CHAPTER 5

“LET’S GO HOME.”

Kieli was sure it was the biggest tombstone on the planet, the oldest tombstone on the planet, and the tombstone that had come the farthest distance.

And she was sure that it just suddenly fell from the sky one day and was erected in an instant.

It was the tomb of the spaceship.

Under the sand-colored sky, the South-hairo wilderness stretched as far as the eye could see, dotted with the pieces of the wreckage of the giant structure that stuck out here and there. Metal walls that had peeled off; the torn, scattered pieces of the tail; something resembling a mangled fuel tank.…A forest of wreckage covered the area, so gigantic she couldn’t see the top of any piece of it without lifting her head and squinting, and when she looked up at it, she felt like she had gotten lost in a cemetery of giants.

She actually was at a loss.

She sat next to the bike, holding her knees and playing with the goggles around her neck in place of the radio.

“Aaah…”

She sighed at the distant sky. She focused directly ahead of her; and far in the wilderness, beyond the light haze of gas, she could see a flock of gray chimneys. It was the cluster of exhaust pipes that stood tallest at the very top of town. Those exhaust pipes formed the border where the fault dropped, and the mining town clung along it.

Suzie had lent her the goggles along with the bike, with the instructions to put them on when she got out of town. They had belonged to Buzz, and when Kieli wore them, they covered even her nose and could not have been more of a nuisance. But, just as Suzie had warned her, as she drove across the wilderness, she stirred up tremendous clouds of sand and dust, and things could have been vicious without the goggles. When she looked in the side mirror a second ago, the shape of the goggles stood out clearly on her face, and under those marks, her face was completely black. She found running water next to a parked three-wheeled truck, so she scrubbed her face and took a drink of water while she was at it.

While she had traveled the wilderness, she had gotten completely used to the rusty, sandy taste of the dirty water—come to think of it, she didn’t think he realized it himself, but Kieli had noticed long ago that Harvey had an unconscious habit of wiping his face with his shoulder instead of his sleeve.

Are you here, Harvey…?

She turned her head, still holding her knees, and looked up at the barrier towering behind her. A rusty metal wall jutted up from the ground and stood blocking her way, as if it was the end of the world. She suddenly thought that the world might not really be round, but more like a room, surrounded by high walls.

Of course, if she looked up at it from a little farther away, she could tell that it was the body of the spaceship poking out of the ground.

There was a truck parked there, so she’d figured that someone must be inside, but when she called out, there was no sign of her voice reaching the interior. When she tried to go inside, she couldn’t find a crack to go in through anywhere she could reach, let alone an entrance.

After wandering around the wall for nearly an hour, she still had no idea what to do, and went back to where she had parked the bike. When she got there, someone was sitting in the driver’s seat. She gaped for a second and backed away, but the person didn’t do anything or even react to her, only gazed absently at the rubble of tombstones spread out before them.

She couldn’t move the bike even if she wanted to, so Kieli crouched down a little way off, and was at a complete loss for a while.

“Um.…” She tried addressing the person on the bike, giving him a sideways glance as she pointlessly adjusted the band on the goggles.

“Did you come here on this…?”

The shadow only cast his expressionless gaze at the wilderness before him and didn’t betray the slightest reaction, as if he didn’t notice that she was there.

He was a thin man wearing simple beige clothing. A metal plate engraved with old letters and numbers had been sewn into his sleeve, and a small plate with the same numbers ate into the skin on his cheek.

“…Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked innocently.

The man, still directing his downcast eyes forward, muttered, “No, not really.” He’d finally responded, and Kieli breathed a sigh of relief.

“I did something really bad and got arrested, so they put it on me and sent me out into space.”

“You did something bad?”

“Yeah. I tried to kill someone important.”

“You don’t look like you’d do that,” she said honestly, and then the man looked her way for the first time. He blinked with the faintest of surprise.

“…You think so?” As he smiled wryly in self-derision, his air resembled a certain someone she knew very well, and Kieli couldn’t help looking down. By the time she raised her eyes again, the man was nowhere to be seen.

“Ah…” There was no way anyone could have been sitting there to begin with. The deserted three-wheeled bike just stood there, exposed to the wilderness wind—but in his place, a small metal plate had fallen directly under the driver’s seat. Her fingers scratched the ground as she picked it up. It was so rusty, the lettering was almost impossible to distinguish, but Kieli could just barely make out pieces of the numbers from the plate that had been buried in the man’s cheek.

I should have asked him how to get in.…

She turned back to the starship behind her, feeling a little regret, when, clunk! There was a heavy sound, and a crack ran through the wall where nothing had been before.

“Wah…” Kieli’s jaw dropped, and she watched as the wall floated up like a sliding door, creating a rectangular opening.

She saw a beige back go inside the gloomy, gaping hole, but he was only halfway through before he literally disappeared.

His hand entered his vision and slid an ID card through a scanner on the wall.

……? That’s not my hand.

It wasn’t the hand he was used to seeing. It was smaller, the hand of a young girl. Apparently the ID card was accepted, and the metallic door slid to the side. When he ducked and peered inside, he couldn’t see very far into the room, cluttered as it was with cabinets buried in paperwork, some kind of machine parts, monitors, and countless other things. He discovered the back of a small man in front of one of the desks, half-buried in materials and data.

“Brother!” Of course the voice he used to call out wasn’t his own, but that of a girl.

The man turned around. His face was much younger than the one Harvey knew, and more than anything, that strange monocle wasn’t attached to his face, which is why Harvey didn’t know who the man was for a second. When he called out “Elena!” though, the familiar name connected the dots in his memory.

“Wh-what are you doing here?” the man immediately whispered in a panic and ran toward the girl. He pulled her inside, ran a quick gaze around the hall outside, and closed the door. “How did you get in here?”

“My friend’s brother is a plumber, and he said he had work to do in this building, so I had him bring me here in secret. And look. This is your spare ID card.”

“That’s no reason to sneak all the way in here.…”

“I brought you lunch. You’re busy today, right?” the girl’s voice said brightly, not caring a bit about the man’s agitation, and her hands held out the basket she had brought with her. “You almost never come home, even though you promised that we would have breakfast and tea together. What’s this?” She interrupted herself, peering at a terminal on the desk. A three-dimensional image of a rough sphere showed on a seventeen-inch display monitor.

“Never mind that, just go home now. There’ll be big trouble if they find you.”

He blocked her view and the girl reluctantly left the terminal, asking something else instead.

“When is your next vacation?”

“Oh, next week, I think.”

“Really? Oh, good. Next Wednesday is the anniversary of Mom and Dad’s death.”

“…Oh. That’s right. Yes, I’ll definitely take the day off.” The man relaxed his tone a little—for the first time, he showed a normal, pleasant smile, and Harvey was surprised to see how well it suited him. He accepted the basket and held it up to show Harvey, or actually the girl.

“Let’s eat before you go. When we’re done, you’re going home.”

“Okay. Okay!”

He felt the girl’s emotions as she nodded twice and felt as if he might be glad with her; he had mixed feelings about this.

At the man’s urging, the girl cheerfully started to sit in a chair, but suddenly, he heard a door opening behind them. “Ack!” The man pushed her head down and forced her under the desk, then his legs stood in front of her, as if to cover her eyes.

“How’s it going, Daniil?”

“H-hi. How are you?” Apparently one of his colleagues had come in, and the man returned the cheerful greeting evasively. Harvey wondered if “Daniil” was the man’s name.

“How is the design for the replica going?”

“I think I can miniaturize an entire power plant’s worth.”

They both sighed; that was nowhere near good enough.

“It really is a tremendous crystallization of lost technology. Just how did they fit an inexhaustible supply of ultrapure energy into that tiny stone?”

“What about the cell-repairing function?”

“It’s a total black box, but it looks as though we can replicate it.”

“So it looks like the biggest problem really will be controlling the energy.”

Ignoring the difficult-sounding exchange behind her, the girl crawled out to the other side of the desk. Three monitors larger than the one on the desk lined a corner of the room, and they all showed what looked like different angles of the same place. Still crouched on the floor, the girl looked curiously up at the monitors.

The screens were crowded with giant machines, pipes, and cables, and from just one glance, she had no idea what they were showing. But when she looked closely—though she couldn’t make it out clearly because it almost seemed to be a part of the machinery—there was a person buried in the center of the equipment. The bundles of cables sprouting from all over his body pulsed in time with his heartbeat—the girl’s impression was conveyed directly to Harvey. In her confusion she associated it with the electricity experiments and rat dissections she had done at school. It was so much like an experiment that it didn’t really sink in that it was a person there, and the girl thought of him as a different creature. I wonder if it’s alive. I wonder if that hurts. I wonder what it feels like for your heart to move while hooked up to all those things.

With his head hanging, the silhouette’s shoulder suddenly twitched. There was no way he could have noticed her looking at him through the monitors, but he lifted his head slightly and glared her way.

I know him…!

“Eek! He looked at me!”

By the time the thought occurred to Harvey, the girl, still on all fours, had flipped around in surprise, and the monitors were in his blind spot. Wait, wait! Don’t run away! Let me see it again! But no amount of wailing would make it so he could interfere with the girl.

“Elena, what are you—”

“Who’s the girl? How did she get in!?” The sound of something breaking overlapped the cries of the man and his colleague. Next, the floor shook like in an earthquake, and the lights in the ceiling flickered a few times. Then all the lights in the room, including the large monitors and the display on the terminal, went out.

One second later, the greenish emergency lights crept up dimly from close to the floor. There was a commotion out in the hall.

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

The colleague flew out the door. “Stay here, Elena. Understand?” the man said to his sister before following him. Left behind, Elena cowered on the floor in a daze, but after looking around the room, in the end, she dashed into the hall after the man.

That instant, someone rammed into her. She clung to the wall, nearly falling.

“The specimen has gone wild…!”

“Who activated it!?”

She heard yells and screams down the hall, and lots of people came running, as if fleeing something. Conversely, there was another group heading the other way, violently shoving the confused wave of people aside. The girl joined the latter group and started to run. She was technically an intruder herself, but it seemed now was not the time for anyone to care.

She passed through a few halls and doors and stood at her destination. The scene that entered her view made Harvey think for an instant that she was still looking at the display on the monitors—or actually, that the girl’s feelings and his feelings had blended together, and he could no longer tell whose were whose.

In the long, narrow space, buried in giant machinery, Harvey could see the shadow of a large man against the opposite wall. He ripped the cables off his body and punched the equipment around him with his bare fists. “Seize him!” “Bring the guns!” “He’s coming this way.” “Run!” “Uwaah!” “Help!” In the midst of the black smoke and sparks, people ran in chaos from the grotesque figure of the large man staggering toward them, dragging cables behind him. Screams cut short filled the air.

Still not understanding what was happening, the girl was almost trampled in the panic around her, but she finally found the man she was looking for through a gap in the stampede and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Brother…!”

The man reacted to her voice and turned around. “Elena, no!” he shouted, his eyes suddenly wide. The girl didn’t know what was wrong; she thought he was angry that she had followed him as she lifted her face in the direction indicated by his gaze.

A beam was falling from the ceiling, lights and all—Harvey was probably the only one who realized this immediately. The girl just stood where she was, unable to grasp the situation right away, and looked up at the scene of the rapidly approaching rubble that had once been the beam and its lights, as if it somehow didn’t concern her.

Idiot, run!

As the girl’s feelings blew away, the scene before Harvey’s eyes blurred and blacked out, like a monitor being turned off.

His consciousness was abruptly pulled back to reality.

“……!”

Instinctively, he tried to jump up, but his body wouldn’t respond, and all that happened was that his fingers moved a little.

A gloomy ceiling, its metal planks peeling off in places, rose above his head. There was no sign of lights having fallen to the ground; rather, the scenery was completely different than it had been in that room.

Was that…?

After staring in a daze at the pattern of rust on the ceiling for about ten seconds, Harvey remembered his situation. He had been shot with a strange gun and had passed out—there was no feeling in his body, as if his nerves had been ripped out, and he felt as though he was floating. Fortunately his head was still functioning properly…he thought. He didn’t really trust his own judgment today, though.

To think the cores had such a weakness, he grumbled inwardly. He imagined that gun (?) was made to temporarily generate something like the magnetic fields created by the fossil fuel strata—no, a stronger magnetic field—and paralyze his core’s functions. A sensation similar to the discomfort he felt when going through the tunnel to the abandoned mine in Easterbury had run through his body, followed by a complete loss of strength.

That’s much more effective than a carbonization gun. Scary…, he thought honestly. He never wanted to get shot with that again.

Harvey didn’t think he had been out for very long, but he had completely lost consciousness, so he couldn’t rely on his sense of time. He moved his eyes around the area and confirmed the situation. He had been shoved carelessly into a crack in a broken machine or something and lay faceup in an extremely awkward position with his hands and legs sticking out.

Ugh. What the hell…?

He looked down at his body and wanted to vomit.

There was a hole a few centimeters across in the center of his chest, as if it had been drilled there, and a bundle of organic cables protruded from the bloody opening.

His senses were numb, so he didn’t feel any pain. But as a consequence, he was able to observe with a cool head and was once again disgusted at his own construction, so obviously different from normal people. I’m still alive after this? he spat at himself inwardly and averted his eyes. He remembered someone saying the same thing to him before.

Instead of looking at himself, he traced the path of the cables sticking out of him. There was no doubt the man who had drilled the hole used those same bloody hands to handle the cables, and the blood-stained bundle wriggled around the wreckage of machines to the top of his head, like snakes twined together.

He somehow managed to lift his chin; the instant he tried to look up, the rubble under his head crumbled and his neck snapped back, and, conveniently, he could see over his head. But now up was down.

He could see the upside-down back of the man a little way off. Daniil—that was his name.

Something was buried in the inside wall. Harvey furrowed his brow and squinted.

It was a warped ball—it looked similar to a clump of scrap metal that had been compressed for disposal—with things he thought were electrical outlets sticking out all over it, and it had a huge mass of biocables connected to it like tree roots. He had seen something like it before—no, it couldn’t be. It was too big.

Even stranger things lined the wall directly above (no, he corrected his sense of direction)—rather, directly below the strange sphere. A group of cylindrical capsules, big enough to fit a human—it was his first time seeing any, but he wasn’t very surprised. Intellectually he knew that the interstellar spaceships had technology for something called “cryogenic sleep.” They said that back in the pioneering era, people would cross vast space, spending decades or centuries in deep freeze. The story of the Saints the Church taught boasted that the Eleven Saints and Five Families, or whatever they were called, took ages to arrive at this planet, but to them it probably just felt as if they had gotten here after a little nap.

Anything remotely useful had likely been carried off long ago, so the capsules that remained were almost beyond recognition. However, just one of them, though distorted, had been repaired. The glass had been patched up with metal planks and was hard to see through, but he could make out the almost too-white face of a frozen person. A girl about thirteen or fourteen—Elena, no! For a second, the man’s bitter cry echoed inside his head.

Several narrow organic cables pierced the girl’s hands and feet, a bundle of thicker cables sprouted from her back, and all of them collected together at the sphere overhead. The cables protruding from his own chest were hooked up to the same ball.

Huh…

He was starting to see the connection.

“Hello. So you’re awake.” Harvey heard the man’s monotone voice and shifted his gaze; his eyes met the monocle looking diagonally down at him. Beyond it, he saw Daniil’s upside-down face.

“…Yo,” he rasped back. He still couldn’t get any energy to his vocal chords.

“You reactivated sooner than I expected. How do you feel?”

“Bad,” he spat indifferently, indicating behind the man with his eyes, wordlessly demanding an explanation. The man seemed to guess his meaning immediately. He moved over a little to show Harvey and looked up behind him.

“A replica of an Undying’s core.”

“It’s huge.…”

Harvey looked up over the man’s shoulder in disgust at the object he spoke so proudly of. He had guessed that was probably what it was, but still, it wasn’t a replica so much as a copy enlarged a few dozen times, and its quality that much worse for it.

“Even so, this is the very smallest I could make it. With our current technology, it would be impossible to collect all the core’s functions into something small enough to fit inside a human body. When I was at the lab, I tried taking an Undying’s core and putting it directly into another corpse, but I couldn’t control the energy, and the body exploded.”

Exploded. What the hell were these guys doing? The man even smiled a little as he explained; Harvey felt so much hatred for him and his lab that he wanted to puke, and at the same time, he shuddered to think that something so dangerous was inside his own body.

“I’m going to take some of the energy from your core and give it to my replica. I only need a little. Then I can bring Elena back to life.”

“Are you stupid…?” Harvey inquired listlessly, since he still had no energy for his voice—though he probably would have said it the same way under normal circumstances. “Even if it works, she won’t come back to life. She’ll just move. She’ll be hooked up to a weird giant machine and move like a robot, and that’s all.…” As he murmured this in fragmented bursts—longer statements were still hard on him—he started to doubt his own sense of self. Maybe he didn’t have any more “self” than this girl would.

“If her soul goes back inside the moving flesh, then Elena will come back to life. I don’t see a problem,” Daniil answered in an empty voice, as if what he said was obvious. Maybe it would be more accurate to say his voice sounded automatic. “Now, come here, Elena. You can go back to your body soon.”

He called the girl’s name and ran his monocled gaze around the empty space. The girl’s spirit was nowhere to be found in his sphere of vision, and after looking around once, his eyes stopped on the capsule. He practically danced to it, as if carried away in his fervor; he pressed his face on the glass and peered in at the girl’s body.

“Be patient just a little longer, Elena. When you’re alive again, we’ll have tea together. And eat together. I promised you, after all. I’m sorry I made you wait eight years.…”

If what Harvey had seen happened eight years ago, then this man of undistinguishable age really wouldn’t be an old man yet. Had a mere eight years done this to him? Well, Harvey supposed that might be a long time to a normal person, but still.

“We can be together forever now. You’ll never die again.…”

Harvey stared at the man muttering and clinging to the capsule and started to consider something, but immediately turned the thought away as something he didn’t want to think about.

Instead, he shifted his gaze behind the man, to the empty space there.

At some point the girl’s ghost had appeared in the air and was staring over the man’s shoulder at the body contained in the capsule. A frozen corpse, wrapped in cables and looking like an animal from an experiment, with the same face as the ghost herself.

…Would she be happy to come back to life like that? he asked himself, and the girl’s spirit slowly turned her head. She looked at Harvey with dark, lonely eyes, as if she wanted to say something. Come to think of it, hadn’t she been making that face the whole time he had been there?

Oh. Sorry I didn’t get it right away.…

He sighed and lightly closed his eyes. You wanted to stop him, didn’t you? Got it.

He opened his eyes and looked around; he confirmed that the radio was lying at the edge of his still upside-down vision. If he shifted over a little and stretched out his hand, he thought he would be able to reach, but right now, he didn’t even have the energy for that.

…Don’t keep synching with me. I know you can move by now, he muttered inwardly and waited a few seconds. The fingers on his right hand twitched in response, and he heard the faint sound of a motor from around his elbow. Maybe it was because his nerves had completely fused with it recently; his right arm had apparently followed suit when Harvey could no longer move and ceased all function, but really, it should be able to move independently of him. What are you doing passing out with me at a critical time like this, damn it…?

The five metal-framed fingers traced over the machine wreckage like the legs of a beetle and crawled to the radio. They caught the radio’s cord as it hung to the floor, and pulled the casing closer.

Wah, don’t face it this way; you’re scaring me. The other way, the other way!

The fingers adjusted the direction of the speaker—

…Okay, good.

—and turned on the power.

That instant, the staticky features of a soldier burst from the speaker.

“—mn you!”

The soldier howled, and at the same time, a shock wave shot from the radio with an air-splitting roar. “What in the…!?” As Daniil turned around, it brushed over his head and scored a direct hit on the giant iron clump of the core replica.

An explosion and a collapsing wall—Harvey couldn’t tell which came first. The wall, now rubble, and the iron mass, now covered in flames, collapsed over Daniil’s head. He watched it out of the corner of his eye as he gritted his teeth and tried to somehow pull himself up.

Just then, through the cables piercing his chest, he felt an intense suction, as if his heart was being yanked out—and not just his heart, it was enough to make him think every organ inside his body had been carried off.

His vision and hearing went blank for a second, and the world plunged into nothingness.

Snap…

He heard the sound of something cracking in the middle of his body.

After that, the noise around him came back all at once. Just as he noticed a low moaning sound and vibrations resounding from under the floor, they immediately reached the walls and ceiling, and the shaking started to envelop the entire room. Was the ship itself shaking?

The next instant, he heard a ferocious roar from somewhere. If he had to describe it, it was a crunching, like a giant excavator boring into the ground. “Gah!” An upward thrust sent him a meter above the floor. He hit it again a second later, and the floorboards, which must have turned brittle, fell out from under him with a spectacular crash.

Harvey opened his mouth to scream he didn’t even know what, but whatever it was, he didn’t have the time to get it out, as he fell to the empty space below, taking the surrounding rubble and floorboards with him.

She was walking up the gloomy hall, wondering anxiously if she was going the right way, when suddenly everything around her started shaking and rattling.

Fortunately, a handrail passed all the way along the hall walls, so when a bunch of rubble slid down the sloping hall and passed by her, and when her body was flung into the air for a second, and when there was a sharp crash after that, Kieli clung desperately to the handrail and managed to escape disaster. She couldn’t imagine that suspensions in midair like this happened very often, so she wondered why the wall would have a handrail. But anyway, it saved her.

The intense quaking and roaring was still going on. Relying on the rail to get her through the shaking, she pressed her face to a crack in the wall and strained her eyes to see what was happening outside.

“It-it’s running!” she gasped involuntarily.

The spaceship that was supposed to be sticking out of the ground was sprinting along, its bottom scraping the ground, sending up clouds of sand and dust. But if a spaceship is running across the ground, then it isn’t a spaceship, is it? Er, I mean, I thought this ship was a wreck that stopped being able to move a long, long time ago!

“What’s going on…?”

As Kieli looked in confusion to either side of her, faint static reached her ears. She gasped and looked for the direction the sound had come from. The rubble that slid down had piled up behind her (a little while ago, it would have been down the slope, below her, but now that the spaceship had leveled out and started running, it was behind her), and there was a small hill of debris blocking her path.

She noticed muffled static from a gap in the rubble and she tried to run to it but tripped in the shaking and fell. She used the handrail to pull herself up and traveled back down the hallway, still holding on to it.

Kieli knelt in front of the pile and desperately pushed rubble aside. She strained to pick up a thick metal plank that seemed to be the remains of a wall and pushed it aside, and when she dug up the smaller fragments of metal piled behind it, she found the casing of a small radio buried in the wreckage.

She pulled it out and held it up in both hands.

“Corporal! Corporal!” she called out, shaking it unthinkingly.

“…Don’t shake me,” a hateful voice came from the speaker mixed with bursts of static. “…Huh? Oh, Kieli, it’s you.”

“Corporal…I’m so glad. I’m so glad to see you.…”

Kieli hugged the radio in her arms and sank to the floor. She put the speaker to her forehead, felt the familiar faint static, and almost cried with relief.

“What happened? Where are we?”

“Where’s Harvey? He’s not with you?”

They simultaneously blurted mismatched questions, and simultaneously fell quiet. After a period of silence, they continued:

“What’s happen—”

“Where’s Harvey?”

They had spoken over one another again, but this time Kieli’s voice was stronger. “Hell if I know!” the radio suddenly shouted in reply.

“This time I really am done with him! Do you know what he said about you? There’s no way in hell I’m letting him take care of you any—”

“Corporal, answer my question!” Kieli interrupted, in a voice sharper than she had intended. She grabbed the radio in both hands and held it to her face. “What happened to Harvey? He’s not with you?”

“I told you I don’t know. And you don’t have to forgive that son a bitch, either.…”

“Corporal.”

“……” The speaker faltered, as if she had intimidated him.

“Hey, let’s stop. I don’t like this. Things are just weird right now, you know? They’ll go back to normal soon, right? You said it yourself, Corporal. You said you trust Harvey. I came to find you both. I came to find you and Harvey, both.”

“Kieli…”

“Let’s all go home together. All three of us, together.”

Let’s go home.

He felt as though he heard someone’s voice. Maybe he had only muttered it himself.

He pushed aside the steel frames piled on his back and crawled out of the debris, then bent over and coughed two or three times. Some of his feeling had returned, but he still couldn’t move decently. Annoyed at himself, he used his right arm to pick himself up, and spotted the bundle of cables piercing his chest.

Ugh, I’m still connected…?

Harvey cursed and grabbed the cables in his left hand, but as he lacked the composure to handle them with care, they snapped as he yanked them out. A pain so intense it made him nauseous ran through him, and he ended up facedown in the rubble again. “This…sucks.…” Some of the severe sense of loss from before—the feeling that his heart was being sucked out—was still oddly present with him. And then there was that sound he’d heard right afterward, the sound of something cracking. It couldn’t possibly mean…could it?

You’ve got to be kidding me.…

He couldn’t work up the nerve to check inside his own body himself, so he grabbed his shirt and pulled it together, his forehead still pressed against the rubble.

Collapsed metal planks and steel frames enclosed the area around him, and he had only a narrow field of vision, but it looked as if he had fallen with the floorboards to the lower level of the ship. Under the debris, he still felt intense shaking and heard the moaning of an engine—the ruin was moving. Of course he had no idea what was going on or why, but he could be sure of that one fact.

“Elena…Elena, where are you…?”

He heard a voice muttering on the other side of the rubble and squinted to see through the mangled steel frames. The monocled man, Daniil, was crawling through the debris, pushing aside pieces of the wrecked walls.

“Hey! You!” Harvey shouted, trying to stand. But he broke off with a groan as his legs faltered and he fell, leaving him with no choice but to use just his arms to cross the metal framing and crawl toward the man.

“Why are we moving? Didn’t you say that you couldn’t create enough power to move the ship!?”

“I said I couldn’t do it with the dregs of resources we have now, didn’t I? The replica’s explosion must have caused the energy in your core to flow backward into the power sector. I didn’t make anything but hasty modifications on the engine; there’s no way it can control such high energy. Honestly, you Undying—” Daniil maintained his calm expression without resting his hands from moving rubble aside. But as he spoke, his tone rose and his voice grew shrill: “You Undying really are clumps of bottomless energy! It’s a terrible shame! To think that if I had been born before the War like you, I could have seen the lost technology with my own eyes!”

“You keep babbling nonsense,” Harvey began, then noticed that something was wrong with the man.

A bloodstained iron rod stuck out of Daniil’s back. A bent iron pole pierced his side and went straight through his back, probably the remains of the ladder that led to the flight deck. The lens of his monocle had broken, too, and it appeared not to be functioning anymore.

“Hey…” But Daniil showed no sign of concern for his own condition, merely muttering as if possessed while he kept moving rubble aside. “Elena, Elena…” He finally found the girl’s body under the ruined capsule. He dug her out and held her lovingly to him. “Oh, Elena. Here you are.…” Thrown out of its frozen state, the girl’s white body drooped limply against the man’s shoulder.

Harvey was chilled by the clearly psychotic scene, but for some reason, he just couldn’t look away from the sight of those two—the man and the corpse.

Get back. It’s dangerous.…

He heard a voice whisper beside his ear. The instant he turned to look, the girl’s face, so close she touched his cheek, vanished; the next second—

Whoom! There was a piercing roar, and the air shook; as he watched, the pile of rubble beneath Daniil’s feet fell out from under him. Daniil, the ladder sticking through his side, and Elena’s corpse all tangled together as the collapsing rubble took them with it.

Rather than get back as Elena had warned, Harvey reflexively leaned forward, and although he didn’t consciously give his arm the order, it reacted and grabbed the falling ladder. The weight of two people and the ladder itself, plus the heaviness of all the rubble beneath them, was enough to pull his arm off, and he heard an unpleasant snap somewhere very close—from his arm or his shoulder or inside his head.

Apparently the avalanche of debris had broken through the outside wall. His vision shook with the intense vibrations, and what he saw below him was the wilderness, racing by at incredible speed, the sand and dust it threw up, and the side of the spaceship as it plowed across the ground. He felt dizzy for a second, then immediately pulled himself together.

“Hey, if you can move, then get up here!” he shouted. He wasn’t sure if it was fortunate or unfortunate, but with the iron pole skewering him, Daniil was stuck halfway down the ladder. If Harvey reached out his other hand, he might have just barely been able to grab on to the edge of his clothes, but of course he couldn’t afford to do that. It was all he could do just to cling to the tear in the outer wall and keep from sliding down himself.

Maybe Harvey’s voice reached him or maybe it didn’t, but Daniil had no ears for Harvey as he strained to reach out to the girl’s body, caught a few steps below.

“Elena! Elena, grab hold! Elena!”

“Are you stupid!?” That’s a CORPSE! he wailed inwardly, annoyed. “Get up here, fast!” He wouldn’t last any longer himself. The sinew in his right arm had been creaking strangely for a while now. And just then, the metal structure of his prosthetic tore off halfway down his upper arm, ripping the fused skin and flesh as it went.

He swallowed the scream that automatically came to his throat, gritted his teeth, and held back the pain. Even so, he couldn’t completely suppress the agony of having his arm ripped off. Cables snapped one after another; a few stragglers managed to hold out for a time, stretching to their limit, but with a high twang, fissures began to form in them too.

I’m sorry. It’s okay now. Let go.…

The girl’s spirit whispered, appearing before him again and bringing her face close. “No,” said Harvey without knowing why; his mouth formed the word without conscious thought. The girl smiled and shook her head.

Thank you.

Her voice hung in his ears as she lightly changed direction and slid down through the air along the ladder. As she went, her figure melted into the wind and vanished—at the same time, Daniil, who had just succeeded in pulling Elena’s body close to himself, fell off the ladder.

Harvey couldn’t help crying out, aghast.

Like dolls thrown violently away, the two figures tangled together and crashed into the rubble and iron frames as they tumbled down and were swallowed up by the wilderness beneath him. Clouds of sand and dust billowed below, and in the blink of an eye, they were left far behind as the scenery raced forward.

“Are you done changing? Would you like some coffee?” the small woman asked in a cheery voice as she appeared in the doorway to the living room.

She spotted Beatrix sitting on the sofa, and opened her mouth in a little “oh, my,” then went on to smile brightly. “You really are pretty when you clean up.”

“…Yeah, well,” Beatrix agreed in a contrary tone, bringing her hand to the back of her head and retying her hair.

The woman walked with a cane, and yet she had been moving around taking care of her all night, so much that Beatrix found it annoying. With a “You must feel awful like that,” she’d brought some hot water and half-forced her to wash her bloodstained face and hair, even pushed a change of clothes on her; and to top it all off, her right knee was now in a splint and had a bandage wrapped properly around it. Of course Beatrix couldn’t make the woman do something so extreme as to sew her severed leg back on, so she’d adamantly refused the offer.

“Are you buying time? Until the Watch or the Church Soldiers get here?” she asked, and cast a cold glance at the door behind the woman.

“Eh?” The woman blinked two or three times, then looked somehow very sad.

Realizing she might cry, Beatrix winced a little and said, “I’m joking.” She sighed and leaned back against the sofa. “Anyway, if you’re going to report me, now’s your chance. Since I can’t run away right now,” she added indifferently. She still had no feeling below her knee, but in a little while, her leg should connect enough that she could walk minimally.

Still, whether she could walk or not, normally she would never sit in a house with people she didn’t know she could trust, casually letting them take care of her and offer her coffee. But today she honestly felt that they could do whatever the hell they wanted. She just didn’t care anymore.

I’m kinda tired.…

She pulled her uninjured leg up onto the sofa and rested her chin on her kneecap. It was relatively comfortable in this town, so she had stayed a long time. But she would probably have to leave it soon, too. She grew bitter at Ephraim for causing this with his outlandish favors, though it was a little late in the game to start feeling that way now. Where will I go next? I’m alone anyway. I don’t really have any goals. It doesn’t particularly matter where I go.…

“You’re so alike,” the woman suddenly muttered as she readied the coffee set on the table.

Beatrix stared blankly at the woman’s profile and then answered with a scowl, averting her eyes, “…Yeah, we’re alike.” She hated herself for knowing who the woman was comparing her to.

That’s why she sometimes lectured him. It annoyed her to feel as though she was looking at herself. She figured, in the end, every single one of their kind was fundamentally the same.

Her chin felt a faint vibration through her knee, and at the same time, the coffee set on the table started rattling a little.

She heard a muffled commotion and a roar from outside the living room window. She instinctively put her guard up and looked in that direction. On the other side of the closed curtain, sounds like engine noise and shadows that looked like three-wheeled trucks passed by one after another.

What…?

She took a somewhat defensive stance on the sofa and unconsciously ran her eyes around the room as she started strategizing in a corner of her mind about how to get through this with the least damage to the house. That second, a large shadow appeared slowly in the doorway. “——!” She flipped around, but she still couldn’t stand. She got up once, only to sink right back down.

Fortunately, it was only the man of the house who had appeared, but he was a big, scary man who made her want to run anyway. Suzie looked at him anxiously. “Buzz, did something happen outside?”

“The ruins are charging this way.”

The man’s unexpected remark made Beatrix gape along with the woman. “…Huh?” they both asked dumbly.

With an absolute air of seriousness, the man said, “Apparently the ruins of the spaceship are charging this way across the wilderness. If it keeps going, it’ll come over the fault and burst right into town. Everyone’s running.”

“What? I don’t understand. ‘Ruins’? That’s where Kieli went, right?”

In response to his wife’s question, the man shook his head as if he didn’t get it either.

Beatrix glanced through the opening in the curtains to check on things outside. The first thing she noticed was a three-wheeled bike with a small mountain of bags forced onto its luggage rack, then people carrying similarly large bags, then a three-wheeled truck packed tight with miners. They were all headed the same direction: down the slope.

It was ridiculous, but if she were to assume that it really might be happening—if that giant structure charged from the top of the fault and slid down the slope—there would be a lot of damage not only to the mine, of course, but as far down as the center of town below. She cursed bitterly in her heart. What in the world did they do…?

“I hate to ask when I’ve already caused you so much trouble, but if you have a free car, could I borrow it?” she asked the giant man, looking away from the window.

It was the wife who answered. “You’re going to go?” she asked, immediately understanding Beatrix’s intention. “You couldn’t possibly drive on that leg. I’ll go with you.”

“It’d be even more reckless of you to try to cross that uneven wilderness with your hip. Normal people don’t stand up to wear and tear, so you should take care of yourself. You can just forget about me already. You two need to get out of here.”

She used the arm of the sofa to prop herself up and stood on her left leg. She started to put out her right leg and stumbled; the man’s thick arm appeared in front of her and held her up.

“I’ll drive.”

“Now, look! Stop meddling already!”

“I’ll let you come along while I go pick up Kieli. Got a problem with that?”

She couldn’t help faltering, feeling threatened by his low voice and demeanor that looked as if it would snap at her at any second; and as she did, he hoisted her up onto his shoulder without giving her a chance to object.

I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to walk another step.

Keep going! Just a little more. Just one more push.

“Keep going, keep going.” You just keep saying that because there’s no way for you guys to keep going anymore.…

Avalanche on your right.

Harvey dodged to the left a bit, reacting to the voice, and a metal beam from the ceiling brushed past his right side, falling with a clang.

He glanced sideways at the small mountain of iron framing and shuddered, then reluctantly and unsteadily started walking again. He was in a hall in the lower level of the ship, encircled by debris. He had to at least climb up one more level; if he stayed here, he would be buried alive before long.

He was technically standing on his own feet, but he practically dragged his body forward, holding on to the wall and the rubble. His arm, dangling from a few taut cables, followed after him, sometimes catching on the debris at his feet and seeming annoyed as it shoved the obstacles away by itself. He didn’t have the spare energy to shut off the pain, so his arm had been in incredible agony for a while now. His will to react to the pain had abruptly run out, though, and he only thought, Damn, that hurts, strangely calmly, in a corner of his consciousness. The hole in his chest had probably already started healing, but he didn’t want to look and so left it alone. An ache had been hanging around the heart of his body—where he’d felt the crack.

He’d instantaneously had enough energy sucked out of him to make this giant structure move, even if it was just skipping along the ground, so it wouldn’t be strange for there to be a crack or two. (Of course, he couldn’t even imagine what would’ve happened if it had taken all the energy needed to fly into space.)

As for what effect it would have on him…

…Hell if I care.

Maybe he was just avoiding reality, but he forced that problem out of his head and instead thought about the man who fell.

Why he’d immediately grabbed the ladder, why he’d desperately tried to help him, yelling at him to climb up—somehow, Harvey knew the reason. Trying to revive a dead person as an Undying (and so incompletely, as well) was so incredibly stupid it took him beyond exasperation or sympathy, and no emotions came to him. He didn’t even feel like getting mad that he was nearly killed.

But it wasn’t impossible that he might someday turn into that man. If Kieli ever…

“……”

He punched the wall, and rubble rained down on top of him.

Argh, I can never think about anything good when I’m tired.…

He shook the small pieces of debris off his head, and while he was at it, he shook away all the unnecessary thoughts and focused his attention on walking.

The vibrations and muffled motor sound echoing from under the floor; the intermittent sound of crumbling walls and ceiling; the sound of his own irregular footsteps as he progressed, dragging himself more than walking; the pain he felt in his arm when his prosthetic periodically got stuck between pieces of rubble and struggled.…He accepted only minor thoughts like that on the surface of his senses as he silently moved his feet forward.

All right, you’re there. You did good.

Guided by the voices that echoed in his eardrums, he looked up. A faint ray of light shone through a gap in the crumbling ceiling. Metal planks and iron beams piled high; they were unstable, but they were something to stand on, and it looked as if he could manage to climb up.

“…Thanks…for showing me the way,” he said, quietly expressing his gratitude to the voices.

He saw two shadows pass through the gap in the ceiling and up to the light. Two men wearing pale blue jumpsuits. The one in back turned around, smiled carefreely, and gave a thumbs-up. The one in front just glanced coolly at him, but then whispered:

Do the best you can. Even if you do have a long way to go.

Then he disappeared in the light. “See, that’s exactly how I paraphrased it!” his friend criticized, then he disappeared after him with one last yell of, “Keep going!”

…You say it like it’s so easy, but it’s tiring to keep going.

He looked down and sighed with a wry smile.

“Harvey.”

The voice made him doubt his hearing.

He automatically froze for a few seconds, still facing down, then raised his head somewhat awkwardly.

“Harvey, I’m so glad I found you.”

A girl’s face peered in through the gap in the ceiling that the jumpsuited men had disappeared through. A radio swung at the end of the cord around her neck.

“…It’s…you. Why?” was all he could murmur, his voice hoarse, as he stood there. The white gauze on her forehead stood out painfully under the faint light behind her head, and the dull ache he felt in his heart throbbed sharply for a second, piercing him.

“I came to find you. Are you hurt?”

She was the one who was hurt, but she didn’t seem to care about that. She reached out to him, looking as if she was about to cry. “Can you get up? Can you hold on?” As she leaned forward, the fragile gap in the ceiling widened, and part of the ceiling crumbled.

“Ah!”

The girl slid down from the ceiling along with the rubble. “You id…” Moments ago he’d been thinking that he couldn’t walk decently anymore, and that he didn’t even want to, yet now his body moved automatically. He ran, stumbling, up the pile of debris and caught her in his left arm. As he went on to embrace her head with the same arm, his shoulder slammed into the rubble, and immediately ceiling debris rained on them from overhead.

Harvey was hit on his back, shoulder, and various other places all at once, and all the air was knocked out of his lungs.

“Ow. Look, you…,” he grumbled in a whisper as he regained his breath a moment later. “I-I’m sorry.” He involuntarily slackened his hold on her and she jumped away, so he immediately grabbed her hand and pulled her back.

He hadn’t really put any thought into the action, so he just grabbed her and froze.

“Harvey…?” she asked wonderingly. He held her hand tightly, without a word, his face still pressed against the rubble. It really was a small, delicate hand compared to his. She always desperately reached out this hand for him…and back there on the stairs, he had brushed it away.

“…Sorry,” he murmured under his breath. “…I’m sorry. I…”

“Let’s go home, Harvey.” Her whisper interrupted him, and her other hand hesitantly touched his neck. At the cool, comfortable feel of her palm, he was sure it was his imagination, but the pain throbbing through his entire body softened a little.

A quiet voice, with just a little hint that she might be about to cry, whispered in his ear.

“I came to get you. Let’s go home now. Okay?”

He prayed in his heart, to no one in particular, to please let him stay buried in the rubble a while longer. I can’t lift my head. What kind of face am I making now?

When asked, “So have you thought about how we’re gonna get back?” Kieli turned to the crack in the wall and looked outside, gazed at the scenery that raced by, and tilted her head in thought. Harvey didn’t look outside, but at Kieli’s face, and a faint smile rose to his lips. He strangely seemed to be enjoying himself.

“You knew I couldn’t answer when you asked, didn’t you?”

“Yup. That’s right.”

“You’re evil,” she said with a pout. Normally, it made her happy to see Harvey smile like that because it meant he was in a pretty good mood, but now she got the feeling it was just bravado.

See, he shouldn’t have the composure for that. His prosthetic arm was only hanging on by its cables, and while technically it was moving on its own, it didn’t appear that the nerves were all connected. His upper arm, where it tore off, as well as the chest area of his shirt were covered in blood, and he sat leaning against the wall with his whole body covered in wounds.

There was one other thing that bothered her. He would sometimes grab his shirt near his heart.

“Harvey, are you really okay…?” Kieli sat diagonally across from him and peered into his face.

“I’m fine. Ah, I’m in a little pain,” he answered, surprisingly honestly, and then he reached behind Kieli’s head and pulled her to him. He rested his forehead lightly on her shoulder and murmured in a somewhat drained voice, “I feel better like this.…”

Feeling his faint sigh and copper-colored hair on her neck, Kieli sat still in that position for a while. Under their heads, the radio was muttering static. Still unable to contain his rage, the Corporal had almost started yelling again when they found Harvey, but the second he saw his face, “…What the hell happened to you?” was all he spat quietly before falling into a sulky silence.

“It’s kinda been a long time since we’ve really talked. About a week, huh?”

“Yeah.” Kieli immediately nodded at the voice in her ear. “No, about two days,” she corrected, after a little thought.

Harvey only reacted with, “Oh, is that right?” as though it didn’t matter.

It was the evening of the day before yesterday that she’d found Harvey and Beatrix at the gambling house and Harvey hadn’t come home. Just two days. Now the same old scent of tobacco that had seemed so far away from her in those mere two days was right beside her. She felt such relief, but at the same time, anxiety at the thick smell of blood mixed with it.

“…Kieli, hey. There’s something I need to consult you about.”

Consult. Did Harvey even have such an admirable word in his vocabulary? “Huh? Okay. What is it?” she asked, worrying that he might have gone crazy from massive blood loss.

Harvey seemed to hesitate, and after some silence began, “I think I’m going to…”

The floor they sat on suddenly shot up with a thunk, interrupting him.

Kieli’s shoulder and Harvey’s forehead struck each other lightly. “Ow! I bit my tongue.…” Harvey grumbled, holding his mouth, and looked up; but then he opened his eyes wide in shock and stared behind Kieli.

Kieli turned to follow his gaze; at the same time, she heard a destructive rending sound, and the gap in the outer wall ripped wider as part of the wall tore off. The heavy metal wall flew up like a scrap of paper, and blew away behind them in the blink of an eye.

“Whoa…”

On the other side of where the wall used to be, the racing scenery spread wide outside, and the rushing wind and the roar of the ship’s bottom scraping away at the ground rang in her ears.

“Wow, nice view,” Harvey said unconcernedly and crawled over to (what had been) the outer wall. “Looks like it’s gonna keep falling apart. I guess we can’t just sit and wait for it to stop on its own.…” The wild wind blasted through his hair as he checked the situation outside. As soon as he cast his eyes in the direction they were heading, his expression suddenly froze.

“Crap…”

“Hmm? What?”

Crawling on her hands and knees across the ever-shaking floor, Kieli poked her face out beside Harvey’s. “Ah!” On the other side of the barrens before them, a cluster of gray chimneys entered her field of vision. At that instant, a strong gust nearly carried off the radio, along with the top half of her body.

“Moron, stay inside!”

Harvey narrowly managed to wrap his arm around her and stop her, and they both practically fell into the refuge of the wall’s shadow. “Be a little more careful. When you’re like that, the worry shakes my resolve to—”

Harvey sighed in mild annoyance over her head and suddenly changed the subject midsentence. “…We’re heading straight for town.” He plastered his back to the wall and glared at the wilderness ahead. “We fall over that fault, and we won’t get out of this safely, either.”

“More importantly, the town’ll be in huge trouble if a huge ship like this charges through it!” Kieli’s face snapped up and she unintentionally spoke in an accusing tone. Harvey sent a look her way and blinked.

“…Oh. Oh, yeah.” He only nodded halfheartedly before averting his eyes back outside. Kieli bit her lip, unsure what else to say.

“I’m gonna go look for a way!” Anyway, she couldn’t just do nothing. When she turned around and started to stand, he called her name.

“Kieli.”

She stopped and turned back, still half-standing. Harvey directed his usual emotionless expression forward and murmured in his hallmark frank tone, “Do you like that city?”

“…Yeah. Pretty much.” She had the feeling he had asked her that before. She nodded blankly and Harvey seemed to mutter something under his breath.

“All the controls were carried off, so we can’t hit the brakes or change direction. All we can try is to cut off the power…” He trailed off, glancing at Kieli. “No, we can’t.”

Harvey dropped his head and sighed. “If only you weren’t here.…”

“What’s that mean!?”

Kieli was not happy with the remark, but Harvey said nothing and stayed frozen for a while; after a few moments, he looked up as if he had suddenly realized something. He leaned outside the wall and stared out the way they were headed.

“……?” Kieli peered outside, too, over Harvey’s back in order to stay out of the wind.

She saw a small cloud of dust approaching diagonally ahead of them. The ship raced forward at a high speed, and the distance between them shrank in no time, so she was shortly able to determine the identity of the cloud.

It was a small, three-wheeled covered truck.

“Buzz!” she called out automatically. Crammed into the driver’s seat, stiffly clutching the steering wheel, was a big man with a beard. Another silhouette poked her face out of the passenger seat window. Her long, golden hair tied behind her, fluttering in the wind, she squinted up at them, then looked back at the driver’s seat and shouted something.

The truck kicked up a cloud of dust as it made a one-eighty and started driving parallel to the wall out of which Kieli and Harvey were peering.

Beatrix leaned out of the passenger side and called out to them. Kieli could hardly make out any of it over the roar thundering around them, but she was probably wailing something like, “What are you doing? You’re nothing but trouble!”

“Bea, you’re the best! This is great timing!” Harvey leaned out, too. He didn’t care at all about her complaints and actually shouted praise back at her. As Kieli gaped at his unusually bright voice, he grabbed her shoulder and pushed her forward. “Take care of her!” She turned back in surprise. “What’s going on, Harvey? What are you saying?”

“I’m going to stop it before it hits the town. You get off here.”

“No! How can you say that…!?”

“It’s okay, you can jump over to the truck. I’ll help you. Trust me.”

“That’s not the problem!” she interrupted, wailing at the top of her voice. Harvey backed away, faltering a little, and she clung to his neck. “I’m not leaving you! Not this time.” Something like this had happened before. On the Church Soldiers’ train, when they were running from Joachim. She didn’t see Harvey for two weeks after that—she never wanted to go through that again.

“Kieli, listen to me.”

“I won’t listen! Whatever you say, I’m not doing it!”

She shook her head fiercely in response to the persuading voice at her ear and tightened her arms around him.

“Kieli. Please, listen,” Harvey repeated patiently, and his sigh caught in her ear. His usual subdued tone, his low, slightly gravelly voice.

“No matter how hard I try, I just can’t feel any attachment to that town, and I don’t really care what happens to it. I even think it would be great if the ship just kept going and wiped out those Watch guys. That’s me personally…but if you like that town, if there are even a few people there that were nice to you, if you say you want to, I want to protect it. I want to with all my heart. So…”

His voice broke off there. He took a breath, as if he was tired from talking, and went on. “So I’ll do whatever it takes to stop this thing, if you get off. I can only think of a violent way to do it, and there’s going to be a big crash. It’s all I can do to take care of myself right now, and I’m not confident that I can protect you. Please, listen to reason.”

“…No. Harvey, you…”

“I’ll be fine. If I’m alone, I can manage somehow. Okay?”

“…No…”

“Kieli.”

“……”

Kieli pursed her lips and hung her head. She loosened her grip just a little and stepped away just a little. She gazed, almost glared, for a time at Harvey’s neck in front of her. There were beads of sweat there, dirty with blood and dust.

Slowly, she let go.

“Thanks. Now go,” sighed a relieved voice from above her. She glanced back up at Harvey’s face one more time as he pushed her shoulder, but Harvey was no longer looking at her.

“Ephraim…!” She heard Beatrix’s voice faintly from the truck running beside them.

“Get a little closer! She’s coming down!”

She didn’t know if his voice reached them, but Harvey gestured instructions, and Buzz turned the wheel and brought the truck right up next to the outer wall. The passenger door opened and Beatrix leaned out, shouting something like, “Are you serious?”

His right arm, its cables stretching out of it, held on to her hips like a lifeline, and his left hand supported her, too, as she stepped onto the edge of the wall.

“Herbie.” Suddenly a voice leaked out of the radio. “I’ll go with you,” it said shortly and grumpily. Kieli gaped down at the radio, then twisted her neck to look back at Harvey.

Harvey froze for a few seconds, face tight, then said, “…Thanks.” He softened his expression slightly and lifted the radio’s cord off Kieli’s neck. He wrapped the cord around his left hand, then supported Kieli’s back again. “You can do this.”

“Yeah.” Kieli nodded a little nervously as she stared at the ground flying by below her.

“You just have to kick off as hard as you can and jump. You can trust Beatrix. I guarantee it.”

“Yeah. I can trust Beatrix.”

“All right. Good.”

He pushed her. She kicked hard off the wall, and the feeling of Harvey’s hand left her. Beatrix leaned as far as she could out of the passenger’s seat and stretched out her arms; her fingertips touched Kieli’s hands, and at the same time, the lifeline of his right arm left her—also, at the same time, a sideways gust rammed into her. The wind carried her with it, and she flew backward.

“Kieli!”

In the nick of time, Beatrix grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the passenger’s seat.

Her face plowed into Beatrix’s chest, and they fell into the driver’s seat, where Buzz’s giant body acted as a cushion, conveniently absorbing the shock. Still, Beatrix coughed painfully, and Kieli immediately jumped off of her.

“Harvey!”

She latched on to the passenger door and looked up at the spaceship rushing beside them. Harvey had crouched at the edge of the outside wall and was pulling in the cables of his right arm with his left hand as it fluttered in the wind. For just a second, he seemed to glance her way and smile a little, but…

Boom!

There was a muddled explosive sound behind them, and the truck suddenly lost speed, as if it had caught on something. In no time, it was left behind by the racing spaceship.

The last thing to pass by the truck, shaking the ground violently as it went, was the back of the spaceship, buried in the ground until just a little while ago, its tail torn off. In a daze, Kieli watched the cylindrical ship go, running across the barrens with thick black smoke spewing from its exposed jet nozzles, and thought it looked like a train that didn’t run on rails.

“Corporal.”

“Herbie.”

They murmured simultaneously and went quiet simultaneously.

“……”

“……”

After some silence:

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry.”

They spoke over one another again. After another silence:

“I apologized a second before you. I win.”

“Why you—”

“Do you have enough power for a really big blast?”

“I have a reserve of enough power to blast you twelve times.”

“Right now, a little push would be more than enough to knock me over.”

“…Says the man who doesn’t know when to kick the bucket. Can you really do this?”

“I think so,” Harvey answered with a wry smile, then, tired of talking, walked in silence for a while.

He had gone to so much trouble crawling out, but here he was, going back down to the lower level’s hall, following the rubble as he made his way unsteadily toward the back of the ship. Apparently even when you thought you really couldn’t take another step, if you used all the willpower you had, you could still keep walking surprisingly far.

Sometimes debris would come crumbling down as the hall continued to shake, and for a while now, ghosts wearing beige prison clothes had been flying around the air, though they didn’t show themselves clearly. They looked as though they were just running back and forth in a panic, but when he came to a fork in the road, they would all slide in the same direction as if showing him the way.

“Kieli sure is strong. Makes us look like idiots for having a fight over something so stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a strong, straightforward girl who gives everything her all. Seriously, she’s too good for you.”

“Yeah. She is too good for me.”

It wasn’t that Harvey wasn’t thinking about his answers, but his responses became somehow mechanical, and there was a little pause before the radio spoke again.

“Hey. You’re thinking about something, aren’t you?”

“…Nothing really.”

“Say it.”

Intimidated by the low voice, he stared silently at his feet for a few seconds. Every step was extremely heavy; if he didn’t focus, he wouldn’t be able to go on. Using eighty percent of his nerves to take the next step, he took the other twenty percent to put his thoughts into words.

“…I think it would be better not to hang around Kieli forever like this.”

“She likes things the way they are now. There’s no problem here.”

“Not for Kieli, but for me, there’s a big problem. Kieli’s got a whole life full of possibilities ahead of her. I don’t have the confidence to say it’s okay for a guy like me to mess with that, and I’m not ready.”

“You may be a little stupid and immature and insensitive.”

“Shut up.” Don’t talk like Beatrix.

“But even so, that girl stays with you because she trusts you. She doesn’t have a single doubt.”

“That’s all the more reason. I’d be in trouble if I kept taking advantage of that part of Kieli when I haven’t really thought things through, or at least that’s what I figure. I want to really think about it for a while, alone.”

“Why are you only ever serious about weird things like that?”

“Well, excuse me.”

“Sheesh.”

He thought he might get yelled at again, but all that came from the speaker was a resigned sigh. Radios didn’t breathe, but that was the impression Harvey got.

“…There’s no helping your troublesome personality now,” the radio spat, then said nothing more on the subject.

The ceiling ahead of them had collapsed, and the hall beyond it had become a narrow tunnel. The ghosts swam in the air and disappeared into it, one after another. Harvey followed them and crawled inside on all fours. As he went deeper, the heat and the smell, like old oil, got stronger. Occasionally the ceiling and walls around him would peel away in the shaking, and small pieces of rubble rained on his head.

The sound of the engine gradually grew closer, and when it changed into a low, heavy roar that pounded the core of his head, he came out of the tunnel and into a slightly more open space.

Thick pipes crept closely together over the walls and ceiling with their metal planks half peeled off and converged at the engine in the deepest section of the room. Far inside the complex engine, he could see the burning of a faint amber light—that must be the reactor in its heart. It was hard to suddenly believe that it was possible to move an interstellar spacecraft from the distant mother planet with the resources of this planet, but the energy from his core seemed to be working smoothly—or rather, damned inconveniently.

“I’m glad you came with me. Actually, I hadn’t really thought of what to do.”

“You want me to blast that thing? But if we’re not careful, we won’t get out of this in one piece, either, you know.”

“I’ll just run as fast as I can.”

“Not a very good plan…,” the radio grumbled in exasperation, but immediately changed its tone. “When I hit it, just get away as fast as you can, and jump somewhere you can hide.”

“Roger that.”

He ducked down, pushed the radio forward, and aimed its speaker directly at the reactor. When he started the countdown in his head, the radio abruptly changed the subject. “You do plan on coming back, right?”

Harvey couldn’t answer right away. The noise of the engine ate into his thoughts, and he couldn’t consider anything too deeply.

He took a breath, then muttered his reply, although the noise around them drowned out his voice and he didn’t know if the radio could hear him or not. “…I do intend to come home.”

A shock wave burst out of the radio. Its blast flew straight for the center of the reactor at the speed of sound; half a second later, a white light enveloped his vision.…

For a second, Kieli saw a white light gush out of the jet nozzles. The next instant, the back of the starship tore off, became a ball of fire, and rolled away. The detached body of the ship plunged forward quite a ways, jumping along the ground and scattering metal walls around it, then finally turned a revolution and a half and stopped.

After witnessing the event, Kieli leaned out of the passenger seat and squinted impatiently ahead of her until the three-wheeled truck, only able to run at a sluggish pace as it spouted smoke, finally arrived on the scene.

“He is so reckless. What an idiot…,” Beatrix muttered absently, squeezed into the passenger seat with Kieli. Detecting a serious air in her exasperated voice, Kieli bit her lower lip, her gaze still fixed forward.

When they got to the edge of the wreckage strewn about the spaceship, she couldn’t bear waiting for the truck to stop completely and jumped to the ground.

“Harvey!” she shouted to her right and left as she pushed her way through the mountain of debris. The one fortunate thing was that this part of the ship had separated from the power sector before the fire from the explosion could engulf it, so there were no flames. She covered her face against the thick clouds of dust as she looked around, feeling as though she was praying.

“Harvey, answer me! Harvey!”

“Kieli.”

A thick voice came from behind her, and she turned to see that Buzz had parked the truck and was following after her over the rubble. He had tried picking up metal walls a few times along the way, but when he strode up to Kieli, he closed his eyes regretfully and shook his head. “It’ll be hard to find a single person in all of this. We’ll need help.”

“We can just take our time digging him out, can’t we? He won’t die, no matter how many years he’s buried,” Beatrix said in a carefree tone as she came up behind him, dragging her bad leg. Kieli involuntarily glared threateningly at her, and she winced. “I get it. I’m joking.” She sighed and averted her eyes. She gazed over the ocean of rubble spreading before them and bit her shapely lip.

“…Do you hear something?” she muttered abruptly and stood still, tilting her head as if straining her ears. Kieli blinked and looked back at Beatrix’s face for a second, and then she, too, focused on her hearing.

What reached her ears were the sound of the wind blowing over the barrens, and occasionally, the sound of falling debris. And, in the distance, the wreckage of the power sector crackling in flames.

Through all of those sounds, it was faint, but she definitely heard something else. It came off and on, so she couldn’t quite make it out—the staticky sound of stringed instruments.

She gasped, looked up, and turned toward the music. It was in the very back of the severed ship’s body, and she was already running by the time she’d finished processing that thought. Some rubble caught her foot, causing her to stumble, but she hurriedly picked herself up and crawled on all fours across the debris, looking for the place the sound was coming from. She heard the faint melody only in spurts, so she couldn’t get a clear hold on it.

She desperately searched around her, on the verge of tears. “Corporal, where are you…!?”

Rustle…

Very nearby, under her chin, she heard the sound of rubble scraping against rubble.

When she dropped her gaze, suddenly, someone else’s hand stuck out from the pile of debris under both of hers. She instinctively let out a short scream and jumped back. Landing on her rear, she looked again and saw a metal-framed right hand struggle as it tried to crawl through a gap in the wreckage.

“……!”

She hurriedly crawled to it and helped the right hand move the rubble away. Buzz ran over and shifted the metal walls piled up around her. The faint, muffled noise gradually became clearer, and under the last metal wall Buzz picked up, she could see red hair, now white with dust.

“…Harvey!”

He lay buried in rubble and limp as though dead, but his left hand held tightly to the radio, protecting it. Apparently the right hand had crawled out on its own, looking for help, just barely attached by torn cables.

“Harvey, are you okay?” she addressed him and waited a little, but he didn’t react.

She burrowed into a gap in the rubble and peered into his face. “I know you’re alive. Come on.…” She timidly reached out her hand and brushed away the hair on his forehead, and he finally twitched. He slowly opened his eyes, blinked somewhat absently, and sluggishly shifted his gaze toward her.

“…Did it work?”

The instant she opened her mouth, she thought she would burst into tears, so Kieli wordlessly and emphatically nodded her head.

A tiny hint of the smile he had when he was in a good mood rose to the corner of his mouth, and he muttered, “…Heh, heh. We did it.” Then he closed his eyes, exhausted.

They saw the Watch’s trucks approaching from the direction of town, so they hurried to vacate the area.

There had been all kinds of trouble, so they probably wouldn’t be able to go back there. She had been saying “Let’s go home” all this time, but that home no longer existed.

It was sad, but for some reason, now she felt as though they had come home to the place they had been before.

Wearing the radio in her usual fashion for the first time in a long while, Kieli smiled to herself. She looked back at the three-wheeled truck parked a little ways off. Harvey sat on the edge of its covered bed, leaning against the side wall, staring into space. His torn arm had been shoved into place and bandaged with a cloth for the time being, and his hands were thrust into his pants pockets. Beatrix was in similar shape. Kieli wished Undyings would take better care of their bodies.

“Kieli, get in. We’re leaving,” Beatrix said, looking out from the driver’s seat. Her bound golden hair flowed over her shoulder.

The small three-wheeled truck that they decided to borrow was the one that had been abandoned where the ruins of the spaceship used to be, and according to Harvey, there was no reason they couldn’t use it now.

“I’m coming!” Kieli answered, facing forward again, lifting her chin up as high as she could to see into the face of the big man standing in front of her.

“Thank you for everything. Will you tell Suzie that for me, too?”

“Yeah.”

“And tell her I’m sorry I had to leave without seeing her again.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell her.”

A little flustered by Buzz’s usual curt reactions, she gave a final bow of her head and finished with, “Really, thank you.” When she looked up again, giant hands picked her up effortlessly by the waist.

“Wah!”

He pressed her face to his sturdy neck and hugged her tight. Kieli put her cheek on that neck that smelled of dust and sweat, and the constant scent of milk and butter, and closed her eyes just a little.

“Take care,” came his plain parting words, and he put her back down.

“Kieli, I’m going to leave you here!” a slightly impatient voice urged.

“Coming!” Kieli hurried to turn around. (Beatrix might really leave her behind.) She ran back to the truck and started to climb into the bed; that instant, there was a revving noise and a jolt, and the truck really did set off in earnest.

“Wah, meanie…!”

She panicked, about to be left behind, and Harvey grabbed her with his left hand, just managing to pull her in. She sat on the edge of the truck bed and breathed a sigh of relief as she looked up at Harvey. He didn’t say anything in particular, only leaned back against the wall, directing his gaze outside.

The truck immediately sped up, spouting smoke from the exhaust pipe in its rear. Buzz’s truck, with Buzz standing next to it watching them go, grew farther away against the wilderness scenery. Kieli leaned out from the truck bed and waved. Buzz answered with a nod, then seemed to smile a little. But he had already gotten much smaller in the distance, so she might have imagined it.

She pulled her legs off the edge of the bed and adjusted her position, watching the scenery as she listened to the sound of the truck’s engine and its tires rumbling over the road. She glanced next to her at Harvey. He just leaned against the side wall as his vision drifted over an ambiguous spot in the sky, looking at nothing in particular.

“Harvey,” she interrupted him hesitantly, and a second later, he blinked lightly and turned toward her.

“…Oh, sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“Oh. What is it?”

“Mmm…” Kieli was somewhat suspicious of his answers—they seemed to indicate a screw loose somewhere—but she didn’t say anything about it as she returned her attention to the landscape outside.

Far beyond the wilderness disappearing behind them, several lines of black smoke rose up, as if the sand-colored sky was breathing them in. That was where the power sector blazed on.

“The ruins are gone now.…”

“They just changed shape and location a little, that’s all.”

“…Oh.” His simple explanation strangely made sense to her.

The spaceship sticking out of the ground had turned into the wreckage of a spaceship lying on the ground, and it had changed location a little—it was much closer to the city than it had been the day before—but still, it wasn’t much different from yesterday, and starting today, that place would be the South-hairo spaceship ruins. Kieli got the feeling that if she had the chance to come back a few years later, it would probably still be standing there quietly, one with the land, as if it had been there for hundreds of years.

She hoped that she would be able to come back someday. To the town where Buzz and Suzie lived. The town that had been home to Kieli, even if just for a short while. And the town that Harvey said he wanted to protect.