CHAPTER 6

AS THE DEEP RAVINE’S WIND HOWLS

Kieli soaked a piece of ship’s biscuit in reconstituted dry milk and then put a slice of smoked meat on it. Something seemed missing. After a little thought, she tried topping it with canned chickpeas. Yep, that’s a pretty balanced meal, and it looks pretty good too. Nodding to herself in satisfaction at her workmanship, Kieli set the tin plate in front of Mane. But he snubbed her, looking miffed.

“I told you not to treat me like a dog!”

“But you are one, aren’t you?”

“I’m not a dog.” Apparently he had no intention of acknowledging it. “And I won’t die even if I don’t eat anything anyway. Your owner’s the same, isn’t he?”

“But I made it for you…” Kieli muttered dejectedly as she started mechanically eating her own helping, all alone. She tore herself alternating pieces of ship’s biscuit and smoked meat and crammed them into her mouth, stopping periodically to take a bite of the chickpeas with a spoon. The biscuit and bread were part of the standard gear she kept in her bag; she’d found the chickpeas sitting forgotten on a shelf in the station office’s kitchen.

While they’d been staying on the parish border, the bartender and Yana had been there, so there’d been comparatively regular mealtimes every day. But once off on a journey, if Kieli didn’t remember to secure her own food and her own time to eat it, she sometimes accidentally skipped meals. After all, the thought of “eating” just never even occurred to other members of her travel party. There was no one she could have a proper conversation with about the meals themselves, so things like variation and visual appeal fell completely by the wayside, and she ended up simply trying to ingest enough fuel for the day and calling that success.

After a while of letting her hands automatically go through the motions of pouring nutrients into her digestive system, Kieli realized that somewhere along the way Mane had come up beside her and started eating the food she’d laid out for him. When she darted a glance at him, he only shot her a grumpy sidelong look without raising his nose from his plate and continued messily eating. Kieli faced forward again too, and went back to the business of chewing her biscuit. It seemed more flavorful now than before.

Music wafted to them from the radio tower overhead, along with familiar static. It was a different song from this morning’s, but it was equally bass heavy, and it made her feel nostalgic for some reason, even though she’d never heard it before.

Kieli was currently having a slightly late lunch on the doorstep of the station office, with pleasant tunes for background music.

I wonder if the expiration date on these chickpeas is okay. Well, either way I’m already eating them. These vague thoughts were interrupted when she saw a lanky redhead walking toward her from beyond the smokestacks on deck. He’d left on a walk this morning just as she was getting back to the station office.

As she watched him with her spoon still in her mouth, he noticed her, too, and gave her a What are you eating on the steps for? sort of look. Kieli groped for words for a while, eventually settling on, “Want some?”

Since she still had the spoon in her mouth, it came out more like “Ahnt umm?” Harvey seemed to get the message, though. Still, he gave her only the barest possible response (“Mm? Nah.”). Then he passed by her at about three steps’ distance and walked into the station office. With his nose in his milk, Mane twitched his ears, but didn’t say anything.

Kieli watched Harvey’s tall form melt into the dimness indoors with her head cocked to one side. After a little while, though, she faced forward again and resumed her meal. However, the hand transporting food to her mouth got gradually slower and slower, and eventually it stopped altogether.

She hadn’t been able to talk right since that stunted conversation last night. I forget, why are things so strained between us again? I said selfish stuff about repairing the radio and Harvey slapped me… She put her hand to the cheek he’d slapped. It didn’t hurt, particularly. Actually, Harvey was the one who looked as though he’d been smacked hard then…huh? As she thought about it, Kieli realized her own thoughts had gone screwy somewhere. The radio wasn’t what had gotten her slapped.

Harvey had begged Kieli. Said “please,” looking as if he was hurting really badly.

That’s right, I did something I shouldn’t have.

When she tried to think more about it, her brain froze up. It was as if a piece in the core of her mind was burnt over. That one little section was smoldering; too hot for her to touch. What is that? I forget, what’s behind here?

She heard the sound of a pile of rubble crumbling somewhere on the deck. Maybe a wall caved in or something? When Kieli scanned the area to check, she thought she saw something black in the shadow of one of the smokestacks for a moment, but it had vanished from her vision in no time, so she couldn’t be sure. Was that just my imagination…?

While her attention was focused on the deck ahead of her, out of the blue a muffled explosion sounded in the opposite direction, from behind her, and the entire ship suddenly lost speed. “Wah!” Inertia sent her pitching forward as she turned to look. A different sort of smoke, black rather than the usual light gray, rose from the exhaust pipes on the station office roof.

“What—Mane!”

Mane had pulled his nose out of his food to turn and look, too—and then immediately tore off running into the station office. Kieli hastily stood up and followed him. The living area and studio were on the second floor, but Mane passed right by the steps leading up without stopping, and scrambled down the work stairs that ran from the first-floor pilothouse down to the lower deck instead. She’d heard the power room was below the station office.

As she got farther down the steep stairs, clinging to the railing all the way, the air grew hotter and thicker with the smell of fossil fuels, and a clanging machine noise got steadily, maddeningly louder, until she could feel it right down to the core of her body. Eventually she saw a thick steel door at the bottom, slightly ajar. The tip of Mane’s tail slipped around the edge and disappeared. As soon as she reached the bottom and peered inside after Mane, a scorching heat and bright amber light assaulted her eyes.

Her impression of the room was that some sort of cylindrical coal-burning stove monster that stretched up all the way up to the ceiling was enshrined there, in the center of a round clearing in a forest of differently sized piping. That must be the power reactor. A big man covered in misshapen armor stooped over the controls, adjusting various valves, and Harvey was standing there looking on interestedly. It appeared as though the reactor had malfunctioned somehow, but also that it was back to working again, at least for now; amber light burned behind a glass window there.

Shy of going up to them, Kieli called out uneasily from behind. “What’s wrong…?”

“This re-ac-tor is near the end of its life span, too…We’ll stop for a while and give it a break,” the assistant explained, turning toward her, and then waved her back outside.

“Go on,” agreed Harvey, gaze still lingering for a time on the power reactor. So Kieli turned back toward the stairs.

At which point a dry crack sounded over Harvey’s shoulder as he was finally taking a step away, and there was a momentary blinding burst of light inside the reactor.

“Get away!” Mane yelled sharply all of a sudden. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he was leaping forward. Before Mane could get to Harvey, the station assistant was already there in one running step, launching himself in between Harvey and the reactor and shielding his back. At that same instant, a tiny crack appeared in one section of the reactor and a single beam of amber light spilled out.

He heard a heavy skrunching sound, like scrap metal being crushed in a compressor. In fact, it was literally the sound of the metal plating that covered the station assistant’s back being crushed, and it came from right above Harvey’s head. For a split second he felt all his strength leave him, and he thought he might thump down to the ground, but at the sound of a girl’s half-screamed cry of “Harvey…!” he pulled himself together and checked himself before he could fall. When he looked over to the power room’s entrance, Kieli herself had plopped to the ground, white as a sheet. She was shaking hard.

“…Hey, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Mane, go to Kieli,” Harvey said in a somewhat hoarse voice, and Mane, who’d been a beat behind the station assistant in leaping to him, went back to Kieli’s side.

He looked up at the massive figure of the assistant standing in front of him. The armoring on his back had been crushed out of shape at the sudden radical pressure, and it was corroded and covered with thick rust, as if it had leaped decades forward in time in the space of a single second. The same phenomenon that had happened when the ring broke—a fragment of fossil resource must have exploded inside the reactor. Whatever it was, if the assistant hadn’t shielded him, that same level of decay would have hit him full-on.

“This is no pro-blem. It’s on-ly my ar-mo-ring. There is nothing wrong with my bo-dy.”

The man informed Harvey of his safety in the same mechanical tone as always, and the brittle tension in the room finally eased a little. “The cry-stal is be-gin-ning to break down. We should not stay here too long. The ra-di-o will be fixed to-day, so to-mor-row we will take you to the town across the gorge.”

“Right…”

Harvey nodded, wiping a light sheen of sweat from his forehead that hadn’t come from the heat. Then he turned to face Kieli in the doorway. She was still sitting on the floor. Mane sat close beside her, and she gripped the fur on his back hard enough to rip it out.

“I’m fine. Can you stand?” He walked over to her, intending to help her up.

“I’m fine, I was just a little surprised, just surprised,” Kieli babbled quickly, holding on to Mane and struggling to her feet without him. “I’ll be upstairs.” Then she turned on her heel and fled up the steps. Although Harvey hadn’t explicitly asked him to, Mane resignedly followed her.

The creaking of feet on the work stairs receded into the distance overhead. Harvey thought about going after them, but he thought with a sigh that he probably wouldn’t be able to say anything helpful anyway. So he watched her go, and stayed behind in the power room with the assistant. If the same thing happened again they’d be in serious trouble, so it was probably best not to hang out here too long, but something was nagging him. He turned back to the reactor one more time.

He’d been told that this mobile radio station was powered by crystallized fossil resources from the previous civilization, just like the one in that ring, so it did make sense to him in a general way: that decay just now must’ve been triggered by a crystal inside the reactor breaking down. Which was fine as far as it went, but why did the crystal suddenly break in the first place? Somewhere in the back of his mind it had bothered him how surprisingly easily that ring had broken, too, though he’d begun to forget about it. I thought “cores” and other high-purity fossil crystals were harder to break than that…

He put his vaguely formed hypothesis to the assistant. “Does a crystal’s strength…have a natural life span?”

The other man nodded as he continued the work of patching the crack. “Yes, it does. It’s ex-treme-ly long; com-pared to a hu-man life, e-nough time to call e-ter-nal, but I i-ma-gine that in terms of ge-o-lo-gi-cal time, it’s not ve-ry long at all. It seems the old pre-War ones are gra-du-ally nea-ring the end of their lives and be-co-ming fra-gile.”

“Is that right…?”

This new information surprised Harvey, but he found himself accepting it remarkably easily. So, even the cores everyone said were permanent power sources met their end at some point. Since his core was already starting to break down anyway, it didn’t make much difference in his case, frankly— but either way, some sort of end really had been there for him all this time.

Huh…

He knew it was weird to feel this way, but somehow, he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders.

So there’s nothing really eternal on this planet after all.

Gazing at the whole thing from a distance, she thought again that this ship really did seem like one big grave. The tallest part, the steel tower in the center, was the gravestone, and the shorter smokestacks around it, along with all their pipes, were flowers placed there in memory. Stained by the copper color of the evening sky, the crude, rusty flowers quietly standing by their gravestone were pretty, Kieli thought.

They’d decided to give the engine a break until nightfall, so the radio station was currently parked in the middle of the gorge. A rock ledge stuck out of one wall at just the right level, so Kieli had jumped over from the deck and climbed a little way up to sit there and look at the view. She was at about the same height as the steel tower’s observation deck. A black beast was lying on a rock a level lower than hers, standing by. Harvey had told him to stick with Kieli, so he was following that order until it was rescinded. Even if the man himself—dog himself?—denied it, he was definitely like a dog in that respect (and a faithful dog, at that). He was keeping watch over her out of the corner of his eye without getting up. When Kieli met his gaze, he gave a pointed, transparently fake yawn. His mouth gaped open all the way to his ears, revealing the green gums, teeth gleaming with viscous drool, and a fat tongue like a calf ’s…He had a dog’s face if he just kept his mouth shut, though.

Kieli shifted position, lifting her legs from where they dangled over the end of the ledge and hugging her knees to her chest tightly to make herself as small as possible. Hours had passed, and yet the core of her body was still shaking. I’m glad nothing serious happened, but that scared me…I can’t stand for any more bad things to happen. I don’t want anything else to happen.

For just a moment, she saw something dart across her peripheral vision, and she lifted her head. Hmm? Kieli looked in the direction she thought she’d seen it, far behind the stern of the radio station, in the shadow of the rock wall— but nothing in particular struck her eye on the floor of the gorge that was fading from the color of sunset into the slate gray of night.

She’d thought she saw a funny shadow earlier in the day, too. Was she getting jumpy?

As Kieli tried to drive the discomfort out of her mind, Mane’s ears perked up where he lay, and he gave a low growl. He was staring in the same direction Kieli’d just been worrying about. A little later, Kieli’s own ears caught a faint outof-place sound. The sound of tires on rock, the sound of engines—

Kieli stood up with a start. Her eyes caught up to her ears, picking out a vehicle in the shadow of the gently winding gorge. Was it a truck? It was still a pretty long way off, but the radio station wasn’t moving; at this rate the truck would make contact with them before long.

“Mane, tell the others!”

Mane didn’t need her to tell him; he was already running down to the station house so fast he was practically flying. Kieli herself climbed down from her high perch a little at a time with her whole body in contact with the rock wall, darting frequent looks at the ravine behind the station. She could see now that three vehicles were approaching. They were armored trucks painted black to blend into the darkness— Church Security Forces trucks.

She caught sight of Harvey running out of the station house hardly a breath after Mane dashed inside. After peering behind them and getting a visual on the trucks, he ran up to Kieli as she neared the ship. The engine let out a roar as it came back to life, along with vibrations that shook the very air in the gorge. Puffs of ashen smoke rose up from the exhaust pipe. Before Kieli could get all the way down the rock face, the deck slowly started pulling away in the opposite direction from the trucks.

“Kieli, hurry up! Jump down!” Harvey ordered from below. Kieli was still fairly high up, but she summoned her courage and jumped. Harvey caught her to his body just as she was afraid the steadily accelerating ship would glide right past her. By that time the radio station had taken off at a fast clip, billowing smoke. When she looked behind her, clinging to Harvey’s arm, she could tell that the trucks had sped up, too. They were clearly following them.

“Get inside, both of you!” called a boyish voice from overhead. Mane’s black form was standing on the observation deck. The sun had set, and he was steadily melting invisibly into the darkening sky. Urged on by Harvey, Kieli staggered across the wildly rocking deck into the station office. They entered the pilothouse on the first floor to find the station assistant’s armored body darting busily between the joystick and the various control levers, alternately steering the vessel and glaring at the gauges covering one wall.

“Can you shake them off?”

“It’s not pos-si-ble. If we in-crease our speed any fur-ther, the po-wer re-act-or won’t with-stand it. They are fa-ster than we are. We’ll be o-ver-ta-ken in nine-ty se-conds,” the assistant replied calmly, still glaring at the gauges.

“Freeze!”

All of them turned around at the order echoing outside behind them. It didn’t do them much good, though, since there was no rear window in the pilothouse. The monitors all appeared to be broken, too, so they couldn’t see what was going on to the station’s rear from here. Further orders thundered through a megaphone at them. “Stop! We have some questions for you! If you don’t halt your craft, we’ll deem you a suspicious converted vessel and attack!”

“Questions?” Harvey muttered dubiously. He and the station assistant exchanged glances, seemingly having a silent conference, and then he said, “Let’s stop. We don’t know that they’ll automatically attack us.”

“All right,” the assistant agreed, and tinkered with a few valves and control boards, finally pulling down one big square lever with both hands. The entire body of the ship rocked violently up and down. “Please hold on to some-thing.” Kieli did as she was told, clinging fast to the doorjamb of the pilothouse and clenching her teeth against the jolts as they bounced along the rocky ground so that she wouldn’t accidentally bite her tongue. They gradually slowed down until after one last giant rock back and forth, Kieli could feel the ship come to a stop.

The vibration and thundering roar that had ruled all of her senses died down, and everything around them fell horribly quiet. Still, she stood frozen with her legs braced for impact a little while longer before she sensed an animal walk up beside her on silent paws. Mane was back from his expedition up the tower.

“We’re surrounded. I spotted three Capital Security Forces armored trucks. One of them’s circled around in front of us.”

“The capital sent their own people…? Are you sure it’s not soldiers from town coming after us?”

“They’re not from town. But hey, either way, all I have to do is eat them,” Mane said, sticking out his slimy tongue pointedly.

“I want everyone on board to come out. I’ll wait sixty seconds.”

The voice over the loudspeaker was coming from a lot closer now. Everyone in the pilothouse exchanged rapid glances. They might have said “everyone,” but the station assistant and Mane couldn’t very well show themselves; their appearances were too bizarre. That inevitably limited their options.

“I’ll go out alone for now.”

“What?! I’ll come too!” Kieli hastily asserted. She’d taken it for granted that she’d be one of the ones going out. But Harvey immediately dismissed this, with a face that said he took it for granted that he’d be going alone, and that his mind was made up on that point. “You wait here. I’m just going to find out what they want. I’ll be right back.”

“But, if you’re all alone…”

“Wait here,” Harvey repeated in a tone that brooked no argument, and Kieli reluctantly backed down, unable to say anything back to him.

They relocated to the studio booth on the second floor, where the station assistant concealed his large form in the shadow of the glass window looking out over the stern to keep watch over whatever unfolded. Kieli hid behind the pipes sticking out of the assistant’s back and peeked out at the deck along with him. In the white light of the armored trucks’ search beams, the forest of smokestacks on the deck cast eerily crisp shadows. She saw Harvey’s back leaving the station house and walking calmly over toward the stern just about sixty seconds on the dot after the order over the loudspeaker.

There were footholds on the side of the ship; around a dozen armored soldiers climbed up them onto the deck. A man who wore a greatcoat over his clerical robes and looked to be a commissioned officer brought up the rear. He came up to face Harvey, who’d stopped halfway across the deck, leaving a little distance between them. He seemed to start up a conversation about something, but he wasn’t speaking over the loudspeaker this time, so their voices didn’t carry all the way to them.

“I wonder what they’re talking about…”

“I do not know. Mane may hear it from where he is, howe-ver.”

Kieli might be reading too much into it, but she thought his flat voice betrayed a hint of restlessness. Mane ought to have climbed back up the steel tower by now to keep an eye on how things went.

Since Kieli and the assistant didn’t know how matters were progressing, minutes crawled by when all they could do was fret. Not much time could have passed, but she felt as if they’d been waiting a hundred times longer than anything a clock could have told them. As it was starting to be too much to bear without losing her head, a reflection appeared on the metal plating of the assistant’s back right next to where her hand touched it.

Kieli whirled around, startled, and for just a moment she caught sight of the tail end of a shadowy form crossing in front of the studio doorway.

Mane…?

Maybe he was back from the tower. The assistant was still focusing intently on the scene outside. Kieli moved away from his back to peek out through the doorway into the corridor. All she saw was a deserted hallway lying there enveloped in coarse, grainy darkness. Mane was nowhere in sight.

“Mane…where are you…?”

When she took a step forward, looking left and right, she heard a voice behind her back—no, at the nape of her neck. Right behind her head, a toneless voice lapping up her neck like a lukewarm breeze.

Found you.

“!”

Kieli instinctively leapt away, immediately tripping and falling forward, landing hard on her knees. When she turned her neck and looked up at the place where her head had just been, a giant sort of jet-black shadow was hugging the ceiling and dangling its neck upside down at her. The head attached to the end of its long neck gaped in a crescent-moon grin, giving her a glimpse of the inside of its bloodred mouth. Everything above that mouth…was nothing but the darkness of the hallway behind it. There was no nose, no eyes, nothing. Viscous liquid dripped from the severed plane of its half-sphere head where the top half had been.

The scream almost ripped Kieli’s throat out in its rush to escape her mouth.

After that brief cry, she cut off the scream and took off running down the hallway, still practically on all fours.

That’s what I sensed this afternoon, too. I thought I was imagining things, but something really was there. What is it? What is that?! The black presence followed her, crawling along the ceiling like a spider. She half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs. By the time she realized that she would’ve been better off running outside from the first floor, she’d already run all the way down to the power room below deck in her blind panic, dived inside, and slammed her whole body against the thick steel door to close it. She seized an iron pipe lying nearby and thrust it through the inside door handle to bar it shut, and walked backward into the room with her eyes fixed on the door. Her throat had gone all funny and she found herself panting raggedly—but it was because of the scream, not the running, she was sure.

She stopped with the power reactor at her back and watched the doorway in the glow of its feebly burning amber light for a while, but there was no sign of anything strange happening.

Kieli exhaled slowly a few times until she got her breathing under control, and let the tension in her shoulders go.

I wonder if anyone noticed my scream… The tension left the rest of her body along with her shoulders, though, and she went limp; she was afraid she was about to crumple to the ground when she heard a noise on the other side of the door. Her body went stiff again for a moment, but it was a sound like something metal dragging along the floor, so she thought maybe the station assistant had come for her.

A little relieved, Kieli lifted her gaze—and her heart instantly froze solid in her chest. From a gap between the steel door and the wall that was so small she could hardly think of it as a “gap” at all seeped a formless black noise that crawled along the wall. The noise grew like thick liquid waste forming a puddle little by little, encroaching on the wall and the door, and eventually it gathered itself together to form a bizarrely long human arm. The hand groped around until it found and grasped the pipe she’d been using to bar the door, and bent it out of shape as effortlessly as if it were a stick of taffy, and dropped it to the floor.

The door handle worked all by itself and the door was pushed open, and the spreading darkness beyond seemed to give birth to another darkness that split away from it, and then the black shadow assumed its human shape again and plodded sluggishly into the room.

What the barely flickering amber light in the power reactor window revealed was a bizarre form, its entire body covered with scrap metal and rubble from the radio tower assembled into crude armor so that it looked something like the station assistant—but with a decisive difference: underneath this armor there was no body. In the gaps between the metal plating, static the color of darkness swirled. And no, it definitely didn’t have a head. Everything from the nose up looked to have been bitten off, it was so cruelly crushed in, and particles of noise swarmed like maggots on the surface of the cut.

Found you…

…said the crescent-twisted bright red mouth again.

“Ah…ah, ahh…”

Kieli’s couldn’t move a single step; she stared wide-eyed at the sight of it, gasping meaninglessly. Her jaws wouldn’t fit together right to form words. A ghost with its head crushed in—the image of a man in that same state clawed its way up out of that burnt-over place in the depths of her memory and made a bitter accusation.

You’re the one who said it.

With a shrill metallic scrape that gave Kieli goose bumps, the ghost came toward her. She couldn’t move. Screech…screech…screech. Metal plating rubbed against the floor with each step.

“Kieli!” cried a voice out of nowhere at the same time that a black beast launched himself toward the armor, rounding his back and tackling it in midair. The rubble and scrap metal that had shaped itself into a suit of armor came apart and scattered pieces of junk all over the floor. However, the once-dispersed noise quickly gathered itself back together again into a crawling human shape and sucked in the junk around it, beginning to rebuild its armor.

Mane had alighted in front of Kieli; as he assumed an attack stance, ready to go for the armor again, he swung his tail and thwapped Kieli’s legs with it, shooing her away. “What are you standing there for?! Run!” Kieli snapped back to herself and started to run for the exit, but she made it only a couple of steps at most before her legs got tangled up and she landed in a pathetic heap. Her brain didn’t manage to form the idea that she had to stand up again fast. Using her hands, she sluggishly pushed just her upper body up off the floor, and turned to look at the re-forming suit of armor.

Suddenly the jammed gears in her mind started turning again, and her thoughts touched the burn deep in her memory.

You can kill! —There was her own murderous voice when she ordered Mane.

I don’t mind killing a person or two. —There was her own half-crazed face when she argued back against Harvey.

I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only protecting. —There were her own blood-soaked hands dangling the ax as she stared calmly down at the corpse.

“I said go! Kieli! Hey!” Mane shouted impatiently as he leapt at the armor again. Knocked back just when it finished standing up, the suit of armor doubled over and lost its balance. With a jarring screech of its metal plating, it tottered and fell against the power reactor.

More or less halfway between the stern and the radio tower in the center of the deck, Harvey faced off against a man who appeared to be the commanding officer of a platoon. The rest of the soldiers remained behind, standing by in front of their respective trucks. Still, even counting all of them together, this wasn’t that large a unit; Harvey got the impression the officer had brought only the men in his own direct command. Actually confirming their pursuers’ numbers and equipment didn’t help him figure out their objective at all. In fact, he was understanding it less every minute. Local Security Forces troops after them for the Mane incident, a raid on the radio station, Undying Hunters on his tail—this didn’t quite fit any of the possibilities he could think of at the moment.

The officer surveyed the antiquated smokestacks clustered on the deck with a slight look of surprise, then assumed a determined expression and faced him again.

“How many more people are inside?”

“None.”

The officer sent up the trial balloon without any preamble, and Harvey replied calmly and readily. He didn’t look convinced, but Harvey’d never believed they’d get out of this without any trouble.

Judging from the number of badges and various other decorations on the greatcoat he wore over his clerical robes, he was pretty high-ranking even for someone in the Capital Security Forces. Still, he didn’t have the unnecessarily high-and-mighty attitude Harvey normally associated with that many medals, and he wasn’t overly tall, so he didn’t come off as overbearing physically either. Something about him sort of reminded Harvey of someone he knew, but he couldn’t place who that was.

What the officer came out with when he got down to business wasn’t any of the three possibilities he’d imagined: it was something completely outside the realm of anything he would ever have anticipated. “We’re looking for a girl. We have information that she’s in this area.” Harvey merely lifted his eyebrows a fraction. He couldn’t readily decide on a response. The officer seemed to interpret his silence as his way of prompting him to move it along; nodding, he withdrew a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat. It…looked like a photograph?

“Do you recognize this girl?”

The surface of the photo he held up reflected the searchlights of the trucks. His right eye wasn’t completely accustomed to strong light yet, so it smarted as he squinted at the picture. It was all he could do to make out the edge of the photo that was out of the beams’ direct path. He recognized this scene from somewhere; it looked as if there was something like stage sound equipment…?

As he quizzically narrowed his eyes even further, all of a sudden an engine drone roared below his feet, and then the floor bucked wildly beneath them.

—?

Feeling as though he might get whiplash, Harvey planted his heels and just managed to hold his ground. The whole deck shook, and the pipes overhead creaked and showered flakes of rust on their heads. For a second the platoon soldiers looked ready to run, but the officer’s sharp voice had them tightening their formation and standing at alert in no time.

“What’s this about? Cut the power!”

“Don’t look at me!”

He couldn’t figure out what the hell this was about either. Did something happen in the power room? When he turned toward the steel tower where the station office was, he hardly had time to register the belch of thick black smoke out of the previously still exhaust pipes before, with a ponderous tremor of the ground and an even more violent jerk up and down, they began traveling between the rock walls on either side of them. The abrupt acceleration sent Harvey pitching forward. He managed to catch himself with his hand in a half-sitting, half-standing position before he hit the floor. Several of the soldiers standing near the edge lost their balance and went overboard, screaming as they fell.

“What do you think you’re doing?! Stop this ship!” bellowed the officer, who’d narrowly managed to stay on his feet and was shielding his head against the rust rain.

“I told you, don’t look at me!” The deck bounced and Harvey almost bit his tongue, so he aborted the conversation and looked up to the roof of the station office. A gritty fog-like substance very different in character from the black smoke of burning fossil fuel was streaming continuously from the exhaust pipes. A ghost—?

Harvey had a bad feeling about this. He heard the officer’s voice calling after him to stop as he took off running, but he ignored it and ran across the shaking deck back to the station office.

When he dived into the pilothouse, he found the station assistant clinging to the joystick.

“What happened?!”

“Some-thing’s gone wrong in the po-wer re-ac-tor. We’re out of con-trol.”

The tone was inflectionless, but the sense of urgency was unmistakable. Looking around him, Harvey realized the girl it should be his top priority to protect was nowhere in sight, and his flesh crawled. “She’s in the po-wer room,” the assistant told him before he could ask. “Mane went there.” His body had turned without his conscious order and sent him sprinting out of the pilothouse before the man had even finished talking.

“Kieli!”

Harvey skidded down the work stairs to the power reactor with a hand on the railing for balance, reaching the bottom just as Mane was dragging Kieli through the half-open door by her clothes. “My tail got burnt,” Mane griped when he noticed him. The tip of his lion-like tail had begun to rot, and it was dangling like wilted ivy.

Harvey was momentarily relieved to see that Kieli was safe, but when he ran over to her, she was curled up in the fetal position, unmoving even though she didn’t appear unconscious. “Kieli?” He crouched down next to her and peered at her. Her face was as bloodless-white as a corpse’s, and she was trembling like someone off her head with distress. Harvey raised his face and looked closely into the power room. The power reactor was warped out of shape, and all around it swirled something black and staticky, diffusing and concentrating intermittently into a human form.

That’s—

The specter of a man whose head was half crushed in by enormous teeth clicked instantly with that image still fresh in his memory. The sight of the man’s face as he died, his head crushed in right in front of Harvey, burst back to life again in his mind in a flashback so realistic he could even feel the flying globs of brain hitting his cheek and sticking. Bile rose in his throat.

“…ry……I…”

Sounds burbled from Kieli’s mouth. Hardly opening her mouth, she mumbled indistinctly, “I said it, I killed you, I’m sorry…!”

“Ki—” The sight of her weak-voiced apologies stabbed him through the lung, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. —Yes, he’d told her never to say that again. But he hadn’t meant to place all the responsibility on Kieli personally like this when he’d said it. The rest of her name caught in his throat. He forced himself to suck in air that burned his throat and lungs, and tried again. Kieli was holding her head and trembling; he gripped her by the shoulder and shook her.

“Kieli, stop it! That’s not true; it wasn’t you; you didn’t do it!”

“I’m the one who bit him, you know,” put in Mane in his usual carefree voice, looking puzzled. But Kieli shook her head minutely back and forth on a neck rigid as a clockwork doll’s, mumbling over and over about how she’d killed him. “H-he hit Harvey, and shot…So I…I had an ax, and I…”

“An ax?” She was starting to make less and less sense. Maybe she was mixing this up with something else? Harvey brought his face close to hers and said in a strong voice, “What are you talking about? There’s no ax anywhere. Snap out of it!” Kieli’s aimlessly wandering eyes finally focused and turned to him.

For a few moments she looked at him vaguely, and then her face crumpled and fat, wet tears began to stream down her face. “I’m sorry, I’m sor…”

“Okay, I understand; it’s okay. It’s not your fault. You didn’t actually do anything. I’m safe, all right? I’m right here with you,” Harvey soothed, wrapping his arm around her convulsing back as she sobbed out apologies. He didn’t care whether what she said was true, whether any of it had really happened; right now he’d force her to listen to him; for now he’d hypnotize her into believing him even against her own will if he had to. “It’s not your fault. I’m here.” Holding her with his left arm, he pulled her up the stairs. Mane pushed up from below with his back. Working together, they got her up to the first floor.

“We are not safe here. We need to e-va-cu-ate quick-ly.”

The assistant came out of the pilothouse and took over for them, easily hoisting Kieli onto an armored shoulder. The whole station house continued rocking violently. The roar of the out-of-control engine and the ship scraping against rock assaulted his eardrums from all directions.

When he started running, eyes racing over the scenery around him, something coarse and warm stroked his ankle. Warm, and yet it gave him chills. Harvey jerked his foot away, shuddering at the eerie sensation, and looked down. A thin wisp of blackish noise particles hung in the air just brushing his foot. Even more static swelled and swarmed its way up from the darkness of the stairs down to the power reactor. It was in the process of covering the whole floor.

“This way.”

Driven forward by the sea of static, they were forced upstairs whether they liked it or not—but in no time the static began to seep through the second-story floor too, so they fled from the station office roof up the access ladder to the steel tower. Mane took the lead, and the station assistant followed with Kieli. Harvey took the rear, glancing down every so often to check his footing. As they climbed, the station assistant right above him abruptly turned his head down to look at him.

Harvey looked back, blinking.

“You are o-ver-pro-tec-tive,” he said softly.

“That a problem?”

“No.” Something in the assistant’s mechanical voice made Harvey think he was making fun of him. The other man coolly turned his gaze back upward. Harvey glared oddly grumpily at the bottoms of the assistant’s metal-plated feet until he heard a flat voice above him call down, “Hur-ry, please.” He cursed under his breath at the distance that had opened up between them and upped his pace.

…Call me whatever you want.

Supposing that some sort of blame truly did lie with Kieli, if there was a penalty that had to be paid, he’d happily pay it all himself. He didn’t care if he was overprotective; he didn’t have the slightest intention of letting Kieli bear this guilt.

The assistant put Kieli down when they got to the observation deck midway up. “Please stay here. I left your radi-o be-hind,” he said, and climbed down the tower again. When Harvey looked down over the guardrail, the sea of static had overflowed out of the station office and begun to spread across the deck. The sudden appearance of what looked like a swarm of mysterious black insects threw the soldiers into a panic. Soon they were running in all directions, some falling off the edge of the rocking deck, and a few even deliberately throwing themselves off. The officer he’d talked to earlier was calling out this way and that, trying to calm their agitation, but Harvey doubted any of them had experienced this sort of unusual situation before; the command had totally broken down.

“They’re coming this way, too.”

Mane, who’d climbed a little higher up and was gazing at the whole scene from above, gave this urgent report in an incongruously carefree voice. The noise wasn’t just spreading out like water; tendrils of it were starting to crawl vertically up the steel tower, too.

“Kieli, climb! Move your own legs!”

When he put his left arm around her side to drag her with him and his right elbow against the ladder, and began climbing in that extremely precarious stance, Kieli moved with him. On her own power, if slowly and groggily, she placed her feet on one rung after the other. Evidently the confusion in her mind was finally starting to clear. Harvey had a few seconds to savor his relief before there was a ponderous screech of metal that made him want to cover his ears, and the steel tower started to list to one side. A rock wall was careening toward him at high speed right in front of his eyes. The steel tower wasn’t falling down: the entire ship itself seemed to have come up on a rock or something and lurched dramatically to one side—before its flank crashed against the rock wall next to it, and the ship was skewered with a blow and a crashing roar. And even that didn’t stop them; the radio station careened on through the gorge, out of control, with its side scraping along the rock wall, taking out chunks of it as it went. Clinging tightly to the ladder with his arm around Kieli so they wouldn’t be thrown off, Harvey gritted his teeth and bore it out.

There was one last jolt even harder than the rest, and a high-pitched metallic wail echoed above them.

By the time the sound had stopped bouncing painfully around inside his skull and the reverberations had died down at last, the roar of the ship scouring the rock wall was gone too, and everything was so weirdly quiet that he thought maybe he’d busted his eardrums. After a beat of unnatural silence, the howl of the wind blowing through the valley came back to his ears as if remembering itself.

“…We’re stopped.”

At the sound of Mane’s somewhat dazed voice, Harvey peeled his forehead away from the rung he’d been pressing it against and lifted his face, letting go of the breath he’d unconsciously been holding. He’d be willing to bet he’d scraped his forehead up. The first thing he did was check on Kieli, who was still clinging to him, stiff as a board. Then he looked up— his whole field of vision was tilted on its axis—and saw Mane dangling upside down from a steel pole by the talons of his hind leg and swinging back and forth in the wind. He was looking just a tiny bit miserable.

Even farther above Harvey than that, the tip of the steel tower had plunged straight into the rock wall tilted about thirty degrees, and its antenna was pitifully flattened. Here and there fragments of rock broke off and fell down to earth. The radio station had finally come to a stop.

“No, crap, this is bad.” Mane turned just his head to face down as he rotated his upper body, got his forelegs around the steel pole, and swore.

When Harvey looked down, he could see something exploding directly below the steel tower, right around where the power reactor was. An invisible shock radiated from the steel tower across the deck like ripples across water. A beat later the blast came, and fire along with it, but before it could spread, the familiar wave of decay on its heels swallowed it up. The network of pipes rapidly collapsed, exactly like shriveling blood vessels, and started rusting over. The static fog that had covered the entire deck was swept up as the decay moved forward, too. It squirmed painfully as it died away. The soldiers who’d escaped being thrown off the runaway ship and were holding on to the tilted deck for dear life stared with dumb amazement at the phenomenon sweeping over everything around them.

Then a stir arose from one section of them. They snapped out of their trance at the sight of a peculiar-looking armored man appearing on the half-collapsed station office roof and aimed their rifles and, efficiently if timidly, set about surrounding him.

“Ah…!”

Harvey could see the radio held up in the assistant’s hand, but the decay had already engulfed both metal-plated legs all the way up to his lower back. Rust covered every inch. Though he seemed hard-pressed to even walk, he moved forward one step at a time, apparently to intimidate the soldiers surrounding him, who backed away in fear.

“Stay here. Stay here and hold on tight. Do you understand? Mane, get over here!”

Harvey took Kieli’s hands and forced them into a tight grip around a rung of the ladder as Mane descended smoothly down to them. Leaving her in the animal’s care, he climbed down the tower. The station assistant noticed him when he’d made it a little lower down than the observation deck. “I’m thro-wing it.” He wound up as he spoke, and he’d already pitched the radio up to Harvey by the time the words finished leaving his mouth. Harvey leaned out and managed to catch its strap with the tips of his fingers, and then cried, “Hurry!,” waving at the assistant to climb up. But the assistant only shook his head sadly and gestured toward his feet. Both legs of the armor were completely immobilized. They’d become one with the rust covering the roof, planted in it from the ankles down.

“Hang on; I’ll be right there.”

“No! Do not come down. Please, climb back up quick-ly and get a-way from here.”

“What are you talking about?! We’re going togeth—”

“No!”

Harvey’s leg momentarily froze in the process of stepping down to the next rung. He’d never heard that violent inflection in the assistant’s voice before.

And that was when the shot rang out—one of the soldiers fired right at him, more than likely snapping under the strain of all the commotion. Harvey escaped a direct hit, but the bullet scraped just the shallowest path across his shin to rebound against the rung he was standing on, and the heel he’d jerked away midstep missed its footing when it came back down. “Crap—” He tried to grab hold of the rail with his left hand, but the radio it held got in the way and he missed. Losing his balance, he fell backward.

Before he felt the impact of his body crashing into the station office roof, he made impact in midair against something invisible. It felt as though he’d smacked headfirst into a pocket of a different, high-pressured dimension.

KKCHK…

A dull, baffling sound right in front of his eyes, the sensation of something foreign embedding itself in his body—

Half of his field of vision abruptly left him.

“Harvey!”

Kieli screamed when she saw Harvey fall from halfway down the tower. Just as she took her next step, there was a metallic creak above her—the peak of the tower that had stabbed into the rock face broke off and the tower jolted down even further, shaking her grip free from the rung she’d been holding. After the briefest of moments when it felt as if she were floating, she began to fall upside down. “Ack!” “Kieli!” Mane chased after her, running down the face of the tower and finally leaping off one of the supports and launching his black body into the air.

“Grab hold!”

Quicker than thought, she reached out in midair and clutched at the hair around Mane’s neck. He was curled up like a black cannonball; pulled after him, she plunged even farther down. The wind howled, cutting at her cheeks. The deck got rapidly closer. Meanwhile, Harvey had crashed into the roof of the station office, bounced, and then rolled off and down toward the deck. Mane managed to slide underneath him, dangerously close, and scoop him onto his back.

“—!”

As she clutched Harvey’s clothes, Kieli’s eyes opened wide.

Two rifts opened up along Mane’s shoulder blades, and with a creaking sound, armlike protrusions attached to some viscous membrane and sticky with coal-tar blood thrust out. They spread out wide, membranes unfolding into bat-like wings, and caught the breeze.

“Hold on tight to him!”

Just before they would have crashed into the deck, they got some lift, and suddenly they were skimming just above it in level flight, shooting forward with all the speed they’d had in free fall. Mane’s unsteady wings missed streams of air over and over. Each time Kieli and Harvey were shaken, and each time they came close to falling off. Stretching herself across Harvey’s back and holding him in her arms, Kieli clutched Mane’s hair as hard as she could. They almost plunged straight into the agitated group of soldiers until Mane veered away at the last moment—and she saw a wall of rubble looming in front of them—

We’re going to hit it!, she thought—

But then they swerved to the side with so little room to spare that Mane’s wings scraped most of the way along the side of the wall before they shot through a gap in the piping over the deck and soared into the air.

“Wah…”

All at once the sky spread out before her. The sea of clouds covering the whole tiny gorge sky was closer than she’d ever seen it before. It looked as if they’d shoot out of the valley and straight into the clouds, and Kieli felt dizzy.

Mane rotated high in the air, and the radio tower below them entered her vision again. Rust swept up the steel tower from its base toward the summit. The whole thing changed from gray to red even as she watched. Like the spreading roots of a great tree, the pipes on the deck swiftly went red-brown with rust too, starting at the steel tower and spreading outward in every direction—and though the spreading phenomenon was definitely, unmistakably decay, what it looked like was a bed of red flowers putting down roots in a gray, barren land and blossoming, and Kieli watched it play out below her, wide-eyed and wordless.

The red steel tower cloaked in rust all the way to its tip seemed just like a colossal petrified tree.

And at the great tree’s roots stood a solitary smaller tree. Such a tiny tree compared to its companion, and yet it had been plenty big enough to protect them. A red-brown tree in the shape of a large-bodied man in misshapen armor. One lone branch stretched up in the sky as if to wave to them; in that position the assistant had turned into an unmoving hunk of steel and rust.

“Mane, go back…!”

Mane did move to go back once, but in the end all he did was circle once in the air above the radio tower, and then he turned his back on it and began flying away, apparently giving up.

The great tree that was the remains of the radio tower and the tree of armor that stood nestled up against its base grew steadily smaller in the distance until they were swallowed up by the valley and disappeared from sight. Whether it could truly see them or not, Kieli didn’t know, but the tree of armor seemed to watch them go the whole time with one hand held overhead.

Owooo…nn…

Was that the sound of the sharp wind against her cheeks, or was she hearing Mane howl for the first time? The sorrowful sound made her heart squeeze. Low, and long, and lingering before it vanished into the sky above the gorge.

“What the hell just happened…?”

The officer looked dazedly around him at the results of the bizarre phenomenon that had just happened before his eyes, wanting to doubt his own senses and his mind itself. A landscape of decay, everything blanketed with seasoned rust as though decades, maybe even centuries, had passed in the space of just a few minutes—but when he thought about how long ago this place had been built, he seemed to feel at the same time as though this moldering wreck was its true form, and it didn’t strike him as strange—a fact which itself struck him as strange.

He assumed what had started it all was a power surge in the reactor, but oddly enough, there wasn’t much fire damage. The violent quakes had died down, too. Time might as well have frozen, it was so quiet.

“How many casualties?” he asked his adjutant, recalling his job even if he hadn’t quite recovered from his shock. “Report immediately.” The other man had been standing stock-still, looking as stunned as he felt, but at his order, he anxiously set about confirming their status.

“Eleven men with minor injuries and two with major injuries. No deaths.”

“I see…”

Whatever that might have been, for the moment he could feel relief that they hadn’t lost anyone, at least. It’d be tough to clean up the mess caused by a big problem happening while he was using the unit for a private errand, so there was that— but more importantly than anything else, he didn’t like to let any of his men die. That should go without saying, but unfortunately, lots of people tended to forget it once they were given a large command.

He looked into the distance of the night-dark gorge ahead, in the direction where a funny-winged beast the likes of which he’d never seen before had fled after saving the man who’d fallen from the steel tower. That one-armed redhead had struck a chord in his memory, though he hadn’t been able to figure out exactly why right away. Now he remembered: the description of a certain fugitive the Undying Hunters had a bounty out on fit him like a glove. Anybody the Undying Hunters were paying a reward for wasn’t just some ordinary human, obviously. He must be one of those.

And, although just for a brief moment, he’d clearly seen a girl clinging to the beast’s back.

He was fairly certain he wasn’t mistaken about who it was. Although he found himself somehow wanting to doubt his own eyes…

“Get Lord Sigri’s envoy on the line.”

After they’d zigzagged wildly through the gorge for a stretch, they eventually crashed into a protruding rock, and it was just too much to hold on through; this time Kieli was thrown off. “Gyah!” Fortunately she was saved by a ledge sticking out just far enough from the rock wall, so while she slammed her back hard, she escaped more or less unscathed.

Just as she began to sit up, coughing, Mane’s black body thumped down next to her in an artless heap. One wing was bent unnaturally underneath him when he landed, broken from its base. It hurt Kieli just to look at it. “Mane!”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not like these originally belonged to me,” Mane declared bluntly. He pinned the broken wing down with a hind leg and ripped it off. “Is he alive?”

Harvey was lying over by the edge of the rock ledge. Kieli crawled over to him on all fours and peered into his face. “Harvey?!” Harvey shifted his head slightly with a little groan, but put it right back down again and pressed his cheek into the rock. He had a horrible sore on his left cheek that went all the way up to his temple; it looked just as if the iron rust had infested his skin.

“Got caught in the fallout from it, eh? Can you see?”

A beast’s snout thrust itself forward beside Kieli to peer down at him. At Mane’s question Harvey cracked open his left eye, only to shake his head slightly, just once, and cover it with his hand. The hand itself looked as if it might break at the slightest touch: sunken flesh, bones standing out with grotesque sharpness. Half-crying, Kieli threw her arms around him.

“Harvey, no, not this…!”

His lips parted just a fraction, and she heard a scratchy voice say something she couldn’t quite catch.

“……li……ine…”

“What? Harvey, what is it?” She crouched down low and brought her face close to his, straining to hear him.

“I’m fine……so, the Corporal…?”

He repeated the same thing several times in a painfully raw voice. He almost sounded like someone in a nightmare. Jolted, Kieli looked around her. She spotted the radio on the ground on Harvey’s opposite side, and went to fetch it. All the parts had been put back together again, but no matter how much she fiddled with it or shook it, she didn’t hear the usual white noise, or the Corporal’s voice, either. “I dunno; I can’t hear anything. I don’t think he’s working…!” she reported tearfully.

“We’re walking a little farther. We can get out of the gorge.” Mane grabbed Harvey by the scruff of his neck and dragged him. Kieli helped by leaning Harvey’s tall form onto Mane’s back, and they started walking, more or less dragging him with them.

The path of narrow ledges along the rock wall stretched on, twisting and turning uncertainly until it disappeared into the darkness far ahead.

“Whoa…”

The small patch of night sky visible from the gorge was beginning to lighten faintly into the sandy color of morning. Captivated by the view that spread out beneath her eyes, a little exclamation escaped her along with her sigh of relief.

In the dimness ahead of them, at the end of the path of rock ledges, a single thin thread of weak light had seeped in through a gap in the rock walls as they walked. Now they’d passed through that gap to the other side, at a point about halfway up the towering rocks of the fault. Blue-gray predawn wilderness spread out far down below, shrouded in a light mist.

She could see the outlines of a ghost town in the foothills at the base of the fault, and a single railroad track that curved in a gentle arc out of sight.

In the pantry of a kitchen blanketed with dust she found a sealed bottle of alcohol. When she stumblingly read the type and proof on the label out loud to Harvey, he said, “Eh, that’ll do it. Give it here,” and carelessly accepted the bottle. He was slumped heavily against the wall. He felt around for the cork without looking at it, and used his mouth to pull it out when he had to. No sooner had he brought the bottle to his lips and tossed back a gulp of it than he suddenly choked.

“A-are you okay?”

Harvey coughed. “I’m fine,” he said, shoving her off with an elbow when she tried to rub his back. Rather than drink the rest of it, he tilted his head back to face the ceiling and up-ended it over his face. Clear liquid dripped from the inflamed skin around his left eye all the way down his neck, soaking his clothes.

They were in a humble shack that consisted of just one room with an attached kitchen, plus a little loft underneath the roof. It showed no signs of use; Kieli guessed it had been abandoned decades ago now. Mane, who’d gone up to the loft to look around, descended smoothly back down to sit beside her.

“Want me to do it?” he offered, displaying the sharp talons of a great bird that crowned one leg.

Harvey shook his head without uncovering his eyes. “I’ll do it myself.” Kieli alone didn’t quite grasp what Harvey planned to do next. When she directed a questioning glance at Mane, who looked sort of disappointed that his offer had been refused, he told her calmly, “He’s going to gouge his eye out.”

Kieli forgot to exhale. Struck speechless, she couldn’t immediately formulate a reply, and Mane’s detached explanation continued. “Hopefully it’s only the eyeball itself that’s done in, but probably the decay’s eaten at some of his optic nerve, too. If he leaves the eye in, there’s a possibility it’ll travel farther and farther inside him. Right now there’s no other way, and there’s no time to hesitate. If we’re unlucky, it’ll get all the way to his brai—”

“Kieli. You go wait outside,” Harvey interrupted in a slightly offhand voice, cutting off Mane’s easy flow of words. He looked as if he wanted to tell him Don’t explain it in that much detail.

“I’ll be done fast, so wait outside…please.”

After this repeated plea, she heard him add in a barely audible voice, “I don’t want you to see this.” He was covering his face with his hand. Between his slim fingers, though, she caught a glimpse of the left eye beneath them, pointed down and to the side at nothing in particular. His copper eye had darkened to a cloudy blackish color. Kieli’d wanted to stay with him, but after seeing that, she couldn’t insist anymore. She could only nod.

“Hey, Kieli…”

When she moved to leave the room, entrusting the rest to Mane, Harvey suddenly called out to stop her as if he realized he’d forgotten something. She stopped moving halfway through the process of standing up, propped on one hand. Harvey’s hand scrabbled anxiously along the floor, found hers, and gripped it lightly.

“Mm. What?”

“About the Corporal…I think things maybe turned out for the best this way.”

At that, Kieli pressed her lips together and looked down at the radio hanging around her neck. It dangled from her neck just like it always did; it looked ready to speak up any moment just like it always did. And yet the radio didn’t say anything to her anymore. Apparently they hadn’t gotten the repairs done in time.

When she stayed stonily silent and didn’t answer him, Harvey rested for a breath and then went on. His normally gravelly voice sounded even scratchier than usual.

“Kieli, it’s just, I want you to understand…Let’s bring him with us to Easterbury. I want to take one last journey together, just the three of us, and go back to Easterbury…and let the Corporal relax and rest in peace. I’ll be with you, Kieli, I’ll still be with you…Won’t that do…?”

She could tell that he was thinking hard, carefully choosing words that felt strange on his tongue. He was being good to her, trying with all he had to convince her after she’d stubbornly refused to listen to him. Even though really, the Harvey she knew hated to talk for so long…If he wanted to, he could’ve done what he always did: decide on his own and just do it, whether Kieli agreed or not. But instead he was trying to consider her feelings.

There was an uneasy silence while he waited for her answer. After a little bit, Kieli blinked back the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks and nodded. Harvey kept waiting, though, the unease not gone from his face yet. She belatedly realized he couldn’t see her very well with only his right eye, so she opened her mouth and answered again out loud.

“…Okay.”

She turned the hand he gripped palm-up and squeezed it back, and Harvey’s expression relaxed a little, relieved at last.

The northwestern mining district. This was the district where countless mine shafts were dug along the enormous ore-containing fault, and Kieli and the others had come out of the gorge into its outskirts.

It was an old mineral vein that had been mined even before the War; here were the remains of an old mine where people even found relics of the high-level civilization before the War. There was a market for those relics, too, and this area had been prosperous once (apparently the mobile radio station Mane had lived in had stayed in the western part of this region for a long time). But fossil resources were running dry even here, and according to Mane the number of mine shafts left was less than half of what it had been in its heyday.

Kieli sat on the stone steps in front of the shack, looking down at the view before her. A desolate mining town clung to the foothills of the fault down below, where the land was hazy with white morning air. That town had almost certainly been a lot livelier once, but there didn’t seem to be a single operating shaft in the vicinity, and all the tunnel entrances that dotted the middle stratum of the rock face were boarded over. She thought the shack they’d found while walking along the rock wall must have been a rest area for miners once, but it wasn’t in use now. There were several other ramshackle buildings here that looked to have been storehouses and processing stations. Steep stairs and paths jutted out of the rock face and stretched down to the town in the foothills. Shovels, carts, and various other tools of the trade lay forlornly here and there, abandoned like children’s toys scattered at the park and forgotten.

“Corporal…” Kieli called experimentally, pressing her forehead against the radio she hugged between her knees and chest. Her only answer was the cold feeling of the metal. The angular parts of the speaker hurt where they ground into her forehead, but she pressed against it even harder anyway, and started whispering to him. She didn’t even care if he didn’t answer back.

“Corporal, get angry with me…I’m—a really bad person…”

She was just like that woman from the mansion. No, that woman had just been simpleminded; Kieli knew her own heart must be even uglier inside. She hurt people without a second thought when she thought they’d take something precious from her.

I don’t mind killing a person or two if it’s for you. In that moment the words had just flown out of her mouth without passing through her brain, but when she considered it now, she didn’t think she’d lied. In the end, what she’d said without thinking was what she really felt. No matter what Harvey said, even if Mane had killed that man, Kieli might as well have been the one to kill him. Because in her mind, she’d been bringing the ax down on his head.

If something like that happened again, and she happened to have an ax in her hand, she’d bring it down on the attacker’s head without hesitation. She was sure of it. She hated that part of herself, and it scared her, and she wanted to run away from it, and yet she was sure that’s what she would do. But that would also pierce Harvey’s heart at the same time. The bad things Kieli did always came back to bite Harvey and hurt him when she’d meant to protect him.

She didn’t want to hurt people anymore. She didn’t want to make any more missteps. Suddenly it struck her that in that case, maybe it would be best to just leave everyone’s lives. Maybe I should just go away somewhere where I won’t cause anybody any trouble. Where would I go…? She couldn’t think of anywhere to go but to Becca or her grandmother or her mom. But she was sure not one of them would welcome her the way she was now.

…What am I thinking?

Kieli shook her head back and forth. The hard body of the radio chafed her forehead until it stung, which thankfully cut off her line of thought that was getting so mixed up. She pulled her head back from the radio a little and gazed into the speaker. She got the feeling it was silently telling her Nobody’s going to give you advice about something like this.

Could she really become someone who could protect the people she loved on her own, without relying on anyone else, without hurting anyone else? Somehow she thought that might be way, way beyond her.

By chance, her downcast eyes found something that looked very much like an exposed water pipe. A good ways down the slope sat what looked like a tap for drinking water. A pail was lying on the ground nearby, even.

Water…

Kieli looked over her shoulder at the door of the shack. Harvey might want some water to drink. She’d left her flask back at the radio tower along with her bag, and he’d been gulping alcohol when he hardly ever drank anything…Although she was disappointed in herself that a tiny little thing like this was the best help she could think of to give him, it was something, and she couldn’t stand to sit there much longer anyway. So she put the radio around her neck again and stood up.

Kieli walked somewhat unsteadily down the steep, rocky incline, as if magnetically pulled toward the place where she’d seen the water. There was a big hole in the bottom of the tin pail, but luckily the spout was working at least, and rust-red water trickled out when she turned on the faucet. It must be drawing from a layer deep underground, because as she let it run it started coming up relatively clear. Kieli felt a little moved. It still smelled thickly of rust when she brought her face to the faucet, but she put her mouth under it and drank a little, and then let both hands fill up with it so she could wash her face.

“Fwahh!”

Letting the cold water contact the skin of her face seemed to perk up her feelings a bit, too. She ended the ritual by slapping both cheeks a few times, and then told the radio, “Okay, Corporal, I’m awake now.”

She spoke to him just like always, even though she knew he wouldn’t answer. She did it to convince herself to behave just like always. “I’m sorry I whined at you, Corporal. It’s okay; I’ll try to do my best on my own…I’m fine without you now, so don’t worry.” She had to admit her voice as she said so sounded too feeble to be very convincing.

Plop…a sphere sticky with blood and slime and wisps of nerve fiber fell on the floor in front of his face. Lukewarm fluid spilled out of his empty eye socket onto the cheek resting on the floor. He’d cut off his sense of pain, but more than the pain it was the unbearable unpleasantness of it all that made him feel like throwing up. Harvey pressed his palm over his hollow left eye, then closed his right eye too to shut off all visual input from the outside.

“Huh,” said a boyish voice at his side, sounding impressed. “First time I’ve ever seen a human do that in his right mind.”

“I’m not in my right mind,” Harvey spat tiredly without getting up.

“…I’m guessing you know this, but that’ll probably only be a temporary fix no matter what. I think the decay will still eat its way into your nerves. That’ll only slow down the progression.”

“Better than dying now,” he answered half-automatically, without actually thinking about it, and received a somewhat surprised silence in reply. Harvey himself was surprised at his words too. He couldn’t help the thin, self-deprecating smile that came to his lips beneath the hand over his face. “Is that funny? Heh, it is funny, isn’t it? Me, struggling to survive like this. Right now…I’m clinging to life no matter what I have to do. I mean, what choice do I have, Corporal? It’s…it’s your fault for ending up like that. Now if something happens to me, Kieli’ll be all alone and…” Ugh, he thought, I’ve been talking up a storm today; I hate that, but somehow he kept going, and the more he talked the less he knew what he was saying. With his eyes closed he felt as though he were drifting in deep, dark water, and it sucked his consciousness down into the darkness with it.

A guy with no will to live isn’t worth killing.

The Corporal had told him that. Harvey could still remember it vividly.

Does that mean right now I’m worth killing, at least? I wonder if you finally acknowledged me in the end. I hope so… He mumbled to himself for some time with no real awareness of whether or not he was doing it out loud. At some point he realized, Huh, I think I might be talking crazy right now, but he couldn’t think about it very clearly. Apparently he really actually wasn’t in his right mind; his thoughts spun dizzily. Wait, who was I just talking to…?

Splish.

With a warm, wet sound, a thick drop of water fell on the floor in front of him.

About a tenth of his brain was wondering skeptically what the sound meant when a damp muzzle loomed toward him and prodded his cheek. Foul animal breath and the smell of old blood and new blood. The beast’s snout pushed aside the hand he’d been holding over his left eye—

—and with no warning, something was shoved into the empty socket.

“Augghhh!”

The anguish attacked him out of nowhere, no time to prepare, and ripped the scream right out of his lungs. Unable to take it, he rolled around on the floor, hitting a wall after about three rolls and not even caring because he was just trying to claw the foreign object out of his eye—but someone seized his shoulders and pinned him down. It took every ounce of his strength to crack open his right eye and look up. Mane was straddling him, and his left eyehole was empty and dripping cloudy, viscous fluid.

“What—?!”

“Just bear it for a little while. Don’t take it out; I don’t just hand that out to people every day.”

All Harvey’s concentration was scattered by the agony and the feeling of wrongness, as though someone had stuck a chunk of rock in his head, and he couldn’t quite manage to shut out the pain. The creature’s face was right in front of him, but the voice seemed warped and far away. “This is my owner’s eye. I got it when I ate him. It ought to stick right to you too, so I’ll let you have it. You should be able to use it for a while, anyway.”

In just that eye his senses were bizarrely amplified into hypersensitivity, and he could clearly feel the severed ends of nerve fibers stretching from the intrusion, crawling like tentacles deeper behind the socket. He tried to grind his teeth together and accidentally bit the inside of his mouth instead. The taste of blood spread on his tongue. When it came, the sensation of those tentacles pulsating as they encroached into his brain was too much. He vomited pure gastric juice.

While Kieli was walking around by the watering place looking for something to serve as a canteen, she heard a sort of muffled shout. She looked toward the shack and heard what sounded like a violent struggle in the distance coming from that direction. After a little while, it went quiet.

Harvey…?

When she wondered what was happening, she felt afraid. She started climbing up the path, thinking she’d go back and check on him, but on second thought, maybe she shouldn’t go back inside yet; she changed her mind, and stopped. She went back and forth on it for a while. Just when she’d decided to go back down to the water after all, she caught sight of a group dressed in white approaching from the foothills. They were still a long way off, but the wind carried the sound of metal chinking against metal up to her.

Church Soldiers—! After freezing on the spot for a moment, she started and hid herself behind a rock, holding a hand over her racing heart as she peeked out at them. It was a safe bet that they were coming after her and Harvey and Mane, but evidently they hadn’t actually pinpointed their location yet, because it looked as if they were methodically searching everywhere. A “platoon,” is that what that’s called? It was a group of about a dozen men in white clerical robes reinforced with armor plating over their vital points, carrying rifles at their shoulders.

What do I do? We might not be able to move Harvey yet. But I have to go let them know; that’s the first thing.

Kieli avoided the path the platoon was climbing, circling around to a narrow staircase between two rock walls, and ran smack into another platoon coming down from the other side.

“Oh!” She’d stopped still and let out the gasp before she could think. But apparently the soldiers hadn’t expected the encounter any more than she had; their reaction was simple surprise. So Kieli took advantage of that opening to turn around and take off like lightning.

“Stop!” someone ordered behind her. Ignoring it, she fled down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. I can’t let them go toward the shack; I have to go in a different direction and confuse them.

Her own momentum ran away with her and two steps turned into two and a half, making her miss her footing on the next one and fall. She heard the smack of the radio hitting rock and cradled it to her stomach the best she could, curling herself up into a ball as she tumbled down the stone stairs. There was a flat rock ledge immediately below it, so she stopped there, but she’d hit her elbows and knees badly enough that she couldn’t get up for several seconds. In that time the metallic footsteps of several soldiers overtook her.

A square, gloved hand grabbed her upper arm and dragged her up. Squirming and flailing all her limbs, Kieli shouted random noises at the top of her lungs. Best-case scenario, she’d make her captor flinch, and hopefully even if she didn’t manage that, Harvey or Mane would hear her and realize that something was wrong.

“H-hey, pipe down! Just come quietly!”

“Waahhh! Waa—”

Along with the nonplussed soldier’s shout came a blow to the back of her head, and for a moment the sound of her own voice faded from her ears.

“Hey, she dropped her letter. Pick it up for her,” the radio ordered him in an Obviously that’s your job sort of way. Resignedly, Harvey stooped forward and collected the stationery that had slid to the floor and landed by his feet. He slipped it as softly as he could underneath the girl’s hands where they lay on her lap, sighing.

“Where is she gonna send that letter?”

“She’s got nowhere to send it.”

“Why did she write such a pointless letter?”

“Everybody has someone they want to write a letter to, even if they’re not gonna send it.”

“I don’t.”

“That’s nothing to be proud of.”

The put-down that came as quickly as Harvey’s own response ought to have been just another of their exchanges, sickeningly routine, and yet Harvey felt strangely as though it had been a long time. He was oddly relieved, somehow.

He leaned his head against the cold window glass and let his gaze roam the scenery outside the train. The vast red-brown wilderness and sand-colored sky were sickeningly routine, too, and they flowed sluggishly by without inspiring any particular emotion. Chug, chug, chug… The constant thumping vibration against the bottom of his seat reinforced the unchanging ordinariness of it all even more.

When Harvey took his eyes away from the boringly familiar scenery in the window, the portable radio who seemed to live for nagging him was sitting by the sill just as always. The soft sounds of sleep came from the seat kitty-corner from him. He glanced at the girl’s face, and his shoulders twitched a little when he thought about how unguarded her face looked in sleep.

“Herbie.”

“Harvey.”

“Are you enjoying this?”

“What is this all of a sudden…? I don’t enjoy talking to you.”

Harvey was lighting a cigarette, giving vague answers without paying overmuch attention to the conversation. “I’m serious,” said the radio in a lower tone, like Harvey’d hurt his feelings. “Do you wish you’d stayed dead at the abandoned mine, or—”…Huh? Wait a second. Isn’t this something he already said to me, way back in the day? No, more like this whole conversation is from back then.

“—are you glad that you’re alive right now?”

When he belatedly registered his déjà vu, the scene inside the train car warped like melting taffy, and then immediately it began to be pulled away, stretching farther into the distance before his eyes. Kieli and the radio were taken away along with the rapidly stretching train, and he was left behind alone.

“Wait…”

The instant he stood up, the floor at his feet vanished. No tracks sprinting by, no train car; just a void that swallowed him up when he fell into it headlong.

Where am I…?

Now he was walking all alone along the floor of a dark valley. He didn’t know when he’d started walking or where he was going or why, but here he was, walking.

Through a long, long winding ravine wrapped in dimly staticky darkness. The air felt disgusting. Cold and coarse. Owooo…nn… The sorrowfully moaning wind had a grainy texture that filed away at his skin rather than caressing it. He had the sense of pain to feel that, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any evidence of his presence. He tried holding up his hand to get it into his field of vision, but nothing happened. Did he really have a body in the first place? He started to lose confidence that he’d existed as a discrete individual at all. There was a lump of nausea and pain somewhere at the core of his consciousness, and he clung fast to it as the only fragile thread that let him perceive his own existence.

Somehow he tripped over something, even though he didn’t have any legs as far as he could see. When he looked down, there was a corpse there. The corpse of a redheaded man lying in a patch of wilderness where some battle had taken place, with the right half of its body burned to cinders—Who is that, again? he wondered. After giving it some thought, he realized it was him. Oh yeah, that’s what my face looks like. Remembering that made his existence feel just that little bit more real. Seeing himself dead just as he was finally starting to feel real seemed like kind of a shame.

When was this self from, again? I guess it must be from a long time ago, when I was still fighting the War. Looking around, he saw other selves lying here and there too, ones who probably would’ve died there if they’d been a little unluckier. Most of them were from the War era, but there were also a lot from pretty recently.

The one buried in the sand with all those white-boned corpses at the bottom of the sand ship,

and the one lying like a rag doll in front of a white town wall early one morning,

and the one lying faceup at the bottom of the mine lift with his heart gouged out…

Oh, this one’s from Easterbury…

He looked up along the dangling wires of the lift overhead to see the shaft’s exit. But the top of the deep shaft was painted over in black so that it looked as if it were the bottom instead, and he felt as though he might start falling upward.

If the timing of anything at all had been even a tiny bit different, it wouldn’t have been surprising for any of these selves to have died for real. And the fact was that he remembered once thinking that he was fine with dying anywhere at any time…but now, gazing at each corpse in turn, he thought with all his heart, I’m glad I didn’t die there.

I have to go home. I’ve still got things to do.

As he started walking in search of the way back home, something grabbed him from below. He looked down. The corpse of the self buried in sand was hanging on to his ankle. Not that he could actually see his ankle; still, the leg that as far as he knew wasn’t there was nevertheless being dragged deep down into a whirlpool of sand. He tried to fight back, but there was no way to fight when he couldn’t perceive his own limbs, and so he was buried up to his face in no time. Coarse grains of sand scraped off bits of his skin and even invaded his mouth, until at last he couldn’t breathe.

No, not yet…! He tried to shout, but the sand filled his throat and no sound came out. His whole field of vision was buried in sand. No, I need a little longer; I can’t die yet! Someone—

His eyes abruptly surfaced out of the sand. Someone’s hand was there, grasping his arm and pulling him up. Through the touch of that someone’s hand the existence of his own arm felt clearly real, and in the same moment he experienced it as real, his invisible arm became visible as something physically real.

The hand that hoisted him out of the sand was the rugged hand of a man in a shabby dark green military uniform. With the hand still tugging him along, he climbed up the mine shaft toward the top. A thin ray of light shone down from the exit that had been colored solid, opaque black. The slightly clouded sand-colored light that shone on all the land on the planet.

The hand let go of him when they came into the light, and he was flung all alone into a white space where he lost all sense of which way was up. He heard a final sharp whisper of warning in his ear, and then the man’s hand dissolved into static.

Wait, Corporal—! he shouted for all he was worth, and tried to grab on to the disappearing hand. Even to his own ears he sounded like an abandoned kid now. No, Corporal. Wait, I don’t want this after all. I don’t want you to go yet—

The sound of his own voice pulled him back to himself. “Ugh!” Instantly, a sharp agony behind his left eye. Harvey doubled over and writhed until he hit the wall, fell back the other way with a thud, and planted his face into the floor. Gathering his scattered thoughts, he managed to bring the sharp throbbing under control, but the dull pain weighing heavily on the center of his head remained.

“You okay?”

He cracked his eyes open at the sound of a boy’s voice. A vague gray floor floated in front of him. Then his eyes started to adjust a little better, and he could see the forelegs of the black beast standing beside him.

“You passed out for a second there.”

“A second…?” His throat was bone-dry.

“Not even a minute’s gone by. Are you starting to see out of it a little?”

“……” Without lifting his cheek from the floor, Harvey let his muddled brain take in what he could see. His left eye’s field of vision covered his right eye’s with a hazy film. He was in the same boat he’d been in not long ago, just with left and right reversed. The daylight filtering through the tiny window from outside cut a single, slanting beam of sandy light through the dimness of the room, making a pool of sunlight on the floor. Just like the light that had filtered down into the mine shaft: light the color of their planet.

Harvey spaced out for several seconds before abruptly coming back to his senses and lifting his head. It felt heavy, as if his brain had turned into a dense mass, and he felt dizzy. His left eye’s focus was still fuzzy. Relying on his good right eye, he stood up, letting his hand follow him up the wall for balance. Mane’s voice followed him. “You should wait a little longer. It’ll take some time for the nerves to finish hooking up.”

“Kieli’s…” The Corporal had warned him. Kieli’s in trouble…!

The back of her head throbbed. She was being pressed against the ground where she’d fallen forward when she was hit, and her hands were restrained behind her back. The radio cut into her stomach where it was trapped underneath her, and her face twisted as she glared hard up at the soldiers in front of her. Blood seeped out of her cheek where it’d scraped against the rocky ground.

If only Harvey—no, if only Mane would come…But they were a long way from the shack here, so maybe even Mane hadn’t heard her. Kieli stuck to her brave attitude, but on the inside she felt ready to cry any second. Harvey…!

Help came from a totally unexpected direction. “Hey, hold on! Stop that! What are you doing?!” a voice broke in. But she’d never heard that intonation before in her life: something without the hard tones particular to Church Soldiers, something relatively soft. “She’s not some kind of rebel. There’s no call for violence! Let her go right now!”

At his order, the soldier holding her down relaxed his grip somewhat. When Kieli raised her head from the ground, the person climbing up the mountain into view wasn’t a Church Soldier in a white robe; he was a man in a long, jet-black greatcoat—a priest. Her arms were still held captive, but the grip around them had relaxed, so she sat up on the ground, coughing, and looked suspiciously up at the priest running toward her. He was a comparatively young, wimpy-looking man; Kieli doubted he was the soldiers’ superior. Priests and Church Soldiers weren’t even in the same organization to begin with.

Waving the platoon back, this particular priest came to stand in front of Kieli. “I’m very sorry. That violence was my responsibility; I didn’t make my instructions explicit enough. I promise you, we mean you no harm,” he apologized frankly. Kieli was a little startled at that, but she quickly refocused and cordoned herself off from them again, glaring daggers up at the priest through her lashes. “Truly, um…I’m not going to do anything to you, so please don’t glare at me like that.” He looked discomfited by Kieli’s blatantly hostile attitude before straightening himself with a little cough and executing a neat bow. It was the polished gesture of a capital priest.

“I’m here…I have come here on orders from Father Sigri, the Eleventh Elder on the Council of Elders, as an envoy with full authority in this matter. At Father Sigri’s request, I’m extending an invitation for you to come to the capital.”

“……?”

Blindsided by this totally incomprehensible announcement, Kieli gaped. “…What kind of joke is this, sir?”

“No, I haven’t said anything to laugh at…”

The priest trailed off hesitantly, bewildered at her entirely incredulous answer, but after another cough, he persevered. In slightly uncertain tones, as if he himself were only reciting a speech someone else had given him to memorize: “Well, now…sixteen years ago, Father Sigri’s wife, Setsuri, took their baby, who was about to turn one year old, and disappeared from the capital. You are that lady’s gift to this world, and…well, that makes you Eleventh Elder Father Sigri’s daughter.”

The priest stopped talking, looking relieved to have finished with this summary explanation, and watched for Kieli’s next response. Several seconds of blank silence passed.

And then the priest cried a loud “Ack!” as Kieli took him off guard with another escape attempt. Paying him no mind, Kieli ran as fast as she could. “C-catch her!” The Church Soldiers chased after her at the anxious priest’s instruction; while she did manage to get a good distance down the path, in the end it didn’t take them long to subdue her. The priest caught up a while later, panting hard and kicking up the hem of his long coat as he ran.

“Why are you running away?!”

“Let me go! Let! Me! Go!”

With her arms locked in a full nelson by a Church Soldier behind her, Kieli thrashed her legs as hard as she could, aiming to kick over the priest standing in front of her. As he dodged hastily, looking nonplussed, he tried a different tack. “Oh, dear…Ahem, well, I didn’t want to play this card, but…” And, his tone becoming a bit pompous, the priest broached a new subject.

Specifically, that of a person Kieli wouldn’t have expected in a million years to hear about from him.

“We have an acquaintance of yours in our custody…Does the phrase “Witch of Toulouse” ring any bells? She’s safe for the moment, but her treatment in the future will depend on you. So I’m asking you, please, listen to—”

“Beatrix!” Kieli cried, almost screamed, in fact, cutting off whatever the priest had been about to say.

After the reflexive shout, she was too astonished to speak. The blond woman’s face the last time they’d talked at that bar on the parish border sprang up in the back of her mind. Kieli’d told her off for keeping Harvey’s letter a secret, and she’d gotten this expression that was sort of sulky yet ashamed at the same time, and then started smoking there at the counter as if she didn’t know what else to do with herself, and then a customer had come into the bar and the moment to start up the conversation again had never come.

Kieli’d worried. She’d worried for so long. There were things she had to apologize for when they saw each other again, but she was sure Beatrix would tell her she was an idiot for worrying about them and forgive her right away, and once they made up they could talk so much more than they used to, and go clothes shopping together, and all kinds of things. That’s what she’d thought.

And she’s been in the capital this whole time…?

A seething rage boiled up within her and erupted.

“Did you do something to Beatrix?! If you did, I’ll never forgive you!”

“I-I told you, we haven’t done anything!” The priest, who’d shied back when Kieli interrupted him and had stood stiff ever since, hastened to explain further. “She’s just fine, I promise. So listen to what I—”

“Why should I believe you?! You say all this stuff that makes no sense, and you bring my mother’s name into your lies! Just who does this ‘Sigri’ jerk think he is, anyway?! I’ve had enough!” Kieli screamed hysterically, fighting back with everything she had. When the soldier behind her flinched back, she took advantage of the opportunity to shake free and try to make a break for it, but they caught her and overpowered her again in no time.

“Augghh!”

A husky scream, and then the soldier gripping Kieli’s arm bent backward, holding his face in his hand. She whirled around, stumbling with how suddenly she’d been released, to see a jet-black beast with one bird’s leg and one grotesquely twisted protruding wing landing between her and the soldiers, protecting her.

“Mane!”

The beast glanced back to her when she called his name and nodded pointedly to reassure her everything was fine. When she got a good look at him, her momentary relief was gone in a flash: his left eyehole, the one where a dark brown eye should have been, was pitifully crushed in.

“What happened to you…?!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mane answered easily, giving a glance at the enemy with his remaining amber eye. The platoon was daunted by the strange beast’s appearance, but they resumed their formation and readied their rifles. Mane didn’t give them a chance to fire. He closed the distance between them with one powerful leap, getting right into the heart of their camp and beginning to bite one soldier after another.

For several moments Kieli was too stunned to do anything but watch the uproar begin, but then she jerked back to her senses with a start. “No killing, Mane!”

He paused for only an instant at her voice, and in that instant there was the bang of a bullet slamming through the air—the bizarrely shaped wing seemed to leap into the air, broken right at the base, and his black body staggered, equally black bodily fluids pouring from it. However, he planted his feet and kept himself upright, immediately hurling himself at the soldier who’d fired, mauling him with his forelegs and knocking him to the ground.

“Mane…!”

“Get uphill!” he snapped. So Kieli wrenched herself away, turning on her heel to find a single soldier standing in her path up the slope.

She somehow managed to duck underneath the gloved hand reaching out for her, but she couldn’t hold enough of her balance to stand back up again, and she ended up landing on her butt on the ground. Just as she thought she wouldn’t be able to evade the soldier again, he suddenly stopped moving.

Holding her body stiff, Kieli looked up with her eyes to see a tall, thin redhead standing behind the soldier. He was holding the soldier by the throat with one hand and squeezing. Long, bony fingers bit deep into the struggling soldier’s throat as he gasped tiny, thready noises, and she heard an uncanny creaking—from the bones in the soldier’s neck, and, she suspected, from the ones in his throttler’s arm, too.

“Harvey, wait…”

As Kieli called out for him to stop, right before her eyes, a bullet grazed Harvey’s arm with the sharp sound of a gunshot—his lower arm—and tore off a chunk of his skin. Kieli gave a raspy shriek, frozen to the spot.

Harvey casually dropped the soldier, who was beginning to foam at the mouth, and rolled his eyes slowly toward the man who’d fired the shot. After first glancing down at the blood dribbling freely from his arm and tilting his head almost questioningly—

“—!”

With a battle cry that Kieli could hardly even hear, he suddenly leapt at the shooter with no warning movement whatsoever, closing the distance between them and seizing the barrel of the soldier’s gun faster than her eyes could follow. Never mind Kieli; it all happened so quickly that the now weaponless soldier himself was equally dumbfounded, and before he could recover, Harvey had shifted to an underhand grip and felled him with a blow to the jaw from below.

The black-robed priest who’d been standing behind him collapsed nervelessly to the ground, blabbering. Harvey just thrust the mouth of the rifle against the priest’s head, supporting its whole weight with just his left arm, and put his finger on the trigger. There wasn’t any conspicuous hesitation in his coppery right eye—or in his inky brown left eye, either. “Harvey, wait, stop…!” Something was wrong; there was too little uncertainty in his actions. I think he’s kind of snapped a little.

And then Harvey abruptly swung the barrel straight out to the side. There was a dull metallic impact—the man who’d been on the verge of stepping in managed to raise the hilt of his saber just in time block the attack. Upon which they both immediately jumped a step backward and faced off from that distance.

The soldier who’d inserted himself between Harvey and the priest as a shield wasn’t like the ordinary Church Soldiers; he was a man in the prime of life wearing a highly decorated white greatcoat. Kieli realized right away that he was the officer who’d come to the radio tower.

“Oho…” Squaring off against an opponent with some skill, Harvey let out a surprised noise that also sounded fairly amused. The officer, on the other hand, looked tenser. He licked his lips lightly, and then resolutely, though with a surprisingly mild attitude, set about the task of talking Harvey down.

“We apologize for our bad form. We don’t want to fight you. We’d like you to listen to what—”

Without waiting for the man to finish, Harvey gripped the rifle like a saber and lunged at him. Kieli wouldn’t be able to stop him in time—

“Will you just cut that out, you damn fool?!”

As the bellow rang out, the air in front of Kieli’s chest swelled up, and a shock wave gushed forth that hit the rifle Harvey was about to mow down his rival with dead center and smashed it in half. Harvey was blasted backward along with the broken rifle, rolling downhill in a backward somersault. Knocked off her feet herself by the recoil, Kieli looked down at her chest with her mouth hanging dumbly open.

“C-Corporal…?”

Dark green bits of static spewed noisily from the speaker of the radio around her neck, and an image started to form in midair. The face floating within it diffused and laboriously reformed several times as it opened its mouth and spoke. The low voice coming from the speaker in time with its movements was distorted, filled with awful static, but it still had an intimidating air.

“Very well, then…let’s hear what you have to say.”

Thus addressed by a strange, unknown body of noise, the officer widened his eyes. He was still holding up his saber to parry the blow. Behind him, the priest was sitting on his rear, white as a sheet. The other soldiers that Mane had been attacking stopped moving too, stunned, and all the uproar abruptly died down into silence. A few men here and there did panic and run, but their cries sounded feeble and far away.

“Herbie,” the body of noise whispered to the youth behind him, all the while keeping the men around them in check with the force of his glower.

That pet name Kieli hadn’t heard in so long, the one that as far as she knew only one person in this world used; that mis-pronounced pet name, and that rough but warm tone.

“Calm down, Herbie. What the hell do you think you’re doing, for God’s sake?”

“But—” Harvey was just sitting there where he’d landed with a poleaxed expression on his face, but now he opened his mouth and started to make some kind of excuse for a moment before closing it again, seeming to forget how to speak. Then something in his face shifted, and he looked as though he were about to cry. To Kieli, it looked like the face of a little boy who’d just been scolded by his father.

She thought he reminded her of someone. He was a really high-ranking officer in the Capital Security Forces, and yet he didn’t come off as so high and mighty. He seemed trustworthy. Could he be…? Maybe she should’ve asked him if he had a son, but she missed the right moment to do it, and then he was boarding his truck and leaving.

They stood on a rock ledge about halfway up the slope of the fault, watching the men at the armored trucks on standby down in the foothills collect the injured. Mane was lying on a rock a little ways down from them, keeping a sharp eye on the scene below him, at once watchful and menacing. Before long, the line of trucks began to withdraw, leaving behind only a circle of smaller trucks hanging back at a distance for observation. Leaving a surveillance team to watch them had been the one condition they wouldn’t budge on, and Harvey had accepted it without argument.

They’d heard the priest who called himself the “envoy of the Eleventh Elder on the Council of Elders” state his business again from the beginning, and after a considering expression, Harvey had answered fairly readily. “We’ll accept your invitation.” Kieli felt lost. She couldn’t figure out what he was really thinking.

Harvey fixed his eyes not on the priest envoy, but on the Capital Security Forces officer who claimed to have brought his men to serve as their escort at the Father’s personal request, as he continued. His attitude was unruffled.

“But we’re not interested in being hauled in like criminals. We’ll get there on our own steam. Kieli’s being invited there as an honored guest, you said. Is that how you people treat your guests? You take them prisoner and force them to come with you?”

It was a valid point, and moreover, thanks to Mane’s mauling spree, half of the escort platoon was currently nonfunctional; even if what he’d said had been pretty absurd, their side was in control here anyway. Not to mention the sheer nature of the group who’d placed themselves around Kieli as a barricade. To start with, the one-eyed black beast curled up on the ground at her feet glaring intimidatingly—who periodically terrorized the soldiers by opening his mouth wide from ear to ear to display his bright red tongue and sawlike teeth. And particles of noise gathered around the radio in her arms to form the face of a soldier’s ghost opening its mouth to growl at them before dissolving and then starting the whole process over again. And last but not least, there was the half-copper-eyed, half-dark-brown-eyed, one-armed Undying…He was standing at Kieli’s side looking unconcerned, but every now and then he’d glance over at the circle of lower-level soldiers as though some thought had struck him, and whichever one his eyes happened to meet would gasp in terror and back away.

As for Kieli, the key figure in their conversation, her legs were trembling so hard she thought they might crumple beneath her any moment, but she drew reassurance and courage from everyone protecting her and managed to hold her ground.

“I’m afraid that, er, won’t do. We’ll need her to come with us…” the priest had persisted through his own obvious fear. But then the officer leading their escort force had taken over the negotiations and accepted Harvey’s terms on the condition that a small unit stay behind with them to keep watch (“escort” though he might be, he was clearly higher-ranking than the young priest).

We’ll get there on our own steam—hearing Harvey say that so casually made Kieli happy, but more than that it made her scared. There was no way Harvey could possibly think that an Undying going to the capital would get by there without incident. And yet nonetheless, he intended to go there with her, as if it was just a given that he come.

The Council’s Eleventh Elder’s…daughter?

As if she could believe something like that all of a sudden. Since the priest had specifically brought up her mother’s name, it seemed as though they weren’t just completely mistaking her for someone else, but that only made it harder to figure out what they were after. Doubt and unease and confusion just swirled around and around inside her.

Keeping watch over the procession of trucks receding into the distance out of her peripheral vision, Kieli darted a glance behind her and to the side. Harvey was sitting on a ledge a level above her (it was plain that he was sitting because standing was too painful), inspecting the radio. It was lecturing him about something or other as he fiddled with its tuning knob and grumbled back with a sullen pout. At one point she heard him saying, “Shut up; you let me do all the work and then just stole the limelight.”

The armored station assistant’s repairs had been almost finished. Evidently when Kieli’d fallen on top of him, the last connection had been knocked into place, and the radio had started working again.

The Corporal coming back to them was the one thing, the one real, true saving grace of all of this.

Noticing her gaze, Harvey turned his face toward her. The moment their eyes met, he grinned and said, “Hey, you. What’s with that face?” Embarrassed, Kieli turned away. Was she really making such a weird face? Lately seeing Harvey’s smile made her chest hurt for some reason, and it was hard to look at it. She’d always liked it when he smiled at her before…

“I was always planning to go to the capital sooner or later anyway, so if they’re not going to get in my way, that suits me fine. And if they really are holding Beatrix there, I have to go.”

“I…think it’s some kind of trap.”

“What kind of trap?”

“Well, I’m not sure, but…”

Kieli looked down, faltering. She didn’t have any grounds for thinking it; she just did. After a short pause, she heard a rustle of fabric coming from the rock ledge above, and then she felt a faint warmth of body heat over her shoulder. When she looked back just briefly, Harvey was crouching close over her shoulder, peering at her.

“But you know, if what they said was true, it would mean you’ve still got relatives.”

“I don’t want any,” she answered curtly, turning her head away again with a huff.

“…Hey, Kieli,” a quiet voice reasoned in her ear. “You don’t have to overthink this. You might have a father there. Just meet him and see what he’s like.”

“I don’t want to meet him.”

A father in the capital? Even if that was actually true, it didn’t make her one bit happy. Just the idea that she might be related to someone in the Church actually gave her chills. To think that she was on the side of the people who’d made Harvey, and Beatrix, and all the other Undyings suffer for so long…

She hadn’t wanted to learn that, not now. It would’ve been enough for her just not to lose what she already had. There wasn’t anything else she’d wanted beyond what she already had—she’d never wanted to know something like that, something that was only good for upsetting her.

“Kieli.”

When she stared at the ground and stayed quiet, he tugged lightly at her hair. Reluctantly, she tilted her face up to look at him, not bothering to hide the scowl. When they were squatting on the rock ledge like this, Harvey’s eye level was actually a bit lower than Kieli’s even without her completely raising her head, and he looked up into her face at an angle. His inky dark brown left eye looked strangely at home against the inflamed skin of his cheek; if anything, the fact that it didn’t seem out of place to her made it more distressing to look at, making her feel conflicted.

“I hope it’s true. ’Cause I’ve always wanted to help you meet a living, breathing parent. So let’s go find out. The Corporal and I will both come with you. Okay?”

“……”

Kieli couldn’t find any response to make, and she hung her head again, unable to meet his eyes any longer. When her eyes turned downward, Harvey’s hand tugging at the hair hanging off her shoulder entered her line of sight. Joints even more prominent than before made it look all the more slender, and it was such a wreck, and yet this hand kept on trying to protect Kieli as it always had…Why did God treat him so unkindly, and rip away a little more of his life like this every time something happened? Kieli was the one who deserved to be punished, so why couldn’t Kieli take his place?

Harvey’d always been planning to go to the capital sooner or later, even if this hadn’t happened. And if that were the case—if Harvey would take her with him, and not abandon her yet, mess though she was, to Kieli that all by itself was enough reason to accept the invitation from the capital. More than enough, if it would let them stay together a little longer. Because Kieli wanted to protect Harvey just as he always tried to protect her.

Because she might not know what to do just yet…but in the end, rather than running away from the thought of hurting what was in front of her, she wanted to become strong enough to protect it.

Softly, she laid her own hand over the long fingers threading through her hair. After a short hesitation at the feeling of those bony knuckles, she wrapped her hand around his pointer finger, and nodded. It gripped back lightly, as if to nod back. For as much as she felt heartened, she also thought she could see the end of the fragile thread binding them together, the one that had almost slipped off, that could snap any moment, but she squeezed Harvey’s finger tightly as if to hold on to it.

All along she’d been thinking, Will we still be journeying together when we leave this gorge? What if we all end up going our separate ways there? What if our final destinations are different?

But for now, at least, their journeys still all led in the same direction.

I don’t want to cut this thread yet. I want to protect him.

So let’s go to the capital—.