Edge Of Human

11

She ascended to the appointed place, at the appointed hour. Without effort, almost without will-thermal sensors had registered her presence within the small space, a disembodied voice had asked if she'd wanted to go up to the building's roof, far above the dense weave of structure and light that formed the static ocean of the city. All Sarah had had to do was say yes.

Thus we rise, she thought as she closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against the wall of the elevator's vertical coffin. Not as angels, transparent to gravity, buoyant in God's sight, but as inert, gross cargo, hauled aloft by cable and winch, like stones and dust in a box.

What machine would clasp her in its embrace when her death came, bearing her aloft the way the elevator did now? Nobody, she thought glumly, self-accusingly. Everything she did, everything she was about to do, was designed by her own intent to bring about that exact lonely result. Fate as programmed as a train's iron rails-she figured she'd wind up like her uncle Eldon, isolate in glacial splendor, brooding over a chessboard like an owl watching for mice to scurry across the forest's dead leaves and twigs. Unless…

Unless what? She raised a hand, pressing thumb and forefinger against her eyelids, blue sparks wriggling inside her head. Unless every not-living thing quickened and breathed, all the earth's graves burst like ripe seed pods, and the drowned rose with seaweed hair and pearls in their mouths. It could happen — neither thought nor belief, but what she would have believed if she were still capable of that. Her own resurrection, or the simulation that was as much of one as she could hope for, pushed light through her hand and into her eyes as the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open.

He was waiting for her. On the building's executive landing deck, the private one that had been reserved for Eldon Tyrell, but rarely used. She stepped out of the elevator and strode toward the unmarked spinner and the figure lounging against its flank, his arms folded across his chest.

"How did it go?"

Andersson shrugged. "Oh… pretty much as I expected. He didn't put up a struggle or anything. Not that it would've made much difference if he had."

"My." She let herself smile. "You're such a professional. Aren't you?"

"I'm paid to be."

"Whatever you indicate will happen, happens. Like pushing a button

… on the elevator over there." She nodded toward the closed doors, the brushed stainless steel raked by the sun's fierce glare. She turned her own gaze away from the man. The light and heat would siphon away any possible tear. She felt genuinely sorry about Isidore; the poor little geek's neck, with its wobbling bespectacled head on top, would probably have fit inside one of Andersson's fists. Perhaps that was how he'd done it, like twisting and pulling the knobbed cork out of a bottle of Dorn Perignon. More likely, the obliging Isidore had volunteered, soon as he'd figured out what was wanted of him. Wuhwould you like me to kuh-kill myself? Huh-huh-happy to.

"You're the one who pushes the buttons."

"Am I?" That still seemed an odd concept to Sarah Tyrell. "I suppose so." She remembered being a three-year-old child and looking up at her uncle-the doors of the Salander 3 had unsealed and popped open; a nurse hack led her down the ramp, with the long boxes holding the remains of her parents following right after-and seeing his thick glasses, the lenses shaped like the computer monitors that had been her windows aboard the starship, the cold eyes behind them scanning and assessing, calculating. He had reached down and touched her hair, rubbing a lock of it between his thumb and forefinger, as if gauging its suitability for some new industrial process…

"What're you doing?" Her voice, sharp' and startled; she felt her spine go rigid, every muscle tensed for flight or attack. The reverie into which she'd sunk had been translated into this reality, the rooftop landing deck of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, right now. Her uncle's touch had become Andersson's; the man, still leaning back against the spinner, had reached out and stroked the stray wisp of fine brown hair at the nape of her neck. His fingertip stayed there, a fraction of an inch away from her tremulous skin. "What… I don't… "

"Yes, you do." He leaned forward and kissed her.

Kissed and fell to the landing deck's hard surface, both his hands upon her, as they had been before. She turned her head and saw the undercarriage of the spinner, the extruded landing gear, the vents and air intakes: she could smell the sharp reek of its fuel and the condensation of steam, mixed with the closer scent of his sweat as he reached between them and undid the front of his jumpsuit; she couldn't tell the mingled odors apart anymore, or whether they came from him or the machine. It didn't matter to her.

She closed her eyes. That was part of the payoff, the regular arrangement between herself and Andersson, that kept him working for her, plus the checks drawn upon the Tyrell Corporation's black operations account and made payable to an electronics supply warehouse in Mexico City. The arrangement must have been satisfactory to Andersson: she had lost track of which installment this was. Easy to forget that she wanted this, wanted everything, as much as he did..

Something else to be sorry about. That the arrangement had come to an end; she knew it, even if he didn't yet. At the edge of her awareness, she felt her hand remove itself from his back and reach inside her coat pocket, for the object she had taken from the drawer of the bureau plat down in her uncle's office.

Andersson gasped-too soon, at least for him; she could feel the shock wave run through his body. He pushed himself back from her, his spine arching. One hand clawed at his back, fingertips smearing through the bright red that had burst open there.

"Goddamn…" He'd rolled onto his side, finally having managed to pull out the knife she had inserted, point first, between his shoulder blades. Andersson shook his head ruefully. "I knew you were going to do this. I knew it…" The knife clattered on the hard surface of the landing deck. He managed to push himself up into a sitting position, propped up against the spinner. His blood shone on the black metal. "It's not like…" Voice weaker. "… it's unexpected…

"Please don't ask me why." She kept her own voice formal, polite. She had gotten to her feet and was now putting her own disarrayed clothing back in order, reaching down to smooth the skirt of the dress over her knees. "I'd find it tiresome to explain." Sarah straightened up, noticing a spot of his blood on the front of her blouse. Silk, and thus ruined.

He managed to laugh. "Don't bother…" He gazed at her, almost admiringly. "It's pretty much… the nature of the business…"

Checking the time, as much by glancing up at the sun as looking at the slender watch on her wrist. And waiting; as always, Sarah hoped he wouldn't take too long.

A few minutes later she succeeded in dragging his body to the low parapet surrounding the landing deck, her shoes leaving a triangle and dot pattern in the thin pool of his blood. She was surprised at how light he seemed when dead; she had unexpectedly little trouble in lifting the corpse high enough to topple it over into the empty space at the center of the Tyrell Corporation's slanting towers. Adrenaline, she thought; some little surge in her own bloodstream, unnoticed by her cognitive processes, had perhaps given her the extra strength required,

Andersson's body fell of its own accord, arms and legs splayed out in air. Hands braced against the parapet, she watched until it was lost to sight; the corporation's employees, working in the replicant manufacturing units that formed the base and core of the complex, had no doubt already had the surprise of the corpse smashing into one of the reinforced skylights above their heads.

Business to take care of — Sarah straightened up and took her cell phone out of her coat pocket, punched in the security division. "There's been an accident." She smoothed her hair into place as she spoke. "It can be taken care of on an internal basis. There's no need to call in the police." She gave a few more details, some of them true, then disconnected. The corporation's own security people were drones, without Andersson's initiative; she could count on them to do no more than what she wanted. Even the mess up here on the landing deck-they'd all keep their silence, and their jobs.

She started to turn away, to walk back toward the elevator doors, then stopped. A shudder ran through her body; dizzy and nauseous, she had to lean against the spinner for balance. The adrenaline, and whatever other hormones had been released, now seemed to evaporate from her veins. She closed her eyes, her pulse scurrying faster, breath quick and shallow. "I'm sorry," she spoke aloud. As if there were anyone to hear her, as if it would have done any good if there had been. She resisted the impulse to lie back down upon the deck and curl up with her trembling fists and elbows tucked close against herself.

The attack passed. Breath slower and deeper again-she took the few steps back to the parapet and looked across the vast space, to the three other towers of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. A city in itself, surrounded by the larger compressed mass of Los Angeles. The four towers slanted in toward each other and the truncated pyramid in their midst, like the petals of a cubist flower that hadn't fully opened yet. When she had come back from Zurich, with the corporate minions who now worked for her, she'd been given the grand tour, through all the sectors of the complex, the areas that she'd never been allowed to enter while her uncle had been alive. It'd taken days to complete. They had told her everything, all the secrets. Including what they had called the red button, though there wasn't any red button, but an overlapping series of commands that had once been keyed to Eldon Tyrell's voice pattern, but hadn't been keyed over to hers. The one thing beyond her control-even as the minions had been telling her about what would happen if she could have spoken those magic words, a vision had come to her. That had made her heart swell with a fierce gladness.

She looked out now across the landing deck's parapet, that vision overlaying the solid, slanting towers. Fire and force, this world she owned riven by its own private apocalypse. The explosions would start at the base of the structures and continue upward, following the Wagnerian sequence of the programming that had been built into them from the beginning…

Brennt das Holz heilig brunstig und hell, sengt die Glut sehrend den glanzenden Saal…

"'If the wood catches fire,'" she murmured, eyes closed, "'and solemnly, brightly burns, then the flames will destroy the glorious hall…'"

Wagner had that much right, at least. Not programming; she knew that was a stupid word for it. Fate was the true word.

Der ewigen Gotter Ende dammert ewig da auf…

"'The eternal gods' last day then dawns… '

Sarah opened her eyes. The vision had faded, leaving the parallelogram towers of the Tyrell Corporation still standing.

She turned away and headed for the elevator, to go back down inside the building's heart.

He'd made his decision. Or, at least, the next step in his rapidly evolving plans.

What do I need this loony sonuvabitch around for? Dave Holden glanced over at Batty, sitting beside him in the cockpit of the freight spinner. They were flying west, returning from the Reclamation Center out in the desert, to the sprawl of the city. The same harsh sunlight that darkened the curved glass's photochrome membrane heated the brown stew of pollutants hanging in the air above L.A.; he could see it up ahead, like an old, frayed edge wool blanket spread over the simmering buildings. Batty's hands moved across the controls, manually piloting the craft. When he was busy doing something, he didn't look quite so maniacal. But that didn't change the situation.

The question didn't need an answer — Holden had decided that part a while back. But there were other questions that did.

"So, uh, exactly what is your interest in all this?"

"I told you." Batty turned his cracked smile on him again. "The sixth replicant. The one that's still missing."

"What about it?" The smile still had the capacity for making him nervous. "You just want to shake its hand or something? Get an autograph?"

"Don't want anything from it. Except to find it and kill it. And take back the evidence to the people who hired me that I've completed this little job for them."

"And who's that?"

"Can't tell you." Batty's eyes shifted. "It's… a secret."

"Bullshit." His inner radar, his honed blade runner senses, flashed on the other's momentary unease. "I can tell you're soamming me." He peered closer at Batty. "You don't know who hired you, do you?"

"Well… I got my suspicions about it." Batty gave a minute adjustment to one of the controls. "Might be the LAPD, Or it could be a gov agency. Possibly the feds, maybe even the U.N. — bad replicant business can call down some pretty high-level heat. Whoever it is, they're working outside the official channels, so we're talking cover-up. Ultraspook stuff; I got the job details and my up-front money through a double-blind courier service, no trace possible on who sent them my way."

"How'd they find you? In the yellow pages?" Probably under Cannons, Loose — the thought gave Holden a twist of smug amusement.

"The fact they found me at all just proves these guys're up there. Man, I'd pretty much figured if I was going to be retired against my will, then I was going to be retired all the way-I'd taken every dime I'd saved up, from when those bastards over at the Tyrell Corporation had been still paying me my royalties on their line of Roy Batty replicants, and I'd dug myself in tight into a nice, safe little conapt in one of the Cracow ex-pat zones. I was gonna do nothing but drink gin and listen to Mahler's Second for the rest of my life." He shook his head. "You know, I don't have to kill people to have a good time."

"But it helps."

Batty shrugged. "Speak for yourself. I didn't need to take this job-"

"You did, though." Holden's turn to show a thin smile. "So now you gotta go through with it. If these people you're talking about are such heavyweights, they wouldn't like you crapping out on them."

"Tell me about it." His face appearing suddenly older, expression glum. "I've worked these kinds of gigs before. Perform or die's the general rule. Even so," muttered Batty, "I got half a mind to pull the plug on the whole operation. Dealing with an ungrateful little jerk like you-"

"What'd I do?"

"It's what you didn't do." Glum to resentful. "I arrange for a whole new heart and lungs to get slapped inside you, and you don't even say thanks."

"Christ… give me a break." Holden shook his head. "All right, you have my sincerest appreciation. Satisfied?" He looked ahead to the city approaching on the horizon, then around to Batty again. "Not as if it was all selfless altruism on your part, though, is it? You had some reason for busting me out of the hospital and all."

"True. That's what pisses me off. I need you."

Holden raised an eyebrow. "For what?"

"Come on." A big sigh from Batty. "I've been out of the game for a while now. When I took you out of that hospital, that was the first time I'd been in L.A. in years. It's a whole lot bigger and uglier than when I left it. I need somebody who knows his way around. Otherwise, that sixth replicant could be hiding out in there, and I'd have fuck-all chance of finding it."

"Oh, sure." He gave a snort of disbelief. "So buy a map, already."

"It's not just the lay of the land, pal. It's the connections. You got'em and I don't. When I took off from L.A., I cut all my ties, all my sources of info, my whole network. I expect that most of the people I used to deal with are dead now, anyway. Places where they were at, things they were into — longevity's not much of an issue there." A shrug. "Wouldn't be such a problem if I'd done anything to replace them. But I. don't have time to do that. Replicant number six has gotten a real jump on getting himself safely out of sight. I can't screw around any longer finding it-I need somebody who's already got their systems up and running. Blade runner-type systems. That's you, Dave. That's why you're here."

He didn't say anything in reply. If Batty wanted to believe he was so valuable, he wasn't going to do anything to dissuade him from the notion. A mixed bag regarding the state of his own connections, though. He'd been flat on his back, zoned out on the hospital's IV drip, for the better part of a year; that was a long time to be off the scene, especially in L.A. Batty didn't have a clue about how fast things changed now, compared to his day. Plus he was on the lam himself-his old boss Bryant, and God knew how many other people, had put him on ice for their own reasons, and they weren't likely to be too overjoyed about finding him walking around again. Though maybe that's a positive, mused Holden. If I got taken out by a conspiracy against the blade runners, the rest of them will be on my side. They'd have to be, for reasons of their own survival. At least the smart ones will be, he thought. Which meant that Batty's assessment was correct; he did have resources that he could call upon. The best kind, right inside the LAPD itself, right under the noses of Bryant and the others who'd set him up.

The residue of doubt evaporated, leaving the hard stratum of a blade runner's self-confidence. He still had the edge that came with being human. The spinner had reached the L.A. suburbs, sections of a maze homogenous with that of the city's tight, imploding center. Somewhere in there was the answer, walking around with someone else's face. Whose?

I'll find out soon enough. Holden glanced over again at the figure beside him. The same question went through his mind, assessing how much further use he had for Batty. Or whether he'd be better off without him, going out on the hunt alone.

"All right," said Holden. "I'll help you out. After all… it's only fair."

Batty looked up from the spinner's controls. "We got a little partnership going, then."

"Oh… we sure do." And smiled right back at him.

Deckard knew where he was going. He just didn't know how to get there.

It'd been easier when he'd been able to fly straight to the safe-house apartment in an unmarked spinner, at night with the tracking lights switched off, engines throttled back to near silence. That was when I was a blade runner, thought Deckard. A real one. With all the perks and privileges that accrued thereby. Now he had to creep along on the ground like a civilian or, worse yet, a hunted thing. Whatever transformation Sarah Tyrell promised him had been completed some time ago.

The stolen cop uniform was so torn and shredded as to be unrecognizable as such. His bruises and abraded skin, wounds crusted with dried blood, showed through the ragged gaps. As he climbed over the floes of concrete rubble and twisted rebar, the palms of his hands left small red marks.

At the crest of one long upward pull, Deckard stopped to catch his breath, the dry-heated air scalding the interior of his throat. An exact ninety-degree angle of marble and steel, once vertical and now laid out along the ground, marked where one of the zone's towers had fallen. Some of the buildings had pancaked fiat during the long-ago seismic upheavals, but most had toppled over lengthways, riding out the earth's whip-crack motion. A knife of freeway cleaved the zone, the lane-divider dots writing empty, absurd graffiti along the roadbed turned to wall.

A glance over his shoulder revealed unmarked sky, no pursuit from the air in sight. Holding on to the tumbled building's ridge, he shielded his eyes with one hand, scanning across the zone for any other indication that his laboring progress had been spotted. No one and nothing-either the cops who'd been on his tail at the central station had assumed he'd fallen under the wheels of the rep train, and were still searching the tunnel for his bits and pieces, or they'd put the chase on hold until he reemerged in a territory more to their liking. Clusters of serious-bad criminal types-Sawney Bean dysfunctional families, Dahmer-ized protein fetishists-were known to make the sideways world their turf; sending a squadron of fresh uniforms through here would be like parading a flock of leather-wrapped turkeys into a wolves' convention. It wasn't worth having a set of sharp-filed teeth ankle-biting through your jackboots, when the chances were good that the bones of the person you were looking for were already being gnawed somewhere else in the zone.

Using the building's broken windows as handholds, Deckard worked himself down the slope of the other side. Just get there — a message not just to his fatigued limbs, but from one part of his brain to the other. More than exhaustion; the rep train and the nightmare vision it'd held, memories and faces, with the last one the most disturbing, had rattled him down to his soul. If he had one left.

He'd have to think about that later. Right now, the rest of Deckard's functioning cerebral sectors were mulling over his plan of attack, once he'd reached the safe-house apartment. There'd be little time to rest, and the job to do still in front of him. Hooking up with his old boss Bryant had turned out not only to be a wash, but worse than that; the task of finding the sixth escaped replicant was now compounded by even darker mysteries. Somebody had iced Bryant-what the hell did that mean? Maybe, thought Deckard, the sixth replicant did it. Killed him. The one whose ID data Bryant had purged from the police department files. As long as Bryant had still been alive, the coverup wasn't complete; there was still at least one person who knew who the sixth replicant was. With Bryant laid out cold, the data was purged from its final location, human memory itself…

All of which meant, Deckard knew, that the job of finding the sixth replicant was going to be that much harder. Bryant had been his only route into the department's records. The synthesized image of Bryant on the video monitor, with its glib real-time responses, might have been lying, stalling him, when it'd said that the sixth replicant's ID could still be drawn up from some locked-tight sector of the databases-no way of determining that now. And no way of getting back into the police station to try accessing the information; the cops would be on him in two seconds if he were stupid enough to show his face around there again.

What then? Deckard brooded as he continued his laborious progress over the sideways world. Dig up an old Voigt-Kampff machine from the gear stashed at the safe-house apartment, and start running empathy tests on everyone in L.A.? That should only take a few centuries to complete.

One possibility had occurred to him. Of trying to establish some kind of direct comm link with the authorities in the off-world colonies, passing himself off as a high-level figure in the LAPD-maybe as Bryant, if the off-worlders didn't know about him being dead-and getting a repeat transmission of the original data about all of the escaped replicants. That'd be one way of getting number six's ID; the only problem was that it'd be nearly as difficult as bringing Bryant himself back from the dead and grilling him for the info. The off-world security agencies weren't exactly on the phone grid; the U.N. sat on every tight-beam transmission between Earth and the colonies. Even if he could engineer some way of tapping in and getting on-line to them, there'd still be the small matter of faking the police department reciprocity codes, convincing the off-worlders of some bullshit reason for sending the data again, the whole elaborate ruse-and doing it without alerting the cops about what he was doing and where he was doing it from.

He didn't like his chances about pulling all that off, but at the moment it was the only plan he had. Other than letting the word get out that he was back in town, and waiting for the sixth replicant to come looking for him, with murder on its mind. That was something else to think about.

Or too much to think about. Deckard gritted his teeth against the sting of the sun-baked rocks in his palms and the swirl of plans and possibilities inside his head. Enough to make him long for the time when it'd been easier, when he'd hated his job but still knew what to do. When he could stand with legs braced, squinting through the rain slashing at his eyes, bringing the heavy black gun up with both hands locked tight on its grip, arms extended, aiming as the city's crowds had parted before him like an ocean with faces…

Then firing; the gun's recoil traveling hard into his chest, then rolling onward, its palpable echo diminishing at the base of his spine, the gun lowering of its own dead weight. The last had been the female Zhora, one of that last batch of escaped replicants-and the first of their number that he'd retired. He could still see the flight of her body, its energy combined with the bullet's thrust, crashing through one plate-glass window after another. Until it had come to rest, blood mingling with the rain, the bright shards like melting crystals of ice at his feet as he'd looked down at her. At what it'd become, a dead thing, its quick life over…

Deckard pushed the memory loop out of his brain. Thinking about stuff like that only led to grief. To bitter meditations about what he'd become. He'd quit the job, quit being a blade runner, before that time. When he'd realized that he didn't hate his job… but liked it too much.

With thoughts carefully stilled, Deckard went on clambering through the rubble. The small bit of luck he'd had in getting across the sideways world lasted for the rest of his journey: he spotted no one, human or less so, though he heard some scurrying noises at various distances, indicating some of the more timid inhabitants fleeing his approach. He also managed not to get lost himself amid the sector's jumble and clutter, even though he was translating a bird's-eye knowledge of the route into progress on foot. The fallen freeway served as a landmark-he knew that if he kept it to his right and counted off ten up-ended off ramps, he'd arrive more or less at his destination.

Which was right in front of him, at last; Deckard managed to get a sigh of relief through his panting for breath. He stumbled toward the multi-storied apartment building, an early-period Gehry knockoff.

The corridors inside the building were unlit tunnels, oriented wider than high. Some rudimentary electrical service still existed in the zone, remnants of some of the pirate utility grids that had flourished around the turn of the century. He hoped that no one had tapped out the conduit that served the safe house's security functions; it'd been a while since he'd had to use the place.

He found the door, a rectangle on its long side, a number in the low hundreds barely visible beneath layers of spray paint. A placa demon, fuzzy-edged batwings and Day-Glo fangs, still decorated the inverted hallway. Deckard knelt down to the small metal grid a few inches from the plugged keyhole.

"It's me." He tried to keep his voice as level and free of stress tremors as possible.

"Come on, open up."

A red LED flashed on behind the grid. "Do I know you?" A canned voice, the emotionless female that resided on most small-device chips. "Please don't violate me. Go away and leave me alone."

He didn't have time to deal with a recalcitrant lock; squeezing his eyes shut in frustration, he banged his fist against the grid. "Open up or I'll take you apart, so help me God." He'd use his fingernails for screwdrivers, if he had to.

"Shame on you."

His forehead came to rest just above the tiny holes. "You want more samples? Fine." He scrabbled through his near-depleted brain for something more to say, to trigger the lock's recognition mode. "Four score and… something years ago…" He couldn't remember the rest. "Um. Say you're walking along in the desert, and you see a tortoise. You see a tortoise and…

A sharp click sounded inside the grid. He barely caught himself from falling into the room on the other side of the door as it popped open.

He closed the door behind himself, leaning a hand for balance against the wall that had once been a floor. Even darker in here, the windows boarded over and sealed tight. Deckard could make out a few familiar furnishings, remnants of lives led when the building had still stood upright: an overstuffed couch beside a row of framed Keane paintings, footsteps imprinted across the big-eyed waifs, an overhead light fixture that now dangled into one of the inverted corners; through the doorway into the apartment's kitchen could be seen a disconnected refrigerator lying on its avocado-green flank, the magnet-studded door flopped open.

In this small pocket of security-when it'd originally been set up as a safe house, the exterior walls had been injected with both thermal and acoustic sensor-tracker foils-he felt a measure of tension drain out of his cramped shoulders. But only for a moment. He looked down, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, and saw a miniature Prussian soldier, with a clown's rouged cheeks and an elongated nose, tip broken off, gazing back up at him. The little soldier's eyes went wide in frightened realization.

"I know you!" Its voice was pitched comically high. "I saw you before!" It spun on the heel of its cavalry boot and ran toward the apartment's bedroom door. "Sebastian! Sebastian! There's a man here-a bad man! A killer! Sebastian!"

Before Deckard could react, the door sprang open, its knob whacking the surface on which he stood. Something flew out, knocking the little soldier aside. Something that spun and twisted, and struck him full in the chest before he could get out of its screaming trajectory.

He landed on his back, with a pair of what felt like hands gripping tight around his throat. A white-haired wraith knelt on his chest, its teeth clenched and eyes radiating a murderous fury. He recognized it, even though when he'd seen it before it'd had the face of a young woman, and now wore the skeletal mask of deracinated leather. Its wrists felt like corded bones in his hands as he struggled against its throttling hold.

"Pris!" Another voice, from somewhere else in the tilted room. "Don't do that! You'll hurt him!"

At the edge of his sight, drowning in a red haze, Deckard saw a man with the face of a wrinkled baby, strapped to the back of an animated teddy bear. The man tugged with a single hand at the crazed figure's arm, its tattered leotard tearing open farther. Deckard felt himself falling away from the visions of combined nightmare and memory, the cutoff of his own breath turning red to black.