Read Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) for Free Online

line and my feet lift off the crusted black sublavic nose. It should be the captain who goes down with the ship, I think, not the engineer. Goodbye Ti, goodbye the Bathyscaphe.
    As we rise into the air in a pressed-together black-suited clump, I watch my sublavic sink. Perhaps I am crying, as I watch it enfold slowly into the burning waves. Magma flows into the hole I broke through the ablative brick and mortar wall, and I can only hope the end for Ti will be quick. Probably she will choke on exhaust though, as the magma burns up all the air. Then she will bake, then she will crumple as the walls bend like chewing gum, and then she will burn.
    The Bathyscaphe is swallowed, and gone.
    I look up, my body nudging against Far and So as we rise. The ragged black bulk of the Solid Core begins to grow larger. This is why we have come.
     

 
     
    CARROLLA B
     
     
    Afterward, she sleeps. I lie awake, watching the red glow of the alarm clock cycle through the numbers available to it, shadows through the room lilting slightly with every digit. Through the glass I see the moon, can just make out the half-circle encampment around the man in the moon's left eye.
    Water projects, built in a bygone era, before the global killer tsunami swept the old order away. I've heard the solar reservoirs up there are as big as the great wall of Sino-Rusk, but what does that matter, now that the bridge between us is long cut off? Still I imagine the last few tiny people up there, perhaps still alive, starting their own civilization built out of craters and moondust, and wonder if their lives would have any more weight than my own.
    I told her the skulks are a Lag, but that's not really true, because the Lag is complete, and the skulks never are, even after they get battered by a tsunami wave. Something always remains, and much of the rest is still there to salvaged, brought back from the bay floor to be re-used.
    The Lag is complete. It is the lost space a graysmith goes to when he loses himself in another mind, memories shearing away like ablative layers on a sublavic in the Molten Core, the weight of them lost forever.
    It happens if we go too deep, or dive too much, with every dive stealing a little more until there's nothing left inside. It's the nature of the work, why they go in shielded in Calico, and why what I do is banned to the skulks and effectively illegal everywhere else.
    Nothing's illegal out here.
    Mei-An nestles against my shoulder now, sleepy in the cotton sheets, as she should be. Her body's chemicals are doing what they ought, our skinship transmitting information too complex to fake.
    I could do another job beside graysmithing. Lying there in the dark with a beautiful girl at my side, I know I could do something else, and perhaps I'd be happy at it too. This is all so perverse, to stay here and live like this, to boast of what I'm doing like it's a Lag, when all the Lag has ever brought me is pain and loss.
    My friends are all gone, under the Lag, but somehow staying here I still feel close to them, like they're only one remove away. If I got another job over in Calico, and started a new life, then I'd be really leaving them behind, and I can't do that. I lost so many in the Arctic, and what could I do for their minds as the life ran out of them? There was no tsunami wall big enough to stop the flow of blood. And family? Of course I have no family.
    This is where I belong, glimpsing only fragments of what a real life might be like, through the memories of a girl like Mei-An. She may be fake, but she's real fake. I'm not even that, because I wasn't ever wanted, and never wanted anything I didn't lose along the way.
    I rise to my feet, these maudlin thoughts too much even for me. Standing naked at the glass wall, I hear shouting rise from outside like breakers on a wave, impersonal as a dog barking. The old homeless marine in the blue-tarp park. I hear him a lot, cursing out the crulls in New Anglais. I've seen him cooking them