Tim Lebbon - Echo city

I'm a monster, she had said, taking on the blame for the Vex. And thinking of the Pserans and Neph, Gorham's uncertainty about this woman grew even more.

Now, the two of them close together as they climbed through the buried histories of Echo City, she was becoming more of a stranger to him than ever before. She was the Baker, not Nadielle. In her mind, memories of old. In her heart, knowledge handed down through the ages. Behind and below them, rising from the unimaginable Chasm with the bones of millennia of the city's dead in its gut, came the Baker family's greatest mistake.

Nadielle was changing so much, and her fear was Gorham's terror.

Up through the Echoes, and Gorham felt eyes upon them all the way. Sometimes he thought he saw movement in old buildings and ruined streets, but when he looked, lights would blink out and darkness would stalk there once again. Other times he saw nothing but sensed things following them, slinking through shadows only just touched by Nadielle's oil torchlight, sniffing after them like hungry hounds. The feeling would go and then return, but he never mentioned it to Nadielle. She was very far away, and he was afraid to disturb her haunting thoughts.

And he wondered what would happen should her torch's fuel reservoir dry up.

Whatever observed and followed did nothing to interfere with their journey, and an unknown time after fleeing the thunderous Falls, Gorham thought that he recognized the Echo around them. Nadielle paused several times-from tiredness, he thought at first, but then he saw the alertness on her face-and all at once she seemed to relax.

"The laboratory is safe," she said. "Not far now."

"I recognize this place. These old fields."

"We'll approach from a different direction, but, yes. My rooms are guarded, Gorham."

"Guarded by what?"

But she was frowning again, distant, and Gorham wondered just how much of herself the Baker had left down at the Falls.

The land rose slightly, old farmland given over to the chaotic remains of wild forest, and soon Nadielle paused at a dip in the ground. There was a round metal hatch cast into the gulley's wall. She glanced back at Gorham, smiling uncertainly, then touched a succession of bolts and dials. A hiss, and then the hatch clicked open. She and Gorham entered, pausing to pluck two torches from the wall.

We're back, Gorham thought, and relief flushed through him. He climbed in after Nadielle and breathed in the familiar, mysterious scents of the Baker's laboratories. He held her arm and tried pulling her to him. She resisted.

"Nadielle?"

"Not now," she said, voice strained. "Don't you see that it's all changed? That I'm someone else?"

"No," he said, but he could not keep the lie from his voice. For a while, Peer's distant presence had been pulling him forward and upward, not Nadielle's.

"I've never had much of a cause," she said. "I've no memories of being a child. I don't even know how old I was when I was chopped. My first recollection is of things carrying me through the Echoes-and I knew what the Echoes were, even then. What child deserves memories like that? When they know everything? Ever since, I've been trying to find my sense of wonder. Sometimes the work I do is… just because I'm the Baker. There's never been much of a reason. But now I have to do what I can." She was distracted, uncertain, and could not meet his eye. "It's all that's left."

"And I'm here to help," he said.

Nadielle froze for a moment, then slowly lifted her head until she was looking right at him. He had never seen such soul in her eyes. "Thank you," she said. She turned from him and walked along the dusty corridor. "I hope you can."

He followed her. As they came to the end of the short corridor and she started to open another metal door, she muttered a brief warning over her shoulder, which did nothing to prepare him for what was inside. "They won't hurt you." Then she opened the door.

Her laboratory was alight with flaring oil lamps. It was also alive with stalking, crawling things-multi-bladed, many-fanged, their bodies muscular and trim, heads thin, eyes dark and large to make the most of the light. They hunkered down when Nadielle and Gorham first entered, then rushed to her like eager pets welcoming their master home.

They won't hurt me, they won't hurt me, Gorham repeated in his mind, because he had never seen anything like this. Neph was similar, but it was humanoid, its origins obvious. These things were part insect, part lizard, as large as a man but so obviously inhuman that he found them less disturbing to look at than Neph. But, unlike with Neph, Gorham could not read them at all.

Some hissed, a few clicked toward him on gleaming claws. Nadielle spoke words in a language he had never heard, and they held back, but he sensed a constant readiness in them to leap at him. He touched his sword's handle and almost laughed at how ineffectual it felt.

"Let's eat and drink," Nadielle said. "And you'll be wanting to rest."

"And you?" he asked, thinking of her bed, her warmth.

"No time for me," she said.

"Then let me help?"

"You?" she asked. When she turned around, it was as if she did not know him at all.

"Me. I'm not just an inconvenience, Nadielle. I went down with you to help, and I'm here to help now."

"I'm not sure what-"

"Don't cast me aside!" he shouted. The huge vat room echoed with the scrape of claw on stone, and shadows tensed.

"Gorham, this is beyond you. You don't know what I am."

"Yet you've tried to make me understand. How many others have you tried telling?"

Nadielle sighed, nodded, and they walked across the vat room together.

None of the womb vats was ruptured, but several still seemed to be working. The creatures-he'd seen maybe twelve, though there might be that many again concealed-patrolled the chamber, and he felt their attention focused upon him. She's their mother, he thought, and that realization led him to consider the convolutions of her strange, unnatural family history.

The more he knew, his fascination with her only increased. But the love he'd once claimed for her now felt different. Lessened. In the face of the Baker, such an idea felt almost childlike.

Speaking again in that strange language, Nadielle entered her rooms at the end of the vat chamber, and Gorham followed. The sense of familiarity enveloped him, and he sighed in relief when he closed the door behind him.

"It's good to be home," Nadielle said, surprising him.

"I was thinking the same."

She looked at him quizzically, smiling. "You still…?" she started, but words seemed to have left her.

"Trust you?" he finished.

Nadielle shrugged.

"Of course," Gorham said softly. He went to her, desperately hoping that she would not pull away again, but she turned and headed for the door beyond her bed. The last time she'd entered that room had been with Peer and Rufus, and Gorham had felt a stab of jealousy-he'd been in her bed but not her most secret room. Now she beckoned him after her, and he supposed that was some form of intimacy, at least.

He could smell her rich body odor, stale breath, and the fear and trials of their time in the Echoes. He wanted to ask her how long they had been down there, but he was afraid her answer might frighten him more. Peer and Malia had not returned with Rufus-or, if they had, those chopped monsters had kept them away. For all they knew Rufus might be dead, caught by the Marcellans and nailed up on their cursed wall as an offering to their twisted, stubborn beliefs. Peer and Malia might have been caught, and the pale stonework of that ancient edifice could be soaked with their blood also. It had seen too much sacrifice for too few reasons.

He was tired, afraid of everything he had discovered and everything that was to come, and as he passed through that door behind Nadielle, emotion took him. He tried to stifle a sob, but it burst out. His chest felt heavy, his eyes wet. He coughed, surprised, trying to disguise what had happened with a further coughing fit.