CHAPTER 5

THE DREAM ENDS ON A WHIM

That night, he changed out the old hallway lightbulb. Evidently it’d been burned out for quite a while now, but it’d be dangerous for his mother to climb on a chair and stand on tiptoe to reach it, and his younger brother Toby wasn’t tall enough to reach it even on a chair.

I’m glad I came home.

It was such a little thing, really, but Christoph felt so satisfied as he carried the chair back inside and returned it to where it’d come from. There on the kitchen table was a basket holding three glossy yellow apples. He tilted his head, trying to remember what day it was. There was no breadwinner in their household; they certainly didn’t have the money to be bringing home fruit when it wasn’t a special occasion.

He figured it out right away.

“Toby,” he called as he put away the chair. His brother was reading a book in a corner of the room, looking innocent. As if reading weren’t the last thing he’d normally do—not to mention that this book, an old, thick volume of the collected Epistles of the Eleven Saints (someone had given it to them a long time ago, and it was the most expensive book in their meager collection), had to be too hard for him; and what’s more, Christoph doubted Toby would even be interested in it. Though he imagined their mother would be happy if Toby were…

Toby lifted his gaze from the book, and started making preemptive excuses before he’d even so much as opened his mouth to say “apple.”

“Oh, right, those. Someone gave them to me. Don’t they look good?”

“You’ve been stealing, again?”

Thus confronted, his brother made an “oops” face as if he knew he was in trouble, but then unexpectedly turned defiant and came back with a sulky, “Jeez, what’s the big deal about two or three apples? That fruit seller’s dog’s bitten me before, you know. Now we’re even.”

“Go, give them back,” answered Christoph, taking a bit of a stern stance as the older brother in the room. Not that it came off so cool, considering his words came out clumsy and without inflection.

“It’s okay, I’m telling you, nobody’ll know it was me. If I go give them back now, that’ll give me away. I want Mom to have one.”

“It’s not about whether you get caught. This kind of thing, won’t make her happy. Go on, give them back.” He shoved the apple basket at Toby. Toby took it, but then tossed one of the apples back to him with a sullen look.

“Sheesh, it’s not worth getting so worked up ab—”

The sound of a sudden squish coming from his own hand startled him. His brother gulped and stopped talking.

When he looked down, he saw that he was crushing the apple in one hand. Cloudy juice seeped out from between his fingers and dripped onto the floor. But I didn’t think I gripped it tightly at all when I caught it—why—?

As he stared aghast down at his own fingers, still clutched tightly around the ruined fruit, Toby sing-songed, “Uh-oh, now you’ve done it. Now you’ve done it!” He started jumping around him in circles as though this was some kind of children’s game, babbling Now you’ve done it over and over. “Don’t blame me! We can’t give it back now! It’s your fault!”

“Shut up!”

All of a sudden the sound of his younger brother’s jeers was really getting on his nerves.

The apple basket fell to the floor, and the yellow apples rolled around at his feet. “Huh…?” His brother’s body slid down the wall and crumpled to the floor, leaving a trail of blood in his wake as if someone had flung the flesh of a red fruit there.

For a moment Christoph didn’t know what he’d done.

“Toby…?”

You’re over-acting; all I did was push at your shoulder a little! This is just teasing, teasing that I’m so slow…

However, his brother stayed slumped against the wall, unmoving. He showed no signs of jumping up and laughing, “You fell for it!” What’s wrong with him? Something’s strange…something’s strange…

“Hey, Toby…”

As Christoph timidly ventured toward his brother, he heard a sound behind him.

His mother was standing in the doorway. Clutching the ends of the shawl around her shoulders with trembling hands, she stared ashen-faced at the sight of her older son standing rooted in place with an apple crushed to pulp in his hand and her younger son collapsed on the floor bleeding from the head.

“Wh-what are you doing…?!”

“Mom, wait, you have it, wrooong…” He couldn’t quite wrap his tongue around the end of the last word, and it stretched out low and long like a groan. The hand he reached out in an appeal for help was bony and misshapen, with soggy fruit pulp sticking to its greenish skin. His mother recoiled in plain rejection, and covered her mouth with her shawl. She’s going to scream at me again…!

Kill her—

Someone whispered in his head. All you have to do is kill her before she makes a fuss; it’ll be easy if you just squeeze her throat; come on, do it just like you did to your brother—STOP IT! With a strangled cry, he held his head in both hands and tore off running toward the window with exaggerated, sweeping motions, as if he could shake off the voice that way.

He rose light as a feather into the air with just a tiny push off from the floor, and jumped right through the windowpane out into the road. The skin he’d cut on the shards of broken glass was already healing in the time it took for the cuts to register in his mind. He crashed square into the wall of the building on the opposite side of their street, and then took a ninety-degree turn without giving a thought to left or right. As he burst into the main road, he bumped smack into a woman passing by.

As soon as she took in his appearance, she opened her mouth in the shape of a scream. He reached out a hand to cover her mouth, but before he knew it the hand was gripping her by the throat and preparing to slam her into a wall. He let go with a start and reeled unsteadily backward, panting. Then he spun on his heel and ran.

A beat later, a shrill scream sliced right through him. A passerby walking in front of him turned in surprise at the sound; he should mow down this one before he had a chance to scream at all—No! That’s not right! Right in front of the man, he changed direction and charged into the road itself.

Help me, help me…!

Over and over as he ran blindly through the city, he ran across other pedestrians and got screamed at, and each time he changed direction and ran away. He had a horrible feeling that if he got too close to someone he’d kill them, and that simple terror kept him running, searching for somewhere with no people. But where in Westerbury, of all places, was there somewhere with no people in it?

Desperate with impatience, he looked around. An indistinct white moon hung in the sky in front of him. There ought to be two moons, but he could see only one, with the black shadows of two needles falling across its surface.

That’s…

The clock tower of the park. His heart began to ache. He’d promised Toby that they’d go there together sometime. When he’d tried to refuse the invitation at first, saying he couldn’t go outside, his brother had snorted proudly and whipped out something he’d been hiding behind his back. A wool cap that covered the whole face except for holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Toby’d said he would be fine wearing that; he’d answered with a wry smile that he’d just look a different sort of suspicious, but he’d pinky-sworn to go all the same. His finger was warped and crooked, its skin puckered, but his little brother had wrapped his own young finger around it without hesitation.

“Freeze!”

Truck headlights came to a stop in front of him amidst the sounds of commanding voices and many squealing brakes. Armored men with long shields swarmed out and aimed bayonet guns at him. Bayonet guns? These weren’t the Church Soldiers who carried those horrible big-bore guns that hurt. As long as he wasn’t facing one of those, it wasn’t too scary. Hollering a war cry, he ignored the commands to stop and charged right through them.

From the other side of the wall of interlocking shields, gun after gun spat fire. He jerked backward briefly, pierced by several rounds at once, but they’d started to heal by the time he regained his footing. See? You can’t hurt me with those things!

…Huh?

Even though his wounds were half-healed already, the pain was getting worse and worse. Heavy pain, as if someone had pounded wedge after wedge into the very heart of his body. The bullets had bitten into his flesh and stayed there, and now his regenerating cells were taking them in, pushing them deep into his body. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts…Why is this happening to me? I haven’t done anything. I’m just running.

Kill them, kill them—

He heard that voice whisper again. They’re all trying to kill you; your only choice is to kill them before they get you—SHUT UP! He shook off the voice and plunged through the Church Soldiers’ barricade to make a beeline for the clock tower. He could hear trucks and gunfire chasing after him—but I won’t die from that. Please, I’m begging you, don’t follow me!

I don’t want to kill anyone! I have to run away to someplace where there’s no one around, so I won’t kill anyone. If someone tries to stop me, I have to get away no matter what, even if it means killing them—

He didn’t notice then that he was taking leave of enough of his senses not to notice that he wasn’t making sense.

Bearfoot screamed again and flattened himself on the floor as the one-legged soldier sliced the saber through the air over his head with a yell and split the black shadow attacking them in half. But there were too many; eliminating one or two of them hardly seemed to reduce their numbers at all. They kept on leaping one after another out of the corner of the trailer like waves of black water, and making for the body of the girl sleeping in the bed.

“Dammit, there’s no end to them,” groused the soldier’s ghost irritably as he fought them off. Then he called abruptly, “Hey, you!”

“Sir?!” Bearfoot squeaked, still holding his head.

“Grab Kieli and me and get out of here!”

“U-uh…when you say ‘me’…?”

“Don’t you get it, you halfwit?! The radio, obviously!” the soldier barked. He sliced through a new shadow springing at him with one flash of his saber. Well, it was easy for him to call that obvious, but—“H-how was I supposed to know?!” Bearfoot half-wailed, crawling for all he was worth toward the bed, pulling the limp Kieli into his arms, and seizing the cord of the radio on the folding chair.

With no tension in any of her muscles, the girl’s slight form felt heavy as a corpse. Shielding Kieli’s head and keeping himself low to the ground, he darted through the black shadows and dove through the curtain across the doorway out of the truck.

“Okay, sir, now what?!”

“For now, just run straight!”

“What, that’s it?!” I thought he had some amazing master plan or something!

The evil spirits that had made it out of the truck followed them through the air, forming a swirling black mist. Bearfoot ran for the camp clearing, cradling Kieli and looking over his shoulder every moment.

Particles of noise spewed out of the speaker of the radio strapped to his hand and gathered together to form an indistinct human face. The enormous form of the soldier writ upon the nothingness in midair glared at the mist overhead and opened its mouth wide—

“Get lost, every last one of you!”

With a roar, an invisible blade shot out of the speaker, slicing through the air clean and deadly toward the mist and piercing right through it. “Gah!” Bearfoot, knocked over by the recoil, tumbled to the ground and rolled, Kieli in his arms. He managed to protect her through desperate force of will as the hard ground hit every last centimeter of his back until he thought his soul would literally fly out of his mouth.

“Oh, ow, ow, ow…”

If he could just actually pass out and let his mind slip free for a while, he could evade the pain, but unfortunately the blows to his head weren’t hard enough to knock him out. At last they came to a stop and he sat up, coughing at the creaking pain in his back. Instead of standing, he raised his face dumbfounded to the sky.

The black mist had vanished, leaving nothing behind but a few wisps of signal noise. The post supporting the camp light, which had been in the path of the shock wave, was warped in a mushy-looking sphere shape like a candy sculpture.

“Wow…,” Bearfoot breathed admiringly before he’d thought not to.

“Heh. Well, now you’ve seen…a pro…at work…”

Static began to mingle into the boastful answer partway through until it eventually broke up. When he looked down, little tendrils of smoke were rising from the radio on the ground at his feet. The soldier’s ghost was nowhere in sight, either. The only ones here in this clearing surrounded by trailers were Bearfoot, slumped on the ground in its center, and the girl sleeping beside him. Other than the deformed light post, there was no sign left that this had been the site of a desperate battle of offense and defense mere seconds ago.

Well, that was all settled, at least. No sooner had he let his shoulders slump and given a sigh of relief than a voice above his head said, “What are you doing?”

Bearfoot forgot to inhale the next breath. It was a low voice full of anger; a voice even more terrible than the enraged shouts of the dead soldier; a voice that sounded like a lethal weapon all on its own. Come to think of it, what must I look like I’m doing right now, carrying an unconscious girl outside while nobody’s around and rolling around in the dirt with her?

He twisted his neck jerkily around to look up at the man behind him, slapped a fake smile on his face, and gave an experimental “W-welcome back, sir…,” just in case that would help.

“I asked you what you were doing,” their troupe leader repeated without softening his forbidding look one whit. He folded his arms and proceeded to loom over Bearfoot from behind.

Mr. Harvey…

Bearfoot prayed even more fervently for the redheaded man’s quick return than he had when the evil spirits chased them out of the truck. For him personally, this was the greatest and most mundane pinch he’d been in today—whether or not he’d be able to keep eating and sleeping here was on the line.

His prayers weren’t answered, but another savior appeared much closer to home.

“Nng…nn…”

The girl cradled in his lap began to groan. When Bearfoot looked down, hardly daring to hope, the eyelids that had been so firmly closed flew open, and she sat straight up. There she was, wearing a camisole and sitting on his lap with his arms around her as they gazed into one another’s eyes, and Bearfoot’s heart unthinkingly began to race at this happy state of affairs until she opened her mouth to speak her first word, which was “Harvey!” and then unceremoniously shoved him away. The back of his head knocked against the ground. When he looked up, the tip of the troupe leader’s shoe was resting right up against the crown of his head.

“Kieli, so you’re awake. Are you okay?” Shiman asked, concerned, his anger relaxing. As Bearfoot stayed sprawled on the ground, lamenting his broken heart to the skies, Kieli all but stepped on his chest in her hurry to get to Shiman.

“Sir, please take me to the park! It’s Harvey!”

“What’s gotten into you…?”

“Sir!” broke in a new voice, accompanied by crunching footsteps. Bearfoot’s coworker and partner in crime, Rat, entered the patch of sky in his field of vision. After Rat had called for their leader, he happened to glance down at Bearfoot’s face. “…What are you doing, man?”

“Oh, nothing,” Bearfoot answered vaguely, earning himself a funny look from his friend.

The formerly silent nighttime campground was starting to get pretty noisy.

“Did something happen?”

At the troupe leader’s question, Rat turned back to him and refocused. “Seems like the whole town’s in an uproar, saying there’s a monster on the rampage.”

“Monster?”

“I don’t really know, but anyway they told me it ran into the park and holed up there.”

Bearfoot half-listened to this exchange from flat on his back on the ground. He felt as if he’d missed the right time to get up, somehow.

His vision was still blanketed by a cloudy sky the color of dark slate, without a glimmer of dawn in sight.

It looked like the eighth night of Colonization Days wouldn’t be over for a while yet.

The last two days of the Colonization Days holiday began in the morning, and Harvey figured the park had probably been planning to liven things up with a special finale, but either way he doubted they’d be open for business at all come tomorrow. It was in no way the time for him to be casually thinking about stuff like that, but think about it he did, feeling pretty indifferent about the problem.

He tested his body to see if he could move.

He’d slammed back-first into the playground’s far wall, along with the bench and swing, and that had been quite enough to leave him down for the count for a while. Now, when he managed with some difficulty to pull himself out of the rubble his back was buried in, one or the other of his bones made a funny noise. The physical damage had definitely piled up during that battle in the coliseum, and evidently he was now hitting his limit.

No sooner had he pushed his body up alongside the wall to a standing position, coughing, than the figure in front of him jabbed straight for his throat. Throwing himself back against the wall as far as he could, he grasped the other man’s wrist and squeezed bare millimeters before it reached his throat.

Then Harvey heard a disgusting wet sinking sound coming from inside his own neck. Five freakishly gnarled fingers dug into it all the way to the knuckle, cutting off his breath. Clenching his teeth, Harvey concentrated all his strength into the grip of his left hand and narrowly managed to halt the fingers where they were, though they were still trying to work their way even deeper into his throat. He traded glares with his opponent at their close range.

Tight, desiccated skin and bulging lidless eyeballs. Harvey didn’t know where the other man had gotten his injuries, but his clothes were in tatters and black blood like coal tar oozed from all over his body. He quickly realized it was coming from bullet wounds.

“Ngggnngghhh…” The moan never formed words. The man’s spinning eyes that couldn’t quite settle on a focal point conveyed his confused thoughts to Harvey loud and clear, however.

It hurts kill them humans hurts kill them all…

No matter how you sliced it, Harvey was at a definite disadvantage in terms of power—with their reason impaired, they were governed by aggression, and they didn’t seem able to rein in their strength. The fingers were gradually digging deeper.

“Chr…is…”

Harvey used up every scant molecule of air in his throat to squeeze out the name, and the other man’s shoulders twitched as if perhaps he’d recognized that he was being addressed. For a moment, his hand relaxed around Harvey’s neck as he gave a pained groan. Harvey seized the opportunity and kicked him off, regaining his breath. Breath or no breath, though, he couldn’t move right away; he crumpled and slid down the wall to the ground, coughing violently.

Christoph didn’t seem to have hit an artery, but blood nonetheless welled up from the base of his neck as if someone had pulled out the stopper. It felt as though it’d get really bad if he didn’t do something about it, so he concentrated his attention and at least closed up the surface of his skin, forcing himself to ignore the throbbing that always started up deep in his right eye socket when he healed himself. As for Christoph—

“Ugaahh!”

Christoph, who had been holding his head and moaning, suddenly gave a ferocious roar, turned around, and took off running in the opposite direction. There was a wall in his path, but he crashed right through it as if he hadn’t seen it, and tore off into the clockwork city.

“Wait…” Clutching his neck, he struggled to his feet. “Chris, wait!”

Harvey rushed out of the playground after the other man on slightly unsteady feet, but by the time he’d gotten back out into the street, Christoph already had a giant head start. He looked small now as Harvey watched him from behind, destroying whatever he came across as he ran, disregarding the winding path and simply cutting straight through the town. He was heading for the tall tower at the center of the clockwork city. In the night sky overhead—and this was the one thing to be seen that wasn’t set against an artificial sky backdrop for dolls, but the real sky—the clock tower’s round clock face gleamed hazily.

“Chris, I’m telling you, wait! You recognize my voice, right? Listen to me!” He shouted to the man in front of him as he gave chase, then gave a hiss of irritation and began grinding his back teeth.

He’d half had the feeling this might happen one day. Still, the hunch didn’t exactly tell him how it could be avoided, and he suspected the truth was that it couldn’t be avoided. That didn’t make him any less exasperated with himself for not finding a way.

Up ahead, Harvey saw a house with an elaborate scene of a chimney sweep taking a break to play with a little bird on its triangular roof. Christoph barreled through the house’s wall without paying it any mind, tilting the roof where the doll stood and running through to the other side. Immediately after Harvey slipped through the crack in the wall after him several moments later, the whole wall crumbled at his back, taking the dolls on the rooftop with it.

It was chilling, but he retrained his gaze in front of him, at which point he realized he’d lost sight of Christoph. He could see the evidence that the other man had charged on straight ahead, so he followed the trail of wreckage farther along.

He found himself in a long, narrow, closed-off space with a peculiar smell of fuel and rusted iron that reminded him of the bottom of a sand ship. Piping and gears fitted vertically and horizontally together in all directions jostled against each other in the cramped space, making it even more claustrophobic. This must be the power area where they operated all the clockwork houses and dolls from behind the scenes. The steam engines didn’t seem to be running right now, of course. In the glow of the emergency lights, the contours of the stationary gears rose out of the gloom like a collection of megalithic monuments made by some ancient culture.

“Chris!” Harvey’s own voice echoed dully back to him in the enclosed space.

Then he began to hear the low clang of a motor drifting back to him from somewhere up ahead. Squinting, he saw that in the deepest section of the otherwise dormant power area, a lone set of gears was moving.

All sorts of different gears interlocked together in a tall column that reached the ceiling and disappeared into the darkness beyond it; the smallest of them was still wide enough in diameter that it looked like an adult would have room to lie down on it. It was all set up in a long, narrow vertical space like a tower. A steep spiral staircase ran along the inner wall.

If there was one machine that would be running after the park closed, of course it would be the clock in the tower. Gong, gong, gong…Now that he knew what to listen for, he could hear that the low clanging that reverberated in his gut was pounding in time with the enormous pendulum hanging from the ceiling, beating precisely once per second.

A figure crawling from gear to gear up toward the ceiling caught Harvey’s eye.

“What are you climbing up there for?! Get down here!” he called from directly below.

“Gnnaaagh!” Christoph didn’t form words, but he raised one hand and punched a nearby gear as if to tell Harvey to stay away. The gigantic gear cracked, and Harvey took cover, barely escaping before chunks of it came tumbling down on him. They sent up a massive cloud of dust at the walled-in base of the tower. Meanwhile, Christoph climbed up and up and up, haphazardly destroying his own footholds as he went until Harvey was sure he’d fall too.

“What are you thinking?! Right, you’re not thinking at all, are you?!”

Harvey reluctantly circled around to the staircase along the wall and started running, taking it two or three steps at a time. Scrambling through the gaps between the moving gears seemed to give even Christoph a hard time, so thankfully the stairs were faster, if only somewhat. Harvey caught up to him about halfway up, and called over the railing, “Chris, go back down; that’s dangerous!”

But Christoph merely kept climbing on and on, occasionally losing his footing, and showed no signs of stopping. Harvey’d only get left behind if he stood around here, so he clicked his tongue irritably and gave up on talking. Instead, he poured all his energy into sprinting up to the top of the stairs and rushing into the loft between the ceiling and the roof.

“…I’m…” I’m definitely getting weaker, Harvey complained mentally. He was breathing too fast to get all the words out. With each ragged breath, his lungs gave a weird, creaking scream. My lungs’ve gotta be losing their ability to purify air by now anyway; maybe I should start smoking a little less, he thought (as if he’d ever actually act on that). Leaning his hand on his knee, he stopped to rest just long enough to suck a good breath down, and then quickly raised his face again and took stock of his surroundings.

He seemed to be in the very tip of the clock tower. A domed roof hung over his head, and arched windows in three of the walls let the wind flow in from outside. The large round steel plate fitted into the remaining wall must be the back of the clock face. The clockwork machinery coming out of the floor all came together there.

Gong, gong, gong…

The second-by-second vibrations filling the domed space echoed heavily in his chest, dragging his heartbeat along with them and making him feel sick.

There was a great circular hole in the middle of the floor, where four support pillars rose up into this space from below: one from the center of the hole, and three around the edges, holding up the gears and the enormous pendulum. When Harvey got down on his knees beside one of the pillars and peered over the edge of the hole, he could see Christoph climbing up the gears toward him. The whole mess of gears was beginning to crumble from the ground up thanks to Christoph’s own destructiveness.

“Chris!”

As Christoph raised his face in response to Harvey’s voice, a large crack appeared in the gear he stood on.

With a tremor that shook the very air around them, it fell apart beneath his feet, and his hands scrabbled for purchase against thin air. Harvey half-lowered himself down through the floor and grabbed one of those hands just before it slipped away, but that meant a heavy weight wrenched at his left shoulder, and he only just barely managed to hold his ground by hitching what remained of his right arm around the support pillar.

Then Christoph uttered the first actual words Harvey’d heard from him so far.

“Nggh, don’t touch, me…!”

“Wah, you idiot!”

The other man was kicking wildly with both legs, trying to escape Harvey’s hand, which put so much strain on his shoulder that it was seriously not funny. He clenched his teeth, feeling the fracture in his left hand lengthen unmistakably, and wrestled his sense of pain into submission.

Below Christoph’s struggling feet, one set of gears had escaped collapse and retained its function, turning around and around with a ponderous grinding noise. Harvey didn’t even want to imagine what kind of mottled mincemeat a person would turn into if they got dragged through those gnashing teeth.

“Please, don’t touch, me! If you, touch me, I’ll end up, killing you! Let, me go, please!”

“Just stop squirming around, or we’ll fall!”

“Let me, please, let me fall, I won’t die, even if I do fall!”

“You might not die, but it’ll hurt! Even if it hurts so bad you want to die, even if dying would be a hundred times better, you won’t die—imagine that for a second!”

“I-I don’t want to hurt! I don’t want to hurt…!”

“Obviously! I don’t, either!” Harvey yelled, the other man’s wrist slipping abruptly in his grip. Christoph uttered a short scream. For a moment he almost lost hold, but he managed to regrip, and so the only thing that fell was one of Christoph’s shoes, which slipped off and was swallowed up by the enormous clockwork mechanism below. His mother must have bought that pair for him after he was welcomed home; it was a cheap shoe, but it was brand-new, and it pained Harvey to watch it get crushed between the teeth of the gears before it disappeared.

“You have to grip me back; I’m not strong enough by myself!”

“But, I, I—”

“No buts! Cut the crap and—” This time Harvey thought he might scream; he closed off his throat before any more sound could escape. The bones of his left hand creaked, and an excruciating pain shot through his shoulder.

Hesitantly, Christoph gripped back at his hand. Now instead of a dead weight dangling from his shoulder, Harvey had a grip so tight around his wrist that it felt as if it might rip right off. He winced, but it was still a relief; he let the muscles of his left hand relax a fraction and used every ounce of his strength to drag the other man’s large, heavy body up, supporting himself with his right arm around the pillar. When he’d gotten as far as the edge of the hole, Christoph crawled up the rest of the way on his own power. Relieved, Harvey let the ball of tension in his stomach relax, and his entire body went limp with it.

He sank to the floor, more or less slumping on top of Christoph’s back where he lay curled up on himself, and took a breath. His jaw just brushed Christoph’s blood-smeared back, which trembled beneath him. Coming from further below him, he could hear the sound of sobbing. The tears that trickled to the floor weren’t transparent; the fluid was cloudy.

“Toby,” he blubbered, “I hurt, hurt Toby…I only, pushed him a little, but there was so much, blood…Mom was, scared, so I ran…and then, everybody chased me, and it was, sca—sca—”

“Yeah, it must’ve been scary. It’s okay now; nobody’s here chasing you now.” His hand was useless; he couldn’t rub Christoph’s back if he wanted to. So he just said soothing things.

“Yeah, I was scared, I was so scared…,” Christoph mumbled in a muffled voice, rubbing his forehead against the floor as if he were confessing his sins to Harvey. His back shook.

Christoph’s bizarre fingers were still clinging to Harvey’s left wrist, digging in deeply. Harvey couldn’t really tell so well anymore how much pain he was in, so he chose not to think anything about this beyond, “I bet that’ll leave a bruise.”

“I’ll, I’ll be one of them, soon…I’ll be like the other, monsters, at that place. I’m already, turning into that…I’m scared, I’m scared…”

“It’s okay, Chris, you don’t need to cry.” What’s okay about it? he asked himself silently even as the words came out of his mouth. He didn’t know himself what that was supposed to mean. In fact, the longer this went on, the more he was forced to realize that nothing was “okay,” and yet until Christoph calmed down a little and stopped crying, Harvey sat there over the other man’s back as he repeated the words “I’m scared,” and answered “It’s okay” over and over. The sound of the huge running clock kept on beating dully, heavily against his eardrums and heart until it made him want to vomit, and that was his only solace. It threw off his sensibilities along with his heartbeat. He couldn’t summon any particularly deep emotions.

Eventually the sobbing quieted down at last, and by then the fingers biting into Harvey’s wrist had loosened. When he attempted a very slight tug, he was freed easily.

“Let’s get down from here. You have to go home and check on Toby, right?” he asked the back of the man below him. Christoph nodded, though he still sniffled occasionally, and sat up.

“I, have to say, I’m sorry, to Toby.”

“Yeah.” Harvey nodded, trying to stand up. He got only halfway before he fell flat on his ass. He hadn’t planted his hand right, because he couldn’t feel it. Christoph, who’d gotten up already, cocked his head in confusion; he probably wasn’t aware that he’d been gripping Harvey’s wrist like a vise all that time. “You can’t stand?” he said, offering a hand to help him up.

Harvey flinched slightly. He had a hunch that if Christoph gripped his wrist again it would shatter for sure this time. Still, it’d be too much of a hassle to stand up on his own power, so in the end he obediently reached out his hand. Before they made contact, though, all of a sudden a blinding glare hit him in the face over Christoph’s shoulder.

A harsh white light was shining through the wall’s arched window from below. Is that a searchlight—?

“Ugh, what’s that?”

Christoph turned and started walking over to the window. Startled, Harvey called, “Chris, wait—” But in the same moment, several rounds of gunfire echoed outside. Thick sounds like bursts of compressed air—

carbonization guns—

and then—

Boom, boom, boom!

Three shots. The first two dug big chunks out of the arched window frame in deafening blasts; then Christoph was exposing himself to view in the white light, and the final shot hit him square in the chest.

In a strange slow motion, as if to deliberately, stubbornly burn the sight frame-by-frame into Harvey’s brain, Christoph’s body tilted backward. And with the violent thunking sound of a heavy suitcase being tossed on the floor, his giant form fell at Harvey’s feet in a cloud of dust.

Not a single drop of blood spilled out of him. The center of his chest was a hollow half-sphere of nothingness, as if the whole complex network of human innards it should be stuffed with had never been there at all; as if his rib cage had always been a void. At the bottom of the cavity, the heart buried in his innermost depths was exposed to view. A misshapen black stone, slightly larger and coarser than the real ones.

Still unable to stand, Harvey crawled over to him on elbows and knees. “Chris…!” he said, searching his face. Christoph was convulsing violently and darting unseeing eyes around the emptiness in front of him, but at that he seemed to register Harvey’s face, and looked up at him pleadingly.

“Hurts…it, hurts…”

Cloudy tears streamed from both eyes. His misshapen fingers twitched as they wandered in the empty air as if tracing some kind of pattern there, until they lightly brushed Harvey’s cheek.

“It, hurts…help me, please, help me…”

Harvey couldn’t answer him. He only shook his head, biting his lip hard enough to cut right through it.

Wounds from a carbonization gun couldn’t be easily healed, but Christoph didn’t have the ability to block out pain. Here he was, wrecked, carrying enough pain that death would have been preferable, and yet he couldn’t die or even lose consciousness; he could only keep moving—

Harvey’s left hand was so numb that it took him a moment to realize someone was holding it. Christoph tugged his hand over to the cavern in his own chest. Over to the stone he could see at the bottom of the cavern, to be precise.

“Kill me, kill me, please, take this…”

“What the hell are you talking about?!” Harvey tried to shake him off, but Christoph forced his hand closer to the stone where his heart should be with a strength he was probably unaware of. The bones of his captured hand creaked.

“I don’t, want to hurt…I don’t, want to suffer, anymore…Kill me…”

“That doesn’t mean you can…!”

“Please, I’m asking, you…”

“Don’t you—,” Harvey started to yell, and choked on his own breath. “Don’t you push a job like that on me!” He yanked his hand out of Christoph’s grasp, no longer caring what happened to the bones and tissues inside it. After the rebound sent him tumbling backward into the clock face, he regretted shouting.

When he raised his face to apologize, a figure was standing in front of him.

Shunk.

The heavy yet somehow inane sound of piercing flesh. The blade of a broadsword impaled the center of Christoph’s chest where he lay faceup, and his upper body bent sharply backward just once. The black stone that came tumbling out of the cavern in his chest rolled along the floor with strange innocence, like a child’s toy ball, and was swallowed up by the hole in the floor where the gears came up.

Shkreeuuhhh…

With one last grating creak of the gears, the loft that had been filled with such maddeningly loud machine noise went silent.

The clock behind Harvey had stopped.

Christoph wasn’t moving anymore, either. The two things happened at the exact same time, as though Christoph himself had been the great clock’s power source—it stopped as he stilled on the floor, cloudy tears trailing from his lidless eyes, and the hand Harvey’d shaken off reaching out toward him as if to follow after him.

Then the broadsword was casually pulled out of the now heartless corpse. It was the sword from the suit of armor he’d left skewered to the wall back in the coliseum.

His mind still somewhat vacant, Harvey looked up at the person standing in front of him holding the naked broadsword. “Joachim…,” he rasped.

Those blue-gray eyes steeped in the darkness of the loft glanced emotionlessly down at the corpse at his feet, then lifted ever so slightly in his direction, and before he knew it, Joachim was lunging at him with no warning, slashing out with the sword.

The instant Harvey ducked, a metallic thwonk echoed scant millimeters over his head, so loudly it rattled his brain. He rolled away, shuddering as he saw a crack form in the back of the clock face out of the corner of his eye. But now he was almost exposing himself to the searchlight’s circle of light, so he dived into the shadow of the window. Pressing himself against the wall, he looked down to see armored men in white surrounding the bottom of the tower, armed to the teeth. Undying Hunters.

Harvey realized the soldiers were preparing to storm the tower, and turned to say, “Hey, we don’t have time for this—”

Joachim paid him no regard. The second attack was already coming, and Harvey hurriedly dodged. The blade sideswiped the wall, its momentum taking out a chunk of the concrete. This attack had exactly the same exaggerated, puppetlike motions as the suit of armor’s had—there was something off about how Joachim was acting, Harvey thought, but there wasn’t time to think too deeply about it. “Why, you!” He evaded the third attack by stepping sideways just in front of the hole in the floorboards, and then—

“You bastard!”

Joachim stumbled forward under the force of his own momentum, and Harvey tried to knock him down the hole with a full-body hit, but Joachim twisted his body and got a lock around Harvey’s neck; so, unable to escape, he ended up skidding along the floor with him instead. In a pile of limbs, Harvey on his back on top of Joachim, they stopped their slide with their upper bodies already over the edge.

Slam, clang…

Overhead—or was that below his eye?—the abandoned broadsword smashed against one of the great gears, bounced once, and was sucked down into the murky depths of the tower.

Harvey had just figured out why the big clock had stopped, not that it was exactly his most urgent problem at the moment. Christoph’s core was stuck in between two gears, keeping them from turning. The gears squealed, trying to crush the obstruction with their teeth, and with each grind, the core’s amber light flickered arrhythmically. It’s hurting—Harvey knew it was a silly thing to think, but that’s how it looked to him.

“Let go…!”

He wanted to break out of the grip around his neck, but he couldn’t feel his hand, and he didn’t have enough strength left in his arm to pull free anyway. Meanwhile, whether Joachim wanted to fall and take Harvey down with him or just wasn’t thinking, he refused to unlock his arms even as he slid little by little over the edge.

“Joa—”

“Joachim, stop it.”

Harvey heard his own voice from inside and outside at the same time, like a chord instead of a single note, and after a beat to take that in, his flesh crawled. One of those voices hadn’t come from his mouth.

Standing on the opposite side of the hole, he could see the upside-down figure of a boy. Seeing that face upside down could never be enough to mistake it. In fact, seeing it upside down made it seem all the more familiar, as if he was seeing his reflection. It was a boy with rusty red-brown hair who looked exactly, disgustingly like a certain someone.

The boy darted a glance at Christoph’s corpse on the floor and bit the corner of his lip, his cheek twisting slightly. Do I make that face at times like that, too? Harvey wondered, feeling oddly coolheaded, or more like numbheaded.

“…Why did you kill him?”

“‘Why’? He wanted to die, so I killed him, that’s all,” Joachim answered from beneath Harvey with a scornful laugh. That familiar snide way of talking was unmistakably Joachim’s, or it should have been, but now Harvey realized that something wasn’t quite right. “I wouldn’t mind killing this one too, but I’ll give him to you if you want him. He is yours, after all.”

“Joachim, this is pointless. It won’t change anything. Our time was over long ago.”

“Hmph. I figured you’d say that.” As the voice climbed higher and higher, the arm around Harvey’s neck tightened, and it grew harder to breathe. He slid with Joachim a little farther over the edge of the hole, and with a lurch his upside-down field of vision sank one level lower.

“See, this is why you piss me off. You always act like you’re the good one and talk like you’re all enlight—”

“I’m not enlightened! I didn’t want to die either!”

Joachim snapped his mouth shut for a second, seemingly daunted by the sudden angry yell. For just that second, the screeching of the gears overhead—or rather, below his eye—came to the fore in Harvey’s hearing.

The next voice he heard behind him was the same one, and yet something was slightly different again.

“…Get…out…”

A scratchy, barely-there voice, as if it had been forced up his throat from his very heart.

“Get out!”

At the same time that Joachim repeated himself in a stronger voice, the arm around Harvey’s neck was removed, and it shoved him in the back instead. The push sent him just high enough that he managed to grab hold of the support pillar. Clinging, he looked back over his shoulder to see the bottom of Joachim’s shoes disappearing from view as he fell headfirst down along that same pillar.

Slam.

Joachim seemed to trace the same arc as the broadsword, crashing into one of the great gears and bouncing once, and then his body doubled over backward and there were two of him for a moment before a slim, ghostlike figure was thrown out. The actual body stayed on top of that gear, revolving with it several times, before sliding off the side. Moments later, Harvey heard a thud of impact and saw a cloud of dust rising from the bottom of the tower. He didn’t think Joachim would actually die from that, but man…

He couldn’t afford to worry about what was going on down below right now. With a hiss of effort, he hooked his numb left arm around the pillar and dragged his upper body upward, and, after nearly slipping many times, somehow managed to use his right elbow and knees to clamber back into the loft proper. At some point after he’d collapsed on all fours a short way from the edge, Harvey sensed someone’s presence above him.

The ghost boy who’d been thrown out of Joachim was standing in front of him and glaring down at him. Just like that redheaded boy, this one looked disgustingly like a certain someone; Harvey didn’t know what had him looking so displeased (probably there wasn’t anything that did please him, and therefore everything displeased him), but his dark eyes were filled with resentment and hatred.

The boy reached out and touched Harvey’s brow with the fingertips of his right hand. Not that he could even feel the touch—but he could tell that they dug straight into his skin up to the first knuckle.

Fine, your body will work too. It pisses me off, but since I’ve got no choice, I’ll go ahead and use you…

The fingertips passed through his skull and reached his brain, and Harvey heard the voice doubled, sounding from both inside and outside. Blue-gray eyes that normally held so little presence of their own that they took on the color of whatever was around them became curiously present now as they drew closer to him. His body went rigid, as if he’d been stunned, and he couldn’t tear his gaze away.

Harvey—

It felt as though a girl was calling out to him. He almost took no notice, unconsciously dismissing it as a hallucination, but—

Below them, there was a swell of deadly malice, and a shock wave flew at the boy’s ghost with a shout of “Back off, brat!”, knocking him out of Harvey’s line of sight. Then Harvey himself was knocked over by the backwash of displaced air. He somersaulted backward once, realized he had control of his body again, and picked himself back up just in time for the second wave: a blade of air flew up at them from beneath the floorboards along with the giant, staticky form of a soldier, which glared menacingly at the ghost boy who’d fled through the ceiling.

From Harvey’s crouched position, he looked over his shoulder through the hole in the floorboards. Down at the bottom of the tower, a figure was starting to run up the spiral staircase. It was hard to make out in the murky darkness, and it still looked tiny at this distance, but it looked like a girl holding a radio.

“Harvey!”

This time he knew for sure it was her voice he heard, and along with it a sudden burst of cheering outside the tower.

“Oh, wow!”

“Yay!”

“Look at that!”

All sorts of different voices blended together until, in the blink of an eye, the individual voices melded into one uproarious round of cheers and applause that shook the very air around them. “What the…?” Avoiding the searchlight, Harvey peeked out from the shadow of the arched window. He didn’t believe what he saw right away.

A giant parade of street performers led by a band of musicians in divided skirts had assembled at the base of the tower in a crowd that swallowed up the armored Church Soldiers surrounding it. Dancers in light blue feathered costumes twirled around the soldiers, taking their hands and inviting them in high voices to dance; the band surrounded them playing cymbals and trumpets. As if that weren’t enough, all the other performers broke in and started doing their acts, each determined not to be outdone. Glittering light filled the doll city that had been so dark and silent, illuminating the twisting and turning road with its trolley tracks that covered the whole town. The light overflowed from the road as the parade ballooned bigger and bigger, overrunning the square below the clock tower with people.

After an interval during which Harvey forgot his circumstances and just gaped in mute amazement, his eye lit on a pair of performers in giant-headed bear and mouse costumes jumping around in the thick of the mob. Behind them, a yellow bunny was waving his hands around in some sort of signal.

The Church Soldiers had offered no resistance so far, off guard and jostled by the throng of people, but at around that point they finally seemed to come back to their senses, and they started suppressing the crowd.

“What are you people doing out here so late?!”

“Out of the way! Go home!”

Men began shouting here and there around the square; shrill whistles rang through the air. The ruckus didn’t look as though it would die down quickly, but it probably wouldn’t last too long, either.

“Harvey! Hurry!” urged the girl’s voice from the bottom of the stairs. Harvey obediently left the window and got ready to run.

SKREEEEEEE…!

That was when he heard a screech louder than any he’d heard from the gears so far. The amber light in Christoph’s core, jammed in between the gears, was growing almost blindingly bright.

The spiral steps had been a serious pain in the butt during Harvey’s climb up, but thankfully the trip back down was easy. He basically slid down the railing. About halfway to the bottom, he met Kieli running up to him.

“Are you okay?!”

“More or less.” On second thought, Harvey reflected as she seized him in a hug, that wasn’t actually true. But he wrapped his arm around her and confirmed that he could touch her for real this time, and then buried his face in her hair for just a moment before quickly letting her go. “Corporal.”

“Yo.”

That too-short-to-call-a-conversation exchange pretty much took care of the business between him and the radio. Kieli was here and she could be touched. That explained everything important.

Kieli lifted her face then and looked up over his shoulder into the loft.

“Ephraim…!”

Harvey thought that might be the first time he’d ever heard that old name come out of her mouth. She wasn’t talking to him, though. When he turned around and looked up, the redheaded boy was standing at the edge of the hole that led to the loft, watching them.

The light bleeding from the core got even brighter and stronger, until thin beams of light seeped out of the cracks between gears and began to illuminate the inside of the tower just like a searchlight. However, the boy alone wasn’t illuminated: the beams of light passed through him as if he didn’t exist, and no shadow of him darkened the ceiling.

“Hurry up and get going,” Ephraim said, breaking the silence. “I’m pretty sure we weren’t ever supposed to meet you guys. Don’t come back here again.”

It was awkward and uncomfortable, somehow, like the first time Harvey’d ever heard his own voice through a communications device. He didn’t entirely grasp the situation, but he found himself feeling mysteriously unsurprised.

He opened his mouth to answer, but in the end he just exchanged one glance with those eyes the same color as his own, and then turned to leave without saying anything after all. He got the feeling that thank-yous and apologies and good-byes weren’t the kinds of things you said to yourself, anyhow.

Instead, he urged Kieli in front of him and they ran down the stairs, speaking rapidly.

“Your idea?”

“Nope, the troupe leader’s. He invited people from other troupes, too. ‘Our gig here is finished now, so how about we all paint the town red together before we go?’, he said.”

“Oh brother…” Honestly pained, Harvey couldn’t help the wry laugh that escaped him. He didn’t even know how much he owed Shiman anymore.

He took the last bit of the stairs by sliding down the rail again, and darted his eye around them as he hopped down to the floor. They probably didn’t have time to escape on foot. “That way,” said Kieli. Harvey looked where she pointed and saw a single trolley parked in a corner. It seemed to be designed for employees, not parkgoers; a thin track stretched away from it toward the power area he’d come through on his way here instead of around to the front of the tower.

He cast a glance at the mountain of rubble heaped up in the middle of the tower floor. Joachim’s arms and legs were sticking out from in between the broken gears like the limbs of a thrown-away doll. When he turned unconcernedly back to Kieli, she was gazing at him with this complicated look on her face that was half entreaty and half If you don’t want to, though, that’s okay with me.

“Sheesh,” he griped, doubling back to the ruined pile of gears. He dug out Joachim by kicking aside debris until the other man was uncovered. He probably wasn’t dead, but apparently he was completely nonfunctional. It would’ve been good enough to just grab a leg and drag him along, but Harvey’s left hand was practically useless at the moment, so he was forced to wriggle underneath the other man and bump him onto his back. Kieli came running over, and between the two of them they got Joachim over to the trolley and tossed him in.

“You first.” Harvey pushed at Kieli’s back to send her clambering aboard, and then set the trolley in motion by shoving his whole body weight against its rear wall. It started rattling its way down the gentle slope, and he chased after it, kicking it a few times to speed it up. When he finally vaulted inside with a helping hand from Kieli, a wall of white light began spreading behind them as if to shelter them from behind.

Harvey turned to see more beams of light, countless beams, streaming out of the gears overhead. They grew brighter and brighter as he watched. The whole dim interior of the tower was enveloped in light, as if it suddenly had its own noonday sun—no, on this overcast planet wreathed in dust pollution, even the sun wasn’t this brilliant.

Without thinking, he shielded his face from the blinding light source with his arm, and in that instant—

Kab—

Harvey heard only the first split second of the explosion. After that, his hearing blanked out. He thought he’d told Kieli to be careful not to bite her tongue, but since he couldn’t hear the words himself, he didn’t know whether she’d gotten the message or not. He cradled her head to his chest and took cover on the floor of the trolley. As the ceiling began to cave in behind them, their little trolley truck slid along the downhill track, now with an extra speed boost from the force of the blast.

That same blast carried the remains of wrecked gears with it, which grazed the walls of the trolley as they whizzed by. The ceiling’s collapse steadily caught up with them like a great sweeping wave; the aftermath of the torrential downpour of debris all around them jarred them on the track.

…Huh?

Harvey abruptly realized something strange. The one and only place the debris wasn’t falling was on their heads.

At the thought, the contours of a human figure hovering protectively over the trolley flashed before his eye for the barest moment before disappearing, like a video feed that lost power right after it was turned on.

No matter how much Harvey rummaged through his memories, he didn’t recognize the face at all. It was just some totally ordinary town youth, the kind you might see anywhere; Harvey doubted he’d take any notice of him if they passed on the street, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t think much more than Good muscles, but he looks kinda dim-witted before forgetting all about him a moment later—and yes. He’d never seen what the man had originally looked like, but all the same he didn’t have to ask who this was. Logically speaking, Undyings shouldn’t have spirit forms like normal humans, so maybe it was just an illusion. Or, on the other hand, maybe it was something like the ghost of his last wish.

“Thanks…”

Harvey had to close his mouth for fear of biting his own tongue before he could get the man’s name out, but he half-felt as if he’d caught a glimpse of his face again, smiling shyly.

“Whoa…”

For several seconds, Bearfoot stood rooted to the spot in his bear costume, gawking at the spectacle overhead and actually having the dazed thought, It’s beautiful.

Countless beams of amber light streamed from the arched window of the clock tower, decorating the slate-gray night sky with glittering patterns. It looked so much like one of the effects rigged by the park that he thought anyone seeing it from the new city would probably believe them if they said it was a Colonization Days finale event.

He wasn’t allowed to stay happily spellbound by the view for long, however.

“It’s coming down!” someone shouted, and it seemed to jerk everybody standing in the square back to their senses. As one man, they all started running. “H-hey, let’s get out of here!” cried Rat, prompting Bearfoot to hastily turn on his heel to follow suit. They were in the area of the crowd closest to the tower, practically right underneath it, so they were among the last to evacuate the square. No sooner had they stumbled away than an even fiercer light shot out of the tower, and the clock face at the top peeled off with a hollow clonk…

RumblerumbleRUMBLE—

…And with a thunderous roar, the tower itself began to crumble from the top down.

They all covered each other’s heads—Church Soldier, performer, it didn’t matter; they were all mixed together—and huddled as small as they could under the rain of rubble and dust pouring down on them. The enormous clock face crashed into the ground with such a deafening noise that it seemed as though the world was ending, and raised a thick cloud of mineral dust made up of mixed sand and metal shavings and chunks of concrete that blanketed Bearfoot’s entire field of vision.

The dust mercilessly invaded his crudely made costume from the eyes and mouth until he couldn’t take it anymore. He yanked the headpiece off and fell into a violent fit of coughing. When it started to taper off, he riveted his teary eyes on a certain point above him, wearing his bear head half-on like a hat. The people around him who’d escaped danger were the same: some of them were coughing up dust, and others were just sitting on the ground in a daze, but all of them were sighing in relief as though they’d just survived a trip to the deepest pits of hell, and one by one, they all raised their faces and slowly looked up at the sky.

Their gazes were fixed above the fog of dust which had yet to settle, on the pitiful sight of the clock tower whose top quarter had crumbled away. No—now that its symbol, the clock, was gone, these were only the ruins of an ordinary nothing-tower standing against the sky.

“Chief…is someone going to have to take responsibility for that…?” he murmured dumbly.

“…Let’s bow out fast,” answered the bunny sitting next to him in the same dumbfounded voice.

“Harvey, you’re heavy…,” she groaned from underneath the arm covering her, but the arm showed no signs of removing itself. “Harvey…?”

There was no response to Kieli’s second call, either, so she crawled out from beneath Harvey’s arm on her own power, scrabbling at the wreckage around them for grip. Then she squatted next to him, examining him. He was still lying motionless where he’d fallen. She heard him give a brief, soft moan, but that was all. Maybe he’d gotten hit hard somewhere? He didn’t seem able to get up.

Think, Kieli: what happened…?

She cradled his coppery head on her lap and looked around them; but there was no light, not even the faintest glow of emergency lights, and her eyes could hardly identify anything at all. Judging by the echo of her own voice, she thought they were closed up in someplace fairly small. She managed to just barely make out the outline of the trolley truck turned over on its side a little ways ahead of them, and that was when she remembered. A blast had knocked them off the rails. Kieli seemed to recall them flipping over a few times, so the fact that she was uninjured must mean that Harvey had protected her.

She saw Joachim lying on the ground near the trolley, too. He evidently couldn’t move, either.

“What should we do, Corporal…?”

“Want me to blow a hole through something and make us an exit?”

“We’ll get buried if you do that…”

Their voices echoed in the confined space, which was walled in by rubble on all sides, and tiny fragments of debris sifted down on them from above. She didn’t think it was the vibrations from their talking that caused it, but her voice naturally faded out of fear that the ceiling could come down on their heads any second.

At a loss, she ran imploring eyes all over their surroundings, and discovered that now that she was gradually adjusting to the dark, she could see something very like a door at the far reaches of her vision. It was still there, not buried in rubble. It seemed to be the power area’s emergency door.

Setting Harvey’s head down for the time being, Kieli crawled over to it at a snail’s pace, careful not to disturb the rubble around her if she could help it. She’d gotten her hopes up that they might be able to get out, but when she drew near it, her heart sank.

A sturdy-looking padlock and an iron chain. And of course she didn’t have the key. Only a park employee would have a…

…a key?

Here, I’ll give this to you. This might be useful if you run into trouble.

The words of the old man possessing the locksmith doll suddenly popped into her mind. But, but it couldn’t be—I wasn’t in my body when he gave it to me.

Was it in my left pocket, or my right…? Gulping, Kieli gingerly put her hand in her right coat pocket. After a little bit of feeling around, her fingertips touched metal.

“No way…”

She drew her fist out of her pocket and stared down at it in disbelief. When she gently opened her fingers, she was holding a rusty lead-gray key small enough to fit in her palm.

Near the point when she managed to drag Harvey through the door and outside, clasping his tall body in both arms and struggling hard, she encountered a resistance. It felt for a moment as if a wall of air was pushing her back. Kieli was puzzled, but she took another step.

“Gah!”

Harvey abruptly doubled over violently, and Kieli accidentally let go, sending him tumbling to the ground and rolling. “Wh-what’s wrong?!” she cried, running after him in a panic and catching him in her arms. She tried to get a look at his face, but he was slumped facedown where he’d landed, clutching his chest.

“Harvey!”

“’m—fine…Just—can’t—move…,” he ground out between gasping breaths. Then he stopped talking and, face still planted in the dirt, twitched the tiniest of gestures toward the door they’d just come through. Immediately understanding what he meant, Kieli retraced her steps and set about carrying Joachim outside. She laboriously dragged his tall body through the door, exactly the way she had Harvey’s before, and the instant she passed through that same spot, she felt herself catch on something like the surface of a pool of water.

Amazed, she stared hard at that place, but she couldn’t see anything different, and when she tried touching the nothingness with her hand, it naturally just slid through, and she couldn’t feel a thing there.

As she gripped the back of Joachim’s coat and dragged him along backward, Kieli looked all the way up the emergency-door wall as far as she could see. Apparently they’d exited the park from the back. On the other side of the long, high wall that enclosed the sprawling park grounds, she could dimly make out the tip of the wretched, partially collapsed tower against the Westerbury sky where dawn was just now beginning to break.

The former clock tower, now significantly shorter and missing the clock at its peak—it was an empty sight, as if a one-night-only “Whimsical City” truly had ended as a fleeting, whimsical dream and vanished at daybreak.

The cool, white breeze of early morning caressed Kieli’s cheek as it blew by. When she took a deep breath and sucked that breeze in, it smelled like sand and dust.

It was the sort of morning when you woke up from a long, long dream of adventure and felt just a little bit sorry to leave it, as though it left a hole in your heart; but at the same time the sort of morning when you were relieved to have been able to wake up from that dream. A clean, quiet, definitely real morning.

That afternoon, after she treated Harvey’s wounds, they went downtown to Christoph’s place together. “I’m coming, too,” she’d insisted firmly to Harvey, who’d apparently intended to go on his own as if that were a given. Maybe he’d finally gotten it through his head how stubborn she was, though, because he let her come along without protest. They left the radio behind with Nana.

Toby came out to meet them in front of the apartment door with a bandage wrapped around his head. Luckily, it seemed that his injury hadn’t been a serious one. In fact, Harvey was by far the worse off of the two—he was banged up from head to toe—and yet Kieli noticed him breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of the boy.

Toby was just as bad, too: instead of being concerned about himself, the first words out of his mouth were, “Tell me about my brother.”

After looking down at the much shorter boy’s face in silence for a few moments, Harvey gave him an extremely simple explanation of what had happened. Literally extremely simple: Christoph had to go far away, and he’d asked Harvey to tell his family that he wouldn’t be coming back to them. The end.

It was rare for Harvey to lie at a time like this. It was a ridiculously bad lie, the kind of lie you assumed someone would call you out on before you even told it.

Kieli couldn’t tell how Toby took the story. Maybe he believed it, or maybe some sort of brotherly intuition had already told him the truth. At any rate, he didn’t question them any further; he just nodded and said, “I see…”

After that, he stared up into Harvey’s battered face for a bit, and then bobbed his own injured head politely. “Thanks for taking care of my brother. I’ll tell Mom myself. I wish I’d gotten the chance to tell him not to worry, because I’ll protect Mom. We’ll be okay.” He’s a tough kid, Kieli thought. Maybe this boy who’d grown up in a poor downtown family, sometimes stealing things along the way, had some particular sort of strength in common with those kids at the school who’d lived in the wartime city with stubborn persistence.

After that brief conversation in front of the door, a minute or two at most, they parted with Toby and headed out of the apartment building. That was when it happened.

“Wait!”

Kieli and Harvey turned around to see Toby’s mother burst out of their apartment. She was in her nightgown (Toby’d said she was sick in bed), with only a shawl thrown over it and her long hair hanging loose and tousled over her shoulders. She half-stumbled to Harvey and clung fast to his arm.

“Give me back my son…give back Chris!”

“Mom, stop!”

Ignoring Toby, who was jogging out after her, and ignoring the plaster wrappings around Harvey’s hand, too, she shook his left arm fiercely and cried, “Why?! Why make me so happy and then crush my hopes?! I bought him new shoes, you know! I made meatloaf! I thought so hard and planned out everything: today’s breakfast and lunch, and tomorrow’s, and the day after tomorrow’s! I wish…I wish you’d never brought him back in the first place if you were just going to take him away again! That’s just cruel! It’s cruel, it’s cruel…”

“Mom! Stop it; it’s not his fault—”

“Toby.” Harvey cut him off as he tried to calm his mother down and pull her away. Harvey quietly looked down at the mother clinging to his arm and breaking down in tears, not supporting her, but not trying to shake her off, either. “…I’m sorry,” he said at length in a voice of ordinary sincerity, without his usual coldness. He bowed his head lightly.

Kieli didn’t know what he was apologizing for; maybe for not being able to bring Christoph home today, or for lying—but either way, she didn’t think Harvey deserved the blame for any of it. Yet Harvey didn’t say a single word in his defense.

Kieli didn’t voice any objections, either. She thought that if she said anything, all of Harvey’s forbearance would go to waste; so she stood silently behind him and just bit her lip, looking at nothing but Harvey’s left hand as Christoph’s mother squeezed it hard enough to crack the plaster.

She was glumly silent on the way home, hardly looking up from her own feet, until Harvey sighed and slackened his pace a little so that she could catch up.

“This is why I didn’t want to bring you. I knew you’d get angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Kieli answered, pouting. She was relieved to hear that his voice had gone back to normal. True, lately she’d been angry all the time, but today she really didn’t think she was angry about anything.

They both lapsed naturally back into silence again without the conversation getting anywhere in particular, becoming just another part of the crowd for a while as they walked through the lazy bustle of the downtown afternoon.

Shortly after they’d come out into the main street, Harvey unexpectedly stopped.

“Let’s get on that.”

“‘That’?” Following his copper gaze, Kieli saw a sign for a bus stop by the roadside. A rattletrap old bus was just clattering to a stop in front of it. “The bus? But that’ll take us out of our way, you know. If we’re just going back to camp, we can get there on foot.”

“I’m tired, and walking is a pain. We’re taking that back,” Harvey insisted, almost like a peevish child. He started walking off toward the bus stop. Nonplussed, Kieli quickened her pace to catch up.

Over by Central Station and uptown there were new double-decker buses running, but the bus making its sluggish circuit of downtown was a secondhand vehicle whose red paint had almost entirely peeled off, so that it only looked gray now. It was a midsized bus structured similarly to the troupe’s trailers, with three wheels in front. Harvey got on with no ticket and no money, calling back “You get the change,” so Kieli quickly counted out enough to cover two passengers’ fares and put it in the box before running up the steps.

The ridership was sparse, possibly because they were riding in midafternoon when nothing was happening. One or two people shot them annoyed glances, but overall nobody paid any special attention to them as they took seats next to each other on the wide seat at the very back. Then the bus lurched into motion with the noisy sound of fossil fuel combusting.

In the back, the engine sounded pretty loud, and she could feel the wheels vibrating right through her seat. It’d looked like a great seat at first glance, as the widest one, but Kieli was kind of regretting the choice now. She could see why nobody had taken it before them. Harvey, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered. He tossed his legs out wide in front of him, sank deeply into the seat, propped his head on the backrest, closed his eye, and promptly went still.

…Okay, he really did seem tired.

Growing bored, Kieli leaned her head against the window and let her eyes roam the scenery outside.

The run-down gray bus lumbered along the run-down gray landscape of downtown.

She did see the odd abandoned building with broken windows, but the buildings lining the main street were all large ones, and the street itself was wide, too. Now that she was getting a more leisurely look at the city as it flowed gently by, the sheer size of Westerbury struck her all over again.

I guess this is the last I’ll see of it…

It was afternoon on the ninth day of the Colonization Days celebration. Tomorrow would be the last day, and also the day they planned to leave Westerbury. Despite how much Kieli felt she had done and seen in the exactly ten days since they’d first arrived at East Station on the afternoon before the holiday began, she’d hardly spent any time at all in the town proper, so maybe it was a good thing she had the chance to ride on a bus that made a full circuit of it before they left.

Plus, she’d never ridden a bus sitting next to Harvey before.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye without lifting her head from the glass, and saw his left hand resting right next to her right hand on the seat. It was held fast with plaster from the wrist all the way across the back, with bandages wrapped on top of it; he could technically move his fingers, but he couldn’t manage too many fine movements. Harvey had objected to that loud and long and exactly like a peevish little kid, but Kieli was dead sure that he’d aggravate the injury again before it healed if she didn’t put a cast on it. He didn’t have a right hand, so she very much wanted him to cherish the left hand, at least.

The back of that hand looked a size bigger now thanks to the rough plaster, and the long fingers sticking out of the top looked even thinner and bonier than usual in contrast. They were close enough that their fingers would touch if Kieli moved her own hand just a tiny bit, but she hesitated, and only squeezed it into a light fist.

Joachim’s words came back to her:

Ephraim’s going to die one of these days, you know.

He’d always been someone who seemed only just barely fixed to this world by a thread, but now if he took one wrong step, the thread might really break this time…Kieli bit her lip and clenched her fists hard.

Just then, the long fingers right next to one fist suddenly twitched, and with a small startled sound, Harvey jolted upright. Thanks to the way he’d been sitting, which even the politest person would’ve had to call sloppy, he immediately slid off the seat onto the floor, prompting another small sound.

Startled herself, Kieli froze for a second before hurriedly moving to drag him back up from where he’d landed on his butt below the seat. “Wh-what are you doing?” Peering into his face as she straightened out the back of his rumpled clothes for him, she asked, “Were you asleep?” He sort of seemed as if he’d jumped awake from a dream of falling.

“No…I was, um, thinking,” Harvey mumbled. He looked slightly dazed, as if maybe he’d surprised himself, too. He accepted Kieli’s help to reseat himself, leaned his head against the backrest again, and looked up at the ceiling, resting the back of his plastered hand on his forehead and heaving a tired sigh.

He went still again in that position, so she tentatively asked, “Harvey…?”

Nothing.

After watching what she could see of his face underneath the plaster for a while, Kieli couldn’t think what else to say after all. She turned her gaze back to the window.

Once she’d taken her eyes off of him, she heard a muffled voice speak up from below the plaster. “…I…”

A faint voice that sounded as though he was wringing it out of himself.

“…I couldn’t do anything for him.”

The wheels below their seat bounced lightly on a dip in the road.

Outside the window, the scenery kept flowing on monotonously, sluggishly past as the bus slowly made its way through the lazy downtown afternoon.

The loop-line bus completed its circuit around the downtown area and passed in front of the park. Kieli was giving Harvey a confused look, but he nudged her forward, and they got off the bus there. He’d planned to from the time he’d decided to board it, after all.

With two days left of the festival, the park was closed (as expected, or perhaps as was only inevitable); but what with the Church Soldiers investigating and the workmen clearing away rubble and the curious onlookers with too much time on their hands who’d come especially to get a look at the ruined tower, if anything there were more people here now than when it was open for business. Harvey went around to the side of the property to avoid the crowd. He wasn’t positive that it was the right way to go or anything, but as a starting point, he tried circling the park’s outer wall on foot.

On the other side of the long, tall gray wall that divided the park from the wilderness, sprawling across the land like the massive enclosure said to have confined the prisoners back when this place was an exile planet, he could see the remains of the clock tower now missing its clock. Its backdrop was the usual cloudy sand-colored sky.

Vvnn…gnnnnn…

When he held his hand up to the void running a little in front of the wall, he heard a low drone like a machine gauge going past the red zone, and the air radiated outward from his palm. The magnetic barrier that had existed on the pedestrian bridge in front of the front gate extended all the way out here, as a sort of second wall enclosing the physical wall that enclosed the park.

Harvey trailed his hand along the invisible barrier as they walked, and after a period of time, he came to a spot where the wall seemed to have been torn down from below.

“Ah, here we go.” He’d figured there must be a loophole somewhere that had let Christoph sneak into the park without being affected by the magnetic field. And just in that area, be it from a warp in the geological strata or whatever, he didn’t feel any of that strong magnetism in front of his outstretched hand.

“Kieli.”

She looked up when he turned to her. She’d been following behind him so far, seeming anxious.

“You go up first. I’ll give you a boost.”

“Huh? But…”

“Go on. I want you to help me.”

When Kieli appeared hesitant, he pushed her in front of him without waiting for her to make up her mind, and lent her his elbow and shoulder so that she could climb up the wall. The pile of ruined concrete might be crumbling, but it was still easily taller than Harvey was. Though ordinarily he’d still have no trouble scaling it, it was a little beyond him when he didn’t have free use of either hand.

Kieli reached her hand down to him from the top of the crumbled wall. As she helped him by pulling on his plaster-stiffened left hand, he used the debris for a foothold to scramble up to where she was.

He didn’t exactly marvel at the view on the other side or anything, but a little impressed breath did escape him.

For a little while, they crouched side by side on the rubble and took in the sweeping view of the dormant doll city that lay before them under the afternoon sky. It pained him to see the trail of destruction winding through the houses up to the half-wrecked tower on the hill that must mark Christoph’s passage, but he decided not to think about anything for the moment.

“I thought maybe it would be more fun if I saw it in the daytime…,” Kieli murmured ruefully.

“It’s not fun?”

“Not at all…”

Well, probably that was only natural after she’d been chased around by a horde of evil possessed dolls in the middle of the night here, Harvey guessed. He felt a little guilty for never managing to show her the clockwork when it was working normally.

“Let’s go inside.” He slid down the other side of the wall into the park and reached out a hand to Kieli. After a touch of hesitation, she wound both arms around his neck and hung on. Harvey embraced her and set her gently down on the ground. As he did, he asked her with a straight face, “Hey, have you gained weight?”

When she shrieked “Huh? Huh?!” and jumped away from him, though, he couldn’t hold back the laugh.

“Actually, I’d rather you be heavy than be a ghost or whatever.”

“…That didn’t really make it any better.”

Kieli scowled at him, and he let his gaze wander away from hers, still half-smiling. She seemed a little more like her normal energetic self now, which was a relief. He’d said something kind of weird back there on the bus, and it’d bugged him how concerned she was.

Vnn…

The same drone from earlier reached Harvey’s ears, and the scenery flickered around them. One moment he was dizzied by the distortion in his vision, and the next, the scenery in front of him was utterly different, as if a curtain had flown up in the wind to reveal something else behind it.

It was the same thing he’d seen falling from the stairs during his scuffle with Joachim on the bridge—twilit sky, and ashen ruins sprawling beneath it. The ruins were blanketed with a fine sediment of mixed blood spray and gunpowder smoke. A sea of rubble spread out over the whole area; scattered here and there, Harvey could see the backs and limbs of men in army uniforms peeking out from the crevices.

He unthinkingly retreated a step, and his back bumped into something. When he looked over his shoulder, the view of the ruins fluttered, and for an instant the park wall appeared, but by the time he looked ahead again, the wall at his back was gone, and he was standing in the middle of the ruins.

“Harvey…”

He felt his sleeve being tentatively tugged from behind.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah…uh-huh.”

Harvey schooled his expression. The horrible scene of urban warfare embedded itself in his eye like a shard of glass, but instead of turning away, he took a good look all around him. Were the thick smells of blood and iron rust assailing his nose and the sounds of distant cannons present here in this space, or were the deepest recesses of his memory calling them up as part of a chain reaction triggered by the sight?

“…It’s fine. This is what I came to see.”

He’d wanted to get a look at it. At the scenery he’d grown up in, in a distant past that he couldn’t remember.

He began to walk around the ruined city, treading on the rubble. Though it wasn’t the sort of hostile sensation he’d felt going through the magnetic barrier, he could sense a slight resistance in the air, could almost feel himself pushing his way through a pool of water. Maybe you could call it the feeling of the like poles of two magnets repelling each other. In all likelihood, Harvey wasn’t welcome in this space.

“Kieli, did I really live in this city?” he mumbled as he walked and took in the sights, almost as if it had nothing to do with him. He had to say, though, it did feel kind of weird to ask Kieli about his life when she hadn’t even been born at the time.

“Yeah…I think you did.”

“Huh…”

Harvey had thought he might remember something, but so far nothing was sparking any memories. Every so often the sky rippled, and the park peeked out from behind the warped air. A dry gust of wind blew along the ground, carrying away the dull red dust that had accumulated there at his feet.

His vision cleared with the wind, too, and he could see a large building in front of him.

He heard voices whooping, and suddenly a soccer ball appeared in the air in front of him, with five or six little kids chasing right behind it before Harvey had even had time to process the ball. The moment they seemed about to collide, they passed right through him; when he turned around, there was no one there.

What was there, though, was a line of crude grave markers made of piled stone, exactly enough for each of the children.

This is…a school…

All of a sudden he found himself standing in the middle of a schoolyard.

“Kieli?”

She should’ve been right next to him, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. Schools were alien to him, and though he knew it was childish of him, he felt strangely helpless left all alone in one. He was darting his eye about like a lost boy when he heard a voice call out, “This way!”

He turned his head toward it, and saw Kieli standing in front of the schoolhouse entrance. “This way, this way. Hurry!” She was waving both hands wildly. Harvey started walking toward her, feeling a bit reassured, and she ran back up to him.

“Effy,” she said, innocently wrapping her hands around his arm.

“You…”

“Effy said that if a grown-up Effy came, I should show him around!”

“Kieli…where is she?”

“I just borrowed her for a minute. It’s okay.”

The girl who lisped clumsily in Kieli’s voice pulled him along by the arm until he stepped through the entryway into the school. The overall scene ahead of them was vague and blurry, but as they progressed down the hallway, his field of vision was distorted and the objects up close unfolded crisp and clear. Classroom doors with signs indicating the classes, a bulletin board, lockers, rows of windows…When Harvey felt the girl jerk at his arm and turned back to her, stumbling slightly, everything behind him warped like melting rubber, going back to its former blurry milk-white.

“This is the nurse’s office! It’s where they dis-infec’ you.”

The girl pretty much delivered a monologue as they walked, and he heard her telling him stories with half an ear.

Effy always felt bad in the mornings, so the nurse used to call his house and tell them to make sure he ate breakfast, but really half the time he was just playing pretend because he wanted to take a nap—By the time the girl had explained this in the childish vocabulary that was all she knew, they were long past the nurse’s office; next they passed by a door that said “lunchroom” (This is where we all ate together, but Effy was really picky, and he didn’t hold his spoon right), and then she pointed out the marks where somebody’d cut into the hallway window frame with a utility knife (This is from when Effy and Joachim were racing to be the tallest, but the teacher found out and they got in trouble, but then after everybody ’vacuated and all the grown-ups were gone, they didn’t measure anymore).

No matter what he heard, Harvey didn’t feel as though any of it was really about him. It seemed as though even if he didn’t have any concrete memories of the school he ought to at least feel some attachment to it, but he didn’t, in particular.

Like it or not, it all reconfirmed what Harvey’d been vaguely thinking in the back of his mind for a while. He and the boy who’d attended this school were probably different people. They might be one and the same in terms of their physical vessels, but perhaps Harvey was basically a pseudo-personality derived from a few scraps of memory left in this body’s corpse after its rightful owner had died. The self in the earliest memory he could definitively call his own had already died once and been reborn, and was participating in the War as a living weapon.

What the heck am I…?

Something that had never existed in the first place, with no thread connecting it to anything.

“Effy. Effy!”

Someone was yanking hard at his sleeve. When he looked down, Kieli—no, the girl inside of Kieli—was looking up at him with a seriously miffed expression on her face.

“Grown-ups gotta listen when people talk to them. You forget your lunch money ’cause you don’t listen, Effy.”

“Ah, sorry…What?” He apologized before he’d thought the better of it. Not that this lunch money thing had anything to do with him.

“The other kids said Effy was sliding there, and he fell and his arm got fact…frak…”

His ‘arm got fact’…? Ah, right, his arm got fractured.

The girl pointed as she explained, clearly reciting something she’d heard from someone else and knew only a little about. When Harvey followed her finger with his eye, the milky-white blur warped, and a staircase appeared by the wall of the corridor. She must mean that he’d fallen trying to slide down the banister. From all he’d heard from her so far, he never did anything decent.

“Sarah told me. Effy’s mommy came, and she cried really hard, and Effy apologized.”

Harvey heard the girl’s voice in one corner of his mind, unconsciously transfixed by the sight of the stairs.

Those stairs, I’ve seen them somewhere…

His feet took him toward them almost as if they were pulling him in. When he reached the bottom of the staircase illuminated by the dim, hazy light filling whatever space they were in, a square landing came into view.

The instant he put his foot down on the first step, he thought he felt the sight before him blur just a little.

“…?”

Raising his face, he looked around him. The walls and ceiling of an old schoolhouse, stained reddish brown in places. There wasn’t anything particularly strange about them. And yet for some reason, something felt just the slightest bit off…Is my eye level different? Was the ceiling really this far away before?

“…What am I doing, again?”

He cocked his head, confused, and then remembered: That’s right, I have to go home.

Pushing his messenger bag around to hang behind him, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets and started walking down the stairs with his head lowered. School was out, and it was pretty late already. Maybe there was still a kid or two playing in the schoolyard, but the inside of the schoolhouse was wrapped in chilly silence.

I gotta stop by the hospital and fill out a bunch of forms. I’ll have to pay the bill, and collect the body, and what’ll I do about the funeral? I don’t know how that works. What did we do about Dad’s, again? Oh, right, it was easy with Dad, because his body burned on the battlefield and didn’t get sent home. I’m pretty sure I get some kind of subsidy or something now, so I’ll have to go apply for that at some point…Sheesh, I wonder how come I only think of practical stuff like this…He thought that normally people had more feelings and stuff at times like this, but nothing was coming to him.

His feet reached the landing. His bag was starting to slip off his shoulder; as he adjusted it, a drop of water plopped down in front of his shoe.

He stood still for a while, gazing at the tiny water stain on the floor.

“Oh…,” he breathed, head still bowed. A tiny, spent breath.

Even as he held a hand over his mouth and choked down the sob, he felt somehow oddly relieved that a tear had finally fallen. Oh, good. I’m really crying. Because I must’ve really loved my mom.

…I’m sorry, Mom…

Neither of us hated each other, really, huh? We just couldn’t do the “family” thing too well, was all. If I had been a little older, more of an adult, would we have been able to manage some things a little better? If he were as adult as his father, could he have been more considerate of his mother, maybe? By the time he realized anything it was too late for everything, and he thought his mother probably hadn’t ever been a really happy person, not to the very end.

“Effy?”

The girl’s voice calling him yanked him back to himself.

“…Mmm?”

Big black eyes were peering at him from below and a little to the side.

Harvey groggily lifted his gaze. He was still standing in the same place, but the ceiling that had seemed so far away was a bit closer now. He’d gone back to his normal eye level. He was back to only seeing out of his left eye again.

“That…”

I remember that. That’s really my memory. From the day my mother died, here at school after hours.

“Do you feel bad, Effy? Is it your tummy?” the girl asked curiously.

“Ah—” Startled, Harvey wiped his cheek. He stared down at the teardrop stains on his bandages, and felt surprised at himself. How many decades had it been…?

“You’re weird. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to cry even if it hurts, you know.”

“Oh, uh…” He gave the blinking girl a vague, wry smile, and tried to collect himself, but—“Huh? They…won’t stop…”

It just was too rare for him; he didn’t know how to stop them. He could remember how to shut down his sense of pain in no time, but not this. “Ugh, this sucks…” Wiping his one tear-stained cheek with his hand, he turned his face away from her. He was lucky it wasn’t Kieli with him (though technically it was Kieli). There was no way he could let her see him looking this pathetic.

“Oh, grown-up Effy, what will we do with you?” said the girl in what she clearly thought was an adult voice, but even as she spoke, she stood on tiptoe and reached out her hands to him. “It’s okay, Elisha forgives you. I mean, I’ll never be a grown-up, so I don’t have to try not to cry. That’s not fair, huh?”

Harvey felt so pitiful meekly letting her pull his head down and stroke his hair that he could have cried for a different reason.

He was stupidly taller, so the ceiling was closer, but that was about it. In the end, growing up hadn’t made him able to manage anything better. Even now all he did was fail and screw up…But, oh, hey—

He really did have a connection to some of the past, even if not to all of it, and that was a part of who he was now, and somehow, he kind of felt as if that was enough.

Harvey squatted in front of the stone grave markers in the schoolyard, resting his cheek on his knees, and lapsed into a daze for a while. He reached out his left hand to touch one of them, but it only passed through, pawing at the air. This schoolyard no longer existed in the present.

The red tint of evening was beginning to glow faintly in the sandy clouds. He’d sent Kieli home ahead of him, and come back here one more time alone.

As he dropped his arm back down, frowning irritably at his plaster-hardened hand, a voice behind him said, “Sheesh, you really messed up my body. What happened to the arm and the eye?”

When he turned around, a boy was standing behind him. Harvey had no idea how long he’d been there. He was glaring harshly at him with coppery eyes that reminded even Harvey of the color of dried blood.

“Didn’t I tell you not to come back here again?”

“You could’ve just stayed out of sight, then. You even left me a guide. What are you trying to do?” Harvey stood up and turned to face him properly, deliberately answering him with the same face. The boy’s expression quickly softened, and he let his gaze slide off to one side.

“I got the feeling you’d come, and I was curious, so I figured maybe it wouldn’t hurt to talk to you just a little.”

“…You’re pretty fickle.”

“Yeah, well, you’re the same person as me, aren’t you?”

At that, it was Harvey’s turn to let his gaze wander with an unreadable look on his face. They shared only a few memories. Probably you couldn’t say they were completely one and the same. You could say that the moment Ephraim died, his personality had split in two, or to put it less nicely, you could say that Harvey wasn’t really even human.

Still, maybe they were the same person to some extent after all, because they seemed to share the same sharp instincts. After Harvey’d gone silent for a while, the boy gave a good grief sort of sigh and smoothed things over himself, even though Harvey hadn’t really complained at all.

“Relax. You don’t have to be considerate. I don’t mind if you think of yourself as me. I’m the real freak here anyway, still wandering around this place after all this time.”

“I’m not being considerate. You quit being considerate and act your age. You’ve got a grudge against me, really, don’t you?”

“…Well, I used to have a lot of ’em, frankly. But once I saw you, I pretty much stopped caring. If my Undying is you, I don’t really mind.”…So there was a possibility you’d have declared me no good? The idea of having to pass some test by a childhood version of himself didn’t entirely sit well with Harvey, but he confined himself to a sulky expression.

“I won’t be able to take very good care of it, just so you know,” he mumbled in a low voice without making eye contact. He hadn’t thought in advance about anything he might especially want to say to this boy, but if there was something he wanted to tell him, it was this. So maybe Harvey had actually been waiting for him to show up. “There’s still something I have to do. So…I think I’ll be pretty rough on it for a while yet.”

“Do what you want, if it’s something you’ve decided. After all, that means you’ve got your own will. You’ve still got a path you can choose for yourself.”

A path I can choose for myself…Harvey recalled someone else once telling him something similar. At the time, though, he’d thought, I’ve never even seen a path.

He looked up. His eye met the boy’s eyes: the same color as his own, but there were two of them, and they were considerably lower to the ground. To an outsider, maybe it would look as though he was standing in front of a mirror that reflected a different time.

However, it was very clearly not a mirror.

The wilderness wind smelling of sand and iron rust fluttered Harvey’s hair and the hem of his coat. Neither the clothes nor the copper-colored hair of the boy across from him twitched even a fraction.

Faced with this boy standing in a frozen time, Harvey was at a loss for a response.

The boy was the one to break the silence. “Oh, but hey,” he added lightly, as if something had just occurred to him. “Try to take care of it if you can. Don’t make that girl cry. Kieli.”

Harvey was speechless for a second. “…Obnoxious brat.” He felt all his energy drain out of him, and at the same time, he got the feeling they were definitely different people after all. Like hell would I ever say something like that, out loud, to another person.

The boy quirked the corner of his mouth in a smile, apparently enjoying Harvey’s sullen look.

“Well, hang in there.”

Harvey always felt that it was irresponsible for dead people to tell him that, but today he accepted it with strange meekness, and nodded with a little wry smile. “Right, for a while yet, anyway.”

Facing each other on either side of an invisible mirror, their smiles then were probably identical. Harvey noticed for the first time that he evidently had a habit of smiling with just one side of his face, and the thought that he’d had the habit since way back when made him feel self-conscious and weird for some reason.

“Okay, I’m off.”

“Yeah. Bye.”

And with that exchange of simple parting words, Harvey turned on his heel and walked away from the graves. It was highly unlikely that he’d ever see that boy with the same face as his again, yet he was casual about it the way he would be with a (much) younger brother, as if it was nothing much at all, as if he was just saying, “Okay, I’m going to run some errands before I go home,” and then he walked away at his normal pace, without feeling any particular urge to look back. He figured there was no need to exchange any big speeches with himself, after all.

“Tick, tock, tick, tock.”

“Tick, tock, tick, tock.”

A girl’s childlike voice, and a man’s gravelly voice. Kieli let their uneven duet (it’d be hard for her to say even out of politeness that they blended together well) wash over her as she carelessly swung her legs.

The radio was beside Kieli on the doorframe, and Nana sat on the other side of him, copying her and swinging alternate legs from where they hung off the edge as she quietly but happily sang the song about the old clock.

Kieli was starting to get genuinely sick of that tune. She searched her memory for something else Nana could manage, wanting to teach the girl at least one more song—but the only ones she’d learned at boarding school had been hymns, and she hadn’t really sung those seriously at the time, so she’d mostly forgotten them.

She’d wanted to give Nana some kind of present before they said good-bye tomorrow. But there were very few things that Kieli could give somebody.

The color of night was beginning to gradually overtake the sunset-streaked sky above the camp. She’d been hearing the sounds of lively activity in the clearing for some time now as they prepared for their celebration.

Kieli had woken up to find herself on the bus back to camp with the troupe members leaving the park earlier that evening. Since it was closed for business now, instead of doing their entertainment jobs today they’d all been recruited as laborers to help clear away the wreckage. According to Bearfoot, Harvey had escorted her to the park entrance and then wandered back in alone.

By now, just one day after the clock tower’s collapse, the incident had been blamed on a fault in the clockwork city’s engines that had made them run wild, and things were largely settled. Kieli didn’t know whether they just hadn’t found Christoph’s body or if there’d been a cover-up, but so far she hadn’t heard any word of a mysterious corpse found at ground zero of the explosion. Shiman had apparently been called in by the authorities and grilled about the street performers’ nighttime spree, but the charges against him seemed to have been dropped. Most likely, Kieli thought, they’d escaped this turning into a big thing because of pressure from the capital. They wouldn’t want the public knowing about the replica cores. Just this once, she was rather glad for that.

I wonder if Harvey’s okay…

In truth, she did remember loaning her body to Elisha, although it was all pretty fuzzy. She had no intention of telling Harvey that, though.

“Tick to—”

Nana’s singing abruptly broke off.

A tall figure stood over them.

“You bastard, how dare you—”

“Corporal,” Kieli said, silencing the murderous, static-spewing radio by placing a light hand on it. She let her wariness clearly show, though, as she raised her eyes and gave their visitor a hard look.

A lanky man in a full-length coat was looking down at her with two light blue-gray eyes that blended in with the color of the twilight sky behind him. He didn’t have that mushy look as though his organs were melting today.

“You got better, then?”

“More or less. For now.”

Kieli hadn’t asked out of any special concern, so she just gave a noncommittal “Hmm,” and then asked with open hostility, “What do you want?”

“I’m leaving town, so I thought I’d get one last look at you first.”

“I didn’t need to look at you.”

“So cold.” He let his shoulders slump dramatically, but without looking really hurt. “Come with me,” he said, casually getting down to his real business.

Just like that, as if it were no big deal. Kieli looked up at his face and blinked. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the words; she just couldn’t imagine how they would merit the slightest consideration. After she’d stared blankly back at him for a while, he clicked his tongue and backed down without a fight.

“Meh, it figures.”

He hadn’t expected her to agree in the first place, it seemed. Even the tongue click seemed like a Yeah, that’s what I thought sort of sound.

Then he unexpectedly bent over and brought his face to Kieli’s ear to whisper, “I’ll be coming to kidnap you later,” his breath and lips ever so lightly brushing her ear. Shocked, Kieli turned her face away, but by then he was already straightening back up, coat flapping around him as he turned.

“Later,” he tossed breezily over his shoulder as he walked away from the trailer.

Kieli wordlessly watched the tall, lean back that would have looked exactly like Harvey’s if not for the color of his clothes and hair as it retreated. Then something struck her. “…Hey.” The man paused, sending her a glance over his shoulder and raising his eyebrows in slight surprise. “Do you still both hate milk?”

“What?”

“Nothing. As long as you don’t hate it, it’s fine,” Kieli said, promptly ending the conversation with no change of expression. He stared at her stupidly for a few seconds, but she kept her mouth firmly closed, so eventually he walked off into the darkening nightfall, this time without turning back. The sandy wind sent his long coat billowing up around him, and before it had settled back into place again he was gone, as if he’d vanished into thin air.

“Kieli?”

Nana’s arms came winding around her waist, nervously, as if she’d picked up on the threatening atmosphere. The radio stuck between them spewed static as if it couldn’t figure out what to vent its anger on. “Kieli! Why did you let him leave?!”

“It’s fine for now,” Kieli replied in a low, subdued voice, and then she stared wordlessly into the evening darkness where the tall man had disappeared—at the afterimage of the Undying man who was like a distorted reflection of Harvey; who was nothing like him, and yet for some reason was also very like him in a way.

Joachim came to a halt in front of the camp exit.

A figure his exact height was standing there by the wall of blocks. He’d had the feeling he might meet this guy here. He got his grunt of annoyance out of the way up front, since just the sight of that face had already pissed him off.

“What are you here for?”

“I didn’t do anything. Don’t look at me like you’re about to rip my head off.”

They glared at each other with quiet but blatant malice. There was no reason for their conversation to be so menacing on sight, but neither of them felt the need for any special reason at this point.

“I just came to leave a word of warning, as my way of saying thanks for saving me.”

“I don’t think of it as ‘saving’ you. If you want to thank me, never show your face around me again.”

“You know,” Joachim continued, ignoring him, “if you go back to the capital, you’ll die for real this time.”

The other man lifted his eyebrows slightly, falling silent for a moment as if he didn’t know what to say to that. “…Why should I go to the capital? I don’t have any business there anymore.”

“Huh. So that’s how you’re going to play it, eh?” Joachim snorted. You just can’t ever admit what you’re thinking, can you? “I’m going, though. To tear the heads off those senile old fools on the Council of Elders.”

“Go ahead and get yourself killed for all I care. Nothing to do with me.”

“Well, that’s fine. Let’s meet again in the capital someday, fate and luck willing.”

“I told you, I’m not going.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say.”

The other man had clammed up. One last slanting beam of sunlight the same infernal coppery color as his hair and eye hit his glum cheek before sinking between the clustered buildings of the new city. Taking that as his cue, Joachim started walking again. His companion stayed in place, waiting.

As Joachim passed him, their equally tall shoulders brushed each other.

“Next time I see you, I’ll kill you,” they murmured simultaneously without meeting each other’s eyes, and neither of them looked back after that.