Tears stream from So's eyes, as the last breath wheezes out of La's lips.
Then La is dead.
"Rest," I say to So, "there was nothing you could do," but she doesn't listen. Instead she starts working at the clasps of La's armor, unlatching them one by one. I lay a hand on hers and say, "We don't have to do this now," but she only snarls at me.
"Get your fucking hand off me, Me."
I release her. It's no time to pull rank. Instead I help, popping clasps down La's right side, and we lift off her chest-plate together.
Her innards spill out onto the ground like hot soup. They have been liquefied, as though scrambled by a QC particle. I can see clear through to the bone-white shards of her spine, embedded in the inner black casement of the suit. The hot stink of burnt offal and blood rises from the mess trickling through the fake grass around our knees, and So turns pale.
I reach to her again, but she slaps my hand away, her eyes hot and wet with anger.
"How the fuck could this happen?" she demands. "How could fucking bayonets do this, Me?"
I have nothing to say, and this plainly disgusts her. So is normally quiet, hidden behind the twins, but now both of the twins are dead. She drops La's casement and lurches to her feet.
"So," I call after her, but she staggers away. I watch as she lumbers between the dead model soldiers, plunging her musket bayonet through their chests and heads like it's a sharp cane sinking into cheese.
Far is looking at me. He's squatted by the tree still, his eyes red-rimmed. Ray is looking at me too. I try to smile, but Far only turns away.
SAVE FAR
The mission pack said it, but I don't understand.
I tongue on blood-mic to the remains of my chord. "La is dead. The bayonets disrupted her like a QC. Only the suit was holding her together." A pause. "Report."
Another pause, as the others silently acknowledge this. Then Doe's voice comes in, settled and calm, the shock-jack doing its job. "Nothing. There's nothing moving out here Me, just like it was before."
A long silence falls, and I watch So. She is on her knees now, sawing at a soldier's neck.
"This place is not right," says Ray, chiming in through the mic. He nods at So. As we watch, her bayonet cuts through and she lifts the dead soldier's plastic head clear. She drops it to the side and starts on the next.
"Nothing's bonded correctly," Doe says. I look around the clearing, but can't see her. She must be in the tree cover already. "We knew that on the outside too. Everything around us is more solid than we are."
She's right. We are not meant to be here, and I need to know more about why. I pull out the mission pack, flip a few pages forward to the last blank page.
"I'm going to read it out loud," I say on mic.
"It said not to," Ray says.
"I don't care." I turn the page.
YOU ARE ALL FACETS OF MY MIND
AND I NEED YOU
I don't read it. I look up at Ray, my mouth silently moving, and he frowns at me across all the dead bodies.
"I didn't catch that, Me, say again."
I feel like laughing. Facets of an imagination. I've never seen anything like it in a mission pack, but when do I remember ever looking in a mission pack before? These papers are familiar, every member of my team and every scrap of gear I have is familiar, but I don't really know any of it.
What would it mean, to be a facet of an imagination?
I want to tell the others, share it with them, but I can't. We might laugh about it, but I don't think so. I think it might break us. Ti and La are dead already, and their sacrifice has to mean something. It has to, or we can just give up on the mission now.
The reason has to be real.
"Nothing," I say. "It's blank."
I turn the next page before any of them can complain.
INFLITRATE
- ENTER THE MAZE
Beneath it there is a vaguely familiar complex schematic diagram, all lines and circles, which begins to fade at once. I catch a freeze-frame of it in my HUD, then sling it to the others. Ray clicks on.
"It's the design on your chest, Me," he says. "It's your insignia."
I look down the symbol one printed bright yellow on my uniform front. It does seem to match. I wonder what that might mean.
I bring up the image in HUD to study it, a series of intricate concentric circles, some of them overlapping, some of them interlocked. In places other shapes cut through the lines: yellow oblongs, triangles and smaller circles, lined up like transistors on a circuit board, some of them solid and some wireframe.
Ringing them all on the outside is a wider circle, broken in only one place to the outside.
"It's a map," says Doe.
The image slings back from her with a flashing red dot added, staked out to the right of the only narrow point in the enveloping outer circle. "That's us," Doe says.
I stare at the blipping red dot, and imagine that it really is us. A pulse, a presence, trapped in the outer ring. I study the next circle inward, my eye drawn to another point where the wall is narrow, located at the exact antipodal point from where we are now.
I stand up, and look off over the trees, into the distance. I see no walls, only darkness. The others continue talking, but I tongue them down. I imagine the modelscape continuing ahead of me, circling up the Solid Core, round it, held in place by no walls at all, a sphere around a sphere suspended by gravometric bonds we can't understand.
I imagine us walking and walking, peeling the inside of the apple, and only ever returning back to where we started.
"How much candlewax have we got left?" I ask.
"Enough for one blast more, maybe two," says Doe.
I look up at the ceiling. It is dark and smooth, unlike the Solid Core's corroded exterior. I imagine the vast and complex inner ventricles beyond it, the corridors and passageways that ravel up and down each other, rooms and halls and alleys like the interwoven markings on my chest, and wonder if this maze will kill us all.
I open the mission pack and flip to the next page, but it is blank. So is the page after that, and the next. I check every page from there until the end, but find nothing, more, the ink has already faded if there ever was anything written on them at all.
We are alone. Standing and looking out over all the dead soldiers, the place that La died, around the up-curving trees of this impossible outer ring, I realize that fact fully now. There is to be no friendly welcome for us, no safe harbor waiting. This is only the beginning of our end. We are in the Solid Core, and the Solid Core wants us dead.
The feeling is mutual.
I notice Ray standing at my side, his hand on my shoulder.
"We need you to deal with this, Me," he says, off-mic, his HUD hanging down his back. There is swirling concern in his ice-blue eyes. He nods again at So, to the pile of decapitated heads now at her side. She's already busy sawing at the next. "To lead."
I look at him. Square jaw, those crazy tooth-loop braces, sharp blue eyes, and a face tattoo down his left cheek in the shape of some mythical creature's wing. I think, Ray is what I would be if I wanted to be only good, and kind.
I look at Doe, coming toward us across the battlefield like a white ghost wearing a shadow-black suit, a musket slung over her shoulder. She's what I'd want to be if I was only strong, and smart.
But I'm Me, caught somewhere in the middle.
"We bury La," I say. "Clean her up, please."
I go to So while they work, and stand by for a time as she cuts off heads. When each one is done, she peers at the sawed-off edges, into the head and down the neck, but there's nothing inside, no ichor, no wires, no innards. It's all just the same solid plastic gray Ray chipped off at the start.
"Wear them as a necklace, if you like," I say.
She slices the current soldier's last bit of neck, then drops the head on her pile and turns to me. She's not crying any more. She's angry.
"Tell me this is worth it, Me," she says. When I say nothing
, she gets to her feet and pushes me. I hold out a restraining hand to Ray who's already starting near. He stops. So has the bayonet in her hand, and she pushes me again. "Come on, captain, tell me something!"
I look into her dark green eyes and see the pain of her loss taking root, along with a kind of madness. It's biting at her already, this place, this air. I can feel it too. These bonds are not right for us.
"It's worth it," I say, and pray to the chord that I'm telling her a truth. "Believe in me, So. It is worth it, and we have to do this."
She stares at me a long time, moment. Then she throws the musket to the ground. "I'll kill you if you're lying."
I smile, softly. I'll welcome death at her hand, if it is a lie. "Let's bury La first," I say.
So bites her lip, and nods.
Some kind of fire seems needed, a symbol for us to rally around, so Doe and I try to hack some wood off one of the trees. Of course we can't muster more than a few scattered plastic chips, even with the bayonets, and none of them take a light.
"Use this," says Ray, handing me an oxyfer flare. I set it in the middle of the circle of dead soldiers, and light it off orange and gold.
So weeps openly, as I wrap La's missing abdomen back in her suit exterior. Ray says a few words, though I'm sure he knows no more about La than I, or Doe, or even So herself. She was just another one of us, lost.
I suggest the drop. We carry her together, all except Far who squats to watch us. We clip her body in and traverse it out until she's hanging limp in the middle, like some ancient warning symbol for those who might come after. She hangs there for minutes, as we each say goodbye to her, to what she means. Perhaps we will all die here. Perhaps that is what we are for.
"Now," So says, and Doe cuts the clasp.
La's body falls, a slow plummet through the floor and down the black tunnel. I lean to watch her go, pin-wheeling slowly in the hot updrafts, growing smaller. Soon she is the size of a dropped pebble, then a black speck of grit, then finally an infinitesimal spark in the Molten Core far below.
"She's with her sister now," Doe says.
So is first to leave the hole. She goes to Far and sits down, wraps her arm around him, and pushes her face into the side of his head. For some reason this makes me want to cry too.
Two down, five to go.
AETHERIC BRIDGE F
They let Carrolla pick up his fingers, drop them in an ice-lined node-box, and flit off for the nearest hospital. There are several on the neighboring skulks. He'll have no problem getting credit, because they'll know I'm good for it. Whether they'll let him get any further than the front door and out of my sight though, I do not know.
Me they hold on to. Out of the graysmithy, we turn left down the sad alley to the grimy plastic-matte jetty. Shored off the edge is a gleaming white speedboat, with the name-
ORICIPULIS
written down the side. I've heard the name mentioned before, but the Don looks in no mood to discuss it.
"I believe you," he'd said, pulling on his pajama top, after I'd finished telling him it all. "I could get some other brickhead in here to dive you for confirmation, but then you know that don't you? If we don't find what you've promised, I will. In fact I think I will regardless. Now, after you."
His thugs in their dark pajamas manhandle me onto the boat. Perhaps I could drop one of them, if I had my node. At the absolute outside I could handle two if I was in peak condition, but I'm pretty far from that and they know it. I'm hungover and in shock, can hardly get my wind back after that single blow to the stomach, and there's three of them, all with guns.
"Mr. Ruins," says Don Zachary, reclining in a leather-padded chair facing the speedboat's nose, while I am hunched unceremoniously on a storage box lid facing the engine. "It's too strange to make up."
He leafs through the folder I gave to him, lingering on some pages. He'd read the whole of the introduction sitting in the graysmith reception, and looked up at me with a strange look in his eyes.
"We're doing you a favor, son," he'd said. "Looks like this guy has a major hard-on for you. You'd've been wearing your kidneys like bloody pompoms in a couple of days, if not for us."
I nodded.
"And now he's gonna die, hard. All things come, you know."
The speedboat engine roars to life, black scum water fountains up from the propeller, and we lurch forward. I am jerked off my seat, just catching my balance on the lid's sharp edge.
The Don is impassive, studying the folder.
"I'm sorry about your son," I say.
He waves a hand. "Don't be. I have others."
Infamously, he does. It's one reason I didn't recognize the man posed as Napoleon earlier- the Don is rumored to have over 100 children, many of whom have come at some point to my graysmithy for collection or implantation. To a man and woman they are all exactly as ugly as their father.
"I don't know why he got you tangled up in this," I go on. "Or why I'm involved either."
"He's mad," says the Don, disinterestedly.
The boat whips over the waves with a thumping regularity. The spray of skulks is clearer from this distance, like dark bacterial growth clinging to the Calico tsunami wall. Around the wall goes, encircling all of the great city's estuary bay and city up to the mountains, and around go the skulks.
They look like mire, washed up by the waves. At last count I remember there were ninety, but that number is constantly in flux. Each skulk is like a great water-barrel raft, linked to the others and anchored to the wall, but there is always one foundering, its flotation failing, or one splitting itself down the middle, or a new one being added.
Of course there are the boats that get rigged into the mix as well, some shunting down in the gaps between the skulks broken open by the shifting of tides; all manner of vessels like yachts, coracles, catamarans, schooners, fluyts, deck-frigates, in one place I believe there's an old Ananzi-Rusk subglacic. These get roped in and paved into proto-Calico constantly, some charging tolls as new bridge-spans, others offering some variation on the three Bs.
It makes the skulks of proto-Calico a feverish place to be, constantly in flux. Sweeping left and right the length of the wall, beyond which there are far-off mountains thrust up by recent volcanic shifts, it continues. A proto-city for proto-people, all waiting for the next wave to come rub us out, and amongst them me, and Carrolla, and Don Zachary, and somewhere a crazed murderer called Mr. Ruins.
The Don continues leafing through the folder. "Did you know that there's some upturned godships on hidden reefs off of Tenbridge Wulls?" he asks, without looking up at me. "I thought they were all gone."
"I didn't know," I say, "I hadn't read that far."
"Might be good plunder there. I'll send a crew."
I look out to sea. In that direction there is only the gray of waves, spiked in places by a few hydrate mines, like spinning tops on the horizon. Here and there I catch the green of a kelp farm. Go the distance a few thousand kilometers after that, and you'll be at the Arctic circle, where once there was ice.
I look back at the Don but he's intent on his reading. There is no hint in his wrinkled old eyes of whether I'm to die today or not. I consider throwing myself off the boat, but it would do no good. They'd only swing around and pick me up again, maybe chop a few of my fingers and drive in their nails.
Or something worse.
All that remains to do is wait. I listen to the thump of the speedboat as it rides along the skulk spine, to the occasional shuffle as this old man in pajamas turning the papers of the folder meant for me. I wonder what will happen to Mei-An now, if the Don will let her go, or consider her complicit. Will he let me go? A dead son is a vulnerability, and for anyone to know about that vulnerability makes it a greater vulnerability still.
I wonder. Will the shark arena be the last place I ever see? Did Carrolla even make it to the hospital? They've taken my node so I have no way of checking.
Soon the charred exterior dock of skulk 53 is rushing by on our le
ft. In some places the framework is gone entirely, in others the bones of it still remain, splintered with blackened metal girders. The speedboat pulls up to the flagging dock I remember, half-sunken, lined with its few canting bars. From this angle the shark-arena looks like a bloated mushroom, its once brown exterior faded with the rain to sleety gray. It's a wonder it never burned.
The engine kicks out, and a silence falls over the dead skulk and us. Perhaps cognizant of this, the Don's thugs get out wordlessly, tether the boat, and the Don follows. Bar the ceaseless lapping of waves, it is silent. There is nothing alive on this abandoned skulk but the echo of the old shark-master's mad creation and us.
"Come on," says the Don. "Nothing to be afraid of, if it's what you said."
I refrain from asking for that in writing. There will be no point now. Instead I get out of the boat and start along the tilted jetty carefully, leading the way.
"It's intriguing stuff, all this about the power of memory," says the Don behind me, as we shuffle carefully along. "Do you credit it at all?"
I wonder if this is a chance, to prove myself useful. Perhaps it is a tactic to keep me talking so I cannot plan an escape. To either end it behooves me to talk, because I can plan while talking at the same time.
"I may," I say. "It chimes with some religious theories, that consciousness is more of a great flame than a million tiny little flames, and we're all just one bit of the whole, experiencing itself."
The Don grunts, and we turn off the jetty and start down the wooden side of the shark arena. "I've heard of that. Go on."
I think on it some more, the ideas building latently since I read the paper this morning. "Well, those theories suggest there are actually invisible bonds between all of us. More than bonds really, because we're all actually pieces of the same thing, like radios tuning in on a specific frequency to this grand consciousness bandwidth."
Don Zachary laughs. "I ain't no radio, son."
"Add to that, some people think that at the center in the heart of the brain which no graysmith can dive, there's an aetheric bridge that can reach across to every other mind, a way through the bandwidth."
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 10
