Echo City by Tim Lebbon

small square. Peer tried to reassure him with a smile, but he did not meet her eyes.
    There were several more phantoms, some obvious, some little more than blurs on the air. Sometimes all three of them saw, and once it was only Peer who seemed able to make out a tall man sitting in a broken chair in the doorway of an ancient home. She thought he nodded at her, but his head rose and fell as he slept.
How long ago?
she wondered. He was even older than he looked.
    I will see Gorham
, she thought, the idea hitting her suddenly and hard.
If he’s not dead. If the Marcellans didn’t hunt him down after taking me
. The excitement was tempered by caution; she could not afford to hope for too much. But the idea of meeting her lost love again was thrilling, and she tried to ignore the three years that had separated them.
    Three years, and an escape from Skulk yet to be made.
    They left Pool and started climbing a steep hill toward the border with Course Canton. There were few people here, as proximity to the border served only to remind those living in Skulk that they resided in a prison. Those people they did encounter seemed little more than phantoms themselves, and they rushed to hide away. These were the outcasts from the outcasts, those who could not accept Skulk as a place to live and who hovered at the border, as if one day they might go back.
    But no one sent to Skulk ever returned. It had been a longtime since Peer had been here, and she’d forgotten just how heavily guarded the border was.
       They called them the Levels. Once, before the plague, the dividing line between Skulk and Course Cantons had been difficult to distinguish. A street here, a square there, the banks of the Southern Reservoir, perhaps the edge of a park or the center line of a road. After the salt plague, there’d been a need to mark the border permanently. And so the razing had begun. In history books, the transcribers had gone to some effort to describe the methods used and the caution taken to prevent injury or worse to those innocents caught up in the chaos. In reality, the Marcellans had ordered the razing to be completed within two days. In such a short time, with so many fires set, ruin wagons dispatched, and buildings marked for destruction, the suffering of innocents was inevitable.
    A fifteen-mile-long strip of land from southwest to southeast Echo City had been flattened of everything that stood or grew upon it. The Levels followed the old borders, up to a mile wide in some places, while here and there they were only a few hundred feet, one side still visible from the other. Following the razing and burning, almost two hundred watchtowers had been constructed along the northern edge of the Levels. For the next few years these were manned by Scarlet Blades, but as the public slowly forgot the plague and its consequences—or, if not forgot, at least put them to one side while they continued with their lives, content that the Marcellans had saved Echo City from its gravest, darkest hour—the Blades announced themselves as too important to spend their time on guard duties. A new branch of the Marcellans’ army was therefore created. The Border Spites—brutal and barely trained—were employed from all levels of Echoian society, the only requirements being that they were strong, able to fight, and willing to kill if the need arose.
    The need frequently did. Even since Peer had been in Skulk, she had heard of almost a hundred attempted escapes. They all ended the same way, and the rotting corpses were left across the Levels as warnings.
    Facing the Levels, hidden in the shadow of a tall house, Peer could see three watchtowers. A gentle drift of smoke tailed from one of them as the Border Spites cooked their lunch. Between them and her were the sad, fire-blackened ruins.
    “This is where we say goodbye,” Penler said. He sighed heavily, staring anywhere but at Peer.
    “You could still come,” she said.
    “No, I’ll slow you.”
    She