Echo City Read Online Free PDF Page A

and before long the rain front had moved too far for her to see.
    “The weather knows no boundaries,” she said, but Penler only laughed. “What?”
    “You,” he said. “Still watching.”
    “I was born a Watcher,” she said. “It was in my heart, such belief. I can’t bear ignorance. I can’t understand people who
don’t
think such a thing.”
    “You don’t understand me?” he asked, a tricksy question. She glanced sidelong at him, and he was staring at her with raised eyebrows and a curious smile on his lips. For an old man, his mind was agile. That’s why she liked his company so much.
    “You’re an explorer,” she said. She’d told him that before, and it seemed to please him immensely. In Echo City—a place mostly known—true explorers had only their minds in which to travel. That, or down into the Echoes.
    Penler smiled, but it did not quite touch his startling blue eyes.
    “Penler?”
    “My exploring days are long behind me,” he said. “I’m getting old, and sometimes I wish I could …” He trailed off and looked at the stoneshroom in the palm of his hand.
    “Wish you could what?”
    But he shrugged and stared back out at the desert.
    The rain fell around them, light but drenching, and soon they were huddled together, sharing warmth and closing in so they could hear each other speak. It was strange, sitting side by side talking, because their raised hoods meant that they could not see each other unless they turned. Peer spoke and, when Penler responded, it sounded like a disembodied voice. The Marcellans claimed that Hanharan spoke to them in their sleep.
We’re ruled by ghosts
, Peer thought, but that could not make her angry. She believed in a larger world beyond the deadly desert—never seen, never known—and what was that if not a ghost of possibility?
    “You said you have something to tell me,” she said at last. She heard Penler sigh and take another drink of wine. The rain fell. The desert sands were dark and wet. She loved sitting here at the southern tip of Echo City with the whole world behind her.
    “Whispers,” he said at last. “Peer, you know I have … ways and means.”
    She turned to him, took the wine bottle, and lifted it in a casual salute.
“Something about you
, is how they say it. Dark arts. Bollocks, I say.”
    “Getting things is easy,” he continued, “and the border is not solid. There’s money, and people will do a lot for that, whatever their declared allegiances. But I’ve never dealt in money.”
    “No. You deal in information.” Peer sipped at the wine. It was almost gone, and she wanted them to relish the final drop.
    “Yes. Information. It comes, and it goes. Much of what comes is of no consequence or is likely false. Some of what I hear, I store.” He tapped his head, gave her that lopsided grin once again. “And some of what I hear, on occasion … sometimes I try to forget.”
    “Now you’re worrying me.”
    Penler pressed his lips together and turned away, and as he did so the rain caught his face and spilled like tears.
    “What is it?” Peer asked, suddenly afraid.
    “Murmurs from the Garthans,” he said.
    “The Garthans?” Peer had never even seen one. They lived way down below the city, in some of the earliest Echoes that were supposedly tens of thousands of years old. Some said they were pale and blind and so far removed from surface dwellers that they were another species. Others claimed that they were cannibals, fondly feasting on offerings of human meat presented by those eager for their strange subterranean drugs. The only certainty was that they were no friends of top dwellers.
    “Rumors of something wrong,” Penler said.
    “You’ve heard such things before. You’ve told me, there are
always
stories from the Garthans.”
    “Yes, that’s true. But this time they’re afraid.”
    “Afraid of what?”
    “I don’t know. But the Garthans are never afraid of
anything.”
    Peer waited. Penler felt the