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

by Grist, Michael John

  Water projects, built in a bygone era, before the global killer tsunami swept the old order away. I've heard the solar reservoirs up there are as big as the great wall of Sino-Rusk, but what does that matter, now that the bridge between us is long cut off? Still I imagine the last few tiny people up there, perhaps still alive, starting their own civilization built out of craters and moondust, and wonder if their lives would have any more weight than my own.

  I told her the skulks are a Lag, but that's not really true, because the Lag is complete, and the skulks never are, even after they get battered by a tsunami wave. Something always remains, and much of the rest is still there to salvaged, brought back from the bay floor to be re-used.

  The Lag is complete. It is the lost space a graysmith goes to when he loses himself in another mind, memories shearing away like ablative layers on a sublavic in the Molten Core, the weight of them lost forever.

  It happens if we go too deep, or dive too much, with every dive stealing a little more until there's nothing left inside. It's the nature of the work, why they go in shielded in Calico, and why what I do is banned to the skulks and effectively illegal everywhere else.

  Nothing's illegal out here.

  Mei-An nestles against my shoulder now, sleepy in the cotton sheets, as she should be. Her body's chemicals are doing what they ought, our skinship transmitting information too complex to fake.

  I could do another job beside graysmithing. Lying there in the dark with a beautiful girl at my side, I know I could do something else, and perhaps I'd be happy at it too. This is all so perverse, to stay here and live like this, to boast of what I'm doing like it's a Lag, when all the Lag has ever brought me is pain and loss.

  My friends are all gone, under the Lag, but somehow staying here I still feel close to them, like they're only one remove away. If I got another job over in Calico, and started a new life, then I'd be really leaving them behind, and I can't do that. I lost so many in the Arctic, and what could I do for their minds as the life ran out of them? There was no tsunami wall big enough to stop the flow of blood. And family? Of course I have no family.

  This is where I belong, glimpsing only fragments of what a real life might be like, through the memories of a girl like Mei-An. She may be fake, but she's real fake. I'm not even that, because I wasn't ever wanted, and never wanted anything I didn't lose along the way.

  I rise to my feet, these maudlin thoughts too much even for me. Standing naked at the glass wall, I hear shouting rise from outside like breakers on a wave, impersonal as a dog barking. The old homeless marine in the blue-tarp park. I hear him a lot, cursing out the crulls in New Anglais. I've seen him cooking them before, on trash-fires of plastic and leaves, wrapped in old Calico newsprint. He sets these elaborate traps to catch them, all triggers and string and crutch points. I think he fought in the Arctic too, but we don't talk about it.

  Like the crulls, that ill-gained fusion of crows and gulls, we were never meant for life outside of a skirmish. But still the skirmishes ended, the victors rose up, and this is our world now.

  I sit beside him sometimes and we chew through the newsprint, biting into crull flesh. It is sour and gamey, but there's something to be found in eating it together. We both know it tastes bad. He may be utterly crazy, but how far off am I from that?

  Seeing me at my window, he raises one wing of charred feathers. I raise my hand like a salute. I'd prefer if he didn't shout so much at night, but I can't begrudge him that. He could come in here and kill me in my sleep if he wanted, but he doesn't, so I have to be grateful for small mercies.

  There's no real law out here, we could all do what we want, but we don't. None of us care enough, I think. Plus there's Don Zachary, watching over us all, a monopoly on crime. It's all a kind of Lag.

  Enough.

  One last look at Mei-An and I pull on my pants, shirt, jacket. Carrolla will be waiting, and I want to taste the Arcloberry, fruit of my sacrifices, one more time, and maybe this time hold onto it.

  My node tells me Carrolla is down-skulk, so I set out. It's warm out despite being some time after three, and I shrug off my polarskin jacket, down to jeans and a slink shirt. I nod to the marine through the park, and he nods back.

  The main alley is raucous now, packed with a horde of neo-Armoricans regaling each other back and forth with whores and touts pressed between their bulging bellies and bristly beards. The smell of frying chicken grease hangs on the salty air. One of the neo-Armoricans lifts up Eldra, a busty whore with great muscle tone, and starts to dry-hump her in the street.

  His friends all laugh. She spots me and waves, then tugs herself free and gives the big idiot a slap. Everybody laughs some more.

  The alley will chew them up and spit them out soon enough, like a digestive tract through which they all have to pass, another round of nutrition with everybody eating off everybody. Whatever freighting dues they've earned will be cut down to size through liquor, sex, drugs, food, and a bed to sleep it off in, and we'll all go on our way sated for another day.

  The alley winks out as I pass by, bound for the off-wall walk. I could go across the skulks, it would be cheaper but would take forever, weaving in and out of all those slums, alleys, each like the one behind. It would make a mockery of where I live, to see all those places much the same as the last. Plus I might have to jump between the skulk barrel-edges, if there weren't bridges in place.

  Or swim.

  At the alley top the wall looms overhead like the starkly cloven wall of the Arctic icepack. I join a line of other skulk revelers waiting to cross the low-slung rope-bridge of old canoe paddles that leads to the wall's base. Some of these people are so drunk they'd sink if I only tipped them over the edge.

  "3," the bridge guard says to a man arguing about the last jetstream winners. "Pay or get off."

  The guy fumbles and pays. We all take a step closer as he wobbles over the bridge, to join the flow of people walking the off-wall walk.

  This close and looking up at the wall's sheer gray-white bulk, it's so apparent how transient we all are. I wonder for the hundredth time if this was how all the world used to feel, living in the shadow of the Arctic ice, knowing that one day soon it would shear and everything would change.

  Walking the off-wall way I pass a dozen skulks on my right, some of them like mine, others open and serving as docking harbors for freighters, some as warehouses, some as floating blocks of hutches. My node beeps in my pocket when I go past Carrolla.

  I find him on skulk 65, a bar called the Aeternum at the end of an alley much like our own. Inside it's decorated like a subglacic, all metal bolts and hatches cut from boats sunk beside the wall. He's sitting at a bar made of five periscopes laid flat, shouting blearily at a man in a rubber diving suit, oxygen-tanks on his back. The bar is about half-full, and I slide into a space at Carrolla's side.

  "…it's business," he's shouting at the diver. "You know? 10 for 10, 20 for a dozen."

  I tap him on the shoulder. "What did you order?"

  He turns and gives me a big grin. "Rit!" To the bartender, a lanky young Germanic-type, blonde hair down to his shoulders in a t-shirt with a 'hump'n'bump' written across the front, he says, "Arcloberry vodka, straight up."

  The Germanic busies himself with ice, shot-glasses, and a bottle of pale purple liquor.

  "Glad you made it," Carrolla slurs, squeezes my shoulder. He's red-eyed and ready to pass out. I look to the diver.

  "Velour curtains," the diver says to me. I've dealt with him before I know, though his name escapes me. White beard, though he can't be more than 40. I smithed a lot of guys like him in the Arctic, so though I've never actually donned a breathing tank once, I remember diving hundreds of times. He sighs. "I've told him, there's not a recent enough wreck for that."

  "Or velvet!" Carrolla adds. "Anything plush."

  The diver shakes his head. "Take the carpet or I'm done with you."

  "I can't put carpet on the walls! How will that look?"

  The
barman serves, and I take Carrolla's shot-glass and hit the bar-periscope in front of him with it. The hollow metal bongs satisfyingly. "Just drink. I'll sort it out."

  He smiles widely. "Would you? There's a dear."

  He downs the liquor and smacks his lips. I beckon the diver over and talk into his ear while palming him 100. "Get it from the through-market. Tell him you dredged it."

  The diver looks down at the notes in his hand, chuckles. "If you say so."

  I turn back to Carrolla, who's looking at me with a hangdog expression. "I heard that."

  I laugh. I don't know what it is about him, but he always cheers me up. "You won't remember in the morning."

  "I will! It's supposed to be a sea-themed boudoir, Rit, dammit. If it's not jetsam, what is it? Newly spun? I could be in Calico for that!"

  I laugh. "In what way is velour authentic for a subglacic? You think we had rotating massage beds in our bedrooms too?"

  He laughs. "Like a subglacic but better," he says, tapping me on the shoulder. Then he looks about the bar.

  "Somebody fuck me now!" he shouts at the people there. "You, how about you?" He's focused in on a meta-Filippine, and as he peels out of his chair he gives me a wink. "Try your juice."

  She receives him well, which many girls do. He musses with her hair, starts explaining the bar-boudoir he's building on 49 while rubbing at her hand, and I tune them out.

  My own pale purple Arcloberry shot sits before me. I try to summon some memory of drinking it before, but nothing of the content comes, only the frame holding it in place. I know I had a memory of drinking the juicebox, but the flavor is gone.

  I hold up the heavy glass, smell it. Alcohol and a sandy twang, kind of like raspberry mixed with red chilis.

  Arcloberry and the others were just side-effects of the pack-ice melting, all those seeds blown from the dustbowls of millennia ago trapped in the ice like hidden messages. When all the surface ice thawed and the blue giants rose up from the depths, they were just frosting on the hydrates and oil in the under-crust.

  I swig it, slosh it around my mouth. A spicy berry with a kick, this message from a pre-Jurassic era. Is this what dinosaurs ate? I slot the taste into the space where the missing memory was, and rub at the reddening in my eyes.

  3:45 by my node, and hours to go before I'll sleep. I can't go back until Mei-An has left anyway. Carrolla's ditched me, but that's fine. There's a bar here, and numbers burning a hole in my pocket.

  "Three more," I tell the barman. "And beer, whatever's on tap."

  Hours later, and some idiot neo-Armorican is riling me with his pals gathered around. It's another bar, there's no Carrolla around, just me and these overweight, overhyped idiots.

  "Just tell me man," the lead guy says, some kind of freighter with tattoos across his tattoos. "How many Ginks you swatted down in the skirmishes."

  "I told you, I didn't fight," I say.

  "Ha!" He says it like a word. "What I thought. So what were you, a bitch? Is that what it was like out there? I heard you were all fucking each other, up-down and sideways. Were you top, bottom or sideways bitch?"

  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 r
arely 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