Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (11 page)

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 definitely 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.

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 be 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.

But he didn’t fall. She caught him.

Now it was her hand wrapped around his, all the more vice-like. She said nothing, nor did he; the two of them merely stared at one another, and the endless times they saved one another’s lives echoed between them. Then Lincoln crumpled onto her, a single gasp escaping his lips. He clutched at her shawl, and felt her fingers run through his wispy shock of white hair.

“Don’t leave me, not here, not alone,” he hissed. “Please.”

Her voice had regained its sharp and measured edge, yet through it a note of softness twinkled. “I’m sorry.”

They remained there like that for a time, glad for the contact. Lincoln took hold of himself, rising from her chest with all the dignity he could muster.

“They’re all gone, aren’t they?” she said.

He drew a long sigh. “Soon,” he said, “soon we will all be gone.”

The survivors of the End had grown elderly, even those who had been young and fresh when the Old World departed—even Alexander.

“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Evelyn said. “After all we’ve given, the lives that were sacrificed.”

“It was always going to escalate.”

“But to end like this…”

“End? No, this is not the end.” He took her hand and pressed it between both of his. “Our greatest achievement was always in showing just how inextinguishable the flame of civilisation really is. Even if we all fall here, somewhere and some time, there will be others. And they will know what we did here.”

She gave him a thin and watery smile. “Tell me it was worth it, Oliver,” she said. “Tell me I lived a good life.”

He brought her hand gently to his lips. “My lady,” he whispered. “There was never a better life lived.”

Then it was him taking her into his arms. Clumsy rattling footsteps arrived from the depths of the tower, accompanied by exhausted panting. Lincoln didn’t turn from his embrace with Evelyn as somebody arrived in the doorway behind them. From the little wheezing sounds, he recognised Latif Hadad.

That boy knows more about machines than his fellow man. I forgot to add tact to our syllabus.

“Yes?” he said, injecting gruffness into his voice.