Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (22 page)

The threads lead back through skin and bone, into the Molten Core of minds and spirits, where they plug in neatly and perfectly: their eyes, their ears, all the means they use to sense the world.

And I unplug them.

It is so easy, and the jolt of each one spooling free is substantial. They heighten my senses and increase my reach, recharging the slow dwindle-down of the godships' vigor. I have never Lagged a waking soul before, and never felt anything like this. When I Lagged Tofu's mind with a portable EMR, I felt nothing.

But I don't need an EMR machine anymore. I am a fission reactor at hot capacity, able to strip bonds through proximity, each one serving to elongate the chain reaction. I remember Mr. Ruins in the shark arena, dropping Zachary's thugs just by pointing at them, and realize I have that same power now.

It feels good.

I pluck at their forming threads like a virtuoso banjo-ist, pulling out the weight behind every memory as it threatens to form between us, keeping my presence in the minds of the Hawks as nothing more disturbing or important than the ache in their legs from standing duty all night, or the remembrance of some old dry calculus lesson they took through engram injection.

They do not fire as I pull up to the dock, as I settle the speedboat in to a berth and climb out, as I rope it in and look around at them. I feel as though I could flex my muscles and Lag them all into infinity, if I wanted.

"Sir, you can't park that here," one of them says, his eyes lukewarm and calm as a gentled shark. He can barely see me, for the speed at which I'm pulling out the weight from memories his mind is trying to form.

"It's the Don's boat," I say pointing at the name written down its side.

ORICIPULIS

I let this slip through for them all. It means they will guard this boat as though it is the Don's, until I return.

"But who are?" the man asks. His dull face is vaguely quizzical. "Does the Don expect you?"

"Yes," I say, and pull the weight out of the lie before it sees me shredded by howitzer from above. It is so easy now, with every struck bond providing more energy than it takes to break it. Their minds want to recoil, are waiting for the weight to tell them to, but I don't give them that chance. "Can you let me through please."

"We're not supposed to," a man says from above.

I chuckle. "Would you prefer I climb?"

I let the chuckle and the warmth through. They are professionals, cold killers more ruthless than I ever was, perhaps as cold as Ven before I softened her a little, but like Ven they will respond to warmth in the complete absence of threat. For them, there is nothing to fight.

The man before me smiles uneasily. "No sir, of course not. Well, let's open it up."

I wink. "Just a crack will be enough. I can slip through."

"Of course sir."

A portcullis-style section of the wall lifts up to my left. I nod briskly and make for it.

"Carry on," I say, and they do, all interaction between us forgotten.

Inside the wall is a weakly lit passage that smells of urine and seaweed-tobacco ash. The Don's line through here is hot and recent. A few industrial drying-lamps wrapped with metal bars spit hot orange light out in staccato bursts. A camera array above records my face and entrance, reports it to men ahead who I feel begin to panic, move to raise the alarm, but this is no concern to me.

I reach out and quiet them from a distance.

Through the passageway, I emerge into a wide open space, gravel underfoot like a courtyard, where a dozen ancient road-vehicles are parked. I walk amongst them, these collectibles scoured from a forgotten era, useless on the skulks, trailing my fingers over their sleek, gloss-metal lines.

BMW

ROLLS ROYCE

PORSCHE

LAMBOURGHINI

They are all silver. From this I infer that Don Zachary prefers silver.

The gravel crunches underfoot, and I notice the absence of any give in the flotation devices underfoot. Perhaps there are none, and this part of the skulk is actually rooted deep down in the sea-bed. I have heard rumors to that effect.

Overhead the night sky is blocked by a high white plastic-looking ceiling held up by an array of metal rafters, this to keep any prying eyes atop the Calico wall from peering down.

I stalk through it, following the Don. I still every thread that leaps out from my body, before it can dart back through the eyes of the soul that sees me, to a mind that would shoot me on sight. At a gateway I talk through an intercom while soothing the man who mans it, persuading him to open for me, and he does.

The skulk is vast, a maze, and I walk down long halls filled with the bright light and syrupy smell of narcotic hydroponics, others filled with chemical apparatus and clinical white light, attendants within busily working at their titration like Heclan on his CSF still.

I pass down a long corridor of dormitories, sensing more ex-Hawks in the rooms either side, off their shift, some of them sleeping. They are all thugs, drawn from the skulk morasses, though some of them have families too. I feel the hot tang of Don Zachary's children mixed in amongst them, adult and infant both. The Don's thread is everywhere now, his influence touching everyone, like a thick purple web.

I follow it back.

Another entrance, another intercom, and then I am riding down in an elevator, deep down, to emerge within the Don's private mansion. A grand hall extends away from me, and everywhere I look there is sheer salvaged silk or vat-grown mahogany, the fur of extinct creatures used for curtaining and rugs, ancient bones used to hold up his coffee table and worked into the details of chairs.

Through four vast living spaces I proceed, each more opulent than the last. The solid cement ceiling overhead has been disguised with Romanesque flourishes and elaborate skirting, but I can feel the weight of it bearing down. All of this is tsunami-proof. Nothing less for the Don.

In one room everything is made of glinting brass, as though I am gazing into the innards of a polished trumpet. Chairs, walls, floors, tables, all sinuous and perfectly golden.

A ladder leads down further stairs, and I can feel the chefs down there at labor, the mechanics watching the gas levels and the security guards watching their monitors. If I Lagged them all then sealed them tight from above, they wouldn't remember enough to even turn their oxygen on, and all of them would die.

The sense of the Don is everywhere, the air is thick with his thoughts and his deeds, like salt and rot in the skulk air. I find him in a four-poster bed in a grand circular room, alone. It is pitch dark but I find my way to him easily, following the hot trails in the air. There are women sleeping in alcoves all around the room, each a colorful buzz of thoughts raised on a small dais with spotlights above and ensconced with mirrors. A private boudoir, a strip club, a brothel for the Don should he wish it.

I turn on all the lights, go to his side, and nudge him awake.

"You wanted to kill me," I say.

He wakes up fast, and with consciousness and recognition comes rage, hot and red. He goes for my throat, but I Lag the depth from his intention to move and he sags back.

"I'm sorry your son died," I say. "It wasn't me though, or Carrolla, or any of them. I'll deal with the man who did it. You can remember that."

I let some of his anger spike through the fog I've put him in, to afford him his say.

"I want to hire you," he says.

I have to laugh at that, the schemings of his mind. This is how he has become the Don of so many skulks, not only through barbarism but through intellect. 

"You can't afford me," I say, "and you won't even remember I was here."

He looks at me with some kind of understanding. Perhaps he knows something about the gray, and about the Lag. He saw Mr. Ruins' notes after all, and he sees me here now, unharmed in the heart of his bunker-mansion.

"Please don't hurt my children," he says.

It hits me like a blow between my eyes. Upon hearing it, I want to leave. I want to assure him I am not that man, I would not kill them all for some petty vengeance, but I can't afford to say those things now. He is still a killer and a torturer, but then this is the skulks and we are all killers and torturers of some kind.

So what kind am I?

Outwardly, I nod. I feel sick, but there is still a job to do, and only I can do it. I seize hold of his mind and all the bonds linking him to me, and I Lag away his every recollection of me. Weight and frame both, I strip it back to the barest outlines, that there was once a graysmith on skulk 47.

The unwelcome power of those broken bonds shoots me through the roof, beyond my control. His hatred was immense, and these are settled memories in a living mind, not unformed sensations or relics from the past.

Now my consciousness is hovering a mile overhead, hanging in the air above the skulks and gazing down on them all, even over the Calico wall. Spread throughout, I can see to the heart of every person I have ever touched or known. They are spotted everywhere like visited dots on a map, the women I've fucked and the drinking buddies I've fought. The neo-Armoricans I stabbed with my node are still in their cups, drunk or sleeping scattered around the end-skulks. The red-headed whore is at work even now in my old alley.

I look wider still. In Calico, the city shining and high-towered behind its protective wall, I see Carrolla. He is alive and healthy, recovering from his nail-branded hands, and cursing my name every day for getting him involved. There is Mei-An in the Reach, distraught at the depths she has fallen to in her parents' eyes. There are others too, scattered throughout this little isthmus of unbranded land off the Allatanc ocean, marines I'd met, people who helped or hurt me as a child.

I feel them all, until the glow of Don Zachary's loss ebbs, and I sink back down. He is lying there gazing up at me with rheumy eyes. His women are wakeful in their perches, and I still them.

I walk out of the skulk like a wave of darkness and sleep, leaving emptiness and quiet behind. I drop into my speedboat and roar away, both sickened and gladdened by what I have done.

Access to the tsunami wall between Calico and Tenbridge Wulls is easy. Mr. Ruins' notes detail an ancient stop on an unbuilt in-Wall train line, when once they hoped to link the skulks without to the city within by more permanent means. Now the station is a vacuum inside the core of the wall, locked off by great metal plugs.

Access hatches remain though, too small and reinforced to present any threat to the wall's integrity. I pull up to a stretch of open wall between the cities of Calico, where the night sky is brilliant with stars and the waves reflect that back, and there is no walkway and there are no skulks.

I am alone. I tether the boat to a docking ring embedded in the wall, and climb up shadowy dimples spotting its flank. Up, up, until the subglacic-like hatch is beside me, locked by triple combination locks, and I dial in the number written down in the folder of ruins.

The chute beyond is narrow and still and smells of mold. Already I feel the massed ranks of engineers who built this place welling up from the poured concrete. These were grand dreams, faded glory.

I lock the hatch behind me and proceed by flashlight, through a series of flood-proof valve-doors, until I emerge into the half-oval of the solitary station on an unbuilt line.

The rails have been laid and bedded with gravel, but they end in solid concrete at either end. A platform rises up at the side, where there are old-new metal seats still covered in their factory-plastic. A few unpowered vending machines line the wall, interspersed between tile plates announcing this lost station's name.

ERRAL FALL

I climb to the platform, leaving trails in the thick dust as though through snowfall. The feeling of the bonds tracked through here are similar to the godships, and to the skulks, but unique. These minds are scientific, filled with purpose, linked back to families spread throughout the world. This place was built by some of the brightest minds in existence.

And abandoned. I sit on one of the wrapped metal seats and crack open a can of beer, one of 24 I have brought with me, along with godship vodka. I set down a halogen lamp and flick the switch to light it, turning off my flashlight. It surrounds me with a globe of warm light.

I could go back to my home on skulk 47, even reclaim my graysmithy, but what kind of life is that now? I have started down this path into ruin, into a world of bonds and unfathomable power, and I can't stop myself now.

I start to drink. I scan the far wall, covered in rough, unfinished blastcrete, the return platform not yet constructed. I am not tired, but I have been awake too long to not want sleep. I am tired of myself, and of this power that connects me to everyone and everything, but to no one and nothing at once. I am tired of seeing again the look in Zachary's eye, as all pretense fled away and he truly understood who I was, and what I had come to do.

Don't hurt my children.

He was begging, and it makes me ill. I am not the man to enjoy that. It makes all the power of the bonds from the godships tainted, if this is what they are for.

Mr. Ruins said I was a predator, but I do not think I am. I don't want to feel this way anymore. The Don's rheumy eyes won't go away.

For some reason they make me think of Ven, and thinking of Ven makes me drink harder. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? And where is my soul now, after I have stolen so much from so many? I looted the memories of the dead and the living alike. I feel sick at what I have done, and yet here I am back in the thick of those dreams, tonic for the massive hangover coming due.

I drink. I take another beer, and I drink. Carrolla is well but he hates me. I open the vodka, and I drink. Ven is still dead, and the half-life I built on skulk 47 is over, and again I don't know what to do.

I drink, and I drink, until the power fades and the questions fade, and the blackness of unconsciousness beckons. I drink because it is the only way out, and the only way I know.