"What did you see?" he asked.
"The Vex has reached the Echoes, clothed in the city's dead." She struggled into a sitting position, shrugging off Gorham's helping hands. "Tens of thousands since it fell, hundreds of thousands. It fed on them, and it grew so large that they litter its skin. Perhaps they can no longer fall past it. Perhaps it filled the Chasm." The Pserans came, shoving past the splayed blades and limbs of the chopped monsters as though they were tree branches blocking their way. They helped Nadielle stand. She swayed, then gently pushed their hands aside, staring down at the floor. She seemed physically lessened, but there was a strength about her that Gorham had never seen before. Previously she had been superior yet flawed, someone whose confidence went only so deep, he had always felt. He'd tried to touch her, but her front had held firm. Those insecurities had remained buried. Now she was the Baker, completely in control and self-assured, confident in what needed doing and how much she could do herself. When she looked up again, she had changed, in the blood of her dead eye and the power in the other.
"I must leave," she said, and she started for the end of the vat room. She passed the special vat without a glance, walking taller the farther she went, and Gorham ran after her.
"Nadielle! You can't just leave. You have to tell me-"
"There's no time. She's your responsibility." She paused and stood face-to-face with Gorham, almost close enough to kiss. "Water the vat regularly. Pay her attention; be here for her. I've put accelerant into the mix, so she won't be long. Maybe even today." She glanced past him at the vat, then turned quickly away.
"But what about us?" he asked, hating the pleading tone to his voice. He could not let her leave without another word.
"Goodbye, Gorham," the Baker said without even turning around. She left the laboratory, with the Pserans following behind. One of them looked back at him, cold and hard, and in that stare was unveiled threat. The smaller bladed things followed, and those three larger monsters disappeared behind the rows of vats, heading for the wider curtained route he knew existed to the outside. In moments he was alone in the Baker's rooms, left in charge of equipment, words, and deed that he could never hope to understand.
Three years earlier he had sat at a table in a friend's home, knowing that Peer was being taken by the Scarlet Blades. The purge had not yet begun in full, and he and several others were preparing to melt away as Watchers, allowing the Marcellans to think they had shattered the outlawed organization. But for a while he had nursed a bottle of wine, staring into a candle's flame and wishing he could be so consumed. The guilt was a hard thing that weighed him down. There had been a time when he had said goodbye to Peer, knowing that he would never see her again, and he'd done so without giving anything away. A monstrous deception, a brutal betrayal, and yet he'd believed it was all for the best. Every day since then, he'd wished that goodbye had been sweeter.
He wished the same now. But Nadielle had left his life as surely as if the door she'd passed through was a barrier between the living and the dead. She would not survive. And though cold in passing, she had left him with the greatest responsibility.
Soon the new Baker would be born. He would be here to care for her. In the space of a day he had gone from lover to father, and his insides ached as if an age had been impressed upon him.
He wandered the rooms for a time, watching the vat, watering, exploring. There was much about the laboratory that Nadielle had always refused to discuss, but looking on his own seemed an empty affair. He found small rooms he did not understand and corridors that seemingly led nowhere. He always returned to her living rooms, to lie in her bed and try to remember their good times. But already there was a bitterness, and strive though he did to shrug it off, he could not avoid feeling that he had been used.
And he could also not help thinking that he deserved it.
The rooms were silent but for the noises made by the vat. Sometimes he sang, but he could not find a tune to fit. He tried fighting songs from Mino Mont's gangs, but the martial aspects did not seem to fit the shape of these rooms, their echoes sounding all wrong. He tried some love songs that his estranged sister used to write when she was young, but she had grown into a woman whose belief in love was vague, and his own experiences made the lyrics seem naive. So he whistled instead-aimless tunes that matched the path of his wandering around the rooms. Sometimes shadows drew him, sometimes areas lit by the oil lamps. He wondered why the oil never ran out. He wondered why there was always food in the cold store when he wanted it, and where the dried and smoked meats came from, and how he could be sure that the water collected in several sacs lining the wall in one small room could be fresh. It was all Nadielle's mystery. And more and more his attention was taken by the special vat from whence the new Baker would emerge. He spent more time sitting on its rim, watering when the levels fell and watching the thick fluid suck in the stream without a splash. Sometimes he reached out a hand to touch the surface but never quite got there. Fear, and respect for the Baker's talents, kept him away. He had seen but a tenth of them, and the loss he felt at her leaving was amplified so much more.
There were no timepieces in the Baker's rooms, and in truth his concept of time had been shattered. He could not tell whether he had been belowground for days or weeks. His perception of day and night was gone, replaced with a need for food, sleep, and toilet, and that was how he tried to regulate his time waiting for the birthing. But there was no time for routine to form. It seemed an age since Nadielle had left, but in reality he guessed it was no more than half a day before the sounds from the vat began to change.
She told me nothing, he thought in a panic. He climbed the ladder fixed to the vat's side, and the liquid's surface was in turmoil. I don't know what to do, or what this means, or whether I should be watching or running away. Soon the vat began to shake and flex and the ladder's uprights cracked, sending several rungs spinning to the floor. He climbed carefully down and retreated from the vat, looking at the remains of the others, which had not repaired themselves after birthing those huge chopped warriors.
Helpless, terrified, he could only watch as Nadielle became the old Baker, and her descendant was born into a time of chaos.
The birth was not as violent as the others he had witnessed. The vat bulged and split, and the pale shape inside reached through with delicate hands, grabbing the vat's outside and pulling itself through. It gasped in a first lungful of air and vomited purple solids. As the rupture spewed the vat's innards, the shape fell and went with the flow, striking the floor softly and sliding a little until it came to a stop.
Gorham approached wide-eyed and amazed, because this was something of his. I made that, he thought, the idea ridiculous yet insistent.
Nadielle had told him nothing about what the new Baker would be like, how old, how possessed of knowledge, instinct, or fear. As he approached, he saw the body of a child approaching her teens. And when she squirmed around to look at him, he saw that she had his eyes.
Peer and Malia waited in a small abandoned building close to where the dome met the ground. They did not like it, but Nophel and Alexia convinced them it would be the safest option. After all, they weren't invisible and had refused any suggestion that they sample Nophel's blood, insisting that they remain part of the world they were determined to help.