EdgeOfHuman

  We soon shall recover our home; the city of saints shall appear, the day of eternity come . . .

  He closed his eyes, her hand still in his.

  They gave him a new heart-a newer one, top of the line, better than the one he'd been born with. And a new job, an easy one, at least for a while. Wrapping up loose ends, more or less. For the department files.

  He checked his pulse and blood pressure, the oxygen mixture in his artificial lungs, with a glance at the miniaturized LEDs that had been implanted in his wrist. Everything in order-Dave Holden felt no strain as he walked up the path from where he'd left the police spinner. The dry pine needles shifted beneath his boots with each step. Small living things scurried away, into the forest's deep and dark shade.

  The cabin was ashes and charred boards, as he'd expected it to be. The men who'd worked for Sarah Tyrell had given all the details about their assignment here, the last they had gotten from her. What they had done, and what they had left. He raised the camera and took a few photographs, for documentation.

  Holden stepped across what had been the sill of the cabin's door and looked around the black rectangle. Glass in the ashes, the remains of a heat-cracked window, an iron stove toppled onto its side, shapes of what might have been a wooden chair and table before the fire had been set around them . . .

  And something else, untouched. In perfect condition -- the men had done that, as they had been told to. Taken the black coffin, the transport sleep module, out of the cabin and a safe distance away; then returned it to where it had been before. Complete with that which it held. No longer sleeping; no longer dying. Beyond all that.

  He looked down through the coffin's glass lid, at the woman's face. Eyes closed, dark hair spread across the silken pillow. Rachael, he thought. He knew it was her. The one that his ex-partner Deckard had loved. It had always been.

  A glance at the transport module's control panel had shown that all life processes had ceased, vital signs at zero. The coffin's sustaining mechanisms had been switched off. Not murder, not technically, but an authorized procedure on Tyrell Corporation property.

  He didn't take any photos of the black coffin. He didn't need to. In the picture in his memory, she could still be sleeping.

  Walking slowly back to the spinner, he wondered. Why had Rachael been left there? Like that, untouched. He knew, or could guess, why Sarah had done everything else. The whole charade of pretending to be Rachael, asleep on the bed in the Tyrell private suite. While the persynth-the real-time, computer-generated replica of herself, a talking, responding simulation of herself-had shown on the screen of the video monitor. There had been enough evidence in the smoldering remains of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to reveal what she had done. The same trick that the police had used before on Deckard, set up in the shabby office in the central station, to make him believe that Bryant had still been alive. Deckard had seen through that one. Strange that he hadn't seen through Sarah's little joke as well.

  He supposed it was all a matter of getting what you wanted. A hawk wheeled across the sky and was gone. Sarah had done that, gotten what she wanted. To become Rachael. To be loved . . .

  Maybe Deckard had as well. Something that Holden had thought about before, back when he'd first figured out what had happened. Maybe Deckard hadn't been fooled at all.

  He got back into the police spinner and let the cockpit glass seal around him. Maybe, thought Holden, he got what he wanted. Somehow. Maybe he did. Not that it really mattered.

  A moment later the spinner mounted into the sky, banking south and toward Los Angeles.