Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (26 page)

I went to her studio the next day for the sample, in the lower hills the Rise. It was large and white on the outside, amongst a hill-scape of large white Mediarranean villas. Inside the walls were slashed everywhere with her strange art: blown-up mathematical equations, genetic coding strips, a mad variety of patterning types, even some sculptures that somehow represented the helical DNA.

"They say you're a dark horse," she said, as I lay back on the chair so she could take a sample through the cochlear canal. "Are you sure you want me to expose all your secrets?"

I smiled. "I'd like to see them made into something beautiful," I said.

A long, thoughtful look.

"Thank you," she said. "I'll try my best."

We were both mostly business-like. I flirted a little about her hair, she flirted a very little back about my build, which I'd kept up since my skirmisher days.

It was very pleasant, but slightly distant, and after she very deftly turned down my suggestion of a date to an art museum in the Reach, on my way out, I considered it finished business.

In those days, I occupied my free time wandering the city, enjoying the feel of the solid earth under my feet. I liked looking up at the towers, imagining how high they might one day grow, perhaps even tall enough to outrace the gathering tides.

When I felt low, I climbed the wall and walked along it, looking down on the dirty blue skulks as they pulled themselves back up out of the water. By night they buzzed with the neon arteries of alleys like mine, trafficked by money and souls coming in, money and souls going out.

Don Zachary's rooted compound was still there, as ever, and I wondered about that life, to be the only solid thing amidst gossamer threads. Did it make him feel better, superior, like Mr. Ruins?

When I thought about Ruins, I turned my mind to something else. I imagined the wild life Carrolla was living down there, and if he'd finally made his bar of subglacic parts. I thought back on my old life, but I didn't hanker for it. I was done.

Three months later Loralena called on my node, though I'd never given her my number. She invited me to see her latest work, saying she'd finally finished sequencing my CSF. It was in her studio, so I went.

She met me at the entrance with the fire of curiosity burning in her eyes.

"Who are you, Ritry Goligh?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Graysmith. Art appreciator. Wall-hiker."

"And so much more," she said, and led me through.

The painting of my mind was bigger than any of the others. It covered the floor and the walls both, so immense were the patterns and the details within it. It was a maze of seven distinct parts, with each part utterly different from the others, represented in a different way.

She took my arm in her own. "I've never seen anything like it. I want to know everything about you."

Despite myself, I choked up a little. I waited for it to subside before I answered.

"Would you care to walk the wall with me?"

We walked the wall. I talked a little, revealing brief hints of who I was and had been, but each time only in exchange for something from her.

She'd grown up sheltered from the dying years of the skirmishes, tucked deep away in an oasis holdout somewhere in the midst of the old neo-Armorica desert belt, far from the suprarene tank-crawling routes.

Her parents had been climatologists who studied the weather, and every day since she was a small girl they took her out to walk the dunes encroaching over the tops of old skyscrapers, burying a city that was once at the heart of the world.

"Imagine this," they always told her. "Imagine how it was for them, and how it will be in a thousand years."

They taught her the long perspective of ice ages and extinction-level events, about the tumbling agglomeration of sand particles in the air as the water was sucked out of soil and into the oceans. They asked her to imagine divinity as a circle, not the religion in a book, a circle that goes round and round and never stops remaking itself.

I loved to hear her stories. She loved to hear mine. One night we walked the wall so far we came to the old lighthouse I'd almost jumped from, and I started to cry.

She took my chin in her hand, my sadness matched in her own eyes, and said, "Tell me, Ritry. Please."

So I did. I told her all of it, in bits and pieces. She wept for me, at times. She laughed with me. I shared it all.

We slept together for the first time, in the lighthouse, surrounded by the bonds of people who'd dreamed of offering succor to those who were going to die.

"I want to see it," she said, in the morning that followed. "The place where you made your stand."

I took her there. Together we went back to Candyland. It was a little more ruined now, a little more overgrown, though the thick scent of burning sugar still filled the air.

I found the room where I'd faced down Mr. Ruins. It was wrecked in a way I didn't remember, strewn with bottles. Loralena picked up one of vodka bottles from the subglacic I'd sunk, another from the godship.

She looked at me, and nodded.

"I'm so proud of you right now."

We walked the dried-out riverbeds of the RAGIN' RIVER donut loop. We climbed the heights of the wooden rollercoaster. Sitting huddled together at the top, wrapped up in a blanket borrowed from the ruined hotel, we looked back over the dusk falling over the string of cities.

"I was raped once," she told me. I listened. She went on to tell me how, and who it was. A client from her early days as an artist, who thought the passion he felt for her was requited. It wasn't so he took it. He since fled to the skulks, and died in the last tsunami.

I held her, and she held me. It was a start, building out of real roots.

The best times of my life followed. I became senior partner at the graysmithy. Loralena went on to publish amazing works, though she never shared the one drawn from my mind with anyone else. Together we folded it up, then burned it over a glass of rye.

"To the future," we toasted.

Our first child came a year later. We called her Art, after our shared passion. A year later came a boy, who we named Memory, Mem for short. We spoiled them in everything, and took them everywhere with us. We walked the wall and made up games for counting all the ships out at sea, we planned elaborate treasure hunts across the length and breadth of Calico to keep them guessing and giggling, we played in the ruins of Candyland building makeshift structures out of chairs and tables. We made a thousand new memories together, with a thousand more to come, and they brought a real depth and meaning to a life I'd always lived for myself.

Then came Mr. Ruins.

"It's him," says Far, pointing at the name in the last line, on the last page. "He's done this to us."

I roll the name in my head. Mr. Ruins. I remember him now, hanging there in a vacuum above all the other memories I've given away to come this far.

"So," I call on blood-mic. "So, do we have enough? Is it enough to make it?"

I get static back, hushed mutterings that might be a voice singing childhood lullabies.

"So's gone," says Ray. "It's just us now."

"We need to move," says Doe. "Arm yourselves."

We do. I split the story from the giant book into bite-sized chunks and sling them out to the others, enough to get us to the next book, to the next door, to the Solid Core at the heart of this maze.

"Heave!" I shout, and we burst out into the corridor beyond at a sprint.

10 YEARS LATER E

It was a treasure hunt day.

Loralena and I had spent two weeks preparing. The clues to it were hidden in her latest work of art, a number of impossible creatures enfolded within its extensive colors and patterns. There was a porpoise-finned dog and a monkey with squid-tentacle limbs, a clamshell mouse and an elephant-whale.

We'd spent a merry evening a week back preparing them, while the children were asleep. We sketched them out in the drawing room of our 50
^th
floor apartment in Calico Reach, while drinking good red ice-wine and looking out over the city's pulsing blue lights.

As we got increasingly tipsy, our sketches grew more outlandish, and the stops on the route more ridiculous.

"Your anemone looks like a football," Loralena teased. "A fat football with a thousand fat legs."

"It's not even an anemone," I said, a little giddy. "It's a universe in bloom."

She was standing behind me and leaning over my shoulder, her arm round my back, squinting at my drawing. I kissed the soft curve of her neck and tasted the faint residue of the Violet perfume she put on every morning, drifting warmly on the salty scent of her. I'd given it as an anniversary present.

"What kind of universe blooms in the Allatanc?" she asked, nonplussed. She looked at me, kissed me. "Are you quite mad?"

I laughed. "Quite mad. I should be arrested."

She chuckled and wriggled over the chair-arm to sit in my lap. She tapped the drawing.

"I hate to say it, but this particular protuberance looks sexual."

"That's the spiral arm. Or maybe it's a sea-horse tail?"

Another kiss, some more snuggling. Rooting underneath her, she found something in my lap that seemed to amuse her.

"That's not part of the treasure hunt," I told her, and she smirked.

"That depends what hunt I'm on. Right now I'm hunting for impossibly small things, and I think I found one."

"And oh look," I said, my hands rising to cup her breasts. "I found two. Does that make the winner?"

She leaned closer, whispered, "Silly," in my ear, and kissed me harder. She tasted of sweet wine and happiness. I carried her to bed, and the treasure hunt continued. I didn't know then that it would be the last time.

We finished the treasure trail in the following days, with Loralena working the best of our creations into her art, while I wrote up some short verses to print beside them, clues on where to go next. I wrote them in ultraviolet ink, a trick we'd used before, for which we'd bought special flashlights so the kids could seek out messages we'd left them.

At first the secret messages had been part of a standard treasure hunt, with the clues written out and the flashlights provided, but it quickly ballooned to encompass a wide swathe of everyday life. Loralena and I started writing messages on our kids' toys, their bedroom walls, which we made sure they sometimes saw us doing.

We left little jokes, puns, directions to hidden candy, sometimes even lists of chores, wherever and whenever the fancy took us. The kids responded with a level of enthusiasm which astounded us.  Art would lead Mem on long sweeping trawls of our apartment for hours at a time, scanning every possible surface that we could have written upon, seeking clues.

Then they started to leave clues for us too. Perhaps they'd hide one of my slippers, then leave an invisible message telling me where to find it written on plain paper balled up in the toe of the one remaining. They'd take all the fruit out of the fruit bowl and draw a smiley voice blowing a raspberry, with one single raspberry left on the tip of its tongue.

The clues to the hunt were various buildings, parks, and museums around Calico, connected by the sea/animal theme. There were a few buildings that resembled animals (one with four legs and a tail, which was an Arctic history museum, and one that looked like some strange beetle, which was an architectural firm's headquarters), and few places close to the wall that linked to the sea theme, like an artificial sea pod where they could skim kelp and a beach where they could dig for cockle-shells.

Together we'd trail around Calico, Loralena and I trying our best not to give any answers away. There were questions to answer at each location, things they'd have to observe, AR tags they'd have to post, and even a few geocached items hidden away in little boxes clipped to lampposts and benches with tiny magnets.

We'd likely spend half the day rooting around in bushes, caught up in the kids' enthusiasm, trying our best not to let the answers slip too fast.

On the day of the hunt things proceeded exactly to plan. They caught on to the sea animals quickly, and led us out of the apartment at a run.

"I'll take the sea-dog, you go catch some fish," Art told Mem as they confabulated in the elevator heading down, whispering loudly as if keeping it a secret from us. Of course we had geo-tags on them, so we knew where they were at all times.

In the lobby they split up accordingly. We waved them off, but we were already forgotten. There was a record to beat, and a complicated scoring system for what they'd get upon completion as a team.

We laughed as we wandered down to the park, where we spent most of the day lazing in the grass, following their progress on our nodes: little blinking lights that racked up points as they went.

We read books, dabbled our feet in the fountain, and talked about the next game we'd plan, how it was time to step up the challenges a little.

"You're the brain expert," Loralena said with a nudge. "What do you suggest?"

I had all kinds of ideas. Some included weekend-long hunts taking them to other cities down the chain, specific interactions they had to have with service-providers, things they had to build, move around, buy or sell.

"Start a bank account, go shopping for cutlery, file a tax return," I said.

Loralena laughed. "Those are your chores."

I smiled a winning smile. "How many points do I get for each?"

She laughed, and bought me ice cream.

When the kids came back we tallied the points, made a big show of converting that to numbers, and paid them what we'd expected to pay from the beginning anyway.

They rejoiced, and whipped out their nodes to start lining up purchases.

"As ever," Loralena added, "we'll pay you interest of 5% on anything you don't spend."

Mem spent all of it anyway on new games. Art teased him and only spent a quarter on a new painting easel, something she was taking after her mother in.