Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (35 page)

Terror.

I kick him in the face, stamp on his chest, then drop to his chest to tear off his helmet. His eyes are staring up, but not at me.

"Who are you working for?" I ask him. With the EMR gone I catch a glimpse into his Molten Core, filled with atrocities and genocides I can barely comprehend. Hundreds of thousands dead, and sucking the marrow out of their suffering. I try to dive deeper and yank at the bond encircling him, but something rebuffs me effortlessly.

I recoil, dive harder, then the man's eyes focus on me, and he smiles.

"It's good to meet you, Mr. Goligh," he says. Then his eyes roll back in his head, and he screams. I feel something changing in him, vibrating like a piece of metal in the microwave, and I pull out of my dive. The thick band of thought stretching into him goes ultra-hot for a moment, more powerful than anything outside the aetheric bridge, rising to a crescendo.

Then his mind implodes. There is nothing physical, bar a sigh and the sag of his dead head against the blood-slicked vinyl, but I feel it like a dry-ice bomb in my own head. It stuns and terrifies me, even as the thick band of thought dissipates.

I reach tentatively to the dead man's mind, but it is gone, more surely than any semblance of the original structure is gone from a pulped orange. Inside his head there is nothing but soup, every thought, memory and bond instantly atomized.

I've never seen anything like it. I do not know if it is that or the drugs in my system that makes me stagger as I head back to the one whose visor I staved in. His mind is pulp too. I think of gory blood oranges mulched in the blender, and I want to be sick.

I stand there swaying and look around me. Everyone else on the train is Lagged by the mind-bombs or dead.

"They will all come for you," Mr. Ruins said, "they all know you now."

I just met them. They're stronger than anything I've ever seen. And they want me.

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