Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Read online

  Alex kept walking, but with every step forwards he took, James took one back. “That’s not true. I love you. I love all of you.”

  “Then why would you not tell me that Malverston took her!” James roared, all the hurt suddenly bare upon his face.

  “You needed to go to Radden. I don’t know why, but you had to. It was going to eat away at you until you did.”

  “Distract me, you mean. You wanted me focused on Newquay’s Moon. You needed all your pawns in order!”

  Alex sighed helplessly. “We’re so close, James. So close to getting Malverston on side.”

  “That’s all you ever think about. How much ground we can gain, how many people we can get on side. This bloody destiny.”

  “It is our destiny!” Alex bellowed, stabbing a finger towards the ground.

  James paused. “No matter what it takes, right? What’s a few lives in the grand scheme of things? You figured I’d get over her, keep on trucking, and we’d be one happy family once Malverston had cut her to pieces and fed her to his dogs.”

  Alex bunched his fists, shaking. “We’re so close,” he hissed. “Don’t do this.”

  James’s lip trembled, and he gave a wordless yell. “Stay away from me. Don’t look for me again.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  James bawled, “I’m going to get her back, Alex!”

  Then he was gone, ignoring Alex’s protests. He vanished into the rubble, running on feet made agile by a lifetime in the wilds, defter than Alex’s Old World clumsiness could ever match. Alex yelled himself raw looking in the following hour, but there was no sign of James. Cursing, kicking every stray stone in his path, he returned to his horse and kept on heading south.

  *

  When James heard Alex calling his name over the next few days, he couldn’t tell on which occasions he was really hearing him, and which were merely echoes in his head.

  Wrapped in his travelling blanket in upper-floor windows, his stomach growling constantly and his horse exhausted nearby, he glowered at the beast until total darkness took him, cursing it for having to rest. Every minute that slipped by was one minute more that Beth was in the clutches of that fat slimeball of a mayor.

  He couldn’t risk making a fire. These places had just enough food lying around for him to scrape by, but that meant they were also riddled with scavengers and hermits. That meant he was further limited to daylight hours, as he couldn’t even light a lantern. As soon as the sun got low, he had to stop and hunker down until dawn.

  I’ll go mad if this goes on any longer.

  The thought ran on a loop in his head, driving a thorn into his brain. His jaw ached from grating his teeth.

  Alongside that thought was something all the more maddening: an echo of the last thing he had said to Beth when he had left to ride north, when she had begged him to stay: I will be back. They’re never going to bother you again. I promise.

  Those words tortured him each time they replayed, over and over. Then when finally he thought they might have grown quiet for the night and sleep might take him, Alex’s voice rose up, wandering the streets looking for him, probably waking every madman for a mile.

  This was the first time they had been apart this long in all of James’s life. They had read together, hunted together, learnt together. The mission of the Alliance had been born by their hands.

  But the son of a bitch had just let James carry on north. He had been willing to let Beth die. James had made sacrifices all his life for the mission; he would fight for the Old World until the end of his days. But he would never sit by and let people just die. Nothing was worth that.

  He’ll stop. Soon enough, he’ll stop.

  But as more days passed, and the north gave way to familiar southern lands, Alex didn’t stop. He kept on calling, his voice hoarse and cracked but unending, searching for James amidst the world’s broken ruins.

  VI

  Latif Hadad bent low in musty darkness, breath caught between his teeth. Canary Wharf, nexus of the southern Alliance, warbled beyond the walls of his workshop, but he had become deaf to it; the entirety of his attention focused on his work. He had no sense of how long he had been in preternatural gloom, hunched upon his stool. His face was inches from the HAM radio upon the workbench, which lay partially dismantled atop blueprint paper before him, teased apart with infinite delicacy, each component outlined in white and labelled. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to it.

  Every now and then he’d look at his meticulousness afresh, through a stranger’s eyes, and snort in derision. Anybody would think he was a rank amateur, documenting such a primitive piece of Old World technology with such precision.

  I mean, bloody hell, it’s just a radio. They were using these things almost a hundred and fifty years ago.

  But he hadn’t left anything to chance. One wire dropped and he might break whatever fragile balance kept it working. There would be hell to pay with Lincoln if he broke the only piece of operational radio equipment in the known world.

  Because the truth was they had no idea why this one worked. Latif had little time for hand-wavey mystical nonsense; he was loathe to listen to some of the End-day theories people touted. Alien abduction, social experiment, AI simulation gone mad, the Rapture. The nut-bags loved their little seances and get-togethers to chat about how the End had been mankind’s punishment for its evils, recompense for trespasses—departing from God’s path, losing itself in runaway technology, burning the rainforests, whatever.

  That kind of drivel was why they were in this mess, a mantra that left sense thin on the ground. The masses of the North had lapped it up in the Early Years, spurning the Old World and its wicked ways.

  So here they were, having slid to the brink of a bloody dark age, with only a few pockets in the southern Alliance to keep the wheels of civilisation spinning.

  Latif grunted. “What shite,” he muttered under his breath.

  There was a logical explanation for everything. There always was.

  There was no such thing as magic. That meant there was a good reason why this radio had picked up a signal, and not a single other had done so in forty years. He just had to find it.

  So why in all hell can’t I find it?

  The others had all but given up. At first it had been a whole team of them poring over the little wooden box, tinkering with feverish excitement, certain the answers were just around the corner. But the very simplicity of the radio had been their enthusiasm’s undoing. To every angle of inspection, every reference from manuals and shreds of documentation, it was standard. Nothing special, not a single screw departing from factory specs.

  “You’re in there somewhere,” he muttered accusingly, glaring at the radio. “I’m coming for you, you little bastard. You can’t hide from me.”

  Sighing heavily, he put the components back in place, his nimble spidery fingers moving automatically. He had done it so many times there was no conscious effort. Instead he watched his hands working, looking for a sign, some clue of something out of the ordinary. He didn’t blink until the radio stood before him, whole yet again.

  Nothing.

  His eyes watered, his head ached.

  How long since I last slept? Doesn’t matter. I’m almost there. I have to be.

  He wouldn’t be beaten by a lump of wires and solder.

  Sighing, he took up balls of cotton wool, stuffed them in his ears, and flicked the power switch. The room filled with an ethereal screech, a thousand nails on as many chalkboards, clawing through the wool into his skull. Frowning against the thrumming behind his forehead, squinting through eyes that had looked upon nothing else in at least twenty straight hours, he twiddled the dials.

  The frequencies swept by. The same constant ring, unchanging, threaded not even by static. It was as though some great cosmic banshee broadcast its death throes across the entire spectrum.

  Latif shook his head—

  Maybe it’ll break if I stare enough and spill its secrets… I definitel
y need to get some sleep.

  —then twiddled the dial to the frequency now burned forever into his memory; one also etched in biro onto his arm and scribbled on every dog-eared piece of paper nearby. One of the others had even carved it into one of the workstations in a fit of despair.

  His fingers spread away from the dial as the needle touched the sweet spot, and the wailing died immediately, replaced by something Latif would never tire of hearing: a human voice, scratchy and broken and garbled; the Scottish distress call that had been their one ray of hope.

  How many times had he listened to this same looped message? He’d lost count.

  But still his lips twitched into a helpless smile. The people before the End hadn’t known what they had. To think somebody might be out there now, projecting their voice across half a world, to reach his ear. Thousands had succumbed to the famine this year, utterly at the mercy of the elements. They were but beasts, once again.

  But this was something tangible, to show they had been greater once.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is magic in this world.

  He listened to the whole message: the rhythm a familiar friend. The Scots really had survived, and it seemed they had forged a similar vestige of the Old World in the far north of the British Isles. They were looking for others, for help, against a scourge laying waste to every settlement. The very same force imminent upon Canary Wharf, somewhere out there.

  Norman Creek and over a dozen others had ridden north to find them, while the rest of them made ready. They had heard nothing since. And the skies grew darker.

  Latif sat up straighter, shaken from his own private world, the walls of his workshop expanding out. His stomach tightened and fizzed.

  It was all really happening. There were people coming to kill them. At first it had been people struggling to survive, fighting over scraps of food. Hunger drove people to do terrible things; there were no judgements to be made when it came to such desperation.

  But the famine had passed. Things were getting back to normal.

  Yet still they came. They burned, killed, raped, and took what slaves they would, leaving a swathe of destruction in their wake. This wasn’t a fight for survival anymore. The last remnants of the Old World were being exterminated.

  That’s why you’re down here, he thought. It’s all too much. And you’re a tinkerer, not a fighter. There’s nothing more you can do.

  Still, to think he sat here and played with his toys while what remained of their order scrabbled outside.

  “This sucks,” he muttered to his workshop.

  His voice went unanswered. He cursed, twiddling the dial, cutting off the message. It gave way to that same unbroken screech. Latif didn’t bother putting the earbuds back in, welcoming the pain, letting it wash over his tired mind and blanket out all the doubt and worry and fear.

  Unthinking oblivion was better. He closed his eyes, turning the dial as the screech continued to throb and thrum. Through his hand, it seemed magnified tenfold, his entire body resonating. The strange feeling carried him off, away from the world, and his sleep-deprived mind went gladly. He floated in a dark void where there was only sensation, the air in his lungs. The waves lapped at him like water, and he floated upon them, free of all this terrible reality.

  All the while his hand twiddled the dial, back and forth, back and forth, making little corrections for which there seemed no rhyme or reason.

  In his half-unconscious state, he frowned.

  Am I looking for something?

  It certainly seemed so. He was tempted to shake himself out of it and get back to work, but curiosity kept him sitting with eyes closed, letting his hand run on autopilot. For a brief moment it seemed the screech itself directed him, working him like a puppet. Then the screech died again.

  He released the dial as a voice once again emerged from the speakers.

  What are the chances of finding the Scots’ channel blind? he thought. Must be muscle memory.

  Then the voice spoke again, and his eyes flew open. It was different. Loud, jocular, and upbeat. Riddled with static and hopelessly garbled, he caught only the tone, yet there was no mistaking it: it couldn’t have been further from the Scottish plea.

  As though to reinforce the point, the voice rang off with a digitised swish, and in its place, music filtered out into the dusty old workshop.

  He looked at the dial and saw it wasn’t the same frequency. The needle lay fixed a few megahertz lower than the magic number scrawled on his arm.

  No. It can’t be.

  Shaking, terrified he was about to destroy some miraculous fluke, he turned the dial slightly, grating his teeth this time when the screech cut in. He paused, took a breath, and turned the dial back with a prayer on his lips.

  The scream died. Music again.

  God. What’s happening? What did I do?

  An immediate answer from elsewhere in his mind: Does it matter?

  Latif stumbled from the stool, his legs weak and clumsy from sitting too long. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he ambled towards the door. “The old man is going to crap a goat when he hears this,” he muttered.

  VII

  Canary Wharf heaved with activity. The walls, over fifteen feet high and composed of reinforced concrete, had held back any would-be attackers for almost a decade. Cutting off the Isle of Dogs on one side, with the Thames flanking the other, and coupled with a contingent of armed guards upon its many catwalks, the encampment had become a fortress. Safe as any place could be after the End.

  Had been. Before the siege.

  “Nobody feels safe,” Evelyn Fisher muttered, her smoker’s lips crinkling into a pained grimace. An icicle of a woman, straight-backed and regal, with eyes that could skewer any seasoned stoic, she had shrivelled to a wisp. Wrapped in her purple shawl, which had for so long swept in her wake and served to frame her in billowing theatricality, she seemed to be wilting. She crossed her arms over her chest, gnarled fingers clutching at her shoulders as she looked through the tower’s plate glass windows into the courtyard below.

  Sir Oliver ‘Lincoln’ Farringdon could only watch, both hands planted atop his walking stick. Everything had been said, every mote of encouragement, every spin or shimmer of light poking through the dark sludge of their prospects. But it hadn’t been enough. Hollowed and depleted, the stores of optimism about the camp had bled dry.

  “We’re all just waiting,” Evelyn said.

  Below, Marek Johnson barked orders at a few nursing volunteers who had erected wash basins in the path of auxiliary power lines. Stunted and muscular, his tireless figure milled back and forth without pause. There was seldom anything left to do, yet Marek had maintained an air of tautness throughout, putting on a show, keeping everybody on edge, for they would have no warning of an attack.

  Lincoln bristled. Despite a combined age pushing sixteen decades, he bet he and Evelyn could take any world-weary youth.

  No. Such nonsense will not stand. We will not be beaten. I refuse to believe there’s nothing to be said. And to hear dear Evie say such things, such drivel…

  Ten storeys up in One Canada Square, a great sparkling jewel that was visible for thirty miles, they could see the whole camp. The figures below moved food stores inside, erected what barricades they could, stocked piles of ammunition close to the walls. They worked tirelessly, yet every move they made and every breath they took seemed charged with hopeless lethargy.

  Lincoln had seen it plenty of times in the wilds. When he, Alexander, and the others had been forging the fledgling Alliance, every other sign of habitation they had come across had been laced with it, like a sickness. Like the world was fading, winding down like a bob coming to a stop.

  “I’ve failed them,” Evelyn said hollowly. In her reflection, Lincoln watched her blink slowly as though she were in fact far, far away.

  I will not be among those our children look back on one day and say, “They were our undoing, through their inaction and cowardice. They chose not to b
e brave.” I will not, Lincoln thought.

  “Get a good grip of yourself, woman!” he barked.

  Inwardly, he prepared to cower, but he held his stance as she turned from the window. Yet all he saw was a slab of meat staring back at him, the seat of a great power vacated and bare. No fight. Just a stare.

  “No,” he snarled, striding forwards and throwing his walking stick aside. “I will not stand for this. Of all things, I will not allow it! Not you, Evie.” He gripped her shoulders, shook her as he bore down upon her with all the fire he could muster. “We have to be strong. All this time we’ve stood against everything and built all we have, because we’ve stood together. Nothing has changed. We can be strong. We can. We must!”

  Her eyelids fluttered. A glimmer of something stirring behind her glazed eyes.

  He shook her again. “I will not let you turn your back on yourself. I can’t do this alone.”

  She spoke as though from the bottom of a well. “There’s too many, Lincoln…”

  He recoiled, stung. “Evie, don’t do this. Of all the horrors of this blasted End, I will not let it take you from me as well.” His voice cracked at the last word, and his frail old heart skipped a beat.

  “Stop it,” she muttered.

  “No, I can’t,” he said, holding her vice-like between his fingers. He shook her still harder. The younger man in him bade him desist; they were too old for this kind of savagery. But still he shook her and, biting his lip and bearing a fit of self-hatred, he withdrew one hand and swept it sharply across her face—a face once taut and radiant with searing intent, turned pale and translucent by the long hard years. “Wake up!”

  A moment passed in which he glimpsed wide eyes, awake and furious, and then stars erupted in his head, and his cheek sang with pain. His hat tumbled from his head, and the left flank of his sideburns smarted. Wheeling away from her, thrown by Evelyn’s incredible wiry strength, he almost fell without his stick.