King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (24 page)

She has no weapon, only a knife. Ruins is at her side, his grey suit shredded by the bullets, his bright red blood spreading out across the pearly floor.

No, she thinks. Not now, not so close.

Craning to look back, she sees there are five of them, ten, black-clad marines pouring up the stairs, all with buzzing EMR-helmets and weapons trained on her. One of them steps forward and flips up his HUD. He has dark copper-skin, a black trident beard, and the fire of twin blazing Suns in his eyes.

"Hello, Mr. Goligh," he says. "I am surprised to find you here."

"King Ruin," Doe manages. Speaking makes something come loose in her chest, and she coughs up blood.

The man smiles. "Thank you for opening the bridge. Thank you for leading the way. Now, goodbye."

He lowers the howitzer to train on her face. With a high whine, the barrels begin to spin.

I am organs and blood, floating in oil.

There is a mirror so I can see what I have become, and no way to close my eyes. I don't have eyelids anymore. I don't even have arms to cover my face. I don't have a mouth to scream with, though I have ears to hear.

Seven tones, of this artificial womb. Seven tones that mean something but I don't know what, that are so familiar but so meaningless. So I was born, so shall I die.

I look at myself in the silvered glass, this exploded galaxy of brain, nerves, senses, spools of guts, muscles and shedded skin, floating in the humming liquid, and wonder. I am like a galaxy, hollow at the core. Now I am living, thinking matter, but completely devoid of motive force. I am entirely at King Ruin's whims.

"You were always at my whims, Mr. Goligh," says King Ruin. The words warble through the glass tank, muted. He is standing before me as Yena now, listening to my thoughts. I can't turn away, can't cover my ears, can only watch and listen.

"All things are ultimately my hands," he goes on. "I use them as I see fit. Some I slough off, some I retain. You realize this now. Should I wish it, you will have a new body. I could strip you over again, top to bottom. We can repeat it. We may do that, out of curiosity if nothing else. How long can you hold, I wonder? How many bodies would I need to take from you, piece by piece, before you finally break?"

I can't speak, can only think. I imagine my organs leaping out of the womb and choking him. They wrap around his neck and wring the life out of his eyes.

"You won't help me, I know," he says. "So you believe. But it may not be necessary that you do. I have almost reached the center of your friend, Mr. Ruins. There is something strange at work inside him, it has taken many of my hands to breach his Solid Core. Now though they have. I believe the secret to crossing the bridge is held inside him."

I Lagged it, I think. I remember Lagging it.

King Ruin shrugs. "Perhaps you should hope you did not. Maybe then I would forget you, and leave you behind. Your suffering may end, or at least allow a fall into madness. Because if I do not find what I seek in Mr. Ruins, I will extract it from you. There will be no more relief. I don't mind if it takes decades, Mr. Goligh. Centuries. You see I am old, so you will be old too. I will strip you back to raw genetics and rebuild you in my image, if that's what is required. We will become old companions, in this endeavor."

He gestures at the mirror, where the parts of me float, held apart like clothing out to dry on wire.

"Do you find yourself repulsive, now? This is what you are made of, after all. Your constituent matter. I believe these parts have a beauty of their own, in the way they combine to create a living, sentient thing."

Looking at him in the form of Yena, I think about the horrors I saw in her, the skyscraper tombs filled with buried-alive bodies. I think about the moment she stabbed me in the gut.

"This hand is attractive, that's true," says King Ruin. "But this is not Yena. It only carried her engrams, for a time. The true Yena lives in the parade, one part of it anyway, a glass-walled zoo I keep for special occasions. She has her body, enough space to move around in, but all she can see are the others around her. Naji is next to her, as are a dozen others. Do you think that sounds pleasant? Perhaps it seems tame, compared to my other works. You saw Memphen, of course. But can you imagine what life in the glass zoo might be like? It would not end in a day, with the air crushed from your ribs as in Memphen, or in a week after you starve, or in a month after all the meat you've feasted on goes rotten. In the zoo it goes on and on, because I keep them alive. They are a hundred little test tubes, conducting a grand experiment. Of course they come to hate the sight of each other. Some of them blind themselves to avoid it. Others dig their fingers into their ears so hard they deafen themselves, just to escape the sound of their own breathing."

I hate him. I envisage my boneless muscles wrapping around him like a Lag snake, slowly throttling him to death.

"That is the life for Yena and Naji, and all others like them. They suffer the slow, gentle horror of proximity, faced with the truth of their own existence, just as you are faced with yours now. It is gentle horrors such as these that cut the deepest, I feel. In the glass zoo, they are all quite mad. It takes time, as they strive toward hope, toward dreams of some possible escape, but at last they all succumb. So will you."

If I had a mouth or a throat I would gag.

"Not cheerful, I agree. Very potent. And all the memories, I keep. It's another kind of collection, in engrams, which I use when I need. Would you like to see them? I may put you with them, in a new body, for a time. Would you like that?"

In my mind, I force my entrails down his throat, filling him up so he chokes.

"Enjoy this brief reprieve, Mr. Goligh," he says. "Hope that I find what I want in Mr. Ruins. Because if I do not, I will take you apart piece by piece to find it. You will become the full-time work of my life, and I have so many wondrous plans. In the meantime, another taste of what will come. I feel you've been holding to those subglacic days a little too firmly. Let them go, Mr. Goligh. Stop clutching so tightly, it's unseemly. Let's say farewell to them together, shall we?"

He Lags me. They are gone.

He smiles. "Who will you talk to now?"

I don't understand what he means. I begin to panic, as the scope and scale of the ebbing frame of whatever he just took is enormous. It is vast, and I feel it like a scoop taken out of my middle, like my skin has been pulled away and all my bones extracted.

He leaves, and I am left hanging in the liquid alone, unfeeling, unable to close my eyes, staring at the exploded pieces that make me up and wondering what remains.

He boils me down.

"You don't need this anymore," he says, as pincers reach into the artificial womb and snip away my left leg. It is muscle only, tendon and gristle which I could only twitch, but to watch it cut away in the mirror still sickens me.

"We can do this a thousand times," he says, "and it will always feel like this. Do you imagine you could get used to it?"

I hardly have the will to think about killing him. It is such a distant fantasy now, and I don't know why I have resisted this far. Perhaps there was something in the memories I've lost, some solid ground to stand upon, but I can't feel it anymore.

"Do you feel like weeping?" he asks, as the pincers move over and cut away my right leg. "Do you feel like calling out for your mother?"

I never had a mother.

not this

says the voice.

"There it is," says King Ruin. "I heard it. Now can I find it?"

I feel him shuffle through the gaps in my Molten Core as though I'm a filing cabinet. His touch is cold and hard.

"Maybe it's this," he muses. He brings the memory up through my transponders, forcing me to relive it. It is me as a child, when my parents were diving me day after day. "Is then when you learned to partition yourself? I suppose it is. Look at you, Mr. Goligh. So small, but so resistant. You would have been a perfect candidate for one of my experimental Courts, but I suppose your that other one sheltered you. Never mind, I have you now."

He begins the Lag, and the memory tears away like skin, like the sheep's skull ripping back and shredding a thousand connections. He scrapes away the straggling lines of thought with the thumbnail of his mind, molding the screaming mess I am left into some new shape.

I have no mouth but I scream for long minutes. I stare at my exploded body in the mirror and scream as some new conception of what I must be takes hold. If I had a body I would sob and pant, vomit and shake.

In the viscous oil of my artificial womb, I twitch.

ritry

says the voice,

me

but I don't know what it means, other than as a label that has applied to this creature I am within. I don't know where it comes from, but it steadies me.

"Still?" asks King Ruin. "That is truly inconceivable. Were you born with this voice, Mr. Goligh? Is this how you have succeeded in diving the bridge so many times?"

Please, I think, stop. No more.

"I can stop, but why would I? Will you dive the bridge for me?"

No, I think, yes, no.

no

I am torn between them.

"Even, could you?" he asks. "Would you know how to do it, now? I think I may have taken you too far. Now there's so little of you left."

He waves at the mirror. Even as he does it, the pincer slides in again and cuts off the purple loops of my internal organs. I feel it as a short sharp pain, but the sight of them dropping away to the bottom of the tank is worse. It is horrific.

"Perhaps you could dive," he goes on. "Perhaps you could not. But I am deep into your ebbing friend as we speak, an old friend of mine too, and there is some trace of you within him, I think. You left your tracks to the bridge, and I will find them. That leaves you as, what, a curiosity? You are not protected, Mr. Goligh. You are not special. You will ride for me, without end."

I feel madness beckon. I cannot control myself. I cannot control my thoughts. I watch as the pincer snips away the muscles of my arms, my shoulders, my chest.

"Even this?" asks King Ruin. "Yes, even this."

He cuts away my heart. Its pulse stops and it drifts to the floor of the tank, leaving only the soft seven tones of the womb. He cuts away my neck, strips back all the muscles and fat of my face as though some obscene haircut, until only my eyes, my ears, and my brain remain, hanging from wires.

"Now we are down to the truth," he says. "This is what you resolve to, Mr. Goligh. This is what all that pretense was for, a heap of shivering meat in a pool. Do you feel foolish now, for ever defying me? Do you wish to defy me more?"

There is no place for me to feel sickness within, not anymore. There is no blood to run cold. There is only a deep, intrinsic sense of horror and dislocation. I am dizzy for what I was. I am terrified for what more might come.

ritry

says the voice, and I want it gone. I want the King to take it too, to free me of this incorrect desire, this aberrant wish to instate my own will. I am plainly not my own. Take it, I call. Please.

He smiles. "The slow horror of proximity. You feel it even within yourself. A mirror is all you required. Mr. Goligh, do you understand me now? Do you know why you are here?"

I don't. I no longer know anything. Everything I have done so far was a mistake. It can only be a mistake.

I'm sorry, I say in my mind. I'm sorry.

"I know. I know that you are. Here is your forgiveness."

He Lags more. Chunks of my life evaporate, sucking out of me to feed him. More and more, and each one making me more alone in this empty mind, more ignored, more unwanted.

"You were never wanted," he says. "Who amongst us truly was? None. We are vainglorious efforts at eternity, and we deserve to know the truth. No one truly loves us, no more than they love themselves. I show this to you, Mr. Goligh, I share this with you until you learn it. This I what I show to the world, by shoving its face in its own rectum until it learns what it truly is. Wanton filth, Mr. Goligh, enlivened by sucking, grubbing hunger. That is what all of you are. In such company, there is only truly room for one."

ritry

I think of something then, something that is not a memory because all my memories are gone, but more an echo of a learned fact, perhaps once a memory. There is a voice, something I trust, and it is telling me what I should be.

let it go

the voice says.

be what you can

It is no hope. It only makes the horror worse to point out what I should do, when there is no hope of it. There is no moment in which to be myself.

Except there is. The moments go on, one after another, and I am still here. I am only eyes, ear, and mind, but I am still here. I exist, I think, I live. The horror doesn't go, but what other way to be is there but to live with it, and through it?

I watch as King Ruin's mouth opens in wonder.

"Are you transcending even this? This is stunning, Mr. Goligh. You have nothing, yet you are relentlessly resourceful."

Why? I ask, a single question in my mind. I repeat it, again and again, because within it I find some sense of purpose. It is unanswerable. Even with an answer, it is unanswerable. Within it I find who I will be now. I do not know Ritry, or Mr. Goligh. 

What I am instead is outrage. Less than that, what I am is justice. I am rightness, and I judge this wrong. I exist only to judge it. I have no way to influence what it becomes, I only watch. But in watching, I judge.

This is wrong, I think. Why?

A long time passes, as King Ruin's body, a beautiful dark-skinned woman, goes still before me, her face slack.

Why?

He comes back.

"Very well, I'll debate you," he says. "We are down to the essence, and it intrigues me. Why? Because I live for the essence. I'll boil this whole world down, in time. All the people in its seas, all the minds sunk beneath the everyday meaninglessness of their lives, I'll boil them all down, and at the end I'll be left with the true, pure essence of what they are, and it will be shit."