CHAPTER 4

A DANGEROUS YOUNG LADY AND A KIND BEAST

The self he saw in the pictures seemed so awfully foreign to him that it gave him an uncomfortable feeling. After all, until quite recently he’d never even imagined the day would come when he’d be in photographs like these. There he was, standing next to the woman who’d vowed to spend her life with him only a few days ago, dressed up just a little more than usual and facing the camera with a nervous smile that was nevertheless so stupidly happy that even he wanted to tease the guy wearing it.

“What do you think? They came out well, didn’t they?” said that same woman, raising her eyes from the photos lined up on the counter and smiling. They’d been looking through them together.

“Yeah, but I’ve gotta say they make me feel a little shy.”

He gave her a strained smile to cover up his doubts. Maybe part of my problem is that I feel guilty for being the only one of us to get a happy ending. But no; thinking like this would only get him yelled at by the leader and the rest of the guys.

It wasn’t quite time to open the bar yet. Lazy evening sunbeams filtered in through the windows. The bartender turned his gaze toward the far side of the hall, past the reach of those sunbeams, toward the little stage where nothing was left but some ancient sound equipment. After the night of his wedding party, the four-man rock band hadn’t appeared on that stage again. He still stayed behind by himself after closing every night, polishing glasses until bedtime in the faint hope that someone—his old bandmates, past regulars, anyone— would appear. There was a gaping void in his heart, but nonetheless, he suspected that nature would take its course in time and fill up the gap with the contents of his new life. Starting next week, a new band was scheduled to play here. It wouldn’t be rock music, of course; they’d be doing something safer. But hey, he was a music lover.

“Here’s Kieli. She looks so cute!”

Brought back to himself by Yana’s voice, he turned his attention away from the stage and back toward the photographs.

When he looked down at the picture she’d brought to the top of the pile, his heart swelled, feeling warmed and broken at the same time. A girl smiling a little hesitantly in the wreath of artificial flowers and white lace that had been clapped on her head—how could this girl on the edge of seventeen look so painfully much like Setsuri? For all her eyes were modest, her strong will and dignity were plain to see there. They seemed to be an even deeper, more striking color now than when she’d first visited his bar.

The bartender reached out to touch this photograph with far more emotion than he’d felt looking at his own. But when he picked it up, he caught sight of the edge of another one stuck to the bottom of it.

…Oh God.

He hurriedly covered it up with another photo.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, ah, no, it’s nothing. Well, it looks like it’s time to save the rest of these for later and open up the bar,” he babbled quickly. Yana gave him a puzzled look, but she soon smiled in agreement. “Yes, let’s take our time over them after we close for the night.” His conscience twinged. He…he hadn’t been married a week, and he’d already hidden something from her.

“I’ll go open up,” said Yana. After she’d jogged outside to flip the sign, he wiped the cold sweat from his brow and covertly snagged one photograph out of the pile. It was the other picture of Kieli. Her smile was far prettier and more natural than in the first one, but…

The bartender couldn’t have stopped the dry, grim laugh from escaping him if he’d tried.

Kieli, sitting primly in the chair, wasn’t the only one in the photograph. His old bandmates were clustered around her, leaning forward and clamoring to be in the picture. The vocalist/guitarist, trying to casually put his arm around Kieli’s shoulders; the bass player on her other side knocking away his hand and trying to get an arm around her himself, the drummer striking a pose with a stick in each hand, and in the very back, the bandleader holding up his sax.

“Aw, jeez, it turned into spirit photography…that’s Kieli for you, huh?” he said wryly to himself. Then he put a hand over his eyes for a moment. I really was blessed with good friends, and they’ve sent me off on the rest of life’s journey with all kinds of other good fortune. I’ve got a long way to go yet.

And then he heard a little shriek coming from outside.

With a start, he hurriedly wiped his eyes and lifted his head to see several people standing in the doorway, crowding Yana back inside. Soldiers in white clerical robes with armor plating, but these were large, muscular soldiers who radiated an extremely intimidating air: clearly on a whole different level from the town’s laid-back Security Forces outpost—! All at once the horrific raid fifteen years ago sprang to his mind in full color, as if it had happened only yesterday. His whole body went tense.

“H-how can I help you?” he greeted his rude, unwanted guests in a hard voice as Yana ran to him. He hugged her from across the counter. It looked as though a few more Church Soldiers were standing by outside, but only two of them entered the bar. One of them came up to stand in front of the counter to loom over him.

“Sir, we’ve been informed that there’s a girl working at this establishment.”

The mechanical politeness was civil enough, and yet somehow it didn’t sound very sincere. This man must have come not from the town outpost, but from the Security Forces headquarters in the capital. The bartender couldn’t grasp the situation yet, so he decided to stall for the time being. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re looking for…” But as he spoke, the soldier’s eye settled on the photos scattered on the counter. Crap. It was too late; a rugged gloved hand was reaching for the one on top. The other soldier drew an old-looking photo out of his breast pocket, and the two of them compared the photos and nodded to each other.

He caught a brief glimpse of that old photo, and the woman in it was—

Setsuri—?

The soldier put away the photo again while the bartender was still standing there bug-eyed, and gestured to the one left in his hand of the raven-haired girl in the wreath of artificial flowers.

“Where is this girl now?” he said. He’d gone from the former polite attitude to something like cross-examination, but his tone was still just as mechanical—to the point where the change didn’t even worsen the bartender’s impression of him. A tense silence fell on either side of the counter until, after a long pause, the soldier brought out his trump card. “We’ve checked into this place. If you refuse to cooperate, we’ll be forced to take steps.”

Yana stiffened uneasily, her eyes wide. The bartender hugged his wife’s shoulders tightly with one arm and ground his molars together. She didn’t know about the old bar, or the raid. He hadn’t wanted to get her caught up in the whole thing, and he hadn’t thought it would cause any problems for them anyway.

If you refuse to cooperate, we’ll be forced to— If he refused them, he’d lose the peaceful life he’d only just—finally—begun. If he cooperated, though, he’d be betraying two people who had trusted him enough to tell him their circumstances and seek refuge with him.

Harvey, Kieli…

For the past few days he’d been dwelling on one painful question: why was something always lost in exchange for anything new you gained? This world was truly finely balanced. With some irony, he thought, Maybe there really is a God living on this planet. An ever-so-fair-minded God with an outstanding sense of balance.

From the moment she’d seen this city’s skyline, she’d had the feeling it had reminded her of someplace she’d been before; she just couldn’t remember where.

It was a relatively developed city for such a remote part of North-hairo parish, with well-maintained buildings and streets. There was a decent amount of traffic on the main street, too. Three-wheeled taxis with enormous cylindrical fuel tanks on top whizzed by, gushing exhaust and noise. From what she’d heard, a certain wealthy family who maintained an estate here had been investing money in the city for a long time.

“Oh, I know. It’s Toulouse.”

Something about the mood of this place reminded her of the “witch-hunt town” of Toulouse, which had been flourishing as a tourist destination despite its location far from the center of Westerbury parish. They even had the same geography: they were both framed by a gently sloping wilderness on one side and an intricate network of steep rock ledges on the other.

“Too loose?”

“‘Toulouse.’ We stopped there while we were traveling with Beatrix, you know?”

She’d thought of it as an established fact when she said it, but the only response she got from the radio was a blank silence. Oh, right. When she remembered their situation, she felt a little glum. “I guess you don’t remember Beatrix either, huh, Corporal…The two of you were buddies, you know.” “Mmm?” Kieli kind of liked this more untroubled Corporal, but moments like this made her long for him to get better quickly and go back to normal.

As she walked unhurriedly along the main street, she tried explaining the blond, blue-eyed woman to the radio.

“You see, Beatrix is an old friend of Harvey’s, but she’s selfish and she lives however she likes and she talks big and she spends money like water—really, I don’t know what to do with her! And she can’t cook or clean, either…” She’d just said the first things that came to mind, but replaying them in her head, Kieli realized they really didn’t sound flattering. Surely there was something else she could say. She knit her brows and thought for a moment.

“But you know, she’s a good person…and she’s really beautiful.”

She couldn’t help smiling at the memories.

Suddenly the honk-honk-honk of someone leaning on a car horn filled her ears. Kieli realized with a start that she’d been about to cross the street without looking. Shrieking, she tried to backpedal, but her heel slipped and she fell down right in the path of a car. Brakes squealed shrilly against the pavement, and the vehicle came to a stop just before it would have crushed her toes.

That was close…

She stayed sitting on her butt on the shoulder of the road, too petrified to move for a while. Her heart was racing in her chest.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Are you hurt?” a female voice called down from the car parked scant centimeters away. Slim and pale legs descended onto the shoulder of the road. Kieli’s heartbeat still hadn’t quieted down when she raised her eyes to see a beautiful lady with waist-length hair tucking up the hem of an expensive-looking dress and climbing out of the backseat—though in Kieli’s personal view, she wasn’t quite as beautiful as Beatrix. The car she’d been riding in was as high-class as her clothes. On the surface it was similar to a three-wheeled taxi, but it was longer, and the rear seemed to have a set of elegant facing seats in place of the standard backseat. A large man Kieli guessed was her private chauffeur climbed out of the driver’s seat after her.

For a split second her nose detected something off, but the soft scent of perfumed oil wafting from the woman’s hair soon banished whatever it was.

“I’m fine. I only fell because I was so startled. I’m the one who should apologize to you for not looking where I was going.”

It looked as if the driver was about to help her up, so Kieli hastily declined and started to get up herself, but just then an arm seized her from another direction and yanked her upright. “Kieli,” muttered a voice overhead. When she craned her neck to look up, the familiar tall, redheaded form was standing there looking down at her. The tone of his next words didn’t change in the slightest, but she thought he probably was worried.

“What’s wrong?”

“I almost got bumped into, but that’s all. I’m not hurt,” she hastened to explain. Harvey appeared skeptical, and turned to regard the driver and the young lady in the dress with eyes that weren’t hostile, but weren’t exactly friendly, either.

The moment the young lady saw Harvey’s face, she cried, “Oh!” and her eyes went round. Before Kieli could blink, her whole face lit up. “Please, I’d love to invite you to my house for tea, if you would be so kind,” she said, reaching out to grip Harvey’s hand and more or less shoving Kieli aside in the process. Kieli blinked, stumbling.

At this abrupt request from a total stranger, Harvey’s “not exactly friendly” attitude visibly slid to “unfriendly.”

“No thank you. Kieli, let’s go.”

He brusquely shook off the slender hand touching his, turned his back, and began striding away. “R-right,” Kieli agreed, rushing to chase after him. He was walking fast; she had to jog to catch up. When she managed it and took up walking diagonally behind him, she turned her head to look back. The young lady they’d left behind was still standing stock-still in front of the car, gazing at them. Eventually, though, she addressed a few words to the driver and disappeared back into the car.

“Didn’t you think there was something strange about that woman?”

At Harvey’s gruff voice, Kieli turned back to look at him and tilted her head to one side.

“Not really; why?”

“What about you, Corporal?”

“Ah, she was quite fine-looking, wasn’t she?”

“…All right, then,” Harvey tossed carelessly over his shoulder, withdrawing the topic without even turning around. He was directing his feet toward their inn.

“Could you see the mirage?”

“No,” he answered flatly. He’d gone out to the outskirts of town today to have a look at the mirage.

It was two days ago now that they’d disembarked (through the window) at the station closest to where Harvey said he’d seen a towerlike mirage from the train. Apparently the mirage Harvey and the radio had seen had started appearing in the sky above the rock ledge across from town about a year ago, and all the townspeople were talking about it. But they said you could see it only once every few days, and not on any sort of regular schedule, so now they were staying here for a few days waiting for its next appearance. It seemed as though Harvey’d had some ideas of his own about that mirage. It was nothing unusual for Harvey to summarily change the route of a journey (whatever he might say, Harvey was pretty stubborn when he got a hunch about something), but since she couldn’t rely on the radio to grill him about it this time, Kieli was even more strapped for information than usual.

Just as she was looking up to check his profile diagonally in front of her, he abruptly stopped walking and swiveled his head to one side. “Did you notice something watching us just now?” By the time Kieli managed a flustered “Huh?” while trying not to trip, Harvey was already bursting into a sprint in the direction he’d gazed.

“Harvey?!”

Harvey’s back was retreating down an alleyway; Kieli took off after him, but in no time he was too far ahead, and she lost sight of him. When she emerged from the alley and into the next street she couldn’t figure out which way he’d gone, and she was at a loss. Happily, though, before long she made out a redheaded figure wandering back up the street.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said, but he was still darting his eyes this way and that, looking unconvinced.

The radio asked in a worried voice, “Say, Master, are you maybe feeling a little tired?”

“Yeah, and you’re not helping,” Harvey snapped in a way that left no possible response. Kieli privately thought he might really be a little tired. That hadn’t been his usual curtness; she’d sensed more bite to it. She hardly ever heard that tone coming from Harvey’s mouth. Normally the radio was the hotheaded one, and yet now it felt as if Harvey was on edge, as if he was being more impatient to make up for its complacency.

“Hey, Harvey, we’re not in too much of a hurry, so why don’t we take a little break here before we go on…?” Kieli ventured tentatively. She wanted to fix the radio as soon as possible, of course, but she sort of got the feeling that Harvey was in an even worse state, somehow. Coppery eyes glanced sharply at her. She was pretty sure that if he’d used that tone with her it would have hurt a lot, so she’d felt a little apprehensive as she asked, looking up through her eyelashes. After a pause, Harvey was the one to break eye contact, and then he smacked his own cheek lightly with his left hand.

Dazed, Kieli wondered what that behavior was all about.

“Yeah, I guess…Sure, why not?” He was back to his normal slightly uninterested voice. Sighing, he said, “Thanks. Sorry.” She thought he was probably directing that to both her and the radio. Then he took the hand he’d struck his cheek with and ruffled her hair. Its ingrained tobacco scent gently tickled at her nose.

Caught off guard by this gesture he hadn’t done much lately, Kieli felt a sudden sting of tears and promptly ducked her head to hide her face. While she pretended to wipe some sand off her coat, she gazed at the tips of her toes and thought, What a mess. Usually she could stay calm and composed, but every so often when she let her guard down she felt like crying. Sometimes she accidentally remembered the fact that she didn’t see a single good thing to look forward to after this.

I really do wish the journey would never end…

That night she dozed off in the middle of writing a letter and had a bizarre dream.

An indistinct white figure stood in the middle of a dim space. She knew, vaguely, that it was somebody she knew, but when she tried to look closely the person’s face blurred, and she couldn’t tell for sure who it was.

Whoever it was stood staring down with tousled hair and eyes fixed on a corpse lying on the ground—head crushed in, body so mangled Kieli couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman—while gripping a blood-spattered ax. Thick, red-black blood dripped—dripped—dripped down from the tip of the broad wedge-shaped blade. The person’s clothes and face were equally plastered with blood, but no attempt was made to wipe it off; the figure just stood there placidly gripping the ax. Kieli was thinking, I just did what anyone would do. I didn’t do anything wrong. He tried to take something precious from me. I was only protecting what was mine.

All of a sudden it was Kieli herself holding the ax. The iron handle of the ax she gripped was so heavy she thought it might wrench her arm right out of its socket, and strangely warm when it should have been cool. The warmth came from the still-wet blood clinging to it. The ax got heavier and heavier as she held it, but she couldn’t let go of the handle, so it dragged her arms down until they stretched in a weird, slithery way toward the ground.

It should have been frightening, but for some reason Kieli felt perfectly calm, thinking the same thing she was thinking. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only protecting.

Kieli—

When she looked up at the sound of her name, there was a person standing in front of her. She could tell now that it was definitely someone she knew, but she couldn’t recognize who it was. She couldn’t recognize her, and yet she could see the expression on the individual’s face with crystal clarity; something sticky clung to those familiar cheeks, and eyes that Kieli couldn’t place scrutinized her as if near tears.

Why do you look so sad…? Kieli didn’t know what was wrong, and so she just looked up, still brandishing the ax.

Just as the person’s mouth opened to say something, the dream dissolved.

Kieli woke up with her face planted on the side table of her room at the inn, gripping the pen in her hand almost hard enough to break it.

…She wasn’t holding an ax. When she fumbled her stiffened, cold fingers open, there were nail marks imprinted deeply into her palm.

What an awful dream. I wonder what that was about.

First things first: she pulled herself together and finished writing the letter, her hand still a little numb. The next day she set off for the post office just as Harvey was coming back from whatever walk he’d apparently gone on early that morning, so she left him at the inn. The letter was to the bar on the parish border, and she took the opportunity to report their change of travel plans, too. She’d wanted to write a letter to settle her feelings and cheer herself up anyway. And after she had that thought, she realized that without even noticing it, she’d found a place she could send a letter to anytime she wanted. In exchange, though, lately she’d stopped writing letters to Becca that she never planned to send…Most people might think that was the normal thing to do, but it still made her feel a little lonely. Next time, she’d write a letter to Becca, too.

I’ve got to hang on and do my best…

She was the only one here with both a sound mind and body. She couldn’t let herself feel blue. Telling herself the dream was probably just groundless fears, she forced it to the back of her mind, mailed her letter, and left the post office.

She walked down the post office steps with her shoulder bag clopping against her side and came out on the main street at the bottom, where her eye caught sight of a car passing by on the other side of the road. Longer and classier than a three-wheeled taxi—it was the car that belonged to the young lady they’d met yesterday. The car was gone before Kieli could get a good look through the backseat window, but maybe she was riding in it right now.

The next time she left the inn, she asked the doorman about the girl as they exchanged greetings. Apparently the young lady was so famous there wasn’t a single person in town who didn’t know her; the doorman understood whom Kieli was talking about as soon as she described the car. He explained that the young lady was the current head of the family investing so much money in the town. There had actually been a male heir, but there’d been some kind of trouble and he’d left home, or something, so his younger sister had inherited the family fortune.

True, it was rare for a woman to be heir to such a prestigious family, but there was something that nagged at Kieli even more about the whole thing. According to the doorman it had been more than ten years since she’d taken over the family estate, and yet the lady had still looked quite young to Kieli. About Beatrix’s age, going by appearances. Could she be a woman Undying like Beatrix? she mused, and then immediately dismissed the idea. If she were, surely Harvey would’ve noticed right away.

I wonder why she wanted to invite Harvey over all of a sudden yesterday.

Kieli puzzled to herself for a moment.

She couldn’t have a crush on him, could she…?

She looked in the direction she’d seen the car heading. Faint traces of its thick fossil-fuel exhaust still hovered along the surface of the pavement, showing the path it had taken. Kieli doubted it meant anything, but technically that was the same direction as their inn.

It probably doesn’t mean anything, though, she repeated to herself firmly, even as she unthinkingly began to lope back toward the inn.

There was a faint, dully colored bruise on his left wrist. It was shaped almost like a set of fingers.

What is this…?

He held up his hand in front of him and stared at it for a while, but it was becoming too much of a bother to think about it. He let it drop back to his side and straightened out the cuff of his sleeve, which he’d tugged up with his teeth. Without a right arm, even trifling movements like these were slow going. Harvey rolled over and lay facedown in his bed, burying his face in the dusty pillow and feeling somehow drained. The end-of-winter air, still crisp but pleasantly, refreshingly so, streamed in through the window above him and ruffled the hair on the back of his head, bringing with it the smell of smog and the noise of the city.

Evidently the mirage hadn’t shown up today either. He wanted to get another look at it and confirm what direction it was in. And then there was the other issue that wouldn’t stop bothering him: the issue of the voice he’d heard for a moment at the station and the form that had escaped into the gap between train and platform. And that feeling like discomfort that he’d had when that woman touched him yesterday, the one he just couldn’t explain the reason for—there was such a confusing jumble of things going on in his head that he couldn’t tell anymore what he should think about first. Or maybe he was overthinking things, making them more complicated than they had to be?

Why was he so impatient to take care of all these different things at the same time, anyway? All it did was make him brood too much all at once and make him tired and pissy, until he almost took it out on Kieli and then she ended up worried about him. Pathetic.

This is all the Corporal’s fault…

Harvey turned his cheek against the pillow and glared resentfully at the unconcerned radio sitting on the windowsill. Any other time that radio would have butted in with “There you go again, thinking in circles about complicated stuff and not getting anywhere,” and Harvey would’ve gotten sick of the whole thing and just stopped thinking about it. But no, now there was nobody to put on the brakes, so his thoughts had gotten so snarled up that there was no untangling them anymore. He was actually starting to think that maybe in some sense the Corporal’s insufferable nagging had acted as a tranquilizer for him.

Harvey dragged himself upright and half-crawled to the window like a lazy animal, reaching for the radio.

He grabbed it by the cord and suspended it out of the third-story window. It seemed like a good way to vent his frustration.

“…Master, do you have something against me?”

“Not particularly.”

Dangling his arm out the window and letting the radio swing in the breeze, Harvey propped his chin on the sill and looked down below. Their room was only on the third floor of the inn, so it wasn’t all that high up. From here he could take in the street beneath them. This town was no Westerbury, but there was still a fair amount of traffic. His right eye’s lag had cleared up quite a bit in the last few days. If nothing else, he didn’t get dizzy anymore.

He was mindlessly watching the pedestrians go by when he noticed someone watching him from across the street.

That gaze—!

“Wah, Master, I’ll fall! I’ll fall!” shrieked the radio. Harvey realized that he’d abruptly stuck his upper body out the window, and the radio was in serious danger of getting flung away. By then it was already too late: the owner of the gaze tore off in a single bound, disappearing into the alley behind it. The glimpse Harvey’d caught was of an all-black creature, and he had the impression it had run on four legs. Was it…an animal?

That took him enough by surprise to momentarily delay his reaction, but after a beat he slid out of bed and burst out of the room. He ran down the stairs, impatiently hanging the radio around his neck one-handed, bolted past the cheap hotel’s cheaply paid doorman standing at the entrance with about as much enthusiasm as his salary warranted, and came out into the street.

Which way did it go? Harvey turned in the direction he’d seen the shadowy figure run off, and was just starting to cross the street when a vehicle pulled up on his right, announcing itself with the sound of a clamorous fossil-fuel engine as it appeared out of the edge of his vision, just where a bit of a blind spot still lingered. He threw himself back into the shoulder of the road just in time, but—

What the—?!

The driver turned and, of all things, headed straight for him! He couldn’t avoid it in time; he ended up pinned between the car’s front bumper and the wall at his back. While he’d reflexively shifted the radio to spare it the brunt of the damage, Harvey himself took a heavy hit to his side. At the same time, the short, abrupt squeal of brakes sounded practically right in his ear, close enough to rattle his brain.

The part of his brain that worked automatically without his conscious thought immediately determined that his injuries weren’t fatal, but they were sure enough to impair his sight and hearing for an instant; he heard a disturbingly excited female voice say “Oh dear, how awful!” but it sounded fuzzy and distant (“Oh dear,” my ass! You were blatantly aiming at me!).

“Carry him quickly, Job!”

“Hey! What—?!”

Pinned between the car and the wall, Harvey couldn’t move. Hands yanked him roughly free and he was tossed over a man’s broad shoulders like a sack of potatoes before he could put up any resistance. The same sort of discomfort he’d felt from that woman yesterday tickled at his nose. Now he finally realized what had made him uncomfortable—this was unmistakably the stench of rotting bodies.

Harvey was tossed on the floor of the car’s backseat, where he hit his back hard. He was ready to spring back up in a heartbeat, but a metallic clang made him jolt. When he looked up, his left wrist was bound in an iron manacle attached to a thick chain. The other end of the chain was fixed to a seat leg. “What the hell are you—”

“I finally get to see you!” It was that same woman from yesterday, throwing her arms around him as if to cut off the violent struggle Harvey was seriously contemplating.

The next thing she said, though, he reacted to.

“Brother! You came back to me!”

“Huh?!” he blurted. He had to admit, it came out as more of an undignified screech than anything else.

“When did he leave?”

“About fifteen minutes ago…I think…”

She’d run straight back to the inn, but neither Harvey nor the radio was in his room. So she’d tried asking the doorman at the entrance, but all she got was that vague, dubious answer.

Where could he have gone? He could have at least left her a message telling her where, or even just a couple of words scrawled on a napkin, but as usual, those little considerations were completely off his radar. Nonplussed, Kieli turned around and left the inn again without even putting down her bag. She figured she’d try looking around the neighborhood a little, just in case.

“……?”

After she’d walked for a while, she realized that something was following her. At first she thought it was just her imagination, but when she stopped and glanced behind her, it stopped short too, maintaining the same fixed distance. It was an animal a little larger than the average dog, with short black hair. It looked like a dog, yet Kieli had the distinct feeling it wasn’t one; she couldn’t figure out what it was, exactly.

Does it have some business with me…? Not that she wasn’t skeptical about the idea of a dog having “business.” She was deliberating whether to approach the doglike thing when a commotion suddenly started up around her.

“It’s the mirage!”

“I can see the tower!” cried voices from somewhere in the distance, and the flow of people on the streets all turned in one direction as if pulled by an invisible magnet.

The mirage…?

Maybe Harvey and the Corporal had gone to see the mirage. Yes, that sounded right. Kieli was about to set off running that way too, when a cry sounded behind her.

Not a human cry—something very much like a dog’s howl. She turned to see the animal being kicked as it tried to weave its way through the legs of the crowd. The man who’d kicked it merely said, “Where did this thing come from? Little piece of shit could hurt someone,” and began to hurry on, leaving it there on the ground. Kieli was just turning to go back to it when it leaped up and immediately sank its teeth into the man’s shin.

The man cursed loudly as he shook his leg free, and for a short time the attention of the crowd shifted from the mirage to them—which was when Kieli saw something incredible.

The animal landed nimbly on its feet, and its lips pulled back, mouth suddenly gaping open from jaw to ears. Closely packed sawlike teeth rimmed a mouth that was green like rotten meat; abnormally overdeveloped canines dripped with saliva. The animal launched itself into the air and latched on to the man’s arm with those two varieties of sharp teeth, sending a spray of tiny beads of blood into the air like fog. Everything from the elbow down was wrenched off.

The man collapsed to the ground, one arm just a stump now, and rolled around there, blabbering deliriously words that didn’t even manage to become screams. The first truly scream-like scream came from the mouth of a nearby woman who probably didn’t even know him. Panic spread from there until people began running in all directions from the spot where the animal had landed, just as if someone had dropped a bomb there. Kieli herself had been rooted to the spot with horror; now, pushed along by the crowd, she stumbled into motion too and started to run mindlessly.

That was—that was—

Her brain was half-numb, and she couldn’t quite get it to work. The sight of that animal just now, its mouth greenish as if its cells were rotting and falling off in clumps, made a series of similar images flash through her mind—the monsters in Gate Town’s underground waterways, Christoph when she’d met him in Westerbury, and Joachim. Is it like they were?

After someone passing her from behind knocked her off balance and almost made her fall, Kieli turned down a side alley to escape the chaos of the crowd. She kept running for a while, looking over her shoulder periodically to make sure no one was following her, until at last her legs faltered and she came to a stop, clinging to the wall for balance. As she put a hand to her chest and tried to catch her breath, she checked the alley behind her one more time. It looked as though she was the only one who’d come this way. The screams and pounding footsteps of all the people faded into a distant roar that bounced off the walls of the gloomy alley.

Just when she returned her gaze to her own surroundings with a sigh of relief, a dark red droplet landed with a slow liquid plop on the gray pavement before her. Kieli gasped and tried to back away, but she found she couldn’t move. Petrified, she stared in terror at the puddle of blood forming right in front of her boots. When she forced her head to tilt up, frozen neck muscles creaking, that doglike animal was balanced catlike on top of one of the exhaust pipes along the alley wall. Blood dripped steadily from the severed end of the human arm in its mouth.

It casually dropped the arm right in front of her, and with a strangled cry, Kieli managed to back away at last. Somewhere in the middle of her retreat she plopped down on the pavement and couldn’t stand up again. She thought she could see the arm lying in front of her boots, still twitching slightly. She felt bile rise in her throat.

The animal that alighted across the arm from her gave her a blood-soaked grin—at least, she thought it was grinning. The corners of its mouth pulled back all the way to its ears to reveal a glimpse of its slimy green mouth.

“Here. Your friend can have this. It’s gotta be inconvenient having one.”

The creature spoke. Its intonation was a little weird, but it spoke, in human language.

“Undyings can just stick on body parts, even ones that don’t belong to them, and the nerves will pretty much hook right up. Pretty convenient, huh?” it continued, giving a single wag of its tail (although its body was doglike, its tail was long and thin like the tail of a mountain lion she’d seen in a photograph once) and contorting the corners of its gaping mouth into what Kieli thought was probably another smile. When it closed its mouth, it went back to more or less looking like a dog. Kieli stared at the baffling animal standing before her eyes in openmouthed amazement, still sitting on her butt on the ground.

It could speak in words, and it seemed fairly intelligent, too. And by “your friend” and “Undying” it could only mean Harvey. Which meant it was saying that it must be inconvenient for Harvey to be missing an arm, so it was offering him a new one. If she set aside the fact that it had torn a man’s arm off with its teeth (although she didn’t necessarily think that was an issue that could fairly be set aside), maybe this animal didn’t pose an immediate threat…?

“Are you…um…a dog?”

It was only when Kieli heard her voice come out scratchy that she realized her throat was dry. The animal seemed offended.

“How rude. What part of me makes you think of some mongrel?”

Kieli wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was built like a medium-sized dog, and its long-nosed face looked like a dog’s, as long as it kept its mouth closed. The pointy, triangular ears and short, jet-black fur made it look like one of those slender breeds of dog, too. On the other hand, the hair around its neck, which was longer than all its other fur and stood stiffly out, and the slender tail with just a poof of hair at the end reminded her of a mountain lion. The expression in its eyes—they were mismatching shades: one amber and one a dark brown—was oddly human, and as it continued to regard her she grew uncomfortable.

…All in all, though, Kieli still felt it was more like a dog than anything else. After observing all its features and considering them, she only ended up at the same conclusion; she was at a total loss for a response. Eventually the animal said “Eh, whatever” in a sulky voice, and leaped nimbly back up onto the pipe again. Though it was a lot bigger than a cat, it had a catlike way of moving without making a sound. Kieli was getting more and more confused about what kind of animal it was.

“I know where your friend is.”

“What?!” Kieli cried, taken by surprise at the unexpected subject change. “You mean Harvey, right?! You know where he—” She leaned forward eagerly only to snatch her hand back in a hurry when she almost touched the fallen arm.

Mismatched brown and amber eyes gazed down at her from the pipe, and the animal made a rumbling sound in its throat with another probably-a-smile.

“He’s a pretty interesting guy. A little old to be getting kidnapped, isn’t he?”

“Is this the place…?”

Facing the back gate of the estate’s cracked border wall, Kieli hunched her shoulders against a chill that had nothing to do with the evening breeze.

On the other side of the gate an old mansion stood against the sky, where sunset’s copper glow was beginning to melt into blue-gray. She’d been told the mansion belonged to a distinguished family that brought wealth to the town, but it looked awfully run-down for such an important estate. The border wall and the walls of the mansion itself were riddled with fine webs of cracks and liverwort. There wasn’t a single plant in the garden that you’d expect to find in a place like this. Even the iron gate before Kieli’s eyes was so completely covered in rust that she was afraid if she touched it, it would come loose and just fall down.

According to what she’d heard from the doorman this morning, about a decade ago—in other words, not long after the newest family head had assumed that position—there had been a natural disaster. An earthquake had opened up a fissure at the northern end of town, and several mansions like this one had been destroyed. That was exactly where they were right now: the northern outskirts. Of all the grand homes, this one alone had miraculously escaped destruction, and the female head of the family still lived here to this day. But apparently there wasn’t a single other occupied house anywhere nearby.

Still, Kieli’s impression was the opposite of what she’d heard: vague though the feeling was, she thought this was the house where she couldn’t sense a living presence.

The sight of it made her flinch more than a little, but she gulped and pulled herself back together.

“Did Harvey really get carried off by that woman?”

“Yep,” the beast answered lightly, and jumped easily to the top of the wall. It balanced all four limbs adroitly on the narrow surface and began to walk back and forth along it, perhaps scoping out the interior of the estate.

“Climb on up.”

It said this as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. Kieli gave the animal a slightly envious look as she nodded. They’d circled the whole estate, following along the wall; the front gate was far too tall for either of them to imagine Kieli climbing. This servants’ gate in the rear seemed surmountable, but certainly not easily. It was like when the creature had brought her an arm it had torn off of someone: it meant no offense, but the way it showed her consideration left something to be desired. Was that because it was an animal?

The moment Kieli placed a foot on the rusty gate, it screeched loudly. White-knuckled with fear, she did her best not to make any noise as she scrambled up; when she reached the top she straddled the gate and surveyed the grounds inside.

On the other side of a barren, empty space Kieli wasn’t sure she could properly call a “garden” stood the crack-riddled walls of the estate. They had a really creepy air about them. All the visible windows were dark gray. Scraps of once-white curtains hung in a few of them, but no light was on in any of the rooms. Kieli started to wonder whether Harvey was really in this place after all.

She swung both legs over the gate and jumped down into the estate grounds. She was just pulling her bag back up to her shoulder and pondering her next move when suddenly a voice behind her asked, “Who are you?”

Kieli’s heart leapt to her throat. She hadn’t sensed anyone there at all. She turned around stiffly, trying to get her heartbeat back under control, and discovered a long-haired woman in a beautiful dress that looked out of place in the wild garden. Out of the corner of her eye, Kieli glanced up to the top of the wall, thinking, She found us right away!, but the black animal had already disappeared into hiding, abandoning Kieli to her fate. Traitor…

All of a sudden coming face-to-face with the mistress of the manor like this had her feeling rattled, but she held her head high, told herself she’d come here for an honorable, aboveboard purpose (though technically, scaling the gate and sneaking in kind of tossed the “aboveboard” thing out the window), and stated her business.

“Um, I heard that Harvey—I mean, the man I was with yesterday—was here.”

“Oh, you,” said the lady, sounding as if she had only just now remembered Kieli’s face. Evidently she really hadn’t taken any notice of Kieli at the time.

“Did you come to bring him back with you?”

“Yes…I did,” Kieli confirmed cautiously, disconcerted. The lady tilted her head for a moment as if she was pondering this, but then she offered Kieli a gentle smile and said, “Yes, he’s here. Come in.” She started walking, leading the way back toward the mansion. It was such an unexpectedly normal welcome that it temporarily knocked the wind out of Kieli’s sails, but then she snapped out of it with a start and began jogging after the lady in the dress.

The mansion was as devoid of light as it had seemed from the outside. The air inside was chilly, and in it she caught a faint smell like spoiled food. The lady of the house lit a candlestick to light the way and led Kieli down a gloomy corridor. The feeble candle flame made the walls and ceiling flicker into view around her in a way that made it hard to judge their distance from her, making her feel even more uneasy being here all alone. The clacking of the lady’s high-heeled shoes and the rustling of her skirts; the clomping of Kieli’s boots and the rhythmic thumping of her bag—the sounds of their progress through the deathly quiet mansion echoed eerily off the walls.

Unable to stand the silence anymore, she addressed the back in front of her. “Um…”

Facing forward and continuing to walk, the lady said without warning, “Say, would you give him to me?”

This stunning question came casually, in the same offhand manner someone might say Can I have your doll?, and Kieli’s feet stopped in place without her conscious order. “Huh?” she squeaked. The candle’s circle of light and the dress she was following pulled farther away into the darkness, so she hurried to catch back up, flustered.

“Um, what do you mean by that?”

“You should. He’s my brother.”

“B-bro-ther…?” Kieli asked falteringly, the word so alien that her tongue fumbled it. The lady calmly kept walking, paying it no mind.

“I knew it from the moment I saw him. I’m positive he’s my brother reincarnated. So give him to me. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Wait, but Harvey’s not a thing. It’s not an issue of ‘giving’ or ‘not giving’…”

The lady whirled abruptly around to face her for the first time.

“You’re saying no?” she asked, tilting her head to the side adorably. Her confusion was plain. Kieli lost her nerve for a moment at that, and fell silent. Then:

“I-I’m saying no…”

The moment Kieli answered, she was shoved hard in the shoulders. “Huh?!” Taken off guard, she stumbled into a door in the wall—which promptly opened, sending her sprawling shoulders-first into the dark room beyond. She heard the sound of the door closing behind her and sat up in alarm. “What— Please, let me out! Let me out!” She felt around for the knob and seized it, rattling it back and forth, but the door didn’t budge.

“No, no, you mustn’t get in my way…” came the lady’s voice from just beyond the door. It lilted like an innocent child’s voice singing a song, interrupted by giggles.

“You mustn’t get in my way…because if you do, I’ll have to kill you…”

Kieli had the sudden illusion that the thick iron door rippled like a thin piece of cloth for just a moment. It felt as if someone’s slightly foul-smelling sigh washed across her face. She took a step back from the door, shuddering.

High-heeled footsteps and the sound of swishing skirts withdrew into the distance. Kieli was pinned in place for a time with her eyes glued to the closed door, unable to move, but when the sound of footsteps disappeared she was released from her paralysis, and she tore her gaze away from the door to look around her. The only thing visible was one dim, lonely ray of twilight shining down on the far corner of the room, hardly enough to see anything but itself by. From the way sound echoed she could guess that it wasn’t a very large space, but other than that, she couldn’t tell anything about her surroundings. There seemed to be a window where the light was leaking in, but it was high up on the wall, and when she peered closely at it, she saw that some unknown party had nailed a board over it to block access.

When she started to feel around her for anything she might be able to use to escape, Kieli realized with terror that a whitish, humanlike form was lying at her feet.

She looked downward and inspected it carefully: there at the bottom of the darkness, a facedown figure in a pinafore like a maid’s—she thought it was a woman, but the head was so thoroughly crushed in that there was no way to tell from the face. Some kind of mushy substance lay scattered on the floor around it.

“What’s wrong?” said a voice out of nowhere.

The lady of the house stood in the center of the room, bathed in a ring of pale light. How long had she been there? Her long hair was disheveled, both her face and the dress she was wearing were greasy with the blood of her victim, and she was brandishing with both hands a great ax dripping with gore.

“Brother, what’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that…?” she asked in confusion, tilting her blood-soaked face to the side endearingly.

“You’re blaming me…? It wasn’t my fault; it was hers. After all, she was about to toss out my ring right along with the laundry. I know she meant to take the ring. She wanted to get in our way. I just know it.”

As she calmly explained this, she walked closer, dragging the bloody ax behind her. Shnnk. Shnnk. With each step came the heavy sound of it scraping along the floor. Kieli backed away in horror, but after only a few steps her shoulders hit the wall.

That dream— This is what that dream was about.

As she realized this, something made a creaking sound overhead. The lady’s form blurred sideways and dissolved into static as though the noise had erased it, and at her departure the darkness around Kieli softened slightly.

Kieli’s eyes traced the wall upward. Her chills hadn’t disappeared yet. When her gaze reached the window, she saw that the boards nailed over it had been snapped apart from the outside, and the color of the night outside was streaming in. It was still brighter than the room, if not by much. A long, thin black face suddenly popped up against the backdrop of the twilit sky, one amber eye gleaming eerily, and she’d opened her mouth to scream before she realized.

“Oh!”

An amber right eye and a dark brown left eye: it was the black beast. Relieved, Kieli ran up to the wall below the window. “I was afraid you’d run away…”

“I found him. That way, over there,” the animal said cheerfully, indifferent to Kieli’s emotional state. It indicated with its eye for Kieli to come outside. Which was all well and good, but the window was high out of Kieli’s reach. The animal didn’t quite seem to understand that, however. She turned and looked around the room again, but it seemed to be an unused storeroom or something; all she saw were a few odds and ends piled up in one corner. Nothing that she could use to stand on.

When she looked up at the window through her lashes and made a display of her distress, the animal appeared to notice for the first time that Kieli couldn’t climb up. It blinked both eyes. Then it scrunched its long nose as if in deep thought, and after an amazingly sulky-looking grimace, it grumbled, “Dammit, I can’t believe this,” drew its head back outside, and thrust its rear end through the window frame instead. That long, thin tail just like a mountain lion’s on a body that was otherwise pure dog dangled down to her. Kieli gratefully took hold of the end of it to use as a rope. When she gripped it tight and pulled, she heard a strangled groan overhead.

Kieli climbed up the wall with her feet, using the tail as a handhold, and let out a little sigh of relief once she’d gotten her upper body onto the window frame and dragged up her shoulder bag after her. The tail fled from her the moment she let go. When she looked down from her position half-in and half-out of the window, she saw the animal’s back; it was scratching its claws against the ground for some reason, writhing. “I’m sorry; did it hurt?” she whispered. But the animal shook its head without looking up. Apparently pain wasn’t the issue. Maybe it had tickled.

Kieli transferred her gaze to the wall below the window. There was a little mountain of loosely heaped fossil fuel like brown coal at the bottom, maybe for heating. She thought she could probably slither down from here onto it.

“That way. You can see it from up there.”

The animal lifted its head unsteadily, as if exhausted, and pointed with its nose toward a point off in the darkness. Across an open space that she guessed was the courtyard, though it was as barren and empty of plant life as the back garden had been, Kieli could see a smallish building that must be some sort of detached cottage. A faint light bled from one of its windows. So, one of the building’s rooms was apparently occupied.

The lighted window seemed almost as small as a postage stamp from this distance, but when she squinted she could make out a redhead sitting against the wall inside.

“There he is…!”

You got “hit by a car and kidnapped”? What are you, a little kid? Honestly… She was heaving a half-worried, half-exasperated sigh when the hem of a long dress appeared from the side of the room, and someone came to stand in front of Harvey. It was the lady.

Kieli’s heart gasped, and then she froze up completely.

Within the square of the window, the lady drew up her skirts and knelt on the floor before Harvey. Her two white hands reached out to palm Harvey’s cheeks, and her face drew in close—

Wh-wh-what is she…?

But before Kieli could see what happened next, a great shadow loomed in front of her, cutting off her line of sight. The chauffeur that had been with the lady when they’d met her yesterday was standing beneath the window, brandishing a large ax with both hands. Kieli jumped down onto the coal pile just in time. The very same moment she slid down to the ground, there was a great metallic clang as the thick wedged blade slammed into the window frame with enough force to send vibrations through the air that Kieli could feel. The rust on the window frame exploded into fine mineral dust that filled the air.

The animal launched itself off the ground and sank its teeth into the chauffeur’s neck, but the chauffeur didn’t seem to think anything more of it than Kieli would of a fly buzzing in her ear. He just shook it off harshly and lifted the ax to swing at Kieli again. He’s not hurt—? “He’s only a moving corpse,” the animal explained as it landed lightly on the ground next to her. It continued to expound, though Kieli was fairly certain they didn’t have the time: “The woman’s been dead a long time. You noticed her smell, right?”

Kieli was in no state to answer. She rolled out of the path of the chauffeur’s blade with no room to spare and scurried away on all fours as fast as she could. A great crash of impact sounded behind her, followed by a clanging roar that reverberated in her ears until she couldn’t hear anything else. The ax flew out of the chauffeur’s hand and came careening toward her, turning end over end and grazing past her dangerously closely before it lodged itself in the ground.

Only the first gasp of the scream made it past her throat.

She felt all the blood drain from her face, and all of her strength went with it, sending her crumpling to the ground. She couldn’t make her legs stand up again. When she turned her head nervously to check behind her, she found the chauffeur buried under the collapsed coal pile, kicking his legs up and down like a mechanical toy.

Harvey didn’t hold back at all. He used all the force he could muster to kick the woman bringing her face close to his. It sent her flying.

Reeling, she fell against the table behind her, knocking the candleholder onto the floor. The candle flame that had been illuminating the room went out, and the faint twilight beaming in through the window became the only thing to see by. That suited Harvey fine, since low light was easier on his eyesight these days.

The woman sank to hands and knees on the floor as if grief-stricken. Eventually she lifted her head and gave him an almost offended look.

“Brother, why are you treating me so coldly?”

“Don’t give me that ‘why.’ Take this off.” When he yanked at the manacle around his left hand, it was promptly yanked right back with a jangle of the heavy chain. The other end of the chain was tied to a round metal fitting in the wall, meaning Harvey couldn’t move away from said wall.

“What? No, I can’t do that!” said the woman who’d shackled him and confined him here, without a trace of shame. “If I take it off, you’ll run away! Didn’t you say you loved me, Brother? And yet you ran away and left me…I’m never letting you go again.”

She crawled toward him, her long hair trailing along the floor. Harvey shuddered at the sight. “Stay away from me!” He made to pull away from her, but his back was against the wall, so he tried to scoot sideways—but she cut off his path by putting a hand to the wall beside his head. Somebody help me! he cried in his mind. It sounded pretty close to a whine, actually.

Harvey remembered hearing something about the younger sister taking over the family because her brother had left; he didn’t particularly sympathize with this brother or anything, but he could sort of see why. Anyone exposed to this girl’s nutty expressions of love would probably want to run away. The fact that she even had manacles and chains and iron rings in the first place already put her squarely in the “freak” category.

“Where’s your ring, Brother? Those matching rings are our treasures! I know you have it on you somewhere. I could tell right away.” Mumbling nonsense, she put one hand down the collar of his shirt and started fishing around. The sensation of cold fingers slipping underneath his clothes sent goose bumps rippling over his skin.

“Hey, stop it!”

“Come on, where are you hiding it? Over here?”

This time, Harvey’s cry wasn’t just in his mind. “Wah!” He kicked her off again with all his might. He plastered himself to the wall, breathing hard. Now he really did feel in danger, at least of a certain sort, and he was starting to get chills. He seriously wanted to get out of here pronto.

“Oh, Brother, what am I going to do with you…?”

Harvey was sure he’d kicked the woman hard in the stomach, but she sat right back up again without seeming hurt, and started crawling back toward him, undeterred. He made a last-ditch attempt to pull his left hand free from the manacle. All he got for his trouble, though, was a shower of rust falling down on his head. The chain and the ring in the wall were both corroded, but not so much so that he could break them just by yanking on them.

Just as the woman’s arms were twining around his neck again, a metallic vibration like the gong of a great bell echoed somewhere nearby.

“…Goodness, what could that noise be?”

Harvey directed a silent thanks to whatever it was for at least distracting her attention temporarily. It had sounded as if it was coming from outside. The courtyard, maybe? After a few seconds’ pause, there was another noise like a pile of heavy luggage falling over.

“Perhaps it’s another intruder…? Wait just a minute, Brother. I’ll be right back. Job? Job, where are you?”

Evidently the unfamiliar word was the name of that hulking chauffeur with the superhuman strength. Harvey watched her disappear out the door calling for her driver, grumbling at the back of her retreating dress that she didn’t have to ever come back for all he cared. Once he felt her presence exit the hall, he heaved a deep sigh all the way from the bottom of his lungs.

Give me a break… He slumped back heavily against the wall and let his head droop. The chain prevented him from lowering his left arm; the ring above him creaked and rained another scattering of rust on him.

He was in what seemed like the parlor of a detached cottage. The hallway light seeping in through the doorway and the faint light from the window dimly illuminated the room. In its center stood a table and a chair that were pointlessly large and expensive-looking, but apparently very old too; the ornamental carvings on the legs were worn almost completely away. There was an equally expensive-looking fireplace on the far wall, but it was covered in a thick layer of dust and fossil-fuel ash, and showed no signs of being in use. It was plain that there had been no living residents here for a long time.

At any rate, he wanted to escape now, while he had the chance, but…Harvey cast a hooded glance at the radio set neatly on the table.

“Do something, already.”

“To think you had such a beautiful younger sister, Master! I’m afraid I’m a little disappointed in you. I never took you for the kind of man who’d just run away and leave his own sister like that.”

“……”

The Corporal had been out to lunch all day, so he was no help at all. Whose side was he on, anyway?

He’d been jangling the manacle for a while now, more to vent his feelings than out of any attempt at escape, and his next tug wore through the skin of his hand, making blood well up there. The bruise he’d noticed on his wrist this afternoon hadn’t quite healed yet, either. Harvey had remembered a little while ago that it was from when that woman had grabbed his hand yesterday.

He’d also noticed a ring set with a blackish stone on her left ring finger. The stone’s pull was faint due to its small size, but he could sense a fossil-resource-based magnetic field from it very like the one he’d felt at the park in Westerbury. Harvey guessed that stone was somehow providing the energy to keep that corpse in the condition it had been in at the time of its death. Still, while he’d known that crystallized fossil resources could affect the dead, he hadn’t thought they were powerful enough to animate corpses. The woman must be sensing the “core” buried in his heart, and that was why she thought Harvey had the matching ring…That thought made him feel even more endangered, in several senses.

Then he picked up a faint squeak, not with his ears but by a crawling on the surface of his skin. Someone was coming toward him from the hallway. Reflex put him instantly on high alert, breath silent and all senses attuned to the slightest movement. After he spent a while staring at the doorway by the light from the window, a dark figure appeared within the door frame, backlit by the dull hallway light.

Shnnk, shnnk…

A heavy sound like grinding stone scraped along the floor in time with the approaching footsteps. The light coming from the window hit the end of the rod-shaped thing the figure brandished with both hands, illuminating the contours of a thick wedged blade. The blade bore down unhesitatingly straight toward his head—

A dull clang sounded just above the crown of his head and, since he was leaning that head against the wall at the time, the impact sent his brain bouncing in his skull.

After a split second’s pause that felt like time had stopped, fragments of the concrete wall began raining down on him. When he looked up, still unconsciously holding his breath, the thick blade of the ax was sticking out perpendicular to the wall directly below the ring where the chain had been attached. A beat later, the severed end of the chain belatedly slid down the wall and hit him on the head, too.

“Are you okay?” the figure in front of him said in a girl’s voice.

“Yeah…but warn me next time you do that,” Harvey griped, shaking the bits of chain and rust out of his hair. Then he tried to stand up, but his legs felt weirdly nerveless, and he had to cling to the wall for support.

“Oh, sorry,” the black-haired girl replied in a calm voice as she braced one foot against the wall and violently yanked the ax free. I felt malice for a second just now…What was that?

“Eh, whatever. Let’s just get out of here. Corporal, we’re going home.”

“Going home? But isn’t this your estate, Master?”

“I’m not the kind of guy who’s into getting chained up in his own house.”

Just talking to the radio was exhausting. He grabbed its strap roughly, and the manacle and strap of chain still dangling from his wrist made an annoying creaking sound. Kieli hefted the ax she’d pulled from the wall. “Want me to break it off?” “…Nah,” Harvey declined. “I’ll do it myself later.” He kind of got the feeling if he let her do it he’d lose his hand in the process. Kieli dropped the ax to the floor with a clang, looking vaguely disappointed…He was starting to get the distinct sense that the malice he’d felt a little while ago had been real after all. Why’s she in such a bad mood?

“Harvey, back a few minutes ago…did you really do it?”

“Do what?” he asked, falling back on his old habit of answering a question with a question in the face of her glare.

“…Nothing.”

Kieli turned away from him, looking miffed for some reason. Harvey saw a figure move behind her.

“Kieli!”

In the same moment that he automatically reached out and pushed her aside, the woman in the dress swung the ax down from overhead.

A dull sound, accompanied by a heavy shock, jolted the bone of his arm.

As Kieli stumbled from the push, the thick, darkly gleaming blade arced down toward Harvey’s arm right before her eyes. She tried and failed to scream. It felt as if her heart would stop.

Gong…

Instead of his arm, the manacle circling his wrist broke in two and fell to the floor with a thunk. The lady of the house hmphed irritably.

“Honestly, Brother…I really don’t know what to do with you,” she mourned in low tones, shifting the ax back to an attack stance with more strength than her slender arms seemed capable of. She took a step forward. “I see you want to run off with some other girl again. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t let you get away?”

“Drop the ‘again’; you’ll make me look bad,” Harvey retorted, taking Kieli’s hand and guiding her behind his back. She could feel a tiny bit of his own numbness through the hand he held. His wrist had been badly scraped up to begin with; now it was darkening rapidly even as she watched, standing out clearly against the rest of his skin. The sight made Kieli shudder. If he’d been hit even slightly higher or lower, he really would have lost his hand. And of course there was no manacle to shield him against the next blow.

She was biting her lip at the awful situation when a black shadow leaped into her field of vision and pounced.

Out of the young lady’s mouth came a husky scream like an old woman’s. Her arm flailed, swinging the ax around wildly, and attached to that arm was the black animal, biting in hard. “Him!” Harvey shouted in surprise. Did they know each other?

The ax clattered to the ground and slid spinning across the floor, and the animal slid equally neatly to rest on all fours. There was a baffling KKCHK sound, and the white, pole-shaped object in the animal’s mouth broke in half—the lady’s torn-off arm. The animal dug right into the arm and began eating noisily. The sound of bones being crushed, the sound of flesh being chewed, the sound of dripping blood: the discordant trio echoed eerily in the dimness until Kieli thought she would vomit.

The ring the lady had worn on her left hand slipped out of the side of its mouth and fell to the floor with a terribly light, soft sound in contrast to the heavy cacophony filling the air.

“Ah!”

The lady instantly lunged for it and scooped it up with her remaining hand. But in just a matter of seconds, though Kieli didn’t know what had happened, the lady had transformed into a wretched shadow of herself. Her waist-length hair turned cobweb-gray, her plump cheeks grew hollow and sunken, and her skin shriveled and cracked like one more wall of the estate. Yet the lady paid no attention to these changes as she gripped the ring and gazed fondly at it, as if she had eyes for nothing else.

And right there in her hands, the stone set in it cracked to pieces. Just like that.

The lady stared at the tiny fragments that were left of it, her withered cheeks stiff with shock.

And then right afterward, the wrist of the hand in which she held the stone began to crumble away. The disintegration swiftly spread from her wrist up to her elbow, pieces audibly crumbling away like a dried-up twig. “N-no…No!” As Kieli looked on in dumb amazement at the lady waving the remains of her arm about and screaming, behind that lady, with no warning whatsoever, the fireplace collapsed, sending up a thick cloud of ash. Cracks and rust began radiating out from the wall to the floor and ceiling, as if their change were triggered by hers.

“Uh-oh. Broken, huh?”

The animal dropped the half-eaten arm on the floor with an air of regret, and clicked its tongue (the animal! clicked its tongue!).

“Everybody get moving. It’s time to run.”

It turned around on its four legs and bolted for the exit, so in her stunned state Kieli automatically followed suit. “Harvey, quick!” When she looked over her shoulder to urge him after her, he turned to face her too, looking startled, but then his face suddenly jolted as he was yanked backward. The lady was hanging on to the strap of the radio Harvey held.

“Gah, let me go!” it shouted, its voice overlain with violent crackles of static.

“Corporal!” Kieli frantically snatched the radio out of the lady’s hand.

“Wait, Brother. Help me!”

The radio stolen from her, the lady grasped Harvey’s coat instead, and tried to pull him down to the floor with her. Her voice was completely the hoarse one of an old woman now. The flesh of the thin arm tugging at his coat dried to dirt before their eyes and dropped away to expose white bones. “Why? Why are you leaving me behind again…?! Please, please don’t leave me…!” Her sobbing voice lost its tone, steadily unraveling into something that wasn’t a voice at all.

Seeing the barest moment of what looked like hesitation on Harvey’s face, Kieli determinedly reached out with both hands and shoved the lady across the room.

“Don’t touch him!” she shouted. Then, surprised by her own words and the voice in which she’d said them, she froze in place. Harvey, on the other hand, seemed to snap back to his senses at her cry; he tugged her by the hand and started dragging her forward, and so she started running. Looking back one more time, she saw the lady stretching her hand pleadingly after them from where she’d collapsed on her stomach in the hallway. She’d raised her head, and Kieli could see that the flesh of her face had turned to dust too, and was falling off in great clumps. Eyeballs that looked like cloudy marbles now dropped out of their sockets and rolled along the floor.

She looked as if she was trying to say something, but her voice wasn’t there anymore; soon she was just a skeleton, just bones collapsing to the floor. Only her long white hair and the dress she’d been wearing were left.

When they came out of the cottage, the curtain of night had already descended completely over the outside world. Kieli glanced at that place by the wall as they ran through the courtyard and saw the chauffeur lying there. He’d managed to scramble out from under the pile of fuel just in time to turn into an unmoving white skeleton. Then they were out of the courtyard; they could see the servants’ gate across the back garden now. The animal running ahead of them launched itself to the peak of the gate in one jump and transferred itself to the top of the wall, turning back to them as if to urge them on.

“Climb.”

Kieli scaled the gate first with Harvey’s help. When she landed on the ground on the other side, Harvey tossed the radio over to her. It sailed up in a high arc and then down again, shrieking all the while. While Kieli was hastily moving to catch it, Harvey put one foot to the gate himself and climbed straight to the top in one go. But when he tried to jump down—

“…Huh?”

He abruptly lost his balance and fell in an unnatural, shoulder-first pose. Startled, Kieli ran over to him clutching the radio. “Harvey?!”

“I’m—fine.” The look on Harvey’s face told her he didn’t know why he’d fallen either. He braced his hand against the ground and tried to get back up. Kieli lent him her hand and pulled him upright, then more or less dragged him after her until she stumbled too a little ways from the gate, and the two of them fell on top of each other with a thud, the radio sandwiched between them.

Panting, Kieli sat up and turned around, still on the ground. When she looked up at the mansion on the other side of the gate, she saw that the extraordinary decay had spread all the way to its outer walls. Thin cracks covered the whole building until there were more cracks than there was wall. The progression of the bizarre phenomenon had stopped just at the point where it looked as if even the tiniest breath of pressure could make the entire thing dissolve into sand and come washing down to the ground.

“…What the hell was that…?”

“What was it…?”

“Dunno…”

After that one round of empty conversation, they all just stared up at the gate together, unable to snap out of their stupor for a while.

A lady that had aged and withered as if decades of time had passed at the speed of light, and an estate that had moldered just like its mistress. What the heck had just happened…? Whatever it was, Kieli didn’t sense that ominous stench she’d picked up from the lady coming from this estate anymore. The only thing drifting vaguely through the air now was loneliness. Unrequited, distorted emotions—not regrets or grudges or anything like that; just a young loneliness like a little girl crying over being abandoned without even knowing why. It tinged the air around them, and then, little by little, it vanished.

The black animal jumped down from the wall and landed soundlessly by them. It merely stood there on its four legs, not taking any sort of offensive stance as far as she could see, but Harvey gave it an openly hostile look and moved Kieli behind him. Apparently he really did know something about it. Was this animal an Undying too, like Kieli had imagined? (Of a different breed, of course.)

“You’re the voice that talked to me at the train station, aren’t you? You watched me a few times after that, too. What’s your game?” Harvey said in a harsh voice, his tone a full two steps lower than usual. The animal made a sort of shrug, and spoke in human language with its animal mouth.

“It’d been so long since I’d seen an original Undying that I got interested, so I was observing you, that’s all. I don’t mean you any harm. So what’s your problem? How about you stop automatically reacting with hostility to everything?”

Its intonation was kind of wonky, maybe because its vocal cords were built differently from a human’s, but if Kieli went just by its wording and the actual quality of its voice, it reminded her of a streetwise boy. But the human expressions it formed with its long, doglike face were frankly pretty grotesque. It had a very low adorableness factor, as a dog. Asking someone not to automatically be on guard was an impossible request. Harvey just kept glaring at it, his attitude fixed at “hostile.”

Kieli wavered a little, but in the end she timidly tugged on Harvey’s sleeve.

“Um, he did technically save us,” she ventured. Harvey darted a sidelong glance at her and blinked. “…Uh-huh. Yeah,” he agreed. He didn’t look completely convinced, but maybe he’d accepted that she had a good point, because he visibly dialed down his hostility.

The animal twisted the corners of its mouth up to make a smile. The closely packed sawlike teeth and the four sharp canines peeked out from its greenish mouth.

“Okay then, let’s say it’s technically nice to meet you. I’m—” Bang!

A sort of dull explosion rattled her eardrums, cutting off its voice. A gunshot—? The animal’s body was blasted to one side, the grin still on its face.

Letting out a raspy shriek, Kieli instantly started running over to it. “Kieli, wait—” She shook off the hand Harvey tried to stop her with and got down on her knees beside the fallen animal. Then she leaned protectively over it and took stock. There was a hole right where its hind leg met its torso; blood was welling up from it before her eyes. With no real idea what to do, Kieli just covered the wound with both hands and tried to stanch the bleeding.

She could see the flickering white rays of flashlights across the dark road. She could hear voices talking to one another: “That way.” “There it is.” “It has friends!” Narrowing her eyes against the light behind them, she saw that a group of about ten men had appeared from around the corner of the estate’s outer wall. They were armed with what looked like shotguns, but judging by how they talked and the fact that they were all dressed differently, they weren’t Church Soldiers. Did that mean they were local men? It didn’t take long for things to click: they were out looking for the animal that had bitten off that man’s arm this afternoon.

“You’re a real fool,” said a boyish, streetwise voice with wholly inappropriate calm. Boyish, and yet at the same time the little muffled laugh it gave deep in its throat was like an old man’s. It shifted Kieli off of itself and stood up as if nothing had happened. A viscous liquid that looked like coal tar oozed out of the gaping gunshot wound in its hind leg and started covering the opening. “Core” blood. It really is an Undying—

“You could’ve just pretended I was attacking you. I can’t believe you actually declared yourself on my side instead…Ah, well, I’ve gotten real fond of you. Your name’s Kieli, right?”

Fangs dripping with saliva peeked out of its smiling mouth. Its dark brown left eye blended into the darkness; only its amber right eye caught the light and reflected it thickly back. As it ambled around to face off against the men with shotguns, it told her, “My name is .”

One part of the sentence, in which it must have said its name, sounded more doglike than human, and Kieli couldn’t make it out.

“In today’s language, it means ‘Mane,’” Mane supplied, the stiff hair around his neck bristling, and growled like a cat. The skin of his wounded hind leg started to rapidly tear away from where it connected to his torso, and from beneath the mucous membrane swarmed by coal tar appeared a new leg that took the place of the old—a fat leg with hooklike talons, that looked as though it belonged to a giant bird of prey. Did he have the traits of all kinds of different animals—?

The animal kicked powerfully off the ground with his three beast legs and his new bird leg, and went straight for the group of men. A tremor ran through the crowd even as they aimed their shotguns.

Kieli just gaped after Mane for a moment, but then Harvey grabbed her arm and forcibly dragged her to her feet. “Time to run, Kieli.”

“But…” She started running down the road with him in the opposite direction from the encirclement, darting worried glances behind her all the while. Without slowing his pace, Harvey turned his head and shouted an order over his shoulder to Mane: “Don’t kill them!” Mane, who’d already sprung at the crowd, ducked his head as if to say Good grief.

When he returned his gaze forward, he gave a little “Huh?” that sounded like a tire going flat, and before Kieli could process it he abruptly fell flat on his face. He’d shoved Kieli away just before he went down, so her legs got all tangled up and she fell down on her butt in the opposite direction. She picked herself up immediately and crawled over to Harvey, who was still lying where he’d fallen. She peered into his face.

“What’s wrong…?!”

“Sorry—my foot just—slipped,” Harvey said, as if it were no big deal, but he was curling his body protectively around his stomach with his hand over a spot on his side, and it didn’t look as if he could get up. He gave a strange, hitching cough, and spit up a glob of something from deep in this throat that was covered in black blood.

Kieli’d thought that fall from the gate was strange—he must have been sick ever since then; she just knew it. “No! Harvey!” She threw her arms around him; he shoved her off with an elbow in an I’m fine sort of way—bringing his hand into her field of vision. When she saw the condition it was in, she doubted her own eyes.

The flesh there was sunken so that the joints and blood vessels stood out strikingly; it was as if it wasn’t Harvey’s hand at all, and yet those were definitely the bones of Harvey’s hand, and she could see where it connected to Harvey’s body near his shirtsleeve. It’s just like how that lady changed…!

“No! What…what is this? Why?!”

Kieli was reaching out to cling to him, scared to death, when someone behind her yanked her shoulder bag hard, tearing her away from him. The townspeople had caught up to them. They bore down on each of them separately to subdue them, cutting off Kieli’s view, and the sight of Harvey was swallowed up by the crowd in no time. “Corporal!” She clutched at the radio just as it was about to get taken away from her in the confusion, wrapped both arms around it, and held on for dear life as she scanned the throng for Harvey. She caught sight of a red head of hair through the crowd in time to see a man raise up his shotgun and strike that red head with it. Harvey fell facefirst to the ground; the man straddled him and jammed the mouth of the shotgun between his ribs. Harvey showed no signs of getting up.

“No!”

Kieli’s own shriek was accompanied by a scream from behind her. Mane’s teeth were sunk deep into the arm of the man who’d been holding Kieli. “Harvey! Don’t help me. Help Harvey, quick!” she called at the top of her lungs, pointing toward Harvey even as she stumbled and fell.

Mane alighted on the ground next to her and cocked his head to the side. “Can I kill? It’d be a pain to save him without killing anybody, and it’s pretty hard to do.”

“Yes! You can kill!”

The next second, Mane was descending on the man holding a gun to Harvey in one leap, baring his sawlike teeth and sinking them into the man’s head. Harvey had just found the strength to lift his upper body; the man’s skull was crushed in right before his eyes, spattering what looked like bits of brain all round.

While the other men screamed in terror and the crowd began to scatter every which way, Kieli sank nervelessly to her knees where she stood, staring at the almost headless corpse.

Still lying weakly on the ground in front of the body, Harvey stiffly turned his head and looked at Kieli. Something sticky clung to his cheeks, and he looked as though he might cry.

Oh, I was wrong, Kieli realized in that moment.

That wasn’t the lady.

In that dream, the one holding the ax and staring at the corpse…

…was me.

An area on the left side of his torso was mummified the same way as his left hand: the flesh was shrunken as if all the moisture had evaporated away at once, and his ribs stood out clearly underneath his too-taut skin. That was where that woman had clung to him before she’d turned into a skeleton, Harvey remembered. He didn’t like to look at it, so he smoothed his shirt back down to cover it again. Then he had another fit of coughing.

“Geez, you’re a mess,” said the black beast that spoke in human words, the unidentifiable creature that’d said that his name meant “Mane” (so Harvey’d decided to go ahead and call him that). His boyish voice didn’t sound particularly upset about it.

“The stone’s power must’ve sucked those parts into itself.”

“Will he…get better?” Kieli asked uneasily. She’d been watching silently by his side.

“It doesn’t look fatal…but I can’t say for sure whether it’ll heal or not.” The beast blinked his dark brown eye and his amber eye, and glanced sidelong at Kieli while deftly turning just one eye to meet Harvey’s. “See, this isn’t an injury or something; it’s his true form,” he said, and shrugged in a strangely human way, regarding them with a strangely human expression.

Then Mane had left, telling them “Wait here” before launching into a four-legged run toward somewhere deep in the gorge. He used protrusions in the rock as footholds, vaulting easily from one to the next, until before long his black form melted into the night and disappeared.

They’d slipped out of town, and now they were camping out by the fault line to the north for the time being. Rock ledges so sheer that Harvey couldn’t even see the tops cut in front of and behind and back upon each other to form an intricately winding ravine; he could make out only one of the twin moons, indistinctly visible in one of the thin, irregular scraps of night sky above.

Owooo…nn…

Wind groaned along the rock walls, echoing faintly and sounding very much like a beast howling in the distance.

In the beginning Harvey sat down with his back propped against the rock wall, but before long sitting up straight was too hard, and he doubled over. Probably the stone had taken out part of his digestive organs or something around there, and now they were malfunctioning. He had to say, the fact that this didn’t present a clear and present danger to his life meant his body was a pretty crude piece of work. Anyway, he had a feeling it was going to take some time to get used to the uncomfortable sensation that half his insides were made of papier-mâché now.

“Are you okay?”

Kieli peered at him worriedly. He shoved her a little farther away with his elbow. Once there was just the right distance between them for talking, he consciously pitched his voice downward. “Kieli…why did you say a thing like that?”

Kieli was kneeling on the ground with her feet tucked under her now. From the look on her face, she clearly didn’t understand what she was being scolded for at first. “That man died, you know. He wasn’t a Church Soldier. Just one of the townspeople. He could barely handle his gun.” Come to think of it, Harvey got the feeling something gross was still stuck to him, right around the edge of his peripheral vision, so he wiped his cheek off roughly on his sleeve.

Kieli shifted a little, looking uncomfortable. Evidently she understood what he was saying now. She pouted and defended herself, though, even if she did it in a soft, cowed voice. “But,” she argued, “it was to save you, Harvey. That makes it self-defense, you know.”

“I—” Harvey’s voice choked up before he could finish the sentence, and he had to swallow. There was a burning pain deep in his throat that made swallowing rough. “…I don’t want you saying things like that. For my sake or not.” He knew that he was imposing his own selfishness on her by saying this. He did get that. He did get that he had no right to talk when he’d killed so many people himself. Nonetheless, he didn’t want Kieli of all people to have those savage feelings. “Promise me you’ll never say that again. Please…”

His voice splintered painfully coming up his throat. He couldn’t go on any further. He stopped talking there and watched Kieli’s face. He’d figured she’d agree, but Kieli stubbornly shook her head without looking up. Clenching both hands into tight fists on top of her knees, she said quietly and rapidly, “I…I don’t mind killing a person or two if it’s for you.”

Smack.

Harvey reflexively slapped her. The radio couldn’t let that pass by without intervening. “Master…!” He—he hadn’t hit her that hard, but the fact was that he had hit her. Kieli put a hand to her cheek, looking stunned. Harvey was even more stunned by what he’d done than she was, though.

“No, Kieli, I didn’t mean to hit you—”

He could say that all he wanted, but it didn’t change reality. He was just making excuses. When he leaned forward with that same hand to touch her cheek, Kieli flinched back, maybe expecting him to hit her again. That reaction was so heartbreaking that he instantly snatched his hand away. In the same instant Kieli popped to her feet, bag and coat whipping out around her, and took off running in a random direction.

“Kieli, wait…”

Harvey tried to go after her, but he fell over again before he’d quite managed to stand up. Swearing quietly, he used protrusions in the rock to help himself to his feet and began tottering after her with one hand on the cliff wall for balance. But Kieli was gone, vanished somewhere among the crisscrossing rock ledges. She did have the radio with her, but he couldn’t depend on it in that state—if they got separated in a place like this—

BoooOOOOOOooo…

There was a low rumbling sound and the ground beneath him began to shake enough for him to lose his footing and almost fall down again. The rock walls on all sides vibrated until he could feel the tremors reverberating in the pit of his stomach.

What the…?

A narrow beam of light similar to a searchlight’s shone through a gap in the rock walls ahead of him, lighting up the area. Unable to pinpoint the source of the earth tremors, Harvey pointed his feet toward the source of the light and started walking. As soon as he made his way through the narrow gap between the rock faces into the relatively open valley beyond, a great circle of light assaulted his eyes.

The abrupt change from dark night made him dizzy; he shielded his eyes with his hand and peered until somewhere between the phantom afterimages burned into his retinas he could just about make out an enormous shape covering the whole valley floor, with that light like a single giant eye in the center—a structure with rows of great gray wheels on either side fully the height of an adult person; a structure Harvey thought must be a vehicle. He couldn’t judge how long it was, since the end of one side disappeared beyond what he could see of the valley, but in both size and appearance it reminded him of the ships that traveled the Sand Ocean. The crucial difference between this and a sand ship, however, was that it was kicking up sand as it drove along the ground.

Then he saw Kieli, frozen like an animal in the headlights. When he tried to run up to her, a section of the structure slid to one side to reveal a rectangular tunnel like a hatchway, and someone’s arm shot out and grabbed Kieli by the waist. In no time, she disappeared into the wall, leaving only an echo of her scream behind.

“Kieli!

After a moment so stunned that he almost forgot to go after her, Harvey snapped back to himself and followed, jumping through the hatch door just as it closed. It thudded heavily back into place immediately afterward, cutting off the roaring noise and the bright light so that his senses of sight and hearing both felt smothered. The inside of the place reminded him of a sand ship’s bottom, too. It was a closed-off, darkish space thick with the smells of iron rust and fossil fuel. A steep staircase stretched out in front of him. He could hear footsteps somewhere near the top: shrill against the sheet metal flooring, but coming in long, unhurried strides. And there were Kieli’s muffled pleas for release, too. Harvey put his hand to one wall and climbed up after her, carefully but quickly.

Once up the stairs and through the narrow doorway above them, he came out into the open air again, into a place that was probably equivalent to what you’d call the “outer deck” of a sand ship.

“Whoa,” he blurted when he took a good look around the deck in the pale moonlight.

It was less like a vehicle here, and more as though a (very small) city had been constructed right here on deck. A very different sort of city than modern-day ones, though. Before his eyes were rows of structures you would never see in the average city, tall and shaped like smokestacks. Thick pipes stuck out of the tips and sides of each smokestack, crisscrossing each other like meshwork over his head. Here and there columns of white smoke rose into the sky. The sight made Harvey feel exactly as if he’d been sucked into some enormous machine, which automatically reminded him of a certain other place in his memory.

“What? No, no,” said a boy’s voice from overhead. Harvey looked up to see a beast black enough to be almost indistinguishable against the night sky sitting on one of the pipes all curled up into a ball and looking as if someone had perched him there for decoration. His amber right eye stood out eerily in the darkness.

“It wasn’t the girl I wanted you to carry here; it was the man…The girl can walk on her own.”

“Let me go!”

The owner of the arms that had snatched Kieli, the large form carrying her over his shoulder, had so far ignored her struggles and walked sedately onward. At the sound of the voice, though, it obediently deposited her on the deck. Harvey ran over to her where she’d flopped down on her rear, and shielded her with his own body as he looked up at the unknown figure. When he got a good look at it, his eyes widened. A large, misshapen man with slack green-tinged skin as though his cells had grown and grown and then melted away— it took no thought whatsoever for Christoph to spring to mind—but junk parts and scraps of metal that must be wreckage from some of these structures on the deck were stuck all over its body like poorly made armor, and two or three bent pipes stuck out of its back at an angle in just the same way they were sticking out of all the smokestacks overhead.

“I apo-lo-gize,” the figure said in a mechanical voice, and took a step back. About half of its face was hidden behind metal plating, preventing Harvey from reading its expression; that and the lack of any inflection in its voice gave him an impression of emotionlessness.

“I keep telling you, quit automatically being on guard all the time. That’s way less dangerous than I am,” broke in a boyish voice with all the easy inflection his companion lacked. Apparently Mane was actually aware that he was dangerous.

This place…

Harvey took in the sights around him. Everything was covered in rust, so old it was a miracle it was still running, and very definitely not made with today’s technology. He knew another city existed elsewhere that was very like this one, but even bigger. All the buildings were relics of the pre-War culture’s technology, from back when fossil fuels had been plentiful.

“The ‘first radio tower’…?”

“Ah, I thought you might know it. It is sometimes called that, so you’re right.”

When Harvey looked up, he could see a steel tower even taller than all the rest, piercing through the network of pipes that formed a thick ceiling overhead and jutting into the night sky. It was topped with an antenna. This was the truth behind the mirage he’d seen from the train—

It was what, for a while after the War ended, people had called “the first radio tower.”