Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (10 page)

- SURVIVE

- INFILTRATE THE LABYRINTH

- REMEMBER

- FIGHT THE MINOTAURS

- REVIVE

That is all. I scour the page as the ink lightens away, but there is nothing else. I look to Ray and Doe.

"Does that mean anything to you?"

"It's more like a motto than a mission directive," says Ray.

"And is it sequential?" Doe asks. "If so, where are we up to? Have we survived already, or is that yet to come? The sublavic could've killed us all, but most of us survived. We've broken into this hall, so does that mean we've infiltrated the maze?"

I shrug. "It's meaningless without context."

"It could be these are concurrent things," Ray adds, "like we should be doing them all constantly. It works for all of them. As long as we here, we might be always surviving, always infiltrating deeper, remembering more, fighting more minotaurs- that's a kind of maze guardian right, and reviving."

"From Gracian myth," I say, one of those odd things I remember.

"Reviving what though?" Doe asks. "Remembering what?"

None of us has an answer.

I edge my finger under the next page. "Ready?" They nod. 

As I flip the paper, three things happen at once.

One, strident and impossible to ignore, is the scream from the forest. I know at once it is Far, and he is terrified.

Two, the sharp crack of gunfire rings out, and the bright nimbus of light from the whitelight cluster over the hole is extinguished, plunging us into a grayscale world lit only by the low embers of our suit lights.

Three, I see the fading writing in the mission pack, echoing the scream back at me.

SURVIVE

- SAVE FAR

"Fuck," says Ray.

POWER D

I sleep, and I wake. It's afternoon. A pale gray light rinses through the windows of my apartment. The smell of Mei-An is on the sheets still, one of her hairs shimmers on the pillow, but she is of course long-gone.

The scent fades quickly, beaten back by the thump of my pulse booming in my head, pain in my back, my head, my chest. I feel out the sore places without moving, letting the movement of my breath be my sonar.

Bruises and cracked ribs tell a story of violence, and with it come intermittent images of last night. Carrolla was there, and a fight, then I was wandering through some ruined skulk, after swimming the sludge-divide because I didn't feel like walking the wall. And there was a dead body.

My breath stiffens involuntarily. Last night I saw a dead man, and I don't remember why.

Of course I know how to get the memories back. Its my job, after all, what I've done all the days of my adult life; graysmith. They're not gone, only obscured. Being blackout drunk is not like making an engram sale, or even like the chum I tossed to the Lag in Mei-An's mind. The frame and the weight of the memory both remain, I just need to get the right kind of relaxed to feel it out.

But right now I truly don't give a fuck.

A trip to the toilet nearly ruins me. I lean on the ceramic bathtub's rim and run the hot shower over my throbbing head. I ease myself over the rim, and sit under the hot water stream in the bath well, steam frothing the air and the water a drumbeat on my scalp and back. I spit and heave into the water, gross clots of purple and red out of my nose and hawked bitterly from the back of my throat.

I piss without getting up, and drink hot water straight out of the shower flow. This is horrible. In the distance far off my node rings, probably Carrolla calling me in to gray, but they don't need me right now. It's book-keeping today, some check-ups, and he can handle that.

Thirty minutes dozing in the heat, and I get up. I feel a little clearer now, ready to stomach more than water. In my miserly kitchenette, I locate the seaweed bread in the cupboard.

It's half stale, springy in places, hard in others. I drop two slim slices into the toaster, click it on. It pops while I'm swirling two fizzing tablets of Helicomol into a glass tumbler already frosted white with past tablet accretions. This is a pattern for me.

Sprawling on a checked red chair by my small breakfast table, I make the calculation carefully, weighing the benefits. If I wanted to I could erase this whole morning, gift it to the Lag for nothing and rouse to a sonic bath with the weight erased, only the outline frame remaining. As a graysmith it's only too easy to remove unpleasant memories. But that wouldn't make it any less horrible for me right now.

I knock the foamy water back in one gulp, chase it quickly with two mouthfuls of bread. The sound of my own mastication rivals that of my pulse for a time. A hard swallow, and I feel the pain in my jaw.

Out of the window lies a corner of the blue-tarp park below. The crulls are cawing away, and the old homeless man is just visible, setting up his complicated trigger-spring crull-traps. The day is gray like brain matter around him, rain clouds forever rolling by.

The blurry image of the dead man slips back into my mind, along with something else. A cursory glance brings it to my attention, a folder of white pages scrawled with red ink, lying spread out like a magician's fanned cards across the floor.

A dead man's script. I gather the pages up, then sit back down to give the room time to stop lurching. I try to straighten the pages neatly with a few sharp raps along their edge off the table-top, but the sides don't align. I run my fingers over them, flicking between them looking for where they're stuck, but they're not. Every page is a different size.

It's disconcerting. The front page reads

FOR RITRY GOLIGH

But the 'TRY' has run and faded where a drop of water has smeared it. Interesting. I try to remember exactly how I got this, was it really a dead man, or a trick from Carrolla? Perhaps I imagined it, some other person's memories surfacing from the Lags I'd consigned them to.

I flip through the pages, unevenly. There are titles in bold at the top of every page, followed by some kind of directions, a crudely hand-drawn map, then paragraphs of detail. There's something vaguely familiar about them, but I don't know what it is. Some kind of travel guide, maybe places I'd been before?

I turn back to the first page and begin to read the printed text.

There's power in memory Ritry. I know that you know this too. There's power in love and loss, in desperation and forsakenness, in hatred and lies and sacrifice.

Do you remember how we met? But then which time would you remember, when I was a Sino-Rusk sailor carving out blocks of ice for the ore drill gunwales to barge through? Or when I was a sergeant-at-arms fighting shoulder to your shoulder in the depths of an Arctic whitestorm? Or even when I was that lonely janitor, mopping up the floors in the neonatal room, gazing in at the little chunk of subdividing cells that was you, hanging in your artificial womb?

I've been so many people, Ritry, in so many places, and I know you remember none of them. Such is life, a thing so fleeting we are but fireflies within it, glimpsing a single frame of an endless movie.

Except of course for me. I alone of all souls alive remember the holocaust of the Caucasus, and the third and final rise of Napoleon. I alone stalked the battlefields of New South Texas, supping on the flagging thoughts of a hundred thousand dead to the gas, to the bombs, to the floods. I alone rode the Titanic 2 as she sank a second time, and walked the hospital barracks of the Arctic front line whispering words of condolence to dying men, feasting on their fading thoughts.

All those lives lost, Ritry, and for what? For me? For you?

There is power in memory, I tell you, in the shreds of it left behind, the tangles that curdle against the bowl long after the meal is gone, telling the shape that it had once been.

There is power in these bonds that lie without our minds like an endlessly woven spider web strung between us all, and like the fission mushroom that bloomed over old Afric's southern cape, there is a vast power to be had in breaking them.

I want to give that power to you. You, longest-lived of your batch, the first children grown out of a woman's living womb, and the only one not deformed or deranged beyond coherence, an absolutely unique delicacy, the first of a new breed.

I want to help you Ritry, and I will. Come find me, and I'll give you more than everything you ever wanted. I'll give you something to want.

Mr. Ruins.

I put the papers down and rub my eyes.

Bullshit.

It makes me angry. Could this be Carrolla, I wonder? I don't want to fire him, but it's too far gone to be a joke.

"Shit," I whisper, rubbing my temples. A few scrapings of dried blood rustle down to fall on the page, like haphazard punctuation. I must have missed them in the shower.

If it's Carrolla, I'll deal with it. If it's someone else, I'll deal with it too. But Carrolla wouldn't kill a man for a joke, wouldn't dress him up like Napoleon.

The image of the dead man rises again, more vividly now, accompanied by a strange presence in the darkness, teeth gleaming white like a shark. A shark arena.

I sit up too abruptly, and the rush sends a wave of silvery nausea through me. Pushing through it, I pick up the pages, peel the first one away and look at the one beneath it.

MCAVERY'S SHARK-FIGHTING ARENA

SKULK 53, QUADRANT 7C, QUAYSIDE

I knew there was something familiar when I flipped through the pages, like these were places I had been. I have been here, it's where I ended up last night.

A shark-fighting arena on an abandoned skulk.

Beneath the title and directions is the map, even the section of promontory descending into the water. The bar 'Shaley's' is even marked. I read the line below it.

Abandoned 2055, when all the sharks were gone and the last tsunami warning came.

I remember that warning. I was only three months out of the Arctic, still wandering the streets every night, unable to settle to any kind of work, burning through my bounties in women and beer, fighting to forget what I couldn't sell or afford to cede to the Lag.

Half the people fled then, paying what they had to broach the tsunami wall, enter Calico on the other side. I heard it's a kind of paradise over there, but paradise is not for me, not for my kind. I belonged here. The eve of the wave, I sat at the edge of skulk 1 with a crowd of others with a death-wish, all of us waiting for the tide to come and wash us away, staring into the rain-gray distance.

"Arctic?" a man to my right asked me. I could see he was a bounty-man from the deadness in his eyes.

I nod.

"Desert," he said. "Tar-sands."

That explained everything. He fought the new coalition nations in the sand, and I fought them in the ice. Perhaps we were on the same side, or opposite sides, but what did that matter to either of us? I remembered from my strategic training engram-injects one surely misplaced story of brief armistices on the battlefields of the first great war, where the soldiers of rival powers crossed the barbed-wire-tangled No Man's Land and played football together.

That's us now, masterless like ronin.

"You're a graysmith," he said, again reading it in me, as I read in him he was likely a tank-crawling arene, who once roved the new deserts of neo-Armorica or Darain, boring down to scavenge cities lost beneath the sand for their treasure. I see it in his scoured hands and the blasted sand-grooves in his cheeks, circling the marks where his goggles would have been.

"I was."

He jerks a thumb back. "The last graysmith on 47 ran. His place'll be free, if you can use it."

That was all. There were criminals and killers all around us, god knew I was one, but we sat together and waited for the wave, gambling our lives on the weather. It was a high point and a turning point, the air thick with lost dreams and resignation.

When the wave never came, it seemed natural to move to the graysmith's joint, and start work. I've been there ever since.

A second birth for you, wasn't it Ritry?

This line, a footnote for the date 2055, written by hand at the bottom of the page, tells me it can't be Carrolla. He came years later, when I was long-acknowledged. There's no one I remember from before those days, and no way he could know how I came by the graysmithy.

I look back to the paper. Following are three paragraphs describing the shark arena, a potted history like something I might be able to pull up on my node for any spot in Calico. Of course there are no records for places like this, out in the skulks.

It was owned by a man named McAvery, who started it up with his bounty from the Alpine skirmishes, as part of a dream to breed a new trait into sharks that would make them hunt porpoise for food. His dream failed though, and he converted the podding bays into an arena, finding a modest level of success starving his sharks enough to make them kill each other off.

In the midst of that McAvery lost his way, started to beat his wife and his daughters until they fled him. He was a drunk, so sickened by the deterioration of his dream that he grew cruel. He loved the sharks, and now he killed them every night, for crowds he despised. Soon the fights grew more ferocious, longer, drawn-out, as though he was plumbing for the lowest ebb he could reach. The crowds correspondingly grew larger. What else was there to do?

On the night of the wave he killed himself with fire, burning half the skulk down with him, a conflagration which ironically left his most hated creation, the arena, completely untouched. It remained that way through the skulk repopulation after the wave didn't come, when a few drifted back and fresh grifters wandered in. Burned and sinking Skulk 53 appealed to none of them.

The final line:

There is power here, Ritry, if you're willing to look. Come find me.

I set this paper down too. This is crazy.

Still I bind the papers back in their folder, and slip it into my jacket, moving more confidently as the Helicomol takes effect, as a new certainty descends. Clothes on, jacket and boots, I look over my sad apartment.