CHAPTER 4

HAUNTED STARSHIP

She was sure she had slept for several years.

She thought about it, her cheek on her pillow, as she gazed at the profile of the woman standing by the window, and that was the conclusion she reached.

Because as she stood there, Becca appeared all grown up, and had become a beautiful woman. Her long, blond hair with its slight wave and her clear, blue eyes remained the same. She had grown taller and taken on a mature aura, but she still had a little bit of her mischievousness left.

I’m happy for you, Becca. You grew up. I’m so glad. She felt it with all her heart. She had become a wonderful woman, just as Kieli had imagined.…She also fleetingly thought that it wasn’t fair. Kieli herself might not have grown an inch. She had never expected to become a beautiful woman to begin with, but it was possible she hadn’t even changed much from the helpless fifteen-year-old girl who couldn’t do anything.

Come to think of it, what time was it? If she didn’t get up and get ready, she would be late.…

“Wah, I overslept!”

Her own voice, and the pain shooting through the side of her head the instant she got up, woke Kieli completely.

“You startled me. What is this? Don’t jump out of bed so suddenly like that.”

The woman, who had been looking down outside the window, turned around in surprise. Easy for her to say, but jumping out of bed was “suddenly” by definition.

“Bea…” She was sure that’s what Harvey had called her.

“It’s not your place to call me that. It’s ‘Beatrix,’” the woman shot back.

She’d just woken up, and already this person was unflinchingly hostile. Sulking, Kieli put her hand to her head. Something clothlike was spread over the right side of her forehead, which throbbed.

It was her bedroom in her apartment that rose to view in the dim light of the room. Her eyes automatically went to the side of the bed. She had the feeling he had been there a moment ago, but the young man with the copper-colored hair was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Harvey…?”

“Ephraim is out.”

“Out where…?”

“I don’t know,” Beatrix answered curtly, then returned her attention to the window. The bluish color of the night reflected in the glass. In Kieli’s grogginess a moment earlier, she’d thought she was going to be late, but now that she looked at her bedside clock, she saw the hands indicating the late hour.

“It’s still today, isn’t it?…”

“There’s no day that’s not today. Yesterday and tomorrow are today in their own time, too.”

Kieli shut her mouth at the rude comeback, but as the woman hadn’t denied it, it must still have been today. She realized briefly that Beatrix must have stayed with her this entire time.

Come to think of it, she got the feeling that in the dream she’d just had, she’d panicked about being late, not to her part-time job, but to class at the boarding school. As a ghost, Becca was rather inconstant, so while she would inevitably appear most mornings, she was fickle, and would sometimes wake Kieli up and sometimes not. As a consequence, she was completely unreliable as an alarm clock.

As she watched Beatrix gaze out the window and thought of Becca again, Kieli noticed that a shade of caution had risen in the woman’s face. She surveyed the streets below with a strangely stern determination, almost a glare. Kieli directed her attention that way and made out, though faintly, muffled noises through the window.

“Did something happen?”

“Dunno. But it looks like things are dangerous out there. They’ve been making noise for a while now,” Beatrix answered, still fixing her gaze on the window, then added, almost to herself, “He sure is late for just going to pick something up.…”

The second Kieli heard that, she peeled off her blanket and set her feet on the floor. When she tried to stand, she staggered once. There was still a dull pain in her head, and she suppressed it with one hand.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to look for Harvey.”

“Don’t be stupid. Stay in bed. We don’t know that anything happened to Ephraim. Knowing him, he’s probably just wandering around somewhere nearby.”

“Either way, I have to find Harvey and ask him about the Corporal.”

“You can do that after he gets back.”

“The Corporal is none of your business. Please leave me alone,” she complained stubbornly as she sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her shoes on. This time, she stood firmly on the floor. She retrieved her coat from the top of the blanket and headed for the bedroom door. She realized she was being obstinate; but when the woman said things like “knowing him,” as if she was the expert, Kieli couldn’t help feeling rankled, even though she knew she shouldn’t think like that.

“Look. You may not care, but I don’t know what Ephraim will say to me,” Beatrix’s unhappy voice chased after her. Pulling on the sleeves of her coat, Kieli looked back from the doorway.

“He’s not Ephraim, he’s Harvey. The one I’m with right now—the one who didn’t abandon me and brought me with him all the way from Easterbury—is named Harvey; the one living here with me and the Corporal right now is named Harvey, so it’s only natural that I would go get Harvey; and if something’s happened to Harvey, it’s only natural that I would go help him. And you can just stay here and wait for ‘Ephraim,’” she said in one breath and left the room.

A boy peered out of a dark window from the second floor of a building along the street. His eyes met Kieli’s for a second, and while there was probably no meaning behind it, the boy waved his hand a little. She returned a meaningless wave when a woman who appeared to be his mother picked the boy up from behind and closed the curtain.

She heard angry shouts flying at each other in the distance, reverberating between the blue-gray asphalt and concrete walls. The residents appeared to be holing up inside their homes, afraid of the turbulent commotion echoing through the late-night streets.

I would feel better if the Corporal was with me.…

As Kieli directed her feet toward the commotion, she felt a little forlorn without the weight of the radio hanging from her neck. Harvey said he had thrown it away, so just in case, she checked the trash heap in the back alley but couldn’t find the radio.

Anyway, she got the feeling that if she found Harvey first, the radio would come back, too. She didn’t know where they had gone wrong, and things had gotten a little strange, but she was sure they would be able to go back to living together, the three of them, as they had until now.

It’ll be okay, she assured herself with a nod, then, “Oww…” Her head still hurt a little when she moved it. She pressed at the gauze on her forehead with her right hand.

I’d better hurry.…

As she tightened her expression and quickened her pace, she heard the sound of an engine approaching from behind. It was the familiar sputtering, clunking noise of a running fossil fuel engine that always sounded broken even when it wasn’t.

She stopped and turned around. A single headlight came up behind her, and soon a three-wheeled bike stopped directly beside Kieli. A beautiful woman, with her long golden hair tied behind her back, straddled the driver’s seat.

She glared at Kieli with the worst of ill-humored scowls and said in the worst of ill-humored tones, “Get on. We’ll look for him together.”

“No thank you,” Kieli replied with a scowl to match hers, faced forward, and walked off at a quick gait.

“Stubborn little—” Beatrix revved up the engine and followed her, drove a meter past her, and stopped again. “He did kind of trust me to take care of you, so I’d be in trouble if anything happened to you. Don’t think of it as being for you or me. Think of it as being for Ephraim, or what was that name? Harvey? This is for him. Are you okay with that?”

Kieli passed a few steps ahead of the bike and stopped.

She dropped her gaze to the asphalt in front of her and stood there for a while, then turned around, walked back, and climbed in the backseat without a word. “Hold on tight so you don’t fall.” She couldn’t see Beatrix’s face, but she felt like her voice was a little softer than before. Kieli wrapped her arms around the woman’s waist and held tight to her back. The scent of soap wafted by for a moment; she had thought her mother was the only woman who smelled like soap, so this was an unexpected discovery. As Beatrix revved up the engine and the bike sped forward, the smell immediately vanished in the exhaust gas that spewed from the muffler.

They descended the hill path toward the center of town, making enough noise to disturb the neighbors in the after-hours streets. The lamps at the edge of the road slid past her vision, drawing lines of yellow light.

The soft blond hair falling down the back in front of her fluttered in the wind and coiled around her face. Kieli shook her head in annoyance and called over Beatrix’s shoulder.

“Um, Beatrix…”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Beatrix!” She raised her voice to be heard over the engine and wind. “What’s your relationship with Harv…” But her voiced faded again partway through. Beatrix glanced back once, then slowed down a little.

“You don’t have to worry. We’ve been stuck together for so long, it’s too late for there to be anything like that between us.”

“That’s not really how I meant it,” Kieli said, but inwardly she did sigh with relief, then felt awkward and changed her question.

“Do you know someone named Jude?”

“Kind of. Those three were famous, after all.”

“Three?”

“Jude and Ephraim and that psycho idiot Joachim—oh, but you know him, too, don’t you? The three of them are pretty well known for defeating an entire corps of armored foot soldiers in North Westerbury all on their own or something.”

“Huh…” Kieli listened with great interest. She would never hear anything like this from Harvey.

“I was sure they were all dead, but I happened to meet Ephraim a while after the War. We would occasionally run into each other, or he would come give me something to do for him, like this time.”

“Something to do for him?”

“Ephraim hasn’t told you anything? Nothing at all?”

She shook her head in response, then realized that Beatrix wouldn’t see it. Apparently the message got through, though, and she sensed Beatrix letting out a sigh. “…Honestly, that man. He should just get over himself and tell you.”

“What? Tell me what?” she asked, drawing her face close. Just then—“Ouch!”—Beatrix abruptly hit the brakes, and Kieli’s nose ran straight into her back.

“Wh-what?”

“…Oh, no,” Beatrix muttered, then suddenly turned the bike around. Kieli had been rubbing her nose with one hand and almost fell off the bike, so she hurried to wrap her arms around the woman again. The second she thought they were off and running, there was another abrupt stop, and she hit her nose again.

“What’s going on…?”

She started to get angry and looked up, then gulped and froze at the scene that greeted her over Beatrix’s shoulder.

There were shadows at the top of the slope ahead of them. Not just one or two, but five or six people stood blocking the way, and more people came out of the alley to join them. They were men in common civilian clothes, but black cylinders in a few of their hands shone dully, reflecting the streetlights—the rifles of the Watch.

She heard footsteps behind them and turned her head, still holding on to Beatrix. Similar shadows appeared a few at a time from the alley at the bottom of the slope and blocked their path of escape. “How could I let this happen…?” a strangled voice reached her ears.

“Beatrix?” Kieli turned forward and peered over Beatrix’s shoulder to see her face.

“It looks like Ephraim wasn’t the one in trouble—it was me. It really was a bad idea to talk to that man.…”

The woman clicked her tongue and bit her pale red lips hard enough to cut them.

“Beatrice,” came a voice from among the watchmen ahead of them. Judging from the demeanor of the troops, the most important man was the large one standing in the middle, but the one who spoke was the one who stuck close to his left.

The speaker shot Kieli a suspicious glare from over Beatrix’s shoulder, as if to say, “What’s with the girl?” Then the back in front of her shifted to the side a bit, blocking Kieli’s view so that she could only guess what was going on ahead from the conversation.

“That’s ‘Beatrix.’ Can’t you remember anything? Apparently the alcohol got to your head before it destroyed your liver.”

“I don’t give a damn about your name now, Beatrice.” The man shrugged off Beatrix’s insult with a hiccup of a laugh and went on to say, “I know what you really are. You’re the female Undying who escaped at the Great Fire of Toulouse.”

Kieli rummaged through the depths of her memory and found that reference in a small column from her Church history textbook. Toulouse was a city on the outskirts of Westerbury parish, where they’d once had a “witch hunt” or something. The calamity that had burned the city down when the witch escaped was known as the Great Fire of Toulouse.

“You don’t have to brag about it. You’re not the one who figured it out anyway.” Beatrix sighed. “I was careless to talk to that priest from Westerbury. It’s no surprise that a priest from there would recognize my face. Well? Don’t tell me you think you can do something to me with your poor excuse for artillery.”

Her voice lowered in pitch and echoed dangerously through the darkened streets. There was a moment of silence as the man apparently faltered, then he continued.

“Either way, don’t think you can escape. Church Soldiers will be here from the port soon.”

“Oh? Then you should have just been good little boys and left it to the Church Soldiers. I suppose you couldn’t wait to claim all the glory. Did you want to be publicly acknowledged again? Well, now I have some time to escape. Thank you.”

After the deliberate provocation, Kieli heard the men’s murderous murmurs and metallic clacking sounds—the sounds of readying guns.

“Beatr—!”

“We’re getting out of here. Hold on tight,” Beatrix whispered sharply without turning around, then immediately twisted the accelerator and spun the bike 180 degrees. She abruptly sped toward the wall of watchmen blocking their escape. She’d told Kieli to hold on but didn’t give her time to react. If she hadn’t already had her arms around Beatrix, she would certainly have fallen off. In a panic, Kieli clung tightly to the woman’s back.

“If you don’t move, I will run over you!” Beatrix shouted ahead of her. A stir ran through the wall of watchmen. Half of them stayed put and cocked their guns, but the other half broke away. The bike charged right for the weakened wall.

She heard gunshots behind them—behind them? Kieli twisted her neck around, and directly under her line of vision, there was a thunk as something hit very close to her rear end. Smoke rose from the fuel tank under her seat.

“What are you thinking!? I’ve got a normal girl here!” Beatrix looked back and shouted. Kieli was already facing forward when she heard the next volley of gunshots—this time from ahead—as the bike’s front tire popped and flew away. The two back wheels spun into the air and flung Kieli’s body forward.

She screamed.

“Kieli!” Of course the voice she heard and the hand that grabbed her belonged to Beatrix, but for some reason, she thought for a second that Harvey had come for her.

Kieli closed her eyes and clung to Beatrix, so she couldn’t tell for sure, but they probably hit the asphalt and rolled over a few times, stopping when they hit the concrete barrier of the curb.

At the same time, a spectacular crash rang out nearby. Apparently the bike had rammed into a wall.

It took her a while to relax her body after they stopped, and as she held her breath and froze, her face still pressed to Beatrix’s chest, a short sound came from Beatrix’s mouth, and the arms embracing Kieli loosened their hold. Kieli gasped and jumped back. “Beatrix!”

“You’re not hurt, right?” Beatrix asked her before she could speak further, and Kieli spot-checked herself. “I have a lot of scratches,” she reported, and Beatrix nodded.

“Good. Sorry, but you’re going to have to deal with it.”

Beatrix tried to push herself up, then suddenly collapsed into a crouch on the ground. “Damn it…!” She fell onto her side and pressed both hands against her knee, letting out a curse unbecoming of her shapely lips. Her right knee showed under the hem of her disheveled skirt.

Everything below the knee had torn off and was gone.

“No…”

The bike! Her knee had gotten caught in the wheels of the bike as it rolled over with them!

As Kieli started to scream, she heard violent footsteps and sensed several people standing behind them. She swallowed her cry and turned around. Between ten and twenty watchmen surrounded them in a semicircle, about half of them aiming rifles.

One knee on the ground, Kieli moved to cover Beatrix. But a blood-soaked hand immediately grabbed her shoulder from behind, and a voice said, “Out of the way.”

“But—!”

“Out of the way,” the voice repeated flatly, and Kieli was shoved to the side.

When she stumbled and put her hand on the ground, her fingertips felt skin.

One leg wearing a shoe was lying there.

Kieli automatically pulled her hand away, then gasped and snatched the leg to her chest. In front of her, the bike lay on its side, its back wheels spinning in the air.

When she turned back, she saw Beatrix using the wall to support herself as she tried to stand on just her left leg. As they watched her still try to get up on her own, even after losing a leg, a frightened stir ran through the men of the Watch—maybe one of them got overexcited, because a short gunshot rang out and Beatrix’s body snapped slightly backward. Fresh blood poured out and dyed the golden hair on her shoulders.

Low screams came not from the woman who had been shot, but from the men, and there was a metallic sound as they directed their guns at her head.

No!

Still clutching the leg, Kieli instantly kicked at the ground and stood up. She ran to the bike handle in front of her and twisted the accelerator with all her might. The back wheels rotated with a groan, and the bike spun across the asphalt, still sideways. It almost dragged Kieli along with it, but even as she almost fell over, she let go of the handlebars in the nick of time.

After that, several things happened in quick succession.

She heard a series of gunshots. The bike spun into the group of men. The men screamed and scattered, and the bike knocked around a few of them who didn’t manage to escape. One shot grazed Beatrix’s cheek and there was a burst of fresh blood—it was possible Kieli had the order mixed up, but all of the events unfolded around her almost simultaneously.

Unable to process all of the information in her head, she stood in a daze for a second.

Maybe the accelerator grip was broken—the bike kept spinning as its engine ran at full power, and the Watch got farther and farther away. She dashed over to Beatrix, who was trying to pick herself up with her bloody arms, burrowed underneath the woman and lent her a shoulder.

“I don’t want your help.…”

“If you have the strength to talk, then hold on.” And if Kieli had any energy to talk, then she wanted to put that energy into her arms, too. She supported the woman in a pretty unlikely pose and half-dragged her as she escaped into a nearby alley.

She slipped into a narrow alley behind a bar or something, pushed Beatrix into a gap between the liquor bottle cases stacked up in the trash heap, and held her breath as she waited for their pursuers to pass by.

After the angry shouts and footsteps echoing off the concrete walls grew farther away and completely disappeared, Kieli finally breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed her tense body. “I think they’re gone.…” She sat down against the wall next to Beatrix, exhaled slowly, and caught her breath as she glanced beside her.

Beatrix leaned against the wall, holding her right hand against the left shoulder that had been shot. Like Kieli, she breathed a sigh of temporary relief.

“You can be pretty brutal. Ramming the bike at them…”

Her tone was the same as always, but her voice was rasping, and a grim expression showed on the profile that rose faintly out of the darkness of the alley.

“I was in a daze. I wasn’t thinking of anything.…”

“You’re really something if you can do that in a daze. I guess I’ll rethink my opinion of you.”

Kieli blinked and stared at the woman’s profile. “Th-thank you.” She realized that she’d received a compliment, but as the notion of it actually confused her, she let her gaze escape to her hands.

She was still holding the leg.

“Ack!” She shouted involuntarily and thrust it away.

“Who do you think you are, throwing people’s legs like that…?”

“I-I’m sorry.”

Beatrix shifted her body with great difficulty and picked up the leg. Then with a, “Now then,” to herself, she lifted her skirt up to her thigh and started fitting the severed leg to her knee section, as if she was a do-it-yourselfer making a chair. Kieli couldn’t help staring at what was transpiring. Beatrix suddenly stopped and looked up at her.

“…I think you’re better off not watching. You’ll never be able to eat meat again.”

“I-I’m sorry.”

Kieli repeated what she had said before, and looked quickly away.

As she had nothing else to occupy her for the moment, she leaned back against the wall and clutched her knees.

She sat in a daze, feeling the cold concrete against her back and the warmth from Beatrix’s body lightly touching her shoulder. She didn’t mean to think about anything, but various scenes floated into her head of their own accord. Their apartment in shambles; trying to ask Harvey what he meant about throwing away the radio, and falling down the stairs; Beatrix being there when she opened her eyes; going to look for Harvey and being chased by the city Watch; the bike flying; Beatrix’s leg…

“…Kh, ngh…”

Before Kieli knew it, tears welled up and overflowed from her eyes, and she was crying uncontrollably. She wiped her tears with her sleeve, still sobbing convulsively. Even her own clothes were dirty with Beatrix’s blood. It had already changed from red blood to a blackish stain resembling coal tar. Just like Harvey’s, the blood of an Undying.

“Why are you crying now…?”

Beside her, Beatrix sighed as if this was too much for her.

“Well, your—your leg, it came off.…”

“It’s fine. If I stick it back on, it’ll connect again soon enough. It would be better if I could stitch it on, but I can’t ask for too much right now.” As she spoke plainly, she started wrapping strips she had torn from her skirt around the pieces of her leg to hold them in place. “It would be really hard if I lost it completely like Ephraim’s arm, but as long as I have all the parts, I can manage. I have to thank you. Your picking it up for me was a big help.”

That’s not the problem! Kieli wanted to wail, but her sobs got in the way. The words didn’t form, so she shook her head back and forth again and again. Whether she had the leg or not, Kieli was sure it still hurt. Why did these people talk about such things as if they were nothing?

They sat in silence, and for a short while, Kieli’s strangled sobs and the tearing of cloth were the only sounds that resounded faintly against the alley walls.

“…During the War, this happened every day,” Beatrix murmured, still gazing down at her work.

“It was especially wretched when two squads with Undying ran into each other. As long as their hearts weren’t shot out, they could lose two or three legs and still go at each other forever. Every army kept at least a few pet Undyings.”

Still convulsing occasionally, Kieli clutched her knees, pressing her cheek against them, and listened to the woman’s voice. Her clear, beautiful voice and reserved way of speaking permeated Kieli’s hearing comfortably and quietly.

She was a woman, and she was so beautiful. But like Harvey, she, too, must have had some incredible experiences in that bog of a War in the past. Maybe she got covered in wounds and hid in back alleys like they were doing now. What must she have been feeling as she talked so openly about the War that Harvey never wanted to speak of?

“Of course people lost hands and feet, but there were also guys with their innards hanging out, and if they were careless, they’d have no head. They all crawled around the battlefield, looking for the parts they were missing. When that happened, there were people who didn’t care if it was theirs or not—they would tear an arm or a leg off of any dead body on the ground and stick it to themselves. During the War, we were convenient tools that never lost their usefulness, but thinking about it rationally after the War, we must have been nothing more than monsters.…That’s what an Undying is. We’re not people you tag along with out of curiosity, or admiration, or sympathy, or feelings like that.”

Beatrix finished tying the fabric and raised her face. When she did, the very slightly softer aura from before had vanished, and the same unsympathetic tone from when she first warned Kieli had returned.

“My opinion hasn’t changed. Leave Ephraim as fast as you can. If you stay with him, things like what just happened will happen all the time. And when they do, not only will you be completely useless, you’ll just be a burden to Ephraim.”

“But…!” Kieli started to retort automatically, but she began to get the feeling that nothing she thought would mean much to this woman. She no longer had anything to say. She looked down at the tips of her shoes and thought.

It was vague, but there was one argument she might be able to make.

“Even so…” She spoke slowly, thinking about how to most accurately put it into words. “Even so, I want to be by Harvey’s side. Because Harvey made a place for me. Diagonally across from him.” She thought of the boxed seats in the train. Ever since they’d started their journey, her place hadn’t been beside him or directly across from him, but, she continued, “Diagonally across from him, he made room for me. He didn’t open his mouth and say I could be there, but he made room for me.…”

“But that was because you selfishly—”

“No, that’s not it.”

That wasn’t what she most wanted to say. She tried to put the words together, but just then, she sensed a commotion approaching on the other side of the concrete wall.

Beatrix took on a stern expression and checked on the street from the shadow of the liquor cases. Kieli, too, cast a glance over the woman’s shoulder at the light visible at the end of the alley.

“Looks like they’re back. It would be nice if they’d just pass on by.…”

“What if they come this way…?”

Beatrix probably couldn’t walk very well yet. Kieli had dragged her this far on the strength of blind momentum, but she wasn’t confident that she could move very far from here. She bit her lip anxiously, and Beatrix turned her face toward her.

“You’ve done enough. Go home—” She cut herself off before she finished, then clucked her tongue bitterly. “It’s too late for that to solve things for you anymore, isn’t it? Honestly, where is that man, and what is he doing? Hurry and pick up your baggage already!”

“Right now, you’re the baggage, Beatrix, not me,” Kieli retorted, unable to let the woman’s remarks pass, and they glared at each other angrily.

Rustle.…

They heard a sound surprisingly close by. Kieli sensed someone opposite the clamor of the Watch, on the other side of the piles of trash bags—when she turned to look, a giant silhouette stood there, overshadowing the two of them. A terrifying bearded face rose from below the gloom, and Kieli almost screamed but covered her mouth with both hands.

“Kieli,” the shadow spoke. His direct tone resembled Harvey’s, but his voice was thicker and more powerful.

“I came to find you. Suzie’s been worried,” he said, and the familiar, giant cook of Buzz & Suzie’s Café offered her his large hand.

We can’t trust them. Obviously they’re going to sell me over to the Church. Beatrix struggled, wailing. Kieli frantically tried to calm her down, and Buzz forced her onto his shoulder and labored to carry her through the back entrance of Buzz & Suzie’s Café.

Once they brought her into the living room inside the diner, Beatrix finally seemed to accept her plight, and now she clung to a corner of the sofa, curled up in a ball, and played with her tangled, blood-coated hair, a scowl on her face.

It felt like taking in a beautiful but scratched-up stray cat.

As for Kieli, as soon as Suzie saw her, she took notice of the gauze on her forehead and advanced on her threateningly. When Kieli answered with part of the truth, that she had fallen down the stairs, Suzie’s energy deserted her, and she sank into a chair.

“Honestly, what in the world is going on?” she said, placing her elbow on the table and resting her head in her hand. She pressed the same spot on her own head where Kieli was injured, a complex expression on her face.

“The Watch was wandering about, so I called around to our regular customers to find out what was happening. They said they were looking for some suspicious people. They said it was a small man with a weird monocle and a young man with red hair. I got worried and sent Buzz to your apartment, but no one was there, and the room had been turned upside down.”

“Red hair—you mean Harvey!?” Kieli interrupted. Now it was her turn to press Suzie. “Who was the man with the monocle? Is Harvey with him now? Do you know where they are right now!?”

She practically slammed her hands onto the table, accidentally knocking over the mug that Buzz had just placed there. Coffee with milk in it spilled over the table.

“I-I’m sorry, I did it again.…”

It hadn’t even been one night since she had been sent home early for making so many blunders. She immediately tried to wipe it up with her sleeve, hating herself. “I got it. Move.” Buzz grumpily forced her out of the way, holding a dishcloth.

“Kieli. Have a seat and calm down.”

“Yes, ma’am…”

Chastised by Suzie, too, Kieli plopped down into a chair diagonally across from her.

“So you don’t know what’s going on either?”

Kieli shook her head silently, and Suzie sighed in defeat.

“We don’t know where Harvey is either. It looks like the Watch hasn’t caught him, but their information is mixed up, too—after a while, the description of the suspects changed. Now they’re looking for a woman with long blond hair and—”

She broke off for a moment and glanced back at Beatrix on the sofa. Beatrix, still hanging her head, turned her eyes upward and glared at her for just a second. Suzie muttered, “Somehow, they’re exactly alike” (Kieli thought she knew who Suzie was comparing her to), then turned back to Kieli.

“They say the other one is a girl with short black hair. I just don’t know what’s what anymore.”

“I’m sorry. I hope all of this doesn’t cause any trouble for the diner.…”

“That’s not what I mean, Kieli.”

Suzie’s tone suddenly turned gentle, and Kieli looked up blankly. Suzie was gazing at her with a soft smile, the smile she often gave to regular customers who came to the shop hungry, an expression that said, “You are hopeless, aren’t you?” Buzz, too, had finished wiping the table and was watching over her with his usual grumpy but quiet expression.

“You should have come to us to begin with. You should be more assertive about letting people help you. Because people can’t live life without getting help from somebody. So don’t be shy, just bother us already. Understand?”

“……”

Kieli continued to gape as she looked from Suzie to Buzz and back again.

“…Yes, ma’am,” she said with a small nod after a moment.

And here she’d thought she was relying on them too much already just by getting them to let her work at the diner.…There was something she’d thought occasionally since meeting Suzie and Buzz. Even if this planet is just, and an upright, completely neutral God didn’t reach out to people, maybe people like Suzie made the world a little bit kinder to make up for it. If only everyone in the world were like Suzie and Buzz, then this world would be much gentler and more tolerant, and no one would chase after Harvey or Beatrix anymore.

Curled up in a ball on the sofa, it wasn’t as if Beatrix had been sleeping, but she found herself half-dreaming, remembering the past.

She remembered that it was a calm morning with no wind. Buried in burned-up rubble, she was gazing absently at the brightening sky. The fire that had burned the city of Toulouse all night long still sputtered in places, and the crackling of flames filled her ears, strangely peaceful. There must have been a burnt corpse nearby because the smell of charred flesh wafted her way, but it wasn’t worth the effort to move her head.

She pinched a lock of her burnt, frizzy golden hair and sighed. If she cut it to even it out, it would end up very short. It was short during the entire War. It was a stupid reason, but that was why she liked long hair. She suddenly shifted her gaze from her hair to her hand. It was horribly burnt and blistered. She lifted her other hand, confirming that it was in the same state, and came to the conclusion that the smell of burning flesh came from her, though she didn’t much care. The lower half of her body was invisible to her, and it might be in even worse condition. She had no feeling in either of her legs, but of course she didn’t care about that either. All she cared about was her hair.

And I liked it. Such a shame.

The “witch hunt,” the “Great Fire of Toulouse,” it didn’t matter; the minor historical event that would later be called those things was a story that, in broad terms, was found all the time in old stories and wasn’t the slightest bit interesting—they discover that a woman living in town is an Undying; the townspeople capture her and start to burn her at the stake. The fact that an influential person in the city knew she was an Undying and took great care of her anyway, the fact that she had just been starting to believe that if the people of the town would only accept her she could live there forever—there were all kinds of minor facts like that, but to history, they were all insignificant details.

She heard footsteps approaching over the debris. A citizen, or a Church Soldier—she had escaped as far as the outskirts of town, then had run out of the will to try any longer. She lifted her head as if this wasn’t any of her concern.

With the sand-colored morning sky as a backdrop, a man with hair the same color as the rusty evening sky stood looking down at her.

“…Ephraim.”

She felt as though she hadn’t spoken that name in more than ten years. His eyes, the same shade of copper as his hair, stared into her face. Then, after thinking for about ten seconds, he said, “Oh. Is that you, Bea?”

He said it with the amount of emotion she would expect after being apart for a month at most. Was that how he said hello to his old war buddy, who had faced death with him time and time again, when he saw her again after so long? She sighed, thinking to herself that he never changed, and answered with the same degree of disdain.

“That’s my line. What are you doing here?”

“There was quite a fire show last night.” He nonchalantly surveyed the charred ruins. “It was really burning, so I kept watching. Then it went out, so I came to check it out, and there you are.” Apparently it never occurred to him to help extinguish the fire while it was burning. But she didn’t really feel like blaming him. She probably would have done the same thing in his position.

“How long are you going to stay buried there? The Church Soldiers’ll be here before long.”

“I don’t care if they catch me. I’m tired.” She ignored the hand he offered and averted her face in a huff.

He simply took his hand away and turned on his heel. “Oh, okay. Well, I’m off, then.”

“Hey! You came all this way, and you’re just gonna leave me?”

“…Make up your mind.”

He turned back, exasperated, took her arm, and pulled her out of the rubble. As she held his hand and righted herself, for some reason, she suddenly felt like wailing.

“Listen to this! The bastard abandoned me!” She complained to the skies, still sitting in the wreckage.

He made a face of extreme annoyance. “I don’t care. Don’t cry to me.”

“I’ll never trust normal people ever again. Oh, maybe I’ll just settle for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I wouldn’t like it either.”

“Then don’t say it.”

“I regretted it the second I did.”

They glared at each other, repulsed with all their hearts. They ran into each other from time to time but never stayed together long, most likely because they both inwardly hated that it always turned into a party of licking each other’s wounds.

After a while, he was the one to look away first.

“Can’t you walk?”

“I don’t know. What do my legs look like?” She hadn’t looked at herself yet, so her answer was a little strange.

“…I’m doing you a favor. Make sure to pay me back.” He wrapped his arm around her side and easily lifted her up.

“I owe you one.” She couldn’t work up the energy to resist and obediently put her arm around his neck, gazing at the scenery over his shoulder. A little in the distance, the bell tower of the Church in the central plaza stuck out under the nebulous morning sky. Apparently, the bell tower had managed to avoid destruction, but that plaza was where the fire had started. The area had probably taken the brunt of the damage.

“I wonder if a lot of people died.…”

“Probably.”

In contrast to the almost unsatisfying peace of the morning, strong winds had blown violently through the town the night before. The bonfire that was meant to burn her at the stake spread and became a giant inferno.

She didn’t get angry. She didn’t hate them. Even now, there was a part of her that still believed, somewhere in her heart, that she might have been able to live in that town forever—but of course that would be impossible now. She would probably never come back.

“I burned my hair.…”

In the corner of her eye, she saw that not only had she burnt her hair, but both of her arms were horribly charred and blistered. Still, in the end, she only murmured about her hair as she watched the smoldering remains of the city grow increasingly distant until she could see them no longer.

Back then all I thought about was my hair and the town, like an idiot.…

Beatrix heaved a light sigh as she combed her fingers through her blood-encrusted tresses.

Living life as a vagrant for very long, one stopped caring about nearly everything—including oneself—but occasionally one became strangely fixated on the most pointless things, and she wondered why. For her, it was her hair and that town.

So for him, it’s that girl.…

Still resting her cheek on the back of the sofa, she studied the profile of the girl standing in the middle of the room. She thought, “But she’s just a normal girl with nothing really special about her,” an impression that might offend the girl a little. She watched as the girl changed out of sandals into sneakers and pulled on the stiff goggles for riding three-wheeled bikes around her neck. Then, finally, she started to suspect something.

“Kieli. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to go look for Harvey,” Kieli answered, turning to Beatrix and adjusting the band on the goggles. “I got some information. The man with the monocle might be the weird person who lives in the ruins. I’m going to go check it out.”

Hearing that, Beatrix remembered that the lady of the house had been making phone calls in another room. Her husband had left, saying he was going to make something for a late-night snack.

“I’m going with you.”

“With your leg, it would be hard just riding in the back. You’ll just drag me down.”

As she sat, unable to respond to the blunt assertion, Kieli finished her preparations and muttered a simple, “All right,” as if to gear herself up.

“Hey, wait a second. Going by yourself isn’t going to—”

Beatrix hurried to rise from the sofa, but the nerves in her legs didn’t work. She almost slid down before she clutched the back of the couch. Kieli turned back from the door and looked at her in exasperation, as if to say, “See? I told you,” and Beatrix felt extremely dissatisfied. That little girl was crying just a few minutes ago, so why was she acting as if Beatrix was the one who needed looking after?

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t get to finish earlier.”

“What?” Beatrix asked, her voice unintentionally sulky.

Kieli hung her head a little and dropped her gaze to her sneakers. “Um, I told you before that Harvey made a place for me…,” she said, then paused, thinking about which words to use, and raised her face—she didn’t look particularly worked up, but wore an expression as if what she was going to say was obvious.

“But the truth is, I think Harvey was looking for a place for himself more than anyone. So I hope I can find a place for him.”

As the girl left the room with a “Well, I’m off,” Beatrix, unable to come up with anything to detain her, watched the child go without saying a word.

After the girl’s footsteps disappeared on the other side of the door, Beatrix leaned against the sofa and sighed. “…That girl is much better prepared for whatever may come,” she murmured under her breath and somehow managed to come to terms with something. And she thought, just for a second, that she might be jealous.

Then she looked up at the ceiling and thought:

That’s exactly why, Ephraim. It’s because she’s so straightforward that she’s such an extra burden to an idiot like you.

“Turn the steering wheel! The steering wheel!”

A wall suddenly filled the round beam cast by the headlights. The second he shouted, the truck took a sharp left, sending up a murderous screech of friction, stopping as the side door grazed the wall a little.

After a pause, there was a fsshh behind them.

“I’m tired.…”

Forced against the side window that just barely touched the wall, Harvey sighed in exhaustion. A lot had happened, what with having it out with the radio, suddenly getting shot at, and falling off a cliff, but he got the feeling that riding in this truck had put him in the most danger he had been in all day.

Luckily, there had been a rock shelf a few meters below the cliff where he had fallen. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see in the night’s shadows and ended up hitting his back hard. Still, in the darkness, he was able to wait for the Watch to leave, escape town in the beat-up, three-wheeled truck his companion called his beloved car, and drive recklessly through the dark wilderness, relying on the headlights and the track on the ground. Inwardly, he decided that he would walk home.

“You’re a really crappy driver. I’m amazed you’ve come to and from town so often without dying,” Harvey grumbled, narrowing his eyes at the man in the driver’s seat.

“If you’re going to complain, then you drive. But we’re already here,” the man answered simply, his tone calm. He opened the driver’s-side door and jumped out.

“I suck at driving, too,” Harvey muttered, half to himself, then crawled out over his seat and into the driver’s. When he stuck his face out the door, the wilderness air brushed his cheeks, carrying a hint of a rusty, metallic scent. He slid from the seat and stood on the ground, savoring the rough earth under his shoes.

It was a world of almost complete darkness. The white light from the headlight was the one thing cutting through the emptiness, illuminating a small, circular area. Sunburnt earth with stones strewn about and a rusty metal wall stood abruptly in the middle of it.

He noticed bent metal pipes poking out of the ground nearby. “Plumbing…you get water?”

“That’s how I can live here.”

Harvey got closer and tried twisting the faucet. After a burst of liquid and air, muddy water flowed from the tap. “Huh. How long has it been here…?” It may have crashed, but it was still technically a spaceship. This water line had probably been dug by people who had come looking for valuables. Harvey availed himself of the opportunity to stick his head under the faucet and wash the blood from his cheek.

“Is this your first time here?”

“Yeah. My first time this close.”

He must have considered checking it out before, so why had he given up on the idea? He couldn’t remember the reason, so it must not have been very important. As he ruminated about it, he finished up at the faucet by putting his mouth to it and taking a little drink. It was dirty water with rust and sand in it, but he was used to the taste, so it didn’t bother him. Not that he liked it, either.

He shook off the wet hair that stuck to his forehead and made do with wiping his face with the shoulder of his shirt as he looked around. In a corner of the headlights’ glow, the man had plastered himself to the wall and was moving something around, pointing his monocle at what seemed like a control panel.

There was a heavy clunk, and a rectangular crack sprang into sight a little ways up the wall. A part of the wall floated about ten centimeters up on their side, then slid to the side and formed an opening.

“Huh…,” Harvey found himself muttering, without any deep meaning.

The small man had a bit of a hard time climbing to the hatch created in the wall. “It’ll close up after a little while,” he informed the Undying before disappearing inside. Harvey got closer and peered through. Something like a hall stretched out before him.

“Oof…!” He put both hands on the threshold and kicked lightly off the ground, jumping inside. Just then, clunk! The hatch closed, making the same sound as when it had opened.

He really meant a little while.…

Harvey looked over his shoulder at the wall and shuddered a little. Thank goodness he hadn’t been locked out in the middle of the wilderness.

The cylindrical hall, surrounded by metal walls, sloped steeply upward. As Harvey walked, he wondered why it would turn into a slope, and hit on a very simple reason. He had forgotten because he had seen only part of the outside wall just now, but when he’d looked at the structure from far away, it stuck out of the ground at an angle.

“It still has power…?”

He couldn’t imagine how a starship that had crashed hundreds of years ago would still have a working power source, but emergency lights lining the bottom of the wall at equal intervals dimly illuminated his feet. He had muttered it half to himself, but the man walking a little ahead of him answered without turning around.

“I fixed the nuclear reactor in the power sector and remodeled it so it could get a little power from the resources of this planet. But of course I can’t create enough energy to get the ship itself to move with the dregs that are left now.”

“Huh,” he responded, honestly impressed, and hurried to follow the man’s back, floating somehow eerily in the dim glow from the emergency lights at their feet. The two sets of mismatched footsteps resounded faintly and indistinctly in the enclosed space as their feet struck the hard floor—he didn’t know what it was made of, but the floor, which must have been originally much smoother, was now coarse with layers of dust and fine rubble.

They climbed a good way up the sloping hall to a place where the ceiling and walls had collapsed, blocking the way forward. His guide went through a crack in the corner and deeper inside.

When Harvey bent down a little and passed through the crack after him, he heard a voice say, “I just got back.”

Harvey swallowed and stopped walking. He was appalled at himself. It hadn’t even occurred to him to consider the possibility of someone else being there. (He really was in serious trouble today. His ability to deal with danger was completely misfiring. If an enemy had been nearby, he could have shot Harvey right in the face.)

Maybe this was where his host lived. The space was relatively wide, like a division of the ship. Naturally, it tilted at the same angle as the hall, but the rubble had piled up so thickly toward the bottom of the slant that it formed a floor that was relatively flat and stable.

A person’s silhouette floated in the center of the room.

The figure wasn’t clear in the rough, almost staticky darkness that enveloped it, but it was a woman—or rather, a girl; she was thirteen, fourteen at the oldest. Only her lifeless white face and slender arms rose oddly out of the shadows.

The girl stretched her white hands out to the man and slowly moved her lips.

Welcome back, Brother.…

A faint, almost inaudible voice sounded in his ears.

“I’m home, Elena,” the man answered, standing in front of the girl.

He can see her…?

Apparently the guy could see the spirit girl, just like Harvey could. The Undying gaped at the realization, but something felt off.

The girl’s face was right in front of the man’s eyes, but his unsteady gaze was directed somewhere around her chest. “I know I was out late tonight. I’m sorry you were bored.” As he spoke, he still didn’t look the girl in the face. The ghost opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but he just talked over her—something about how he scared those idiots in town today. Though it was thanks to that scare that Harvey’d got caught up in this mess.

So he can’t see her clearly.…

As Harvey stood in the doorway and surveyed the center of the room suspiciously, his host finally finished recounting all the events in town that day. “Oh, yes. Today I brought an interesting guest.” He turned back toward Harvey.

“I don’t think I’m strange enough for you to think I’m interesting,” Harvey retorted with a frown, but the man didn’t care.

“First let me fix this. Then we’ll talk.”

He placed the radio on a worktable overflowing with old computer terminals and scrap metal. (He’d refused to let go of the radio, saying he was going to fix it when he got home.) He pressed the lens of his monocle against the rusty casing and muttered dreamily, “Fascinating. I wonder what kind of spirit is inside.”

“…What are you? A paranormal researcher or something?”

There was no way the Church would sponsor a lab for that kind of research, but it was the only thing Harvey could think of, so he asked—the man had claimed to have seen Undyings there. Harvey had followed him out to the middle of nowhere like this so he could press him for more details.

His host answered readily, but so readily his tone was empty, and completely untrustworthy. “Something like that” was his answer.

“‘Like that’? So you’re not. What was that lab for?” Harvey questioned further. The man had brought his tools to the table and was already repairing the radio. The spirit girl clung to him, leaning on his back. To an outsider, she looked incredibly heavy, but the man just immersed himself in his work, wearing an ecstatic expression that betrayed a hint of madness.

What is with these people…?

Harvey sensed an aura of inapproachability about them, and paused so long he ended up missing his chance to continue the conversation. He sighed and shifted his gaze around the room.

He probably got the energy from the power sector he said he had remodeled. He had secured enough light to live by, although it certainly wasn’t a brilliant light. As Harvey stood there for a while, looking around, he noticed an iron ladder installed in the wall toward the top of the slanting room—the wall itself tilted, leaning this way, so the ladder went beyond perpendicular and hung at quite an athletic angle.

There’s more above…?

Harvey casually started walking toward it. Using the metal reinforcements and pipes sticking out of the peeling wall as handholds, he climbed to the top of the slanting floor. As he grabbed the metal frame of the ladder, he heard a voice overhead.

Huh? There’s still someone else…?

He thought he had heard something, but as soon as he focused his attention on it, it vanished.

Harvey glared suspiciously at the darkness above the ladder, and after a little while, whispered voices leaked through again, like vague static.

Liberation army…

Weapons dealer and sniper…

He tensed up for a second when he caught the troubling words, but the next things that came to his ears were “Flush,” “Two pair,” and “You win again?”

Apparently they were playing a game.

He looked down toward the bottom of the room to make sure that the researcher wouldn’t be looking up from his worktable for a while, then set his foot on the ladder.

He wasn’t faceup, but he was pretty close to it as he climbed the ladder. When he stuck his head through the opening in the ceiling, the first thing he saw was the cloudy, blue-gray sky completely covering the area overhead. The outside night air touched his skin. It was dry air, with a hint of a rusty metallic scent. Sometimes he thought that the smell of the wilderness was the same everywhere on the planet.

He forgot what he was doing for a bit and gazed at the night world extending across his vision, then crawled onto the floor of the deck above him, which tilted sharply, like everything else.

He was at the tip of the starship. It was probably the place they called the flight deck, but all the valuable machinery had been carted off long ago, and an empty space spread before him. A large portion of the ceiling had fallen out, centering around a quarter-sphere-shaped hole that seemed to be where the windshield had been. It had become an observatory from which he could look directly out over the world.

Still, right now, all he could look out over were the shadows of the clouds hanging overhead—but if it had been a night when the twin moons were bright, he probably could have enjoyed the scenery some. The sky was lightening ever so slightly, but it was still too early for dawn.

Harvey was sick of seeing the night sky with nothing in it, but he looked up at it anyway, and as he did, he thought he could see a tiny speck of light beyond the clouds.

“Huh…?” he muttered and blinked once.

When he opened his eyes again, a world of blackness expanded above him, seeming to suck him in.

An ocean of darkness stretched as far as the eye could see. Across its surface twinkled countless particles of light, similar to the city lights he had gazed down on from the top of the hill. Pale blue lights, reddish lights, small, faint lights, bright, cross-shaped lights…Sometimes they would fall, leaving a white tail.

The twin moons, which should only have been vaguely visible through the layers of sand and dust that covered the planet, rose distinctly into the sky. They were spheres with rough, rocky surfaces. It seemed as though gravity could pull them crashing down at any second—

“Wah…”

The illusion caught hold of Harvey, and he cried out in spite of himself. The instant he did, his voice pulled him back to his senses, and his vision suddenly contracted. The next thing he knew, the sky from before—completely buried in low, blue-gray clouds—spread before him again.

Still gazing up, he stood frozen, speechless, for a while.

“Three Moon and Planet Earths.”

“Temple flush. Yesss!”

He heard voices behind him. They were the voices from before.

Harvey slowly turned toward them. A dimly lit area rose into view in the middle of the flight deck, like a solitary island suddenly springing to life in the sea of darkness, and several people sat in a circle inside it. One of them, wearing a light blue jumpsuit, seemed especially happy and triumphant at beating the man beside him, who wore the same outfit.

“This time, I win.”

“It happens occasionally,” the other man answered plainly, not particularly upset, and started to nimbly shuffle the gathered cards. As Harvey stood watching them, the first player turned his face toward him.

“Yo. How was the view?” he asked with a carefree smile, playing with his chips in one hand.

He thought for a second, then answered with a wry grin, “…I think it was a little scary.”

“You’re honest. I like that,” the man said and beamed, satisfied.

“Wanna play? The nut down there doesn’t seem to notice us enough for us to get through to him. He’s no fun.”

“Sorry, but I’ll pass too,” Harvey declined, shaking his head. (It would be hard to play. Their cards were just as transparent as they were.) He did, however, slide down the slanting deck to where they sat.

Aside from the two men in the pale blue jumpsuits, a few others sat in the circle wearing simpler, beige clothes, and they were all enjoying their game of cards. He bent down beside the circle and watched the game, occasionally speaking with the first jumpsuited man.

“You been playing here all this time?”

“Yeah, we’ve been doing this here for a long time. I guess it’s been hundreds of years.”

“Even during the War?”

“There was a time when they seemed to be shooting off guns a lot. We’ve seen some guys like you, young men who don’t die. You guys killed a lotta people, didn’t you?”

“…Yeah. That’s right.”

Harvey closed his eyes lightly and nodded. The player broke off the conversation for a time, moving his cards around, a sullen expression on his face, but when he finished, he looked up from his hand and said, “Well, that’s war for you. A lot more died in the wars on the mother planet.” He laughed cheerfully.

“What was the mother planet like?”

“Hmm, it wasn’t much different from this one. It was almost all wilderness and desert.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t as though he had ever pictured anything in particular, but he’d had a vague idea that it might be prettier. He couldn’t help responding with a bit of disappointment, and the second man in the light blue jumpsuit threw some chips into the circle and opened his mouth.

“Do you hate this world?”

“…I don’t really like it. But I don’t hate it.”

Saying the first thing that came to mind, Harvey remembered using the exact same line on someone else. In the recesses of his memory, he tried to remember who it was, and the bright voice of the girl from the fifth floor rang in his ears.

Do you like this city, mister? I.…

“As for me”—the second jumpsuited man dropped his eyes to his own cards and continued—“I like it pretty well. The land that the prisoners cultivated from a barren wilderness into a place where they can just barely manage to survive, and the new history that was born there.” As he said it, he redirected his gaze at the other onlookers around the circle. The men in the beige clothes looked up and smiled, a little bashfully.

“Unfortunately, we can never set foot on this land again. So we want you to ….”

I really hope you’ll like it for me.…

“Sorry, but I can’t take your place,” Harvey muttered, interrupting him. He had a feeling he knew what he was going to say. “…I’m more like you guys than anything else, anyway.” As Harvey said this, he remembered the girl’s line. “We’re kind of the same, aren’t we?” He looked at the circle inside the light and suddenly thought that it might be kind of nice if he could join them, in this place where time stood still, and just enjoy playing cards forever.

“You’re not like us,” the second jumpsuited man said quietly. “You can still touch the ground with your own feet and walk a path. Your journey must be endlessly long, so maybe you lose sight of the path sometimes. But even so, if you just keep walking, you’re sure to end up somewhere.”

“……”

For a while, Harvey had no reply.

Still gazing at the man’s profile, the Undying turned the sentence over in his mind. “Aw, don’t brood about it. He just likes talking fancy, the poet,” the first player laughed beside him. His laugh was infectious, and Harvey chuckled a little, too. Wasn’t “Don’t brood about it” the kind of thing he was always telling her?

“Well, I guess it’s about time to break up the party,” the man said as a faint light started to hit his back. He raised his face and looked up outside the flight deck. A sand-colored horizon had begun to appear far in the distance of the night world, painted blue-gray.

“Well, you know, if I was to take my colleague’s words and paraphrase ’em for you…” As he spoke, gathering up the cards, the crewman’s profile gradually grew paler, melting into the morning sun. The beige-clad prisoners went on ahead, disappearing one after another. “You may have a long way ahead of you, but just keep doing the best you can.”

“You’re paraphrasing too much. That’s completely different,” his colleague complained, and he lightheartedly replied, “Not that different.” Then, bidding Harvey a brief farewell, he said, “Well then. See you again, if fate allows.” Then he disappeared with his colleague into the sand-colored morning sun.

I get the feeling that “fate allowing” me to meet a dead person wouldn’t be a very fortunate thing, but…. Because Harvey was thinking of such trivial things upon parting, he missed his chance to say good-bye, and the next thing he knew, he had been left alone on the remains of the flight deck.

Your journey must be endlessly long.…

Harvey considered again the meaning of the words still echoing in his ears, and still crouching, he looked at his feet. Tattered work boots. He had stopped counting long ago, so he didn’t remember how many pairs he had worn out before these.

Lose sight of it? I’ve never even seen a path.…

He cursed but then thought it might be because he had never tried to find a path. He just wandered aimlessly, carried wherever events took him—come to think of it, what was he wasting time hanging around up here for? Didn’t he have something more important to be doing?

Argh. What, am I running away…?

He sighed inwardly at his bad habit’s reappearance. He’d meant to go out and get some time alone to figure out what he would do next, but he had ended up chasing the still-tangled thoughts out of his head. In fact, perhaps he had even been unconsciously escaping reality, because he hadn’t thought once of how Kieli was doing until just this very second. He had taken his frustration out on her, hurt her, and run away.

“I’m so immature.…”

He didn’t need Beatrix to point it out to him; he was already fed up with his lack of maturity.

Harvey wondered if she was awake yet. Beatrix was probably there with her, but if she woke up and the radio wasn’t even there, she would probably feel alone and nervous.

I guess I’ll head back for now.…

He sighed and picked himself up. After he stood, he looked down at the space in front of his shoes one more time, and he really couldn’t find anything like a path, but at the moment, he at least knew what he had to do. He had to go home, look her in the face, and apologize.

He could decide what to do next after that.

But Harvey had a feeling that he knew the answer.

As he climbed down the ladder, Harvey twisted his head to see how things were going below, and the monocled man was sitting at his worktable just like before. Maybe he had finished his repairs, because Harvey noticed that he was about to turn on the radio’s power. “Whoa, wait a second!” He panicked and jumped off the ladder. The momentum carried him, and he almost slid down the diagonal floor toward the tinkerer.

The man turned around, and Harvey snatched the radio from him in the nick of time. His host pouted like a child who had had a toy taken from him.

“What are you doing?”

“You can’t turn him on too suddenly. It’d be really bad.”

“Why?”

“If you really have to, then do it in the middle of the wilderness or somewhere; anywhere there won’t be severe damage.” Remembering how things were right before the radio broke—er, before he broke it—Harvey could easily imagine what would happen as soon as the power came on. He knew he had sown the seeds himself, but he still wanted to tear his hair out.

“There’s wilderness right outside. No problem,” the man said with a straight face, taking Harvey’s warning completely at face value. He went on to look, still with a straight face, down at his watch. “Oh, but before that, it’s time for breakfast. I promised Elena to always eat breakfast with her. You may join us.”

“No thanks. I’m going home,” Harvey tossed out carelessly, fed up with the random changes of subject (first of which, he was under no obligation whatsoever to let this man see the radio with its power on), and started walking toward the crack in the wall that they had come in through.

“You don’t normally eat? You may not need to eat to keep your strength up, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get hungry, does it?”

He stopped.

“Your ‘core’ records all of your cells’ information in its memory at the time it starts up, and functions to maintain the same conditions semipermanently, so your cells don’t age, and if you get hurt, the wound heals immediately. But other than that, your basic biological activity should work the same as the average human’s.”

“…My sense of hunger went numb during the War. And I can control my other senses to an extent,” Harvey answered in a monotone, but he inwardly raised his caution level to its maximum as he turned around. He had been about to leave without asking this man the most important question.

“Who are you? What kind of lab did you work at?” Harvey demanded, lowering his voice.

“Well, sit. You can at least drink tea, can’t you? I promised to always have teatime with Elena once during the day,” the man said, his answers not quite meshing with the question as usual, and he put an aluminum pot filled with water over the burner on his worktable (though Harvey didn’t think those burners were originally meant for boiling water). He looked over his shoulder at the spirit girl hanging on his back.

“Oh, right. We only have coffee here. I’ll go into town again tomorrow and buy your favorite kind of black tea. Starting tomorrow, you really will be able to drink tea with me.”

The girl wore a dark expression and looked down, shaking her head as if she wanted to say something. It seemed as though the gesture meant she didn’t want coffee or tea, but the man only nodded to himself, as if agreeing with his own idea, and started mixing coffee powder into his cup.

“You may already be aware, but the magnetic fields created by this planet’s fossilized resource strata have the unique characteristic of resonating with spiritual matter. I crafted this monocle from fossil ore. The spiritual matter reacts, and I can see it as wavelengths. Fascinating, isn’t it? Would you like to take a look?”

“…No, I’m good.” Harvey shook his head, a little repulsed by the man’s passionate invitation. If he remembered correctly, the man said he had been chased out, and Harvey could kind of understand why. Becoming so obsessed with paranormal research that wouldn’t help or harm the Church, or actually that would only harm them, they would chase him out. He was lucky they didn’t drag him into custody as a heretic.

“So never mind you—what did they do at that lab?”

“The Church gave us money to research pre-War fossil energy.”

“Aside from the dregs, there aren’t any pre-War energy resources left anywhere on the planet. You can’t do research without any material.…”

Harvey realized the answer as he spoke, and his voice trailed off.

There was just one kind of resource currently remaining. The final culmination of the advanced energy culture from before the War—he felt his heart pound a little harder.

The liquid inside the aluminum pot started boiling and bubbling. In the midst of their brief silence, the extremely ordinary burbling sounded very out of place. The man didn’t look at Harvey, but maybe he sensed the mood around him (or maybe he was just talking because he wanted to—that was a very likely possibility) and nodded, continuing.

“That’s right. That’s where they send the ‘cores’ of the Undying that the Church captures. Miraculous stones, masses only as big as a fist, containing a tremendous amount of ultrapure energy material—their inner structure is a mystery, but as I just told you, scientists are gaining an understanding of how they function. Before, they would capture the entire living Undying”—the man interrupted himself to joke that “living Undying” was a bit of a contradiction as he picked up the pot—“but there was an accident eight years ago when a test subject went berserk, and there were casualties. Since then, we’ve taken out just the ‘cores,’ and focused our research on reproduction.”

A short, meaningless sound emerged from Harvey’s mouth before his voice stopped working.

It wasn’t as if he couldn’t understand what the man was saying. He knew that the Church had been collecting the cores as relics of the pre-War energy culture, and by extension, he could naturally comprehend that they were trying to get the pre-War technology from them.

But—

“Reproduction…?”

Of what? Why? He wanted to continue, but he swallowed his questions. He didn’t have to ask. He could guess the answer himself. But it was like his latent consciousness refused to put it into definite words—he didn’t want to acknowledge the answer.

The man turned around, an aluminum mug in each hand. The white steam rising from the cups fogged the lens of his monocle, obscuring his focus. He directed an uncertain gaze that seemed to look straight at him, but also to look at the empty space in front of him, and headed toward Harvey.

Harvey unconsciously backed away half a step, and the man offered the cup in one of his hands. The words Harvey didn’t want to hear flowed right out of his mouth. “If core reproduction becomes a reality, that means they will be able to create Undying.”

He felt dizzy.

That instant,

“——!”

The tinkerer’s hand flashed in the shadow of the mug. Harvey pulled instinctively away, and immediately the thing in the man’s hand charged in his direction. Before he could think, his reflexes kicked in, and he knocked the man down with a right elbow to the side of his head. Something brushed in front of his face, sending a strange chill down his spine.

The mug fell to the floor with a high-pitched sound, and coffee splattered out. At the same time, Harvey’s assailant crashed backward into the worktable, and everything on it clattered to the floor.

“What…” He stood frozen in a cold sweat for a second, but then got out, “What are you trying to do, damn it?”

He strode over to the man sprawled under the worktable; the tinkerer tried to stagger to his feet, but Harvey stomped on his wrist. He let out a broken scream, but held tight to the thing in his hand, refusing to let go. It resembled a small gun, but its mouth had a wide, elliptical shape, and however he looked at it, it was no more than a handmade toy. What did he think he could do with a thing like that? The man was up against an Undying, much as Harvey really hated to think of himself that way.

Still prostrate on the floor, the man raised his face. He clung to Harvey’s ankle with his free hand and plastered an insane, twisted smile on his cheeks. “Share your heart…with Elena.…”

“Let go!”

He shuddered and automatically lifted his foot; in that second, the man jumped to his feet and thrust the strange-looking gun at Harvey. “Come on, a little thing like that—” He pulled back and parried with his arm; as he brought his hand back, he tried to grab the gun and take it away, but…

Vnn…!

There was a low sound, like a gauge needle spinning past the red zone, and a strange sensation ran across Harvey’s palm. It was like being sucked in and blasted in the opposite direction at the same time—it was difficult to describe the unstable feeling that started at his left hand and passed through his entire body like a wave.

“…Huh?”

His knees crumpled.

He tottered a few steps behind him and fell backward onto the rubble.

Harvey didn’t realize right away that he had fallen. When he did, he still didn’t have the energy to get up. He sensed the man standing in front of him, but he couldn’t even turn his head. Still buried in debris, he somehow managed to move his eyeballs and shift his gaze; the man stared at the weapon (Harvey guessed it was a weapon after all) in his hand, muttering something with a look of dissatisfaction on his face.

“So it didn’t completely stop him. There’s still room for improvement.…”

“Damn…you.…”

It took a lot of effort to wring those two syllables from his throat. He just barely lifted his head a few centimeters and glared up at the lunatic, who turned his gaze on Harvey and let out an impressed, “Oh?” A dangerous light filled his monocle. “If I shoot you again, will it finally stop you from moving?”

You’re asking me? Harvey wanted to spit, but as he didn’t have the energy to spare to say it out loud, he gritted his teeth without a word.

“It’s no big deal; I just want you to hold still for a while,” the man said as he crouched down and pushed the gun’s muzzle against him. He felt a cold, metallic sensation through his shirt. A little to the left of the center of his chest, right above his core.

I guess I’ll head back for now.

The words he’d thought before he came down from the flight deck floated into his head. That’s right, I have to go home. There are things I have to apologize for, and a lot of things I need to talk to her about, and then something I have to decide—

The sensation from before pierced the center of his body.

He heard the dull thud of his head hitting the floor, and the world stopped.