Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (28 page)

Perhaps this is what was lost.

It tells a fragmentary story of my infancy, or the infancy of Ritry Goligh, since I never lived it. I am an expression of Ritry as he became, that I know now. I am not all the various stages of the man, but only one phase. The further we go, the older the memories get.

We are close to the Solid Core, so close I can feel it in Far's hum. A little further and we will be in the tank with the blastocyte Ritry Goligh, while the seven-tones of his artificial womb build him into existence. Further still, back beyond the arc of recollection to a place that is truly primal and disconnected from memory, we will hit the moment of conception.

Perhaps the answers will lie there. Perhaps there will be a bridge to something better, and a reason for all of this.

Then Far screams.

The noise is incredibly loud in that dark cavern, and without my HUD I cannot buffer it. The boy is sitting bolt upright and screaming, and at once I see why.

The Lag is in the room with us. Its distended pink head is in Far's lap and goring at his stomach. Blood and viscera sucks down its throat as its lipless jaws smack and bury. Far stops screaming and his eyes roll up in his head.

I leap to the Lag and rip it away, thrust my arm between its jaws. It champs hard at my shoulder, chipping deep divots into the exo-suit armor. I rove with my fingers until I find the matter it stole, and grip it hard.

"Kill it," I shout, as Doe and Ray awake. Another Lag tendril shoots across the space and hits Ray full in the HUD, knocking him flat onto his back inside the book.

The beast's lips bite through my armor and into my shoulder, and the pain is excruciating. I thump it with my free hand but to no avail. Doe is already astride it with the bayonet in her hand. She stabs down, and while the beast thrashes she decapitates it.

Its jaws relent and I pull my wounded arm out of its mouth. Blood is everywhere, whether from me or the ruins of Far's innards I don't know.

"Stabilize him, shock-jacks, transfuse, whatever you can," I shout as I lurch backward.

Does goes directly to it. Somewhere nearby Ray is wrestling with his Lag duodenum, his hand reaching out toward Doe. She puts the bayonet smoothly in it as she kneels by Far, and Ray drives it into the monster's jaw, sealing its lips shut. 

I turn to Far. He is thrashing now, his upper body jerking in time with his pulse. I drop next to him and hold out the fistful of viscera glistening in our flickering suit lights. His heart is amongst them, I think.

"It's going to be ok, Far," I say, as soothing as I know how. Doe is holding his head, has the vital tubes from his suit aorta linked in to her own. I glimpse a fat slug of her blood bead along the tube and enter Far, another, all of it spilling out.

"Quickly Me," she says.

I lean in and drive my fist into the gory hole in Far's middle. There I snap open my fingers to deposit the load that was stolen, then pull it out again. I have to use my other hand to slick the trailing, torn strands of gut off. They sit in the horrible hole like food vomited from a mother chick's mouth.

I scrabble for the edges of his exo-suit, to seal him up like I couldn't seal up La, but it seems the beast must have ravaged it, and the edges won't match.

Doe is already stripping, pulling her suit off over her head. Beneath it she is all sinuous white flesh, a sweat-darkened bra bound tightly across her breasts.

"Get that off him," she says and I comply, fighting with Far's fading tremors to feed his arms back through the arm-holes of his suit, one, the next. My touch rings tones out of him, but now they are discordant, off-key, not the pure harmonics before.

Ray drops beside me to help. He is covered in gore too, ragged grooves in his cheek where the beast's abrasive lips must have caught him. Between us we tug the suit off and drop it to the side, then work to wrap him in Doe's suit. It's too large and we get his arms in easily, seal it up over the horrific wound in his middle, and watch as it compresses inward.

Ray breathes a sigh of relief. Doe closes the siphon off her throat and hands the tube to Ray, who takes it and plugs it in to his own.

"He'll be alright," says Ray, and though the words are hopeful I can't help but detect the desperation in his voice. He has to be alright.

Doe sits down heavily. "Where did they come from?"

I rise and track the convulsing duodenal beast's fleshy jawless appendage. The lights on my suit blink and fade, so I can just barely make out the point where the meat joins the rock. There is no gap, the conjoin is seamless. There is rock, then there is flesh.

"They didn't get in," I say. "They grew in."

Ray laughs. "What the hell, Me?"

I prod the supple snake's base, but it doesn't press away from the rock as I would expect. It simply strains, and tight white sinew lines rise up along it like scars.  

"It grew," I repeat. "This whole place is turning against us."

"Out of solid rock?" Ray asks. "So would have a field day talking about bonds."

It's a weak joke, and nobody has the strength to laugh. Ray has Far's head against his chest, is rocking the boy unconsciously. Doe is sitting and breathing hard, her white skin glowing like a halogen flower-flare in the deepening dark.

Ray turns to her, notices all her bare snow-white skin, and spreads his impeccable grin.

"You look hot," he says.

Doe frowns. "Shut up."

"I'm serious. You should take off the pants too. It would be good for morale." 

"You take off your pants," she returns.

Ray appears to give this suggestion serious thought. Then he nods. "If that's what it takes." He shuffles awkwardly to his feet, holding Far in one hand, and starts unbuckling his pants.

I snort a laugh. Doe is quizzical, though I see the corners of her mouth start to turn up.

"Don't be an idiot," she says. This doesn't stop Ray, who already has managed to get his waist-band loose and sliding down. Doe turns to me, all seriousness. "Me, we need to leave. If they can metastasize in rock, they can metastasize anywhere. Make him stop."

I nod, but I don't make him stop, because part of me suspects we need this. I am not here for morale, that is Ray's job and I leave it to him. Doe huffs a big sigh, and we turn to watch Ray strip down his pants.

Doe says, "Stop," half-heartedly a few times, but of course he doesn't stop. It becomes a funny dance for balance as he shuffles his pants off one leg at a time, still managing to hold Far's head up. He can't kick the pants off over his boots though, so he settles for leaving them down.

Thankfully he has his inner-skin suit on underneath.

He turns to Doe.

"Happy?"

"Of course I'm not happy, you lunk. Put them back on."

He turns to me, twirling like it's a cat-walk.

"Me?"

I shrug. "I've seen better." More intestinal snakes could burst through the rock at any moment, but right then I don't care. This is the chord, my chord, and this is what Ray does best.

Ray turns back to Doe, then inexplicably gets down on one knee. He almost trips on the pants. "Doe," he says, and now his tone is surprisingly earnest. "Doe, I've done as you asked. I took off my pants. And I love you. Won't you take off your pants for me?"

Her face skews in feigned disgust, but I can see the amusement beneath it. Even Ven, in her most authoritarian moments was still the woman who worked me mercilessly in bed. "You think this is the time for this? Far almost died, we almost died."

"That's why it's the time," Ray says, reaching for her hand, which she snatches away once, twice, but not a third time.

"Me, tell him," she says.

I don't tell anyone anything. Instead I get up, go over, and pick Far from Ray's arm. I unplug the aortal stimulator and plug it into my own suit. At once I feel the drain. The fritzing display of my HUD shows my numbers begin to fall, but that's alright. Through it I can feel the boy beginning to heal, as the suit sews him up inside, fabricating what he needs.

I go to the edge of the cave and sit with my back against the wall, Far in my arms like a baby being fed. I look back and see Ray has produced a ring, and is holding it up to Doe. I have no idea where it came from, or when he made it. It looks a little like one of the gamma-clamp spools lasered away. In place of a diamond sits a gouged out brass button from one of the plastic soldiers in the outer orbit.

"Are you kidding?" Doe asks.

"I am serious as a snake in the gut," Ray says. "Doe, I love you. From the moment we woke up in adjoining fire-pods in the sublavic, I've loved you. Your skin is so pasty-white, and your hair so yellow, you swing above the Molten Core with such grace and of course you speak Gaullic too. Doe, will you take off your pants for me?"

She punches him in the head, but he doesn't back up.

"Put your pants on," she says. "You think this is the time?"  

"It's the only time. We're almost certainly going to die."

"Put your pants back on!"

"No, take yours off."

She punches him again, but he rolls with it, pulling her after him. They scrabble and bite their way around the book and out of sight. Squeals of delight and surprise quickly follow.

I mute my HUD, focus on the tones fuming up off Far. I don't hear them or see them, but I feel the new memory building in my own mind. It is good, happy, snatching joy from the jaws of this misery.

Far feels it too, and I think it helps. His draw on my fluids reduces, his pulse chimes into time with my own. Perhaps it buys us some time. It is the first powerful memory we've made that is not someone dying, and that is something to be proud of. It holds a kind of dispelling power, and keeps the Lag at bay. But only for a time.

Doe is first back around the book, staggering. Her hair is more disheveled than usual. "He's an idiot," she says.

"He's all yours," I say with a grin. "Now we really have to go."

Ray pops his head around the book too, grinning so wide I think his face might split. He doesn't say anything though, probably he's too shocked that his outrageous play worked. He lurches over to me to lift Far from my arms. He plugs in the aortal sap, but there's very little drain.

He claps me on the shoulder. I clap him on his.

"Let's do this," he says.

"Agreed," I say.

On the map in my HUD, blinking in and out of existence as the power drains down, I see our flashing red dot stalled so close to the center. We have missed every fractal quagmire, and we're almost there. So close.

The wall behind me begins to thrum. I step away, and watch as the faint cross-section outline of a duodenal snake begins to form, a speck of flesh at a time in long lines like stretches of code compiling, being printed out of the rock.

Doe kicks out the slab of rock enclosing the cave, and we run back out into the tunnels, pathways bored through solid stone as though they've been chewed by insects. We duck our heads and run fast and cramped, through the dark and dripping puddles, skirting stalagmites and stalactites, with the glow of new love encircling us.

Our red dot flashes ever closer to the Solid Core's core.

SKULK 12 F

I drink. I cannot drink enough. I drink until I puke, then pass out, then I drink some more.

Still I dream. There can be no escape. I cry, and scream, and roll around in the filth and shit of this blue-tarp park in this new skulk, gnashing my teeth and covering myself in ashes.

"Please!" I scream up at the skies, until the locals come and beat the thought out of me, then I huddle in a freezing ball and whine, blood running down my burst lips and chest, as I feel every bit of everything he does.

They forget me. They forget every piece of me, and just like he said, he takes my place.

"I'm sorry!" I shout up at the sky, "please, I'm so sorry."

He does fuck my wife. He does change the names of my children. He treats them like shit, and he makes them think it was me, then Lags the weight of it away so they never realize and can never escape, and he can do it all over again.

He does it all over again, forcing the love we had inside out and feeding off the pain.

"Come within a mile of the Reach, and they'll die," he told me, as he dropped me off in the park. "Come at me through the bonds, and they'll die. Do anything but suffer until I say you're done, and they'll die."

So I drink. When the locals come to beat me, I don't fight, I only keep myself alive.

My ribs break, and I drink a thousand bottles of Arcloberry. My fingers break, and I drink all the gene-spliced rye in the world. My teeth break, and I drink all the rum. My hair grows long and shaggy, I stink, I'm wearing whatever ragged clothes I can scrabble for and find, and I weep or whisper every night, begging him to let it end.

It doesn't end.

He hurts Loralena. He hurts Art and Mem. He twists all the things we used to do to make them awful: messages left in invisible ink that say I hate them, treasure hunts that lead to horrific tableaux, images of suffering and pain hidden in Loralena's art.

They weep too, and beg, and he Lags it away to begin again.

I can do nothing, only drink, and sob, and break my body on the rack.

Skulk 12. A year has passed, and the pain is numb, but it's always there. I wake with the pain and I sleep with it. When I'm lucky I drink. Some of my fingers don't work as well as they used to. It's not as bad as it used to be, almost tolerable, but there are always spikes.

He left them, mostly, but he goes back. They live a normal life for weeks at a time, until he gets hungry and takes it out on them. He beats them all now. He has it perfected to a routine, with a sheathed belt, slaps with a flat hand, then Lag the memory away.

He tells them they are business trips he goes on, and every time they wait for him like they would wait for me, eager and ready. Every time he comes back to hurt them, and every time it hurts just as bad. They can never get used to it.