CHAPTER 4

LONG NIGHT BESIDE A DEEP POOL

She didn’t know who the hell had first confidently suggested that the world was round, but it was definitely a lie.

No matter how far you went there was nothing but relentlessly flat, rocky wilderness, and she didn’t see a scrap of sensory proof that they were inhabiting a spherical planet. The distant, low-lying bluish shadows of the northern mountain range actually looked as though they were getting farther and farther away the more she walked, and she couldn’t imagine she was drawing any closer to them.

Surely this land was on a sort of conveyor belt that looped backward beneath her the exact same distance that she walked forward, and those snide mountains sprawled majestically at the end of the world, someplace that she could never, ever reach, where they lived in comfort and laughed mockingly at all travelers. Damn it.

“Now that I think about it, I should’ve just waited until tomorrow morning and gotten on the next train. Why am I following her on foot?! It’s getting my clothes dirty, and damaging my hair, and chapping my throat, and who’s going to take responsibility if my soft, maidenly skin gets burned by UV rays and I get a rash?”

“Are you really an Undying? Quit bitching like such a sissy.”

“That is total discrimination. A problematic statement. Look, it’s not wartime right now, you know. It’s an era of peace. What’s wrong with having requirements appropriate to the times?”

“Okay, okay, just stop swinging me around!”

It had been half a day since she’d started walking along the railroad tracks, dragging with one hand the clattering cart to which she’d affixed her trunk, and now with the other hand swinging the radio vigorously by its string. Naturally she hadn’t seen any trains pass, but the fact was she hadn’t even seen a single truck driving along the rutted road that ran next to the tracks. The sand-colored sun peeking through the dust storms had long since passed its peak in the sky and started to travel west.

She should’ve turned around the moment she realized that the most effective way to overtake Kieli was certainly not to go to Gate Town on foot, but rather to wait for the next morning’s train; however, by that time she’d already walked far enough that the thought of turning back pissed her off, so she was stubbornly pressing on.

“This is all your fault to begin with. If you call yourself her guardian, at least trouble yourself to predict what she’s going to do!”

“Don’t ask for the impossible! Even I never thought she’d just run off on her own! And anyway, when you get right down to it, this is YOUR fault for not showing that letter to her when you got it; the secrets just piled up after that, and that’s how things ended up this way.”

“Well, you knew about it and you never said anything, either, so you’re just as guilty! Besides, the reason I couldn’t show it to her was because what he wrote was just so insensitive, so, yeah, the whole mess is because he’s stupid and thoughtless. Why should I be—” Suddenly she realized something and broke off talking, stilling her steps at the same time.

The sounds of her own incessant chattering and of the trunk dragging along the ground temporarily stopped, and the lonely wilderness silence that blanketed her surroundings made her feel oddly hollow. The dust clouds dancing over the tracks flapped at the hem of her trench coat as if to tease her.

“What is it?”

“We’re turning back.”

When she pivoted on her heel and began returning the way she’d come, dragging the trunk behind her, the radio spoke up in a panic: “Hey, wait a second, are you serious? When we’ve come this far already? At this point it’s going to be hard work going back, too. I’m telling you, it’d be better to keep going and hope for a car to come by.”

“She’s the one who left all on her own. Why should I have to go out of my way to chase after a troublesome girl like that? She can just do whatever she wants. Die in a ditch somewhere, wander into a bad neighborhood and get captured and forced into prostitution, whatever.”

“Idiot, that’s not funny!”

“Why should I care? I’ve babysat her more than enough to fulfill my promise to Ephraim. Any more than this wouldn’t be worth it even if I made him be my errand boy for life to pay me back. That’s if he’s even alive.”

Beatrix had been briskly walking as she delivered this fast-tongued assertion, but after about twenty steps she stopped again.

“Sheesh, what now?”

After silently glaring at the ground for a while with a sour face, she turned around 180 degrees again and began quickly picking her way back north.

“…Beatrix.”

“What?!”

“You’ve got an unprofitable personality, huh?”

“Shut up or I’ll leave you here.”

Beatrix considered doing exactly that, but walking and shouting all by herself in the middle of the wilderness would feel more empty than anything else, so in her heart she firmly resolved to sell him off as soon as she got to town. Just then, a faint new sound caught in her ears, which had become accustomed to nothing but the sounds of her own voice and the radio’s, the clattering trunk, and the ambient noise filling the wilderness.

She stopped and looked back over her shoulder. Dust clouds were rising up over the rutted road that ran parallel to the tracks a short distance away. As she stood there squinting, the faint sound of a fossil fuel engine drew steadily closer, and a three-wheeled truck with its canopy up came into view.

“I’m in luck!” she murmured excitedly. She shifted her grip on the trunk and ran from the railroad tracks over toward it. As she did so the truck did its own part to close the distance between them, and when she got to the side of the road, cart rattling wildly, it was just pulling to a stop before her.

“Thank goodness! I was really in a bind. Would you mind giving me a lift to Gate Town?”

“Oh, now you play the nice girl.”

Swinging the radio’s string behind her back and letting the machine slam into the corner of the truck, she flashed her full-wattage professional smile and looked up at the driver’s seat. The truck driver stuck his head out the sand-grimy window. He gave her face a quick, appraising look with his elbow propped on the windowsill, and immediately grinned. “Wow, I’m pretty lucky today, picking up such a fine-looking lady in a place like this.”

Huh? Beatrix frowned, feeling as if she’d heard that lightly flirtatious voice somewhere before. At that moment, the driver’s eyes fell on her trunk and his mouth made a little “o” of surprise that sparked her memory.

It was the young man who’d been trying to pick up Kieli in Toulouse. He hadn’t looked as if he was on a pilgrimage, so she had taken him for an ordinary tourist, but judging from the sight of him driving the truck, he must be a merchant. “Wow, what a coincidence,” he said. “Isn’t that other girl with you?”

“Never mind, I don’t need a ride,” she answered. She turned ninety degrees to the left and set off walking again.

“Hey!” a flustered voice called after her. “What the heck? Come on, get in. You want to go to Gate Town, right? Even by car it’s still more than a day away, you know. There’s no way a woman could walk that far.”

“Mind your own business.” She half-turned, thoughts rather contradicting the antidiscrimination rant she’d delivered to the radio earlier. Don’t make me out to be the same as all those normal women! That was when she first noticed the driver had companions in the passenger seat.

Two small heads were peeping out at her interestedly from over the driver’s shoulder. There was a girl who seemed a few years younger than Kieli and was what she might politely call “unassuming” (or, to put it another way, she was plain and screamed “country girl”); with her was a boy about another four or five years younger.

The boy’s face immediately brightened, and he let out a cry. “Hey! It’s that lady who was with the witch!”

“Il! You’re being rude!” The girl blushed and forcibly ducked his head back down. Beatrix was impressed that he’d recognized her; she’d been in her disguise at the time, after all. Anyway, it was one thing for the guy to go after sixteen-year-old Kieli—now he was trying something with kids of this tender age?

“You’re seriously misunderstanding this, aren’t you? It’s not like that at all. I just let them ride with me out of the kindness of my heart.”

“I wonder.” She shot a hooded glare at the driver.

He raised both hands in front of him and waved them in a pacifying gesture. “Okay, then, if you get in, too, it’ll prove that I’ve got no ulterior motives. Sound good?” He smacked a fist into his palm as if he’d just come up with a brilliant idea, beaming at her with a face that betrayed ulterior motives all too clearly.

The far-northern mountain range beyond the fortress walls was still a long way off, blurred with sand-colored gas that made it seem like a mirage. But from here, if she squinted she could start to make out a dark gray city lying solemn yet strangely eerie in the heart of it. It was a skyscraper city with tens, or maybe hundreds, of towers jutting up toward the heavens, each looking different from all the others—if you looked at it a certain way, it seemed like a collection of gravestones twisting and writhing in pain, all twining around each other looking for help.

So that’s the capital, the mechanical city…

Kieli stood still for a while, gazing at the shadow of the distant city.

The pictures on the walls of the boarding school had fired her imagination with the idea that it must be a glorious view, but seeing it with her own eyes now, it didn’t inspire any particularly deep emotion. A feeling like awe bubbled up in her for just an instant and then vanished, and that was all.

When she shifted her gaze from that distant scenery a little closer, the milky-white fortress wall ringing in the northern part of the city loomed over the roofs of the houses uptown. The corresponding wall to the south had crumbled during the War, and to this day had never been rebuilt; the downtown area had expanded in slow stages and was now a sprawling slum.

This city might be the “gateway to the capital,” but beyond the gate in the northern wall there was still a wearyingly long road and a steep climb waiting before you got to the center of the mountain range. Apparently lots of the pilgrims from all over the planet who stopped here on their way to the capital ran out of steam and ended up just settling down here.

Uptown, with its houses of the historied high-born who had received the favor of the capital, and downtown, where the lower class and the pilgrim settlers lived—Gate Town had a unique structure: it was divided into two radically different neighborhoods by its midtown, where the station and the church were. Its other defining characteristic was its vast network of underground waterways, which Kieli understood had been built drawing on the groundwater from the capital’s mountain range. It was a relic of the prewar era, but it had hardly changed since then. It spread below the entire town.

She’d spent about a day and a half vibrating along with the train, and had arrived here from the parish border town the afternoon after she’d boarded. She’d gotten a grip on the basic layout of the city at the station and set out for the downtown area to the south. From downtown to the higher ground of uptown ran layer after layer of staircase-like inner walls, probably also left over from the War; maybe they’d protected the city from invasion back then, but now they just divided the various city neighborhoods and made traffic difficult. Kieli had been told that the “underground waterways” were not always underground downtown, since the neighborhood was already at such a low elevation, and that sometimes they actually passed through those inner walls towering above her.

As she walked down the paved, zigzagging stairs along one such wall toward the slums of downtown, the dry air of the city got gradually moister. The sun was still relatively high in the sky, but already an exhausted fatigue was settling about her shins. The walls and ground gave off a smell like soaking-wet laundry that refused to completely dry, and it stuck in her nose.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs she saw a line of arched openings like windows at the base of the inner wall. From them, dreary tunnels stretched on into the wall. Apparently this area had once functioned as a part of the waterways, too, but now the waters had receded, and the trails they left behind had become perfect refuges for pilgrims and vagabonds.

The fading sunlight of afternoon hit the tunnels at an acute angle, providing just enough light to dimly illuminate them. Kieli stepped inside one of them and made her way toward its depths, flinching a little at the unfriendly stares from the people lying scattered around on both sides of the tunnel.

As she was debating with herself over whether to ask anybody for help, she noticed a table set up deep within the tunnel, with a crowd of people around it enjoying a card game. Though it was still the middle of the afternoon they already reeked of alcohol, and most had a beer in one hand; still, they seemed far easier to strike up a conversation with than those people who were just lying there in the shadows and glaring at her like she was a nuisance. Those people seemed half-dead.

“Excuse me…,” Kieli ventured, standing behind the ring of players. However, they appeared to have gotten to the most important stage of the betting, and they were all so caught up in the game that no one responded. Just as she started to get worried, her eyes met those of someone leaning one hip lightly on the end of the table and surveying the game.

It was a woman, wearing disheveled makeup and clothes open wide at the breast. She craned her neck over the heads of her companions and spoke to Kieli. “Hi. What’s up?”

At first Kieli was relieved that someone was giving her a friendly response, but she quickly felt something was off. She hesitated a little, but in the end there didn’t seem to be anyone else she could ask, so she walked over to the woman.

Just at that point the game ended, and under cover of the noise of the players all crowing about who’d won and lost, Kieli asked her question. “Um, is there anybody around here named Hans?”

“Hmm, there are all kinds of people named Hans in this world.”

“I heard he was a cleaner who worked around the wall.”

“Oh, him.” The woman sounded as though she knew whom Kieli meant, and Kieli’s breast filled with hope. But then she added, “I hear he’s dead.”

And those brief words were all she said.

“Dead…?” Kieli echoed dumbly.

“Yeah, so I hear,” the woman repeated. She thrust a hand into the hair piled up on top of her head and mussed it, continuing, “I forget how long ago it was, but he went to work one day and never came back. Everyone’s saying he must’ve fallen into the waterways. Even if he’s lucky enough to get found, he’ll probably be a swollen-up floater by then. It’s not too unusual for someone to go missing in the waterways.”

The woman’s interest returned to the next game, which had just started, and she left it at that.

For a while Kieli just stood stock-still behind her, utterly lost. She’d thought that if she could meet up with this person who was supposed to have seen Harvey, then even if she couldn’t figure out exactly where Harvey was, she’d at least get a little bit of a clue about what she should do next. But now suddenly she had nothing to go by.

“Come to think of it,” said the woman, as if she’d just remembered something. Kieli raised her eyes to look, and saw that the woman had craned her neck around to face her again. “About Hans—people say he was going on about some pretty weird stuff before he went missing. Something like, ‘If I die, I want you guys to know that it’s because I saw the procession of the dead, so they came for me.’ But you know, he was living just like normal even after he started saying that. When people die, it’s sudden and it’s over before you know it, huh?”

“The procession of the dead?” Kieli had never even heard of it. Or seen it, of course.

“You go on now. This is no place for a girl like you,” the woman said coldly, and then turned around again. Kieli gave up on finding anything in this place, thanked the woman softly, and turned her back on the circle of people living it up over their card games.

What do I do now?

Should she just head straight for the capital? But if she went there, she really had no idea what her next move should be. Naturally she didn’t know anyone there, plus now that she thought about it, she didn’t have much money left.

Wait…someone I know at the capital…

Just as she was on the edge of remembering something, suddenly a ruckus broke out at the waterway exit in front of her. Amidst the confusion she could hear the clanging of something metal, and against the sand-colored sunlight coming in through the archway appeared one huge black shape after another.

At the same time another commotion rose up behind her. When she turned around, the people who had been enjoying their betting were hastily gathering up the cards and cleaning off the table.

“I told you, hurry up and get going.” The woman from before jerked her chin toward the exit. She was the only one composed in the midst of this storm of activity, still leaning on the edge of the tilted table. When Kieli only stood there stunned, her voice grew impatient. “It’s illegal to gamble here. If you don’t want to get thrown into the slammer with the rest of us, you’d better run away quick.”

The dozen or so people who’d been participating in the card game feverishly tried to carry off the table, but by that time the group gathered at the exit had entered the tunnel, and they began to seize the screaming crowd one after the other by the scruffs of their necks.

White clerical robes were fortified with white armored plating over every vital point, and all of them carried nightsticks—these were the Church Soldiers charged with maintaining order in Gate Town, mainly by keeping the pilgrims who passed through the gate under surveillance.

The other residents who had just been lying around got caught up in the heat of the moment and started running away, too, and in the blink of an eye the tunnel had descended into chaos, with criminals and bystanders all running amok together. The Church Soldiers, for their part, seemed to more or less be hauling in anybody who crossed their paths without worrying too much about who it was. Before she knew it, a hand clad in rough gloves had grabbed her by her neck.

“Let me go!” Kieli struggled and wheeled her fists around, trying to get away. Then there was a crack on the back of her head and a brilliant flash that filled her entire field of vision, and she collapsed into the crowd.

For some odd reason something the woman had said to her before still rang in her ears, repeating itself over and over in her mind. When people die, it’s sudden and it’s over before you know it, huh? When Kieli had first heard it she’d just let it wash over her without thinking anything in particular about it, yet now…

He’s not dead…

She’d almost begun to believe it in spite of herself, but now she stubbornly denied it. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t like normal people; there was no way he’d die easily.

Her rear end was cold where it pressed against the ground, so she shifted slightly. As she did, she took the opportunity to lift her face slightly from where it had been buried between her hugged knees and take stock of the area. Into this damp space penned in by gray walls about twenty people had been crammed; they squatted on the ground like refugees. Among the crowd she could see the faces from around the card table, but surely half of these people had just happened to be in the tunnel at the time, and gotten caught up in things and dragged here with the gamblers.

“Yo. Your head okay?” said a voice next to her. She turned to look. The woman she’d spoken to in the tunnel was sitting beside her in the line of people next to the wall.

Kieli put a hand to the back of her head, and whispered half-jokingly, “I’m fine. I’ve got a hard head.” In part she was trying to cheer herself up. It didn’t work very well.

She hugged her knees again and propped her chin on them, gazing with downcast eyes at the tips of her own boots. This was the first time in her life she’d ever been in lockup. Even though she hadn’t done anything to be arrested for (in this case, at least), despair crept into her heart, whispering that maybe they’d keep her here and never let her go. This uniquely closed-off space where the damp and stink settled heavily along the ground might be pretty effective at making a person lose her energy.

“Well, you don’t have to worry. They don’t really intend to do anything to us, so they’ll let us out soon enough. After all, if all they do is lock up a bunch of poor people and feed them for free, it might as well be volunteer work. We’re actually grateful for it, and nobody ever learns anything from it, so all of us just repeat the same thing over and over again. This is basically a regular event.”

The woman said this with a light laugh, and Kieli smiled back, cheered a little. She’d vaguely imagined that the people living in North-hairo parish, which was strongly influenced by the capital, would be even more devout than those in Easterbury, but it looked as if not everybody living in the slums was a pious believer.

“What did you want with Hans? It doesn’t sound like you know him. From the look of you, you’re not a pilgrim either. Did you come all the way here just to see Hans?”

“No…” Probably nothing more than idle interest had motivated the woman’s question, but Kieli was at a loss for an answer. “I’m looking for someone Hans might have seen, so I wanted ask him about it.”

“Huh. So, your boyfriend, then.”

“Eh?!” she squeaked in surprise without thinking. It echoed unexpectedly loudly against the bare concrete walls, and everyone else in the cell looked at her funny. She stammered her denial in a flustered whisper. “N-No, it’s not like that!”

“Sure, sure,” agreed the woman in a teasing voice that didn’t really convince Kieli that she believed her. “Well, I don’t know what’s going on, but I hope you find him.” A tired but pretty smile appeared on her thin, makeup-streaked face.

“Thanks…,” Kieli answered, looking down in embarrassment. Still hugging her knees, she leaned her back against the wall. Staring at the tips of her boots, she murmured softly, “But he might not be alive anymore…” As soon as she heard herself say it, she was disappointed by her own weakness. She’d denied it so vehemently just a few minutes ago, and now unease was already reasserting itself.

“You don’t know he’s dead yet, right? Why not search for him?”

Maybe it was nothing more than false comfort, but it had the same sort of scent about it somehow as what the station manager had said to her on the abandoned train platform. After a pause, Kieli gave a small smile. “You’re right. Thanks.” She’d just begun to search, after all. She had no intention of giving up yet.

Metallic footsteps approached. When she looked up, one of the Church Soldiers guarding them was standing on the other side of the barred door. Kieli stiffened in surprise, but her fellow prisoners merely turned sluggishly toward him; after he’d glanced contemptuously over the lifeless people in the cell, the guard began to noisily unlock the door. “We’re finished with you. Scram.”

Someone gave a low whistle. The woman next to her whispered, “You’re a lucky girl. He’s letting us out early today. Usually they leave us to stew here at least overnight.” Kieli heard other voices nearby lament that it wouldn’t have hurt to let them go after dinner.

The barred door was wrenched open, and the people confined inside heaved themselves up and started heading for the exit.

At the woman’s voice urging “Go on, go,” Kieli got in the back of the line and passed through the door as well. When she got into the hallway and turned back to look into the cell, everyone was out and it was empty.

The woman was nowhere to be seen.

“What’s the matter with you? Get a move on,” snapped the guard. She resumed her place at the rear of the line and started walking again, silently giving thanks. The woman must have realized that Kieli didn’t know anyone else in the cell, and talked to her so that she wouldn’t feel lonely and discouraged. I wonder how she died…it must have been sudden and over before you knew it, just like she said. Kieli even thought that kind of death would have suited her.

They came through the hallway lined with communal cells and climbed the stairs to the ground floor. There was an observation room right before the exit to the prison. Before it two Church Soldiers stood guard with identical expressions of practiced, robotic blankness, watching the prisoners leave. Diagonally behind them, Kieli glimpsed another person standing there primly, seeming small compared to the well-built soldiers.

In contrast to the white clerical robes of the soldiers, he wore a long, jet-black robe with a high collar—priest’s clothes, though somewhat plainer than those worn by the full-fledged priests. They looked like the uniforms of the seminary students who had come to visit the Easterbury boarding school to do their in-service training, but the boy wearing them seemed young for a seminarian, young enough to still be called “boy.” It was odd how the brawny soldiers held their expressions rigid and stood motionless, as if unnerved by the boy behind them.

She watched him casually out of the corner of her eye as she passed, and their eyes happened to meet.

She held his gaze as she walked a few steps past him, until her neck couldn’t turn any further, and then she stopped. Her neck still twisted, they gazed at each other across air that had grown tense for some reason.

The boy’s mouth opened first. “…Kieli?”

Kieli whirled around, her whole body twitching, and gaped up at him in speechless silence.

…Gaped up at him?

It was true: the boy wasn’t actually “tall,” but he had a fair number of centimeters on Kieli. The eyes looking down on her from above were dark green. There too were the soft, light brown hair and the refined features.

“Juli…?”

At her dazed murmur, the boy’s face lit up. His expression instantly became more childish, and he looked a full two or three years younger in one stroke. “Kieli, it is you!”

He came toward her with arms spread wide in greeting and a smile on his face, and seemed about to hug her around the shoulders before his hands froze as if he’d suddenly remembered himself. He recovered his attitude before the suspiciously frowning soldiers at his back, and spoke again in a restrained whisper. “Wow, Kieli, it’s really you, isn’t it?”

Kieli stared up at him in disbelief. “Juli, is that really you? But I don’t remember you being so…” She compared this boy to the one in her memory of almost two years ago. I don’t remember you being so tall! Kieli remembered actually being a little taller than he was. His voice was lower now than before, too, and it was kind of strange. But his way of talking and his expression did belong to the mischievous Julius she knew.

“You’ve changed, too, Kieli,” said Julius, looking a little shy. He darted his eyes around them and schooled his expression again (which made him look old enough for a seminarian’s uniform to suit him). “Well, never mind. Let’s have a nice, long talk later.” He bent down a little and brought his face to her ear, lowering his voice even more. “How did you know?”

“Huh?” Kieli said, bewildered.

Julius blinked his dark green eyes, still quite close to her. “Huh? Didn’t you come because you knew? I thought I’d worried for nothing.”

“Knew what?”

“Well, you know…that he’s here.”

“…Who?” she asked, and then abruptly realized who it must be. But even after she figured this out, she couldn’t think for the life of her how to react. She stared fixedly up at Julius, frozen.

“He still looks pretty bad. Are you sure you want to see him? You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Let me see him.” Her expression was still frozen, but she nodded firmly. Julius signaled the guard of the solitary confinement cells with his eyes. The guard withdrew a jangling bunch of long keys and began unlocking the door.

Once they’d descended the steep stairs down from the communal cell block even deeper into the building, Kieli had been led to a hallway of long, narrow doors with tiny barred windows in them. Perhaps the underground waterways were directly underfoot now; it was chilly, but she felt a layer of moisture settling on her skin, and the sound of her footsteps here was subtly different than it had been on the floor above. The echoes bounced off the walls slightly diffused, as if she were ringing bells in a cave.

In a corner of the hallway were a steel desk and chair; on top of the desk were a logbook, a rusty kettle, and a camp stove. On the wall beside it was a coat hook with a dark gray coat on it. That must be where the guard stayed when he wasn’t on his rounds. Working in an environment like this, just keeping watch all alone all day long, must be enough to drive you crazy.

The guard released the bar and peeked through the small window before slowly pushing the door open, creating a gap just wide enough to admit one person. Then he whispered something to Julius, who replied with a brief “I see” before turning to face Kieli.

“Perfect timing. It sounds like he might look a little better now. Wait here just a little longer,” he said. Kieli had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded, and then Julius slipped through the opening and disappeared into the cell by himself. She could hear the low rumble of voices through the door.

Kieli unconsciously fumbled one hand into her coat pocket and gripped the thing her fingers found there.

Her pulse sped up. The thumping of her heart threatened to rise into her throat, and she swallowed thickly against it.

“Kieli.”

It felt as though she’d waited a long time, but really it had probably been less than ten seconds. Julius was craning his head around the door frame. He gestured with his eyes for her to come inside.

She walked somewhat stiffly to the door, hands still stuck in her pockets. On the threshold she stopped and looked slowly and nervously around the cell. It was a tiny, damp room hazily lit by a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling. The first thing her eyes fell on was a middle-aged woman wearing classic black clothes. She nodded a brief greeting at Kieli with a smile on her plump-cheeked face, as she bustled about the room tidying up the debris of dirty clothes, bandages, and washbasins lying scattered around it.

The frozen tension in the air was finally broken by the sight of this unexpected figure; then the woman withdrew to the side as if to make room, and past her Kieli could see someone else.

Sitting with his back against the undressed concrete wall that looked as if it couldn’t possibly be comfortable was a tall, lean young man. Despite the fact that three other people were crammed into the tiny space with him, he displayed no interest in his surroundings, merely staring down with lowered eyes at a random spot on the floor.

It seemed he’d just had his clothes changed, and now he was comparatively neatly dressed, but she could see festering wounds all over the skin peeking out at the throat and cuffs of the shirt he wasn’t able to wear quite properly. He looked even more emaciated than he had before; his collarbone and the bones of his hands jutted out sharply.

“Hey,” Julius said in an exasperated voice, and at last the man irritably lifted his head of washed-out, damp copper hair.

The moment she saw his face, Kieli’s heart gave a great lurch in her chest.

Half his face was covered by huge patches of gauze plastered over his right cheek and eye and held in place with tape. In the glow of the bare dull-yellow lightbulb, the snow-white gauze looked awfully, spitefully clean, harshly emphasizing the painful scar on the man’s face and the bleakness of the room.

She unthinkingly started to look away before she caught herself and tightened her fists fiercely in her pockets against the impulse. “Har…vey…?” she murmured in a trembling voice. He was right there in front of her eyes for the first time in so very, very long, and yet her lips and tongue fumbled the name.

At the sound of her voice, the man sluggishly turned his face toward her. He squinted his one remaining copper-colored eye slightly, as if straining to see her (maybe his eyesight was bad?); after a beat, he frowned in undisguised suspicion. “…Who are you?”

Those were the first words she heard out of his mouth.

Her vision was abruptly shrouded in a white cloud. She froze. “…It’s Kieli, obviously,” Julius ground out next to her, sighing.

“Ki…” the man mumbled brokenly at Julius. Then he turned back to look at her face, checking. It still took several more seconds before he looked as though he finally understood.

“What the hell are you doing he—”

But before he could finish the sentence, Kieli drew her right fist from her pocket and threw the object she’d been holding in his face. A lighter wrapped up in crumpled paper hit the gauze over his right eye. In that instant she regretted it a little—but only a little.

“What do you mean, what am I doing here?! D-Do you have any idea how much I…” Oh, no, I’m going to cry!

The moment she thought it, she spun 180 degrees and flew out of the cell.

“Wai—”

The voice behind her ordering her to stop was cut off, and then she simultaneously heard the clatter of the washbasin or something similar being knocked over, something collapsing onto the floor, and someone saying “Ow!” She ignored all of it. The guard standing at attention outside looked at her in surprise, but she ignored that, too, slipping past him and running out of the hallway and up the stairs at full speed.

He immediately tried to follow her, but when he got to his feet he tottered unsteadily and tripped over the washbasin, and then somehow it didn’t even occur to him to get up. He turned his attention to the feel of the damp concrete against the cheek now planted against the ground and the faint sounds of moving water.

The wet cold slowly but surely oozed up through the gauze over his face and began eating at his wound like a swarm of microbes. With the remaining half of his vision, he hazily glimpsed the same sickeningly familiar walls and ceiling of undressed concrete that he’d seen day in and day out for so long—to the extent he thought he could probably close his eye and reproduce the sight down to the details of the water stains.

He heard a rusty scraping sound and flicked his gaze upward a fraction. Out of the bare thirty-centimeter gap between the open door and its frame (the guard here was always terrified, and never opened the door wider than this, so that if something should happen he could close it instantly, abandoning the visitor inside if necessary) appeared a boy in priest’s clothes.

The other two people in his cell had left to chase after the girl who’d gone running out, but apparently the boy had now come back alone.

From his position on the floor, Harvey glowered at him and asked in a low tone, “Where’s Kieli?”

“I’m taking her home with me for today.”

“Let me see her again.”

“Not today. Even someone in my position will get questioned if I let visitors come in and out of here too frequently.”

“I don’t give a shit about your position,” he spat, but even to his own ears it just sounded like venting, so he clicked his tongue in annoyance and fell silent. Julius sighed and leaned against the door behind him. They regarded each other in silence for a while. The quiet didn’t become unbearable to Harvey or anything, but eventually he spoke up anyway, figuring he’d rather hurry up and ask what he wanted to know and then put a stop to this unpleasant atmosphere. “Did you call her here?”

“How could I? You refused to tell me where she was, remember? She came all the way here looking for you. She had a terrible experience, getting mixed up in their sweep of the slums and tossed in jail, and then when she finally got to see you, you responded like that?! Do you remember what you just said to her?”

Harvey was silent. The boy’s lecture made him incredibly pissed off, all the more so for the fact that he couldn’t actually refute any of it. Why should he have to be scolded by a little brat like this?

“Cool your head a little, will you?”

“Shut up. It is cool,” Harvey shot back, mouth twisting. He turned his head away, pressing his forehead to the cold ground while he was at it.

Whatever the boy might say, she’d been the one at fault here. Just showing up out of the blue, and suddenly looking kind of different and more grown-up…as if anyone would be able to recognize her like that!

He glared up at Julius’s figure in the door frame out of the corner of his eye and internally chided himself. Look how big that little snot-nosed brat has gotten! He’s even giving you lectures like some big shot now. If you’d actually thought about it for a second you’d have had to realize that Kieli must’ve grown up a little, too. You just never actually expended the effort to think about it.

“All right, I’m leaving, too,” Julius said, straightening. He peered through the window and signaled the guard, but then turned back around as if he’d just thought of something. “Maybe I’ll invite Kieli to go out sightseeing tomorrow. Just the two of us, to celebrate finally getting to see each other again. You can get a good view of the town from the corridors at the top of the walls. It’s beautiful at night.”

The boy was blatantly rubbing it in his face, and Harvey felt pretty seriously murderous. He let it show in his attitude as he kept glaring; Julius seemed to shrink back a little, but nevertheless flashed him a triumphant smirk.

…He’s still just a brat after all. Harvey looked away, feeling ridiculous, and spat, “Do whatever you want.”

“I’m really going to invite her, then. Don’t you regret those words.”

“I won’t.” Maybe the disinterested response took the wind out of his sails; he just let out an annoyed breath and turned to go. The guard outside removed the bar and, as always, pushed the door open just wide enough to let someone slip through.

Harvey thought of something, and called out to the boy’s retreating back. “Julius.”

The boy paused on the threshold and turned back to look at him one more time. “What?”

“…Why did you save me?”

It was the question he’d almost asked before, then put off with a “next time.” It had been lying unspoken and unanswered ever since.

Julius paused as if in thought, and then answered him seriously. “I wanted to try talking with an Undying.”

“Liar.” What, that’s all?

“It’s not a lie,” he said flatly, and then lowered his voice, maybe out of concern about the guard outside. “The Church teaches us that Undyings are barbaric monsters, repugnant beings who go against God’s order. But you look just like a normal human being. And you can speak and understand just like anyone else—not that you seem to want to speak with me. I don’t know if Undyings really have to be captured and put down the minute you find them, like rabid dogs. I don’t really understand why we have to go that far.”

“Heh, you’re a heretic? Your parents would cry if they heard you.”

“I’m sure my father would understand if I spoke seriously with him about it.”

“You’re dreaming,” Harvey snorted derisively, figuring he’d get a little of his own back for Julius’s victory before. “If the Church would change its tune based on one thing a little kid said, the world would be a real happy place.” Julius fell silent with a glum look on his face.

After a while, Julius changed the subject with an abrupt arrogance. “I’ll tell you one thing: don’t assume I’ll just unconditionally release you when you’re healed. You’re my prisoner. Your life is more or less in my hands, you know.” And with a final “I’ll be back,” he left the cell for good this time.

The door was closed with the same rusty creak it had opened with, the bar was shoved back into place, and the four locks were turned one by one. Harvey felt they were being unnecessarily careful with him. He didn’t warrant that much security. He’d become too used to the sounds, though—lately he’d started to think that maybe his apartment in South-hairo had had four locks, too.

Two sets of footsteps echoed against the walls of the corridor, getting farther away. The guard must have gone with the boy to see him off. All at once, as soon as the signs of their presence disappeared, an exhaustion so great he hardly felt like breathing descended on him. Harvey let out a strangled breath and planted his cheek back on the floor. After that, he didn’t move a muscle for a long time. He concentrated on the flow of blood in his body, experimentally tracing the path it took outward from his core. He’d learned this clever feat only a few months ago, lying in this cell with too much time on his hands, conscious but unable to move.

When he lay still, he almost felt as if he could actually hear the blood moving slowly through him, carrying little regenerative particles along with it, and he began to feel somewhat more at ease.

It seemed almost the entire capacity of his core was used up trying to regenerate the damaged parts of him, and there wasn’t enough leftover energy to maintain his regular biological activity or his bodily functions—at least, this was how he’d vaguely grasped his situation while, again, lying in the cell. That must be just how much the functions of his core had been impaired. Before the Incident, he was pretty sure injuries like this had always been healed by this time.

Apparently this was the result of the crack to his core back on that spaceship in South-hairo.

At the very far reaches of his dim field of vision, he could see his own arms lying flung out on the floor. He’d wrecked his prosthetic right arm escaping from the capital, and now he couldn’t move it at all…or maybe it wasn’t quite accurate to say he couldn’t move it. After it had begun to tear off during that incident in South-hairo, though the external wounds had healed and it had been connected again on the surface, it had never again fused with his nerves like before, and since then he’d never been able to move it of his own will.

However, it had moved independently on his behalf, almost perfectly intuiting his will, so he hadn’t suffered any handicap. In fact, it had been more dexterous than his original arm. After he’d left South-hairo and set out for the capital, it had always aided him as his lone personal (mechanical?) travel companion.

But now he couldn’t feel a trace of the soul he was sure the arm had housed.

“Hey,” he tried calling out to it, but as expected there was no response from the cruelly warped metal, only the faint sound of its motor running. It was as if it had never been anything but an ordinary prosthetic arm. As if it had never once moved by itself. Though when he thought about it, he supposed that was only normal.

Where do you get off just up and breaking down, you idiot? he inwardly complained, unreasonably. He sighed silently. Then he tamped down on his feelings and transferred his attention to his flesh-and-blood left arm.

He directed his energy into it. After a brief time lag the message reached his fingers, and he balled them awkwardly into a fist, but there was almost no strength in his grip. Or rather, he couldn’t really remember how to use his strength.

It took a certain amount of effort just to grasp the lighter in front of him, with its scrap of paper that looked like trash, and bring them toward him.

Huh, I think this is mine…, he thought, gazing at the lighter. But it was the kind of mass-produced one you could get anywhere, so there was no way to conclusively determine whether it was his. He couldn’t really say. It wasn’t worth enough to insist on his ownership rights either way.

However, when he unfolded the scrap of paper he’d thought was garbage, he did recognize it: it was in his own handwriting. But it was just a memo he’d jotted down in two seconds and handed to the information peddler. He only remembered what he’d written after rereading it.

…I asked her what the hell she was doing here. Recalling the stupid thing he’d said to Kieli just a little while ago, he was thoroughly disgusted with himself. Obviously she’d used the memo to trace him here. His mind had short-circuited, and his mouth had basically been running on nervous reflex.

“She’s the one who should be asking me that…” Of the two of them, he was less sure what the hell he was doing.

He opened and closed his left fist a few times. He hadn’t really moved his body in a while, and now it was out of shape; it felt alien, hardly like his own body at all. But before long he started steadily getting sensation back, and remembering how to use his strength. His body had maintained a low temperature, but now he could feel it beginning to rise, as if he were switching to active mode.

He felt a presence on the other side of the closed door. Apparently the guard had come back. From just the sense of presence and the sounds, Harvey could clearly picture his every movement as he sat down in the folding chair at the desk, making it squeak.

Still prone, he stared at the door. This time he clenched his fist tight.

I guess this would be the perfect warm-up…

“Here.”

A delicate teacup was placed with a light tapping sound on the subdued tablecloth at the dining table. Kieli sat primly on her chair and looked down at it. A dark-brown liquid filled the cup to a refined three-quarters, sending up a trail of steam and a sweet aroma.

“This will warm you up. Or are you too old now for hot chocolate?”

“Oh, no, I like it. Thank you,” she said, wrapping her hands around the cup. She felt pressured; it was a beautiful cup, and it would be terrible if she dropped it and broke it. “I’m sorry for troubling you. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“Please don’t worry about it. We don’t mind having you here at all. You are a dear friend of the young master’s.”

Kieli hadn’t noticed it at first, but she recognized this gentle-voiced woman. She was the lady in the maid’s uniform who’d been there the first time she’d ever seen Julius as their sand ship was leaving to cross the Sand Ocean, standing at the pier waving good-bye with her handkerchief. She’d been Julius’s nursemaid, and now that her duties in that area were finished, she’d come back to the family home in Gate Town’s uptown district. Kieli was informed that Julius usually stayed in this house when he visited Gate Town; now he had arranged for her to spend the night here.

“I owe Juli…I mean Julius…Master Julius so much for all his, um, assistance…and I’ve got to…I mean, I must thank you both for what you’ve done for Harvey, too…” She tripped awkwardly over the unfamiliar polite language. As she stared down at the cup in her hands as if searching for help—though of course it wasn’t as if there were a guidebook written there—the lady laughed softly.

“It’s perfectly all right for you to speak as you normally would.” On the whole, that did seem like a safer idea.

Putting the rim of the cup to her mouth, Kieli looked up through her eyelashes at the face of the woman sitting kitty-corner from her, who had begun peeling a piece of fruit.

According to her, she’d been visiting the prison once a week on Julius’s orders to take care of Harvey. Although he was an Undying who wouldn’t die even if left alone to rot, he still had certain minimally necessary bodily functions that had been working during his recovery. However, he’d been more or less a vegetable up until recently, and hadn’t been able to do anything for himself.

“Um, you have close ties to the Church, don’t you…?”

Kieli couldn’t bring herself to say If you’re so religious, why did you help one of the “infernal Undyings”? so it came out as a very roundabout question. The lady seemed to understand what she meant, though, and began talking with a smile, staring down at the hand holding her paring knife. “I merely do what the young master wishes. I don’t ask unnecessary questions, and I don’t tell a soul. After all, I imagine he has his reasons. Though it’s true he was once an impish little boy, and I used to scold him for it,” she added, her smile a little wry. Then her expression softened again into the mild smile with its restrained pride. “He suddenly started studying quite a lot after he returned from his trip alone to South-hairo last winter, and he’s been at the top of his class ever since he advanced to the high school division of the seminary.”

“Yes, Jul—Master Julius has turned out really…er, quite wonderfully,” she said, still a little stiffly, and remembered afresh her reunion with Julius that evening at the prison. All traces of his mother’s ghost, which had followed him everywhere when they’d first met on the ship, had vanished. She must have realized to her relief that he’d be okay by himself now…

“He has turned out wonderfully, but he doesn’t seem to have any friends of his own age, and I’ve been worried. I feel much better now that I know he has a charming friend like you.”

“Er, right…” Kieli’s eyes darted around the room. She wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. She was embarrassed, and more than that she was guilty. It had been almost two years since she’d practically run away from Julius at the South-hairo port, and she’d barely thought of him since, yet Julius still thought of her as a friend, and had harbored Harvey even though he knew he might face terrible punishment if he were found out.

He’d done so much for her; she could never be grateful enough.

She took a sip of her hot chocolate. The sweet taste she hadn’t experienced in so long was delicious, and somehow comforting. But at the same time, she also felt it bring home to her that when all was said and done, she was still a little kid that sweet hot chocolate suited.

She’d always had someone protecting her. When her mother had been alive, and when she’d been staying with her grandmother, and when she’d been at boarding school, and when she’d traveled with Harvey, and this past year and a half when she’d been with Beatrix and the radio, too. The Corporal was a given, of course, but even Beatrix had always stuck with her, for all her complaining.

If Kieli had thought about it at all she must have known that they were considering her feelings, trying to keep her from being hurt, and yet in a moment of distrust, she’d thrown a childish temper tantrum and left them behind.

I wonder if they’re worried about me. Forget that; they must be angry.

And Harvey must be angry, too, huh?

It must have hurt. His face looked so awful…The image of the painfully white gauze on his face and the wound she could see beneath it were still burned into her brain. He’d been so injured, and she’d thrown the lighter right at his wound with all she had. And now that she thought about it, that might have been the first time she’d ever actually thrown something at Harvey. When she’d last looked at him, he’d been staring at her with frozen-faced shock.

But this is Harvey’s fault, too, she murmured in her heart. It half-sounded like an excuse. After all, that reaction had just been too cruel when they’d just been reunited after so long. How much did he think she’d worried, hearing that he might be dead?

…But when they’d just been reunited after so long, she’d cut off their conversation almost before they’d said anything, and run away.

What the heck did I come here for, anyway? I left everyone behind, and then I fought with Harvey, too.

It was as if she’d suddenly been cut off from everything she’d been connected to before, and left all alone. And she’d brought it all on herself, too.

Seeing Kieli staring silently down at nothing, the lady stopped peeling fruit and gently said, “You must be tired. You should take a bath and go to bed early. Let’s go visit him again tomorrow.”

“But…” She closed her mouth, eyes still on her hot chocolate. Today, tomorrow, it was all the same; she still didn’t know how she could face him. She wasn’t confident she’d be able to speak calmly to him next time either, and he might be angry, too.

“I thought he was more frightening at first,” the lady said in tranquil, clear tones.

Kieli looked up at her face, astonished. “You mean Harvey?”

The lady nodded and continued, furrowing her brow as if a little troubled. “Naturally I thought Undying were fearsome things, and he was so horribly injured, with one eye gone; in the beginning that was frightening enough that I couldn’t look at him…And above all else, his good eye was always glaring at something. He had such a harsh expression on his face…”

To Kieli this speech felt somewhat unexpected. She didn’t have many memories of Harvey seeming scary. If she had to pick a most-common Harvey expression, it would be the one in which he looked as if he wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

“Last week, though, he finally started speaking to me a bit. That day I’d dressed his wounds and helped him change his clothes as usual, and as I was about to leave, he said, ‘Thank you for your help.’ It was almost a whisper, but he said it.” And with that, the lady smiled and brought the tale to a close.

Kieli gazed speechlessly at her for several seconds, then dropped her head to her chest and answered with what few words she could manage before the tears came. “Yes…that’s the kind of person he is…”

Boom!

A huge noise suddenly rang out from the other side of the isolation cell door, and the guard sitting in the chair outside felt both his heart and his rear end leap a full five centimeters into the air.

He’d seen off Master Julius and returned to his post. There was still a little time before someone from the night shift came to relieve him, but nothing in particular for him to do, so he was sitting at the desk writing in the logbook.

The log itself was purely a formality; they only wrote in it the kinds of harmless things that could be reported to their superiors. Only a very small number of people knew the truth about who exactly was imprisoned in this solitary cell: Master Julius, the prisoner’s guarantor; Julius’s hired woman; the tiny band of soldiers under Julius’s command whom he’d had bring the prisoner here; and the guard whose salary the young master’s pocket money was supplementing in exchange for staying silent and keeping watch over this place—in other words, himself.

Rather than keeping watch to prevent the prisoner from escaping, his main job was in fact to vigilantly guard against anyone else seeing the prisoner.

What was that noise? Putting down his pen, he stiffly craned his neck around to look at the door. But there was only silence in the wake of the original crash; now the cell was so devoid of sounds or any signs of living presence that it sent a chill up his spine. He started to get up, intending to check on the prisoner; but while he was still only half-standing, he hesitated.

When the prisoner had first been brought here, he was such a tattered half-corpse that the guard had almost expected to smell the stench of rot. But not only had the prisoner not died, he’d gradually recovered to the point where the guard felt he was capable of going berserk any second. The man wasn’t human.

Still, Master Julius trusted him to guard this prisoner. He’d never be able to face the young man again if something should happen to his charge…

There were some who didn’t think well of Master Julius, saying he had only gotten his position through the influence of his family, but the guard and most of his colleagues felt the boy wasn’t so bad. True, he came from one of the super-privileged families of the capital, and he made full use of that authority doing things like keeping a mysterious prisoner here, but it wasn’t as if that had unduly messed up their work or anything. There were probably plenty of kids from powerful families who had the potential to become uncontrollable tyrants, but that boy was (though he knew this was a strange way to put it) a tyrant with a true conscience.

Aw, damn it. Okay, I have to do this for Master Julius…

Resignedly he prepared himself, praying all the while that nothing would happen.

He kept his eyes fixed on the door as he felt about with one hand for the nightstick at his waist and withdrew it. Then he fearfully approached the cell in a timid crouch, walking noiselessly. Brandishing his nightstick in his right hand, he brought his face to the bars at the window and darted a look inside—

Whoosh!

That instant, a hand suddenly shot out from between the bars and grabbed his wrist. He shrieked. Then he tried to turn around and run, but the prisoner’s arm immediately slid up to his neck and dragged him back, and his own captured arm ended up bizarrely crossed with the prisoner’s in a choke hold at his throat.

“L-Let me—”

“Don’t speak,” whispered a low voice behind his head as it was pressed up against the window. He gurgled in answer. Even if he’d wanted to speak, the other man’s arm was biting into his neck, and he could manage only sporadic snatches of breath.

“Unlock the door.”

The voice was blunt and commanding. The breathing at his ear sounded like a low, canine growl. Inwardly trembling with terror that the fiend might latch its teeth onto him at any moment, the guard nevertheless screwed up what little courage he had and managed to shake his head a fraction in refusal. The hand holding the nightstick was captured, but the other one remained free. By contrast, the prisoner had only one arm.

He tried prying off the enemy’s grip with his free hand, but to his surprise, it didn’t even budge.

Of the two, he was clearly in better shape. The prisoner’s arm was so emaciated that it had fit through the barred window; the bones and veins stood out starkly. There was no way that arm could possibly be stronger than his. And yet, no matter how hard he yanked, the prisoner didn’t move.

The guard whimpered.

“Unlock it. I could kill you easily.” The arm at his throat tightened as he repeated his order. The guard thought he heard a strange snapping sound coming from that arm, but he was so out of his mind with fear that he couldn’t think anymore; he fumbled at his waist for the keys and began unbolting the door behind him.

He had to do it by feel, and on top of that his hands were shaking and unsteady. He couldn’t quite get the keys to go into the locks. As the time passed the prisoner’s arm bit more fiercely into his neck, and he had trouble breathing. A sense of heavy, sharp malice like a mad dog stifling its growls pressured him from behind.

He’s going to rip me apart…!

The guard continued to work feverishly, praying for divine protection, and somehow managed to undo all four locks before his neck was broken or his breathing cut off. (Why were there four of them?! The inconvenience was unforgivable.) He drew the bar out and dropped it on the floor.

The arm around his neck momentarily relaxed, and he had just enough time to be fervently relieved before it tightened again and slammed his head hard against the window’s bars.

While he was lost in a fit of dizziness, he found himself dragged into the open cell and thrown into one corner, the prisoner passing him in the doorway as he slid out. Then he heard the bar slide into place outside.

“Oh, hell…” Shaking his throbbing head, he hastily stood up, pressing his face to the window and peering through the bars. “Huh?” He hadn’t heard any retreating footsteps, but somehow the prisoner had already vanished from the hallway.

The guard was utterly bewildered for a moment, but when he looked down he realized that the Undying had simply collapsed right at the bottom of the door; however, in no time he stood up again and ran with a somewhat unsteady gait to the stairway. He grabbed the guard’s coat from the wall on his way out.

“W-Wait!” All the blood drained from his face at once. “Hey! Somebody come here! Hey!” He grabbed the bars with both hands and rattled the door on its hinges, screaming for help, but of course there was no one else within earshot. That was exactly why Master Julius had decided this would be the safest place to hide the prisoner.

Wh-Wh-What should I do? Forget about taking a pay cut; if I’m unlucky I could be fired for this, or maybe even driven out of the Church. “Somebody, please…!”

For lack of any better idea, he rattled the door madly. He felt hopeless. After a while, though, he noticed the crossbar starting to come loose. Maybe the prisoner had been in a hurry; apparently he’d mounted it carelessly and it wasn’t firmly secured in place.

Taken aback, he shook the door even more violently. The crossbar slid a few centimeters at a time from its perch across the metal fittings on either side, eventually coming loose on one end and sliding to the floor with a clatter.

There was no time to stop to breathe. The guard flung open the door and bolted down the hallway. Before he could give it much thought, he flew to the alarm on the wall and sounded it. With its furious wail as background music, he seized the phone.

The tinny voice of his coworker in the guardroom above greeted him. “Man, what’s up? I’m eating right now and—”

“This is no time to sit around eating! We’ve got a prison break on our hands, do you hear me?! And I’ve told you a million times: bring me some food before you dig in!” he bellowed back in irritation, and then threw the mouthpiece at the wall before grabbing a flashlight and running off in the direction the prisoner had escaped.

The hallway spat him out at the foot of the stairs leading up to the communal cells. He stopped there for a moment and looked up into the darkness above. There were windows high up on the wall of the landing to let in light; perfect square slices of the blue-gray night sky stood out against the gloom. Someone built like the prisoner might be able to squeeze through them, but realistically speaking, it would be impossible for him to climb up to them.

He dropped his gaze to his feet. In the muted light of the bare bulb overhead, his shadow lay pale and blurred on the floor. Letting his eyes travel across the floor, he saw a forty- or fifty-centimeter water drain in front of the steps. Its grated metal cover wasn’t sitting quite right.

He was regretting that he hadn’t waited for his colleague to join him before coming down here, but it was too late. Fearfully casting the round beam of his flashlight before him, he squelched along the pitch-dark underground waterway. With each step came the sensation of the soles of his shoes being sucked down into the moist ground, the feeling of damp cold, and the sound of slow-moving water. It all combined to form an air of perfect eeriness.

On top of that, there was no telling when that wild dog of a prisoner would leap from the darkness and tear out his throat.

He lamented the bad luck that had landed him in this horrible situation. Oh, why does this have to happen to me? God, did I do something to wrong you?

Letting the prisoner escape had been a mistake, of course, but so had ringing the alarm on the spur of the moment like that. If the situation got out of hand and others found out that the prisoner was an Undying, even Master Julius would be in a very awkward position, and his own head could roll. Possibly literally. Oh, I should never have let the special bonus lure me into taking this side job! It’s just like they say: humans should humbly live with faith as their only joy. Yeah.

He felt water lap at the tip of his shoe. When he trained his flashlight on the ground, he saw a rippling pool of black liquid right in front of where he had put his foot.

The hallway that formed the riverbanks broke off suddenly into a sharp vertical drop.

“Whoa, that was close…!” He drew his foot back with a shiver and wiped the cold sweat from his face.

Then he heard a low growl behind him, like something clearing its throat—

The instant he whirled around, the tall shadow suddenly standing there behind him shot out a long arm. Before he even had the chance to scream, five bony fingers clutched his throat, and he had the rare experience, both his first and his last, of hearing his own neck breaking.

“Temple flush! How d’ya like that, eh?”

“Full house, cruisers and swords.”

Julius flung his cards to the table with a cry of dismay, leaning far back on the couch and tipping his head up as if in appeal to the heavens. “I lost again! I never expected you to be such an expert at cards, Kieli.”

Gathering up the cards from her seat on the sofa facing his, Kieli gave a pained smile of embarrassment. “I’m not good enough to be called an expert.”

She’d taken advantage of the lady’s kind offer and had a bath. As her body warmed up she’d become pleasantly sleepy, but just as she was thinking of going to bed, Julius had come home. So now they were playing cards and living it up reminiscing about the past.

The subject of what they’d done after parting at the South-hairo Port came up, and she told him a safely edited version of her job at Buzz & Suzie’s Café in the mining town and about her life in eastern South-hairo. Of course there were some parts she couldn’t go into detail about, like the Corporal, who was a radio, or Beatrix, the other Undying besides Harvey.

Julius had stayed in South-hairo for a while and then gone back to the capital. He had now advanced to the high school division of the seminary. Two things surprised Kieli about his story: first, although she’d thought she was at least two or three years older than Julius, she now discovered they were only one school year apart. Second, Julius’s family was even more wealthy and famous than she’d ever imagined.

Julius’s grandfather was a prominent member of the Church’s highest body, the Council of Elders. Likewise, his father was second-in-command of the Church’s Security Forces—in other words, he was Number Two in the organization that united all of the local outposts of Church Soldiers across the entire planet. To put it in extreme terms, thanks to his father’s influence Julius could come and go freely from any of those outposts and do whatever he wanted.

The Council of Elders was made up of eleven high-level clergymen who were said to descend from the Saints, and below them fell all the individual organizations, like the Security Forces responsible for the Church Soldiers and the Preaching Department responsible for all the priests. Kieli personally doubted that the “Eleven Saints” had ever really existed, but at any rate Julius’s family was one of the planet’s eleven greatest houses, and Julius himself might become one of the Elders someday.

When she heard this, Kieli found herself staring at Julius as if he were literally from another world. She said, “Juli, you’re like the prince of some noble family” (and there had never been any nobility on this planet, so the old tales of nobility must have come from the mother planet), and he smiled broadly at her and told her, “And the girl who marries me can be a princess.”

“I just know she’ll be lovely, too.”

“No, that’s not what I meant…” At Kieli’s blank stare, his smile slipped slightly for some reason. “Well, whatever,” he sighed.

Julius kept insisting on another round, so even though Kieli was starting to get seriously sleepy, she’d gathered the cards and begun cutting them again when the lady appeared in the living room doorway.

“My, you seem to be having fun,” she said, taking in the sight of them. Then she gestured to Julius with a look. “I’m sorry to interrupt you, young master, but you have a call from the guardhouse.”

“At this hour?” Julius frowned slightly and stood up from the couch. He left the living room with a promise that he’d be right back. The lady disappeared with him, and Kieli was left alone; with nothing better to do, she let her eyes wander around the room as she continued to meaninglessly cut the cards.

Sofas, curtains, low tables, cabinets: all its furnishings were elegant without being showy. It probably didn’t hold a candle to Julius’s family home, but this house was surely upperclass in its own way. She’d heard that Gate Town’s uptown was filled with the estates of the capital families’ cousins, as well as of the families who had served the capital for generations. It probably wasn’t even worth bringing up, but she couldn’t help wondering why there was such a gap between their lifestyle and that of the failed pilgrims who lived in the abandoned waterways of downtown, when they were all members of the same faith.

She drew her legs up onto the sofa and hugged her knees. What should I do tomorrow…?

“Kieli!”

Julius’s sudden return caught her by surprise. She lowered her legs from the sofa in a panic and straightened her spine a little to sit formally as she turned to look at him. He was standing in the doorway, all the color drained from his face.

“Is something wrong?”

“They say he ran away!”

“Huh?” She blinked, gazing back at him. Julius wasn’t doing much better than she was. He was standing still as stone and looked half-dazed. “…Huh?” she whispered again, and then after a beat she shot up from the sofa. “What do you mean?! Where did he go?!”

“I don’t know! It looks like he escaped into the underground waterways, but…Anyway, I’m going over to the prison right now.”

“I’m coming, too!” Kieli cried eagerly, but he refused her with unexpected sharpness.

“No.”

Somewhat surprised, she swallowed the rest of her words. Still, she gazed into Julius’s dark-green eyes in earnest appeal.

After a while, he sighed in defeat. “Fine. Go get your coat. It’s cold outside.”

Kieli nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right back!” She flew out of the living room and headed for the guest room on the second floor, where the lady had put her for the night. What does he mean, “ran away”? Harvey, why would you do that when you’re so beat-up?! Her heart began to pound, and not just because she’d sprinted up the stairs.

Now she bitterly regretted the short temper that had sent her running out of the prison so fast earlier that day. She hadn’t gotten to do more than see his face for a few moments. She hadn’t said anything to him yet. Somewhere inside, she’d assumed that she could just make up with him the next time she saw him, and she’d let herself relax. But too late she realized there had been no guarantee she’d get a “next time.”

When she dived into the bedroom, she couldn’t bear taking the time even to turn on the light. She found her coat by the faint glow of the streetlamps through the window and grabbed it. She was already turning to leave the room, shoving her arms through the sleeves, when the door slammed shut with a bang.

She heard a key turning in the lock.

“What…?”

Unable to grasp the situation, she simply gaped at the closed door in shock. Then with a start she seized the doorknob. It just clicked back and forth as she turned it; the door didn’t budge.

“I’m sorry, Kieli,” said Julius’s voice from the other side. The doorknob passively continued to bar her way. It had a picture of a sheep etched into it. She let go of it and plastered herself against the door, pounding with both fists.

“Juli?! What is this? Open up!”

“I’m sorry, but you need to stay here until I get back.”

“No! Take me with you! Why are you doing this?!”

“It’s kind of a bad situation. Depending on how things go, even I might not be able to protect him any longer. But no matter what, I’ll guarantee your safety, I promise. So just stay here.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying! What is this? Did something happen to Harvey?!” she demanded, pressing her face to the door.

The answer came in a cold, clipped voice that was horribly unlike Julius. “It’s the other way around.” He sounded annoyed, or disappointed.

“Juli…?”

“They found the body of the guard who went after him in the underground waterway. He was murdered. His neck was broken.”

“Mur—”

“There’s a search force in the waterways now. They’ve got permission to shoot him on sight if he puts up any resistance. If they do that, it’s only a matter of time before they find out he’s an Undying.” This speech came out in a voice deliberately stripped of feeling, and then Julius fell silent, as if declaring the explanation over. While Kieli stood there thunderstruck, she heard him start to walk away, leaving a few words of instruction to the lady.

“Wait…wait! It’s not true! Harvey didn’t do it!” she cried hurriedly through the door, but his footsteps continued down the hallway without pausing.

“Juli, wait! Please, let me go! I’ll find him and ask him what happened. I know this is some mistake! Please, take me with you!”

She kept pounding the door with her fists, but the footsteps didn’t turn around. The lady’s thin, rather trembling voice told her, “I’m very sorry. I’ll come back later.” Then her footsteps disappeared down the hallway, too.

“Wait…”

Kieli stayed glued to the door even after all signs of human presence disappeared from the hallway, but after a little while she heard mumbling voices behind her, and she spun around like lightning and ran to the window on the opposite wall.

As she looked out through the glass, a black truck that blended into the nighttime darkness was just pulling away down the road in front of the mansion. It was a Church Soldiers’ truck. It must’ve come to pick up Julius.

She tore her eyes from the window and looked around the room, but there weren’t any exits other than the locked door. Turning back to the window, she pressed against the glass and ran her eyes over the surrounding walls outside. Below her she could see light spilling from a window on the first floor. It was some distance down, but if she hung off the window ledge she should be able to manage a jump.

When she unlocked the window and opened it, the nighttime autumn winds of North-hairo stirred her hair. Feeling genuinely sorry for the trouble she was causing Julius, she climbed out onto the ledge.

Unfortunately I wasn’t raised well, so nobody ever taught me to always enter and exit a room through the door.

Since Harvey’s right arm wouldn’t move, he opened the pack of cigarettes he’d just bought with his teeth and pulled one out with his lips. With his left hand he returned the pack to his pocket and grabbed the lighter instead, halting his steps just long enough to light up.

As he brought the flame to the tip of his cigarette, he stared at the lighter and silently racked his brains. I just don’t get it…It was the lighter Kieli had thrown at him, but looking at it again now, he still didn’t have any memory of owning it.

His attention was on the lighter, so he sucked in the smoke out of habit without thinking too much. His lungs immediately seized up and he fell into a violent fit of coughing.

While he was underground, he’d been the extremely ungrateful victim of a strict no-smoking policy; now that he thought about it, it had been a pretty long time since he’d last inhaled smoke. Maybe he was now oxygen-deprived, because the world swam before his eye and he stumbled slightly. Crap. Now all the pedestrians around him were giving him dubious looks. He pulled his hood farther down across his face and sped away from them.

Grabbing that coat he’d spotted hanging on the wall had been a good call, if he did say so himself. There had been a little cash in the pocket, which he’d gladly taken to buy some smokes before melting into the crowds and welcome darkness of the city night. Now he was walking toward uptown. No pursuers seemed to be following him through the city streets yet. To be honest, he hadn’t expected the guards to fall for such a simple ploy, but luckily they seemed to think he’d headed into the waterways, just as he’d hoped they would.

Now that he was forcing his body to move, his core seemed to have transferred its energies from healing his wounds to more everyday activities; even though he’d been so weak at first that he’d immediately collapsed after escaping his cell, his awkwardness had steadily faded and now he was starting to be able to move normally.

His right eye and cheek had begun to throb painfully, though. He hid that conspicuous gauze under the hood of the coat and rushed along the edges of the city, puffing on his cigarette with odd stubbornness even though it didn’t taste that good, and periodically coughing.

Incidentally, he’d also injured a muscle in his left arm using that absurd strength earlier.

They’d been treated as the strongest of soldiers in the War because they’d been able to ignore their physical limitations and go wild, since no matter how much damage they did it would heal right away anyway. They didn’t actually have inhuman strength or anything. He’d heard rumors that when they were manufactured, the scientists had chosen the corpses with the best parts to use on them, which frankly seemed likely—but even if that were true, it still meant their superiority or inferiority was measured on the same scale as a normal person’s.

Shit, this is taking forever…

Pain still shot from his elbow to his shoulder when he flexed his arm. He realized once again that if he unthinkingly went too far, his regenerative powers probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. Looking back on it now, he thought his decision to rip out the remains of his own crushed eyeball because the odd loose feeling of it had annoyed him might have been too hasty. At this rate, it was going to take a fair amount of time for the eye to fully regenerate. He couldn’t get a handle on his depth perception, and he’d come close to knocking over several passersby before he’d gotten used to walking around with only half his vision.

The woman had given him an overall explanation of the city’s layout before, so he found the house he was looking for comparatively easily. It was in a corner of a quiet uptown residential district. In this neighborhood the mansion could be rated “cozy”; there was an agreeable refinement to the white walls that jutted up into the blue-gray night sky.

He felt somewhat relieved to see that it was more or less as he’d pictured it. Then, in an act that sharply contradicted this peaceful feeling, he darted his eye in either direction to confirm that the coast was clear and began climbing the gate. From the top he dropped down soundlessly to land in the estate’s front garden.

“Now then…” So far he’d acted without hesitation, but now that he was actually standing at the front door, he came to a halt. He hadn’t given any concrete thought to what would happen next.

If anyone was here besides Julius or that woman who’d been his nursemaid or whatever, he couldn’t very well just waltz right in, but on the other hand, even if he sneaked in somehow, he sure as hell didn’t know the layout inside the house. And even if he got past those hurdles and managed to meet up with Kieli…

What do I even intend to say?

He considered this for a few seconds, then mentally shrugged and decided it would work itself out somehow. He was casting around for a good point of entry when the front door suddenly opened.

The rectangular patch of light from inside illuminated the garden. He made as if to hide, but then the female-shaped shadow who’d flown out the door tripped on the step and started to fall. Without thinking, he reached out to support her.

With a cry of surprise, the woman in his arms lifted her face. When she recognized him, her mouth opened in the shape of a scream, so he hastily covered it with his left hand. He bent his mouth to her ear and said in a fast whisper, “I’m not going to do anything to you. I heard that Kieli—I mean, the girl who came to see me this evening—was here.”

No sooner did the woman give a tiny nod than she began shaking her head wildly, eyes wide. He realized something was wrong and removed his hand. She immediately grabbed his arm with an awful expression on her face. “I’m so sorry! She’s gone from her room and—”

“Gone?”

“I’m sure she went to the underground waterways to look for you. This is all because I took my eyes off her for a minute…Oh, how will I apologize to Master Julius? No, that’s not important; what if something happens to our guest?! Quick—we must go look for her—”

“Hey! Okay, I get you. Calm down.” Faced with this woman wailing at him as tears and makeup ran down her face in streaks, he was a little at a loss. He pulled away. “How long ago was it? Do you know which way she went?”

“It can’t have been long…I’m so sorry, I don’t know which direction she left in. This is all because I took my eyes off her for a minute! However can I apologize to Master Julius?!”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” You said that before. “Look, go back inside. It’s okay. I’ll go look for her,” he said as sincerely as he could, holding on to the woman’s shoulders. As he spoke, half of his mind was focused on bringing up a mental map of the city and orienting himself to where the possible entrances to the sewers were. If not too much time had passed, he should be able to catch up.

The woman wiped her tears with the handkerchief clutched in her hands and lowered her eyes in embarrassment. Apparently she was feeling a little calmer.

“I’m sorry for getting so upset….”

“It’s fine.” He let go of her shoulders and bowed his head lightly. “I should apologize to you for all the trouble.”

With that he turned on his heel and started to leave, but feeling eyes on him, he looked back again to find the woman still at the front door, staring stupidly at him, her face streaked with tears. When their eyes met she dropped her gaze hastily. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just…you sounded like such a normal person, and I wasn’t expecting…oh!” Harvey had no idea what that “oh” was supposed to mean, but the woman shrank back and fell silent without continuing the thought.

Well, excuse me for being so unexpectedly normal.

Unsure how to respond, he eventually turned around and left without any expression registering on his face.

“Il, it’s late. Go to sleep.”

A boy’s voice cheerily answered the girl’s. “I’m not sleepy yet!”

Beatrix peeked at the bed of the truck through the small window in the back of the cab and stifled a sigh. The girl had made a little bed out of blankets in the space between pieces of cargo in the back, and now the boy was rolling around on it with cries of delight.

What a peaceful scene.

“So like I said, when that innocent little brother and sister told me they were going to their relatives’ place in North-hairo all by themselves, I took them aboard out of the pure kindness of my heart. A man wouldn’t be able to sleep at night thinking of some bad guy catching them, taking all their money, and selling them into slavery, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, quit going on about that,” she answered carelessly, sliding her gaze to the man in the driver’s seat, who was chattering fluently as he gripped the steering wheel. Well, she guessed he was probably telling the truth. He might have an ulterior motive—perhaps he guessed that these relatives were a rich family with ties to the Church and hoped to force their gratitude and get some reward money, and with luck, some business connections—but she was under no particular obligation to worry about that.

According to what he’d said, he was a merchant who traveled between Westerbury and North-hairo, mainly dealing in rarities and collectors’ items for fanatics. It was true that there was a comparatively large number of rich people in those places who could afford to pour money into such interests. Of course, it was still just a handful of the elite.

He’d been making a pit stop in Toulouse when a black-haired girl with a cool expression and some real talent who’d happened to be at his table in the gambling parlor had caught his eye, and so he’d gone after her to try to pick her up. And the rest was history.

“But man, talk about a surprise. You were wearing such a weird, no, I mean eccentric getup and covering your face, so I thought you must be a real ugly woman. But you’re a total babe! I should’ve asked you out that day.”

“If you had, I would’ve done more than hit you with a trunk. And there were extenuating circumstances that day.” “Eccentric” isn’t any better than “weird”! I know you mean the same thing by it!

“What circumstances?”

Beatrix turned away irritably. “None of your business.”

“Lady, why did the witch girl leave you behind?” broke in a guileless voice from behind her. When she turned around, the young boy was sticking his head through the window with a grin on his face. She didn’t really like or dislike children, but if nothing else she was bad at talking to them. While she hemmed and hawed, grimacing, the boy’s older sister grabbed him and yanked him away from the window. “Il! I told you not to bring that up anymore!”

“She’s right, Il,” nodded the merchant, assuming a brotherly expression for no reason Beatrix could see. Addressing his audience in the rearview mirror, he launched into a specious lecture. “The story that the Witch of Toulouse was a black-haired woman in black clothes is pure fiction. The souvenir sellers who’ve set up around the bell tower invented it based on eyewitness accounts from people who said they saw a ghost there or whatever. What the reliable sources say is that the witch was a beautiful woman with blond hair and blue eyes.”

As he spoke, he darted a look at Beatrix out of the corner of his eyes. Unable to judge how much he meant by it, she confined herself to glaring expressionlessly back at him. Could he be gauging her reaction? Maybe she was overthinking things, but…

“Anyway, the witch’s ghost couldn’t exist in the first place. Everybody calls her a witch all the time because that’s easy to understand, but the actual Witch of Toulouse was—”

“No!” the girl cut in suddenly, halting the merchant midsentence. The loud cry echoed in the back of Beatrix’s skull, and she instinctively leaned away a little. She turned, wondering if it was really something to shriek about like that, only to see the girl crouching in the truck bed with her arms protectively around her brother. He squirmed to get away, whining “What was that for, Monica?!”, but she kept her hands clapped firmly over his ears.

“That’s a dirty word that you mustn’t ever say! It’s even worse than ‘witch.’ Our parents and the Church priests were v-very strict about it…!” In her passion, the girl was actually convulsing. Both flabbergasted, Beatrix and the driver exchanged blank looks.

“Wow, now I really feel like I’m in North-hairo,” joked the merchant with a grin.

“…Yes,” Beatrix agreed shortly. Then she turned away and looked out the windshield at the scenery. There was nothing much to be seen there, however: just the headlights cutting white circles into the heavy blue-gray of the nighttime world, casting shadows on the rutted path through the wilderness.

That kind of thing wasn’t limited to North-hairo, the lap of the capital. To the totally average devout family, it was totally average for Undyings, and the word “Undying,” to be thought of like that.

Boom!

An explosive sound like something pounding against an invisible wall suddenly reverberated through the back of the truck, jerking her thoughts back to her surroundings. Then music began to play at high volume.

“Wh-What the hell is that?!” the merchant cried in surprise. Equally shocked, Beatrix covered her ears and turned to look into the bed, and almost jumped out of her seat. The little boy sat frozen on the blanket, stunned. In his arms was a small radio. She’d tossed it back there with her trunk; the boy must’ve picked it up and fiddled with the controls.

“Give me that, you idiot!” Leaning her upper body out the window, she snatched it out of his hands. She immediately turned the sound down with a sigh of relief, but the girl, who had also sunk to the floor of the truck in a daze, frowned at her.

“What was that? Savage music like that is banned, you know!”

“Well, excuse me for being say—” the radio began, protesting. To shut it up, Beatrix tossed it onto the floor of the front seat without looking.

“Um, you see, this isn’t mine. I’m just holding on to it. If it were up to me, I’d throw it away right now, but it isn’t.”

Things were starting to get kind of troublesome. She was fed up with it all, but she bluffed it out for the moment and glanced at the driver to check his reaction. He kept on driving casually with his elbow on the wheel. “Eh, loosen up. It’s not like anybody’s going to take you to task for it out here in the middle of the wilderness. Go ahead and let it play; I don’t care. Like they say, good company on the road makes the shortest journey.” He beamed, winking at her.

This guy is a little too understanding. “…Thanks,” Beatrix said grudgingly, and decided not to let her guard down around him.

She sensed something lurking beyond the darkness in front of her.

She tried beaming the flashlight hanging from her neck at it, but the light was swallowed up right away by the darkness of the tunnel, and she could see only a little way ahead. Underground, darkness must be higher on the totem pole than light.

“Harvey…?”

No voice answered her weak call. The echoes of her own voice just bounced eerily back to her off of the walls of damp and dark that enveloped her. For lack of a better idea, Kieli trained her light on the pathway along the water and went in that direction. It’d be trouble if she ran into the Church Soldiers’ search team, so she couldn’t very well wander around shouting for him.

She’d found the flashlight sitting in front of Julius’s nursemaid’s house and grabbed it, silently apologizing for her terrible upbringing. She thought it had been a little less than an hour since she’d climbed down into the underground waterways from a drain in the uptown residential district and started walking along the water. A moist cold seeped through her coat, chilling her to the bone; it was completely different than the dry, biting winter wind that blew across the plains. The wet sound of her feet striking the dank concrete floor echoed weirdly off walls slimy with muck and moss. She was already nervous, and the sour smell and the claustrophobic feeling of the underground tunnel only made her feel smaller.

She hadn’t thought she was walking aimlessly, but now she was gradually losing confidence. It made sense that to get from uptown to midtown, where the prison was, she should follow the water downstream. But in this part of the tunnel the current slowed down, and it was hard to tell which way was downstream. When she cast her light on the surface, viscous black water like used oil undulated with the deliberation of a lazy animal.

The underground waterway network was built by the advanced pre-War civilization, and boasted a grand scale that was probably impossible with today’s technology. People said it spread out underneath all of Gate Town, crisscrossing itself like a labyrinth. Walking down the concrete path that had been built along the water, Kieli sometimes saw gaping arched caverns along the wall beside her. Water flowed into these thin sidestreams and out of sight.

The passage she was walking along now followed a fairly large stream; the puny glow of her flashlight didn’t reach the other side. However, considering how wide the tunnel was, it wasn’t very tall. The uneven ceiling coated with muck that hung low over her head deepened her feeling of claustrophobia.

After she’d gone down the tunnel awhile, she started to hear the sound of rushing water coming from the darkness ahead. She walked a little farther, shining her light around her, and came out into a slightly wider space where two streams met. At the point where the two currents ran into each other and grew stagnant, she could see a sort of black embankment stretching across.

It looked like all the debris that the water carried with it, large and small, had accumulated in the center of the stagnation, combining with the muck and lumping into a small dike. The dammed-up water flowed out through cracks in the dike, past which it broke out of its stillness and coursed in a fast current downstream.

Kieli could understand now what had been blocking up the flow of the river behind her. As she squinted at the dike, the toe of her boot slipped into the water with a splash, and she hurriedly drew it back out. Maybe the pathway she’d come down was starting to crumble beneath the surface; the concrete slanted down into the water before her and the hallway was cut off.

I’m at a dead end…

If the presence she’d felt earlier hadn’t been a figment of her imagination, then there must still be a path forward somewhere (as long as that person hadn’t dived into the water, and that was why she hadn’t seen him…). She let her light play over the water slowly so that she wouldn’t miss the smallest clue.

Various bits of flotsam were stuck right in front of the dike and were bobbing slightly up and down on the black surface of the water.

Among them was what looked like the back and head of a person floating facedown.

With a cry, Kieli realized she’d stepped farther down the path and into the stream without really thinking about it. Luckily, there wasn’t a sudden drop-off or anything, and the water only came up to about the tops of her boots. She sloshed along, sending up splashes of the cloudy water churning around her legs.

She managed to scramble up onto the dike where a part of it had rotted and crumbled, and walked along to the floating body. Hesitantly, she shined her light on it to see if it was still alive.

Oh!

In hindsight, of course she hadn’t been sure it was Harvey; she’d just seen a person floating and so she’d come closer to investigate, that was all. And the thing that had looked like a person was just a big piece of trash tangled up in a tattered, waterlogged blanket.

She was relieved, but at the same time a little deflated. Maybe she’d leapt to the wrong conclusion because she’d heard that it wasn’t unusual for people to go missing in the waterways.

It looks like I can keep going from the other side…

When Kieli let her light shine on the other bank from her perch on the dike, it looked as though the path hadn’t crumbled into the water on that side. If she crossed over, she could probably keep going downstream.

She started walking down the dike to the opposite bank. Muddy gunk coated the trash it was formed out of, and it was easy to slip. She moved cautiously forward one step at a time, paying attention to the surface under her feet.

She thought she’d been careful enough. But she’d been so focused on where she stepped that she was taken by surprise when her foot slipped inside her water-filled boot.

“Wah!”

She lost her balance and slipped down the other side of the dike, splashing into the water backside-first. “Oh…uh-oh!” The water on the other side of the dam was moving faster than she’d thought. She was almost swept away before she knew it, but at the last second, she grabbed the dike with both hands.

She’d just barely managed to hold her ground, but now she couldn’t move. She was sure the slightest motion would throw off her balance and she’d be swallowed up by the current.

It hadn’t bothered her when she’d first stepped into the water, but now the wet hem of her coat was unexpectedly heavy, twining around her legs and threatening to drag her into the current. As she somehow resisted, clinging to the dike, painfully cold water was seeping through her clothes, soaking her to the core. She started feeling pins and needles in her hands.

Even as she panicked, she still couldn’t quite grasp the situation. The flowing sands of the Sand Ocean had been smoother, and had never clung to her like this. And far from being this cold, the sand had actually had a slight warmth to it.

What should I do? I’m in trouble…

She’d never known water was so heavy and cold.

“I’m so stupid…,” she mumbled to herself.

“Yeah,” a completely unexpected voice agreed.

Kieli looked up from her humiliating pose sitting butt-first in the water and clinging to the dike with both hands. The flashlight around her neck was submerged, too, but luckily it didn’t seem to be broken; enough wavery light broke through the water’s surface to win her a small field of vision.

On top of the dike in front of her, she saw the hem of a dark-gray coat and a pair of long legs. Sliding her gaze up a little further, she made out the shape of a man standing with both hands shoved into the pockets of the coat.

She lifted her chin a little farther still and looked up at his face. He was a young man of about twenty, with white patches of gauze covering his right eye and cheek.

She breathed a little noise of relief and started to smile, but—

“What’s wrong with you? That foolhardy personality hasn’t improved at all. A normal person would at least think about the fact that if she got in the water unprepared she might get swept away.”

—The very next moment she was mercilessly cut down, and her thawing feelings froze over again at once. She couldn’t see him clearly in the dimness, but all the same the look of exasperation in his copper-colored left eye was plain as day.

“…Well,” mumbled Kieli. Embarrassed and offended, she looked down, sulking. Well, there were no waterways in Easterbury or South-hairo, and it’s easy for him to say a normal person would have thought of it, but I never have. It’s Harvey who knows too much about this stuff…especially considering he doesn’t even know where chickpeas come from.

After she’d stared at the dike in miffed, stony silence for a while, she heard a sigh and saw a hand thrust down toward her. She looked up to see Harvey crouching there, his right hand still in his pocket, his left hand reaching out to her.

“Here. Hurry up and give me your hand.”

“…”

She gazed at the hand in front of her for a few seconds. Various different emotions flashed through her mind. Long fingers and a big palm—they were slender and bony, but she could still see the rough muscles there. It was no different from the hand etched into her memory.

For a moment, she thought of grabbing it.

But in the end, she turned her eyes angrily away. “No thanks. I don’t need your help. I look after myself.”

“Obviously you can’t, or you wouldn’t be in this situation! What’s with the weird stubbornness?”

“Excuse me?!” Kieli looked right back up again. She felt as though she’d just been letting him insult her for this whole conversation, and she didn’t like it. “This is all your fault in the first place for running away! And Juli took good care of you, too, and then you caused him trouble! I’ll have you know he was angry about it!” she shot back in a wild voice.

Now Harvey was the one who looked miffed. “Look, you! I only did that because you stormed off without listening to me.”

“Well, that was because you—” she started to argue, and then her hand slipped from the dike.

Two panicked voices cried out in chorus. She immediately dug her fingers into the slimy sludge of the trash heap and got her grip back. When she lifted her bloodless face to look at Harvey, his own face was equally ashen; he stood there paralyzed with his hand still stretched toward her. For several seconds they gazed at each other, speechless.

Eventually Harvey appeared to give in. “Okay, fine,” he said with a grimace and a sigh. “We can call it all my fault. I’ll listen to you complain all you want later, so for right now just give me your hand. You’re giving me a heart attack.”

This made Kieli even madder, since he sounded as if he was only letting her win out of necessity. He says I haven’t improved, but his habit of just agreeing with people because arguing is too much trouble hasn’t improved at all either!

“Kieli, come on, grab it. Please.”

“No. Leave me alone.” She started scooting herself sideways along the dike to get away from that outstretched hand. She could probably climb up on her own if she could get to a place where the current was weaker. After all, she’d gotten along without stupid Harvey this long.

“Hey, watch out—”

She felt the place she’d grabbed for a handhold squish and sink underneath her fingers.

She was suddenly holding on to nothing but handfuls of half-rotten garbage plucked from the dike, and in no time she was propelled away by the black, rushing water, and then she didn’t know what was happening anymore.

“You little id—” Harvey managed to bite out before other concerns became more pressing. He’d managed to grab Kieli’s wrist at the last moment, but when he instinctively tried to reach out for purchase with his right hand, naturally it didn’t respond. Unable to keep his balance, he ended up getting dragged into the water with her instead.

Kieli seemed to be unconscious. He drew her to him by the hand and held on to her body with his left arm. Since that left him no way to resist the suddenly faster torrent, he let it knock them about, sending them slipping through the dark tunnel. The roar of crashing water bounced off the walls and ceiling and assaulted his eardrums from all directions.

If it had been completely dark, he would’ve lost his sense of direction in no time, but the flashlight around Kieli’s neck managed to cast a dim, blinking light as it bounced off the surface, sunk, and reemerged again.

Damn it, how far does this thing go…?

He strained his eye, following the light downstream, but the arched tunnel just stretched on and on into the blackness in a slightly weaving line. He couldn’t even guess how far they might be carried. With a silent growl of irritation, he tightened his one-armed grip on the limp girl clutched to his chest so that she wouldn’t get wrenched away. He just hoped she hadn’t breathed in too much water…

When he returned his attention to the tunnel in front of them, he let out an involuntary groan. The end of the road had abruptly come into view. Maybe “end of the road” wasn’t quite the right term. At any rate, the black torrent broke off suddenly, leaving only a horizon line, beyond which there was nothing but darkness.

He realized the danger, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it; by that time the brink was already right in front of him. He slid cleanly off it and launched into the dark.

At the horizon line, the water cascaded straight down. Buffeted by the churning current, Harvey fell with it and was smacked into the surface of the stream at the bottom several seconds later. For a moment his awareness dimmed. Then he realized with a start that he’d almost let go of Kieli as they sank underwater, so he reasserted his grip on her, kicking up to the surface.

“Kieli!” The roar of the falls was so loud he couldn’t even hear his own voice. He propped her head on his shoulder and briefly checked the color of her face before surveying their surroundings.

They were in an almost circular open space, like an underground lake or something. The ceiling was high. When he let his eye travel up the vertical waterfall, it was swallowed up midway by darkness, and he couldn’t tell how far they’d fallen. He guessed it was about a dozen meters, or maybe a little more, but it didn’t really matter, since he couldn’t see any way of getting back up.

Directly below the falls, where the loudest of the roaring was coming from, the water sprayed up violently and churned in muddy whirlpools, but otherwise the water here was comparatively calm. Gentle black waves reflected the light. Judging from the fact that the water level seemed to be constant, there might be a drain somewhere on the floor underneath them, but the water was pretty deep, so that didn’t really matter, either.

He saw a bank along the far wall that looked low enough for him to crawl up it.

Hmm, that’s a little far away…

Given that he could only use one arm and he was holding onto Kieli, it would be tough to swim that far. Irritated at his own body, he bit the girl’s neck in his teeth so that her head wouldn’t slip beneath the surface; and he began to swim, pushing at the water with his now-free left hand.

The waves were gentle, but their wet clothes made their weight feel many times heavier, and the sluggish black water clung to his limbs with what seemed like deliberate malice. With enormous effort, he closed in on the bank. Just when it was almost within reach, he heard the girl’s groans amid the rush of water filling his ears. “Ugh…nnn…”

It sounded as if she had come to.

Harvey suddenly had a bad feeling about this. It was painfully obvious that she couldn’t swim. She probably had never experienced being in water so deep she couldn’t touch the bottom…

After a few seconds, enough time for her to take in the situation, his fears were confirmed.

Kieli suddenly gave a shrill scream, eyes rolling sluggishly around the room, and she clutched his head as if trying to use it to crawl up out of the water. “Stop that, you moron!” With her pushing his head down, his face started to sink below the water, and of course Kieli started to sink with him, which only terrified her and made her clutch more desperately at him.

They came close to drowning together, but Harvey somehow reached the bank before his breath ran out, and he seized one of Kieli’s flailing hands and forced it to grab the side.

“Climb up!” he spat in annoyance, pushing her from behind. Kieli clung frantically to the bank, hauled herself up, stumbled a little farther on as if to put whatever distance she could between herself and the edge, and then dropped down on all fours and began to cough.

“Sheesh…” Immense exhaustion poured over him, and for a while he just leaned his upper body against the wet concrete, panting. After he caught his breath, he finally pulled himself up one-handed onto the bank. “You really had me panicked there. Were you trying to kill me?”

“But—”

Harvey cut off whatever excuse she was going to make and bellowed, “‘But,’ my ass! You have no clue how dangerous the water is!”

Kieli shrank back at his shout, but she was apparently still upset with him over something, because she turned away with a sullen look on her face.

“…Whatever. Do what you want; I don’t care.” He couldn’t deal with her anymore. Sending off splashes of water every time his feet hit the ground, he walked a little ways away and sat down.

He couldn’t see the whole room from where they were, but it seemed to be a pretty big circular space. Along the gentle arc of the wall, a sort of lakeshore stretched out to their right and left. In one direction the path had crumbled a little ways ahead and sunken into a pile of flotsam and jetsam by the edge, but in the other direction it kept going on into the darkness; they might be able to get somewhere by following it.

For right now, Harvey didn’t feel like doing anything.

The path was less than a meter wide. If he stretched out his legs, his heel could touch the brim. He bent his legs a little and sat there, leaning his back against the wall. Every centimeter of his body was soaked through, but he couldn’t work up the energy to dry himself past swinging his head a little to shake the droplets out of his hair. His heavy, freezing clothes stuck to his skin in a thoroughly unpleasant way.

The noise of the falls crashing in the distance faded into a nice static here, easing the silent atmosphere. Letting the sounds of the water flow over him, he stole a sidelong glance at the girl sitting next to him. Like Harvey, she was sitting with knees folded and streaming water like a drowned rat. Her face was bluish white, and her lips trembled a little; she pressed them into a thin line and wrung out the hem of her coat with the same violence someone might use to throttle their parents’ killer.

“You’re cold, right?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Leave me alone.”

“…I see. Fine, I won’t say anything anymore.”

Conversation over.

He had no idea how they’d gotten on such bad terms. He couldn’t remember anymore what the direct cause had been. While he was avoiding her gaze, he turned his face up to the blackness above them and sighed. He thought quite sincerely that if there were someone looking down on them from the sky, he wished they’d tell him what had happened—but then again, even if there was someone there, it was hard to believe they could see all the way down underground to where he and Kieli were anyway.

Her clothes were soaked right through to her underwear, and every time she moved even slightly, they squelched. It felt gross.

Even though her hands were so numb she could hardly feel them, she forced them to squeeze out the hem of her coat as she stole glances at Harvey’s profile. He was sitting against the wall, long legs folded, staring at a random spot on the shadowy surface of the water with a faint scowl of annoyance on his face. As she watched, he irritably tore off the tape that had half peeled free from his cheek. Underneath the gauze a nasty wound was still festering horribly. The tape over his right eye was wet and peeling too, but maybe he didn’t want to take that gauze off. Instead, he pressed his palm to his face and forced the tape back down.

When he’d held out his hand to her earlier, she hadn’t really noticed anything, but now she realized that his right hand had been stuck in his pocket this whole time. She wondered whether that meant he couldn’t move it anymore. Come to think of it, she had the feeling he hadn’t used his right arm while he was dragging her here through the water, either.

Why was this man always so tattered every time she saw him?

It’s not fair, she thought. When she saw him like this, she started to feel as though she was the one in the wrong. Now it seemed as though her stubbornness was just causing problems for an injured man.

…Before, we could have made up and been friends again so easily.

The year-and-a-half void hit her in an unexpected way. How had she talked to him before? Was she cheerful and honest? Or had she been more reserved? If nothing else, she knew she hadn’t been this pigheaded and contrary.

Harvey was probably the same as he’d always been. She must be the one who had changed. He was right there within her reach, so close, yet the deep rift that year and a half had made seemed to yawn open between them.

Kieli shifted to sit with her hands around her knees, and gazed into the wide, dim space in front of her. With nowhere to go, the murky water that was neither clean nor clear grew stagnant, its ripples sluggish. Soon it started to look like a mass of tentacles waiting to drag any prey that got near the edge down into the black depths, but when she drew her feet away a little in fear, the surface was tranquil again, and it began to seem like nothing more than gentle, dark waves.

Maybe the water here was a mirror that reflected a person’s state of mind.

If I can manage to talk with Harvey like I used to, will this foul water seem clear? She tried to imagine a beautiful, clear lake, but she couldn’t really picture it. She hugged her knees and shrank inside the coat that was now just heavy and cold.