Tim Lebbon - Echo city

Nadielle had never just let him hold her. There always had to be something else.

Outside again, Nadielle was leaning over the book, scanning its pages. She did not look up when he approached.

"I'm not sure I can let you do this," he said.

Now Nadielle looked up, expressionless. "You'd try to stop me?"

Gorham did not reply. Though there was no threat to her voice, she'd sounded so cold.

"No choice," she said. "It's happening now, and I can't turn it back." She returned to her book, and Gorham slapped his hand onto the table. The anger was sudden and unexpected, and it shocked him as much as it did her.

"Then include me, at least!" he shouted. "I'm wandering these rooms like a lost puppy, and you're working as if I'm not even here. As if I was never here."

"Are you serious?" she asked, smiling in surprise.

Gorham already felt cowed and embarrassed. He looked away.

"This is so much more than us," she whispered.

"Was there ever 'us'?"

For a moment so brief he wasn't sure he saw it at all, Nadielle's eyes softened and her lips trembled. Then she was hard again, flipping a page in the book and running her finger along the lines as she read.

"You told me I was your sunlight."

"It's dark!" she shouted. "Darker than ever. Get off your own ass and wake up!" She ran both hands through her hair, then turned the book on the table so that it faced him, spilling loose sheets and another book to the floor. "Here. You want me to include you? I need the chemicals listed on the top half of this page, in those exact amounts. Bottles and measuring jars are in my cupboards. All labeled." She leaned in close and he smelled her breath, knowing that she was already becoming a memory. "Don't spill a drop. Don't make mistakes. Don't mess it up, Gorham."

She left the room and he glanced down at the book, her family history written in a hand the Baker could call her own. Closing his eyes, breathing deeply, he wondered whether the next Baker could be so cold.

It took Gorham a while to collect the powders, fluids, and carefully weighed tablets. Carrying them all on a wooden tray, he went out into the vat room and spotted Nadielle tending the special vat once more. She sat on its rim, both feet on the ladder's highest rung, and she seemed to be whispering. She glanced at him, then pricked at her hand with a small knife. She squeezed several drops of her blood into the vat and then sheathed the knife, climbing down the ladder mindless of the blood smearing its wooden rungs.

"You should bind that," he said.

"I'll be needing it again. Thank you." She took the tray from him and placed it on the ground, mixing and stirring, careful not to spill or waste.

"How long will it be?" he asked.

"No time," she said. "I'll be leaving soon."

"So this new Baker…" he began, but it was too confusing.

Nadielle stood and took his hands. The move surprised him, but there was no affection or warmth to her touch. Just because she thinks she needs to, he thought.

"What I'm about to ask you is a true responsibility," she said. "Not like leading some underground political group or trying to take on the guilt for bad decisions you might have made. A real responsibility. My mother chopped me before she died and birthed me herself, and virtually every new Baker is welcomed into the world by the old Baker that chopped her. That's part of our duty and part of the way we cope with how and what we are. But I'm handing this duty to you. Because I must, and I trust you, and trust that you want the best for Echo City."

"I do," he said. "I always have."

"And this is for the best, believe me. I know what I'm doing." She glanced aside at one of the bladed things sitting against the wall. "Here, at least."

"And down there?" Gorham asked.

"Down there, I'll do whatever I can."

"To right a wrong."

"Bakers never make mistakes, Gorham. They simply explore too far." She smiled softly, let go of his hands, and grabbed the glass mixing pot by her feet. Climbing the ladder, she nursed the pot carefully against her chest, then emptied it into the vat as soon as she reached the top. She dropped the glass pot and bit at the cut on her hand, squeezing out more blood.

"Is it happening now?" Gorham asked, because he felt a sudden change in the chamber's air. The bladed things had gone from relaxed to alert and expectant, and it was as if their blades were held at attention, a potential of violence almost unbearable in its intensity. Some formed a wide circle around the womb vat, several more stayed back, going to the doors that led to the Echo outside. Guarding. Though guarding against someone coming in or something going out, Gorham was not sure.

"New weapons," Nadielle said. "My daughter will take a while longer." She was staring lovingly into the vat, her face softer than he had seen for some time. Not vulnerable, as she had been down in the Echoes when she demanded his intimacy, but strangely content, even with everything she had done and what she was about to face. Right then she was beautiful, and Gorham mourned for the woman she might have been.

Three other vats began to bulge. Some unseen, unheard message must have been relayed to them, and they started to spout steam and gas, sides cracking, fluids gushing from the ruptures.

"Nadielle," Gorham said.

"You'll want to stand back," she said. She waited a moment longer atop the ladder, looking down into that one special vat before descending.

Gorham had witnessed Neph's birth, and through the fascinated disgust he had felt privileged. But watching these new things born from Nadielle's womb vats inspired only horror.

How she could have grown them so quickly, he had no clue. The talents handed down through the Baker's generations were so arcane and mysterious that they'd be called magic by most, though he knew that she vehemently repudiated any such descriptions. Magic's for the frightened and the indoctrinated, she'd told him once, and for those without the imagination to see how amazing things can really be. They'd been naked on her bed at the time, and recalling the conversation now, he recognized it as another moment when he had not really been there for her. She'd used his presence to talk to herself.

Perhaps the speed with which these things had been chopped went some way to explaining the terrible screams as they were birthed. They came to the world in agony, three of them emerging from vats with the help of their many-bladed and spiked limbs, forcing their way out as if inside was torture, only to discover that outside was worse. They thrashed and rolled in the thick fluids that spilled around them. Gorham backed away, closer to the Baker's rooms but unable to hide himself away entirely. He was shocked and afraid in equal measures but still certain that Nadielle would allow no harm to come to him.

Unless she's rushed it. Unless, in her desperation, she's made a mistake.

But then she was walking among her new creations, and now Gorham could see just how large they were. He'd subconsciously been comparing them to the dozen bladed guards that slinked around the vat hall, but these things were at least five times the size of those, and there was nothing even vaguely humanoid about them at all. They were flesh, blood, and metal, monstrous mergings of soft and hard. Their blades glittered with sharpness, their spikes were slick with afterbirth, hands were heavy with studs, and what might have been their heads-he wasn't sure, but he thought each creature had at least three-bore vicious white horns as protection around their mouths and eyes. In those mouths were silvery teeth that already had shredded their lips and tongues, the blood adding to the terrible mix smeared across the floor. And in those eyes was nothing he could recognize.

Nadielle spoke, and a bladed guard darted toward each of the newborns. The giant creatures lashed out, piercing the smaller chopped, picking them up with blades or fists, depositing them in mouths that opened up where Gorham had not noticed them before. The sound of chomping was appalling-crunching, crushing, splitting, bursting, and brief cries as three lives were snuffed out.