Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (31 page)

This place I'm going isn't my home. I left that behind a long time ago. There's nothing out there for me but darkness, and ruin.

It's nearly midnight by the final station, the Brink. The night porter walks by holding his ticket ticker.

"Here for the Mass lights?" he asks.

I shake my head. He points out the window, and I see colored fairy lights dancing in long lines over the small station outbuildings, up the rain-shelter frame, around the curved spine of the single bench.

"No," I say, getting to my feet. "I'm visiting friends."

He gives me an odd look, but takes the ticket from my hand and punches a hole through it.

"Well, then," he says, "you best hurry, they'll be closing down the line soon." He carries on to the carriage end.

The doors open and I leave the tram behind. 

The little town of the Brink has only a few hundred inhabitants. I heard once it's actually part of Don Zachary's proto-Calico, a kind of skulk on land, but I've never felt the Don come here. It's just another space left behind, outside the protection of Calico's walls.

Looking out over the water, I see the first point of light on the horizon. One of the intermittent Arctic rigs we fought so hard for, sucking hydrates out of the ancient ocean bed, once covered by ice. Now they float across the whole Allatanc, like my old skulk on the waves, sucking the last rotting succor out of the bodies of dead dinosaurs buried far down below.

We are everywhere now, and every place is known. There are no more unbroken stretches of darkness, no dark spots on the map but the ones we've left behind.

I walk through the little town of Brink. Shuttered windows and doors pass by on either side of me. The air smells saccharine, hot tar and brown sugar, more heightened than any time I've passed this way before. They boil sweets in the refinery all day and all night. Here and there I catch patches of tinny music leaking from lit second floor bars, warblings of voices that liven up the night. Once that was my life too.

I emerge out of the little town, leaving the last of the lights behind me. Ahead is one gray patch at the map's edge, where I will make my final stand. I cross an old wooden bridge, and catch the scent of decaying whalemeat out to sea. They caught another carcass.

The cloying scent of candy gathers up a fresh undertone of seeping vegetation. This place was a theme park once, with tall ferris wheels and gravity towers. Candyland. Its rollercoasters dominated the skyline, and the cries of delighted children would echo all around.

I came here with Loralena, when it was already a ruin, and we imagined the life it once held. I came here with Art and Mem. I came here a different man, filled with hope and hubris, enough to bring me snapping back like an unbreakable elastic bond.

I pass the shell of an old bus stop. It's only a frame now, the glass shattered out by nu-rockers a generation ago, its metal posts slowly wilting in the steady blast of the sun.

I walk the empty car park with memories bubbling up around me. We came here together and all held hands. The park was already dead, but still we'd come to play. I step over regimented lines for parking spaces scrawled over the tarmac like crazy paving, in places erased by time, soil accretion, creeping moss. Cracks have lifted sections, dropped others into the ocean, driven by the rising tide. Here I once pulled up in Don Zachary's own speedboat.

A different life.

It grows very dark close to the entrance, and I can see nothing but a faint glow from the distant satellite-lights overhead. Barbed wire rustles in my hair as I clamber over the turnstile. In and through, I see boulderlike shapes lying around in the shadows. I touch them as I pass, and feel the heat of the sun still buzzing within their lifeless frames. They are toppled fishing boats. Once upon a time the waters tipped them up and left their undersides showing for the vultures to pick clean.

Down the main promenade there is jungle to either side of me. I still smell the refining sugar, but it is fading. Instead my mind tells me I smell caramel popcorn, the acrid burn of fireworks exploding overhead, the flowery shampoo smell of Mem's hair as she pulls me down to whisper in my ear:

"This is wonderful, Daddy."

The memory of a memory. None of us saw this place alive.

I walk up the steep wooden rollercoaster tracks to the apex of the dive, rising far above the land below. Here is my tower, standing at the turning point, complete and thick with bonds. No crows have dislodged its turrets or parapets. No shelving units have been hung up by the homeless.

It is only my Tower. I am the only one who ever saw it, and built it with everything I had, bricks chipped away from other buildings, bits of rail-line gleaned rusting in the weeds, cement powder I scraped from the undersides of ceramic sinks. I bonded it with all my memories. It stands as tall as the Calico wall.

I enter the Tower through the one entrance, and begin the slow ascent up the circling staircase. As I move up, I let the backs of my fingers trace the wall. The surface is rough, unpolished, like granular stucco. For a month I wattle-framed it, heaping on thick handfuls of liquid plaster, dusting in every memento I had.

This Tower is made of memory. It is a cast of my life and the life of my family, of my children Art and Mem, of my wife Loralena. It is what remains, and the reason my mind is so clear.

Because I'm going to take my family back.

The hairs on the backs of my fingers tingle in the charged air. I have known this pain for so long. I feel it like static electricity, a wellspring of power, now focused.

I arrive at the top, and look out over the park and the world. It is all in shadow. I look up to the sky and see the endless reams of satellites. I look across the land and see the twin cities I've forsaken, both Calico and the shadow sprawl of proto-Calico hugging the wall on barges in the bay. This is all our land, and our swollen seas, and the fragments of life we have left.

I touch the wheel, by which I will steer myself home. It is as large as the wheel on a subglacic, connected to vents and flue shafts all throughout the Tower, and a rope hanging down the stairs. Everything is perfectly balanced.

I am ready, just as I always was as a marine in the Arctic skirmishes, ready to fight for my right to exist. I lay my hands on the smooth wheel's handles and allow myself a brief moment to repeat the terms of the deal I made with Mr. Ruins all that time ago.

If it doesn't work.

That thought doesn't hold fear for me anymore. It is an answer either way. I can't be hurt anymore, and my family can't be hurt any worse if I am gone than if I am alive.

I lift the wheel and it clicks to engage. I feel the wind about me rush to fill in the ventricles the Tower has opened. The cement beneath my feet vibrates. I turn the wheel, and the thumping begins.

I feel the wave rise.

It's beginning.

And I dive.

Down into my own outer cortex I plunge, buoyed by the strength of so many ragged bonds, so strong I don't need an EMR. Down I race through my glia and axons, down into the root and branch systems of my own dendritic tufts, blasting by pyramidal neurons both afferent and efferent, deep to Mountcastle's thalamic line and through, so deep I begin to lose all sense of my own body, plunging beyond the Mohorovic discontinuity and toward the mind's Molten Core.

I hit hard, into bright-hot magma and churning lava flows, the heat and the violence all around. Consciousness sloughs off like ablative plating, and everything I am splits into the seven constituent tones of my mind's architecture, the primal memory, each one slotting into individual fire-forging pods within the sublavic bathyscaphe I have built for my own protection.

Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.

They begin to rouse, and for one instant some sense of me is still with them, writing the mission folder they will soon read, because I know everything. I have seen what Far is planning, that child who saved me once, saved me twice, who built up a Solid Core so dense no mind could ever penetrate its depth.

No mind but my own. I understand what is required, the sacrifices needed to breach the aetheric bridge and touch the face of eternal consciousness.

It is terrifying. It is beautiful, beyond my comprehension.

Then it is gone, as my last sense of self is swept away in the forging, and I come to in one mind only, Me, coughing up treacle-black smoke in the rusted corridors of the sublavic, with the fire-forge burning around me and the screw failing and the air filled with the stink of burning brick.

CANDLEBOMB G

Huddled by the blast-door, we're talking in low fast whispers. Doe is trimming the wicks of the candle-bomb, aligning the gamma-clamp to corrosion marks in the huge black blast-door. Ray is talking into his blood-mic, to So back at the outer orbit, his piercing blue eyes on me.

"Anything you can give us, So, on what's on the other side, anything at all."

As ever, no answer comes. I flip up the chronometer function on my HUD by rolling my eyes. Has it already been a week in this maze?

Far calls us to hurry from the end of the corridor. He's speaking more now, where he used to only sound the tones of our chord. He can't be more than twelve years old. His shadows cast a long way down in the orange oxyfer flare lights.

I gesture to him to be calm. I try to project my soothing vibes out to him, but it's hard when there's sweat beading down my face, pooling in the dead vacuum cups gathered under my eyes. I nod to Ray, who was always better at that, and he smiles to Far, which helps.

"T-minus 3," says Doe, wiping her greasy hands on her black double-breasted flak jacket. I try to blink the panic-sweat out of my eyes but it won't dissipate. The HUD vacuum stopped working days ago. Everything here reeks of sweat.

Ray claps a hand on my shoulder. I look through my visor and see his big black grin, bony white teeth inset with loop piercings like some ridiculous mesh of braces.

"You crying, Me?" he asks.

"It's the vacuums," I say. "They don't work."

He taps me smartly on the head. The HUD warps with the movement, then the sweat wells under my eyes jostle, stream down my cheeks like tears.

"Thank me later," he says.

"T-minus 2," says Doe, and she turns to face me. Her white albino face stares like a ghost. Her fingers are covered in candle-wax. "Nearly there," she says.

"What's the problem?"

She points at one of the candles, a scented purple thing, probably lavender. It is squat and carved with glissades that make it look like a long unicorn's horn. I see the wick is already blackened, as though the fuse wouldn't take.

"Dud," she says. "Like a dead ant."

"So fire it remotely," says Ray, his sharp blue gaze meeting Doe's pink irises.

"I don't have enough wick left to get us all out of range. We used most of it on the Solid Core wall."

A beat passes.

Down at the end of the corridor, Far whimpers something. He's been seeing monsters for the past three days, and I know he's seeing one now. They come big and small, they come with jaws and suckers, and they eat him every time. He lies screaming for hours as their absorptive cell walls digest the very bones out of him, turning his body to a mass of living jelly.

I slap him awake, and each time he's a little bit less there. Only twelve years old. Still, he has to survive. We all have to survive, to the heart of the Solid Core.

Ray's vibrant blue eyes jerk me back to the present. My HUD shows the determination in his adrenals marked out with angular squiggly lines.

"So use my arm," he says. He doesn't need to think about it.

Doe looks at me, I look at her.

"Maybe just a few fingers," she says. "If I lay them end to end. They might just put us round the corner."

Ray holds up his hand, plucks the black glove off it, grabs Doe's trimming wicks from her waxy grip.

"Screw it," he says, and chops off his little finger.

It drops to the floor. The floor is beveled with odd shapes, and the finger falls to lie betwixt them like some kind of meaningful augur. The shapes here seem to be initials, letters grouped and pounded up from the underground by chisel-stencils and hammers. Blood drops and pools about the initials R.G., raising them like little islands soon to be flooded.

Doe looks up at Ray, and I know what she's thinking. One more. Ray lifts the clippers but before he can lay out the chop I've pulled out my hand and tugged off the glove. My fingers wriggle like toes out of shoes, white and strange, tuber-things I haven't seen for such a long time.

How many weeks have we been in here?

"You do it," I say, holding my hand out to him. He grins.

"Yes sir," he says, then clamps the wick-trimmer around the base of my little finger, snips it off. The digit drops to lie next to his, and I wonder briefly what that could possibly mean. A few drops of blood leak out before my skin seals over the wound.

Doe gathers up the digits and stabs one of them into the tip of the unicorn horn candle, sets the other one like a lintel-stone between it and the next candle over, a long graceful white cone. Everything else is wired with wire, and the candelabra looks like a spider's web.

"Let's just hope this is the last door," grunts Ray, pushing himself to his feet and drawing his glove back on.

I give a token dry laugh, rise, and Doe motions to us to get back. "Lead time of 15 seconds, then it'll blow."

Ray whispers this into his blood-mic, and So comes back to him with a sing-songy snatch of lullaby, faint as the wind. We haven't really heard from her in days.

"Far, we're coming," I call to the kid, "T-minus 1, around the corner."

He shuffles out of sight, back to where the orange flower-flares are bursting. I clamp the blacks down on my HUD, then lay a hand on Doe's shoulder.

"Let's go, Doe," I urge her. She spins a top at the apex of her Rube-improvised inflammatory, and as we watch, the first licks of electricity spark in the complex apparatus.