Tim Lebbon - Echo city

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.