Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"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.

It was only when he had to hunt, collect, and transport their victims down into the Echoes, then hand them over to the Garthans who manufactured the slash, knowing that the drug-addled underground dwellers would slow-roast them alive, tearing off cooked chunks of flesh to feed their babies… It was only then that Jon entertained an awareness of what he really was.

The white-haired man was lost, that much was obvious. He had been walking across the landscape in a vaguely northwesterly direction since they first spotted him, and for most of the afternoon they had been casually trailing him. They followed at a distance, and once he wandered beyond a small commune growing beans and lushfruit, Jon decided the time had come to close in. Their traps had been empty for the last few nights-not even a wandering wild horse or tusked swine to offer in lieu of the preferred long pork. It would bode well for the three of them if they could report a capture this evening.

"We'll wait until he's in the next valley," Jon said. "I know it well. There's a wide irrigation canal, no bridges for half a mile in either direction. Maybe he'll swim, or maybe he'll go for a bridge. Either way, we'll have him trapped."

"And then have time to take him," the woman said, her eyes wide with excitement. Jon knew that she'd suffered at the hands of the Mino Mont gang-she'd shown him her scars and injuries and where they had taken pieces of her away-and he was afraid that the mental wounds formed more-deadly scar tissue in her mind, places that could not be touched and tempered by slash. Sometimes, he thought she was mad.

"Can I take him down?" the boy asked. His eyes were wide as well, but this was a childish fear, not excitement. After each catch, the boy still cried. Jon always administered the slash to him first, and slowly he could see the drug working on the boy's concerns, burying and camouflaging them. But it always took some time.

"Well, it's daytime," Jon said. "We'll have to be fast. This is no time to let someone scream."

"I'm a good shot," the boy said, and Jon could not deny that. He'd once seen him take a rathawk out of the sky with his doonerang.

"Let the kid have a go," the woman said.

Jon smiled and nodded. "First shot, though," he warned, and the kid grinned and started forward.

They spread out and followed the white-haired man up a long, slow slope planted with countless rows of dart-root shrubs. The spicy smell hung heavy in the still air, warm and enticing. Jon brushed against leaves and sniffed at his fingers. He realized how hungry he was. After they caught this one and took him down-the Gagers maintained many hidden routes down to the exchange points in the Echoes, and he knew of one close by-it would be time to eat.

"Hey, kid," the woman said, and she started running.

"Wait!" Jon hissed. How could it have gone so wrong? The kid was darting through the plants, impressively stealthy and yet much too early. The man would hear him coming, turn and see him, and if he had a spit of self-preservation he'd be off, running into the endless miles of crops and making what should have been an easy catch hard. So Jon started to run as well, risking making more noise but offsetting that risk with the knowledge that they had to slow down. If he shouted after the kid now, all would be lost.