Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (14 page)

They look like mire, washed up by the waves. At last count I remember there were ninety, but that number is constantly in flux. Each skulk is like a great water-barrel raft, linked to the others and anchored to the wall, but there is always one foundering, its flotation failing, or one splitting itself down the middle, or a new one being added.

Of course there are the boats that get rigged into the mix as well, some shunting down in the gaps between the skulks broken open by the shifting of tides; all manner of vessels like yachts, coracles, catamarans, schooners, fluyts, deck-frigates, in one place I believe there's an old Ananzi-Rusk subglacic. These get roped in and paved into proto-Calico constantly, some charging tolls as new bridge-spans, others offering some variation on the three Bs.

It makes the skulks of proto-Calico a feverish place to be, constantly in flux. Sweeping left and right the length of the wall, beyond which there are far-off mountains thrust up by recent volcanic shifts, it continues. A proto-city for proto-people, all waiting for the next wave to come rub us out, and amongst them me, and Carrolla, and Don Zachary, and somewhere a crazed murderer called Mr. Ruins.

The Don continues leafing through the folder. "Did you know that there's some upturned godships on hidden reefs off of Tenbridge Wulls?" he asks, without looking up at me. "I thought they were all gone."

"I didn't know," I say, "I hadn't read that far."

"Might be good plunder there. I'll send a crew."

I look out to sea. In that direction there is only the gray of waves, spiked in places by a few hydrate mines, like spinning tops on the horizon. Here and there I catch the green of a kelp farm. Go the distance a few thousand kilometers after that, and you'll be at the Arctic circle, where once there was ice.

I look back at the Don but he's intent on his reading. There is no hint in his wrinkled old eyes of whether I'm to die today or not. I consider throwing myself off the boat, but it would do no good. They'd only swing around and pick me up again, maybe chop a few of my fingers and drive in their nails.

Or something worse.

All that remains to do is wait. I listen to the thump of the speedboat as it rides along the skulk spine, to the occasional shuffle as this old man in pajamas turning the papers of the folder meant for me. I wonder what will happen to Mei-An now, if the Don will let her go, or consider her complicit. Will he let me go? A dead son is a vulnerability, and for anyone to know about that vulnerability makes it a greater vulnerability still.

I wonder. Will the shark arena be the last place I ever see? Did Carrolla even make it to the hospital? They've taken my node so I have no way of checking.

Soon the charred exterior dock of skulk 53 is rushing by on our left. In some places the framework is gone entirely, in others the bones of it still remain, splintered with blackened metal girders. The speedboat pulls up to the flagging dock I remember, half-sunken, lined with its few canting bars. From this angle the shark-arena looks like a bloated mushroom, its once brown exterior faded with the rain to sleety gray. It's a wonder it never burned.

The engine kicks out, and a silence falls over the dead skulk and us. Perhaps cognizant of this, the Don's thugs get out wordlessly, tether the boat, and the Don follows. Bar the ceaseless lapping of waves, it is silent. There is nothing alive on this abandoned skulk but the echo of the old shark-master's mad creation and us.

"Come on," says the Don. "Nothing to be afraid of, if it's what you said."

I refrain from asking for that in writing. There will be no point now. Instead I get out of the boat and start along the tilted jetty carefully, leading the way.

"It's intriguing stuff, all this about the power of memory," says the Don behind me, as we shuffle carefully along. "Do you credit it at all?"

I wonder if this is a chance, to prove myself useful. Perhaps it is a tactic to keep me talking so I cannot plan an escape. To either end it behooves me to talk, because I can plan while talking at the same time.

"I may," I say. "It chimes with some religious theories, that consciousness is more of a great flame than a million tiny little flames, and we're all just one bit of the whole, experiencing itself."

The Don grunts, and we turn off the jetty and start down the wooden side of the shark arena. "I've heard of that. Go on."

I think on it some more, the ideas building latently since I read the paper this morning. "Well, those theories suggest there are actually invisible bonds between all of us. More than bonds really, because we're all actually pieces of the same thing, like radios tuning in on a specific frequency to this grand consciousness bandwidth."

Don Zachary laughs. "I ain't no radio, son."

"Add to that, some people think that at the center in the heart of the brain which no graysmith can dive, there's an aetheric bridge that can reach across to every other mind, a way through the bandwidth."

The Don grunts again, and I don't say anymore. We reach the ladder leading up to the shark arena stands. One of the Don's men shoulders in front of me and starts up it, leaving me with the Don and the other two. One of them pulls his gun and points it at my head.

"Precautions," the Don says.

The guy above reaches the top, and we hear his footsteps thump over the wood. There's silence for a few moments, then he's back leaning over the edge.

"He's here, Don. In the suit, everything."

The Don gestures for me to climb, and I do, and with every rung up a new plan presents itself. I could simply ride it out and hope the Don will let me go, but that seems unlikely. I could try to overpower the one bodyguard at the top, but he'll probably be standing a ways back with his gun on me, ruling it out.

I wonder if I should risk the bullets anyway. I could also wait, until we're all up close and studying Napoleon, then dive into the froth of the arena. If they didn't shoot me mid-dive, escape might be possible, though I'd probably just drown before I made it out from under the skulk, and even if I did manage to swim my way out, I'd only pop up a few feet away by the sunken jetty, where they could pick me off like a fish in a barrel.

There's no good plan.

I reach the top of the ladder, and lift myself over the edge. As I thought the bodyguard is standing a ways off in the shadow of the arena, a stray fleck of sunlight glinting off the barrel of his gun.

"Come on in," he says.

I do, and he shuffles backward carefully, keeping his distance. Everything is as I remember it, Napoleon down by the scummy arena, his bicorne hat slack across his face, his tunic open where I popped out the folder.

I wonder if I am about to go to my death just as he did. Will I perform the pantomime and get into my coffin-suit, on the infinitesimal chance that the Don might let me live?

Out here that's far harder to believe. There's never a cost to killing in the skulks, but in this abandoned arena so far from everything else, that lack of cost is a palpable thickness in the air, pressing in on me like the drink and madness must have pressed in on the arena's suicidal owner.

I walk down the rotten stands and circle the costumed figure. Oddly he doesn't look as fat as he is in my memory. Hardly fat at all.

"Scene of the crime," says the Don, emerging at the top in the door's oblong of daylight. "How do you feel, Ritry Goligh?"

I don't think it's good that he's using my full name. Like an obituary. "Hungover," I say.

He cackles, starts down the stands.

"So this is him," he says, pointing at Napoleon. "I suppose I should be glad it's not in public."

I realize then that I am certainly going to die. I grin. In five seconds I think, I am going to dive for the arena.

Four.

But until then, every outward I give will be normal, a cognitive dissonance between me and them. In T-minus three seconds I'll abruptly become a different person, and they won't have seen it coming. No nervous ticking at the railing, eyeing the pool, licking my lips, egging myself to the decision. It's what kept me alive in the north, and it's what'll give me a chance now.

Two. The Don is opening his mouth to speak again, even better. They'll be distracted. I don't tense a single muscle, make no change in my outward demeanor.

One.

Then something I don't expect at all happens. Napoleon sits up. His hat flies off, and in the second before the air gets thick with confusion, I see that it is not the ugly man it was before. It is Mr. Ruins.

He points one finger of each hand at two of Don Zachary's thugs, and as if on cue they collapse. It is stunning, like their bones have all at once gone to jelly, like they've been Lagged standing up. I feel something rushing beneath the air as it happens, a powerful and throbbing sensation like I'm about to make a dive and the EMR is cycling up around me, only this is like no dive I ever made before. This is destructive, filling my mind with unseen possibilities.

CRACK

CRACK CRACK

I can't focus. Gun smoke clouds the arena. The Don has hunkered behind a line of seating, and along with one of the thugs is shooting at us.

Ruins' white teeth glint in the shadow, and he points at the third thug, dropping him instantly.

I feel it, or some part of it, like a memory snatched up by the Lag. I'm staring, almost frozen, but now Ruins is moving. He leaps up and sprints the stands with preternatural grace, to stand over Don Zachary. He points a finger at the ugly old man's face, and I think in any minute I'm going to feel that strange sense of dislocation again.

But it doesn't come. Instead Mr. Ruins snatches the folder from the Don's hand, runs back down the stands, and sets it down on a mottled red plastic seat. He looks up at me, with eyes so dark I feel like I'm looking into the empty void of space.

"I promised you a reason to live, Ritry," he says, then taps the folder once with his finger. I open my mouth to say something, but then he's gone, like the record on Tofu's turntable has skipped. One instant he's there, the next he's not.

Lagged?

Then Don Zachary is shouting. I start running, snatch up the folder as I pass, but

CRACK

Don Zachary is standing with a gun held in both hands and his bullet grazes my shoulder. A slice of pain, and I'm rolling along the front of the arena, as

CRACK

CRACK

CRACK

Bullets ricochet around me. At one of the fallen thugs, his eyes open and full of tears, I snatch up a gun and return fire. The Don drops, buying me enough time to root in the man's pocket for his node. Up the stands, I circle back around to the exit, shooting at Don Zachary every few steps. I drop out of the door and fall the ladder-length to the jetty below.

My ankle crunches with the landing, but the jetty has some give and the damage can't be too bad. I catch my balance and run on at a hopping limp, along the pier and out down the tilting jetty.

CRACK

The Don is firing at me from the shark arena, and I swivel to fire back. He shouts something, but I barely hear it as I leap clattering into the speedboat. I pull the tether loose, and while the Don shouts something about nails and my manhood, I rev the engine and tear out of there.

The speedboat thumps over the waves, away.

Node to my head, I dial in for Carrolla, but there is no answer. I can only hope he's in surgery, not already twelve foot deep, drifting amongst the velour of a world long gone. Perhaps I'll never know either way.

The ring clicks to message, and I shout into the mouthpiece.

"Get the hell out of the skulks, Carrolla. Don Zachary's going to kill you, me, whoever he can. Don't stop to raid the graysmith, forget your bar, just pay for passage over the wall and start again in Calico. Just get out."

After that I toss the node in the water, and race out over the open ocean, bearing for the last of the godships overturned on a lost reef, the last place anyone could ever hope to find me. 

ROTATIONAL MAZE F

We set to making new armor from plastic tree bark. It's hard, but it's a step in a better direction, and far more resistant to the bayonets than our sublavic suits. With every chip fallen at our feet, hacked out by bayonet or shot clear with the muskets that never seem to run out of ammunition, the mood of the chord improves.

Ray begins to joke about setting up a nice life for himself in one of the burning cottages, and Far amuses himself kicking around some of the heads So cut off. Only once does the mood break, when he tries to throw one down the hole toward the Molten Core.

"No!" snaps So, instantly angry.

Far sets it down, but doesn't cry. I feel proud at that. Instead he goes back to gathering all the chips in a cart he found near Doe's cannon.

"I don't want them with La," So explains. "Sorry. I just-"

Ray gives her a hug, squeezing her tight.

"Take a break," I say.

I stroll over to Doe's cannon, where she's squatted down and chewing on a long thread of her rattaned white hair, studying the weapon.

"I think I can carry it," she says, looking up at me. "If I fit a few mag-levs, I can affix it on my suit shoulder, instead of the accelerator. The bonds don't seem to translate to extra weight."

I look over the cannon, a deep gray iron-looking tube, bulbous at the tail end, like a globule of blown glass. There is a tiny speck of fuse jutting from its rear, which I never saw her refill. It simply remained after each of its earlier blasts. At either side near the fat-tapered end there are handles welded in place, for carriage, or to click it into one of the bases.

"Or lead it behind you like a toy cart," I say.

Doe raises one eyebrow. One thing I know about Doe is she doesn't really understand humor. That only makes the image of her walking through a Solid Core corridor with it trailing behind her seem more funny to me.

"I could carry two, maybe," she muses, as my joke rinses right off her.