Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (32 page)

Doe is a genius, even if she is an albino. Her mind works in logic circuits and keystrokes, like an algorithm. She can crack codes and innovate incendiaries all day long, but ask her to relate to Far's crying fits, and she'll reason herself to a standstill. Ray and I have to wind her back up when that happens, and steer her away from the kid.

"T-minus 1," she says, then we're hauling her up and on the run. The initialed metal floor clangs beneath our booted feet, and the fritzing striplights overhead send paroxysms of color through the sheen of my HUD.

We round the corner, and the orange flower-flares blind all of us momentarily. Far is huddled behind a mass stalagmite, and we roar to join him.

"Goligh," says Doe, randomly, for no reason I can think of, then the candelabra makes a blinking sound, blink, blink, Ray holds onto my shoulder, and the incendiary erupts.

BOOM

I catch the B- of it before my HUD shuts down auditory. I feel Far trembling through the ground beside me. A second passes, smoke and light flaring out from the bang-point, then we're up and running. Metal turns to goo underfoot with the heat and I hold forth my bayoneted musket and run into the explosion's aftermath.

We burst through into room that is not a room, in a space that is not a space, and I see it, the thing we've come all this way to find.

The aetheric bridge. It is vast but infinitesimal, as small as the sun and as large as a pinhead speck of dust on the tail of a fractal arm. It is everything and nothing, a dimension overlaid and underwritten over and beneath everything that has ever existed, and within the holy eye of its splendor I feel myself begin to drift.

I am Me, captain of the bathyscaphe, but I am also Doe, and Ray, and Far and So and La and Ti, and Ritry Goligh, and Ven and Ferrily and Tigrates and Heclan and Carrolla and my mother and father who I never met and Mr. Ruins too and Loralena and Mem and Art, all at once and all wrapped in the same blanket like one huge sausage sandwich.

"Oh wow," says Ray by my side, and it is my mouth and my voice and my throat that breathes the words, and my ears that hear them, and my mind that made them.

It is a star that never ends, a white field of plasmic force that coruscates and shimmers like a Quantum Confusion particle, streaming out a billion bonds that contain all the clustered tones of creation's pulse. It is a scream of all sounds and a chorus of all chords, raised in joy and fusion, because here everything can be, and will be, and is.

"Oh god," says Doe, and I see she is weeping openly. The musket in her hands, in my hands, goes slack. We are hanging in space, and standing on the ceiling, swirling at light speed forward and backward at once and spaghettified by the black-hole mass of it. So is there, singing, and so are La and Ti. We are all there again.

And I understand, something that Far always knew, that I knew when I wrote the mission folder long before I ever read it. This is the sacrifice, and this is the only way through.

I turn to Far, and the boy smiles at me. In this place all his weals and wounds are gone, and he is smiling. He is the master of this world. I thought I was bringing him, but I see now that he has brought me.

"I'll bring you back," he says to me, in my own voice. "I swear it."

Then he plunges his musket bayonet into Ray's chest, and Ray bursts in a shower of fizzing white energy. Doe nods with understanding as he plunges the blade into her, erupting more force to coruscate around his young angelic face.

I spread my arms too, like that ancient man on his cross, and smile at this child of mine, this part of me both innocent and utterly vicious.

ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL.

"Thank you," I say, and he nods, then spears the bayonet through my heart, through the center of the maze written in yellow across my chest, and I am gone, my matter converted to energy with all the fissile strength of a final broken bond.

The boy Far stood in the center of consciousness and felt out to the world. He'd never come here before, though he'd come close once, driven by the tortures of his parents who held him down until he learned to breathe molten lava, until he learned to tame the Lag and make it part of what he was.

He looked out over the dizzying array of threads arcing outward, a billion souls linked in to the flame of consciousness, and reached for one in particular, one that had haunted him since before he was born, had plagued him for so long, and plucked at it.

Mr. Ruins, from within. In the apartment in Calico Reach with his blades in his hands, standing above the family of Ritry Goligh and waiting for his long-time victim's suicide to end, Mr. Ruins stood tuned to the outer bonds waiting for the moment he could reap these last, sweet connections.

He couldn't see Far. No one could see Far, coming like an assassin through an inward bridge conceived but never experienced. Ruins didn't understand it when all the weight and frames for his memory of Ritry's family was sloughed away, though he felt it. It burned like a cauterized stump in his mind, though he no longer knew why he was standing over this terrified woman and these children, they were meaningless to him.

But he knew something had happened, and he knew why. Far didn't have time to cut any more, before Mr. Ruins slammed in place locks and bars across his mind that couldn't be breached even from within. By dint of his own strength from a long lifetime of vampiric slaughter, Ruins shut himself down and started for the true culprit.

Ritry Goligh.

As the door shut down on him, Far reached through the crack and etched the name in burning bright letters in the magma of Mr. Ruins' Solid Core, that most simple of graffiti, only the name.

Ritry Goligh.

It enflamed Ruins, as the boy Far intended. Ruins would hunt until he found Ritry, then he would take it out on Ritry and Ritry alone, which was how it should be.

When the door to Ruins' mind finally slammed shut, Far was left alone in the white space, surrounded by howling forces a million times stronger than the Lag, pushing him back. With the last strength of broken bonds he flung himself backward out of the blast-door, so hard he kept flying back down the flashing red trail they'd left and out through the outer orbit, past poor disembodied So surrounded by headless corpses of Napoleonic soldiers left as guards by Mr. Ruins, out of the corroded metal tunnel and into free-fall.

He hit the Molten Core with a joy he hadn't felt in years. This was his home, the amniotic womb he'd been forged within, and into it he breathed the seven primal tones of his own self's architecture: Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.

The faster he rushed, a thousand leagues ahead of the Lag and sloughing on flesh and plate-metal with every glial neuron and axon transfer passed in the magmic flow, the faster they grew out of him. Like seeds in his breast they sprouted, with Me at the bridge and Doe by his side, Ray manning the trim tanks, So and La mortaring in ablative paneling, Ti down at the engine screw and driving them, driving them, driving them forth.

All together again. They would be all together again.

MOVEMENT 3. THRENODY

TONE CLUSTER A-G

The world spits out Ritry Goligh, complete, and he sags to the floor of his memory-tower and shakes with sobs and happiness as the immense weight of terror lifts.

They are safe.

He can feel Mr. Ruins coming for him, but he doesn't care. He can feel his family coming back to themselves, their long life of torture and loss come to an end, and that is all that matters, because for now they are safe.

He laughs and he cries at the same time, with his head against the raw wood he'd scavenged from a ghost house, scraping at the grain like it was the outer hull of a Solid Core and all he can do is scratch his initials into it, to leave some sign he exists.

They are safe, and there is only the shark left, the man who stalked him all his life, Mr. Ruins, and even now he is coming.

And Ritry Goligh is ready. He will be ready, because now he understands all the plans his own partitioned mind made behind the scarification wall, the plan to save them all.

He lurches to his feet and begins the process of pulling out wooden pegs set into the tower's walls. The structure trembles as the lines of stress distribution shift, the great weight of so much wood and brick plaster shuddering under the changes.

Three, four, five, ten pegs. He circles the tower and plucks them one by one, running his hands over the adobe walls as he goes, fingering the ash of so many memories, still alive under his touch. Here is Loralena's first painting of his mind, an intricate rendering of seven tones which she never showed in a gallery, because it was only for them. Here is Art taking her first few steps, then years later helping Mem take his first steps too.

He weeps, and slumps in the dark bottom floor of the tower. The winding spiral stairs lie at his back, built atop a metal desk which is holding up the central support column, and the air is crowned by bars of morning light shining through the holes he has pulled. Pegs lie in an untidy pile by his side like decapitated heads, next to a long rope that looks like a fuse.

One finger, he thinks, though he doesn't remember why. Two fingers. It reminds him of crull-meat in a blue-tarp park, slowly unpeeling, and a blue room filled up with photographs like a shrine. Random thoughts buzz in his healing mind, as memories take their place and re-shape who he is. This is Ritry Goligh, he thinks. I am Ritry Goligh.

I am Ritry Goligh.

I lie in the dust in the sun-shafted dark, and breathe. These are the confines of my body, the outlines of my life. I can feel it all around me, who I am built into this tower like a thorny knot of bonds, all of them tied in to me. I am a diver, the deepest diver of them all, and I have built the strength of my mind into a physical space.

Mr. Ruins will see it. He will see the bonds, and the strength, but he will not understand them. I have Lagged his every conception of my strength, because
they
are my strength, and he does not know them. He does not know the qualities of love and devotion, because he has never loved a thing more than himself. Having them with me makes me strong in ways he will never understand.

I rub my eyes, feel the scratchy fibers of the rope in my hand. How long did I dive for, and what did I see? I barely remember. There are only glimpses of an invasion, a chord of marines in a dark space fighting soldiers with cannon and long snake-like lengths of intestine that snapped close.

I am dizzy and exhausted, but I feel him getting closer. Mr. Ruins. Like a fish on the line I am reeling him in, but this fish is a shark, and this shark has teeth that can bite me out of existence, and still take my family with him.

But they won't. I have shown that. I am stronger than him, stronger than any soul that ever lived, because I have dived through the Solid Core and seen the glory on the other side.

Let him come. Let them all fucking come.

I lay my head down, dizzy with fatigue, to wait.

I wake with him standing in the archway to the tower. It is late evening by the gray light filtering through the peg-hole slits and haloing him from behind. The inside of the tower is murky, filled with dust and memory, blocked out by his outsized shadow.

He watches me as I blink awake. Across the tower floor, at the top of Candyland's tallest rollercoaster, I can feel the fury in him, raging against a steely exterior calm. He's wearing his gray shark-suit, and he no looks no older than the day I first saw him in the shark-fighting arena. A fitting place, perhaps, just like this.

All of it come to this. If he dives, he'll see my family. He'll understand why these broken walls all link to me, and where they link back to. He'll see the way to control me again.

I have to stop him before that happens. I need him to come a little closer.

"Not bad," he says. His teeth shine in the deepening dark. "It's the first time since Napoleon that anyone fought this hard. I have to respect that."

I laugh, a sallow barking sound. There is dust of pounded memories in my throat, mixing with mortar-smoke. "You didn't respect it very much for Napoleon."

He gives a light shrug. "I honor him, as I will honor you. I admit, I never expected him to escape Elba a second time, but he did. He was a rascal, really. Such charisma. You don't remind me of him in that regard."

"You've come for more than insults."

"You're right. You did something, but I don't know what it is. You took something from me, and I didn't know how. But now I do."

I glare up at him, feeling the fear he wants me to feel, waiting for him to take the steps closer he has to take if he wants to finish this with his own hands.

"It explains all this," he says, gesturing at the tower around us. "This crazy contraption. Is it a lens, Ritry? You focused your considerable skill. You dove the Molten Core, and the Solid Core, you breached the aetheric bridge, and you stole something from me through it like a thief in the night."

I stare back, defying him. It only makes him angrier, bringing the rage to the surface and boiling off him like eruptive flares off the Molten Core.

"What did you take, Ritry? What have you stolen from me?"

I smile at him. "It wasn't yours. It never was."

His eyes flare wide, and I think for a moment I have pushed him too far and he will simply Lag me lying here, in the ruins of the ruin of my life. He is still far stronger than I. But he is too curious for that, too hungry. With visible effort he calms himself, takes another step closer into the gloom.

"You see the pins you have in me, Ritry? Tweak them a little in the right way, and I can be forced to explode. But perhaps that is what you want? A quick ending. I won't grant it." He's calmer already, the shark tucked away deep in his belly, the smooth gray veneer back. "It's what Napoleon begged for in the end, as I fucked the spirit out of his beloved Josephine while he could only languish on his shitty island, just like you. I had to send a message, you see. The utter depths of his defeat were delicious. But where's your Josephine now, Ritry? I could swear I had it, had something, but it's gone. Is that what you took?"