K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

He could have kissed her. The impulse to do just that, to lean down and press his lips against the cold glass, a few inches away from hers, had moved inside him before. When he'd come up here with Andersson on that other job, just a couple of days ago, when they'd taken the sleeping woman's true lover away with them and back to L.A. He hadn't done it then, because he'd known that Andersson wouldn't have understood. Or worse, would have-he knew that Andersson had loved this woman, but in another form; the same face, but not mired in death.

That'd been while Andersson himself had still been alive. of course; he'd been among the security detail back at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters who'd scraped Andersson's broken body from the base of the slanting towers. He knew what had happened, though it wouldn't be mentioned in the official explanation. Andersson had loved the living woman, and had died for that sin. That mistake. Maybe those who loved the dying, the dead, would find eternal life thereby. In his own motionless heart, the team leader wondered how poor Deckard was doing.

For a moment longer he stood gazing down at her. Then he stepped back and gestured to the other men. "All right. Pick her up and take her out of here." It was what he wanted, but it was also part of the orders he'd received from the sleeping woman's double. He watched as they picked up the black coffin by its recessed handles, lifting it from the knocked-together wooden trestles. "Careful…"

They carried her outside, away from the cabin, toward the spinners. A moment later the men returned, this time with the canisters of gasoline in their hands; the team leader hadn't had to tell them to do that. Or the rest; they were on program now.

When the cabin's interior was soaked, the men splashed more gasoline on the outside, then poured a trail on the ground to where the team leader stood. He lit a match and dropped it at his feet. The fire, a hot shimmer in the daylight, ran from him and dived into the darkness behind the cabin's open door. A moment later the fire shouted from the single window, its bright fingers spreading apart the walls and roof.

They watched the cabin burn, until the charred boards collapsed in upon each other. It took only a few blasts from the extinguishers they brought out from the spinners to end 'the fire's short life, grey smoke unfolding into the sky. Then they finished up the rest of what they had to do.

From the cockpit of one of the spinners, the team leader looked down at the black mark on the earth's surface. The spinner lifted higher, and the cabin's burned remains were lost among the surrounding trees. He turned around in the seat, closing his eyes, keeping them that way until he could see the sleeping, dying woman's face again. All the way back to Los Angeles.

"Quite a place you've got here." She looked around, as though completing a realtor's assessment of a valuable property, estimating its worth on today's market. Sarah had stepped into the room, the disorder of its sideways condition having no visible effect on her. She radiated a cool assurance, money more powerful than gravity. "Distinctive."

"We like it." Deckard as gracious host. "It's those homey touches that're so important."

"I can imagine." Swathed in her coat, the fur collar turned up against her bound hair, she seemed insulated from the still heat collected between the safe-house apartment's inverted walls. She turned her inspecting gaze toward him. "For Christ's sake, Deckard-you look like a scarecrow." She reached over and fingered the torn sleeve of the stolen uniform. "If the LAPD decided to go into beanfield management, they could stick you on a cross out there. You could frighten off the birds all day long."

"There are worse jobs."

She followed him into another section of the apartment, ducking her head to get past the sides of the doors. To one of the bedrooms; it must've been a child's at one time, before the seismic events that had turned everything around. Faded curtains with a still visible pattern of baby ducks and chicks hung askew over the boarded-up window. He felt Sarah watching him as he lowered the door of the closet and dug out some of the clothes he'd stashed there. Spares; operations in this zone had often taken days to complete. Holden had kept some clothes here as well, his finicky tailored suits carefully hung in a plastic garment bag smelling of cedar extract. He didn't see the bag now; he pulled himself back out of the closet, his own things draped over one arm.

Keeping his back to her, he stripped off the uniform jacket and the shirt beneath, things of cloth and leather, stained with his own blood. He didn't flinch, as though the nerve endings were already dead, when he felt her hand touch the wounds across his shoulders.

"You should take care of those," Sarah's voice had softened just a little. "You wouldn't want them to get infected."

Somehow the apartment's bathroom had wound up not just tilted onto one side, but turned 180 degrees around, the ceiling light fixture now in the middle of what had become the new floor. Deckard knelt down by the remains of the sink, letting a trickle of water fall away from the cracked porcelain and into his cupped hands. Carefully he sponged away the dried blood from his torso and arms, using the wadded-up rag of the cop's shirt to dry himself. A piece. of the broken mirror was large enough to see himself in: a face made lined and older-looking by exhaustion, eyes even older by witnessing. The water was translucent pink on his hands when he took them away from his brow and deepened sockets.

He dressed in the bedroom, knowing that she was still watching him. The new clothes were only slightly musty from their long stay in the closet; he buttoned the tight-checked shirt's collar up against his throat, the top button digging at his abraded fingertips. The long coat was identical to the one he'd worn before; he'd bought them both at the same time, from a Paraguayan haberdasher working out of the dense warren of linty cubbyholes in the old Cooper Building downtown. He slipped it on, though he knew how stifling hot the safe-house apartment, and all the Santa Ana-battered world outside, was right now. The blood he'd lost from all the tiny marks on his skin might have been enough to take his core body temperature down a couple of degrees. Or else it's from her, thought Deckard. The woman brought her own winter along.

"Very nice." Sarah spoke from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her leaning back against the bedroom wall, arms folded across her breasts, a judgmental smile. "Is this the man I fell in love with? The other I, that is. Rachael. Is this the way she first saw you?"

"I don't know. Maybe she did." He picked up the last of the things he'd taken out of the closet. "Maybe she didn't see anything at all. Just a cop." His hands worked the rough wool necktie under his collar, then started fumbling the knot together. He could feel Sarah watching him. "Why did you come here?"

She regarded him for a moment. "I thought I should check up on you. Deckard. See how you were doing."

That was the problem with working for other people. She probably wanted the head of her sixth replicant on a stick. "How'd you find this place?"

"It was easy. Your old friend Holden-he has a nice new heart-and-lung set pumping away inside his chest. The unit was manufactured by one of the Tyrell Corporation's medical subsidiaries; there's a lot of crossover work between manufacturing replicants and human prosthetics." A smile. "We knew for whom that particular one was intended. They're all custom jobs; they have to be. So a miniature transmitter was put in it, way down inside where the valves go clickityclick. Anywhere Dave Holden goes, we know about it. I know about it. That's all that matters. That's why I wasn't worried about being able to find you again. No matter where you got to. I figured Holden would always be able to find you. Blade runners know each other, don't they? Your minds work the same way."