Chapter 5: What Lies at the End of the World
Hey, what kind of person is God?
Julius had once asked his nursemaid that, too. As a small child he really had had an endless need to know things; he wouldn’t rest until he’d cleared up whatever question was bothering him.
Hmm…I’ve never met Him either, you know, she’d answered, looking sort of at a loss.
I wonder if all the really important people have met Him!
Yes, I suppose they must have. The Elders receive the word of God directly, after all. You might get to be an Elder someday, too, you know.
Little Julius’s eyes lit up at that. If I got to meet God, I’d ask him for all kinds of stuff! I’d wish for some rare trading cards, and to be stronger, oh, and I want a pet dog! Oh, and then…
When he started listing one wish after another, his nursemaid smiled at him wryly and said, Now, now, young master, God isn’t someone who grants wishes. God is someone who watches over us, loves us, and forgives us.
R-really…?
Yes, really.
Oh…At her explanation, all the excitement of a moment ago vanished, and young Julius hung his head dejectedly. And I had a bunch more wishes, too…like for Mom and Dad and you to always like me, and…for there to be no people in trouble on our planet and for nobody to be sad or hungry or freezing anymore.
But I guess God doesn’t grant wishes like that, huh…?
I don’t need God. “God” never does anything for us.
Her words springing to his mind again were like a heavy blow to the chest.
The upper ranks of the Church were trying to deal with both the string of Elder deaths and the monster affair without letting them become widely known. With the Council of Elders still short-staffed, administrative functions at the top were a mess. They had their hands full keeping up appearances to make sure the confusion didn’t show; there was currently no official position on the monster issue. Even though civilians were dying. Considering that the Undying Hunters were on the move, it seemed clear that the Council of Elders was somehow involved, or at the very least had information on the monsters, but that information still hadn’t come down to the Security Forces, the ones actually attempting to protect the city.
No matter how he tried, Julius couldn’t ignore the fact that his distrust in the Church was growing every day. He wanted to believe that his fears were groundless. And yet…
The day it happened, the cold was still unremitting, even though it was just about time for them to be welcoming spring, and the skies were leaden. After receiving a peremptory call that consisted of “Come get me,” Julius had come to a train station near headquarters that shuttled people affiliated with the Church. He saw the train pulling up, and then a short time later a gaggle of passengers poured out of the station house, looking somehow more restless than usual.
In a crowd dominated by people in the black greatcoats and hats of the clergy, it wasn’t too difficult to spot the tall redhead. When he stopped in front of the man amid the flow of passersby, the first words out of Julius’s mouth were, “It’s not a good look on you.”
“Shut up.”
The redhead who glared grumpily down at him, still maddeningly half a head taller than he was, wore jet-black priest’s robes and a greatcoat with the hood pulled down low over his forehead so that he at least stood out less than usual. Around his neck hung an ancient portable radio Julius recognized. Though a careful observer might notice that the right sleeve tucked in his pocket was empty, at a glance from a distance he looked like any priest coming home from rounds in the country. Apparently, Julius’s old nursemaid’s husband, who worked at a Security Forces outpost in Gate Town (and whom Julius was fairly close to; he thought of the man as a sort of favorite uncle), had hooked him up with the outfit.
You’d think that the long, high-collared robes themselves would suit his tall, lean form, but he was projecting a decidedly “outlaw” atmosphere that, as far as Julius was concerned, made the overall effect just wrong. Nobody would take him for anything but a rogue delinquent priest. I’d look a hundred times handsomer than him in those robes. Probably. He was willing to bet there wasn’t a respectable priest in this world sporting mismatched eyes and a blatantly sketchy sore on his cheek the color and texture of iron rust…
This guy was missing another body part every time Julius saw him.
With some hesitation, he asked, “What happened with your eye?”
The other man smirked. Julius fumed. He’d been nice and asked out of concern, and he got the feeling he’d been teased for his trouble.
“Yeah, right! That’s pathetic, not cool.”
“Yup, I’m fighting a lot of losing battles right now, so I’m pretty pathetic.” The easy admission struck Julius speechless. Wow, I don’t remember him being so honest and open…“I don’t have time to worry about appearances right now, so I’m just gonna use whatever I can. I called you because getting your help was the most convenient way to do this. Even though I’d really rather shoot myself than owe you a favor.”
“……”
Never mind, I hate him after all. Julius pursed his lips in disappointment. More than two years had passed since they’d first met on the Sand Ocean, and Julius felt that he’d personally matured at least two years’ worth in that time, but just like this guy hadn’t gotten older, his messed-up personality really hadn’t changed a bit.
A broad connecting bridge extended from the station exit toward Church headquarters. They slipped into the flow of similarly attired people around them and began walking down it side by side.
“…Where’s Kieli?”
They were both facing forward when the soft question came. Julius had no doubt he’d been dying to ask that from the very beginning. He hmphed irritably and answered, “I heard she went to Father Sigri’s house to meet with the hostage.”
“So she got together with Bea…” the other man murmured, relieved. The way he glanced down at the radio at his chest as he spoke made it look for all the world as though he and the radio were nodding to each other.
“You want to go there?”
“Nah…if she managed to meet up with Bea, we don’t have to hurry. First—” He abruptly slowed down and veered a little unsteadily toward one side of the bridge, so Julius followed him warily.
“What’s going on?”
“A little smoke break.”
“Excuse me?!” To his amazement, the man proceeded to lean on the parapet of the bridge and light up a cigarette under the cover of his hood. “Didn’t you just say we don’t have time?”
“I don’t. So”—he took a deep drag and exhaled—“I gotta dope up with nicotine now, or I’ll be dead on my feet before we’re done.” He didn’t sound as if he was joking. Letting the parapet of the bridge support his weight, practically hanging over it as he breathed out his smoke, he did look genuinely in pain. Julius could see now that he was hanging on to his strength of will by a thread, feeding it by being provocative because it was the only thing keeping him on his feet.
“So, about the monster thing.”
“Right.”
Julius ended up leaning his own back against the parapet next to Harvey and taking a break with him as they spoke. The people coming and going on the bridge glanced their way every so often, but Harvey was facing away from the flow of traffic, so he didn’t get any dirty looks for the smoking.
“Can the lab be infiltrated? They have to be coming from there.”
“I think we could set it up if we wanted,” Julius answered briskly. “At this point I wouldn’t mind going to my father about it, but I got a lead from one of my own connections, so—” He broke off when Harvey stopped smoking to blink and stare at him out of the corner of his eye. Julius tensed reflexively, figuring he was about to get teased again. “Wh-what?”
“What you’re about to do is treachery. Do you get that?”
“That’s a fine thing to say when you’re the one who asked me for help.”
“I’m not going to force you. I can take you hostage and manage something on my own.”
If that’s not “force,” Julius wondered, what is?
“I’m kidding.”
“Liar.”
“Yup. I’m serious.”
“……”
After a bit of reflection, Julius dropped his gaze to his feet and said solemnly, “I just want to know the truth, that’s all. I want to know whether what I’ve believed in all this time, what I’ve never doubted, was really there…Whether maybe there was never anything there at all…” Had God really been in the place that he’d had his eyes on all this time, that he’d been aiming for all this time?
I don’t need God. “God” never does anything for us, Kieli’s voice said in the back of his mind.
“Doesn’t the Church exist to help people…?”
“…Are you asking me whether this world needs the Church? What do you want me to say? My answer’s obvious.”
It hurt to have his honestly dejected question smacked down like that, but Julius realized that he’d been the insensitive one for asking it, so he couldn’t make any retort. To an Undying on the run from the Church, the Church’s God was the enemy; obviously he wouldn’t need it.
I don’t need God—
But…was that really true, though?
“I still don’t think the Church is unnecessary, even now. After the War ended and this planet’s cities were plagued with starvation and plundering, it was the Church that gave them food, built them heating, and helped restore order. That’s—that’s really true, if nothing else. I’ve always wanted to be able to help the planet like that, too…” But right now what Julius had aspired to was shrouded in a gray haze, and he couldn’t see it so well anymore. What was it that he’d believed in all this time?
The man next to him only gazed casually with his mismatched eyes over the parapet at the city sprawling below them and puffed on his cigarette. Julius didn’t even know whether he was listening or not. It wasn’t as if he could expect an answer anyway. And he hadn’t said those things hoping for one, really, but in the end he still ended up hoping for some kind of response, at least.
Silence fell for a while. The restless flow of people on the connecting bridge continued without pause.
“Julius,” his companion said. Julius, who’d long since given up on getting a reaction from him, waited nervously to see what would come next.
“Do you seriously think you can save all the people on this planet?” Harvey asked, as though he genuinely couldn’t understand it. The hopes that had just built themselves back up again crumbled to dust in Julius’s soul with such force he could almost hear them. Indignation and shame made his face blaze bright red.
“Wh-what, you got a problem with that?!”
And then something moved heavily on the other side of Harvey. The other side—outside the parapet. Julius opened his mouth in an “o” of shock, but he didn’t manage to get any words out in time. Harvey seemed to get the picture from his expression anyway, because he immediately tried to dodge, but the swiping talons sent him flying backward, where he slid along the parapet.
One of those monsters sprang into view, leaping up and over the parapet from underneath the bridge, which it must have crawled up somehow without their noticing.
Unable to really respond right away, Julius only squeaked in surprise and backed up a few paces. Panic spread swiftly through the foot traffic on the bridge, too. He heard screams from every direction.
The thing’s throat gurgled with something almost like a human moan as it came toward him on sticky, squelching feet. His gaze fixed on its pupil-less eyes, Julius couldn’t force his trembling legs to run.
The sound of its dragging footfalls echoing with strange clarity, it stuck out its tongue to lick a red hunk of flesh speared on its talons.
“Julius, get down!”
Before his body could respond to the voice, his heel slipped where he’d tried to step back, and he fell on his rear end. Something shot through the air above him just a hair’s breadth from his head; and the monster, who’d been almost upon him, was knocked sideways by a blow to the temple. It got back up right away, though, without seeming to have taken much damage. One eyeball bulged out grotesquely from the impact, but it only tilted its head curiously, maybe not quite understanding what had happened, and then transferred its attention from Julius to the man who’d gotten in its way as it slowly stood up.
“Get back. You’re in the way,” Harvey said bluntly, and stepped in front of him. He held what looked like a steel pipe, which Julius guessed had come from the broken parapet. As he raised it, blood oozed out of a tear in the sleeve of his greatcoat. When he gritted his teeth hard and closed his eyes for just a second, a liquid like coal tar began to seep from the wound. His skin initially started to knit itself back together, but before long the liquid dried up and Julius could see him totter for a moment.
“A-ahh…ah…”
I have to help him. I have to do something.
Turmoil and fear still held his throat closed, and his brain hadn’t thought any of it through clearly before his body charged forward.
With a loud yell, Julius full-body tackled the monster. He slammed it into the parapet, and he tried to keep going and push it right over, but its claws caught at his neck and almost brought him down with it. “Julius!” The shout was accompanied by a hand reaching out and grabbing his arm right in the nick of time. The monster plummeted down without him. Panting and clinging to the parapet with Harvey still gripping one arm, he looked down at the city below.
A shiver ran all the way down his spine.
The arched exits from the waterways that wove through every neighborhood in the city, dotting the towering inner walls partitioning it, were gaping open. And he could see droves of those greenish, drowned-corpse-like monsters crawling out of every one of them. A muddy green color overtook the inner walls as if foul water were oozing out. Julius stood riveted to the spot, staring at the horrific sight with the panic of the crowds running around on the bridge behind him for background music.
Then a ball of fire was launched into the flock of monsters crawling along the walls toward them. Julius couldn’t tell from where. Watching them going up in flames and plummeting down from the walls filled him with even more nausea than relief.
He saw Security Forces soldiers with armor plating over their pure-white clerical robes appear in the town below. One platoon of them, brandishing their lit torches, came running up to the connecting bridge.
Julius recognized a familiar, heartening face at the lead.
“Dad!”
“What’s going on—”
Julius’s father noticed the lanky man with him and stopped in the act of leading his troops toward them. The two of them stared narrow-eyed at each other from a distance. It wasn’t the time for a standoff, though; the monsters that had temporarily backed off under the torches’ flames were already pressing close again. His father glanced over the parapet down to the land below and cursed softly. “They all came out of the sewer exits at once. They’ve shown up in the ordinary residential districts, too.”
“What about Kieli? I heard she went to Lord Sigri’s house—”
The words had hardly escaped his mouth before Harvey was suddenly climbing up onto the parapet and getting ready to jump down. “H-hang on a second! Don’t jump from all the way up here!” Julius cried, panicked. He instinctively seized the collar of Harvey’s greatcoat to stop him, which ended up more or less cutting off the man’s airflow.
“Are you trying to kill me?!” Harvey bellowed, rubbing his neck with one foot still on the parapet.
“Hold on. The young lady isn’t at Lord Sigri’s. I got word that they’d run away,” Julius’s father explained calmly, taking hold of Harvey’s arm.
“Run away?”
“We’re guiding all the people in the residential districts to the cathedral. Try going there.”
After he’d heard out Julius’s father with narrowed eyes, Harvey nodded once and turned on his heel toward headquarters.
“Julius. You go, too.”
“What about you?”
Heart aching for his father staying behind to lead his men, Julius obeyed, wrenching himself away to take off running, too. As he made his way through the confusion, occasionally bumping into the people running this way and that, he called out to the tall form in priest’s robes ahead of him. “Hey! Can Security Forces weapons take down monsters like that?”
“No,” the man replied immediately, without even turning around. “The only way is to penetrate their hearts and break them. They’re…my kind.” His tone was emotionless, but he spat out that last part as if it tasted bad.
When they cleared the footbridge, the main gate into the Church headquarters’ forest of steeples came into view. The front gate was jam-packed, overflowing with people fleeing town for the safety of the cathedral. They shoved each other, everybody trying to make it through first; old men fell to the ground amid the chaos; children sobbed as they were separated from their parents—
Unbidden, Julius’s feet came to a stop. “…I’m going back. I should at least be able to help guide the evacuees.”
Harvey turned to give him a dubious look. Julius met his eyes evenly and said in a strong voice, “You go look for Kieli. If you keep going straight ahead, you’ll see the cathedral soon.”
“…I don’t need you to tell me that.”
He was used to the needling by now and simply raised one hand in response before veering back in the direction they’d come from.
“Julius,” said a voice behind him. He turned around to see that Harvey was still standing there looking at him. When Julius paused for a moment and gave him a strange look, he went on rudely. “I think the way you seriously believe someone like you can save the planet is so stupid it’s funny.”
“G-gee, excuse me! Don’t call me back just to say that!” Julius shouted, his face beet-red with anger.
The other man abruptly smiled at him. “But…honestly, I also think you’re amazing for being able to seriously believe it.” The smile was softer than his usual smirk.
I didn’t know he could smile this way…This unexpected side of Harvey plus the unexpected words made Julius fall silent in surprise.
“Hang in there!”
The man in priest’s clothes took off with that cheer. Julius stood rooted to the spot for a while, watching him go until his coppery head disappeared into the chaos.
Hang in there—
For some reason, hearing those words from the man he’d always longed to catch up to made him want to cry. You’re the one who’s so beaten up he can hardly walk, and you’re cheering me on?
“……You hang in there, too.”
There was no way Harvey could still hear him. Still, Julius murmured the words and prayed that they’d be heard anyway. Then he spun around and took off running in the opposite direction.
From where she sat next to Kieli, Beatrix abruptly began darting her eyes all around them.
“What is it?” Kieli asked quizzically.
“…Mm, nothing. It’s fine.”
The woman who’d cut off the golden hair she was so proud of without a trace of regret smiled reassuringly at Kieli from beneath her black shawl. One section of that poor lopped-off hair was wrapped around Kieli’s wrist as a good-luck charm. After they chatted awhile, a middle-aged woman sitting in front of them shot a glare. They exchanged looks and fell silent.
They both wore black clothes and black shawls. Pilgrims in dark-colored hats sat jostled up against each other in the pews packing the cathedral filled with gentle pipe organ background music. The great hall with its high vaulted ceiling was wreathed in a cool tranquillity at odds with the amount of people crammed into it. The faint scent of oil paintings wafting around them was the same one from Father Sigri’s house. Had it worked its way into their clothes?
The pipe organ music ended, and a high-strung-looking old man dressed in long, pure-white robes trimmed in gold appeared on the balcony at the front wall. Though Kieli personally couldn’t sense the slightest bit of godly power in him, reverent sighs escaped the congregation around her at the sight of him.
“I see that’s not Father Sigri,” Beatrix whispered, still staring forward. It was true; Father Sigri had stood at the platform for the worship service Kieli’d observed the other day, but today it looked like a different Elder would be giving the sermon. Straining her eyes, she made out Father Sigri waiting in the wings at the rear of the balcony, where he wouldn’t be conspicuous. He had his right arm in a sling. Oh, I get it. I guess he’d just unnecessarily upset the crowd if he stood on the platform looking like that.
“Who’d have guessed you came from such a high-class family, huh?” Beatrix whispered half-teasingly. When Kieli frowned in distaste, Beatrix shrugged a little and winked at her. “Hey, it’s a good thing, right? You found a parent.”
Kieli shook her head back and forth. The fabric of her shawl swung from side to side, slapping against her cheeks.
“You’re not happy.”
Kieli shook her head.
“Why not?”
“…Because the Church is the enemy for you and Harvey,” she said darkly, looking down. Beatrix, on the other hand, answered in a cheery, offhanded voice, “Eh, tiny issue.”
“It’s not tiny!”
Kieli’s own voice rose before she knew it, and that same middle-aged woman sitting in front of them glared again until they exchanged another look and shrank back a little. Beatrix lowered her tone to whisper, “Do you think Ephraim would sweat a little detail like that?”
“Well…no…”
“Your happiness is always top priority. For him, and for me. We’re not worried about us, as long as you keep moving forward. So…I’m sure lots more rough times are waiting ahead, and it’s okay if you run away or stand still sometimes, but…never turn your eyes away from the future.”
Her whisper next to Kieli’s ear was soft, but so firm and strong. With the left hand, the one wearing her good-luck charm, Kieli grasped Beatrix’s right hand where it lay next to her on the pew and squeezed her beautiful fingers. “Stop it,” she said in a scratchy whisper. “All of you—all of you stop saying things like that, like you’re about to die. I don’t want that. Don’t leave me alone…”
Her own voice was weak and pitiful, but even so, what she said was her most heartfelt wish. Her prayer. She bit her lip against the threatening tears.
Beatrix’s hand squeezed hers back firmly. Then she said in her usual utterly confident voice, “It’s okay. You won’t be alone. You’ll get to see Ephraim.”
“…Yeah. And you’ll be with us forever, too, Beatrix.” Forcing her tears back, Kieli squeezed her hand more tightly and nodded.
While they’d been concentrating on each other, a general stir had begun to ripple through the people around them. Even the middle-aged woman who’d glared at them whenever they talked was deep in conversation with the man next to her, frowning about something.
Beatrix and Kieli hadn’t noticed it when everyone else had, since they hadn’t been listening in the first place, but at some point the Elder’s sermon had broken off. A wave of wariness swept over the congregation from the front of the room to the back.
What’s going on…? Kieli straightened her back to sit up taller and peered through the heads of the crowd at the balcony. While the worshippers in their pews and the priests standing nearby all exchanged quizzical looks, the white-robed Elder on the balcony stood statue-still as though the sermon had completely vanished from his mind, staring pale-faced into the empty air.
For just an instant, Kieli saw a figure floating there above him. “Beatrix…!”
As she started and grabbed Beatrix’s arm, a woman’s shrill scream rose from somewhere in front of them.
Without warning, the Elder’s body folded forward and pitched over the railing, plunging down from the balcony. Maybe to the congregation it looked as if he’d jumped—but Kieli had clearly seen an inky shadow grab the old man’s robes and shove him. From where she sat, she couldn’t see where he’d land, but she was pretty sure it was over ten meters from the balcony to the floor of the hall. There was an awful, heavy thunk. Screams rippled through the hall, and all the worshippers rose to their feet at once.
“Beatrix, did you see that? Just now—”
“I saw it. Don’t get separated from me.”
As the confusion swiftly engulfed the crowd, the two of them stood up, too, and pressed close to each other with their hands clasped tightly.
What happened? Why did he fall all of a sudden like that…?
Did he slip?
No, I saw it! I saw someone push him!
Unsettled whispers—it all overlapped perfectly in the back of Kieli’s mind with the events from when she’d been a baby, the ones she’d seen in the paintings. She felt a vivid sense of déjà vu at the sight of the priests beginning to clear the bustling congregation from the room. This meant the next thing to happen would be—
Soon after the people started to follow the priests away, an enormous shadow fell over the electric lights illuminating the great hall.
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!
Kyahahahahahaha!
Eerie animal laughs from all sides blended together and echoed off the arched ceiling. The torches adorning the walls crackled and shot out sparks, then exploded in a wave from the front of the hall to the back as if someone were raking the place with gunfire. All the lights were snuffed out, and the only illumination in the hall was the faint outside light from the stained-glass windows. Her vision hadn’t adjusted to the dimness yet, but she could make out people screaming, people huddling together in fear, people curling themselves into little balls with their arms around their heads. With her hand in Beatrix’s so they wouldn’t get separated, Kieli was shoved by the confused crowd from all sides, jostled this way and that.
Then she spied a baby on the ground between the legs of the crowd, lost or left behind by its parents.
“Kieli—?!”
With a cry, she shook off Beatrix’s hand and ran to the baby, snatching it up just before it could get stepped on and cradling it safely to her. “Are you okay?”
The instant Kieli peered into the face of the baby wrapped in its blanket, she gasped. The infant, not even a year old by Kieli’s guess, came wide awake and fixed her with a murky, pupil-less gaze.
It twisted its mouth into an unpleasant grin.
Hyahahahahahaha!
The baby burst out laughing in a shrill, crazed voice, its plump young face filling with wrinkles before Kieli’s eyes until it was old and shriveled. “No!” Kieli cried, and tried to let go, but the baby hung fast to her clothes with far too much strength for such tiny young hands; and no matter how hard she fought, she couldn’t pull herself free. The baby’s shrill laughter echoed on and on, out of place in the midst of the crowd’s confusion.
She was stricken again by that vivid déjà vu.
The next thing to happen. The next thing to happen would be—
“That child did it! She’s demon spawn!” someone yelled, pointing at them. The hysterical shouts wove their way through the crowd, spreading like wildfire among people who were already at the height of fear. They fell into a frenzy and mobbed Kieli, surrounding her and jostling as they tried to snatch the baby.
Her situation was the exact same as her mother Setsuri’s had been back then.
The past was repeating itself. It was just like that day.
As Kieli’s clothes and hair were pulled at from all directions, the creature in the blanket that had clung so hard to her and refused to let go abruptly vanished. The baby with the ancient face dissolved into a shadowy black mist, gliding smoothly up to the ceiling without a break in its crazed laughter. Looking up, Kieli’s eyes met those of a narrow-faced man in glasses standing off to one side of the balcony, seemingly rooted to the spot, just looking on with a ghostly pallor—her father. Before she knew what she was doing, Kieli extended a pleading hand toward him through the crowd of people for help.
He took in her outstretched hand—and abruptly turned his gaze away, disappearing into the shadows of the balcony.
Some momentary half-formed hope broke inside her with an audible snap. The same despair her mother had felt flooded her heart.
Demon spawn! Demon spawn!
Kieli was the only one left penned in by the condemning crowd now, but their frenzy showed no signs of stopping. They kept on yelling and yelling as if possessed. The place felt almost like the exact opposite of a cathedral in the Church capital whose authority extended throughout the world; it could have been the gathering place of some violent heathen religion.
“Kieli! Kieli—”
She could hear Beatrix’s faraway voice calling from across the throng of people, but she couldn’t see her. Crazed faces surrounded her from all sides. Their railing was only a jarring sea of sound now, just violent percussion that held no meaning. I’m scared…I’m scared…! The fear robbed Kieli of the strength to resist them or shout anymore.
Help me, help me, HARVEY—!
When she finally couldn’t help calling out for help to the man who wasn’t here, she heard it:
“Stop it! Stop it!”
Someone was plowing his way through the crowd toward her, shouting. It wasn’t Beatrix, and it wasn’t Harvey either: It was the narrow-faced man in glasses, jet-black robes flapping as he ran through the crowd, elbowing the rioters violently aside to get to her and then immediately grabbing her arm.
“Stop it! I said let her go, you idiot!” the man shouted at one of the rioters who’d been pulling Kieli’s hair and decked him.
One of the highest-ranking priests, someone who was supposed to be a man of character. Turned on a normal believer. Called him names. And hit him. With a closed fist.
In the center of the still-roaring chaos, Kieli gaped up at her father’s desperate face as he crouched protectively over her, feeling almost like a bystander to some situation she had nothing to do with. The possessed expressions of the people pressing in on her and the commotion all around her—all the things she’d been so scared to death of a second ago—felt awfully distant and unreal. Her father was shouting abuse at them, but she couldn’t really hear it. There was the warmth of her father’s body as he held her. That was the only thing she could sense.
“Lord Sigri’s taken leave of his senses!”
“Right now we need to take care of the late Father’s body!”
She heard shouts, muted and far away.
Her father’s voice shouting back, on the other hand, abruptly came through crystal-clear.
“Forget about a few senile old fools who were practically dead anyway and do some work!”
One of the highest-ranking priests, someone who was supposed to be a man of character. How could he say such a thing? Kieli couldn’t believe her own ears.
“Why are there so many people here?!” Beatrix cried, irritably punching various people who blocked her path. She was sure there hadn’t been so many people in the great hall during the service, but for some reason waves of them were pouring in from outside; by now they were all so tightly crowded together that they could hardly move. At this rate, she suspected they’d already crushed that Elder’s fallen corpse underfoot.
“Kieli!” she shouted, casually hitting (with a closed fist) whatever random person happened to be getting in her way. Beatrix had seen her escape the hall with Father Sigri, so she did think the girl was probably okay for now, but still.
“Ah! I found you!”
That priest, Yoshiu or whatever his name was, forced his way through the crowd to her. He caught at her clothes as if to make sure she wouldn’t get away from him again, his hand scrabbling somewhere around the waist of her dress.
“Watch where you’re grabbing!”
“Huh? Oh! Ah—” The priest hurriedly let go of her, and then a confused look passed over his face as he wondered where he should grab. His hands sort of hung in the air as he thought. While he was thus preoccupied, a shove from behind sent him face-planting forward into her chest. “I-I’m so sorry!” he babbled, and immediately jerked away.
As he rubbed his bruised nose, he took a fresh look at her and blinked. “You’ve cut your hair straight!”
It’s impossible to stay on guard around this guy…Beatrix sighed in disgust. “What’s all this fuss about, anyway? Why are all these people coming here?”
“Oh, that’s right! You see, something terrible has—”
A scream cut off the priest’s explanation. It came from somewhere over the entrance—in no time, people were retreating from that direction, pushing their way back toward Beatrix. Across the wave of people, she saw a large greenish form. “Oh, no, they’ve made it here!” the priest shrieked pathetically, hiding behind her. In the center of the doughnut-shaped ring of people running around in panic, a single monster with skin gone mushy like a drowned corpse’s ambled drunkenly forward.
……So those are the Undying failures Kieli told me about.
“Well, this is just peachy,” she complained to nobody in particular, and tested the weight of what she gripped underneath her shawl.
“L-let’s run!”
Urged forward by the priest, who’d been more than ready to run from the beginning, Beatrix joined the tide of people fleeing from the monster for the time being. The crowd didn’t seem to be running away from the monster attack so much as they were running to get ahead of everyone else. Screams rose up as people shoved each other aside or fell down. The cathedral that had been so wreathed in tranquillity a few short minutes ago was turning into a war zone, with all the ugliness of human nature on display and everyone acting as if the evil spirits had taken over their bodies.
And then the priest running in front of her gave a little cry and turned around, sort of hesitantly marching in place, so that Beatrix nearly crashed into him.
“What was that for?!” Beatrix started to complain, but he was already slipping past her and jogging a few meters back the way they’d just come. An old woman lay doubled over on the floor right in the middle of the brutal chaos; probably she’d fallen and hadn’t been able to get up.
“Oh, dear Lord…dear Lord…” She was pressing her forehead to the floorboards, curled up around shaking clasped hands and muttering a string of prayers. Other people were stepping over her for the moment, but someone would step on her any second now.
“Grandma, what are you doing?! Get up!”
The priest embraced her and tried to help her stand. And that was when a great heavy shadow fell over their heads. With the old woman in his arms, the priest looked up and froze, all the blood draining from his face. The monster’s claws came slashing down.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Regripping the scissors underneath her shawl, Beatrix lunged without hesitation at the monster.
Clang!
She blocked its claws with the tip of the blades, then plunged them into one of the monster’s eyes. If the thing really was an Undying, the blow wouldn’t be even close to fatal, but it flinched back for a moment when she stole half its sight, and she took that opening to ram her shoulder into its torso with all her strength and send it flying. “Give me a break! I’ve only got this stupid thing for a weapon!” She kept on griping as she adjusted her hold on the scissors and squared off with the enemy she knew would probably be back on its feet any second.
She spared a glance at her own shoulder and clucked her tongue. Apparently she’d been clawed. There was a huge tear in her dress and a gaping wound on the exposed arm underneath. The monster’s eyeball regenerated, and her own wound healed itself in parallel. Tumult swept over the people standing frozen around them.
“M-monster!” someone screamed. And who did they mean? Beatrix didn’t even have to wonder. Obviously they wouldn’t need to shout that about the thing that looked like a monster; they must be talking about her. Terror spread among them in the blink of an eye, and the petrified congregation started to run off in all directions again.
It was nothing new, but Beatrix couldn’t stifle a frustrated grumble. Boy, does it ever get on my nerves how everybody has to freak out and call me a monster over a little thing like this—
“Um!” a timid voice suddenly spoke up from right nearby, as opposed to the retreating voices of all the other people scrambling to get away from her. The priest had secured the old woman and was peeking his ashen face out from behind the shelter of a pew back. At her sidelong glare of annoyance, he cringed a little as he asked her with hesitant concern, “Are…are you all right?”
Beatrix gaped at him with her mouth hanging open like a fool. The priest watched her face timidly, trying to gauge her mood.
She gave him a faint, wry smile.
“I’m fine. I almost wish it were stronger. You’re in the way here, so hurry up and escape.”
“Y-yes, ma’am!”
She watched the priest start moving deeper into the cathedral, helping the old woman along with him, out of the corner of her eye. Then she turned to face the monster again. The better part of the crowd had been retreating into the passageways at the rear of the cathedral, as if pressed back by the monster who’d appeared at the front door. Judging by the way the screams were growing fainter, the evacuation seemed to have mostly finished.
All right then, what to do now? Sure, she’d cracked a joke about wishing it were stronger, but if she were honest, she hadn’t exactly thought much about how to compete with an enemy that had the same immortal qualities she did.
She glanced over its shoulder and let out a distinctly unrefined “Ugh…”
Several more monsters were shambling up the steps leading to the cathedral entrance with their swaying side-to-side gait. They distracted her for only a split second, but her opponent took advantage of it to launch itself at her in a bizarre leap she couldn’t believe came from a bipedal walker. “Shit!” Beatrix seized one of the six-person pews and swung it with all her might into the monster. It hit dead center and broke apart. It seemed to only slow her enemy down; by the time the broken pieces of pew hit the floor, it was already right there in front of her. Out of its mouth, which gaped so wide she found herself wondering if its jaw was dislocated, peeked a rough tongue covered in viscous saliva and bumpy taste buds.
“Bea!” she heard a voice call. By that name she thought her family had called her a long, long time ago. By that insanely abbreviated nickname used by only one person left on this planet. At the same time, something skated along the floor toward her, spinning. Her reflexes knew what it was and had her ducking to pick it up before her brain even registered it.
A black big-bore gun with an ammo belt dangling from it. Wielding the bulky weapon in a two-handed grip, she leveled it at the enemy’s heart.
Whump!
The thick gunshot sound unique to the carbonization gun rang out. The point-blank shot turned its whole chest to soot, leaving nothing but a gaping hole, and its nerveless body collapsed forward straight into her, pinning her to the ground beneath its heavyweight-class corpse. Beatrix screamed. The spongy feel of its skin, slack and moist just like a drowned man’s, made her flesh crawl. “Gyah! No! Gross, get off me!” She thrashed her arms and legs like an overturned beetle until someone grabbed her arm with that same call of “Bea!” and managed to drag her out from under the slimy body.
When she turned around to look at it, half-crying where she sat on the ground clutching the man’s arm, she saw its charred stone heart tumble out of the hole in its chest.
The corpse had returned to a mere corpse, never to move again.
“Phew…” When Beatrix heaved an undignified sigh, she felt one of her ribs twinge. I guess that thing broke it in the fall…Ah, well, it was bound to heal up again before long. She just blocked out the pain and banished it from her thoughts to look at the guy who’d come to help her out.
They grinned at each other.
“Yo.”
“Long time no see. You alive?”
They bumped fists. As two-year reunions between them went, that was about as emotional as it got. Beatrix’s first impression was that on the one hand, he was disgustingly unchanged (well, not that she’d changed either), but on the other, he was now just about as far away from “whole and healthy” as you could get. The prosthetic hand she remembered from two years ago was gone, along with most of his right arm, and his left eye was a different color. Maybe he’d gotten another one.
He returned her slightly disgusted gaze with a gaze of his own and blinked.
“Something’s different about you. Oh, you don’t have enough hair!”
“I don’t have enough? What kind of way is that to say it?!”
She decked him.
Then she shrugged and laughed softly, reaching out with that same hand to ruffle his copper-colored hair. “You’re as beat-up-looking as always. It’s very you.” “Qu-quit that!” The gruff way Ephraim tried to bat her hand away was so funny that she wanted to do it again.
“How’re you doing, Pops?” she asked the radio dangling from Ephraim’s neck, looking down, but the only answer from the speaker was a burst of static that seemed to object to the “Pops” thing. “Huh? Pops?” She looked back up at Ephraim.
“It broke, and it won’t go back to normal…”
The way he lowered his eyes and bit his bottom lip despondently left her at a temporary loss for words, but she rallied. “Don’t look so sad. It’ll work out. You’re the one who’s always saying ‘It’ll probably work out somehow.’” Beatrix tugged on his bangs to drag his face up, then smiled at him. “It’s a good thing you’re here—hurry up and go find Kieli. I think she went around behind the cathedral. This thing still has bullets left, right? I’m borrowing it.” Maybe he’d stolen it from a soldier he’d come across or something; the giant ammo belt unique to the carbonization gun still had plenty of rounds left in it.
“Bea?”
She stooped to pick up the carbonization gun. Ephraim caught her arm just as she finished standing back up. His copper eye peered at her worriedly. He’s onto me, eh? With a self-deprecating smile, Beatrix put a hand to her side. The broken ribs were almost healed already.
“I’m fine. I’ve still got a little business to take care of, though. I’ll catch up with you later.”
While she’d been busy getting squashed by corpses and whatnot, she’d seen the newly arrived failures chase the pilgrims deeper into the building. In the same direction as that priest had taken off with the old lady. There was no going back now…Once you saved a guy the first time, you had to look after him till the end, or it left a bad taste in your mouth like nobody’s business.
“Beatrix,” she heard him call one more time just as she was about to run off with the carbonization gun slung over one shoulder. “Mm. What?” she said, stopping. She kept her tone casual, but she knew perfectly well that when he called her by her actual full name, he was trying to say something serious.
There was a pause before his next line came.
“…Let’s all go home together,” he said, staring at the ground as if he was embarrassed and glowering shyly. Beatrix blinked stupidly at him for a moment, then gave a suppressed laugh.
He might seem as though he hadn’t changed underneath all those new scars, but it really hit her now how somewhere along the line, he had. He never used to show his feelings so openly on his face like this before. It had been only a few short years in a life almost a century long. And yet for them those few short years had brought new meetings substantial enough to effect at least a bit of change in what had dragged on and on unchanging for so long before.
“Well, duh. I’ll catch up with you soon.” She reached up with one hand and dragged the coppery head even higher than her own into a light embrace and said, “You do your best on your own, too.”
The same thing she’d said to her baby brother a long, long time ago.
This time, she managed to make that line—the one she’d spat coldly as a young girl who couldn’t express her feelings right—come out soft and warm.
Only a few short years, during which she’d undeniably changed, too. She didn’t regret them at all.
With that promise to meet again, the two of them each took off running in different directions.
Why aren’t any Church Soldiers coming?
Isn’t it the Security Forces’ job to protect the people at times like these?
Oh, dear Lord…
The pile of pews they were using to barricade the door to the supply room they’d fled into gave a weird, squealing clatter. There was only one monster on the other side. Nonetheless, even with the combined strength of all the men pushing it back, the barricade creaked away as if it was ready to break at any second. They had a few young priests there in addition to the pilgrims; as Yoshiu joined them in bracing the barricade, he listened with half an ear to the whining and complaining gradually starting up among the women and children and elderly huddled together in the back of the supply room watching them.
The Security Forces are probably doing everything they can, too. Far more packs of monsters were showing up in the city streets, and if this was what one of them was like, he doubted Security Forces equipment would be enough to easily hold them all off. And yet only a handful of them had made it all the way up to the Church building—these people who couldn’t come up with anything to do but complain at a time like this probably didn’t give a thought to the fact that it was the Security Forces’ hard work they had to thank for that. Still, he had no right to criticize anyone. He felt like airing a complaint or two himself.
Whether he’d let his muscles slacken as he thought or it had just broken through, the monster’s arm abruptly thrust through a gap between the legs of two pews, ripping a scream from the priest’s throat.
Bony fingers with slack greenish skin and sharp claws squirmed like an insect’s writhing limbs, trying to grab its prey through the barricade. The men at the barricade screamed in terror, and so did the people behind them. “Nngah!” The arm reached out and seized a young man right next to Yoshiu by the neck. His madly struggling body was yanked flush against the barricade from the other side; Yoshiu pulled it back with every ounce of his might from this side. Just when he and two other priests had managed to wrestle the man away from it, the monster’s arm snapped in half at the elbow with an eerie crunch that gave him goose bumps. Everyone around screamed and jumped away from where it had landed on the floor.
The creepy wrenched-off forearm kept squirming, crawling along the floor with just its fingernails as if it were still searching for prey even now. They all gave it a wide berth, staring at it pale-faced. He heard a child’s shrill voice start to cry. The barricade started to creak again, and everyone desperately formed a wall to hold it up.
“Help me! Please!” called a human voice unexpectedly from the other side. When Yoshiu pressed his face up to the crack between the pews and peered out, he saw a man who seemed to have fallen behind the rest standing there pleading. A pilgrim, he thought. The now one-armed monster noticed this new arrival and sluggishly turned its gaze to focus on him.
“Help me, let me in, please! Now!”
Some of the men slackened their hold on the barricade at his panicked begging, but then one of the onlookers behind them protested, “Don’t!”
“Don’t open it, or that thing will get in, too!”
Yoshiu couldn’t believe his ears. A normal civilian who hadn’t run as quickly as they had was outside, and this woman was telling them not to open the barricade. And even more unbelievably, a chorus of others cried out in agreement. “Sh-she’s right. Don’t do it!” “We’ve got no choice. He was just unlucky.” “But…” There were a few people who looked as if they wanted to object, but they were cowed into silence by the majority.
“What are you waiting for?! Please, hurry up and open it! Help me!”
They could still hear a man’s voice pleading for help from beyond the creaking barricade, but the people on the inside only exchanged dark looks. In the end, there wasn’t a single person who tried to relax the barricade. The man screamed on the outside, and everyone inside flinched. His voice, still screaming “Help me, help me,” grew steadily thinner and fainter.
As he held up the barricade with everyone else, thoughts swirled in Yoshiu’s mind. What should I do? I have to help him. But that monster really will come in here the moment we let down the barricade. What should I do? What should I do—? Why won’t God reach out a hand to save us at a time like this? Is even this a trial?
“You! Out of the way!”
Out of nowhere, a sharp voice calling from outside. “You” wasn’t nearly specific enough to actually get anything done, though; they were all too flabbergasted to move, let alone get out of anyone’s way, when—
Whump!
A dull explosion like a blast of compressed air rang out on the other side of the barricade. One section of it collapsed with a clatter; a split second after the men nearby leapt aside, screaming, the greenish monster fell through along with a broken pew. Screams sounded around him, and the crowd backed up all the way to the rear wall.
There was a beat of questioning silence. But the monster stayed slumped facedown over the pew, with no sign of movement.
Just as the mood of the crowd was beginning to turn from fear to puzzlement, a figure leapt up and over the barricade from the other side, using the monster’s back as a springboard and landing on the floor with a loud bang. A stir swept through them as they looked up. The sight of her, her shortened golden hair floating up around her and scattering reflected light all around as she flew through the air as if on golden wings, was just like—
Just like—
“An angel,” he heard someone murmur with a sigh.
She flew nimbly, gorgeously as an angel through the air and alighted on the floor without even a wobble. The next moment, though, the people’s reverent sighs were replaced by a stir of repulsion. They took in the sight of her properly, carrying a blood-covered man who must’ve been bitten by the monster slung over one shoulder and a black big-bore gun braced against the other.
“Monster…” he heard the ones who’d seen her abnormal healing powers whispering to each other.
Meanwhile, she just dumped the injured man rather roughly on the ground without appearing to pay any attention to their terror and said flatly, “Do you have a doctor or anything in here?” She scanned the faces of the crowd. “If somebody doesn’t patch him up quick, he’s done for.” The priests there who knew first aid rushed, if timidly, to help him.
“Only one of them here? There were more, weren’t there?” the woman quizzed them further, gesturing with a wave of one hand at the monster, which showed no signs now of ever moving again. Yet nobody in the crowd moved to answer her question. Impulsively, Yoshiu cried out, “There were some people who ran into the other passageway! I think the others probably followed them…” When her crystal-clear, ice-blue eyes fixed on him, they stole his breath, and he closed his mouth.
And then she flashed him a first-class smile that shot straight through the hearts of everyone who saw it, just as it always did.
“Okay. Thanks.”
She spared only a brief glance at the people still keeping their distance and looking on with those repulsed gazes before she spun around and flew back through the barricade, once again using the monster’s corpse as a springboard. Apart from the priests tending to the wounded man, the crowd around him just watched her go without reacting.
“…Ah!” Yoshiu, who’d been just watching her go right along with them, jolted back to himself and elbowed his way through them, diving into the hole she’d left in the barricade. He hesitated to touch the monster’s body, but then he averted his eyes and crawled up over it anyway (the spongy feel of it, its sort of foul, bloody stench, and the burnt smell mixed in with it all made his stomach roil and his eyes burn with tears) to get to the other side. When he landed in the corridor outside the supply room, he cried, “W-wait, please!”
At his call, the woman running down the passage with a carbonization gun on one shoulder stopped and turned to him.
“What? It’s dangerous here, so go back and fortify the barricade or something.”
“I—well—that is—” Yoshiu stopped a little ways from her, his tongue suddenly faltering.
She blinked curiously at him a couple of times and then went, “Oh,” as if she suddenly understood, although he hadn’t actually said anything yet. “Right, I guess you need to capture me, don’t you?”
“No, that’s not it,” he denied anxiously, shaking his head…You don’t really have to go help them, do you? You should just leave those ungrateful wretches to their fate. That’s what he’d dashed out here to tell her. But now that it was time to actually form the words, he hesitated. It was just such an awfully selfish thing to say right after she’d saved him. It disgusted him how cowardly and narrow-minded he was. There’s something wrong with this—did I really pass the priesthood exam? The idea was starting to seem incredible.
“The one I need to capture is the weapon of massacre and the ‘Demon of War’ and the ‘Witch of Toulouse,’” he said, thinking hard about each word. “Not you.”
She looked mystified. He himself didn’t really know what he’d been trying to say, for all the thought he’d put into it. He bit his lip, impatient with himself for not being able to put what he wanted to say into words.
“When we first found you, the town kids were all excited, calling you an angel, and to be honest I thought it was ridiculous…but…” He took a breath, and then after a moment continued. “But the woman who arrived at my place out of nowhere that day really was an angel…”
After the words were out of his mouth, he realized he might have just babbled something horribly cheesy. Fierce embarrassment seized him. He couldn’t bear to look into her astonished face, so he looked down, cheeks flaring. Wh-what the heck am I saying?! That almost sounded like a love confession!
But staring at the floor in silence soon became unbearable, too, and before long he risked a glance up through his bangs to check her expression.
“……Thanks!”
She smiled—smiled that exquisite first-class smile just for him—and then sprinted off into the chaos where the monsters still roamed.
“Out of bullets, huh…”
The ammo belt was empty. She let the carbonization gun fall to the floor with a heavy thud. She was in a pillar-lined passageway toward the rear of the cathedral. At her feet, where gunpowder smoke was currently settling, lay the bodies of the failures she’d shot through the heart. They weren’t exactly giving the place a pleasant atmosphere. She’d used up her weapon, but she was pretty sure she’d taken out all the ones who’d gotten into the cathedral now. Maybe there were a few more who’d made it into the headquarters facilities farther into the Church complex, but if that meant they were attacking the Elders and high-ranking priests who’d hightailed it out of here without a thought for anybody else, Beatrix sure wasn’t going to waste any pity on them.
Blowing out a deep breath, she sat down with her back propped against a pillar to take a little break.
“Sheesh…”
She grumbled in annoyance at the tears all over her clothes. This had been the simple black dress she’d liked the best out of all the ones that had been bought for her while she was imprisoned (ensconced) in the Sigri residence. Beatrix’s body was pretty tattered, too, what with little cuts and big cuts and bruises and all, but unlike the dress, her body was salvageable, so she wasn’t bothered about that (maybe normal people would prioritize things in the other order).
She let her gaze drift casually over the bodies strewn at her feet.
“You were victims, too, weren’t you? I’d like to give you a funeral service, but that’s not in my job description, you know? And this place is crawling with priests, after all.”
She wondered if Ephraim had gotten to see Kieli yet. A wry laugh escaped her with the sigh. That boy just took so much looking after. Even an angel wouldn’t go this far looking after a stranger!
An angel, hmm…?
Remembering the priest’s words to her, she felt just the teensiest bit flattered. One minute she was being called a witch in Toulouse, and the next thing she knew somebody was saying she was an angel. Frankly, she preferred “witch.” It was a lot less work than being an angel.
I mean, angels have to do “good things” for people.
Then again, for today at least she thought she’d made a damn fine angel, if she did say so herself.
In between two pillars she saw a large painting. The portrait of a flock of angels ascending to Heaven surrounded by saints was blurred with the smoke drifting along the floor of the passageway.
Thank you! It’s wonderful! It’s wonderful! she heard a sunny voice say from within it. In the yard of the tidy white house, a golden-haired girl in a brand-new white dress laughed merrily as she danced around and around and around. A little boy chased his sister around as she ran until he tripped and fell flat on his face. Sheesh, don’t you know boys don’t cry? the girl lectured him when he looked ready to cry over his scraped knees, lifting him to his feet.
You do your best on your own, too—why had she said the same words to Ephraim then that she’d said to her little brother at their parents’ funeral? Ephraim never stopped needing looking after, and deep down he was a scaredy-cat who couldn’t make up his mind about anything, and he was way too fast to get tears in his eyes for somebody that pig-headed…Yeah, now that she thought about it, she guessed he must’ve been pretty much just like a little brother to her this whole time.
Let’s all go home together.
Ephraim’s final words floated through her mind. Right, she couldn’t afford to be taking a break yet; she needed to get moving. So they could all go home together.
“Okay, gotta go. I’d better do a little more babysitting.”
She tried to stand up, but her still-tired legs lurched a little. “Get your act together,” she snapped at them, putting a hand against the pillar to steady herself.
And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the monster corpse lying by the next pillar over slide a few centimeters. Beatrix’s eyes widened in disbelief. I shot that thing through the heart! How can it still move?! It crawled along the floor still facedown and disappeared beyond the pillar.
Strange things that looked like broken-off cables were dragged along with it into the shadows. And then she began to hear the crunching of teeth on flesh and bone.
“…?”
When she stared quizzically in that direction—
Shunk.
Beatrix felt a baffling pressure as though something were bearing down on her heart from above. When she tried to stand up, she crashed back down onto her rear end, unable to support her own weight.
She saw a giant misshapen form on the other side of the pillar. Dragging all manner of fat and thin cables and pipes of all sizes from various parts of its body like a scrapped machine, it lurched heavily out of the pillar’s shadow.
Still sitting flat on the floor, Beatrix widened her eyes in horror. She couldn’t believe what they were telling her. Her voice trembled.
“You’re…”
The sensation of her father’s left hand pulling at her own right hand was frying Kieli’s brain. It didn’t feel like Harvey’s hand or Beatrix’s hand or her grandmother’s hand. She couldn’t find the words to describe it, couldn’t process it in her mind. Her thoughts were all mixed up. I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t get it…
“P-please let me go,” she said weakly, finally finding the voice to refuse.
“A-ah, right. I’m sorry.” Her father let go of her hand apologetically. They were both breathing pretty hard. They stopped running and just walked briskly for a while in silence. Her father’s glasses were gone, and a bruise was forming to one side of his mouth. She wondered if he’d taken a punch from someone in that frenzied chaos in the cathedral.
…Because he’d helped Kieli.
They’d managed to escape the chaos, and now they were walking along the colonnade connecting one of the headquarters buildings to another tower. Thin beams of outside light filtered in from between the thick columns; the space stretching out in a long line before them was wreathed in a dusky tranquillity very like the one she’d felt in the cathedral before. The distant commotion they’d been able to hear from that cathedral most of the way here had faded out of earshot behind them at some point. Their two sets of footsteps and still-irregular breaths echoed in the deserted colonnade.
“Are you hurt…?” her father asked tentatively, and Kieli firmly shook her head. His bruised face broke into a smile, as if this relieved him. Even though he was the one who’d been punched, who was enduring a black eye, and he’d lost the sling for his right arm at some point, too, so that his arm hung painfully and unnaturally from his shoulder. The conversation petered out after that, and uncomfortable silence reigned again for a while.
Kieli abruptly came to a stop, so her father stopped, too, looking at her as if he was wondering what was wrong.
“This—this isn’t—” She looked down at the tips of her boots as she spat the words out, scooting backward a little to get away from him. “This isn’t—wh-why are you…? You’d better not think this is enough to win me over!” She knew as she spoke that she was blurting out horrible things, but her head was all messed up and she didn’t know what she should say. She wished somebody would come rescue her that very moment. No, I don’t want to be left alone with him. Harvey, Corporal, Beatrix…! The anguished expression on his face, lips pressed tightly together, made the atmosphere between them even more unbearable.
“I…I have to go back to Beatrix.”
“Wait—”
She shook off her father’s hand when he reached out to stop her and took off in the direction they’d come.
This time Kieli really was at her limit. She didn’t know what she might do if she stayed with him any longer. She was sure to blurt out something that would make Harvey look sad again. She’d hated herself more and more each day she’d been here.
Your happiness is always top priority—
Beatrix had said that, said it about her as though she deserved it somehow, and how could she face the people who felt that way about her if she kept doing this?
Kieli heard a low, animal gurgle from somewhere nearby.
She came to a halt, chilled to the bone. She could see a large human form in the shadow of one of the colonnade’s pillars. Posture stooped like an animal’s, swaying from side to side, it tilted its head and gurgled again inquisitively as if it was making sure it knew what she was. A failure—
Kieli’s father stepped in front of her where she’d frozen in place mid-run. Still, the arm he’d thrust out to protect her with was quivering slightly. The failure took a step out from behind the pillar, and Kieli’s stiff feet moved jerkily backward at her father’s push.
After that one step, though, the failure abruptly folded forward and collapsed facedown on the floor. Kieli’s eyes widened incredulously—it was just so sudden—and then she turned them away instinctively a moment later, swallowing back the rising nausea.
Half the fallen failure’s body was missing, as if it had been bitten off.
“This tastes nasty,” she heard a different voice say in the shadows. There, holding a bloody stone heart in his right hand and noisily slurping up the blood and meat sticking to the end of a bio-cable dangling from the corner of his mouth—someone Kieli knew—
Horrified, Kieli made her lips form his name. “Joa…chim…?”
“Sheesh,” the lean man in black robes muttered in an incongruously breezy voice, sighing and shrugging. “You said you couldn’t ever get it back, but that was a lie, wasn’t it, Pops? Or else what are you hiding behind your back?” Kieli shrank back in surprise when he fixed her with a look over her father’s shoulder. Her father took a step forward protectively.
“You got something back, didn’t you…What a liar.”
And out of the shadow of the pillar walked Joachim, with the same sluggish steps those monsters had. Kieli sucked in a startled breath when she saw how strange his appearance had become. Half the left side of his body, which he’d been hiding behind the pillar, had turned to a mass of rotting green flesh, and globs of rotten meat dribbled down from the fingertips of the left hand he dangled lifelessly at his side. As he nibbled at the stone heart in his right hand just as though he were sipping sweet fruit nectar, he gave a strange, hiccupping laugh.
“Say, I wonder which of you it would be more fun to hurt by killing the other one,” he said, facing them and cocking his head curiously.
“Run,” whispered her father, shoving Kieli back. She let him, and began to tear off down the passage, but before long she tripped over her own fear-stiffened feet. Her father caught her before she fell and tugged her hand; they began running together.
A steel door was visible at the end of the dusky colonnade ahead. She could sense leisurely steps following them from behind. They made it to the other side, checking over their shoulders all the way, and her father seized the doorknob and pushed. This entrance evidently wasn’t used very often; the door was thick with rust, and all it did was creak under his hands. Unable to bear to watch any longer, Kieli stood next to her father and rammed her body into the rusty door with all the strength she could muster. Their only warning was a squeal of metal before it flew open with surprising force, and their momentum sent them half-falling through it to the other side.
The darkness was deeper here than it had been in the colonnade outside, and the air was thick with rust and dust and a foul odor. They were in a sort of cylindrical tower. When Kieli looked up, she saw walls crawling with fine cracks and a spiral staircase running along them and disappearing into the darkness above.
A low groaning sound like wind blowing down from above echoed dully against the walls.
While they’d struggled with the door, the presence pursuing them had gotten much closer. Kieli was already panting, but her father dragged her forward by the hand and they ran up the narrow staircase that would allow only one fully grown adult to pass at a time. She could hear two sets of footsteps jogging up the concrete steps…And the thwacking of a third set of footsteps coming leisurely after them from behind. He was walking slowly, and yet the impression that he was steadily closing the distance between them set her nerves on edge.
Kieli wasn’t sure how high they’d climbed, but her already leaden feet stumbled and missed the next step, and she tumbled forward and whacked her shin. She knocked her father off balance in front of her, too, through their joined hands. He managed to regain his balance, though, and lent Kieli a hand to help her up. But while they’d paused, the footsteps approaching from behind had grown quite close.
In the dim stairway they had only a few meters’ visibility. A tall man appeared out of the darkness below.
The arm he slashed out sent her father flying. The priest’s back slammed into the wall, and he slumped down onto the steps. With a little scream, Kieli immediately tried to run to him, but an arm hooked around her neck from behind and ripped her away. Her father only lay there on the floor, groaning, and didn’t get up. He had a hand to one shoulder. Had he hit the one that had been dislocated?
“Let me go!”
As she struggled, the hand around her neck grabbed her jaw and squeezed. The skin of his palm was squishy; the feel of it pressing into her jaw sent a thrill of horror down her spine. He pressed her back against the railing of the spiral staircase until she was half bent backward over it. Directly below her head was a column of fathomless darkness.
“Stop…it…” she heard her father grunt. Joachim tossed a glance over his shoulder without releasing Kieli and clucked his tongue. “To hell with you. You have something you’re desperate to protect, don’t you? You got something, didn’t you? That pisses me off. You traitor,” he spat as he wrapped his hands around Kieli’s throat and began to choke her. “Ngh…” Kieli desperately tried to force her own hands between Joachim’s to buy herself an airway. Her vision flickered with the lack of oxygen.
As she writhed in pain, Joachim drew his face in close to hers and licked his lips in anticipation. The stench of death assailed her nose.
“Are—humans tasty…? That meat—before tasted—nasty…”
His grip loosened by a fraction, letting air back into Kieli’s lungs.
“Jo…a…?” she gasped out brokenly, trying her best to call his name through her fit of coughing. She thought he was acting weird. His eyes that had been the same pretty blue-gray as the night sky were clouded with white now, and they weren’t both focusing on the same point. “Joachim…Joachim!” she called to him, still coughing; his blue-gray eyes bulged and rolled around in his head just millimeters away from her face until they finally focused, and then he looked at her.
“Ki—eli…help me…” he said in a hiccupping voice, his cheeks distorted into a bizarre, sad, pained smile. “It’s weird—my whole body keeps hurting—but I can’t shut out the pain…I can’t remember how…I can’t think—I can’t think. Hey, is there anything weird about me right now?”
“Joachim…!”
“Hey, do me a favor, Kieli.”
Pushing her into the railing with one hand wrapped around her neck, Joachim used his half-rotten other hand to take Kieli’s and press it to his own chest. His eyes rolled and bulged again, and then he turned his gaze to her with a sad expression.
“Dig my heart out,” he implored her. Kieli widened her eyes in terror. “Dig it out for me, come on…Help—me, let me rest…”
“No! No! I can’t! Let me go!” As she struggled to get free, Kieli shook her head as hard as she could in refusal. Her hand sank effortlessly into his chest, which almost seemed to swallow it up. With a ragged scream, she tried to pull it back out.
Traitor…
In her dimming consciousness, she heard him curse her not with her ears, but echoing deep inside her skull.
Bits of conversations she’d had with Joachim since they’d gotten to the capital floated into her mind and then disappeared again like bubbles.
I’m going to kill your dad, you know.
Whatcha crying about?
You and I are birds of a feather.
So you know what? I’ll give you a hand with this. I’ll kill your enemy for you.
You’re nothing like me after all.
Traitor—had she betrayed him? First she’d said she didn’t mind if he killed her father—she’d said her father was an enemy—and then when push came to shove she’d hesitated, and she’d tried to stop him in the end. She’d gotten all confused hearing her father’s words and feeling his warmth, and she’d been rejecting him as hard as she could, desperate not to be won over. Just now, when her father had been knocked down, she’d immediately tried to run to him. Was acceptance a betrayal? She didn’t know. She didn’t know what to do. Somebody help me—
“Joachim!”
It was like being shaken awake from a nightmare: the voice in her dimming ears abruptly snapped her mind back into focus.
Joachim stopped moving. With her back shoved up against the railing and her neck bent backward, Kieli swept her gaze over everything she could see of the tower. A tall, lean figure ran up out of the darkness that sank over the bottom of the staircase. In those jet-black robes that melted into the dark, for a moment she almost mistook him for someone else, but there was no mistaking that dull gleam of red hair in the gloom, or the voice that reached Kieli’s ears loud and clear without his having to raise it. No mistaking it. Even though she was still being held captive, an inexpressible feeling of relief spread within her heart.
The new arrival stopped a little ways below them on the steps, panting.
“Yo. The hero’s showing up at the perfect time,” Joachim said teasingly, holding him in check by clenching a hand around Kieli’s chin.
Grinding his teeth and aborting the step he’d been about to take, Harvey shouted, “What the hell are you doing, Joachim?!”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m in the middle of a murder-suicide with your precious Kieli, obviously.”
Joachim forced her even harder against the railing, until her upper body doubled over backward and began to slide down. Her entire field of vision was a darkness that stretched endlessly down, down, down, framed by black bubbles popping at the edges as her head swam. Joachim and Harvey glared at each other from their respective high and low positions.
While they were distracted by the staring contest, Kieli sensed something moving behind Joachim.
“Let go of my daughter!”
Sigri pounced at Joachim from behind in a sort of tackle. Joachim seemed slightly surprised, but he shoved the Elder off with a jab of one elbow and then knocked him over with a merciless karate chop to his right shoulder. Sigri sank back to the floor by the wall again. But Kieli, who’d been released from Joachim’s arms in the meantime, had already slid to the ground and half-rolled down the stairs away from him.
Harvey’s priest’s-cloth-covered legs appeared before her eyes as he stepped protectively in front of her.
Cursing, Joachim rubbed some rotting flesh off his chin. Then he turned and sprinted unsteadily up into the towering wall of darkness that shrouded the top of the spiral staircase. For a moment Harvey moved to follow him, running two or three steps up, but he stopped almost right away. The sound of retreating footsteps was swallowed up by the darkness overhead. Holding a hand to her throat and gasping, Kieli looked up to where the sound of his footsteps was fading into the distance. He’d already vanished from sight.
Sigri was lying midway up the stairs. Harvey stooped a little to check on him and then returned to the step where Kieli sat.
Kieli still coughing a little, Harvey still panting slightly—their eyes met.
The tall form squatting in front of her pulled her gently into a hug.
Kieli bit her trembling lip and tried desperately to hold back her tears, but once one of them managed to spill out in a single fat drop, there was no stopping them anymore. “Aaaa…Aaaaaaa, Harvey…!” She wound her jelly-limp arms around his back as tightly as she could and buried her face in his chest while she gasped for breath. Tearfully, she called his name over and over again. “Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.” Over and over and over again.
Each time, she heard him whisper “Yeah” into her ear. The familiar comfortable voice and the familiar tobacco smell. “Sorry I’m late.”
She shook her head from side to side without lifting it from his chest. He’d come for her. He’d come for her just as he’d promised. He’d said he’d come no matter what, so he’d come when she was in trouble. That was enough for Kieli.
“What about Beatrix?”
“I saw her. It’s okay now. We can go home together soon.”
She soaked up the quiet, comforting voice all the way down to the bottom of her heart, and the tears just kept coming. She’d just finished shaking her head, and now she was nodding over and over. We can go home soon. We can go home together. How long had she waited to hear those words these past few days? Each one had felt like a month.
Clang.
The sound of a door creaking shut far above them. With a groan, cool outside air flowed into the musty inside wind that had been echoing bitterly off the walls. Harvey looked up once, then drew away a little from Kieli.
“Can you wait for a few minutes? I want to have a talk with that idiot. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
Kieli made an uneasy face, but nonetheless she swallowed back the urge to stop him. She gave a tiny nod. She was sure this was another thing Harvey needed to settle for himself so they could all go home together…and if that’s how it was, Kieli couldn’t stop him.
It was so they could all go home.
Harvey nodded back at her reassuringly. He lifted the radio from his neck and handed it to her, then stood up and took off up the stairs. Hugging the radio to her, Kieli watched him go until his priest’s robes vanished into the darkness. The radio began to croon a quiet, lullaby-like static for the unease deep in her heart that she still couldn’t quite banish.
“Corporal…” When she pressed her forehead to the speaker, she caught the faint sound of the radio’s voice through the static.
Kieli crawled just one step closer to where Sigri lay and tried to assess how he was. He didn’t move. Was he unconscious? She closed the distance only that little bit, though; she couldn’t go any closer, and she couldn’t speak either, so she just curled herself into a ball a little ways away from her father, hugging the radio and feeling uncomfortable.
There were still things weighing on Kieli’s mind that needed to be settled for them to go home together. Things that Kieli had to settle by herself—Kieli, and no one else.
He took the stairs all the way up to the top. Once he’d cleared them in one long dash, he stopped and exhaled, then took just a few more deep breaths to get his lungs under control.
Chilly outside air blew in through the half-open steel door in front of him. As soon as he stepped through it and came out into the open air, a strong mountain wind hit him hard enough to almost knock him over before he managed to grab the door frame. A long, open cloister stretched out in front of him toward a neighboring tower. He had the rock faces of the mountain range to one side of him, and to the other side he had one of the city’s sheer inner walls plummeting straight down into the distance. Far below him, Harvey could see the “mechanical city” enveloped in gray smog and the overpasses of the railroad that cut through it.
And then he saw one knee crumple underneath Joachim and send him falling right about halfway through the cloister. The wind was blowing hard and Harvey was still breathing fast, but he closed the distance between them at a dead sprint. Joachim turned and jabbed a folding knife at him as soon as he’d picked himself up from the floor. Harvey parried it, though he did take a shallow cut to the back of his hand in the process, and grabbed his opponent’s arm. They both tumbled over and rolled along the floor of the cloister as they wrestled for control of the knife. When they came to a stop, Harvey was straddling Joachim, the tip of Joachim’s knife was pressed to his jugular, and Harvey’s hand was gripping the dead center of Joachim’s chest, right above his heart. They glared at each other in that position, where with the next moment’s movement either of them could put the other out of commission, at least temporarily.
The decay was progressing. Harvey could see the skin of Joachim’s cheek crumbling horribly right before eyes as the other man stretched it into a smile and gave a bizarre hee-ha laugh.
“Did you come to laugh at me? You came to laugh and call me pathetic, didn’t you?”
“I’m not gonna laugh.”
“So, what, are you gonna be nice and kill me, then?”
“Yeah. It’ll be my pleasure.”
Harvey channeled more force into the hand gripping his opponent’s chest. He felt the sensation of his fingers sinking into putrefied skin. However, he stopped moving there.
“What’s the matter? Do it. Or else your head’s gonna roll.”
He flexed his hand and a thin line of blood welled up under the tip of the blade at Harvey’s throat, but Harvey still didn’t push him any harder. Joachim twisted the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “What’s that look for? What, are you pitying me now? You know this was all your fault in the first place. You piss me off. You seriously piss me off full tilt, heart and soul, you know that?!” The last few words came out like a war cry as he flipped them over so that he was on top. They rolled together a few times until Joachim’s back hit the railing.
Apparently it had grown brittle. A whole section of the stone rail gave way in a clatter of falling rock that kicked up clouds of mineral dust everywhere. Joachim fell backward right along with it.
Quicker than thought, Harvey found himself bending his upper body over the edge of the cloister and grabbing Joachim’s wrist in the nick of time. His shoulder creaked under the burden of a grown man’s full weight. At the same time, a sickening sound like some viscous substance tearing apart met his ears. Joachim’s half-decayed left arm ripped at the elbow joint, until he dangled only by a few last threads of tendon or nerve fiber or something.
Below the cloister plummeted the sheer inner walls of the city, oozing dirty sewer water from every crevice. Far beneath them he could see an angular rocky slope. Harvey wasn’t sure even an Undying could come back to life if he fell headfirst from this height and dashed his brains out, and he’d never tested it, either.
Hanging by one arm over a drop of something like forty meters, Joachim arranged his face into a taut, mocking smile as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him.
“You know, I don’t get you at all. You make no damn sense. Why’d you save me after that whole speech about killing me?”
“You’re the one who makes no damn sense!” Harvey bellowed back as he supported Joachim’s weight with every ounce of his strength.
“What were you trying to accomplish? What did you want?! First you hang around me, getting in my way all the time, and then you ask me to kill you? What the hell is that?! What the hell did you want from me?!”
The words were coming out of his mouth without passing through his brain first. He hadn’t particularly intended to give this guy a lecture like this. Why was he getting so worked up over a guy like this?
Harvey could feel certain that he was glad he’d taken the path he had, that he had no regrets. But this guy—had anything ever satisfied him a little? Had there ever been anything he could feel glad for? He always resented every stupid little thing; he always looked like he hated everything; what had he, himself, wanted all this time—? It wasn’t that Harvey pitied him or wanted to save him or whatever. He was just venting his irritation at not being able to understand. Sometimes their paths had crisscrossed and sometimes they’d run parallel to each other, but all the same, he felt as if he’d always been walking the same distance as Joachim. If he’d traveled just a slightly different path, maybe he would have ended up just like this guy. This guy was another him who’d traveled a different path. A him who hadn’t been able to find anything.
The mocking little smile vanished from Joachim’s face. He looked straight up at Harvey with those sickeningly familiar blue-gray eyes. Their gazes met for a moment.
And then Joachim said with a sigh, “You just never stop being a sickeningly softhearted moron, do you? That’s why I hate your stupid ass. What was I trying to do? What did I want?……No way am I telling you that. Moron.”
The same old familiar invective, and then—
With the folding knife in his right hand, he cut the tendon at his left elbow that was the last thing supporting his own weight.
“Joachim!”
Falling headfirst with his left forearm still in Harvey’s hand, Joachim smirked and pointed his right thumb to his chest. Then he plunged the folding knife into it dead center and slashed it sideways, wrenching away the bio-cables to yank out his own heart.
As he thrust the stone in Harvey’s direction like one final gesture of spite, his figure grew steadily farther and farther away—
Harvey heard a crash somewhere far down below.
He could see the sky.
Far, far beyond the peaked-hat roofs of the steeples, the sky growing tinged with the copper of evening ran from one end of the world to the other high, high above. The planet’s sky, blurred with fine clouds of dust. A sky so much lower than it seemed, and yet he knew that his hands could never reach it.
Blah…am I still alive, then?
His right hand, lying flung out against the ground, still held his own heart.
What did you want?
There hadn’t been anything he’d wanted anywhere, really. In the end he’d only been grasping after something that didn’t exist and that he didn’t even understand, so it was only natural that he’d never been able to get it, no matter how far he went or how high he climbed.
Yeah, but just now, he’d figured a little of it out……I wanted to be like him. He’s a freakishly softhearted moron, he can’t make up his mind about anything, he’s totally hopeless—but that’s probably why he somehow wound up with all kinds of things I couldn’t get no matter how much I wanted them.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I was jealous of you all along…
Our starting lines would have been the same—what made our paths split off in different directions? Where did I step wrong?
If I didn’t step off the path, I—
It seemed like kind of a shame that this was how it ended, just when he thought he was finally starting to get an idea of what he’d wanted. It’s been one long, pointless life, huh. Oh, well. A pointless, dumbass death like this suits me.
He raised his right hand and grabbed at the sky.
Not even the tips of his fingers could reach it, naturally, and then—
Plop. His heart slipped out of his palm and rolled away along the rocky ground.
His copper-stained field of vision turned steadily white. There was nothing there; no light or sound or smell, no loneliness or despair or suffering or sorrow or even pleasure.
There was really nothing at all there at the end of the world.
It was a really, really immaculate nothingness.