Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (6 page)

His friends all laugh, and I wonder how they might have looked on my smithing table, the blood welling out of their bodies from fighting over frozen water, trying to hold them in themselves while their bodies rebelled.

"I asked you a question," he shouts in my ear, jostling my drink. The liquid spills, the half-memory gone. "Just what kind of bitch are you?"

No answers will keep them happy now. That's fine, I come out to these bars because in some way, I'm still looking to dance. I am glad of the chance they are offering. Like Mei-An, at least this is something real.

I break my glass on the bar and shove it in his face, rolling off my stool at the same time.

He howls and falls away, while three of his friends drop toward me like the falling wall. I thump a blow to one of their jaws, but another locks my head in under his arm, while the third breaks what must be a wooden chair across my back.

On my knees and choking with my head crushed beside his hip, I see the one I glassed smear blood from his cheek and pick up a pool cue. He says something threatening I can't hear through the blood, and strides closer.

From my jeans pocket I slip my node, squeeze it for alarm, and even as the spike flips out from the side and locks, I slam it into the inner thigh of the guy holding me.

He screams, hot blood pumps out over my hand, and the pressure on my throat pales away while he lurches backward. I surge to my feet and drive after him like a battering ram, shoving him into his bloody-mouthed friend. Even as I drive forward I can feel him trying to fall over, but I don't let it happen until the two of them crack against the wall and tumble in a bloody heap together.

Another blow off my head, a wooden crack, and I watch the top of a pool cue spiral ahead of me like a flung discus. What a blow, I think remotely, before my knees drop out again and things go black for a second. I fall, then surface on my hands and knees with time enough to roll.

Two of them are closing in more cautiously now, one of them holding the broken cue and looking at it like he's confused. I've got a hard head though, so much scar tissue from too many dives. Drunken bleariness fades beneath the rush of adrenaline, and I lurch back to my feet.

"He's not fucking human," one of them says.

He's right. I'm not human like they are, not at all.

I bare the node, dripping with blood, and run at them.

More hours, and I'm stumbling back through some dark skulk I don't recognize. It's all black behind me, but I see the glow-light of the coming dawn beginning over the wall.

"Where the fuck am I?" I mumble to myself. My jacket is gone and it's cool out. I shrug my node out of my pants, hold it up close to my eyes, but I can't resolve the tiny screen. Arcloberry packs a punch.

I remember the end of the fight vaguely, with the four of them panting on the floor around me, and me swaying in the middle. I won that one, but I don't always win.

My jaw throbs. Was I following something, or somebody? What am I doing out here?

"This way," a voice says, and I spin to see nothing.

What?

I stagger after starlight, flashing through gaps in the skulk's skyline. There's a swell in the decking ahead and I climb it, following a voice or a feeling. Perhaps up here I'll find Ven, my old friends, and I won't have to live this way anymore.

I crest the top, and see a skulk decimated by fire spread around me. I turn, and there's a sound like gunshot.

The deck gives out underneath, the rotten wood cracking and mulching, and then I'm falling into darkness. My feet crack off an uneven floor, my knees jump up and punch me in the chin, and for the second time that night I flop into unconsciousness.

Lying on rough old wooden beams, I breathe in dust. I remember now crossing over into desolate skulk 53, making the long way home. Was I following someone else? I remember the fight. My jaw hurts worse than before.

I can taste my own blood in the sour dust of this rotten slum. Where am I? It's dark in here, the ceiling overhead is bare rafters, spinning with the ragged hole I fell through, through which I can barely see stars. Was I walking on the rooftops? I don't remember.

I pat myself down for wounds, feel the bruises in my back, the pain in my jaw. It'll hurt to talk for a week. Leaning to the side, I puke up purple liquor. It's foul and brackish in my throat, but for the moments after I feel clearer.

I rub my eyes and look out into the darkness around me, lit only by the silvery glow of the moon. There's a wide metal-railed circle cut into the floor before me, down to the ocean below. A foul frothy scum sits on the water-top. In places the railing is broken inward, like we had our bar fight through here. There are windblown leaves crusted over the water-surface and into every nook and cranny. Three rows of seating circle around the rail, tiered like a stadium.

It's a shark-fighting arena.

As with everything in the skulks, shark fighting's not illegal, but it rarely happens anymore, not with sharks so rare and more valuable as kelp-tillers. I glance up to where the score-boards would've been mounted, but see only the faint outlines of red and white wires trailing from the wall. In the darkness down by the announcer's cage, I think I see the old-yellow taint of bone.

A plastic chip packet stirs in a waft of rotten wind from above. I'd been to a shark fight once, when I'd just got back from the north. It was vicious, the animals plainly starved and dying, their blood splashing across the crowd. Everybody was cheering, holding up their tickets, and I felt empty, like I'd only swapped one void for another.

I scan the darkness for a way out, but see none. Perhaps I'm the first person here since it closed down. It's a strange thought, almost as strange as the realization that I had been walking on the rooftops.

Then I see a man in the darkness.

My heart skips a beat and my gut goes cold.

He's sitting in a ring-side seat by the scum-arena, a ridiculous three-cornered hat on his head, dressed in a dark gray suit, and he's staring right at me. He's maybe forty years old, turning some kind of cane slowly in his hands. His eyes are intensely white in the dark.

I scrabble down into my pockets for the node, watching him all the while, but he doesn't move.

What the hell.

"You won't need that, Rit," he says, pointing his cane at the spiked node now in my hand, still tacky with blood. I don't know how he knows my name.

"Who the hell are you?"

He smiles broadly, displaying gleaming white teeth as bright as a shark's. "You can call me Mr. Ruins."

MOLTEN CORE B

We web ourselves onto the Solid Core with fibrous steel, hooking in through great rivet-holes in its vast and rusted girders. Up close the surface is pitted and corrupted, etched with hundreds of initials, simplistic messages from all those who've come before.

C + MA WOZ ERE

F.LY TIG.S HEC.N

RG 4 V 4EVA

Who were these people I wonder, as I run my gloved fingers over the marks they've left behind. Were they like Ti, marines who could never make it any further, who died to bring us this far?  

I should stop thinking about her, I don't remember anything about her more than a flash of dark hair. I have responsibilities to the living.

I give orders to Doe, La, and So for a peel patrol to recon the Solid Core, and they roger it. With grapnels and steel rope they start away, traversing the rough black ceiling through leaps and swings, spiraling outward from our starting position, each on a slightly different vector. Doe is most capable, my lieutenant, so she gets the sharpest gradient, taking her further away fastest. So is shallowest, La is in the middle, like three strands in a genetic weave, with the ones to come later filling in the corkscrew gaps left by the others.

Peeling the apple.

Far is tucked in beside me, and Ray is singing him a simple song. Ray is always good at this kind of thing.

Looking down I stare into the sea of Molten Core, yellow striated with red like the fibers of a glial cell, orange bubbles of liquid rock bursting lazily on the surface. This is the heart. I touch a hand to the thin-leafed mission document tucked into my lava suit, and wonder about its meaning.

Ritry Goligh – proto-Calico

The first seems a name, the second a place, but I have heard of neither. I'd look at more now, but I want Doe and Ray both to be here when I do. With vanishing words, it's the best way to get the clearest remembrance.

"Do you know someone called Ritry Goligh?" I ask Ray.

He stops singing to Far, who's already nodding off, and looks to me with a raised eyebrow. "No. It sounds familiar though. What is it?"

"First words of the mission pack."

He nods. "You found it then."

"Yeah. And Calico."

A blank look, and a moment passes.

"I shouldn't say this, since I'm your second lieutenant, but I don't even know what I'm doing here, Me." A long pause. "Do you know?"

I don't, not any more than him, not any more than the reality before us, but I'm the captain and can't show that indecision. "Inveigling the Solid Core," I say.

"Right, but beyond that? I don't remember anything before waking up in the sublavic, but I know you, and the others. Even this kid," he nudges Far. "I feel like we're a team, but I don't know why."

"We're a chord," I say. "And it hurt me to lose Ti too."

Ray looks away. "I didn't even speak to her," he says. I don't know how I know him, couldn't tell you his birthday or what city he's from, but I do know this is a way Ray grieves, as if we've seen a thousand deaths before.

He turns back. "Do you think it's an effect of the forging?"

I think back to those first moments in the sublavic, wreathed and pinned by forging fire. "I've thought about that. But I can't remember ever being forged before. I've got nothing to compare it to."

Silence for a while, broken only by the distant flare and fizz of magma below. It's been long enough now, and I tongue the blood-mic on. "Report."

"Recon 1, no breaks," Doe comes back to me, her voice a fuzzy crackle. I look out across the sweep of the black ceiling, on the vector she took. It doesn't seem a ball this close, now it is a black landscape with only a slightly curved horizon, broken by a wealth of uneven struts, gables, and bracing stanchions. I begin to think it must have been welded by a child, or a parent before some wonderful Christmas, layer after layer tacked on with ribbons and bows, a loving surprise.

"Recon 2, So, any sign of an ingress?" I ask.

I can just see So's frame still, the slack on her guide-rope swaying down with the motion of her body. She fires the grapnel to the next metal ridge over, lets herself drop and swing, then ascends smoothly on the suits in-coil. Even with my HUD filters maxed out, I can't resolve any detail on her for the glare of the molten ocean behind her. She is just a black silhouette.

"Nothing," So says. "Only more ridges, and rivets missing. What pulled out these bolts?"

"Roger that, keep looking. La, anything?"

"Nothing like a door here either," she comes back. "Writing in a different tongue, I think though. Gaulic."

I frown. By my side Far shudders, and Ray tamps him down with soft words.

"What does it read?"

"'Arrete! C'est ici l'Empire du Mort.' It's spread out in a spiral, like it's all separate initials, but they're bigger, and scored more deeply. Do you know what it means?"

I don't. Doe comes back. "It means 'Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead.'"

The line goes quiet for a while.

"Depth gauge it," I mic back to her.

"One sec," La says, and I imagine her rustling for the gamma-clamp, suctioning it into place against the grooved black metal and switching it on to scan the Solid Core's interior like the sublavic's sonar.

"Still nothing," she comes back. "Either it's solid all the way through or this metal's impenetrable to radiation."

I frown, look at Ray. The kid is sleeping now, webbed tightly into a crook in the structure like a tiny fly in some vast spider-web. Ray shakes his head, of course he hears the conversation through blood-mic too. He knocks on the metal, a compact thwack sounds out. A suggestion.

"Try hitting it," I tell La. "Sound it for hollowness."

She does, and her suit's external mics capture the sound of it, a hollow bonging like some old clock tolling time.

"It's a way in," I say.

"Not
the
way in, if it's sealed off," says Ray beside me, his blood-mic off. I tongue mine off too, look at him.

"Not the way but maybe the only way. Any better ideas."

He shrugs. I tongue the blood-mic back on.

"Plot it and keep peeling the apple," I tell La. "So, keep on your bearing, Doe too. I don't want to get infiltrative unless I have to. There could be a portal around the corner. Bang the hull every leap, plot the harmonics. I want to get a good idea for the density of this thing."

"Roger that," they say. "Though there are no corners, chief," Doe adds.

"Out," I say.

Ray is smiling when I look back at him.

"Look at this," he says, and softly prods Far's nose. The boy makes a funny gulping sound.

"Stop that," I say, though my heart isn't in it.

"It's great," says Ray. "Every bit of his face makes a different tone." He prods the boy's forehead, and Far gulps a little higher. "We could play a concerto off him, if we wanted."

I sigh, because a moment ago we'd been debating who we all were, and now Ray is playing games. "You'll give him bad dreams."

"Ha," snorts Ray. "Like he's not going to have those already. Just listen."

He plays the first few bars of a song I recognize but can't name, off Far's face. Nose, forehead, left ear, right, nose, chin, forehead.

"Why does he even swallow?" I ask, getting into it despite myself.