Echo City by Tim Lebbon Page A

They had talked of the bad things, knowing that countless fellow Echoians thought of
them
as the bad things. They’d had something taken away from them—true criminals or offenders of the mind alike—and that fact was ever-present in that old place of disease and death.
    Peer found a free table outside a bar called Hestige’s. Sitting there exposed, starting to relax, the memory of the dying Border Spite shoved to one side—or at least smothered beneath the sights and sounds presented to her on Six Step Bridge—she ordered a bottle of cheap wine, and she and Rufus sat drinking it in sight of Marcellan Canton’s distant wall.
    Traders traded, drinkers drank, and people walked back and forth across the bridge. It had an air of bustle that no number of sedentary drinkers and eaters could dampen, and a whole selection of street performers added to the buzz. A woman juggled baby rockzards, her hands and forearms a network of scars old and new. A man seemed to be walking on stilts, until Peer saw that he’d been inexpertly chopped. His long legs were bony and bleeding, his desperate smile verging on madness.Three children performed an ever-shifting play, a huge old woman following them and providing sound effects and prompts if they forgot their lines. They told of marriage and celebration among the ruling Marcellans, and ribald jokes and dangerous insinuations surprised the audience as they were muttered by the innocent-looking girls. Jokers told their amusing stories, painters strolled from table to table offering to capture moments in perpetuity, charm sellers preyed on maudlin drunks, and food stalls fought covert battles of smell and sense.
    Peer lifted a glass and toasted Penler, and Rufus sat silently beside her, waiting for what would come.
    “So who are you really?” she asked, and Rufus refilled her glass.
    “Rufus Kyuss,” he said.
    “That’s what I named you, but you have a name I don’t know. A life I don’t know.”
    Rufus nodded, looking around the busy street. “Will you help me find it?”
    “I’ll try,” she said. “And if you tell me who you’re looking for, I’ll help you find her as well.”
    “I’m … not sure.”
    “But
I’m
not her!” Peer said, perhaps too loudly. After their flight from Skulk, this wine was quickly going to her head. She laughed over her embarrassment, then drank some more. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s someone who’ll help us both.”
    “Who?”
    “An old friend.” Peer thought again of Gorham, and the air shards in her arm drove pain through her bones, reminding her again who she was.

As soon as he saw her, he left the street, pushing through a hustle of drinking men and women and entering a small waterfood eatery. The smell of boiling fish and the crack of shells being ruptured grated—he hated fish—but he swallowed hard and went to the window to make sure. He had to lean over a small table, nudging a woman’s arm as she brought a shrimp stick to her mouth. She mumbled, her companion bristled, and the man apologized. They quieted quickly. Perhaps they saw the knife in his belt and the scars on his face.
    He wiped condensation from the window and looked across the bridge at Hestige’s. He must have been wrong, it could
never
be her … but there she sat, sipping from a large glass, speaking to the weird white-haired man seated beside her.
    He gasped, clouding the window again with his breath, then stood back from the table, staring at the wall.
    “Are you …?” the woman diner asked.
    He looked down at her and the remains of her meal. His stomach rolled. “This is going to be interesting,” he said. Then he turned and made his way back through the eatery.
    People moved aside for him. He had that effect, but usually he did not notice. Today was different. In the kitchens, the sour reek of fish more intense than ever, he nodded at the two chefs and then kicked open the chute door.
    Most buildings clinging to the edges of Six Step