Tim Lebbon - Echo city

Something flew overhead. Jon stopped and looked around, but whatever it was must have been very low. The dart-root plants barely rose above his shoulders, but already the flying thing was lost to sight. Rathawk, he thought, but that felt wrong.

He moved on, keeping track of the kid and the woman. She was good, he had to admit, and he'd told her that many times. She was running faster than anyone and moving like a phantom.

Jon saw the tall man's outline as he reached the top of the hill. The man paused and looked around, lost but apparently searching for something. It wasn't often that Jon worried about what people were doing out in these fields-they rarely preyed on the farmers or pickers, because the Gagers knew how quickly suspicions and myth would spread among the farming communities-but this man had him intrigued. There was something strange about him, as if he'd taken a massive dose of slash and now was lost in the landscapes of his own mind. Jon had seen it happen before and had even experienced it once or twice himself. Just what are you seeing when you look around? he thought. He searched the memories of his own slashouts, but they were as vague as fleeting dreams.

Jon almost tripped on a ridge in the soil and looked down at his feet, and when he glanced up again the ground before him was red.

He should have stopped running, should have recognized what it was and what had happened, but he'd not taken slash for several days. His reactions were a little rusty, his perception skewed by thoughts of where and when the next smoke would come from. So he kept running, and it was the woman's uncoiled guts that tripped him.

Jon went sprawling, unable to contain the scream. Shock, disgust, grief, terror-they all came out in one piercing shout. He held out his hands and they pressed into something warm. It splashed his face and neck, and then he rolled, feeling things crunching and bursting beneath him.

Her head, I see her head, and she's screaming, and there's no sound because-

Because her head had rolled away, and he was in her body. When he saw the hand, he focused intently on it, because it was the only part of her not touched by spilled blood.

Steam rose, and everything he touched was warm.

He was trying to take in another breath, but shock had winded him. The boy, he thought, because he always thought of him as Boy, and now he wished he'd shouted the kid's name one last time before he'd run away.

Jon managed to stand. His feet sank into wet soil, but he looked away. When he'd found her beneath the mepple stack, the woman had tried to kiss him, hands stealing to his cock because, in her gang, that was the only way she'd known to survive. When she'd felt no stirring there, she frowned, and then Jon had kissed her forehead and told her to tell him her story and that everything would be fine. Now everything was no longer fine, and he had to Something else flew overhead, wingtips and limbs skimming the uppermost plants and sending leaves drifting down. Jon flinched downward, closer to the ruin of the woman, and then he found his voice and screamed.

He stood and sprinted uphill. The tall man was staring down at him, skin pale and eyes wide, and, closer, Jon could see the boy's bobbing head as he closed on their prey. Plants all around the boy shook, and he disappeared.

Jon was about to shout when he heard the boy's terrible wet scream. It was cut off quickly. The plants stopped moving.

So did Jon. He was staring at the white-haired man, and he realized the man was not afraid. Confused perhaps, and a little bewildered. But the boy's dying screech, piercing and awful, had not seemed to perturb the stranger.

Figures appeared all around. Gray shapes, stooped like the few Garthans Jon had seen over the years, and he thought, They've started hunting for themselves. But then the shapes stood tall, and he realized that these were not Garthans. He didn't know what they were, though he had his suspicions. He'd read books about the Dragarians-speculative stuff concerning what that hermitic society had been doing for the last few hundred years, why they never came out, and why no one who tried to enter their canton was ever seen again. There had been illustrations, but most were merely projections of what they might look like now. They'd been human when they shut themselves away.

"But you've changed," Jon whispered, and the tall man met his gaze again.

Jon started to back away. His increased heartbeat flushed some slash dregs into his system and he felt a curious calmness descending, the terrible fate they had been ready to subject this man to vague and ambiguous now. He almost tripped over a dart-root stem but resisted the temptation to look back. They're not looking for me, he thought. It's all him. Whatever this is about, whatever they want, it's all him.

His vision swam and he closed his eyes, willing away the wooziness that sometimes accompanied his first slash of the day. When he opened his eyes again, one of the things stood before him. A Dragarian. And the very fact that it was humanoid made its indigo eyes even more alien.

"Wait," Jon whispered, and something flashed before him. When he went to speak again, no sound emerged. And as the thing turned away and sprinted back up the slope, Jon felt the rush of blood and knew that his throat had been cut.

He went to his knees, then fell forward onto the rich soil. His blood would fertilize, his flesh rot and give goodness, and his dying thoughts were fueled by slash. Best way to go, a fellow Gage Gang member had once said, all slashed up. Jon almost agreed.

As the world grew dark, he heard the sound of songlike worship, and the pain came in at last.

"You made me name Neph, because it was not a suitable name," Gorham said. "So what about her?"

Nadielle was walking beside him in the deepest Echo he had ever seen. Neph was somewhere ahead, patrolling beyond the reach of their burning torches and already making Gorham feel safe. Behind them came the woman. She neither spoke nor responded when he spoke to her, and he'd caught Nadielle watching him in amusement when he tried.

The Baker seemed uninterested. "Choose a name, if it will make you happy."

"Don't you want to name her?"

"No," she said softly.

"Why?"

"Same reason I had no wish to name Neph: I left that for your amusement. Besides, she's going to die."

Gorham wanted her to say more, but Nadielle walked silently on, staring down at the sandy soil of this older Echo.

"I'll call her Caytlin." He looked back at the short, slight woman as he spoke the name, but there was no reaction. She was following them like a sad puppy, and he wondered where her impetus lay.

"Fine," Nadielle said. She kicked at a raised rut, and the loose stones and soil clumps hissed down before them.

Soon after heading away from the Baker's rooms, they had been in a district of the first Crescent Echo that Gorham had never seen before. He was used to the ruined farmsteads and dead fields, visible only as far as torchlight penetrated. And he had been down into the most recent Course Echoes as well, which resembled that canton's built-up appearance. But the lifeless forest had come as a shock. The trees were stark and gray, leafless, petrified remnants of a place once teeming with life. He could not identify any of the species, though that was likely due to the amount their bark had degraded, most of it drying and turning to dust. The soil around their bases had shrunk away, revealing the agonized poses of old roots. And in the hardened flesh of several trees, he saw the carved proclamations of long-forgotten love affairs.

A thousand steps later, they'd reached a place where the ceiling had tumbled and the ground had reared up, and Nadielle had led them down through a series of caverns and tunnels to the Second Echo.