CHAPTER 5

TORI PERI

Tori Peri.

It seemed to be somebody’s name. And, even more strange than the name, it seemed she was the one being called by it.

“Tori Peri, where are you? Come out here,” a familiar voice was calling from somewhere. It was a low voice that rumbled in the throat a little, with a faint gravelly quality that felt nice on her ears. Attracted by the noise, she crawled out of the hole in the wall and meant to say, “Here I am!” but what came out of her mouth was more of a scraping “eek” sound.

“Oh, there you are. You do like small places, don’t you?” The lighthearted voice and footsteps came closer, and the toes of work boots stood in front of her. She clung to the shoes with flat-clawed hands; the owner of the boots grabbed her by the back of the neck, and she floated up to his shoulder. She loved riding on his shoulder, so she buried her nose in his neck, stained with the smell of tobacco, and squeaked again.

“What? Are you hungry?”

But it seemed she couldn’t really get through to the man, and his copper-colored eyes peered at her in exasperation. A little flustered at having his face so close that she could touch it, she squeaked, trying to say, “No, it’s not that!” “All right, all right, don’t rush me. I’ll get something for you.” He laughed, not getting it after all, but she was happy enough just to see him smile at her, so she felt like it was all right anyway.

…He’s never smiled like that in front of me…

Envious of this “Tori Peri” someone in her dream, Kieli slowly woke up from her light doze.

She felt as though she’d been asleep for a very long time.

Before “Tori Peri,” she kind of remembered being stuck in a long nightmare, but she couldn’t really recall what it was about. Anyway, a painful, suffocating feeling had invaded her head, and she hadn’t known what was what.

No. I’m scared…

When she tried to remember, she felt a sharp chill and shivered inside her blanket.

A low engine sound echoed from under the floor. Her bed wasn’t soft, so Kieli thought she must have moved from the medical office back to her third-class room, but she peered quietly out from her blanket and saw that she wasn’t in the fourth division she’d gotten so used to.

A yellowish bulb hung from the ceiling, swinging slowly as it brought her surroundings to light. She was in a long, narrow space with round windows lining the walls on either side. With its simple bedding of stiff blankets and hard pillows cluttering the floor in a messiness completely estranged from organization or tidiness, it gave the impression of shared quarters kept by a group of men. Did The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son have a room like this?

“Are you awake?” When she turned her head and lifted it a little, Kieli heard a hoarse voice beside her. She jumped up in surprise, taking the blanket with her, and was assaulted by pain in various parts of her body; her breath caught involuntarily for a second.

Kieli froze, still clutching the blanket to her chest, and the voice spoke again soothingly. “Oh, sorry for startling you. You don’t have to get up if you’re not feeling up to it.”

“…No. I’m fine…”

She sat still for a bit and the pain subsided. She raised her face tentatively but couldn’t see the speaker anywhere. Huh…?

Casting her gaze around the room and back, Kieli saw an old woman in an olive-brown overcoat beside her pillow. How long had she been there?

“Um, where am I…?” she asked, somewhat startled.

“The Sandwalker. You’re our guests.”

“Sandwalker…?”

She had thought in passing that she might be on a different boat, but apparently she really wasn’t on The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son. Before it even occurred to her to wonder when she’d changed ships, the nervous thought struck Kieli that maybe she’d been separated from Harvey.

“The boy is up above. If you can get up, come with me; we should put his mind at ease,” the old woman said, as if reading her mind. She got up with a grunt and started to walk, dragging her feet laboriously. At one end of the long, narrow room, Kieli could see a ladder with galvanized metal steps.

She stared blankly at the back of the head of the old woman who called Harvey “the boy,” but then put her blanket aside and stood up. “Wait. I can go with you.”

……? What’s going on…?

When she moved, for some reason every joint in her body, especially in her arms, hurt excruciatingly.

But the seasickness that had pressed on her so heavily had disappeared, as if she’d imagined it, so she actually felt very good. When Kieli likened the pain in her arms to the time she was ordered to clean the archives and had to carry massive numbers of insanely thick books, it stopped bothering her so much, and she followed after the old woman with a bounce in her step.

“Honestly, that boy’s face before he knew your condition was nothing to worry about…I’ve never seen him like that.” As she walked, her small frame dragging her overcoat along, the old woman’s throat made a chuckling sound, like she was savoring her laugh. “The boy really never does change; no matter how much time passes, he’s still a stubborn little boy on the inside. Reminds me of Tori Peri…”

Kieli blinked, unable to determine if the old woman was talking to herself or to her, but after a pause, the last part of what she said caught her ear. “Ma’am, who’s Tori Peri…?!” Kieli asked emphatically, addressing the old woman’s back as she climbed the ladder.

But by then, the old woman had disappeared into the gloom overhead.

“Wear this. It’s cold out.” As she heard that last sentence, the overcoat the old woman had been wearing fluttered to Kieli’s feet, as if its contents had suddenly vanished.

Slipping the borrowed overcoat over her camisole, Kieli, barefoot, climbed the cold metal ladder to the ceiling, where a door opened upward. She grabbed the lock lever and pushed the door open with both elbows. The instant a crack opened up, chilly outside air rushed in, but the thick overcoat blocked the cold. It was just as heavy and stiff as it looked, but she had no complaints about its functionality or warmth; it had a lot of pockets, and a fur-lined hood.

Just as she was about to put more energy into pushing it a little farther, the door’s weight suddenly disappeared.

“Wah, oof…!”

The extra force almost catapulted her into the open. Kieli panicked and clung to the doorway. She lifted her face to see that a man she didn’t know had lifted the hatch from the other side.

She automatically fell speechless and froze. The man looked down at her in amusement.

“Hey, the little princess is awake,” he called in a slightly accented drawl, looking over his shoulder. Cheers and laughter broke out behind him.

The hatch opened right onto the main deck. This ship seemed much smaller than The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son, and she could see all the way from stem to stern just by the light of the lantern hanging from its support. Dark blue-gray clouds hung in the night sky spreading above her.

A big, cylindrical oil stove stood in the center of the deck, and about ten men sat in a circle around it. Apparently they were in the middle of a party and a card game; liquor bottles and tin tankards, along with cards and chips, lay scattered around the floor.

Kieli didn’t know any of them, and they were all wearing similar, uncouth clothing, so she couldn’t really tell any of them apart. She started getting nervous but then spotted an unmistakable copper-colored head mixed in with the crowd. She’d missed him for a second because he was wearing the same kind of coat over his shirt as the one Kieli had borrowed.

Just as she noticed him, Harvey turned. The second their eyes met, she thought some kind of emotion flickered in his usually stoic face, but as soon as the notion struck her, he suddenly turned away and lit a cigarette obliviously.

“……?”

Kieli got confused, wondering if she had done something to put him in a bad mood, when she heard, “What’s the deal? You wouldn’t leave her side until just a little while ago.” The man above the door laughed then took her arm and pulled her up onto the deck. Chuckles rang out from the circle of sailors.

“Yeah, shut up. Don’t put weird ideas in her head. Kieli”—Harvey interrupted the laughter around him with a grimace, his cigarette hanging from his mouth, and gestured—“Over here.” He lightly patted the floor next to him with the back of his hand. A little nervously, Kieli joined the circle and sat down on Harvey’s right. Warmth from the oil stove heated the deck’s floor, and she found it surprisingly comfortable.

“Well, have a cup.” A red-faced man diagonally across from her pushed a tankard over, but Harvey glared at him through narrowed eyes. “Don’t give her liquor!” The man winced and reluctantly withdrew his hand. “She can have this,” offered another man, handing her a mug instead.

Kieli thanked him and accepted the cup. A bitter fragrance wafted up with the white steam from the liquid as she put it to her lips. It was coffee, so watered down that it had almost no flavor, but the moisture felt good on her dry throat and spread to the core of her body. Now that she thought about it, she’d been bedridden with seasickness for so long she didn’t know how long it had been since she’d put anything decent in her mouth.

“How are you feeling?” Harvey asked shortly when she paused after savoring a few sips of the warm coffee.

“Mm, strangely, I feel completely fine now.”

“Do you hurt anywhere?”

“My arms hurt a little, but it’s fine.”

“All right then,” he responded curtly, taking a single breath, then looked down at the cards in his hand.

He held his cards in his left hand; Kieli noticed that his wrist was in a bandage with a splint and frowned. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

“Nothing. If I’m not careful, it’ll break again before it heals, that’s all.”

“Not that.” I’m asking why! When she started, understandably, to complain, a guffaw burst from the man sitting on the other side of Harvey. He was in the prime of his life, with a fearless face, and had a little more personality than the others, but as he was moderately drunk, a goofy smile spread across his intimidating features.

“Oh come on, give her a decent explanation. She doesn’t even know her own situation.”

“It’s a long story; I don’t want to. And the guy in charge of explaining is broken,” Harvey declared, not wanting to take the trouble. The radio was on the ground next to him, but from what Kieli could see, it looked like it had no power. Why was he broken? And what happened to The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son with Julius on board? And when had they changed ships? Who were these people? What day was it? Why was Harvey hurt like that?

It was nothing new for Harvey not to explain anything to her satisfaction, but there were so many things that didn’t make any sense that she started to get angry.

“Um, let me play, too, please.” Kieli addressed the man diagonally across from her who was dealing, and all the men in the circle looked up from their hands and stared at her, wide-eyed. “You? You can play?” the dealer asked somewhat derisively.

With every eye on her, Kieli faltered inwardly but stubbornly answered, “I know the basic rules. I watched some games the other day.”

“Hey, now. What are you thinking?” came the expected exasperated response from beside her. Kieli glared sideways at him and, deliberately lowering her voice, declared, “I have an idea.” Harvey likewise looked sideways at her and frowned questioningly.

“An idea?”

“Play me. If I win, then you explain everything to me yourself without sounding annoyed. You tell me everything that happened starting with the last thing I remember.”

“I wondered what you were getting at…,” Harvey murmured with a sigh, adding under his breath, “She’s not still possessed, is she?”

“Possessed?” Kieli repeated, not understanding his meaning, when the man with personality from before slapped the knees crossed in front of him and started to belly laugh.

“Okay, okay, I allow it! Give her some chips!” he said loudly to the dealer, then laughed even harder. “You’re an interesting little girl. I’d never’ve thought a girl could talk to an Undying like that!”

“I don’t see anything interesting about it. You must be starved for entertainment from being out at sea for so long,” Harvey retorted, frowning in annoyance at the man who kept slapping his knees, clearly enjoying himself. The conversation was so completely natural that, for a second, Kieli missed the most important part. After thinking something along the lines of, “Do they know each other?” she realized the word “Undying” had casually fallen from the seaman’s mouth, and she was flabbergasted.

The words wouldn’t come immediately, so she questioned Harvey with her eyes. He seemed irked as he let out a smoky sigh.

“Okay, okay. If you win. I’ll tell you about that, too.”

“You really will. You promised.”

“Fine. There’s no way you’re gonna win anyway,” he said smoothly. Kieli, still staring at Harvey, was left speechless, and after a pause, she took great offense.

Kieli demonstrated surprising talent at the sailors’ card game and thoroughly defeated all of the men in the circle, including Harvey, gathering all the chips to herself. Their leader clung to her, weeping, “For heaven’s sake, just don’t take the ship!”…But such a wonderful scene, of course, never actually came to pass. Not that she expected anything like that.

She thought she’d learned the types of cards and what went into each hand watching at the gambling house at the port, but when she actually played, she learned that what was important in a game was not collecting the right cards. Rather, most of the game had nothing to do with the cards in her hand but feeling out the other players. The sailors of the Sandwalker were good bargainers, but Harvey outstripped them all. At any rate, he never gave the slightest hint as to what was in his hand.

As she picked up the cards that slid to her across the deck, Kieli stole a glance at Harvey’s profile next to her. Did he have that sleepy look on his face that seemed to say he didn’t have any interest in this little game when he had a strong hand or a weak one? She tried to sound him out, but she had no clue. His attitude was aloof when he quickly collected the five cards for the strongest hand in the federation army suit, but there were also times when everyone sensed a strange confidence from him that made them all fold despite his pitiful hand. He mystified all the sailors, to say nothing of Kieli.

While she tried to read his expression, her intention to “steal a glance” turned into “staring at him,” so Harvey noticed and looked sidelong at her. His cigarette hung from his mouth as a malicious smile crept across his lips.

“Give up?”

“Not yet,” she shot back, looking pointedly away from him. Instead, the man sitting to Kieli’s right groaned and threw his cards down.

“I give up. I’m out of chips.”

It was the sailor who first helped Kieli onto the deck. She was sure he said his name was Ka Rif. He wasn’t the only one; most of the names of the Sandwalker’s sailors sounded like they were from a language unfamiliar to Kieli, and their skin was darker than Kieli’s or Harvey’s. They were a race of people she never saw in Easterbury; it was possible they were from a land somewhere far across the continent.

“It’s your turn, little lady,” Ka Rif told her, and she hurriedly looked down at the four cards she’d been dealt.

The house rules on the Sandwalker were a little different from the ones she’d learned at the port city. They still competed with the strength of the five cards in their hands, but instead of all five cards being dealt facedown, one of their cards was dealt faceup so that everyone could see it. The strategy required that she be able to reason out her opponents’ hands from the single cards that she could see and compare them with her own.

The card facing in front of Kieli’s lap was the judge of the federation army. Among the four cards in her hand, she held the judge with the free city mark.

A pair of judges, huh…? she murmured inwardly, careful not to let it show on her face. The judge was the card with the distinction of being the strongest of the thirteen types of cards, and if she had a pair of them, she could say at this point that she had a fairly superior hand.

“Call. Fifty,” she declared, using a word she’d just picked up, putting five chips worth ten apiece in the circle. That meant she was staying in the game, betting only as much as the person who went before her. If she didn’t have enough chips to call or if she didn’t think she had a very good hand, she would “fold” instead and sit out that round. As she started to understand how it worked, it was pretty fun to play.

Beside her, Harvey muttered, “Hmm,” expressionlessly, but she couldn’t tell if that “hmm” meant he was calm or concerned. Or it might have just been to throw her off. His faceup card was a shepherd. Like the judge, it was one of the five cards that made up the strongest hand, but in any other scenario, it would actually decrease the value of the other cards; it was an extremely difficult card to handle.

“I raise. A hundred fifty,” Harvey casually declared regardless, tripling the wager and unceremoniously tossing fifteen chips forward. “Erk!” gulped the man next to him whose turn it now was. He may have accidentally given away his hand. If she remembered correctly, his name was Ol Han, and he was the man with the scary face who talked to Harvey like they were so close. The Sandwalker didn’t really have a “captain,” but he was sort of the leader who took charge of the other sailors.

“Damn it, I call. A hundred fifty, right?” Ol Han grabbed some chips carelessly and flung them forward, then play continued in order of the next player’s turn.

When the bet went over one fifty, people started folding left and right. When it came time for the final wager after exchanging cards, Kieli, Harvey, and Ol Han were the only three left.

What’ll I do…? Kieli looked down at her hand and considered. She had four judges. Not bad—or rather, very good. She glanced at her opponents. Harvey was cool as always, and in contrast, Ol Han looked very unsettled as they both exhaled puffs of smoke.

If I lose here, it’s over…She could no longer depend on the chips in her hand. The wager had gone up to four hundred. She could fold and wait for another chance, but she had such good cards…

She decided. “Call. Four hundr—” she began.

Just then, something tugged at her back. She turned around, but no one was behind her.

She sensed a presence and dropped her eyes down to see a brownish something crouched in the sleeve of her coat, as if it was hiding. Judging from its appearance and size, it seemed like a wadded, beat-up overcoat—she couldn’t come up with just the right word to describe the short, fat creature.

Wah, what is that…?

She reflexively pulled away in surprise, but when she saw it look up at her with small, round eyes stuck to either side of (what looked like) its face and shake (what looked like) its head, she somehow understood what it was trying to tell her.

“You call, little lady?”

“Yes. No.”

At Ol Han’s prompting, she looked up, and after peeking at the side of Harvey’s face, which, as usual, never betrayed a sliver of what he was thinking, she hesitated for just a second then declared, “I fold.” Harvey looked up with just a hint of surprise. Immediately thereafter, he erased his expression. “I raise. All of it,” he murmured, shoving his remaining chips forward.

“Guess I got no choice. I bet everything, too.” Ol Han bet the same amount, and it turned into a final showdown between the two of them. The other sailors, who were all drinking together as spectators now, fell silent, awaiting the outcome.

When Harvey nonchalantly revealed his hand, everyone, including Kieli, gasped in disbelief.

All five of his cards were shepherds.

“He’s an idiot,” someone muttered, astonished.

According to the complex and strange rules of this card game, having a shepherd card lowered the value of all the other cards in a hand; collecting shepherds was as good as suicide—but the one exception was braving that danger to get a shepherd in all five suits. Five shepherds had the power to completely turn around the power of all hands, reversing each of the values. In other words, no hand existed that could beat five shepherds.

As soon as Harvey had convinced everyone that he had won, he swore and hurled his five shepherds carelessly to the center.

“What the hell? That was dirty.”

“Ha-ha! Say what you want.” Ol Han laughed heartily at Harvey, who frowned unhappily, and revealed his own hand so that Kieli and the other gawkers could see. Kieli and the sailors leaned forward to look at it.

He had the four strongest cards—the judge, the sword, the revolution, and the bishop’s staff—of the white temple suit, but his last card was meaningless—the exile. Basically, he didn’t have a hand.

The sailors around her saw it and burst out laughing, and a little later, Kieli, too, figured out what had happened. There was no hand that could beat five shepherds, but looking at it the other way, after the turnaround caused by the five shepherds, the one hand with even greater power than the shepherds would be no hand at all.

“Who bets everything on a bluff? You’re an idiot.”

“Ha-ha. Just keep talking, sore loser. You’re good, but you’ve never been careful enough in the final stage.”

“Oh, shut up. Damn, you destroyed me.”

Ol Han cheerfully gathered the mountain of chips to himself, while Harvey looked away and puffed at his cigarette, clearly not amused. Watching their exchange, Kieli started laughing in spite of herself. It was unusual for Harvey to show ordinary emotions like this.

“Are you really upset?” she asked, holding back her giggles.

Harvey looked sideways at her and scowled. “Of course I am. I was playing to win.”

“Now, you promised. Explain everything to the little lady,” Ol Han interjected. Not grasping the situation for a minute, Kieli blinked, then remembered the “bet” she herself had completely forgotten. While Harvey ended up losing everything to Ol Han in the last hand, Kieli folded before it ended, so while she didn’t have many, she did still have chips left. That meant that Kieli had beaten Harvey in their little game.

Oh yeah…!

It was thanks to that brown creature who told her. She dropped her gaze and looked around, but even after turning over the sleeve of her overcoat, the old rag of an animal was nowhere to be seen.

“Kieli?” Kieli looked up at the questioning voice to see Harvey exchanging glances with the man on the other side of her, clearly wondering what she was doing. She turned her head, and there was the young sailor who had first left an impression on her, Ka Rif, offering her a silver-colored pot.

“Oh. Thank you.”

She held up the mug still sitting beside her, and he poured her some more coffee. White steam rose from the pot’s spout, and a warm liquid filled her cup. As the warmth gradually reached her hands, she realized that she was frozen down to her fingertips. They may have been sitting around a stove, but they were still outside in the winter.

“I wish we could give you some chocolate or something, but this is all we have; sorry. Only men live here, so aside from this, all we have is booze.”

“What about that old lady?” she asked, reacting to the “only men” part of what he said, but Ka Rif blinked in surprise. “Old lady?”

“There’s no old lady here. Oh, I guess there was one about ten years ago, but she got sick and retired before I came on board.”

“But she was just with me down below.”

“Kieli, that’s enough.” A frank voice stopped her, and she cut herself off and turned questioningly to her left. She looked up at Harvey’s face, devoid of emotion, and realized what he meant. Now that she thought about it, the old lady was supposed to have gone onto the deck a little ahead of Kieli, but she hadn’t seen her once since then. “Ka Rif, booze!”

“Coming right up!” At Ol Han’s summons, Ka Rif stood up, ending the conversation.

The card game broke up and turned into a bout of drinking; the men’s lively laughter filled the deck.

“So you met the old lady?” Harvey muttered his question, casually considering the smoke rising from the cigarette in his mouth. Kieli nodded, and he sighed in exasperation. “I saw her, too, and got an earful. Something about, ‘I thought you’d grown up some, but you’re the same as ever. Why should I have to keep worrying about you even after I’m dead?’ Like I give a damn.” Even as he complained, something like a bitter smile showed very faintly on his profile; his copper-colored eyes might have been recalling pictures of days gone by, days Kieli knew nothing about, in the smoke.

“Before I know it, even she’s dead. I don’t remember how many years ago I last saw her…” Harvey started to talk; maybe he was going to keep his promise and explain everything. But his husky voice seemed pained somehow, and it pricked at Kieli’s heart.

She unconsciously bit her lip and waited for him to go on; Harvey suddenly turned to face her and let out a little laugh. He reached his splinted left hand toward her and lightly pulled Kieli’s head closer. “Stupid. It’s not as serious as all that. There’s just one thing I kind of regret is all.”

Of everything she heard after that, what shocked Kieli the most was that more than one religion existed in the world.

On this planet, if someone said “the Church,” they couldn’t possibly have meant anything but that Church, but apparently on the mother planet that the Saints came from long, long ago, there were all kinds of other churches. They each worshipped different gods, preached different doctrines, and taught different histories about the creation of the world. In reality, no matter how she thought about it, Kieli could not fathom how differing creation stories could coexist, so how in the world could they have established such contradictory societies on the Saints’ planet?

While she racked her brain to imagine what such a world would be like, Harvey looked at her with an exasperated expression that said, “I didn’t worry so much about other people.”

On this planet, there is only one Church.

But in places a lot of people didn’t know about, there were people, though on a small scale, who believed in religions other than the Church. One such group was these members of the Sandwalker. The Sandwalker was the name of their boat, but it was also the name of their religion. There was a time they had quite a few believers, but the Church found them and exerted pressure on them; they dispersed after the death of their founder, and only one practice remained as almost the sole doctrine that connected the believers—the practice of laying their dead to rest.

They didn’t bury them in the earth like the Church did; they consigned the bodies of their dead to the Sand Ocean. It was this boat’s job to make sure that corpses arrived safely and securely at the spot where everything drifting at sea eventually ended up—the Sand Ocean Graveyard—by transporting the coffins they collected at the various secret ports to a point near the graveyard.

It wasn’t necessarily a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but maybe it was a matter of course that believers of a heretical faith suppressed by the Church and an Undying being chased by the Church would develop a friendly relationship; apparently there was a time before when Harvey had stayed on this ship. It was decades ago, when Ol Han’s predecessor was alive and the old woman, who was the predecessor’s younger sister, was still full of energy, caring for the ship full of seamen.

Harvey spoke only a little at a time, then interrupted himself, put his cigarette to his lips, and started up again after a little while, so it wasn’t until the empty can that sat in front of Harvey in lieu of an ashtray was full of cigarette butts that Kieli managed to hear that much. But all she knew was who these people were and why they knew that Harvey was an Undying. They hadn’t yet gotten to the important part—what had happened on The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son.

The excitement of the drinking party had already passed its climax, and a sleepy atmosphere started drifting in amidst the bouts of laughter, which gradually grew fewer and further between. The pale blue light of the lantern gently illuminated the deck from above, and the orange flame that flickered in the oil stove wrapped its surroundings in a faint warmth.

“‘The dead return to the sand, and eventually become life again.’”

“What’s that?” Kieli asked blankly in response to the cryptic words that suddenly flowed out of Harvey’s mouth.

Gazing as usual at the smoke from his cigarette, Harvey said, “I told you a little about it before, remember? Everything that drifts to the end of the ocean dries up and erodes there, becomes sand, then drifts out to sea again. Over time, the bodies of Sandwalkers become part of the sand like everything else. ‘The dead return to the sand, and eventually become life again.’ I’m not interested in these guys’ doctrine, but I don’t hate that saying.”

“…Hmm. It is a pretty expression…”

It was pretty, but Kieli thought it somehow sad. She clutched her knees wrapped in the overcoat, rested her cheek against them, and glanced over at Harvey sitting next to her. He probably didn’t realize it himself, but Harvey said things sometimes that sounded like he longed for death. It frustrated her that, when it happened, she fell silent, unable to say anything that might help.

“Hey, you guys,” came a slow, slurring voice, along with a thick arm that wrapped itself around Harvey’s neck. A thoroughly drunk Ol Han leaned on Harvey and put his chin on Harvey’s shoulder. “You’re heavy. And you reek of booze,” Harvey spat in annoyance, pushing the man’s red face away.

“I been watchin’ you, and you two’ve been buildin’ up a depressing little world for a while now. Put more oomph into it and have a good time. We’re having a party to send off the dead!

“That’s right, oomph! None of you have enough energy!” Ol Han suddenly started yelling at everyone around him. Kieli looked and saw that almost all the men were already lying around the stove, snoring. Still telling his shipmates off for their lack of energy, Ol Han sat down where he was and crossed his legs, but maybe he too was half losing the battle against sleep. He started pouring himself a drink with a dangerously unsteady hand.

Kieli watched him, a little startled, and quietly asked Harvey, “Send off the dead? What does he mean?”

“They’re going to send the coffins piled up in the ship’s hold out to sea tomorrow. They’re goofing off before that,” Harvey answered with a sigh, looking in exasperation at his hammered old friend. “Hmm.” Kieli let it go at first, but after a moment, she threw a terrified glance down at her feet.

“There are bodies piled up?”

“I told you this boat carries coffins, didn’t I? It’s like a funeral ship,” he snapped in a tone that said, “I didn’t want to talk about it to begin with; don’t make me repeat myself,” and Kieli winced. She had been listening, but her imagination hadn’t yet absorbed the fact that there were actually piles of dead bodies on this ship right now. “…The old lady’s coffin is down below, too.” Harvey knocked the deck with his fist, wearing a wry smile that mixed with some other complicated emotion.

“Harvey! Hey, join me!” Ol Han wailed in his still-slurring voice; apparently it didn’t take long for him to decide that drinking felt empty, and he dragged himself toward them with one hand. He pushed a tankard full to overflowing with an amber-colored liquid into Harvey’s hand. “Come on, drink. It’s not like you can’t drink.”

“I don’t get drunk, so it’s no fun. You’re lucky, getting to enjoy yourself,” Harvey responded with narrowed eyes as he reluctantly accepted the tankard. Without a moment’s delay, Ol Han clinked his own tankard against Harvey’s and made a toast by himself. The amber liquid sloshed out and spilled onto the deck and Harvey’s overcoat. “Look, you,” Harvey complained, but Ol Han laughed it off with an, “Oh, don’t worry about it!” and drained his tankard in one go.

Harvey sighed and carelessly tilted his own tankard.

Looks like they’re having fun…

Kieli let out a giggle as she watched the two. Feeling a little jealous inside, she brought her cup of now completely cold coffee to her mouth when—Huh…?

She realized that the scene around her was different somehow than it had been mere moments ago.

The rusty oil stove had become a sparkling silver, like it was brand-new, and before she knew it, the sailors curled up around it, as if competing for space, had changed a little. The older sailors had gotten younger, and instead of the relatively young sailors like Ka Rif, different sailors in the prime of life lay sleeping in their places.

She ran her gaze over the whole deck and saw that the floor, which had been patched up in places with galvanized planks, and the lantern’s support, which had been leaning slightly, were all clean and new.

“Harve…” Gaping, Kieli turned her head to the side, then broke off involuntarily and opened her eyes wide.

Ol Han, sitting next to Harvey, had completely changed in appearance. He looked maybe about Harvey’s age, and instead of his weathered demeanor, he had a young and innocent smile. Still, his outspoken attitude wasn’t much different as he forced more beer into the reluctant Harvey’s tankard.

In this scene where time had apparently turned backward, the one thing unchanged was Harvey, sitting there looking the same as he did now; what was different was that there was a brown object resembling a wadded-up, tattered cloth sitting on his lap. It curled up its body, looking enviously comfortable as it occupied the entire space between Harvey’s thighs as he sat cross-legged.

It was the creature that had appeared for just a second during the card game!

“Ah…!”

That instant, the scene began changing again at a dizzying pace. This time, it jumped rapidly forward. Ol Han and the other sailors grew old before her eyes. The oil stove aged and rusted over, the lantern’s support leaned, holes opened up in the floor, and though no one was there, they automatically patched over with galvanized planks.

The world started spinning; Kieli closed her eyes automatically, and when she opened them again, the scenery around her had returned to the present.

Ka Rif and the sailors snored by the stove as they had before, and Ol Han, though drunk, had gone back to being the leader with personality, in the autumn of his life. Maybe Harvey hadn’t seen the mysterious scene she’d just witnessed; he didn’t seem disconcerted as he continued to humor Ol Han and reluctantly tip his tankard. The round creature in his lap was gone.

Why did only I…?

Kieli looked around in dumb amazement, her glance stopping in a dim corner of the deck.

The old woman in the overcoat was sitting there snugly. The same old woman who’d been next to her when she woke up; the old woman who was now a corpse sleeping in the ship’s hold.

“Did you show that to me, ma’am…?” Kieli asked in a low voice.

The old woman nodded, and her lips, buried in wrinkles, twisted into a wry smile. “I want you to find Tori Peri. She’s been waiting for that boy all this time, and now that he’s here, she shuts herself away. So frustrating…”

A hoarse voice lingered in Kieli’s ears as the shape of the old woman disappeared, seeping into the darkness—the next thing she knew, there was just a pile of sandbags sitting there.

I want you to find Tori Peri…

Kieli turned the old woman’s last line over in her head for a while, then abandoned her cup and stood up. She sensed Harvey looking up at her questioningly and casually reassured him. “It’s nothing. I’ll be right back. Don’t forget that you’ve only told me half of what’s going on.” Harvey scowled—no doubt thinking, “So I am gonna have to tell her about that, too.”

Kieli went down inside the ship through the hatch and felt the cold metal against her bare feet as she descended the ladder on tiptoe.

With its lack of fire or people, the cabin, lit only dimly by a yellow lightbulb, felt even colder than the area on deck around the stove. Just like when she first awoke, simple bedding lay scattered across the floor.

Where was that hole…?

As she looked around, she remembered the dream she’d had right before she woke up, comparing that scene to the oblong room. In the very back, there was a hatch like the one on deck. When she considered that it probably led to the ship’s hold below, where all the bodies were, Kieli naturally felt a little chill and started feeling anxious at being alone in the gloomy cabin.

There was a crack in the wall next to the hatch roughly wide enough for a cat to pass through.

Kieli, for no particular reason, tried not to make a sound as she stepped over the crumpled blankets and drew closer. She got down on all fours and stuck her face up to the wall. On the other side of the opening was a small space where scraps of cloth and cotton that looked like they’d come from a torn-up down coat were piled up thick and warm, forming something like a bed.

“Heeey…Tori Peri, are you there…?” she called in a whisper and waited a bit, but there was no sign of anything reacting.

She pushed her face through the crack and caaarefully reached out one hand to pick up a scrap of bedding. That instant, the dust that had built up heavily on top of it fell off all at once and danced up, filling the small space. It hit Kieli right in the face as she inhaled, and she panicked and jumped away from the wall.

Cough, cough…!

She sank to the floor and choked. She didn’t know how long the space had been abandoned, but she didn’t think there would be so much dust. It must have been years, or decades…

Then a small shadow entered the corner of her vision, watching her from a corner of the cabin. She turned suddenly, but the shadow jumped up in surprise and retreated into the wall, so she couldn’t catch a clear view of what it looked like.

Ngh, it got away…

Kieli coughed once and steadied her breathing, then crawled along the wall to where she saw the shadow disappear.

A crack, a size smaller than the opening she was just investigating, sank into the darkness; if she hadn’t known anything was there, she would no doubt have missed it.

She got down low and put her cheek to the floor to look inside the crack; as she expected, cotton and scraps of cloth were spread out like a bed in the small space. As she squinted inside in search of the bed’s owner, wondering in exasperation how many homes the creature had, she noticed places where things like pieces of paper stuck out from the worn-out scraps.

What are those? Cards…?

She reached into the hole like she did before, being careful not to stir up dust this time, and carefully pulled a piece out. Maybe it had eroded; half of it turned into ash and crumbled away, and the other half only just barely managed to remain in her hand.

On one side, there was a streamline pattern drawn in blue ink; on the other, there was a silver crest and a single human being. Not only had the color faded completely, but part of it was torn off, so she couldn’t make out the whole picture. However, it was a picture she had seen before, so she could fill in the missing pieces and reconstruct the picture in her head.

An emaciated man bound in chains and standing in the wilderness—its silver trade color put it in the federation army suite of cards; it was the exile.

She looked and saw there were several other picture cards from the game buried inside the bed. They seemed to be considerably old, and a lot of the ink had come off, but she could make out parts of a bishop’s staff, a shepherd, and others.

Did Tori Peri bring these here…?

Why would Tori Peri gather up cards? Kieli wondered, returning her gaze to the scrap of the exile in her hand. When she did, she was hit by the strange sensation that the prisoner in the picture was trying to talk to her.

“What…?” In her surprise, she stared intently at the card. But of course there was no way that a person in a picture could talk, and the exile stood hanging his head, chained up in the wilderness, as before.

Did I imagine it…?

The minute she relaxed, the memories that someone had etched into the card came flowing into her brain, as if replaying a recorded image.

Tori Peri.

Someone was calling. Kieli vaguely understood that she was the one being called.

“Tori Peri. Come out here.”

It was a low, gravelly voice, speaking in the brusque tone he used when he was in a bit of a bad mood. Kieli ducked inside her bed of scrap cloth. The cards she hid under her tummy brushed together and made a rustling noise.

“Stop your stupid pranks and give them back. Where are you?”

The tall owner of the voice crouched down and peered in at her big bed next to the trapdoor. But she wasn’t over there. “Kieli” had beds all over the Sandwalker (it was the boat’s fault for being in such bad shape; she could find lots of cracks that she wanted to sleep in), and even that tall man had no way of knowing all of them. The bed she was in now was one she had made just recently, and no one would have learned about it yet.

“Harvey, we’re sending the boat out soon,” called another man, coming down from the deck.

“Yeah, I’m coming.” The tall man lifted his face from the crack in the wall and turned to the other.

“Tori Peri’s not coming out?”

“I don’t know what she’s thinking. She pulled some cards out and ran off with them,” he spat, an air of annoyance lacing his words.

“Oh, those cards. Our last leader left them to you? You were his best student, after all. With that much beaten into you, you won’t have trouble making a living your whole life,” the other man said with a vulgar laugh. It was the man who had become the ship’s new leader in place of the last one, who had just died.

“My whole life? How long will that be?” he murmured and turned on his heel. “Oh well. Let’s go.”

“You sure? This is her way of sulking and trying to keep you here.”

“It’s fine. Leave her.”

“You’ll probably never see her again. If we’re lucky, we might see each other again, but sand moles don’t live as long as people.”

“Doesn’t matter. If she won’t come out, there’s nothing I can do.” He kept responding in short sentences and stepped onto the ladder, leaving his companion, who smiled wryly. “You’re so stubborn.” What?! He’s leaving?! Kieli panicked and pulled together the cards under her belly, then crawled out of her bed with them.

Her hands and feet, with their flat claws, may have been good at shoveling sand, but in any other place, they slipped and slid, and were nothing but inconvenient. Even so, she struggled with all her might on her short arms and legs, but by the time she had crawled out of the crack in the wall, both of them had already disappeared through the trapdoor above the ladder and onto the deck.

He’s gone…Was he really mad…?

The cards she held in her clumsy hands scattered onto the floor.

She wasn’t really trying to hide them; she was going to give them back as soon as he found her. She just wanted him to let her ride on his shoulder, smile at her with his pretty copper-colored eyes, and rub his cheek against her one more time before they said good-bye, and then she would have been satisfied.

She carefully gathered the cards with her claws and picked them back up. Someday, she would give them back, no matter what. She didn’t know when that would be, but she was sure he would visit this ship again—even if she herself was no longer alive—because his life was probably much, much longer.

I hope he’s not still mad when he does…

When Kieli returned to herself, not surprisingly, she was in front of the small crack in the wall, gazing down at the exile card in her hand. The cheek she had pressed against the floor was thoroughly frozen.

“…Tori Peri. Come on out. It’s okay.” She quietly addressed the other side of the crack. She waited a little, and inside the bedding, where there had been nothing up to now, the brown creature that looked like a wad of old clothes gradually become visible, as if it had been buried there the whole time. It was short and fat, with spatula-like claws on its little arms and legs.

The ghost of the small sand mole looked timidly up at her with its round, dark brown eyes.

“Let’s go give the cards back. I’ll go with you.”

Tori Peri hopped up from the bed but then burrowed back inside and shook its head. Kieli gave a small laugh.

“Harvey’s not mad. He’s not the kind of person who would stay mad about something like that forever.”

She reached a hand under the belly of the cowering Tori Peri and slowly pulled out the other cards. They would crumble if she handled them with the slightest roughness, so she took them out very gingerly, one at a time. They were very eroded, but it looked as though they were all thirteen cards of the federation army suit.

She carefully closed her hands around the thirteen cards and stood up.

“Now come on. Or I’ll leave you behind.”

Tori Peri crawled out from the bed but, still very nervous, got only her head out of the wall, then hesitated. Kieli breathed a light sigh, turned on her heels, and started to walk off.

“I don’t care. I’ll get all the praise myself,” she threatened jokingly, glancing back as she walked. Tori Peri, who was starting to crawl slowly out from the crack, jumped up in surprise and hid again. Apparently it was better not to look back at her.

When she turned forward again and set foot on the ladder that led to the deck, wind and a dull light from outside leaked in from overhead. She raised her face and suddenly locked eyes with a figure who had opened the hatch and was about to come down into the cabin.

“What are you doing?”

“Uh, right. Nothing,” Kieli answered vaguely; the sudden appearance of the person she was about to go see caught her off guard. She stepped aside to give him room, and Harvey slid down the ladder. “Aren’t you cold?” he muttered in such a tone that she couldn’t figure out whether he was exasperated with her or being considerate as he ran his eyes around the chilly cabin.

“Where’s that man?”

“Finally fell asleep. He’s a bad drunk, but he holds his liquor; what a pain.” It seemed he wasn’t actually as bothered as he said he was, and there was dry laugh in his voice, as if to say, “Ah well.” Then Harvey’s eyes fixated on the pieces of paper that might as well have been scrap, and he gave her a questioning look. “What’s that?”

“Do you remember these?”

Kieli held out her closed hands and carefully opened them up to show him.

She waited a few seconds like that but got no reaction. As she realized, a little late, that far from still being mad it was possible he’d completely forgotten about it, she started to feel uneasy and turned her eyes upward to look at him.

“Harvey…?”

Harvey stood frozen in place, looking down at what was in her hands, all expression erased from his face.

“Where did you get…?” The instant he started to talk, he cut himself off again, as if suppressing some emotion, and covered his mouth with one hand.

“You remember?” she asked again, and after a pause, he nodded.

“I remember. Of course I do…”

“You’re not mad anymore, right?”

“…About what?” he asked in reply, and a second later, made a face as though it occurred to him. “Oh…” Pressing his face, he sighed as if squeezing the breath out. For all the worry the other party had borne over everything, Harvey didn’t seem to be holding any kind of a grudge. It exasperated Kieli just a little bit; he must have always been like that.

“She’s been wanting to give them back all this time,” she said, dropping her gaze to the cards.

“…Let me see them.” Harvey held his left hand out in front of her, somewhat hesitantly. Kieli lifted her hands above his and transferred the scraps of cards into his palm.

The thin prisoner on the exile card that lay on top gazed up at them with quiet, downcast eyes. A faint breeze blew in from the trapdoor above them—that instant, the thirteen cards in Harvey’s hand crumbled and fell between his fingers like fine sand.

When the yellowed bits of paper danced to the floor and settled there, suddenly, a small, shabby creature stood hunched in their center.

Without a word, Harvey dropped to his knees and crouched in front of it.

“Tori Peri…”

He spoke in a murmur. The ghost of the sand mole opened its round, dark brown eyes and lifted its head slightly.

“You kept these all this time?”

Tori Peri nodded. “Oh.” Harvey buried his head in his arms, resting on his knees, and heaved a deep sigh. The pieces of cards piled up on the floor danced in his breath.

“I’m sorry for keeping you waiting for so long. I’m sorry…”

Tori Peri shook her head slightly, but several times. She moved her arms and legs clumsily, crawling to Harvey’s toes; she clung to his shoe and closed her eyes happily.

“Man, so many depressing things.” Kieli never expected to hear such a phrase from Harvey’s mouth, so after staring at him briefly, she almost started to laugh, then ducked her head when he glared at her.

“Look, you. While you were off being happily possessed by vengeful spirits, I went through one painful experience after another. First I get punched, then kicked down a ladder, severely injured, and on top of that, all these corpses come at me…”

Maybe he felt with all his heart that that last part was an especially bad experience; Harvey broke off there and leaned against the deck rail with a look of disgust on his face. Apparently Harvey went through a series of harrowing circumstances from the time Kieli went to bed on The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son until she woke up on this ship, and it seemed that that was why he was not in the best of moods and didn’t want to talk about what happened.

She was finally able to get the story out of him shortly before (but he didn’t fill her in on the specifics of his encounter with the corpses), and the pieces of memories she had here and there finally came together, though hazily.

She just barely remembered up to the point where the screams, agony, and hatred of all those people flooded into her head—trying to remember still made her head ache a little, and a chill ran down her spine.

“It’s not like I was ‘happily’ being possessed, you know…”

“That was pretty intense. To be honest, you even scared me.”

“I’m not glad to hear it,” Kieli replied, sulking, and leaned like Harvey against the rail, flinging her arms out toward the ocean. She wondered if she would ever go back to The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son. She got the feeling that the people sleeping in its hold needed a proper burial.

The dark azure sea and sky began to take on a faint brightness. Dawn was near.

Kieli and Harvey were the only ones out on deck; the engines had been shut off, and only their whispers echoed above the now-quiet ship. Only tankards and cards lay scattered around the oil stove, as if the men that were there until a short while ago had suddenly vanished.

Voices reached them from below, mixing with the sound of the sand waves. Kieli leaned over the rail and looked down at the belly of the boat; a hatch opened near the sand’s surface, and sailors started pushing out several long, narrow boxes, a few men to each one.

One after another, the white coffins were pushed out to sea and left the boat, riding the flowing sand.

Rocking atop the still dark ocean as they drifted away, the groups of coffins sometimes sparkled white, reflecting the pale morning sunlight that had just barely begun to shine, and it even seemed as if they were saying good-bye to the two onlookers as they watched the caskets being offloaded from the ship.

The old woman was sitting on the last coffin to be released through the hatch. Beside her crouched a brown sand mole, its round eyes turned toward them.

“Bye-bye, Tori Peri…,” Kieli whispered, giving a small wave of her hand. She glanced sideways, and Harvey was resting his chin on his arms, crossed on top of the rail, seeing the coffin off as she did. His copper-colored eyes were fixed in their usual downcast inscrutability, and he watched without even blinking as the coffin grew more and more distant.

Thank you. Thank you for bringing the boy and Tori Peri back together…

A hoarse voice suddenly echoed in her head. On top of the coffin that was now just a speck in the distance, the old woman’s ghost looked Kieli’s way.

Kieli answered with a smile and shook her head; the old woman returned the smile and went a little farther. In a slow, quiet tone that seemed to spread throughout her, she heard:

You really are the girl from back then…

It can’t be a coincidence that you’ve come to this ocean; a power must be working to draw you together…

“Eh? What…?” Kieli spoke aloud in surprise, but by then, the coffin carrying the woman and the sand mole had disappeared beyond the faintly hanging morning mist with the other coffins.

“What was the old lady talking about…?” Harvey asked curiously; apparently he’d heard the same voice.

“I don’t know.” Kieli just shook her head—he could ask, but there was no way she could answer—and returned her attention to the surface of the ocean where she could no longer make out a single coffin.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but sand, mist, and sky, all the same color—the usual ocean scenery spreading out before them.

After that, they fell silent, and the two of them gazed, wordlessly, far off into the ocean until the sky brightened a bit.

“…Do you remember?” About the time the morning mist had thinned and they could clearly make out the flow of the sand, Harvey opened his mouth in a whisper. “…Tadai’s dad. The first guy to take care of me.”

“Yeah, the one at the clinic.” Kieli turned and nodded, thinking it strange that he would suddenly start talking about the past. He was the father of the old man who lived in the clinic by the transfer station; the kind-looking man who, she was told, picked Harvey up off of the battlefield.

“When the last leader here died, it reminded me of when the old man died; I just couldn’t really take it anymore and decided to leave the ship,” Harvey continued as if talking to himself, his chin still on his arms, and his eyes fixed forward, looking at nothing in particular.

“It was right when the Church Soldiers had gotten wind of me, and there was going to be trouble. I didn’t have time to worry about Tori Peri. I never imagined she’d have been worried about that this whole time…”

“But you saw each other again. Right?”

“Yeah…”

He nodded, then muttered something under his breath. Kieli blinked in surprise. He said quickly, “It’s nothing. I didn’t say anything,” and looked away.

Kieli watched Harvey’s profile for a time as he scowled at the ocean. She sneaked a smile. She kind of knew what he’d said….I’m glad you were here.

She imitated Harvey, resting her chin on her hands over the rail, and closed her eyes for a while, lending an ear to the sound of the gently sliding sands.

“When I die, I want to be sent out to sea, too…” The words casually slipped out of her mouth. When she opened her eyes, as expected, Harvey was glowering at her.

“Sorry. I just wanted to say it.”

“Don’t say it again.”

“Yeah.” She shrugged and nodded, but thought inwardly, It’s not like I was completely joking.

It wouldn’t happen for a long, long time; she figured if things went their normal course, it wouldn’t be for decades. But when she did die, someday, she hoped she could have a burial at sea by people like the ones here. She would be reborn as part of the sand at the Sand Ocean Graveyard, and then she’d be able to follow Harvey forever, wherever he went.

An ocean of sand, a sand-colored sky, a sandy wind—sand enveloped this wasted planet; it was always there, wherever anyone was.