Last Breath

Part 2: The Ring

One week later there had been eight more deaths on the Ring. Everyone was feeling the pressure, disjointed and unable to maintain a pace without cringing away from the wall, or affirming a friendship without an impending sense of doom, or engaging in life at all. People were falling apart. I felt close, and my father had all but checked out. Hirrik and Ruce spent more and more time together with their kids as their need to be surrounded by their family was increasingly intense. Luckily they included me and my father in that category on most occasions, and Mako and his family had started to infiltrate our circle too. It appeared a lot of people had the same thought of 'fuck the rules' and had decided that friends were worth trying for. We help each other, even if our ideas of what the future could look like didn't necessarily ring true for everyone.

We were talking over some stew that Ruce had lovingly brewed very early that morning, chunks of charred rat adding a grounding element. None of us were sleeping well so getting up at stupid o'clock was routine now, but it left us meandering around trying to find something to distract our thoughts from the now-inevitable trauma of a normal shift on the Ring.

"Surely they'll do something?"

I tuned back in. Hirrik was asking Mako.

"They don't care," he said.

"Wow, you're starting to sound like Klaod," my father joked.

"It's true, they don't care at all," I said. By now Mako and his family had expressed their dislike of the way things were heading, and 'Fuck the Birds' was our general motto, with nothing left to lose. Well, Hirrik and Ruce were less on side than I had hoped. They seemed sure that the Birds would fix the fault because they, as parents, wanted their kids to have a future but I knew the Birds didn't even care about their kids, let alone dirty Runner children. The flower proved that to me infinitely. We slurped our stews in private contemplation.

"So you figured out what the problem is?" Hirrik asked hopefully. Watching her and Mako talk was sometimes like trying to understand another language: they both were tinkerers at heart so when they got talking about inventions or electronics or anything that was vaguely creative in that vein, we left them to it. Apparently they had been meeting regularly to discuss conspiracy theories, as Ruce put it.

"I've had a thought. I think there is an issue with the coils," he said in his quiet, confident way.

"The whats?" I asked.

"The coils. Big metal springs that store the energy we produce when we run and feed it back to the Birds. That's the only way they could keep such a large amount without having to use it directly," he explained.

"So there are these 'coils' somewhere?" my father asked Mako.

"I'm certain of it. There's no other explanation and it fits what's been happening. I've seen something similar in small gadgets I've found off the dump..." he trailed off.

"But I've been everywhere in the Run and I've never seen anything like what you're describing," Ruce said.

"They are probably underground, if they are as big as I think they are, they'd be much too heavy for Rigfell."

"So what's wrong with them? The coils." I asked.

"I think they're losing their coating."

"How do you know that?"

"Well, it's part of the principles of physics..." Mako went off on a bit about insulation and something called 'shorting', rounding off quickly when he realised I was far from his ideal target audience. "Basically, it means that the electricity isn't trapped any more. It's escaping, going haywire. It's not supposed to do that," he says, fishing out a chunk of rat and stripping meat from the bone. "I reckon it doesn't have long left."