Me is here and that is all he feels. He runs ahead on firm bones genetically designed for war, bound for the grumbling guts of the great tank buried amidst a dungeon of tortured Souls. The Suns' hands come and attack him, shooting their simple rifles that can't compare to a QC parabolic, but nothing touches him; he turns their aim away with his thoughts. He runs until there is a door and beyond it a plain white room with a glass artificial womb in the middle, within which hangs a walnut-knot of pale brain-matter.
Me.
A woman stands at the tank ablaze with the full gaze of the Suns, pushing a set of shears down through the tank's oil to snip through his innermost core and erase him completely, but Ray Lags her an instant before the blades can slice into meat.
She drops.
Ray races to the womb, calling to Me through the bonds but Me doesn't know him now, doesn't have any kind of frame of reference to know anything anymore, but he is there still. They are brothers yet, one part each of the same chord, and that is enough to let Ray in.
Through the bonds Ray sucks the immense weight of Me out of this organic fragment; the weight is crushing, the whole mass of a living Soul burning his arms, and all he can do is tip Me into the nearest receptacle: the Lagged woman on the floor.
He drops to the metal floor, panting and bone-tired. It took everything he had. As the King's wasps buzz closer he gasps and struggles to hold onto his frazzled mind and watches as this new Me opens her eyes for the first time.
S. FAR
As the aether crackles and warps after Ray's leap, Far looks at the two of them, Doe and Mr. Ruin, and wonders at such a disparate pairing. In all his planning he hadn't expected this. He'd always expected to die himself, but perhaps now there is a better path…
"Where did he go?" Doe asks.
"To the Darain desert," Far answers. "To a suprarene tank in King Ruin's empire."
He has been watching so many Souls, here in the aether. He has learned more than any Soul before him. He has seen the golden shield wrapped around King Ruin's twin suns, and tested its power and understood it that means.
"And Me?" Doe seems almost angry. Far understands; she needs to know this if she is to do what must follow.
Far listens to the movement of the aether. Bonds shift as the world is remade, and Ray brings Me back from the brink. "Alive," he says. "In a new body. But the King knows. He's coming for them with everything he has. Thousands of marines, mindbombs, glassbombs and atomic missiles."
Doe nods and gives her hand. She knows what must be done, with Far's understanding backwashing through her. Even Mr. Ruin feels it and gives his hand too. They all understand that only one thing could produce enough power to overload a sun.
Far takes their hands and leaps. Stars race by either side, the aether sparkles like a moonlit lake and in seconds they close on the twin red suns at the center of the universe. The Suns. The golden shield around them shimmers and boils.
"The King knows we're here," Far says, slowing their rush to hang in aetheric orbit. He turns to Mr. Ruin. "Can you bring the shield down?"
Ruin grits his teeth. He is a new man, now, expanded by the new knowledge from Far; earned after waiting and watching the Suns from his perch in the aether. Now Mr. Ruins knows what he knows, that the shield is a barrier of memory, impregnable to all but those who know the King the best.
Far could never have predicted Mr. Ruin would be here.
"I can try," says Ruin. "I will try."
A long moment passes as Far looks at Ruin and Ruin looks at Far and a simple kind of communication passes between them.
"The chord will know," Far says.
At that Ruin flings himself toward the Suns.
Far follows with his mind. Sun flares snake out like whips but Ruin evades them, spraying out the last memories of his Soul as flak: snippets of grand parades past, of Napoleon on Elba and a baby found in the midst of a Court. The flares lash through them, tearing through the classroom of corpses and the misery of Loralena, through all Mr. Ruin's deepest prides and shames and a lifetime of bending his innocence to the destruction of others, until the blistering light of the Suns swallows him.
The golden shield flexes beneath the tiny speck he has become, and in the moment before the blast Far sees the beginning of it all.
In the deepmost halls of a grand Pharaoh's palace, a monster is born; a Siamese twin conjoined at the face, with eight newborn limbs splayed in an unbreakable embrace, a bloody pink-skinned spider curled in upon itself.
The mother screams and the father screams and the infants labor to breathe with no mouths or noses, only a faceless double head that turns purple as each twin sucks the air from its sibling's lungs and back again.
The midwife cuts a hole in their double cheek, a bloody mouth through which their first ragged breath comes and their first ragged scream peals out.
The Pharaoh sends men to smother this abomination in a shallow grave by the river, and the twins understand none of it; they only feel the cold of the raw water and the rough hands twisting them under. All they can do is hug each other and scream, and in their screaming they kill every Soul around them.
So it begins.
The deaths bring them succor and the succor brings them strength, and that strength pulls in others on the bonds. Wordlessly and thoughtlessly they enslave these Souls to serve their every infant need; fishermen and reed-harvesters, boatmen and their wives. Through these earliest interactions they learn that the suffering of others lessens the pain of their own deformity.
In time they grow strong. In the shadow of the Pharaoh's palace they ferment in the deaths of their slaves. They learn to suck down Souls with every bite better than any food crushed through the wound in their cheeks. They learn the contours of each other so well that they break through their own Solid Cores as a single fused chord, building a golden shell of love encircling them both.
The power of the aether dizzies them. The clarity is immeasurable. There is nothing beyond their command, now, except for one small thing.
The bridge will not open for them again.
This becomes their mission. After enslaving the Pharaoh they usher in a new era of atrocities, seeking the strength to reach the aether again. They build armies and fight, defeating Genghis Khan on the battlefields of Mongol, defeating Alexander across the Thracian divide, defeating Tut down the Nile delta.
Still the bridge remains closed to them.
They seek other ways, exploring all the many permutations of pain. Never have they been denied before, and with failure comes a souring of their rage at the world. Their Courts worsen and their atrocities grow greater until in a fit of congealed fury they trigger the godship tsunami that wipes out the world.
Billions die, and this provides them succor for a time. Perhaps they are truly happy. Enough have suffered, the world is in order and the Courts run clean.
Then a single man jacks the aetheric bridge.
His name is Ritry Goligh. He does not know what he has done.
They reach out.
In the midst of this rush of memories, Mr. Ruin kills himself.
Far feels the bayonet sink in, and the power of Ruin's bonds spills out like a glass bomb blown out from the Bathyscaphe's hull. Beneath this incredible sacrifice the golden shield cracks, fractures and blasts into the aether like bondless atoms loosed from a QC cannon.
Doe looks to Far with a knowing sadness in her eyes. Everything is clear now. They were always coming this way. The Suns are defenseless, and now it falls to her.
There is nothing to say. Far must survive to rebuild the chord. Doe alone can lead the way. They are both the same and made of the same stuff, except now Doe must die. Far leans in and kisses her tenderly on the cheek.
"Tell Ritry I love him," Doe says. "Tell Ray."
"I'll be them all," Far says, "and I'll never forget."
Doe smiles. "I like what you've become, Far." She ruffles his hair, then leaps.
Far watches as she soars like a bullet towa
rd the roiling blaze of the twin Suns. It reminds him of La falling down through the Death Gate to the Molten Core below, only this time there will be no coming back. Against the great red churn she becomes first a slim matchstick figure, then a tiny speck of dust then nothing at all.
"T-minus three," comes her crackly voice on blood-mic.
"Goodbye, Doe," Far says, "thank you."
No flares come to beat her back. The Suns is exhausted and more vulnerable than ever.
"Two," counts Doe, "one."
He feels it as she pushes in the bayonet, relinquishing all her bonds at once. The explosion is the most beautiful thing Far has ever seen, spreading outward like a new nebula to encompass the whole of the right sun in yellow and blue. There is no sound but the tsunami of power gushes over Far in pummeling waves, filling him with snatches of memory blown out in this final act of self-sacrifice.
Doe's life, Doe's love for Ray, Doe's hope for children of their own: all sacrificed for the chord.
Swiftly the lights dim to nothing. Where twin Suns had hung spinning red and brilliant in the center of all, now there is only one sun left, steadily tingeing to gray. King Ruin is dead, or soon will be.
Far opens a bridge in the aether and crosses into a new world.
T./21. ME
"Me?" Ray asks. He has a new voice and a new face, but somehow I know it is him. "Is it really you?"
I don't know.
I remember things but they are things I didn't do. I remember fighting through the mud of a Sunken World and blasting helicopters out of the sky with trebuchet and gunpowder-mined bodies, though I wasn't ever really there.
I was dying?
I look up and see the thing that I was, a grey nodule of brain hanging in an artificial womb. The chime of the womb's seven-tone pulse makes me want to weep. Who am I now?
Answers come with a rush of memories, of Spartan's Crag and breaking my Soul into parts, of Far's voyages in the aether and Doe, Ray, So, La and Ti punching through the icepack wall into the tsunami-struck Sunken World of Mr. Ruin's mind and…
Now Ray is here, looking at me in the world while the forces of King Ruin rush in toward us, and I look back into his real eyes, rooting myself in him. He is different somehow, no longer black with no piercings in his teeth, but he is my brother still. My lieutenant. My friend.
I touch my own face. It's not what I remember, but how could it be? That body is gone. I find a way to control my tongue, to control my lungs and use them both.
"I'm Me," I manage to say. "What happened?"
Ray's new eyes well up. "You almost died. I was sent to save you. We have to-"
He cannot finish because in that moment a supernova blows across the bonds and sweeps away our thoughts like a mindbomb, and at once I know it is Doe. Her death erupts within King Ruin and forces him into overload, crushing the attack underway against us in a shockwave that shakes every bond in existence.
Every hand under King Ruin's thick band of control drops.
It takes minutes to adjust. In the aftermath I see Ray is crying. I am crying too. I remember it all now; not only my own suffering but Far's and Ruin's and Doe's. These memories belong to us all now. I crawl over to Ray and we hold each other while the aftershocks ring out.
King Ruin is dead or dying. Doe is dead. Ruin is dead.
Time passes.
Everything is different. I stand and my reflection stares back at me from the glass of the artificial womb. I am now a woman.
"This is strange," I say, and my voice comes out higher. "It's-"
"You're beautiful," says Ray, one hand on my arm. I smile. It's enough for now.
The suprarene is silent around us; not a single Soul here was truly alive. We roam the decks past the King's hands where they fell, breathing still but vacant inside. They lie everywhere like shed skins. The tank is immense; seven decks tall and propelled on vast caterpillar tracks, equipped with drills for boring out the last, deepest pockets of tarsand oil.
Hundreds of hands are empty now.
Ray leads me to the corpse of Mr. Ruin. He lies in a large hall, in an EMR machine with the bone cap of his skull lifted off and wires sutured to his brain. So the King kept Mr. Ruin's Sunken World open until the end. Eighty EMR bays surround him, wherein lie eighty dead hands; the marines who hunted for my chord in the White Tower.
In other rooms we find experiments, perhaps candidates for the King's parade. They are horrific, of course, these abominations; broken minds and bodies that have been tormented and twisted for decades and more. There is a room filled with a vast sponge of amorphous meat, containing a dozen bloated Souls stitched flesh-to-flesh and mind-to-mind and locked in constant, raging insanity. There is a glass menagerie where prisoners without eyelids were forced to stare only into the eyes of each other, endlessly, unable to ever look away. There is a terrible parade of those who'd failed to jack the bridge before me, all trapped in recycled memories of their humiliation before the King Ruin's, riding with his many pikes jostling up in their guts.
Those that cannot be saved, I Lag. The rest we set free and attempt to heal.
In the conning tower of the suprarene on the top deck we assess the threat.
"Nothing incoming," Ray says, reading his screens. "All signs show the King is silent and his hands are cowed."
"For now," I say. For now we have this time. I look at Ray. "I'd like to go outside."
He smiles; sad, gentle, ready. "Me too. I've never seen a real sky."
Together we walk up past the King's empty hands. I let my mind float on a sea of nothing; for the first time in decades this almighty tank is free of fear. There is pain still, but it is the pain of a bruise after all the blows have fallen. Now the healing can begin. I feel a burgeoning hopefulness welling up, because now things will get better.
We emerge into the light of a blinding sun high in an azure sky. We blink against the brightness and shade our eyes. Half-crescent copper dunes spread around us like a storm-tossed ocean of gold, here and there broken by the dark fingers of ravaged buildings rising through the shifting, wind-blow sands.
I close my eyes and luxuriate in the touch of the sun. 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 Darain deserts; the last time I imagined what this would feel like.
Loralena.
With that word another wave of memories floods in, of Loralena and my children and what they have lost now too. Their Ritry Goligh is gone, broken into six of his seven constituent parts. We were Loralena's husband, we were father to her children, but what are we now?
I don't know.
I look at Ray and know he feels the same. Together we stand on the hot black metal of the suprarene's upper deck in the bright of the desert sun, trying to hold onto the sense of hope. Good things can come from all this. They have to.
Soon enough the chord returns.
We lay out four hands for them, empty vessels waiting for motive control. Far is first, born from the aether, and with him come the traces of So, La, and Ti, each to a body of their own.
But no Doe.
One by one these newly forged tones open their eyes. I kneel and put my hands on them as though these are the firing pods and this is the Bathyscaphe, but they are not and this isn't our ship. This is the world, and we will each find our own role within it.
La and Ti weep and lurch into an embrace. So staggers to Ray and holds him tight, sobbing against his neck. I look at the young man Far has become and he looks back at me. Together we have done this, and changed everything. I think back to the depths of King Ruin's torment, when it was only Far's voice inside that kept me alive.
"I couldn't have done it without you," I tell him.
"Nor I without you," he says. "You were my anchor. The aether would have swallowed me whole."
I pull him into an embrace. He is taller than me, now.
"This is going to take some getting used to," I say, and he laughs.
"It's all going to take getting used to," he says, looking around at the six of us, embodied here in the world.
U./22. ME
Down broken bond-paths, riding our suprarene across the desert for days on end, we find the shell of King Ruin in a stalled tank amidst desolate dunes a thousand miles north. We approach cautiously but no mindbombs fall, no black-clad marines burst out with EMR-helmets buzzing to fight us.
I board first, alone, leaving the rest of the chord behind. I find all his hands here dead. Their drained and dehydrated bodies lie like husks of corn in the corridors and control rooms. The helicopters are all gone. The bonds leading away have been Lagged.
Deep in the bowels of the massive tank I find his remnant Sun. It is a withered old brown body with the front half of its head cut away. Inside the skull the bone has been polished smooth. This half-twin hangs in a dried-up artificial womb, nestled into a foam frame that would once have allowed it to gaze endlessly, hand in hand, into the mind of its twin.
Now that twin is gone. There is dried blood everywhere. It would have been an emergency procedure, I think, to sever the two. King Ruin will never be the same again; never be as strong.
The body that remains is female. It is hard to imagine that this strange, malformed, sad creature committed the atrocities I have seen. She killed so many for so long, and for what? To end up here like this, broken in half.
On the wall a name is painted in old blood.
RITRY GOLIGH
Perhaps it is a warning. More likely it is a pledge. But there are other things I have to worry about now, now that the overwhelming shadow of their father is gone.
King Ruin's brood.
I remember everything that was shared through the chord. I know who these people are now, how they are brutal, callous and cruel. King Ruin raised them to be that way. And there are so many.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 39