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

skulk 65, a bar called the Aeternum at the end of an alley much like our own. Inside it's decorated like a subglacic, all metal bolts and hatches cut from boats sunk beside the wall. He's sitting at a bar made of five periscopes laid flat, shouting blearily at a man in a rubber diving suit, oxygen-tanks on his back. The bar is about half-full, and I slide into a space at Carrolla's side.
    "…it's business," he's shouting at the diver. "You know? 10 for 10, 20 for a dozen." 
    I tap him on the shoulder. "What did you order?"
    He turns and gives me a big grin. "Rit!" To the bartender, a lanky young Germanic-type, blonde hair down to his shoulders in a t-shirt with a 'hump'n'bump' written across the front, he says, "Arcloberry vodka, straight up."
    The Germanic busies himself with ice, shot-glasses, and a bottle of pale purple liquor.
    "Glad you made it," Carrolla slurs, squeezes my shoulder. He's red-eyed and ready to pass out. I look to the diver.
    "Velour curtains," the diver says to me. I've dealt with him before I know, though his name escapes me. White beard, though he can't be more than 40. I smithed a lot of guys like him in the Arctic, so though I've never actually donned a breathing tank once, I remember diving hundreds of times. He sighs. "I've told him, there's not a recent enough wreck for that."
    "Or velvet!" Carrolla adds. "Anything plush."
    The diver shakes his head. "Take the carpet or I'm done with you."
    "I can't put carpet on the walls! How will that look?"
    The barman serves, and I take Carrolla's shot-glass and hit the bar-periscope in front of him with it. The hollow metal bongs satisfyingly. "Just drink. I'll sort it out."
    He smiles widely. "Would you? There's a dear."
    He downs the liquor and smacks his lips. I beckon the diver over and talk into his ear while palming him 100. "Get it from the through-market. Tell him you dredged it."
    The diver looks down at the notes in his hand, chuckles. "If you say so."
    I turn back to Carrolla, who's looking at me with a hangdog expression. "I heard that."
    I laugh. I don't know what it is about him, but he always cheers me up. "You won't remember in the morning."
    "I will! It's supposed to be a sea-themed boudoir, Rit, dammit. If it's not jetsam, what is it? Newly spun? I could be in Calico for that!"
    I laugh. "In what way is velour authentic for a subglacic? You think we had rotating massage beds in our bedrooms too?"
    He laughs. "Like a subglacic but better," he says, tapping me on the shoulder. Then he looks about the bar.
    "Somebody fuck me now!" he shouts at the people there. "You, how about you?" He's focused in on a meta-Filippine, and as he peels out of his chair he gives me a wink. "Try your juice."
    She receives him well, which many girls do. He musses with her hair, starts explaining the bar-boudoir he's building on 49 while rubbing at her hand, and I tune them out.
    My own pale purple Arcloberry shot sits before me. I try to summon some memory of drinking it before, but nothing of the content comes, only the frame holding it in place. I know I had a memory of drinking the juicebox, but the flavor is gone.
    I hold up the heavy glass, smell it. Alcohol and a sandy twang, kind of like raspberry mixed with red chilis.
    Arcloberry and the others were just side-effects of the pack-ice melting, all those seeds blown from the dustbowls of millennia ago trapped in the ice like hidden messages. When all the surface ice thawed and the blue giants rose up from the depths, they were just frosting on the hydrates and oil in the under-crust.
    I swig it, slosh it around my mouth. A spicy berry with a kick, this message from a pre-Jurassic era. Is this what dinosaurs ate? I slot the taste into the space where the missing memory was, and rub at the reddening in my eyes.   
    3:45 by my node, and hours to go before I'll sleep. I can't go back until Mei-An has left anyway. Carrolla's ditched me, but that's fine. There's a bar here, and numbers burning a hole in my