Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

ear.
    "She'll have to stay down there," she says. "Egg the screw on, or we'll sink. All of us will sink."
    I understand. I knew it the moment I sent her down there. Ti is going to die for the rest of us.
    I barrel for the EOT and ring it backward and forward five times, enough to make it clear when no words will do.
    Thank you. 
    Then Doe is pressing my combat suit on around me, Ray is helping, strapping in my QC parabolic, HUD over my head, and I can think clearly enough now to help them.
    Then we surface.
    Everybody falls as the sublavic jerks forward with the lack of resistance, bobbing up in the magmic floe within the proximal zone like a cork in the water. The grind of molten stone fades a little, even as the screw deep below begins to whine hard, to keep the extra weight of us buoyant.
    I pick myself up and quickly take stock. Smoke is everywhere, so thick I can barely see the others, but I can find my way to the fin ladder and start climbing. Ten more rungs and I hit the exit hatch, rotate it a full revolution in both directions, and open it inward.
    Super-baked air pours in, scalding my lungs, and I slam my visor into place. "Charge your faces," I shout down at them. My HUD grays instantly, blocking the worst of the magmic glare glowing through the brick.
    "Pick," I shout down, and Ray hands me up the pick-axe. Hard to wield in this short space, but it has to be this way. The final ablative hull of brick is mortared in place like the wall of a house, and it's the last thing between the outside and the cooking interior of this metal can.
    I drive the pick into the brick, and red shraplets spit out, a chunk of mortar falls and clatters off my visor. Sweat is everywhere, and I'm losing my grip. I swing again, take a sizable divot out of the outer hull, and catch a glimpse of the extreme heat without.
    Two more blows, and the ablative bricking tumbles out and down. I climb up through the hole, onto a blackened crag of sinewy black magmic crust, cooling now atop the surface-nose of the Bathyscaphe.
    Around me is the all-encircling glory of the Molten Core, and we are but a dark outcropping on its churning concave ocean. In every direction the molten floes spread outward, then rise, arcing round to form a vast and perfect hollow sphere, a three-dimensional moat about the Solid Core of this world.
    I look directly up, and see the grimy black heart of this body, hanging impossibly overhead. It is a vast moon of rusted metal, and we have breached the Mohorovic discontinuity between it and the Molten Core.  
    Far climbs up beside me, and I hold onto him in his little suit, like a toy to be played with. So and La follow soon after, Ray, then Doe. No Ti.
    "Work the grapnels," I tell Ray and Doe. "Get us off this thing."
    The sublavic grumbles underfoot, and I know the screw is dying under the sudden load I've asked it to bear. There is no way Ti can make it.
    Who is Ti anyway? I have no memories of her, and perhaps this is why. I saw her once down the corridor, and then she died so that the rest of us could live. She will die, but what is the difference now, her death is as certain and complete as any death in history.
    History. What is any other note in the chord for, but to pass the message through whole, and let history continue the way it should, the way it does.
    I pat the mission document sealed against my chest, hold onto Far tight, and watch as Doe launches the grapnel traverse-line to the Solid Core. I know that inside that rusted metal heart there will be answers. There must be answers, because if there are not then all this has been for nothing.
    The grapnel snags into the black Core, and Doe begins latching us all into the taut line, even as the sublavic sinks underfoot. I can hear its metal walls buckle beneath the heat and mass, its brick-hull melting away. It begins to cant then slide downward, and we slide with it, inching back to the molten floes which birthed us.
    Goodbye Ti, I think, as Doe starts the haulier