Restless, he walked outside the cabin again. In the narrow cathedral of trees he touched the gun inside his jacket. And wondered why he didn’t just end it now.
“I know what’s on your mind.” A voice spoke from behind him.
He felt another’s hand touch his shoulder. He didn’t dare look around. Because he knew the voice.
Her voice.
“I bet you do,” replied Deckard. Weariness swept over him, a last defeat. He’d hoped he’d be dead before he got to the point where he began to hallucinate. In the moon’s shadows the small creatures scurried away through the dead leaves, as though in holy dread. “Since you’re just something inside my head, anyway.”
“Am I?” A soft whisper, as he felt the hand—her hand—brush the side of his neck.
“How do you know?”
He sighed. This would be the absolute dead end of his luck, to wind up arguing logic with his own hallucinations. “Because,” he said, still not turning around. “Because you sound just like Rachael. And she’s already lying in her coffin, as good as dead.”
“Then look at me. You don’t have to be afraid.”
The hand’s touch dropped away from his neck. He turned, slowly, first bringing his gaze around. To see her; to complete the hallucination. He saw Rachael standing there beside him in the darkness, her skin paled beyond death by the moon’s partial spectrum. Her dark hair was swept back, the precise arrangement he remembered from the first time he had ever seen her, in another life, a world far and different from this one; the way she had worn her hair then, walking across the deep-shadowed spaces of the Tyrell Corporation’s offices.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“I see you, Rachael. That’s how I know I’ve lost it. My mind.” Grief and loneliness had won, had walked through and left open all the small doors inside his head, the doors torn from their hinges. So that there were no divisions anymore, between what he wished for and what he perceived. “This is what’s called being insane,” he told the image he saw standing before him. “I don’t care. You win.”
A sad smile lifted a corner of the image’s mouth. The image of the woman he loved. “Is there no possibility?” The image of Rachael touched his hand, fingertips cold against his skin.
“That I could be real?”
“Oh, sure.” The thought didn’t cheer him. “I could be screwing up some other way.” His eyes and other senses lying to him, traitor thoughts. “Maybe you really are here—but where I lost it was back in the cabin, when I was taking care of you. I thought I kept the controls set for you to go on sleeping—but maybe that’s where I was hallucinating.” A theory good as any. “Maybe I really set it so you’d wake up again. And you did, and here you are.” He found himself wishing it were true. That she had woken up in the empty cabin, bound her hair the way she used to wear it, then came and found him out here in the dark. “It’d be nice if you were real. We could stay out here and look at the stars . . . all night long.” He took her hand in his. “But . . . che gelida manina.” He used to pick that one out by ear on the piano in his flat, back in L.A.; everybody’s first opera tune. “ ‘Your little hand is frozen.’ ”
“Don’t bother translating. I know the words.” A hard edge crept under her voice. “And I don’t mind the cold.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s one of the advantages of being dead. Or close to. Everything gets put into perspective.” He dropped her hand and reached back inside his coat. The lump of metal was as cold as her fingers had been, real or hallucinated. He couldn’t keep his own voice from sounding bitter. “We got a date, then. If we don’t freeze to death out here, when the sun comes up we can review our options.” Deckard extracted the gun and held it out, fiat on his palm, toward her. He spoke the words that had been silent in his head before. “Why wait?”
“You poor, stupid son of a bitch. You’re pathetic.” She slapped the gun from his hand, sending it spinning into the darkness. “Why do you blade runners always wind up so ready to off yourselves?” The voice’s edge sharpened to a withering contempt.
The gun was lost somewhere in the forest’s mat of rotting leaves. So she must be real, he thought. He would never have gone so crazy as to have thrown the gun away himself. You lost your final option if you did that.
“It’s the Curve.” He looked back around at her. “What they call the Wambaugh Curve. That’s why. You land far enough along it, and you start thinking suicide’s a good idea. Unless you got a reason not to.”
“Cop mysticism. Spare me.” She shook her head. “You were burned out a long time ago.” She peered more closely at him. “So what was your reason?”
“You were, Rachael.” The absent gun still seemed to weigh against his chest. “Even before I met you.”
“How sweet.” She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek; if he’d turned his head only slightly, he could’ve kissed her palm. “Come on—” She drew the hand away. “Let’s go up to the cabin.” Walking toward the distant yellow spot of the lamp, she glanced over her shoulder and the furlike collar of her coat. “Oh . . . and you’re wrong, by the way. I’m not Rachael.”
“What?” He stared after her. “What’re you talking about?”
“I’m Sarah.” The bare trace of her smile, the tilt of her head, indicated an obscure victory.
“I’m the real one.”
He watched her turn and start walking again. A moment later he followed after.
“This is a spooky thing, isn’t it?” She looked up from the coffin and toward him. “Don’t you think so?”
“I suppose.” Standing by the woodstove, Deckard glanced over his shoulder. Past her, through the cabin’s small window, he could see outside the dark bulk of the spinner the woman had piloted here. He’d been right about the trace of light he’d spotted in the night sky; its simple fiery word had been meant for him. Now he rubbed his hands, trying to get the stove’s warmth deeper inside than his skin. “You live with the dead, you get used to things like that.”
“Not quite dead.” When Sarah had entered the cabin, she’d walked over to the bulky device, knelt down by the low wooden trestles, and ran an expert scrutiny over the control panel’s dials and gauges before standing back up. “Looks like you’ve been taking pretty good care of her. These transport sleep modules aren’t all that easy to run.”
“It came with a manual.”
“Did it?” She nodded, impressed. “You must’ve hired yourself some fine thieves.” She placed her hands flat against the glass lid and gazed down at the mirrorlike image of her own face. “Ones that good usually don’t come cheap.”
“There were some old debts owed to me.” He’d watched her, not sure what he felt at seeing a woman who looked like Rachael but wasn’t. “From being in the business, you might say.” Or was she? He didn’t know yet.
Sarah continued gazing at the sleeping woman inside the coffin. “New life,” she murmured, brushing her hand across the glass, as though tenderly stroking a sister’s brow.
“ ‘New life the dead receive . . .’ ”
He recognized the line. Not from any opera. “ ‘The mournful broken hearts rejoice . . . ’ ”
One of his own aunts, the church-going one, had used to sing it. He had a memory of her naive, awkward soprano voice, floating from a kitchen window, and from the choir at his mother’s funeral service. “ ‘The humble poor believe.’ ”
“Very good.” She looked over at him. “Charles Wesley—O, for a thousand tongues to sing. Most people don’t know any eighteenth-century hymns. Raised Protestant?”
A shake of the head. “Not raised much of anything. Just like most people.”