as Deckard headed for the colony’s streets that had people in them. Cop instincts shifting to criminal: if anybody was looking for him, it would be easier to hide in a crowd than out in the open.
The door of the hovel was unlocked; the knob turned in his hand without resistance. It had taken him another half hour, pushing and shoving his way, head down, through the thickest part of the milling pack, to get to the Niemand residence; the last dozen or so yards, where there had been no one about except for a few total burnouts rooting blindly through the accumulated debris, had been the most nervous-making for him. He knew that if any kind of trap had been laid, it would be right here on his own front step. The old instincts, hard to root out as the sinews along his bones, had again moved his fingers under his jacket, searching for the gun he’d carried in his other life; his hand came out as empty as it had on the neon-lit street of Sebastian’s private universe.
Darkness inside; he pushed the door open, enough to reach in and flip the switch on the wall. In the hovel’s cramped spaces, everything looked as it had before he’d left, minus himself sitting at the table, slumped unconscious. The briefcase was still there, handle turned toward the door; he could see his initials on the small metal plate beneath. And the various paraphernalia, the graduated beaker and glass rod, the packet torn open with a few granules of the white powder spilled out, the spoon from the kitchen area . . . a tableau that might have been of more interest to a drug enforcement agency, if any had stuck their heads inside the hovel.
He shut the door behind himself. As soon as he had, he knew there was someone else there with him; he could sense the minute disturbance in the trapped air, different from the leakage through the ceilings’ and walls’ multiple patches and caulking. Deckard halted, listening, hearing nothing; then stepped quickly around the table, taking the couple of paces to the bedroom door and shoving it open.
“Mr. Niemand—thank goodness you’re home!” The calendar on the wall spoke in its flutey, overexcited voice. “Terrible things have happened while you were away! Murder and ruin!”
Deckard ignored the calendar. In the fall of light from the room behind him, he saw a figure lying on the bed. Smoke from a strong tobacco, more expensive than anything available in the colony’s black market, drifted as a thin grey wraith to his nostrils. The figure on the bed brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled; the small glow of fire drew the familiar angles and shadows of Sarah Tyrell’s face. She didn’t even bother to look at him, but went on gazing abstractedly up at the water-stained ceiling, her dark hair unbound and spread across the pillow.
“You’re home,” said Deckard. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Where’d you go?”
“Far, far away Ash drifted, unnoticed by her, across the back of her hand and onto the blanket. “You’d be amazed, probably, if you knew.”
“Probably so.” He let his shoulders slump forward, his forearms against his knees, tiredness stepping along the chain of his bowed spine. The clock on the little bedside table was gone, its metal and plastic bits scattered outside.
No great loss; he’d hated the clock and its idiot chatter as much as Sarah had.
Clockless and shadowed, the room seemed to exist outside of time. From the corner of his eye, he could see her without effort. Overlays of memory slid beneath the thinning smoke. They looked so much alike, this face and that other; identical, as Eldon Tyrell had meant for them to be. He had no need to close his eyes in this darkness; he could see the other one, the one he’d loved, the dead one. Deckard had to make a dead thing out of himself, something without desire, to keep from lying down beside her. Taking her in his arms, bringing his face to hers, smoke and kiss and the presence of her body, alive and real and an illusion. He wouldn’t have cared .
The calendar on the wall sensed the deep reverie into which he had fallen.
“Mr. Niemand,” it whispered, as though fearful of intruding. “There’s something you should know.”
He didn’t look up from his own hands dangling empty before him. A slow nod and sigh. “What’s that?”
“There’s somebody else here. I mean, besides you and Mrs. Niemand.”
Deckard raised his head, taking a slow scan across the room. He stopped when he encountered another pair of eyes gazing back at him. “Who are you?”
A little girl, with dark hair drawn back into a braid, regarded him somberly.
“Don’t you know?” She sat on one of the chairs from the kitchen area table that had been dragged into the bedroom’s corner. The girl tossed her head so that the braid fell across one shoulder. “She knows.”
He looked over at Sarah, lying on the bed. “What the hell’s going on? Who’s this?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Sarah emitted a groan of disgust. She kneaded her brow with one hand. “Don’t you start with that.” Pushing herself up against the wall behind the bed, she fixed an angry glare upon him. “You know there isn’t anyone there. Don’t pretend you see someone.”
For a moment longer, Deckard gazed into the dark centers of the woman’s eyes, then turned back toward the presence in the room.
The girl shrugged and shook her head. “That’s the way she’s been talking. She didn’t believe those other two men, either, when they said they saw me.” The girl lifted her chin in obstinate defiance. “She doesn’t think I’m real. But I am.”
Deckard nodded. “She has her little ways.” He looked back at Sarah. “Where’d she come from? Why did you bring her here?”
“Now I’m really pissed off.” In swift, angry motion, Sarah swung her legs over the side of the bed; she jabbed her cigarette out against the table as if she could drive it through the imitation wood like a nail. “You know goddamn well where she comes from. She comes from whatever weird little scheme you and those die-hard Tyrell Corporation loyalists must have cooked up together. I don’t know what kind of twisted gaslight agenda you people thought you could get rolling.” She turned a fierce, annihilating glare upon him. “Maybe you wanted to drive me even crazier than I already am. Though why you’d want to bother is beyond me. I’m already at the limit.” Her words came through gritted teeth. “I can see her, but I’m supposed to; she’s my hallucination.”
He resisted the temptation to go over and grab Sarah by both shoulders and rock some sense into her. “Look,” said Deckard, setting a hand flat on the bed. “I’m not going to go into details now, but I just came from someplace that doesn’t exist. Not the way that real things exist. So I know the difference. There’s a girl sitting in this room with us, and I want to know what she’s doing here. That’s all.”
The radiation that lasered out from beneath Sarah’s eyelids went up another notch in lethality. “Fuck you, Deckard.” She stood up and strode past him, out to the front part of the hovel.
“All right.” Every encounter with Sarah Tyrell left him feeling exhausted, not the least of which came from the cognitive warpage of seeing the face of the woman he’d loved looking back at him with utter contempt and hatred. He leaned forward and placed his hand gently on top of the little girl’s. “So you’ll have to tell me. What’s your name?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.” Deckard tried to smile as gently as possible. “I really don’t.”
“I’m Rachael.” She looked straight back into his eyes. “My name’s Rachael He felt the room go still around him, around the two of them, himself and the grave, dark-haired little girl. A moment of stopped time, as though the world itself had held its breath, caught the way his was, next to his heart.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” He spoke without anger, all harshness filtered out of his voice. The child’s hand, a thing of warmth and flesh and skin, was tangible beneath his palm. “I won’t be mad—I won’t be mad at you—if it is. Did somebody tell you to say that?”
“Of course not.” She looked offended. “It’s my name. It’s my real, real name.”
