He was already reaching inside his jacket, his hand closing around the gun, as he looked back toward the figure on the bed. It’s right, his thoughts ran, don’t be a fool, do itAll he saw was the woman’s tangle of dark hair, an angle of her face shadowed both by darkness and the overlay of his own memory.
“Goddamn.” He shoved the gun deeper into his jacket. The chances were more than good, they were certain, that he’d regret this. “Let’s go.”
In the front part of the hovel, Deckard let go of the Rachael child’s hand long enough to pop open the lid of the briefcase on the table. “What’s going on?” asked Batty’s voice. “I could hear you people talking—”
“Later.” Deckard swept the Sebastian paraphernalia, the packet and other bits and pieces, into the briefcase, then snapped it closed. “Just shut up for now.”
Briefcase in one hand, leading the Rachael child with the other, he emerged from the hovel. No hail of gunfire met him. That’s a good sign, thought Deckard wryly. He set off at a fast pace, carrying his burdens with him.
That sonuvabitch.” She splashed cold water onto the bruise that had begun forming along one side of her jaw. Small, but darkly colorful; it looked like a smoky-red L.A. sunset as viewed from the top levels of the no- longer-existent Tyrell Corporation headquarters. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him.”
Sarah fixed her angry glare at her own reflection in the hovel’s bathroom mirror. Angrier at herself than Deckard; she had known what kind of a schmuck he was, and she had still let herself be conned by him. I want you . . . The memory of those words in her mouth pooled salt on her tongue, tasting like the blood from the cut lip Deckard’s blow had given her. The perfect image of a woman wronged; she looked at herself with contempt. I trust you . . . Typical, she knew. They’ll say anything, get you to say anything, and then they’re gone. Right after the fist is applied.
She emerged from the hovel’s tiny bathroom, toweling her face, punishing herself with the wincing pain from the bruise. At least the chair near the bed was empty, the hallucination of the Rachael child vanished for the time being.
Deckard, for whatever twisted reasons were in his head, had kept up the act of pretending that the little girl was real right up to the moment he was beyond the hovel’s front door and out of earshot; she didn’t even want to speculate why. Probably just to drive me crazier. As if that were possible.
“Mrs. Niemand . . . you know, it’s not too late.” The calendar on the wall had spotted her; the hectoring voice had taken on an irritatingly superior tone.
“There are still viable options.”
“What?” She scowled at the calendar and its too-perfect scene of trees and distant mountains. “What’re you talking about?”
“You can still kill yourself. These things can always be arranged. Just because Deckard is gone, that doesn’t mean you have to change your own personal plans.”
“Oh, I like that.” Sarah shook her head in amazement. “Suicide as a viable option—that’s good.”
“Well, or therapy perhaps,” the calendar said helpfully. “Some other kind of therapy, I mean. You were talking about that, remember? In regard to these hallucinations you feel you’re suffering from. Now, in my opinion—and you can certainly take it for what it’s worth—I feel that surgery would be your last option. That’s a little extreme —”
“Just shut up.” She reached over and ripped the calendar off the wall. “You traitorous bastard. Telling Deckard to go ahead and shoot me.” She flung the calendar into the corner of the bedroom, where it landed with a fluttering squawk. “You’re lucky I don’t have a gun right now.”
That was the problem. Out in the hovel’s kitchen area, as she rummaged through the cupboard over the sink looking for the meager stash of coffee substitute, Sarah weighed her options. If I had the gun, she thought grimly, I probably would. Kill herself; she hadn’t changed her mind about that. There was just no way that appealed to her as much as the finality of a bullet through the head.
After being so tritely humiliated by Deckard, she didn’t want to employ any less violent method, anything-like a drug overdose or a Plathian head-in—the-oven genuflection—that smacked of feminine frailty. After all this time, she had to admit that she was of the blood of Eldon Tyrell in more ways than one. If she could crack her own head open like an egg, she would have.
She brushed away a trace of white dust on the sink counter and spooned the ersatz coffee into a chipped- edge cup. Her jaw still ached, reminding her—as if she could forget-of Deckard. He probably enjoyed that. Even more than the hit, the mind trip, the getting her to believe that he was ready to die with her. Taming on the tap, she held her hand in the thin stream of rust-tinged water, waiting for it to heat up. Well, she thought, her Tyrell blood bringing her own decisions back into focus, if he doesn’t want to go voluntarily, that’s all right. She held the cup under the tap and watched it slowly fill.
There are other ways.
Pulling a chair out from the table, she sat down with the fake coffee in front of her. It tasted like brackish plastic. I should’ve brought some real stuff back here from the yacht. There had been every indication that it’d been stuffed with the expensive pleasures of life, as one would expect from a part of the late Eldon Tyrell’s private fleet. However bleak her situation might be otherwise, she wasn’t without resources; she supposed she could find a way of unloading the yacht’s contents—and the yacht itself-on the emigrant colony’s black market. Perhaps she could track down some high-up exec in the Martian cable monopoly who’d give her a package deal for the whole thing, rather than having to dispose of it piece by piece; either way, it’d come to a good deal of operating capital, more than enough with which to buy Deckard’s murder.
She took another sip of the repellent black liquid, holding the cup between both hands. She didn’t need to; the muscular tremors of her rage had died down, replaced by cold, nerveless calculation. And regret: she wished now that she hadn’t gotten rid of Wycliffe and Zwingli. She could have used them. If nothing else, they had been hem only means of getting in touch with the rest of the shadow corporation; she imagined that theme were others dedicated to the Tyrell resurrection. And among those, former members of the security department, hard men and deadly. Those were the ones she really needed now.
She didn’t feel like waiting for them to show up at her doorstep, the way the first two die-hard loyalists had appeared. Another slow, meditative sip, her tongue almost numb to the taste; she’d have to think of some way of contacting the shadow corporation .
A sharp, quick sound came from behind her. Someone had knocked on the hovel’s front door.
That’s too good, thought Sarah. She carefully set the cup down on the table.
Either the universe, in its mysterious and infinite workings, had learned to read her mind, or her hallucinations had become even more convenient. All she had to do was ask for something and it would be provided. With only one catch to it .
She turned around in the chair, facing the door. “If you don’t exist,” she called out, “then go away. I don’t need you.”
A muffled response came through the thin fiberboard. “Hello?” The knob rattled, as though the person on the other side had tried it and found it locked. “Is there anybody home?”
If it were a hallucination, considered Sarah, I would’ve given it a key. She got up and went to the door, pulling it open.
The man on the hovel’s doorstep was shorter than her, running to fat, as if compressed from a taller size. “You must be Sarah—” He smiled, blinking at her from behind ordinaryseeming lenses. If he was part of the shadow corporation, he hadn’t adopted the same square black rims as the late Wycliffe and Zwingli had. “Sarah Tyrell? Am I right?”
It struck her that hallucinations shouldn’t need introductions. Maybe he’s real. “You could be.” She put her hand against the door frame. “Depends on who you are.”
“Miss Tyrell, my name is Urbenton. That’s all I go by.” His smile broadened, creating more elaborate details in his rounded cheeks. From his breast pocket, he extracted a business card and offered it to her. “That’s how people know me.”
She looked at the card, holding it by one corner. The man’s name appeared beneath larger letters spelling out SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS, with a company logo of a stylized, sharp-edged skull with wings. “Charming.” She tried to hand it back to him, but he refused it with an upraised palm.
“Keep it.” The man radiated an oily unctuousness, as though his excess body fat were percolating into the air around him. “Just in case we can’t come to an agreement right now, Miss Tyrell—”
“How do you know my name?” Sarah tilted her head, eyeing him with increasing suspicion. “My real
