Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (23 page)

James moved to strike him, but the fire in Lucian’s eyes stilled him. He shook, jaw clenched, an inch from Lucian’s face. “She’s more than that. Her and the Moon. There are good people there, they don’t deserve Malverston, his men, or us. Especially us.”

“It’s not about what they deserve,” Alex said. “It never was and never will be. It’s us or them. The world will fall on the side of light or dark. If we don’t do everything we can to load the dice. It’ll all be gone, and we’ll never get it back.”

“Don’t. Just don’t,” James spat. “I’ve had enough of your bullshit.”

“The game hasn’t changed!” Alex strode forwards, a livid fire melting the neutral mask he had been hiding behind. “You think that one life could change the stakes?”

“Not this, Alex. Not Beth!” James roared, raising both fists to his forehead.

“Anybody,” Alex yelled. “Anybody it takes. If it comes to it, we all have to be ready to sacrifice, or we’ll never get anywhere. That’s the bare truth of it.”

“She never did anything but protect her family, and now she’s going to pay for what we’ve done.”

“We don’t know that.”

“If it’s not, why did the others go back as well? Why, if not to use this to take Malverston out when he’ll be too focused on us to see them coming.” He paused, sucking bull-like through his nostrils.

The cobbled square rang with fresh silence. A few pigeons cooed from the farmhouse rooftop.

Had it really been a week ago that they had ridden from this place, on some crazy mission to the far north? It seemed a million years ago. If only he could turn back the clock just that much, go back to that moment he and Beth had stood in the alley between the house and the stables, where she had begged him not to leave.

He’d never let her go.

Oh God, please just let me go back.

“We could use this,” Lucian said.

James blinked. “What?”

“We can use it.” He swept a glance around at them all. “If they’ve gone back to throw Malverston out, and Malverston’s looking to use your girl to get to us, lure us into a trap or whatever, then a shitstorm is about to kick off in Newquay’s Moon. We could use it.”

“That’s not our way,” Alex said. “That’s the whole point.”

Oliver cleared his throat. “Alex, I think the time for politics is done.”

Alex said nothing.

“It’s too dangerous,” Agatha said. “It’ll only ge’ us into more bother. We’ll lose people.”

James barely heard the others, looking deep into Lucian’s eyes. An understanding had formed between them, something that only they could understand: no matter what happened, people were going to die today; and no matter what, James was going to be one of the ones doing the killing, whether the Alliance was behind him or not. He had to win Oliver and Agatha over now, or they would slip through his fingers. “We go, all of us, right now. If we get there in time, we can turn the tables in our favour.”

Silence. He sensed Alex watching carefully from the corner of his eye, but he kept his gaze fixed on Oliver and Agatha.

“They’ll be waiting for us,” Oliver said. “That is the only thing of which we
can
be sure.”

“Yes,” James said, “they will. Say we don’t go, Malverston’s trap goes untripped, but those men take him while his back is turned anyway. They’ll kill half the people in the Moon just to make a point. What do you think they’ll do then, when they realise that we’re still out there, a threat that knows all their secrets?”

For a heart-stopping handful of moments, nobody in the square moved. Then Lucian stepped around to James’s side.

James’s knees threatened to buckle with gratitude, but he kept his eyes trained on the others, heart racing, praying Alex wouldn’t work his magic and tear it all down; he would take Alex’s place one day, that was the whole point of his great destiny, but Alex possessed an unparalleled capacity for bullshit and manipulation.

James knew that if he wanted, Alex could turn them all around on a dime. They would go nowhere, and James would go it alone.

I need him.
The thought arrived ready formed and incontrovertible in his mind.
They’ll follow him anywhere. If we’re going to save Beth, I need him.

Hating himself, knowing it was going back on everything he had thought and felt over the long ride home, he said, “Please, Alex. If you ever cared about me at all, please.”

Alex looked into him; not at him, but into him. They had worked for this their entire lives, building up to this moment. Not once had James thought in all that time that he would beg Alex not for reason, but mercy.

He knows it: if he does this, he gets what he wants. I can see it in his eyes: the cheering masses in Newquay’s Moon, shouting his name when we save them.

“Okay,” Alex said.

James managed to keep himself from sagging to the ground. He turned to Oliver and Agatha and the Creeks over what seemed like a thousand years. “I’m not going to force any of you to do anything,” he said. “I’m not hiding anything. If you come, you’re risking everything.”

Their reticence endured for only a moment. They stepped up one by one, touching their heads to his.

“You kids always make such a frickin’ mess,” Agatha muttered.

“Thank you. Thank you…”

“We’ll prepare immediately,” Oliver said. He pointed sharply to James and Alex. “Get some rest, both of you. You are going to need everything you have.”

Lucian squeezed James’s arm. “We’ll get her,” he muttered so low the others wouldn’t hear.

“An hour,” Agatha said.

They disbanded, heading for the kitchen and the stables, leaving James with Alex and the Creeks. Shell-shocked, James turned to Norman, who still stood frozen before him, wide-eyed. “Sorry, Norman,” he said weakly. Could a person ever feel so very defeated? “I really am.”

Norman blinked, uncomprehending. “Go on back to your mum and dad. This isn’t kid’s stuff.”

“I’m not a kid,” Norman uttered. “I can help!”

James smiled weakly and nodded to the doorway, where Hector and Helen still loomed, mute and sheepish. “Go on, now. We’ll be back soon.”

Norman looked forlorn, his eyes darting between James and Alex.

Then a voice rose up, so unfamiliarly strong that James didn’t quite recognise it. Hector emerged from the doorway, Helen clutched at his side. “We’re coming,” he said.

James and Alex shook their heads simultaneously.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Alex said.

They shrivelled, but with what seemed like every scrap of courage within them, they stood their ground, clutching Norman’s head between them. “I know we’re not like you. We never were. But we’re part of this Alliance, for better or worse. If you all go and something happens, we could never forget it,” Hector said.

“We’re coming with you,” Helen muttered.

Norman seemed awed by his parents, his gaze fixed upon them. His big, round eyes drifted from them to James, then to Alex. “Please,” he muttered.

James prepared to let them down gently, when Alex did the unexpected: “All right, you can come. But you keep your son safe. You stay back,” he said.

Hector nodded firmly. Tight-lipped and victorious as though quite unable to believe what they had done, the trio retreated inside.

James caught the way Alex looked at Norman, something he had never been able to hide: like the kid was a bag of useless nothing; he wasn’t interested in the mission, and so he was no good in the Messiah’s eyes. Just dead weight.

Is that why he’s letting them come: hoping that they’ll get a few scars and toughen up? Even now, he’s looking for soldiers, for pawns.

Everything that had been festering inside him the past few days returned with a vengeance, acid so vicious he felt it might burn through his stomach and bore a hole into the ground. The Creeks led their child inside to make their own preparations, and James was left alone with Alexander in the square. They shared a long, stony look, two men apart upon opposite sides of a fresh line in the earth, something neither of them would have ever dreamed of.

“We’ll get her back, James. We can undo this.”

James burned that moment into his retinas.

Whatever happens, this is going to be the moment I look back on, because this is the last time we could have changed the course of everything.

“If she dies…” James couldn’t finish. He sighed, his heart ripped and warped by two inescapable truths: that Beth had been put into harm’s way by the both of them; and that whether they saved her or not, there was no coming back from this. His great destiny had never seemed so fanciful and childish, so very far away.

He strode for his room, leaving Alex behind him, a single poisonous thought blossoming behind his eyes:
If she dies, I will take everything you’ve built apart, piece by piece. And I’ll make you watch
.

Alexander woke to the song of larks outside his window and gripped his mattress as liquid fear seemed to seep into his body from the bed sheets. Immobilised, he could only stare about at his room, crushed by stark reality. To live a life of speeches and great journeys in the unknown, cast a romantic sheen over everything, turned fear into bravery and dimmed the sharpness of things to a rosy tint. But to be here, in the cold stillness of early morning, with everybody asleep and water dripping from a pipe nearby; an old man alone in his bed, everything was suddenly too sharp, too pedestrian and so very real.

Outside, the larks’ song fought under a blanket of pigeon cooing. People rose for their breakfast, and somewhere out there in the wilds, people just like them were coming to tear them apart.

For a moment Alexander considered sending a prayer. What good would it do? He had never seen it save anybody. A lot of people had died praying in front of him.

Feeling so weak he wondered whether he might already be a walking corpse, he threw back the sheets. Splashing some water over his face from the basin, he looked at himself in the mirror and realised anew just how old he had become, how all the long years of struggle and work really had gone by, leaving him with a haggard ruin of a body. Clipping his beard, brushing his hair, he re-familiarised himself with his face’s every wrinkle and divot, knowing each one had been hard earned—and had probably meant the end for somebody, somewhere.

He dressed slowly, intent to feel every moment, every slip of fabric against his skin, the carpet between his toes. This was what he had fought for, after all: to live in a home and enjoy running water and heated pipes, to have books on the shelves and linen on the bed. If this was to be the end of that way of life forever, he was going to savour it, one last time.

Descending the stairs took more effort than he could bear. His feet seemed encased in cement, and a childish cowardice inside him willed him to grip the picture and door frames as he passed. He made breakfast and ate in silence. Usually he read while he ate; in this manner he had slowly worked through the many thousands of volumes of his library. This morning he could only stare at them all, sat in his armchair and chewing bread made tasteless by cotton mouth.

Had he ever really appreciated the notion that it might all be for nothing—that he himself would certainly die before the Old World returned in magisterial splendour? In his daily speeches and plans he had stuck doggedly to a realist stoicism; but in his dreams, he saw the lights returning, lighting up the old cities, and planes taking to the skies once more.

Did I ever really accept this life, or did I only hide away inside what was left of it?

He wished it was a question he couldn’t answer, but the truth was he could: that was exactly what he had done. That was why all this had fallen down around him, why—in the end—it would all come to nothing. He had forgotten the bare reality of his fellow men, chasing street lights that would never again be lit and telephones that would never again trill.

Alexander toured his home in the dead-quiet of early morning, touching things. He touched everything.

People had come here from across the country not long ago. Live-in scholars in the vein of Professor DeGray who boarded upstairs in the many rooms, poring over his library and the books from the city’s vaults, excavating tidbits of know-how and nuggets of wisdom like archaeologists, rediscovering once great voices from across the sands of time. For that was what the Old World had truly become: already it was the stuff of legend, and to their children’s children it was little more than a bedtime story, myth and whimsy to explain away the hulking metallic carcasses that littered their world of encroaching forests.

Now those scholars were gone, never to return. Where were they now, those who had been the sole conduits to the world’s origin for many fledgling communities? Dead in ditches, burned upon pyres, or marching under the sigil of a pigeon?

By the time the first sounds of the city stirring began, Alexander had exhausted the many rooms and pokey crannies and retreated back to his study to stand by the fireside, wallowing in yet more nostalgic slime: all the times he sat here with Norman expounding a rhetoric that had never quite landed, raised a second heir—and what? Found him inadequate?

No. Norman had greatness in him, but he would never be what Alexander had before in James.