Ruin's Wake

by Patrick Edwards

  The doors closed, the edges glowing berry red, but we were moving. There was a sweet smell like cooking meat mixed with burnt hair, then I heard the whimper next to me.

  Mason, my comfort, my strength, was burned in a narrow strip all up his body an instant before the doors closed. A livid line had been scorched the length of him, starting at his knee, running up the leg, his chest, his neck, then over half of his face. One eye was gone, the other rolled back in his skull. His hair was singed and the flesh blistered and blackened. He regained consciousness only to scream in pain.

  I did what I could with the meagre supplies we had left. His burns were so severe that he began to go into shock, his body quaking to the point where I could no longer hold him down. The painkillers barely calmed him and all the while the smell of his wounds filled the place, a miasma that still sticks in my nostrils. I will never be able to eat meat again as long as I live.

  I tried to calm him, tried to stop my own panic and tears and think rationally, but I was out of my depth. His breathing laboured. In the last moment he looked at me with his one good eye, crushing my hand in his.

  He told me he loved me. He told me where to go to find help.

  Then, he told me his real name.

  Sleep 20 – 499

  Karume is worse than I remember it. On one level I think I have become used to my own company and the unpolluted expanse of the glacier – here the soot clouds are visible from kilometres distant, draped over the city like a shield that turns the midday sky purple. It is not being forced to be amongst people again, it is the way they look; their faces are either bovine or skittish from moment to moment. And the smiles: fixed, lifeless, telling the world everything is fine and life is good while inside fear twists their guts.

  Did I look like that once? I am most likely projecting – perhaps they are not all tortured inside, perhaps their ignorance is a comfort of sorts. How could they know unhappiness, never knowing anything else but the lives they lead? The only person alive that has any kind of outside context is me, and in truth I don’t know if the things I learned have freed or condemned me.

  Getting to Karume was not easy and took much of the money I had with me, but through negotiation and threat and cajoling I made it. Gaining access to the Elucidon was the easiest part – the doorman was likely an undergraduate who’d been stuffed into a uniform and taught to hold a clipboard. A change of clothes at my apartment had me looking like myself and I gave him my most contemptuous faculty stare before striding through the gate, leaving his goggling eyes and hanging pen in my wake. He might have called weakly after me but I had rounded a corner and kept going, heading for my old department.

  Fermin had made himself comfortable in the few days he’d had on me – my office was now filled with his clutter and his anaemic staff laboured outside, though he wasn’t there himself. One of them tried to stop me from entering and I let my tongue have free rein. I think the woman almost cried. She recognised me then, I think, and stepped aside. Reputation is a useful thing.

  They watched through the window as I turned his (my!) office upside down. I broke his trophies, smashed his framed diplomas, scattered his papers. I found his valise under the desk, still stinking of his journey and lying open. Inside, amid the clutter, I found a thick brown folder I recognised.

  My elation was short-lived, however. What I held were the co-ordinates of the outpost, a couple of charts of the Makuo glacier, but the accompanying diary (wherein we’d recorded all of our findings from our sessions with the Spark) was missing. The fat idiot had clearly run off to the faculty with it to beg for a pat on the head, leaving the location behind for later.

  I made sure the papers were properly alight before I tossed them aside. The office went up like kindling and I pushed past Fermin’s aghast researchers as they ran in to try to stamp it out. I managed to slip out in the confusion, even passing the hapless doorman running the other way with an extinguisher clutched to his chest. Appearing to belong there is just as good as the real thing.

  I am sure of two things. First, they know what we found up there, its significance and doubtless the threat it poses to the Hegemony’s status quo. Second, they do not know where: I have the printed maps and I made sure no copies survived through a short visit to the archives, as well as the geology department. The fire I’d started kept attention elsewhere and I was unimpeded. Each department of the Elucidon guards its finds like a miser; once a source of frustration back when I was just another academic, now a blessing as I didn’t need to range far to destroy all records of the early surveys – the ones that had sent me to Makuo in the first place. Once this was done I joined in with the throng being shepherded towards the exits.

  Had I found Fermin in his office, I would have clawed the skin from his face, to let him feel a fraction of what Mason – I cannot think of him with any other name, despite what he told me – had felt in his last moments. I didn’t get my base revenge, so I will do something else. I will find the place he told me about as the life stuttered out of him and give what I have to his friends. If the world were a bone, it broke five hundred years ago and was badly set by a blind man. The only way to allow it to grow properly is to break it once more.

  viii. Knife

  By mid-afternoon the heat had lulled, pavements sighing as the warmth bled from them. Kelbee emerged from the sewers after completing another drop and checked around her, as had become her habit, to be sure she was alone. The quiet part at the back of her mind, the observer, noted how much she’d changed. She no longer quivered with fear after sneaking out of bed to gather information; she knew how to blend into a crowd.

  Despite this new confidence there was a sliver of doubt that had crept in ever since the night when she and the Lance Colonel had talked – truly, like equals – for the first time. She still couldn’t bring herself to use his real name but there was a difference, a shift in the tiny air currents of their marriage. He’d come home one day with a small, hand-picked bunch of orange flowers which he’d placed in a mug on the kitchen windowsill. He’d been embarrassed, but instead of covering it with anger as he normally did he’d smiled like a boy. Later that night, in bed, he’d moved towards her and the old fear crept up again that he was going to take her. Instead, a single kiss, a light brush of his lips on hers, holding for just a moment of absolute stillness where his heartbeat matched hers, then he moved away. She’d not been able to sleep for some time after that, feeling his warmth on the far side of the bed as futures clashed in her head.

  The side of her that said it wasn’t enough to make up for the bad years still held the field but it wasn’t absolute any more; it had been much easier to steal from him, betray him, when he was nothing more than a looming threat.

  Sometimes, in her quietest moments, she wondered if she could just walk away from all this danger, back into her old life. There was nothing left to incriminate – she could pass the child off as his for the rest of her life, knowing now how easy it was to lie. Danger would pass into normality. But what of the child inside her? A boy would be thrust into the military and a girl would be married off to a man who would doubtless use her just as she herself had been used. And the most honest part of her knew that it was too late to unlearn what she’d learned, to accept the unacceptable.

  No, she thought, that door needs to close. When it was time, she would leave.

  Just as the hour struck for the workers to go home she arrived on a familiar street. Opposite, she saw the squat pile where she’d once spent the days sewing garments – where she’d met Nebn, where it had all begun. She paused for a while, watching the women on the other side of the street; their eyes were tired and downcast as they trudged along the pavement. There was a face she recognised: the girl who’d cut herself on the shears. Her once-pretty face was worn now, and she walked with an unsteady lurch, cradling her bandaged stumps to her chest.

  From around the corner came a large staff car bearing flags. It was travelling at speed and the light traffic moved o
ff the road to allow it through. Some officer on his way home, no doubt, or off to a night’s drinking. She watched it pass, then set off again, already preparing herself for another evening aping the quiet servitude of her old life. She touched her bump, as had become her habit. It was stretching the fabric of all her tunics these days and she found more and more that she needed to sit down and take the weight off her back.

  There was a screech of tyres behind her, then a bang. The staff car had collided with a small utility van that had been pulling out of a side road; both drivers were out on the street, yelling at each other. As she turned to look, Kelbee caught a flash of motion from the street she’d come from, a person ducking back behind the corner, trying not to be seen. Ice gripped her throat.

  The crowd on the other side of the street had grown as more workers left the building, bumping into the backs of those who’d stopped to gawp at the accident. Kelbee rushed over to meld into the crowd. She jostled past people, keeping her head down as she made for an alleyway just up the street that should be a shortcut to the park. If she could make it through she could lose herself in the trees. She came to the alley mouth and ducked in, breaking into a run.

  The alley was cast in shadow, a deep snaking trench between two tower blocks. It was narrow, barely wide enough for two people abreast and littered with rubbish. The echoes of her feet pounding on concrete reverberated – and perhaps another, following behind. The terror gave her a boost and she pushed harder.

  She came to a dogleg and rough concrete tore at her palms as she fended off the walls, speeding around the kink. Ahead was a slice of daylight, and between her and freedom was a high fence of chain-link.

  She swore under her breath.

  If she stretched her hands as high as she could she could almost reach the top of the fence. Scanning the alley, she saw an old stack of crates mouldering by the wall. The old wood cracked under her fingers as she hauled them one by one over to the chain-link, piling them into a rickety stair. The wood cracked and splintered under her weight as she climbed, the light at the alley mouth beckoning safety. Then the boxes collapsed.

  She scrabbled to grab the fence as she fell. The crates did the rest, the waterlogged wood breaking her fall. A few shards tore through her clothes, one of them slicing a neat gash over her forearm. Her throat closed up and she pushed herself into the corner, waiting for her pursuer to come charging around the corner, gun pointed at her, ready to haul her off for questioning.

  There was nothing. No footsteps, no Factors bearing handcuffs, only the sound of her own sobs bouncing from the walls. She heard someone shout from a window high above and flinched, then another answered it and she realised it was only neighbours arguing. The alley was still.

  She picked herself up and dusted herself off as well as she could, using her shawl to hide the tear in her sleeve. She leaned against the wall for a few moments with eyes shut, waiting for the pounding in her chest to quieten, the sweat on her brow cooling in the gentle flurries that set the splinters dancing.

  She was jumping at shadows. No one was coming. But she’d seen something, she knew it, felt it in her bones. She had to get out. It had to happen soon.

  Back at the apartment, she set about scrubbing, washing and preparing dinner as if work could burn her worries away. She moved from one thing to the next, never allowing herself a gap, knowing it was always there, the fear that someone had been following her.

  If it hadn’t been for the accident in the street she’d never have seen that darting shape on the corner. But what if it hadn’t really been anything; what if it had just been someone dropping something, or changing direction for a reason wholly unconnected to her? She shook her head to try to clear it and set about scrubbing the floor tiles with renewed vigour.

  A half-hour later she felt a little better; the gnawing feeling in her stomach had been pushed into the background. She took a few moments to gaze out at the Tower, the way she used to before all this had started. There was a reassuring solidity to the edifice, a still, unmovable constant in her life. Calmer now, she could order her thoughts. No one had come after her back in the alleyway. If she’d been tailed they would have had her plumb, lying against that fence.

  Be rational, she told herself, think logically. There was nowhere to hide overlooking the sewer entrance – that she knew for certain; it had been picked for that very reason – and the streets leading back to the central district had been wide and empty.

  You would have noticed someone coming after you. Just keep a grip.

  She rubbed absently at her belly as she gazed out of the window, fingers tracing the outline. Evening crept over the city. It was an odd feeling, being able to calm herself so quickly. She’d changed so much in such a short time – never a toe out of line in her whole life and now here she was running with subversives, spying on her husband. And how normal it all felt!

  It was doing, she decided, rather than merely existing, that felt right. Not going through the motions set out for you, being a dutiful shell. Duty: to father, husband, authority, the Seeker himself; always at the bottom of the mountain. Obeisance. It had been the schoolmistress’s favourite of the Principles, repeated over and over.

  Obeisance, rotten girl. Above all.

  Would I have remained as I was without meeting Nebn, stealing away a kiss, a caress, then more? Would I still be walking that narrow, proper road without being pushed off it? Or perhaps there was always something inside, waiting for the chance.

  Was this it, though, the cure to her sickly former life? Being used to lying wasn’t the same as revelling in it, and for all that she could pad out of their room in silence to steal Hegemony secrets, it didn’t mean the knot of terror went away. In a room with two doors, each leading to opposite extremes, she wanted to open neither.

  Was that old crone right? Am I rotten?

  It didn’t matter, she decided. Until Nebn could take her away, she would have to bury her doubts and endure.

  Be just another blank face, let the speaker posts wash their toneless mutterings over your head and never look the Factors in the eye.

  Karume, the Hegemony, it was such a fragile, cracked thing – she saw that now, but until she was away from it the knowledge needed to stay in the dark place behind her eyes.

  A chime from the wall chrono brought her back. She had to get ready for the evening. Kelbee glanced at the back of her hand; the skin was unmarked now but the memory remained of No-Face’s nails digging into her. Would she have to humour that strange woman and her boorish husband again tonight? As she put away her scrubbing brush, she resolved to be a gracious hostess, though when she thought of those painted talons pinning her flesh to the counter, she resolved that that would not happen again, not in her house. She’d continue to wear the wire Tani had given her, pour drinks, smile demurely. The perfect wife, the perfect liar.

  She halted at the bedroom door with a sharp intake of breath. The room had been trashed, her closet ransacked, the bed upended against the wall and smashed in, pieces of foam from the slashed mattress littering the floor. And in the corner, sat like a child with his legs crossed, the Lance Colonel, his head down as if asleep. She saw him cradling something, a grey disc-shaped box.

  Her blood ran with ice.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

  He lifted his head; his eyes were red. His uniform tunic, normally so neat, was torn open at the collar like he’d been struggling to breathe. He watched her for a quiet moment, until she wondered if he could see her at all.

  Was he drunk? If so, it was bad – he’d hit her before, but never trashed a room.

  ‘I received a letter today.’ His voice was steady, unslurred and eerie in its flatness.

  Not drunk. Something far worse. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

  ‘A letter from the clinic,’ he continued. ‘Some problem with samples, a breakage. They salvaged just enough to run the test, after a delay.’

  She began to back away from the doo
r. He stood, slowly, as if every motion was weighed down. He looked at the recorder in his hand, turned it over. ‘I came home. I was angry.’ He waved a hand at the chaos around him. On the floor by his feet lay a heap of her clothes; stark against the others was the yellow dress with flowers around the hem. It was inside out and the extra pouch she’d sewn in herself to conceal the device torn open.

  How could I have been so careless?

  The Lance Colonel fiddled with the disc-shaped device in his hand as if fascinated. He looked up at her, his bloodshot eyes spearing the distance between them.

  His voice was quiet murder. ‘Traitor.’

  She took another step backwards. He let the wire fall from his fingers. His face was resigned, almost reluctant, like he was performing a chore. He drew his pistol and fired.

  Her ears screamed from the sound of the gunshot but the pain on the side of her head told her she was alive and he’d missed. As she scrabbled backwards on her palms she saw the gaping hole the bullet had punched into the wall. He appeared at the bedroom door, gun up, his face a terrifying blank. He sighted again and she kicked a small end table – the dark wood skittered over the floor and banged into his shin. He swore and the second shot went wide, shattering the Seeker’s portrait as she scrabbled to get out of the way.

  There had to be something she could use; to shield herself, a weapon, anything. She ran for the kitchen but in her hurry tripped over a stool – she hit the counter with her ribs and fell to the floor, the breath knocked from her.

  The Lance Colonel was there, the same detached look on his face. She knew it was too late to move, nowhere to go. The pistol came up, hiding one half of his face as he took aim. His finger squeezed the trigger.

  There was a dull click.