Redlock’s boots spat dirt as he broke into a run.
Tarvi was after him, calling Ecko’s name.
Retrieving her bow – and relieved that Syke hadn’t seen that lapse – Triq moved more slowly, watching the cave around them.
The sound ended in a single, Gods-almighty smash.
Disharmonic echoes reverberated, jangling her teeth, but the scream had gone.
And the quiet was deafening.
Nothing moved. The crazed lights had died. The water drip-drip-dripped as though it hadn’t even noticed.
She heard Redlock call her, his voice a crack of precision through lingering layers of resonance. He didn’t sound like he was fighting.
He sounded...
The last of the crash flowed back from the walls and was gone, a dying wave of sound.
In it, she could hear Ecko laughing.
* * *
Ecko said, “You motherfucker.”
In her hands, Tarvi held the rocklight. It lit her face to ardour and wonder.
And it lit the chamber – rock walls more regular, a lower ceiling. This one looked like it’d been hewn, indiscriminately pickaxed out of the stone. In places, the semi-regular brickwork showed again – but that wasn’t what Ecko was looking at.
Around him, an oil-stained stone floor, rags and old papers, scatters of nuts and washers, fuel cans, spray cans, demijohns. The tarp in one corner covered the bike – he hadn’t yet gone that way. He was cackling like his mind had finally fucking snapped.
I broke your doorbell, Maugie. Come and get me why don’tcha?
Around him, the spiralling fairground lights had gone. Occasional, now-stilled refractions lit the walls, colours surreal. The smell was still there – the smell of home, the smell of death – but he was looking for something.
He unclamped his fingers. Lugan’s lighter was still in his hand.
Fuel.
Refilling his tanks would be ten kinds of fucking awkward – but if he’d just woken up every major cave-dwelling nasty from here to the doors of Hell, well, he kinda needed a weapon.
He searched.
Behind him, Redlock was picking up washers like they were the gold coins of some fucking dragonhorde... letting the steel tumble through his fingers, jingle as it hit the floor. His expression was wary. He kept one axe in his hand and one eye on the entranceway.
Tarvi held the light high and looked wider. She picked things up and stared at them as if they would hiss into steam and be gone. She moved gracefully, light on her feet and her hair...
Stop it.
Triqueta appeared in the doorway, patches of light on her skin, her mouth gaped round speechless shock. Chuckling, Redlock threw a handful of washers at her and she caught a couple, opened her hand to stare at them.
“White-metal? How...?”
“How much luxury d’you want?” He laughed at her. She stopped to pick up another handful, stared at them – then lunged to stuff them down the front of his shirt. While he swore, laughing, she ran for it, feet skidding on rusting metal. Grinning, he picked up a random gear and spun it at her like a discus. It didn’t fly very well.
Kinda freaked that’d found the treasure before they’d actually mashed the bad guy, Ecko picked up another can, shaking it to hear the sloshing of –
Tarvi screamed.
His boosting lurched – now, which was verging on annoying. It spluttered, coughed into life like an old engine, carried him to her side even as he wondered where the bad guy was at.
He couldn’t keep fucking doing this – his endocrine system wasn’t getting time to reboot for chrissakes. Was she trying to wear him out?
But she was backing out of a corner of the chamber, clinging to the rocklight as if to draw its warmth.
She said something, cleared her throat and said it again, “I know this man.” Redlock had stopped fooling. He stood by the chamber wall – by the soot marks that told where the beasties had blundered through. Stuffing a handful of washers in a pouch, Triq crouched by entrance to the broken crystal, the light glittering from the stone in her cheek.
Tarvi backed into Ecko, small, soft frame, hair – again – in his nose. He half expected her to turn round, bury her face in his shoulder – was wanting it and dreading it and working out how he could push her away – but she was staring, transfixed, at the source of the reek.
Ecko said softly, “Fuck.” He’d found where the death smell was coming from.
Three corpses, twisted and broken. He’d seen such things before.
But they were metal.
A plated hide, an exquisitely fine insect carapace, covered each one – eyelids, fingertips, genitals. Like one of his Tech’s, Mom’s, more fucked up experiments...
...trusst me, Tamarlaine. I can make you the besst. Hold your faith in me, my little one, my child, my obssession and creation. You wissh ssuperpowerss? I can make your dreamss come true...
...they’d been enhanced, a botch-job that’d gone terrifyingly off the rails – and he knew how it felt to have your skin delicately peeled back, your flesh exposed, the naked and intimate secrets of muscle and fibre and joint, all bared to eyes unseen in the darkness. He knew the screaming and the savagery of the pain, knew the terror of being that utterly helpless and vulnerable. He knew the hope, the struggle to retain self and sanity as you were remade, transformed into something more than human...
He’d survived. Through trial by blood and terror and nightmare and painstaking reconstruction, he’d survived. He’d survived by sheer motherfucking will.
And he was unbreakable. Nothing could ever torture him like that again.
These fuckers hadn’t been so lucky.
He found he was shaking, nausea in his throat from too much adrenaline. Against him, Tarvi was steady and warm.
“Ecko?”
His hand was on her shoulder, a grip like steel, but she didn’t wince or pull away. Her hand went over his, pale skin against the mottle his Mom had given him.
An anchor.
He said, “Maugrim did this?”
“That one – there – he trained with me. I didn’t know him well, but –” her voice shook “– name of the Gods, what happened to him?”
Anger, fear, outrage, heat in his face indicating a rising need to throw up.
“Seems someone likes to play.” His rasp was like a broken saw, as rusted as the steel that was scattered across the floor. Steel that this bastard had been using to create some fucking superbeing. “And got it wrong.”
The rocklight shone from the tiny plates, each one crafted with an expert touch that even Ecko couldn’t match. Beneath them, the flesh was beginning to decompose, to swell, blackening, through the cracks. Their eyes were open, death masks twisted with the kind of exquisite agony he fucking understood.
He understood.
There were marks on the stone where the cave-critters had come, but they’d turned away, empty bellied. The guy Tarvi knew had a plate across his mouth, carved with a ghastly impression of a smile.
Someone had not only done this, they’d enjoyed it. Found humour in it.
Ecko retched, controlled himself. His mouth tasted of bile. Jesus, looking at this, he was beginning to think it was Eliza who needed the fucking shrink already...
In the back of his mind, he heard his conversation with the Bard.
I’m s’posed to think this is real?
I’m supposed to think it’s not?
Kale, talking about pain. Pareus, burning to death...
Tarvi turned round, wrapped herself in his arms.
Looking over her shoulder, Ecko found his rage blazing uncontainable, his own pity and helplessness and snarling frustration mocking him. Dance, Ecko, daaaaaaance! To be that close to home – and then to face his own most terrible and most elating memory...