King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (17 page)

"I only stabbed you a little bit," he pouts, a strangely childlike grin on his face. "Only a little, you barely felt it."

"I'm wearing a lavic suit," she say. "I heard it more than I felt it."

"Ha ha ha ha," he says, grinning again. "Ha ha, I'm such a fool. Let me go now, please. Come on, sweetheart, dearest Ritry, let me go."

"I'm Doe," she says. "Ritry isn't here. It's just you and me."

Ruins stops hopping and looks at her with sudden interest. His head cocks to the side. "You're a woman. You're so pale."

"I'm Doe."

He nods eagerly. "Yes yes, that's how! Clever Ritry! Oh I knew he was so clever. Seven-tones, who would have thought of it? An army of plastic soldiers is one thing, but seven minds in one? Only the Suns ever came close."

"You keep saying the Suns, what does it mean?"

"What does the Suns mean? Doe, my darling, where are the others? I'd like to meet them. Ritry always respected me, I know that. We were good friends, really. Where are the others? I want to meet Me. I want to see the little boy, Far. Yes!"

"They're not here."

"Oh," says Ruins, then narrows his eyes suspiciously. "I saw others, though, with you. Two others. The black one and one of the twins. Where are the rest?"

Doe says nothing. She contemplates beating him but doubts it would help. Instead she merely tightens her grip on his arm.

This time he doesn't squeal. He doesn't leap, and instead only looks her dead in the eye, through the faceplate of her HUD, with the light of understanding growing in his eyes. When he speaks it is with surging happiness.

"He's abandoned you, hasn't he? Ritry sent you here alone. Half of you are dead, and Me and Far never came. I can feel it. You're alone! He's not anywhere near. He abandoned you!"

"He didn't abandon us."

"He abandoned you!" Mr. Ruins crows. Tears of joy leak out of his crusted-yellow eyes. "Oh it's delightful. Thank the Suns, to send me such as this. I was so hungry, and there was nothing to eat, and now Ritry has provided. Bless you child, bless you."

Doe feels some shade of his certainty leak into her, and begin to corrupt. This mind is dying around them, Ruins is a bitter ghost haunting his past glory, and Me and Far really are gone.

"What are the Suns?" she asks again.

A slow smile spreads across Ruins' face. "I'll tell you. You'll love it. It means he has him. Ritry. It means he's going to suffer."

Doe shakes him. "What are they?"

"Only a god," Ruins snarls back at her. His spit flecks her helmet. "The holiest of them all. I'll show you, if you want. I'll show it all, so you know what fate your dear Ritry is facing. He sent you here to die, little Doe, you little bitch, so I could eat your brains out of your white little head."

She slaps him, then, hard. He wails, laughs, then starts shouting for more. She slaps him until he stops, and a fresh run of blood trickles down from his nose.

"I was so hungry, you see," he says softly, looking down to the mud. "That's why. That's only ever why. I was so hungry."

"So show me," Doe says.

He starts to shuffle around her. His feet take tiny steps, like an old man's, squelching in the mud. When he sees the pile of dead bodies in the left branch of the T, he starts to cry harder.

"They dived on a grenade for me," he says, in a tiny voice Doe can barely hear. "All for me."

"Why?"

He looks up at her. The madness is back in his eyes.

"I was so hungry."

She holds him at arms length. While he mutters about putting on a suit, and taking off a suit so he wouldn't have to dig his way through buttons, leather and thread to get at the meat, she lets him putter slowly forward, toward the keep.

not that

After more sobbing, reeling, feeling lost to myself, I sit with my shattered hand and broken foot before me, and only look at them.

In moments he changed who I am. I am thin, now. I am so thin I barely know what I am. I dare not dive into memory, try my graysmith's trick again, lest he take whatever I come upon.

Their names pop up like fireworks, those so far beyond his touch. Ven, Heclan, Tigrates, Ferrily. That's all I have now. Before that there were parents, some kind enough, some cruel, but none like this. I hide them as deeply as I can. Perhaps I should have Lagged them all.

not that

says something in the back of my head. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's a thought put there by King Ruin. I don't know if anything I think now is my own.

My foot looks like a ball of dark rotten kelp. Where his bat struck the bones shattered, driving shards through the skin. It has swollen up in a heavy lump, trickling out blood and dribbles of yellow pus in turn. It aches like a phantom limb.

My hand I can barely stomach to see. I force myself to. The missing fingers have left snapped tendons and muscles behind, dangling purple and pink like disconnected cables on a skulk, like a building with its façade torn away.

They won't re-attach, I'm fairly certain. I've set the shorn fingers near to the place where they ripped from, and already they've turned a gray shade of pink. They don't belong, because they are dead.

I am dead too. This is how I should begin to think of myself. A plaything for the King, a symbol of his power. I don't like to say it, don't like to think it, but I am terrified.

I am terrified.

not that

says some voice in my head. Not that, and I want to rip it out too. It's too soon, like King Ruin said. It's too soon to make me eat my own vomit, too soon to make me chew down my own fingers.

But he could. It's what he could make me do that is the worst. And I would do it. He could make me enjoy it. He could wire me all around to love it.

I shudder. I tremble. The fear doesn't go away, at what I might become.

not that

says the voice.

On the sublavic with Heclan, sometimes I thought about the end of the world. We'd lay back on the smithing benches with the EMRs powered down, sipping mind-numbing CSF liquor, and talk about what the world might be.

"I'll grow water plants in the desert," Heclan said once. "I'll engineer them to suck it out of other molecules and farm it chemically. It's simple."

I laughed. Heclan was always saying ridiculous things like that.

"Plants need water, they don't make water," I said.

"And do brains need thoughts, so they can make thoughts? Do you have to put one in to get one out?"

"Yes."

"Maybe, but it's not zero-sum. It's more like perpetual motion, or transmutation. Take a baby; you put in food and water, and you grow this little person that becomes a soul, add some starter thoughts to get it going, and pretty soon it's churning out ideas all of its own. It's writing engrams all over the cortex out of nothing, transmuting mind out of vapor."

"You make it sound like alchemy," I said.

"Isn't it?" he asked. "We do alchemy everyday, turning ice into water, turning water into life, turning living people into dead people. It's all transmutation."

Looking at my hand and my foot, I wonder what Heclan would say to this.

"Some guy ripped out my fingers," I tell him. "He broke my foot. He's going to make me eat my own vomit."

Heclan laughs. "He's helping you transmute, Rit. You can be something new."

"But I won't get to choose what I am."

Heclan frowns. "Is he writing inside your mind?"

"He's erasing it all."

"But you're still in there. You still get to be you, in some basic, fundamental way."

"He controls that too."

"All the time?"

"No. I don't know."

Heclan laughs. "Not possible. He has to be himself too. He can't be you all the time. You get to be yourself, even just a little."

"But that's nothing. What am I, without knowing who I am? He could take my name. He could take everything I've ever done. He could take you. What am I then?"

Heclan toasts me with the CSF. "True, that does sound pretty shitty. But even then, you'll still have your mind. You'll still be able to transmute, to filter to make your experience what you want. That's a miracle right there."

Here I may be crying. "But it hurts, Heclan," I say. "It already hurts so much."

He takes a long smacking suck of his CSF. "Life is pain, Rit. Pain is transmuting us all the time, into something better."

"How is it better?"

"It's better because it's harder. It's forged. You come through it, the steel doesn't falter, and you're really somebody then."

"But I can't fight back."  

Heclan sets his glass down.

"You're thinking on the wrong battlefield. We're not above the ice here, that war is already lost. We're below it, where the waters are murky. We don't move the pole around, do we? We hide like guerrillas beneath it. We're skirmishers. You don't own your body any more, so stop pretending that you do. It's just a dying animal you're tied to. You don't own your mind any more, fine, let it go. It's postcards of a life you don't need. You had that life, and it's over now. Now you're a new you, forging in the fire. Fight for what you'll become, in the moments you have. Everything else is vanity."

My feet and hand blur before me. I've lost a lot of blood, spilled across this white floor.

I wonder if Heclan would really say any of that. He wasn't philosophical. He was fat, drunk, and incompetent.

I look up. Now King Ruin is standing before me. He's every bit as handsome as he was before. He looks curious.

"This is your partitioning, isn't it?" he asks. "What you're doing now. This is how you Lagged your parents."

not that

"I'm having a nice conversation," I say, a slur. "Would you please fuck off."

That.

He kneels down and picks up one of my fingers. He turns it slowly on his palm.

"Perhaps it's time," he says.

I imagine pushing my broken fist into his face. Perhaps I could spear one of his eyes. Give me another moment, and my teeth would find his throat.

"Very well," he says.

I think of that, while my own hand picks up the finger, and guides it to my mouth. I think of him sucking helplessly at the air, while it crunches in my mouth. I think of standing above him in the dirty gray light of my home on the skulk, looking out to the sky, and seeing two red suns burning paths across the sky.

In the brightness of the white room, I do as he asks. 

not that

says the voice.

I know, I tell it. It's this.

Hours later, I lie clutching my arms to my gut in the semi-dark of my white room. The lights have been dimmed. I want to vomit but I don't want to have to eat it again. I have to keep it in.

It is so hard, to be like this.

"A reward," King Ruin said, as he dimmed the lights on his way out. "For eating so well."

I am different, again. There are a dozen tortures and humiliations behind me. I have done things I never thought I would, everything he demanded. I am broken and bloody.

not this

says the voice.

The pain is all around me. It is inside me. I remember the soft touch of his hand and it sickens me more than anything else. His hand stroking my brow with my head in his lap, after taking away pieces of me I'll never get back. He striped my body with scars I'll never remove. He pulled out half of my teeth.

I taste salt, urine, vomit.

"You'll be so beautiful," he said softly to me. "When you ride."

not this

I shudder and shiver. I have learned so many terrible things about myself. I have learned the color of the insides of my bones. I have learned what suffocating on my own screams feels like. I have tasted what despair feels like.

"We can be like this forever," he said. "You and I and all the others, together. I'll string you up like holiday decorations at every Court. You'll parade. I'll be so proud."

Not this.

At the end, he fed me like a baby. It was the head of a sheep, raw, brought in by another man who looked just like him.

"One of my hands," he said proudly, pointing to the new man. "I breed them here. They are clones, raised in an artificial womb, just like you. It makes them easier to control. They have no mind of their own, but for when I reach out to control them. they make no demands, they don't open their mouths wide when they're hungry. I love them for it."

As the man set the silver platter down beside us, I looked into his eyes and saw the emptiness within, enlivened only by the King's touch, like a marionette.

I remember that emptiness.

The sheep's head still had wool on it. The eyes were blue and filmy.

"No," I murmured, through my bloody mouth.

"It's alright," he said. "I'll feed you."

He opened the sheep's head with a saw he'd just used on me. He peeled back the skull, revealing the stringy white membranes of the cortex. Using his thumbnail he scraped them back.

"You're hungry," he said, "I know you are."

So he fed me. He made me eat. Spoonful by spoonful, I ate all of the brain. I ate the eyes. I ate every part.

"Can you imagine the ones in the fort?" King Ruin asked me. "Can you imagine how that must have felt for poor Harim?"

I am too hungry to be disgusted. I have eaten nothing but fingers for days.

Before he left, he laid me down with my head in his lap, stroking my hair gently.

"You understand, don't you?" he asked softly. "Mr. Goligh, I can't allow any others to rise."

Now I think back on that. In the sickness of my pain and misery, I turn it over.

not this

These are the moments I have to myself. He may be watching, he may be listening, but I'm here. Fuck him.

This.

I call up Heclan. I let him go. I call up Ven.

She sits on the bed beside me.

"You're crying," she says. "Ritry."

I stop myself from crying.

"I love you," she says, which starts me crying again.

"He might take you," I tell her. "He could come at any minute."

"Then we should make this count," she says. "Tell me, what can I do?"

I remember how much I loved Ven. I remember how broken I was, when I woke from the EMR to find them all dead. I was half-alive for a very long time, as my Molten Core regrew.

"Help me think," I say. "I can't think. I can't stop feeling him."

"He isn't here," she tells me. She touches my chest, in all the places King Ruin wounded me. She caresses my chin. She leaches out some of the pain he put in. "I'm here. I'm always here."

"Like Far," I murmur.

"Like Far," she answers. "He can strip us, but we won't be gone. We always will have been. Even if you don't remember me, we always will have been together. Whoever else you've loved, they always will have loved you. You always will have loved them. He can't take that away."

I sob. "He can make me forget."

She holds me close. "I'm here now. Remember Heclan. Fight the battles you can. Remember me now."

I loved her. Gods, I loved her. In her arms, I grow calm.

And I think.

And slowly, I begin to understand.

It doesn't change anything, not at first. But as Ven breathes in my ear, as the glow of it spreads wider, it begins to.