"Far!"
He shouts but he can't move. Red lights flash in his HUD, warning of broken legs and arms, broken ribs and shoulders. He can only wave one unbroken arm to the slim figure of the boy in the doorway, the boy who saved them all before.
"Far!"
And Far comes, but he is not a boy anymore. He's a young man now, tall and strong. The blemishes of his old weals and scars have turned faint and stretched with age and muscle.
"You look good," says Ray, looking up. "Damn, son."
"You look terrible," says Far, "really bad."
Ray chuckles, even as Far grips him under his arms and begins to drag him back. The locked suit keeps the pain at bay, but the grey swirl of unconsciousness beckons. His feet scrape over soot-blackened white marble, he glimpses the tidal wave just outside the window, then he's through the door and into the purple roar of the aetheric bridge.
At once the pain in his body fades, as his bones heal. He rises disbelieving to his feet, then runs back out into the Tower to fetch Doe, but Far already has her. Ray goes to help but instead Far nods at the bloodied figure of Mr. Ruins.
"Take him," he says.
"What? He's-
"Just do it, Ray, please!" Far shouts.
It is enough. Ray scoops the small figure of Ruins in his powerful arms and sprints back toward the bridge.
And the final tsunami wave strikes. It erases the hole Ray's missiles made, consumes the Tower with all the Suns' dead pulses inside, and swallows up the last of Mr. Ruins Sunken World in a vast supernovic implosion.
Ray and Far stand side by side within the aetheric bridge, panting, watching while the tsunami churns by and eats up the door. Ray looks at Far, and Far only shrugs.
Then Doe is on her feet. She grabs hold of Ray, plucks off his HUD, and kisses him hard and long.
"I love you," she whispers, in the fevered heat that follows, her grime-streaked white face close up to his. "Do you hear me, Ray of the chord? I love you, you last-minute saving bastard."
He tries to laugh, to say he loves her back, but she is kissing him too hard.
When she finally lets go, they both turn to look at the place they have come to, where they have only been for the briefest moments before.
The aetheric soul. It is everything and nothing at once, a universe of a billion stars in a blue-black firmament, all of them intertwined with bonds, spreading in every direction like the trillion interconnections in a single Molten Core. Flashes of electric light coruscate between them like action potentials, twinkling with distance-shift, every star and every mind a mote in a massive ocean of life.
"Fuuuuuck," Ray says in one long exhale.
"Amazing," says Doe.
Nestled in the center lie the blood-red burning twin suns of King Ruin, like a gory wound in the glittering darkness. Venal bond-lines spray out from it like cancerous growths, pulsing with the organic beat of stolen life. It is at once repellent and fascinating.
"That's the King", says Far. "The Suns."
Ray zooms his HUD in to study the slow revolve of the fever-red stars. A glossy golden band encircles them like an orbital ring. Squinting into the display, he can almost make out individual moments in the band, what look like tightly compressed memories.
"I never knew," says Mr. Ruins.
Ray turns, and sees Mr. Ruins has changed. He looks as he did when Ritry Goligh first met him in the shark arena, wearing a grey suit, his teeth gleaming white like a shark. Tears shine in his eyes. This evil bastard who tortured Ritry and raped and abused his family, who tried to destroy everything, is crying.
"I didn't know," he says, looking now at Ray. "I swear, I didn't know."
Ray wants to break in his face, but Far stops him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. Through that touch, he begins to see what Far has seen. He begins to understand everything that has happened, and everything that will happen. He understands the cost.
The anger drops out of him and he turns to Doe.
"It's alright," she says, "Ray, it'll be alright."
He can't think of any words to say. He tries to breathe but the air has no weight, does nothing to clear the burn in his chest.
"Tell Ritry I'm sorry," says Mr. Ruins, looking at him still. "Please, Ray. I so wanted to be better, but I didn't know how. Tell him I only wanted to be better."
Ray feels himself changing inside. Becoming. He hates this man more than anything, but here he is, begging for understanding.
"I should kill you," Ray says.
Ruins smiles, and a tear breaks down his cheek. "You already did. I'll be dead soon, anyway. I hope you can make things better out there."
Ray's fists tighten, and though Far's hand is still on his shoulder, filling him with a soft low tone, and though Doe is holding tight to his hand, he imagines what he would do. Mr. Ruins would be torn in half and scattered. His blood would consecrate the bridge, and serve as payment for everything he took.
But he doesn't. Instead he reaches out with one trembling large black hand, and places it on Ruins' chest, over his heart. Through that touch, he feels the agony inside. This man has suffered too.
He sees a lifetime of reaching out, but never knowing what for. He feels the constant frustration of killing the only things he loves, only knowing how to hurt them. He sees a baby born in the midst of a Court, and left for the Suns to take.
It's too much, more suffering than he's willing to accept, but he can't keep his hate in the face of it.
Perhaps they could have been friends. It was all that Ruins wanted, though he didn't know how to ask. Everything could have been better. The last bulwark of anger breaks under this understanding, like a wall beneath a tsunami, and he gives into to it.
Forgiveness.
"I'll tell him," he says. "I promise."
Fresh flurries of tears run down Ruins' cheeks. "Thank you, thank you you beautiful man. Now listen. You have to be ready. Even if we kill the Suns, it won't be over. It's not only King Ruin. If you crush him there'll be others, thousands of his brood just like me, all waiting for their chance to rise, my brothers and sisters. They'll all want the bridge. You've dived it so many times now, and they've all been watching. They are the smartest, most ruthless people in the world, and they'll all be learning from you. You need to put them down."
"We will," says Ray. It is hard to speak, knowing what he has just given this man, knowing what lies ahead. Doe's hand is in his, and he cherishes her touch. For so long they waited, only stealing glances between missions in the Molten Core, never really knowing each other and too afraid to take things any further. And now…
"We have to go," Far says. "Me is dying."
"Kill them all," says Mr. Ruins. He takes Ray's big hand in his own and squeezes it.
Ray lets him, then pulls Doe and kisses her again.
"We always will have been," Doe says. "Remember that, Ray. You'll always remember, even if I won't. Now go."
It is the moment, and there is no use in delay. He looks a final time to Far, this boy now a man, and nods. Far nods back.
Then Ray turns. It is the hardest thing to do, but Me is dying, Me needs him. He focuses on that and the anger comes flooding back. He knows what King Ruin has done, and it makes him burn with rage. There will be a time for sorrow later.
Now it is time for revenge.
He leaps out through the aetheric soul in a way he has never done before, but it comes to him through Far's memory easily, like swinging on elasteel grapnels below the Solid Core. He soars, then lands within the nearest star, one over from the collapsing black hole of Mr. Ruins' mind. It is a hand of King Ruin, the Suns, slack for the time being. The thick red band of control linking it to the King is fallow and pale.
This is a becoming, he thinks, as he steps through the aetheric bridge and into its Solid Core.
Inside it is empty, an empty grey corridor through an empty building, with no sign of the Lag. Ray lets the power of the bridge propel him outward, gliding through the building and out of the edge of its Solid
Core, to look over the tepid boil of this mind's mild Molten Core, churning slowly with nothing.
There are no thoughts inside the lava, no ideas, no memories. The King has cored them all, leaving only the most basic autonomic functions of breathing, standing, eating. It is a vehicle and nothing more.
Ray cuts its tie to the King, then dives bodily into the Molten Core. He has no need for the Bathyscaphe in these lukewarm floes, no need for a crew. With his own voice he chimes out the sound of his tone, a deep rumbling Ray, which swells out through the magmic floes and realigns their polarization, turning them all steadily to him.
Around him this hollow mind slowly reorients. The healing of his single tone prepares the way, and Ray reaches after it, slipping his thoughts into the mind's causeways of control as though slipping on a glove. He slides into the hands and the feet, into the arms and legs; he feels the thump of this body's pulse, feels the sound of its breathing and the sensation of air on its skin.
So he is born, and for the first time opens his eyes on the world.
It is a dark room filled with other bodies like his own. He looks down at his copper-dark hands in the gloom, lit by low underlights.
He is alive. He is breathing. He is here, and Me is near.
He reaches out to every other hand in the room and Lags their connection to the King. He strides amongst them until he finds a door, then walks out into a white-lit metal corridor of a suprarene tank-crawler. He can feel the grind of vast caterpillar tracks grinding deep below. There are many copper-skinned hands walking around him, all of them connected to the King. He feels the bonds linking them back like tethers, like genetic instructions driving them on a kind of autopilot like ants in a hive.
And they don't see him. He has come through the bridge, not the bonds, and King Ruin can not know what it means. He reaches out amongst them, feeling through the bonds for the one thing he seeks, and finds suffering.
He sags under the intensity of it, so much suffering across so many floors dedicated to pain. It is horrific, but now he is here, and there is nothing to stop him. With one Lagging stroke he alleviates their pain, and uses it to fuel the red-hot righteous anger inside. He reaches further through the tortured souls, deeper into the grumbling guts of the tank, until he finds what he's looking for.
He starts to run. Lagging every hand around him as he goes, he sprints down corridors and stairs, deep into the belly of the vast machine, finally through the door, and into the plain white room where a viscous fluid tank fills one wall, within which hangs a walnut-knot of grey brain-matter, within which is trapped the mind of his lost leader, Me.
The woman beside him is hot with King Ruin's control, driving a set of pincers through the tank's oil, bound to cleave Me's mind in two. Ray Lags her seconds before they can slice into meat, then calls out through the bonds.
Me, it's Ray! I'm here, I've come for you.
Me doesn't know him, doesn't remember even his own name, is terrified and confused, but there is something there still. They are brothers, after all, one part each of the same seven-tone chime, and that is enough to let Ray in.
Through the bonds he sucks Me's consciousness wholly out of his suffering organic matter, and nestles it safely in a corner of his own. There he bathes it, heals it, and performs the engram infusion that will teach it everything he knows.
At last, with the last of his bridge-derived strength, he pushes it out into the nearest hand, the female figure on the floor. He doesn't have the strength to reach any further. He grunts with dizzy exertion as the last floes transfer over.
Then he sits back, gasping, and watches as this new Me opens her eyes.
ME G
Different.
I remember things, but they are different things. I remember fighting through the mud of a Sunken World, blasting helicopters out of the sky with trebuchet and gunpowder-mined bodies, even though I wasn't there.
I was here.
I look up and see the thing that I became, a grey brain hanging in a vat of oil. I remember cutting this mind down to shape, from within the mind that I now stand inside. I have become my own tormentor, and I remember doing it even as it was done to me. I remember the pain as it happened, and the frustration as it had no effect.
I am Me. I am a hand. I am King Ruin's quarry and his tool.
Other memories rush in, of a woman named Yena from the inside and the outside. This body was hers too, still redolent of the memory engram that was written then removed. I remember starting the resistance against the Suns, even as I remember King Ruin crashing down on us. I remember doing everything I could to break Ritry Goligh.
But it was never Ritry Goligh I was trying to break. It was Me, and Me had Far to help him, peeking through the aetheric bridge. Me was the pawn in an intricate plan, and he only had to endure.
I endured.
The enormity of what I have come through hovers around my thoughts like a helicopter, stretching back to Spartan's Crag, and tearing myself into three parts when I saw the King was coming; Far to the bridge, Me for the King, and Doe, Ray, So, La, and Ti punching through the honeycomb wall into the tsunami-struck Sunken World of Mr. Ruins' mind.
Other memories surge, of doing a similar thing when I was trapped in Don Zachary's EMR machine, passing through Mr. Ruins' flagging mind to Lag them all.
The Iovian horse, I remember.
I look into Ray's eyes. He is different, has taken on the orange-brown face of one of my captors, but he is Ray still. He looks much taller than me now, which is strange.
"Me?" he asks. "Is it really you?"
I touch my own face. It is not what I remember, but how could it be? That body is gone. "It's me," I say, "but what happened?"
Ray grins. "You're a woman! You look hot, too." He nods appraisingly. "Really nice."
I cannot believe these are the first words he says to me. Still I look down, and catch some glimpse that he may be right. On my feet, I wonder that it is strange to have feet again. In the vat where my old brain hangs, I make out my reflected outline. I am indeed a woman.
"This is too weird," I say.
My voice comes out high, as it would.
"Lots of new options to explore," says Ray. "If I didn't know it was you in there, I might be interested."
I frown at him. After what I have been through, all the horrors that are still buzzing around me and waiting to unpack, it hardly seems appropriate.
"I am your captain," I say.
"Hot captain," he says. "So what do we do?"
I hold the frown a withering moment more, until the horrors surface in a final wave, and drop me to my knees. In a rush I remember everything King Ruin did to me, every lie, insult, torture, and humiliation. I remember being boxed down to nothing, and still finding something to hold onto right down to the essence.
At the essence, I judged him.
He cut all my memories away, but they were not cut from Ritry Goligh. Ray had them, Far had them still, and now I have them again. The mind is unfalteringly liquid, and adapts. These memories wash back into me through the bonds, because they always will have been, and now they will be again.
Ray catches me by the elbows, though I can feel the backwash of my sudden horror ebbing into him too. The memories belong to us all. We sag against each other, numb for a time, until the first round of hands burst in.
They are black-clad in buzzing EMR helmets, Kaos rifles held out. Moving as one they spray the vat containing my old brain down with bullets. The glass cracks as ammunition ricochets off wildly, the cracks spiderweb rapidly under their continued fire, then the whole thing ruptures.
Stinking thick oil floods out and knocks us all back, the marines back into the corridor, Ray and I hard into the wall. Ray grunts before we even hit, as though he's broken a bone, but I ride it smoothly. We come to rest against each other and I whisper, "They don't know what we did."
Ray nods.
The King will have noticed that his Yena-hand was usurped, and imagined it was the brai
n of Ritry Goligh that did it. He couldn't know that Ray was in waiting, hiding in the comatose mind of Mr. Ruins, waiting to emerge. He couldn't know any of it, and he still doesn't.
We stand up and walk calmly to the door. The marines push past us, striding through the thinning layer of oil on the floor, and rake my old brain with rifle fire. It chops and splinters into gobbets in seconds, but the marines ignore us as we step in behind them, and sidle knives from their belts.
To them we are just more hands. They would no more watch us moving than I watch my own feet when I eat breakfast. They would no more expect us to cut the straps of their helmets and pull off their EMR-shields than King Ruin expected me to change bodies.
But I did, and we do.
The first two slit off easily, and the third follows a second later, allowing me to Lag them all from the King with ease. He is far and I am near, and I have been through the bridge. The hands stop firing as soon as it is done, and instead stand there blankly, waiting for instructions.
I give them instructions.
They run on ahead of us, while we follow behind.
"Like this," says Ray, flipping the knife in his hand.
"Like this," I say.
King Ruin sends three more waves of EMR-helmeted hands past us, each as ignorant as the last, before we manage to lock down all the supply ports where the helmets and guns are kept. We set our helmet-less men to guard them. It is a wholly bloodless coup, fought through the bonds. It is over before it even began.
So begins the long hard work of Lagging the King's connection to every hand.
I send Ray off to secure the upper deck against physical reprisal. I return to prowl the maze-like hallways of the Court.
In a large hall near my room, I find the corpse of Mr. Ruins. He lies in an EMR machine with his skull-cap lifted off and a hundred wires leading in to his brain. So the Suns kept his Sunken World open until the end. He is surrounded by eighty EMR bays, wherein lie eighty dead hands, the marines who came for us in the White Tower.
In other rooms I find other experiments, candidates for the parade. They are horrific, the things he has done, like the Crag but worse, bodies and minds recombined, personalities fused, families forced to become tormentors of each other, bodies reduced to slop, minds boiled down to chitlins, souls split through cannibalism, hearts broken apart through lies, all the tools the King held dear, all part of his plan for the world.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 24
