“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 tightchecked 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.”
“Maybe,” said Deckard. “Up to a certain point. But I didn’t go with him-did I? He had business with me, too. An offer; like being partners again. But I didn’t pick up on it.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing I was interested in. Besides—” A shrug. “I already have a job.”
“Oh?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “I appreciate your loyalty. But then . . . you’re motivated. Aren’t you?”
Something caught his eye. He turned his gaze away from her and saw that it was the broken mirror inside what had been the apartment’s bathroom. He could see his own splintered, fragmented reflection, an image that’d been cut up, pieces scrambled together, then sorted out and poorly reassembled.
His brooding was interrupted by a sudden noise, a hissing intake of breath, pitched high and loud enough to be a cry of dismay. At the same time, something grabbed his arm, two hands squeezing tight into the heavier fabric of the coat’s sleeve. He looked beside him and saw Sarah, drawing behind him as though for protection, an expression of loathing and disgust on her face.
“What the hell is that?” She took one of her hands away from his arm and pointed.
In the bedroom doorway, the rectangular opening turned on its side, crouched Pris. Or what remained of her, what her lover Sebastian had been able to salvage. The emaciated figure, flensed to the bare minimum inside the ragged leotard, balanced itself with one bony hand against the door frame; the red eyes, dots of fire beneath the uncontrolled shock of white hair, had already scanned across the bedroom space. And fastened onto the other female creature held by it.
“Don’t worry.” Deckard watched as the Pris-thing unfolded itself spiderlike into the bedroom. “It won’t hurt you.” The head stayed low, the stare of the red eyes sweeping to either side as it cautiously advanced, as though looking for any possible threat, before returning to Sarah.
“You’re right about that.” Her other hand let go of his arm, and she began rummaging in the deep pockets of her own coat for something.
“Pris! Pris!” Sebastian’s piping voice echoed down the hallway outside. “Don’t go in there! Leave those folks alone—”
Beside him, Sarah raised her arms, both hands locked together. He saw what she had pulled out of her coat, the black metal filling her doubled grip.
At the same time the Pris-thing rose up in front of Sarah, spine telescoping like a machine rearing into place. The hissing breath changed into a gasp of wondering surprise, eyes widening to reveal more of the fiery lenses inside the skull. A trembling arm, a skeletal hand reaching its white fingertips toward the face of the woman, drawn back by instinctive aversion.
Its mouth opened wider, a word, a name, struggling to bridge some fragile synapse and emerge onto the rattling leather tongue. . . .
He tried to stop Sarah, to grab her arm and pull it away, but he was too late. The smallest motion of one of her fingers was all that was required. The recoil pulsed through her braced stance, pushing her back against his side for a moment. Muzzle flash eclipsed the Pris-thing’s ravaged face, only inches away from the black hole at the end of the gun. Even before the afterimage had begun to fade from his sight, he could see the lightweight creature hoisted by the bullet’s impact, desiccated splinters spraying from the shattered cheekbones and brow, the spinal column arching into a bow as its shoulders were flung back onto a bed of empty air.
In the doorway, Sebastian screamed. His single hand and forearm had lifted him higher onto the back of the teddy bear, so he’d been able to see everything that’d happened. The toy soldier shoved past the bear, then stood rooted in place, eyes and nose following the Pris-thing’s trajectory as it slammed into the angle of two walls.
Nausea rose in Deckard’s throat. The last time Pris had died, when he had killed her, the body with its ripped-open gut had flopped and spasmed on the floor, shrieking not so much with pain as with the release of the fierce energy unspent. This time around, the twice-dead Pris lay crumpled like a rag doll, torso folded at the hinge of the lower back, disjointed hands sprawled behind, head bowed forward as though to reveal the red fissure beneath the albino golliwog hair. The red eyes had already dimmed to black dots, any remaining battery cells shorted out.
“You didn’t have to do that.” The nausea had mutated to a heavy sadness, a stone in his chest, as he’d watched Sebastian crawl from the back of the kneeling teddy bear toward the broken corpse.
Sarah turned a level gaze at him. “Yes, I did.”
On the other side of the room, Sebastian had reached the dead thing, had gathered it into the embrace of his single arm, and now rocked back and forth with it. Tears ran along the wrinkles of his face as an anguished keening issued from low in his throat. One of the teddy bear’s paws stroked Sebastian’s shoulder in a futile effort at comforting him. The toy soldier completed the pieta arrangement, the point of its antique helmet bending low over the corpse’s blood-spattered feet.