by Tim Lebbon
Peer turned and looked up through the haze of smoke at Hanharan Heights, far to the northeast. She imagined one of those giant Scopes up there, extending its neck and turning its monstrous eye, and that brought a brief, unexpected memory of her mother. Long dead now. Peer wondered what she would think of her daughter. She thought she would be proud.
“And I see you,” Rose said. She looked at the others, still smiling softly, and nodded. “We can move faster now,” she said. “Nophel can see our way for us, warn us of dangers, and guide us along the easiest route to Skulk.”
“How can you talk to him?” Peer asked, but Gorham touched her arm and rolled his eyes. “Oh,” she said, quieter. “Baker stuff.”
As they moved on, Rose was muttering to herself, an ongoing conversation with a man no longer there. Constant vibrations were rising through their feet, and as they entered the heavily built-up southern half of Course Canton, there were fewer and fewer unbroken windows. Glass speckled the ground, crunching underfoot. They passed a burning house. People ran, some screamed, and there were more bodies. Could fear drive so many to this? Peer wondered. Was Echo City really built on such a thin crust? They came to a place where a building had collapsed across the road, blocking their route completely. A few people were digging with their bare hands, calling names as they searched for buried loved ones. Peer wanted to stop and help, but Rose steered them through an abandoned house and emerged in a small herb garden, climbed a wall, and veered left into a narrow, deserted alleyway. Still muttering, her arms still bleeding, the girl seemed hardly there.
They followed Rose through gardens and squares, wide streets and narrow alleys, and even though all around them they heard the sounds of chaos, they seemed to travel in a bubble of calm. Nophel steered them away from trouble and urged them south, as quickly and as safely as he could. Peer was humbled by the trust the Baker placed in that poor, brave man.
Everything Peer saw—every scene of random violence, goodwill, or heart-wrenching tragedy—brought home to her more and more that the city was at an end. When the Vex arrived, everything would change. The four of them bore the responsibility of ensuring that there was a future for some.
Gorham was keeping her strong. He was a constant presence beside her, and whenever she glanced aside he always seemed to be looking at her. There must be such a desperate need for forgiveness in him, but now he projected only strength and confidence.
The bags of bloodflies twitched and moved, a sickening sensation but one that drove her forward. We can release them soon, she thought. Soon. And then whatever this new, young Baker had done to the flies would be out there, and there would be only one way to find out whether they had worked.
She thought back to the day she had first seen Rufus coming in across the desert. Even rushing across to him and back again, she’d been reticent. Will I be able to step out into that desert? Will any of us? And then she realized that the decider would not be what might lie ahead but what was behind.
The streets and parks became more crowded the farther south they went. Many people had started the journey but ended it in a tavern or parkland, perhaps losing the urgency that Gorham’s message had implanted in them or maybe just deciding that whatever was coming offered no escape. The Hanharans among them—most of them, she realized, because indoctrination was one of the Marcellans’ greatest powers—would be praying silently to their deep prophet, asking him for salvation were they to die that day. Children cried and parents bustled, but there was a surreal air to the whole scene.
“Don’t they realize what’s happening?” Peer asked.
“How can they?” Gorham said. “The ground shakes, and that has happened before.”
“Never to this extent. The fallen buildings. The fires.”
“Most of the fires are started by people,” he said.
After a while Rose guided them to a park where dozens of standing stones had been raised to signify important points in the city’s history. It was called the Learning Fields, but today thousands of people were passing the stones without a second glance. Peer had come here once on a school trip when she was ten years old—a three-day journey, across the city and back to Mino Mont, that had opened her eyes to the rest of their world. The day spent touring the Learning Fields and being lectured by the historians who had made this place their life was one of the fondest memories of her childhood. Passing the rocks now only made her sad, because she could feel the rich history of Echo City being forgotten already. She wondered how many Echoes were left untouched below this place and whether any of them were even there anymore.
At the far edge of the Learning Fields, they found the long street before them thronged with people. They looked for another way around, but neighboring thoroughfares were equally jammed.
“Nophel says the streets are all like this between here and Skulk,” Rose said.
“There’s no way around?” Gorham asked. “No route through or below the buildings?”
“Even his Scopes can’t see through walls.”
“How far are we from the Skulk border?” Gorham asked.
“A mile,” Peer said. “Perhaps less.”
“The Border Spites won’t let people through,” Alexia said. “They’re mean bastards.”
“They’re also cowards,” Peer said. “Little more than mercenaries. They’ll have run at the sight of this many people. This must just be the line waiting to get in.”
Skulk, she thought. How unprepared was it for this? It could never feed and water thousands of people. The Southern Reservoir was kept mostly drained so that those who lived in the ruined canton could be kept under constant threat of thirst, and stoneshrooms could not feed the whole city’s population.
“How many do you suppose came?” she asked, raising her voice above the crowd’s hubbub.
“Not enough.” Gorham was looking back the way they had come, across the Learning Fields and past the imposing wall of Marcellan Canton. On the slopes above, a whole sector seemed to be blurring.
“What the crap is that?” Alexia said.
Peer squinted, rubbed her eyes in case they’d picked up dust, sniffed the air for smoke. But nothing improved her vision. And nothing changed what she saw.
A spread of buildings and streets almost a mile across sank from view, sending up great billowing clouds of dust, explosions of rock and bricks, and a horrendous roar that swept in across the Learning Fields like the cry of a dying god. The Echoes were swallowing the present and making it history.
“Oh, by all the gods!” Peer said, adding her voice to a thousand exhalations of shock and terror. “It’s gone.”
“Just sinking down,” Gorham said, aghast. “All those buildings. How many people?”
Rose stood between them and held on to their arms, slumping down. The crowd was surging away from the park, as if the cataclysm that had befallen the city several miles distant could reach out and consume them all.
Perhaps it can, Peer thought, and, looking at Rose’s face, she knew there was no perhaps to it. This was the beginning of the end.
“Vex?” she shouted above the crowd.
“Open the bags,” Rose said. Though her voice was soft, Peer heard every word. “Release the bloodflies slowly. We’ll make a path through the crowds. We have to reach Skulk’s southern walls. We don’t have very long.”
Penler!
Gorham hugged Peer around the shoulders, and she relished his warmth. But when Peer closed her eyes to lose the dreadful sight, she was presented with another—Malia, spluttering in agony, dying beneath her sword.
And she knew that she could not leave anyone else behind.
Gorham went first, holding his initial opened bag up high before him. The flies spewed out and spread, thousands of them, hazing the air around him before darting off in all directions. Perhaps it was because they had been incarcerated for so long—or maybe because of something the Baker had done to them—but they spread and dispersed quickly. A few people cried out in surprise as they
were bitten, but most pulled away from Gorham and the others at the sight of what they were doing, and a route opened along the street.
Peer came behind him, with Alexia and Rose bringing up the rear. This is when we find out, he thought, and the strangeness of their actions struck him. Releasing countless flies into the air might decide whether everyone he could see now lived or died. He wanted to explain, but they would never have believed.
He saw a woman swatting a fly on her arm, and he almost cursed her for a fool.
They moved quickly along the street, and when his first bag was empty, Gorham unslung another, pricked its corner with his knife, and hurried on.
“Save your last bags for Skulk,” Rose said. The buildings around them were more dilapidated, obviously lived in but fallen into disrepair, and Gorham hoped that meant that they were approaching the Levels.
He had never been this far south. Skulk was another world, a part of Echo City that people knew existed but most tried to cast from their mind. Like Dragar’s Canton, it was a section of the city cut off from the rest, though its purpose could not have been more different. He’d had many arguments with friends and fellow Watchers about the moralities of banishing people from the rest of Echo City, but he had always seen it as fairer than the alternative. A thousand years before, during the brutal reign of the first Marcellan family, criminals were banished to the Markoshi Desert, the city walls patrolled so that anyone trying to return would be captured and boiled alive in sleekrat oil. Banishment was surely preferable to that.
And there was still the Marcellan crucifixion wall for the worst offenders.
Then Peer had been tortured and sent to Skulk, and it had become more of an unknown land to him than ever before.
A fly landed on the back of his hand and bit. It was a sharp, brief pain, and when the fly fluttered away, he looked at the tiny wound it left behind.
“I’ve been bitten,” he said above the excitable crowd’s voice.
“Will I feel a change?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said, sounding weaker than before. He glanced at her, and she was marching on with a determined expression, her face, arms, and hands speckled with dozens of fly bites. She met his gaze and looked away again. She wanted neither pity nor any more questions.
“You okay?” he asked Peer, and she nodded, turning her arm so he could see several bites across her wrist.
“I’m itching all over,” Alexia said.
“You should wash more.”
“Fuck you, Watcher.”
By the time they reached the Levels, they had each emptied all but one of their bags. People behind and around them yelped and swore as they were bitten, and Gorham was amazed no one had tried to stop them. Just another bit of strangeness in their lives today, he thought. And then he saw Skulk for the first time.
To their right stood a watchtower, several people in its upper levels waving everyone on. To their left was the blazing ruins of another tower. He could smell cooking meat, and he blinked the smarting smoke from his eyes.
“Quickly,” Peer said, and she was the first of them out onto the Levels. This is her place, Gorham thought.
The going was slow. Many people were crossing, though plenty seemed to be holding back, the ingrained fear of Skulk causing them to hesitate. What must they think of the sudden idea to come here? He thought of asking someone, but he felt apart from everyone other than his companions. They had come here not as refugees but as saviors.
He untied the last bag of flies and hurried after Peer. She seemed keen to reach Skulk. Maybe she thought of it as coming home.
I’ll have to tell them soon, she thought. I’ll release the flies and then go for Penler. Make sure there are a few left in the bag for him. She knew that he probably would not still be in his home, that he had likely moved on when she left, that what was happening today would have drawn him out, fascinated and afraid. But she also knew that she had to try.
“Peer, slow down!” Gorham called behind her, and she realized that she had broken into a run.
“I’m going for Penler,” she said.
I left a man in Skulk, she’d told him.
“I know,” he shouted, “but will you just wait?”
She paused and looked back at Gorham, Rose, and Alexia. They’d halted beside the hump of a burned-out building, and Gorham was leaning in close to Rose, listening to her soft voice. She seemed weaker than ever, but Peer still thought the new Baker had more strength left in her than most. Or was that wishful thinking? Right then it seemed to matter so much less. They’d done what Rose had asked of them, and now it was in Fate’s hands.
Rufus had told them so little of what was out there, but perhaps detail did not really matter. What mattered was that there was something out there, beyond the murderous sands and lifeless dunes, and beyond the sun-scorched corpses of those who had tried before. Their world is called the Heartlands, Rufus had said, and their Heart and Mind sees through me. It knows Echo City now. I hope it will welcome you.
But that was vague and nothing that they could communicate to anyone in the midst of such chaos. Instead, the people would need someone to lead them out into the desert. Someone to lure them. The idea of being the first to go out there and keep walking, seeing whether this new, young, fading Baker’s ideas had worked at all … that would take someone special.
Peer sagged as realization struck her: It would take Penler.
“Gorham!” she called. “I’ve got an idea. I’m going to find—”
“Penler,” he said again, nodding. “And I’m coming with you.” He said something else to Rose and Alexia, then trotted over to Peer. “Better to split up anyway. Spread the bloodfly love.”
“That’s why you’re coming?” she asked, smiling.
“Of course. Why else?” His feigned innocence made her chuckle, and she could not recall the last time that had happened.
“Welcome to my home,” she said, indicating the first line of Skulk buildings not far away, and part of her enjoyed the flash of guilt in Gorham’s eyes.
They waited until they’d crossed the Levels before pricking the final bags. Many of those crossing had been bitten already or were being bitten as the plague of flies followed the general direction of travel. But there would be people in Skulk who had yet to be exposed, and Peer wanted to give them as good a chance as any.
She kept glancing back toward Marcellan Canton. She reckoned that the area that had been swallowed down into the Echoes was five miles distant, and a pall of smoke and dust still hung over the whole site, obscuring the view. The glow of fires burned through here and there, and they must have been voracious to be visible from this far away. She tried to resist the feeling that they were relatively safe here in Skulk. Though the destruction seemed to be behind them, she could still feel the ground beneath her shaking. The Echoes below this place were fewer, the buildings here older than almost any in Echo City, but that did not mean they were safe. Whatever was rising—Rose had called it the Vex, muttered in hushed tones of abject terror—would have the whole city as its playground.
Nowhere was safe. The city was finished. She felt sick but also a barely veiled excitement at that. Everything she had always believed as a Watcher was about to be explored for real. In a matter of days, everyone in Echo City might be dead … or some of them could be somewhere else.
They ran where possible, and where there were too many people, they pushed through the crowds. Reaching the first of the buildings, Peer drew her knife and pricked the last bag, agitating it with both hands until the flies started pouring from the tear. Gorham did the same.
The streets of Skulk were awash with thousands of people who had never considered that they would be here. Some wandered in confused groups, aimless and seeking something more, casting fearful looks at their surroundings. Others were sitting along sidewalks or in the street, on fallen ruins or in the windows of the taverns and cafés that had been set up here over the years. Whole families sat together in protective
huddles, and here and there single people roamed, lost and alone. Peer felt the urge to tell them what was happening—but if she stopped for one, she would have to stop for them all.
The crowds parted as she and Gorham rushed through the dilapidated streets, flies spewing from the shrinking bags. They left behind the familiar yelps of people being bitten. When Peer felt that her bag was almost empty, she pinched the slit shut and tucked it beneath her arm. These are for Penler.
“Done,” Gorham said behind her. “Peer, wait.”
“No time,” she said, and Gorham cursed as he struggled to keep up with her.
The confusion was palpable. Encouraged to flee to this prison district by urges they could not identify, everyone was now waiting for whatever came next. Marcellan Canton was visible from most places, and where it was not, the people still seemed aware of what had happened there—what was still happening. The fear showed in their eyes.
This is not the place I lived in for three years, Peer thought, and she was glad for that. Skulk had never seen so many people, and even when she passed a small café where she sometimes drank five-bean while reading one of the books collected in a central library, it no longer seemed familiar. Only now did she realize that it was people who shaped the face of a place, not the place itself.
“How far?” Gorham asked.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” he said, panting hard. They paused on a street corner, leaning against a wall.
“You’ve let yourself go since I left,” she said, offering a smile to show she was joking.
Gorham shrugged, looking around nervously. She felt protective of this place and what had been done here. The Marcellans sent those they thought were the worst of the city this way, and most of them had made a go of forming a functioning society.
“I used to live over there,” she said pointing along a street. “Half a mile away. Small house, nice. Still had pictures on the wall.”
“You don’t need to tell me this,” Gorham said.
“It’s no problem,” she said, looking back along another street at the imposing mount of Marcellan. Smoke hung heavy over that canton now, drifting west across Course. “We’re becoming strangers to the whole city, and …” She trailed off. Gorham said something to her, but she could not hear. Blood thrummed in her ears, her heartbeat increasing, breath raking at her throat. She felt a fly land on the bridge of her nose and bite, and she welcomed the brief spike of pain, because it was the only hope she had.