“Shut up.” The gun jerked back into position as Sarah visibly tensed. “I don’t want to listen to you. It’s just another one of your con jobs, the stuff cops will say to get themselves out of a tight place. I just didn’t think you’d be quite so good at it anymore.”
He decided to backtrack, to come at her from another angle. Work fast, he told himself. Even without a clock in the room, he knew that time was running out, the moment approaching when she would realize she had been stalled, the moment when she’d pull the gun’s trigger.
“Tell me something,” said Deckard. “After you kill me . . . what’re you going to do with her?” He nodded toward the little girl across from himself. “Anything?”
Sarah gave a noncommittal shrug. “Hadn’t thought about it. Perhaps I’ll try shooting her as well.”
The Rachael child shrank back in the chair, her eyes wide and apprehensive.
“Doesn’t seem like that would accomplish much. If she’s not even real.”
“True,” admitted Sarah. “But it might get her out of my head. It doesn’t matter, anyway, if it works or not. Since I’m already planning on killing myself. That should do the trick.”
The hovel’s bedroom had become a little world of madness, with Sarah as the gatekeeper, the black staff of her office weighing in one hand. For a moment, Deckard considered whether he might have spoken more truly than he’d intended.
Maybe I am as crazy as her. A sure sign of that condition, when you could talk calmly about death, about desiring and willing it, in a strange parody of rationality.
“What if I’m not conning you, though?” Deckard kept himself still, unthreatening. “I’m not in any conspiracy against you; I don’t know these two men you’ve been talking about. And I can prove it.”
“Really?” A sneer passed across Sarah’s face. “How?”
“You say I don’t see her.” He pointed a thumb toward the Rachael child. “That I can’t; she’s a hallucination. Your hallucination. So ask her to tell you something.”
Sarah eyed him with suspicion for a moment, then glanced over at the girl.
“When we were inside the Salander 3 . . . when I found you there . . . what was on the floor between us?”
“That’s easy,” said the girl. “There was a big pooi of blood. It was so big you could see yourself in it, like a mirror. That’s what you said.”
“ ‘A big pool of blood,’ ” repeated Deckard. He looked up and caught Sarah’s gaze, fastening tight upon it. “ ‘It was so big you could see yourself in it, like a mirror.’ ” He spoke the words dryly, in a matter-of-fact tone. “ ‘That’s what you said.’ That’s what the girl here just said.”
“Impossible Sarah’s expression changed to one of puzzlement. “You shouldn’t have been able to hear her say that. She doesn’t exist. Except in my head .
“But I did hear her. So she’s in my head, too. Isn’t she?”
The gun dropped lower as Sarah tried to figure out the puzzle. “She’s not real . . . she isn’t really here . . . but you heard her .
He was aware of the child watching them both. Maybe she’s the only sane one here, thought Deckard.
A genuine smile, one of realization, appeared on Sarah’s face. “Then you’re right,” she said. “You are crazy. Just like me.”
“Just like you.”
With her free hand, Sarah rubbed one corner of her brow. “That’s so strange.
You know . . . it comes as rather a relief. It’s like when I went into the Salander 3. And I found her.” She nodded toward the girl. “I didn’t feel quite so alone. It didn’t matter whether she was real or not.”
“You’re not alone.” Make her believe it—Deckard softened his voice, the way one would speak to a lover. “You and I—we really are in this together. Whether we wanted it to be that way or not.”
“Is that true, Deckard?” She gazed at him in wonder. “Is it?”
He pulled something up from memory, his memory and hers. “Do you know what you had me say, a long time ago? Do you remember that? It was what you knew I’d said to her, that other Rachael .
A slow nod as that tiny fragment of the past became clear to her once more. “I wanted you to say those things to me. The way you’d said them to her.”
The past that had been his and Rachael’s, that had become his and Sarah’s. He spoke the words again. “Do you trust me?”
Gun in hand, Sarah closed her eyes, hearing him this time, and in that other time, and in that time stolen from the woman he’d loved. “I trust you,” she said softly.
Deckard knew he had her now. The gun still hung in the air between them, her finger on the black trigger’s curve, but not for much longer. “Say . . . I want you.” More words from the past. “Say it.”
“I want you.”
He stood up and reached toward her, not to take the gun out of her trembling hand but to take her in his arms, press her close to himself. The way he had taken Rachael and brought her lips to his, felt her heartbeat trip and accelerate, in sync with his own. In this time, the gun was caught between them, her hand trapped against his chest, the black metal like a second shared heart, one with no pulse, no time, nothing but the death they had both raced toward. Deckard kissed her, and for that moment she wasn’t Sarah, she was Rachael. Memory, the past, madness-all folded around him and he didn’t care.
He would have given anything, everything, for that moment to last.
The woman in his arms—Sarah, Rachael; he wasn’t sure which-yielded to him.
Perhaps she didn’t know which one she was, the living or the dead. Madness, thought Deckard as he drew her to the bed, his arm around her shoulders, sitting her down beside him at the mattress’s edge. He brushed her dark, tousled hair away from her brow; her face burned feverish as she leaned it into the cup of his palm.
For a few seconds they were alone in the room; the other, the child, forgotten.
“You’re right,” whispered Sarah. “You’re as crazy as I am. You poor bastard .
.
He nodded. “There’s not much we can do about it.”
“Nothing . . . except She looked down at her hand, still gripping the gun resting in her lap. “Except what I’d already decided to do.” Her unmasked, desperate gaze searched for some sign in his eyes. “That’s right, isn’t it?
That’s what you want, don’t you?”
Deckard could almost feel sorry for her. “Sure.” When he looked back at her now, he saw only Sarah Tyrell. The woman he’d loved was dead. A long time ago. “That’s what I want.”
“I knew it.” An odd, broken happiness sounded in her voice. “I should’ve known it.”
“Tell you what.” He squeezed her shoulder, bringing her closer into his side.
“I’ll do it. It’s easy for me; you know that it is. I’ll kill you, and then I’ll kill myself.” He brought his head down to look straight into her eyes.
“That’ll work.”
A coy smile appeared; she looked up through her eyelashes at him. “I trust you, Deckard . . . but not that much. Besides . . . if I went first, then I wouldn’t get to see you dead. And I wanted that, too.”
“You can have whatever you want.” Deckard brought his face closer to hers again. “You deserve it.” As he kissed her, he brought his free hand between them, onto hers holding the gun. Her fingers had relaxed, loosening their grip on the cold metal. As he had hoped, known, they would.
In one swift arc, he grabbed the gun and pulled it away, sealing it in his own fist. The arc was completed when he leaned back from her, the gun’s black weight swinging up and smashing across the angle of her chin. The impact rocked Sarah’s head back, lifting her partway and throwing her back onto the bed, one empty hand reaching futilely toward him.
“Come on—” Deckard stood up and grabbed the Rachael child’s hand, yanking her to her feet. He shoved the gun inside his jacket; it produced a hollow clank of metal against metal, the blunt muzzle rapping on the ancient first aid kit that he had brought back with him from Sebastian’s pocket universe. Ignoring the sound, he pulled the girl toward the door. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Mr. Niemand!” A voice shrilled from the wall. “Now’s your chance!” The calendar’s pages fluttered. “Don’t just leave her-kill her! Shoot her! She’s a wicked person—she blew away the clock!”
