CHAPTER 3

COME DOWN THE STAIRS TO WHERE I AM

“Ohhh. Did you want me to stop you?”

Now that she thought about it, everything that happened that day started with that one line of Harvey’s.

It was the afternoon of The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son’s fourth day at sea as it continued its cruise to South-hairo port. After taking a late lunch in the ship’s dining hall on the first-level deck, Julius invited Kieli to come play in his room—Harvey’s prosthetic hand had hung the boy up and chased him off the day before, but today he specifically had a special-class passengers’ lunch brought to the general passengers’ cafeteria and was determined to eat lunch beside Kieli, whether anyone liked it or not.

Silver and porcelain tableware crowded together on the hastily laid white tablecloth, and the boy wore an indifferent look on his face as he consumed every little bit from the expanse of elaborate dishes that had been laid before him like works of art. He said (sticking a forkful of guinea fowl pie into his mouth) that he would have them bring some for Kieli, too, but Kieli felt like crying just watching him, so she refused the offer. She had recovered thanks to the medicine, but she still didn’t have much appetite. Even the meager lunch provided for general passengers was too much.

“Let’s play cards in my room. The cards I have are limited edition; there’re only five decks like them in the whole world. I’ll make an exception and let you see them, Kieli,” Julius said, wiping his mouth with a napkin (he really was only a little older than ten—when he was done eating, there was sauce and cream all around his mouth) and smirking proudly. “Wow, cool,” Kieli smiled and nodded, half impressed and half disgusted as she thought about his toy gun that looked just like a carbonization gun and all the other fine toys this kid had. She cast a glance at Harvey, sitting across from her.

“Harvey’s good at cards. Right—”

“I’m not going.” He refused before she got the invitation out. Kieli faltered, at a loss for words, so instead, Julius frowned as if to say, “Forget about that guy,” got up from his chair, and grabbed Kieli’s hand.

“You can come by yourself, Kieli. Now come on.”

“Hmmm…” Kieli answered vaguely and checked Harvey’s mood as she stood up.

While Kieli and Julius were eating, Harvey, on the other hand, didn’t touch his food; he rested his crossed legs on the table (unmoved by Julius scolding his bad manners) and fiddled noisily with the back of the radio. The metal frame of his prosthetic hand peeked out of the right sleeve of the shirt he’d halfheartedly pulled on, holding on to a screwdriver a little awkwardly and tightening the radio’s screws.

“…Well, I guess I can go for a little bit. Will you be back in our room?”

“Dunno. Probably,” Harvey responded apathetically, and Kieli for some reason fell speechless. Harvey stopped working for the first time and looked up.

“What? You can go. I’m not gonna stop you.” He blinked blankly at her, then, as if something suddenly occurred to him, “Ohhh. Did you want me to stop you?” That line.

“N-not really!” Kieli raised her voice in spite of herself. “Let’s go, Juli,” she said and ran from the dining hall with such force that now she was pulling Julius.

When she stopped, just once, at the door to look back at their table inside, Harvey was looking back down at his hands and had resumed his work as if nothing had happened. She knew that she was getting her hopes up for no good reason, but Kieli got annoyed anyway and turned back around in a huff. She joined the flow of people going back to their rooms from the cafeteria and set out into the hall with Julius.

It was true that he was never social, but even so, for some reason, he was so thoroughly brusque when it came to Julius that she could almost say he was doing his best to ignore the boy’s existence. She thought that he was maybe a little…but…

“Hey, I thought maybe he was jealous of me,” Julius suddenly declared as they went down the staircase to the lower deck. “Wh-wh-what’s this now?” Kieli asked stutteringly in response; she could feel her face go red at having the boy speak her inner thoughts, as if reading her mind.

“Well, no matter how you look at it, he’s definitely not very nice to me. Anybody would think he was jealous,” Julius answered with a scowl, but he immediately changed to a lighter tone. “But maybe I was wrong. Today he didn’t seem to care about you at all, Kieli. I guess he just had a bad attitude because he always had a bad personality.” Kieli wondered about how he put it.

“Ah-ha-ha…Harvey and I aren’t like that.”

“Then what are you like?”

“What are we like…?”

He struck back with the ultimate question; Kieli laughed it off and fell silent, the smile still on her face.

He could go ahead and ask what their relationship was like if they weren’t like that, but she didn’t have any strong evidence to define it; it was a weak relationship—she didn’t even know how long they could be together. First of all, if, for the sake of argument (and only for the sake of argument) they were in that kind of relationship, even then, she just couldn’t imagine Harvey being jealous. Even before the question of how he felt about Kieli, she figured he never got attached to anyone or anything enough to be jealous. What was she getting her hopes up about?

“Tch. I don’t get it. Why are you with a guy like him, Kieli?”

Kieli fell silent, so Julius puffed his cheeks unhappily and turned away. Kieli let out a complicated, dry laugh and glanced at the boy’s profile.

“Huh?” That was when she realized that Julius’s feet had led them past the second-level deck, where the special-class rooms were, and were headed down to the third-level deck. “Where are we going? Your room’s not this way,” Kieli asked, thinking it odd.

“Heh-heh. Don’t worry; just follow me. I thought of something more fun than cards,” Julius said, laughing mischievously in response, as if he wished she’d asked him sooner. “I found an interesting place a little while ago.”

“An interesting place?”

“Yup. We can explore. A secret passage.”

“A secret passage…er, shouldn’t we stay out of there?” She started giving an honor-student-type response, but even Kieli’s curiosity was aroused upon hearing about a secret passage. She and the radio had walked around the ship on their first day, but because there was usually a limit to where third-class passengers were allowed to go, her range of exploration had been narrow. Fossil fuel tanks might have occupied most of the space, but in a ship this big, there were surely a lot of places she hadn’t seen yet.

The stairways the passengers used ended at the third-level deck, but when Julius urged her to look carefully at a blind spot in the stairwell, she saw a steep, narrow stairway continuing farther below.

It probably went down to a fourth-level deck, and though she could see a passage going off to the side underneath the stairway, it was so dark she could hardly make anything out.

She balked a little when she looked down the stairs, so Julius went first and stepped on the staircase. It was very steep, so he went down backward, clinging to the rail. When he’d gone a few steps, he stopped and looked up.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I said it was secret, but the crew uses this stairway, so there’s nothing dangerous.”

“But we told Harvey we’d be in the special-class rooms…”

“Why do you have to tell him every single place you’re going?” Julius frowned, offended, when she brought up Harvey’s name, then dropped his gaze and started briskly down the stairs.

“Wait! Juli…!”

Kieli hesitated for a minute and stayed in place, but after she thought for a second, she ended up turning backward like Julius did and stepping down onto the stairway. “…Ugh, it’s hopeless.”

Her “it’s hopeless” was just to keep up appearances; really, she wanted to go.

I guess he really won’t be jealous at all even if I do go off somewhere with Juli…

She couldn’t expect anything, but even so, she wished he would show just a little bit of jealousy. She also thought that if Harvey really didn’t think enough of her to be bothered by it at all, she had better be seriously prepared for the possibility of his ditching her as soon as they got off the boat…

It was dark underfoot, so the stairs felt very far apart. Kieli descended slowly, one step at a time, testing her footing with her toe for each stair. After a bit, there was a feeling of stability under her shoes that was different from before, and she knew that she had reached the bottom. When she raised her face, she could see the light from the third-level deck, like a sky cut in a square above her.

“Kind of a dull place.” Julius, having reached the bottom first, looked around and scowled. The air below-deck seemed to confine some kind of smell, and Kieli found it a little suffocating, too. She squinted down the dim passage that extended beyond the stairs.

Bags of materials and sand lay in heaps on either side, squeezing the already narrow aisle to half its width. There were electric lights, but they were far apart. Dull light seeped from the ceiling at equal intervals, like a dotted line of little islands, forlornly illuminating the way.

Partly because of the stagnant basement air and partly because the low vibrations reverberated in her belly more strongly than on the upper decks—possibly because they were close to the engine—the seasickness Kieli had suppressed with the medicine started to sneak its way back. The vegetable stew she had just eaten felt like it was making its way back up from her stomach…Enough of that.

Her own imagination was making her even sicker, and Kieli was thinking she would go back after all, but Julius, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to start walking down the hall.

Kieli decided that Julius had no right to say a word about Harvey’s personality; the two were exactly alike in that they only moved at their own pace, never considering their companion’s feelings. And in that they would both seem to remember along the way and half turn with an expression that said they just knew the other person would be following and bark things like, “Hurry up.”

Kieli looked up at the light above the stairs, sighed a complicated sigh, and then trotted after Julius, who had stopped to wait for her.

He tried going back to their room for a bit, but it wasn’t long before he could no longer stand the oppressively thick crowd. Halfheartedly, Harvey pulled his shoes back on and left the room again.

When he got into the hall, he sighed in disappointment, put his hand on the wall, and looked around as he pulled his workboots over his heels. There wasn’t a soul on the third-level deck; only the lightbulbs swung slowly from the ceiling in time with the ship’s vibrations.

Huh. We’re really rocking…

Maybe the waves of quicksand had gotten higher; apparently the swaying had gotten somewhat heavier. Still, he was fed up with laying low in his room, and since he could only think of one other place to go, he naturally turned his feet toward the stairs when the radio dangling from his left hand suddenly complained, “Not the deck. Think of the damn annoying wind from this damn, good-for-nothing sand ocean and remember I’m a piece of delicate, precise machinery.”

“There’s nowhere to go but the deck. Man, you complain a lot,” Harvey shot back, glaring down at the radio, wondering where it got off calling itself delicate.

The radio had been whining all morning about how its insides were all rough and he didn’t feel so good, so he opened it up and found that minute particles of sand had gotten inside and were preventing it from functioning properly. He scraped out the sand, and now that the radio was feeling better, of course it was complaining again. Next time it broke, maybe he’d leave it that way.

Maybe the spirit had possessed the radio so long, they’d fused together; Harvey thought that these days, the Corporal’s mode of living (though that was a weird way to put it) had started to resemble exactly that of a radio’s. The soldier’s spirit rarely formed itself out of static anymore.

“You could go to the special-class rooms. Kieli’s there, and it should be quiet.”

“You’re kidding. I told you who that kid is, didn’t I?”

“You told me. Why don’t you tell Kieli? Should you really have let her go?”

“…There’s nothing wrong with letting Kieli act normal. I don’t have to worry; she’s not the type to go blabbing to strangers.”

He imagined that, in her case, if she knew Julius’s lineage, far from interacting with him normally, she would get all awkward instead, so he had no intention of telling her now. If he could make it to the end of the trip without being discovered, there wouldn’t be any major problems. Of course, that didn’t mean there was any reason he had to be all friendly and join their card game (first of all, he wouldn’t earn any money), and it didn’t change the fact that the kid was somebody he wanted to avoid with all his energy.

Man, all the extra anxiety I have to deal with because we happened to get on a boat with a problem kid, he cursed in spite of himself, irritated.

“What? So you act like you don’t care, but you really are jealous. You’re so immature,” the radio said in a teasing tone.

“I don’t need to be mature.” He brushed the radio off with the first thing that came out of his mouth, partly because he had been lost in thought and kept walking three steps before he stopped. “Look, you…” What was that radio talking about?

“Why would I be jealous of that pug-faced little brat?”

“You may think he’s a kid, but at that age, they get big really fast. And Kieli doesn’t seem too unhappy with him, either. Don’t tell me you’re not a little upset.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you…” He sighed, exasperated by the radio’s somewhat flippant tone. “He would be good for her; he’s rich, he’s got social status, and he’s got a stable future,” he answered, casually averting his attention from his conversation partner and directing it at the stairway ahead of him as he walked.

“Do you seriously mean that?”

“Yeah, I’m serious. If that brat’ll take her in, that might be better for Kieli, too—gah, what the—?!”

All of a sudden, his right arm swung up, and Harvey looked as if he was about to hit himself; he bent backward instinctively and ended up punching the wall beside him. The sound of a dull shock shook the wall and reverberated down the hall like a wave.

Crap…

Terrified, Harvey automatically froze in place, but it would seem that the shock didn’t echo into the surrounding rooms, and there was no sign of any passengers peering out suspiciously. He waited a little, then breathed a sigh of relief; when he moved his hand slowly away, there were small cracks in the wall, and pieces of it fell to the floor.

“It’s mad ’cause you’re saying those uncute things.”

“Shut up. It isn’t funny,” he snapped, interrupting the radio’s jokes. “…Don’t ever do that again. Next time you act up, I am seriously going to throw you into the ocean. Remember that,” he whispered murderously, glaring down at his right arm, the color still a little drained from his face. It was no empty threat. If it did something like this in front of people, they would definitely know it wasn’t normal.

He didn’t know if it was being good and obeying orders or if it just lightly shrugged him off, but his right arm’s consciousness stowed itself and fell under his control.

“Give me a break…”

First the radio, now this arm—somehow, he always found himself surrounded by weird, inhuman things. But he knew that he had no right to talk.

Maybe it was part of his abnormal regenerative powers as an Undying, but the place where the carbonization gun had blown his arm off and the metal framework of his prosthetic arm had started to fuse together strangely, as if eating into each other. Not only that, but it was like his nervous system had gone ahead and connected with the cables from the metal arm, and he was starting to be able to move it naturally, as if his own nerves were inside it—that is, as long as it didn’t assert itself like it did now.

He wiped the shoulder of his shirt against the cold sweat that had broken out on his forehead and sighed.

……?

When he looked up, an unnatural light coming from behind the stairs in front of him suddenly caught his eye.

It was just a light, dimmer than the bulbs illuminating the hallway, oozing from the stairs’ blind spot, and wouldn’t really grab the attention of just anyone walking past. He approached it casually, leaned halfway over to peer at it, and saw, unexpectedly, an inconspicuous staircase leading below-deck. The dim light came from below those stairs, which gaped open like a mouth to darkness.

“Interesting. A secret stairway, huh? Let’s go down it.”

“It’s probably a work staircase. There’s not gonna be anything down there.”

The radio made its suggestion in a lively voice, making Harvey think, “He’s not a kid. What is he expecting?” Harvey, on the other hand, lost interest after the one glance and started to leave. “You’re boring. Have a little more interest in life; let’s have some fun,” the radio insulted him in disappointment, but Harvey decided he didn’t need advice from a spirit in a radio whose own life ended long ago and ignored him.

When he went back around the staircase, he was stopped short.

“Is something the matter, sir?” Apparently someone had sneaked up on him in the minute his guard was down; a voice suddenly came booming down from above.

His conditioned response was to brace himself inwardly and turn his head back. A person eyed him suspiciously from the stairs’ landing. The man wore a whitish jacket with a stand-up collar—the captain of The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son; Harvey had caught a glimpse of him when they boarded the ship. The normal crew all wore work overalls. Only the captain had that uniform, which is why it left an impression.

“The sand’s resistance has gotten stronger, so the rocking will continue for a while. I would like for you to wait in your room until we’ve reached a safer stretch of ocean.” He made it that far before furrowing his brow cautiously; maybe the captain realized that Harvey had just come from behind the stairs.

“That area is for crew only. Do you have any business back there?”

“It just caught my eye, and I was taking a look. I was feeling sick. I was on my way to the deck.” He had no reason to feel guilty, but he strung a bunch of excuses together out of habit.

“Like you have that delicate a constitution,” the radio interrupted quietly. Harvey heard a short protest of static as he held it behind him and kicked it with his heel.

“Well, all right, then. You really didn’t go down there, did you?”

“I did not go down there.” After answering, Harvey thought dubiously that the man was strangely persistent on that point, but by then the captain had come down to where he stood and said, “I don’t mind if you go out to the deck, but be careful not to fall overboard. We’re swaying quite a bit, after all.” The captain indicated the upper level and made room for him to pass, so Harvey left feeling like he was being chased away.

When he looked back after a few steps, the captain was still standing there as if planning to watch (or “keep an eye on”) him until he was completely gone.

“If you don’t feel better, you’re welcome to visit the medical office.”

“…Thanks.” Harvey wasn’t really seasick or anything, but he had nowhere else to go, so for now, he wound up with no choice but to stick with his original plan and head for the deck.

“Juli, do you mind if I say something?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“I’ve been wondering about this for a while, but is it possible…”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“That maybe we’re lost…,” Kieli whispered meekly to the light brown head in front of her. After a second, Julius, who until then kept walking forward, stopped abruptly.

“Actually, I was thinking that, too…,” he turned around and confessed with the same meek expression.

“I knew it.”

Kieli sighed and looked up at the ceiling. The bare lightbulbs hanging from it lit their very narrow surroundings with a seeping yellowish light that seemed to ooze into the darkness. The lights swung slowly back and forth to the swaying of the ship, and their shadows on the floor stretched and shrank like they were separate creatures.

The hallway ahead of them seemed to stretch straight ahead, but when she looked back the way they had come, for some reason, it curved gently, and she couldn’t see very far down it. What’s more, as long as they were facing forward, the passage seemed to follow a single path, but when she looked back, narrow passages extended to the sides like splinters, so even if they wanted to go back, she couldn’t tell anymore which way they had really come. She also got the feeling that they’d been going around in circles, but the types of baggage piled up in the aisle changed slightly, so they were probably getting somewhere.

She was sure that if he found out she’d gotten lost inside the ship, Harvey would get completely exasperated with her and say things like, “It wouldn’t happen to be your hobby to cause problems for me, would it? And that’s why you keep getting into so much trouble?”

It would be nice if they could get back before Harvey found out…

She glanced back at the walkway behind her as she let her thoughts run; when she faced forward again, Julius was gazing at her, his dark green eyes clouded with anxiety.

“It’s all because I brought you down here…”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t make that face.” Kieli forced a smile so she wouldn’t get too somber. “We don’t have to worry; everyone will come looking for you when they realize you’re gone, Juli. You are a special-class guest, after all.”

She felt kind of guilty, acting all grown-up and trying to cheer up the boy feeling the way she did. It wasn’t just Julius’s fault. The truth was, she’d been thinking things that appalled her, like maybe if the two of them went off somewhere Harvey would get a little jealous. I wonder if Harvey will be mad…It would be okay if he complained to her face, but if all he did was sigh at her without a word, she wouldn’t be able to defend herself. Those were the times when Harvey was really in a bad mood.

Heeey, this way. Over here…

“Ah…! Look, someone’s already here.” She heard someone calling in the distance (what good timing!), and Kieli stamped out all her inner anxieties and peered forward. At the end of the hall, lit here and there with the dull light from bare bulbs, she could see a crew member wearing light, sand-colored overalls.

When she acknowledged that she had seen him, the sailor beckoned to them and started walking farther down the corridor.

“He says it’s that way. Let’s go, Juli.”

The overalled back melted into the gloom and soon disappeared. They’d be in trouble if they lost sight of him, so Kieli urged Julius on and started trotting down the hall. Julius followed her in a panic and called, “Was somebody there?”

“You didn’t see the sailor?” Kieli asked without turning around. “But you heard him call us, didn’t you? He said ‘over here.’”

“Who did?”

“Like I said, the sail…,” she started to answer but cut herself off and suddenly stopped running. They were right at the spot where the crewman had beckoned them. “Wah, what is this all of a sudden?” Julius protested as he almost crashed into her, stopping just short.

Kieli didn’t answer but stared intently down the hall where the crewman had vanished. The corridor had gotten narrower, and sandbags were piled up on both sides, leaving just enough space for one person to pass. She squinted down the tunnel but couldn’t distinguish any sign of the crewman—only the dotted line of round lights from their bulbs just barely floating into view. It wasn’t unlike a will-o’-the-wisp urging them onward, showing them the way.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Julius asked dubiously.

“Hmm…”

She finally turned around to face him and said, “Sorry. It must have been my imagination after all. Let’s go back…,” apologizing vaguely.

Just then, the floor under their feet swayed violently, like a giant wave, and Kieli couldn’t help tottering backward, clawing at the air.

The hanging bulbs swung in great arcs, hitting the ceiling, and their lights flickered. Julius staggered, too, and immediately his outstretched hand grabbed at the sandbags, dragging one out from the middle of the great pile.

Kieli fell backward to the floor as the sandbags fell in an avalanche. A low rumbling like thunder shook the air, reverberating off the ceiling, and clouds of sand swirled up, obscuring her field of vision.

“Juli!” Kieli went pale and called the boy’s name as she coughed through the thick clouds of dust. She leapt to her feet and clung to one of the sandbags blocking her way. “Juli, are you okay? Answer me, Juli!” Don’t tell me he was crushed…! The worst-case scenario ran across her mind, and she cursed herself for being so careless as to come farther down the hall.

“Kieli…!” She heard a muffled voice from the other side of the wall of sandbags. “Kieli! Kieli, are you okay?! You’re not crushed, are you?” the boy’s voice demanded anxiously.

As he’d taken the words right out of her mouth, Kieli opened and closed it two or three times; then she sighed in relief and sank to the floor. “That scared me…”

“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d been crushed!” On the other said of the wall, Julius sounded relieved, too.

“Ugh, that’s my line. I thought my heart would stop.”

“I’m fine. You’re not hurt, are you, Kieli?”

“No. But…,” she started ambiguously, raising her troubled face. Bundles of sandbags made of special fibers piled heavily up to the ceiling, completely blocking the hall. She grabbed the nearest one with both hands and tried pulling with all her might, but even one of them was easily twice Kieli’s weight, and it wouldn’t budge. She could tell that Julius was doing the same thing on the other side of the wall.

“This is bad…”

“I’ll go get someone.”

“You’d better not move. We don’t want you getting more lost.” Sensing him turning to leave, Kieli pressed her face into a space between bags and called out to him in a panic. “You stay there, Juli. I’ll figure out something from this side. I’ll find the exit and get Harv—”

“I can take care of this without his help.”

It was a mistake to be so quick to invoke Harvey’s name. It sounded like Julius was leaving as he spoke, but by the time she tried to stop him—“Wait, Juli!…”—his light footsteps had already pattered back the way they’d come.

…He’s gone. What’ll I do…?

Still looking up at the wall of sandbags, Kieli stood where she was, at a complete loss.

He’ll be okay, right…?

Come to think of it, Julius had his mother’s spirit guarding him, so the unthinkable most likely wouldn’t happen. She consoled herself with that thought and sighed, “Whew…,” leaning against the sandbags.

Now that she was alone, the area grew quiet. Kieli started noticing the sound from the engine at the bottom of the ship more acutely and began to feel sick again.

It was too much to stand up, so she crouched down and hugged her knees, sandbags at her back.

I’ve felt like this before. When was it…?

A certain scene suddenly floated to her mind. It was when she was living with her grandmother in their apartment in Easterbury, so she must have been five or six—she was crouching down like this, sitting at the edge of the apartment stairs. Light from the setting sun shone through the hall window, casting a rusty orange glow on her feet. Creak, creak. She heard the old stairs groan, and when she looked up, she saw her grandmother carrying grocery bags at the bottom of the stairs. She hurried to hide her left cheek with her hand, but it was too late.

Her grandmother spotted her swollen red cheek and frowned. “What happened?”

“…I had a fight with Dini from the first floor.”

Dini from the first floor was the landlady’s daughter, and even though she was a year younger than Kieli, her attitude was three times as big. When Kieli answered sullenly, her grandmother put her bags down on the stairs without a word and sat down next to the girl. Grown-ups didn’t really sit on stairs, and her grandmother was someone who respected that formality, but when she spoke seriously to Kieli, she made sure their eyes were on the same level—in other words, right now, she was asking for a serious explanation from Kieli. But she wouldn’t say anything.

Kieli stayed quiet for a while, but in the end, she couldn’t bear the silent interrogation and confessed, still looking down.

“…Dini’s doll talked. She said that Dini was repulsive. So when I asked what ‘repulsive’ meant, Dini looked at me like I was weird and took the doll away. She’s weird. A talking doll is way more weird than me. And then Dini said that she was only playing with me because her mom said that she had to because she feels sorry for me. When I asked why she felt sorry for me, she said it was because I say weird things sometimes because I don’t have a mom. Then I told her that I felt sorry for her because if I had a mom like her mom, I wouldn’t want a mom. Because I hate the landlady. Then Dini started crying and grabbed me.” Kieli explained the incident very quickly, then got nervous at her grandmother’s lack of response and glanced sideways to gauge her mood.

Her grandmother had listened to her story, her eyes focusing on her hands folded over her lap, but at length she stood up quietly, saying, “We’re going to apologize to Dini and her mother. Come now.”

Kieli looked unhappily up at her grandmother.

“Why? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You said a mean thing to Dini. Anyone would be sad if someone said something bad about her mother. Now come along.”

“Really? I didn’t know…” I mean, I don’t have a mother.

Her grandmother no longer answered but picked up her grocery bags and started once again down the stairs she had just climbed. Kieli still didn’t know what she had done to Dini, but when she looked down at her grandmother’s small back with its hunched spine, she felt a prickling in her heart. It was because she took Kieli in and because Kieli was a little weird sometimes that her grandmother had reason to feel small in the apartment building.

Was Dini right? If she had a mother, would she not be the weird girl that caused trouble for her grandmother…?

Why am I remembering this? It happened so long ago…Kieli wondered inwardly at herself, leaning against the sandbags and looking up at the ceiling. The ship didn’t rock as violently as it did before, but it kept swaying sideways a little more than usual, and the dull light from the bulbs hanging from the ceiling swung left and right.

She figured it was because she saw the spirit of Julius’s mother that she was dredging up the few memories she had related to her own mother, whom she rarely thought about. Kieli hadn’t had a mother for as long as she could remember, and she didn’t think that she had ever felt particularly lonely because of it before now. Julius always had his mother’s spirit beside him, and he had lots of people to worry about him like that lady in the maid outfit. She knew it was childish of her, but to be honest, she really was a little jealous.

Maybe that was why she suddenly felt so dissatisfied with Harvey’s cold attitude…

…What do I do? What if no one comes to find me?

The instant the thought popped into her head, anxiety quickly spread throughout her mind. What if I can’t make it back to the top before we arrive at port? What if Harvey and the Corporal get off the ship and go off somewhere without me…?

She hung her head and clasped her knees tightly. “Help me, Harvey…” She wasn’t even aware that she was muttering his name. And she felt pathetic that she had brought this on herself.

This way…

Kieli heard a voice somewhere. She gasped and looked up. For a second, she imagined it was her grandmother’s voice, but it was male. The voice of that crewman.

Come over here. This way. Hurry, hurry…

She looked to her right and left, and the voice crept into her ears again. It sounded strangely distant, as if it was coming from far away, but like it whispered in her ear at the same time. She squinted down the passageway, but all she could see in the faint light cast by the bulbs was the corridor continuing dimly ahead with its bags piled on either side; she couldn’t pierce the darkness beyond it.

Clinging to the voice, she leaned away from the mountain of sandbags and stood up.

Her nausea had subsided significantly while she was thinking. She kept a hand on the walls of bags lining the hall and moved forward into the gloom.

That was some jolt…As long as I don’t fall over, he thought in the corner of his mind, as he climbed the dim stairway and emerged through the door and onto the deck. The minute he squinted into the white outside light, a misfortune he hadn’t considered literally flew up in front of him.

“Uwah!” Harvey yelped involuntarily and caught the plank that very nearly hit him in the face with his right hand. He heard the dull clang of metal striking metal.

“That was close…,” he grumbled, looking to see what had come at him. It was a raft made of buoyant styrene resin plastered over a one-meter square of zinc planking. It had been positioned on a key spot on the deck in case of an emergency.

“Why would something like this fly at us?”

“Hell if I know,” Harvey spat at the radio, holding the raft so he could lean against it and look around. He saw several crewmen working feverishly at something toward the stern. Apparently one of the wires holding the rafts in place had come undone, and about a dozen rafts had scattered across the deck. The crewmen were trying to collect and restack them, but right now it appeared that it was all they could do to chase after and catch the rafts as they slid in the wrong direction every time the ship rocked.

“Wow, they’ve got it rough,” he muttered in a tone that even he realized was completely lacking in sincerity.

“You can’t work up even a little desire to help them out?”

“I’m just a normal passenger that came up here to distract himself from seasickness.”

“……”

He watched the confusion as the crewmen ran around in the same way he would have watched a fire on an opposite shore. A sailor clung to one of the rafts as it danced, flapping above the deck. He noticed Harvey and called out to him. “Heeey, excuse me, could you bring that over here?”

“Oh. Right…”

He remembered that he was leaning on the raft that had accosted him, using it as a windscreen, and sighed. It seemed he’d have to get involved after all.

He dragged the raft carelessly over. “Oh, thanks.” The sailor held out one hand as he supported the raft with the other, then suddenly exclaimed blankly, “Ah.”

“Aren’t you…?”

“……?” Instinctively Harvey’s guard came up as the man scrutinized him, but the next moment, he gave the same reaction as the sailor: “Ah.”

He had a relatively small build for a sailor (still, it was much different than Harvey’s), and Harvey had a faint recollection of the slender, somehow frail-looking face with its round, rimless glasses. He wasn’t very memorable compared to Tattoo and Whiskers, but this was the man who, following suit, went by the nickname Glasses at the card house at the port.

“So you’re a passenger on our ship.”

“But I almost failed to earn my fare thanks to you three.”

“Ha-ha-ha, you got it back magnificently. Man, you’re good. And you know when to quit. I thought sailors had a patent on cards; did you have a teacher or something?” the sailor said, laughing to show he bore no hard feelings.

“…Sort of. A long time ago.” Harvey just brushed it off vaguely and gazed at the other crewmen running around the deck chasing rafts. He didn’t see the other two, Tattoo or Whiskers, anywhere.

“Oh, they left the ship after our last voyage. Had a fight with the captain,” the sailor explained, guessing what he was thinking. “So they needed some money to get by. You seemed pretty out of it, and we thought you’d be an easy target. That was some miscalculation, eh? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha…” Harvey laughed drily. He thought about hitting the guy, but he was somehow drawn in by his good-natured way of speaking.

“Hey, stop slacking!” yelled a threatening crewman who seemed to be the sailor’s senior, so their conversation ended there, and the sailor with round glasses ran back hurriedly, dragging the two rafts with him. Harvey planned to stay uninvolved and watch him go, but the senior sailor spotted him and called politely to him, “You, too. Come over here and help us tie ’em down!”

“Why should I—”

“We’re short on hands. One of our guys ’as been missing since last night. Lying down on the job somewhere in an emergency like this, the moron.”

“Hell if I care…,” he cursed under his breath. But when someone offered him a wire for tying the rafts down, he took it in spite of himself, and in the end, he found himself helping after all. (He just knew the radio at the end of the cord around his wrist was chuckling.) While two crewmen held the rafts down, two more used the wire to fasten them to their supports on the handrail.

“What’s the big emergency?” he asked as he tied the woven-iron wire around the support, and the round-spectacled sailor answered, pulling another wire next to him.

“Apparently one of the subscrews isn’t working. Normally, it’s no problem as long we have the main screws, but the sand is flowing fast today, and it doesn’t look like we can get through if we’re not fully operational.”

“Is that why we’re rocking so much?”

“One of our guys just went to look at the screws; he should be back soon.”

“Heeey!” another voice loudly overlapped the crewman’s. A new sailor flew through the deck entrance and ran over, waving both arms.

“Everybody, come help! All the bags fell over in the corridor in the power area; it’s blocked!”

“Aren’t I always telling you to clean that place up?!”

“We’ll do it later! Right now, we need to—”

“It’s always ‘later’ with you people! How many more hundreds of laters do you need?!”

Harvey indifferently let the rough exchange of loud voices go over his head, but when he noticed half the face of a small boy peeking out behind the new sailor’s back, he frowned. The boy made a face that obviously said, “Uh-oh!” and ducked his head.

Before he could say anything, the senior crewman caught sight of the boy. “If it isn’t Master Julius. What’s the matter?”

“I found him lost in the power area. He says there’s still a girl inside…”

The instant Harvey heard that, he let go of his wire without a word. “Waah! Hey, don’t just let it go!” the sailor in the round spectacles objected as the taut wire whipped backward and the rafts it held in place fell over again. But Harvey wasn’t in a mood to care; he walked quickly away toward the deck’s entrance.

“I’ll help. Where is it?” he asked, passing the sailor who had come to report. “You two are nothing but trouble…” He glared casually at Julius, still hiding behind the sailor; the boy cowered but shot a rebellious look back at him.

“It was my idea. If you’re gonna get mad, get mad at just me. Kieli didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I’m not gonna lecture you. It’s none of my business,” Harvey cut him off, and the boy fell speechless.

He flapped his lips, then his cheeks flushed red, and he spat, “You’re impossible! I have no idea why Kieli would hang out with a guy like you!”

“…Yeah. I don’t know what she likes about me, either,” Harvey muttered under his breath, looking sideways at the boy as he signaled the sailor to show him the way and started to leave.

After following the corridor that the voice called her down for a while, Kieli ran into a wall and, confused, found herself searching along the cold wall, looking for something.

Her palm touched a handle, like a lever.

I thought it was a dead end…

After a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the lever with both hands and tried pushing it. She heard a heavy clunk, and an iron door opened on the other side of the hall.

A sandy wind blew in from somewhere, ruffling her hair. Lukewarm air like from an exhaust port, a thick smell, and the sound of rotating screws filled the passage. A little ahead of her, in the gloom, a single bulb hung from the ceiling; relying on its light, she squinted at her surroundings. She couldn’t tell for sure, but she seemed to have come into a wide space.

The instant she crossed the doorway and cautiously set foot on the other side, her field of vision suddenly blurred as she dropped directly downward.

“Hya!” she screamed and kept falling a few dozen centimeters. “…Owww.” She turned around, rubbing her rear end after striking the floor, and saw that the door and the floor were on different levels with a simple set of steps between them. “Ugh…” she grumbled her misplaced anger and glared up at the door behind her.

Help me…

She heard the voice, closer than before.

Placing both hands on the floor and lifting herself up a little, Kieli strained her eyes toward the interior. She saw someone crouching under the lightbulb. She could see only half of him as he blended in the darkness, but someone wearing the same sand-colored overalls as the sailor that had beckoned to her in the corridor was on all fours, crawling on the floor, looking for something.

He lifted his head slowly and looked her way—

The instant Kieli saw him face-to-face, she gave a twitch of a scream, then swallowed.

The left side of his body was completely gone, as if it had been torn off. An eyeball dangled by a liquidy string from his torn left eye socket, and the eye, which shouldn’t have been able to move, rotated and looked at her entreatingly.

“No…” Kieli, still on the ground, groped at the floor with her hands, trying to back away. She couldn’t work up the energy she wanted; her heel slipped, and the bottom of her shoe hit something. What was it?

Startled, she looked down, and that “something” caught her ankle.

“!”

Automatically, she started to scream, but she was so upset her voice wouldn’t come. She opened her eyes wide and stared at her feet—what she saw lying there was the corpse of a sailor in work overalls. The left half of his body had been torn off and was gone; he lay facedown, his remaining right arm thrown forward, as if reaching for her foot.

Apparently he had crawled that far with only the right half of his body before expiring. A reddish brown stain drew a thin, dragging trail on the floor, and was drier the farther down it went.

Help me, please. Help…

The ghost, taking the same form as its corpse, crawled toward her, dragging the cross-section where his left half had been torn off. He lifted his head, asking over and over for help.

The second their eyes met, the dangling eyeball fell to the floor, pulling the string with it. But either the ghost didn’t notice or he didn’t care; he turned his empty eye socket to her and reached out his arm, mimicking his own corpse, and grabbed Kieli’s ankle.

My body, it’s my body. Help…

Ghosts weren’t supposed to be able to grab people’s legs. And yet she definitely felt a chilling warmth around her ankle, which jerked toward him. “Eep…!” She tried to resist, but she was so scared she couldn’t summon the strength, and her nails scratched the floor, making a terrible screeching sound.

No, let go! she meant to scream, but the air just stuck in her throat and wouldn’t come out. The ghost and the corpse both had her by the ankles and dragged her farther inside. The smell of the tepid wind got stronger—faintly through the gloom, she saw a giant screw rotating and crunching up sand. If a person got pulled into there, he would be a lump of meat in no time…!

“Heeeey!” a muffled voice suddenly echoed behind her.

She thought the ghost looked blurry for a second, as if the vibrations from the interjecting voice had stirred it up, and then it vanished into the darkness.

Kieli stayed frozen in place for a while, unable to move. “…!” She tried to exhale the breath she’d been holding, but her throat choked up and all she could do was hiccup.

She still felt skin on her ankle.

“Heeey, is anybody in there?” She heard the deep voice again, and with it, the sound of a muddle of approaching footsteps.

“Damn, that was a lot of work. You’d better get that all put away before the day is over!”

“Easy to say, but there’s nowhere to put any of it.”

She turned her head haltingly to see large men, wearing the same overalls as the dead body, appear in the door, talking noisily. “Oh, there you are,” they started to say casually, catching sight of her sitting on the floor, but, “Ack…”

When they noticed the corpse lying on the floor at Kieli’s feet, every one of them opened their eyes wide in shock. “Kieli, are you okay?!” Julius popped out, slipping between the adults, but of course, he, too, went speechless and stopped in his tracks.

Behind Julius, Harvey finally showed his face. He glanced at the scene, almost glaring at it, and muttered, “You idiot…” Then he made his way past Julius and the sailors who stood petrified in the doorway, staring at the corpse as if they didn’t want to get close, and jumped over the threshold.

That’s when Kieli finally realized that, although the body was reaching his hand out to her for help like before, his palm was only touching her ankle and wasn’t actually grabbing her. Kieli sat down near the door, where she had first fallen. She hadn’t been pulled into the room—no, looking carefully, she saw that there was a trail in the sand on the floor where she’d been dragged half a step, and she shuddered again.

“Seriously, you.” Harvey cursed in exasperation as he knelt down beside her. He grabbed the corpse’s hand indifferently and peeled it off Kieli’s ankle. “It wouldn’t happen to be your hobby to cause problems for me, would it? And that’s why you keep getting into so much trouble?”

“Ah. N…” She could speak now, but it only came out in meaningless puffs of air, and Kieli opened and closed her mouth feebly a few times. “I’m, sorry…,” she finally managed, forming her first real sentence. Instantly, tears spilled from both her eyes, which had been forgetting to blink.

“Look, here. If you’re gonna cry about it, then don’t go off on your own to begin with. I’m really gonna get mad,” Harvey lectured in a tone that sounded as though he was already a little mad, so she bit her lip in an effort not to cry. What am I doing? Here I get the childish idea that maybe I’ll test him a little, so I do things I shouldn’t, cause trouble I shouldn’t, and get him even more annoyed at me. “I’m—I’m sorry, I’m sorry…!” She hung her head and tried to hold in her sobs, but it just wouldn’t work, and she kept apologizing in a tearful voice that seemed to keep sticking.

“Argh, that’s enough.” Harvey breathed a short sigh over her head. “That’s enough. I get it.”

He ruffled Kieli’s hair with his left hand, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with this.

“That’s the guy we haven’t seen since last night. Come to think of it, it was his shift to maintain this place…,” muttered one of the sailors who, perhaps finally deciding to get close, crouched down next to the corpse and checked the mutilated face of his colleague. Kieli raised her face, wiping away tears, and saw a sailor with a slender face and round glasses looking a little disturbed. “We meet again, little lady.” He smiled.

The other crewmen gathered around, murmuring. Apparently Julius was the only one who still couldn’t bring himself closer; he kept a nervous watch, only his face emerging from the sailors’ shadows.

“One of the subscrews did stop; looks like there’s a big wrench stuck in there! Dragging half a person with—blegh…” a sailor reported loudly after going farther in, but he cut himself off midway, as if needing to hold in his lunch.

“Pull him out, quick. Then get right to repairs. Be careful not to let the same thing happen again; I don’t care if any of you die, but the last thing I want is that screw breaking!” an intimidating sailor a size bigger than the rest ordered the crewmen in a bitter tone. He spoke mercilessly, but Kieli got the feeling his voice trembled ever so slightly when he looked down at the corpse and muttered, “I wondered where the bastard was sleeping, damn…”

Once the screw was restored, The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son broke away from the whirlpool of flowing sediment and into safer sands at full speed. By nightfall, the ship was progressing smoothly along again in the calm sand as if nothing had happened.

Kieli leaned against the rail of the deck, gazing into the distance of the night ocean. The ocean’s surface had sunk to a deep blue-gray, and she couldn’t see far. If she calmed her mind and listened closely, though, she could faintly make out the sound of sliding sand amidst the rotating screws that filled the deck.

The cold night wind blew past, ruffling her hair against her face. She shook her head, swept the troublesome strands away, and pulled her coat collar closed. The open air that was the perfect temperature in the afternoon had of course gotten quite frigid after the sun set.

Reclining on the rail beside her and smoking a cigarette, Harvey regarded Kieli. “Let’s go inside. You’re not feeling well.”

“Yeah. But I want to see that first,” Kieli answered, burying her chin in her coat collar and indicating with her eyes the crewmen who had gathered at the stern.

A light hung from one of the supports, and three, four sailors were preparing wires underneath it. Two other crewmen had just carried a whitish, rectangular box over to them. They had turned a box for materials into a makeshift coffin. Kieli watched placidly as they started fastening the coffin to the wires, but she suddenly realized something and quickly turned around. She got the feeling Harvey had just said something genuinely nice…

Looking back at her and blinking, Harvey wondered what was wrong all of a sudden. “No, I just want to go inside, is all,” he added halfheartedly, averting his gaze. “You really just can’t be honest with your feelings, can you?” the radio hanging from Kieli’s neck interjected for her.

“You were a little jealous, weren’t you? So you’re feeling bad about it, and you’re thinking you should change your attitude. Am I right?”

“Give it a rest. Besides, what do I have to feel bad about?” Harvey snapped immediately, and Kieli, who couldn’t help getting her hopes up about his offer, let out a sigh of disappointment.

“You should be sorry.”

“…I am.” She ducked under his intense glare. Still, she did feel a little dejected and hung her head over the rail.

Darkness enveloped the ocean lying below her, and she couldn’t make out the flowing waves. The bottom of the ship occasionally flipped up a lump of sand, though, sending up whitish puffs of sand smoke.

“Ready? One, two…”

She heard a voice call out from the stern and turned to look. The sailors were lowering the coffin into the sea by its wires. Kieli leaned forward from the rail and watched as the white casket slowly approached the surface.

When its bottom touched the sand, the wires went slack and the coffin was quietly released into the ocean. The crewmen lined up on the edge of the deck and offered silent prayers. During those few seconds, she felt as though even the sound of the screws got just a little bit quieter.

As the sailors watched, sand half buried the coffin as it rocked in the gentle waves, and it disappeared to the other side of the night sea. Even so, they all gazed mutely beyond the blackness through which they could see nothing.

Eventually, bit by bit, conversation started up again, and they began cleaning up.

“Let’s go,” Harvey said shortly, turning to leave, but Kieli didn’t move from the rail, still contemplating in the direction the coffin had drifted.

“Where will it be carried?” she asked without turning around.

“She’s not listening…” Harvey gave up and trusted his back to the rail again, pulling another cigarette out of its box with his mouth.

“Somewhere in the Sand Ocean, there’s a place where anything drifting in it eventually ends up. The things there weather away little by little over decades and centuries; they become part of the sand, and flow off again to some other part of the planet’s ocean. That’s how the sand in this sea circulates.”

“Huh, you’re well-informed. I’d never heard that before,” the radio chimed in, apparently impressed.

“I’ve never been there myself, of course. I think I might like to see it before I die,” Harvey muttered in a voice that somehow sounded like he had carefully erased the emotion from it as he lit his new cigarette. Kieli kept silently regarding the ocean as she gave ear to the subdued tone and slightly gravelly, low voice beside her. She thought about what “before I die” meant to an Undying and was sure it was an absurdly long time away. Or else maybe it meant that he would never ever go.

Below her, the night sea spread out as far as the eye could see, and the quiet sound of sliding granules never ceased reaching her ears.

The sea of flowing sand that enveloped more than half the planet’s surface was said to threaten the spread of life—but this sound, the gentle sound of sand stretching its hands out as far as it could to embrace everything on the planet, could have been one of the last kinds of music this world, with its scant nature remaining, could manage to play.