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

before, on trash-fires of plastic and leaves, wrapped in old Calico newsprint. He sets these elaborate traps to catch them, all triggers and string and crutch points. I think he fought in the Arctic too, but we don't talk about it. 
    Like the crulls, that ill-gained fusion of crows and gulls, we were never meant for life outside of a skirmish. But still the skirmishes ended, the victors rose up, and this is our world now.
    I sit beside him sometimes and we chew through the newsprint, biting into crull flesh. It is sour and gamey, but there's something to be found in eating it together. We both know it tastes bad. He may be utterly crazy, but how far off am I from that?
    Seeing me at my window, he raises one wing of charred feathers. I raise my hand like a salute. I'd prefer if he didn't shout so much at night, but I can't begrudge him that. He could come in here and kill me in my sleep if he wanted, but he doesn't, so I have to be grateful for small mercies.
    There's no real law out here, we could all do what we want, but we don't. None of us care enough, I think. Plus there's Don Zachary, watching over us all, a monopoly on crime. It's all a kind of Lag.
    Enough.
    One last look at Mei-An and I pull on my pants, shirt, jacket. Carrolla will be waiting, and I want to taste the Arcloberry, fruit of my sacrifices, one more time, and maybe this time hold onto it.
     
     
    My node tells me Carrolla is down-skulk, so I set out. It's warm out despite being some time after three, and I shrug off my polarskin jacket, down to jeans and a slink shirt. I nod to the marine through the park, and he nods back.
    The main alley is raucous now, packed with a horde of neo-Armoricans regaling each other back and forth with whores and touts pressed between their bulging bellies and bristly beards. The smell of frying chicken grease hangs on the salty air. One of the neo-Armoricans lifts up Eldra, a busty whore with great muscle tone, and starts to dry-hump her in the street.
    His friends all laugh. She spots me and waves, then tugs herself free and gives the big idiot a slap. Everybody laughs some more.
    The alley will chew them up and spit them out soon enough, like a digestive tract through which they all have to pass, another round of nutrition with everybody eating off everybody. Whatever freighting dues they've earned will be cut down to size through liquor, sex, drugs, food, and a bed to sleep it off in, and we'll all go on our way sated for another day.
    The alley winks out as I pass by, bound for the off-wall walk. I could go across the skulks, it would be cheaper but would take forever, weaving in and out of all those slums, alleys, each like the one behind. It would make a mockery of where I live, to see all those places much the same as the last. Plus I might have to jump between the skulk barrel-edges, if there weren't bridges in place.
    Or swim.
    At the alley top the wall looms overhead like the starkly cloven wall of the Arctic icepack. I join a line of other skulk revelers waiting to cross the low-slung rope-bridge of old canoe paddles that leads to the wall's base. Some of these people are so drunk they'd sink if I only tipped them over the edge.  
    "3," the bridge guard says to a man arguing about the last jetstream winners. "Pay or get off."
    The guy fumbles and pays. We all take a step closer as he wobbles over the bridge, to join the flow of people walking the off-wall walk.
    This close and looking up at the wall's sheer gray-white bulk, it's so apparent how transient we all are. I wonder for the hundredth time if this was how all the world used to feel, living in the shadow of the Arctic ice, knowing that one day soon it would shear and everything would change.
    Walking the off-wall way I pass a dozen skulks on my right, some of them like mine, others open and serving as docking harbors for freighters, some as warehouses, some as floating blocks of hutches. My node beeps in my pocket when I go past Carrolla.
    I find him on