CHAPTER 6

WHITE WAKE ON THE SAND

When she asked Harvey if he could put it back the way it was after doing all that, he tilted his head, wearing a somewhat dubious expression, as if the problem had only just occurred to him, although Kieli didn’t think that was the case.

“…You can’t put him back together?” she asked again, lowering her voice.

“It’s your fault for not asking before I got this far.” Harvey shifted the blame to her, frowning with his cigarette in his mouth.

He had completely disassembled the radio. Its casing, screws, and parts of the base lay scattered across the deck. Harvey appeared to have organized them according to some kind of system, but to Kieli, it just looked like a bunch of clutter.

It was all well and good that he took it thoroughly apart and scraped out the fine sand that had gotten inside the circuitry, but now that he was at the stage of putting everything back together, she felt a twinge of anxiety and asked, just in case.

And that was the reaction she got.

She shot a suspicious glare at him; and Harvey, twirling the screwdriver between the middle and index fingers of his left hand (for some reason he had this uselessly dextrous skill), said casually, “Well, I’ll figure it out.” She had no idea what he was basing that on.

“You say things really flippantly like that, but what happens to the Corporal if you can’t fix it?”

“I’m telling you, it’s fine. Trust me,” he replied, furrowing his brow in annoyance, and passed the screwdriver from his left hand to his metal-framed right hand. The long, bony fingers that she felt were surprisingly like Harvey’s old right hand twirled the screwdriver the same way his left hand did, skillfully adjusting their position, and started screwing a coiled part onto the base.

Kieli knelt beside him and stared blankly at the hand for a little while as it worked. Before, it never moved the way he wanted it to, and Harvey was always fighting with it. It would seem, though, that during Kieli’s lapse, they’d reached some sort of mutual understanding.

“Since when are you such good friends?”

“A lot happened.”

From the look of mild disgust on his face, she imagined it probably had something to do with the part where he was “attacked by corpses” on The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son. This was the face he made anytime she tried to probe him further on the subject.

With that, Harvey focused intently on the task of rebuilding the radio, as if refusing to be interrupted, and Kieli, with nothing else to do, held her knees and turned toward the oil stove. Maybe it was running low on fuel; the slender, bluish flame that showed through its small window wavered forlornly.

It was a little past noon, and the low noise of the engine and the gentle sound of waves of flowing sediment filled the deck of the Sandwalker, sandwiched between the blurry, tawny colors of the sky and sea. The quiet rattling she heard near Harvey’s hands echoed faintly and comfortably in her ears.

Their early-morning work of “sending off the dead” ended, the sailors of the Sandwalker, starting with Ol Han, retreated through the hatch to their quarters and went to sleep in earnest. Apparently every afternoon following a send-off was like this, and Harvey told her that they probably wouldn’t wake up until the sun went down. They’d stayed up late partying the night before, then gotten up early in the morning to send out the coffins, so it couldn’t be helped.

Aside from Kieli and Harvey sitting in front of the stove, there was just one sailor left standing watch in the steering room near the stern, and every few hours, a sailor would mount the ladder, suppressing yawns, to take his shift.

She happened to look over at the window of the steering room in front of her, and her eyes met those of the man on watch, who, for some reason, was staring fixedly in their direction instead of ahead of the ship.

She blinked and looked back at him; he panicked and did a quick about-face. What was that…? She unconsciously turned to Harvey, but he didn’t seem to have noticed anything in particular as he directed his full attention to the work in his hands.

Hey, just now…

“Just now,” Harvey suddenly said exactly what she was about to say, and Kieli glared at his profile, her mouth half-open. She closed her mouth and waited for him to continue.

Harvey, still looking down at his work, said, “I was thinking. Where were you before your parents died?” He asked in a tone so casual he could have been talking about the weather, so Kieli blinked a few times, unable to catch his meaning.

“Where? Easterbury. In an apartment on the corner of Twelfth Street, on the third floor.”

“Before that. Not the woman who raised you—I’m talking about your birth parents.”

“I was born and raised in Easterbury.” She inwardly added, “I think.” She didn’t have anything to base that on; she just couldn’t remember being anywhere but Easterbury. But apparently Harvey wasn’t really all that interested, and he acquiesced with a “Well, okay then.”

“The old lady said something that caught my attention, so I wondered, is all,” was all he said before falling silent again and returning his focus to the radio.

Kieli held her knees and buried her chin between them, then went back to studying the flickering fire in the stove.

You really are the girl from back then…

The old woman’s parting words floated into Kieli’s mind. What did it mean? When was “back then”? Was it before her grandmother died? She reflected on it but had no clue.

Her grandmother died the spring right after Kieli turned eight. While the people from the complex came to their apartment and started talking amongst themselves about the funeral and how to deal with her things, Kieli stood in the center of the bedroom, looking down at her grandmother’s dead body lying on the simple bed. Is there no one to take her in? Does she have any other relatives? She could hear the landlord and everyone talking behind her.

Don’t you know anything about your mother or someone? the landlord’s wife asked her, and Kieli pointed at the remains of her grandmother. The landlady shook her head in dismay. She’s not your mother. That’s not what I meant. What a troublesome girl. As the eight-year-old Kieli thought, If I’m that much trouble, you don’t have to force yourself to take care of me; you could just leave me alone, she could see someone else superimposed over her grandmother’s body. Her grandmother’s hair, which had always been tied up so properly, was down now, and her long white locks lay on top of her pillow, like flowing water. The young Kieli thought she’d seen something like this before, somebody’s body laid out like this…

“Kieli.” Harvey’s voice brought her back to herself. She turned her head to look, and Harvey, still looking down at his work, said shortly, “Sorry. That was a weird thing to ask.” Kieli stared blankly at him, and he looked grumpily at her. “Is it weird for me to apologize?”

“No,” Kieli said immediately, shaking her head and looking away.

Her cheeks, resting on her kneecaps, spontaneously slackened, and she grinned to herself for a bit.

Apparently it was time for the watchmen to change shifts. The hatch opened with a rusty creak, and the face of a man in a dark brown overcoat appeared. It was Ka Rif. It was afternoon, but he shivered in the winter cold and turned up his coat collar as he nodded lightly in her direction and went into the steering room.

After exchanging a few words with the watchman inside, his expression changed, and he immediately flew back out.

“Ol Han, come here!” He pushed his head through the portal to the quarters below and called for his leader in a voice that, while not loud, was somewhat tense. Kieli turned questioningly to Harvey. Harvey only shook his head, perplexed, and said, “Hold this. Stay here.”

He shoved the half-built radio into her hands without giving her a chance to argue, then leaned on her to stand up. He met Ol Han, who had just emerged from the hatch, and started conversing with Ka Rif and the sailor in the steering room.

After a short while, Ka Rif disappeared alone below-deck, and the other three walked toward the end of the ship, whispering about something.

I wonder what’s wrong…

Kieli considered the remaining parts scattered on the deck and hesitated for a second, then, thinking she’d probably be in trouble later if he’d lined them up according to some system, she gathered them together with both hands and shoved them into the pocket of her overcoat.

Holding the radio (it looked like a radio, but the casing was just kind of pasted together and the reconstruction of the inside was nowhere near finished), she stood up, and when she did…

The deck under her feet suddenly lurched to one side.

“Wah!”

Still clutching the radio in both arms, she stumbled forward and tottered. Ahead of her was the oil stove, filled only with embers, but still plenty hot. Just as she was about to fall on top of the cylindrical stove as if trying to embrace it…

“Oof!”

…a metallic arm grabbed her from behind. She heard a sizzle as something burned.

As Harvey pulled Kieli to him with his right arm, his left hand caught the teetering oil stove. “It’s usually the other way around. You do this…,” he complained, narrowing his eyes at his right arm as he dropped Kieli with a thud and peeled his left hand unceremoniously off the searing metal plating; the skin of his palm came right off.

“I-I’m sorry…Oh no! Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Yeah, it hurts,” he admitted honestly for once as she clung to his arm in shock, and he made a face as if he was really in pain. Closing his eyes in concentration for a second, though, he immediately regained his composure. “I’m fine now.” Harvey fixed his attention on the end of the deck as if nothing had happened. Ol Han and the watchman were leaning over the rail, examining the ocean below.

The sand-colored sky, which should have been relatively bright, was suddenly thick with clouds, and a dense gas covered the ocean’s surface, obscuring visibility. Sometimes they rode up on high waves and swayed heavily to the sides.

“Well?” Harvey asked shortly, and Ol Han turned a grim face toward him.

“We really are being carried off course. It’s weird; the sand currents in this part of the ocean aren’t supposed to flow this way at this time of year.”

“Why do you even have a guy awake to keep watch?”

“I wasn’t really keeping watch on the ocean…,” the sailor retorted, a bitter look on his face in response to Harvey’s comment, but he swallowed his words before he finished. Kieli imitated Harvey, and they furrowed their brows in unison. If they weren’t watching the ocean, what were they watching?

They heard a clamor of voices below-deck. Apparently Ka Rif had woken everyone up, and the men who’d retreated to the cabin climbed up, one after another, yawning. Just then, the boat rocked rather violently, and a few men who hadn’t found their balance staggered and tumbled over. Ka Rif, the last to show his face through the hatch, raised a voice in protest as he was almost crushed.

Kieli held on to Harvey, so she didn’t fall over this time; but Harvey ordered, “You go down below,” and coldly shook her off his arm, shoving her toward the hatch.

“I don’t want you falling over. Sit somewhere against a wall.”

“Yeah…” Kieli had already caused him trouble once, so she couldn’t object. Nodding reluctantly, she left Harvey’s side. As she walked, she hung the cord of the husk of a radio around her neck.

“……?”

Vaguely sensing something, Kieli stopped where she was. She turned to look at the edge of the deck and squinted at the ocean beyond the rail.

She saw a faint shadow approaching through the opaque, sand-colored gas.

A ship…?

All of a sudden, a giant mass of iron appeared directly in front of them. Just as it sprang before Kieli’s eyes, some of the sailors raised cries of terror.

The violent dash and shock of metal striking metal pierced the deck, and the whole boat dipped at an angle that dwarfed the jolt from earlier—she could almost say it was vertical. Everyone screamed as they slid, forced across the deck, and clung, panicking, to the deck rail.

Kieli slid with them, or rather, she fell to the edge of the deck; but unlike the adults, she had a small frame that was her undoing. Instead of being caught by the rail, her body slipped right through.

“Kieli, your hand!”

She heard a voice overhead, and before she could even think, her reflexes took over and she thrust out a hand. The radio swung to her back and the cord caught around her throat. The cylindrical stove rolled toward them, crashed into the rail, bounced with a clang, and brushed past Kieli’s side as it fell to the ocean beneath her feet.

Kieli watched with a chill as the stove was swallowed up by the sand, disappearing in the blink of an eye; then she looked up to see Harvey reaching through the railing and grabbing her wrist.

“Crap…!” she heard him mutter; at the same time, her field of vision lurched perpendicularly downward. Blood marks in the shape of Harvey’s fingers stained her wrist. It was his left hand, the one he’d just burned—the instant the thought hit her, Kieli’s wrist slipped through his hand. Their fingers brushed against each other, ultimately separating.

In the nick of time, someone else’s hand shot out above her and grabbed her wrist again.

Ol Han was holding his hand out beside Harvey. He pulled with such force that she felt he might pull her arm off, and Harvey’s prosthetic arm immediately jumped in to help, grabbing her side to hoist her up. She slipped back through the rail just as she’d fallen.

“That was scary…” She sighed, relieved, clinging to Harvey’s neck.

“That’s my line. I really panicked…,” a sigh echoed by her ear. By the time she looked up, though, Harvey’s attention was already focused elsewhere. He regarded the man who’d aided them, Ol Han.

“You were a big help. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Ol Han’s broad shoulders gave a light shrug as he leaned against the slanting rail at an unnatural angle. He went on to survey the scene to confirm the safety of his shipmates. “Is everyone all right? No one fell, did they?”

Though somewhat dazed, the men around them raised scattered voices to report that they were all right.

The ship’s body was still tilting at a steep angle, and they’d all been pushed against the rail in a strange array of poses. From a distance, they might have painted an odd picture, like laundry hanging out to dry. Harvey’s right arm gripped Kieli in a way that made it look as though she’d pushed him against the rail. Looking down past his shoulder, through the hazy, sand-colored gas, Kieli could make out the flowing sand swirling in a vortex.

“We’ve crashed…,” Ol Han muttered, cursing, then shouted to the top of the leaning deck, “Ka Rif, can you see the other side?”

Kieli twisted her neck to follow Ol Han’s bellow, and there was Ka Rif, clinging to the hatch in the middle of the deck, the only one to avoid the disaster. “Just a second,” he shouted back; then he gathered his strength and kicked off the door, rushing upward.

Grabbing the opposite rail, he dangled from it as he peered over the other side of the ship’s belly, which wasn’t visible from their vantage.

“Wah. Whoa, a ghost ship…!” Hearing Ka Rif’s outrageous report, the rest of the sailors stuck at the bottom frowned as if to say, “What is that idiot talking about?”

Ghost ship…?

Kieli wondered for a bit as she took in the curt reactions on either side of her, and finally she looked up at Harvey’s face. His copper-colored eyes narrowed in a glare.

“You got your hopes up just now, didn’t you…?”

The Sand Mole’s Birthplace. The chipped letters engraved on the side of the ship revealed its name. Danger always accompanied voyages, and apparently sailors setting out on them liked to adopt the name of the lucky sand mole for their vessels.

It was an old ship. The deck’s supports split in half. Large holes pockmarked the floor in places as if someone had stepped through it, and there was no trace of the glass that had shattered from the windows on the bridge. The rusty ship took on the color of the twilit sky, becoming a copper that closely resembled Harvey’s hair; it rested quietly, like ruins buried in the sand for no one knew how long.

Kieli heard a disappointed voice grouse, It’s just an abandoned ship. Even the sailors that had mocked the notion of a ghost ship could easily accept an abandoned ship. They said all kinds of things drifted around the ocean near the sands’ final destination—corpses, oversized garbage abandoned at sea, wrecked ships, and most likely the memories of the people who sailed them.

Kieli stood in a corner of The Sand Mole’s Birthplace’s deck and, unable to help with anything in particular, watched the others as they worked.

The Sandwalker had collided with the derelict ship buried in the sand, and its hold lay atop the drifter’s bow. With Ol Han at their center, the sailors gazed at their own ship’s belly from the drifter’s deck, assessing the damage. A wire ladder had been dropped from the still-slanting Sandwalker’s deck, and for the time being, they had all evacuated to The Sand Mole’s Birthplace.

Examining the backs of the sailors’ heads, Kieli’s eyes ran from one end to the other. When she got to the last, she blurted, “Huh…?” The copper-colored head she thought was among them was nowhere to be seen.

Where did he go…?

Looking around, she found that the head she had been looking for had wandered through a door (so to speak; the door itself was long gone, and this was just a maw opening into a gloomy hole) positioned near the middle of the deck; it probably led inside the ship. Harvey’s tall frame crouched slightly and emerged from the doorless opening; he walked toward her casually, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat.

“You were looking inside?” Kieli ran a few paces forward, stopping when she met up with him. “I wanted to go, too.” In all honesty, she had no small desire to check it out herself and sneaked a glance past him.

Harvey gingerly stepped to the side, blocking her view.

“You don’t need to go in there.”

“Is something there?”

“Nothing. It’s all falling apart.”

Kieli sensed a subtle carelessness in his usually controlled voice and fixed a questioning stare at him. Exactly three seconds later, Harvey dropped her gaze as if trying to escape. He heaved a short sigh and said, “It makes me sick. Being in a place where lots of people got killed…”

“…Killed…?”

He murmured so quietly that Kieli hardly made it out, but that one word clearly stuck in her ears. Harvey grimaced and cursed, as if divulging something he hadn’t intended.

“There were bullet holes in places. They must have been attacked by something, and then just abandoned.”

“‘Something’?”

Somewhere in her subconscious, she’d expected an immediate reaction like, “Hell if I know,” but just as Harvey started to open his mouth, he hesitated, closing it with a peculiar expression on his face.

“…Well, hell if I know,” came the line she expected, after a pause.

“Hey, look for something we can use as a lever. A plank, anything. We’re all gonna push.” Ol Han’s order flew at them, and a few men scattered to find tools. They were probably planning to do something about the Sandwalker’s grounded hull. Ol Han gave a few more quick instructions to his men, then suddenly turned his attention to them.

He had no expression. None at all.

……?

Kieli felt something was off, but suddenly, Ol Han’s usual carefree smile returned to his fearless face, and he called to them brightly, “Harvey, if you’re not doing anything, give us a hand.”

“I’m injured.”

Harvey took his left hand out of his pocket and waved it at him. Ol Han looked jokingly exasperated and replied, “It’s already closed up. We’re taking you to port, so do a little work.”

“…Aye-aye, sir,” Harvey answered with a wry smile and started toward him as Kieli wavered about whether or not to talk to him about what had just happened.

“Harvey,” she addressed his back after opening and closing her mouth a few times, and just then…

Kieli.

Someone called her name. It sounded like a girl’s voice in a lovely soprano. The instant she turned, she saw—only for a second, but without a doubt—a small shadow disappear behind a support. She panicked and faced Harvey. “Did you see that? Something—”

“You stay there. Don’t go anywhere you shouldn’t,” Harvey ordered, stopping and turning for a second before she had a chance to say anything. Kieli shut her mouth, a little peeved that Harvey’s attitude contained not a sliver of consideration for anything she had to say.

Kieli.

The small, high voice called again. It was followed by cheerful giggles. She’d heard them before. She couldn’t remember when or where, but they definitely tugged at the back of her memory.

She tossed another glance at Harvey, who seemed to have dismissed her. He was standing and discussing something with Ol Han as they contemplated the Sandwalker’s grounded hull towering above them.

As long as she was still in Harvey’s line of sight, it would probably be fine. As long she stayed on the deck.

She formulated excuses for herself, and tiptoed toward the support where the small shadow had hidden. She walked around the column, thick enough to fill a person’s open arms, and peered around the other side.

“Huh…?”

There was nothing there. She didn’t think she’d imagined it.

Looking about as she took another step behind the support, she heard a creak somewhere very close by. A moment later, the sole of her shoe sank into the deck.

Waah!

She didn’t even have time to scream before she slid along the floorboard she’d stepped through and plunged below. The daylight disappeared above her in an instant, and her vision went completely black. A second later, her rear end hit something hard (almost simultaneously, the radio around her neck floated up and whacked her in the chin). Not surprisingly, her breath caught for a minute.

“…Owww…”

Fortunately, the deck plank that fell with her worked like a slide and absorbed most of the shock, so the impact wasn’t so bad considering the height of the fall. “That was close…,” she muttered a bit angrily as she exhaled the breath she’d been holding. Still sitting on her rear, she turned her head and cast her eyes around.

A narrow hall stretched in either direction, illuminated by the faint light filtering in from overhead. (Of course, that was the hole that Kieli herself had created.) Narrow openings lined either side of the hall. These were once the frames holding doors leading into the ship’s cabins, but most of them had fallen out. The few that managed to maintain their posts leaned as if about to come loose.

There was no telling how long the place had been abandoned. A sour smell settled heavily toward the bottom, and even the flow of air had stagnated and solidified throughout the desolate scenery stretching farther inside.

I know this place.

It was less like her own thought and more like the words floated into her head of their own accord, surprising even Kieli. “Why…?” She got an eerie feeling and tried to back her way along the floor on her hands when her fingers touched something. She started and turned around.

A small shadow was sitting on the floor.

It was a girl with chestnut curls and blue eyes; her legs, stretching out from her apron dress, were tossed carelessly in front of her. What was something like this doing here? The doll, still new, stood out in stark contrast to the ruined scene around her.

Kieli got scared and tried to distance herself out of some natural sense of self-preservation, but then stopped, as if the glass eyes wordlessly fixed on her were drawing her in.

She slowly reached out and picked up the doll.

Her hand looked strangely small as it gripped the doll’s torso. On the other hand, she had the feeling the doll had gotten a little bigger. She held it to her chest, tilted her head questioningly, and stared at her palm.

“You fell again?” A man’s voice came from above her head. Then a big hand scooped her up, and Kieli, still holding the doll, clung to his neck.

“Guess what, Haabie…”

Huh? The strange lisp in her own voice surprised her. As did not being able to say “Harvey” properly—she wasn’t the Corporal, after all.

She examined the face of the man she clung to and was even more surprised. She’d expected, as if it was only natural, that she would find unkempt copper hair hanging above his cheek and neck, but the lines in the face in front of her were thicker and bonier than she anticipated, and rough, sand-colored stubble grew from his unshaven chin. But she felt like his manner of speaking in a subdued tone and the aura surrounding him were oddly familiar somehow.

“Oh, there you go spoiling her again,” interjected someone else standing behind the man. It was a slightly husky woman’s voice mixed with a wry laugh. Kieli looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a black-haired woman appear on the other side of the corridor and was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The woman resembled someone she was very used to—or maybe very tired of—seeing.

The man walked toward her, still carrying Kieli. He moved quickly and with long strides, so Kieli hurried to wrap her arms around his neck. She could almost sense the doll’s annoyance at being squished between them.

When the pair met and stopped in front of one of the doors, Kieli realized something odd. The doors in the hall that moments earlier had been either tilting or completely unhinged, had all suddenly been repaired, and the glass in the round windows in those doors, which should have been broken, was all neatly in place.

One of those round windows reflected the man’s broad back and Kieli’s own face as she clung to his neck.

What she saw was a small girl with her black hair done up on either side of her head.

Who is this person…?

Next to her, the doll’s reflection in the round window giggled.

Kieli did feel as though the girl resembled someone the moment she saw her. Two or three years old, she wore her shoulder-length, catlike hair in two bunches on the sides of her head. It was difficult to say if she was cute or not, but at the very least, she couldn’t bring herself to say that the downcast black eyes were very attractive.

…It’s me, isn’t it?

After staring at the girl in the glass in front of her for a while, this was the only conclusion Kieli could reach.

She sat with her knees folded on top of the bed in the cabin gazing at the window in the wall. Outside there was only the night sea and sky. A thick, dark blue-gray coated everything, and there wasn’t really anything to look at. The thick glass, dirty with sandy dust, dimly reflected her younger self and the doll she held in her arms along with the man and woman facing each other farther inside the room.

Turning her head just halfway, Kieli looked sideways to observe the couple deep in conversation behind her. The man had his back to her as he sat at the edge of the bed, and she still couldn’t get a clear view of his face. All she could see was his sand-colored hair cut short and his broad back, which told her that, even considering that she had shrunk, he was a large man.

The woman sat in a chair diagonally opposite him. Her white profile rose out of the darkness under a light in the ceiling that swung slowly left and right in time with the rocking of the ship.

“You hate Easterbury that much?” she asked in a calm voice that was rather low for a woman. She didn’t press him as she regarded him fixedly, waiting for a response. Long, black hair gathered behind her head, black eyes, simple clothes that looked easy to move in over her slender body…Nothing about her was loud or showy, and she wasn’t particularly beautiful. There was, however, something in her dark, dark eyes that was mysteriously alluring somehow.

“You can’t get through to Westerbury from the east port without going through Easterbury. You’re the one who said that Westerbury was crowded enough that you could probably hide yourself for a while there.”

“But Easterbury…,” the man muttered; his voice exhibited almost no emotion, but it had a slightly pained, complex feel to it.

“Does it still bother you?” The woman gave a light laugh laced with a sigh. “Easterbury isn’t a battlefield anymore. It’s been decades since the War ended. You saw it with your own eyes; you should know better than anyone,” she said admonishingly as she wrapped her arms around his head in a gentle embrace. The man put his forehead on the woman’s shoulder and muttered, “I know.”

Somehow, Kieli realized why she thought he resembled Harvey earlier. It was his low voice with its suppressed emotion and his straightforward manner of speaking that nevertheless let a complaint slip occasionally as it did now—the entire air that hung around his whole body was similar, she thought.

“What is it, Kieli?”

She studied the man’s back, superimposing a copper-tinted head over it, and the woman noticed her stare and raised her face. She turned a slightly teasing but well-meaning smile toward her. “Are you jealous, Your Highness? Yes, yes, you want a hug, too, right?”

She left the man, knelt on the bed, and reached out her hands. “I’m not jealous,” Kieli sulked inwardly, but for some reason she couldn’t work up the will to resist. When the woman drew her near, she entrusted her full weight to her. Pressing her face to the woman’s chest, she noticed a faint, pleasant smell. This might have been the first time a woman’s arms, other than the rough, bony arms of her deceased grandmother, had held her. They were a little prickly, but strangely, she felt secure.

…I wonder if this is my mom…

She gave herself over to the comforting embrace and closed her eyes, naturally growing sleepy. When she let out a yawn, the woman chuckled. “It’s about time for little ones to be going to bed. If you don’t get lots of sleep, you won’t get big.”

Oh, so the reason I’m not very big at fourteen is that I didn’t get lots of sleep. Kieli acquiesced to the flawed reasoning and burrowed into the bed as she was told. She subconsciously pushed the question of why she was having such an experience when she was supposed to be fourteen to the back of her mind, buried her cheek in her pillow, and closed her eyes.

He didn’t mean to keep focusing on it, but in a corner of his mind, Harvey kept reviewing the bullet holes he had just seen. Black holes pierced the walls in the hall in a line of rapid horizontal fire, and there were burn marks in the bored-out parts of the wall.

Carbonization guns.

The bullet holes themselves were very old, so he couldn’t say for sure, but he knew intuitively.

“Ow…,” Harvey whispered—without realizing it, he had bit his lip so hard that he cut it—and licked the blood that oozed into his mouth. It was thick and tasted like rusty iron. The cut was very shallow and had already closed up.

This ship had an Undying on it, and the Church Soldiers’ Undying Hunters had attacked it. That was a scenario he could see happening, but he didn’t know who the Undying had been. When he considered it, the thing that depressed him most was that they apparently had no qualms about pulling the trigger in the middle of a passenger ship that would have had innocents onboard.

The panic of people trying to escape, their screams of pain and terror—those emotions had been sewn into the walls of the hall along with the bullet holes, and the instant Harvey set foot inside, something flowed into his head as if pleading to him. So he immediately made an about-face and got the hell out of there.

“Hey, you. Hey! It’s slanted.” Harvey noticed a disgruntled voice calling to him at his feet and looked down to see Ka Rif crouching there. He indicated his hands and repeated, “It’s slanted.” Harvey followed his nod and saw that the metal plank he’d been told to hold even with the horizon was tilting forty-five degrees.

“Oh, sorry,” Harvey answered in a stale tone that would be difficult to describe as sincere and used his right arm to level the plank he was holding. “I’m begging you, hold it steady,” Ka Rif emphasized, then resumed nailing the plank down.

The crew had pushed down on the iron scrap they’d found to use as a lever, and by the time they succeeded in getting the Sandwalker off the drifting ship and into the ocean, the sun had gotten quite low in the sky. They erected some scaffolding from the deck of the drifter, half-sunken in sand, next to the Sandwalker’s hull and started repairing the damage.

The sky melted from the gaseous orange of twilight to the blue-gray of night, and the glow reflected from the Sandwalker’s deck lit their surroundings in a pale blue.

Harvey heard a whispered conversation above. It was kind of boring just holding a board in place (though he still had no intention of taking a more active role in the repairs), so he raised his face to the voices. The light overhead was positioned directly behind them and blinded Harvey. Squinting, he saw the silhouettes of two men standing on the Sandwalker’s deck, overlapping the green afterimage burned onto his retinas.

Judging by the physique, Harvey recognized Ol Han’s silhouette right away. He didn’t know the other man’s name, but he was sure it was the sailor on watch when they collided with the derelict ship.

The two faced each other, deep in conversation, standing in front of some machine fastened to the edge of the deck. Harvey couldn’t tell right away what it was. An iron rod, about a meter and a half in length, was loaded into something like a cylindrical firing platform, and a wire stretched from its tip connected to a large crank. When he saw that the rod was sharpened into an arrowhead at one end, he finally understood.

It was a harpoon for shooting sandworms. Harvey didn’t think one had been in service when the previous leader had been in charge.

“Sandworm” was their common name; Harvey thought there was a scientific term for them—something like megascorides alennius—but he wasn’t inclined to exert the effort to remember it, so he didn’t. They were among the few indigenous creatures inhabiting this planet before colonization. They were giant, grotesque annelids, and adults grew to about a meter in diameter. They lived inside the sand and sometimes attacked sand ships, capsizing them.

“When’d you mount that thing?” Harvey asked Ka Rif casually. The sailor stopped working, looking puzzled for a second, but finally noticed what he was looking at and nodded. “Oh, that. I guess it’d be two, three years ago. We were attacked by a grown sandworm and installed it after that.”

“They won’t attack you as long as you stay out of their territory. Shouldn’t you guys know that better than me?” Harvey frowned, skeptical. Everything he knew about sandworms he’d learned from their old leader, so of course Ol Han would know. Harvey couldn’t imagine that the rest of the Sandwalker crew wouldn’t know it, too.

Ka Rif angled his head, wondering why Harvey seemed so fixated on the harpoon. “We have jobs where we have no choice but to go into their territory. The Church is trying to make a detailed map of the entire Sand Ocean, and we have to show them—”

“Wait,” Harvey interrupted, dropping the board. Gravity took over, and Ka Rif fell on his backside to avoid being flattened. “Hey, watch out!” the sailor yelled in protest, but Harvey ignored him.

“What did you say? The Church?” Harvey demanded, bending down and looking Ka Rif squarely in the eye. His tone was more menacing than he intended, as if he might grab the sailor’s collar, and Ka Rif pulled back, frightened.

“Yeah, we guide the Church’s ships through the stretches of ocean we know…”

“I thought the Church treated you guys like heretics. Why are you helping them?”

“That was a long time ago. Since Ol Han became the leader, things have been going pretty well with them. I thought you’d heard all about it.”

“Ol Han didn’t tell me anything,” he muttered in astonishment, looking up at Ol Han’s silhouette. Harvey was so shaken, he couldn’t think straight. Maybe it wasn’t that serious and he was overreacting. But a loud warning bell was going off in his head, and Harvey trusted his instincts—but this was one time he didn’t want to be right.

“Where’s Kieli?” Harvey wondered aloud, standing and shoving Ka Rif aside. He looked around, but all he could make out in the lamplight were the sailors making repairs; the girl was nowhere to be seen.

That idiot, where did she…?

Actually, I’m the idiot, he cursed inwardly. He hadn’t checked on her for a while. Since she had the Corporal hanging from her neck, he hadn’t been too concerned, but of course now he remembered that the antique was still broken.

“If you’re looking for the girl, I saw her go inside a while ago…,” Ka Rif volunteered, indicating the abandoned ship, his rear still planted on the scaffolding. Harvey turned and saw the pitch-black maw leading into the derelict vessel. I told her not to, but of course she went anyway…

Still, now that he had an idea where she was, he relaxed a little and sighed, “She’s hopeless…” He turned on his heels.

“Harvey, where are you going?” called a thick voice overhead. Harvey stopped, directing his attention to the Sandwalker’s deck; a black shadow stood in the center as if cut into the white light. He was facing Harvey, but his expression was lost in the backlighting. Harvey held up a hand and squinted at the silhouette.

“I’m going to look for Kieli. Apparently she went inside.”

“Oh, I’ll send one of my guys; don’t worry about it. Ka Rif, go.”

“Ah? Oh, yeah, okay,” Ka Rif answered haltingly, flustered by the sudden nomination, and stood up. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.” Harvey reached out a hand, blocking Ka Rif as he tried to run past.

“I’ll go. You finish up.”

It was Harvey’s fault that Ka Rif’s repairs were progressing so slowly, but he pointed at the unfinished task anyway, then turned and left Ka Rif in his wake.

He crossed the steel scaffolding and jumped down onto the drifter’s deck without missing a beat and headed inside.

Thunk…

Harvey heard a very heavy, but somehow delayed, dull explosion behind him—or rather, it started behind him and then pierced right through.

“……?”

Harvey’s knees buckled, as if something was pulling him, and he fell forward.

Sprawling on the ground, he examined himself in a daze, and a harpoon, wet with blood, was protruding from his abdomen and pinning him to the deck. As the initial shock passed, a wave of nausea and intense pain raced up his esophagus. His nerves immediately compensated for the pain, but he couldn’t suppress the nausea and gagged violently; clumps of blood laced with vomit spewed copiously from the recesses of his throat.

“What the…”

With significant effort, Harvey managed to contort his face away from the deck, stained with his own blood.

He saw the base of the harpoon sticking out of his back. A round, metal clasp was affixed to the end of the meter-and- a-half-long rod, and an iron wire extended from it stretching all the way to the crank bolted to the deck of the Sandwalker.

A figure stood beside the crank. Harvey’s eyes again adjusted to the light, and he could make out the man’s face floating beneath a green afterimage. A familiar vulgar, but somehow charming, carefree smile was plastered on his lips; his hand rested on the harpoon’s firing mechanism.

“Y-you, what do you think you’re…”

“Wh-what? Ol Han?” Standing behind Harvey and stuttering incoherently, Ka Rif seemed more shaken than the Undying.

“Oh, don’t worry. That scratch won’t kill him. Right?” Ol Han’s voice reverberated through the night so casually as to be infuriating. The sailors who had been working on the deck gathered around him in a circle, blankly surveying their leader’s handiwork. Harvey barely noticed them as he twisted his neck to confront Ol Han.

“Thanks for vouching for me…” Bloody foam erupted from Harvey’s mouth as he spat sarcastically. Even without the pain, the sensation of a foreign object piercing his belly could not have been more unpleasant, and the Undying couldn’t have been angrier. Maybe his rage was so intense that it snapped something in his brain, because Harvey’s clarity given the circumstances surprised even him.

“You’ve got a crazy price on your head. They say an Undying they caught in Easterbury took a young girl hostage and escaped. It’s you and the girl, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, well. So it would seem.” Part of the story seemed to have gotten twisted in the retelling, but Harvey didn’t feel like splitting hairs and nodded carelessly. (Hell, if all the guilt fell on him, leaving Kieli blameless, he welcomed it.) “So you were planning to hand the marks over to the Church, treat us like friends, and just wait for your chance.”

“You don’t have to believe me, but I wasn’t pretending. I don’t hate you, Harvey. It’s just a conflict of interests is all.”

“…I didn’t hate you either.”

As the white light shone from the lantern and the impassive sailors looked on, the exchange between Harvey and Ol Han sounded very hollow. The card game the night before, his drunken, boorish old friend taunting him, the cheerful merry-making of the sailors—Harvey had felt nostalgic, like nothing had changed, but he had probably been deluding himself.

“Sorry about this,” Ol Han apologized thinly, but it did little to move Harvey. “We do things differently now than we did back in the day. If we cooperate with the Church, we don’t have to deal with any of their abuse, and it’s easier to get supplies at port. I learned a better way to do things than when the old man was in charge.”

“If you’re gonna wag your tail for the Church because you don’t like persecution, don’t practice a heretical religion to begin with. What are you, stupid?” Harvey’s venomous retort consumed the last bit of air in his lungs; when he drew breath again, a blood clot caught in his throat, and he hacked—“Guh…!”—driving the harpoon even farther through his abdomen. He almost fainted in agony, unable to stand even the suppressed sensation of the foreign object crawling through his body.

The tip of the harpoon lanced the deck firmly, pinning Harvey like an insect. An Undying specimen. Apparently he wasn’t an appealing one.

Some of the sailors surrounding him covered their mouths with their hands and looked away. Harvey heard someone mutter in disgust, “He’s still alive after all this?”

“Ka Rif. Find the girl.”

Hearing Ol Han’s order, Ka Rif, who had been frozen in shock, jumped up, startled. “Ah, r-roger!” he responded inarticulately, extricating himself from the assembled sailors and heading below-deck. Sprinting past Harvey, Ka Rif cast him a sidelong glance.

One cheek plastered to the deck, Harvey stared wordlessly at the sailor; he’d been sharing a normal conversation with this man just a little while before. When Harvey caught Ka Rif’s terrified gaze, as if he was looking at something repellent, he couldn’t help turning away.

Kieli suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone whispering by her pillow. It was a charming, high voice, like the chirping of birds.

Kieli poked half of her face out from inside her blanket and squinted into the darkness.

A doll fashioned in the image of a young girl sat beside her pillow. Chestnut curls, blue glass eyes, blushing cheeks. The legs that extended from under her dark green apron dress swung back and forth, as if she was bored, and although she had no one to talk to, her high-pitched, soprano voice chattered incessantly in a subdued whisper.

As Kieli listened attentively, the doll’s adorable lips, still smiling, spat one hateful complaint after another, like, “That damn third-rate doll maker! I told him to make my eyes out of jade, but he used these cheap glass balls. He can go to hell ten million times,” or, “How dare that black bear grab my leg and swing me around. He deserved what he got, being taken off by the garbage collectors.”

Kieli froze automatically, gaping at the doll. The string of abusive language ceased abruptly, and a strange silence settled over them.

A girl’s face rose palely from the darkness, creaking as it turned ninety degrees toward her. The glass eyes didn’t blink, fixed in an eerie stare; only her red lips moved, demanding suddenly, “Hello! Stop eavesdropping, and let’s play!”

“!” Kieli shrieked and drew back in surprise. The small bunk creaked. “Hm…? What’s wrong?” Kieli’s mother, sleeping next to her, stirred and asked drowsily.

That instant, the doll froze, regarding her with a chilling smile plastered to her innocent face.

“My doll! She was talking…!” Kieli wailed, lisping, as she clung to her mother’s arm. Her mother just sighed in exasperation. “Oh, is that all?” But she didn’t say it mockingly or as if consoling her daughter after a bad dream; she said it very plainly, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

“Even dolls talk sometimes, when they’re bored. You’d be bored, too, if you had to sit quietly wearing the same outfit all the time.”

“But…” Kieli wasn’t remotely satisfied with the explanation, but as she couldn’t think of anything to counter, she reluctantly fell silent.

Her mother held Kieli’s hand and put it back under the blanket, gently tucked her back in, and said, “Kieli, sometimes you see things that people can’t see, but there’s no reason to be afraid. I’m sure that someday that power of yours will be helpful to someone.”

“Helpful to who?” The little girl regarded her mother skeptically, half burying her face in her blanket.

“I don’t know. It might be lots of people, or maybe just one person. But I know there’s someone who needs you, and that person is waiting to meet you.”

“Waiting for me? Is that person in trouble?”

“Yes, I think so. That’s why you have to be a good friend and help.”

“Hmm…” Kieli thought about helping someone and finally declared, “Okay. Then Kieli will be that person’s friend. Even if the whole world is against him, Kieli will be his friend.”

Her mother chuckled, apparently finding it funny, and put her hand on Kieli’s forehead, telling her to go to sleep. Her mother’s palm was cool and pleasant, and when her white fingertips brushed the hair off Kieli’s forehead, they smelled of soap.

Closing her eyes, Kieli could feel the gentle vibrations of the ship and the low hum of its engine. She felt as if she was in a cradle as she surrendered herself to the soothing rocking and finally fell asleep.

There was a loud boom, and the ship shuddered violently.

Snapped awake, Kieli’s eyes flew open. Her mother quickly rose and slipped out of bed. As she did, the cabin door opened, and a shadow flew inside with surprising agility given its size. It was the man from before with the short, sand-colored hair and stubble. The faint light from the hall hit him from behind, so Kieli couldn’t see his face very well.

“Setsuri. This is bad.” The man addressed Kieli’s mother with stifled urgency. Although she had no idea what was going on, Kieli sensed the tension thick in the air. She clutched her doll and blanket, afraid to move. A commotion broke out in the hall, and she could hear a woman screaming far away. “Kyaaaaaaaaaaa!” The doll in her arms screamed, too, as if finding inspiration. The shriek, like tearing metal, sent a chill up her spine, and of course Kieli winced, but her mother and the man grimaced as well.

“They’re after me. I thought they wouldn’t try anything until we got to port because there are civilians onboard, but…” I was too naive, is probably what he cursed, vexed, under his breath. Kieli’s mother, on the other hand, calmly started gathering their things. “Hurry and get ready.” The man nodded, bracing himself, then took some luggage in one hand and collected Kieli with the other.

“Kyaaa, kyaaa,” persisted the doll. Kieli hurriedly adjusted her grip on the toy and wrapped her arms around the man’s neck.

“Hold on tight,” a subdued voice whispered in Kieli’s ear. She really did think his aura was reminiscent of someone—who was that “someone” again? Kieli had clearly been of a mind that he resembled someone, but now she couldn’t remember whom. Now that she considered it, which came first—her memories of meeting that “someone” or of this person? She got the feeling that rather than saying that the man cradling her in his arms resembled someone, she might instead say that that someone resembled this man.

Without wasting a word, they finished their preparations, and Kieli’s mother was the first to glide out of the room with Kieli’s protector following closely on her heels. As she clung to his neck, Kieli could see through the porthole in their room.

Beyond the glass lay utter darkness, a blackness almost too complete; even when the ocean was its darkest, she had only seen it a deep, indigo-gray, never this perfect ebony.

This wasn’t the ocean. A ship painted blacker than the night’s own darkness was moored alongside the window, obscuring the oceanscape that should have been there. No sooner had the realization struck her, though, than Kieli was carried outside the cabin and walls rose up to block her view of the black ship.

In the hall, the familiar man carrying Kieli turned a sharp right in pursuit of her mother.

“Ah!” Kieli, the only one with a view to the rear, let out an involuntary scream. Foreshadowed by metallic footsteps, several figures rounded the corner on the other end of the corridor. Their appearances were bizarre, shrouded in distorted metal armor that gave the impression that there weren’t necessarily men inside at all, merely shells moving of their own accord. In stark contrast to this white armor, they carried pitch-black objects resembling stocky iron pipes in both hands.

“Don’t stick your head out. Duck down.”

The man carrying Kieli didn’t turn around once, but it seemed that the girl’s scream hadn’t been necessary to alert him to their presence. Kieli started at his stern voice and ducked down; the instant she did…

Fwaboom!

…an explosion resonated through the corridor. For an instant, a strange sense of déjà vu overtook her. Though it was her first experience with the sound, it was already etched in her memory. Memories so terrible they froze her heart and her own screams suddenly flooded her mind. Harvey! Whose name was that?!

The girl had no time to place it. The man in whose arms she huddled was blasted forward with a thunk; Kieli’s neck nearly snapped back at the impact. She panicked and clung to his shoulder.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing. Hurry.” The reassurances ringing in her ear were probably directed at Kieli’s mother. The man only staggered once, his pace never slackening. Kieli clutched her doll and threw her arm around the man’s back so as not to be shaken off.

A strange texture met her palm. “……?” As her vision bucked, she strained to catch a glimpse of her handhold.

Her protector’s entire broad back was charred. Half his skin had turned to ash, and it crumbled where Kieli touched it. Horrified, she let go, and very nearly fell, but the man scooped her up.

“Hold on tight.”

“You’re hurt…!”

“It’s just a scratch. Don’t talk; you’ll bite your tongue.”

No matter how she looked at it, this was far more than “just a scratch,” but his voice was comforting, as if he didn’t feel any pain at all. At least it was calm on the surface.

Undying. Abruptly the word came to her although she didn’t know its meaning. Just like that sense of déjà vu before, she shouldn’t have known the term, but for some reason, it was burned in her brain.

Suddenly the man stopped running, jerking Kieli’s head forward and back. She turned to see what was going on, and her mother, who’d been two steps ahead of them, had stopped as well and was peering through a thick iron door. Kieli could see a narrow staircase leading down into the darkness.

“Go ahead, Setsuri. I’ll be right behind you,” the man prompted, peeling Kieli from around his neck and shoving her toward her mother. Young Kieli almost dropped her doll, but snatched it up hurriedly.

“No.”

Hearing her mother’s response, Kieli lifted her head in disbelief.

Setsuri bit her lip like a spoiled child and glared at the man holding her daughter. Apparently he was just as taken aback by her reaction and stood dumbstruck before finally managing, “What are you saying?! What do you mean ‘no’?”

“Why do you always try to sacrifice yourself? I’m staying with you.”

“One of us has to protect Kieli. I’ll be right behind you, no matter what.”

“But…!”

“Go. Hurry.” Kieli’s mother was still trying to protest, but the man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Reluctantly she swallowed her words and ran noiselessly down the galvanized stairs. Clutching her doll, Kieli clung to her mother’s neck and watched the rectangular cut of yellow light that was the entrance to the staircase recede into the darkness. A tall black shadow silhouetted against that fading light suddenly turned and ran back down the hall.

Within moments, a succession of muffled gunshots punctuated their arrival at the base of the stairs.

Setsuri turned in shock, and over her mother’s shoulder, Kieli took in the ship’s gloomy hold. Containers of varying sizes were stacked haphazardly. Kieli could vaguely distinguish a rectangular outline along the external wall—probably the cargo hatch—where a small craft, somewhat more boatlike that a raft, had been installed.

Setsuri spun and dashed inside the hold, so Kieli’s field of vision swung around again. Her mother opened a container next to the lifeboat and placed Kieli inside. It was packed with burlap sacks, but there was just enough space to stow a single child. Kieli sat on top of one of the sacks and looked up at her mother.

“Can you wait here just a little bit? I’ll come right back to get you.”

“Okay.”

Kieli bobbed her head, and her mother, smiling, repeated, “Good girl. I’ll be right back to get you.” Setsuri paused, though, reaching out and stroking Kieli’s hair, as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to leave. Seeing her mother’s pained expression, Kieli felt the need to reassure her.

“I’m fine. My doll’s with me. I can wait a bit,” she said cheerfully, indicating the doll in her arms. The gesture softened Setsuri’s expression, and she leaned over the edge of the container and kissed Kieli, her daughter, on the forehead.

“I love you, Kieli.”

Kieli closed her eyes at the wispy sensation. When she opened them again, the lid above her had been quietly shut, and the inside of the container was utterly black.

Muffled footsteps and gunshots rang out intermittently far above Kieli’s head. Sitting on the linen sack, she clutched her knees and held her doll tightly to her chest, but this was the moment the doll chose to behave like a doll and said nothing to ease the silence.

I’m fine, Kieli murmured again. The person who needed her mother because the whole world was against him was probably that man. So Kieli was fine; she could wait, even by herself…

Holding her head and clutching her knees, Kieli must’ve drifted off to sleep.

Before she knew it, the footsteps, the gunshots, and even the sound of the engine perpetually reverberating below the ship had vanished, leaving her in complete silence. It was so quiet that her ears hurt.

Kieli stood up slowly. She stood on her tiptoes on the burlap sack, pushed the container’s lid open, threw her doll to the floor, then climbed out herself. When she finally managed to extricate herself from the container, the doll was staring resentfully at her in the darkness.

Grabbing the doll’s hand, letting her dangle by one arm, Kieli started climbing the stairs, staggering a little. As she approached the top, the smell of something burnt wafted toward her.

Gunsmoke filled the corridor. Yellowish smoke enveloped the long, narrow space that stretched in either direction, illuminated by the weakly flickering lights in the ceiling. There were no signs of people; at least no one was moving, and except for her own tiny footsteps and the occasional sound of charred pieces of wall collapsing, the area was deathly silent.

Dragging her doll along, Kieli made her way aimlessly down the hall a little; the tip of her shoe stepped on something, and she heard a dry, crinkling sound. She regarded the smoke settling around her feet.

Long black hair stretched across the floor like flowing water, forming a gentle arc.

She traced the flow of hair and found its owner lying at the end. Her back was cruelly scorched.

Her jet-black eyelashes were shut tight—she would never move again.

For a long time, Kieli just stood there, looking blankly at the white profile lying prostrate at her feet. Kieli’s heart felt empty and flat; it was strange that she couldn’t summon any of the emotions she’d have expected to well up inside her at times like this, and she was sure it was a dream. This couldn’t be real, but how could she wake up from it? Those were the things she contemplated vaguely on the surface of her mind.

She didn’t know how much time had passed; she noticed low voices and the sounds of feet approaching across the cinders piled up on the floor and lifted her head. She saw a few silhouettes through the smoke that hung thick in the corridor.

Out of reflex, she froze and watched carefully as the figures came closer.

They weren’t the white suits of armor, like a troop of devils, that approached, but five, six men wearing shoddy overcoats. “This is terrible…” “How many survivors are there now?” “Anyway, let’s send the injured to the eastern port. We’re under pressure, too; it’s all we can do to feed ourselves.” “Should we set the dead adrift…?” They walked through the gunsmoke, exchanging whispered conversations.

“Oh! There’s still another survivor. It’s a kid,” one of them spoke up, noticing her. He suddenly addressed her in a loud voice, and Kieli automatically jumped and backed away. “Whoops! Did I scare you…?” The man immediately toned his voice down and crouched to eye level with the small Kieli, as though he were dealing with a small, frightened animal, and came closer.

“That must have been scary. It’s okay now.”

She got the feeling she had seen his face before, but that was probably the same sense of déjà vu she’d had earlier. There was a benign smile on his fearless face as he looked into Kieli’s; then he noticed the dead body beside her and lowered his gaze.

“Your mom…?”

Kieli gave a little nod, her lips pressed tightly together.

“I see.” The man gave a short sigh and reached out his big hands to pick Kieli up. “The Church…” she heard him mutter in her ear. But she thought he was talking to himself. “If they didn’t disobey the Church, these things wouldn’t happen. No one would get hurt. Life would be easier…”

Kieli didn’t say anything. She couldn’t remember how to use her voice. She didn’t cling to him on her own—only let him hold her without resisting—and when she put her chin on the man’s broad shoulder, she smelled sand and sweat. Over his shoulder, she could see her mother’s remains lying on the floor.

The slender wrist of the doll she had been holding slipped through her hand. Still smiling, the doll fell through the settling smoke and hit the floor with a lonely thunk.

The scenery in her field of vision changed.

Kieli was standing alone in the middle of the corridor. The corpse lying at her feet and the men in overcoats were nowhere in sight. Stagnant air, as if the ship had been abandoned and no one had entered for years, hung around her ankles. The doors lining her right and left were rusted and leaning, and the glass from most of their round windows had fallen out; the few panes that did remain were cracked, and sand had built up in the gaps.

She could see her own reflection, twisted in the broken glass. The girl standing there was fourteen, with short hair cut to the nape of her neck, and an old radio hanging around her neck.

Only the doll was the same as before, lying fallen at her feet and looking up at her with its blue glass eyes. But her chestnut curls were a tangled mess, and her dark green apron dress was so faded, it was hard to discern its original color.

“Were those…?” Before she knew it, she remembered how to talk. “Were those your memories…?”

The doll didn’t answer the question. She gazed at her; her cheeks that used to be a soft, rosy color were now completely stained and faded; she had the same, but somehow sad, smile as before.

After a pause, Kieli crouched down and reached out to pick up the doll.

But suddenly someone grabbed her wrist. When she looked up, a young sailor wearing a dark brown overcoat—Ka Rif—was looking down at her with a stiff expression.

“What’s…”

“You have to run,” he told her abruptly. Kieli blinked. Ka Rif looked extremely serious; he held her wrist so tightly it hurt and repeated, “I’ll help you escape. You’re a normal human being, right? This has nothing to do with you.”

“…Did something happen to Harvey?” She understood intuitively, and the question came to her mouth before her mind even processed it. She may have been watching the past, but when she realized that she couldn’t remember Harvey’s name even for a second a short while ago, she was surprised at herself.

Ka Rif hung his head awkwardly, but after half a moment, he appeared to make up his mind and looked up.

“He’s okay. Something like that wouldn’t kill an Undying, right? But you’re a normal girl, so…”

“Harvey’s normal, too! He feels pain like normal, and gets hurt like normal, and gets depressed like normal! It’s so obvious, so why…” When she wailed to that point, the first part of what Ka Rif said finally struck her. Something like what wouldn’t kill him?!

“What did you do? What did you do?!” Her wrist still in Ka Rif’s grasp, Kieli used that hand to grab his coat and pull him toward her. He only averted his gaze and faltered for words, so she shoved him away with both hands, and quickly turned. But he still had her wrist, and she was immediately pulled back.

“If you won’t let me go, then take me to him! Hurry!” she shouted, her voice abnormally high.

The instant the scene met her eyes, a strange series of associations must have gone to work in her brain, because what came to her mind, as if overlapping her retinas, was the bishop’s staff card from the temple suit—a giant bishop’s staff with a ring on the end of the handle, skewering the corpse of a heretic, protruding out of the temple floor.

The lantern illuminated a long metal rod sticking out of the center of the deck. A circular metal fixture was attached to the end, making it resemble the ring on a bishop’s staff, and a wire extended from it.

And, like the heretic in the card, skewered from behind and sewn to the ground, was…

“……!”

She meant to scream, but her voice caught in her throat, and all that came out was a rasping breath. A few of the sailors standing in a semicircle around it noticed her and turned around.

“Let go, let go!”

Kieli waved her arm violently and shook off Ka Rif’s hand. He had already loosened his grip on her, so she came free all too easily, and she almost fell over with the excess force as she ran toward the half-circle of gathered sailors. She would have struggled if anyone had stopped her, but no one held her back, and she slipped through the group of men and sat down beside the harpoon sticking into the deck.

“Harvey…!” By the time she was finally able to call his name out loud, she was half crying.

Harvey, his cheek still plastered to the deck, moved just his eyes to look up at her and his lips shifted faintly. “What? Does it hurt? It hurts, doesn’t it? I’ll pull it out right now.” Her sobbing voice ran on, her face close to his.

“Don’t stomp around like that; I feel it in my stomach…,” he cursed, in a voice he had to wring out from the back of his throat, and coughed lightly. Maybe he’d already coughed up everything he had inside long ago; it was no more than a dry hacking as his cheek lay flat in the pool of his own blood, a tired look on his face.

“Harvey, no, hang in there—”

“It’s okay, don’t shout. I’m fine; I’ve cut off the pain.”

Harvey’s eyes were closed, and his eyebrows frowned in annoyance; Kieli tried to cling to him, but he pushed her away. He could say otherwise, but he really did not look fine.

“Why? You were getting along so well…”

Kieli raised her face in astonishment and looked around at the sailors surrounding them at a distance. They stood about as if watching a wild animal about to die—an animal that they had hunted for food, struggling at the brink of death, waiting for it to expire. If she had to compare it to something, that’s what the flat, not particularly emotional expressions looked like, lined up under the lantern’s white light. Only Ka Rif, behind them, looked scared, and his gaze hurried back and forth imploringly.

When she glanced up to see where he was looking, the light from the lantern pierced her eyes as it illuminated the area from the Sandwalker, lodged on top of the drifting ship. She squinted and peered up at the silhouette standing in the glare.

“Relax; we’re not gonna do anything to you. When we’re done with our business, we’ll take you to port.” The shadow’s voice sounded familiar—not as the leader of the Sandwalker, but inside her memories of the past from a moment ago.

“You should never hang out with Undyings again. A lot of people died because of them. These guys don’t die even if you kill ’em; it’s always the normal humans that get sacrificed. Looks like it’s not enough for them to have killed all the people they butchered in the War.”

“What are you saying?!…”

“Stop it.”

Kieli started to stand up, enraged by Ol Han’s last sentence, but a short voice held her back, and something pulled her hand. Still half rising, she dropped her gaze and saw Harvey’s blood-soaked left hand holding hers. “Let him talk,” he spat a little carelessly and closed his eyes, adding under his breath, “It’s all true.”

“All right, finish the repairs and get ready to set sail. We meet up with the Church Soldiers’ ship in the morning.” Ol Han’s voice echoed across the deck after a minute of silence.

The sailors around them scattered, leaving a few men to keep watch. Kieli glared at them in disappointment as they left, and, before she was aware of it, she was holding Harvey’s hand very tightly.

“It’s okay; just wait a little. I can move if I put my mind to it,” Harvey, still facedown on the deck, whispered in a voice only Kieli could hear. She looked and saw that his prosthetic right arm, caught under him, was grabbing the base of the harpoon. He probably meant that he could pull it out if he felt like it, but it seemed to her that if he actually did, it would put an impossible strain on Harvey’s body, and it didn’t give Kieli a scrap of relief.

Maybe he sensed her anxiety; Harvey returned her grip lightly, as if telling her to calm down. But immediately after, he coughed again. “Damn, this is hard…,” he whispered in complaint, understandably having a difficult time enduring. Kieli had lost all words, and all she could do was squeeze his hand. “Say something,” he told her abruptly, and she blinked her tear-filled eyes.

“Don’t sit there all quiet; say something.”

“Something? But…”

“Something to distract me. Was there anything interesting inside the ship?”

“Ah!”

Now that he brought it up, memories of what had happened below-deck, which had vanished in light of more pressing incidents, came flooding back. “Guess what? I was on this ship…!” She started speaking enthusiastically, but there were so many things to recount that she didn’t know where to begin. That apparently she had been on this ship before, that her mother had been with her, that the armored Church Soldiers had come on board and her mother…her mother had died…

Kieli hung her head and bit her lower lip. The terrible event had lain buried at the bottom of her memories until now, and she alone had gone on to live a carefree life. When she hadn’t known, she wasn’t sad, because she was ignorant. But now that she did know, she couldn’t imagine her past to be anything but painful; even so, she didn’t think that it would have been better not to have found out. Her mother was pretty—no, she certainly wouldn’t call her a stunning beauty, but she was very pretty—and she was just the kind of person Kieli imagined would be nice to have for a mother…

She suddenly felt Harvey’s fingertips on her chin. “Oops, sorry. I got blood on you,” he said in a casual tone, removing his hand, but his quiet, copper-colored eyes stared up at her questioningly.

“…What’s wrong?”

“Ah, I’m fine. I just can’t quite sort it all out…”

Kieli hurried to wipe the tears that had managed to slide down her cheeks without her noticing. “Oh, you don’t have to sort it out. Start with the first thing you think of.” Hearing Harvey talk like that again, she thought he really did resemble the man from before, but it wasn’t as if they were completely the same—there were sides of Harvey that only Kieli knew—and strangely, that thought calmed her down and she was able to think.

Come to think of it, that man…

She called to mind the profile of that man who was with her mother, his sand-colored stubble and bony jaw, and suddenly realized something strange.

Even though she immediately recognized her mother as her mother without question, for some reason, she never made the connection that the man might have been her father. Given the situation, it would have been natural to think that he was her father. Maybe it was that, just as she couldn’t imagine Harvey being anyone’s parent, she didn’t get a fatherly vibe from the man who resembled Harvey, either.

But one fundamental question preceded that line of thinking. “Can Undying have children?”

“Wha?”

Kieli let her mouth run without thinking too hard; Harvey gaped, speechless, for a second. “No, well, they can do the thing that would make children, but as for whether or not any children would be produced, I don’t…,” he mused, but suddenly cut himself off; then, for some reason, the most complex of expressions contorted his face and he looked away.

“Did I ask a weird question…?”

“…No, not really,” he said, but still clammed up, so Kieli faltered and closed her mouth, too, and a strangely awkward silence fell over them.

The light that had been so glaringly bright until a while ago was now mostly directed at the work at the bow, so now only a pale, bluish glow fell around the two of them. Apparently they had finished the rest of the repairs, and the sailors were pulling up the scaffolding that crossed over to the Sandwalker’s hull.

Then…

“What…?”

An upward force suddenly bucked beneath her feet, shaking the deck’s floorboards.

The remaining scaffolding clattered down between the two ships into the ocean. “Uwaaahh!” the sailors fell over themselves, evacuating to the drifter’s deck.

As they scrambled across, the two ships started leaning in opposite directions, as if something was pushing them up from the middle.

Still sitting, Kieli slid sideways across the deck; she caught sight of a wire and instinctively reached out for it. She realized a second later that it was the wire connected to the harpoon stuck through Harvey, at which point Harvey screamed, “Ow!” She let go quickly, but Harvey burst out angrily, “Stupid, don’t let go!” and grabbed her hand again.

It was chaos as the sailors screamed and slid to the stern, but thanks to the harpoon, Harvey and Kieli alone remained in the middle of the diagonal surface—still, in this condition, Harvey’s innards would be squished!

“Something’s…” Harvey muttered something, twisting his face in pain, and cast a look toward the top of the slanting deck. She could tell that he had said, “Something’s coming,” but she still didn’t know what he meant. As she followed his gaze, a low vibration like an earthquake echoed up from the bottom of the boat.

Rr, rrrrrrr…

With a heavy sound, like something huge crawling through sand, the vibration moved from one end of the ship’s underbelly to the other…

And on the other side of the deck rail it showed itself.

“!”

It was a worm, the same tawny color as the ocean, easily surpassing a meter in diameter. It was only for a few seconds, but Kieli lost all sense of where she was and what was going on, and stared in wide-eyed amazement.

She knew about sandworms only from animal encyclopedias and holograms, and of course this was the first time in her life she’d seen a real one; but even so, they weren’t supposed to be this big, were they? A terrified chorus rose from the sailors, pinned to the rail at the stern.

As everyone looked on in a stupor, the sandworm calmly stretched its long body toward the night sky and formed an arch as it sank back down into the sand. It caught the wire that stretched from the Sandwalker’s deck, and pulled on it with monstrous power; she could tell Harvey was swallowing a scream. “No!” Kieli screamed in his place, when…

Snap…!

She thought she heard something tearing apart nearby—by the time she processed the sound, the tip of the harpoon ripped up the floorboards as it was dragged through them—“Eh…?” “Wah!”—and plowed a straight line toward the top of the ship.

The harpoon caught on the rail at the top of the ship, and Kieli heard a dull, metallic sound; in the same instant, Harvey released her. She panicked, grabbing at the radio’s cord before it slipped off her neck, and yelled, “Harvey!”

Clinging to the rail, she looked frantically at the sand below; the wire, still affixed to Harvey, dragged him into the ocean. He plunged back-first into the high waves of sand, and the wire stretching from the Sandwalker was the only thing left above the surface as the sand swallowed him in the blink of an eye. “Harvey!” Out of reflex, Kieli slid through a gap in the railing and tried to jump into the ocean herself.

“Wait, Kieli!” a voice abruptly called out from an unexpected direction to stop her. She turned back in surprise and saw a small silhouette in the shadows of the door leading inside the ship—the lovely doll in the faded apron dress was beckoning to her. “This way, this way.”

“It won’t help anyone if you throw yourself over, too. This way.”

“But…!”

“Even if you did jump, what could you do then? Think carefully. You’re going to help him, right?” she told Kieli flatly, and Kieli faltered, unable to object. The doll turned her smiling, childlike face left and right, and said, “Hurry,” in a sharp voice that contradicted her expression; then she disappeared inside the ship.

When the sandworm burrowed its massive bulk into the ocean, the force pushing the ship upward vanished, and, rocking violently, the deck leveled with the horizon. The sailors who had been pushed to the stern started picking themselves up with murmurs of relief.

Kieli screwed up her face and nodded, then ran after the doll.

For a second her eyes met Ka Rif’s as he picked himself up off the edge of the deck. He noticed her moving and seemed to start to say something, but after a pause, he closed his mouth without a word. But another sailor saw her as well and shouted, “The girl’s getting away!”

By that time, Kieli was approaching the stairs that led down into the ship. Another upheaval rocked beneath her feet, and she turned to see the deck as the sandworm passed over the ship, menacing the sailors.

Kieli returned her attention to the ship’s interior. The doll in the apron dress was standing at the bottom of the gloomy stairs; she whispered quickly, “Now’s your chance.” She went ahead of Kieli, who had started to run down after her, and her small feet hurriedly jumped down each step.

“I asked him to make a bit of a show, but I didn’t think he’d pull the wire.”

“You did that…?!” Kieli asked in astonishment; the doll half turned her head and smiled mischievously.

He could remember hundreds of times when he seriously thought it would be better to just die, but there was no question that the current situation was one of the more extreme examples. Harvey couldn’t even lose consciousness, so that’s what he thought about, with unusual composure, in the back of his mind.

The harpoon’s hook had opened like an umbrella and was eating into his abdomen as the wire dragged him across the sand; it was a pretty horrific scenario. He’d rather it just come out, even if it did rip out all his organs with it; but as soon as the wound opened up, it started regenerating, so it was literally eating away at his stomach.

“Damn it…!”

Harvey twisted over, changed his posture on the sand, and reached back to try to do something about the wire behind him. His prosthetic right arm caught the cord, and wrapped it around his wrist, pulling his body forward to lessen the force driving into his belly. Somehow he managed to breathe again.

The problem is that…

As he was dragged along, he trained his eyes on the end of the wire, where he could see the crank fastened on to the Sandwalker’s deck. Beyond it, he saw Ol Han, possibly trying to reel him in.

That bastard…

He clicked his tongue and cursed inwardly at the other man; just then, the sand in front of his eyes swelled, blocking his view. “Wah, you’re kidding me…” The surface of the ocean formed a cone, like the slope of a mountain, and he rolled to the side, still hanging from the wire.

A large quantity of sediment sliding off its rough body, the sandworm from before (he’d hate it if there were two or three of those things) showed itself again. Harvey had seen sandworms lots of times when the old leader was taking care of him, but of course he had never encountered one this enormous. That thing would definitely have no problem swallowing him whole, he thought unconsciously—half hoping—then started to panic and hurried to erase the image from his mind.

It couldn’t possibly have been doing it purposely, but the sandworm bent its body so as to catch the wire that stretched from the Sandwalker with its neck (not that Harvey knew where its neck was). Forced into a different direction, the harpoon sank into his body again, and he swallowed a scream; just then, with the short sound of something shaking free, the wire abruptly went slack.

“!”

He thought he heard a voice shouting, “Get down!” somewhere in his head, and instinctively, Harvey ducked; the next instant, the broken wire whipped back and barely grazed the top of his head.

He shuddered and watched it sail past the corner of his eye, then looked back at the Sandwalker and saw Ol Han clinging to the crank on top of the deck as it rocked in the giant waves. He didn’t have time to worry about that; now he was free from the pull of the wire, but instead, waves of flowing sand buffeted him on all sides, and in no time he lost all sense of direction. The next thing he knew, his face was sunken in the sand.

“Harvey!” The sound of someone calling his name faintly reached his ears; guided by that voice, he regained his sense of up and down.

He managed to get his face above the surface, and looked around as he coughed up the sand that had gotten into his throat; a small boat popped in and out of view between the waves. A girl leaned over the edge of the rocking boat, trying to grab the wire that had been flung onto the ocean’s surface. “Stupid, not with your bare hands!” he automatically tried to call out, but sand filled his mouth.

Gradually, he was drawn close to the boat, unable to resist, and Kieli let go of the wire and reached out to him.

“Grab on. Can you reach?”

Harvey gazed at the hand offered to him and seemed to hesitate a moment for no particular reason. But his right arm moved on its own and grabbed the edge of the boat. With the girl’s help, Harvey crawled up the side of the boat and flopped inside.

Cough…!

The harpoon still pierced his body, so he couldn’t lie prostrate; he fell onto his side, curled up, and started coughing violently. He coughed up more blood than sand.

“Hold on just a little longer; I’ll pull it out right now.”

Kieli knelt beside him and put her hand on the tip of the barb—red pieces of flesh and black, tarlike blood stuck to it in a sort of pattern. Harvey didn’t want to touch it anymore, but she didn’t show a sliver of hesitation. “It’s okay; I’ll do it myself…” He grabbed her hand and pulled it off the harpoon, then sighed as he set his breathing in order.

There were several lines of red blood on the back of her slender hand. Pulling on an unpolished wire like that with her bare hands, of course they would get cut.

“Argh, think before you act…”

“Eh?”

Kieli blinked in surprise; apparently she didn’t understand what he was talking about. She followed his gaze down to her own hands and, after a pause, seemed to get his meaning and looked upset.

“Hey! What are you talking about?! You’re the one who’s pretty darn close to dying!”

“…Oh. Oh yeah. Me.”

Now that she mentioned it…His reaction seemed rather absurd even to him; Kieli was speechless, as if she couldn’t believe it. “Are you stupid?!” she shouted threateningly.

“…Sorry.” Harvey winced and apologized automatically, then felt a wave of annoyance and looked away. Why is she getting mad at me?

Far in the distance, he could see the hulls of the Sandwalker and The Sand Mole’s Birthplace; they were already quite a ways away. The sandworm dipped in and out of the ocean again and again, making high waves and playing with the two ships.

“Should I capsize them?” someone above his head asked suddenly. Harvey raised his face from the floorboard and looked around; he saw a little girl doll sitting on the edge of the boat, swinging her tiny feet back and forth.

“……?”

“Should I capsize them? I will if you want me to.” The doll repeated her question, a smile on her face, as Harvey frowned, wondering who the hell she was.

He glared dubiously at the doll, but after a bit, he looked away, turned his eyes back to the ocean, and muttered, “…Nah. Leave ’em…”

As the waves tossed the Sandwalker about, he could make out Ol Han on the deck, enduring the rocking by clinging to the rail.

Their eyes met, he thought—he probably didn’t imagine it. Ol Han’s eyesight wasn’t bad, so it wouldn’t be surprising for him to notice Harvey’s gaze.

Neither of them wore any expression. The friendship they might have shared long ago had of course been flung to the edge of the world, but that didn’t mean that they hated each other. It was just that their stations had shifted with the flow of time; he was sure that was all it was.

“Harvey…? Are you okay? Hey, are you breathing?” Kieli asked, bringing her face close; maybe his sudden silence had worried her.

“…Yeah,” he answered succinctly, pulling her head closer; he combed his fingers through her soft black hair and closed his eyes for a few seconds.

Somewhere along the way, their stations had shifted; that was all.

That was all, but he had a hard time accepting it.

The harpoon had lodged itself into Harvey’s body far more tightly than Kieli first thought, so she had to exert quite a bit of force to extract it. Harvey said he would do it himself, but it was even harder just to watch without doing anything; so the next thing she knew, she found herself helping. She held on to the hook protruding from the end and pulled with all her might. The gruesome task made her feel as though something crawled through the palm of her hand and down her spine.

The moment they dislodged the harpoon, with one last sliding sensation, Harvey fell forward onto the bottom of the boat, bent like a boomerang, gasping for air. Blood gushed between his fingers as he held the wound, forming a black puddle.

“Just a little more. Move your hand.”

She felt as if she was about to cry, but Kieli bit her lip and braced herself; since Harvey was holding his wound and not about to move, she took his hand and pulled it away. They may have removed the harpoon, but there were still dozens of meters of wire sewn through him.

Kieli started pulling very carefully at the cord. As she pulled it through Harvey’s body toward her, the parts of the wire that didn’t have blood on them came out stained dark red; but even so, she kept biting her lower lip and continued her work, her expression unchanging.

After a long while, she finally excised the wire completely; she couldn’t stand looking at it anymore, and tossed it overboard.

“It’s over…” Muttering in relief, she let out a deep breath of all the air she had been unconsciously holding in. Exhausted, she glanced sideways to see how he was doing; Harvey, his forehead pressed against the bottom of the boat, showed absolutely no sign of responding. Kieli grew a little uneasy and crouched beside him, brought her face close, and whispered, “Harvey? Does it hurt?”

“…No,” came his thoughtless, hoarse reply; then he broke off again. She sensed that he didn’t want her to talk to him anymore, so Kieli waited in silence.

In the middle of the quiet ocean, all she could see was the blue-gray surface of the sand; the small boat carrying her, Harvey, and the doll drifted all alone.

It was a bright night. The moons shone vaguely through the thin gas that covered the sky. One near the border of the horizon, one diagonally above—it was unusual to see both moons in one night, even if they did appear only faintly. It was said that the waves of flowing sediment crashed into each other, breaking the sand up into fine dust that danced up into the air and formed the granular layer of atmosphere that enveloped the entire planet. In that respect, the sky was a part of the ocean sands, too.

Lost in the sound of sliding currents that washed comfortably over her, Kieli closed her eyes without realizing.

“…After all this time, this scenery hasn’t changed a bit…” She suddenly heard a short murmur, as though the speaker was half talking to himself. She opened her eyes and looked down next to her; Harvey had lifted his cheek slightly from the bottom of the boat and was looking up at the sky. The white shadow of a moon was reflected in his copper-colored eyes.

“I wonder why people change with time…”

Maybe it was because of the pale moonlight that his profile gave an even more emotionless impression than usual; Kieli looked wordlessly down at it, and vaguely thought that Harvey was somehow like this planet. She was sure that this world had watched indifferently, never changing now or before, as people went on building their foolish history.

A heavy atmosphere wrapped around them, and time passed in silence for a while. Then Harvey said, “Argh, that was a mistake. Maybe we really should have capsized them.” He rolled over on the floor; apparently he had recovered enough to make flippant comments. “I always suspected humans weren’t to be trusted, but now I’m pretty certain.”

He said it so simply, but she felt as if he had just made a declaration that was, in a way, rather shocking. Kieli opened her mouth a few times to speak before she finally blurted out, “Hey! Even if the whole world turns against you, I’ll always be on your side, Harvey. So you can at least trust me…!” She thought maybe that was a little abrupt and looked at him to gauge his mood, and, as she expected, Harvey was speechless, and wore a look that said, “What is she going off about now?”

Then, after a pause, he started laughing. “Crap, that hurts…” Maybe his carelessness had affected his wound; he doubled over on the floor, but he was still holding back laughter. Kieli furrowed her brow in disappointment, wondering if what she said was that funny.

“Why are you laughing?”

“No reason…”

“Why?!” she pressed, crouching beside him; Harvey, lying on his face, muttered something under his breath. She couldn’t hear it clearly, but the intonation she barely managed to make out was familiar—he would almost never say it to her face, but sometimes he would say “thank you” like this.

She heard a cheerful snicker behind her. She raised her head and turned around to see the doll, sitting carefreely on the edge of the boat, watching them with a smile on her face.

“Oh yeah, what is that?” Harvey asked dubiously, suppressing his laughter.

“Oh, her!” Kieli realized that she had failed to tell him about the doll and the abandoned ship, and started to recount the situation again when…

“You’re Ephraim, right? I’m so glad; I’ve been wanting to meet you.” The words leapt from the doll’s lips. Kieli blinked blankly; in contrast, maybe it was a conditioned response, but a hint of caution rose in Harvey’s demeanor for an instant.

“…How do you know that?” A dangerous air hovered about his voice, and it was a key lower than normal. But the doll showed no sign of fear and went on in a frank tone.

“Jude would talk sometimes, about you, and about Joachim. I could tell right away; you have exactly the same air about you as Jude. I wonder if Joachim does, too?”

“Wait a second! You know Jude—does that mean…he was alive…?!”

The doll nodded her head up and down, and Harvey froze for a minute, a look of mute amazement on his face…or so Kieli thought. But then he suddenly jumped up, crying, “Where is he now?!” He crawled on his hands and tried to get closer to the doll, but on his way there, he started coughing and doubled over. The blood that had finally stopped started spilling out of his wound again.

“Harvey, you have to stay still.”

A little surprised at how unusually upset he was, Kieli went to Harvey’s side and rubbed his back as he choked on the blood rising in his throat. “Honestly. You’re more trouble than I thought,” the doll said in exasperation as she watched them from the edge of the boat. “You’re really going to have to help this one, Kieli.”

“Eh…?” Kieli looked up in shock at the familiar line. Who was it who said that? She felt as though she heard it so recently, and yet so long ago…

The doll, still wearing the same apron dress she’d worn when Kieli was small, and the same smile as back then, too, met Kieli’s gaze—her blue glass eyes were filled with a calm light that left a deep impression.

But I know there’s someone who needs you. You have to be his friend and help him…

In those eyes, she could see the deep-colored, all-encompassing eyes of the person who had combed Kieli’s hair as she soothed her, lying beside her on their bed.

“M…om…?”

Now it was Kieli’s turn to fall speechless in amazement.

“Are you my mom…? Why? How long…?” she muttered, stunned, dropping to the boat’s floor.

She gazed into the doll’s silently smiling eyes, and little by little, a pervading happiness filled her heart. She’s my mom…!

For no reason, she found her gaze darting about, and her eyes met Harvey’s, looking questioningly up at her. “Guess what! She’s my mom! My mom came to see me!” Harvey just blinked, unable to grasp her meaning, and she quickly shifted her gaze from him back to the doll.

“I didn’t remember what happened back then. That’s why it took me so long to come; I’m sorry…”

“You don’t have to apologize for that,” the doll said in a bright voice mixed with a wry laugh. Kieli couldn’t be happier. Her strange power to see the dead, to hear their voices—she might never have felt so blessed to have that power as she did now. It was a special privilege that only Kieli enjoyed; Julius couldn’t imitate it.

Thunk…

There was a dull impact as the bottom of the boat caught on something.

“……?” She put her hand on the edge of the boat and leaned over to peer below; something like a squashed fuel tank from a three-wheeled taxi was poking out of the sand. What was it doing in the middle of the ocean like this…?

“Kieli, over there.” She heard an awed, hoarse voice behind her. She looked up to see Harvey pull himself up, pressing one hand against his abdomen, and gaze far across the ocean. Kieli followed his eyes and turned around. “Wa, ah…,” she muttered involuntarily with a sound like a sigh.

The rolling surface of the sand stretched to the edge of the horizon, burying all kinds of things within it.

Train wheels, three-wheeled taxis with their tires fallen off, bleached animal bones, window frames, stoves, rusty toy robots; those things standing over the sand like leaning towers were probably the bent supports of sand ships…The faint light of the moons illuminated countless long, bluish shadows as they fell over the sand, like grave markers standing like a forest in the wilderness. Or it might have been like a deserted sandbox, after the children had finished playing and gone home, abandoning their toys.

Between them, she could see parts of coffins buried in the sand, floating like white buoys. Some had weathered and started to melt into the sand; some weren’t very old and kept their original shape.

“Is this…the final destination of the Sand Ocean…?”

“I’ve never seen it before, either…”

They each managed a single sentence; then both lost all words, and gazed in wonder at the scene spreading before them.

The final destination of everything set adrift on the flowing sands, the Sand Ocean Graveyard.

It was a world without sound. The silence was so intense it reverberated in her mind like a high-pitched, grinding ringing in her ears.

Even the ever-present sound of sliding sand rising and falling again and again had suddenly stopped. The flow of the sand, the dry wind that blew over the ocean, even the clouds that moved above them—everything here had come to a complete halt, as if time had left them behind. No, it wasn’t that; maybe time was drifting at such a slow, sluggish pace that humans couldn’t perceive it. Because they said that once things drifted here, they stopped flowing and stayed, reborn into the ocean sands over eternity.

“…This is where things settle when their lives have ended. It’s too early for you two to be here yet,” said the doll, in a calm voice that melted comfortably into the silence. Kieli, who had forgotten where she was and gotten lost in the scenery, started and regarded the doll.

The doll returned her gaze with her blue glass eyes and smiled softly.

“Mom…”

“You’ve grown, Kieli.”

“Yeah. No, not much…”

Kieli’s response was awkward. She had so much she wanted to talk about, so much she wanted to ask, but now that she could, she couldn’t put anything into words; she looked down, faltering. She turned to Harvey for help, but of course he just looked at her as if to say, “Why are you looking at me?” Watching their subtle exchange from the edge of the boat, the doll chuckled, amused.

“Please take care of her, Ephraim. Although in some ways, I’m more worried about you,” she declared simply, striking Harvey speechless. At a loss for how to respond, this time he looked at Kieli as if to say, “Say something, you!” But Kieli was at a similar loss.

Just then, there was a clatter as forces were set in motion, pushing them from behind, and the boat suddenly started sliding across the sand—but there wasn’t the slightest hint of waves or wind.

As if inertia held her back, the doll’s upper body fell overboard.

“Ah…!”

Automatically, Kieli leapt to the edge of the boat, leaned over, and reached out to the doll as it fell into the ocean.

When she thought she had grabbed the doll’s hand in the nick of time, the force kept pushing her forward, and she went over the edge. “You idiot!” Harvey’s arms wrapped around her from behind—at the same time, a wind rose softly from somewhere and caught Kieli, like gentle outstretched hands.

Inside the wind she saw the face of a woman who looked a lot like her. She smiled with her deep, clear black eyes.

I love you, Kieli…

And she disappeared with the wind as it passed by.

For a time, Kieli stared dazedly at the empty space where her mother vanished, but then gasped, “Mom…?” and turned her attention to the doll in her hand.

The doll, which had been moving until a minute ago, had lost all its energy; it just dangled by one arm, swinging forlornly. The tips of the small feet that hung from under her apron dress touched the ocean, leaving faint tracks on the surface.

“Mom…?”

She held the doll up and shook it lightly; its head teetered sideways, and its chestnut curls fell over its smiling, childlike cheeks. “Mom, Mom?” As she called out, she shook the doll over and over; every time she did, its head and curls rocked back and forth. “Mom, hey, what’s wrong?” Still, Kieli didn’t stop.

“Kieli.”

“Mom!”

“Kieli, stop.” A quiet voice restrained her.

Kieli’s face snapped up and turned on the voice unintentionally, accusing its owner. His copper-colored eyes looked straight into hers. “She’s gone. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I do not!” Kieli answered immediately, cutting him off. She turned away and shook her head. “I don’t understand! I finally got to see her, so why did she disappear? Why did she say the same thing and leave me behind again? I…I really wasn’t okay. She promised she’d come right back, so I waited, but…she lied…!” Sobs intermingled with the tail end of words that stuck in her throat and wouldn’t come out. She clutched the listless doll in her arms and just shook her head again and again. Above her, Harvey sighed, at a loss for what to do.

In the faint light of the twin moons, the blue shadows of the flotsam that stood like statues in the sand grew small and distant.

If only the wake that drew a fine tail, trailing after their boat, would go on forever, showing the way that led to the ocean where her mother slept—she wished, but as the white wake got farther away from the boat, the end gradually melted into the sand and vanished.

“Young Master…Let’s give it up already; it’s been three whole days!”

Muttering quietly, “There’s no way she’s still alive,” the crewman took the binoculars away from his round spectacles and glanced beside him. A boy with light brown hair was standing on the main deck at the ship’s prow. He held a large pair of binoculars that seemed disproportional to his still small, childish hands, and had been motionlessly examining the sand-colored ocean.

“Master! Master Julius!” the crewman called persistently.

The boy, still peering through his binoculars, answered obstinately, “We look until we find her, duh.”

“You don’t have to be so stubborn…”

“Don’t you say that. If you don’t take this seriously, it’s the death penalty for you.”

The sailor paused—the boy was so casual with such an awful threat; he panicked, straightened up, gave a half-baked answer somewhere between “Yes, sir” and “Yeah, yeah,” and picked up his binoculars again. If he didn’t make himself sufficiently useful, there would be no way for him to escape prison.

It had been three nights since the redheaded youth and the girl with him had fallen overboard.

A lot of people had witnessed the strange sight—a small girl going up to the main deck, swinging a metal pipe from one hand—so the commotion reached the other crewmen and passengers in no time, and one after another, their evil deeds had come to light. A telegram was sent immediately to the Church branch in South-hairo, and The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son was to be put into Church Soldier custody and subject to investigation as soon as it reached port. They had already seized the slave merchant at port who owned the ship.

It all happened because of the mobility and influence of Julius, this boy who was barely over ten. None of the sailors knew any of the specifics of who he was beyond his being the son of some bigwig in the Church, but apparently the boy’s father had a lot of pull, even in the Church’s upper echelons. The crewman faced death; at the very least the world would never have anything to do with him—although he supposed that if the Church Soldiers caught him, they would have plenty to do with him.

Executing another of the boy’s orders, of course, The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son had changed its scheduled course and gone looking for the missing pair (although it seemed that it was only the girl who was important to him). The captain, the main offender, was confined in his quarters, but the boy had pulled the sailor out as a witness and made him help search.

All that entered his narrow field of vision, focused into two circles, was a wall of sandy blur; if he shifted his range, he saw the same blurry horizon far in the distance, where sky and sea mingled. He had been at this for hours already, accompanying the boy since before dawn this morning, but aside from the occasional flock of migrating birds passing from the corner of his eye as they circled above, there wasn’t even a single piece of flotsam in the endless monochrome world he was so sick of searching.

After a few minutes watching that scenery, his eyes started to hurt, and the sailor dropped his hands again; he pulled his coat collar closed and shivered. The sun may have been high, but after several hours standing under the winter sky, he was frozen to the core.

“…No one’s ever been found after getting lost at sea. Even if they do live a few days, they get carried off to the flowing sands’ final destination, and they ultimately die there. Unless there’s a miracle,” he grumbled, stamping his feet to get warm; when the boy’s cold stare hit him, he winced and shut his mouth. The boy had taken his eyes off his binoculars only for a second, and immediately went back to scanning the ocean’s surface. His cheeks, too, were flushed red with the cold, but his resolute attitude would not falter.

“Master…”

The sailor started to feel a little pathetic, and, deciding to summon his willpower and stick with the boy until he gave up, the crewman hoisted his binoculars a third time—although he didn’t think there was much point. Barring a miracle.

“It’s a miracle…,” he caught himself muttering.

The sailor looked up from his binoculars, blinking, then peered through them again. He hadn’t been seeing things.

Floating in the middle of his round window into the beige horizon, on the other side of the thin veil of gas, he could see a small boat.

“It’s a miracle. It’s incredible. It’s a miracle!”

“No, it’s not. It’s because you looked for us, Juli.”

“To be honest, I was starting to give up, too. But just then, there was a miracle. I’m sure that God is keeping special watch over you, Kieli!”

“It’s not like that…” At a bit of a loss, Kieli answered halfheartedly as Julius chattered.

For as long as she could remember, she couldn’t think of one time the Church’s God had protected her, and even if someone had protected her this time, she thought it was most likely some mysterious force at play in the Sand Ocean, and her mother. He probably wasn’t really conscious of it, but Julius sounded somehow proud as he insisted that there was no doubt that the Church’s God had protected her; she felt as if something wasn’t quite right. That’s stupid…

She felt a pang of self-disgust when she realized her thoughts had taken a cruel turn toward him, and she looked away, feeling awkward.

South-hairo port. The western entrance to the South-hairo parish that covered the southeastern continent.

Under the afternoon sky, hung with thin, sand-colored clouds, The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son had come alongside the wharf that reached its long arms toward the ocean. Moving busily around the ship with the overalled crewmen were soldiers wearing white, metal-plated armor over their priest’s robes—they weren’t as heavily armored as the Undying Hunters, but they were a squad of Church Soldiers.

Kieli had caught sight of them leading the captain and the bespectacled crewman away a little while ago. The sailor turned his timid round glasses her way just once, and, unexpectedly, he seemed relieved, like he was finally free.

“Master Julius. I have a message from your father,” a polite voice called out to them from a little ways off as Kieli mused at the carved seal of The Sand Mole’s Seventh Son engraved on its hull, lost in thought.

Big trucks had stopped in a line, forming a black wall at the entrance to the pier. One Church Soldier stood in front of them, waving his hand.

“Yeah. I’ll be right there,” Julius answered, waving back, saying, “Kieli, wait here. My mom’s house is nearby. I’m gonna be staying there a while, so come with me. It’s not like you have any pressing business to take care of, right?”

He started off, then turned and repeated, “You wait there!” pointing at her for emphasis, before scampering toward the truck.

Kieli gave no response and only watched the boy leave, dressed from head to toe in his best clothes, then turned back to face the ocean.

She found a broken piece of concrete from the pier lying at her feet, stuck out her toe, and kicked it; it skipped three times on the sand before disappearing into the current.

“Staying angry like that won’t do you any good. What are you sulking for?” she suddenly heard a voice say beside her. She turned and saw Harvey standing in the shadow of the cargo unloaded on a corner of the pier; how long had he been there?

He leaned on the pile, lit a cigarette, and drew the smoke into his lungs, coughing lightly (he hadn’t fully healed, so he really should cut that out), then shoved his lighter into the pocket of his overalls. The ship medic’s suspicious look terrified Kieli as he said, “For all the blood, it’s not that bad; you were so beat up, I thought your guts had been ransacked,” but fortunately, he didn’t press the matter and lent them each a pair of the crew’s work overalls.

Their bags and Kieli’s shoes had been left in the cabin, but as they didn’t have anything worth stealing, it was all still there.

“Juli doesn’t understand. His mom is always nearby, protecting him,” Kieli answered, pouting, and looked back at the ocean, squeezing the doll in her arms close. Her mother was no longer inside. She wouldn’t stay with Kieli like Julius’s mother.

“That’s what they call misplaced anger. Really, your mom and Julius’s mom have both left this stage of your lives.”

“Don’t talk like you’re so great. You don’t get it, either, Harvey.”

“…No, I don’t. Excuse me,” he spat back at her, and Kieli immediately regretted her words, but now that it was out, she couldn’t take it back; she pursed her lips and fell silent.

“Things are gonna get bad soon, so I’m leaving,” Harvey said, changing the subject. Outwardly maintaining his lack of expression, he cast a sideways glance at the group of trucks and the Church Soldiers standing by them. “What are you gonna do? If you’re really gonna go to Julius’s, then go by yourself. Or do you intend to just stand there for the rest of your life?”

Maybe she really had offended him; he talked as if he was ready to abandon her, and Kieli was afraid to face him. She shook her head, still gazing at the ocean before her. But whatever she did, she still couldn’t bring herself to leave.

As she looked to the horizon where the tawny sky and sea met, her thoughts were on the final destination that must have been far beyond it.

“What’re you gonna do?” Harvey repeated, somewhat irritated. Kieli didn’t answer. Still looking—glaring—at the horizon, she was actually surveying the scenery of the final resting place in her mind’s eye.

Her mother was sleeping in that ocean.

After he waited a bit, she sensed Harvey sighing and moving away from the stacked cargo. He seemed to stop and turn back to her once, but Kieli didn’t budge, and soon the sound of workboots walking on the paved road grew distant. Even so, half out of stubbornness, Kieli refused to turn around.

The dry, sandy wind blew past, stroking her hair and cheeks, almost in exasperation.

“You’re not mad…?” she murmured, looking down at the doll she held in her arms, once the footsteps receded and vanished completely. She wondered if her mother wouldn’t scold her, even though she was being so stubborn and mean.

As expected, the doll didn’t speak to her again. An innocent smile in her blue glass eyes, she looked up at Kieli mutely.

You know what you should do.

For some reason, she felt as if that’s what the doll was telling her.

Kieli raised her face and turned back. Harvey had already disappeared from the port street that opened onto the ocean. She looked around, then started off in the direction that came to her intuitively.

“Kieli, wait!” The boy’s voice chased after her. She stopped and turned her head. Julius had spotted her and jumped down off a truck; he was running toward her. She noticed that there were even more Church Soldiers around the trucks than before and had a bad feeling.

“We just got news from the capital. I never thought he was an Und—”

Kieli didn’t wait for Julius to finish; she set off running again. “Wait! Did you know, Kieli?” he called, trying to stop her. She felt his surprise, hesitation, and a bit of hurt at her betrayal.

I’m sorry, Juli, she apologized in her heart. She had actually made a friend, but she would probably never see him again. Even so, she ran as fast as she could, without looking back. A wind blew past her from the ocean, as if telling her which way to go.

She felt as if her mother were giving her a push forward.