Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (18 page)

“They’ll live,” Sarah said.

“Some of them, anyway. At least they have a chance, now,” Allie said.

Alexander looked after the departed crowd, shaking his head. “I tried. I really thought I could convince them. The way they looked at me…” He turned to them. “How could you ever have followed a fool like me?”

Heather reached for him and looked carefully into his eyes. Her lip twitched disapprovingly. “You’re drunk.”

He blinked. “I sobered up.”

A wry smile touched her lips. “It’s hard to convince people to do anything if you’ve been on the booze.”

“I’m fine. It wasn’t that… I just… They didn’t listen to me.” He hung his head. “I couldn’t even save them. If you hadn’t…”

Heather’s hand wrapped gently around the crook of his elbow. “They’re lost. They came because going somewhere was all they had left, not because they wanted anything from you. Come on, you’re in a state. You were out there a long time, wandering around the wilds. We need to get some food into you.”

“I’m fine.” He tried to turn for home, but her grip on him was vice-like.

“Don’t even think about it. I might have hung the scrubs up for good, but I can still give doctor’s orders.” She and Allie began pulling him towards the street.

Sarah walked ahead of them, rifle swinging before her. “We need you strong,” she said.

“You don’t need me. All I’ve done is bring death on you all.”

“Don’t ever say that,” she said, turning to face him. Her gaze shattered his miserable cascade, and left him staring blankly. “Not ever. We’d have nothing if it wasn’t for you. The wars in the north would have spread. The Old World would be gone. We owe you everything.”

Before he could retort, she had turned away and was walking again. He wanted to cry out to her, to scream:
But at what cost? So many died by our hands that we’re no better than the lords of the North.

But she kept her back resolutely to him, and he hadn’t the strength left to fight.

“I don’t deserve any of you,” he said.

Allie laid a kiss on his cheek. “None of us deserve anything,” she said, sounding so much older than he remembered. “All we can do is play the cards we’re dealt.”

Alexander went with them as the sun began to sink below the horizon, and the people of New Canterbury hunkered down to what he suspected was their last night of peace. When the sun rose tomorrow, there might be nobody left to watch it set. The voice in his head spoke again, but this time it was a shade less invidious—perhaps, just perhaps, it lent a sliver of new strength.

She’s right. If we’re going to stand a chance, we can’t afford to wallow. Now it’s only about surviving what’s coming.

“Not this again!” Lucian barked.

Norman was on the verge of asking what when his body was stuffed through a slot the size of a letterbox once more. He gritted his teeth, abandoning all hope of making sense of any of it, and waited for it to be over. A cacophony of colour, icicles on his skin, a moment when he, the others and the Frost itself whirled into a melted Dalian monstrosity. Then suddenly, he stood quite still beside the others.

Light. Birds singing. Grass brushed his shins. It was late afternoon, the light already failing, casting orange and purple highlights over mossy rocks. A circle of rough cuboid-shaped rocks stood nearby, some standing and others laid horizontally atop the others; a ringed pattern that was eerily intentional.

These are so much older than the Old World
, he thought.

“Stonehenge,” Richard said. “We’re on Salisbury Plain…” He mouthed wordlessly. “How is that possible? That’s hundreds of miles from Radden…”

“You’re really going to ask what’s possible after the crap we just saw?” Lucian said.

Richard kept shaking his head.

“I don’t understand,” Norman said, turning in a circle, then settling on Fol and Billy. “How could we…?”

“This is a special place, too,” Billy said. “It showed me things. It helped me find you.”

Fol shrugged. “What she said. It’s as close as I can get you.”

“That shaves five days off our travel time,” Norman said. A weight seemed to have lifted off his chest. Maybe, just maybe, they really could get home first.

And what then?
Wait to die with the rest
.

One step at a time
, he told himself.
We’ll figure something out.

“We’re still a hundred miles from New Canterbury,” Robert said.

“Maybe we can make London before sundown,” Richard said uncertainly.

The look in Robert’s eye shut him up. “We’ll move through the night if we have to.”

Norman ran a quick calculation in his head. “We’re still two days’ walk from the city.”

“Then we better get going.”

They made to move, but Fol remained before the largest stone pillar. “This is as far as I can go,” he said.

“What?” Billy said.

“I can’t go. It’s against the rules.”

“You can’t leave us,” Billy said. “You have to come.” She stamped her foot.

“I’m sorry. But I can only show you the way. It’s”—a moment of pain flickered amidst Fol’s ever-shifting expression—“part of my punishment.”

She glowered. “For what you did?”

“For what I did.”

“What
did
you do?” Norman said.

Fol blinked solemnly. “Good luck. You’re going to need it.”

Robert stepped forwards, not saying a word until he was face-to-face with the Jester. “I don’t know who you are, what you are… But, thank you.”

Fol winked but didn’t take Robert’s hand. “Sure.”

Billy still stood before Fol, her face red and downcast. “You really can’t go with us?” she muttered.

He looked skywards and sighed. “I can’t go with you any more than I could stop the End, or save your father. We’re all bound to the laws of the Web, scuttling like bugs under the thumbs of powers so much bigger… All we can do is be brave.”

“That’s what you’re doing, then? Dropping us off to go fight your battles for you?” Lucian said.

Fol ignored him. “You’re going to have to be brave a little while longer.”

Norman stepped forwards and placed his hands on Billy’s shoulder. He almost jumped when her fingers rose to clasp his. “She can stop the End coming again?”

“Maybe.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a shot,” Richard said.

“It’s all we’ve got.” Already Fol seemed farther away, as though he wasn’t quite there with them on the plain, but only an echo of a dream. “I’m sorry I can’t do more. I truly am.”

“What do I do?” Billy cried, lurching from Norman’s grasp.

Fol became translucent, and with one gust of the wind his body lost its form and faded away to nothing. Only his voice remained, a ringing tenor inside Norman’s head: “The Web takes no sides.”

Then they were alone with the ancient monolith, the great plains, and the whistling wind.

Robert was the first to recover. “Come on, we’re wasting time. They’re waiting.” He set off at a striding pace. They turned their backs on the stones from the long-forgotten folds of prehistory and headed east.

“If we live through this, I’m going to need therapy,” Richard said.

James Chadwick held an arm up high, and the army of the North grew still. Filling every square foot of the prairies and forests as far back as the distant hills, they watched as Jason and a few burly men worked on a set of gates set into the fenced compound in front of them. The military base lay sprawled over what had once been an airfield, now concealed under forty years of storm damage and infiltrating sapling groves. Between, rusted and faded by the elements but still intact, a sprawling mass of barracks and outbuildings thrust above the fledgling forest. They had taken this place months ago and secured it until the time was right.

Right here lay true Old World sorcery; what the Alliance stood no chance against.

Charlie watched from close at James’s flank, chewing on his lip. Absently, he caressed his stomach; his guts ached constantly. Marching with this godforsaken army was turning him inside out, piece by piece. It wasn’t just the poisonous hatred spewing off it like black exhaust; all around them the sky—the very air—seemed unnaturally darkened, as though they brought with them a cloud of shadow, blotting out the sun and casting shadow over the earth. Then when they grew still and bedded for the night, the cold would come. It was hardly noticeable most of the time, and so he guessed it was always there, made unnoticeable during the day by their progress south. But when darkness fell, something gnawed at him: a cold so deep that he expected to look down and see that he had become a block of ice.

We carry that too. Whatever brings the darkness also brings the cold, and we’re taking it with us wherever we go
, Charlie thought.

Every time he thought of New Canterbury and those who awaited them, his fists bunched with fresh anger. But in these brief interludes when all grew still and those around him ceased to be part of that great lumbering beast and became people once more, with faces turned black with dirt and lives turned blacker by grief and hatred, he couldn’t quite believe any of it was happening. That people could be wrought to such mindless hate shocked him anew, and for a disorienting while he couldn’t suppress a vague hissing voice deep inside him:

What if you’re on the wrong side?

It didn’t matter. He had made his choice. Even if he wanted to leave, he would be cut down—he felt eyes on him even now, as though some sensed his faltering allegiance.

While the army watched and waited, the burly men and Jason disappeared inside the base and returned a minute later carrying something black and heavy between them. They set it down with a metallic clang and stepped aside. Charlie took in the sight of a black length of tubing with a set of legs acting as a stable base, allowing the tubing to be pivoted on an axis. The word
mortar
filtered up from somewhere lost in childhood memory, and the knot in his guts tightened.

Charlie felt a wave of understanding rush by him, propagating through the crowd. Whether from intuition or stories told by elders or from books read long ago, the army came to understand what the black tube represented: devastation, fire, and death, far beyond the means of their bare hands.

“How many?” Charlie said.

James turned to him, and it was like looking into pits so deep that entire worlds could have lain hidden inside. “Many,” he said.

Without a word spoken, the army started forwards through the gates.

“It’s up to four now.” Latif shook his head in amazement, sitting back from the bench. “Only a few hours ago, it was three. Yesterday, two.” His every nerve fired, willing him to run laps around the lab. With great effort he channelled that vitality through his hands, working fervently, making notes and pulling in as many people from the camp as he could—anybody with the vaguest hint of technical knowledge. If the walls fell and only a few survived, he was going to be damn sure that at least some of them knew about this.

By now he was pretty sure there was nothing special about this radio. It had simply been a matter of timing. This was the first one they had found in working order, and nobody had bothered fixing the Old World wrecks in so long that it was quite possible nobody in Canary Wharf had listened to the Blanket in over a year.

Lincoln had been by his side almost constantly. The old goat was no vegetable on any day, but now he seemed born anew—a man who had once advised governments and overseen the construction of nuclear submarines reduced to childish glee.

“The possibilities!” he cried repeatedly, striding about the workshop with his cane clacking over the floor and his hands in constant motion, gesticulating in wild sweeps and thrusts. “Think of what this means,” he snarled into the faces of newcomers, his lazy eye wild and bulbous in its socket. “We stand here in this moment of metamorphosis.”

“Stop bothering people, you old fool,” Latif said at last when Lincoln crossed the workshop to double-check yet again, casting people aside with his cane. “It’s not going to suddenly change.”

“But a mistake could totally reverse—”

“Enough!” Latif laid his hands on Lincoln’s shoulders, laughing despite his incredulity. “Look, we both sat here, didn’t we? You and me, like when I was a nipper? We sat and took it all apart and put it back together, swept the whole band?”