Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (30 page)

Mr. Ruins watches through the bonds with amusement. I know, he thinks I am going to kill myself. This is a ritual, and he is preparing for the feast it will bring. He does not come to warn me. I only feel him sharpening his knives, getting ready to follow through on his threat. Both he and I know that this will be the result.

In the evening when I am ready, I step out into the fresh Calico sea-air, set to bring everything to its end. I do not know what is going to happen, but I trust myself, that part of my mind has saved me before and will save me again. The child that I was, more vicious than anything I have become.

I stride down the steps underground, toward the Wall line.

I'm finally leaving.

BLASTOCYTE F

The tunnels change, as we cross some unseen line into the outer inner core. The metal walls return, embossed with their RGs, which we all now understand.

Ritry Goligh.

As we go deeper we speak of him, this man who was our creator, who embodies us in ways we cannot understand.

"We're all aspects," Ray says thoughtfully, as we walk steadily down a darkening, narrowing hallway. There are few turnings now, the maze has simplified again to a single direct line which we must walk. I haven't seen the Lag for a day and a night, but that hasn't stopped the nightmares.

They come hardest for Far. He sleeps in Ray's arms, and screams in his sleep. His stomach is repaired, but I fear his mind is fatefully damaged. Those few seconds with his heart gone, inside the Lag, have changed him. Broken him.

Ray goes on. "Far is Ritry as a boy. I'm the changes all his friends made in him, Ferrilly and Tigrates, Carrolla. Doe is what Ven left, cold and hard and in control."

"I can imagine captaining a subglacic," Doe says. The blood-mic sputters too often now, so we walk with our HUDs up most of the time, only pulling them down to periodically listen to the distant sighing of So's lullabies, somewhere in a world far gone, and check the map. "I think I'd be good at it."

She walks alongside Ray when they can, when the way is wide enough. They hold hands, which is touching. I remember enough to know Ven hated Tigrates and Ferrilly.

"So what am I?" I ask.

"You're some kind of amalgam," Doe says. "The later man."

We trudge in silence. I am beyond exhausted, even carrying the musket on my back is wearying. I can feel the weight of it with every step I take. I don't know how Ray carries Far, even though he's bigger than me. The man is an unstoppable bear, and he never complains.

"What about So?" I ask. "The others."

Ray answers. "So is Loralena, Me."

Quiet, but for the clanking of our feet.   

"I think the gravity is getting heavier here," I say.

"Did you hear what Ray said?" Doe asks.

I turn back to her. I look at them both. Of course, I am in the lead because I am the captain, but what does that mean, when all these parts are figments of a greater me? Who is really the captain, except the one who is consciously at the helm? What if I fell to the Lag, who would be captain then? Doe, perhaps, then Ray, then Far?

"I heard you," I say. "I know."

So, who still isn't dead. So who hangs on behind us, singing us forward, singing lullabies to her children while she paints us the path ahead.

I blink, rub my eyes.

"It is getting heavier," Doe says. "It's hard to even lift my arms."

We walk on. Now there are shapes carved into the walls, like ancient Egyptian gods. Here is a face I should recognize, but do not. There are figures scampering in the darkness.

"A mother," Ray muses. "A father?"

We come upon an open archway to the side, cut directly into the wall. There has been nothing like it so far, and before I can stop him, Ray wanders in.

"Wait!" I shout, but Doe follows, and then I have no choice.

It is a dark room, but for a glass tank at the side, shaped like a tube and topped with complex metal machinery. It is filled with pale green fluid lit somehow from within. A fat looping cable, like electrical wire, hangs down from the machinery-lid and inserts into the umbilical middle of a half-formed baby.

He is pink, floating in the liquid, and he is looking back at us with tiny gray eyes.

"Ritry," says Far.

He is standing behind us in the entranceway. He hasn't spoken for days, and the sound shocks me.  

"Come in, Far," Ray says.

"No," says Far. "I can't let him see me."

"Why not?"

"You don't understand," says the boy. He makes no further move toward us, so we turn back to the forming baby in the tank. Doe presses her face to the glass, tears running down her cheeks openly. I have never seen Doe cry.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm so sorry."

I can hear the seven tones of the artificial womb in the air now, cycling in some tone cluster where every note sounds at once. There is no pulse to it, no familiar thump-thump, only this endless blend of notes, like a threnody for lost family, but it is not mournful. Here, like this, it is comforting. It makes me feel warm.

Then I hear a shuffle from behind. I turn, and see something in the darkness. I cannot resolve it, a shape scarcely more than a shadow, but it terrifies me. Even here, in this sacred place, he exists.

"Mr. Ruins," Far says, from the doorway behind us.

I stop breathing. I watch this figure, as he stalks up the darkness of the room, back down it, endlessly like a loop. The shuffling sound is his broom, pushed out before him.

The janitor, cleaning. Even here, he was watching.

"He's not really here," Doe says, wiping away the tears, her voice uncertain as though she's trying to convince herself. "It's just a memory."

Slowly the dark figure sweeps his way closer to the glass. We shuffle to the side, driven back by the pervading dark that he brings. Even this close all I can see within the blank hood of his face is the glint of white teeth.

He presses his face to the glass. He taps on it with a finger, like a child at an aquarium, hankering for the attention of the fish.

Little Ritry Goligh turns to him. His half-formed gray eyes take in this specter.

"I'm going to kill this fuck," says Doe.

Ray is shaking with contained rage beside me. I lay a hand on both of their shoulders. I lead them out. "We will," I say. "I don't know how, but we will."

Far gives me a long look as we leave. I think for a moment I glimpse something within him, some hint of deeper thoughts turning far below, but then it is gone, and he is back to being the lost, frightened boy. He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it. We walk on together, while Ray and Doe clutch each other and sob their way down the hall.

"I'm sorry," says Far, as we walk.

I look at him. "For what?"

"It's not the end though, I want you to know," he says. "It won't be the end."

I don't press it. I've never heard Far say so much before. I begin to wonder, am I the captain of the chord I thought I was, or of something different.

At last, we reach the blast-door at the heart of the Solid Core.

It is corroded black-metal, riveted with black and cragged at the edges like the exterior of the Solid Core. I run my gloved fingers over it, feeling the imperfections. This thing is ancient, and deep.

In my HUD, the red blip that is us in So's map flashes against it. This is the center of the maze. We have reached our end-point.

It won't open. We pry at it with muskets, kick it, Ray tries to shoulder-barge, but there is no movement at all.

"Go back, Far," I tell the boy. He nods, so pale. His scars and weals stand out sharply on his skin. I drop an orange oxyfer flare, my last, at a curve in the corridor, where I want him to stay.

He looks up at me with trust and fear in his eyes. I wish I had Ray's way with him.

"So, come in," I call on blood-mic as I head back to the door, ever hopeful. "So, tell us what's on the other side."

No answer comes.

Doe has her pack down, is sorting through it for the last candlewax, the last stretches of fuse. The candles look different from the professionally packed shapes we began with.

"We're down to the dregs," she says, pulling them carefully out and leaning against the base of the door. They are ornamental shapes, carved and filigreed with patterns and figures, horses' heads and soldiers, in a range of colors. She begins to carefully melt them into place around a gamma-clamp affixed to the center of the corroded blast-door, in a tower-lattice. Wax dribbles over her fingers and down her suit.

"Careful," Ray breathes in her ear, "don't mate the red ones to the purple ones directly, or the unicorn horns to the lion's tails."

She whispers something back, about colors and orientations. They work together to construct it, while I lift out the remaining fuse and begin to spool it out.

THE TOWER G

I'm finally leaving.

The Wall-line train roars into the station like percussive wind, thunderously loud, and people pour out. They flow either side of me like molten rock, filling up the spaces, so hot I can feel the energy burning off them.

Things have been changing for me. I see things differently now. People are memories and the Lag at once. They are all the same, and none of them are like me.

I fold into the carriage. A man with a jaw like a toad looks at me, then back to his paper. I turn, look out the glass as the doors hiss shut, and some of the groaning engine sound is cocooned away. The train gets underway, the lights of Calico Central station rush by, and then darkness. In the blackness outside the speeding train capsule I look at my reflection.

Do I look different now? It's hard to know. I wonder at the calm I'm feeling inside, and I look at the faces of the other denizens of this train capsule in reflection. They're tapping on nodes, staring vacantly up at the rack-ads, picking at their cuticles. All living their lives, going from their places to their places, all with their little bits of complexity, their little bits of wonder and misery.

I could pull them apart at the seams. I could become just like Mr. Ruins if I wanted, crack them open like eggs for the taste. But I'm not like Mr. Ruins, I'm me.

Ritry Goligh.

My face looks different in the glass. Thinner and older. It is a year since I cared to see a mirror.

The train hisses in to another station, disgorges, and I hang from my strap as a new population fills the capsule. They're all like murky waters, I can read them by their memories, and I wonder how much it would take to push one of them over the edge. How much tinkering under the hood would be needed to turn them into creatures like Mr. Ruins, to kill their own children and wash themselves in the blood.

How would that feel, I wonder. How would it taste?

The train pulls out, then into another station and I am vomited out by the press of bodies. Already my brand new suit clings to my skin. I feel the humidity soaking in like alcohol, trying to fog my mind. I move through the press. Somebody strikes me in the shoulder as he goes by, and I feel his scorn. He is a cruel and angry man, a bully.

I have time enough for this. I catch up to him through the flow and step round to face him. He's taller than me, thick with muscle as I once was, with sandy hair that slides either side of his face. He seems momentarily surprised, then he recognizes me and the scorn comes back.

"Having a bad day?" I ask, and jam Mei-An's new node into his crotch. He gasps and doubles over. This is not a skulk and I am not beyond the law, but I don't care. I can't be stopped. I grab the back of his head and for a moment imagine ramming the node into his unprotected face five times, cracking his jaw, knocking three teeth loose, maybe imploding an eyeball. It's the kind of thing I might once have done.

Instead I push the node up into his throat and squeeze his windpipe. He's about to start struggling but as the edge of the metal digs into his throat I feel his body go slack. He thinks I have a knife. I lean in over him, whisper in his ear.

"I should kill you. What do people like you bring to the world? What's the point of you? We'd all be better off with you buried in the fucking dirt."

These are barely even words meant for him, I know it as I say them. But this is the most visceral I can be.

I feel his mind recoil. He is full of fear now, the scorn gone. I feel his miserable, small life, and the cruelty he indulges in when he can. He is a bully, and I hate nothing more than bullies.

I Lag him. Perhaps I am the bully, to do this. I take every bit of pleasure he ever gained from cruelty, and leave only the sour guilt that remained afterward. He is clay in my hands, and I am changing things now, finally.

On his knees he begins to sob, as the unmitigated weight of all he has done crumples him. He is now a lost man, as I have been for so long. Perhaps it will be a new start.

I leave him there, and return to the Wall line. I feel Mr. Ruins' delight at what I have done.

The train rises up through the tsunami wall to the Overskulk array, where many people alight for shopping and sightseeing the Allatanc ocean. The train's rhythm steadies out. Clack clack, clack clack, clack clack, along this string of walled cities that make up Calico. From Calico Central to Tenbridge Wulls, from Tenbridge Wulls to Saunderston, all the way to the edge. At the edge we descend gradually, as the off-wall ramp drops down to the natural coast. I get off the express and wait at a dim station for the tram-line to the Brink.

It rattles near, and I ride it alone. These rails are old, over 200 years, once along a ridge and now skirting a coast. I watch my reflection in the glass windows, see it sometimes spiked by the light of shored hydrate tankers unloading at the off-wall pumps, whaling cadaver rigs out mining the waves, searchlight boats out on the dark gray Allatanc ocean.