Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (25 page)

Within that, I sense a little of myself, of the boy who killed his adopted parents for what they did, the boy who could not trust anyone who came next, or believe anything he saw was ever really real.

It was hard enough for me to put down roots. Now I have so few even of those left.

I climb the wooden rollercoaster and stand at the top, looking over my domain. This is a new memory, now, and a new root. It is a beautiful view, to look back along the line of all the cities at dusk, and see their lights glow up like hot beads of amber on a necklace. Off to the side the sinking sun burns brilliant russet through the rain-fogged horizon.

Rides, rides, and nature resurgent.

In a hotel room with a cracked façade, I find room after room untouched. The little packets of shampoo and conditioner remain at perfect positions, like marines awaiting cabin inspection. I stand at the balcony window and look out over a pool that is filled with jungle, a mini-golf set succumbed to tropical bush.

"You're not who I thought you were," comes the voice from behind.

I turn, and there he is. Mr. Ruins. He isn't smiling anymore, he isn't smug. The tail-end of the last bonds I cut are still with me, and through them I can feel that he is angry.

I smile, and spread my arms. "I never was."

He looks at me, I look at him. It is like staring into darkness, into the empty sky and trying to resolve something of meaning, but there is nothing there. He is as lone and cold and vengeful as the dead captain in his sub. I do not care.

"I don't want to see you again," I tell him. "I don't want to know you. I don't want to even sense you've come near me. You're poison. You're sick. You made a man dress up like Napoleon, for what? To get my attention? You broke Napoleon himself, and for what? Your amusement. If that's what it means to be a predator, then I am not one. I am not like you. I don't even want to remember any of this."

Mr. Ruins inclines his head. "Would you like that? It can be arranged."

I laugh. "You go ahead and try. They couldn't Lag me when I was a baby, and they couldn't Lag me with a mind-bomb, so what do you think you're going to do? You're not a shark, you're a spider. You're a sneaky bastard, and I will crush you underfoot."

Now he smiles. Those gleaming white teeth shine like bulls' eyes in the dark.

"Ritry, I am so glad you've said these things. It will make it much easier, when the time comes. I'd always hoped to sample a seven-noter, and you've given me the chance."

I take a step forward. "So try it. Dive all you want. I'll drown you in your own fucking madness."

He laughs. "Oh, no. Do you really think I would come at you straight, when you've said I was a spider all along? Ritry, you are right, we are different. I will savor this. Your fall will be long, and low, and hard. I will grind all the juice out of you like I did Napoleon, and at the end I'll hear your brittle fucking bones snap under their own weight. I'll stand over you and remind you of everything you said here tonight, and how you did this to yourself. Remember that."

"You're a coward," I say. "And you're insane."

"No. I'm just hungry, and bored. I've got forever, and nobody will stop me." He sighs, and I feel his regret. "Ah, we would've had some fun, Ritry, you and I. You've passed up so much. But no matter, I have all the time in the world. I'll come for you when you're ready."

Then he is gone.

I think about chasing him, taking the fight to him and killing him now like I've killed before, but I am too tired. I don't want to hurt people anymore. Besides, I'll be ready.

I slump onto the bed, and a thick cloud of dust whuffs up around me. I feel light, and not drunk enough. There are tiny bottles of liquor in the fridge.

I drink them all.

Everything is different when I wake. The last of the bonds I cut has gone from me, and now there is only the under-swell like the godships, of nostalgia, love, and happy memories.

I rise and throw back the curtains, to see another golden dawn. It falls on the jungle and ocean beyond like manna, a heavenly glow so bright I have to shade my eyes.

I have been a thing of the night for so long. I have fought and fucked and dove and hustled in the grime, and I am tired of it. I have lived on a floating platform waiting every day for a tsunami to come, big enough to rub me out completely and wash all trace of my existence away.

But enough. The taste of these past ten years is sour in the bridge of my mouth. That could be the liquor, but it's also the past. It tastes foul, and I spit it out. I scrape my tongue with my sleeves, rub the fabric around my teeth.

I want to be clean.

The glow in the park fades, but it is still alive. The trees sway in the sea-breeze. The bushes fluff out seeds, ever hopeful, seeking a solid place to sink into and grow. I feel like a seed that has been drifting for 35 years, waiting for the moment to put down roots and reach for the sun.

I let it all go. I drop it in that room, along with the booze, the bonds, the scare tactics of that toothy asshole, whatever I needed to get me through and bring me to this point. I don't need it now. But enough talk, enough thought, enough bullshit. I stride out of the room, and out into the park, heading for the beginning of my new life.

NEW LIFE D

We strip off everything we can.

Doe drops her cannon and accelerator, because they are too heavy. We slough off the tree-bark armor like a second skin. We drop QC parabolics and packs full of rations, our belts and most of our grapnels and cable, keeping only what candlewax we have left and a musket-bayonet each.

Instead we arm ourselves with memory, and shield ourselves with what we did as a child.

I look at them others, and they look at me, and there is resilience in all our eyes. Even Far, who is more drained than any of us, is ready to fight.

"We run," I say to them. "We keep running until we get to the core, then we blow it open for Ritry Goligh. Understood?"

"Understood," they answer. It's not enough.

"I said, am I understood? We're going to tear this maze to shreds and shove what's left up its fucking ass. It should not have fucked with us. Am I understood?"

It's a cheer, now. Ray yells out, "Yeeha!" Doe is more ferocious than I have ever seen her, white like a banshee. Far is grinning.

"Let's go."

We kick out the gumball valve-stopper, pile out sinuously like one smooth black-clad unit into the corridor, and run.

The lips thump after us, and we zag to the left, circling a fractal island. The lips smacks closer, and we zig Inward as they draw closer, racing along So's sputtering path.

I toss fragments of my own past at them like dry-ice grenades, like gold-spray QC particles, and they burst open like bags of viscera, splattering off the heaving cavity walls.

Left, right, I throw more. Every shred is a memory lost, but we are gaining time and speed, learning how to run this maze, feeling the track laid out despite the density. This place is familiar, after all. This place is made of us.

"Incoming West!" Ray cries, and hurls a memory himself, perhaps a fragment of my infantile diving days, perhaps one variation of the orange rattle.

The duodenal snake implodes. I don't know what Ray threw, but it must have been potent. We run on, and Inward. We spiral and climb, we circle and chime, and soon a dozen lipless sucking mouths lie burst like grapefruit behind us, though always there are more.

"Up ahead!" Doe cries.

I toss the last vestige of the childhood memories out behind me like a mind-bomb on a ticking clock, the day I Lagged them all. It blows at my back with enough force to shred a gaping hole in the maze itself.

Doe kicks through the gumball to another room, another book, and with practiced motions we seal ourselves in, haul up the cover, and read.

NEW LIFE

In Calico, I went to Carrolla. He didn't want to know, didn't want to see me, but tracking him to the hospital I'd sensed him in before was easy.

"What in the hell?" he asked, after he'd quit eye-balling me in the doorway. "Rit. What in the hell?"

His fingers were reattached, stabilized in a portable amniotic vat at his side. Calico is a good place, I suppose. They take care of anyone who wants it. He looked well, if a little pale.

"I know you're angry," I said. "I would be too. But I want you to know Don Zachary will never come looking for you."

"Did you kill him?"

"No. I Lagged him."

He stared at me.

"You Lagged
the Don
? How? How would you even get close?"

I shrugged. He started to laugh.

"Ritry goddamned Goligh. You are one crazy son of a bitch."

I smiled.

"How are your fingers?"

He flipped me off from inside his glass tank.

"They have Arcloberry here?" I asked.

He got up off the bed.

"We'll find some."

We went like that, big model-looking Carrolla dressed in his hospital white smock, me in a sharp black suit I'd bought with the few numbers I'd put aside in my graysmithing days, and found a bar. We toasted each other, and everything we'd achieved.

I didn't see him again after that. I since heard he was back on the skulks, setting up his own graysmithy after the tsunami finally came. I suppose he hadn't had enough of being a tourist.

As for me, I found an apartment. Calico was calm, and safe, and restful. People went where they went and did what they did because they wanted to. The coalitions had stumbled upon a brilliant method of self-segregation by allowing the proto-city skulks to thrive. All the people who wanted to live on the edge could self-select and go there, and when they were ready they could come back into the fold, to a place with ironclad laws and justice served within hours.

The towers were vast, soaring into the sky, and I was at the bottom of them all, but I was glad of it. 33, and I had a new start. I took work as a graysmith's assistant at a low-floored lab, where none of the technicians were ex-skirmishers, where sex never preceded or followed an implantation, and where they never dived deeper than the outer boundary of security their technology could provide against the Lag.

There was no risk. Instead of the chemical massage of proximity or sex as a balm after the rough process of engram-injection, they administered artificial dopaminic cocktails so expertly constructed and fine-tuned to the host that the mind knew no differently.

Memory exchange was at a minimum. The process was warm, relaxed, but utterly clinical. I tucked my chin in and my head down, and did the work.

For one year I manned a sonic basin, trusted only to stand nearby while the patients watched colorful sonatas thrum their pulse back at them through audio and visual HUDs. I didn't socialize much, though I went to meetings for recovering alcoholics. I didn't drink.

A year in they promoted me to CSF, Heclan's old position. I studied hard at nights, learning their rules and the new and proper way to work the gray. I earned all the certificates I could, and within two years moved to manning the EMR and preparing the syringes of silvery engram inject.

It took three years all in before they let me make a dive. It felt like returning to an old fiend. They were all watching, my new colleagues and work-mates, many of them younger than me, more educated than me, kids from the Reach and partners from the firm, watching to see if I'd choke.

Would I dive too deep, go into organics? Would I panic and regress, force the machine to go into damage-control?

They didn't know me. I worked the gray like a virtuoso conductor, using all the tricks and techniques I'd learned before in concert with the new technology. The patient said afterward it was the smoothest inject he'd ever received, so seamless and integrated he could barely distinguish it from his real knowledge. He told me all this in fluent Hexi-Canton, the language patch I'd implanted him with.

I did it in the fastest time anyone in my graysmithy had seen. Soon the partners were knocking on the door of my office to ask me how I'd done it. I told them what I could, what I was able to put into words. I was a giver now, not a taker.

One day, the tsunami finally came. It was a big one, enough to toss a few of the skulks up and over the wall itself, spill bilge into the first three floors of the dock-end of Calico, but nobody in the city was hurt, because we were ready.

Everyone on the skulks will have died. Everyone I once knew, rubbed out, except perhaps Don Zachary in his underwater bunker.

My life went on. I met a woman called Loralena, of proto-Rusk stock. She was nothing like Ven, nothing like any of the girls from the skulks. She was utterly self-possessed, in control of her emotions and heart but still alive in every moment.

She was an artist of some medium fame, who specialized in painting with the brain. She took CSF samples from thousands of volunteers, and extrapolated the precise genetic compositions out into vast, riotous tableaux of color. 

I met her at a graysmith party for funders, when one of the partners introduced us.

"You should sample Ritry," he said. "He's a complete mystery. Perhaps you'll get back to us with the inside scoop on how he does what he does."

Polite laughter, they nudged my shoulder, and I smiled.

"I'd love to," she said. "Ritry, when will you come by?"

I made some polite hemming and hawing about soon, and I'd be delighted. We moved on to talk about the skulks, and she espoused her theories on reabsorption, about how everything that dies doesn't really die but gets taken up again in a different way. It didn't matter if it was matter, energy, or thought, which she said was a kind of energy itself.

"It all comes around," she said, looking at me. "It all circulates." 

She was stunning, for how alive she was. When she wasn't speaking she listened intently, and sipped on her ancient-genome rye and ice. I could feel that she was hoovering it all up, not just the words and the tastes but the mood, every single tiny gesture. She was five years my junior, had curly auburn hair that made me think of summer, and a fierce wonder and curiosity about everything that lit me up inside.