King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (26 page)

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.

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 brain 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.

I end their suffering, Lag as much of the horror as I can, and release them. I set the tormentor-hands to work as doctors and nurses, healing the damage they've done.

On the level below, I find the glass zoo he boasted of. It stinks of formaldehyde and waste. I begin the awful process of birthing its victims shivering back out into the light, handing them off to hands that follow my commands and carry them away for intensive care.

I find Yena and Naji by the sense in their minds, the faint memory of what they once were. They have been boiled so far down I don't know that much is left, but still I leave the hint in their thoughts that, when they are ready, there is still a war to fight, and revenge to be had.

Exhausted with all that I have seen, I ride up to the suprarene con, where Ray is waiting for me.

"No mind-bombs," he says. "Nothing inbound. He probably is worried we can take out anything he sends. I set up a simple Wall of hands on the third floor, so he can't get near us. We're already grinding away, and unless he comes to follow our tracks, he won't find us."

I nod. "Good," I say. "I want to go outside."

He grins. "Me too. Never seen a real sky."

Together we walk up through corridors bustling with movement and action, all hands set to defense, set to succor and heal the maimed, set to begin the uprising. I let my mind float out, and know that for the first time in decades this tank-crawler is free of pain. There is a calm, and a burgeoning hopefulness, because now things will begin to get better.

We ascend, releasing any more prisoners we find, those in line for treatment in the Court, Lagging the last fallow links to the King. We go up, following the straight lines and solid metal walls of this skirmish-era suprarene until finally we reach the top, and emerge into the light.

Golden sun, and blue sky.

Both Ray and I blink against it, the glow of the desert. All around us are rolling sand dunes, here and there broken by the dark fingers of old buildings leering upwards, spreading around our massive armored tank.

I hold my face up to the sun and luxuriate in its touch. It has been all my life since I felt this. It has been since talking to Loralena on the wall, about her life growing up in the Dubian deserts, that I have imagined what it would feel like.

Loralena.

With that word, a wave of old memories comes flooding in, dropping me to my knees harder than King Ruin's horrors. Loralena. It is too much to have lost and now regain. Images strike me with vivid detail, as though it was only days ago that I went with my wife Loralena and our children Art and Mem to stand at the edge of the rollercoaster in Candyland, and tell each other stories about how it must have been. The touch of their cheeks on mine and the sound of their laughter makes me feel like I'm going to burst.

"Daddy, can I ride the merry-go-round?" Mem asks me.

I laugh. "I don't think it'll turn, honey."

"But can I try? Can I imagine it turns?"

As a father I can be munificent. I can give permission to a thousand innocent delights, with no cost to myself. This is the true renewable resource, and the source that my strength wells from.

"Of course honey," I say, and think nothing of it, because it is life, was life, and every day brought more of it.

I begin to weep, atop the suprarene tank, for all that I have lost, and what I may one day regain.

Ray pats me on the back. I realize he has never felt this, not as I do, because he never lost it. These memories remained part of him throughout his dive. I was the only one Ritry Lagged, the only one he truly left behind. But Ray feels it now, through me, and we are together again.

Together we sob on the hot, corroded black metal of the suprarene's open con, in the bright of the desert sun. This means hope, I think. They will still be alive. They will still be waiting.

A time later, I stand. Some of the prisoners have died, just in being lifted from the stable misery of their punishment, and there was nothing I could do. Others seem too deeply lost in their madness, though there is time for them to recover. Some already show the fledgling signs of recovery.

"This is our army," says Ray.

I nod. I look into the distance, over the sun-scoured sands beneath which a vast number of King Ruin's sources of food have been buried, to the task that lies ahead. Mr. Ruins said it himself, to Doe in the White Tower. Cut all his Courts, and deprive him of the strength from their suffering. Overload him at the source, and force his sun to go supernova.

There is only one of these I can do. 

For now, there are hands wandering all around us, through the corridors below and out in the dunes, gathering, working. We will fill them all up. We will hunt down King Ruins' Courts and empty every last one of them. We will hunt down his bonds and sever them, hunt down his brood and kill them all.

In the distance, I wait for the supernova to come. This is the direction his wide hot bonds reached back to, and this is where we will find him.

This is where Doe has gone.

"She'll do it," says Ray. His voice is tight with emotion. "I know it."

I clap him on his broad shoulder. It is strange to have to reach up to do so.

"She will," I say.