The X-Files: Ruins

By Kevin J. Anderson

Based on the Emmy-award winning tv series, special agents Mulder and Skully investigate ancient Mayan ruins for paranormal phenomena.

Meet Mulder and Scully, FBI: the agency maverick and the female agent assigned to keep him in line. Their job is to investigate the eerie unsolved mysteries the bureau wants handled quietly but quickly, before the public finds out what’s really out there . . . and panics—the cases filed under “X”.

In the most ambitious and exciting X-Files adventure to date, Mulder and Scully fly to the Yucatan jungle to investigate a missing team of archaeologists. Their exploration leads to a strange electronic signal coming from beneath ancient ruins—a signal aimed upward, at the stars. . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780061981845

Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson has published more than eighty novels, including twenty-nine national bestsellers. He has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFX Reader's Choice Award. His critically acclaimed original novels include Captain Nemo, Hopscotch, and Hidden Empire. He has also collaborated on numerous series novels, including Star Wars, The X-Files, and Dune. In his spare time, he also writes comic books. He lives in Wisconsin.

Book preview

1

Xitaclan ruins, Yucatán, Mexico

Friday, 5:45 P.M.

Even after days of hard excavation, they had barely scratched the surface of the ancient city. But Cassandra Rubicon had already seen enough to know that the ruins held unimaginable secrets about the birth of the Maya empire.

At the far western edge of the Yucatán, where the limestone plateau butted up against volcanic highlands and steamy jungles, the lost city had been hidden by nature for more than a thousand years. The native helpers had called the place Xitaclan, their voices tinged with awe and fear.

Cassandra rolled the word over in her mouth, reveling in the images it evoked of ancient sacrifices, pomp and splendor, blood priests wearing ornaments of jade and green quetzal feathers. Xitaclan.

In the late afternoon, she alone worked inside the Pyramid of Kukulkan, shining her flashlight ahead as she crept deeper, exploring. This place was absolutely alive with secrets. In the chalky bitterness of the air, she could taste the mysteries waiting for her to discover them.

Shining her flashlight ahead, Cassandra ran a dusty hand through perspiration-dampened cinnamon hair—the color of cinnamon bark, freshly peeled from the trees, her father always insisted, not the faded reddish-tan powder found on grocery-store spice racks. The color of her eyes hung midway between green and brown, like rich copper-bearing ore.

Outside, her partners in the University of California expedition kept themselves busy with the external excavations, mapping the overall layout of the city, with its ceremonial plaza, temples, and monolithic limestone obelisks—stelae—carved with fearsome images of mythical feathered serpents. They had found a vine-overgrown ball court arena, where the ancient Maya had played their bloody sport in which the losers—or winners, depending on some historical interpretations—were sacrificed to the gods.

An archaeological treasure trove, Xitaclan provided far too many ruins even for a large, well-financed crew to explore in anything less than a year. But Cassandra and her four young companions would do their best, for as long as their meager university funding held out.

Numerous moss-covered stelae towered at strategic astronomical points throughout the jungle, while others had toppled; all of them, though, contained rich and exciting glyphs. Christopher Porte, their team’s epigrapher, delighted in attempting to translate them, transcribing them into the battered record book he kept in his pack at all times.

The showpiece of Xitaclan, though, was the magnificent stair-stepped Pyramid of Kukulkan that loomed over the center of the city. Though overgrown with weeds and underbrush, it was still beautifully preserved. Its architecture rivaled the great ziggurats at Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Teotihuacán—but this one stood untouched. The locals’ paralyzing superstitions had protected it from prying eyes. Until now.

Topping the pyramid’s highest platform stood the many-pillared Temple of the Feathered Serpent, with its amazing carvings and ornate friezes depicting calendars, myths, history. Cassandra had named the temple herself after noting the dense motifs that showed the wise god Kukulkan and his feathered reptilian companions or guardians—a common symbol of power in the Maya mythos. The intricate bas-reliefs added a new richness to the Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan legends of the early Central American peoples.

Her team had also found an unfathomably deep cistern behind the pyramid, a natural limestone sinkhole filled with oily black water in whose murky depths Cassandra suspected hid many artifacts, relics…and quite probably the bones of sacrificial victims. Such limestone wells, or cenotes, were common in Maya cities of the Yucatán—but this one at Xitaclan had never been ransacked by treasure seekers or explored by archaeologists.

Her team planned to break out the diving equipment within a week, and she herself would descend into the depths—but for now they still had too much initial cataloguing to complete. More breathtaking discoveries, more work—but too little time, and too little money.

For now, she concentrated on exploring inside the pyramid.

If her team didn’t do an overwhelming job here on their first visit, someone else in the competitive archaeological community would no doubt return with a larger expedition, better funding, and superior equipment. It could completely overshadow Cassandra’s work.

The crews of native workers recruited by her team’s local guide—Fernando Victorio Aguilar, a self-styled adventurer and expediter—had worked for days already, hacking and chopping at the underbrush, removing mahogany and ceiba trees, slashing ferns with their machetes, uprooting creepers to remove the shroud of time and nature from around Xitaclan.

As soon as they saw the carvings of feathered serpents, though, the native workers had retreated in terror. They whispered to each other fearfully and refused to come closer to the site or to help with cleaning the ruins, even when she offered to increase their meager payment. Finally they fled. And then Aguilar ran off, abandoning her team in the deep jungle.

In her work, Cassandra had always respected native traditions and beliefs—it came with the territory—but her excitement at these discoveries had grown so intense that she found such superstitions frustrating, and her impatience flared up.

The archaeologists continued working on their own. They had supplies for a few weeks and a transmitter to call for help, should they need it. For now, she and the four others enjoyed their solitude.

Today, Kelly Rowan, the team’s second archaeologist (and, as of recently, the man with whom she shared her tent) was spending the last hours of daylight on the outside steps of the pyramid, studying the Maya hieroglyphics. Christopher Porte bent beside him with his battered sketchpad, excitedly trying to translate the chiseled glyphs as Kelly used brushes and fine tools to remove debris from the designs.

Cait Barron, the team’s historian and photographer, took advantage of the late afternoon light to work on one of her watercolors. Quiet and highly professional, Cait did her official work with the cameras and logbooks in a no-nonsense way. She took rolls of archival photos rapidly and efficiently—but once finished, she preferred using her paints to recreate the spirit of the place.

It was a long-standing tradition of Yucatán explorers to capture the detail their eyes saw, to depict something more than simple, two-dimensional photographic plates could. So far Cait had filled three portfolios with beautiful paintings that evoked the history of the Maya: diptychs pairing images of the ruins as they now appeared and as she imagined the city must have looked during its golden age.

While the team’s quiet but frenzied work went on outside, the simmering jungle sounds increased with the fading light. Daytime creatures sought shelter against the darkness, while nocturnal predators awakened and began to search for their meals. Biting flies that swarmed in the day’s heat flew off to sleep, while mosquitoes, bloodthirsty in the cooler air of evening, swept out in clouds.

Deep inside the Pyramid of Kukulkan, though, the damp shadows knew no passage of time. Cassandra continued her explorations.

After she and Kelly had worked together to pry open the long-sealed outer door, careful not to damage the masonry or the stone carvings, Cassandra had spent most of her time combing through the rubble inside, cautiously penetrating deeper, picking her way from one intersection to the next. She had spent days working through the chambers and vaults, mapping the incomprehensible passages within the immense stone structure, trying to solve the maze.

She had spent the afternoon inside again, taking only brief breaks to check on Kelly and Christopher, who worked at deciphering the heiroglyphic staircase, and John Forbin, the grad-student architect and engineer who was studying the other half-fallen structures. John’s wanderings took him farther into the jungle as he marked the locations of ruins on the wrinkled topographical map he kept with him at all times. Being an engineer, John had no imagination for naming discoveries. John relied on simple numerical designations—Temple XI or Stela 17.

Cassandra glanced at her compass-watch and pushed deeper inside the labyrinth, aiming her high-powered flashlight ahead of her like a weapon. The cold shaft of light raked across rough-hewn limestone blocks and the crude support beams. Stark shadows leaped at her with exaggerated angles every time she shifted the flashlight. She moved cautiously, smelling the moldy air. Something dark skittered into a wide crack in the wall.

Cassandra carried a small microcassette recorder in her hand, as well as a sheet of graph paper on which she kept track of her movements. So far, most tunnels she’d explored had turned into blind alleys that might have been designed to confuse trespassers…or they could have been sealed treasure chambers. Even more exciting—from an archaeologist’s point of view—the dead-ends could be sealed-off burial crypts or storage vaults for collected volumes of ancient writings.

If her team could find an intact Maya codex, one of the gloriously illustrated books written on mulberry-bark paper, it would increase knowledge of the Central American empire a hundredfold. Only four Maya codices were known to exist. Most of the others had been destroyed by Spanish missionaries overzealous in their attempts to squash all beliefs but their own. Xitaclan, though, had been abandoned long before the Conquistadors had arrived in the New World.

Cassandra worked now with dust in her hair and powder smeared under her eyes, across her cheeks. Her arms and legs were bone-tired, stiff and sore from too many nights on an uncomfortable bedroll, her skin inflamed from hundreds of insect bites. It had been too long since she’d had either a cold drink or a warm shower.

But the wonders she had already found were worth all those sacrifices. Archaeology isn’t for wimps, she thought.

Her father always called her beautiful, claiming that she was wasted in the cobwebs of ancient civilizations, but she only laughed at him. Her father was quite a character. It was his own fame as an archaeologist that had driven her into the field in the first place. The great Vladimir Rubicon had gained renown as one of the foremost authorities on Native American cliff dwellings, particularly the once-thriving Anasazi civilization, though he had begun his career studying the Maya.

Cassandra wanted to make her own mark in the field, not just continue her father’s work. Her original passion had been geology, analyzing the composition of the terrain beneath the jungles of Central America—but as she continued her studies, she found she knew as much about the ancient Maya as did Kelly, the team’s self-proclaimed archaeological expert.

Together, they had made an impressive pair, able to talk the Board of Regents at UC–San Diego into funding their modest expedition to Mexico. The team would be all students, willing to work for the possible credentials and the right to publish striking new research, without being paid more than a starvation-level stipend. It was the bane of academics everywhere.

Luckily, like a surprise gift, they had been blessed with matching funding from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, in which the ruins of Xitaclan had been found. With the Mexican money Cassandra had been able to obtain the diving equipment, hire the native workers, and pay Fernando Victorio Aguilar…for all the help he’d been. She snorted at the thought.

So far, their expedition had been a success, and it seemed they would all share a page in the history books.

Cassandra worked her way deeper into the temple, dictating a description of her path as she went. She ran her fingers over the stone blocks, and her voice rose and fell—fiery with excitement, then whispering in amazement—recording what she observed. The marvelous constructions within constructions inside the Pyramid of Kukulkan reminded her of a Russian doll—one inside another inside another, each one depleting her stock of adjectives.

Suddenly, in the flashlight beam ahead of her, she saw that the inner walls to her left were of a markedly different color. With a flush of excitement, Cassandra realized she had stumbled upon the inner temple. This must be the original structure on whose foundation the Pyramid of Kukulkan had been erected.

The ancient Maya had often built taller, more impressive temples atop old ruins, because of their belief that certain places concentrated magic as time went by. The glorious ceremonial center of Xitaclan had been the nexus for rituals in this locality. What had long ago begun as an isolated religious center in the thickest jungle had eventually become a magnet for Maya power.

Until the people had abruptly and mysteriously abandoned it…leaving it preserved and empty for her to uncover centuries later.

Forcing herself to speak in a slow, analytical voice, Cassandra pressed the microcassette recorder close to her lips. The stone blocks here are smoother, more carefully cut. They have a glassy finish, like varnish, as if they were vitrified by intense heat. She caught herself with a smile, realizing she had been studying the stone with a geologist’s eye, not an archaeologist’s perspective.

She ran her hands along the fused stone surface, and in a breathless voice continued to record her impressions. Normally I would have expected to see fragments of the whitewash or stucco the Maya used to decorate their temples—but I see no remains of paint, not even any carvings. The walls are completely smooth.

Cassandra followed the inner perimeter. The air inside smelled more and more stagnant; no currents had disturbed it in countless centuries. She sneezed, and the sound echoed explosively throughout the catacombs. Trickles of dust rained down from between ceiling blocks, and she hoped the ancient support beams would hold.

This is clearly the remains of the first temple, she dictated, the innermost structure that was once the heart of Xitaclan, the first structure on this site.

Very excited now, Cassandra followed the inward spiral, brushing her fingers against the cool slick surface of the stone. She kept to the new wall—actually, it was the oldest wall—wondering what secrets might be contained at the core of the pyramid.

From all the evidence she had uncovered, Xitaclan’s glory was no mere stepping-stone in Maya culture. Tales of the legendary city were so deeply implanted in the psyche of the native people that the locals still talked about the curse and the spirits that clung to the place. Many people had supposedly disappeared in the area, too, but Cassandra put that down to local mythology.

What had caused the ancient Maya to place their hub of religious significance here, in an uninteresting portion of the jungle with no roads or rivers, no copper or gold mines nearby? Why here?

Rubble had fallen across the passage ahead, blocking her way. But Cassandra felt her adrenaline pumping. Now that she had reached the center of the pyramid, she needed to see what lay beyond. It was possible that she stood on the brink of a great discovery—but not unless she could go all the way.

Stuffing the tape recorder into her pocket and the scribbled graph paper inside her shirt, she laid the flashlight down and worked with both hands to pull away fallen limestone bricks from the top of the pile. She ignored the clouds of dust and grit raised by her efforts. She had been dirty before.

Digging bare-handed in the rubble, Cassandra managed to make an opening just wide enough to wriggle her slender body through. She clambered up to the opening and thrust the flashlight forward; then, bumping her head as she strained forward to see, she crawled partway into a new corridor that sloped steeply down.

Ahead, the echoing chamber seemed much larger than the numerous other alcoves she had found in the pyramid, large enough to hold dozens of people. A curved shaft led away from it, a spiral ramp that went even deeper. She played her beam around the new room and nearly dropped the flashlight in her surprise. She had never seen anything like this.

Cassandra’s white light reflected off walls made of peeling metallic plates, bent girders, crystalline panels. When she moved the flashlight beam away, portions of the newly exposed interior continued to glow with an eerie, pale afterlight.

From her knowledge of ancient history and culture, these bizarre fixtures seemed impossible to her. The Maya had never been known to use any kind of metal extensively, mainly satisfied with obsidian and flint for their needs. But here, unmistakably, she saw smooth, untarnished metal as if it had been made in modern smelters. It was an unusual alloy—certainly not the crude gold and bronze the ancient Maya had used.

Astonished, she stared for a while, still practically facedown in an opening barely large enough for a badger. She drew out her tape recorder, squirming and wedging herself deeper into the opening so she could hold the flashlight in one hand and the tape recorder near her mouth with the other. She pressed the RECORD button.

This is amazing, she said, then paused for a long, silent moment as she searched for words. I’m seeing metal with a silvery consistency, but not dark like tarnished silver. It gleams white—aluminum or platinum? But that can’t be, since the ancient Maya culture had no access to those metals.

Cassandra recalled reading how some artifacts recovered from Egyptian tombs had gleamed shiny and new despite being locked away for millennia; yet, once exposed to post–Industrial Age air clogged with sulfur-bearing pollutants, the artifacts had tarnished and deteriorated within weeks. Note—we must explore this chamber with extreme caution, she said. It seems to be quite an exceptional find.

She desperately wanted to climb all the way inside, to explore to her heart’s content. But common sense warned her not to.

I have decided not to proceed into the chamber yet, she dictated, struggling to keep the dejection out of her voice. Nothing must be disturbed until the entire team is here to assist me and provide second opinions on questionable items. I’m going back for Kelly and John. They can help me clear the rubble from this opening and support it with overhead beams. We’ll need Cait to photograph the objects in state before anyone else goes inside.

After a long pause, she spoke again. "For the record, let me say that I think this is it…the Big One."

Cassandra switched off the microrecorder, then swallowed hard. After crawling back out, she unenthusiastically brushed herself off, then gave up, leaving the grit and dust. She began to retrace her steps, winding through the labyrinth to reach the exit, forcing herself to be calm. She thought of her wiry old father and imagined how proud he would be to see his daughter making discoveries that rivaled—even overshadowed!—those at the high point of his own career.

She quickened her pace. Her footsteps whispered and echoed through the stone passageways. As she approached the low exit to the pyramid, bright rays from the setting sun shone in her eyes like the light of an oncoming train. She rushed forward and stumbled out of the pyramid into the open air. Hey, Kelly! she shouted, I’ve found something! You have to get the team, quick. Wait’ll you see this!

No one answered her. She stopped, blinking, and stood outside for a moment in the silence. She held on to the edge of the pyramid doorway for support.

The ruins seemed abandoned again. She heard only the murmur of jungle sounds, nothing else. She looked toward the high levels of the ziggurat, expecting to spot a couple of students on the heiroglyphic stairs…but the pyramid stood deserted.

By now the sunset was fading into dusk, the worst time of the day for visibility, when the shadows took on dim colors. Only a thin curve of the retreating sun remained above the treetops in the west, like an orange beacon backlighting the scene with an incomprehensible glare.

Cassandra saw no one, no members of her team, none of the vanished Indian helpers.

Kelly, John, Christopher! she called. Cait, where are you?

Shading her eyes, she peered out into the open plaza where Cait had earlier erected an easel for her watercolor work. Now the easel lay smashed on the ground. Cassandra could clearly make out a muddy bootprint stomped across one of the new paintings.

Greatly uneasy now, she again scanned the steep staircase that ran up the outside of the ziggurat. There Christopher and Kelly had painstakingly cleaned the chiseled glyphs and sketched them on pads, translating the chronicle of Xitaclan’s mythic history as they went.

No Kelly, no Christopher…not a soul in sight.

Across the plaza where young John Forbin had been studying the collapsed ruins of a minor temple, she spotted his case of equipment, his small wooden stakes and colored ribbons marking line-of-sight intersection points—but found no sign of the grad-student engineer.

Hey! Kelly? This isn’t a damn funny joke, she shouted. Her stomach knotted. She felt utterly isolated, engulfed by the surrounding forest. How could the bustling, verdant jungle be so damned quiet? Hey!

She heard movement to the side—footsteps coming around the pyramid from the direction of the deep sacrificial cenote. She heaved a sigh of relief. Here were her friends after all.

But then the shadowy silhouettes of strange men appeared—obviously not any members of her team. In the dim light she could barely discern their features, but she did see without a doubt that they carried guns. Rifles.

The men pointed their weapons at her.

One spoke in heavily accented English. You will come with us, Señorita.

Who are you? Cassandra demanded, the old fire within her flaring up enough to burn away her common sense. She gripped her flashlight as if it were a club. Where is my team? We’re American citizens. How dare you—

One of the other men jerked up his rifle and fired. The bullet ricocheted off one of the pyramid’s stone blocks, barely six inches from her face. A spray of needle-sharp stone fragments peppered her cheek.

With a sharp cry, she ducked backward into the temple, seeking refuge in the ancient darkness. She ran down the long tunnel, hearing loud shouts in Spanish outside. Angry curses. More gunfire. Merciful confusion.

Her heart pounded, but she wasted no mental energy trying to guess who the men could be or what they wanted. She didn’t dare think of what they might already have done to Cait, John, Christopher…and Kelly. She would think about that later—if she survived.

She glanced behind her. The men were barely discernible outside the temple. She saw them appear at the doorway, arguing with each other. One figure cuffed another, then raised a fist high in anger. More shouts in Spanish.

Cassandra ran around a sharp corner. Her flashlight beam bobbed ahead of her. She had

Reviews for The X-Files

[mutantpudding · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book, although I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadnt waited over two years between the first two books and this one (For once its not my fault this happened, I wanted the audiobook and it took the library ages to get it). I remembered most of the plot, but didnt have a firm handle on who all the characters were, and there are a lot of them. Despite my initial confusions over who was who, all the characters in these books are very well done. There are a lot of different motivations, loyalties, and personalities in play that create a cast who would be interesting to read about even without the exceptional circumstances they find themselves in.

I found this book pretty surprising plotwise. It didnt get boring or predictable (at least not to me) and my options about characters and about what I wanted to happen changed quite a bit as I read the book. Also it made me cry. I still think Kira is a wonderful protagonist, and the fact that this series hasn't gotten more attention is weird to me. Its exciting and emotional and I would definitely recommend it.

[melrailey-412132 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a one sitting read (of course 1/3 of that was at the hair salon). But after reading that first 1/3 of the book, I was too caught up in the story to quit and come back to it later. So, I came home and finished reading to find out what happens to Kira and her motley crew. There were times when I couldn't believe the turns that Dan Wells took with this story. Overall this series ranks at the top of my lists. I like the world, the details, the friendships and the overall theme of the series of working together and living in peace. I even liked the way that Wells handled the stereotypical love triangle. It was a bit of a non-stereotypical triangle. I'm curious to read anything Dan Wells comes up with after this.

[linyarai · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this for the "Set In a Post-Apocalyptic World" part of my 2019 reading challenge. I didn't love it as much as the first two books, I think I had too much of a gap in between reading them. I found having so many groups of characters to be a bit confusing, and the ending felt too sudden and accidental.

[edensteffey · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this series. I thought this book got a little slow in the middle and would have liked to know a little more about the couple of the characters that became part of the book, but ended up liking how the series ended.

[jadedog13 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Partial army is occupying East Meadow. They are broadcasting a message demanding the surrender of Kira Walker. Until they have Kira, they will execute one person every day. Their leader Dr. Morgan believes that Kira's DNA will solve Partial expiration. The human resistance has recovered a nuclear warhead from a sunken navy destroyer. The resistance is taking the bomb to the Partial homeland. Both sides believe they have no other choice. They are only trying to survive.

Meanwhile, Kira has been trying to solve the problem of Partial expiration and find a way to make the cure for RM available to all babies. Kira agreed to let Dr. Morgan perform any tests on her in the hopes that she holds an important solution in her DNA. Kira is desperate to find the answer before both sides destroy each other. She is determined to find a way for humans and Partials to peacefully coexist.

My opinion
At the end of Fragments, I was filled with questions. The Trust had a plan to force the Partials and humans to live in peace. They designed it so that they would need each other to survive. Their plans were well-intentioned, but the situation quickly progressed and got out of control. I was anxious to see how the various story lines would play out and to find out who would survive.

This was a cool series. I liked that the main focus of this story wasn't the love triangle. The story is about what it means to be human. It touches on issues of discrimination and acceptance, what people are willing to do to survive and how war brings out the best and worst in people.

I loved this series. It was easy to read and exciting. Anyone who enjoys dystopian fiction should try reading this. It is appropriate for ages pre-teen to adult.

[filialibri-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Diese und weitere Rezensionen findet ihr auf meinem Blog Anima Libri - Buchseele

Mit „Ruinen“ bringt Dan Wells seine „Partials“-Trilogie zu einem rundherum gelungenen Abschluss. Schon mit den ersten beiden Teilen, „Aufbruch“ und „Fragmente“, konnte mich der Autor nach etwas anfänglicher Skepsis voll und ganz überzeugen und meine Erwartungen an den Abschluss der Serie waren dementsprechend hoch – und wurden nicht enttäuscht!

Auch wenn es schon über ein Jahr her war, dass ich den zweiten Teil gelesen habe, es war wirklich leicht wieder in diese Geschichte hinein zu finden, denn „Ruinen“ ist so aufgebaut, dass man ausreichend über die bisherigen Handlungen und die Hintergründe erfährt, sodass der Roman fast auch allein stehend gelesen werden kann. So ist es wirklich ein Leichtes schon nach wenigen Seiten in die Geschichte einzutauchen und sich ins Abenteuer fallen zu lassen.

Und ein Abenteuer ist es wirklich! Denn statt eine Geschichte zu erzählen, die sich lange hinzieht und nur langsam in Schwung kommt, um dann in einem finalen Showdown zu münden, enthüllt der Autor nach und nach immer wieder einzelne Geheimnisse und hält damit die Spannung das gesamte Buch über hoch. Außerdem – und das war in meinen Augen definitiv eins der besten Elemente dieses Romans – erörtert Dan Wells hier diverse Fragestellungen rund um Leben und Krieg, die allesamt auch einen gewissen Realitätsbezug haben.

Alles in allem ist „Ruinen“ ein großartiger Abschluss für Dan Wells‚ „Partials“-Trilogie, mit einem guten Ende, mit dem man als Leser zufrieden sein kann, auch wenn genug offen bleibt, um der eigenen Fantasie noch etwas ihren Lauf zu lassen ;) Definitiv eine der empfehlenswerteren Dystopien im Young Adult Bereich, die durch eine wirklich beängstigend reale Atmosphäre und faszinierende Charaktere besticht!

[josp-7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a satisfying ending to an interesting trilogy. Every chapter leaves you with a new theory of what is to come. Until you come to the next chapter and find out how wrong you were. This process then repeats itself until you get to the end. Overall, the suspense is exhilarating, and the revelations are spectacular.

[lorune · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Typical ending, but it was a nice series to read through :)

[tom_wright-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love the strong female character.

[vpbookseller · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Our creations vs. Humanity. Morality, Life, compromise, acceptance

[krau0098 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the final book in the Partials series. It was a decent ending, for the most part I enjoyed it. Things do start off a bit slow though.I listened to this on audiobook, the audiobook is well done. The narrator does an excellent job with all the different character voices and conveys emotion well. I enjoyed listening to this.There are spoilers ahead from previous books for those who haven’t read those.Kira is working with Dr. Morgan to try and find out if her DNA holds the secret to cure Expiration Date. Meanwhile Samm is across the country doing what he can to awaken the Partials that were put in a coma and used save the humans from RM. Everyone comes together in this book in a struggle to prevent another all out war between the Partials and Humans and to save both species from extinction.For the most part this book is very well done. My biggest complaint is that things start out very slow. Kira is hanging out with Dr. Morgan and obviously not finding any answers there...time passes and passes. Samm is helping rehabilitate some of the Partials that were in a coma for 10 years, he wants to leave and find Kira but also wants to fulfill his promise to stay and help the humans cure RM. Both Kira and Samm seem to be in a bit of a holding pattern.We spend a lot less time with Kira and Samm as the story continues. There are many different POVs throughout the story. We hear a lot from Marcus and also from Ariel. I didn’t really like how having so many POVs broke up the story. However, I understand why it was written that way. All the multiple POVs do an excellent job of portraying the chaos that this world is going through. They help to broaden the story and let the reader see what is going on at multiple locations at once.Samm has grown quite a bit as a character throughout the series. Marcus has as well. Kira still feels the need to run headfirst into the most dangerous situation possible, no matter the consequences (even the other characters in the book make fun of this). One character we also see a lot more of is Heron, she has always been kind of mysterious so it was very interesting to learn more about her.I also enjoyed the inclusion of a new fish-like type of Partial and the crazy Blood Man. Both added a lot of mystery and interesting twists and turns to the plotline. Most of the story is wrapped up well, although there are some questions that remain unanswered.Overall this was a decent end to this series. This was another end to a dystopian/post-apocalyptic series that made me feel like "eh, well I am glad that series is over with". I didn't really love the ending, I didn't hate it either. I enjoyed some of the new plot elements, but thought the pacing varied a lot throughout. This is definitely a decent post-apocalyptic series, so I would recommend this series as a whole if you are a fan of those kind of books.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kira has returned with Dr. Morgan to have experiments done on her and see if she holds the key to ending the Partial expiration dates; failure after failure has both of them frustrated, and Kira begins to wonder if she was created with any purpose at all. Samm, remaining with the humans in Denver, pulls the other Partials out of a coma and discovers that they have outlived their expiration dates. Marcus and Haru have their own challenges in the human community on Long Island, as factions become divided over how to deal with a potential Partial invasion.All the issues with which Kira wrestles, all the revelations of Fragments, and all the characters make up for a lot of threads to keep track of in this final book in the series. It made for sometimes confusing or frustrating reading, though I surely wanted to know how everything worked out and was kept on tenterhooks not sure until nearly the last page if not just my favorite characters but all of humanity/Partiality were going to survive. I had found Marcus obnoxious in the first book, but he especially grew as a character and grew in my estimation over the course of Fragments and Ruins. While it didn't have the same oomph for me as the previous books, Ruins brought about a satisfying resolution and this is definitely a series as a whole that I would highly recommend to teen dystopia fans.

[therinknite-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

[Cross-posted to Knite Writes]What happened to this series? The first book in this trilogy was great! The second book was pretty good. And this one was plain awful.I don’t understand how this happened. I really don’t.I suppose I’ll just catalogue all my issues in order of when I noticed them.First off, there were way too many POVs in this story. WAY too many. There were so many POVs that by the time I got back around to one person after going through them all, I had forgotten what that person was doing. And there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the POV usage. Some characters had more prominent roles than others, sure, but seemingly random characters we had never met before ended up with POV roles, and they didn’t even do anything substantial to progress the plot. They were there solely to show the reader what was happening in places the reader wouldn’t otherwise see.And this was a mistake, in my opinion, because frankly, most of the information from those POVs wasn’t necessary. Cutting it out wouldn’t have resulted in any confusion. Adding it, in fact, created confusion because I wasn’t sure why all these characters were suddenly tossed into the mix, and they didn’t contribute to my overall understanding of the plot.The POV issue also created a terrible timeline problem. Because there were so many POVs, it was impossible to follow one character’s story through and through, so there were large time gaps between a lot of scenes…that were totally unannounced. Sometimes, it mentioned that “such and such event was so many days ago” somewhere in the middle of the chapter. Sometimes, you just had to figure it out yourself. And I was plain lost on occasion. I got back around to some characters and was completely confused because the makeup of so-and-so’s group had changed and they were in a different place than when I’d left them…and it turns out the last chapter they were in took place WEEKS ago.Add these problems in to the actual plot of the story, and…I had so many problems with the plot of this story.First off, I find it so hard to believe that Kira can figure things out that many, many people who should be way smarter than her can’t. Also, the solution to the main problem in this story is so OBVIOUS, and Kira is the only one who “gets it.” I just…my belief in the plausibility of Kira’s abilities versus everyone else’s just eroded to almost zero over the course of this book.Secondly, random last-minute antagonist alert! I’m not going to spoil it, but it annoyed me so bad that the ending of this book literally came down an eleventh-hour antagonist who came out of NOWHERE and stuck around just long enough for the protagonists to reach a resolution. What a freaking cop out!Third, underdeveloped plot threads that dropped out of the sky. There were at least two important ones I can think of off the top of my head. One of them was a deus ex machina, that, of course, was involved in the battle against the last-minute antagonist.Fourth, the plot of this book was just plain dense, and it felt like half the material in this book should have been in Fragments, to replace all that drawn-out journey stuff I complained about.Fifth, the heap of helpful contrived coincidences. I mean, really? Everybody shows up at the exact right moment? Back to back to back to keep the ball rolling? And it happened so many times in the final 100 pages that I wanted to chuck the book out the window.Sixth, and finally, the ending sucked. It just…plain sucked. There’s a climax, and then the book ends a few pages later. There’s no real resolution. The battle ends and it just…stops. It read like there were three or four chapters missing from the end of the book, and I was not happy that I didn’t get to see how ANY of the issues that this entire trilogy was about were resolved. Not a single one.I’m rarely angry when I finish a book. Content? Most of the time. Disappointed? Sometimes. But angry? Almost never.But this time, I’m angry. The setup of this series promised the answers to huge questions, and never answered them. And there is nothing that riles me up more than when a book doesn’t deliver on its promises.

[susanbeamon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I do not, as a rule, start a trilogy until I have all three books, so I can read them together. But here I got my hands on Partials, and started reading, which meant I had to wait until Ruins was finally written to finish the "Partials Sequence". When I did get the book, I finished it in two days. And I am pleased by the ending. No, it doesn't wrap up all the loose ends, but it leaves us with hope for the future, a situation not promised at the beginning. I highly recommend this series to all.

[dpappas_25 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"I'm glad we could have our tearful reunion before I crapped my pants from fear."I was going to start off my review with a sentimental quote from the book about love but I felt like this quote from Marcus was pretty awesome. Wow, what an ending to a really great series. I have to warn you now that this might just turn into me rambling incoherently about how great this book was.Before I read this book I went back and re-read the other books (and novella) of the series to refresh my memory. After I did that, I couldn't wait to see what happened to all of the characters. In this book the point-of-view switches between many characters so readers get to see what is going on everywhere. While I have grown to like Kira I did enjoy that in this book you get in the minds of other characters and really get to see what is driving all of them. The story was really enhanced by that and it even helped me sympathize with characters that I hated before reading this. I thought I hated Heron but by golly was I wrong. I grew to love her and feel so horrible for her.I loved that this book answered all the questions. This book didn't leave readers with some half ending. This was a definite end to the series and boy what a great ending it was. I swear my reactions to this book while reading the second half of it would have made some pretty amazing gifs. Your adrenaline will be pumping until the absolute end. I really don't want to give too much away but I just want to say that I loved how the love triangle between Kira, Marcus, and Samm was resolved. Pretty much I just loved the ending.I ended this book wanting to give Dan Wells a standing ovation. I would definitely recommend this series to readers that really love young adult dystopian books. I feel like this series is kind of under the radar but it is definitely worth reading.

[darkfaerietales_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie TalesQuick & Dirty: The third book of the Partials Sequence is all that we hoped for, continuing the action and the suspense but with even more urgency, and just enough romance and humor to lighten it up just a little.Opening Sentence: “This is a general message to the residents of Long Island.”The Review:Ruins would stand alone better in the series than Fragments would, and there is enough background given to read it individually, but as with most series, it is a much better read as a whole. The background of the plot seems less important even than the background with the characters. Kira and Samm had developed so much of a friendship in the first two books, that we hope to see that continue, maybe even into something more as it has been hinted at with the cliffhanger ending of Fragments. There is the slight inconvenience that they start out on different sides of the continent with a toxic wasteland between them. Unfortunately, saving the world is first priority, and just as that came between Marcus and Kira before, we really don’t know if Kira and Samm will even see each other again. Marcus is still an important and endearing character and we have yet to find out if he and Kira might develop into something more as well. If they even live through what is hinted at as the second ending of the world by some new (and frightening) characters. There are several characters we haven’t met before, mostly Partials, and several characters that we get to know much better, including Heron and Ariel.Wells manages to just reveal one mystery at a time, which keeps his audience on the edge of their seat throughout the book, even down to the last chapters. There is a point in Part 3 of this book that was drawn out just a little too much for me when I just couldn’t stand it any more and I had to peek at the end, but other than that the pacing was much better in this book than it was in Fragments, the second book of the Partials sequence. This is mostly due to the fact that the Partials are nearing their expiration dates. The human predicament doesn’t seem as urgent, until we are again reminded that the humans must have live Partials to save their babies. Something about suffering babies just creates its own sense of urgency, and that particular aspect is magnified again in the third book.The focus is still mostly on Kira, but not as much in this book. We switch perspective much more often to incorporate all the different groups and physical locations, passing the narrative almost every chapter. This is an important part of the plot because communication is all but impossible, creating chaos, suspense, and difficulty in decision-making, and, of course, immediate survival. Everyone is basically running every which way trying to save themselves, and they have lived in survival mode for so long that their first instinct is still to kill everyone else instead of stopping and listening to each other. Our few characters are doing their utmost to change that but they are met with resistance at every attempt.The best part of this book is the deeper discussion about human nature and even war. Much could be written on that subject using this book as an example, and it would make an excellent base for a term paper or book club discussion. It is fascinating how we start out at the beginning of the series on the human side and fearing the Partials, and by the second book we don’t even know whose side to take anymore, and now we are hoping that both sides can find their “cure”. In Ruins, it becomes very obvious that the dilemma comes from having good guys and bad guys on both sides.This book, and its ending, are satisfying, but as with any good series, there are still some unanswered questions, and, of course, we still want more! It almost made me wish that Wells would have shortened some of the substance in the three books in order to add a little more to the ending. It seems that most dystopian novels are that way, when you reach the ending of the hardcore action, we don’t get much beyond that. But alas, that is just a consequence of reading a creative and well-written series by a talented author.Notable Scene:Samm looked at the Partials. “Lemon or mint?”Dwain shook his head in disbelief. “You’re bribing us with candy?”“We’ll take mint,” said Gorman. Calix nodded and closed the door, and Gorman scowled at Dwain. “That wasn’t a bribe, it was a demonstration.” He shot a hard glance at Samm. “He’s showing us they’re equals.”“We’re working together,” said Samm. “Partners, friends, whatever you want to call it.”“What do you want to call it?” asked Heron. Samm gave her a quick glance but didn’t answer.“But why?” asked Gorman. “After everything that’s happened, after everything you’ve told us about the humans and the world and all the million things wrong with it…Why?”Samm was still looking at Heron when he answered. “If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.FTC Advisory: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins provided me with a copy of Ruins. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review.

[bookswithbite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a really good ending to a great series!Plot: So the plot moves a bit slow in the beginning but thats because the reader is getting caught up on what is happening after the second book. After that, its takes off into lots of action and drama. Every little detail is explain nicely and carried into the new chapter well. I don’t think there is ever a dull moment in the book.Love/Friendship: We do get point of views from Kira as well as Sam and a few other characters. Each point of view is well done with plenty of detail. It flowed smoothly and as I read, it painted a pretty good picture in my mind. The development of a certain love interest kept me going and I HOPED that she choose who I wanted. Indeed she did.Ending: I think the way the whole story came together gave it so much umph and adventure. There are certain plot twists that totally surprised me and had me shocked. Still, I adored it.Constructed smart and luring, Ruins is an exciting conclusion. The attention to detail with what happens with the DNA and scientific experiments had me completely intrigued. If your in for a epic adventure, then read Ruins.