K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

"A job, huh?" Holden studied him. "The only thing somebody would want you to do is to hunt down replicants. That's all you're good for. This little job… it wouldn't have something to do with another one of that batch that escaped before, would it? A sixth replicant?"

"What do you know about that?"

"Oh…" Holden shrugged. "Maybe all kinds of things. Things that you don't know, Deckard. That's why you should come in with me on this. You don't stand a chance, otherwise."

"Forget it." He shook his head in disgust. "I've got a better chance of finding and retiring it than I would have with a patched-up loser like you hanging around."

"Wait a minute-"

"No, you wait. Because I don't have time for your bullshit, Holden. You're not even interested in finding any sixth replicant. You've got this conspiracy trip-wired into your head now, and you can't get it out. That's not my problem. I'm not interested in breaking up conspiracies, saving the blade runner unit, whatever. That's all stuff in your world. Mine's not big enough for that sort of thing. Not anymore."

"You stupid sonuvabitch." A carrier wave of pity, mixed with a higher cutting frequency of loathing, radiated from Holden. "It's not as if you have a choice about what world you live in. What makes you think they'll let you go crawling back to whatever hole you've dug in the ground? Even if you manage to ice their missing replicant for them. You'll know too much; they won't let you go."

Deckard hesitated, then pulled back from the needle that the other man had inserted into his thoughts. "I'll make it. Whether they want me to or not. Like I said: somebody's waiting for me."

"Big talk, Deckard." A sneer twisted the corner of Holden's mouth. "And a long walk. The only spinner outside is the one I came here in. Don't-" His hand darted into the same coat pocket that'd held his cigarettes, this time extracting a small chrome gun. He smiled. "Just in case you had some idea about-shall we say? — borrowing it from me."

"Thought had crossed my mind." Deckard looked closer at the weapon in the other's hand. "Where'd you get that? Not your regular piece."

"I'm making do with whatever I can find these days. It belongs to a mutual acquaintance of ours-the same one I got the spinner from. He left it in the cockpit." Holden nodded slowly.

"You'd be amazed if I told you who it is."

"Don't bother. I told you already. I'm not interested in this stuff."

"You're screwing it up, Deckard. For all of us." Holden's voice tightened. "We've got a chance if we stick together. If we don't, we'll get picked off, one by one."

He shrugged. "You look out for your ass. And I'll look out for mine."

"Okay, jerk-" The machinery that'd been stuck inside Holden sent an angry surge of blood into the man's face. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

Eyes closed, leaning back against the up-ended kitchen counter, Deckard listened to the other's racketing exit from the safe-house apartment. A few minutes later he heard the distant noise of a spinner lifting from the rubble outside the building. Then everything was quiet again.

For only a moment. The silence was broken by a knock at the apartment's front door.

No one came inside. Deckard waited until the knock sounded again. He pushed himself away from the counter. Making his way through the tilted rooms, he grasped the doorknob and pulled.

Rachael stood in the corridor outside, bending her head down to look past the top side of the doorway.

No — He pushed the memory trip out of his brain. It's not Rachael.

"I thought he'd never leave." Sarah Tyrell turned her head to look down the dark, empty corridor, then brought her gaze back to his. She smiled. "May I come in?"

They came to burn.

Nothing fancy; wood and rags didn't require anything more than a simple flammable liquid, an accelerant to get things started. "Put them over there-" The leader of the team pointed to a clear space several yards away from the cabin. "There's some other things we have to take care of first."

The other men, in coveralls marked on the shoulders and breast pockets with the Tyrell Corporation logo, began stacking the red canisters on the ground, their boots crunching through the layers of dead pine needles. An owl, startled from its diurnal slumber, flapped noisily away, its broad wings drawing a curtain across the sun for a moment.

Shading his eyes with one hand, the team leader watched the bird's flight; the creature disappeared under the denser canopy of the forest farther down the mountain ridge. The trio of spinners in which he and the others had come up from the south reflected sunlight from their metal flanks. No effort had been made to conceal the corporation's emblems; up here, there was no need for a covert operation. The one person who might have seen, and noted their identities, was engaged elsewhere, down in the city where they had received their orders.

"Should we go in?"

A voice beside him; the team leader turned and saw his second-in-command, patiently waiting. The gasoline cans had been arranged in a neat, shiny pyramid. We brought too much, thought the team leader. He'd known how small the ramshackle cabin was, but hadn't worked out in his head the practical consequences of that fact. A tiny space, bound by thin, mossy walls and a sagging roof; barely large enough for the lives it'd held. The plural was somewhat inexact, he knew. A life, the man's, and a partial one, the woman's, constricted by sleep and death intertwined. A single can of gas and a match would've been enough. Like torching a doll house, a fragile plaything, a bubble in the great, hard world that surrounded it.

The inside of the cabin's window was covered by a tattered cloth. He'd already gone up to it, right after they'd first brought the spinners down from the sky, and brought his face close enough to the cold glass to catch a glimpse of the interior darkness. And the objects therein: an out-of-date calendar on the rough-splintered wall, a wooden chair toppled over on its back, an ancient stove black with soot. And something else, even blacker, an oblong shape resting on crude, low trestles: a glass-lidded coffin, its occupant unviewable from the window's angle.

He knew she was there, though; he had seen her the last time he'd been in this place, when he'd been the second-in-command and Andersson had been the team leader. They'd all worn unmarked gear then, just their name tags, no Tyrell logos on themselves or the spinners. And they'd come at night, shadowy predators, waiting until their employer had finished her business with the man inside the cabin, then swooping in and carrying him away, as the owl did with the mouse in its claws.

"There's nothing left to do out here," said the second-in-command. The other men stood around, waiting. Patiently-they were regular Tyrell employees, security division, paid by the hour and not by the mile.

"All right." For a while, it'd seemed to him as if this place, the small forest clearing with the cabin at its edge, were deep in some sort of magic time, without clock or event. Suspended, like the living and dying of the woman in the transport module, between one sleeping breath and another, this day's heartbeat and tomorrow's. "Might as well get it over." Maybe if he'd come here alone he could've taken care of everything that needed to be done, by himself. As it was, with all these others around him, there was no way the spell could remain unbroken. "Come on."

The team leader pushed the cabin door open, letting the afternoon sunlight spill across the bare planks of the floor. He stepped inside, letting the rest follow him.

Now he could forget their presence. In hers; he stood beside the black coffin, looking down at the woman who rested there. Under the glass, the curls of her dark hair spread out across the silken pillow. Eyes closed; lips slightly parted, as though waiting for the few molecules of oxygen that sustained her or a kiss; hands pale with stilled blood, folded beneath her breasts.