CHAPTER 1

A MOMENT OF SILENCE AT THE CHOCOLATE BAR GRAVES

Starting from the beginning of her journey when she was fourteen and counting up until today, how much time had she spent like this, riding on a train? It definitely hadn’t all been fun and games, but she’d never once wanted to turn around and go back. For Kieli, at least, so many important conversations had taken place in four-person sets of seats just like this one, even if maybe there hadn’t been very many in terms of numbers. Most of the people who’d sat with her here weren’t great conversationalists, so the chats hadn’t always been lively, and sometimes they’d had fights, too. But all of it, everything, even the sometimes awkward atmosphere—this small box-shaped space had contained everything she loved.

That had always been true, from the very beginning, and it was still true today. There’d never been a single thing here that she didn’t want to keep.

…But still.

However. Nonetheless. Be that as it may.

The stiff, uncomfortable atmosphere here today easily broke all their previous records.

Sitting in her usual spot on the aisle side of their set of facing seats with both fists placed stiffly on her lap and her head hanging slightly, Kieli was currently glaring up through her bangs at the seat directly across from her. She could tell even without a mirror that her frown was making creases between her eyebrows.

Why did this person always sit right across from her?

Although that seat had almost always been empty in her journeys thus far, today it held a passenger. He was wearing the same sort of long, jet-black priest’s robes as when he’d first appeared before her. Right now, those eyes the same deep slate color as the night sky gleamed bright gray in the sunlight coming through the window. He sat there looking happy as you please, apparently completely unfazed by Kieli’s scowl.

I’m a replacement envoy from the capital. Pleased to meet you, he’d greeted them when he came with a replacement watchman. That was yesterday. His thin, too-forgettable smile had blended in so perfectly with his featureless priest’s robes that for a second Kieli didn’t realize who he was and very nearly accepted him into the group without a fuss.

“Can I help you with anything, miss?” he asked with feigned innocence, calmly letting her openly suspicious glare wash over him. Kieli made her scowl even fiercer and darted an uncomfortable glance at the seat next to the (fake) priest’s, the one diagonally across from her.

The copper-haired man there was smoking a cigarette with his tall, wiry body pressed up against the windowsill in a position she thought couldn’t possibly be comfortable. The two men with almost identical slim but tall builds looked so impressively claustrophobic sitting next to each other that she could practically see a wall in front of her penning them in. The seats on this miners’ train were already more cramped than a normal passenger car’s anyway, and on top of that was their biggest problem: These two hated each other so much that they might seriously start trying to kill each other rather than let their shoulders touch even the slightest bit.

Harvey was turned away from the other man’s seat, grinding the end of his cigarette between his teeth and apparently doing his best to calmly ignore him, but his left eye had been twitching for a while now. The blood vessel there looked about to burst at any moment. The small radio in front of him on the windowsill was spewing a continuous stream of menacing static.

“Boy, was I ever surprised. Who would’ve thought that you, Miss Kieli, would be Lord Sigri’s honored daughter?”

In his (fake) priest’s clothes, Joachim was the only person in the train car who was all smiles, seemingly unruffled by the totally unwelcoming attitudes of everyone else around him.

“Stop calling me that. Stop saying…‘miss’ and ‘daughter.’”

“Hmm? Why?”

“We don’t know for sure if it’s true yet,” Kieli growled in a low voice. Joachim blinked, looking surprised, and then burst out laughing. His guffaws sounded blatantly mocking. Kieli, indignant, glowered even more.

“What, that’s all? He thinks it is, right? So who cares either way? All you have to do is gladly take on the name. You’ll get great status, you know. Hey, that’s an idea: Maybe I’ll try to marry up. How old are you right now, Kieli?”

“…Huh?”

By rights, she should have ignored the question. But she’d reacted before she could help it. Now she glanced hesitantly over, not at the questioner, but at the man in the seat diagonally across from her and murmured, “Seventeen…as of today.”

“Today?”

It was Joachim who replied; Harvey continued to look the other way with his chin propped on his hand and his elbow against the windowsill, pretending he couldn’t hear them. Kieli could tell he’d blinked at that, though. She nodded slightly, still watching Harvey’s profile.

Spring came to the northern end of the continent much later than it did in South-hairo, but according to the calendar, at least, this was the last day the winter winds would blow—the day Kieli’s grandmother had decided on for Kieli’s birthday.

“Seventeen, huh? You’ve really grown up…Okay, seventeen is no problem for me.”

“P-problem?”

Joachim beamed as he spoke words she didn’t really understand, standing up and coming over to the window seat next to Kieli, so by the time she’d stammered out her response, she was being crowded toward the aisle and he was knocking knees with Harvey as he sat down (was the weird creaking sound she heard coming from somewhere around Harvey’s temple just her imagination?). Kieli held herself stiff. Joachim propped one elbow against the seat back above her head and started drawing closer to her.

“Hey! Get away from Kieli, you bastard!” called the radio as though its patience had run out.

Ping!

This time she definitely heard something snap. Harvey abruptly stood up from his seat. As Kieli and Joachim both stopped moving to look at him, he stepped over their legs with long strides (Kieli couldn’t really see, but she was pretty sure he kicked one of Joachim’s legs along the way) and kept walking right out into the aisle without saying a word. From where Kieli sat, her view of the rear of the car was blocked by her seat back, but she could hear a commotion—there were shouts like Hey, what the hell, cut that out, give it back!—and then not a moment later Harvey marched right back to them, dragging a Church Soldier whose arms were wrapped around his waist along behind him.

A naked saber dangled from his left hand.

Both eyes—copper on the left, dark brown on the right—looked strangely glazed, and a dark, ominous light gleamed in their depths.

“Wait, Ephraim—hey, that’s dangerous!”

“Eep!”

Kieli and Joachim slid down their seat backs and ducked fast. The blade of the saber plunged into the seat with a shrill whacking sound at exactly the spot Joachim’s head had been a split second ago.

“Hey, whoa, calm down!”

“It looks like we’d better give your head some ventilation holes so your moldy brain can get some fresh air.”

“Yeah! Do it, Herbie. Do it!”

“Stop it—both of you—You’re joining in, too, Corporal?!”

Harvey tried to drill the point of the saber right into Joachim’s skull; Joachim grabbed the naked blade with his bare hands and pushed it back toward him; and the radio irresponsibly egged them on in their closely matched contest of strength. The Church Soldier Harvey’d dragged over just milled around in confusion. He looked pale. Just as the commotion started to get too far out of hand for Kieli to do anything about it by herself, a low, forceful voice shouted angrily, “Everybody, pipe down!”

All of them instantly stopped moving.

A short but muscular old man in sooty work overalls was standing in the aisle, brandishing a long-handled shovel in one hand. Even Harvey and Joachim shrank back a little, frozen where they’d been grappling on top of the seat, and looked at him.

“Didn’t I tell you little snots I’d kick you off my train if you caused trouble?!”

The shout was aimed at the civilians, priest, and soldiers alike, and none of them could talk back to it. After they’d cringed in silence for a while, the old man snorted and plodded back out into the aisle.

His angular form disappeared into the locomotive in front of their car, carrying his shovel over one shoulder. After the connecting door slammed closed with a bang, the tension in the air finally slackened, and they all took a relieved breath. Maybe some of Harvey’s animosity had faded, too; he shoved Joachim away and stood up, then thrust the saber back into the soldier’s hands. The soldier sheathed it with a look of mixed fear and relief.

He didn’t notice…

Kieli stopped clinging to the seat back in an unnatural position and thumped weakly back down again. She’d thrown her body in front of the slash in the seat to hide it the moment the engineer had appeared. She had no doubt that if he’d seen it, he would have picked them up and tossed them out the window without a second’s hesitation.

Joachim, who had shrewdly resumed residence in the seat next to Kieli, shrugged and sighed. “That’s one scary old guy. Did we do something to upset him?”

“Don’t say ‘we,’” Harvey instantly objected. The words Don’t you dare even think about lumping me in the same group as you were written all over his face. Joachim blithely ignored the harsh rebuke and said, “So, Kieli, what do you want?”

“Huh?”

“I’m asking what you want. It’s your birthday, right?”

Taken off guard, Kieli only blinked in confusion. Joachim sat there waiting for her answer with a smile on his face that any onlooker would have taken for good-natured. Frozen, she gaped at him for a little while before snapping back to herself with a start and making herself frown again.

“I-I don’t want anything.”

“Come on, no need to be shy. Not in our relationship.” Kieli didn’t know what this supposed “relationship” was or when they’d supposedly developed it, but he was already continuing. “Okay, then, I’ll give you chocolate for now.”

He started pulling chocolates out of the pockets of his priest’s robes (though she couldn’t think why he would keep something like that on hand), at which point Harvey grabbed his collar and growled, “You. Come with me.”

“Eh? What’s your problem? Don’t butt into the fun conversation me and Miss Kieli are having here.” Joachim was still holding a chocolate bar out to Kieli as he was dragged away by the scruff of his neck. The two of them vanished through the rear door of the car, leaving Kieli behind, alone. She looked at the radio by the window, unsure what to do.

“It’s just one of those ‘we’ll settle this man-to-man’ things,” it said irresponsibly.

They were traveling on the mountain railway that snaked along the base of the northern mountain range, connecting the northwestern mining district to the capital. It was a line that normal travelers hardly ever used, so Kieli and the others were getting a ride on a freight train transporting fossil resources. The train had its locomotive in the front, followed by two passenger cars with seats much plainer than a normal passenger train’s, which they’d been told were for transporting workers to and from the mine shafts. All the other cars were freight cars. She didn’t think they’d done anything to make the train’s elderly engineer angry (or at least, Kieli hadn’t), but at any rate, he was a scary man who acted extremely hostile toward them.

There weren’t any workers on board today, and they had both passenger cars all to themselves. Kieli’s group (mostly Harvey, really) had effortlessly taken control of the first one and set up camp there. The observing soldiers were standing by in the second car. There were four observers; they rotated one at a time standing in front of the first car’s rear connecting door and paying close attention to Kieli and the others so that, for what it was worth, they never took their eyes off of them.

And then there was one more person. The man who was sharing their set of facing seats as if it was the most natural thing in the world (although she didn’t recall anyone ever inviting him) was dressed in priest’s robes and claimed to have come as a replacement for their original envoy, who’d already returned to the capital. She didn’t know if that was true or false—probably false, really.

I wonder if it’s okay to leave those two alone…What if they’re having another scuffle? Kieli glanced uneasily at the connecting door Harvey and Joachim had disappeared through. Her eyes met those of their assigned watchman, who was sitting in the set of seats next to the connecting door (he was the young Church Soldier Harvey had stolen the saber from), but he looked away as if she frightened him.

Well, it was only natural they were giving her a wide berth…that was the position she was in right now.

People were saying that somebody called “Father Sigri,” Eleventh Elder on the Council, which was the highest organ of Church authority, was Kieli’s father. And so the capital had used the (reportedly) captured Beatrix as bait to invite them for a visit. Well, it was less like they were “invited” and more as though they’d almost been hauled in like criminals. In the end, they’d won the promise of freedom on their way to the capital through what you could call a counterthreat, and now they were headed there on their own steam, even if they did have surveillance assigned to them. Kieli thought a lot was probably going on inside Harvey’s head, but whatever it might be, on the surface he didn’t seem in any particular hurry. So far he’d chosen a relatively laid-back itinerary. Still, there weren’t any places they could really go sightseeing in; they just stopped by some desolate mining towns. Not to mention that wherever they went, the Church Soldiers on watch came along with them.

Evidently, once Harvey’d decided not to be bothered about their observers, they truly didn’t bother him. He did things at whatever pace he pleased, just as he always had, and he was keeping the soldiers anxious and unnecessarily busy. Once or twice he even played around by deliberately pretending to give them the slip just to make them sweat. While he always had a nonchalant look on his face when he teased them like that, he still somehow gave Kieli the impression that he was having fun.

As if he were carving into his memory each day of this journey that might be their last one.

“Unexploded bomb?”

“Yep. From what I hear, a huge unexploded bomb got unearthed over in Westerbury and taken to the capital’s energy tower.” Leaning against the guardrail of the deck, Joachim lifted one corner of his mouth to direct a thin smile his way. “Thanks to that, things have gotten a little interesting in the capital these days.”

An unexploded bomb unearthed over in Westerbury…Harvey could safely assume it was the same unexploded bomb he’d been told was sleeping beneath that park in South Westerbury. If a strong magnetic field like the one that’d enveloped that park and galvanized spiritual phenomena there had been transported right into the capital, the mechanical city was probably seeing some kind of spiritual effect even stronger than Westerbury had. That had always been a region haunted by lots of ghosts—the city had been built on top of an old burial ground for prisoners from back in the era when this was an exile planet. It was possible that the replica Undyings quarantined in that lab were being affected by the magnetic field, too.

“So, there you go. Consider that intel a freebie from me,” Joachim said with a tooth-baring grin. Harvey leaned on the opposite guardrail, directly facing him, and narrowed his eyes at him as he lit a cigarette.

“And? What are you really after?”

“Whatever are you talking about? I’m purely interested in growing closer to Miss Kieli.”

“Liar. You want to mess around with her because she’s mine, that’s all.”

“My, my, aren’t we just casually full of ourselves?”

Harvey couldn’t quite make a comeback to that one. He grunted in annoyance and broke eye contact, turning away and puffing on his cigarette.

The air between them was decidedly unfriendly, but the ash-gray smoke swept away by wind and the loud rumbling of the wheels filled it up nicely. The single train track clung to the narrow rock ledge along the slopes of the mountain. From the open deck, they had a direct view of the outdoor scenery—which consisted of a slanting rock face on the mountain side and a sheer precipice on the valley side. If this happened to turn into a brawl, one (or both) of them could easily go tumbling down.

“…Is all this talk about Kieli being that Sigri guy’s daughter true?”

“From what information I have, this much is true: Father Sigri did send an envoy to go pick up his estranged daughter. I mean, I used that to get myself here, after all,” Joachim said in a strangely bragging way. Harvey didn’t know what about that he was proud of. Silence fell for a breath, and the smoke he blew out was carried away behind them on the clamor of the train’s wheels. Staring hard at the smirking man across from him, Harvey lowered his tone a little and said, “Joachim, is your plan for Father Sigri what I—”

The ill-fitting connecting door rattled and shook. Then it opened a little and Kieli peeked out with the radio around her neck, so Harvey cut off the conversation there. Shrinking a little under the gaze of the two taller men, Kieli said, “Oh, I was just worried that you might be fighting…”

“Fighting? Nonsense. Surely good friends like us would never fight. Right, Ephraim?”

The not-even-remotely serious words combined with the exaggerated wink he sent Harvey’s way sent chills up Harvey’s spine. “Who’s good friends here?” He kicked at the other man with his foot to herd him toward the door. “Get out of here.”

“You’re the one who dragged me here in the first place.” Joachim shrugged irritably and started to walk back into the car. As he passed Kieli, who’d plastered herself against the side of the doorway to avoid him, he said, “Here. You can have this,” and pressed a chocolate bar into her hand (brilliantly casually, too; he didn’t even give her time to refuse).

“I told you, I don’t want it…!”

“Oh, don’t be like that. Just take it.”

She tried to shove it back into Joachim’s hand, but it was already gone, and her own hand holding the chocolate bar found nothing but air.

“After all, I’m sure that oaf there didn’t get you anything.”

“Shut up. Get lost.”

When Joachim disappeared inside with a parting smirk, leaving him alone with Kieli, who was standing stock-still holding the chocolate bar in her hand like she didn’t know what to do with it, the air around them grew strained somehow. Yeah, I didn’t get her anything. Why is he even carrying candy around anyway? It’s not like he eats it himself. He’s got to be stocking it as bait.

“Maybe I should, um, throw this…out…?” Kieli mumbled, casting her gaze here and there around the deck as if she was looking for someplace to toss it, so Harvey said, “Might as well eat it. I doubt even he would’ve poisoned it.”

“Huh…? Uh, right.”

She nodded and looked down at the candy bar she was gripping, but even so she glanced up at him through her lashes. She seemed to be trying to gauge his mood. Harvey sighed and plopped down onto the floor of the deck, leaning back against a pole of the guardrail for a backrest, and motioned with his eyes toward the spot next to him. “How about you sit over here and eat it?” Kieli came over and sat with her arms hugging her knees.

He puffed on his cigarette, keeping Kieli in his peripheral vision while she tentatively tore the wrapper off her candy bar and took a nibble.

So the unexploded bomb in Westerbury…is gone, then.

As he let the corner of his other eye follow the slowly flowing scenery, what he’d heard just a few minutes ago sprang back to his mind. Does that mean the magnetic field sucking in the park ghosts died out, too? If the ghosts trapped by its pull, if the kids at that school have been freed…

One of the things that had nagged at the corner of his mind let go, and a tiny bit more of the weight on his shoulders lifted.

He wondered if he had enough time left to unload all of it.

The candy bar she’d received was about ten centimeters long and wrapped in light-brown oilcloth; when she took a bite, it had just the amount of sweetness that she liked.

It was the day when winter turned into spring. The wind in the northern mountain range was still plenty chilly as it whipped around her coat and hair. Still, since the two of them were sitting close to each other on one side of a deck that wasn’t very wide, she didn’t feel too cold. The lurching of the train beneath her vibrated comfortably against her rear. The guard on duty was keeping a sharp eye on them through the tiny window in the connecting door (he was probably wondering why they were sitting outside in the cold to have a snack, actually). When Kieli saw him, she winced a little, but Harvey didn’t seem bothered.

When she peeked to her right, nibbling the chocolate a little at a time, Harvey was casually smoking with his left elbow pressing slightly against her right arm. His long bangs hid it somewhat, but there was still a faint sore around the dark-brown left eye he’d gotten from Mane that made it look sprinkled with iron rust. In addition to this scar on his face and his missing arm, add his general lack of expression, which could only come off as haughtiness to strangers, along with the blatantly disreputable vibe he exuded, and you got someone who their observers had watched only from a distance so far without actively attempting to converse. Well, other than Joachim, anyway.

While Kieli was still peering at Harvey’s profile, he suddenly turned his head to look at her; so she ended up reflexively leaning back a few centimeters out of nervousness.

“Is that thing good?”

“Huh? Uh, yeah,” she answered without thinking, caught off guard. Harvey turned away again in a huff, looking disgruntled. I-is it bad if it’s good? “Um…it’s not that good,” she amended, and Harvey grunted “Okay” without yet looking back at her. O-okay?

Could that mean…?

Does that mean—does that mean he’s jealous? I don’t know, though.

“Your birthday.”

Kieli was nibbling on her chocolate, gaze lowered because she felt a little flustered, when he blurted those short, curt words.

“Tell me beforehand.”

“Oh—I forgot to mention it at first, and then I just sort of…Sorry.”

“Eh, you don’t have to apologize about it.” Harvey scowled at a random point in the sky and grumbled what sounded like I probably wouldn’t have thought of anything even if you’d told me anyway. Why was Kieli the one getting complaints about her own birthday?

Come to think of it, this was her third birthday since meeting Harvey and the Corporal, but she couldn’t really remember any of them giving her a proper celebration. When she had her fifteenth birthday in the apartment in South-hairo, Harvey forgot about it and stayed out the whole day (though they’d all eaten cake together early the next morning), and on her sixteenth birthday, he…Right, he wasn’t there.

Her seventeenth birthday, this year, was the third.

Her eighteenth birthday, next year, would be the fourth…

The fourth—

Would there be a fourth?

“Is there something you want?”

More short words zinged her way, blurted in a rush, and Kieli looked up from her chocolate. Even though it was cold outside, since she’d been gripping it in both hands while she thought, it had started to melt a little between her fingers. “Mm, not…” Not really, she almost answered, the way she usually did, but then she changed her mind. “Well, your p-promise…”

She’d meant for it to come out casually, but somehow she lost control of her voice.

Harvey turned around again and blinked at her with mismatched eyes. He had a “What are you talking about?” expression that made Kieli’s teeth grind with frustration. She adjusted her legs on the deck so that she was sitting up straight and formal and glared up at him through her eyelashes as she said (although it came out in a mumble), “Your promise—you st-stood me up at the sandbox.”

Harvey looked as if he still couldn’t remember, but then a moment later it seemed to click, and his still-swollen right cheek gave a weird twitch. He drew back a little.

“Gah, you just won’t quit!”

W-won’t quit?! Okay, now she was miffed, and she wasn’t about to back down after that. He had no idea how she felt, mustering up about ten years’ worth of courage to ask him. She leaned forward, crowding in on him the same distance he’d pulled back. “H-how could I forget that?! You promised me, Harvey, and then you weaseled out of it!”

“I don’t remember actually promising you—” Harvey began churlishly, scooting away from her even farther until he bumped the back of his head against the railing of the deck. He was darting his eyes left and right like a suspicious character, but there was nowhere left for him to run.

In the end, he let his head droop, apparently resigning himself. “…Okay, okay.”

He turned to face her, scowling and still just slightly avoiding eye contact.

When they were directly facing each other again, this time it was Kieli’s turn to get flustered, but sitting there rigidly in her formal position, she lowered her gaze a little and held her ground, waiting with her heart pounding.

The fingers holding Harvey’s cigarette brushed her jaw lightly, their faces drew close, and her heart made an audible sound as it leapt in her chest.

“What’s this ‘promise’?” a voice broke in out of the blue from literally right in between them (well, it actually wasn’t out of the blue, considering he’d been hanging around Kieli’s neck the whole time), sending them both simultaneously leaping backward on instinct and causing Harvey to bump his head on the railing again. “Crap, I forgot about you!” he said rudely, rubbing the back of his head. Though truth be told, for a moment there Kieli’d forgotten all about the Corporal, too. But he was so quiet the whole time! Sorry, Corporal…

From the speaker of the radio hanging from Kieli’s neck, the disembodied head of a soldier was suddenly sticking out, made of dark-green noise particles and wearing an expression worthy of the guardian of Hell itself. If someone who didn’t know them saw it, they were guaranteed to scream and pass out.

“…What’s this ‘promise’?” the Corporal repeated in a staticky voice that was so low it seemed to crawl along the ground.

“It’s nothing!” Harvey answered in a nervous almost-screech.

The noise-filled ghost only intensified his glare, though, and asked a third time, “What’s this ‘promise’?”

“You’re doing this to me on purpose, aren’t you?!” Harvey wailed, reaching for the power button, and with one last “Ah—” from Kieli and the radio both, the ghost’s face went jagged and then fizzled out, like turning off a video feed.

“Uh-oh. He’s gonna yell at you later…”

Sighing at the thought of what would happen when they turned him back on, Kieli let her shoulders slump in disappointment. So they’d gotten interrupted in the end. The sort of broken, uncomfortable air between them didn’t blow away on the wind, either; it just stagnated between them. She gazed down at her own knees, trembling slightly in time to the vibrations of the train, and then thought, Oh, but, maybe…

If Harvey went to the trouble of turning off the radio, does that mean…?

But when she shot him what all the books called “a hopeful gaze” out of the corner of her eye, he conspicuously avoided it and said, “Oh, I forgot, I hate chocolate.”

Talk about a dirty way of chickening out. “What?!” cried Kieli, whose entire mouth tasted like chocolate. She felt as if someone had whacked her upside the head with a brick. He was the one who’d told her “Might as well eat it,” and now he was using that as an excuse to dodge her with! That’s playing dirty! I-is that how much he hates the idea?

In the end he’d weaseled out of it again…She was seventeen now, and she personally thought she’d grown up a lot getting from fourteen to seventeen—but was seventeen still just a kid in Harvey’s mind?

In which case, would this be okay next year? But—she didn’t even know if there would be a next year.

“…Nothing.”

A few tears she couldn’t hold in escaped along with the whisper, sliding in a wet trail down one cheek and into the corner of her mouth. A salty taste slid into her chocolate-flavored mouth and everything became slightly bittersweet.

“Kieli? Hey…”

Harvey leaned in to peer at her, looking startled. Kieli scrubbed the tears away roughly with the back of the hand holding the chocolate bar and turned her face away. She told herself she couldn’t cry over a little thing like this and make Harvey worry, but a hiccup-like sob caught in her throat all the same. I take it back. Seventeen isn’t an adult at all.

“…There’s nothing I want. I don’t want anything. I don’t care about that promise. I don’t need anything…”

Please, please, if there’s anyone on this planet with the power to perform miracles, let us all be able to be together next year, and the year after that, and all the years after that one, too.

…I know. I’m not stupid. I know I said I didn’t want anything, and now I’m wishing for the most unrealistic, hardest thing I ever could. I must be way more of a selfish crybaby now than I was back when I really didn’t have anything.

“Kieli,” said a quiet voice overhead. A low, scratchy voice that blended comfortably in with the sounds of the train. “Hey, after we’ve taken care of our business in the capital…you know that house by the Easterbury transfer station, where Tadai lived? It’s pretty run-down right now, but I think I want to fix it up and live there.”

Kieli’d been keeping her eyes on the ground, but Harvey’s proposal was so totally unexpected that she lifted her head a little before she’d thought about it. She wiped her tearstained face and looked up at Harvey’s profile. He kept his face turned toward the scenery flowing by them, just darting a glance at her out of the corner of his eye and tilting his head slightly.

“What do you think?”

Kieli’s eyes widened at the question. “I…I think it’s a good idea. Really good.”

“I know, right? And at the transfer station the Corporal’s grave would be nearby, too,” Harvey said, facing the radio on Kieli’s lap and smiling just the littlest bit softly.

Southbound along the abandoned tracks from that transfer station was a cluster of graves where the Corporal and lots of other fallen soldiers slept. Harvey’d promised to take the Corporal’s radio there when it broke for good someday…but if they lived at the transfer station, they could still visit his grave sometimes. They could probably even bring a packed lunch and a new radio with them, and Kieli could play the rock music the Corporal liked for him while she had a picnic lunch and reported all the latest goings-on. Of course, it would make her happiest of all if the radio never broke down at all.

But…

Even though she wished for it with all her heart, she couldn’t imagine that such a peaceful, happy future was really possible. She doubted Harvey believed it either, so why was he saying these things to her now? He’d never once talked about plans for the future before. It struck her that he was talking about an ideal life like that now only because he didn’t believe it would really happen, and she felt uneasy instead of relieved. She felt as though Harvey’s presence was growing faraway and faint, somehow.

“Okay, then, let’s take care of all our business first. You and I both have things to do. Right?”

Unable to just say yes to that smiling “Right?” Kieli dropped her gaze evasively. She stared meaninglessly down at her half-eaten bar of chocolate. What she had to do…she had to meet this person who might be her father and find out the truth, and she had to save Beatrix. It was true that she didn’t have time to be worrying about what’d happen after that right now.

“Kieli,” Harvey insisted, reaching out his hand at the same time and pressing at her head as if to say Come on, agree already! Left with no choice, she nodded, and as she did, the scent of tobacco smoke that should be right next to her seemed somehow far away (though of course it wasn’t), and she got the feeling if she turned to look, there might not be anyone there at all, so she couldn’t raise her head.

Choo…

The sound of the whistle hung heavily in the air above the tracks behind them long after it stopped. These tracks might fall straight down into a pit before they reach that peaceful future…Kieli forcibly bent her thoughts away from the negative direction they seemed determined to go in.

It’s okay. This smoky smell and the touch of this hand aren’t all in my head. Harvey is right here next to me.

A little while later, after a (not exactly) peaceful lull where they didn’t talk about anything in particular, the train suddenly began to slow down. Kieli, back in the passenger car, pressed her face against the window and squinted at the track ahead. Soon a weather-beaten platform built by cutting away part of the rock slope came into view. They slid up alongside it and stopped with a sudden jerk, inertia yanking them forward.

It was a bare-bones station with only the absolute minimum it required to be functional, as though it had been built to be temporary. All it had was a ramshackle station house and a platform surrounded by a simple picket fence; there wasn’t even anything resembling a ticket gate. There wasn’t anything near the station, either. She could see only a narrow path with rock faces on both sides stretching up the mountain from one side of the station house. Still, considering that they’d stopped at this station, she would have thought there’d be people waiting here to get on (since the only passengers on board were her group and the soldiers keeping watch, obviously nobody was going to get off), but there wasn’t a soul in sight on the deserted platform.

Then she did a double take.

Kieli’d been gazing quizzically outside from the empty seat next to her own; now she put both hands against the windowpane and opened her eyes wide.

There were all kinds of people streaming out of the train and onto the platform from the movable steps on either side of the passenger cars. Of course there hadn’t been any other passengers on this train aside from Kieli’s own group, she was sure, and a big group like that could never possibly have fit into two train cars in the first place. That was how many people there were. Most of them wore dusty work clothes. Here and there she could see some shouldering tools like pickaxes and shovels, too.

A line of people hazy enough to blend right into the scenery, and long, so long it seemed to stretch into infinity as they proceeded down the platform and up the mountain path, where one by one they slowly disappeared. The only one staring wide-eyed out the window at them was Kieli. Harvey and Joachim didn’t seem to pay any particular attention to them, and it looked as if the Church Soldier on watch duty didn’t see anything there at all.

A line of dead people…?

Around the same time that the line of people crossing the platform started to blink out of sight like a mirage, Kieli spotted the old engineer stepping down out of the locomotive. He was a short man, but his shoulders were broad; he carried a pickax on one of them, and his opposite arm held a bunch of what looked like long sticks. What was he doing…? Even the Church Soldier who hadn’t been able to see the procession of ghosts was watching the engineer’s movements quizzically. The elderly engineer left his bewildered passengers behind (though she felt that he didn’t particularly treat them like passengers anyway), trudging toward the edge of the platform with his usual grumpy air.

“I’m sorry about this, but could I ask you to wait here just a little bit? Until Gramps gets it out of his system,” a man in overalls that matched the engineer’s said, poking his face out of the connecting door at the front of their car and ducking his head apologetically. He was a lot younger than the old engineer; she’d heard he was an apprentice.

When she turned her gaze back to the scene outside, the old man had started hammering with his pickax along the picket fence surrounding the platform.

No, that wasn’t a picket fence—what Kieli had first taken for a fence was a group of countless sticks. Long ones, short ones…they were all different thicknesses and tilting in various different directions, too, but they were stuck in the ground around the outer edge of the platform at just about regular intervals like a row of giant-sized chocolate bars that all sorts of different people had started eating and then left behind a few at a time.

Those are…grave markers. Lots and lots of grave markers.

The elderly engineer jammed one of the sticks he’d brought into the hole he’d dug with his pickax and started erecting a new marker. With his back to the train, all alone, silently like a man possessed by something.

“Looks like there’s a processing station up there…”

Soon enough the tail end of the procession of the ghosts vanished up the path, and Kieli picked up the radio and went out onto the platform. Wind groaned down along the rock slope with an echoing howl as though it was blowing out of a deep cavern. It was a low, sorrowful sound she could easily imagine was the wailing of the dead.

The old man with his back to them was just starting to erect his second grave marker. Kieli cringed a little at that stubborn back. It seemed to wordlessly say Don’t anybody help me.

“He seems to feel better after he’s done about six or seven of them. I’m really sorry; I know you’re in a hurry.”

When Kieli turned around to see who was talking to her, she saw the young man who was apprentice engineer standing there. He wore the same sooty overalls as the old man, but physically he was the opposite: tall and slim. He was giving her a wry, resigned smile as if to say I just don’t know what to do with the old man. Kieli had heard that the two of them, the elderly engineer and this young apprentice engineer, were the freight train’s entire crew. Their attitudes were opposite, too: in stark contrast to the overly hostile old man, the apprentice was strangely humble.

“Is this place…a mine shaft?”

“Well, I think it would be more accurate to say it used to be a mine shaft. It was a new one they started breaking ground on two or three years ago…It’s getting so you can’t extract much from the old ones anymore, you see. But there was a cave-in, and it was shut down.”

“A cave-in…?”

Harvey had drawn close to them by then, his eyes casually roaming around their surroundings. Kieli could sense him moving abruptly away the moment he heard those words. Shooting a sidelong glance at him, Kieli got the rest of the story from the apprentice engineer.

Evidently the old man’s son had been on the development team here as its superintendent, but he’d passed away when the shaft caved in. The mine shaft had begun development with the Church’s funds, but what with the out-of-the-way location and all, they hadn’t carried out a very decent rescue operation, and that rescue operation petered out with a large number of people still unaccounted for. Now, as they could see, the site was abandoned. Every time the train came through this station, the old man stopped for a while to put up a few more grave markers in honor of the people who hadn’t been rescued.

“I see…”

“That’s why he hates people connected with the Church, you know. Please try not to think too badly of him…I mean, I know that’s probably impossible, but try not to bother too much about it. He’s just always in a bad mood. Honestly, the elderly are so stubborn…” The youth scratched his head with a sigh and went back to the locomotive, mumbling to himself about taking this chance to eat his lunch.

As she watched him leave, Kieli complained a little glumly, “Apparently we’re ‘connected with the Church.’”

“You know that’s what we must look like to strangers. We’re heading for the capital escorted by Church Soldier bodyguards.”

“I’m not connected…not with them…I’m…”…Not connected. Her denial fizzled out weakly.

She looked at Harvey, who was walking along the edge of the platform. At first glance it seemed as though he was strolling around with his hand stuck in his pocket as if he was just out for a walk, but at the same time she thought he looked lost in thought.

He must have realized earlier than Kieli had.

It was the story they’d heard from the brothers hiding out in the Westerbury slums: a few years ago, there’d been a cave-in at a new mine shaft being developed in the mountain range near the capital, and many of the workers had died. Because there were so many casualties, all the bodies were buried in one mass grave in the capital instead of being individually delivered back to their families.

It had always bothered Harvey that he hadn’t been able to save the kindhearted man who’d told them that story.

Yes—this pretty much had to be the site where Christoph had died the first time.

Then Kieli saw Harvey, who’d been wandering around aimlessly, and the old engineer, who’d been walking with a bundle of sticks in his hand, cross paths. Neither of them had been looking where they were going, so their arms bumped each other, and the old man’s sticks scattered to the ground. When Harvey knelt down to pick them up, the engineer yanked them away.

“Don’t touch those! Leave me alone!”

At the sudden angry shout, Kieli cringed with a lump in her throat. He swung one of the reclaimed sticks violently at Harvey and landed a direct blow more or less where the right sleeve of Harvey’s shirt hung. It connected with a dull thump. Kieli squeaked and automatically started running toward them, but the old engineer pulled the stick back right away, so she stopped after a few steps.

Maybe something had felt off when the old man’s blow connected; either way, he seemed to be realizing for the first time that Harvey’s right arm was gone. He knit his brow uncomfortably, but then he only snorted haughtily and brushed Harvey, who was standing stock-still, aside to collect his sticks and plod back to his work.

“That’s so mean…!”

“What’s with that attitude?! He didn’t even apologize!”

Harvey only held his hand against his right side and watched the man go, but Kieli and the radio were indignant. Someone was trying to help him, and he’d just up and hit them! No matter how much he might hate people connected with the Church, that didn’t mean he had to be so unconditionally violent to them.

She was even considering going over to complain to the old man when a cold voice behind her said, “Eh, just leave him be. There’s a type of person in this world that needs to have an ‘enemy.’” How long has he been standing behind me? Kieli automatically jumped aside a step to get some distance between them before she turned to look up at the tall (fake) priest in the long black robes.

“There are people who need an enemy…?”

“Yup.”

Shrugging lightly at her obvious avoidance, Joachim continued. “They’re the type of people who can’t live without someone to direct their hostility at. Guys like him who are all resigned-philosopher about everything seriously piss those people off.”

He directed a derisive look Harvey’s way and pretended to spit. Harvey didn’t look especially angry or hurt about the way the old man had treated him. He walked back over to the train without changing his pace.

Though Kieli thought it wasn’t the same as a “resigned-philosopher” attitude, she did have to admit that Harvey didn’t really have much hostility toward other people…or more like, he was basically indifferent to the pointless hostility other people had toward him.

People who need an enemy…

She looked over at the engineer’s stubborn old back as he went on erecting his grave markers all alone. He’d lost someone special to him, and he couldn’t go on living without someone to direct his anger at…Kieli tried thinking about what would happen if she lost someone special. If the Church hurt Harvey or Beatrix…I’d be the same way. I’d never forgive the Church either.

She wondered if Joachim was the type who needed to have an enemy, too. She was about to ask him when she realized he’d disappeared out of sight just as unexpectedly as he’d appeared. His presence really was as thin as a ghost’s.

If hostility and anger were the sorts of things that sustained people’s existences, what sustained Harvey’s existence? Kieli’s uneasy gaze roamed the scenery until she found a tall, thin man leaning against the side of a freight car some distance away and lighting a cigarette. Mountain wind tinged with light-gray smoke ruffled his coppery hair.

She was sure that what held Harvey fixed to this world right now was that he needed to do something about the problems in the capital. So once that’s all over…

“Well, it ain’t like I can’t understand hostility and anger giving people energy. I mean, regrets and grudges are literally the energy that powers ghosts, after all.”

Kieli snapped out of her mood a little bit when she heard the radio say that, and a smile escaped her. The Corporal seemed to not quite be factoring his own existence into that equation. She was saved by the radio’s familiar everyday tones. Its presence with them always gave them positive energy.

“You’re powered by complaining, huh, Corporal?” Kieli half-joked, and the radio answered heartily.

“You got that right! I won’t be done for a good million years yet. You two just never quit causing me trouble. You’re what people are talking about when they mention ‘speaking ill of the dead,’ you know! Oh, hey, perfect timing. I’ve got something to say to you, Kieli.”

“Huh? Uh, sure.”

“You know I’m always on your side, BUT—” The radio’s tone turned serious all of a sudden, and Kieli’s expression turned meek in reaction. When she looked down at it, the radio paused as if to emphasize that it was about to talk about a very grave matter and then said, “Listen, it’s too soon for you to be smooching!”

“S-sm…?!” Wait, what generation is that word even from?! It was all so out of the blue that Kieli was speechless. Paying her no mind, the radio ranted on, sending out stern, grating bursts of static. “Smooching is something a man and a woman do after they’re betrothed to each other! I’ll never allow such unchaste behavior while I’m still around to stop it!”

B-betrothed? Unchaste?! I’ve never even heard anybody say those words out loud before! “Y-you’re out-of-date, Corporal…”

“There’s no such thing as out-of-date in matters like these! Do you hear me, Kieli? You promise me now.”

“What?! U-um, okay…” Kieli didn’t think the radio was being fair, but she ended up overwhelmed by its forcefulness. She sighed, her shoulders drooping. He’d definitely interrupted them at the last moment on purpose back there. She’d thought his timing had been too convenient…

The radio was still grumbling to itself like an old geezer from a bygone era. “I’m telling you, kids these days are ready to just smooch without even thinking about it, not to mention…”

Heaving a deep sigh, Kieli let her eyes wander from the radio.

She gazed at the old man’s back. He was already starting to put up his fourth or fifth new grave marker. It was a broad, strong back, but it looked so solitary. If he hated the Church, why was he making those grave markers? Who did he believe was going to pray over the dead for him?

Kieli quietly lowered her eyes and offered a little moment of silence to the graves that lay beyond the elderly man at work. Kieli didn’t know whom she wanted to pray to, either. No god came to mind. But…

Okay then, Corporal, she whispered in her heart, eyes still closed. Stay around forever. Don’t go anywhere, okay? Keep watching over us forever…

Who did the prayers reach?

Leaning against the side of a freight car, he watched Kieli through his cigarette smoke as she hung her head and was silent, facing away from him. The girl had apparently already doubted God existed before they met two and a half years ago, and yet he sometimes caught her praying anyway, as if she couldn’t stand not to appeal to someone or something. He was pretty sure even Kieli herself didn’t know what she was praying to exactly.

Hey, Harvey, have you noticed that there’s no God in the Church?

Now that he thought about it, it might be pretty messed up for a girl in boarding-school clothes who was only fourteen to say something like that.

“She’s gotta be an idiot. Why pretend to pray for the sake of something she doesn’t even believe in?” said a mocking voice, breaking into his thoughts. When Harvey shot him a sidelong glare, the man in priest’s clothes was sitting on the deck of the passenger car with his usual snide smile.

They were about three steps apart. They could go for each other’s vital points if they each took one step forward.

“A brat who doesn’t believe in the Church’s God, related to the Church’s highest authority—is that funny or what?” The way Joachim laughed, the sound catching at the back of his throat, seriously got on Harvey’s nerves. Since he didn’t feel like giving Joachim the pleasure of talking about that, Harvey completely ignored him and asked in a low tone, “What are you going to do after you use Kieli to get near Father Sigri?”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to.” His tone of voice stayed flippant, without the slightest change.

Harvey kept the same low tone he’d started in, too. “Do you mean to kill him?”

“What if I do? Are you going to stop me?”

Harvey didn’t answer right away. It looked as though the old man was done working; he put down his pickax, and Kieli stopped praying, too, and lifted her face. She glanced around searchingly for a moment before she caught sight of them talking together. Her expression turned uneasy, but nonetheless, she pointed toward the front passenger car as if to say I’ll go on ahead, and started making her way back. Watching her go, Harvey resumed their conversation. “Beatrix is being held at his house.”

“Beatrix?” After a blank pause, Joachim said, “Oh! I remember. That loud blonde, right? Oho.” To Harvey’s annoyance, he repeated that last “oho” several more times before giving another little laugh in his throat, clearly amused about something.

“So those are your terms, then? You’re saying if I rescue her, you won’t stop me from killing Sigri?”

“…No, I’m not angling for that,” Harvey answered. A denial, but as denials went it was a pretty feeble one. It came out in a weak mumble and ended up sounding more as if he was putting off making a real answer than anything else. Now that Joachim had accused Harvey of telling him about Beatrix with that goal in mind, Harvey could see how he might be right, but on the other hand, the man might be a relative of Kieli’s. If he were forced to choose between abandoning his old friend or Kieli’s relative…no, he didn’t want to think about a choice like that right now.

Joachim made an obviously profane noise and spat on the ground.

“There’s no reason to hesitate over killing those senile Church fools, and you know it. I don’t know whether the guy’s Kieli’s dad or whatever, but I don’t care, either, and there’s no way in hell that’ll make us even with them after they’ve had us on the run for eighty years.”

“Is getting revenge going to satisfy you? Is there even a point?”

“Point? Why should there have to be a point to repaying them for their own hostility? I freaking hate what a disgusting sap you are. Always looking all wise and enlightened all the time—gee, thanks, Mr. Wonderful.”

“Fine…So after you make your counterattack against all the hostility you’ve gotten from people, what are you going to have left? What are you trying to accomplish, ex—”

Skreee—!

The shrill noise effectively ended his sentence for him. Joachim had taken one giant step forward, swinging his right arm…with an open pocketknife in his hand. It left a little scratch where it struck the wall of the freight car, and a few severed red hairs fluttered in the wind.

The air went stiff with tension. After they glared at each other at close range for a bit, standing still, Harvey abruptly pushed Joachim’s wrist away with his left hand, and Joachim withdrew and closed his knife without any further fight.

“You never stop pissing me off.”

“Don’t worry, it’s mutual.”

Joachim stowed the knife in his pocket, then turned around and jumped up onto the deck and vanished into the train.

Choo…The train sounded its whistle and belched out a thick gust of ash-gray steam. “We’re departing. Get on board, please,” called the apprentice engineer, leaning out from the movable steps leading up to the locomotive. The old engineer had already finished cleaning up after his work and was wordlessly striding with his pickax past the apprentice and inside.

As Harvey stomped out the butt of his cigarette and began climbing up to the deck, he suddenly detected a presence at the very edge of his consciousness.

“…?”

He turned around with one foot on the steps. He sensed something move in the shadow of the freight cars behind him. There were about ten of the roofless freight cars packed with brown coal, but as far as Harvey could tell with his still slightly unfocused vision, there wasn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary about them. The very last one was blurred from view by a dim mist.

“Harvey?”

Kieli stuck her face out a window in the first passenger car to look for him. No sooner did he grab the railing and haul himself up onto the deck than the train began to pull away from the platform with light vibrations and a heavy billow of smoke. Before he stepped inside, he turned around to take another glance at the line of freight cars behind him, but he didn’t see anything especially unusual.

My vision’s starting to get worse…

He pressed his hand over his left eye and shook his head a little. The nerves of the left eye he’d been given by the strange-looking beast—Mane—that they’d met in the gorge in the northwestern mining district were hooked up, and it was technically usable, but it was deteriorating faster than he’d thought it would. Sometimes the image there would even cut out for a second. His right eye’s sight wasn’t completely healed either, so sometimes it were as though he was inside a video screen filled with noise. He needed it to hold out for a while longer.

Harvey took one last look at the line of graves erected along the edge of the platform like a jagged picket fence. They receded from view, and even at this distance they already looked like nothing more than blackened matchsticks stuck haphazardly in an ashtray. He wondered if there was a grave marker for Christoph somewhere in there.

Even though he didn’t know where to direct any prayers—for just a second, he closed his eyes and was silent.

When he entered the train through the rear of the second passenger car, Joachim was already gone. Three soldiers turned to look at him from where they’d taken over the front sets of seats on both sides of the aisle to play card games. One of them let his hand slip in panic, and his cards fluttered to the floor in all directions. Harvey ignored it all and kept walking. The soldier who’d bent down to pick up the scattered cards yanked his hand away with a start, although Harvey hadn’t intended to deliberately step on him or anything. He was a comparatively young soldier—the one who’d been on watch duty in the front car a little while ago, whose saber he’d borrowed (or stolen).

All the soldiers watched him leave suspended in midmotion, as if they’d been nailed in place. Harvey merely spared them a glance as he walked at his normal pace along the dead center of the aisle. When he reached the forward connecting door, though, he stilled his steps. Apparently, the soldiers had let themselves relax for a moment; when he abruptly turned back to them, they all stiffened again. Harvey imagined he’d hear frightened gulps any second.

He mentally shrugged. Something Joachim said popped into his mind. Always looking all wise and enlightened all the time—he didn’t think of himself as enlightened one bit, but it was true that while he took issue with Church Soldiers and the Church itself, he’d never particularly felt any hostility or anything. To put it plainly, he didn’t see much point in harboring bad will toward people who didn’t actually matter to him.

“Is my face scary?” he asked them, jerking his shoulder to indicate the sore on his left cheek. And then there was the bonus fact that his eyes were different colors. No one volunteered to be first to answer, so Harvey narrowed down his targets and focused his eyes on that young soldier squatting in the aisle, who immediately looked flustered.

“K-kind of,” the kid blurted.

“‘Kind of’?”

He faked a hurt look, and the soldier corrected himself pleadingly: “I…N-no, not really.” Harvey didn’t think he’d done anything to the kid to make him that scared. He lost interest in hearing any more answers. But when he sighed and turned back to face the connecting door, a tentative voice spoke up behind him.

“Um…does that hurt? I heard that Undying soldiers never feel pain…”

On the verge of leaving the train car, Harvey turned around once again. Maybe the soldier thought Harvey was turning to glare; he immediately tried to drop his question. “That is, er, please excuse me.”

Bam!

Harvey cut him off by punching the connecting door behind him. The soldier who’d asked him, along with the other two, went pale and froze.

“We’re the same.”

His voice and the faint vibration of the train wheels echoed through the tense air of the car.

“We’re the same as you. When we’re injured it hurts, and when something’s funny we laugh, and we feel scared sometimes, too, and you know what? We even play cards.” He dropped his eyes to the scattered cards on the floor, then raised them again and lifted the corner of his mouth in a tiny smile. “Wanna play sometime? But I’ll warn you, I’m good.”

“Y-you’re on!” the oldest of the soldiers declared vehemently. “No way am I losing to some Undying!” The younger two were clearly rattled, but he accepted Harvey’s challenge, face flushed. While this man might still be full of prejudice, he wasn’t pointlessly freaking out, either. Satisfied at having finally managed to get someone to respond to him like an equal, Harvey left them with an honest smile.

He stopped for a moment on the deck connecting the first and second passenger cars. The wind lashing and rebounding against the walls of the cars turned turbulent, whipping his hair every which way. He looked up at the patch of sky he could see from between the cars. The same sky hazed with thin, sandy clouds, the sky that hadn’t changed on this planet for decades, probably even centuries, was still just floating boundlessly above him the same as ever. It never showed him which way to go next.

Jude…am I at least not too far off course right now…?

At the sight that met his eyes the instant he opened the door to the front passenger car, Harvey was struck with a violent fit of dizziness.

Joachim was squatting in the middle of the aisle with a chocolate bar at his feet, trying to balance what looked like a bucket over it with a stick. It was obviously some kind of mousetrap or something, but Harvey couldn’t for the life of him see what Joachim thought he could trap that way…The soldier standing guard next to the connecting door and Kieli, who was sitting in a seat near the middle of the car, were both watching coldly.

“…What are you doing?” he asked with the same cold eyes as Kieli, and Joachim lifted his face without standing up.

“Isn’t this how you tamed her and won her over?”

“Like hell, you moron.” How serious is he being? The scary thing about the way this guy’s mind worked was that he might really, actually be serious.

Sullenly clearing away his trap, Joachim whined, “I want a dog, too,” in exactly the way a kid would beg for a toy.

“I’m not a dog!”

It was when Kieli finally snapped and stood up from her seat to object that it happened.

Owoooo…

A muffled sound very much like a dog’s howl echoed somewhere out of sight. Then came several men’s voices, not quite wailing but not quite bellowing, and the resounding clash of swords. With a start, Harvey turned back to the deck he’d just come from.

“What’s going on?!”

Growing red in the face, the soldier on guard duty dashed out through the connecting door. “Hey, wait—” By the time Harvey’d run out to the deck after him, the guard was already reaching to open the connecting door to the second car.

And then something hit the door’s little window with an ugly, wet smack.

No, not “something”: the bloody palm of a human hand. The hand slid down the glass and vanished below, leaving behind a sticky bright-red print of all five fingers and the palm. In the same moment, an arm stabbed right through the window, shattering it, and seized the throat of the guard standing frozen in front of the door.

Long, bony, misshapen fingers and green skin, as though the cells had rotted and started melting off—

“Harvey!”

“Don’t come out! Stay inside!” he barked back at Kieli automatically, and reached behind him to shut the door to the first passenger car. Cut off by the door, Kieli’s voice calling him grew faraway. The moment he hopped onto the second car’s deck, he seized the saber of the soldier being held in a choke hold, and—

Shunk.

—plunged it with the full force of his body weight at the window. The unpleasant sensation of his weapon piercing flesh traveled heavily all the way up his arm.

“Ngggnngghhh…”

The low, shaky moan of a beast. The arm sticking out of the door slackened, releasing the soldier, who slumped down onto the deck. The door came loose and skewed outward—along with the saber stuck through it and the thing leaning against it on the other side.

Something wrapped in nothing but dirty scraps of cloth. Something that could only be described as a rotting, greenish corpse. Its unfocused eyes rolled around emptily, and then it turned toward him.

That’s…

Harvey made a frustrated sound at himself. This was the presence he’d felt before coming inside the train, then. So it sneaked onto the train while we were stopped…The saber Harvey’d stabbed it with through the window had gone dead through the center of its carotid artery, but it grabbed the blade of the sword piercing itself with its bare hand, as if that hadn’t even slowed it down. Harvey let go of the hilt just in time to avoid getting dragged in close.

“No hard feelings!” he shouted, and with a yell he slammed his shoulder into it with everything he had.

The rush of wind created by the moving train hit the exposed door full-on and blew it clear off its hinges. Its giant body was thrown off the deck with it when it went. Harvey almost got thrown off the train right along with them, but at the last moment he managed to cling to the railing. When he turned his head to look over the flapping ends of his coat at them, it and the broken door were tumbling end over end into the rock surface along the side of the track. They bounced off and were flung out of sight behind him almost before he could register it all.

Breathing raggedly, he crawled back up over the railing and onto the deck. When he checked on the fallen soldier, the man’s cervix was broken; he was already gone.

…For the moment no emotion was coming to him. Maybe his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

When he stepped a little unsteadily into the second passenger car, though, it was still too much; he stopped in the doorway and choked back the urge to vomit.

The second passenger car was a sea of bodies and blood. The corpse of the soldier who’d left his handprint on the window of the connecting door lay at his feet. It was the same young soldier he’d been talking with just minutes ago.

The soldier who’d asked Does that hurt? in a hesitant voice—whom Harvey’d been talking with just a few minutes ago.

And the other two—one was lying facedown in a pool of blood in the aisle in front of him. The last one, the man who’d be the oldest, was slumped heavily in his seat. He looked almost as though he were just hanging his head, asleep, but the windowpane next to him was thick with dripping gore. His skull must have been smashed into it.

Simultaneous powerful waves of nausea and dizziness attacked Harvey. He staggered a little, leaning against the door frame and clamping his hand over his mouth. Emotions he didn’t really understand started welling up inside him. Anger, regret, maybe even something you could call mourning. While he hadn’t felt any hostility toward these people, he hadn’t had any particular goodwill either; if anything, he guessed they’d been in midconflict. Still, they were people he’d been talking with just a minute ago—whom he’d talked about playing cards with sometime—who’d tried to act cool and said No way am I losing to some Undying—and now their pitiful corpses were lying right in front of him.

If he’d paid attention to that presence he’d felt a little sooner, this wouldn’t have happened…

Something creaked. Harvey tensed, straining to sense the slightest presence around him. There’s another one. A shadowy form darted across his peripheral vision. When he turned around with a start—

Crash!

—the window of the rear connecting door at the other end of the aisle smashed in from the outside.

For the last few minutes she’d been hearing a sort of scritch-scritch-scritching against the wall of the train car. “Corporal, there’s something out there…!”

“Make sure you don’t let go of me, Kieli.”

“R-right.” Kieli wrapped both arms around the radio and darted her eyes around the train car fearfully. Harvey and the soldier on guard duty hadn’t come back since they’d dashed out the rear connecting door.

Kieli thought she heard the sound of something running along the roof directly above her head. When she edged backward, hugging the radio tightly, she bumped into Joachim behind her. She whipped around, reflexively moving away as she did so, only to see Joachim half-shrug at her and actually prop his cheek against the seat back, playing the idle spectator.

“Sounds like we’ve got a pretty troublesome stowaway on board, huh?” Joachim said, sounding unconcerned, as if it wasn’t his problem. Kieli glared daggers at him. Apparently unruffled, he only dropped his head back in disgust and gazed at the ceiling, thinking. “Well, it’s not our problem, is it? Why is he putting so much energy into it? Since when is his hobby rescuing people?”

“Harvey’s not like you!” As Kieli moved to stomp on his foot, annoyed by the cynical way he’d said that, she heard a loud grating sound coming from outside the train car. She stepped away from him and shrank in on herself, looking around her. Creak, creak—as if the entire train car were being throttled.

Where is it? The wall? The roof?

As she looked left and right, trying to sense it, something shot through one of the windows along the side wall, breaking right through the glass. At the sight of the thing crawling through the window frame upside down like a spider, Kieli’s eyes widened.

Greenish, slack body, two lidless eyeballs that reminded her of an invertebrate’s compound eyes, long limbs with the flesh wasted away until the joints stood out unnaturally as it crawled over the window frame and into the train—it really seemed so much like some kind of land crab that Kieli felt a gut-level hatred that made her flesh crawl. She unconsciously took a step back, tripping and hitting her back against the seat on the other side of the aisle as she fell.

A shock wave shot out of the radio in her arms at the same time she stumbled and collapsed into the seat. However, the blast of air missed its mark, only lightly grazing the thing’s arm before slamming into the wall.

Stretching out its folded limbs like springs, it jumped at her.

Kieli screamed.

As she cringed where she lay sprawled in the seat, it suddenly stopped moving just above her head. When she hesitantly raised her face to look, still covering her head—

“Dammit. Guess I can’t let the goose who lays the golden eggs get all banged up, can I?” Joachim griped, as if this was all such a pain in the neck. The folding knife in his right hand was plunged into its chest. It struggled, gurgling painfully, trying to pull out the knife. The more it struggled, though, the farther the knife was pushed in, Joachim’s right hand quickly burrowing into its chest. Kieli watched the whole thing with her eyes as round as saucers, frozen in place.

A misshapen stone heart peeked out of the center of its chest where the knife had gouged out the flesh. Twitching the corners of his mouth up in a twisted smile, Joachim put even more force behind his right hand and started to pull out the heart. Kieli heard a bizarre creaking sound she couldn’t believe could really come from inside a living creature’s body.

And Joachim was changing, too. Starting at his right hand around the thing’s heart and moving up his arm, his blood vessels bulged out and his skin began to fester and peel. He still wore that warped smile on his cheeks, but the blood vessels bulged out on one of them, too, and the skin there crumbled away until she glimpsed the flesh underneath. Seemingly unfazed by what was happening to his own body, Joachim wrenched off the bio-cables connected to its organs and yanked out the heart with his bare hand.

It stumbled back, writhing in what looked like pain, hit the window, and collapsed to the ground like a broken doll. The sight of its lidless eyes vacantly roaming the air as its body twitched fitfully made Kieli feel sick. She clamped both trembling hands over her mouth to hold the vomit in.

After several seconds it gradually stopped moving, as if its springs had run down.

Joachim turned to her, still casually holding a clump of bio-cables and a stone heart dribbling tar-black blood in his right hand. When he wiped his cheek with the back of that same hand, the melted skin peeled right off, and Kieli gave a small shriek. Joachim’s right cheek, already starting to regenerate mere seconds later, twisted into a thin smile. “Scared?”

“…I-I’m not scared…!” she answered boldly, though the effect was spoiled by the fact that she was backing away from him, hugging the radio. That was about when the forward and rear connecting doors both flew open at the same time.

“What are you fussing about now?! This time I’m throwing you off the train!”

When the elderly engineer came out the forward door brandishing his shovel and saw the state of their car, even he stopped shouting for a moment. Through the rear door, Harvey came back. Kieli’s face brightened in relief. Harvey, on the other hand, didn’t even spare a glance at what their car looked like. Instead, he slammed the connecting door violently shut and jammed the saber he was carrying through the lever.

Immediately afterward, a green arm broke through the door’s little window, its sharp nails clipping Harvey’s cheek as he jerked his head out of its path. The door bolted with the saber shook loudly from the outside.

“Get going!” Harvey shouted as he ran toward them, abandoning the door that looked as if it would break any second. Joachim turned on his heel in a good grief sort of way and made a break for it, dashing past the old engineer, who was standing stock-still with his shovel raised overhead, and through the door.

“Kieli, you okay?”

“Y-yeah.”

Harvey came up to the seat where she was crashed out in exhaustion. He grabbed her arm and helped her up, and then she started running, too, spurred on by a push at her back.

Just as they made it through the forward connecting door, shoving the old man through it with them, the rear connecting door jerked violently and came loose from the frame to reveal them.

Two? No, Three—? Before Kieli’s eyes could confirm, she was already across the deck and they were all diving together into the locomotive at the head of the train. “Wh-what the heck is going on?” called the young apprentice, sticking his head out the door suspiciously. He screamed when he saw the monsters in the passenger car behind them.

“Detach us, fast!”

“Wh-what?!” While the apprentice didn’t seem to grasp what was going on, at Harvey’s order he nevertheless obediently dashed to the coupler connecting the locomotive to the front passenger car and hastily started working the coupling pin. Nervousness made his hands unsteady, though, and he just couldn’t seem to get it uncoupled. They passed through the passenger car and bore down on them amid all the commotion.

“I’ll show you, you damned monsters!”

The one to raise the war cry was the elderly engineer, who up until then had just been letting them push him along in a stupor. Yelling like a man possessed and brandishing his shovel, he dashed out onto the deck and started swinging it around wildly. “You idiot! Come back!” shouted Harvey, but he paid no mind. One of the monsters grabbed the end of the shovel on the next swing and dragged him into range. The old man disappeared into the passenger car with it.

“Dammit!”

In the same moment that Harvey cursed and started to run out to the deck after him, there was a jolt and a clang as the coupling pin finally lifted.

“Harvey, no!”

Kieli instantly reached out her hand and grabbed the back of Harvey’s coat. Harvey turned, stumbling a little, and laid his hand over hers where it clung. “You go on ahead. If I don’t catch up to you by the end of the day, head to the capital by yourself. I’ll catch up with you later.”

“No!” Kieli shouted over him, loudly enough to be heard over the wind screaming through the air all around them.

“Kieli—”

“I don’t want to be alone! I won’t go! I won’t!”

“Go on, just go.”

“I don’t want to!”

As she yelled, shaking her head, it came home to Kieli just how immature she really was. No, no, don’t leave me alone!—her fourteen-year-old tantrum-throwing child self was bawling in her mind. She hadn’t grown up one little bit since she was fourteen. She was childish, and stubborn, and a tantrum thrower, and all she did was cling to Harvey’s coattails wherever they went. But…but she didn’t want them to be separated anymore. She kept feeling as if this might be the last time—as if she might never be able to see him again.

“Kieli.”

Her clinging hand was forcibly peeled off. Harvey leaned in close to her and started to whisper. The wind blowing on the exposed deck formed a wall of sound around them, and Harvey’s low, quiet voice was the only thing she could hear.

“I promise you: I’ll come get you no matter what. And then—”

Clang.

There was a hard shock as the cars began to separate, and the last thing he said was half-swallowed by the wind, hard to make out. And then he yelled “Joachim!” and she was shoved back onto the locomotive-side deck and caught by Joachim, who was standing behind her.

“That dolt…! Kieli, please, throw me!” cried the radio’s voice through the heaving gusts of wind.

“Stop, please go back! Please!” she shouted, turning to look into the car.

But the apprentice engineer cried back, “That’s impossible! And you know what, I don’t want to!” before dashing back to the driver’s chair.

Kieli turned to face the retreating passenger car one more time. Left on the passenger-side deck, Harvey’s face was growing farther away in the blink of an eye.

No. This isn’t the same as that time, she told herself. She wasn’t the same as she’d been at fourteen. “Let’s take care of all our business,” that’s what Harvey had said. So come on, Kieli, think about what you have to do, what you should do right now, and figure it out.

Pressing her lips tightly together, Kieli gripped the radio’s cord in both hands.

“Harvey!”

He was about to run back into the passenger car when he heard her call. He stopped and turned around.

“Wait!” And before the word was even out of her mouth, the radio was flying out of her hands and straight toward him, screaming, and—whack.

It hit him square in the face, and he went blind for a moment.

“Gah! What the hell?!” Harvey shouted, peeling the radio off his forehead.

“Oh—I-I’m sorry!” Kieli was still leaning out over the edge of the locomotive’s deck in her pitcher’s pose, face white as a sheet.

Behind him, Harvey heard the old man’s husky voice cussing out the monsters. He glanced over his shoulder at the passenger car and grunted in frustration, then turned back toward the locomotive car one more time, held the radio up in the air, and gave her a little smile.

To tell her Thanks. It’s okay. To make sure she knew.

“Joachim! Pull anything funny and I’ll kill you!” he spat at Joachim (who was standing aloof behind Kieli, making a big show of acting as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him) in parting, and then he turned on his heel and dived into the passenger car, hanging the radio around his neck as he ran.

The old man’s shovel was lying in the middle of the aisle. As Harvey ran past, he dipped down and picked it up in his left hand. He saw the old geezer himself at the far end of the car, hoisted up by the monster with its talons piercing through his shoulder, still showering his opponent with meaningless invective. “Take this!” Letting momentum add to his force, Harvey hit the thing attacking the geezer with his shovel as hard as he could.

His enemy tottered back and fell through the doorway out onto the deck, where it was immediately knocked off the train. Its large body tumbled end over end until it was crushed under the wheels. The violent bump and the rasping sound of mincemeat being made sent all the hair on Harvey’s body standing on end. With a great shake, one side of the train rocked up into the air.

The force of it made the old man collapse in the aisle. Harvey jogged over and was just kneeling to help him up when a burst of static and a sharp warning came from the radio. “Herbie! There’s another one!”

Startled, Harvey looked behind him. Immediately afterward, an arm shot out of his peripheral vision and clocked him in the side of the head. He fell over and rolled out onto the deck with the old man in his arms. Once they’d somersaulted a couple of times and crashed into the wall of the car behind them, the rushing wind caught them off balance and they were tossed from the train. Harvey could see the side walls of the cars streaming by right next to him.

Fortunately, cut off from the locomotive, the rest of the train had already slowed down a good bit. Though he’d bounced along the rock face several times, still holding the old man, and then skidded a pretty good distance with his shoulder scraping hard along the ground, he managed to come to a stop before he rebounded back onto the tracks.

A few seconds after the last of the train cars passed right by his head, the deafening roar of metal scraping hard against rock sounded somewhere up ahead.

“Ugh…”

Harvey gathered his focus and shut off the pain. Then, though he didn’t get up, he did somehow work up the energy to lift his head from the ground.

A bunch of the cars in the front had run off the rails and fallen on their sides; the passenger car at the front had stopped just on the verge of going over a ledge. The coal packed in the freight cars was scattered everywhere, and plenty of it was rolling noisily off the cliff.

At the sight of all that disaster in front of him, Harvey heaved a deep sigh. God only knew how many tragic casualties there would have been today if there’d been passengers on board—but fortunately or unfortunately, there weren’t any living human beings on that train anymore.

“You alive, Corporal…?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Just barely.”

Once he’d confirmed that the radio he’d landed on top of was all right, Harvey propped his hand on the ground and tried to get up, but his sleeve was torn to shreds and he caught glimpses of bone beneath it at his shoulder and elbow. “Damn…” He tried concentrating on the wounds, but he couldn’t get the regeneration going at anything faster than a snail’s pace. Concentrating all his healing power in one spot gave him a headache and dimmed his sight, so he gave regenerating up as a bad job. He’d blocked out the pain, so there was just a dull tingling sensation all along his left arm.

Harvey looked at the old man on the ground next to him. His back and shoulder were covered in deep claw marks, and blood stained his work clothes. Harvey crawled over and peered at his face, then spoke. “Hey, Gramps, you alive?”

“D-don’t touch me…!”

The engineer cursed, if weakly, and slapped Harvey’s hand away. “Whoa—” Harvey wasn’t exactly steady on his feet himself at the moment; he teetered over and landed lightly on his butt. He ended up just sitting there for a bit, sort of stunned, but the radio angrily piped up, “Wha—you jerk!”, so after a beat he realized he’d been rejected. The old man gritted his teeth and stubbornly tried to prop himself up on his own. Harvey could literally see the bloodstains on his work clothes spreading as he watched.

“Come on, don’t overdo it.”

“I told you not to touch me, you damn Church lapdog!”

He slapped away Harvey’s outstretched hand again, but the force of his own blow made his shoulder give out, and he fell back down. Evidently all the pain and blood loss had left him only half-conscious; after that he just lay there facedown on the ground, unable to get up again, breathing shallowly. “Dammit…Sheesh.” Harvey clucked his tongue. Then he lifted the geezer’s arm to squirm underneath him and tried to load him onto his own back. The radio spat a burst of static in protest.

“Just leave the bullheaded jerk alone! You don’t owe him any help after what he said!”

“Oh, shut up…” Apparently he was a bit woozy, too; his hearing was dim and the radio’s voice sounded warped to his ears.

“Herbie!”

“I…” Even his own murmuring voice sounded warped. Harvey found himself complaining, half to himself, “I just don’t want to regret stuff like this anymore…! Why does it have to happen where I can see it? I want to just leave it alone…” He knew he was getting weirdly pissed, but there it was. The faces of all the people who’d died in front of him because he wasn’t able to save them flashed through his mind. It was like that with Christoph. And with those soldiers he’d just shared a casual conversation with, too. If this crap happened someplace else I didn’t care about, I could leave it alone and not care about it! So why do they always die right in front of me? It leaves a bad taste in your mouth when people die right in front of you! You can’t just leave it alone then!

Harvey shouldered the old man and tried to stand up, but his knees crumpled.

“Herbie, stop it!”

“Lay off, I get it…”

“What the hell do you ‘get’?! You’re going to collapse! Listen to reason for once!”

“I said lay off. You’re usually the one…telling me to help…people, so you can’t…change your tune…now…”

The radio’s increasingly fierce voice grated at his ears. And he was irritated at himself, because even though he knew full well it was saying this stuff out of worry, he still reacted by complaining. Lay off, lay off, he chanted over and over in his mind, half at himself. At Harvey, the guy who wanted to leave them alone but couldn’t.

When he settled the man on his shoulder one more time and somehow managed to stand up and start walking, something moved in his peripheral vision.

Then there was an unpleasant sensation in his abdomen. He unthinkingly let the geezer he’d finally gotten propped on his back slip off.

He dropped his gaze to his own body to see five sharp claws on gnarled, misshapen fingers sticking out of his side, plunged straight through him from behind. He could see all the way down to the second knuckle. Sinking to one knee with a grunt, Harvey turned to look behind him. A monster half-crushed by the wheels of the train and not much more than a hunk of meat now stretched out an arm to him from where it lay belly-down on the tracks. The damn thing had just jammed its hand through his stomach, and now its empty, pupil-less eyes were looking at him almost pleadingly, for all the world like it was begging him for help…

…Why do everybody and his dog have to die in front of me?

That moment of naive hesitation worked against him. The next thing he felt was the jolt of excruciating pain as it wrenched a chunk of flesh out of his side.

“Bastard!”

A shock wave blasted out of the radio’s speaker. It hit the enemy head-on and sent it flying, but at that same time its arm sliced through the air, and the radio’s cord was caught on its nails. The cord snapped, and the radio fell to the ground.

“Corporal!”

When Harvey reached for the radio, reeling from the backlash still, the monster trying to stand up brought its foot down right on top of it. KKCHK. The case crumpled, parts flew everywhere, and with one last piercing burst of static like a machine going into the red zone, the sound broke off completely.

“!”

For a split second Harvey’s entire mind fizzled out and went blank.

It lifted one leg for a moment and tilted its head to the side as if it were wondering what it had stepped on. The instant it moved to bring its foot down again, Harvey charged. With a scream of rage, he bore down on the thing; he was hardly able to run through the fire of agony in his side, so it was more of a semicontrolled fall. He knocked it away from the radio with a tackle and then seized the shovel lying next to the track.

He shoved the blade into its back where it lay facedown on the ground and slammed the handle down with all his might. There was the sensation of splitting flesh, and then it banged against something hard. Harvey ignored it, gathering up more energy than he’d known he had left to bring the shovel down even harder.

“Ahhh…hahhh…” He fell to his knees, panting. The shovel slipped out of his hand as he went. A stone heart rolled out of its body into the pool of its sticky coal-black blood, dragging a mess of severed cables behind it. With both eyes widened vacantly, the thing abruptly stopped moving.

Harvey’s mental circuitry was half-numb. All he felt was nausea.

“Corporal…” he called in a scratchy voice as he crawled over to the radio, scraping his knees along the ground. Its case was crushed horribly out of shape. There was no answer. “Corp’ral…” Even Harvey heard how incredibly pathetic he sounded. Why was the last thing I said to him “lay off”? Not like that…I don’t want it to end like that.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry…Please, answer me…”

He dragged himself the last few inches and crouched over the radio, pressing his forehead down into the dirt, prostrating himself, and pleaded. But no matter how many times Harvey called him, not even the feeblest answering static came from the speaker.

He sensed a presence above him. He didn’t have the mental or physical strength left to lift his head anymore, but after a little while he did sluggishly roll his eyes up to look anyway. Farther along the tracks at the edges of his blurred vision, several rotting, greenish corpses were crawling out of the overturned train.

“Nggnnghhh…”

“Nng…ng…”

The pained-sounding groans of the literally undead echoed down the mountain railroad on the moaning wind.

One by one, the corpses pushed themselves up into a slouch and half-walked, half-drifted like ghosts toward the first prey they saw—in other words, this way. “Damn…it…” Cradling the radio with his arm, Harvey turned to the engineer, but even in his own mind he seriously doubted that he still had enough strength left to shoulder the old man and run. He tried to stand up and his foot slipped. He fell to his knees.

Just then—

Whump!

The sound of a thick gunshot like a blast of heavy compressed air rang out.

A hole opened up in the body of the corpse leading the attack, and it fell flat on its face. More shots, a whole series of gunshots rang out, and one by one the corpses were blown away, collapsing to the ground like useless broken dolls.

Don’t tell me—

Still crouching on the ground, Harvey raised his head and squinted down the track.

The track itself was wavering in the haze created by the shimmers of heat in the air, but far along it he made out a group of human forms. Forms in clunky full-faced armored robes, pure-white ones that stood out against the jet-black muzzles of the big-bore rifles they all carried—

A pack of grim reapers in monochrome.