Echo city

Is he really so innocent? she thought. His eyes said so, and his voice, and the way he was almost cowered down before her, like a submissive hound. But she could not shake that poison gun from her mind, nor the way he'd swung into action so smoothly when he thought it necessary. As if he'd been prepared rather than aimless.

"I don't want them to see you as a killer," she said.

His face relaxed a little and he nodded.

Peer looked around the small cell where they were holding Rufus. They hadn't locked the door-the mechanism was rusted and jammed-and Malia told Peer they'd taken him there to recover. But Devin had been standing outside the cell ever since, a sword on his belt. He'd said nothing when she came to see the visitor, but Peer could feel his eyes on the back of her neck. I can hardly blame them for guarding him, she thought, and she remembered Gerrett and his easy laugh.

The cell wall was damp with moss, and in the corner the hole in the floor that had once been the latrine was filled with dead rats. A hundred years before, real murderers might have inhabited this cell. She wondered what these walls had absorbed-confessions, tears, shouts of rage. Now, perhaps, they were witness to the beginning of the end.

"When are we going?" Rufus asked.

"Soon," Peer said.

"Now," Gorham said as he entered the room. He glanced at Rufus, then fixed his attention on Peer. "There's no time to waste."

"Where is she?"

"She's in her laboratories. We'll take you."

"What are laboratories?" Rufus asked.

Gorham looked at him, and Peer could not tell whether Rufus's expression was expectation or fear. Probably a bit of both. "It's where she chops," Gorham said. "Where she makes things."

Malia came in behind him, crowding the small cell. "It'll be almost dark," she said. "Now's a good time."

"How far?" Peer asked.

"Just follow me." Gorham could not hold her gaze. He still doesn't trust why I came here, she thought, and she motioned to Rufus to follow them out, Malia bringing up the rear. A flush of anger hit Peer again, aching her head, driving her heart. The bastard had lied to her, had given her up to die! She shook her head to try to clear it, but that only seemed to confuse things more.

Maybe it wasn't that he mistrusted her. Maybe it was guilt. I forgive you, she thought, but she could not imagine saying it, could not mean it-not to this man who was so different from the one she thought she'd known. Perhaps given time. But if what the Watchers had been awaiting for generations really was coming true, time was something none of them had.

Sprote Felder went back down. He never spent more than a few days aboveground, because he found it claustrophobic and constricting, and the sky took his breath away. He discovered his greatest freedom belowground, where the undersides of later times formed the skies, and phantoms from the past whispered to him like the dregs of old dreams. Sometimes he understood what these whisperers were saying; other times their words formed exotic and unknown shapes, like vague mumblings of the mad. He had spent much of his life down in the Echoes, exploring and recording, and the histories of Crescent Canton especially were a source of constant pleasure and fascination. He was always cautious and alert, and occasionally he had been scared. But he had never been terrified-until now.

His father had once told him, To most people, history is a dead thing, but in reality it still exists-but is forgotten. Down in the underside of Echo City, he strove to remember.

His porters had fled. He hired them from the taverns and slash dens of Mino Mont's Southern Quarter-a place that many thought of as a stepping-stone to Skulk. Most people in the quarter were involved in crime in one way or another, be it as perpetrators or beneficiaries. It was a way of life there, with children introduced at a young age and given the only choice of their pitiful lives when they struck adulthood: which branch of crime to enter into. The possibilities were endless, the uptake huge, and few people escaped the circle of life that persisted in that place. The only reason the Marcellans allowed the quarter's existence was that it provided many things that they and their families and friends enjoyed. The city's best slash was refined in the quarter, in dens deep in Mino Mont's newer Echoes, where sunlight could not damage the stock. Some of the larger brothels ran schooling camps, where young girls were taught the ways of sex by an array of visiting dignitaries, Scarlet Blades, and Hanharan priests. And if a dirty deed needed performing that was below even the Marcellans' guard of Scarlet Blades, the quarter was the place to look. Countless taverns held countless shady corners, where killers beyond number drank and waited.

It had not always been that way. Seven hundred years before, Mino Mont had produced some of the finest musicians, artists, and writers that the city had ever known, and there was still no consensus on why the area had become so corrupt and violent. Some said it was creativity driven back to its basic, wild core. Others suggested that creativity and insanity went hand in hand, and the Mino Mont of today was certainly a product of some sort of madness. Whatever the reason, Sprote found that the people of the quarter produced the best porters. In almost twenty years of exploring the Echoes and employing hundreds of people from Mino Mont, he'd had only one turn on him. That man was way down in the Echoes, his eyes put out by his companions, and sometimes Sprote had nightmares that he was still alive.

But now his helpers had gone. Strong men, hard women-only half of those who had come down with him previously had returned on this journey. And of those, only three had crossed the deep Echo border between Crescent and Marcellan Cantons. They had all heard what the Garthans had to say last time, though Sprote was not convinced that anyone but him could speak Garthan well enough to truly understand. And when they had felt the first distant vibrations, like the secret heartbeat of the city itself, those remaining had turned and fled.

"You should come with us," the last woman had said.

"I can't," Sprote Felder had replied. "This is where I live."

He'd watched them leave, walking along a dusty street buried beneath progress for maybe five thousand years, then he'd entered an old dwelling and lit a fire in the hearth. For a long time he had sat there, feeding the fire, snaring ghourt lizards and spitting them over the flames, and thinking about where he was going and what he might find. Shadows moved where there had been no movement for a hundred generations. In another room in the house, a phantom whispered in an old language. And Sprote had known that the only way for him to go was down.

He knew the Echoes, and the sounds that reverberated there, as no one else did. Heading deep beneath Marcellan, passing through Echoes that were still talked about in hushed tones-sometimes awed, sometimes feared-he heard the sound of the River Tharin. It was the city's endless sigh. He was used to the sound from his times beneath Course Canton, but there the river was still on the surface, where some of its power was expended to the sky and the water refineries added their own booming accompaniment to the river's whisper. Here, where the river itself had been built over, its power was contained. Its voice echoed. And as he finally left that dwelling and started deeper, memories of his one and only visit to Echo City Falls began to surface.

He'd been there fifteen years before and vowed never to go again. The Falls carved their way through the rock of the land, the foundation of the place that had become Echo City, and those caves and caverns had been a stark reminder to Sprote that there was a time before the city. He had never been a great believer in Hanharan and the associated creation myths, but during that time down by the Falls, he had understood where some might find comfort in such beliefs. It was a basic, wild place, where the only sign of the city and its Echoes was the steady stream of bodies that the Falls carried away. He'd seen dozens in the short time he was close-the dead swept away by those dead waters, arms and legs waving goodbye to someone who should never have been watching. His porters at the time had been terrified, and the torches they carried had cast dancing reflections across the Falls as they shook in fear.

Below the Falls… even Sprote had not gone that deep. He'd heard tales of the bottomless pit-the Chasm-swallowing the river and its grisly cargo into a darkness that was home to a thousand fearful myths. Some said that the city was built on nothing, and that one day the Chasm would consume it whole. Others claimed that the Echoes made up some vast, mindless creature's face and that the Falls carried the city's dead down into its endless gullet. But explorer though he was, some things were best left unseen. Sprote believed that the sight of this Chasm would swallow his sanity, sucking it down like the countless dead of Echo City over the eons.

Now he was breaking his own promise to himself and returning. Fascination, and also a vague sense of duty, drew him. He'd made himself the authority on these deep places, and now that something was here, he felt that he should be the first to know.

He was deep and had to go much deeper. And already, as well as the whisper of the dead River Tharin far above and the rumbling of the Falls a mile or two to the west, he could hear something else.

Something rising.

Nophel sat naked in his rooms and looked around at what he had. Each book held worlds, but all those worlds were aspects of Echo City. Some volumes could be construed as Watcher material-highly imaginative texts concerning what might be beyond. He had an illicit copy of Benjermen Daxia's Truth-An Exhortation to Revolt. But even these were inextricably bound to the city. Nophel had read nothing of their persuasion that made him believe anything other than that they were written by good fictionalists. If the Council knew he had these tomes, he would likely be in trouble. But that was what Dane was for. Protection.

Other books and objects concerned his mother and those generations of Bakers before her. Reading them was an exquisite torture.

He rolled the small metal flask back and forth across the fingers of his right hand. He felt the liquid in there shifting with the flask and played with its weight. I won't see that water, he thought. I'll barely even feel it. Nophel breathed deeply. He loved the smell of his rooms. If he drank Blue Water and disappeared, like everyone else who had ever tried it, he would miss the scent of books and maps and olden times.

But he had to try.

They had found it in his dead mother's rooms. She had already destroyed him by the time he was old enough to talk, so he had no fear of her now.

He opened the flask and sniffed at its contents. There was very little smell, only the sharp tang of metal. Taking one last look around his rooms, Nophel put the lip of the flask to his mouth and upended it.

His saliva drew back, something pushing it across his tongue and around the insides of his cheeks, and his mouth flooded with cold. He gasped and dropped the flask, leaning back in his metal-framed chair. When he breathed out, his breath misted before him, quickly dissipating in the warmth. Speckles of moisture clung on to his wispy mustache and beard. Blue Water, he thought, and when he tried to hold his hand up before his face, his arm would not work. There's something wrong, he thought, closing his eyes to hold down the panic. Death had never been a fear for Nophel, but he was no lover of pain.

He tried once more to lift his arm and hand, turn it before his face… but again it did not work. "Am I paralyzed?" he asked, and as his mouth opened to speak, the words came out. He tapped his feet against the floor, and the impacts were clearly audible. Leaning forward in the chair, he stood smoothly, feeling no impingement in any muscles or joints.

Lift again, he thought, and this time he knew he lifted his hand. He felt air moving against the tiny hairs on his forearm as it shifted position. Sending the command to bring his hand closer to his face so he could see, he slapped himself across the nose.

"I can't see my hand," he said. Nophel looked down, and he was no longer there. At least not completely, though there were shadows in the air where none should be cast, and when he moved those shadows shifted. He ran both hands across his chest and stomach, down across his groin, bending so that he could run them all the way down his legs to his feet. He felt the cool air touching his body and stirring at his movements, but he saw only a hint of himself.

Nophel laughed. His mother had touched him again, from the distance of twenty years and through the veil of death. He only hoped that wherever her body and soul were still falling into the bottomless Chasm, she felt his derision and hatred more strongly than ever before.

He shrugged on a long, heavy coat. For a moment it hung on nothing, then slowly it faded until it, too, was little more than shadow. He had not been sure, but he was pleased that he could go clothed, and armed, and ready to face whatever might be out there. It wasn't often that Nophel ventured into the city, and even unseen he felt danger pressing down on him already.

"Good," he said, standing before a tall mirror and not seeing himself. And he began to concentrate. I am there, he thought. That's me, I am there… It did not take very long. The Blue Water acted on the minds of those around him, rather than on his own physiology, and knowing that enabled him to control its effects upon his own mind. The initial shock had rendered him invisible to himself, and that had been comforting. It meant that the strange fluid was working. But now he focused upon those shadows in the mirror, shifting left and right so that he could see them becoming thicker, stronger, until the shadows had gone and he saw himself. It was unsettling, but Nophel had been ready for it. He manifested out of surprise, formed from nothing, and by the time he could look in the mirror and no longer see bookshelves through the back of his head, he knew that it was time to go.

He left his rooms and locked the door. Walking softly through the darkened corridors of Hanharan Heights, he headed down ramps and staircases toward the wide courtyards surrounding them. He passed a maid, a whore, and a group of Scarlet Blades playing nine-sided dice against a wall, and the only reaction he saw was from the whore. She paused before him, gathering her robes around her and pressing her forefinger across her tattooed lips in the familiar Hanharan blessing. Frowning, she moved quickly on.

Outside, the setting sun cast his shadow across ancient pavings as he started his journey north. He knew that few people would see that long shadow, and if they did they would run in the opposite direction.

I'm safe, he thought. My bitch mother has made me safe. The streets of Marcellan Canton were busy as dusk approached. People rode toward home in one of the seven giant steam wagons, their faces wan and tired from a day spent working in whichever bank, government office, or shop employed them. The wagons rolled on circular tracks around the canton, moving every hour except one each day, when their reservoirs were refilled and their engines rewound. Nophel stood beside the track as one passed by, and if anyone noticed the man-shaped hollow in the steam cloud, they made no sign.

Many other people chose to walk or ride in tusked-swine-pulled trailers. The streets smelled of cooking food, dust-tainted steam, ale and wine from one of the taverns doing a brisk dusk trade, and swine shit. Nophel walked confidently, enjoying the looks of befuddlement as he passed people by. Perhaps some glimpsed a flicker of what he was, but then the Blue Water influence would work its mystery upon their senses, and he'd be gone before they knew why they felt so confused or unsettled. More than one person stopped in their tracks and started to talk to him-but found themselves muttering into thin air. Some blushed and hurried on, heads bowed so that they did not have to see any observers' smiles or looks of concern. Others headed straight into taverns or restaurants, where the food and drink would divert them. Only a few turned and watched him leave, not seeing, not knowing, but watching nonetheless. These, Nophel guessed, were the ones most likely to suffer nightmares.

He had no wish to inspire nightmares. He bore no ill will toward anyone alive. But this disguise would soon become a necessity, and he kept that in mind as he walked on. And there was that subtle feeling of power that he had experienced only once before.

Then, he'd been alone in his rooms. The walls had been lined with fewer books, the furniture slightly less worn and shaped to his bones and flesh, and he'd waited while they went to find his mother.

Nophel was the god of quiet things, and though cloaked in the Blue Water's strange effect, he still kept to the shadows beside buildings, seeking out streets and alleys that were quieter than most. Once he slipped on some damp cobbles and went sprawling, crying out as his elbow struck the ground. He looked around to see who had noticed and rolled into the mouth of a recessed doorway. Breathing hard, his heart thumping, he rubbed his elbow as the tingling pain lessened.

Someone laughed.

Nophel caught his breath and looked around. The darkening street seemed deserted. It was lined with residential buildings with tall windows and closed doors, and there was a series of scaffold towers where these old places were being built over. The laughter came again, high and gleeful, and he leaned out of the doorway and looked along the street. Three children were playing catch a few houses along, bouncing the ball off a building's facade and seeing who could catch it first. The smallest and youngest of the three laughed each time she threw or caught. The other two played silently.

Nophel did not understand children, but for a beat this sight gave him pause.

He moved on, the feeling of power subdued now, driven down by the force of expectation hanging over him. Dane had sent him out on his own-no one from the Council's famed and brutal Inner Guard to accompany him, and no Scarlet Blades-and he'd done so because he trusted Nophel. You have their ear, Dane had once said, standing on the roof and watching Nophel tend and turn the Scopes. They're my brothers and sisters, Nophel had replied, and that was one of the few times he'd ever seen a look of fear on the fat politician's face. Cosseted from reality, such a man rarely had to confront such mystifying truths.

Nophel walked through the night, traversing the wealthy areas of Marcellan, where huge houses were surrounded by gardens so vast and lush that the buildings were almost invisible from the streets. Many Scarlet Blades patrolled these areas, their garb more refined than most Blades' clothing, their weapons polished, their attitude one of reserved watchfulness rather than the casual superiority exuded by Blades elsewhere in Echo City. They walked in pairs, conversing quietly as they passed from one splash of oil-lamp light to the next. Nophel stood aside in the shadows, thrilling at the feeling of being so close. A couple of Blades paused in their stride and conversation, looking around with hands on the handles of their renowned weapons-the knowledge to cast and fold such swords was long-lost, though many attempted to re-create their qualities-but eventually their companions urged them on. You're seeing shadows, they said, or, It's just the breeze, the wind, a phantom. And Nophel passed through, the god of quiet things, still finding shadows to his liking, though he went unseen.

Close to dawn, nearing Marcellan Canton's sheer outer wall, he waited patiently while a street trader set up his food stall and started cooking diced chickpig and pancakes for the breakfast trade. When the big man sauntered off to piss behind a tree, Nophel snapped up a pancake, smeared the steaming meat across its surface, spooned on dart-root sauce, folded it, and tucked it beneath his coat. He hurried past the pissing man, unsure whether the food would be visible. Rounding a corner, he saw the canton wall, and he climbed fifty-six steps to its ramparts to eat. Relishing the first hot mouthful, he sighed and took in the view.

Beyond the wall began the gorgeous green farmland of the northern arm of Crescent. Three miles away, beyond the haze already rising from the rashpoison canal the Dragarians had built hundreds of years before to protect their privacy, he could see the massive domes that made up Dragar's Canton. They seemed to float above the haze, like giant stoneshrooms sprouting from the heart of the land. Just to the east, the rising sun glanced from the surface of the Northern Reservoir.

I saw something open, something come out, and it closed again, and what I saw…

He shook his head and took another bite, and that was when he noticed the woman sitting to his left. She was perhaps fifty steps away, seated on one of the many stone benches that littered the head of the great Marcellan wall. Long, loose hair, a pale face, the worn, tattered uniform of a Scarlet Blade who had seen one too many battles or drunk through one too many nights of decadence. She was alone. And she was looking directly at him.

Nophel paused with the last chunk of pancake held against his lips. He glanced in the other direction. No, fool, don't pretend, she's looking at you!

When he glanced back, she was already walking toward him. She was tall and thin and ragged, but her stride was strong and confident. She paused a few steps away, staring directly at his disfigured face without reaction.

Nophel leaned to his left, and her eyes followed him. She frowned, then smiled slightly. Amused, but only a little.

"New?" she asked.

"What?"

"You. New? Yeah, a new one. So what did they tell you?"

"I'm sorry…" Nophel said, shaking his head.

"The Marcellans-what did they offer you if you drank that fucking stuff?"

They died, they all died, he thought, but already he knew that was wrong. No… they disappeared.

"Doesn't matter," the woman said. She held out her hand, and with a wry, cynical smile said, "I'm Alexia, of the other Echo City. Welcome to the world of the Unseen."

He followed her along the head of the wall to a stone spiral staircase leading down to the street. A woman turned at the sound of footsteps, but Nophel was sure it was only his that she heard. Alexia was as silent as she was invisible.

At the foot of the wall, she headed back into the warren of Marcellan streets. There was no explanation, no glance over her shoulder. Nophel followed, and even if he decided to follow no more, he was not entirely sure he could simply stop. How many? he was wondering. How many have tried the Blue Water over the last twenty years? How many have been forced to try it?

They stopped outside a sunken door leading to a building all but subsumed beneath a new structure. Not yet an Echo, this was a place soon to be forgotten. He supposed it was an apt hiding place.

"Here we are," Alexia said. "We go downstairs. Quietly." She spoke in the clipped, brusque tones of the military, but though she still wore a tattered uniform, the dyed armbands of rank had either faded or been deliberately bleached away. As she pushed open a heavy wooden door and entered a large, low-ceilinged room, Nophel found himself facing a dozen frightened people.

"There's no breeze," one of them said. Nobody responded. They were all looking directly at Nophel, and he felt naked and insecure, baking in their regard.

Alexia walked into the room, between several seated people. They were playing a tabletop version of lob dice, the dice now abandoned. She paused at the head of a staircase, glanced back, and smiled. "Come on," she said, and they didn't even hear her. "You'll get used to it."

Suddenly I don't want to, Nophel thought. He walked through the room, stepping lightly, careful not to nudge past anyone. The people remained staring at the opened front door, and as Nophel reached the staircase and started descending after Alexia, a man stood.

"I'll do it, then," he growled, striding to the door and slamming it shut. "You're all chickpig cocks."

"Yeah, and you're so brave, Mart," a woman said, snorting like a chickpig. The forced humor lifted the atmosphere a little. As Nophel went down the curved staircase out of sight, he heard the clatter of dice once more.

Alexia turned left and walked along a narrow, tatty corridor, then entered a doorless room where four other people sat. They looked up as Alexia entered, their eyes going wide when they saw Nophel.

"Got a new one," Alexia said.

"That's the dead Baker's son!" one of the other Unseen gasped. "He's the one that tends the Scopes."

"I know who he is," Alexia said.

Nophel paused in the doorway and looked around the room. There were a few broken chairs but no other furniture. No food. No water bottles. This was nowhere near a home, and he wondered what these people were doing here.

"Are you dead?" he asked, the question unforced and unconscious.

They laughed, some more than others. Alexia smiled. "No," she said.

"Yes," someone else said. Another Unseen shrugged.

Nophel focused inward, sensing the solid part of himself that had never let go since his mother had abandoned him. It was strong, this part, and rooted in the real world, because even back then he'd known that he would need a solid foundation to survive. When he opened his one good eye again, the people were all looking at him.

"Still here," Alexia said.

"You all drank the Blue Water?" he asked. They nodded. My mother's Blue Water. He wondered if they knew, and if they'd blame him if they did. He hoped not.

"Did they force you?" Alexia asked.

Nophel shook his head. "I'm here to find something."

"Something from out of Dragar's."

Nophel could only nod. How does she know so much?

"We've been watching," she said. "Sometimes…" She trailed off, her thin face falling slack.

"Sometimes what?" Nophel asked. Alexia stared at him.

"New?" she asked.

"You've already asked me that."

"I have?"

Nophel took a step back into the corridor. The walls were rotting here, the plaster damp and weak, and the joints between floorboards were wide and decayed. Small insects crawled in and out of the space between floors, appearing, disappearing again, and most of them had probably never been seen.

"We've seen what you want," Alexia said from the room. There was no plea to her voice, and no hint of threat. Simply a statement of fact.

"Who are you all?" Nophel asked.

"The Unseen," Alexia said. "I told you that. We're like you."

"No, I can go back. I can-"

"Is that what they told you?" She came and stood at the doorway, the others shifting slightly behind her, moving in a strange, fluid way.

"I know it," Nophel said.

Alexia only nodded. "It's how most of us thought, to begin with. It's a way to try to handle it."

"You are dead," Nophel said, and Alexia chuckled at that.

"Sometimes we wish," she said, "but no. Not dead. Just… faded."

Nophel leaned against the door frame and looked into the room. The other Unseen were still there, but the room seemed hazy, incomplete.

"And we fade more and more," Alexia whispered. "Some become invisible even to the Unseen, and who's to say…?" She shrugged, as though loath to consider her future.

Dane would never have lied to me, Nophel thought. Not if he'd known about this. "My mother made the Blue Water," he said.

"We know." For the first time, there was a sliver of ice in the Unseen woman's eye.

"So you'll know that she was my mother only in blood. In every other way, she was nothing to me."

"Defending yourself?" Alexia asked, then offered a humorless smile. "It's widely known you helped kill her."

Nophel nodded. "So, Dragar's Canton. Tell me what you saw."

"I can do better than that," Alexia said. "We captured it. Come with me and I'll show you."

When they reach the surface, the sun casts its light on the sheer tiled steeple of a Hanharan temple. A man is standing on the precarious iron balustrade around the temple's summit. He's reaching up for the stone birthshard-Echo City's outline balanced in the palm of an outstretched hand-which is the eternal symbol of Hanharan's birth and continuing love for the city. He's stretching, and Rufus (that's not my name, not here, not now, but it's all I know it will do it will suffice)

– can see the slashes and cuts on the man's back as his shirt rides up. And even from this distance-the birthshard stands proud on the steeple's summit, perhaps a hundred steps above the street-Rufus sees that they are still bleeding. The man is raging.

People in the crowd around Rufus are shaking their fists at the man, throwing stones that barely reach halfway and cursing his and his family's name to the pits of the Chasm. Four Scarlet Blades are battering at the temple's main door, but though they have it open and Rufus can see a sliver of flickering light from the thousands of candles always burning inside, the man must have barricaded it. So the soldiers push, and soon other people join them in attempting to break in.

But Rufus has eyes for only the man. He's going to die, he thinks. He might fall, or if he doesn't they'll get in and shoot him down with a crossbow. Or if he grabs the birthshard and gets back into the temple, they'll stab him to death when he's on his way down the staircases…

The man stands on the edge of the balustrade and leans against the spire, gaining himself a vital extra reach. He shouts in triumph as he closes his hand around one of Hanharan's fingers, and the street crowd gasps at such blasphemy.

It's only a statue, Rufus whispers, and he looks up at his mother. She smiles down at him, and he sees surprise in her eyes, and pride. And something else. Sadness? He's not sure, but it's something he'll ask her about later. There's always something to ask later, because Rufus is an inquisitive little boy.

The man tugs, his blood spatters onto the temple spire-red rosettes on the spread of familiar pale gray pigeon shit-and Hanharan's index finger snaps off in his hand.

This time, the crowd cannot even gasp. It holds its breath, and for a moment that congested scene is utterly silent. It terrifies Rufus, and he has the staggering idea that he is seeing a moment between moments, as if time itself has been stretched to the breaking point by this man's blasphemy and Rufus is the only one to exist in and through that moment. It's something else he will ask his mother about later, and when he does she will stare at him for a long, long time and then shake her head and whisper to herself that he has to go.

The man breaks the silence and moves time on. After climbing so far and dooming himself to perform such a useless protest, his trust in the strength of Hanharan is his downfall. Still clasping the stone forefinger in his fist, he tilts backward and falls.

Around Rufus, people turn away or cover their children's eyes. He and his mother watch. Learning never ends, she said to him once, and watching feeds knowledge.

Rufus notices that the Scarlet Blades have disappeared inside the temple. Too late, he thinks, and he takes confused delight in the fact that the man has denied them their kill.

The blasphemer strikes the steeply sloping spire on his back, then slides to its edge. Several tiles come with him as he falls, and he turns slowly so that he strikes the cobbled street on his front. The sound is heavy and wet, and Rufus hears snapping. People pull away, but he and his mother stand still. The man spasms.

Someone from the crowd-Rufus knows him as a baker from three streets over, a cheery man with bright white teeth and rosy cheeks-runs to the body, pulling a huge knife from his belt. He hacks off the dying man's arm and shifts it aside with his boot, careful not to touch the blood-soaked stone finger still clasped in the hand.

Why did he do that? Rufus asks.

Because he's a fool, his mother says. And later she will tell him about false gods and idolatry, all the while watching him with her sad, tragic eyes.

"Rufus?" Peer said. "Rufus?" She grabbed the tall man's arm as he leaned against her, pushing her back against the wall. He raised one hand and pointed up at the temple roof.

"Finger…" he whispered.

"Yeah, it's gone." She'd noticed the birthshard's fault years before, but no one could tell her how it happened. Entropy, Gorham had suggested, and, progress. Now she looked at Rufus's startled expression and wondered.

"What is it?" Malia asked. They'd only just emerged onto the street, and the last thing they wanted was to draw attention. They had to cross the border into Crescent at night, and they wanted to be in the Baker's labs by dawn. A holdup now would be a bad start.

"He's fine," Peer said. She grabbed Rufus's upper arm and squeezed hard, and his head snapped around.

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then said, "He fell."

"Fine, but we have to go." She moved off, still holding his arm, and Rufus followed. As they left the street, Peer glanced back up at the temple spire and the damaged birthshard; the moon cast a weak red glow across the tiles, like the smudge of old blood. He fell, Rufus said. She shook her head and decided to ask him about it later.

Few built-up districts of Echo City were completely quiet at night-if they did not sing to the tune of revelers, they groaned to the sound of streets and buildings settling into their foundations, as if enticed down by the past beneath them. But here was less bustle, because most of the businesses in shop areas were closed, and much of the manufacturing trade worked mainly during daylight hours. Nighttime walkers were also more relaxed, because generally they were out for enjoyment or leisure, eating and drinking at some of the hundreds of taverns and restaurants dotted around the city. Different areas specialized in disparate food and drink, and it was not uncommon for dusk to see a vast emigration of people from one canton to another.

But the night also brought dangers. Peer was Mino Mont born and bred, and she knew that the Southern Quarter of that canton was a no-go area after dark unless you wanted drugs, illegal drink, or had a mind to sell your sex. There were gangs that made the Rage gang back in Skulk look like an orchid-arranging class, and she'd heard many stories in her youth of youngsters who ventured there searching for adventure, never to be seen again. She'd asked her mother why the Marcellans allowed the quarter's continued existence, and her mother's reply had been pointed: Do you think they have any choice? For a young Peer, that idea-that the Marcellans were not as all-powerful as the image they liked to project-had been a revelation. She wasn't sure that her interest in the Watchers had begun at that point, but she had always credited her long-dead mother with planting in her mind the concept of doubt and the inclination to interrogate rather than accept blindly.

Gorham went first, chatting casually with Devin and Bethy, another Watcher. Behind them, Malia, Peer, and Rufus walked together. Malia had produced a bottle of wine and she passed it back and forth. Peer enjoyed the deep fruity taste. Rufus would lift it to his mouth, but she was certain he never drank; he just let the wine touch his lips, leaving a blush there afterward. Peer sensed the tension around them all but hoped that no one else would.

I'm going to see the Baker's daughter, she thought. Back before she was arrested, tortured, and banished, stories of the Baker had terrified her. The Baker had been hunted and killed by the Scarlet Blades when Peer was a teenager, but she was a legendary character throughout Echo City, and many of her chopped constructs could still be seen. There was the Scope that Peer and her mother had once seen, and the larger Scopes that watched from the top of Marcellan Canton. There were Funnelers that drew air into the tunnels and routes passing through the higher parts of Marcellan. And, as a child, Peer and her friends had delighted to rumors of a series of monstrous chopped that existed within the many water refineries dotted along the riverbank in Course and Mino Mont Cantons. They eventually came to learn that the refineries were driven by rather more mundane technologies, but the memory of that belief persisted, as did the sense it had imbued within her that anything was possible. Sometimes she dreamed of the dead Baker and her creations, and anything was a dangerous thing.

They stopped for food and drink at a street restaurant close to the Western Reservoir. Lights bobbed out on the water as lantern fish leaped for night flies, and farther to the west they saw electrical storms out in the desert, lightning scratching out from places no living person had ever seen. Such displays had always disturbed Peer, because it made her realize that there was a land out there. Blank, featureless desert was easy to look at, because it was dead and barren and motionless. But a landscape where lightning struck was one in which something happened. She tried imagining the place where the lightning bolts hit, what they touched, whether they fused sand into glass.

Rufus stared out across the water and said little. Gorham and Malia chatted with the other two Watchers, and Peer was left sitting alone, drinking imported Mino Mont ale and letting the taste flare a surprising nostalgia. Her mother had drunk this brew, and she'd given Peer her first glass when she was twelve. Lots of growing up to do yet, she'd said, but this is a good place to start. She died a year later.

Peer was suddenly cold, and she laid a hand on her lower abdomen. Once, she had sensed Gorham's seed taking life within her, but the next moon had proved her wrong. And now, watching him trying to affect casualness while his eyes and expression remained stone-serious, she wondered whether that would have changed anything at all.

No, she thought. He'd have given me up despite that. She finished the ale and nudged Rufus, and they started walking away from the restaurant.

Gorham and the others hurried to catch up, and Gorham fell in beside her.

"What the crap are you doing?" he asked.

"We've dawdled long enough," she said. She had a headache from the pressure, and sweat coated her skin beneath the thick overshirt and coat.

"Peer-"

"You bastard," she said. "You fucking bastard."

Gorham fell back, silence betraying his shock. But some things can never be forgiven, and Peer hoped he realized that. She hoped he understood.

They crossed the border into Crescent soon after midnight, with the moon throwing their shadows before them. Gorham led the way, eyes darting left and right to ensure his peripheral vision scouted the route ahead. Since leaving the old jail, he'd had a sense of being watched and the idea that catastrophe was weighing heavily on all of them. With Peer following close behind, such a sensation brought back terrible memories.

He'd shut her away. That realization was slowly dawning on him, and each time he looked at her, his guilt bit in harder. They'd taken her and tortured her, then sent her to Skulk, and deep down-maybe deeper than he knew, and perhaps in primeval places where his humanity held little sway-he really had thought of her as dead. It was simpler that way, and any other concept, he knew now, would have made it impossible for him to function. There was a void of loss within him, true, and he remembered her smile, and sometimes the taste of her flooded back to him and the sound of her groaning against his neck as she came. But if these memories manifested when he was asleep, her groan would turn into a cry of pain, and however hard he looked he would not be able to find her. And so, awake, he had tried to ignore the fact that she was still alive. Guilt and pain had fed his delusion: that Skulk was an afterlife, a place where people went when they were dead, and there was no way back. Souls as well as corpses fell into the Chasm, so it was said. But Peer had never taken that fall, and so he had created his own mythology surrounding her departure.

And now here she was, as alive as he was, and in as much peril as all of them. He wanted to hug her and whisper that he was sorry-she had returned expecting to find her lover, not a man who had betrayed her-but that would never do. Worse than giving her up to the Marcellans and their Hanharan torturer, worse than sacrificing his love for what everyone told him was the greater good, was persuading himself to think of her as dead-and he was becoming more and more certain that she knew exactly what he had done.

And now they were going to see the Baker. If his overwhelming guilt could have a name, he would call it Nadielle.

The fields of Crescent were mostly deserted at night, home only to the wildlife that hid away during the day. As they followed the road that he had walked so recently toward the Baker's laboratories, cries and howls drifted across the fields, crops wavered and whispered where things passed by, and an expectant silence accompanied them from very close by. Things fell quiet when humans were near.

They met only a few people coming from the other direction, mostly traders hauling wagons laden with fruit and vegetables. One man walked alone with only a tall staff in one hand, a small bag in the other, and he did not glance at them as they passed on the narrow road. Peer tried to offer him a greeting-Gorham smiled at that, because she had always been garrulous and friendly-but the man did not even turn his head. Looking back as the stroller passed them by, Gorham caught Peer's eye and offered a tentative smile. She looked down at her feet. Garrulous once, yes, but now there was a caution to her that he had never seen before.

Of course, you fool. You caused that. He sighed angrily and marched on, picking up speed so that the others had to hurry to catch up.

A mile before the abandoned farm complex that hid their route down to the Baker, Gorham called a halt. To the west towered several mepple orchards, dark smudges against the moon- and starlit sky, and the vague lights from night wisps drifted in and around them as the creatures patrolled against fruit eaters. Other than the glow of Marcellan Canton to the east, theirs were the only lights visible in any direction. The landscape here was completely given to farmland, and the scattered farmsteads were shut down for the night, families resting for the next day of toil.

Gorham sat on a low stone wall at the side of the road, ignoring Malia's questioning glance.

"What is it?" Peer asked. Rufus sat on the ground against the wall, head rested back and eyes filled with moonlight.

"Not too far from here," he said, frowning slightly at Malia. Say nothing, that frown said. Malia looked away, taking a pipe from her pocket and thumbing it full of tobacco.

"So why are we stopping?"

"Because this way down to the Baker is a secret," he said. "It's the Watchers' way. Maybe she sees other people-with Nadielle, nothing would surprise me-but if she does, they'll have their own route to her laboratories."

Peer sat beside him on the wall. Not close enough for contact, but they could talk without having to raise their voices. On the ground beside her, Rufus had closed his eyes.

"I am a Watcher," she said.

"Peer-"

"You want to blindfold me? In case I'm caught and tortured and-"

"Please!" he said, and his voice sounded more beseeching than he'd intended.

She offered a weak smile that the starlight barely illuminated.

"Not you," he said. "Rufus. I don't want him seeing where we're going, and if you think about it for a minute you'll understand. Don't you understand?"

Peer looked at the tall man-he seemed to be dozing now, the rise and fall of his chest even and calm, even though he frowned deeply-and then rubbed her hands across her face. Gorham saw her wince as her right elbow bent, aggravating the air shards buried there.

"Of course," she said. "None of us really knows…" She rested a hand on Rufus's shoulder. He mumbled something and leaned against her leg.

"Nadielle will know what to do," Gorham said. She has to, he thought. And for a moment he almost told Peer about Nadielle and him, their confused and confusing relationship, but perhaps right then that would be a betrayal too far. I left a man in Skulk, she had told him, but he didn't believe she was talking about a lover. For all he knew, she had waited for him and there had been no one since her torture and banishment. He hoped there had, but it was a selfish hope, seeking only to assuage his own guilt.

"I'm looking forward to meeting her," Peer said. Gorham could not make out how honest his old lover was being. Her eyes, silvered by pale starlight, betrayed nothing.

He hears them talking, and then the feeling of the cold wall against his back is replaced by warm sheets, and blankets cover him against the cold coming off the womb vats in waves.

He sits up, stretching the sleep from his limbs and rubbing his eyes. Dawn peers in the row of high windows along the eastern face of the old warehouse. Dust motes dance in the sunlight, and several small birds flit back and forth between metal bracings high in the open roof space. Rufus stands from the bed (that's not my name, this is not my home)

– and looks around for his mother. As far as he can remember, he has never woken before she has. Even in the night, when screaming nightmares rouse him or illness shivers him awake with fever and sweats, she is already sitting on the edge of his bed, offering comfort. He is used to always having her with him, and whenever she is not in sight, he grows nervous.

There are no memories older than a few months, and the absence is one of his greatest fears. It is also the fear his mother does least to calm. There, there, she says when he talks about his lost years, it doesn't matter, only the now matters.

He dresses quickly and descends the ladder from the raised sleeping platform at one end of the warehouse. The stone floor below is cold, even though he wears thick-bottomed sandals, and a light mist plays around his ankles. If he concentrates, he can feel the cold mist kissing his skin. His mother will never tell him what she is working on next. Sometimes, the things she makes scare him. And sometimes they scare her as well. Once he asked why she did what she did, on an evening when tiredness seemed ready to wither her to nothing and tears hung suspended in her eyes-held back, he knew, only by her love and concern for him. Because it's all I can do, she had replied, and he had never heard her so low. The next day she'd been bright and cheery, as if the sun had reignited her optimism.

"Mother?" he calls. His voice echoes around the cavernous warehouse. It was once home to produce brought from Crescent on vast barges across the Western Reservoir, but when more people started crossing the border to select their own, the barges ceased sailing. Sometimes the room still stinks of rotten mepple and dart-root leaves. "Mother?"

There is no answer. He walks toward the vats, keeping close to the wall and sunlight because he never likes going too close. They're strange. Sometimes they vibrate as if something is turning around inside too fast to see; other times they drip water and tick, expanding and contracting as the processes work away. And occasionally he hears sounds. The scraping of bony, sharp things across their inner surfaces. Bubbles breaking surface. Whispers.

There are four large vats and then eight smaller ones, and by the time he's passed them all, Rufus is aching for a pee. This end of the warehouse is home to his mother's workrooms, several smaller areas partitioned off from the main hall by timber walls barely higher than her head. In one there is a toilet and a huge iron bath, and he heads there now to relieve himself and wash sleep and dreams from his skin.

"He's not yours yet," his mother's voice says. That's all. The silence that follows is heavy, like a bubble ready to burst or a claw about to scrape up the inside of a vat. Rufus (what is my name, what does she call me other than son…?)

– freezes, breath held and one foot raised. He lowers it gently, glancing down to avoid stepping on anything-grit, paper, an insect-that might make the slightest sound. He lets out his held breath, then opens his mouth to slowly draw in another.

And then the voice comes, and it sets his skin tingling.

"All for us, Baker. Our commission, Baker." It's a horrible voice, wet and guttural, and each word is formed by someone or something that does not usually speak the language. And though awkward and forced, its disdain for his mother is palpable.

"He's not quite ready," his mother says. She sounds weak. Rufus is not used to that.

He sees most of the people his mother works for, and though he does not really understand the forces of commerce when applied to his mother's gifts and talents, he likes the fact that they have visitors. Smiling Hanharan priests with their soft hands and ready smiles, Scarlet Blade soldiers wearing smart uniforms and swords, businessmen from Marcellan Canton with strange ideas that his mother nods at, adapts, and re-creates; they all provide color and variety to the days, now that…

Now that she no longer takes him out. It's too dangerous, she said recently, and that was after she'd been drinking wine and sinking lower and lower in her wide seat. Since then she'd forbidden him to ask why.

Rufus moves softly, slowly, heading for the door leading to a small storeroom. It is always left open because his mother says, Stuff in there needs to air. He touches the cool wood and waits for that deep, strange voice to come again before pushing it open. He cannot quite hear the words this time-the voice is lower and quieter, a burgeoning threat. In the room, he breathes easier and looks around.

None of these partitioned rooms has a ceiling. He looks at where the sloping ceiling of the great hall meets the outside wall at the far end of the storeroom. There are shadows there, and heavy spiderwebs. And, piled in the corner, wooden boxes that he can never recall seeing opened, moved, or touched.

The conversation continues, his mother's voice steady but afraid, the stranger's deep and difficult. Neither voice is raised, but Rufus has seen enough to know that there is nothing friendly here. It's too dangerous, his mother said, and he wonders whether, after this, staying inside will be too dangerous as well.

He climbs the boxes, taking his time. They creak and groan, but no one seems to hear. On the highest box, lying almost flat, he lifts his head slowly to peer over the top of the partition, and when he sees the thing talking to his mother, he draws in a sharp breath, ignoring the spider that is crawling across his forehead toward his left eye, not seeing his mother's startled look as she spots him… seeing nothing but the thing turning its head and fixing him with its piercing indigo eyes, then lowering slowly to its knees and stretching out its spidery hands for him "Rufus!" Peer was shaking him, slapping him softly around the face.

"What is it?" Malia asked.

"Nothing." She shook some more and Rufus started awake, pushing away from the wall and wiping at his left eye, his right hand held out before him to ward off something none of them could see. "It's fine," she said softly, grasping his seeking hand and squeezing tight.

"What's wrong with him?" Gorham demanded. "He was acting strange back in Course, and now this?"

"He's confused," Peer said. She resisted talking slowly, as to a child, because that would be petty. "He's overwhelmed and afraid."

"Well, try to calm him," Gorham said. "If he's worried now, when we go down to the Baker…" He trailed off, but the implication was clear.

"What's down there?" she asked, looking up at Gorham. He liked to stand that way, she remembered, while I took him in my mouth. Maybe it always was about dominance with him.

Gorham squatted close to her, glancing up at the Watchers and nodding along the road. Keep watch, that look said. Peer had yet to ask him how many Watchers there were left, and whether they all ever met, and what exactly he was now leading.

"She's careful," he said, glancing back and forth between Rufus and Peer. "She has to be. Not many people know about her, and as far as she's aware, the Marcellans think her mother died and left nothing. They think they ended the ancient line of Bakers, and she likes it that way."

"What happened to her work?" Rufus asked, and there was something more than curiosity in his voice.

"The old Baker? After she was killed, they destroyed everything. I can still remember the fire, though I was a teenager then. Didn't know what any of it meant, only that the Scarlet Blades had caught and executed… I think they called her a 'threat to the city.' The fire burned for three days, and by the time it started dwindling, they'd set up food stalls and ale wagons for the curious."

Rufus nodded, still holding Peer's hand. His own was slick with sweat.

"Why?" Gorham asked.

"I'm interested," Rufus said. "You're taking me to see this important woman, whom the rest of the city knows little about. The rulers of your city killed her mother. I'm wondering…" He looked away, and Peer thought, Just what is he wondering?

"The rulers of the city will kill you if they know about you," Gorham said. "Reason enough?"

Rufus nodded, smiled, and touched his forehead-a curious gesture that none of them recognized. "Sorry," he said.

"No need to apologize." Gorham stood. "We'll go down soon. Malia and I will go first. We know what to expect."

"And what's that?" Peer asked.

"Nadielle protects herself well. We'll meet chopped people on the way down. Just warning you."

Peer felt a thrill of fear and excitement, and Rufus nodded. He did not appear at all concerned.

When Gorham stood and chatted to Devin and Bethy, Peer leaned in to Rufus to help him up. "What did you dream?" she whispered.

"I don't know," he said. "A nightmare, I think. I don't like nightmares."

"Something from the desert?"

For a while he said nothing. They stood together against the wall, and he was still clasping her hand, like a frightened child hanging on to its mother.

"No," he said at last. "The desert is still a blank to me."

"Come on!" Gorham called. "A short walk this way, a short wait, and then say goodbye to the stars."

"Nice way of putting it," she mumbled, and, when she looked up, Gorham was looking at her as if he'd heard. Once, lying naked on the rooftop of her old family home in Mino Mont, the sweat of sex drying on their skin, they had each chosen and named a shape in the stars. She could remember neither shapes nor names-too much had happened since, her desire to forget too strong-but that sense of contentment and peace washed over her briefly now, surprising and powerful.

Then Gorham turned away, and she remembered what he had done. And even that memory felt as though he had abused her, not loved her, on that long-ago roof.

Markmay believed in that cruel mistress Fate, and he also believed that she could be read and predicted-translated from the meanderings of a beetle in a maze, the viscous drip of poison from a wisp's leg bladder, the sway of hanging chimes in a breezeless place. He traced the veins in a rubber plant's waxy leaves, then drew maps with the tracings, applying them to a book of shapes and shades handed down from his great-great-great-grandmother. By the time he reached the end of a mug of five-bean, he felt ready to read its message, discerning truths in the spatter of bean dregs. His mother had taught him how to do that, and he had many fond memories of sitting with her before a roaring fire, reading Fate's path in cooling bean shells. Some called him fool, but he would merely pass them by and content himself with seeing their deaths in a slab of shattered ice.

Today, Fate was telling him that something was coming.

Markmay's home was in the lower levels of Hanharan Heights-a complex of rooms, corridors, and staircases that wound around, above, and below other dwellings. He had no windows in his home and only one doorway, but the places where he ate, slept, and fucked were twisted around and through the daily life of Echo City. Those around him were not aware of the shape of his home. They put occasional scrapings and thumps down to the mass of buildings around them expanding and settling with the sun. But Markmay knew better. His home was a maze, and when he watched those beetles in their smaller mazes, he saw himself. At the end, when he killed them and took them apart to read the truth of their insides, his own guts ached in sympathy.

In one room, seven heavy bone chimes hung from knots of chickpig hair cast into the plaster ceiling. He sat among them for a while, trying to still his thumping heart lest it transfer to the chimes and spoil his reading. He closed his eyes, breathing slowly and deeply, but the excitement was there. Something coming, he kept thinking, because as yet he had no idea what. Stilled at last, he opened his eyes slowly and looked around.

Six of the bone chimes were swaying, too slightly to set their parts colliding and singing but moving nonetheless. There was never any air movement in Markmay's home-that would spoil so many readings-other than when he moved. He watched the chimes, then looked closer at the bone that did not move. It was the longest of them, its knuckle weight closest to the floor.

Markmay leaned slowly to his side and crawled from the room. He left a trail of sweat on the wooden floor behind him. His home was not hot.

He hurried up a curving staircase to a circular room. This was the highest part of his home. Its walls flickered with the light from seventy-seven candles-one for each of the six-legged gods supposed to wander the desert, though Markmay held no allegiance to any such foolish superstitions-and when he closed the heavy door behind him, they danced like excited puppies. He sat in the center of the room and repeated his calming process from before: slower breathing, settled heart, motionless.

When he opened his eyes, the candles were still agitated. Those that danced the most burned with a purple flame, and Markmay knocked several over in his panic while leaving the room. He slammed the door shut behind him and knew he must refer to the book.

Back down the circular staircase, across an empty room, along a doorless corridor, down another twisting staircase that wrapped a Hanharan priest's home like a secretive snake, and in a wide, low-ceilinged room Markmay sat at a table and opened the huge book it held. He went to one page, back to another, forward almost to the end, and all the while he was making notes with a rockzard-spine pen on a pad of rough paper. Sweat dripped from his nose and chin onto the paper, and he wiped it away. It smudged the ink, but that did not matter. This was recording, not reading, and the next person to read this would not be concerned with smudges.

Markmay had the ear of Wendie Marcellan, one of the more senior members of the Council. She told him that none of the others knew of her predilection for Markmay's unusual readings-indeed, she had hinted more than once that some would find it blasphemous-but Markmay knew the Marcellans to be not quite so virtuous as they seemed. He was almost certain that there were other readers informing other Council members, but that did not concern him. He was the best, Wendie paid him well, and whenever he asked, she sent one of her whores to keep him company for the night.

When he finished his notes, he sat back and stared at the filled page. He was shaking his head.

"Not good," he whispered. He rarely spoke to himself, and his voice was loud in the normally silent dwelling. A feeling of dread had settled upon him, and his insides were in revolt-heart thundering, stomach churning, and a pain in his right side like a hot dagger driven between his ribs. It was as if his body and home were so closely linked that he mimicked the upset of swaying chimes, the heat of agitated flames…

And one more thing to check. If this read true, there was much to tell Wendie, and she would have to reveal his knowledge to the Council. How she would do this-tell the truth, make up lies-he did not care.

But they would have to be warned. Perhaps then they could prepare, plan, protect the city from what was about to befall it.

"Please, no," he said as he descended staircases, squeezed through small rooms he rarely frequented, and climbed down a vertical metal ladder. "Please, no. Please, no." He imagined the people living in the homes around which his rooms and corridors were wrapped, and what their reaction would be if they heard the faint echoes of his voice. Phantoms! they might say to one another. Or they might say nothing at all.

Finally he reached the deepest room in his dwelling, one that intruded into the first Echo beneath Hanharan Heights. He had been down here only three times before, and each time he had climbed those stairs again with a sense of relief that things had not gone badly. This time, lighting candles around the room and kicking out at several large sand spiders that had made this space their own, those relieved retreats inspired a nostalgia for good times past. Before even taken his final reading, Markmay knew that everything was going wrong.

"How in the name of Hanharan are the priests going to account for this?" he muttered. The last sand spider scuttled away, melted down, and flowed into an impossible crack, and Markmay set about making the marks.

He trailed handfuls of dust across the floor from a bag hanging on the wall, creating spirals, straight lines, and other patterns with distinct edges. A pile of dust here, a carefully scooped bowl there, and if he dripped sweat he removed the affected area. There must be nothing here that would mislead his reading. Nothing to skew results.

Before he announced the doom of Echo City, he had to be certain.

Several people sitting outside a tavern saw the panicked man burst from the doorway and dart out into the street. His eyes were wide, his hair standing on end, and his hands were clawing at the air as if to grab some down or to haul himself up into the sky.

"It's coming!" he shouted, and his voice was torn with terror.

"There's that reader, Markmay," one of the drinkers said. "I've heard he's mad."

"Coming! Rushing! Rising!"

"Well, he certainly looks-"

A combined gasp went up from the crowd of drinkers as the mad Markmay rushed headlong across the street, straight into the path of a runaway dray. Weighed down with thirty full barrels of fine Marcellan ale, the wagon was hauled by four tusked swine. One of them had died in its harness, and the other three were running in a blind panic, shit and blood streaking from the suspended dead beast as their hooves trampled it.

They ran Markmay down. Even as the dray's front left wheel rolled across his neck, he was still shouting, "Rising. It's-"

Such is Fate. The cruelest mistress. I can't be like this forever, Nophel thought. It's like living among phantoms. But, of course, here he was the phantom. And he had seen what had become of Alexia and the other Unseen.

Where do you live? he'd asked her as she led him out through the gaming room and back onto the streets.

Here. There. She'd seemed confused.

Where do you sleep? Eat?

Some of us… we don't need food. We're removed from the world.

You told me you weren't ghosts, he'd said.

She'd frowned at that, averted her eyes, but not before he saw her fear and doubt.

So he followed her as she weaved through the streets, avoiding people with an expertise that looked effortless but, Nophel discovered, was hard-won. Several times he breezed too close to someone, his arm brushing theirs or his hair stroking the exposed skin of their neck. These people would glance around, startled, and at least twice he was convinced that they saw him, their pupils dilating as they focused, their brows creasing as they tried to make sense of things. Then their eyes grew hazy and their frowns deepened as they turned and hurried away. Once, he walked right into an old woman carrying a basket of fresh silk snake eggs, knocking her to the ground. She cried out as the eggs spilled and broke, spewing their bright yellow innards across the pavement. Alexia glanced back and only smiled, and as Nophel rushed away, he saw the startled old woman's gaze focusing on the footprint he'd left in the yolks.

He caught up with Alexia and grabbed her arm. "How far?"

"Almost there," she said. She pulled her arm away and walked on. He raised his hand to his nose, smelling only himself. It's more than just the Blue Water, he thought. That started it, but she's moved on from there, disappeared some more.

Alexia marched from a street, through a narrow alleyway stinking of something dead, and into a courtyard enclosed on four sides by tall, windowed walls. None of these windows was open, and Nophel had a feeling that few people ever looked down into this place. She walked toward the far corner, skirting around a dry fountain erupting with purple knotweed, and opened a low wooden door set into the moss-covered wall. It creaked on rusted hinges, and Nophel caught a whiff of something stale and wet.

"We're going down," she said.

"The Echoes?"

"Not that far. Just down. These buildings are a warren, and the Unseen have the time and inclination to explore. We found this place after we caught…" She trailed off.

"Caught what?"

She stared over Nophel's shoulder and into the distance, and for an instant she seemed to fade from his view.

"Alexia!" He reached out to grab her, his hand slipping from her arm. Then she grew more visible again, smiling uncertainly.

"Yes?" she said.

"You were going to show me." He felt a cold chill at what he had seen, what she had become. Are there deeper levels? he thought. Do they fade, and fade again, until they're little more than memories wandering these streets?

"Yes," she said, nodding slowly. "Oh, yes." She turned and entered the dark doorway, and immediately Nophel saw her dropping out of sight.

The steps were steep and slick, turning tightly around their central column, treads worn by use. He counted twenty before the first sounds reached him-the clank of metal, and the sniffle of something sobbing.

"It's awake," Alexia said.

The descent ended, the stairway opening into a small low-ceilinged room. One wall was lined with empty wine racks, the wood rotten and slumped toward the ground. In a corner lay a pile of roughly folded canvas that could have hidden anything. In the center of the room, a creature was fixed to the floor with a series of heavy chains.

It growled at their approach. It looked almost human.

It sees us, Nophel thought, but the idea did not surprise him. What did surprise him was what he saw on the creature's back.

"It has wings," he said.

"We tied them folded shut."

"But… it's a Dragarian. With wings."

"Surprised me too," Alexia said softly.

Nophel had heard so much about the Dragarians, but he had never thought he'd see one. They were apart from the world, the six giant domes enclosing their canton simply part of the landscape now for most Echoians. When they'd withdrawn five hundred years before, they were human. Now…

The thing before him was humanoid, though it was thinner than most people, and its piercing indigo eyes were disconcerting. Its broader facial features, body shape, all but the wings marked it out as a human being. Nophel thought it wore leather clothing before realizing the wings folded around its torso gave that impression.

"How did you catch it?" Nophel asked.

"It didn't see us," she said. "Now it does. It learned of us when we brought it down, and the Blue Water has a different effect on its mind. It doesn't forget."

"Brought it down?"

Alexia pointed, and then Nophel saw the dark slick beneath the Dragarian's chest.

"Crossbow?" he asked. She nodded.

The thing stared at Nophel, its eyes blazing in the weak oil lamplight as if focused upon him.

"It's concentrating," Alexia said. "Bringing you into being."

I need to talk with this, he thought. I need to find out why it came out, where it was going, and what it was looking for. He looked at the Unseen, in her faded and stained Scarlet Blade uniform, and wondered at her allegiances. She'd faded into invisibility, and some of those she waited with seemed to have gone further. He had heard many stories about the phantoms inhabiting the Echoes and how they could not be relied on to know anything but the exposure of moments from the past. Could he really trust such a thing?

"Why did you catch it?" he asked.

"Sport," the Dragarian said. Its voice was a growl, like flesh across grit. It ended with a grunt of pain, and for the first time Nophel considered it as a living thing.

"You didn't tell me it speaks Echoian," Nophel muttered.

Alexia chuckled darkly. "Sometimes we can't get it to stop."

"They shot me down for sport," the Dragarian said. "And because it's in the nature of humanity to destroy what it does not know."

"And what do you know?" Nophel asked.

The Dragarian averted its eyes, wincing slightly as it shifted position. Chains clanked, its wings flexed against their bonds. "More than you, ghost."

Dane charged me with bringing this thing back to him, Nophel thought. But it had teeth, and its fingers and toes ended in claws, and even its wingtips were bony and sharp, glittering with moistness that could have been poison. He looked to Alexia, considering asking her for help. But her eyes had taken that faraway look again, and she seemed even less substantial than before.

The Dragarian looked at him and grinned, exposing too many teeth for a human.

"What are you?" Nophel asked. The Dragarian did not respond, but Nophel already knew. He was one of their soldiers. The Marcellans had their Scarlet Blades and the specially trained units within their ranks used to infiltrate, kidnap, or murder. The Dragarians had this. Before they had built their domes and retreated, they vowed that the prophesied return of the murdered boy they had proclaimed their god would bring war. It seemed that under cover of their domes, they had been preparing.

"You've come to spy," Nophel said.

"No," the Dragarian replied.

"Then why?"

"Seeing the sights." The thing sniggered, shifting position again to move weight from its punctured chest.

"What has it told you?" Nophel asked Alexia, but she frowned, appearing not to have heard or understood the question. She looked at Nophel as if she had never seen him before, and when he stepped forward and reached for her, she shrank away, fading as she moved. "Alexia!"

The flying thing laughed some more. Nophel glanced at it, anger seething, and when he looked back, Alexia was climbing the stairs. He grabbed for her leg but missed. As he ascended, she faded from view completely, and he knew then that she was climbing these stairs somewhere else, seeing a different view, and perhaps he was nothing in her memory at all.

He paused on that tightly curving staircase, leaning on a step and catching his breath, trying to work out what to do. Dane would expect him to return with something-and Nophel could not help feeling that there was more to the Blue Water than Dane had told him. It had been easy drinking it down, but perhaps the antidote would be more difficult to procure.

Mother, he thought, have you doomed me again? The old anger bit in-rage at what she had done to him-as well as a desperate fear that he had willingly invited another Baker-inspired tragedy into his life. He slowed his breathing and calmed his mind, knowing that panic could never help. She was dead. Anything that happened now was up to him.

The thing in the basement had called him ghost. He had to show it that ghosts could bite.

Nophel moved quickly. As he stepped down into the basement room again, the Dragarian turned its attention upon him, confirming that he could still be seen.

"Has your friend left-" it began, but Nophel gave it no chance to continue. He stepped on one stretched chain, forcing the creature low to the ground and crushing its injured chest against the stone. As it screamed in surprised agony, he straddled it, pulled his knife, and sat heavily on its back. He felt the wings against his thighs, warm thin things with blood pumping visibly through thick veins.

He grabbed the Dragarian's hair-it was greasy and slick, and he had to twist it around his hand to maintain a grip-and pulled its head back. He nestled the knife against its exposed throat. Its cries and struggles ceased. The basement became very quiet but for the rhythm of blood pounding through Nophel's ears.

"You will find," he said, "that this ghost is not as ineffectual as you might believe."

"You're just like them," the thing said. "You'll fade to nothing soon enough."

"They might fade, but they still shot you down."

"Unfair advantage."

It speaks as though it knows of the Blue Water, he thought. Perhaps it was bluffing, hinting at knowledge it could not own. He would have to be cautious if he was to expose the information he sought.

"It's been a long time since you opened your doors to the rest of Echo City," Nophel said.

"You'd be surprised." It spoke carefully, cautious not to increase the pressure of the blade against its throat. Nophel pulled a little harder, feeling the warm drip of blood on his fisted hand. The Dragarian caught its breath.

"What have you come for?"

"What have you?" the thing replied, and for a moment Nophel wanted to slit its throat. If it thought it could play with him, enter into word games while he was the one with the knife But, game or not, its question rooted in Nophel's mind. What had he come for? To question this thing and serve the Marcellans? Or to seek out something for himself?

"I've done this before," Nophel said, pulling the knife harder. He felt a slight give as it split the thing's skin, and he swallowed the sick feeling rising in him. He could not betray his lie for a moment, or else the Dragarian would never give him anything. It had to believe completely that he was ready to torture and kill it, and once that belief was implanted, he might have a short while to dig for real answers. "I usually start with the eyes, but with you, strange thing that you are, I think the wings will have to go first. You'll fight. I'm sure of that. You're a soldier, after all. But these chains will contain your fight. And I have all day."

There were no snappy answers, no clever retorts, and when he leaned slightly to the side he saw the Dragarian's strange eyes blinking softly as it considered its predicament.

"I was sent out to search for someone," it said.

"Who?"

"Someone… who will save us."

"Save you from what?"

"Doom," the Dragarian said. Nophel felt its fear, the shiver of terror that could not be affected. "The doom of Echo City, rising even now."

"Rising?"

It started to breathe more heavily, shaking. "Please don't make me-"

"What is rising? What doom?"

"The doom that has brought Dragar back to lead us-"

"Lead you into Honored Darkness. I know all your Dragarian swineshit. But I'm not here to listen to your religious crap, and I know you're not here to spout it."

"No," the thing said. "No."

"So what are you looking for?" It did not answer. "What? What?" He jerked back, tugging at the thing's hair even as he pulled on the knife, the sudden movement and violence startling one word from the terrified creature's mouth.

"Baker!"

"Baker?" Nophel whispered. My mother is dead, he thought, and he felt the Blue Water slithering across his tongue once again, smelled it sharp in his nose.

"Our spies tell us that he's back. He will go to her. And he was always ours."

If he had not been distracted, Nophel might have sensed what was coming next. He would have felt the thing's shaking lessen, heard its breathing slow, sensed the rumblings deep inside as it entered into some sort of internal prayer. And he might have taken the knife from its throat. But his mind was on his dead mother, that Baker bitch, and why the hell had this monstrosity come out of Dragar's Canton looking for It flicked its head from left to right and back again, pulling forward at the same time. Its slick hair, grasped in Nophel's fist, tightened around his fingers, and he felt the gush of warmth across his other hand as its throat opened.

The Dragarian cried out in pain, slumping as Nophel fell from its back. He released its head and the knife at the same time, and both thumped to the stony floor. It landed facing him, those stunning indigo eyes fading already as a puddle of blood spread quickly beneath it. The blood was black in the lamplight. Its eyes reflected little. Even as Nophel reined in his shock and crawled to the Dragarian, determined to ask more, why, who, he realized that it was beyond answering anything.

He knelt beside the dying thing and tried to deny the last word it had spoken. But it was beyond denial.

Baker.

Nophel spent a while in the enclosed courtyard. Oxomanlia clung to the sides of the buildings, and usually its sweet perfume would permeate the air at this time of day. But not today. He'd slammed the door behind him, cutting off the dead thing down in that basement, and he held his breath, paused in the moment between past and future.

Baker… Baker…

He had helped them destroy her. Brought them evidence, gathering it through the Scopes, aiding them in building a case, until in the end the Marcellans had decided that it was not in Echo City's interest for her to answer any case. They had wanted her work halted and her voice silenced, and over one terrible night they had done just that. He'd stood beside the Scopes that his mother had chopped to serve the Marcellans and watched as they destroyed everything she had ever done. In that fire, so Dane had assured him, her remains were turned to ash. They had not even wanted her body crucified on the walls as a warning to others, because there were no others like the Baker. Not anymore. Their actions-and his efforts, investigations, and betrayal-had ended the long line of Bakers once and for all and closed a page on Echo City's history. It had been the greatest day of his life.

And now this flying thing from out of Dragar's Canton had come looking for the Baker. He will go to her… And he was always ours. Did they really believe that their old prophesy was coming true?

Nophel touched the deformed ruin of his face. None of the Unseen seemed to see this, he thought, but he knew that was not true. It was simply that the physical meant so much less to them than it did to normal people. A bird called somewhere, startling him and moving the moment on. Behind him was the closed doorway, ahead the narrow alley that led back to the main street. Once on that street, he would have no choice but to return to Dane Marcellan, taking what little information he had. He did not belong out here. He had never killed except at a distance, and the real blood on his hands made him feel sick.

So he walked through the stinking alleyway, soon finding himself standing at the opening where it vented its stench onto the street. He watched the people passing by, and they did not see him. I just killed a man, he thought, though the Dragarian was like no man he had ever seen. It intrigued him that only in death did he think of the flying thing as a he rather than an it.

"New?" a voice asked. Alexia closed her hand around his wrist.

"You've already asked me that."

"Oh. Come and see." She led the way, and even though she had let go of his arm, Nophel found himself following. She weaved through the oblivious crowd, and, unlike before, he found it easier to follow. He still brushed past a fat man and a little girl, but they barely noticed, wiping away a floating spiderweb or the breath of an errant breeze. And as they walked, things began to change.

At first it was Alexia who was different. He saw her fading again, becoming less substantial and showing refracted, distorted parts of the world through her body. Then he felt a shifting of perceptions, something drawn out of him and hauled in by Alexia's closeness and his compulsion to follow, and her body manifested again. This time, it was the world around them that grew vague.

"No," he said, but he kept walking. "Leave me, I have to go." But Alexia turned and smiled at him, mouthing something that seemed to drift in from a great distance: I'm only showing you.

The people around them faded away. Life left the street, color was leached from the buildings and plants as if exposed to a decade's sun in moments, and soon Nophel and Alexia were standing in an Echo City that held no life at all, not even their own. This was a place frozen between times, its plants motionless and lifeless, the sky above wan and empty, and even though the sun hung overhead, it was a pale echo of its true self, unmoving and cold.

"What is this?" Nophel asked, surprised that his voice sounded so normal. He stepped across the street and touched a building. Stone, cool and gritty, just as it should feel.

"The final existence of the Unseen," she said. "This is what awaits us all. I come and go, but every day brings me closer to being here forever."

"No," he said. "It won't be like this for me. My mother would have never meant it to be-"

"Your mother was an experimenter in arcane things!" Alexia spat, and such passion seemed incongruous in this neutral place. "For every thing she got right, there were five that were wrong."

"How do you-"

"The Marcellans gave us her Blue Water-me and many others. They wanted us to be their secret fighting force." The anger left her as quickly as it came. "This is what we became."

"Not me," Nophel said. "Not me."

"Because you're her son?"

He turned and started walking away from Alexia. Change back, he thought. Take me back, I can't be like this… His walk turned into a run, and when he glanced back, Alexia had vanished. His was a lonely, endless gray street in a gray city, and for a moment, until he rounded a corner and saw the blur of movement returning, he thought he might be there forever.

He cried out in joy as the world came to life around him, fading in from some distance until the people were close enough to touch. He did so, startling one woman into a scream, rushing farther until the colors were all there again, the smells and sounds and sights of the city he both loved and hated. As he ran as fast as he could toward Hanharan Heights, all that was left to return was him.

Gorham sent Devin and Bethy back to Course. Peer saw him whispering to them before they left. Maybe they'd simply come this far as a guard, but she thought not. Gorham was planning things moment by moment, and now he had something else for them to do.

"Where are they going?" she asked.

"Spreading the word. Come on." He led the way down into the shadows. Malia descended through the hatch next, and Rufus and Peer followed. It was a strange feeling, leaving the cool open air and feeling the pressures of the land crushing in, and the darkness was complete. Say goodbye to the stars, Gorham had said, and Peer found herself glancing up at them moments before Malia closed the hatch. She had never appreciated the beauty of the sky more than at that moment.

Gorham moved confidently, handing them each a torch from clips on the walls and guiding them along a short corridor to a metal door. He twisted some bolts and the door hissed open, a rush of air pulling past them as pressures equalized. So they can smell what's coming in, Peer thought, and the idea was deeply disturbing. Gorham had warned them about the things they would see down here, the chopped that the Baker used to guard her laboratories, and she was terrified.

He barely paused when they were through the door, even though the space around them opened out so that the walls were way beyond the reach of their torches. Peer had the impression of wide open spaces, and the occasional gnarled columns that the torches danced across did little to alleviate that. Rufus glanced back at her, and the light reflected in his wide eyes. Green eyes, greener than I've ever seen. The more time she spent with him, the more she was beginning to believe there was more to him than met the eye. Breaking out of Skulk, he had been so willing to kill, and now he carried his bag of strange things once more. Gorham had even returned the weapon with which Rufus had killed Gerrett. We all have to trust one another now, he'd said, as if trust could get them far.

Well, perhaps it could. She wondered whether Gorham trusted her or, when he looked at her, did he see only hatred and the potential for revenge? And with what had happened, could she even trust herself?

After a while Gorham came to a halt, hand raised. "Here they come," he said. "Stay calm and-"

Something knocked him to the ground and flitted away into the darkness. Peer heard the gentle flap of huge wings and saw something unknowable flash through the puddle of their torchlight.

"It's Gorham!" he shouted, scrambling to his feet again and raising his torch. "It's Gorham and Malia, and we bring two friends!"

"Friends to the Baker?" a voice said from the darkness, and Peer winced when she sensed something closing on them again. She pushed Rufus to the ground and fell over him, and moments later something rushed by overhead. Things lashed across the back of her neck and head, and she cried out.

"Yes!" Gorham said. "And someone she'll want to see." He was standing again, crouched low and aiming his torch about them. He glanced at Malia, Rufus, and Peer, trying a smile to indicate his control of the situation.

It did not work. Something drifted in from the shadows and plucked the torch from his hand. It doused the flame and shoved him to the ground. Then it sat astride Gorham's chest and whispered, "Wait!" At last, Peer could see the thing.

It had been a woman, but now it flew. The wings were thin and membranous, and many long tendrils drooped from her legs and lower body. A queasiness rose in Peer. This thing was unnatural, a bastardization of what should be, and however clever it might be, she found it disturbing. The Baker made the natural order of things her own personal playground. Yet through the fear and disgust came another thought, and Peer could not help smiling. Penler would love this.

"Tell Nadielle I've-"

"Wait," the flying thing whispered again. It looked at all of them, eyes resting the longest on Rufus. It hissed softly.

"But-"

"Wait."

"Best wait, I think, Gorham," Malia said. And they did, but the wait did not last for long. At a signal none of them heard, the thing lifted from Gorham's chest, disappearing into the darkness before Peer could blink.

"There's something else here," Peer said in a low voice. Never before had she sensed being watched as strongly as this. Watched, observed, analyzed-she felt eyes all over her, and whichever way she turned, the sensation grew.

"The Pserans," Malia said. "They'll guide us in now."

"Or kill us," Gorham said. He stood, brushing himself down.

"I don't see anything," Peer said.

"That's how I know they're there." Malia was turning a slow circle, and then she paused, pointing into the murk.

"There."

A pale shape emerged from the darkness-a naked woman with a wickedly sharp appendage protruding from her chest. Down each side, spines flexed and stretched.

"The Baker isn't expecting you," the Pseran said. Two more appeared, materializing as if from nowhere. Rufus did not reach for his weapon. Peer wondered why.

"We've some important news for Nadielle," Gorham said. "And someone she needs to see."

The first Pseran moved quickly, seeming to flow rather than walk as it approached Peer and Rufus. It brushed past Peer as though she was not there at all and halted within kissing distance of Rufus, eyeing him and sniffing with a delicate nose.

"Ahh," she whispered, nodding and stroking one long finger down Rufus's cheek. "Chopped."

"What?" Peer asked. "What did you say?" But the Pseran continued to ignore her. Instead, it moved past the group and ahead, indicating with one backward glance that they should follow.

"Come on," Gorham said. He sounded flustered for the first time, and Peer wondered how close they had all come to being killed.

"Chopped?" she asked Rufus. "You? Chopped?" Rufus only frowned, bemused.

Gorham was looking back at them as he walked. Peer caught his eye. He shrugged, looked at Rufus, and faced front again.

Chopped? she thought. Confused, scared, she followed, because that was the only way to go.

The Pseran guided them through this Echo of Crescent Canton, over an unstable bridge spanning a dried riverbed, and past a ruined village, where Peer caught sight of strange lights from the corner of her eye. All the while, the Pseran's two sisters-Gorham whispered of them, dropping back slightly so that the four visitors could walk and talk together-followed behind. They kept to the deep shadows, and Peer caught sight of neither, but she always knew that they were there. They watched her. But, more than that, they watched Rufus. She saw the tall man glancing about him many times, and he never once met her eyes.

They followed an old rutted track, and here the ceiling was low enough to be partially illuminated by their oil torches. Peer had been down in the Echoes before, though only a few times and always in built-up areas. Here, she could not help but be amazed at what she saw. Perhaps only two hundred steps above them were the crops that would help feed the uncountable inhabitants of Echo City, while down here the dead past was home to phantoms and dust. Some roots showed through and hung like dirt-caked spiderwebs-the deepest roots of the tallest trees. At irregular spacings were the unimaginable supports and struts laid ages ago, upon which the current Crescent Canton had grown and become the fertile area it was today. Here and there were hollows in the underside, and once Peer saw the red twinkle of blinking eyes staring back at her.

The Pseran halted at last. "Wait," she said, staring only at Rufus.

"Tell Nadielle-"

"I'll return to inform you whether she will welcome you in," the Pseran said.

"You'll…" Gorham shook his head, sighed, and nodded. "Tell her it's important."

"Isn't it always?" the Pseran said with a wry smile, and Gorham glanced back at Peer as the chopped woman drifted quickly into the darkness.

"So now we just wait?" Malia said.

"Yes." Gorham sat on a raised bank of dried soil, taking a drink from his water skin and splashing his face. He rubbed with his hand and wiped it dry with his sleeves, leaving a smear of dirt across one cheek.

"I'm tired," Rufus said. He sat in the center of the rutted road. "Why won't the Baker see us?"

"She will!" Gorham snapped.

"Are you sure she's really on our side?" Peer asked.

Malia laughed, without humor. "She's on her side."

"She has her own rules," Gorham said. "She works on her own time frame, and living down here… she's strange."

"Strange," Rufus said. Peer moved closer and sat beside him, noticing that he'd already closed his eyes and regulated his breathing. That Pseran called you chopped, she wanted to say. What does that mean? Where are you really from? But she said nothing, because now did not feel like the time.

Instead, she got up and went to sit next to Gorham. Malia had wandered off, still keeping within the circle of torchlight and kicking at the dusty ground. Peer thought she was a woman who would never look right sitting still.

"Still talking to me?" he asked.

"No." They sat in silence for a while, and when Peer breathed in she caught a whiff of Gorham's familiar smell. She had inhaled that scent so many times-lain with it, loved it-that she would know it anywhere. It gave her a deep pang of regret for what had passed, but the anger was still stronger. She tensed to stand, and the air shards scraped against her elbow.

"Peer," he began, but she could not let him continue. However much he had changed-become the leader of whatever was left of the Watchers, a true rebel as opposed to the safe protester he had been before-the parts of him she had loved would always stay the same. Their past was a wide foundation, and betrayal and separation had been built upon that. Right now she did not feel capable of finding her way back to the solid base of their relationship. And letting him talk about it would only confuse her more.

"I can't," she said. "There's too much happening here." She looked at Rufus where he seemed to sleep, thought of his piercing green eyes and that Pseran's single word: chopped.

"I need to tell you-" Gorham began.

And then Rufus was gagging, coughing, choking, scratching at his throat with long nails, and even though his eyes were squeezed shut, Peer was certain that all he wanted was to open them.

It's dark, and very cold, and a wind whips in from the desert, bringing only a stale, slightly burned smell. There was a lightning storm out there the previous evening when he and his mother had arrived, and Rufus (that's not my name, but that is me)

– had watched from the flat roof of the empty dwelling they'd found close to a tumbled section of the south wall. She had called him down after a while, hugging him close when he came to her and bestowing affection that he was not used to. She'd been sad since that strange visitor, though there was still something about her that at times made her seem very far away. He'd walk into a room to see her staring at something he couldn't see, her fingers slowly stroking her chin, mouth working ever so slightly as if she was saying something much too quiet to hear. And after those times, she'd be quiet and distracted even when she did start talking to him again.

It was because of the thing that came to visit several days before. She'd been different ever since then. It was a man, though unlike any man he'd ever seen before-incredibly thin, long-limbed, with those indigo eyes that seemed to burn right through him. And when it reached for him, then lowered its head and started mumbling…

He shivers, and his mother hugs him tight.

"It's going to be fine," she says, kneeling and pulling him to her. He can feel her tears on his face, and he wonders why.

"I'm hungry," he says. "I'm thirsty."

"I know," she says, because she has not fed him or given him water for a whole day. "There'll be something soon, don't worry."

"When?"

"Soon."

"What are we doing here?" They were in Skulk Canton. He'd watched his mother speaking with people and breathing stuff in their faces, like she sometimes did. The people-he thought they were soldiers, but scruffy and dirty, not like most of the Scarlet Blades he saw around Course-slowed down, drooping to the ground while he and his mother passed. It was all part of the strangeness that began two days before, when she left for the day. Stay in, she said, making him promise. He did what he was told and spent the day wondering why the womb vats were all silent and empty.

Now here they are, and Rufus knows that something is about to change. There is an air of moving on about the way she speaks to him, touches him, looks at him. It is as if she's trying to remember every part of her boy.

"I'm sorry," his mother says, and when he asks what for, she only shakes her head and cries some more. He has never seen his mother crying before now. She is strong. It makes him cry too, and then he sees something out in the desert.

"There's…" he begins, because he has read all his mother's books about the Markoshi Desert, how everything is dead out there and nothing can live upon its sands.

"Yes," his mother says, and she has already seen it. Far out, a dark-gray smudge on the light gray of the starlit desert, a shape is moving toward them. "It left Course before we did, and now it's coming back to Skulk. As I instructed it." She sounds vaguely angry, as if she wishes her mysterious instructions had not been obeyed.

"What is it?"

"Something I had to make. Because I'm not sure what you are, but if you are what they say, then this needs to be done. And one day you'll return to me."

"What needs to be done?" he asks. "I'm scared."

"Don't be," she whispers. His mother looks around furtively, then pulls her hood up over her head. He doesn't like it when she does that; he can no longer see her beautiful green eyes. There were precious stones called emeralds, she once told him, buried deep in the ground that is now buried beneath the domes of Dragar's Canton. People used to go there many hundreds of years ago and dig them up.

Why? he asked.

Because they were beautiful.

So are your eyes, but people don't dig them up.

She nodded for a while, staring at him, until finally she said, It's all about having something for yourself.

"I have something for you," she says, producing a silvered metal flask from her pocket.

"One of your magic drinks?" he asks.

"It's not magic!" she says, almost spitting. Her sudden anger could have frightened him-but he knows she will never do anything to harm her son. She loves him. "It's only magic because people don't understand it, that's all, and people are scared of what they don't understand. They have to give it names to protect themselves from it." She holds him hard, staring into his eyes, and he thinks, She really wants me to listen. This is how she speaks when she has a lesson to teach. "People try, but they never get it right. I know how to do it, because of… knowledge passed down to me. If you'd known my mother, and hers, you'd understand. But this is not magic."

"Yes, Mother."

"If anything, it's a curse." She looks past him at the thing approaching across the desert. "A curse on me, and a curse on…"

"Mother?"

"You," she whispers. Then she uncorks the flask, holds the back of his head, and tips it to his lips. He drinks, because she wants him to and she'd never do anything to hurt him. And as he sits on the cold wet stone, watches the huge lumbering thing walking in from the desert, and sees his mother going out to greet it, something starts to happen.

First he forgets his name.

"Grab his hands!" Peer shouted, and when Gorham did so she felt that she was taking control. She held Rufus's head still, whispering and soothing, and when he opened his eyes at last he looked lost. There was nothing there-no knowledge of where or even who he was. Then he focused on Peer, and she felt the fear slowly draining from him.

"I forgot my name," he said.

"I called you Rufus."

"Rufus. That's not my name."

"I know," she said sadly. "Maybe the Baker can help you remember."

"The Baker… she's…" He squeezed his eyes closed again, but the thrashing and scratching did not return.

"What's wrong with him?" Gorham asked, speaking as if Rufus wasn't even there. Peer glared at him without answering.

"Someone's coming," Malia said. She was standing several steps away from them, staring into the darkness in the direction in which the Pseran had disappeared.

"Her?" Peer asked.

"I doubt it," Gorham said. "She rarely leaves her laboratories."

"How many times have you been down here?" Peer asked.

Gorham glanced at her and away again, off into the darkness. "A few," he said.

A shape emerged from the shadows-the naked Pseran walking smoothly toward them. She was both beautiful and monstrous, and Peer wondered what else she would see that day.

"The Baker will see you," she said, and Peer noticed that she was looking only at Rufus. There was a slight smile on her face but also a creasing of the brow, which could indicate confusion-or fear.

"Which way-" Peer began.

"Gorham knows." The Pseran drifted in closer to Rufus, circled him once, and then, without another word spoken or a glance at any of them, she disappeared into the Echo once again.

"Come on," Gorham said, and he led them from the track and across ancient fields.

Peer walked behind Rufus, trying to keep her eye on his back but finding herself distracted by what they were walking across. She had never been able to envision whole landscapes of dead fields and gentle hills cut off from the sun and sky like this. It seemed unnatural, and walking across ruts tooled into the ground generations ago made her sad.

"Here," Gorham said. He stood before a door cast into a steep hillside, the stark gray stumps of old trees stubbling the ground all around.

Rufus took a deep breath.

"Are you all right?" Peer asked.

"Yes," he said. "Hungry."

"Good," Gorham said, and his smile seemed genuine. "The Baker always has a feast to hand." He pushed the door open and entered, and Peer followed the others into a new world.

She had never imagined anything like this. She'd heard tales of the old Baker and her incredible warehouse laboratory and how the Scarlet Blades had destroyed it all twenty years ago. The Watchers had always held the Baker as one of their own, though even before her banishment, Peer had known the lie in that. The Baker was unique, last in a long line of freak geniuses among Echo City's scientists, experimenters, and charlatans. At least, most of Echo City believed she was the last.

And now here Peer was, about to meet the Baker's daughter.

Really? she thought. Daughter? This woman had been chopped, not born. Grown in one of the womb vats she saw in the huge room before her, or one very much like them. Created, somehow, by her mother's strange art.

The vats were huge and bulbous. They seemed to cast shadows where the many oil lamps should shine. Moisture trickled down their sides and splashed on the stone ground, and when it hit it took on a sickly viscosity, spreading red as blood before slipping into floor drains. Pipes and tubes hung overhead, converging and spreading again from several points where cogs turned, gears scraped, and steam escaped from vents and flues. The steam fell instead of rising, dispersing to the air and giving the whole room a heavy, humid atmosphere.

The closest vat was a dozen steps away. Peer could hear noises from inside-mewling, scratching, and a grumbling so low that, rather than hear it, she felt it low in her guts.

"Gorham…" she began, but her old lover had already walked on ahead. There was a woman standing beside one of the vats, tending to an array of tools laid out on a wide table before her. She glanced up at Gorham's approach, offered him a half smile, looked beyond him, caught Peer's eye… and then she saw Rufus and dropped the curved metallic tool she'd been holding. The noise as it struck the table and clattered to the ground brought home the relative silence of that place. This was not a noisy factory but a quiet laboratory, its processes proceeding with a calm confidence.

"Who are you?" Rufus asked, and Peer noticed a change in him. It was as if he were a held breath, and with every glance around that amazing chamber he was about to scream.

"My name is Nadielle," the woman said. She was quite short and unassuming, but as Peer walked close to meet Nadielle, she sensed the power in her. Nadielle's eyes were fixed on their tall visitor, her mouth working slowly as if chewing words she could not utter.

"This is Rufus Kyuss," Peer said.

"Named after a god," Nadielle said.

Rufus remained tense, glancing from the Baker to those vats and back again.

"You're the new Baker?" Peer asked.

"New?" Nadielle glanced at Peer, her eyes instantly harsh and threatening.

"Yes," Peer said. She did her best to hold the woman's gaze and silently thanked Gorham when he spoke.

"This is Peer Nadawa," he said.

"Oh," Nadielle said. And she smiled. A smile? Peer thought. As if she knows my name. And then she saw the way Gorham was looking at the Baker, and she understood all at once. Oh, Gorham, after all this time you could have warned me.

"This man says he's from beyond Echo City," Malia said. "He says he walked in across the Bonelands. Peer was at the city wall in Skulk, and she found him. Brought him to us."

"From out of Skulk?" Nadielle asked. The surprise had gone from her face now, and she was hiding her excitement from the others well. Peer could see that.

"A friend helped me," Peer said. "It's not as difficult as you'd think."

"Oh, I know that," Nadielle said. She glanced at Rufus again, then turned her back on all of them. "You'll be hungry," she said quietly, before heading past the vats toward a door in the far corner. "If I'd known you were coming-"

"Nadielle!" Gorham said. "This is important!"

"Yes," she said, looking back over her shoulder as she walked. "It is. So what better way to discuss the end of Echo City than over a feast?"

Nadielle passed through the door without saying anything else, and Gorham looked nervously at Peer. But she could not find it in her heart to hate him anymore.

They entered a chaotic room where tables and benches were strewn with all manner of equipment and containers. A strange smell hung in the air, but Peer could not identify it. She saw Rufus sniffing, his nostrils flaring, his eyes half closed as he took in the scent. He saw her watching and smiled.

"That's not her," he said softly, and as Peer started to ask what he meant, Nadielle spoke again.

"Nowhere to sit," she said. "Perhaps if I'd known you were coming, but even then…" She waved her hand around the room. "I'm very busy."

"What are you working on?" Gorham asked.

"Many things."

"You don't seem surprised by Rufus's claim," Peer said.

Nadielle reached a table in the corner of the room, spread a pile of plates, and then went to a cupboard. Cool air misted out when she opened it, followed by the enrapturing smells of cheeses and fruits.

"You found him?" she asked.

"I saw him coming across the desert, yes."

"And you named him?"

How does she know that's not his real name? Peer thought, but she nodded.

"Why those names?"

Peer told her. Nadielle smiled.

"What does this mean?" Malia said. "After what we discussed last time we were here and-"

"Malia," Nadielle said, "calm. I've sent out my eyes and ears. I've seen and heard. And that's why I'm busy, because what you brought me last time is all true. It's been a long time coming, but I'm able to help at last."

"What's in the womb vats right now?" Gorham asked.

"More eyes," she said. "More ears. Better ones, and they'll be ready soon."

"So quickly?"

She shrugged, putting a slice of cheese into her mouth. "Some processes have been accelerated, yes, but they'll work fine." She looked at Rufus again, watching him take tentative bites from a chunk of bread, a slice of cheese. He was looking around cautiously, and every few beats his eyes would flicker back to the Baker.

"What's wrong, Rufus?" Peer asked.

"That's not her," he said again. The small group fell silent, but Peer saw no sign of confusion on Nadielle's face. She knew exactly what Rufus meant.

"He's been having dreams," Peer said. "Waking from them upset, disconnected. It's as if he's been here before."

"Of course," Nadielle said.

"And your Pseran called him chopped."

Nadielle smiled and nodded, waving a chunk of cheese at the air while she chewed. "I made them perfectly, for sure."

"Then tell us what you know," Gorham said. And in that plea, Peer saw the landscape of the bond between these two, and it pleased her. Gorham and Nadielle were lovers, yet she held him in the palm of her hand. Perhaps she welcomed him into her bed purely for the physical gratification, or maybe there was even a trace of affection or love about her for the Watcher. But the Baker was a woman removed from Echo City and in complete control of her own life. She was superior here, and she held the reins wherever their relationship went.

Nadielle finished the cheese and rubbed her hands. None of them had sat down, and an expectant air hung heavy. "I'll tell you," she said, nodding at Peer. "You seem to be his friend, and that's what he needs right now."

"What about-" Gorham began.

"Eat," Nadielle said, and she headed for a spread of tall bookcases against the far wall.

Peer glanced at where Gorham and Malia stood bristling, then she touched Rufus's arm lightly and guided him after Nadielle.

The Baker slipped a book from the case, plucked a key hidden in its pages, and went to a darkened corner of the room, behind her bed and hidden from view.

"We won't wait for long!" Gorham called, and Nadielle chuckled softly.

"Yes, you will," she muttered, and Peer realized that Nadielle didn't care whether Gorham heard or not. She and Rufus followed the Baker through a low doorway, waiting as she closed and locked the door behind her and lit several oil lamps. It was a small room, rarely used, musty and rich in cobwebs. Pushed against the far wall was a table, and on the table sat two bulky old books and a spread of large paper sheets. At first they looked like maps, but as the three of them stood around the table, Peer realized that they were schematic drawings of some vast… thing. She saw legs and arms, a head and a heart, but nothing else made sense.

"Oh," Rufus said.

"You weren't supposed to remember at all," Nadielle said softly. "It's not like my mother to make mistakes."

Peer closed her eyes, absorbing what had been said and realizing that it all made sense. Perhaps she'd even known it for a while now but had been unable to come to terms with what it meant.

"Maybe it was no mistake," Rufus said.

"You remember her?" Nadielle asked, with a passion and need that she obviously rarely displayed.

"Yes," Rufus said.

"Your mother made Rufus," Peer whispered.

"The previous Baker, yes. Who chopped me when she knew she was being hunted, using essence from her own body, growing me in a hidden womb vat, nurturing me with as much care as if I was in her own womb."

"So how did she…?" Peer asked, looking at Rufus. His eyes were wide, but she also sensed a growing anger about him. Where is that from? she thought. What is it for?

"The same way," the Baker said. "Which makes us, Rufus Kyuss, brother and sister."

Rufus did not react. He moved one of the books aside and traced his fingers over the images on the large sheets. He's seen those shapes before, Peer thought, and she wondered where and when.

"She sent me out."

"Yes," Nadielle said. "She left me many books, and these are the ones I've always kept hidden away. No one can see them, in case…"

"In case?" Peer prompted.

"In case he comes back."

"She sent me out, in this. Made me drink something to… forget. But I'm remembering now."

"I should be writing this down," Nadielle said. She reached for a pencil and a sheaf of paper, starting making notes, but Rufus went on as if neither woman was there. His dreams were coalescing into memories, and Peer began to fear the reaction this seemed to be engendering. He was becoming more animated, though not with joy at the revelation of his genesis but with anger at something different.

"She abandoned me."

"No, Rufus," Nadielle said, setting down her pencil. She reached for him and he waved her back, raising his arm to fend off her touch. How quick he was with that venom weapon, Peer thought, looking at the bag still hanging from his shoulder. Gorham had returned the weapon to him, and now she wondered why. It was clumsy of someone so used to secrecy and caution.

"Sent me into the desert… a place where people die… in this thing."

"What is it?" Peer asked, but neither answered her. She watched Rufus's fingers tracing the lines and shapes on the paper, heard the grit of dust beneath his fingertips, and felt the temperature of that place rising.

"You were a hope she always had," Nadielle said. "The hope every Baker has. The city changes and grows-a living thing-and, like all living things, Echo City's time will come to die. We have always known that."

"How have you always known?" Peer asked. "What have you-"

"Because the Bakers have always lived one step back from the city," she said. "Isn't it obvious? So many believe so many different things, but if you consider things from a distance, you can see all the foolishness and lies. They stink like rotten things, those lies, and people lap them up and live by them."

"The Watchers don't."

"Not all of them, no. But even they live life under a cloud of superstitious prophesies and predictions. I see the fault in this, as did every Baker. Nothing lasts forever, the city least of all."

"What did you bring us back here to show us?" Peer asked.

"This," Nadielle said. "Her charts, her books. These designs. She chopped a construct to take Rufus out into the Bonelands. She knew he'd survive out there-"

"She can't have known for sure," Peer said softly, because Rufus's anger was a palpable thing now. She tried to hold his hand, but he pulled away.

"Well… no, she wasn't sure. That's why she built this thing to carry him as far as possible, toward whatever must be out there. And she hoped he'd return in her lifetime."

"She made me to return?" he asked.

"Of course. And whatever she did to ease your memories, perhaps she designed it to fade as soon as you came home."

"Rufus is not my name," he said. "This is not my home. What did she name me? Sister-Mother-what did she name me?" And in that Mother, Peer realized another staggering truth: Nadielle, chopped from the old Baker when death was stalking her, was as much a mother to Rufus as she was a sister.

"She…" Nadielle said. She touched a book, stroking dust from its surface. They had not been touched for a very long time.

"Nadielle?" Peer asked.

"She did not name you," Nadielle said.

"But I grew into a young boy. With her. My mother. She must have given me a name."

"She made you that age." Nadielle kept her eyes averted, though her voice held little emotion. "You were with her for perhaps thirty days. The Dragarians provided material from Dragar's remains, and she chopped you as a commission for them. But she never intended to hand you back. They wanted the Dragar of their prophesies, and she wanted the truth about that name."

"She listened to myths?" Peer asked.

"Here," Nadielle said, touching the other large old book. "There's so much in here. It's written that Dragar was born to illicit lovers, one tall with white hair, the other with the greenest of eyes. Their love was forbidden-they were from different Dragarian castes-and they chose to meet in the desert, where no one would see. The child was conceived out there, and when born he was immune to the desert's effects. The Dragarians took him to themselves as a god, named him after their god, and soon after that the Marcellans killed him as a Pretender. So long ago, all of it so uncertain, unproven. But when they came to my mother with the commission, she saw the chance of discovering the truth. They offered a shred of Dragar, his essence."

"I might have died," Rufus said.

"But you didn't," Nadielle said. "You were her greatest experiment."

"I'm not an experiment!"

"Rufus," the Baker said, excited, "you have to-"

"That is not my name!" he screamed. The sudden noise was shocking in that confined space, his fury startling. He swept the books from the table, and clouds of dust dimmed the air.

"Rufus," Peer said softly, because she saw his tragic history.

He struck her. She fell against the wall, hand landing on one of the books. Its cover split from the spine; her arm shifted beneath her and spilled her to the floor, setting her hip aflame. She banged her head. The air darkened even more, ringing with shouts and a scream and the frantic shuffling of a struggle from somewhere beyond the room. Silence, the beating of her heart, and then another scream from much farther away, androgynous in its agony. It could only have been the cry of someone close to death.

Peer stood and swayed, closing her eyes to regain balance. She felt the warm trickle of blood down the back of her neck. Moving carefully, she left the small room and found the larger room beyond empty. Even in the disorganized chaos of that place, she saw that things were toppled across the floor, one smashed jar steaming as its strange contents spat and jumped as if to escape the cool touch of stone.

More shouts, raised voices, and two more screams filled with rage and grief. Peer rushed out into the womb-vat chamber, pausing to see where the cries came from. The vats bubbled softly, indifferent to the drama being played out around them.

Another cry-less a scream and more an exhalation of hopelessness. It had come from outside. She ran across the chamber and through the door that had been left ajar, into the wide dark Echo of fields and farmland from decades or centuries before, and highlighted before her in an oasis of torchlight she saw what had happened. One of the Pserans was dead, her hand clasped to her neck and bloody foam on her lips. He killed her, she thought, but she was not as surprised as she should have been. The two remaining triplets stood close to their sister, but not close enough to touch. They looked on as Nadielle knelt beside her creation and stroked the skin of her face, closing her eyes and weeping gently.

Gorham and Malia stood to one side, their torches lowered and turned off. Peer wondered why. She went to them, trying not to make a noise, and Gorham looked up at her approach.

"He's mad," he whispered.

"What happened?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Malia asked. Even this stern, harsh woman spoke quietly. She was no stranger to grief.

"What did she tell you in there?" Gorham demanded. He grabbed Peer's arm, the potential violence almost surreal in the silent shadows. She owed him nothing.

"That Rufus has come home," she said. She pulled her arm from Gorham's grip, fisting her hand, ready to punch. And she could have punched him, happily. She could have swung her fist into his mouth and felt his teeth loosen beneath knuckles hardened by years of stoneshroom picking.

But Gorham sighed, looking back at the dead woman-the dead thing-as her sisters picked her up at last.

Nadielle stood back as the Pserans carried the body into the darkness.

"Which way did he go?" Peer asked.

"Does it matter?" Malia said. "He's gone, and even if we find him again, he'll be no help. How can he?"

"He holds this city's future in his hands," the Baker said, walking toward them.

"You think you can…?" Gorham trailed off.

"Maybe," the Baker whispered, looking past them all at places none of them could know. "It's been tried before, with rackflies, spreading a harmless germ. But that was long ago, and…" She blinked, snapping back to the present. "You have to bring him to me."

"We have to?" Malia asked, attitude spilling from her.

"Yes, Malia," Nadielle said.

"Can't you help-" Gorham began, but the Baker was already walking away.

"I have work to do," she said. "Find him. Bring him. Nice to meet you, Peer."

Peer almost laughed out loud. Nice to meet you. But she smelled blood, and the air was still thick with the violence perpetrated there.

He was ready to run, she thought. As soon as the moment came, he was ready to run. And as she, Gorham, and Malia began the lonely journey back up from the darkness and into the night, Peer knew that there was so much more to Rufus Kyuss.

He went back into Hanharan Heights as he always did: silently, discreetly, slipping through shadows and pools of light without disturbing either, and all the way Nophel tried convincing himself that it was his stealth that kept him unseen. He knew that was not the case-it was a nightmarish kind of knowing, like the certainty that when you woke up you would find yourself dead-but all the way up the urbanized hillsides of Marcellan Canton, through the well-guarded gates of the Heights, and into the warren of corridors and staircases that led to Dane Marcellan's rooms, he maintained the illusion.

Standing before Dane made it all real.

The fat man squinted as Nophel entered his huge bedroom. There were no nubile young women on his bed this time, but the table of slash in the corner still exuded its sweet fumes, and Dane was piled naked on his bed like a heap of bled swine meat. He sat up and turned his head this way and that, frowning. Then he nodded and waved in Nophel's general direction.

"Even knowing you're there, I see only shadow."

Nophel stood silently, wondering.

"Don't mess with me, Nophel." His tone was serious, and his eyes were no longer out of focus.

"Make me whole again," Nophel whispered.

Dane laughed. It shivered his rolls of fat and set him coughing, which shook his body even more. Nophel wondered how long it would take him to stop moving. He might have laughed, had he not felt so wretched.

"You are whole!" Dane said. "Touch yourself. Feel!"

Obeying Dane's words was almost a subconscious act-Nophel touched and felt. His skin was slick and cool with sweat. He held his hand in front of his face and barely saw it.

"I met the Unseen," he said.

Dane's laughter drifted away, and he was serious again. Shuffling to the edge of the bed, he slipped his feet into leather sandals and shrugged on a robe, tying the cord with a surprising dexterity. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said.

Nophel smiled and wondered whether Dane could sense it.

"Everyone who has ever tried the Blue Water," he said. "They exist-like me. And some are more invisible."

"More invisible?"

"They watch you, Dane," Nophel said, feeling a thrill of power and danger. This is a Marcellan, he thought, but Dane stood amazed before him. "They watch all of you. Perhaps they're too far gone for revenge, or maybe not. I couldn't tell."

"But they died. They went away and died, and you're the one it was always meant for. Your mother made that stuff!"

"I don't believe she knew the real power of it," Nophel said. He walked across the room and sat on the end of Dane's bed. The fat Marcellan took a step back, looking down at where the bedclothes were dipped beneath Nophel's weight.

"You really can't see me," Nophel said.

"It seems not."

"I can't… I don't want to be Unseen," he said. "There are the Scopes to consider, my duty to them, and-"

"Let me think," Dane said, and already the command was back in his voice. He turned his back on Nophel and walked to the slash table, picking up a flexible pipe with a bone tip and breathing in a huge draw of the drug's smoke. That's how you think? thought Nophel. But he knew that Dane had a good mind, and whether or not the drug improved that seemed unimportant now.

For a few moments Nophel looked down at himself and concentrated, and the shadow of his limbs and body slowly faded. He closed his eyes and focused, and when he looked again he could see the shine of metal buttons on his shirt. They seemed to wink at him. When he looked up, Dane was walking back and forth before the wide window. Beyond, Nophel could see only sky, but if he went closer he could look out over Marcellan Canton and the hazy Course beyond.

I should tell him everything, he thought. But news of the Baker felt like power.

"Do they scheme?" Dane asked at last.

Yes, Nophel wanted to say, because a frightened Dane would be easier to manipulate. But he suddenly saw real fear in this man, and he felt something he usually felt only in the presence of the Scopes: pity.

"I don't think so," he said. "Not against you or the city. But I think they do still maintain an interest."

"How?" Dane asked. He was looking out the window now, his back turned on the unseen man, and perhaps he was picturing Nophel as he remembered him from the last time they'd met: disfigured, scarred, unsettled.

"They caught the thing that came out of Dragar's Canton."

"Caught it?" He spun around and advanced on Nophel, and Nophel realized that Dane's fear was not for himself. It was deeper and richer and composed of things Nophel would likely never be privy to, however much he asked and however much he thought of himself as almost the Marcellan's equal. "Caught it how?"

"Crossbow," Nophel said. He stood and held his ground. Dane stopped a couple of steps away from him, nostrils flaring.

"What was it?" Dane asked. "I need to know. You must tell me now."

"A Dragarian. A flying thing."

"And it spoke?"

Here we are, Nophel thought. Here is when I play the only card I have.

"It spoke," Nophel said. "Before killing itself, it spoke."

Dane's eyes widened a little, then he sat down on the bed, hands resting on his knees. His head turned left and right, as if scanning the room for something invisible. The Unseen, Nophel thought, smiling. I've made him uncertain, at least.

"What did the Dragarian say?" Dane asked.

"Make me whole again."

Dane paused in his movements, staring at the floor between his feet. Even his massive frame stilled, as though that sway of flesh could rest in a held breath.

"You dare to bargain with me?" he said quietly.

"I merely-"

"You dare to withhold something from me?"

"I can't be like this. I've seen what happens to them."

Dane stood quickly and reached out, his meaty fist closing perfectly around Nophel's throat. He squeezed, his face remaining calm and composed. He raised one eyebrow. "Don't take me for a fool!"

"I know you're no fool," Nophel croaked, and Dane released his hold, turning away. He wiped both hands on his robe as he strode back to the slash table.

"You have such a power now," Dane said, "but you're too weak to see it and too scared to use it. Look at you!" He turned again, long pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth. Dragging on the smoke, his eyes widened and glittered as he dropped the pipe and raised his arms. "Look at you! You're Unseen, Nophel, even more than you were before! Your dead hog of a mother gave you nothing, but her talent has made you what you are now."

"And what is that?" Nophel demanded. He was proud at the edge in his voice, the challenge he could still muster in the face of this man's intimidating authority and power.

"Mine," Dane said, tails of slash smoke still curling up from the corners of his mouth. "That's what you are. Completely. Mine."

"No," Nophel said, but he knew it was true.

"I have the White Water," Dane said. "The antidote. If those fools you say you've seen had come crawling back instead of losing themselves in the city, maybe I would have given it. Maybe."

"Then let me-"

"After you tell me what the Dragarian said."

"You swear?"

"No, Nophel," Dane said. "I swear nothing." He drew on the pipe some more, a gentler draw this time, and then he sat on a giant floor cushion, his robe falling open and displaying the rolls of fat covering his genitals.

He thinks nothing of me, Nophel said. Such disregard. Such disdain.

"It said, Baker," Nophel said. "Then, He will go to her. And he was always ours."

Dane closed his eyes. Sighed. And when he stood again, purpose in his stance and expression, Nophel knew that his drink of the White Water was still not assured.

"You're looking for anything unusual," Dane said. "Anything strange."

"I see a lot of strange things," Nophel said.

"Stranger, then." Dane stood behind Nophel. The mountain of a man smelled of perfumes and sweat and was still panting from the effort of their ascent.

The pretense of their relationship had been shredded; Nophel was Dane's servant. And yet… as they watched the Scope's images presented on the viewing mirror, Nophel sensed that Dane still held him in some regard. Several times as they'd climbed staircases and opened and closed doors on the way to the viewing room, Nophel had almost asked the Marcellan something plain and cutting, a question he had believed he'd known the answer to for some time: Do you truly believe in the will of Hanharan? But such talk might elicit punishment. Still possessed by the effects of Blue Water he might be, but Nophel had no doubt that Dane could bring him down.

"We're looking north," Nophel said. "I'll try to find the place on the wall where I met the Unseen."

"What was his name?"

"Her name. It was Alexia."

"Ah."

"You knew her?" Nophel turned dials and cogs, pulled levers, and a hundred steps above them the Northern Scope was lengthening its skull, projecting its one massive eye farther out over the wall beneath its chest.

"A Scarlet Blade. She took the Blue Water…" He whistled softly, thinking. "Maybe three years ago, during the Watcher crackdown. She was a good soldier."

"She's bitter now."

Dane did not answer, but Nophel sensed no gloating, no anger. Perhaps the Marcellan was sorry.

"There," Nophel said. The screen was filled with an image of the northern wall around Hanharan Heights. He tweaked a wheeled button beneath his left hand and the image shifted left, pausing again at the seat where he had met Alexia.

"If they're all out there, there must be dozens," Dane mused.

"I saw only a few. But the Blue Water continues to work. The removal is… progressive and deeper as time goes by." He shivered, remembering those gray, empty streets. He never wanted to see them again.

Dane rested a hand on his shoulder. It surprised Nophel so much that he jumped, knocking a cog and jerking the Scope's view to the right. That might have hurt it, he thought, but then he felt Dane's breath close to his right ear, and the Marcellan whispered, "I've no wish to hurt you, Nophel. But you're far more useful to me as you are, for now." He stood and pulled his hand back, coughing lightly, perhaps even embarrassed at the contact. Nophel thought that it was the only time the man had ever touched him, other than when he grabbed his throat.

"I need to see the Council," Dane said.

"To tell them what the Dragarian said?"

"That would be the very last thing I'd tell them."

He's trying to say something, Nophel thought. Dane's tone of voice had changed, become quieter and lower, as if something heavy bore down on him every time he went to speak. Desperate to reveal something to me.

"You can trust me to watch," Nophel said. Dane was silent, unbreathing, unmoving. Nophel winced. And now the knife in my back for such presumption?

"Thank you," the Marcellan said, and he meant it. "Now look for me. The Baker is dead, but that Dragarian was out there for someone connected to her. Help me find him."

"Who is he?"

"That's not your concern."

"You'll destroy him like you did the Baker?"

"Destroy?" Dane laughed softly. "Nophel, I know the hate you still carry for her, and it might disturb you to know this, but we weren't guilty of your mother's death."

Nophel closed his eyes, trying to will away the sudden nausea. I gave her up to them. "But-" he croaked, then cleared his throat. "But I spied on her, gathered evidence of her heresy. Presented it to you. So who killed her?"

"The Dragarians," Dane said. He walked away, and Nophel tried to make sense of the revelation.

I'm more useful to him as I am, he thought. And as he heard Dane opening the door to leave, Nophel stood, tumbling his chair over backward.

Dane glanced back across the dimly lit room toward the man he could not see.

"I don't believe in Hanharan!" Nophel blurted. His heart was thumping so hard that blood thrummed in his ears, and he had to strain hard to hear Dane's reply.

"Just keep watch," the Marcellan said. And he closed the door on the blasphemy.

The Baker was waiting for them at the end of the rickety bridge. There was someone with her, and even from a distance Gorham could see that the shape was wrong. Human, yes, but changed. Chopped.

They'd been running, desperate to reach the exit up from this Echo before Rufus did. They knew that once he was out in the city, he'd either be lost forever or he'd reveal himself and the Scarlet Blades would capture him. After that, it would be a short walk to the crucifixion wall.

"Has she come to-" Peer began.

"There's no guessing with her," Gorham cut in. He felt his old lover glaring at the back of his head, but he walked on ahead.

"Have you found him?" Malia called.

"No," Nadielle said. "I sent the Pserans deeper to search."

"If they find him?" Peer asked.

"They'll take him back to my laboratory and keep him safe," Nadielle said. "They're grieving, but they're also mine."

"Is she yours too?" Gorham said. The five of them were standing in a rough circle now, and the small, misshapen form at Nadielle's side was blinking at Gorham with big, wet eyes. She was a woman, but beneath her simple clothing her chest was flat, and her body seemed almost formless. Her long hair hung bound with fine bone clips, her mouth was slightly open, and she looked back and forth between them all, never settling her gaze on one of them for more than a heartbeat. She could have been thirty years old or eighty.

"Yes," Nadielle said. "And she's very special."

"So what can she do?" Peer asked. "Fly? Burrow? Juggle?"

"She can help us find out exactly what's going on," Nadielle said, not rising to Peer's bait.

Gorham glanced at Peer and shook his head, but then he saw how scared she was. Nadielle's blocking our way across the bridge, he thought, and he listened for the flap of leathery wings, looked for the pale skin of a surviving Pseran manifesting from the gloom. He wasn't scared. But there really was no guessing with Nadielle.

"We need to find Rufus," Peer said. "That's the absolute priority, so if she can help us with that-"

"She can't," Nadielle said.

"Then why are we all standing here like spare cocks?" Malia asked.

"Rufus has left the Echoes," Nadielle said. "Another exit, half a mile from here. He's gone up into Crescent, and last I heard he was heading north."

"How do you know?" Peer asked.

"It doesn't matter how I know!" Nadielle snapped, and for the first time Gorham saw fear in her eyes. She's not grieving for the Pseran, he thought. She's terrified!

"What do you need?" he asked.

"You. Come with me. We're going down, way down, to find out whatever it is that's got the Garthans so agitated. You told me about Bellia Ton, the river reader. After that I… investigated further. There are other readers realizing that something's terribly wrong."

"But Rufus-" Peer began.

"Is a part of it all," Nadielle said, more gently now. "So you're right, he's a priority. But something incredible has begun, and I need to know. I need to check."

"Know what?" Malia asked. "Check what?"

But Nadielle ignored the question. Instead, she stroked the small woman's hair and smiled at her. The woman's expression did not alter.

"Why do you need me?" Gorham asked.

"To read me when we get there."

"Read you? I'm no reader. I've never done anything like that. I wouldn't know-"

"I can teach you. We have to go. Peer, you and Malia need to find Rufus. Malia, use your Watchers, however many are left. Find him, and bring him back down to my rooms. Do it any way you can, but it's important-it's imperative-that you keep his existence from the authorities. The Marcellans can't know about him. Nobody can know about him. Do you understand?"

"Yeah," Malia said.

"Do you understand?" Nadielle was almost shouting now, and Gorham took a step back, frightened for her, frightened of her.

"Yes," Peer said. Gorham looked at her, but she would not meet his eye.

"Because he might be the answer," Nadielle said, muttering now. "My mother wrote that she wasn't certain, but it seems it was all true. There's something in him that meant he survived. Out there, in the Bonelands. Something in his blood."

"And you can copy that?" Peer asked.

"I can try," Nadielle said. "But only after this."

"You're going with them?" Malia asked Gorham.

"Yes," he said. The Baker's uncertain, and more than that-she's scared. He was cold and felt the weight of Echo City's present bearing down upon him. He looked up at the dark ceiling of this place, invisible in the gloom, and imagined all those people up there going about their lives with no concept that everything could be about to change. And then he thought of Rufus. He lived out there for more than twenty years. The idea of that was shattering.

"We should go," Nadielle said, and Gorham felt a rush of pure panic. He went to Peer, stood before her, and waited until she met his eyes.

"I'll see you soon," he said. She only nodded, and he resisted the compulsion to reach for her, to hug her until she could understand. "Peer, there's so much I should say to you."

"Starting with sorry again?" she said, glancing at Nadielle and back to Gorham. Then she laughed. It was humorless, that laugh, and bitter, and as she pushed by him, he searched for any sign of regret at uttering it. But her face was hard, her eyes stern.

"I'm sorry," he said to her back. She raised one hand in a casual goodbye. As Malia started after Peer, Gorham reached out and grasped her arm.

"Take care of her," he whispered. Malia nodded. She knew about grief and loss, and as Gorham watched them crossing the bridge, he felt comforted knowing that Peer was in good hands.

"Thank you," Nadielle said when the others were out of earshot. He had never heard her sound so vulnerable, and when she slipped an arm around his waist and kissed his cheek, he wanted to push her away, hear her say something cutting or derisive. He needed her back to how she always was, because weakness did not sit well with the Baker.

"What the crap is this, Nadielle?"

"I'm not sure. I have suspicions." She shivered, hugging her arms across her chest and nodding at the short woman. "She'll help us find out, one way or another."

"You say we're going deep. To talk to the Garthans? Is she chopped from one of them?"

"I've already spoken with the Garthans," Nadielle said. "And you're right, they're scared. That's why we're going deeper than that."

Gorham felt his stomach drop, and the hairs on his arms prickled. "Deeper…"

"Down past the deepest Echo. Deeper than history."

"To the Chasm," Gorham whispered.

"Something is rising from there. I have to know what."

Something is rising… Gorham looked at the chopped woman, her wide, dulled eyes, and wondered what in the name of every god true or false she could know.

They returned to the Baker's laboratories to gather equipment and so that Nadielle could secure her rooms against intruders. She went about things with a distracted air, and several times Gorham tried to speak to her. But events had taken on a weight of their own, and she remained silent and distant.

The two surviving Pserans were nowhere to be seen. The thin, slick man who sometimes welcomed Gorham was also absent, and as the Baker's womb vats bubbled and scratched into the stillness, it resembled a very lonely place.

The small woman sat on a metal chair close to one of the vats, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. Her eyes were wide. She appeared to be listening.

Nadielle called Gorham through to her rooms, then opened a trapdoor he had never seen before. "Go down," she said. "Fetch ropes, climbing equipment, and weapons."

He went to Nadielle and reached out to touch her face. She pulled back.

"Go," she said. Then she turned away and slipped out into the vast womb-vat hall.

Gorham glanced around, remembering sweeter times he had spent in here with Nadielle. She had always been a demanding lover, and it crossed his mind now that he had sometimes mistaken a base desperation for passion. All those times he had felt were keen and honest were now taking on a sheen of betrayal. He closed his eyes and tried to remember making love with Peer, but too much time had passed and it was like recalling the memories of a friend.

Cursing, he descended through the trapdoor. The room at the bottom of the short ladder contained a hoard of objects from the city above. He shook his head in wonder at what Nadielle could achieve and went about gathering equipment for their journey.

We're going down, he thought, and once again he shut off the terror that held for him. There were phantoms and Garthans down there, and other creatures less known. Places unseen, old histories built upon, pressed down, hidden away for many eons…

He found a rope, good and strong. He shouldered it and picked up a wire ring of crampons and a hammer. The most he'd ever climbed was the side of a two-story building.

The Echoes were places of darkness and forgotten things, and anything could exist in their blackest depths. There were tales of giant sightless lizards and serpents formed entirely from shadows that made the old buried places their homes; it was said that packs of wild dogs had gone blind in the darkness and found their way by smell and sound alone. And then there was the Lost Man. Some said he was a phantom craving the luxury of flesh once more. Others claimed he was an outcast from the earliest rule of the Marcellans, adhering to some ancient religion long since dead in the city above. Sent down, he had lost track of time, and time had lost him, his body adjusting to eternal night and eschewing the passing of days to give him a vastly extended life. This version of the story claimed that he was happy to live here-and that he delighted when an occasional meal got lost in the Echoes and wandered into his domain.

"Shit!" Gorham cursed as he dropped the hammer on his foot. He hopped several times, then retrieved the hammer and took some deep breaths.

Farther down, deep at the ancient root of the city, was the Chasm-bottomless, the place where the Falls and the city's dead found their end, and Something is rising!

"Weapons," he said, standing before the wall where all manner of martial equipment hung. He chose two small crossbows and several racks of bolts, a bag of poisoned dust globes, and some throwing knives. He carried his own short sword and gutting knife, neither of which he'd ever had to use, though he remembered drawing the sword one evening in a tavern three years before, just after Peer had gone and he drank each night to try to forget.

Something is rising!

"That's enough," he said. The room was darker than it had been, wasn't it? The atmosphere heavier? He glanced around and saw two doors he hadn't noticed before, one in each of the room's far corners, and without opening them he knew they led somewhere deeper, to rooms stacked with more things that Nadielle had stolen from somewhere in the city above. But right then he had no desire to discover those things.

"Nadielle?" He went back up into her room, looking at the unmade bed and remembering her chuckling against his neck, and from the vat chamber beyond he heard a sound unlike anything he had ever heard in his life. Perhaps babies being fed alive to rockzards would screech like this, or someone having their bones eaten from the inside, or people dipped into boiling oil-the terrible sound echoed and reverberated, gripping on to his mind with tenacious claws, though he would never want such a memory. He dropped the ropes and weapons and clapped his hands over his ears, screaming to try to drown the noise but succeeding only in adding to it.

Shoving through the door, the first thing he saw was the small woman still sitting on her chair, staring into the distance as if all were quiet. She blinked her heavy eyelids and licked her lips.

The sound was fading, and the room was filling with a haze that carried the rancid stench of innards. Gasping, swallowing hard to try to pop his ears, Gorham hurried to the side wall and looked along at the womb vats.

"Nadielle!"

"Here, Gorham," she replied, and he saw movement on top of the third vat. She raised one hand in a slow greeting, then waved at him. "You might want to stand back."

A hundred questions could find no release, because time would not allow them. There was no time; Gorham realized that now. He felt the urgency of the Baker's every action and movement, which had surely been translated to him much earlier but only now made itself known. Something was rising, and Rufus had arrived, and of course the two were connected.

The vat upon which the Baker sat began to change. Though Gorham had never dared touch one, he'd always assumed them to be cast from some metal-thick and heavy and strong. The rough wooden buttresses holding them upright supported that supposition. Now the vat began to flex and crack.

Nadielle looked down into the womb vat, and Gorham wondered what she saw.

He blinked, convinced at first that his eyes were blurring from the stinking mist in the air. But then the vat deformed, something inside pushing out, extending the shell, and finally bursting through in a spray of foul fluid. An arm first, longer than a normal human's arm and tipped with an array of spiked bone protuberances. Its skin was milky and translucent and streaked with globs of thick red matter. The second arm slipped through the gap and worked at widening it, slicing with those bony blades. And then that terrible screeching came again, bursting up from the vat in another pressurized spray. Nadielle held her hands in front of her eyes, but she did not change position. As the cry died away, she looked down, and in her eyes Gorham saw the love of a mother for her child.

He pressed back against the wall, and when he looked at the small woman sitting farther along the room, she was looking at him at last. Her wide eyes were still blank, her hair framing her long narrow face, and a streak of spurted fluid had plastered her dress to her hip. But she seemed not to notice.

"Don't be afraid," Nadielle said, her voice carrying over the wet sounds from the tearing vat.

"If you say so," Gorham muttered, and he watched one of the Baker's creations being birthed. The vat opened, thick rips in its side spreading and allowing the thing inside to emerge. Both of its arms were in the open now, grasping at the air as if trying to gain purchase. Its head followed, then its body, hips, and legs. It fell to the solid ground with a wet thump, screaming again as it tried to stand. Fluid spilled out around it. The air steamed and stank. The vat spewed a thick flow of afterbirth, spattering down around the emerged shape.

It was the size of a big man, its hair dark, long, and matted across its shoulders and back. When it lifted its head and mewled, Gorham saw its face for the first time. It was a very human face, he thought, with an expression of startled delight at being free. He saw the fully formed teeth in its mouth, some of them longer and sharper than normal, and he concentrated on its eyes, because the rest of its body was far from human. Very far. It looked at him and smiled, dribbling slightly, and Gorham looked away.

"Gorham, don't be afraid," Nadielle said again. She slid down the side of the vat and landed with a splash. The vat hung open and steaming, but already the gap the thing had emerged through seemed to be shrinking. The huge container was repairing itself, as walls lifted and wooden buttresses shoved upward.

When Gorham looked at the newborn again, it was already on its feet. It was using its bladed hands to scrape the wet stuff from its hairless skin. Its legs were long and thin, ending in feet that sprouted thick spines. There were also spines projecting an arm's length along its backbone, flexing and spiking at the air as they stretched. Even as he watched, Gorham saw its skin darkening and hardening. The sound its blades made as they slicked moisture from skin turned from a clean, soft hiss to a harder scraping. In contact with the air at last, it was developing armor before his eyes.

Nadielle stood before her newly chopped creation. It was more than a head taller than she was. Gorham watched, fascinated and appalled, as the thing knelt on bony knees and rested its head on Nadielle's shoulder. She stroked its hair and kissed its head, glancing over its shoulder at Gorham and waving him closer.

He shook his head, but she persisted. "Come here, Gorham," she said. "Meet my new child. It's strong and hard, and it knows how to fight and kill. But more than that, it knows how to protect. I want to teach it who to protect, so come here."

As he went, fear was slowly merging with wonder. He'd just witnessed something incredible. "You've chopped a warrior?"

"I've been working on him for some time. Will you name him?"

The thing was looking at Gorham now, its eyes wide and dark. Does it see me as a human? he wondered. Is there real intelligence in there?

"He thinks," Nadielle said, perhaps seeing the questions and doubt in his eyes, "but it's a different kind of intelligence. You'll not discuss the finest points of philosophy and religion with him, but he could take a dozen Scarlet Blades and wear their scalps for hats."

"And you want me to name it?"

"Unless it is a suitable name."

"No," Gorham said. He paused a few steps away, and Nadielle leaned in and started whispering in its ear, all the while looking at Gorham. The thing never took its eyes from him. Even when it blinked, it did so with one eye at a time, so that he was always in its view.

"He knows you now," she said. "He'll never turn against you, and his life is dedicated to your protection."

"And you?"

"I'm his mother. Now, a name." She smiled sweetly, and Gorham thought she was enjoying this display of her strange, wonderful, terrible talent.

"How about Neph?"

"God of sharp things," Nadielle said. "Appropriate." She whispered to the thing again, and Gorham heard the name Neph mentioned several times. It closed its eyes, Nadielle pulled back, and it was named.

"So when we go down," he said, "what are you expecting?"

Nadielle's smile slipped a little. She touched Neph's face as it pressed against her like a hound twisting against an owner's hand. "Not knowing the answer to that is why we need him."

Neph keened softly, and as it stretched, its blades scored lines in the floor.

"So now we go?" Gorham asked.

"Yes, now we go. You leave first with Neph and the woman, and I'll catch up. I have to make sure no one can enter my rooms while I'm away. It's time to open another vat."

Later, with Neph stalking ahead as silent as night, Gorham asked what the second vat had contained. Nadielle would not tell him. She averted her eyes and smiled at the woman, and when he asked once more, Nadielle walked quickly ahead.

Gorham followed, brooding. He and Nadielle carried food, climbing equipment, and other supplies, leaving Neph free to protect them, and already his shoulders were chafing from the straps. The thought that he would not see the sky again for days was harsh. The idea that Peer and Malia were up there now, searching for perhaps the most important person the city had ever seen, inspired a heavy sense of dread.

And Nadielle's strange woman watched him with her wide blank eyes.

Rufus is not his name-he has no name, because as far as he remembers she did not give him one-but in memory, this is now how he thinks of himself. So Rufus, his younger self, is lying in the sand, and all there is for him to see is the low baking desert and the pale-blue sky, as if even that is scorched by the sun. And though only just born, Rufus feels that death is very close. There is no food, and the heat is burning the fluid from his body. She'll be sad, he thinks, not quite certain who she is. He swallows a mouthful of saliva, and the vague thought of her passes away entirely, replaced by a taste that brings a brief but intense recollection of a dark, cold stone wall. Then even that is gone, and Rufus thinks only of himself.

A long time passes, and then the shadow comes. Its touch seems to soothe his burning skin. He sighs, and his throat hurts. His tongue is swollen. I'm almost dead, he thinks, and those words feel strange in his mind. He knows how they are used and what they mean, but he is lost.

Rufus looks up into the shadow that blocks the sun, and the shape is unfamiliar to him. It comes closer, kneeling before him. It makes a guttural, deep rumble interspersed with clicks and hisses, and he realizes that it is talking.

"I'm lost," he says past his swollen tongue, and it's like talking through a mouthful of food. The corners of his mouth are split, and he winces, feeling blood flowing across his face.

The shape inclines its head, and now his eyes are becoming used to the shadow. He blinks a few times to moisten them some more. The shape smiles. It's a whole new experience for Rufus, and he wonders whether he can ever look like this.

It removes part of its face as it reaches for him, and his shock is tempered by the feel of something cool and wet pressed against his lips. He half-closes his eyes and sucks, and water flows into his mouth. He sighs and swallows, closing one hand around the hand of his helper.

Drinking, enjoying the contact of his skin on someone else's, Rufus searches his thoughts and shallow memories for something to relate this to. But though he feels something deep down begging to be released and revealed, his recollection is blank. This is all new.

His helper's face is dark and smooth, eyes deep and protected behind a transparent film stretched across a network of fine wire filaments. It's a woman-he can see the swell of breasts against the thin white gown she wears-and her full lips are moist and shiny. Her hair is long and glinting with bulbs of water. He's entranced by these droplets, because they seem to slip and flow as the woman moves, catching and casting tiny rainbows and shedding them again just as quickly. He lifts his hand from his helper's wrist and reaches up. She smiles-her eyes behind the film crease at the corners-and leans forward some more. Rufus takes in a deep breath and smells the woman for the first time. His child's brain is almost overwhelmed by the barrage of scents, and though his memory is not rich, he can still identify a sweetness and the heat of spices and warmth. He touches her hair, thick yet smooth, and one bulb of water makes contact with his forefinger. It breaks and flows across Rufus's skin. He sighs with pleasure as another burn is soothed.

The woman speaks again, but Rufus shakes his head. He cannot understand her. And then he sees that, though smiling, her eyes are also flickering this way and that as she examines his body. He's naked, and the relentless sun has scorched him terribly, stretching and reddening the skin all across his shoulders, back, and stomach. His legs and groin have escaped the worst of it, hidden as they have been by his stooped shadow for much of the time, but his ankles and feet are blistered and weeping. He sees sympathy in his helper's eyes, but also confusion.

He releases the wet thing in his mouth and lies back, careful to keep his face within her shadow. As he examines her some more, the rush of sensory input is exhilarating. Instinct gives him the ability to acknowledge and understand certain aspects, though there is little beyond that understanding-no reference points, no historical benchmarks. He recognizes much about his helper without recalling ever having seen anything like her before.

(my mother wiped my mind, she made me a blank, and was it for me or…?)

The woman's robe is light and thin but looks strong. It is tied around her waist, wrists, and ankles with fine silver wire, similar to that which frames the clear film covering her eyes and face. Her skin is dark against the white robe, speckled here and there with pearls of perspiration, and the fine hairs on the back of her hands shine with the remains of some cream or salve. She wears boots with heavy bottoms, and around her waist hangs a loose belt. There are knives here and other things that Rufus does not recognize.

(I know now, but I didn't know then, because even my mother could never have guessed at the wonders of the Heartlands.)

While he examines his helper, Rufus is aware that she is drawing in the sand before him. He looks past her and sees the thing she brought with her. It is large and wide, steaming and breathing, and he cannot conceive of what it might be.

She taps her finger on the back of his hand until he meets her gaze again. Then she points down at what she has drawn. There are two marks in the sand; she points at them, then at him and her alternately. Rufus nods. The woman shuffles back, smoothing the sand she has disturbed until it is blank. She quickly makes marks and slashes, mounds and dips, creating a landscape before his eyes and marking it here and there with landmarks only she can know.

She draws something from her belt and whips it at the air-a long thin stick, appearing as if from nowhere. It's hollow and pierced at regular intervals with oval holes, and though Rufus cannot guess at its true use, his savior uses it now as a pointer. Again she indicates two small shapes, and then she moves back a little, thrusting the stick into the ground between a range of low sand humps she has made. A series of grumbled sounds comes from her mouth, which Rufus assumes to be a name.

A stab of pain slashes at his stomach. Thirst scorches his throat just as the sun burns his skin. He yearns to touch those water bulbs in her long hair again and for the wet thing she held to his mouth while he sucked the moisture from it. But her face has grown stern now, and he can sense a rising disquiet in her manner.

(she took away my memories but left all my senses, all my human knowledge. She wanted me to survive… but turned me into nothing.)

She holds the long pointer across the impromptu map, and Rufus knows what he has to do.

Taking the end of the proffered pointer, he climbs slowly to his feet. He knows he can be healed; he knows this strange woman will take him and do that. But first she wants to know where he has come from.

She is looking down at the rough landscape around her feet as he takes the first few steps. She glances up and freezes. Even her loose robe seems to catch the sunlight and pause, motionless in the still desert heat.

Rufus takes more steps back, eye on the map she has made, and he's aware of the drag marks his feet are making in that desert landscape. Soon he is walking across the marks he left coming here moments or days before, and the woman-his rescuer, his savior-has taken one of the several metal and bone things from her belt. She's holding it in both hands before her, raised as if to gather the heat of the sun, and something glints in the object's concave well.

She starts talking, and though he does not know the words, he recognizes the raised inflection of questions.

Back some more, back, way beyond what he can judge to be distance in the out-of-scale map she has made. But he knows that there's something staggeringly important about where he is, who he is, and what he has done, and suddenly he needs to make an impression. He's not just a young, naked boy dying in a desert. He is something far more.

(if she'd told me I would still have come. If she'd trusted me…)

He stops and plants the pointer in the sand between his feet.

His savior is shouting now, her strange guttural words stumbling over one another as she steps forward, stamping out her map as she moves closer.

(she made me what I am… she sent me out to this…)

Rufus turns and points his skinny arm out into the desert, back the way he has come.

(whatever happens now is all her fault.)

The shouting ceases, and now his savior is muttering again. He feels a sudden charge to the air. Every hair on his head stands on end. A thrill passes through him, aggravating every nerve and setting his whole body spasming, kicking up sand. As he turns fully to face her, there's an intense flash that is, for the blink of an eye, brighter and hotter than the sun.

And then a darkness and silence he has never known before.

Nophel soothed the Scopes, lifting their leather shrouds, rubbing ointment into their unnatural joints and creases, and his condition did not seem to bother them at all. Perhaps they did not even know that he could not be seen; their giant eyes, after all, were aimed out at the city. Or maybe this strange curse left in one of his mother's sample gourds did not affect their chopped, inhuman minds. Dogs and rathawks did not see him, but they were natural things whose minds worked in very defined ways. These Scopes were not conceived in the eyes or minds of gods known or unknown.

Just like me, Nophel thought. Though born a very natural birth, he considered himself offspring of a monster.

He had been watching for half a day, and Dane had not returned. He'd said that he needed to speak to the Council and, ever since he'd left, Nophel had sat in fear of what might come. His life had changed so much: the Blue Water, meeting the Unseen, and then the revelation that the Dragarians-not the Marcellans and their Scarlet Blades, as he'd always assumed-had killed his mother more than twenty years before. That disclosure had stolen some of the comforting satisfaction that playing a part in his bitch mother's death had always afforded him. Absorbing such changes was hard enough, but awaiting the inevitability of more change now was almost unbearable. If he sends them to kill me, they won't be able to see me, he thought. But Dane was not foolish. If he sought Nophel's death, he would lull him first. Unseen he might be, but he was as far from safe as ever before.

And then the Dragarian shouting, Baker! What did that mean?

Watching the viewing mirror for hours on end, his eyes had become sore and his mind jaded by some of the secret minutiae of Echo City's existence. Although guilty of matricide-at least, he'd once believed that was the case, and that belief had made him sleep easier-that had been an honorable murder, revenge for being shunned by the one woman who should have held his deformed face to her bosom and loved him unconditionally. The petty, sordid acts he sometimes witnessed from up here, and the resulting waves of effect that spread out from these acts, had planted a sickness in his soul. Most days he could purge that sickness by watching for only short periods at a time and then cleansing himself by longer moments of contemplation or study. But today he had been looking for too long. A visit to the roof, tending the Scopes, being among his own kind-though he was unchopped, they were products of the dead Baker, and bastard children to her-was already serving to erase some of those sights.

There was good, of course. Kind gestures, signs of benevolence, like the porridge kitchens set up around the many entrances and exits through the wall around Marcellan Canton, run by volunteers and renowned for the quality of the free food they gave away to the homeless, dispossessed, and streetwalkers of the great city. Such signs comforted Nophel immensely, and yet they sometimes troubled him as well. He could not watch a family playing in one of Marcellan's many lush parks-father and mother throwing catchballs, children scampering after them-without musing upon how his own childhood should have been. His life was missing a great part, a pivotal slice of existence. She had sent him away. He had been a bitter and angry child, and no one in the workhouse had ever thrown a catchball for him.

He had finished creaming the Western Scope, working the oil-based soothing gel into the heavy creases around its elongated skull and eye socket, when it stiffened and grew still. He'd never seen anything like it before. The Scopes, he thought, were always static unless instructed to extend or divert their focus, but West's sudden reaction illustrated that motionlessness did not necessarily mean stillness. He'd not been aware of it moving, but as it stilled, the world around Nophel seemed to sway and flex.

The Scope turned to the north. He stumbled back, lest he be knocked to the ground by its enlarged and deformed skull. Gears and joints groaned and creaked in protest, old unoiled wheels shed rust and dirt as they traversed the uneven rooftop beneath the Scope's massive eye, and its body shuddered under the stress of moving so far, stretching too much in a direction it had not looked for years.

"What is it?" Nophel asked, almost as if expecting a reply. He crawled sideways and stood in the center of the roof, and it was only then that he realized the Eastern Scope was also diverting its attention to the north. Its complex support structure was not handling the shifting quite as well, and metal groaned and cracked as several bolted junctions gave way. Chains swung and clanged against supports, and Nophel saw the creature shifting its balance to compensate for the damage.

He turned around and stared into the glaring, flexing eye of the Southern Scope. "Do you see me?" he muttered, and then he felt the stirring dislocation of vertigo as its intricate lens shifted and changed. Perhaps if he'd seen his own reflection in there, it would have rooted him to the world, but he was looking at nothing, and he fell.

They've all seen something! he thought, closing his eyes and resting on his hands and knees for a moment. Never had he known the Scopes to act like this. They obeyed his instructions from the viewing room, turning slightly this way and that, extending and closing their vision, and projecting what they saw down to the viewing mirror. But this sheer act of will shocked him.

Nophel stood and looked north, but he could see nothing out of place. It must be far away. And as he ran for the steps down to the viewing room, he thought, And far away in that direction is Dragar's Canton.

He almost stumbled several times hurrying down the winding staircase, and once back in the viewing room he paused for only a moment to make sure he was alone. It was as silent as he liked it. Panting, unsettled by the Scopes' activities up on the highest rooftop in Echo City, Nophel ran to the viewing mirror and slumped in the seat before it-and he saw.

He saw what the Western Scope saw, with its head turned and body straining at supports, looking to the north at what its cousin the Northern Scope must have seen already.

One of the huge domes of Dragar's Canton filled the polished screen, but he had never seen it like this before. It resembled a nest in one of the ant farms of Crescent Canton, seen from a few steps away so that the industrious insects were shifting, hurrying specks.

"Something coming alive," Nophel whispered, unsure why he had chosen those words yet chilled by them.

He reached for the extension dial, tweaked the focus lever, then turned the oiled, worn scan wheel that sent a series of hydraulic signals up into that rooftop creature. Gasping against the inclination to hold his breath, Nophel stared wide-eyed as the image grew in the viewing mirror. The dome's roof closed in, the curve vanishing as the Western Scope focused on one part, and then Nophel knew for sure.

Across the dome, openings had appeared. Some of the creatures that emerged had wings, just like the thing he had questioned, and they took to the air. Others crawled down across the gray dome, soon disappearing from view. Hatches slid aside to reveal impenetrable darkness, and some closed again after only one or two darting shapes had emerged. Others remained open far longer.

As Nophel gasped in another breath, he shifted the source for the viewing mirror onto the Northern Scope. It took a few beats for the swap to take place, and during that time the screen was painfully blank. Must tell Dane Marcellan, he thought, tapping his fingers against the instrument panel without actually touching any dials, levers, or buttons. Something momentous was occurring out there, and much as he saw himself as the keeper of the Scopes, he knew that this was so much more than him.

The Northern Scope saw the same view. He focused and panned, moved in and out, but however hard he tried to follow one particular shape when it emerged, it was soon lost from sight. It was like trying to track a single snowflake in a blizzard. He closed his eyes, cold, and then hurried from the viewing chambers.

All the way down to Dane Marcellan's rooms, he dwelled upon what he had seen and how he might reveal it. He passed several Scarlet Blades in the twisting corridors and hallways, a couple of them alerted only by the breeze of his billowing cloak. When he reached Dane's rooms, he burst through the door.

Dane stood quickly from an expansive desk in the corner, hand reaching for a knife as he scanned the empty room. Even as his panic subsided a little-perhaps he saw a shadow of Nophel's movement, perhaps he only assumed-Nophel spoke.

"The Dragarians are invading," he said.

Dane sank back into his seat, sighing heavily. He rubbed his face and then stared, blinking slowly as thoughts tumbled.

"Dane?" Nophel said, but the Marcellan did not even seem to register the improper use of his informal name.

"I hear you," the Marcellan said. "I hear you too well."

"Dozens of them. Hundreds! I tried to track them, but-"

"Nophel, I will grant you the White Water antidote, but on one condition." Dane shoved his chair back and stood. His brief moment of shock was over.

"What condition?"

"There is something you must do for me."

"If it's to do with the Council-"

"Nothing to do with them, Nophel. They'll know of this, of course, but the message I want you to carry is to someone very far removed from them. Someone else entirely."

"Then who?" And when it came, the answer, though perhaps expected, was shattering.

"The Baker," Dane said. "The new Baker. Your sister."

"Tell me about the Baker," Peer said.

"What do you want to know?"

"All of it."

"Really?" Malia paused, causing Peer to stop and look at the Watcher.

Peer smiled softly. "Her and Gorham," she said.

Dawn had broken across the mountain of spires, rooftops, and walls in the east to find them crossing the border between Crescent and Course once again. They chatted and laughed, trying to exude the image of strolling friends out to watch sunrise beside the Western Reservoir, but Peer was all too aware of the bulges of weapons beneath Malia's loose coat.

After what she had seen, she felt a long way from safe.

"Gorham is scared of her," Malia said.

"It's hardly surprising."

Malia took a pouch of tobacco from her pocket and shoved a good pinch into her mouth. She offered some, but Peer shook her head.

"He wasn't to start with," Malia said, picking leaf shreds from her lips. "First time he went down there after… after you'd gone, I was with him. He was broken. Talked about you in the past as if you were dead already, but I always saw the truth of it."

Peer wondered whether the harsh Watcher woman would mention her crucified husband. In a way she hoped so, because it would prevent Peer from feeling too selfish for asking about this. Tell me about my old lover and this new woman, she was saying, as if that was the only important thing.

"What was the truth?" Peer asked.

"Back then he could hardly live with himself. He helped me when things turned really bad after your capture, when the purge came. He was a real friend, and I sucked up all the help he gave, giving nothing back. He was grieving too. He spent a long time trying to convince himself that you were dead, yet all the time he held a spark of you inside."

"I'm not sure I believe that," Peer said, and Malia's strong fingers bit into her arm, surprising her.

"You asked me to tell you about him and Nadielle," she said. "That can only start by talking about him and you. So give me the courtesy of assuming I know what I'm saying."

Peer nodded but did not reply.

"Giving you up was the hardest thing he ever had to do. By then he was already working his way up what was left of the Watcher inner circles. He knew what your capture would do: protect the Baker, for a time. And he knew that her involvement with the Watchers was utterly imperative to provide us with what we've always sought."

"A way to escape Echo City when the city's end-time arrives."

"Yes."

"And she hasn't found it yet."

"The Baker's line is long," Malia said after a short pause. "You know that. Strange people. Their presence ebbs and flows through the city's history, from criminal to hero. This Nadielle and her mother before her-they were the first to offer such crucial help to the Watchers." She swished her hand through roadside grasses as they walked, releasing a cloud of feathered seeds to the air. "She's important."

"So betraying me helped Gorham save the Baker." Saying it so starkly made her feel sick inside. Had it been intentional? Had a history already existed between the two of them?

"Don't think about that too hard," Malia said. "He did what was best for all of us, but even that only delayed the inevitable."

"No," Peer said. "It saved the Baker. I suppose I'm a hero." The bitterness in her voice was so sudden and intense that Malia laughed out loud. Peer felt a flush of anger… and then she, too, laughed. It was the only way to hold back the rage.

I shouldn't continue down this path, she thought. It's not my place to pry. But now this was her place again. She'd come home, and however dangerous it was, and however temporary her homecoming might turn out to be, there was part of her history missing. Knowing what had happened after she was taken, tortured, and banished might go some way to filling in those blanks.

"And after I left?"

"The purge," Malia said, and in her voice Peer heard a sense of relief. Perhaps this was something she needed to talk about to keep her memories, and her fury, fresh. "The Scarlet Blades were sent out by the Marcellans-and their Hanharan-fucking priests-to stamp out the Watchers' organization once and for all. They'd already destroyed our political side, with you and the others being killed or…"

"Tortured," Peer said lightly.

"Yes, that. So they went after the rest of the organization. Announced it as a banned group, dangerous to the well-being of the city. Bad times. They swept through Course, killing and arresting as they went. Some of us escaped, some hid, a few fought. But fighting wasn't the thing back then, and it likely never will be. We're the sensible minority in a city of unreason."

"How did you escape?"

"Bren and I went down into the Echoes around the water refineries. We thought we'd be safe, because it's endless down there. And he hoped that after long enough we'd be forgotten and could return topside and live again. But there were Blades waiting down there. Maybe it was luck on their part, or more likely they'd already tortured favored hiding places out of Watchers they'd caught. They took Bren, but I slipped away-"

"From Scarlet Blades?" Peer winced instantly, ashamed at the doubt her voice betrayed. But Malia saw Peer's regret and looked down at her feet as they passed from unsurfaced paths onto a road of condensed gravel.

"Bren fought them," she said. "Gave me a moment to flee and hide. Just enough time, the edge I needed, and I ran and ran. I heard him shouting from behind me, a long time after I'd started. Heard them following, like rats scampering through the Echoes. And something…" She trailed off.

"Something?"

"Something saved me."

They stopped walking and Malia sat on a low wall beside the road. "There's a safe house not far from here," she said. "Devin and Bethy will hopefully be there. We need to start spreading the word about Rufus."

"Yes," Peer said, "but what saved you?"

"Phantoms."

Peer frowned. Shook her head. "They're echoes of Echoes."

"Some say they're unsettled wraiths of people killed by Blades in the distant past and that they hate them still." Malia shrugged. "But something covered me down there, smothered me from view, kept me still. I saw three Blades pass within stabbing distance of me, and if I'd been able to move I'd have gone for them. Might've taken two of the bastards with me, at least. But it kept me from moving."

Peer looked across a field of blooming fruit trees at the reservoir and let the brief silence grow.

"They sacrificed Bren on the wall," Malia said at last.

"I know. I'm sorry." Peer saw the glitter of tears in Malia's eyes. An uncharitable thought came-So she does feel-and Peer glanced away in shame.

"As far as I know, the thing with Gorham and Nadielle was all her," the Watcher woman said, wiping angrily at her eyes. "And I suppose he was feeling… vulnerable. Don't know what she sees in him, frankly."

Peer glanced at her, frowning, but then she saw Malia's expression soften somewhat, the creases around her eyes and mouth defined in the morning sun as she almost smiled.

"Yeah," Peer said. "Lousy in bed too."

Malia chuckled. Peer laughed. And then Malia stood quickly as something flitted overhead, flying low and fast toward a spread of buildings to the south.

"What is it?" Peer asked.

"Messenger bat. We use them, but only in emergencies. Too easy to trace. Come on."

Malia led them toward the safe house, and Peer hoped it would remain safe for a little while longer.

It took a while to reach the house, buried as it was far up one of the sloping streets leading toward the walls of Marcellan Canton. Malia jogged steadily, but soon Peer found herself out of breath and sweating, her old hip wound aching. All those long days harvesting stoneshrooms must have detracted from the fitness she'd once enjoyed.

The streets were busy already with people on their way to and from their places of work, and Peer and Malia attracted more than a few curious glances. We should slow down, Peer wanted to say, but something had Malia unsettled. So Peer stayed quiet, concentrating on the pounding heels of the woman ahead of her, and hoped that chance favored her this morning. Hers was not an especially recognizable face, but since breaking out of Skulk she was more than aware that a death sentence hung over her.

"Not far," Malia said over her shoulder, and Peer knew that the Watcher must have heard her panting.

They reached a small, sloping square where a group of musicians had set up their instruments on a leveled timber area. The musicians stood and sat with their backs to the Marcellan wall, their gentle strains serenading people rushing here, there, or somewhere else. Few stopped to watch, but the musicians seemed unconcerned. Peer had seen their like many times before, and from her time with the Watchers she knew more about them than did most Echo City inhabitants. Their music was designed to lull, written by songsmiths embedded deep within Order of Hanharan circles. Listen to enough of that crap, she remembered Malia's husband, Bren, saying across a table of empty wine bottles and spilled ale, and you'll be paying homage to Hanharan's asshole by morning. They'd laughed at the blasphemy and glared at any tavern patrons daring to throw a disapproving glance their way.

Past the square, along a tree-lined avenue of three-story buildings, and then Malia paused at a doorway and glanced back at Peer.

"Still with me?" she asked, smiling. Her breathing displayed hardly any sign of exertion, and Peer's respect for this Watcher woman grew some more.

Malia knocked at the door. A small viewing panel slid open and she exchanged words with someone inside. As bolts and chains were withdrawn beyond the door, she turned back to Peer, face grim.

"We should hurry," she said. "The bat's here and the reading's about to start."

Bats. Readings. Peer knew nothing of this. And as she followed Malia into the small, shady house, she wondered just how much the Watchers had ever confided in her. Being a part of their political wing, she'd believed that she had their beliefs and concerns at heart every time she'd confronted Marcellan politicians or the more fanatical Hanharan priests. The Marcellans had been entrenched, though, and although they were completely driven by their Hanharan faith, they had ironically viewed the Watchers' political face-the representation of a faithless belief-as fundamentalist.

But perhaps the Watchers had felt it safer keeping their true, deeper secrets to themselves. Having been banished and returned, she was now a part of something deeper and more covert. Being used even back then, she thought, but now was not the time for upset or recriminations. The past was past. The future had yet to be formed. And the higher the sun rose today, the more unsettled she feared their immediate future might be.

The woman was huge. Peer didn't think she'd ever seen anyone this size in her life-a bulbous mass of sickly gray and yellow flesh, with rolls of fat spilling from between swaths of damp leather. Atop this gently shifting mass was the woman's head, chinless and swollen, with a small tight mouth and eyes all but hidden in pits in her skull. Her arms and hands seemed unnaturally small compared to the rest of her body, and her legs were somewhere out of sight. The smells were rank and rich, and as the woman shifted to watch them enter, Peer heard wet and fluid sounds. It was disgusting, and it made her want to retch-but then she saw the woman's eyes for the first time.

"Hello, child," the woman said, staring directly at Peer. Her voice was high and light, lilting with harmonies that would have put a silk snake to shame. "Close the door behind you. It's cold."

Peer squeezed into the room behind Malia and closed the door. It snicked shut, and she had a moment of panic when she thought they might be locked in. But then she felt the warm, surprising touch of Malia's hand pressed flat against her thigh, a light tap that's the first time she's touched me.

– and she knew the Watcher was doing her best to settle Peer's fears.

"Peer, meet Blu. Ex-whore, ex-leader of the Bloodwork Gang in Mino Mont, ex-informer to the Scarlet Blades. Murderer, kidnapper, rapist, thief, and monster."

"Fuck you too, Malia," the huge woman said, and her body started to ripple as she giggled like a little girl.

"All that's true?" Peer asked.

"All but one," Malia said. She knelt beside Blu and smiled up at her, as though worshipping the fetid mass of flesh and bone this woman had become. She probably can't even leave this room, Peer thought, and she realized how safe this house must be. Anyone entering through the front door and not knowing what to expect would likely be scared right back onto the street.

"I saw the bat," Malia said. "I was coming to see you anyway, but the bat makes things so much more urgent."

"You want me to read and tell you, Malia?"

"Yes."

"And why should I do that?" Blu's voice was still high and light, but Peer detected the first hint of tension between her and the Watcher.

"Because we keep you safe," Malia whispered. Blu shook some more, but this time her laughter was silent.

"I'm only playing with you, Malia," she said. "Peer. You're very beautiful. I like beautiful women around me, but I… lose so many. I have my needs, you see. Places I can't reach. Things I can't do for myself."

"She's with me," Malia said, and those three words were loaded. Blu sighed, and a ripple of dejection passed around her body and lost itself in the clothes piled around her frame.

"Well, it was worth a try." Then the huge woman opened her hand, and curled in her warm, wet palm was a bat. Its wings were propped beside it, ears high, claws gripping lightly, and its nose twitched as its meaty prison unfurled.

"It flew in from the north," Malia said. "We're looking for someone, and I fear-" But Blu waved her words aside.

"Quiet, Malia. You've come to hear what I have to say, so don't taint the air with supposition."

Malia stood and backed away, standing close beside Peer where she leaned against the door.

"Now what?" Peer whispered.

"Watch and listen," Malia said.

Peer breathed lightly through her mouth, because tasting the stench did not seem quite as bad as smelling it, and her heart beat with nervous expectation.

Blu brought the bat up before her eyes. The little creature shifted in her plump hand, but only enough to maintain its balance. It was looking directly at the obese woman's face, and it seemed ridiculously small. She can't reach her own head, Peer thought, as Blu seemed to stretch her nonexistent neck a little, puckering her lips, pressing her arm into her side in an effort to bring the bat closer. Should I offer to help? Peer was about to ask Malia, but then Blu flicked her wrist, flinging the bat toward her. It landed perfectly on her wide shoulder, fluttering its wings slightly as if to shake off the effort of its short flight.

Blu settled again, and Peer had not realized how much Blu had been tensing her unnaturally large body until it slumped and regained its former, resting position. The huge woman sighed, belched, then tilted her head toward the bat.

Peer's stomach lurched and rolled, her eyes watered, and she could not understand how anyone could bear to be in here for very long. I have my needs, you see, the woman had said, and whenever Peer blinked she had brief flashes of what those needs must be. Her right arm ached in tortured sympathy with whoever had to fulfill them.

She saw Blu's lips shifting a little, and the bat's head tilting, and the woman muttered words and sounds almost too high for Peer to hear. In return the bat flapped its small leathery wings and squealed back. She felt rather than heard the conversation, and she was thankful that it did not take too long.

As the bat seemed to settle again, clawing its way down from Blu's shoulder to her expansive bosom, the woman's head snapped to one side and she grabbed the bat between her teeth.

Peer gasped. Blu bit. The bat squealed, its cries more than audible this time as its body popped. Blood streamed down the woman's wide neck. She bit again, jerking her head back like a wild dog as she drew the bat deeper into her mouth.

"Malia!" Peer said, an expression of disgust rather than a plea for action.

Blu chewed, crunching bone, dribbling blood, and her frown seemed distant and preoccupied. She started swallowing pieces of the bat, and each swallow made a revolting gurgling sound. She chewed some more, glancing at Peer and then away again, her frown deepening.

"What?" Malia said, but Blu ignored her.

When she had finished chewing, Blu opened her mouth and let a glob of glistening, blood-covered fur roll from her mouth. It struck her chest and rested there, spreading a pool of diluted blood across the cloth of her voluminous dress. She stared at it, unseeing.

"Blu, what?"

"Dragarians," the bat-eater muttered. "Many of them, streaming out of their canton. Some fly. Others crawl, run, and slither."

Dragarians! Peer had never seen one, other than in paintings and drawings. They were not quite as mythical as the deep-living Garthans-they were known to exist, beneath the cover of their massive domes-yet they were further beyond the reach of normal Echo City inhabitants. And Penler had respected, even honored them.

"What does that mean?" Malia said.

Blu looked at Malia, then at Peer. Any underlying humor had vanished, and the blood smearing her chin and bloated throat made her look monstrous. "That's for you to know," she said. "I'm just the reader."

"Rufus," Peer said.

"What about him?"

And though she needed to talk with Malia, she did not wish to do so here. Blu was still staring at her, those sunken, strange eyes piercing and animalistic at the same time. She was not chopped, Peer was certain of that. This staggering size was naturally wrought. But such a condition must have also affected her mind, giving her the ability to do what she had just done and perhaps also warping her in other ways. Malia might trust her, but Peer did not.

"Why did you eat the bat?" she asked.

Blu stared at her for a long moment before saying, "Evidence."

"But how did you-"

"Thank you, Blu," Malia said, and she turned to leave.

"But wait, Malia, what about…? When do we…?"

"Thank you." Malia reached around Peer to open the door, shoving her out into the corridor. She slammed the door behind her, closed her eyes, and leaned against the wood, sighing, then opened them again and stared at Peer. "Rufus arrives, and the Dragarians emerge from their canton overtly for the first time in centuries. Is there any chance that this could be a coincidence?"

Is she just going to ignore what we saw? Peer thought, and she felt dizzy with confusion. "Malia-"

"He comes in from the desert, and they stream out from their canton." She was staring at the floor now, where rotten skirtings were punctured with ghourt-lizard holes. "They've spent generations awaiting the return of Dragar. From out of the Bonelands are the words they used, before shutting themselves away from everything else. How the crap do they even know he's here?"

"Spies?" Peer said, shrugging. "People have all but forgotten them-it must be easy for them to watch."

"And now Rufus is lost in the city," Malia said, "and we have to find him before the Marcellans do, because they'll execute him as a Pretender. And we have to find him before the Dragarians do, because if they seriously believe him to be their damned prophet returned to them from the Bonelands…" She shook her head.

"If they believe…" Peer prompted.

"The Watchers know that the end is coming, and we strive to prepare for it. But to the Dragarians, their doomsday belief is a religion. They crave the end of Echo City, because according to their philosophies that's when Dragar returns to take them into Honored Darkness-whatever the fuck that means."

"It's the north," Peer said.

"The north?"

"Honored Darkness. A man I know was sent to Skulk because of his writings about the Dragarians. He respected their aims and their religion. Most think that 'Honored Darkness' means death, but Penler thinks it's the north, where the sun never shines and time stands still. And the Baker told me that Dragar, murdered five hundred years ago, was conceived in the desert and was immune to its effects."

"They think that Rufus is Dragar and he'll lead them north from the city," Malia said softly.

Peer nodded, and her stomach dropped. "And if they think he's returned early…"

"They'll do their best to fulfill the end-days prophecy themselves. Something might well be rising, but the Dragarians could be the immediate threat." Malia pushed herself away from the wall. "Flying things, Blu said. Crawling things. Who knows what the crap they've been doing under those domes for the past five centuries."

"Oh, by all the false gods," Peer muttered. "He's not just important anymore, is he? Rufus?"

"Not just important, no. He's dangerous."

I thought that the moment he killed the Border Spite, Peer thought. But Malia grabbed her arm and pulled her from the house, and events swept around her, dragging her onward, tugging at her fears and hopes, her pains and traumas from the past, and steering her toward some destiny she could not understand and would never have believed had she known.

As they ran back along the street, Peer asked about Blu.

"Believe me," Malia said, "it's better that you never know."

The sun was bright above Hanharan Heights, and the sky held only a few innocuous clouds. But Echo City suddenly felt darker than ever before.

The three Gage Gang members usually worked only at night, but today they made an exception. They'd been following the tall man since sunup. He looked such easy prey.

Jon Gage-all gang captains took the gang's name in lieu of their family name-enjoyed working with the boy and woman he was with today. The boy was respectful, even reverential, and often in awe at some of the stories Jon told him about his last few years as a Gager. Most of these stories were embellished, and some were outright lies, but for Jon that was half the point. Slash took away parts of their lives that they didn't desire anymore or that caused them pain and left openings in memory and intention that could then be filled. The woman used to work as a whore in Mino Mont and was owned by one of the most vicious gangs there, though she had always refused to name which one. She'd escaped underground in a long journey through the Marcellan Echoes and ended up in Crescent, amazed at the intense farming that occurred there, letting her wounds and bruises heal, though her mind never had. Jon had found her one night shivering beneath a huge mepple stack, and they'd been friends ever since. She was comfortable with him, felt protected, and because Jon's preferences went the other way, there were never any sexual tensions.

So the three of them were friends, and this friendship worked well when they were hunting. They were a tight unit, a small part of a much larger organization whose main aim was the procurement of slash. A very particular drug, slash stimulated imagination and awareness, encouraging hallucinations in the user, depending upon the grade of drug taken and the concentration. Small amounts could be procured by anyone in the city apprised of where to look for it, but the addicts forming the Gage Gang had realized years ago that the more money they moved in bulk, the greater the amount of drugs they could buy. They had shifted from being concerted users to organized distributors. And there were those in the gang whose aims were now edging even higher; they wanted to make a play for the subterranean manufacturing plants.

But Jon had never been that ambitious. He was happy with his daily fixes and the comforts that Gage membership brought. The unpleasant side of such a business-the transporting of meat offerings down to the rogue Garthan tribe that ran the production plants-was something he thought about only when he had to. He and the others would spend some days sitting outside one of the rural cafes scattered across Crescent, talking inconsequentialities, enjoying sunlight on their skin and the feeling of slash massaging their minds, and sometimes he even thought himself a moral man. Decent, hardworking, he had certain values, and he let the slash construct and reinforce those beliefs as much as he could.