Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (39 page)

Alex tripped clumsily up a flight of stairs, pushed by an overzealous guard at his back. Any thought of resistance was kept in check by the will to see this through. Beaten or not, he wouldn’t cower. Ahead of him, James and the boy, Charlie, ascended to the top and vanished from sight.

As he too stepped from the stairwell, the guards manhandled him into an office much like the countless others in the skyscraper, around twenty storeys off the ground. From here they had a clear view across the Isle of Dogs and Canary Wharf. The wall-height windows were blacked, weathered to opaqueness by the howling winds and driving rain. A shorter intermediate building cut off any wayward onlookers from street level. The air was heavy about this place, the panic-inducing atmosphere of a predator’s den.

“This is where you watched us, during the siege.”

James said nothing, heading towards a small slit excised in the glass to look out. In his reflection Alexander saw a blazing, mad certainty—an unstoppable drive to finish a job half-completed. If Alexander could have looked him in the face just then, he was sure he would have seen fire in his eyes.

“Yes,” Charlie said beside him, gripping his arm and leading him towards the centre of the room, which had been cleared of stationery and desks, leaving only their ghostly impressions in the dust.

Alexander grunted as he was forced down onto his knees, and his bindings were cut. Massaging his wrists, he addressed Charlie from the corner of his mouth: “You could let me go, Charlie. I know you don’t want this.”

A stinging slap arced across his face. Charlie hissed, “Shut up!”

Alexander cupped his cheek and rose up slowly, lowering his voice still further so not even the other guards could hear. “You’re not like them. There’s still time to stop this.”

Charlie crouched behind him and made a show of fixing Alexander’s kneeling position, yanking the threads of his bindings off his arms. “There was, once upon a time. You remember, don’t you? When your friends trampled me half to death, and then you left your mutt to put a bullet in my head.”

“Lucian was never going to kill you.”

“Don’t lie to me. You might be lauded as some great sage by peasants from here to Penzance, but I don’t give a crap. I see you: you’re nothing. So don’t even bother. I’ve picked my side—and I picked right!”

“Then why are your hands shaking, Charlie?”

Charlie froze, then rose sharply. “Make sure he doesn’t move!” he barked and made his way towards James.

Alexander watched him adjust his limping stance from hesitance to a sheen of familiarity, but it was surface level.

He may be my only chance
, Alexander thought.
He’s not yet too far gone. I may not fool him, but he doesn’t fool me, either: he’s chosen the wrong side, and he knows it. He’s trapped.

Charlie drew level with James and said, “What now?”

“We watch.” Alexander realised that James hadn’t really been looking out into the city at all, but rather into the office’s reflection: right at Alexander and Charlie.

He knows. Of course he knows. How could he not?

But if that was so, why keep a chief lieutenant so close when they could stab you in the back at any moment?

The answer clicked in Alexander’s mind. Even after all this time, he could read James’s mind like a book—a mind he had formed with his own hands.

The boy is why I’m here. I’ve already seen one city burn; another won’t add anything. The boy’s the final demonstration. That’s how he’s going to finish me: a battle of wills.

“We should kill him now,” Charlie said.

“No. We watch.”

“This fight is done. They don’t stand a chance. We don’t even have to stay; nothing’s going to stop them now.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to watch our plans come to fruition, to see the job done,” James said.

Charlie looked over his shoulder, but this time Alexander didn’t see anger or hate in his gaze, but barely veiled fear. “We should kill him.”

James returned his attention to the tower. “We have messengers returning. I want their report.”

Charlie hovered on his mangy leg, sweeping an uncertain look about the room as though some angel would leap forth and save him, then staggered from the room and descended the stairs.

Alexander, James, and the complement of guards watched the storm rage over Canary Wharf in strained silence. Contrasted with their long walk through the reverberating streets, everything seemed hauntingly quiet.

“When all this is done, what are you going to do with the people marching under your sigil?” Alexander said.

James replied after a beat. “I never did anything with anybody. I let them choose.”

“Is that what you call burning towns and kidnapping an entire country? Burn or convert? That’s a choice?”

James didn’t rise to it, his voice measured. “People have to live with the consequences of their actions.”

“What did any of them ever do to you? It was me who wronged you.”

“It’s not what they did that matters, but what they didn’t. This island let itself get swept up in your sweet narrative and turned its back on the truth.”

“The Alliance spreads nowhere near across the country!”

“For once, you undersell yourself. Your name is known in every hamlet and hole in the mud across all the land, and the sickness you bring as though bearing gifts has eaten into the very fabric of this world. If we don’t cure it now, we will never know freedom.”

“All I ever tried to do was help—”

“No, Alex. Enough. All you ever did was what you wanted. I can’t let that decide our fate.”

Alexander couldn’t contain himself any longer, his voice rising to stentorian roar. “So your answer is to cull us like cattle? Because of something I did—I, alone? They deserve to die because of me?”

James whirled from the window and crossed the floor in a few bounding strides, his balaclava falling away and his head descending to Alexander’s height. “You deserve to die. You, and only you. But that wouldn’t solve anything, and it won’t change the past.”

Alexander muttered, “Neither will genocide.”

James’s gaze flickered with something sick and, perhaps, not quite of this world. “The genocide of the innocent is part of what this world is now. I’ve seen it. The End changed things, forever. A new peace. But you and your meddling, everything I helped you do and everything you’ve done since, threatens that new balance—something we have to put right before it’s too late.”

He stepped around to Alexander’s side and crouched beside him, sweeping his arm skywards, above the towers, to the vortex of blackness hanging over London, arcing down as the maw of some great beast descends upon its prey. “See balance restored before your eyes.”

The cold in Alexander’s limbs throbbed, pulled to the forefront of his awareness. He realised James cared nothing for beliefs, ways of being or justice—not even about the wrongs he had done or those who had succumbed to the mission’s fervour.

This was about the End.

He was always different, always had power. Something’s got ahold of him, working through him… something bad.

“What are you doing, James?” he hissed.

James gripped his shoulder. “I’m putting things as they should have been from the start, Alex. There’s only one scratch of truth to be had: we were never supposed to survive the End. We’re nothing but shadows in a world that doesn’t belong to us.”

Alexander couldn’t break his gaze from the black storm clouds. “What is it?”

James whispered into his ear, “What you always taught me to reach for: our destiny.”

Marek dived from the souvenir store just as it was overcome by a flood of men and women bearing sharpened farming implements and kitchen knives. Tucking and rolling, he discarded his rifle with a curse and managed to curtail a headlong tumble with his elbow.

He glimpsed a bloody raw patch upon his forearm but didn’t feel a thing, already pushing to his feet and pulling his hunting knife from its sheath. Before he could lament how small it looked compared to the blades crushing limbs and hacking flesh all around him, he swept forwards.

He slashed across the hand of a middle-aged woman bearing down with a woodsman’s axe, and she screamed, jerking back, shocked from her murderous reverie. For a moment, a person stood before him, her mask of fear pulled back. Then she was gone again as she snarled and swung wildly.

Marek knew he had won. The axe handle was as long as her torso, and she had nowhere near enough mass to counteract the head’s momentum. Like the rest of her comrades, her skin hung in loose folds from her bones. He was surprised she had strength enough to stand.

Marek was small, and his weapon was but a thimble to hers, but he had speed on his side. Untrained and top-heavy, the woman toppled forwards, and he sidestepped with ease, not letting himself move until it was just right, and cut deep across her knuckles.

She shrieked and the axe clattered to the floor. The horror written into her face almost stopped Marek, but he had been waiting for it—for the humanity, for the fear, for the begging—and before she could utter more than a screeching plea, he put the knife down behind her collarbone.

The woman dropped without ceremony, and behind her the square was revealed in full, turned into a riotous mass of warring, screaming bodies. Now that their guns were useless, they had fought their way from cover through sheer force of will.

If they had stayed put, those firing from above would have picked them off one by one. Being in the open wouldn’t save them—they were outnumbered twenty to one—but they would take more with them. Their numbers wilted by the moment, yet despite everything being thrown at them, they were holding their ground.

Marek ran, never stopping, forever darting back and forth on the balls of his feet between struggling dog piles. Desperate enemies, swinging oversized makeshift weapons, never stood a chance; all he had to do was wait until their own weight committed them to a strike doomed to miss, and then he would go in from the side, make a quick vital plunge with the knife, and move on. In this manner he weaved away from the front lines and into the meat of the army. It was here he knew he could do the most damage, where those behind the front lines were concentrating on pushing forwards, not expecting to find one of their targets alone. Slashing, plunging, jabbing, Marek made dozens of small wounds almost unnoticed; wounds that would have his targets bleed out in a minute or two.

His luck finally ran out when he neared the square’s centre. Voices rang out, arms pointing in his wake, lifting his veil of anonymity. He did the only thing there was to do: kept moving. If he stopped for an instant they would be on him, and once his avenue of escape was cut off he would be just another corpse.

I need a bigger weapon
, he thought, and at once began scouring the ground for something with greater reach. He couldn’t run forever, and once he stopped, the knife wouldn’t do.

His trained eye picked out glints of blade, broken rifle butts, all half-buried under bloody bodies or crumpled into uselessness.

The enemy ranks milled like starlings to cut off his escape. His run was done. From everywhere came bloodcurdling cries: “Get him!”

Scrabbling from the hot stinking masses, Marek leaped into the rusted carcass of a London bus, kicking back in his wake until his boot met somebody’s jaw with a sharp crack. Then he was in slippery darkness amidst mulched leaf litter and rotted upholstery, writhing for the stairs. He stepped over a bleached skeleton and seized at a glinting, long blade. Pulling it up in his wake, he bounded up the stairs and emerged onto the open-topped roof.

Backing away from the stairs, he looked at the blade he had retrieved and his heart sank: a three-foot-long antique sabre with a ruby inset in the hilt.

A bloody sword?
He thought incredulously.
Seriously?

Before his dismay could manifest, shadow fell over the stairs, and he swung down, cleaving flesh as a scream was cut short.

Around him the battle raged, all colour drained by the black sky and the driving rain. He knew he couldn’t keep this up much longer, for his arms already burned and every move he made was less coordinated. After all his long years of training to keep the upper hand, he was limited by the very same thing that made these people such weak fodder: hunger.

They were weak, emaciated by the ravages of the long winter. This was less a war than a vague scramble; leagues of walking skeletons, barely standing, eyes huge and faces gaunt. This would be over soon, one way or another.

Marek swung again and met another body. Again, again, again, each time a harsh hacking motion without thought or finesse. If he could get enough, he could block the stairs. He just hoped the snipers weren’t still watching.

His arms were so weak that lifting the sabre became an almost elastic motion, his arm trembling. There was no fighting it, but he had almost blocked the stairwell.

Come on. One more, one more.

Then from the heavens, a low whistling rose above the storm. For an instant everything froze as heads turned upwards and the whistling became a high shrieking whine.

Marek just had time to perceive the bus erupting under him, unzipping across its long axis like tissue paper. Then he was cartwheeling through the air and intense heat seared his back. Half-blinded, deafened by a percussive rush of air, all sense of orientation vanished, bar the vague sensation of spinning and falling.

He hit the ground rolling end over end, skittering in a scree of decay. Stones cut at his face, and a barked shin wailed as he cartwheeled to a stop. The world turned over ceaselessly and were it not for the solid ground under him, he would have been sure he was still flying.

The ringing dissipated just enough for a single thought to run through his mind:
move
.

Willing his senses to clear, he rolled up onto his knees. He overshot and tumbled onto his other side but sent himself back to his knees before he could settle, holding his head in his hands and smacking at his temples. Fighting dizziness and tasting blood, he groped until he found the sabre and slogged to his feet.