Tim Lebbon - Echo city

"Peer," Malia said quietly.

"Do they all know?" she asked, looking around the group.

"Yes."

"They all know everything?"

Malia nodded. Watchers exchanged nervous glances, and then Peer sensed the loaded atmosphere she'd somehow missed before. Some of them were drinking too quickly; others did not touch their drinks at all. Feet shuffled, eyes flickered, and there was a dearth of conversation. This was not a group of people out for a drink. It was a gathering of Watchers aware that what they'd waited for all their lives might have arrived.

"There's hope," Peer said louder. "We just have to find it." She eased back from the man and he picked up his spilled mug, nodding softly at her.

This is when we grow weak, she thought, and suddenly Penler's unspoken beliefs in a deity or deities seemed to make sense. This is when faith in nothing makes us scared. We're rationalists and realists, but doesn't everyone need something to believe in?

"Where?" Devin said. "Show us the hope."

"The Baker," Peer said, and she pictured that strange young woman's confident smile.

"You've seen her, Peer," Malia said after an uncomfortable pause.

"Yes." She was uncertain what Malia meant, troubled by the stillness that had fallen over the group.

"Well… she's mad."

Mad. Peer raised her own drink and took a long draft, taking the time to think about Nadielle, Gorham, and what the Baker could possibly do to help any of them. While she was venturing down to assess the dangers rising from below, the city itself was suddenly filled with threats.

"Maybe," Peer said at last. "But who wouldn't be, knowing what she knows? We take Rufus to her, and she can still help us. She must."

Malia sighed. Devin swallowed more ale.

"We have to look!" Peer said. "Start searching, and if that brings the attention of the Scarlet Blades, then we have to fight."

"Now you're mad," someone muttered.

"So this is it? All this time wasted?" She looked around at them, and her voice rose into a shout. "You're giving up?"

"Hush!" someone said, but she had their attention. She looked pointedly at Malia, lowered her voice again. "All those dead Watchers, nailed to the wall for nothing?" She pulled up her right sleeve to expose the ugly purple scars around her elbow and biceps. "All those people tortured, so we can sit and drink fucking beer while our last hope is lost out there somewhere?"

"You've heard the whispers," Malia said. "The Dragarians are out. They probably have him already, and they'll take him back to their canton, and that will be it. We'll never see him again, and the next thing we know will be war with the Dragarians as they fulfill their own prophesies. And when they realize he's not their savior, they'll kill him."

"So it's hopeless," Peer said.

"Yes."

"Right." She stood and shoved her stool back. It fell onto its side on the pavement, and she glared around at them all. Those who knew her had believed she was banished to Skulk forever, and in some of their eyes she saw grudging respect for her escape. Those who did not know her saw only an intruder. It was sad that the Watchers' jealous protection of their outlawed beliefs inspired such paranoia. "Rufus is a friend of mine," she said. "I brought him into the city and exposed him to everything that's happened. So I'm going to go and find him."

"Into Dragar's Canton?" Devin scoffed.

"If I need to." There's no way I can, she thought. This really is madness. But it had gone too far for her to back down now, and she was too angry to even consider doing so.

"What about Gorham?" Malia asked.

"What about him?" She turned to leave, then glanced back. "At least I'll be doing something positive when the end comes." And their murmured conversation as she walked away could have been the distant echo of some subterranean thing coming for them all.

Rufus is moving, his body jarring against something solid, and when he opens his eyes he sees green.

He tries to sit up but he's bound. His arms are fixed tight to his sides, his head tilted to the left. When he attempts to move his legs, they are unresponsive. He tenses and flexes, but though he can feel a soft breeze against his naked skin, his entire body feels constrained.

The sky above the green is a burning blue, but this is no desert.

Then he opens his mouth to draw in a breath, and that's when he feels the film across his face.

For a moment he panics. He blinks rapidly, and though there's no impediment to his eyelids, he can feel his lashes brushing against something. He smiles and frowns, shifting his expression and feeling the film tightening and loosening across and around his face.

I can breathe, he thinks, but the panic is still there. Air moves in and out through his nostrils, but he's suddenly enclosed and cut off from the world, sensing that everything on the outside is dangerous, and all there is on the inside is him. Am I dreaming? he wonders, but then he realizes that this is a memory, and that when this happened he had no name.

He tries to lift himself to see where he is and what is happening, but he can barely move. He remembers the woman who found him, and that strange webbed mask she had been wearing. She's wrapped me up in that, he thinks, and starts to relax until he remembers what happened.

I showed her where I came from… across the desert… out of the sun and heat and Bonelands… and then she did something to me.

As if summoned by his vague memories, the woman's face appears above him. She touches his cheek, and the feel and heat of her skin are unimpeded by the constraining film. Those rumbles, clicks, and hisses come again, and there's something in their tone that comforts him. Her fingers do not scratch his face but soothe. Her eyes are wrinkled with a smile, not a frown. If she had meant him harm, he would be dead on those baking sands.

He can see green, and in his sudden rush of excitement he manages to sit up against his bonds.

The woman moves back a little but retains her uncertain smile. He sees her hand resting on the thing on her belt she did something to me with that

– but he looks around, shocked, amazed, and his delighted laughter seems to convince her that he means no harm.

It should be terrifying. But something about the lush green rolling landscape that is unlike anything he has ever seen is so natural that it holds no fear. The thing that carries him is moving along a rutted track, which runs along the bottom of a valley. The track side is speckled with swaths of blue bell-shaped flowers, and they spread out into the wide, wild fields beyond. He struggles to see order in the landscape but there is none, only randomness, and that amazes him even more. No farming, he thinks. It's so bountiful here that they harvest from the wild! In one place, the flowers give way to a low, thick plant spotted with a million yellow blooms. To his right, a woodland begins a hundred steps from the track, the trees short and squat, the canopy wild and untended-an uneven carpet crawling up the hillside toward its high, bare summit. Up there he can see the gray stains of rocky outcrops and a few white specks that seem to move slowly. There's a stream bordering the track to the left. It gurgles merrily, following his direction of travel, twisting and turning past rocks and through dips in the land. Bees buzz the flowers in abundance. Web strands drift on the breeze. Butterflies flutter across the fields, in colors and varieties that amaze him. Birds hurry through the air, taking insects on the wing, and high above he sees several larger, more-graceful birds drifting on the air without once flapping their wings. They circle, and he wonders what they must think when they look down upon him.

The woman is walking by his side, far enough back to allow him to see the view. And she's watching him carefully. The smile is still there, but so is a frown of concentration, wrinkling skin darker than any he has ever seen. The beads of water seem to have vanished from her hair. He is something amazing to her as well.