CHAPTER 3

REAL UNDYING

His body was filled with heat and pain. It felt as if the fluids in his body were boiling, melting every last cell one by one.

The agony almost exploding out of him made him want to fall to the ground and writhe, yet at the same time he was haunted by the uneasy feeling that this body wasn’t his at all. His mind was controlling his feet from somewhere a long way off, pushing or dragging one in front of the other to propel him forward. The soles of his shoes were so worn out they hardly existed anymore; the scrape-slap of his footsteps echoed eerily through the darkened streets of downtown.

He’d walked a mind-boggling distance already, telling himself all the while Just try for a little longer.

Just a little longer,

Just a little longer,

Just a little longer…

“…It’s our building…”

He wondered how long it had been since he’d last spoken. A long time, anyway. The sound he squeezed out of his throat now came out low and flat, like a tape played on a dying recorder. His tongue was thick, tripping over the words, and they sounded horribly clumsy to his own ears.

A cheap little apartment building packed tightly between two others on either side, looking almost apologetic for being there. He circled around to the side and stood under the window of the corner apartment on the first floor. Both the window and its curtains were closed, but when he peered through the tiny slit between the curtains, he could see a tired middle-aged woman clearing off the dining table inside.

Oh, she’s a little thinner now…And a little older, too…

His chest tightened, and not out of physical pain.

He placed his hand gently on the window frame. Except he’d underestimated his own strength; his “gentle” sent the thin glass panes rattling loudly.

The woman inside turned around and drew questioningly up to the window. His chest was on fire, again not out of physical pain. What should I say first? I guess the first thing is “I’m home”? “I’m home”…He practiced it a few times without opening his mouth, so that his tongue would obey him when it was time.

The woman parted the curtains a little further and peeked out at him through the glass. The bleary indoor light spilled out onto the asphalt, softly illuminating the street around him. He sucked in a breath, momentarily forgetting the pain in his lungs. “I’m home, Mom…”

The windowpane reflected his face back at him, overlapped with his mother’s, and that was when he remembered exactly what he looked like right now.

His mother’s face on the other side of the glass twisted with fear right before his eyes. The moment she opened her mouth in the “o” shape of a scream, he bolted. A beat later, the scream followed him, echoing off the walls.

He ran for his life, desperate to get as far away as he could, ignoring the pain coursing throughout his body. His mother’s long, thin scream rang in his ears like tinnitus, following him long after his footsteps had taken him out of there; he just kept on running for his life until he couldn’t hear her anymore.

“Want me to carry that?”

“I’m fine,” said Nana, shaking her head stubbornly. Kieli shrugged. But the truth was that she was already walking unsteadily herself, a little cowed by her own mountain of laundry. Nana staggered after her, both hands wrapped around a pile of linens that buried her up to the face.

It’d been a little warmer than usual today, so everything had dried by sunset, thank goodness. There was a huge amount of washing to take in; they were splitting it up into multiple trips between the clotheslines and the trailers. Five days into the Colonization Days festivities, it was a familiar job.

From what Kieli had heard, the lady who used to do the troupe’s chores had gotten sick and quit or something, so now the members were doing their own cooking and cleaning in rotations. Still, though they couldn’t very well shirk kitchen duty, the laundry seemed to always get left by the wayside. It didn’t take long before she couldn’t stand to see all the costumes and house clothes and linens piling up to the sky anymore; she just snapped and started washing, and after that it was a done deal. The whole job became Kieli’s.

The trailer with the water tank in it had an industrial-size washing machine. They dried the clean things on ropes strung between the trailers. Shiman’s troupe wasn’t really that big, but they somehow managed to produce such horrifying amounts of dirty laundry every day that you could spend most of your waking hours just taking care of it. But really, Kieli would’ve felt bad freeloading without giving anything in return, and she needed something to do to kill time anyway, so she was relieved to find herself useful.

Harvey still showed absolutely no inclination to take her with him into town, and when she asked him what progress he was making looking for Beatrix, he only gave vague answers. Because he’d reluctantly agreed to take the radio along with him on his trips lately, Kieli was left out in the cold. Sometimes the performers (especially Bearfoot in his bear costume) invited her to come have fun at the park, but she couldn’t go jaunting around having fun just because Harvey wouldn’t take her with him to search…

Geez, what’s he hiding…?

She was starting to seriously plan on following him tomorrow, whatever she had to do. Promise or no promise, this just wasn’t fair. (In fact, she should’ve noticed that a long time ago.)

“Are you mad, Kieli?” asked a clumsy voice somewhere below her shoulder. When she looked down, one of Nana’s eyes was peeking up at her through a gap in her laundry. The rest of her face was more or less invisible.

“Mm? No, I’m not mad,” she answered, trying to brush it off with a wry smile. Those clear, expressionless eyes gazed right at her as if they could see into her heart, and she felt an irrational pang of guilt. “…Um, it’s not so much that I’m mad…maybe more like annoyed.…” She knew she shouldn’t be saying any of this to Nana, but a few of her thoughts escaped her anyway.

It was herself she was annoyed with. Probably the reason she couldn’t get him to talk to her about anything was that he still thought of her as a little kid, just someone he was responsible for. She wanted to be more help to him, but he wouldn’t let her do anything. She couldn’t do anything.

Am I really that undependable…? Kieli sighed at herself, tossing the laundry into the trailer from the back door a little violently to vent her feelings.

“Ack!” cried someone from inside, jumping.

It was still a little early for the troupe to come home. She hadn’t expected anyone to be back yet. Surprised, she squinted into the dim trailer to find the person there turning back to look at her, then freezing in a half-standing position—with his hand stuck into one of the performers’ bags. The area around him had been trashed.

…It’s the thief. The real one, this time.

For a few seconds, it was just a frozen tableau of them staring at each other. Then one of them, Kieli couldn’t have said who, let out a dumb little noise that broke the spell, and the thief instantly launched himself at her. While Kieli and Nana shrieked and fell on their rears on either side of the door, he flew out of the trailer and took off as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Wait here!” Kieli barked at Nana, springing immediately to her feet and chasing after him. She could hear a child’s pattering footsteps behind her—obviously Nana hadn’t listened. The thief had dived between the two trailers they’d hung the laundry between. When Kieli rounded the corner after him, the linens they hadn’t brought in yet were still hanging down from overhead, blocking her way.

The thief had come to a stop before the wall of laundry, quailing before the fluttering ghostly army, but he started up running again in no time, darting beneath the sheets. Kieli had caught up by now, though. She grabbed him from behind and held on.

“Stop right there!”

“Wah!”

Kieli had too much momentum to stop, so she ended up tackling him more than catching him. They tripped, their arms and legs tangled up in each other, and plunged together into the white curtain of linen in front of them.

Something above her head gave a raspy, scraping noise—and no sooner had she heard Nana’s voice shouting “Kieli, watch out!” than (as she realized later) the rope tore free from the trailer roofs under their combined weight, and the whole forest of laundry came crashing down on them.

“Kieli! Kieli, are you okay?”

Kieli groaned. At first she couldn’t get her bearings with her vision blocked by laundry on all sides, but the muffled voice calling her name from the other side of the fabric reoriented her, and she pushed and wriggled her way through the clothes and blankets covering her. As soon as her head broke the surface, she breathed a sigh of relief. “Ouch…”

“Kieli!” She caught the girl diving into her arms and quickly scanned the area. Where’s the thief?

A groan rose up from somewhere nearby. When Kieli looked closer, she saw that the thief (at least, she thought it was the thief; it looked more like a giant bug trying to break out of its cocoon) was writhing on the ground, twisted up in a giant sheet.

“Did we catch him?”

“…Yeah. Looks like we caught him.” She and Nana exchanged somewhat blank glances. Then they slapped their palms together and grinned.

When Kieli thought about it calmly, however, half the laundry getting wrecked again was nothing to be happy about. Sure, she’d caught the thief, but that among other things had her feeling kind of down about it all.

“Tell us your name—your name and your address.”

A ring of people had gathered in the clearing of the camp, surrounding the burglar tied up with sheets and clothesline. His head showed out of the top now, but the figure in the center of the circle still looked like something cocooned, and that something was, well, a little boy of not much more than ten. His being a kid didn’t change the fact that he was a thief, of course, but Kieli couldn’t help feeling kind of conflicted when she saw one kid getting glared at by a whole bunch of adults because she’d caught him.

At the heart of the group were Shiman and the other troupe leaders. One of them was solemnly asking the boy who he was, but the boy, who seemed oddly at home in this situation, only looked away and kept quiet. Apparently he was from the downtown slums. People told her that there wasn’t much law and order in that neighborhood, and child pickpockets and purse-snatchers were just a part of everyday life there.

Kieli held Nana’s hand and watched the interrogation from the back of the group.

“Good job, Kieli. Harry’ll be proud of you!” Nana said innocently.

Kieli gave her a wry smile. “I’m not too sure about that…” She had a feeling he was more likely to curse her for being rash, actually. She’d gone after the thief on the spur of the moment and made a grab for him, but if he’d been older or maybe even had a knife, she could’ve really gotten hurt.

The questioning was still going on, but the boy just kept his mouth shut. The troupe leaders exchanged glances, obviously at a loss.

“Well, not much more we can do. I guess we should turn him over to the Church Soldiers and —”

“N-No!” It had been an offhanded thought, but to everybody’s shock, the boy suddenly went from standoffish to pale. He crawled like an inchworm to the feet of the adults standing there. “Please, anything but the Church Soldiers!”

“Okay, then, tell us your name and address.”

He clammed right up again.

“Hey, somebody make the call!”

“No! Not the Church Soldiers, they’ll take my heart! They’ll experiment on me!”

As the boy pled wildly and the adults around him snickered, amused, it was Shiman who stepped in. “That’s enough, isn’t it? He didn’t do much damage. How about we toss him into storage for a night as punishment and then turn him loose?” He ran his eyes over the people around him, waiting for their response. The other troupe leaders nodded to each other with shrugs of Sure, if that teaches him a lesson. Shiman nodded, too. Then he turned to Kieli, who’d been watching from outside the circle. “That all right with you, Kieli?”

Kieli gaped for a moment, unable to grasp that he was actually asking her opinion, before unconsciously standing at attention and saying formally, “Y-Yes, sir. That’s all right.” Why was he asking her?

“Let go of me!” the boy shrieked, flailing. One of the performers tossed him over a shoulder. The crowd broke up and began drifting off. People called out casual greetings to Kieli as they passed, even people from other troupes. Mixed among the “Attagirl!” congratulations were a few “Sorrys”; it was then that she realized Shiman had deliberately consulted her to show his support in front of the ones who’d doubted her two days ago.

And so the thievery that had created a subtle air of suspicion in their ragtag camp came to some sort of conclusion. But…parents often said “Church Soldiers tear out the hearts of bad children” as a way to keep their kids in line, so she could see where They’ll take my heart had come from, but she didn’t think she’d ever heard They’ll experiment on me before.

“So sleepy…” He yawned widely. The circus buddy walking next to him gave him an exasperated look.

“You’re sure one hell of a sleeper. You go to bed first every night, and you sleep in latest every morning, and you do the weirdest sleepwalking ever.”

“Get off my case,” answered Bearfoot. He looked the other way, wiping his running eyes. Maybe it looked to other people as though he did nothing but sleep, but his mind was usually awake. He couldn’t help being sleepy. He did think maybe he’d stop doing the out-of-body thing for a while—he’d somehow managed to get away with the flimsy “weird sleepwalking” excuse two nights ago, but he was pretty sure they’d pack him off to the hospital if it happened again. And even if they didn’t hospitalize him for that, he suspected a certain someone would give them another reason.

As soon as he’d hurriedly slipped back into his body in the trailer yesterday morning after getting caught peeping, that someone had stomped on his solar plexus (with shoes on!) and snarled Next time you cause trouble, I’ll make it so you don’t have a body to come back to in a voice that made him think he’d be kicked to death right then and there. It was scary.

“Rrrggh,” yawned his companion. Maybe it was contagious. He ended the yawn with a light stretch and muttered, “God, what a pain. The criminal’s already been caught, so why should we have to keep doing patrols?”

“You said it, man.” Yawn.

Yawn.

They set each other off on fits of listless yawns, griping softly as they walked side by side around the sleeping camp.

Ever since the first uproar about the burglary two days ago everybody in the camp had wanted more crime prevention measures, so now each troupe took turns patrolling in the afternoon and at night. “Crime prevention” was all well and good, but to the poor suckers at the bottom of the totem pole who actually got stuck doing it, it was nothing but a pain. You could make a cursory inspection of the whole place in thirty minutes, but he and the performer who wore the mouse costume had been told “You take your time, and don’t come back here for the next two hours.” So, left with no choice, they were just starting their second circuit.

“And? How are things going with Kieli?” said Rat. Bearfoot had no idea what that “and” was supposed to connect with, considering that the topic had come completely out of left field. Rat was a good guy, but he liked to tease people.

“What do you mean, ‘things’?”

“You’re after her, aren’t you? She’s no knockout, but she’s a normal sort of cute, I’ll give you that. Me, I tend to like ’em a little curvier, but to each his own.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know all about what you like.” Bearfoot shot a narrow-eyed glance at his leering companion. Then he sighed. “Things aren’t really going anywhere.”…Because the guy with her scares the crap out of me.

That whole topic was going nowhere fast, really. The conversation dropped off, and they both fell silent. The only sounds in the quiet clearing were their crunching footsteps. They echoed eerily loudly.

“In that case, let’s tell scary stories,” proposed Rat, who could apparently go from zero to unbearably bored in the blink of an eye. Once again, the topic came totally out of nowhere. What “case”?

“This is just something I heard, okay? But there’s an old geezer from one of the other troupes who says he’s seen him with the Chief before. You know, the redhead.”

“…Okay…but so what? They know each other.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, this was supposedly like twenty years ago.”

“Okay…” He’d steeled himself when Rat said “scary story” (ghost stories were no joke to him), but what was so ghostly about that? Then, after a moment, he got it—and a chill went down his spine. Twenty years ago?

With a stricken face, he turned to his patrolmate. Rat theatrically lit his face from below with his flashlight and pitched his voice down about three notches. “Not just twenty years ago, either. Thirty years ago, forty years ago…and every time he shows up, someone in the troupe dies. Last time, they found a man’s corpse inside a bear costume, covered in blood!”

“A-A bear…?” He gulped nervously, leaning closer.

The corner of Rat’s mouth twisted up in a grin. “Gotcha!”

His shoulders slumped with relief. “What the hell, man?”

“Well, I really did hear the thing about twenty years ago. But it was from this old windbag who narrated silent movies. And even if he was telling the truth, it must’ve been the guy’s dad or something, right?”

“Dammit, I’ll get you back for that,” said Bearfoot, glaring bitterly at his snickering companion and silently vowing to visit him in spirit form later and give him the fright of his life. Something didn’t sit right, though.

He’d been taken aback when he realized that the redheaded man could see him in spirit form, and not just Kieli. And he could’ve sworn he’d heard another voice, too. What was with that group…?

Rustle…

Hearing a sudden noise while he was still deep in his thoughts startled a little falsetto shriek out of him. He slapped his own hand over his mouth to shut himself up. Without taking away the hand, he exchanged questioning glances with Rat. Then, as one, they turned toward where the sound had come from.

At night the walls of the parked trailers blended inconspicuously into the blue-gray of the sky. The noise was still there, coming from behind one of them, and as they listened a rattle, rattle of metal joined it.

The two of them crept toward it together as quietly as they could. When they peeked out from the cover of another trailer’s shadow, they saw a giant human shape crouched at its back door and sort of squirming there. He must be trying to break it open. Rat gave him a significant look and then shrugged elaborately. Presumably he was trying to say something along the lines of, “Wow, we just get one thief after another here.”

Next, Rat ordered him with jerking eyes and hand signals to circle around to the other side of the trailer, which started a whole rapid-fire conversation of moving eyes and lips:

Huh? We’re going to capture him ourselves?

Obviously! If two little girls could do it, two men had better be able to do it. Don’t you want to impress Kieli?

Well, yeah…

By which point the door was wrenched open with a loud creak.

“Oh!” they both exclaimed without thinking, and the intruder turned around in the doorway.

There was definitely no question of circling around now. They just both leapt out of the shadow at once, and his companion beamed the light at the trailer ahead. In the center of its white halo they saw the thief’s face—

He was just sitting down on the wall of blocks and beginning to light a cigarette when he heard brisk footsteps behind him. When he turned to look, a small figure was running out of the shadowy camp toward him. It stopped just inside the circle cast by the light overhead, the frozen puffs of its breath coming just a little too fast, and then walked the rest of the way to him.

“You came again…”

“Oh, I just happened to wake up and I saw you coming out here.”

Harvey got the feeling she’d actually stayed up watching for him. But maybe she wasn’t in as much of a hurry today, because she was wearing a coat this time, which was a relief for several reasons.

“When did you get home?”

“Little while ago. I just had a talk with Shiman in his trailer.” As he answered, he grabbed her arm and pulled her up before she could ask permission to sit next to him. When he took the radio from around his neck and gave it back to her, she sat with her shoulder almost-but-not-quite touching his and put the radio on her lap.

“We just heard about your adventure. Sounds like you were a star.”

“Well, something like that.”

“That’s all well and good, but try not to do stuff that’s too dangerous.”

“I know. I’ll be careful.”

Harvey lit his cigarette for real this time, only half-listening to the conversation next to him. Come to think of it, hadn’t he said something like that to the radio a few days ago, too? I can see why the Corporal always has something to worry about, he thought in a somebody-else’s-problem sort of way as he dropped the lighter back into his pocket. Around that point he noticed that Kieli was watching him out of the corner of her eye. It seemed as though she was expecting him to say something, so after a moment’s thought, he patted her lightly on the head and said, “Attagirl.” That was it. The radio had already covered what he wanted to say, so he didn’t really have anything to add. Kieli seemed relieved. She dropped her gaze back to her lap, looking a tiny bit more cheerful…Don’t look so weirdly happy at such a little thing.

For some reason he didn’t know quite where to look suddenly, so he turned up his face and blew a cloud of smoke at the sky partly just to cover his confusion. He figured he wasn’t flustered enough to fall off the wall today, anyway. That last time had just been one of those things. Yeah. He’d still been thinking of her as a kid, but then all of a sudden she was unexpectedly, yeah, one of those things, so he’d panicked a little, or something. What the hell did he even mean by “one of those things”?

Dammit, this is all their fault…All these people around saying all that stuff had put dangerous ideas into his head. Harvey made an annoyed sound around his cigarette and glared sideways at the primary person “around”: the radio. “What are you looking at?” asked a frosty voice from the speaker.

“Shut up. This is your fault.” He sure as hell didn’t need the radio asking what was supposed to be its fault, though, so he was in the process of looking away and obviously dropping the subject when the screams rang out through the dead quiet of the camp. They kind of sounded like the death throes of some giant bird, but they were male voices. Two of them, Harvey estimated.

He’d already swung himself down from the wall on sheer reflex by the time he’d even processed the sound. A clamor immediately sprang up in the camp. He could hear people pouring out of their trailers.

As he poised himself to run in the direction of the screaming, something came shooting through the clearing toward him from that very direction. A massive figure carrying something tossed over his shoulder—he kept turning his head, looking behind him, looking behind him, yet he was still charging forward at unbelievable speed—

“Gah!” Harvey dodged fast enough to prevent a head-on collision, but he couldn’t get completely clear; the blow caught him in the shoulder and sent him flying. He immediately dropped into a roll and let it take him a half-turn on the ground before springing back up onto one knee. Harvey’s opponent, on the other hand, had apparently fallen completely wrong and landed splayed out awkwardly on the ground. But he was up again in no time, hurriedly pulling his hood down over his eyes and resettling his cargo over his shoulder.

Harvey caught a split-second glimpse of the face underneath the hood. Green skin like a rotting corpse, bulging lidless eyeballs—

“I-It’s a monster! A monster kidnapped the thief!”

“Over there!”

The strange figure’s shoulders twitched at the shouts and running footsteps coming from inside the camp, and it took off again like a gunshot. “Wait —” Harvey started to say, turning to go after it. Then all the blood drained from his face. There, standing directly its path, was—“Kieli! Dodge!” he shouted.

She was standing rooted to the spot in front of the block wall, with the radio clutched to her chest. At the sound of his voice she ducked, probably automatically. The next moment, the fleeing figure kicked up off the ground and launched into the air, clearing Kieli’s head and the wall in one leap and disappearing over the other side.

Kieli lifted her head and gave him a look of total incomprehension. “Har —”

“Stay here! Don’t you dare come after me, you got that?!” he snapped, and shot past her to vault over the wall without waiting for a response. By the time the radio started up with its “Moron! Don’t go alone, Herbie!” he’d already landed on the other side. The mysterious figure was already a spot in the distance, making its way toward town.

It’s fast, Harvey thought, clicking his tongue as he ran. Not only was it carrying a huge load, but it was running in the most haphazard way, dragging its rear foot and throwing its front onto the ground with a slap, and yet somehow it was freakishly fast.

The “load” it was carrying turned out to be a human child. He’d heard someone shouting crazy stuff like “The monster kidnapped the thief,” and Shiman had said the burglar they’d caught was locked up in a trailer, so he guessed this boy must be the thief. Why it would take the trouble to go after that kid Harvey had no idea, but anyway his first priority should probably be making sure the brat was safe.

Still, to think what he’d searched four days for with no luck would actually come to him…

As he ran, Harvey felt for the folding knife in his back pocket with his left hand to make sure it was there. That was all: he didn’t take it out yet. He’d been carrying it because of what he assumed would happen when he did make contact, yet even now something inside him refused to give up, stubbornly hoping that he wouldn’t really need it.

By around the time his breath finally started to race, they were in the slums of downtown. The figure in front of him showed no signs of tiring. It ran on and on through the darkened streets’ sporadic circles of light and finally kicked aside a pile of trash to dive into a narrow alleyway.

Harvey followed right on its heels, but when he rounded the corner, there was nobody there. Footsteps clanged noisily up the zigzagging stairs on the right-hand wall.

He was starting to think that something about this wasn’t right. He ignored it for the moment, though, and took the stairs up after his quarry two at a time. About three or four floors up, he jumped into the building through an emergency exit. A dimly lit hallway lined with doors stretched out to one side of him. It must be a hotel or apartment building or something, but he guessed it wasn’t being used now; there were no signs of life, and a dusty, musty smell had settled over everything. He saw a retreating back shoot straight past all the doors to the emergency exit on the opposite wall.

The vague feeling gelled into certainty. Something’s not right. Harvey’s opponent was amateurish, but it was obviously trying to give Harvey the slip. Were those things capable of that type of high-level thought…?

The instant he got out of the hallway and through the second emergency exit, he sensed malice directed at him from somewhere overhead. When he reflexively leapt to one side, it dropped down from underneath the stairs of the floor above, where it’d been waiting in ambush. It was unencumbered now. Maybe it’d laid the boy down on top of the staircase. A wild punch sliced through the air and slammed into the handrail with a harsh clang, leaving the metal warped and twisted.

Ugh, this is not funny! Harvey thought with a shudder, backstepping away from the barrage of attacks that followed. When his back touched the railing, he slid down to the floor on his back and shouted, half to encourage himself and half as a curse: “Fall!” His assailant was already running toward him with too much momentum to stop. Harvey jabbed a knee into its stomach and sent it flying. Then, still lying down, he immediately twisted his upper body around to peer over the side of the staircase.

The giant who’d sailed over the railing into space with a dull bleat of surprise was now being embraced by the ground below. Harvey doubted a mere three-floor fall would be enough to disable it, though. Should he go after it? No, first he needed to make sure the boy was safe…

He waffled between going up and going down, but the instant he caught sight of the girl running into the street below him, the decision was made for him.

“Hey! I told you not to come!”

Kieli screeched to a halt when she saw a huge object suddenly fall into the garbage pile in front of her. She stood there cowering, rooted to the spot. It promptly sat up among the trash, looking completely unharmed, and went after her. Harvey made a profane noise and coiled himself to spring down the stairs, but at that point he was tackled from behind by a completely unexpected enemy.

“You jerk!” cried the boy he’d thought was a victim, clinging to him like a monkey. Harvey missed a step and lost his balance. They tumbled down the stairs more or less in each other’s arms. He just barely managed to make his fall break right, but he slammed his back against the rail of the landing hard enough to knock all the breath out of him.

It was no time to be passing out from the pain. After a gasping second, he blocked out his nerves’ messages and tried to sit up, but the boy still glued to his torso got in his way. “What’s with you?! Move it!” When Harvey got pissed, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and tried to peel him off, the kid started pounding on him with tiny fists.

“Bastard! Bastard! What’re you trying to do to my big brother?!”

“Whatever!” Harvey didn’t even care anymore. He was just about to throw the brat off by force when he processed what he’d heard and let out a dumb, “Huh?”

“L-Let go of my brother!” cried a thick voice from below at the same time. He turned his eye toward the source of the sound, hand full of struggling child, and saw the hooded figure facing him with an arm around Kieli’s throat to keep him in check.

So now they both had hostages. They glared at each other, with the air frozen still between them, until Harvey echoed in an awkward, blank voice, “‘Brother’?”

The door creaked open a tiny crack, and then the boy slipped inside and closed it again right away behind him. Kieli was starting to feel fidgety, as though she didn’t quite know what to do with herself, so she was a little relieved to see him.

“Things in town are fine. There wasn’t any stir,” he reported briskly, moving across the room to switch places with Harvey, who was standing by the window. The window was so far up the wall it was practically at the ceiling, and the boy was too short to see out of it; somebody had built a tall pile of hemp sandbags and things underneath it as a lookout perch. He climbed easily up it and stood on his knees as he checked the street outside.

When they’d all spoken at that building earlier, the brothers had said they lived right nearby, so they’d changed locations. Now they were in a semibasement apartment that wasn’t much better than a storeroom. A bare bulb on the ceiling cast murky, yellowish light on its dusty corners. The hemp bags piled under the window had plenty of company: big boxes, little boxes, broken furniture, and all kinds of other debris littered the floor. Kieli sat on the edge of a long box up against the wall that was apparently being used as a bed.

“Want a drink?”

Surprised, Kieli shrank away unthinkingly from the mug that was suddenly thrust at her. The radio hanging from her neck leaked menacing static, and a charged atmosphere swelled all around them.

“Kieli,” Harvey said. “…Corporal, cut it out.”

Chided by Harvey’s quiet voice, all the radio’s menace evaporated immediately. Kieli quickly felt sorry for her obvious rejection. She reached out for the tin mug. But when she took it from him, their fingers brushed, and she gave another tiny flinch. His skin puckered as if it had been melted and then dried out again. His fingers were gnarled, misshapen. On some of them, the nails were just missing, as if they’d peeled off…Kieli went stiff, staring at those hands. Then, with a start, she tore her eyes away and gazed at her own hands instead.

A hand came down over her hair. When she lifted her face, Harvey was there. He sat down beside her, ruffling her hair lightly. “Sorry, Chris.”

“It’s fine. Please, don’t worry.” The man who’d introduced himself as Chris—Christoph—twitched cheeks as puckered as his fingers into an unpracticed smile. He spoke a bit slowly, as if he had to concentrate hard to make the sounds come out right. “It’ll warm you up a little,” he said to Kieli. “It’s cold, in here.” Then he deliberately retreated to a box a bit of a distance from hers to sit down.

Harvey had sat next to her to reassure her, and feeling his body heat close by was a huge relief, but at the same time she was flooded with guilt. She dropped her eyes dejectedly to the mug in her hands. It was filled to the brim with thin, lukewarm coffee. It reminded her of the man who’d brewed it and the way he spoke: eager but awkward.

Other than the camp stove they boiled water on, there was nothing in the apartment to give off heat. Nor any proper bed, either; just this long box with a blanket pushed out of the way to one side. This was what passed for his home—in other words, his hideout.

“Sorry, for causing a fuss. I was afraid my brother, would get turned over to the Church, so I was in a rush, to help him…” The sentence wasn’t very long, but it took his clumsy tongue longer than most people to get it out.

The boy keeping watch at the window turned around and pouted. “You don’t have to apologize to them, Brother,” he argued with lively, quick words that made him sound like the exact opposite of his brother.

“It’s your fault, Toby. I’ve told you, over and over, to quit stealing. Mom would be so sad.”

“Who the hell cares? Mom treated you like —”

“Toby,” said Chris, slow but harsh. The boy scowled sulkily and looked back out the window. Christoph sighed and turned back to them. He didn’t seem capable of very complicated facial expressions, but Kieli thought his pained smile probably meant he was uncomfortable. “He’s not a bad kid…He saw me, and recognized me, and hid me here. We lived on the, first floor of this building, so we used this place as our ‘base.’ We used to play here, together all the time, before I left to go find work.”

Kieli felt as though she could almost see the images of the past that were playing out in Christoph’s mind. Two close brothers who ran around hiding behind boxes as they played “war.” From his ravaged face and body it was hard to imagine what he’d looked like before, but she thought he must’ve been a nice, even-tempered young man.

His story went like this: about two years ago, the capital had sent out a call for workers to come develop the mountain, and Chris had left home to join them. However, not long after the job began there was a huge cave-in, and in the days afterward the news was filled with lists “missing” and “unidentified” persons. When the authorities eventually released a list of the bodies they’d managed to put names to, Christoph’s name was on it. The government said there were too many casualties to deal with each individually; Toby and his mother only received a letter saying that no remains would be delivered to the families and that all victims would be buried in one mass grave in the capital.

“…And the next thing I knew, I was in the pit with the monsters. Though now I guess I, didn’t look any different from them…Most of them either sat still, and never moved, or else just wandered around, and never sat down. Sometimes, they’d start eating each other, but then they’d get tired of it. Once a day, a hole in the ceiling would open up, and somebody would toss down the new guys. That was just about the only thing, that ever really happened. Everybody’d swarm around the new guys, and tear them to pieces, but they’d be fine again the next day, and they’d help gang up on the next set of new guys…”

He spoke each word slowly and clearly, so his listeners had plenty of time to take in each new revelation and let their imaginations run wild, which meant the scene sprang to vivid life in Kieli’s mind. She felt something sour rising in the back of her throat. She sipped her thin coffee to wash down the bile.

“Do you want to wait outside, Kieli?” Harvey whispered. He was still sitting next to her with his legs crossed. When she lifted her gaze a little to peek at him out of the corner of her eye, from her vantage point the left side of his face seemed as expressionless as ever, his eye a bit downcast. He chomped meaninglessly on an unlit cigarette and looked vaguely in the direction of his knees. His left hand was in his coat pocket—probably fiddling with his lighter.

Kieli could tell that what Harvey really meant by Do you want to wait outside was I want you to wait outside, but she shook her head firmly. “I’ll stay.”

She wanted to know anything and everything that might be connected to what Harvey’d seen in the capital.

Kieli had realized right away that Christoph was the same species as the monsters from the waterways underneath Gate Town (though she wasn’t sure whether “species” was the right word to use). Christoph was dried-out while they’d been aquatic, and the biggest difference of all was that he was wearing real (if obviously secondhand) clothes, but they all shared that greenish skin and giant, warped shape like their cells had bloated and swollen.

Now that she’d run into that same species a second time, Kieli couldn’t very well not press for answers. Maybe even Harvey agreed that there was no point in trying to hide this from her anymore; at long last, he’d told her in his own words about the things he’d stubbornly refused to discuss before: those monsters, and what had gone on in the capital.

She’d only just heard it all in the ten minutes since they’d come here, so she hadn’t digested everything yet, but—what had been happening at that research facility Harvey’d invaded last winter—they’d been manufacturing replicas of Undying “cores,” and the Church was in on it, and some of the corpses the Church was supposed to bury were delivered there, and with unstable replica cores shoved into them, their cell regeneration functions had gone haywire, so basically people were mass-producing defective Undyings—

So many bare facts had been stuffed into Kieli’s head all at once, and in such an offhand voice, that it honestly didn’t feel real. However, now that she’d heard this much of Christoph’s story, she was starting to internalize the reality little by little.

She couldn’t deny that she was scared to hear more. But all the same, the desire to know was stronger. Christoph had broken off and waited for her, so after a moment she said, “I’m sorry. Please keep going.” Her voice was a bit scratchy. Christoph nodded and slowly began talking again.

“…was so scared, I just cowered in a corner, the whole time. For days and days and days…that’s how I lived in that stinking pit, and I figured I would die there. But none of us ever, starved to death. Not me, not the other guys. Days passed, weeks passed…I figured I’d live on forever there.” He paused. “But then, one day, someone opened the barred door, in the wall of the shaft from the outside. It was this place called ‘Section 6’ or something.”

Something in Harvey’s hand made a small clicking noise, and he stood up so suddenly the bed-box squeaked. Kieli kind of suspected he’d accidentally flicked the lighter inside his pocket and had to put it out with his fist. He immediately smoothed all expression from his face and said, “Never mind, it’s nothing.” Maybe something had struck him, though.

Instead of sitting down, he lit the cigarette that had been hanging out of the corner of his mouth, apparently deciding that as long as he was up he might as well make the most of it. He offered an abbreviated version of Kieli’s apology from before (“Sorry. Keep going.”), and Christoph answered with the same nod. This time he took a little breath before continuing, as if all the talking was wearing him out.

“We all stampeded out of the open door. I think we were going on instinct, trying to get into the light…Some guys with guns came after us, pretty quick. I’d bet most of us were killed, or caught. But in all the confusion, I managed to get away clean. It took months, but, I made my way home…and when I saw my mom, I was so happy, I tried to show my face to her…” His voice petered out.

There was a short silence, and then he abruptly changed the subject. “Look.” He stooped over and rolled up one pant leg. Half of his shin was gouged out, the area around it charred black—it was a wound from a carbonization gun. “I got shot, on the run. Everything else healed right away, but not this. My leg hurts…it hurts so bad at night, I can’t sleep. I want to sleep, but I can’t, and I can’t take it…”

Kieli could hear Harvey sighing as he blew out a thin stream of smoke.

She’d been told that even for an Undying, it took a long time to regenerate tissue when you were shot with a carbonization gun. There was Harvey’s missing right arm, for example—and Christoph hadn’t been trained to block out pain, so he had to keep on suffering while the unhealed wound kept hurting…

“Hey, there’s a way to fix my big brother, right?” piped up the boy at the window, breaking his silence for the first time. Maybe he’d been itching to join in all along. With all eyes turned to him, he slid down from his pile of bags, sending up a small cloud of dust. “You know lots of stuff, right? Make him better. Turn him back to how he looked before, so he can go see Mom. That way the three of us can live together again like we used to.”

“Toby, it’s not fair to ask him that…,” said his brother from behind him. But Toby refused to be quieted. He walked right up to Harvey and looked imploringly up at his tall form.

“Mom won’t say anything to me, but she’s cried every single night since they told her he died. I know, ’cause I stay up and listen even after she kisses me good night. Make him better, okay? Please.”

“…Sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” Harvey’s voice and the coppery left eye looking down at Toby were cold as ice, and Toby and Christoph were both struck momentarily speechless. “It’s not an issue of making him better. He’s dead. He’s been dead for a long time. His corpse is just moving. You can’t make a corpse better.”

Who was he talking to? It was almost as if the words weren’t meant for Toby or Christoph.

The boy finally let go of the breath he’d been holding. It came out in an agonized “Why…?!” He flew at Harvey, wailing. “What’s that supposed to mean?!”

Harvey faltered back a half-step, but that was all; he didn’t try to avoid Toby or peel him off. His left hand and the right hand he didn’t have both stayed in his pockets. He stared down at the boy shaking him violently by the coat without seeming to feel anything.

“Why?! My big brother didn’t do anything wrong! Why did they make him into a monster like this?! Put him back the way he was! Put him back, put him back, put him back!”

Nobody else moved. Harvey just stood still and silently let Toby do what he wanted; Kieli, Christoph, and the radio couldn’t quite figure out how to interrupt. They didn’t seem able to do anything but watch and see what happened.

A while later, after the boy’s wails somehow turned to sobs, he started clutching Harvey’s coat and crying. Christoph finally shook himself out of his paralysis. He walked stiffly over to them and pulled his younger brother off from behind. Meanwhile, Kieli…

Kieli was angry. Maybe Christoph hadn’t done anything wrong, but Harvey sure hadn’t, either! He didn’t deserve this abuse one bit.

Bitter at Harvey for taking it all on himself and not saying anything back, and bitter at herself for not being able to say anything, she squeezed the mug of stone-cold coffee tightly in her hands.

As they walked back out into the street from the back door of the apartment building, Harvey started patting his coat pockets. “Forgot my smokes,” he muttered to himself.

He started to turn back, but Toby headed him off by saying “I’ll go get them!” The boy had been bringing up the rear of their little procession, still puffy-eyed from crying; now he immediately changed course and jogged back down the narrow steps to the semibasement storage room. Harvey, Christoph, and Kieli were temporarily left alone by the back door. Kieli stood silently looking down at the light bleeding out of the downstairs door until a finger poked the crown of her head and an exasperated voice whispered, “What are you so mad about?” She shook her head with a scowl.

Christoph hung back in the shadow of the doorway with his hood pulled low over his head, whispering uneasily, “What about the troupe…?”

Harvey waved him off carelessly. “Eh, I’ll make up something.” Who knew what unbelievable story he was going to fob everyone off with this time.

Christoph pulled the skin of his cheeks up to form a smile. “Thank you for everything…You’re a good man.” Then his words grew more hesitant and indistinct. He gave Harvey a look with a little fear—and probably a little envy mixed in, too. “You’re, a real Undying, aren’t you…?”

After stiffening for a moment, Harvey gave a little laugh as if he didn’t know how to respond. A real Undying…Now that Kieli thought about it, the words did sound kind of funny. Maybe hearing Christoph say them with such a straight face tickled him. Either way, she suspected it was an ironic laugh, directed at least partially toward himself.

Before long, they heard light footsteps running up the staircase. “Are these the cigarettes?” asked Toby, a little winded. He held out a box.

Harvey accepted it casually. “Thanks.” Toby glanced shyly up at him, seeming to check his expression. When Harvey blinked in confusion, he looked away uncomfortably.

“Um, sorry…”

Instead of answering, Harvey roughly rumpled the boy’s hair with his left hand. That was all, but maybe it got the point across, because afterward he looked ready to cry again (for another reason this time, Kieli thought). By then, of course, Harvey had already let go and turned to her. “Time to get going.”

Just then, a woman’s voice tore through the air, charging the relatively friendly scene all at once with tension. “Toby!” Almost as one, all four of them turned in the direction of the voice. Through the open doorway, they could see someone standing halfway down the hallway that connected the apartment building’s front and back doors. It was a middle-aged woman wearing a cheap-looking synthetic shawl.

“Mom…”

“What have you been doing out so late? I was so worried…!” As she spoke, she looked with blatant suspicion from Toby to the others with him, who so obviously didn’t live here. The instant her eyes settled on one particular face, she let out a short shriek.

For a split-second Christoph’s whole body went stiff, and then he flung himself out of the entryway into the night. Since Kieli was standing just in front of the door, he bowled her right over, and only Harvey pulling her into a rough hug saved her from hitting the ground. “Brother!” Toby yelled after him. Christoph was going so fast he couldn’t slow himself down in time, and he crashed into the wall on the other side of the street. He didn’t step back or even slow down. He just spun ninety degrees.

“W-Wait!” cried the woman. Christoph was already tearing off again, body hunched like a wounded beast’s, but hearing her seemed to paralyze him. All of them were frozen in midmovement for several blank seconds.

The first person to speak was the woman in the shawl. “Chris…? That’s you, isn’t it, Christoph…?”

Christoph’s shoulders jerked in alarm. Still only half-standing, he reluctantly turned his head to look at her. Could she see her son in the profile of this man’s face, glimpsed underneath the hood? Her tearful eyes widened.

“But…they told me you died, in an accident…So then why…?”

“I did die, Mom. But, I came back.”

When she heard her son’s stilted, clumsy way of talking, she gasped and staggered unsteadily back. Pressing clasped fists to her forehead, she bowed prayerfully and pleaded, “Look how sinful a creature he’s become…forgive him, O God, forgive him…” Over and over she mumbled it, like some sort of spell: Forgive him, forgive him, forgive him. Christoph just stood there, shoulders slumped. Toby clenched the hem of his mother’s shawl from behind, biting his lip wretchedly.

Just what about Christoph’s body is such a sin against God? It was the Church who made him this way in the first place! Kieli absolutely refused to accept this. Still clutching Harvey’s arm tightly, she watched the whole mother-son scene with a glare.

“Would you…let me get a better look at you…?”

“But, it’s my face, that makes you…”

“Let me see you.” Her appeal was firm, even if her voice was weak. Christoph walked timidly up to her. His mother reached out with both trembling hands and placed her fingertips on the tight skin of his cheeks, then snatched them back in horror at the feel of it. Christoph hunched his shoulders apologetically.

She hesitated a little, but then she laid her palms on her son’s cheeks, steadily this time. She stared up at his corpselike features. “Those eyes…you really are Chris, then.”

“Yeah…”

“You came to see me at first, didn’t you…? I was just so startled…”

“It’s okay…I’m sorry I, scared you.”

The woman watched her son do his very best to answer her, stumbling and clumsy-tongued as he was, and bit her lip as if to hold back some powerful emotion. She murmured please forgive him one more time. But then…

“…Welcome home…” she said, bringing his head toward her and pressing his face into her shoulder, murmuring a different set of words over and over and over like a spell:

Thank you, God. Thank you for returning my son to me. Thank you, thank you…

The rest of the late-night alleyway looked as bleak and deserted as anyone might expect, but the windows of one corner apartment on that building’s first floor were bathed in a dull yet gentle light and a faint warmth.

“Okay, so it seems like the whole thing worked out even without us being able to do anything…but do you think that family will really be able to keep living together?”

“Beats me. It’s not my problem, and I can’t do anything anyway,” answered Harvey curtly. He turned his back on those windows and started off down the alley, motioning Kieli along. “Us being able to do anything,” eh? So did you want to do something? Kieli came after him, but she still looked miffed about something, and she was glaring at the asphalt under her feet. He gave her a tired sidelong glance. “And? What are you so mad about?”

“Lots of stuff.”

…Lots of stuff, huh? Harvey gave a short sigh. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about the stuff in the capital. I meant to do it sooner or later.”

Still looking down, Kieli shook her head, and then asked softly, “Is that everything?”

He didn’t have a ready answer for that. For a few seconds he couldn’t find anything to say. Eventually he echoed “That’s everything” in a voice that sounded stilted even to him.

“…That’s okay, then.” Kieli’s voice lightened a bit in her relief, which only made his own words cut him deeper.

He walked in silence for a while, keenly uncomfortable. Downtown at this time of night was ruled by silence and a subtle tension. It wasn’t a sleepy silence so much as an “I’m holding my breath to keep my prey from hearing me coming” sort of a silence. Every so often there was a dry crinkle as he stepped on a piece of trash on the roadside.

When he pulled out a cigarette and lit it, the awkward atmosphere eased some. He tilted his head back as he exhaled so his eye could follow the trail of smoke into the night sky and wondered with a certain bizarre admiration why the smoking habit was so convenient for liars. It struck him that whoever had invented the very first cigarette long ago must have been a con man.

Boring, boring, boring…

He’d kept an eye on them for a while just out of curiosity, looking forward to seeing when it would eat its little brother and attack its mother, but things had resolved themselves surprisingly peacefully.

Well, no matter. It wasn’t as though the possibility had been completely ruled out. There was no guarantee mental corrosion wouldn’t turn it into a real monster someday. He smiled a little as he pictured what the despair on its face would look like when it realized it had killed its family. No, wait, I guess at that point it wouldn’t have the brain function left to feel despair. Heh, whoops.

“Heh,” my ass. Did I really just think that? He had to admit he was in a creepily good mood today. Any other day he might’ve been pissed off enough at having his fun spoiled to go over there and kill it himself, but today he was pretty much past caring about the little stuff. He wasn’t even particularly angry.

He’d found something much more interesting than observing failed monsters.

Watching the redheaded man and that slip of a girl disappear into the blue-gray gloom from his spot in the shadows of the alleyway, he found himself breathing a low “Wow.”

Truth be told, he was pretty shocked that the man hadn’t gotten sick of dragging that girl everywhere with him by now. She’d grown since he’d last seen her, too. So, even a little runt like that eventually gets some curves, eh? Makes me almost wish I’d done things differently.

The sardonic grin had stuck in place on his right cheek. He rubbed it with the back of his hand, and a piece of necrotized skin peeled off and stuck. Damn it, again? He looked down in irritation and saw that the skin of the hand itself was bubbling up in throbbing blisters. The coal-tar-like liquid that was his lifeblood seeped out, clinging around the wound, regenerating and perfecting the necrotized cells from the outside in. As fast as the cells recovered, they bubbled up and necrotized, and then recovered again: life and death in an endless, pointless game of tag that looked like maggots sloshing around the surface of a mud puddle. The overflowing clumps of cells splattered wetly down at his feet, making odd black stains on the asphalt.

…Well, he supposed he was a failed monster, too. Hmph.

He clicked his tongue in annoyance and ground his own cells into the asphalt with his foot, then leaned against the wall of the building and changed the direction his body was facing. He left his shoulder there to rub along the wall as he began dragging his body down the deserted alley toward the place of deepest darkness.