The first thing Echo did, once he was out of sight of the church, was take off the robe.
He did it on the run, tugging the cord loose at his waist and shrugging the pale grey cloth off his shoulders without breaking stride. It caught the wind behind him and went tumbling away down an alley, flapping like a startled bird, and he didn't look back at it.
"Finally," he muttered.
Underneath, he was wearing what he'd worn the day they arrived. Dark jacket. Dark trousers. Old running shoes with the soles worn thin. His discs hung along his belt in a neat row, six of them, cool and silver against his hip.
He felt about a hundred times more like himself.
"Three days in a bedsheet," he said to nobody in particular, vaulting a low garden wall. "Never again. That thing made me look like a lampshade."
Then he put his head down and ran.
The city was chaos.
