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After turning off the closet light, he stood for afor activity in the bedrooht be the silence of soe

He eased open the door The ular s barely revealed by the snow-veiled glow of streetlamps

He crossed the threshold and after a moment identified the open doorway to the upstairs hall, which was slightly less dark than the black wall through which it cut

If anything like the blonde in the blue robe had been waiting for him here, it would already have attacked He vividly reone after the people in the Trailblazer

Bent forward, hands reaching out low to search for obstructing furniture, Rusty eased toward the doorway He needed to get as far as possible fro attention to hi them away from Corrina He felt around an armchair, past a tall chest of drawers, and reached the open door withouta sound

His mouth was as dry as a salt lick Stomach acid burned in the back of his throat, as it had not done since the war

For a long ested that the killers either had not entered the house or had already left it

He took just two steps into the upstairs hallway and halted again, listening No s here Di frobelow, revealing nothing

Silence Silence A distant clink-clink-clink He thought the sound had co Not downstairs It issued from the farther end of the pitch-black hallway in which he stood Clink-clink-clink, clink-clink This tiot a better fix on the source: to his left, an arth away

Chapter 62

Nummy O’Bannon listened to radio sometimes, but he never before was inside where they ers he expected The rooms were just mostly offices except for the spaceship controls where Mr Ralph Nettles worked, and the desks were all stacked with stuff, not neat at all

Mr Lyss atching over the broken monster, the Xerox Boze, in one of these offices, and Nu over the the usual nasty ht piano to play, so he kept an eye on the thing He kept an eye on Mr Lyss, too, because the old , even if it wasn’t so Grands were quieter than they had been since Nu of the whole strange day happened In fact, it was the secondwhen Grandmama died and he was left alone

A estbut tall and with a lot of h he earing a hooded coat He was bigger than Buster Steelhaht have been able to do disappearing tricks with apples the way icians did with coins Half his face was tattooed, but it was his eyes thatever to happen to Nuh his eyes sort of the way that theacross the screen that showed Grandh this was soht, not scary, either, but beautiful and calht in the hten him, like he would have expected, especially with the half-broken face and tattoo--and then he did know

Grandels, but they worked in secret and weren’t easy to tell fros or halos She said the only way you soht of love in their eyes They were so full of love, Grandmama said, that soave theht in their eyes

Nuel, and now here was one, and he said to Nuht Fifty days froel turned his eyes toward Xerox Boze, stared at hi moment, and then said to Mr Lyss, "You claim this replicant is broken"

Mr Lyssman’s eyes--or if he did see it, maybe he didn’t knohat it was To the old el used His eyes bugged out, and his hair seemed to stand on endits paw in an electric socket and all its fur going bzzzz

"Claim?" Mr Lyss said "Claim? Is that a weasel word so you don’t have to say tosonofabitch? You walk in here like you own the joint, your fancy face tattooed estions Conway Lyss is a liar? I’ve done worse things to people who call me a liar than Stalin did to kittens, and believe me, Stalin hated kittens He ripped out their throats with his teeth if he caught one This thing that was supposed to call itself Barry Bozeman is broken so plain any fool but you can see it Look at his hangdog face, his whipped-dog posture in that chair He’s programmed not to kill himself, wants ood and ready to kill him Nobody tells me when to kill him, not even soel react to the name Frankenstein, but he didn’t ask if Mr Lyss was crazy or call hi more at all to the olddown at hiht the angel would say that he couldn’t, that it wasn’t soel could do Instead, he said in the most tender way, "I am your brother Two hundred years separate our … births Do you recognizetime and then said softly, "I … don’t know"

Mr Lyss beca and wanted to know if this was some kind of hellish monster convention Nobody, not even Nuel asked Xerox Boze, "What is your life?"

"Misery"

"Shall we stop hiainst my maker"

"I think I can And will Where is he?"

"The Hive"

"Perhaps you’re not broken"

"But I am"

"Perhaps you’re here to lure me into a trap"

"No"

"Help el said

"How?" Xerox Boze asked

"He didn’t name it the Hive"

"No It’s our word"