“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-ofdate 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-incommand 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 secondin-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.
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.