Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3)

by Manners, Harry

Fol became translucent, and with one gust of the wind his body lost its form and faded away to nothing. Only his voice remained, a ringing tenor inside Norman’s head: “The Web takes no sides.”

  Then they were alone with the ancient monolith, the great plains, and the whistling wind.

  Robert was the first to recover. “Come on, we’re wasting time. They’re waiting.” He set off at a striding pace. They turned their backs on the stones from the long-forgotten folds of prehistory and headed east.

  “If we live through this, I’m going to need therapy,” Richard said.

  *

  James Chadwick held an arm up high, and the army of the North grew still. Filling every square foot of the prairies and forests as far back as the distant hills, they watched as Jason and a few burly men worked on a set of gates set into the fenced compound in front of them. The military base lay sprawled over what had once been an airfield, now concealed under forty years of storm damage and infiltrating sapling groves. Between, rusted and faded by the elements but still intact, a sprawling mass of barracks and outbuildings thrust above the fledgling forest. They had taken this place months ago and secured it until the time was right.

  Right here lay true Old World sorcery; what the Alliance stood no chance against.

  Charlie watched from close at James’s flank, chewing on his lip. Absently, he caressed his stomach; his guts ached constantly. Marching with this godforsaken army was turning him inside out, piece by piece. It wasn’t just the poisonous hatred spewing off it like black exhaust; all around them the sky—the very air—seemed unnaturally darkened, as though they brought with them a cloud of shadow, blotting out the sun and casting shadow over the earth. Then when they grew still and bedded for the night, the cold would come. It was hardly noticeable most of the time, and so he guessed it was always there, made unnoticeable during the day by their progress south. But when darkness fell, something gnawed at him: a cold so deep that he expected to look down and see that he had become a block of ice.

  We carry that too. Whatever brings the darkness also brings the cold, and we’re taking it with us wherever we go, Charlie thought.

  Every time he thought of New Canterbury and those who awaited them, his fists bunched with fresh anger. But in these brief interludes when all grew still and those around him ceased to be part of that great lumbering beast and became people once more, with faces turned black with dirt and lives turned blacker by grief and hatred, he couldn’t quite believe any of it was happening. That people could be wrought to such mindless hate shocked him anew, and for a disorienting while he couldn’t suppress a vague hissing voice deep inside him:

  What if you’re on the wrong side?

  It didn’t matter. He had made his choice. Even if he wanted to leave, he would be cut down—he felt eyes on him even now, as though some sensed his faltering allegiance.

  While the army watched and waited, the burly men and Jason disappeared inside the base and returned a minute later carrying something black and heavy between them. They set it down with a metallic clang and stepped aside. Charlie took in the sight of a black length of tubing with a set of legs acting as a stable base, allowing the tubing to be pivoted on an axis. The word mortar filtered up from somewhere lost in childhood memory, and the knot in his guts tightened.

  Charlie felt a wave of understanding rush by him, propagating through the crowd. Whether from intuition or stories told by elders or from books read long ago, the army came to understand what the black tube represented: devastation, fire, and death, far beyond the means of their bare hands.

  “How many?” Charlie said.

  James turned to him, and it was like looking into pits so deep that entire worlds could have lain hidden inside. “Many,” he said.

  Without a word spoken, the army started forwards through the gates.

  XIII

  “It’s up to four now.” Latif shook his head in amazement, sitting back from the bench. “Only a few hours ago, it was three. Yesterday, two.” His every nerve fired, willing him to run laps around the lab. With great effort he channelled that vitality through his hands, working fervently, making notes and pulling in as many people from the camp as he could—anybody with the vaguest hint of technical knowledge. If the walls fell and only a few survived, he was going to be damn sure that at least some of them knew about this.

  By now he was pretty sure there was nothing special about this radio. It had simply been a matter of timing. This was the first one they had found in working order, and nobody had bothered fixing the Old World wrecks in so long that it was quite possible nobody in Canary Wharf had listened to the Blanket in over a year.

  Lincoln had been by his side almost constantly. The old goat was no vegetable on any day, but now he seemed born anew—a man who had once advised governments and overseen the construction of nuclear submarines reduced to childish glee.

  “The possibilities!” he cried repeatedly, striding about the workshop with his cane clacking over the floor and his hands in constant motion, gesticulating in wild sweeps and thrusts. “Think of what this means,” he snarled into the faces of newcomers, his lazy eye wild and bulbous in its socket. “We stand here in this moment of metamorphosis.”

  “Stop bothering people, you old fool,” Latif said at last when Lincoln crossed the workshop to double-check yet again, casting people aside with his cane. “It’s not going to suddenly change.”

  “But a mistake could totally reverse—”

  “Enough!” Latif laid his hands on Lincoln’s shoulders, laughing despite his incredulity. “Look, we both sat here, didn’t we? You and me, like when I was a nipper? We sat and took it all apart and put it back together, swept the whole band?”

  “We did,” Lincoln hissed, his wrinkled lips churning and working as he considered. “We did indeed. But it is so unbelievable…”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And it is true. Like I said, four open frequencies now.” He swallowed, relishing the fact that he had the opportunity to add, “This one’s clear.”

  Lincoln, on the verge of returning to his striding about the room, squawked like an exotic bird. “Clear?”

  “Yes. We’re getting no broadcast. Not the Blanket, not a voice, not music, just… white noise.”

  The few snoopers who remained in the workshop seemed to sense Lincoln’s burgeoning outburst from the way his crooked frame straightened over a period of several seconds. They shuffled out while Lincoln strode forwards, taut as steel cable, and laid a hand on the radio—so superstitious a gesture that Latif frowned. “What?”

  Lincoln huffed quietly. “For so long I worked on these wretched things in the Early Years. It was different then; I still hoped things could go back to the way they were—half the time I was convinced it was all a dream. How many times I thought I was going insane, picking through each frequency, listening to that same wail… hoping there might be one sliver…” He broke off, his lip trembling.

  Latif waited, said nothing, just watched Lincoln take his hand off the radio. “I’m sorry, my boy. I don’t think I’ll ever believe it, not quite. It’s your time to do the real detective work.”

  “Fine,” Latif said. He tried a smile but found there was too much adrenaline in his system; his face felt paralysed.

  Evelyn appeared in the doorway, an imperious shadow draped in lengths of shawl, as much a part of the encampment as the walls themselves. “Progress?” she said.

  “You have no idea,” Latif said.

  “Enlighten me.” She stepped into the workroom and closed the door behind her, cutting off the noise from outside. In her doing so, Latif caught a guarded air about her, as though she were ready to voice disapproval.

  A sliver of guilt stirred inside him. So focused had his attention on the radio been that he had scarcely given a thought to what was going on outside; while he had enjoyed an escape to a timeless world of exciting discovery, the others had remained out there, tending to those wounded in the siege, making ready what they could
for the coming storm—twiddling their fingers and waiting for bullets to start flying.

  His head threatened to crack in two, like a boiling engine head doused in cold water. To make this discovery now, when they might be snuffed out any moment. How could providence be so cruel?

  “Mr Hadad?” Evelyn stood at his shoulder, her calculated stare trained upon the radio.

  “We’re picking up three transmissions, now. The Scottish distress signal—still on a loop; some kind of music that seems to be mixed on automatic, I think perhaps some old radio station server that somehow survived; and an emergency broadcast message, also on a loop. The latter two have opened up in just the past few hours.”

  “Opened up? You mean to say you discovered them? How could you have overlooked them all this time?”

  Lincoln shook his head. “Mark my words: in my years I have scoured every part of the spectrum time and time again. These broadcasts were not there before.”

  “And these new ones weren’t there yesterday,” added Latif.

  She glowered accusingly at the radio. “You’re sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  “I trust very little in this world, Mr Hadad. I need you to stop working on this curiosity this minute. Our scouts in the northern counties have returned to report an army marching on New Canterbury. I’m afraid we don’t have long left before…” She cleared her throat. “We haven’t long left. I need you to spend whatever time we have remaining on strengthening our defences.”

  Latif gaped. “There’s nothing left to do. I promise you.”

  “Still, it would be time better spent, just in case something occurs to you.”

  Lincoln shook his head. “No, he will stay.”

  Evelyn rounded on him. “I know what this means to you, Oliver. I really do. But we can’t afford this distraction, not now.”

  “This distraction might save us!” Latif cried.

  She blinked and turned a cold eye on him. “Explain.”

  Latif blushed. Astonished at his own audacity, he reached out and grasped her shawl. “Madame, the Blanket really is breaking. If we wait, other frequencies will open up. I’m sure of it.”

  Lincoln cut across him, looking her in the eye, ignoring her troubled frown. “We have just discovered another. It is open.”

  “You mean…?” Evelyn’s face had fallen slack.

  “We may be able to transmit,” Lincoln said. He too now clutched at Evelyn’s shawl, and a youthful smile spread over his face. “Evvie, we may be able to call for help.”

  Silence reigned for a few moments, so potent that Latif could hear every footstep up on the catwalks outside. He watched Evelyn’s face go through the same transformations that his own had: shock, rising hope, relief, then a troubled glitter that threatened to dash it all.

  “Yes,” he said, “it relies on somebody else out there listening.”

  Her lips had become firm and unyielding once more. “Nobody has bothered fixing radios in some time, Mr Hadad. You know this as well as I.”

  “Nobody here. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who haven’t given up. A few scholars, experimentalists, tinkerers.”

  “You underestimate how very fortunate you are to have the resources of the Alliance at your disposal,” she said distantly. “Out there, it is about survival and little else… Nobody will have bothered for this long.”

  “They will! I know somebody will, somewhere.”

  “Mr Hadad, we don’t have time for this.”

  He burst out, “Well we damn well better make time! We have a chance here. We can’t let it slip through our fingers.”

  She shook her head. “Waste of time,” she muttered.

  Lincoln sighed. “Evvie, listen to me. Somebody put this radio down in that vault under the airport, shielded it somehow from the End. Somebody knew they would need it, perhaps because they knew that eventually the airwaves would be free again.”

  “We can never know what they knew,” she hissed.

  “No. We can never know. But the fact remains: somebody foresaw the Blanket fracturing. And that means perhaps others knew.” He swallowed, his turkey neck throbbing.

  Evelyn pulled herself free. “Very well. Stay in here, do your work.” She blinked harshly. “I hope you’re right, Mr Hadad.”

  “So do I,” he said with a meek grimace.

  She left in a whirl of shawl, and the workshop door clanged shut behind her.

  Lincoln sat beside Latif, and their combined gaze rested on the lump of wood and metal until all the world seemed to fade once more.

  “Do you really think somebody might hear us?” Latif said.

  Lincoln sketched busily, drawing out plans for a broadcast antenna. “I have never been a man of faith,” he said quietly, then ever so briefly met Latif’s eye, “but there comes a first time in one’s life for everything.”

  *

  As dusk fell, Alexander gathered up the refugees’ leavings from his lawn, bundled them under a tarp, and loaded them onto a waggon. Slowly, savouring the labour, he set off down the street, hauling it from the city under the great flocks of wheeling pigeons. He was fully sober now, but the wave of embarrassment he’d expected hadn’t come. What Allie had said had stuck: all he could do was play the hand he’d been dealt.

  After they had cleaned him up and forced some soup into him, he had gathered his will and set out for the cathedral. It had taken every scrap of self-respect he had left to walk through those doors and face the people inside; his people, those he had lifted from their former lives and brought to this place, moulded to service his dream of a better world. Those who now stood to be torn to pieces because of what he had done.

  In his mind’s eye they had swarmed him, cut him down where he stood in the doorway, and paraded his body through the streets.

  Instead, they had only stared as they had always stared, with the same acquiescent nods, even from the depths of their prisons of perpetual terror. Walking along the parapet had felt like a mile-long hike, but by the time he had reached Agatha standing by her podium, he felt something like his old self again.

  “You’re back,” she said quietly.

  “I’ve been back for a while.”

  “No. That wasn’t you. Now you’re back.”

  He had taken her into his arms, not caring if she fought him off in front of all those people—God knew he deserved it. “I’ve done such terrible things, Aggie,” he muttered. “I’ve put us all here.”

  She pulled him to arm’s length, and all the memories they shared throbbed between them. “You did what nobody else could,” she said. “For better or worse. But don’t think for a secon’ it wasn’t what we all wanted. You’ve got the gift of the gab, Alex, but you always forgot one thing: people aren’t stupid. They ain’t your flock, some rabble set up to follow you into darkness. We’re all people, and we all believe. We all did this. An’ we could never repay the debt we owe you, not in ten thousand years.”

  Alexander glanced to the majesty of the cathedral, its high ceilings and ornate carvings, everything of the Old World they stood to lose. “We’re about to lose everything. Look at them… They’re so afraid.”

  All those pale faces, looking furtively at the two robed figures by the podium, peeking from hundreds of nests amongst the pews.

  So many faces…

  Her hand on his elbow had brought his eyes back to her, and her stony glare cut into him. “You think tha’ matters? You think bein’ afraid of the end means the journey wasn’t worth it? If we were goin’ to do it all over again, knowing we’d end up here, I’d do it all the same way. ’Cause even getting the chance to live that dream was worth everything. We did what I never thought we could: we stood up for what we believed in.” She punched him on the arm. “We gave it a shot.”

  “I could have done it better.”

  “Stop that blabber. You look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t do more than any other person could have done.” She steered him to face the podium. “Now, one
last time, be the one we need, tell us a story.”

  Alexander had turned to the cathedral then, to all those rising from the pews; the remnants of their order. He had let words come, any words. What emerged had indeed been a story, the first to come to mind: the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland.

  Presently he hauled the wagon across the city limits and towards the hills. He mouthed the words of that story now, a story he had read to a little boy with emerald eyes, so long ago. He reached a clearing in the grass, and he began unloading the refugees’ things, laying them out where he knew they would find them if they still lurked in the trees somewhere close by. As he worked, the warm glow the story had brought fizzled out.

  The truth was he could have done so much better. None of them, not even Lucian, knew the truth of what he had done. Why James would never stop, not even when they were all dead; why he wouldn’t halt until every last scrim of the Old World had been scoured from the Earth.

  Alexander laid everything out neatly and returned to the city, dragging the empty waggon in his wake, already missing the burn in his shoulders. Pain felt good, felt right. He needed to pay at least some penance before the end.

  I’ll settle for a sleepless night, he thought as he returned home, and the sun set on his city for what he knew, quite simply knew, was the last time.

  XIV

  Norman clutched his coat tighter around him, curled in a pile of hay. It was warm enough, but he couldn’t shake the chill in his chest, ever-present as a shard of ice stuck through his heart. They had walked all day until their feet had been worn raw, across a landscape still smouldering with wreckage. They avoided London, skirting its edge for fear of remnant splinter groups of James’s army or hostile refugees hiding out in the dense city sprawl; but they had been close, so very close, that the tower had been visible from across the Thames, lighting up all of Canary Wharf, one beacon ablaze in the dark.

  Would it still shine when the sun fell tomorrow?