Echo City Read Online Free

her mad. There were also those who viewed her as fair game; Echo City’s criminals were a varied breed.
    After washing in a bowl of cold water and eating a quick breakfast, she set about arming herself. A knife in her belt, three soft widowgas balls in her pocket, and the wide, short sword on view. She had never grown used to the sword, but Penler assured her that it would scare off any casual aggressors. Up to now, it had seemed to work.
    He often chided her for living on her own.
A woman on her own here in Skulk …
he’d say, shaking his head, then pursing his lips because he knew exactly what she thought of such attitudes. Still, she knew that he had only her safety at heart. After berating him with a playful punch, she’d argue that most criminals here weren’t really criminals at all.
They execute the really bad ones
, she would say.
Some always slip through
, he’d counter. And so their little play went on.
    Today, she and Penler were meeting for lunch down by the city wall. He said that he had something to tell her. As always for Penler, the mystery was the thrill.
       When the sun was up and birdsong filled the air, and Peer was feeling sharper and brighter than usual, she oftenconsidered Skulk Canton as evidence of the basic goodness in people.
    Since the devastating plague, it had become the place to which criminals and undesirables were banished by the ruling Marcellans. Murderers, rapists, and pedophiles were still crucified on the vast walls of the central Marcellan Canton, but lesser criminals—pickpockets, violent drunks, and political dissidents—now had a new place to be sent. The vast underground prisons in the Echoes below the city had been closed, because the abandoned Skulk was far easier and less dangerous to police. It was a city unto itself, and the criminals were left to make it their own.
    Over the past few decades, they had done just that. It could hardly be called thriving—they still relied on regular food deliveries from Crescent Canton, and a new canal had been built from the Southern Reservoir in Course Canton to ration their water—but the majority of people in Skulk lived a reasonable life, and most contributed to making their community a bearable place to live.
    Naturally, there were those who viewed it as their own private playground. Thieves ran rampant in certain areas; gangs formed, fought, and dispersed; and there were a dozen men and women that Peer could name who considered themselves rulers of Skulk. But as with elsewhere in Echo City, these gangs and gang leaders ruled only those who were at their own level. Violence was frequent but usually confined to rival factions.
    Those who kept to themselves were mostly left alone.
    Upon her arrival, Peer had been convinced that she would be raped and killed within days. Terribly injured, traumatized from the tortures she had endured and the fact that she was no longer considered an inhabitant of Echo City, she had scampered into a building close to the razed area of ground that marked Skulk’s northern boundary with the rest of the city, and there she had waited to die. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Time lost itself. Day and night seemed to juggle randomly with her senses. And one day after passing out, she woke up in Penler’s rooms.
    He told her that three men had brought her to him and then left. He did not even know their names.
    Walking along the street toward the stoneshroom fields where she spent most of her mornings, Peer tried to deny the sense of contentment that threatened. She’d been feeling it for a while, as it sought to put down roots in a place that she had never believed she could call home. There was so much she missed—her friends, her small canal-side home in Mino Mont Canton, and Gorham most of all—that it felt wrong to be happy here. She had been banished from the world she knew, escaping execution only because the Marcellans knew it would be dangerous should she become a martyr. In Skulk