Free Echo City by Tim Lebbon

glance, being in the wrong place when a madman walks by.… Death is so easy, and life so precious. I could die here today. What would happen to Rufus then?
    Her whole world had changed, and there was plenty more to come. The future was suddenly a weight upon her shoulders, and she knew that she had to be strong. Life had never felt like such a precarious gift as at that moment. Peer hurried through the streets, one hand holding the bag containing breakfast, the other hanging close to her knife.
    Penler was waiting for her in the hallway behind his front door. He ushered her in, took the food bag, and dropped it unceremoniously to the floor.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked, sensing the change in her.
    “Nothing. Where’s Rufus?”
    Penler nodded back toward his main room. “He’s like a child, Peer. Full of wonder, but he knows so little.” He touched his long, wiry gray hair, twirling it around one finger. “The desert … it’s burned something out of him, so many memories. Either that or he’s lying.”
    This time she could see through his doubt. “What do you really think, Penler?”
    “I think he’s been through some bad times. And his words … strange. Echoian, but almost a different dialect. Almost as if he’s relearning a language he hasn’t used for some time.”
    “Did you look in his bag, like I said?”
    The old man’s face changed. The frown returned, but his eyes sparkled.
    “I think I know what some of it is,” he said, “but a couple of the things …”
    “Did you ask him?”
    “He’s enjoying looking at my maps.”
    “Right,” Peer said, inclining her head slowly. “And it’s not that you want to figure them out for yourself?”
    Penler laughed, and it was good to hear the old man sounding like himself again. “You know me so well, Peer.”
    Eager to see Rufus again, she picked up the breakfast bag and ushered Penler back along the hallway.
    Rufus seemed pleased to see her. He pointed at one of the maps but said nothing, his incredulity evident in every crease of his face, every movement he made. She nodded and placed the bag on the large table, next to the contents of Rufus’s shoulder bag. Penler stood close beside her, his arm touching hers. He pointed at a small round object, similar to a watch but marked differently.
    “This finds direction,” he said. “I don’t know how, but it works.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Which way’s north?”
    Peer pointed without thinking. Most people in Skulk knew the direction of the world that had shunned them.
    Penler pulled the small instrument close to them, opened the lid, tapped it, and a shard of metal floated inside, suspended in some viscous liquid. The arrowed end of the shard pointed north.
    Peer turned the instrument around, and the arrow turned slowly to maintain the same direction.
    “Clever,” she said.
    “Not clever. Scientific.”
    “All your city?” Rufus said, aghast. He was staring at a large current map of Echo City that took up most of one wall.
    “Yes,” Penler said.
    “Here,” Rufus whispered, moving closer to the area marked as Course Canton and pointing at the shadow of buildings. “Homes?”
    “Some,” the old man said. “Groups of homes, at least. The blocks in a grid you see spanning the river, they’re water refineries. And the straight lines leading from them, they’re the canals.”
    Rufus was watching Penler with his mouth agape, incomprehension clouding his eyes.
    “It’s a large city,” Peer said. “Thirty miles across.”
    “Miles?”
    Peer glanced at Penler.
    “From here to Peer’s home is less than half a mile,” he said. “To walk from the south of the city, where you came in, to its northern edge would take two days and a night.”
    Rufus turned back to the map, spreading his hands across its surface, as if by touching it he could absorb every wondrous thing it displayed.
    “What’s that?” Peer muttered, pointing at a long, thin tube.
    “I think it’s a