“Wha…?! D-don’t tell me that was your girlfriend?!”

Trying to take a step backward, Two tripped over One where he lay in the fetal position, cradling his hand, and landed gracelessly on his ass. One let out a sob.

The landing deposited Two in front of Three in the puddle of blood. Three’s consciousness seemed as if it was already fading; his body was being racked with jerky spasms. Advancing half a step toward Two, Harvey gestured briefly toward Three with his eye.

“That guy’s done for if someone doesn’t stop the bleeding soon. Not that it matters, since I’m gonna kill all of you.”

He figured that was fair warning, for what it was worth. Two shrieked, pale-faced, and scrambled away without even trying to stand up. He just scooted backward on his rear, feeling his way with his hands behind his back.

“Hey, man, we just teased her a little, we didn’t do anything…C-come on, calm down, okay?”

“I am calm. It’s almost funny how calm I am, really. Heh, it kinda makes me laugh.”

“Th-there’s something seriously wrong with you!”

“Really?…I think I’m just being normal.”

He looked down at the folding knife in his hand and adjusted his grip a few times experimentally. He’d only been carrying it around before; today was the first time he’d ever tested how it felt to use. Already it felt comfortable and right, fitting his hand perfectly. And it had been a long time since he’d really gripped a knife, but now that his feel for it was starting to come back, it actually felt pretty nice.

“Huh…I like this thing.”

A thin smile rose to his lips unbidden.

Two gave a shrill hiccup and bolted, practically on all fours still. He promptly tripped over Three’s prone body and fell again. Dragging his fallen friend up with him, he choked out to One, “H-hey, run—!” before starting to run himself. “Wait! Wait, damn it!” One hurriedly caught up to him, and they braced the incapacitated Three between them as they scurried off in same the direction they’d come from.

Well, look at that.

They’d actually taken their friend with them when they ran. Harvey was rather impressed. He decided to give them a five-second head start as a reward. 5, 4, 3—Eh, that was about two seconds short, but good enough. He regripped his knife and started to dash after the running men, when just then he saw a shadowy figure standing in front of them. “H-help us!” they cried pathetically, circling behind the newcomer as if he were their last hope. The bravado was completely gone from their voices (Great, now I look like the bad guy). As soon as they got a good look at the newcomer’s face under the gas streetlamp, however, those voices and attitudes did an abrupt 180.

“Why, you—”

Before Two had the chance to finish, the new arrival had already slammed an elbow into his face. For a split second Harvey remembered that Two was the one whose nose had been covered with gauze, but he didn’t feel any particular sympathy; it was forgotten again as soon as the memory formed.

“Joachim!”

Without slowing down his dash, Harvey switched targets and went after the newcomer.

The heavy sensation of piercing flesh—but the scream didn’t come from his target’s throat or his own. It came from Punk Number Two. Joachim casually shoved away the arm he’d yanked in front of him and used as a shield, filching its owner’s knife while he was at it, and launched an attack at Harvey without even pausing for breath. Two crumpled to the ground, cradling his mangled forearm and sobbing about something or other, but Harvey’d lost all interest in him by that point.

Skreee—!

The shrill screech of blade hitting blade rang across the bridge in the darkness. Their eyes locked over their still-locked knives. Faces close enough to feel each other’s breath, they paused long enough to each get a word in—“Yo! What’s got you so flipped out?” “You bastard…!”—before they simultaneously took one great leap away and immediately prepared for their next attacks.

Neither of them had a real reason for trying to kill each other on sight, nor did either feel the need for one.

Looking up toward the sky, Kieli realized that the clouds had stopped moving. The intermittent booming of the cannons in the distance and the dusty wind carrying the merry whoops of the kids through the yard had both abruptly died down. It was just like that final destination of all things drifting in the Sand Ocean: a place where everything had come to a complete halt, even the flow of the air.

One corner of the bleak schoolyard beneath that overcast sky was now dotted with little gray mounds. They were tiny, misshapen grave markers: nothing but a few stones piled together.

In the center of this crude collection of tombstones she hesitated to even call a graveyard, a young redheaded boy crouched piling up rocks bigger than his own fist, one by one. His silent back seemed to be warning her off even offering to help, so Kieli couldn’t do anything but stand still and quiet behind him, watching him work.

Snik. Snik. Snik.

For some time, only the dry sound of stone striking stone echoed emptily in the sky.

When a pretty stone meant to be the top of the last mound was laid down and they were all finished, little Elisha materialized above the grave. Her eyes wandered over her surroundings for a while, empty and expressionless, but when they focused on Ephraim’s face where he squatted in front of her, she smiled just a little, looking happy.

“Thanks for always making the graves, Effy.”

His drooped shoulders twitched as if he was holding something in, and Kieli’s heart hurt just watching him.

Without answering Elisha, Ephraim stood up in front of the grave and retreated to stand a little ways away. From that spot extended three sides of a square, marked out with mounds of stones—a makeshift graveyard holding not even ten people.

“He’s done!”

At the call of Elisha’s childlike voice, the other kids appeared out of the nothingness one by one to sit on top of their respective graves, knees drawn up to their chests. All of a sudden Joachim was standing next to Elisha, though Kieli hadn’t seen him arrive, and they’d naturally fallen into the same lineup as their seating order in the lunchroom.

“Today was no good either, huh?”

“It just never goes right.”

“And I even wrote a warning on the board, too!”

“I guess you have to write it so it’s easier to get.”

“Even if we make it easy to get, there’s no way anybody will get it.”

“I wonder how come we can never remember it when it’s happening, even though we can remember everything once it’s over?”

“Tomorrow we’ll forget everything again and start all over, huh?”

“I wonder if somebody will catch on tomorrow…”

And so they went around the ring of children, with each one making a comment.

Kieli had started to understand a bit about their circumstances after that stray artillery fire had landed in the schoolyard. This school was endlessly reliving a certain day from its past—she’d met a few spirits before who’d gotten trapped in time loops. The presence of a foreign element that shouldn’t exist in that loop, namely Kieli herself, had caused things to follow a slightly different course today, but in the end the results hadn’t changed.

If she’d done just a little more, taken some kind of positive action, could she have saved everyone? Or in the end, would something that’d happened so far in the past never change, no matter what she did?

“Okay, guys, see you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Bye-bye, Ephraim. Bye-bye, Joachim.”

Their brief meeting over, the children vanished one or two at a time, fading into the sky’s thin, low-hanging clouds. “Bye-bye!” Elisha, the first to appear, was the last to vanish. Then all the younger children were gone, leaving behind only the meager graves they rested beneath.

Ephraim and Joachim alone were left, the two oldest students, facing each other diagonally just as they had in the lunchroom. But neither tried to meet the other’s eyes. They stood for a while staring at the ground in stony silence.

Finally Joachim parted his lips from their bitter, tightly pressed line and muttered in a strained voice, “…It came so close to going right today. If we just catch on a little faster…If we do it again tomorrow, maybe it’ll go right this time.”

“It’ll be the same tomorrow.”

Ephraim’s answer was even flatter and more emotionless than usual.

“No matter how many times we redo this, nothing will ever change. It won’t bring the runts back to life. We’re just wasting our time.”

“You bastard!” Joachim cried furiously, and then almost before Kieli could blink, he was springing forward and launching himself at Ephraim. They tumbled to the ground in a pile of limbs and kept rolling through the low cloud of dust they kicked up, starting up a real scuffle somewhere along the way.

“Why do you always, always give up right away like that?!”

“Quit yelling about it; you’re being a pain in the ass! You know it’s the truth, and anyway we’re all long dead by now!”

“This is what pisses me off about you, the way you act like you’re better than me ’cause you’re so calm and rational!”

“What’s that got to do with it?!”

Joachim straddled Ephraim and punched him in the face, and Ephraim, not to be outdone, kicked Joachim in the stomach from below. “Stop it! Stop it, you can’t do that!” Kieli had just been watching from the sidelines up until now, but she surely couldn’t sit back and watch this. She jumped forward and dove between the two boys, peeling them apart. They still both seemed determined to get their hands on each other, so she raised her voice. “I said stop it! Cut it out right n—!”

One of their fists caught her on the side of her head, and she let out a shriek. That seemed to bring them up short, and they both stopped moving.

All three of them froze in a tangle of arms and legs for a few moments. As they gathered their breath, the two boys glowered at each other as if to keep each other in check.

“…Hmph.” Joachim was the first to look away. Coughing a little with one hand on his solar plexus, he stood up and said offhandedly, “I freaking hate you.”

Then he turned on his heel and stalked off. “Oh, wait—!” Kieli called after him. You’re leaving the school grounds. Joachim ignored her, jogging a bit unsteadily out of the schoolyard and disappearing into the ruined city beyond its half-collapsed concrete wall.

“Leave him be. He’ll be back tomorrow,” she heard Ephraim spit from behind her when she just stood there staring bewilderedly after him. She turned around to see that he was literally spitting a glob of blood onto the ground along with the words.

“Are you okay?”

“This is nothing.”

Kieli reached out to touch him, but he warded off her hand with a sulky expression on his face and wiped his mouth off with the shoulder of his own coat. After that, they sat in their corner of the empty schoolyard for a little longer in silence, still covered with sand from the fight.

“Um…,” Kieli ventured hesitantly. “If I come back tomorrow, I think maybe it could go right this time. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ll still remember today.”

“Don’t bother. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Her shoulders slumped dejectedly at the flat refusal. She knew she was an outsider, and actually maybe she shouldn’t even be here at all, but that was exactly why she’d wanted to be able to do something for them…

After she’d stared at the ground without saying anything for a while, she heard Ephraim sigh. “Look, I didn’t mean it like that…” His tone was just a tiny bit softer, as though maybe he thought he’d been too harsh before. Kieli lifted her eyes a little. This side of him was just like the man she knew so well, too.

“I don’t care about tomorrow or whatever anymore. The only thing I regret is the first time, the real time,” Ephraim mumbled in a low voice, staring with downcast eyes at a spot somewhere just in front of his own crossed legs.

“I just think—if I’d paid a little more attention to the noises outside, maybe I could’ve called the runts back in, or if I’d gone outside with them instead of sitting in the classroom spacing out, maybe I could’ve saved even just one of them…maybe I could’ve saved Elisha, at least…If something had been even a tiny bit different, maybe the future would’ve been different, and it was my—”

The boy’s words broke off with a choke. He bit his lip, head hanging, and a few tiny stains started to dot the ground at his feet.

“It was my job to protect them…!”

The grief-stricken cry stabbed Kieli right through the heart, and for a second she was choking too. “Oh, no…don’t cry, okay?” She crawled over to him and tried to get a look at his face. Ephraim shook his head violently, wiping his face with one coat sleeve and turning away from her. “Hey, don’t blame yourself, okay? It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, Ephraim…!”

Irritated at herself for not coming up with the right words to console him, Kieli couldn’t summon the nerve to say anything else, so she just gripped the back of Ephraim’s coat in both hands. Before she knew it, she was gasping out a sob and her own tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Hey, hey—why are you crying?” said the boy whose back she’d buried her face in. He sounded a little at a loss. It was the same gravelly voice and curt speech she was so familiar with, but more childlike and more helpless.

Kieli couldn’t answer verbally, so she just shook her head and clung tightly to a back no broader than her own—more slender than her own, in fact.

She couldn’t have stopped the wish for anything: If there’s anyone on this planet with the power to perform miracles, please, please end these children’s suffering and let them rest in peace. But if such a person really were out there somewhere, you would think they could’ve reached out a hand before so many young lives were taken. God was mercilessly fair to the world—so why was the world’s makeup so unfair?

They both took a wide leap back, braking with their heels. Their shoes gave a loud clack! as they simultaneously smacked hard against the asphalt.

Their knives were held in opposite hands. Other than the fact that Harvey had only one arm, their stances were virtually symmetrical. He felt as if he were facing himself in the mirror, and it sickened him. He deliberately broke his own stance to wipe his face with the back of his hand. Blood was seeping out of a shallow cut on his left cheek. With an annoyingly amused look in his slate-gray eyes, the mirror image said, “Come on, this is no fun. If a little scratch like that won’t heal up right away, you’re no better than some normal human.”

Now Harvey was so sickened he actually felt like retching. “So you’re the one who ran off his mouth to Kieli,” he ground out in a tight voice. From the moment he found out this guy was in town he’d had a hunch, but now he was sure. She’d been acting weird the past view days because she was in contact with him.

“Whatever do you mean? I didn’t tell her a single lie, for once. You’re the nasty one here, aren’t you? If something’s hard to tell her, you don’t tell her at all. Now that’s just selfish.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you. This is between me and her.”

“Oh, really. I wonder why she came to see me, then?”

“…”

This time Harvey gritted his teeth and didn’t answer. The man in the mirror laughed out loud at him, looking immensely pleased. “Poor Kieli. I’d take such better care of her, you know?”

The end of his sentence came out as a battle cry as he lunged at Harvey. Catching the tip of Joachim’s knife with his own and deflecting it to the side, Harvey jumped back again. He glanced over his shoulder to check his clearance just barely in time to bring himself to a grunting stop. He’d backed right up to the edge of the stairs. He felt himself tip backward and realized, horrified, that he was about to lose his footing. Joachim promptly seized the opportunity to make his next attack.

Crap!

A split second’s judgment told Harvey that he wouldn’t be able to dodge; he steeled himself to take the hit from the blade and launch a counterattack before the other man could withdraw it. It was like that saying: “Take a hit to win the battle.” But to his surprise, Joachim abruptly lost his balance right before Harvey’s eye. Harvey was suspicious of his good fortune, of course, but he didn’t let his chance go to waste. He knocked away his opponent’s knife with his left hand and slammed a shoulder into him with his whole body weight behind it.

Happily, the blow sent Joachim sailing off the edge of the stairs, but just before he fell, he grabbed the right sleeve of Harvey’s coat. “Gah! Let go, you bastard!”

“Not a chance!” And so Harvey was flung into the nothingness along with Joachim, and—

Gzzznnn—

—That low noise sounded again as he felt his body slam against a wall between him and the void. Repelled by the wall, Harvey’s body was flung up into the air for the briefest of moments—and he couldn’t believe his eye. The scene below him was a sky blanketed with twilit clouds over ashen ruins extending all the way to the horizon—and then gravity caught up with him and he started to fall again.

When they passed through that space, both of them screamed at once. The dizziness and nausea Harvey had felt sticking just his hand into it before was nothing compared to this. His inner ear wasn’t working; his balance shot, he couldn’t tuck to pull off a proper rolling landing; so his body hit every corner full-on as he tumbled down the stairs.

He couldn’t pull himself together enough to shut down his sense of pain, so it was a small blessing that, before he had to face the pain of hitting the ground, his mind abruptly blacked out, and all his senses were cut off.

Episode 4: Ephraim

“Nana. Come on, Nana, wake up. Go sleep in your own trailer.”

The tiny form curled up near the foot of Kieli’s bed gave an incomprehensible mumble.

Bearfoot shook her awake. Muttering something he couldn’t hear, Nana half-opened her eyes, but when he started to pick her up, she clutched onto Kieli’s blanket.

“I’m staying until Kieli wakes up!”

“Look, I’ll call you when she does, okay?”

“No!”

Bearfoot didn’t know the first thing about how deal with a fretful child. He was just about at his wit’s end when a voice at the door of the truck saved him. “Nana!” The girl’s mother, come to collect her! Nana’s resistance flagged a bit at the sound of her mother calling her name, and Bearfoot seized the opportunity to rip her away from the blanket, pick her up and carry her to the door as gingerly as he might handle a sand-lion cub, and deliver her to her mother. Nana meekly wound her arms around her mother’s neck.

Resettling her grip on her daughter, the woman glanced toward the rear of the truck and said, “She still won’t wake up?”

“No, but I think she’ll be okay. Mr. Harvey went looking for—er. Um, never mind,” he finished vaguely, flustered at how he’d almost blurted out the secret. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice the slip-up. She only frowned worriedly and said, “Oh…I wonder if it’s shock from the trauma…I’ll take over for you once I’ve put Nana to bed.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. You go ahead and sleep with Nana.”

Bearfoot wanted her gone as fast as humanly possible, before he ended up letting the cat out of the bag. He pressed hard at her shoulder and practically forced her to turn away. “Night, Corp’ral!” the little brat called sleepily as they left. It sent his heart jumping straight up into his throat. He pulled back the curtain on the door just enough to let one eye peek out and watch them disappear back into the camp.

Then, finally, he could heave a sigh of relief. One catastrophe dealt with.

Other troupe members had been showing up periodically throughout the night to visit her or offer to switch with him; he’d sent each one packing with nervous assurances of “Nah, I’ll stay here and watch her; I’m fine, it’s fine.” When he thought about how Rat was sure to start up some messed-up rumor about him tomorrow, he started wishing miserably that tomorrow would just never come at all.

But, well, now wasn’t the time to be agonizing over little everyday problems like that.

Okay, then…

He steeled himself with a gulp and turned apprehensively around. He’d been half-hoping that when he next looked, it would be gone, but—

Oh, it’s there. It’s still there…!

—No such luck.

A black-haired girl was lying on the cheap fixed bed in the back. A banged-up old radio was sitting on the folding chair at her bedside, and firmly ensconced in that same folding chair was a man sitting with his arms folded. He wore a dark green army uniform caked with blood and mud. A blood-soaked sorry excuse for a bandage was wrapped around one of his knees, and there wasn’t anything left below the joint. The back of his uniform, riddled with bullet holes, made it plain how gruesomely he’d died—and now that battered soldier was exercising his authority over everything around him with nothing but his penetrating stare. His eyes glittered under the low brim of his army cap.

Bearfoot had never met a girl with a dead soldier for a guardian spirit before. Well, of course he hadn’t. There couldn’t be many people out there who had that kind of protector.

I’m heading out to look for Kieli. Guard the fort for a while. Put this down in there.

The troupe leader seemed to have left with the Church Soldiers, so Bearfoot had come to check on things. The redheaded man was just coming out of the truck, and as he’d passed, he’d uttered those three sentences, which Bearfoot couldn’t quite see the connection between, and shoved the radio into his hands. Then, unbelievably, he’d gone off somewhere. What the hell is he thinking, leaving Kieli alone after all that?! There’s no way I can trust a guy like that with her! Bearfoot had fumed to himself as he climbed into the truck (he was too scared to say it to the man’s face). But when he saw Kieli again, he realized something was wrong.

He didn’t have a reason he could clearly explain, but if he had to try, he’d say it felt like recognizing his own kind—because Bearfoot himself was made that way.

Kieli’s spirit wasn’t inside her body.

“…Hey, you.”

“Y-yes, sir!”

The words weren’t especially threatening, but hearing himself addressed in that lethally sharp voice was enough to make Bearfoot’s heart quiver in his chest. He found himself audibly clicking his heels together as he answered. His posture was so ramrod-straight he felt almost as if he might actually salute (usually when the troupe leader was yelling at him to do something about his stooped shoulders!). The soldier darted a keen glance his way without moving from his station at the bedside.

“Don’t just stand there; sit down,” said a staticky voice from the radio’s speaker; bits of the soldier flickered in concert, like signal noise on the screen of a transmitter with a bad connection.

“Y-yes, sir!” Watching the ghost apprehensively out of the corner of his eye, he moved to sit down in the second folding chair at the foot of the bed.

“…Wait,” the soldier ordered in a lowered voice.

Bearfoot squeaked and toppled off the chair he’d been lowering himself into.

“They’re here.”

He was sprawled on his backside with his limbs tangled up in the collapsed chair, but the soldier’s gleaming eyes seemed to drag his own gaze with them toward one corner of the truck. The ceiling lamp dimly illuminated all the corners but that one, where a darkness had sunk that was so complete it seemed to have swallowed up all the light.

No, it wasn’t a darkness—it was more like a pile of bizarre human shadows the same color as the darkness squirming on top of one another.

Slither…

Five grotesquely long, twisted fingers reached out to hug the floor, and one of the shadows began to crawl out of the corner toward them. Bearfoot, who’d slumped weakly on the floor with his legs splayed out, gave a shrill scream and hastily pulled them back.

“Damn low-class ghosts…You just try to lay one TIP of one finger on Kieli,” the soldier threatened in a growl, whipping out the saber at his waist and switching to a reverse grip. He plunged it down between his legs as if to hold the enemy in check. Cowed, the black shadow halted its advance—only to start pacing back and forth, hunched down low, as if waiting for its chance.

Bearfoot whimpered.

Somehow he’d gotten caught in the middle of a staring contest between guardian spirit and evil spirit, and it was just too much. He used both hands to scrabble backward, tripping himself up on the chair in the process and silently beseeching the man he’d just been fuming at for help.

Mr. Harvey, please hurry back…!

The thin, sandy clouds rippled like one big curtain, and for just a moment, Kieli could see a blue-gray night sky on the other side.

“What was that…?”

She looked up at the sky uneasily.

“It’s okay; that happens sometimes. Let’s go.”

“Okay…wait up!” Prodded by the boy’s voice, Kieli looked back down and hurried after the retreating back of his coppery head. The boy Joachim had brought her along this path through the ruins, and now she was walking back in the opposite direction with Ephraim as her escort. This boy climbed over the wreckage as if he was perfectly used to it, and Kieli followed after him clumsily. That was just the way it had been with Joachim, too.

When Kieli’d said she didn’t know how to get back, Ephraim had suggested they start by going back to where she’d first appeared, and it’d been settled that he would take her there.

“What should I do when I get there, though…?” she sighed dispiritedly, keeping her eyes on the ground so as not to trip over the rubble. She had no grasp whatsoever of her own situation at the moment.

“Eh, it’ll work out,” the boy walking ahead of her called back casually. Kieli shot him a slightly reproachful look. She decided to try complaining.

“Sheesh, you talk like it’s not your problem!”

“Because it’s not my problem. I don’t owe you anything,” he answered bluntly.

Kieli was struck speechless. What could she say to that? (And he was sure helping out a lot for a boy who “didn’t owe her anything”!) Ephraim tossed her a small smile over his shoulder, apparently enjoying her reaction. Kieli was the older one here, but she just knew he was teasing her.

“Big talk for someone who was crying a few minutes ago!” she fired back, pouting.

“You were the one crying.”

“I was just going along with you, Ephraim!”

“Hey, I didn’t cry,” he answered aloofly, and turned to face forward again. Kieli sighed, half exasperated and half impressed. Where did that just-a-bit-sweet attitude from before go? Still, she found it all strangely convincing somehow. He was a pretty Harvey-like child, really.

Thinking about it that way…

This Ephraim is Harvey from when he was a kid, right…?

When she consciously thought about that, she felt like asking him all kinds of things. Things about Harvey’s childhood—like his parents, whether he’d had any siblings, where he’d grown up. But his parents had evidently passed away, and since there hadn’t been any brothers or sisters of his at the school, she guessed that either he was an only child, or his siblings had passed away, too. There weren’t very many things she could ask lightly.

Kieli’s feet stopped moving without her noticing, and Ephraim slowed down and gave her a quizzical look. Flustered, she ran after him as she tried to think of an easier question, but even though there must be any number of things she’d like to know, the only things that popped into her head were stupid ones. Like his favorite foods, his favorite subjects in school, his favorite kind of girl…

“Eep!”

Odd thoughts had made her neglect her footing; when she put her boot down on an unstable pile of rubble, it crumpled under her and she fell to the ground.

“Whoa, what?!” Ephraim cried, startling himself. Then he picked his way back to her and lent her a hand. “Why would you fall there? You were walking slower than a snail.”

“Ow, ow, ow…” He steadied her by the elbow as she stood up and pulled her ankle out from where it was caught in the wreckage. When she lifted her face, his copper eyes met hers at close range, and she blushed a little before she could stop herself.

That scrawl on the blackboard was probably just childish teasing, but Kieli couldn’t help remembering it now. Ephraim and Kieli were…

She heard a humming like the beating of wings, and the sky shook again. Ephraim broke eye contact and looked up at the low-hanging clouds overhead. Just as before, the sky was rippling like a curtain, the clouds shifting from sand-colored to sunset-copper to nighttime-slate and then back to sand-colored again.

“…I don’t think it usually wavers this much,” Ephraim murmured, chin still tilted upward.

“It doesn’t…?”

Kieli glanced at him anxiously.

“Oh,” she breathed hoarsely when she saw the sight over his shoulder. Dumbstruck, she tugged on Ephraim’s coat sleeve and gestured with her eyes at it.

Her field of vision fluttered like a curtain in the wind, and past the ruins stretching out before her, she could see entirely different scenery. There, the ruined buildings had been torn down and everything flattened to level ground. It looked like the sprawling site of a new building project; construction equipment and people in overalls were hard at work on it. Out of nowhere, a trolley truck passed by in front of her, and she automatically cringed as she watched it pull away. One trolley after another followed it along the tracks on the ground, packed with piles of dirt and building materials.

Could this be the construction site of the park…?

No sooner had the thought occurred to her than the scene wavered violently. Her warped field of vision made her dizzy, and she was overcome with a feeling like motion sickness. She closed her eyes briefly.

By the time she opened them, they weren’t standing in ruins or in a vacant lot anymore.

In place of the half-collapsed buildings in the ruins, there were houses with all kinds of different roofs—round, conical, mushroomed; there was no unifying theme, and they were all crammed tightly together, one squeezing past the next or even sitting on top of one another. Something seemed off about them…Looking more closely, Kieli saw that they were all adorably small, half the size of any human home at most. Tracks lay underneath her feet instead of the debris she’d been treading on. They ran along the center of the pointlessly winding road (there was no way a normal urban area’s streets would twist so much), making their way through the throng of miniature houses.

“This is the park…!”

She’d only ever looked at it from the bridge, so this was her first time actually seeing the inside. But the clockwork cityscape was bathed in slate-gray dimness, and she didn’t see any trolley trucks carrying tourists or hear any steam engines operating. There were only the pallid emergency lights picking out the contours of the hushed artificial city.

Feeling someone’s gaze on her, Kieli half-turned to look behind her. When she looked up the wall of the cozy little round house standing there, she saw a figure by the second-story window covered head to toe with blood.

“It’s a doll,” Ephraim pointed out calmly as she started to scream. Kieli clutched his arm and held on, half-hiding herself behind it as she took another look. He was right. It was just a doll in red clothes. Nonetheless, the way only half of its faintly smiling face was visible at the window and one hand was frozen in midair (maybe it’d been about to wave?) was chilling in and of itself.

That wasn’t the only doll, either: there were a dog and a boy chasing each other around beneath a streetlight, a cute girl with a headscarf selling flowers…and across the tracks on the other side of the road, she saw a bear with a drum, a fox with a trumpet, a monkey with cymbals, and all manner of other animals forming a brass band led by an owl. They were all suspended midmarch, with their right feet raised high in the air. Perhaps if she saw the animals actually moving in the light of day, they’d seem fanciful and fun, but although the details like the fur and whiskers were exquisitely crafted compared to the patchwork costumes made by Shiman’s somewhat clumsy troupe stagehand, the sight of them motionless in the dark like this was just creepy.

Vnn…

The air shook again, and for the barest of moments Kieli was standing in the afternoon ruins she’d just come from; but then it was right back to the city of clockwork dolls again.

“What’s going on here…?”

“Dunno, but let’s hurry. I know which way we’re going.”

They started walking deeper into the clockwork city wrapped in darkness and silence. Both of them quickened their footsteps without thinking about it. It felt strange to be walking down the tracks of this city, when you were supposed to be taking in the sights as you rode through it in a trolley.

A bee merchant selling honey by the roadside, a rabbit mommy feeding a bottle of milk to a human baby in the window, a chimney sweep up on the rooftop—there were dolls arrested in midmotion everywhere she looked. Glancing around fearfully at them, she lowered her voice to a whisper, feeling as if they might leap to life at any moment if she made a loud noise. “They’re scary when they’re not moving, huh?”

Ephraim had never let go of her right hand after helping her up earlier. Now he gripped it a little more firmly, as if to tell her it would be all right. She darted a glance at him, but he was just walking along, facing forward and looking as if nothing had happened.

“…”

Kieli turned her head forward again too, and squeezed back tightly. His hand wasn’t much bigger than Kieli’s yet, but though slender, it was boyishly angular. It felt just like that same left hand on the adult version of him that she knew.

Harvey…

It heartened her, and at the same time made her impatient to get home. Her sense of time was all fuzzy now, so she wasn’t sure how long she’d been here, but if this park was really the one from the present, then it must be around midnight now. I wonder what happened to my body…Will it still be in the same place? What will I do if those guys are back again…? One anxious worry after another raced through her mind. What if I can’t ever get back into my body again?

Clackety-clack, clackety-clack

Kieli heard a faint sound behind her. Evidently Ephraim heard it, too. They both stopped walking and exchanged wary looks, then turned around to peer into the shadowy city. However, nothing looked especially different than it had when they’d walked by it. There were the girl selling flowers, the bee selling honey, and the owl leading the band, all smiling and still.

“There was a sound, right?” Ephraim said, glaring behind them and tilting his head in confusion.

Kieli tugged on his hand. “Come on, let’s go…” She wanted to get out of this place as fast as she could. She had a bad feeling.

So they turned back around and started walking again—

Clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clackety-clack

There it was again. When they stopped walking, the sound stopped just a fraction of a second afterward. Kieli started to turn around, but Ephraim glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and silently mouthed, Don’t move.

Gulping, Kieli signaled with her eyes that she understood.

They froze in place face-forward for a while, as if to hold off whatever was behind them, and then they exchanged looks, nodded, and abruptly spun around to catch it off guard. However, there still wasn’t anything particularly suspicious. There were the girl selling flowers, the bee selling honey, and the owl leading the band, all smiling and—

—and the band—

—seemed closer than it had been before.

“Ephraim…!” Her right hand still in Ephraim’s, Kieli grabbed his elbow with her left. The boy’s shoulder, not much broader or higher than her own, moved in front of her slightly, protectively.

Around the motionless animals, each carrying its particular instrument and smiling proudly, swirled a gritty black mist. Kieli could hear them saying something in rapid whispers that sounded almost like pouring sand.

The spirit of a child, the spirit of a child!

They say a child’s spirit is sweet

They say a child’s spirit is sweet and crispy

They say a child’s spirit is sweet and crispy and shiny

Sounds good to eat! Sounds good to eat! Sounds good to eat!

The bear drummer’s jaw dropped open impossibly wide. The owl conductor swiveled his big golden eyes, unfurled broad wings protectively colored to blend into the craggy wilderness, and raised his baton.

When he brought it down, Ephraim took that as his cue.

“Run!” he shouted, and Kieli pitched forward at the sharp pull of his hand as they took off sprinting down the tracks. She turned to look over her shoulder and saw the animals all give chase on cue from the baton, clacking their jaws open and closed. Mechanical feet marched to their own earsplitting clackety-clackety-clacking accompaniment. A shiver ran down her spine. “Don’t turn around! Hurry up!” Ephraim yelled, yanking her by the hand. Kieli faced forward again and ran after him with everything she had.

And then suddenly he slammed on the brakes, so she shot out in front, her arm stretching out like a rubber band before being snapped back.

“What’s wrong?!”

After Kieli’d instinctively shaken him off in protest, her ears picked up a metallic noise different than the high-pitched sounds the band made, coming from the opposite direction.

Clank, clank, clank

A new group of dolls appeared out of the dimness to block their path. They were about half as tall as Kieli and Ephraim, but they looked like the castle guards in fairy tales, with impressive, darkly shining armor. They each had thick ponytail-like decorations coming out of the tops of their bell-shaped helmets. The row with blue ponytails held crossbows with arrows at the ready, and the row with red ponytails held up spears taller than they were. Both rows marched toward them with perfect precision.

For a moment Kieli thought maybe they’d come to the rescue, but that hope was quickly dashed. With crazed smiles plastered on the adorable round faces beneath their helmets, the guards all brandished their weapons. Voices all began to chatter at once. These were different from the scraping-sand whispers of the band; if anything, they reminded her of the repetitive rise and fall of a siren.

Intruder alert! Intruder alert! Intruder alert!

Find them, catch them, give them jail cell beds!

Then up to the guillotine, and off with their heads!

Off with their heads, their heads, heads heads children’s heads

Their voices grew strange and distorted halfway through the chant, and then…

They say a child’s head is sweet

The say a child’s brains are sweet and soft like pudding

They say a child’s eyeballs are sweet and round like candies

The say a child’s earlobes are sweet and firm like—

Kieli and Ephraim had no obligation to stay to the end of that line, obviously, so they turned to run, but the animal marching band was bearing down on them from the other direction. They were trapped between the castle guards and the band with nowhere to run. Ephraim darted his eyes from right to left and made a profane noise.

“Over here,” broke in a voice different from either the band or the guards. When they looked around, unable to find its owner, the voice called out again, “Hurry, over here!” It came not from in front of or behind them, but diagonally above them. Kieli looked up with a start and caught sight of a two-story house with a signboard displaying a picture of a key. At the top of the spiral staircase attached to the outside wall as if to hem in the climbing vines growing along it, there was a little door. A doll’s hand reached out of it, beckoning them.

There was no guarantee he was on their side. While they hesitated, an arrow from one of the crossbows whizzed into view, and they simultaneously ducked and covered each other’s heads.

“Hurry,” urged the voice from the house for the third time. Ephraim seemed to make up his mind. He took off running toward the house, pulling Kieli along with him.

“You first.”

Pushed forward by the shoulder, Kieli stepped in front of him and put one foot on the steps. The staircase was so steep it was practically a ladder; as she used both hands and both feet to climb it, Kieli glanced down just in time to see an arrow scrape her leg as it landed smack between her feet. Terror almost made her miss the next steps, but she managed to sprint all the way to the top. When she arrived there and turned around to peer down, a jumble of hands from people and animal dolls were reaching for Ephraim from below as he climbed after her, straining together and stretching up like the tentacles of a single animal to catch him by the ankle.

“Ephraim!”

She gave him her hand and hauled him up the last few steps, and they fell through a tiny dolls’ door into the house together in a tangle of limbs.

The dolls jumped up after them, but at the last second the iron door was closed, and it rattled as something outside struck it over and over, hinges screeching. Escaping into the house was all well and good, but it looked as if they’d be overtaken in no time. Kieli’s brain was numb, though, and she couldn’t think what to do next. She just sat petrified on the floor until the doll who’d saved them began bolting the door from the inside with calm, steady hands on the locks.

Well, she wasn’t sure if “locks” was the right word…

No, each separate one was definitely a normal lock, but there were so many latches of different kinds, and together they formed some kind of pattern that completely sealed the opening. Kieli watched the doll’s small hands inserting so many keys into so many locks with blank astonishment, breathing hard. Finally he passed a thick iron chain across the door and hung an enormous padlock on it. Then, moving his hand as if to wipe sweat from his brow after wrapping up his work, the doll turned to them.

“This should hold for a while. It’s a ward against evil spirits.”

Kieli didn’t exactly understand that, but it was still amazing.

Exchanging looks with Ephraim, she breathed a sigh of relief for the moment.

The room they were in was cramped and close, partly because they were two humans crammed into a house for dolls, but also because it was filled to bursting with haphazardly piled belongings. The arched ceiling was so low that even Kieli had to stoop a little so she wouldn’t hit her head on the skylight. A heavy steel worktable sat in the center; the hunks of metal covering the majority of it must be tools for cutting keys. She recalled the sign with the key on it outside.

There was one lone wall that wasn’t obstructed by stuff, and all sorts of different keys hung there like a collection on display. Big keys, little keys, silver keys, copper keys, rust-covered keys with serpent carvings that looked as though they could open cursed treasure chests.

The master of the house was a doll in the shape of an old man, about half Kieli’s height and wearing a crimson waistcoat that suited him well. The big, self-asserting hooked nose in the center of a wrinkled face constructed in fine detail was distinctive, and his round, rimless spectacles were perched perfectly on his nose. A steel arm and some tubing that most likely connected to his power source sprouted from a hole in his back, but the arm’s fittings had been uncoupled at the joint, which probably explained how he could move freely around the room.

“What the heck are you?” demanded Ephraim outrageously, glancing casually around the room. Apparently he didn’t feel as fascinated as Kieli.

The old man lifted his nose a little, looking hurt. “You’re a mannerless brat, I see.”

“I was brought up badly.”

“Th-thank you so much, you really saved us,” said Kieli, hurriedly bowing as she elbowed Ephraim in the side. He looked grumpy, but he did say a brief, grudging “Thanks.” He’s so contrary…Kieli gave a small shrug and returned her gaze to the old man.

“So, um, you’re…”

“Well, I’m nothing unusual, really. I’m the same as you two. I’ve been a resident of this area since way back in the day. But not too long ago, the humans built this weird city of vessels with no souls. Suited me perfectly, so I’m borrowing this doll and this house.”

“You’re a spirit possessing the doll…?”

The old man dipped his hooked nose in a Sure, I guess? sort of nod.

“The neighborhood’s gotten dangerous since the evil spirits came. I’m thinking it might be about time for me to move. You’re some of the kids who’ve settled in that school, right? That place might start to feel the effects soon, too.”

“So you know about the school. Did you die in the War, too?” Ephraim responded, stepping over the man’s belongings to the opposite window. It was round to match the line of the ceiling, and countless latches were attached to it, just like the door; Kieli guessed it was another of those “ward” things. From where she stood, the dark glass only reflected the room back to her, and she couldn’t see outside. Every so often, though, she heard the high sound of something whacking against the frame. The soldier dolls must be firing arrows at it from below.

“I imagine they’ll give up eventually. Go on, sit down and take a load off—though I suppose that’s a strange thing to say to the dead.”

He offered her a stool next to the worktable, seeing how uneasy she looked, but it was piled high with thick books and covered in dust. Upon closer examination, the books turned out to be fake ones stuck to the stool. Kieli abandoned the idea of sitting there and began brushing the dust off a wooden box next to it (it wasn’t real wood; it was fake, too, and stuck to the floor).

“Hmm?” The old man pushed his spectacles higher on his nose with one fingertip and began peering at her interestedly. “You’re a bit different, aren’t you…?”

“Um, I’m not…” Kieli trailed off, thinking I’m not dead yet might be a weird answer. At a loss for how to reply, she glanced over to the boy at the window, not that she really expected any help from that quarter. Ephraim was staring out of it with his bangs pressed up against the glass, completely indifferent to their exchange.

“It’s started to get worse again…” Apparently those copper-colored eyes weren’t keeping a lookout for the dolls; they were trained on the sky hanging above the city. The slate-gray night sky warped like a fluttering curtain again, offering a glimpse of a different-colored sky on the other side.

“Mmm, this space is more unstable than usual tonight,” the hook-nosed doll muttered to himself, stroking his chin. Kieli watched his hazy reflection in the windowpane over Ephraim’s shoulder. She was kitty-corner from him, and Ephraim was closest of all to the window, touching the glass with both hands—but as she’d half-expected, their reflections were missing. The glass only showed a box with nobody sitting on it and the furnishings behind it, as if that were the natural state of things. Even though Kieli herself could clearly feel the box she was sitting on…

Averting her gaze from the old man’s reflection, she turned back to the real thing. Well, this probably wasn’t what he truly looked like anyway, so maybe it was weird to call him the “real thing.”

“This place, this space, what is it?”

“Have you heard of how the magnetic fields created by prewar fossil resources attract spirits to them?”

“Yes, a little.”

“I don’t know too much about it myself, and I’ve never seen one in person, of course, but…I have heard from spirits who’ve been around even longer than me that there’s an unexploded bomb buried around here somewhere.”

That didn’t give Kieli enough to follow the thread of the conversation. She stayed quiet and let the question show on her face; after a few moments, the old man began to speak again. As he spoke, he moved slowly about the room, dragging the tube attached to his back along with him. Sometimes he would clack his jaw open and closed in a way totally unrelated to his voice that made Kieli feel exactly as though she were watching the old storyteller character in a puppet theater performance.

“North Westerbury launched it into the heart of South Westerbury late in the War. Apparently it was their ultimate weapon, made by scraping together the high-purity fossil energy that was already showing signs of running dry at the time. If it’d gone off, it would have been a crushing blow to South Westerbury, make no mistake, but fortunately the city escaped damage; and after that the South switched to the offensive, launching a counterattack against the North.”

That part matched what Shiman had told her several days ago. After the South Westerbury forces got their hands on a platoon of Undying, they turned the tables and crushed the North army instead, and as an extension of that effort went on to invade Easterbury to the east. However, by then the depletion of the planet’s resources had become acute, and the War was gradually drawing to its natural close. It took a long, long time and many, many sacrificed lives before the people realized that they’d lost what they’d originally started fighting over through the very act of their warring, and there was no longer any meaning in continuing it.

Kieli glanced out of the corner of her eye at the profile of the boy at the window. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was listening to them; if so, he didn’t show any particular response. He was still staring outside. Come to think of it, did Ephraim know that he’d died in the War, and that he’d become an Undying afterward…?

The old man’s reflection in the window moved to stand in front of the key collection on the wall, crimson-waistcoated back facing them. As he walked along it, examining each key as if searching for something, he continued his story.

“This mysterious space only recently appeared here. When they built this artificial city they dug up old strata of the ground, and the magnetic field of the unexploded bomb that’d been sleeping under the ruins all those years spread out like ripples on a lake, engulfing the city. It’s so strong that ghosts from many different time periods have gotten caught up in it, and their planes of existence are mutually encroaching on one another. And another thing…this is probably another effect of the field, but in this space spirits, who are by nature unstable beings, maintain a curiously solid form—you two can touch things like any normal human, you get hungry, you feel pain when you get hurt, and at the end of the day I imagine you get tired and sleepy…Ah, yes, I think it’s this one.” The old man took one key off its hook in a corner of his collection and came back to Kieli.

“Here, I’ll give this to you.”

It was a rusty lead-gray key small enough to fit in his palm.

“It seems you still have a body to return to. This might be useful if you run into trouble. Though I’d rather you didn’t, of course.”

“…Thank you.” Bewildered, Kieli took the key from the doll’s small hand. She could clearly feel its metallic weight and coldness in her own palm. It was a rather businesslike key, with no adornment of any kind.

“You see, one of the human guards dropped it here one day. It’s called the ‘master key’ or some such thing, and it’s evidently quite important. When I picked it up and hid it among these keys, he went white in the face and looked all around the ground for them—but not up here,” he added mischievously, as if to say This is our secret, though Kieli wasn’t sure who it was supposed to be a secret from.

“Hey,” Ephraim blurted unexpectedly, and plastered his forehead to the glass as if he were trying to hang out the window. This time, he wasn’t looking at the sky overhead. He was gazing down at the street. “They’re leaving.”

At those terse words that could have been meant for himself or as an announcement to them, Kieli dropped the key into her right coat pocket and stood up.

She peeked out, tentatively, since there might be more arrows coming, and saw the crowd of dolls whispering to each other as they walked away from the house. They weren’t wandering off in all directions as though they’d given up; it was more as though they’d found something else to go after, and switched targets at once. Guards and musicians formed a single procession, all mixed together as if no longer aware of which camp they’d started out in. Heads of all different shapes and sizes bobbed in the crowd as they all disappeared off in a single direction.

“I wonder where they’re going…” Her forehead pressed to the glass now, too, Kieli stared in confusion until she heard the old man’s voice behind her say:

“Quite a number of unusual folks seem to have stumbled our way tonight.” The doll’s dim reflection in the mirror opened and closed its jaw in time with the words. “I think there’s something nearby that’s pulling strongly at all the spirits. That’s got to be what’s resonating with the magnetic field, making the space unstable.”

“Resonating—”

Could it be—one thing sprang to mind instantly. I know one thing that resonates with magnetic fields from fossil resources…!

“He came for me!”

Kieli shoved her cheek against the pane to check which direction the dolls were marching in, then spun around and left the window. She jogged up to the door to open it, but it was sealed tightly shut with all those locks and chains. The door that had been so reassuring when it cut off their pursuers and saved them from their plight was only driving her crazy now.

“Hold on, what’s gotten into you all of a sudden?” Ephraim’s quizzical voice reached her ears, but the words weren’t making it to her brain anymore. She whirled around and pleaded rapidly, “Sir, open it, please open it, quick!”

The old man appeared unruffled. “I told you spirits maintain a solid form in this space, but when you get right down to it, in the real world a spirit is like a phantom…If you take away the perceptions of your eyes, a real door might as well not even be there.”

“…?”

Puzzled by what sounded like a riddle, Kieli nevertheless turned back to face the door. When she reached out to touch it with her right hand, her fingers passed right through it with no resistance, as if she were touching the surface of a pool of water. Kieli unthinkingly jerked her hand back in surprise, and then experimentally touched it again, but this time her nails smacked hard against it.

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and swept the presence of the door out of her mind.

She stepped out with one foot as if she were just walking down a hallway. One big step.

She didn’t run into anything.

Gingerly opening her eyes, Kieli saw that she was looking down on the nighttime city from the top of the outside stairs. With the dolls gone, it was hushed and silent again. Right behind her was a door scarred by the arrows from their crossbows.

She turned to face forward again, and dashed unsteadily down the steep spiral staircase.

Harvey—

When she was only a few steps from the bottom, she jumped down (but her feet didn’t make any sound), made an immediate ninety-degree turn, and took off running down the street with the trolley tracks. The trolley path took a lot of excessive curves as it threaded its way through the town, and its forward visibility was poor in consequence; it wasn’t possible to keep the doll procession in her field of vision anymore.

Her feet naturally picked up speed. She could feel the pounding of the heart she didn’t even have thrumming all through her.

The moment she careened around the corner of a building on the zigzagging road, she nearly tripped over something lying at her feet. Reflexively she jumped over it, and then turned to see what it had been—

And then gasped, and came to a halt.

The scene that spread out behind her wasn’t the clockwork town she’d just run through; it was a ruined urban wasteland. When she craned her neck back around, the tracks she could swear she’d just seen ahead of her were gone without a trace, along with the adorable houses and the dolls peeking out of them. Corpses in military uniform littered what had become of the city all the way until they met the cloudy twilit sky at the horizon. A dry wind fluttered the hem of her coat as it blew by, carrying away the powder smoke that had settled around her legs. It smelled of sand and gunpowder and blood.

“Ephraim…?” she ventured, feeling suddenly anxious. She’d run off by herself, so the boy who’d stayed with her thus far was nowhere to be found. Kieli stood all alone in the middle of the ruins. As far as her eyes could see, there was no one and nothing else standing in this place but the bare walls of half-collapsed buildings. Otherwise, it was just an ocean of rubble and dead bodies lying at her feet in ashen waves.

“Ephraim, aren’t you here? Hey…”

Looking around her uneasily, she took a step back, and the thing she’d almost tripped over earlier brushed the bottom of her field of vision.

Don’t look! a voice from her subconscious warned, but some even more compelling force made her drop her gaze to the ground anyway.

Lying limply on the rubble was a dead young soldier. The back of his uniform was a ragged mess of burn holes; white bones and black-red patches of what must be his organs peeked out from beneath skin burned raw and coated with mud and blood. The best Kieli could guess was that he’d been part of the fallout from an artillery strike. She didn’t think that was what had killed him, though. He might have been lying here already when that happened. The wounds on his back were still fresh, but the blood that spread from one temple to cover half his face was already dry and stiff.

Kieli knew that particular face very well. Those wide-open eyes vacantly staring at nothing were the same color as the dried blood stuck to his temple.

“Har…vey…?”

Her knees crumpled underneath her, and she sank to the ground.

No…

Nonononono—Someone inside Kieli’s head was clamoring violently to run away right this second, but it was as if her motor nerves had been severed at the spine. Her body wouldn’t respond to the call. With sluggish movements, she reached out a hand and lightly shook the man’s back, though even she didn’t know what she was hoping to accomplish. His body jolted forward, freed from the rubble it had been caught on, and his head of coppery blood-encrusted hair flopped onto Kieli’s lap.

Coppery hair drooping over her knees and the weight of a corpse’s head. Kieli reached down dumbly to support it in place.

Harvey…no, not Harvey…is this Ephraim…?

Dimly, she became aware of the sound of tires crunching over the rubble toward her. There were no thoughts in her brain; she only lifted her face in automatic response to the sound. An army truck painted dirt-brown appeared through the gunpowder smoke hanging over the ruins, kicking up a cloud of dust with its back wheels. One truck…and a second one behind it.

The trucks and their dust clouds both parked in the middle of the ruins. Several soldiers in uniforms that matched the bodies littering the ground climbed out of the first one, followed by a man in a high-collared greatcoat who seemed like more of a big shot than the others (perhaps he was one of those “commissioned officers”?). From the other truck came a smallish man who didn’t look military at all. Soon they were engaged in muttered conversation that reached Kieli’s ears mingled with the white noise of the sandy winds: “Try to get fresh ones in decent condition if you can…” “What about this one?” “Hmm…yes, let’s take it with us.” Two soldiers hoisted up one of the corpses between them and carried it over to the bed of the truck.

They went on sifting matter-of-factly through the dead soldiers’ bodies, exchanging a few brief words over each one and determining whether to leave it there or pull it out of the debris and carry it back to the trucks. After they’d gone through about ten of them, one of the men said, “How about this one?”

“Hmm, he’s pretty badly damaged…”

Several shadows fell over Kieli, and the army men started up the same conversation while they looked down at the copper-haired youth in her lap. The officer in the greatcoat nudged him in the ribs with the tip of one army boot, and the coppery head slid off Kieli’s knees and thumped against the ground. “St-stop it!” she protested, reaching out to cradle the young man’s head back to her lap again, but the officer flatly ignored her presence. Instead of stopping, he casually plunged a hand into dead man’s uniform.

He tugged the bloody dog tags out from under his collar and glanced at the inscription on the metal. “Well, let’s bring him along. He’s young; we can probably still use him,” he grunted, not sounding particularly impressed. At the order, his subordinates hoisted the young man up between them. They didn’t seem to even notice Kieli, who gaped up at them in horror. They grabbed him by the shoulders and legs and carted him off to the truck the same way you’d carry a bag of flour.

Crunch, crunch, crunch…

The two trucks set off in tandem again, trailing exhaust fumes and the ponderous sounds of their fossil-fuel engines behind them as they left the ruins wreathed in gunpowder smoke behind. They carried about a dozen bodies between them.

“They’re collecting the materials to make Undyings,” she heard a voice say from above her and to the side. A voice like the wind blowing through the battlefield: dry and faintly gravelly. Kieli looked up to see a boy with the same copper-colored eyes and hair as the corpse standing behind her.

He watched the dust cloud sent up by the retreating truck impassively for a moment, and then said, “The guy who didn’t look military was an arms dealer who came to push his Undying technology. Apparently he was in North Westerbury before he started cozying up to South Westerbury. Are you okay?”

He lent a hand to Kieli and pulled her up as he explained. The gears in Kieli’s brain still weren’t quite catching. She didn’t even think to brush off the hem of her coat, which was solid white with dust now; she just let him deposit her on her feet, ducking her head to look up at him through her lashes even though he was hardly any taller than she was.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry you saw something scary because of me. I guess nobody feels good seeing a corpse with the same face as the guy standing in front of them, huh?”

The boy gave a wry smile, looking a little uncomfortable. Kieli lowered her eyes and shook her head.

“No, that’s not it, it’s just…You knew, then. About how you died in the War, and about being an Undying…”

“Well, I’ve ended up in this area a bunch of times walking around town—and that wasn’t my first time seeing that, either. I guess the time in this area is a little later than the time over by our school,” Ephraim answered plainly as he cast a cursory look around them. He sat down on the remains of a nearby wall that had crumbled to just the right height, and jammed his hand in his pocket to pull out his pack of cigarettes. When he turned it upside down and shook it a little, all that fell out into his palm was one lonely stick—and not a new one; just a stub.

“Want to sit down?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Kieli accepted the offer and sat down to his left. Their shoulders brushed lightly as Ephraim lit his cigarette stub.

“After the runts died, Joachim and I were drafted at fifteen. Our units split up pretty soon after that and I didn’t see him again for years, so I don’t really know much about it, but I heard he died in the battle to retake South Westerbury. My unit got wiped out not long after, too. And then, before I knew it, I was at the school. Joachim was there, and so were the runts, and we were all the same age as before.” The thin stream of smoke rising from the tip of his twisted cigarette accompanied his detached voice up into the sky, blending into the gunpowder smoke to be carried away on the wind. “I kept fighting the War even after I died, though, huh…? Undyings are just tools of war with no feelings, right? I wonder if I was killing people without thinking anything or feeling anything…”

“…I think you regret it now,” Kieli murmured softly, and Ephraim shot her a sidelong glance, looking a little surprised. It wasn’t something she could pretend to know for sure, and now that it’d come out of her mouth, suddenly she was losing her nerve. She let her gaze fall to her knees and went on in a voice so quiet she might almost have been talking to herself. “Um, you’ve regretted it all along, I think…and you still do, a lot…” Maybe Harvey regrets that as much as Ephraim regrets what happened to the little kids.

Silence fell between them for a few moments.

Ephraim let out a smoke-filled breath, carelessly, as if it meant nothing, and then said, “Huh. Is that so.”

That was all. In a casual voice, as if it meant nothing.

It wasn’t as if that would make the War never have happened. It wasn’t a justification or a pardon, and it didn’t save anything, and it didn’t change anything. Nonetheless, the boy repeated his “Is that so” one more time as if a tiny bit of the weight had dropped from his shoulders.

A dry wind blew through the South Westerbury ruins that were too vast for the eyes of someone as small as they were to even take in. Kieli thought this quiet, sandy wind blowing through a battlefield where all the fighting had ended reminded her of Ephraim, somehow—and Harvey, too. When she closed her eyes softly, she could faintly feel the presence of the boy to her right, and it was just the same as the feel of Harvey that was burned into her memory. They both had the copper-colored hair and eyes that she loved, and they could both be cold and mocking and lazy and childish, and deep down they could both be ridiculously soft-hearted, too.

There was no way he’d dream, but Harvey felt as though he’d been dreaming. He thought he had a vague recollection of what the dream had been about, and yet as soon as he tried to form it into words in his mind, it dissolved into nothingness. He did sort of get the feeling it had been about his childhood. Well, not that he’d ever really dream, but…When had he last had a peaceful, lucky man’s experience like that?

Awareness returned to him as abruptly as it had cut off.

“Ugh…”

There was no strength in his muscles; his whole body just felt dull and heavy, as if all his limbs had gone to sleep. With his cheek still glued to the ground, he took stock of his surroundings using only his gaze. It was so dark he could hardly see anything. As soon as his night vision had kicked in, though, he was startled to make out a sharp, spurred metal foot right in front of him. When his eye traced it upward, he found an iron gate guarded by two suits of armor towering above him. He didn’t know if that odd scenery he’d glimpsed for an instant before passing out been an optical illusion or what, but either way he was most definitely lying in front of the park gate.

After he’d waited there for a while, feeling came back to his hand and feet little by little, and he started more or less regaining his ability to move, not that he was very steady. Apparently the impact was the worst in the instant you passed over the boundary of the barrier. Now that he’d come through to the inside, the magnetic field’s influence on him had relaxed somewhat; he did still have a faint sense of “off-ness” and that migraine-like pain, but it didn’t seem to be enough to paralyze the functioning of his core.

When he tried to push himself up to a sitting position with his left hand, he realized he was still gripping the folding knife.

The marbled pattern of caked blood and fat on the blade sent a shudder through him, and he gagged. He tried to open his hand and let it go, but his fingers refused to obey his orders. It was as if the skin of his palm had melted under high heat and fused solid to the handle—

Let go…I said let go! his mind clamored; he propped the stub of his right arm on the knife to hold it down while he forcibly ripped his stiffened fingers from it one by one. When he’d gotten the last finger, his pinky, peeled off to the second knuckle, the knife fell away with a dry clatter.

Harvey lay perfectly still for a minute, lungs full of air he’d forgotten to exhale, and then he pressed his forehead to the ground and blew out a long, deep breath. The pavement leached the heat from him until the ability to think coolly gradually returned to his chilled head.

What was I thinking back there?

It was as if I was enjoying torturing amateurs to death…They were injured and trying to run away, and I went after them as if it was a hunt.

He shuddered at himself. A different kind of nausea roiled in him than the one that had attacked him going through the barrier; this time it was inspired entirely by his own deeds. If he threw up now, Harvey thought what came out wouldn’t be blood or bile but some dark, sordid monster.

His left hand still lay where he’d flung it out on the ground; one joint was so swollen from where he’d fractured it punching the wall of the truck that it stuck out like its own sore thumb. When he clenched his fist, it smarted angrily. Without shutting off his sense of pain, Harvey lifted it high in the air and—slam—rammed it into the pavement with everything he had. It throbbed even worse now, but the pain pushed back the nausea.

Damn, that hurts…

He should’ve held back a little. He knew he was acting incredibly stupid right now. Speaking of which, he guessed those guys from before must be long gone by this point, but somehow he didn’t really care anymore. They’d all be spending time in the hospital anyway, if he was any judge.

Kieli…

I have to hurry up and find her. What am I wasting time on this stupid crap for?

Harvey forced his throbbing left hand to push him up off the ground and into a sitting position again, and instantly sensed malice behind him. Instinctive reflex had him springing to his feet and speeding away in what was basically a controlled fall. His back thumped against the gate, and he sank down against it. Immediately afterward, a harsh clang sounded a hair’s breadth above his head.

He made a profane noise when he saw who was standing there. The eyes gleaming dully at him were the same blue-gray color as the night sky behind them. Immediately, the two men leaped in opposite directions, keeping their distance.

Joachim twisted one corner of his mouth up in a grin and flashed the knife in his right hand.

“Letting go of your blade? What are you, stupid? Or did you give up because you know you’ve got no chance of winning?”

Harvey just glared back, grinding his teeth, and didn’t answer. Not only was he weaponless, he had only one arm. It seemed pretty clear that he was at a disadvantage here, but now he realized that Joachim wasn’t looking quite right, either. He was bent over a fraction, cradling his stomach with the arm that wasn’t wielding a knife; he’d propped one shoulder against the gate next to him. Come to think of it, he’d faltered right before they’d fallen down the stairs earlier, too. And now Harvey remembered that the other man’s core hadn’t been working right when they’d met in the capital, either. Joachim might look more or less normal compared to the other failures, but Harvey guessed in the end he was still running on an imperfect, replica core.

“Seems to me like you’re not in top form right now either,” he spat, and focused for just a split second on his left hand, blocking out the pain. Regenerative powers aside, it looked as though he wasn’t necessarily at a total disadvantage when it came to physical shape.

They faced off on either side of the gate, each “attended” by a knight in a suit of armor, and glared for a while as they sized each other up. Harvey no longer understood why they were still trying to kill each other, under the circumstances, but then again, they’d never had an actual reason to begin with.

The first one to make his move was—

—a suit of armor.

“Huh?”

With a rusty metallic squeal, the suit of armor standing behind Joachim raised its broadsword. Harvey’s eye widened in shock. Joachim looked at him with the same expression. He was already reflexively dodging as he looked behind him; the suit of armor he’d been standing in front of was starting to move, too.

Both suits raised their arms in concert and swung their swords straight out to the side in a fast, lethal sweep. Harvey and Joachim were moving as mirror images again as they ducked, just barely managing to dodge, but then being flung back against the gate by the gusts of wind the broadswords created.

Slam!

Broadswords hit the iron gate on either side of them, crushing it out of shape and then over backward with a deafening roar that pierced straight through Harvey’s eardrums and rattled his brain. Caught up in the gate’s collapse, he fell right over it into the park, rolled once, and leaped back to his feet. All that choreography was synchronized with Joachim’s, too.

“What the hell? Why are those things moving?!”

“How should I know?!”

As they argued, two giant shadows loomed through the haze of mineral dust blanketing their vision. The suits of armor stepped over the fallen gate in one great stride, swinging their swords down at them again. Harvey and Joachim threw their bodies in opposite directions almost as if they’d shoved each other away, just as two broadswords simultaneously struck the ground where they’d been.

Stupid as it was, for a moment Harvey genuinely wondered if there were people inside them, but no, those weren’t the movements of a living creature. Rather, they were almost like the exaggerated motions of something being moved about with steel wires. But such big hunks of heavy metal couldn’t be manipulated with wires, obviously, and anyway, who could be doing it, and from where?

Something was possessing them—he could conclude that by process of elimination. Though probably a person with normal sensibilities would’ve eliminated a ridiculous possibility like that right off the bat.

The open plaza right past the gate seemed to be where one boarded the trolleys; several different tracks branched out from it in a fan shape, and on each one sat rows of roofless trolley trucks big enough to hold about four people each. As near as he could figure squinting into the dimness, there were around twenty of them. From this boarding area the tracks all converged into one for the trolleys to head into the clockwork city carrying parkgoers. Naturally there were no parkgoers or employees to be seen at this time of night; the lines of empty, shadowed trolleys stretched out solemnly in front of Harvey like a collection of rectangular coffins waiting for their turns to be sent into the graveyard.

Harvey and Joachim ran through the gaps between the trolleys, chased deeper into the park grounds by the armor. The grating clang clang clang of spurred boots pounded after them. Harvey got the impression that trolleys were being crushed one after the other behind him (sheesh…), but he had a sneaking suspicion that if he turned around to look he’d have to take responsibility; so he silently ordered himself not to turn around for anything. Don’t come crying to me later, I don’t know anything about this.

A steel pipe lying on the ground caught his eye—it was the perfect length for a weapon. Probably the control lever to one of the trolleys. He scooped it up with his left hand as he ran. In the very next moment, he instinctively sensed danger, and as he spun around he rammed the pipe into the ground to block the broadsword arcing down at him from behind. He heard a dull thud of impact near his hand. He’d pulled back just before it hit, avoiding the full brunt of the blow, so he narrowly escaped being sent flying. A heavy pins-and-needles sensation shot up his left arm, though. The fracture was getting worse; he just knew it.

“Whoa!” No time to even pause for breath—now the other suit was launching an attack at him from his other side, and he had no confidence he could block a second one. So he turned tail and ran, yelling, even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good, “Why are you both coming after me?! There are two of us, you know!”

Where had that jerk Joachim gone off to, anyway? Harvey made a profane noise, scanning his surroundings.

Clackety-clack, clackety-clack

A new sound, different than the big metallic strides of the suits: oddly short, quick footsteps. It was coming from deeper inside the park…When Harvey squinted down the trolley tracks, he saw a pack of small creatures approaching from beyond the miniature city’s night skyline, bouncing and hopping.

They were strangely pleasant little clockwork dolls with oversized heads. There were all kinds: some animals like bears and monkeys, some that looked like helmeted guards, and many others. The one thing they had in common was that there was no tension in any of their faces. “What are those things…?” he found himself mumbling, dully—but as it turned out, this wasn’t the time to be wondering.

A group of dolls dressed like guards had pushed a wheeled gun battery along in front of them, and now with a breezy “Ready, go!” they opened fire.

A bang, and a burst of white smoke belching out of the muzzle—Harvey quickly ducked, and an explosive roar ripped through the air above his head. (They weren’t shooting blanks; they’d loaded real gunpowder into the thing!) When he risked a look up, not yet raising himself off the ground, the suit of armor that’d been chasing him was missing its head. Its giant frame staggered, severed neck smoldering where it had been cruelly beheaded, and fell back onto the trolley, sending up a cloud of dust and deafening noise. On the one hand, Harvey was grateful that they’d so perfectly defeated one of the suits for him, but on the other…He felt a shiver run down his spine. Those things had a lot of destructive power for their size.

While he’d been distracted by the gun, the rest of the dolls had hopped right up to him. They started noisily crawling up his legs and all over him like a pack of insects swarming their prey, so he brushed them away with a series of kicks, shuddering. “Cut it out, you pains in the neck!”

It didn’t do any good, though. They just kept coming. One, two, threefourfivesix—Disgusted, Harvey stopped counting. Anyway, there were enough of them that getting an exact head count wasn’t going to help him handle all of them. And as if that weren’t enough, the remaining suit of armor brandished its sword and started coming after him again.

Hearing the metallic clatter of wheels start up behind him, he turned to look for the source of the sound. One of the trolleys that normally shouldn’t even be running at this hour (not that tonight wasn’t squarely in “weird” territory already, with suits of armor and dolls running around everywhere) was rolling down the track toward him. It just about crashed into him, too; he dodged in the nick of time, looking up as he rolled to see Joachim lever himself up into the trolley from behind.

For a split second Harvey was in danger of just watching him go by, but then he came back to himself with a start. “Don’t you dare try to escape alone!”

As the trolley passed in front of him, he grabbed on to the outer wall and forcibly vaulted himself over it. Joachim tried to kick him back out with one foot, looking annoyed. “This is a one-man truck! Beat it!” “Liar!” They were still tussling when the troop of guard dolls with the heavy artillery began bearing down on them from the track ahead. Two guards busily loaded the next round and spun the body of the cannon toward them, and there came that breezy “Ready, go!” again. In the instant that Harvey hastily dropped into a crouch and plastered himself against the inside wall of the trolley, the second cannonball whizzed by close enough to almost graze his head.

Screeching, the soldiers jumped down from the gun carriage and started running. The trolley, which had picked up speed on the downhill slope, knocked the miniature battery clean off the tracks and barreled right along into the clockwork city.

“What the hell are you going farther into the park for?! That’s backward!”

“If you don’t like it, get out! This is a one-man truck!”

“I know you’re lying!”

Busy with all that fruitless bickering, neither of them noticed right away that they could hear twice as many wheels on the tracks now. When they came back to their senses and looked behind them, a crowd of animal dolls were crammed to overflowing into another trolley chasing theirs. “Urk…” Two of the dolls were pumping the control lever in the rear of that trolley up and down, so they were gaining speed like nobody’s business, and the gap between their two trucks was practically closed in no time. As for Harvey and Joachim, their trolley’s control lever…

…was missing.

Both of them stared wordlessly at the empty space where it should have been for several seconds.

“…Ephraim,” Joachim asked with hooded eyes, “You were carrying a steel pipe earlier, weren’t you? That was the lever, wasn’t it?”

“I chucked it,” Harvey shot back with the same hooded gaze.

After they wasted several more seconds glaring at each other, the shouting started again.

“Why are you always so damn careless with things?! How many hundreds of lighters have you lost?!”

“Shut up! You’re the last person I want to hear that from!”

While they were preoccupied with fighting, the trolley behind them had been gaining on them. Now it crashed into them from behind. The violent impact sent their own vehicle rocking back and forth hard enough that Harvey wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d ended up with whiplash, and he definitely couldn’t keep his mouth open through this. He gritted his teeth and rode out the shocks.

The force of its own attack had temporarily pushed back the other trolley; before it could make its next hit, they jumped out from either side and flung themselves away. The second crash happened immediately afterward, and the trolley truck they’d been riding in pitched right off the tracks and barreled into a building by the roadside. In a real city street they’d be witnessing a tragic disaster, but luckily there were no residents here to complain about the damages.

Harvey rolled out of his controlled fall and promptly got back up again. The dolls that had been riding in the other trolley jumped out one after another on either side of the tracks and stayed divided into two groups that way, each fanning out around its target—Harvey on this side, and Joachim across from him. The dolls’ teamwork seemed surprisingly good. Before long they had him surrounded in a tight, flawless semicircle and were slowly closing in.

His stare never wavering from them, Harvey retreated backward. His back hit a wall after only a few steps, and he heard something clatter to the ground. Glancing quickly over his shoulder, he saw a sort of club lying on the ground with a spiked ball attached to it. Though he’d never actually seen one before, his memory said it was one of those whatchamacallits, those ancient weapons…but what was it doing here?

Harvey cast a brief, wary glance around him. He was standing in a wide-open space. What looked like spectator seating formed an oval that closed him in on all sides. There were two doors, one on each side of the ring, that he assumed were entrances. Weapons of war stood propped against the wall by each one like a collection: swords, lances, axes, shields, and everything else. And then there were the lights: a massive lighting fixture was strung up on wires hanging from the top of a support column. Although only tiny emergency lights were on now, every lamp was pointed toward the center of the ring. Sure, considering that the train tracks were running right through it and all, it did seem like part of the tourist-attraction doll town, but—it was a coliseum.

Whatever bad luck had him facing the enemy in a place like this, Harvey certainly hadn’t seen it coming.

Sizing up the dolls out of the corner of his eye, he went for the weapons behind him. There were so many of them that he froze in indecision for a moment before snatching up one of the single-edged long swords he was relatively familiar with (there were some weapons that might give him a longer reach, like the jointed thing that looked like a bunch of short clubs strung together, but he didn’t know how to use them). It was sized for the dolls, so it was a good bit smaller and shorter than a normal long sword, but that meant it was perfect for wielding with one hand. He wouldn’t be able to swing a regular long sword one-handed.

With a single gleaming swing, he beat back the pack of dolls jumping at him all at once. They smacked against the coliseum’s walls and ground wherever they happened to land, but then they just got back up, necks and limbs contorted at impossible angles, and swarmed once again. The easygoing smiles plastered on their big round faces just looked crazed when you saw them dangling from necks broken at ninety degrees.

“Argh!” There were too many of them; it was starting to get seriously annoying. While he was shaking off one clinging to his back, several more worked together to trip up one leg, and he lost his balance and fell with a surprised “Wah!” to the ground. A mass of dolls was pinning him down in no time.

A jewel!

He’s hiding a jewel!

Take the jewel! Take the jewel!

Their shrill whispers grated at his ears. He was dragged down to the ground by the pack of dolls, and one of them swung an ax straight for his heart. Harvey rolled to one side, dodging by a hair’s breadth, and heard a bone-chilling crack as the thick blade buried itself in the ground where his upper body had been just a split second ago.

Rolling over once and bouncing to his feet at lightning speed, he ended up back-to-back with Joachim (who’d slipped through his circle of dolls too, apparently) in the center of the coliseum, each of them facing off against his personal band of enemies. Joachim’s weapon was a long staff with wedged-shaped blades on each side: one of those giant axes called “halberds” or whatever. This whole town must have “olden days” theming; all the weapons were the kind of classical ones that existed only in historical records from the mother planet.

We want the stones, we want the stones

Big, pretty, sweet candies

Give them to us, give them to us!

The dolls formed a circle around them and pressed in. Dizzied by their lilting half-song, half-incantation whispers, Harvey hissed, “Are these ‘jewels’ they’re after cores?”

“Looks that way. Are they so desperate they even want your broken-down piece of crap?”

“Yours isn’t even real. Just give it to ’em.”

After trading a few snarky comments over their shoulders, they subsided into annoyed grunts.

A wave of dolls gave a queer cry and flew at them; Harvey and Joachim cut them down, but it felt like a drop in the bucket. There were just too damn many of them.

If only there was a way to destroy all of them at once and avoid any more trouble—

The lights.

The lighting fixture hanging from the very top of its thick pillar caught his eye; by the time the word “lights” had finished forming in his mind, his body was already moving. Joachim moved at the same time, possibly with the same idea.

They cut their way through the encirclement with brute force, dragging a few of the dolls on their heels along after them as they made a beeline for the pillar. Running side by side, they exchanged glances.

“Who takes the bottom?” Harvey asked.

“You.”

“Why me?”

“Like you could even climb. I’m on top.”

It didn’t sit well with Harvey, but there was no time to argue about who’d draw the short straw here. They were already right below the lights. Joachim had tossed away the halberd; he started scrambling up the lighting pillar with an open knife in his teeth while Harvey held off the dolls who tried to follow after him, knocking them down like some kind of bizarre festival game. Okay, true, it’d be hard to do the climbing with one arm.

Now he was stuck taking on all the dolls himself, though, which meant he was swamped in no time, and one of them leaped straight at his face and clung on. Seeing its blank, manufactured smile right in front of his eye gave him goose bumps. “Get off!” He immediately tore it away, catching a little of his own cheek in the process, but in the brief moment it obscured his sight, a whole pack of dolls managed to push him to the ground.

“Ephraim, get out of the way!”

At the shout from above, Harvey barked out a panicked, “No, wait a—” But apparently that “get out of the way” was just for form’s sake anyway, because Joachim displayed not the slightest intention of actually giving him time to dodge. He cut the wire holding up the lights without a moment’s hesitation.

The great downward whoosh of air hit first. Harvey somehow managed to claw his way out from under the mountain of dolls one-armed just in time for the disc-shaped lighting fixture to graze the tip of his retreating shoe as it came crashing down.

Their shrill dying screams felt like blades scraping at his skull. Unable to take it, he covered his ears, but just like the gate earlier, the screams pierced straight through his eardrums and bit into his brain.

As Harvey stood gritting his teeth, left hand and right stub clapped to the sides of his head, the cloud of dust and glass shards gradually settled back down to the ground, and he could see again. By then there were no more screams to hear, either; just echoes that sounded like wheels spinning in the air.

Underneath the warped iron framework that once held up the lights lay a pile of crushed dolls wearing broad smiles. Harvey sank to the ground and took great heaving breaths for a while, at which point Joachim came shimmying down the pillar, pretty much sliding toward the end, until his knees touched the rubble and he plopped down next to Harvey in a fit of light coughing.

“…You pay the damages, not me.”

“Whatever, it’s our joint responsibility.”

“I’m making tracks.”

“Me, too.”

A brief exchange where either of them could have been saying any of the lines, and then nothing. They just sat mutely for a while, without further energy to talk or move. Eventually, Harvey managed to breathe a grunt of displeasure at the idea that they’d actually joined forces, emergency or no emergency. That really deserved a more extreme negative reaction than one little grunt, but he didn’t have the energy left for that, either.

Here and there, a doll pinned under the lights twitched as if it had suddenly remembered movement. The motion looked strangely human to Harvey, and something bitter rose up the back of his throat. Anyway, they’d managed to wipe them out, at least.

He let some of his tension relax for the moment and let out a long sigh.

“…Wait, aren’t we forgetting something?”

Something was tugging at the back of his mind. Joachim tilted his head at the question.

“Now that you mention it…”

“What was it?”

As they exchanged quizzical looks, an enormous shadow fell across them. Harvey tipped his head back to look up, his sense of danger not quite kicking back in, and saw a dark-gray suit of armor looming behind him, appearing suspended in midmotion. Its raised broadsword gleamed dully as it reflected the emergency lights.

In the instant that sword was brought down, he and Joachim both made little “whoa!” noises and scrambled away, half-crawling. The tip of the broadsword smashed the piece of rubble they’d just been sitting on clean in half. Harvey confirmed this out of the corner of his left eye and shuddered even as he started to stand up, which was when Joachim’s shoe stepped on the empty right sleeve of his coat. Unable to react fast enough, Harvey pitched forward and fell.

“What the—you son of a bitch!”

“I’ll let you take it from here. I’m sick of this,” Joachim tossed coolly over his shoulder, already running through the spectator seating. Soon enough he disappeared beyond the coliseum wall. “I’m plenty sick of it too, you know!” Harvey shouted pointlessly after him—not that he could spare the time, since the suit of armor was taking a great stride toward him to deliver a follow-up attack. Harvey snatched a large fallen shield from the ground and blocked the blow, but it still sent him flying backward until his back crashed into the weapons collection against the wall. The whole set of weapons collapsed on his head with an almost musical clatter.

“Ow…dammit…”

He silenced the pain in his creaking back, and then the next attack was coming without giving him time to pause for breath. Rolling out of its path and letting the sword bury itself in the wall instead, he grabbed the shaft of the first weapon he saw, which turned out to be a long spear. It was easily taller than he was, and definitely too heavy to swing around with one hand, but he kicked the end up with his foot and managed to get into some semblance of a defensive stance.

The armor yanked its broadsword free with a great heave and turned back to face him, lifting its weapon overhead again like the fool who just repeats the only thing he knows. “You have to do more than just”—Harvey ducked to evade the slash, at the same time launching himself right up against the armor—“swing the damn thing around!”

He put all the weight he possibly could behind it—the momentum of his forward leap, the weight of his weapon, and the entirety of his own body weight—and plunged the tip of the spear into the tiny joint at the suit’s abdomen. It went straight through its hollow torso and came out the back to strike the concrete wall behind. The force of the impact drove more heavy pins and needles up Harvey’s left arm and let them zing through all the bones of his body.

After freezing there for a few moments with his face pressed up against the suit’s breastplate, Harvey let go of the spear and stumbled back a few paces. At that point his knees gave out, and he landed on his rear in the rubble.

When he looked up, his lungs heaving violently, he saw the suit of armor dangling in front of him, staked to the wall with a spear sprouting out of its stomach.

“…And don’t you forget it,” he spat, dropping his gaze and sighing…and seeing the armor’s arm twitch in his peripheral vision.

His gaze jolted back up again. It was lifting the broadsword again, the broadsword it still held even after being pinned to a wall. Unable to move in that moment, Harvey’s eye stared fixedly at the tip of the blade as it swung down toward his head where he sat.

Fwish…!

The blade whooshed by his left shoulder close enough to feel and plunged into the ground with the force of the sword’s own weight, sending up a spray of debris and dust that combed up Harvey’s hair from below.

The right arm that had gripped its sword hung down limply, and the suit of armor went still again, presumably for good this time.

Harvey’s head was just fine, but the experience seemed to have short-circuited his brain for some reason. Stunned and unable to snap out of it, he looked vacantly around him. Overturned trolleys, a wrecked coliseum that looked as if a sandstorm had just passed through it, dolls crushed to scrap wood under the stage lights, and a suit of armor that he was sure had been standing outside the gate until the park closed this evening hanging crucified against the wall like some crazy religious symbol.

When the park employees discovered this disastrous sight in the morning, they’d probably wonder what cult had snuck in overnight and what the hell kind of ritual they’d held here. Harvey didn’t even want to think about it.

Ninety years without slumbering,

Tick, tock, tick, tock

Harvey could hear someone singing softly. It wasn’t singing so much as murmuring, really; a little off-rhythm and a little off-key.

Walking on a bit unsteadily, he began to discern a space like a tiny walled garden in one corner of the city’s slate-gray dimness. The only lonely equipment was a miniature set of chin-up bars, a sand pit, and a swing set; there was no sign of any dolls playing there. A park with no one in it didn’t need any help projecting a poor, run-down aura.

It looked deserted, and yet it wasn’t.

There was a bench wide enough for two people over in one corner, and on it sat a black-haired girl in a black duffle coat, hugging her knees to her chest. Her presence there was so faint and weak that he felt as though, if he didn’t concentrate on her, she’d just melt into the scenery and disappear from his sight. He could see the subtly transparent scenery of the other time there, making her normally pale skin look even bluer, which in turn made her presence seem even less substantial.

His life’s seconds—

The song broke off, and the girl on the bench raised her head.

“You’re so tone-deaf,” Harvey murmured in amazement from the park entrance. The girl quickly plopped her feet down from the bench onto the ground and sat up straight (not that he could see any point in her trying to keep up proper appearances after all this time).

“I wasn’t trying to sing it. I can sing a little better than that!”

“Uh-huh,” he said in a teasing I’ll let that go tone of voice. She gave him a miffed look.

“You took too long to come get me.”

“Yeah…I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, cutting off his apology with a shake of her head. Hey, make up your mind. She dropped her eyes to her knees and pressed her lips together. It was her same old look, the face she made when she was a breath from crying and yet refused to cry.

Harvey pushed himself off the fence at the entryway and walked over to the bench. He tried to walk as normally as possible, but he lost his ability to balance before he got all the way there; and just as he made it up to the bench he folded at the knees and slumped into a barely controlled crouch. The girl stooped forward and peered at him worriedly.

“What’s wrong…? Are you okay?”

“I’m just tired.”

Without standing up, he hung his head and rested his forehead on her knees. It slid through her legs and smacked against the cold metal bench. He could sense her hand hesitantly touching the back of his head and stroking his hair. He could sense the gesture, but he couldn’t feel the touch.

“You weren’t done with the song, right? Go on.”

“No, you’ll just tease me,” he heard the girl’s voice say above him, a little primly, as if she were trying to act tough. Harvey wished he’d listened a while longer instead of interrupting with stupid comments.

In lieu of singing, she started up another line of conversation. “See, this is a song about how a clock that ran for ninety years starting when the old man was born broke down right when he died, and wouldn’t run anymore.”

“Huh. Depressing song.”

“Yeah…but here’s what I think: The song isn’t really about the clock breaking down. It’s about how the clock was alive. It’s about a clock that lived with the old man from his birth to his death. Even though it knew they’d have to say good-bye someday, it cared about the old man so much that it stayed by his side until then, watching over him.”

“…Huh,” Harvey said, trotting out his favorite handy answer. Frankly, he couldn’t care less what she was talking about. He’d just slid his eyelid shut and lost himself in the voice above him. A voice that blended a little into the dusky park sky and the faint noise at the edges of the night air; a voice neither too high nor too low; a comfortable voice. It was so frustrating that he could hear her, but not touch her.

“Kieli,” he said, finally calling her by her name. It felt like a long time since he’d last done that. “…Are you all right?”

He thought the situation probably called for saying something more than that, but nothing really thoughtful was coming to him. When he pulled his forehead back from the bench a little, there were her scraped-up knees right in front of him. When he lowered his head to rest it on those knees, they disappeared from his vision, and there was only the bench after all.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

She didn’t sound cheerful, no, but her voice was the same as always. Harvey felt a little relieved.

“See, someone brought me back here. They could tell you had come for me, though, so they left just now. Want to know who it was?”

“Not really…who?”

“It’s a secret.”

Why’d you bring it up in the first place, then? He raised his face to look up at her, slightly disappointed. Her cheeks, just as scraped as her knees, wore an impish smile. “I’ll tell you about that later,” she said cheerfully, but by the time she was finished she’d already tucked the smile away.

Lowering her gaze, she began a quiet, halting confession. “Harvey, I met Joachim…”

“I know.” Harvey could pretty well guess what had happened, so he hadn’t pressed her about it, but maybe Kieli thought she had to say the words to him herself; she went on without lifting her head or heeding his response.

“And he said he’d tell me lots of things if I came to see him, so I went. I heard lots of stuff about the capital, and other things you didn’t tell me.”

“…Yeah.”

“And then I ended up leaving late for camp today, and I was in a hurry, and then there were people following me, and I got scared, and I ran, but they came after me…”

Her tightly clenched fists trembled slightly where she held them against her knees, and drop after clear drop of water fell on the white backs of her hands. “Kieli, you don’t have to tell me now. It can wait.” The girl shook her head fiercely, scattering teardrops onto the bench. However, the drops didn’t stay where they landed. He tried to touch her hand, but all he felt was the bench. Teardrops slid right through the back of his own hand. Harvey didn’t think he’d ever been this frustrated before. He could hear her—she was crying there in front of him—so why couldn’t he reach out right now and hold her?

“Let’s go home, okay?”

“But I don’t know how to get back.”

“It’s okay. From what I hear, if you wish really strongly to come home, it’s not too hard to do.”

“But then it really might be impossible. I mean, right now, I don’t really want to come back…,” blubbered Kieli, still sobbing. It took a second for Harvey to actually register what she’d said, and then he was struck speechless.

After a blank interval of nothing passing between them, he peered at her face and ventured, “…Why not?”

Wiping at her tears with her coat sleeve, Kieli answered in a hesitant, tearful voice. “…While I was waiting for you just now, I started thinking maybe it’d be okay to stay like this forever. I thought…if I stayed like this, I could be with you forever, and maybe that would be better—”

“No it wouldn’t. Don’t be stupid,” Harvey said immediately. Kieli shrank back a little in surprise. However, she didn’t seem inclined to take it back, either. She was wearing a very stubborn expression as she stared at her shoes.

…There she goes into one of her fits of confusing selfishness again. She’d said stuff like this before: “I wish I was a ghost,” or “When I die, I want to be sent out to sea…”

He couldn’t afford to dawdle here very long, either, since he wasn’t about to let anyone brand him as the criminal who’d wrecked the coliseum. Harvey sighed, at a total loss. Then: “…Okay, okay.”

An idea occurred to him. “Let’s do this,” he suggested. “If you can make it back, you can ask me to do one thing, and I’ll do it.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than Kieli lifted her face alertly. “Really?”

All of a sudden Harvey had a bad feeling about this. Backing off somewhat, he tried tacking on a bunch of conditions: “It has to be something I’m capable of. And short-term. And if you ask for something too hard I’m saying no.”

Kieli dried the tears from her face, reining in her expression almost meekly, and said, “Okay, I have something to ask.”

“What?”

“Well, um…” She trailed off into silence for a second, and then, although Harvey was pretty sure nobody was listening, she leaned over and brought her face close to his. Her lips hovered lightly over his ear, and he heard a soft little whisper.

Damn it…

It got hard to even put one foot in front of the other, and Joachim sank to his knees, cradling his stomach. When he doubled over in a fit of coughing, a clump of dead organ tissue landed on the ground in front of him, twitching for a few seconds as if maggots were writhing around on its surface before all the moisture evaporated out of it unnaturally fast.

All he could see in his darkened vision were his own vomit and the dull black shadows of the tracks. He had little idea of his surroundings, but he was sure the dolls were looking down from the pitch-dark windows of the houses and sneering at him.

His core’s regenerative powers were in overdrive once again, and all the cells of his body had started going haywire. He’d already sensed this coming when he dumped the suit of armor on Ephraim and split, so he’d meant to hightail it out of the park as rapidly as he could, but his core moved faster than he’d expected, and he lost the ability to move before he’d made it all the way.

“Ugh…”

It felt as if somebody’d poured a bucket of overboiling water into his stomach. Unable to stand it, he fell down onto his hands and knees and set to work making his puddle of vomit bigger. He tried to cut off his sense of pain, but every time he threw up another chunk of the guts forcing their way up his throat his concentration was shot, and he writhed in agony. All five of the fingernails on one hand had torn off when he clawed at the hard ground, and blood was seeping out of the wounds. When he made a fist, ignoring that sight, his fingernails got mixed up in the regeneration and started transforming into something grotesquely shaped. Joachim shuddered.

“Help—someone—,” he started to say, and then grunted at himself in disgust. There wouldn’t be anyone around here, and it was even more unthinkable that someone would go to the trouble of coming here for him.

And yet no sooner had he finished the thought than he was surprised to sense someone standing over him. Crouched pathetically on all fours in a pool of his own vomit, he raised his head to see a figure standing on the tracks in front of him.

He felt the letdown right away when he registered who it was. Great, a freaking kid.

A skinny boy was staring intently down at him with dark eyes in this low light. With dark eyes—with eyes whose color depth changed subtly depending on the light or dark of the world around them. Dark gray eyes with a shade of blue.

“You’re—”

The boy took a step closer and reached out his right hand wordlessly. His fingertips touched Joachim’s forehead and kept going, plunging right into his head up to the first knuckle as if he were just sticking them into a mud puddle. Joachim cried out and tried to jerk away, but his body froze over from the forehead down, and he couldn’t move. He couldn’t even feel the touch, and yet there was a definite discomfort, and very real pain where the fingers pierced his forehead.

The boy opened his mouth.

“Thief…” The voice picked up by his ears and the voice flowing directly into his brain through the fingers were just slightly out of synch, so that he heard them separately, overlapping each other, and he was overcome with a dizziness as if his whole field of vision was melting out of shape.

He’d heard that voice before. It sounded almost exactly like someone else’s.

“Thief…Who gave you permission to use my body?”

“Body? What are you talking about, kid? I’m me!” Joachim answered, gritting his teeth against the pain in his brow. It was a bizarre pain that he couldn’t shut down through the normal means. He couldn’t even figure out where or how his sense of pain itself was interpreting the sensation.

The boy lifted his jaw a little, jeering at him. From this new angle, his eyes were a light gray.

“Who’s this ‘me’? You’re nobody. This body originally belonged to me. You’re just a thing, a thing that thinks it’s me when really it’s nothing and no one.

“Get out.

“Get out of my body.

“You didn’t exist to begin with, so nobody will miss you if you’re gone, will they?”

“Shut up and get lost! Stay away! Stop—”

The boy’s fingers sank deeper and deeper into his forehead. From the first knuckle to the second, then the hand, the wrist…when he was all the way to the elbow, Joachim felt his throat being grabbed from the inside, and he couldn’t speak anymore. He couldn’t breathe either, obviously. He just stared wide-eyed at the boy’s approaching face. It was twisted and crazed; Joachim felt as if he was looking into a mirror, and that mirror reflected back at him the most infuriating eyes in this world, more infuriating than those copper ones, even—the slate-gray eyes he hated more than anything else.

“This world doesn’t need you,” echoed his doppelgänger’s voice in his head. Shut up! Joachim shouted back silently, resisting. But the voice invaded even his thoughts, blending with his own voice until This world doesn’t need you shut up this world shut up doesn’t need you he couldn’t tell whose thought was whose anymore this world doesn’t need you this world doesn’t need you this world doesn’t need me—

He could remember it all until the hand reaching down his throat seized his heart, and then nothing.

Kieli brought her mouth close to one ear half-hidden by coppery hair, and whispered a few short words.

Then she drew back a little to gauge his reaction. Harvey just crouched there frozen in front of the bench with all expression vanished from his face, so eventually she spoke up again.

“…That’s a no?”

She’d thought it qualified as something he was capable of, and as something not only short-term but momentary.

“…Is it too hard?” Kieli asked, looking straight at him even if she let her eyes lower a little. Harvey himself broke the eye contact, seeming uncomfortable for some reason, and put his hand over his mouth, mumbling, “No, it’s not hard, or anyway it’s not hard for me, but—no, wait! Look, that’s not the issue…”

He was totally floundering. Kieli’d said her piece fully prepared to be turned down flat; she hadn’t thought he’d be so genuinely rattled. Just getting to see him look this flustered felt pretty satisfying all by itself—

“Huh…?!”

It felt as if someone were grabbing her by the back of the collar and yanking. At the same time, in the corner of her vision her own hand blurred shakily for a moment. There was no one behind her, of course. “Harvey, there’s something wrong with me…” She raised her hands in front of her and flipped them over a few times, watching them. Like a bad video feed, they shook periodically and went fuzzy with signal noise, and then the video began steadily breaking up into individual little particles.

Kieli knew the rest of her body must be doing the same thing, too, because Harvey was gazing at her in shock.

“I—guess you can get back after all?”

“Huh? That’s not fair! I haven’t wished to go home yet—,” she cried frantically, though wasn’t sure who she thought was being unfair, and then—

A heavy roar sounded, like something collapsing far off in the distance, and the whole area around them shook.

Harvey got to his feet at once, his face tensing. Kieli stood up from the bench, following his example. Fine sand dribbled down from the walls of the homes surrounding the park, and the chains of the empty swing began squealing insistently.

“What is that…?” Harvey muttered, looking warily in the direction the sound had come from. Even as he spoke, Kieli’s sense of being dragged by something intensified until the whole park was blinking in her vision and filling with static. Probably Kieli was the one blinking, though, and not the park.

“Harvey, what should I do…?!”

“You go on ahead to the camp. I’ll be back there soon too.”

“No, I want us to go together!”

Kieli fought the dragging force at her back, trying to cling to Harvey’s arm, but she slipped right through it, and suddenly with nobody touching her, without even any air resistance, the sight before her eyes was receding into the distance as if she’d been blown backward. “Don’t forget, Harvey, you promised me—” Even her own voice was abandoning her, slipping away, and that was all she could get out before

Boom!

An explosion, and white smoke billowing up into the sky in one corner of her vision.

In her rapidly fading view of the park, she could just barely make out a person rushing straight out of the collapsed wall. A green giant—!

She saw Harvey look over his shoulder and say something, but at that exact moment her vision was suddenly cut off like a signal being lost. All she had left at the end was her hearing, and it picked up the edge of his voice in the darkness.

Roger.