Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (10 page)

Beth’s mind grew numb. She could only stare as a single weak thought echoed through her head:

James…

“You don’t have to do this, friend. I’m just passing through.” Alex spoke carefully, his hands raised, stepping slowly to one side.

“Stop moving. One more step and I’ll do you,” snarled the kid in front of him. Ruddy and stout with a face like a bruised piece of fruit and clothes that reeked of meat turned bad, the boy had emerged from a lean-to amidst the rubble like an eel slithering from its hole in some coral.

Alex scanned his surroundings without moving his head. They were alone so far as he could see. The kid barely looked nourished enough to hold the pigeon gun in his hands steady. But he also looked young enough and mean enough to be the kind who shot first and didn’t bother asking questions. Those kinds littered the North, remnants of families shattered in endless power struggles and massacres as the lords squabbled over their fiefdoms. This little town outside Nottingham was the typical place for them to take refuge.

Alex should have been on the lookout. In the back of his mind, he realised he had been, but he had been too focused on searching for it to register.

“I’m not looking for trouble. All I want is to be on my way.”

The kid’s eyes trained on his pack.

Alex flicked his head over his shoulder. “There’s nothing much in there, but it’s yours. Token of good faith. What do you say?”

“You got a horse. I saw it. And a gun. You think I’m stupid?”

“No.”

“Uh huh. Well I’m not. I’m smart. How else do you think I’m not dead like the others?”

“I’m sure you’re the smartest. That’s why I know you’re going to do the
smart
thing, and let me leave my pack, and be on my way.”

He made to step back, but the kid took a firmer grip on the pigeon gun, starting forwards. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

“Like I said, I don’t have much.” Alex kept his face even, but any hope of getting out of this easily was fading fast.

He’s either fresh out into the wilds, or he’s lost somebody who used to protect him. Damn.

He was pretty sure now that no matter what happened, the kid was liable to do something stupid.

“Stay there! Don’t you move.” The kid muttered under his breath, “I got you. I got you good. You’re mine.”

“That’s right, you got me. Congratulations. But like I said, I’m not looking for trouble—”

“Who were you calling for?” the kid said, his eyes narrowing.

Alex closed his mouth slowly and said nothing.

The kid’s face paled as his lips drew back from his gums. “I heard you. You were calling for somebody. But there’s nobody here but me.” His eyes widened. “That means you’re crazy. You’re nutty nut nuts, just like all the others. You’re here to kill me—”

“I’m not here to kill you,” Alex said tightly, preparing his legs to run.

Crap.

“Yes, you are. You’re crazy! Just like the others. They all tried to kill me, so I killed them first. I got them, I got them all good!” He laughed as tears sprung into his eyes. “I got them all,
pew pew
, all gone! Just like I’m going to get you, because you’re not going to get me, no, no, no, not little old me. I’m going to get you first, hehe!”

“I’m not going to hurt you!” Alex yelled, fists bunched, ready to dive. He would have one chance, assuming the kid missed.

He might not miss.

The kid’s eyes bugged at his raised voice. “That’s what they all said, but they lied. They all lied and they tried to kill me. But I got them ALL, like I’m going to get YOU.” He held the gun clumsily out in front of him like a cannon. “Die, die,
die!—
”

His finger never made it to the trigger. His skull seemed to blow out above his left eyebrow, spurting the grimy brick wall beside them with crimson and gristle. The pigeon gun fell to the gravel, and the kid crumpled into a shuddering pile, jerking and twitching.

Alex dropped his hands, blinking.

Behind the kid’s body, standing in the middle of the street, James Chadwick slowly lowered his rifle.

“You didn’t have to kill him,” Alex said, looking to the twitching carcass before him.

“He was going to shoot,” James said.

Alex frowned. “He was just a kid.”

James blinked. Not a trace of recognition registered on his face as though the two of them were utter strangers instead of brothers. “He was going to shoot.” He shook his head, balancing his rifle upon his shoulder. “Stop following me.”

He made to turn away, but Alex held out a hand. “Wait! Just… wait. Hear me out.”

James rounded on him. “There’s nothing to listen to. I don’t want to see your face, I don’t want your help, I don’t want you anywhere near me.”

“I’m sorry for what I did.”

“You’re a lot of things, Alex, but you’ve never been sorry, not for anything.”

Alex stepped over the kid’s body, desperate to hold James for a little while longer. Three days he had chased James south, away from Radden Moor, searching for him in the northern wilderness. In the endless hundreds of square miles between them and their home, finding one person had been a daunting task. His only hope had been to trust his gut. They both had to rest their horses, and Alex had most of their food. He knew James would have to scavenge from some bigger settlements on his way back.

It had paid off this once. But what had it cost him?

Almost his life.

And if he lost James now, he might never find him again. Now that James knew he was on his trail, he would probably make sure of it.

“Please, just listen to me.”

“There’s nothing you can say that I want to hear,” James said, backing away. His face was taut and emotionless, but Alex knew he was lying. It was written into his gaze. Alex knew those eyes better than anyone; he had looked into them every day since the End when James had been but a blue-faced baby in an abandoned crib.

“You know I’d never do anything to hurt you. You know that.”

“You don’t care about anything but your precious mission,” James spat. “That’s always the way of it.”

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.

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.