EdgeOfHuman by Unknown

shook his head. "I don't regard that as a tragedy."
    "I can see that." She touched the rim of each of the empty glasses in turn. "So . . . I'd have to make it worth your while, then."
    "You don't have enough money to do that. Nobody does."
    "Perhaps not. But . . . there are other things I could offer you. Things you value. Say . . . the woman you love . . ."
    Deckard straightened up in the chair. "What's that supposed to mean?"
    She stood up from the bureau plat and went over to the suite's high windows. "Come here." With a single motion of her hand, she turned the glass dark, an artificial night. "I have something to show you." The sun's glare burned through the photochrome layers, like the end of a severed vein.
    For a few seconds he looked at her without moving, then got to his feet. As he walked toward her, she reached behind and loosened the binding of her hair.
    "You did that once already." Deckard placed himself right in front of her, watching as she shook the dark wave of her hair free, across the tops of her shoulders. "You don't have to do it again. I can see the resemblance."
    "It's not resemblance." Sarah brushed one hand through it, letting it fall again. "It's identity. You know that, don't you? No matter how many times you tell yourself otherwise . . . she and I are the same. When you love Rachael . . . it's me you love."
    He closed his eyes. One of his hands raised, as though to take her by the arm, then halted.
    "I'm the original. Rachael's the copy." She brought her voice down low. "You have to remember that . . ."
    The hand trembled, caught between his will and his desire. Her presence -- she knew, could see it -- radiated through him, hot and bright as the sun piercing the muted windows.
    She laid her own hand against his chest, to balance herself as she brought her lips close to his ear. "You know . . ." A whisper. "You know that it's me . . . always . . . '
    "No . . ." He shook his head, eyes still closed. "You're not . . .
    Her own eyelids shut out the little light remaining. All she felt was the brush of her lips against the side of his face. "She's dying. She's dead . . . that's the only difference." A whisper.
    "Why should you love the dead?" Soft as her breath. "When you can love me?"
    He made no reply. But his hand flew up and caught hers at his chest, locking tight upon the wrist's fragile bone.
    The past was on tape, but she knew she didn't have to play it for him. Words that had been spoken beside another window, in another room, that had been caught by his own hidden cameras. The place where suspicion, a blade runner's occupational hazard, intersected with longing. The tapes had been left behind in Deckard's own apartment; they had been found and brought to her. So she knew what had been said in that other place, that other time, that other world.
    She drew back a few inches from him. "Say . . . 'Say that you want me . . ."
    As though caught in dreaming, he turned his head. Listening.
    "Say it." Her whisper a command now.
    He spoke, the words slow on his tongue. "Say that you want me . . ."
    Time folded around them. His past, this present; his words, and the words Rachael had spoken. Long ago. "I want you . . ."
    His hand let go of her wrist, but only so that it could sink into the darkness of her unbound hair, his other hand grasping her arm tight, drawing her toward him. Crushing her against him. The unspoken words in the kiss, the past that opened around them, that had never ended.
    With a sudden convulsion he pushed her away, hard enough to snap her head back, as if he had struck her. Her breath trembled at her parted lips. Dizzied, she saw him turn his head back toward her, his eyes narrowed in the glare of one who has woken from a betraying vision. From the remembered past, into this world, and unsure for the moment which was the hallucination into which he'd fallen.
    Another movement of her hand, and the window returned to an unfiltered transparency.
    The smoldering light from outside