Echo City Read Online Free PDF Page B

gone before them shriveling in the sun—but most died without saying anything, diseased flesh falling from their brittle bones and their insides turned to bloody paste, rotted by the desert’s toxicity. Gorham had once told Peer that he’d seen two people die this way, and he would never forget the terror in their eyes.
    The desert had always been this way, and such a terrible place attracted its myths and legends. There were the Dragarians, shut away and isolated in their canton for more than five hundred years now, who believed that their savior, Dragar, would emerge from the desert at the city’s final hour to lead them into their mysterious Honored Darkness. There was the Temple of the Seventy-seven Custodians, who claimed that the desert was home to six-legged gods that watched over Echo City. But the Markoshi Desert—commonly known as the Bonelands—was the end of the world. And there were the Watchers, her people. They believed that there was something beyond and that their future lay in countering the desert’s terrible effects.
    She never grew bored of this. As the rain came down heavier, Peer leaned on the wall and watched.
       At first, she thought it was a breeze blowing through the rain. The shadow shifted far out in the desert—a slightly more solid shape amid the unremitting downpour. She frowned and shielded her eyes, blinking away moisture. The day had grown dim, and the cold was making her hip ache.
    The top of the wall remained deserted. Most people were sheltering from the rain or doing whatever it was they did to make their lives easier. Penler had probably reached the place he was happy enough to call home. Peer was alone … and the chill that hit her when she next saw the shifting shape made that loneliness even more intense.
    There’s something out there
, she thought, and the idea was shocking.
Nothing
lived in the desert, because it was a place of death. She strained to see farther, leaning on the parapet in a vain attempt to take her closer. Curtains of rain blew from east to west, wiping the movement from view, but between gusts the shape was always there.
Something out there, and it’s coming this way
.
    She glanced frantically left and right. To her left, a tower protruded above the wall, but she knew that the staircase in there led only up, not down. She knew of a small breach to her right, maybe half a mile away, that had collapsed a hundred years before, during the purging of Skulk Canton. Many fireshad been set back then, and it was said that a pile of thousands of bodies had been thrown from the wall and burned. The intensity of the flames had made the stonework brittle, bringing down a section of wall.
    Peer ran. She paused every few heartbeats to glance out over the desert; the shape was definitely there, closing, resolving, and her heart started to pummel from more than exertion, because
it looked like a person
. The way it moved, the way it shifted behind the veils of rain, seeming to hunch over as if trying to protect its face from the unrelenting storm, gave it all the characteristics of a human being.
    And then she saw something strange. The figure stopped, and perhaps it was the first time it had looked up in a long while, because it paused where it was and leaned back, looking at the great wall before it and the city beyond.
    Even though it was impossible through the rain and over this distance, Peer felt that she met the person’s eyes.
    She ran on, finding it difficult to tear her gaze away, and tripped and went down.
Right arm
, she thought,
left hip
, and she fell awkwardly so that she jarred both. She cried out, then looked around to see if anyone had heard her. In the street below, a couple of people dashed from one building to another, but they seemed unaware of her presence, and she was happy to leave them to themselves. Biting her lip, standing, she concentrated on the cool rain instead of the heat of her old injuries.
    When she looked again, the figure had