Episode 1: Jude

“Oh hello. Nice to meet you,” were Harvey’s first words to Father Sigri when he woke up. Then they just stared blankly at each other for a while, as if neither of them was sure the words fit the situation, and the whole atmosphere went kind of silly. And as for Kieli, she went rigid, cheeks flaming.

Wasn’t that greeting just too…too normal, somehow?

The man Harvey was talking to was a member of the Council of Elders, which made him one of the natural enemies of all Undyings. With his authority, his very next words might be orders to have Harvey killed—for all they knew, he’d killed tons of Harvey’s brethren already! But at times like these, Harvey’s lack of any hang-ups about people who did him wrong tended to make him say ditzy things like this.

Then Sigri recovered himself and said, with such a tangled mixture of feelings on his face that Kieli couldn’t even begin to sort them out, “I see. So you’re the…”

You’re the . There were all sorts of ways for that sentence to end. All sorts of meanings simmering below the surface.

“Yes, that’s me.”

And, as usual, Harvey’s response wasn’t quite normal. The radio let out some exasperated-sounding static, and Kieli was so unbearably uncomfortable that she stayed silent and stared at the floor. She was still at the same fixed distance from Sigri she’d been maintaining all along.

Sigri sat up. He looked as if he was still in pain, but he lightly waved off the hand Harvey reached out to support him with and arranged himself with his back leaning against the wall. “Well, it seems I owe you a lot. I have to thank you.”

“That…!”

Hearing Sigri say that, Kieli’s feelings erupted inside her and in a flash she’d lifted her head and cut in. “Th-that’s not enough to make us forgive you! It’s not…that ea…sy…” When she noticed Harvey giving her a scolding look, all those feelings deflated like a balloon, and she quickly faltered. Sigri clammed up again, too, looking apologetic. A strained silence fell over the tower.

Harvey eased the tension by plopping his hand lightly on Kieli’s head and standing up.

“Let’s get moving. Can you walk? I’ll give you a hand.”

“Yes, thank you…” Sigri took Harvey’s proffered hand and got to his feet, and then began making his way down the steps with Harvey’s shoulder supporting him. Slipping the radio around her neck again, Kieli stood up, too, and followed them on leaden feet.

I’m sorry, Corporal, she silently apologized. She hugged the radio to her chest as she plodded along, bringing up the rear. Self-loathing weighed heavily on her heart. She’d quickly realized why Harvey, who hardly ever got angry with her, had given her that scolding look.

He wasn’t being considerate of Sigri, she thought, so much as he was getting angry on the Corporal’s behalf. For all he was totally insensitive most of the time, sometimes he could be strangely considerate about stuff nobody else noticed.

The Corporal’d had a daughter once, too. If a father got that kind of rejection from his daughter…If he heard words like that from a daughter lashing out at her father…the Corporal was sure to feel sad.

And yet, at the same time, she couldn’t open her heart to Sigri, and she just couldn’t control that part of herself. Her heart was ugly, filled with something thick and black.

The radio’s horribly warped speaker didn’t produce real words anymore. It must be pretty much a miracle that the Corporal was still in there at all. Of course Kieli hadn’t blamed Harvey, but Harvey seemed to think it was his fault. He was always attentive to the radio now, listening for any faint static. For some reason, Harvey could apparently hear the Corporal’s words in the static that just sounded like meaningless noise to her.

Why couldn’t Kieli hear it…?

Corporal, come on, say something to me, too…

She wanted him to give her a good scolding in that same old rough tone of his. She wanted him to lead her down the right path in the same old clear and simple way he always gave his opinions. It just felt as if that would clear up all these clouds in her heart in no time…Because as far as Kieli was concerned, the Corporal was her guardian, and he always would be. Forget about some father she’d known for only a few days and wasn’t close to. She still wanted the Corporal.

They reached the bottom of the tower’s spiral staircase, went back out into the colonnade they’d come from, and had just entered some other tower Kieli didn’t really know anything about when she saw a group of people come running toward them. The figure in the lead, attended by a group of Security Forces soldiers, wasn’t in the usual priest’s clothes, but rather in the more youthful, simpler seminary school uniform.

“Good, I’ve been looking for you.”

“Yo.”

“Lord Sigri, I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Yes. Good man, Julius. What’s the situation?”

The greetings the boy exchanged with Harvey and Sigri were about as brief as it got, but Kieli could still hear the mutual trust in them. Then he turned toward her and gave a somewhat uncomfortable, shy smile. It was the first time they’d seen each other since Kieli had pushed him away after he’d been nice enough to come visit her in the room they’d assigned her.

“Kieli, I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah…thanks…” Kieli answered softly, equally uncomfortable. She didn’t quite meet his eye. There was a tiny pause where both of them seemed to be waiting for the other to say something, but in the end the conversation never went any further than that.

Julius took the injured Sigri from Harvey, briskly ordered a nearby soldier to see to his treatment, and then fell into step beside Harvey as he explained the current situation. Kieli trailed silently after them, feeling as though she was the only one being left out of things, unable to even join the conversation.

Apparently the Security Forces were using this tower as their on-site disaster headquarters. In the wide entranceway scores of soldiers came and went, treating the wounded and replenishing the weapons stores and doing all sorts of things. Everyone was working busily. They were led to the command center set up in a room upstairs, where Julius spread out a big blueprint of Church headquarters on the table. According to his brief summary of things, headquarters had been completely cut off from the outside world by the roaming monsters surrounding it, and the Security Forces squads were now split up into two groups: the ones within the Church campus and the ones out in the city.

“Where’s the energy tower?” Harvey asked, giving the map a quick once-over.

“Energy tower? Right here; why?” Julius answered, pointing to a big circular section in just about the center of the Church headquarters facilities.

“Did you know an unexploded bomb dug up over in Westerbury got brought here?”

“I’ve heard about it, but not the details…What about it?” Julius asked, giving him a quizzical look. Gazing down at the map, Harvey began speaking quickly.

“I’ll skip the details, but the fossil fuel inside that bomb is creating this magnetic field that affects them…and me. I’m betting it’s what made them all come out and start rampaging all of a sudden.”

“So does that mean all we have to do is take care of the unexploded bomb?”

“Well, it won’t magically solve everything. I’m pretty sure we’re past that point.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Hell if I know. Don’t look at me.”

Their exchange was a bit over Kieli’s head. She let it flow in one ear and out the other, thinking about how she was the only one here in the dark about everything. She thought Harvey and Julius were amazing for blending right in with the soldiers and exchanging conversation with them on equal terms. It irritated her so much how at this time when they all had to work together to get the situation under control somehow, she was the only one who wasn’t useful for anything, who built a wall between herself and everyone else and just stood there doing nothing. And she was disappointed in herself, too.

Kieli left them alone and went out into the hallway, just carrying the radio.

She wandered aimlessly among the bulky soldiers’ busy traffic, hunching her shoulders. Eventually she found a little window on the staircase landing, which was relatively deserted, and she stood at it and let the wind from outside hit her face. The smells of soot, oil, and gunpowder smoke mixed thickly together in the dry mountain wind. About twelve hours had passed since the commotion began. The sky beyond the mountain peaks was stained with sunset, and the jagged range was beginning to sink into darkness. The heavens burned so red they looked like flames ready to burn out the monsters. When the sun set and it got harder to see outside, the people were sure to be at a disadvantage, and they’d be in even more difficult circumstances than they were now.

Every single one of them was uneasy. Some of them were taking up arms, and some of them were cowering in corners trying to make no sound, but all of them were waiting for the night that was about to begin.

Oooo…nn…

A low groan made the tower’s outer walls vibrate.

Was that groaning wind from the mountain range really the wailing of the failures?

“Kieli,” said a hesitant voice behind her. She turned around to look without taking her hands off the window frame. Standing there was the boy who’d grown so much taller and more mature than Kieli in the six months since they’d last seen each other in Gate Town.

Looking a little uncomfortable, he scratched the back of his head and then bobbed it in a quick bow. “Um, I’m sorry about before.”

“Juli, you don’t have to apologize for that; I was the one who…”

But her protest got stuck in her throat halfway through and sort of fizzled out. I’m the one who did something wrong; I’m sorry…Kieli was irritated with herself. The words were right there in her mind; why couldn’t she be like him and just come right out and apologize?

Maybe it was because of the envy and jealousy of Julius that had taken root in her somewhere along the way. That boy who’d still been smaller than her when they’d first met on the Sand Ocean, and a bit of a spoiled rich kid, and a rascal who was always making his dead mother worry—that boy had gotten so tall and grown-up now, joining all the adults and giving his opinions like an equal. He was taking the lead in doing things to protect the capital, protect the people.

Meanwhile Kieli, his elder, was left eating his dust. Look at her, all tied in knots over her father problem and still being wishy-washy about it.

“Um, look, we’re…still friends, right?” he asked reluctantly.

“Of course!” Kieli cried eagerly without thinking. “I mean, if you’re not mad at me…”

“Of course I’m not mad. You’ve had a really rough time.”

Julius’s frank smile as he said that made Kieli’s own lips lift in a smile, too. They met each other’s eyes and smiled together, and confirming that she hadn’t lost this precious friend yet lifted just a little of the weight bearing down on Kieli’s shoulders. Because she knew she really, honestly did find Julius amazing, and she really did want to cheer him on. It relieved her that she could think that way.

Then Julius dropped his gaze to the floor, darting just a brief glance up at her through his lashes as if he was wrestling with his next words.

“So…by ‘friends,’ um, you really do just mean ‘friends,’ don’t you…?”

“Uh-huh?” Kieli blinked for a few moments, confused by the question, and then piped up with a sunny smile, “Of course! We’re really friends!”

Julius’s shoulders slumped until his head hung a full ninety degrees onto his chest. As Kieli was starting to get flustered, wondering if she’d said something wrong, he gave her a sort of drained smile.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter…I can’t win anyway,” he muttered to himself. Just then, someone came up behind him and gave his head a good shove.

“No hitting on her behind my back.”

“I haven’t been!” Julius cried, cradling the back of his head as he turned around. He looked from Harvey, who stood glaring sort of overbearingly down at him from his higher vantage point, to Kieli, who was just bewildered. Then he hmphed irritably, though she wasn’t really sure why.

“Julius, sir. We’ve managed to contact your father,” broke in a soldier’s voice from the head of the stairs.

“Okay.” Julius nodded. He shoved Harvey back with one elbow and then actually stuck out his tongue at him before jogging back up the staircase. Kieli watched him go. Something about the fact that the little rascal part of him wasn’t really gone after all reassured her.

And then she noticed that she was alone with Harvey now, which made her uncomfortable for its own reasons, so she quickly dropped her gaze from his in a way that probably looked kind of suspicious. Her own knees beneath the black skirt and petticoat caught her eye. It was almost as if the moment she’d put on these clothes that were so much like her old Easterbury boarding school uniform, she’d actually gone back to being that fourteen-year-old girl. Right now she was wandering restlessly through all the years between fourteen and seventeen: trying to be an adult and act brave, then going back to being a kid when she couldn’t quite manage it. She kept bouncing back and forth.

Kieli looked up through her eyelashes and observed the man standing in front of her. The everyday church clothes that Harvey was wearing were black, too; you might even say they matched Kieli’s. Priest’s robes, with a high collar and a long hem, and they fit him perfectly (although he’d unbuttoned the collar and was wearing them pretty sloppily). He also had a heavy-looking carbonization gun on his left shoulder that he’d gotten from somewhere or other.

When he noticed Kieli looking, Harvey blinked his eyes, the copper and dark brown not quite reflecting the light the same way, and then said, “Oh, this. It doesn’t suit me?” He looked down at his clothes, tugging at his collar a little. Kieli remembered almost taking him for a seminarian from the capital when she’d first passed by him at the Easterbury train station two and a half years ago. He’d looked pretty rough back then, but right now he really did look the part.

“Ah—um—i-it suits you!” Kieli blurted, a strange attack of shyness making her tongue stumble as she waved her hands in front of her for emphasis. Her heart beat wildly, and her cheeks began to burn.

“Oh. Thanks,” Harvey mumbled vaguely, scratching his head almost as if he felt a little shy himself. They gazed at each other for a little while in skittish silence, Kieli looking up through her lashes at him, Harvey looking down through his lashes at her, and it felt like the mood was starting to get just the teeniest bit romantic—

Kshht, zikka, bzzzzzzz! came the radio’s static, flagrantly interrupting.

Kieli groaned. “Corporaaalllll…”

Harvey sighed and hung his head in defeat.

Gnn, bzzz…crrr…!

“Hey, I haven’t even done anything yet!”

Gnn-zik!

“What? No, the ‘yet’ thing was just a figure of speech—quit jumping on every little detail!”

The radio static and Harvey started bickering about something, but Kieli couldn’t understand what their conversation was about. She looked back and forth between Harvey’s face and the radio around her neck in confusion.

She was the only one left out of things again, it felt like. The odd one out. Depression settled over her once again. “Harvey, how come you can understand him…?” she murmured helplessly, and then immediately sank even further into self-loathing at the thought that she’d sounded jealous of him. Unable to endure it, she dropped her head and stared down at the tips of her shoes.

Harvey’s hand stretched toward Kieli and casually ruffled her hair. It felt as if he was trying to console her, which actually had the opposite effect, making her feel even more pathetic. She was starting to want to cry. “I can’t hear the Corporal’s voice…!”

“Sure you can, Kieli. You’re just not listening.”

“I…I am too listening.” But her voice petered doubtfully out almost before it escaped her mouth.

You’re just not listening…Was that true? Yes, she knew that right now she was confused with herself for feeling on the verge of accepting her father, and she was confused about accepting reality in general, and she was building walls to keep out a lot of things she wanted to just reject. She did know that much. Is that why I can’t hear the Corporal’s voice, either…? But—but then how can I be more open so that I can hear him?

Things started getting noisy downstairs. She could hear men talking and the clanky sound of armored people walking around.

“The southern barricade’s been breached! Requesting backup!” they heard a voice shout from downstairs, and the soldiers packed into the room on the floor above them took off running. The flood of people bolting down the steps almost knocked Kieli over. Flattening herself against the wall to keep out of their way, she scanned her surroundings uneasily.

Harvey’s hand tugged at one of the hands she was using to cradle the radio to her chest. The carbonization gun at his shoulder clanged as it swayed with the motion.

“Right now let’s just go find Bea.”

Just as Kieli followed his lead and began running, too, she saw Julius up above her on the stairs; he’d sprung into action with the soldiers. Harvey turned around mid-run and called, “Julius, we’re splitting up!”

“Uh, right. Be careful,” Julius agreed. Teetering a little as Harvey pulled her along by the hand, Kieli turned back to look at Julius, too.

“We’ll always be friends, Juli!” she said, waving see you later with her free hand. The sight of him waving back at her (with a smile that looked strangely pained for some reason) disappeared behind the corner of the wall, and Kieli faced front again as she jogged down the staircase.

“What was that, a parting shot?” Harvey asked, glancing back at her. When she blinked at him, he only raised one eyebrow a little before turning away again. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”

They came out of the tower housing the temporary headquarters and out into the colonnade. It was noisy out here, too, with soldiers bustling to and fro carrying weapons and torches and things; but after a while the crowd gradually began to thin out, the din receding into the distance. Kieli was only following along behind Harvey. She didn’t really know whether or not he had an idea where Beatrix might be and was heading somewhere in particular, but she was pretty sure they were going in the opposite direction from when she’d run away, tugged along by Sigri. The direction of the cathedral.

“Ah!” Kieli blurted suddenly, stopping on her own this time. Since they were holding hands, they ended up sort of yanking at each other until Harvey was pulled back, stumbling a little as he slowed his step and turned to look at her quizzically. “Wait a second. I dropped it…” Kieli pulled her hand out of Harvey’s and jogged a few meters back the way she’d come, crouched down, and picked up what was lying on the ground there.

“It broke…”

It was the good-luck charm she’d gotten from Beatrix and tied around her left wrist. It looked as though the cord braided from Beatrix’s hair had snapped and the bracelet had come undone. The stone had fallen out, too.

Why would it snap all of a sudden like that…?

A vague unease stirred inside her. Still, she forced it down, telling herself firmly that it must be a coincidence, and tucked the stone and band into her skirt pocket. She stood back up, sending the radio swinging, and ran quickly back to where Harvey was waiting. “Sorry, it’s nothing. Let’s go,” Kieli called to him. Then she cocked her head, puzzled.

Harvey hadn’t reacted to her voice. Maybe he hadn’t noticed she was back at all. He’d turned his head toward the end of the colonnade, and he seemed to be looking intently at something. Kieli stood on her tiptoes and peered over his shoulder, trying to see what he was looking at.

The colonnade was beginning to fall dark now that the sun had finished setting. It stretched out straight in front of her to the far end of her vision. She could make out only the dim shapes of the thick, evenly spaced columns. Nothing was moving.

“What’s wrong…?” she whispered, intimidated by the grim atmosphere around Harvey without completely knowing why.

“For a second I…thought I’d found Bea,” he answered in a low voice, still staring straight ahead. Harvey put his hand over his heart and gripped there lightly. He kept on mumbling, not really making any sense. “And I sense Bea’s presence, too…but…What is this…?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than Kieli, and not understanding any more of it than she was.

Kieli began to hear a faint sound coming from farther down the colonnade. She went cold, grabbing Harvey’s sleeve tightly. The sticky smacking sound of an animal chewing raw meat—

When she squinted as hard as she could into the dusky colonnade striped with shadows, she could make out bits of half-eaten monsters scattered here and there like a trail of bread crumbs. She gulped against the rising nausea and clutched Harvey’s arm. Harvey kept pressing his hand to his chest and staring grimly ahead, stiff and still.

A horrible stench assailed her nostrils from somewhere at the far end of the trail of broken monster bodies. There in the shadow of one of the pillars crouched a fidgeting, writhing thing—a sort of mass of flesh. A misshapen blob of flesh and metal, dragging what looked like snapped pipes and cables from various parts of the giant lump of meat at least twice as tall as Kieli that made up its body. When she looked closely, she realized the lump of meat was made up of failure parts. Countless arms and legs stuck out at impossible angles, and countless slack faces had sunken into its surface.

What is that thing…?

The giant crouching monster was eating away at a failure corpse with single-minded dedication. As it devoured the rotten flesh, bits of the corpse surfaced on its body from within, erupting out of its skin and making it even bigger and more misshapen. When it crushed the failure’s stone heart in its mouth—so buried in meat she could hardly think of it as a “mouth”—something exploded inside violently enough to blow off a good half of its face. But regeneration began immediately, cells stitching themselves back together as if they had a will of their own.

Its eyes were almost completely buried in meat, too, to the point where Kieli doubted they could actually see anything; still, the thing noticed them and swiveled those eyes in their direction. With the partly eaten leg of a failure still dangling from the corner of its mouth like a bizarre tentacle, it sluggishly turned to face them, and—

Owooonn…!

With a low bellow, the mass of flesh came barreling a little clumsily toward them.

“Out of the way!” Harvey gave Kieli a shove that sent her stumbling a few paces backward. A beat later the radio hit her in the belly. The thing made a beeline straight for Harvey; Harvey sank down low and slipped beneath its arms.

Even as her back smacked into a pillar behind her, Kieli’s eyes stayed wide open and riveted on the monster.

She’d spotted something almost impossible to believe: a familiar face, a face she knew very well, buried in one part of that monster’s body.

There was a scratchy voice coming out of her mouth.

“It…can’t be…”

Her knees crumpled underneath her, and she sank to the ground.

As soon as he’d shoved Kieli away, Harvey knew instinctively that she wasn’t even on the enemy’s radar.

It’s only after me…?

The thing coming straight for him swiped at him with an arm made of the melded bits of other corpses. The arm’s simple flail was easy enough to dodge, but the cable it dragged along with it cracked toward him like a whip. Harvey lifted the carbonization gun hanging from his shoulder and let its barrel take the brunt of the attack. The deep rut it left in the body of his gun sent a shiver down his spine. His eyes lit on a scrap of a failure corpse lying at his feet—an arm or something. When he picked it up and lobbed it straight for his opponent’s face, the enemy temporarily transferred its attention to the dead arm whizzing in front of it, latching on to it and beginning to eat. Was it acting on a sort of autopilot, some primitive animal survival instinct driving it to take in the corpses to fuel its own growth? It must only target Undyings.

Harvey sensed the core inside himself thumping hard, experiencing some strange pressure. He felt something in the center of his enemy’s body resonating with it. The thing was a mass of metal and flesh centered on an enormous core, wrapped in the carrion and cables and pipes it had absorbed.

Once it finished eating the arm, it shifted its focus back to Harvey. It charged blindly at him and swiped. He wouldn’t let the same move hit him twice—at the same time as he slipped past its arm, he dove into close range, grabbed the base of the flexible cable that came flying at him, and yanked his enemy off balance.

Which was all well and good—

“Ah!”

—but since he’d never fought anyone this gigantic before, he totally misjudged the distance and didn’t manage to get out of the way before the huge form fell on top of him.

Knocked over by the mass of flesh, Harvey hit the side of his head on the floor going down, and his vision darkened. His enemy’s enormous hand jabbed his chest before he could move. A couple of his ribs creaked, and then there was a snapping noise. Harvey shoved at it with all his might, but he was overpowered. Five misshapen fingers were just beginning to dig into his chest when—crackle!—he felt a pressure like a burst of static electricity—no, like some sort of even stronger and heavier mutual repulsion—in his core. Harvey and the monster were both thrown back a little ways in opposite directions, and the eyes buried in that lump of meat met Harvey’s at close range. Sandy eyes like the morning sky over the wilderness, just barely peeping out of the folds of flesh.

“…na…ngh…?” It gurgled thickly and appeared to tilt its head slightly.

And in that instant—

“—?”

Its eyes suddenly grew enormous in Harvey’s vision, and a sand-colored light burst in his brain and filled it, as though he’d been sucked into the monster’s irises.

An image flowed into his mind, a flat image of nothing but a solid sandy color.

He was in a sprawling space the color of sand. Behind him was a crude gray building, crumbling and half in ruins now. There was a half-collapsed wall of blocks enclosing the space. A chin-up bar crushed out of shape. A tiny smoldering sand pit.

This is…a school…Is it those kids’ school in South Westerbury?

He saw two small forms in one corner of the schoolyard, in front of the chin-up bar. A young redheaded boy crouching, back hunched, single-mindedly building a pile out of rocks fully as big as his own fist. And another boy standing at a distance and watching him work. There were a bunch of tiny stone grave markers built up in front of that chin-up bar so pitifully crushed out of shape that children would probably never be able to play on it again.

What the hell is this? Why would it start showing me this all of a sudden—?

There was an army truck parked far away across the wall of blocks that surrounded the yard facing the school building. Its ensign indicated that it was on their side: part of the South Westerbury army’s Undying platoon. Two large soldiers in long, dark greatcoats stood next to it.

Guess some stray artillery fire landed on ’em…said one of the soldiers emotionlessly, and started climbing into the truck without showing any particular inclination to help them. The other soldier looked equally emotionless, his sandy eyes just watching from a distance while the boys piled up their rocks.

Why do you have this memory…? Who are you…?!

“Who are you?!” Harvey screamed, at the same time pulling the trigger of his carbonization gun. It was just a wild shot, though, and it missed all the vital organs. All it did was blow away a chunk of the thing’s arm.

The images that had been ruling his consciousness broke off. But just before they did—

—Harvey heard the first soldier’s voice call.

“What…?!”

He felt dizzy, as if he’d been punched in the head. His head spun with confusion. “No…no!” In a fit of some strong emotion, he jerked up the carbonization gun and trained it on a vital point this time: the center of the enemy’s chest—

“Harvey, don’t!” cut in a girl’s voice in something like a scream. By that time, his left index finger was already pulling the trigger. Still, reflex came quicker than thought, and he managed to shift his aim just slightly before the bullet ripped free. Half the lump of meat’s torso blew away.

And among the chunks of meat raining down on his head—

There was a fragment of a familiar face absorbed into its flesh.

A fragment of a familiar…woman’s face.

“B…Bea…?” he whispered, aghast. He sat down right where he was, cradling the lump of flesh that contained her face, and let his eyes roam the air around him, searching for the girl who’d screamed as if he was looking for some sort of answer. There: Kieli stood clutching a pillar on one side of the colonnade and staring toward them. She was shaking violently, face white as a sheet. Her reaction was his answer. His eyes hadn’t been mistaken. This was unmistakably her.

He had to dodge the next attack. But his body didn’t move as he stared up at the enemy. Light burst in his brain again.

A round room where tightly packed pipes and cables covered the walls and ceiling and floor.

The hideous corpse of his former superior, now nothing but a stone heart and bits of nervous system hooked up to bio-cables.

No…

Superimposed over sandy eyes buried in a misshapen rotting face made from fused corpses, Harvey saw eyes of the same color that belonged to a man he’d known long ago, his former superior. His confused mind, rejecting reality, repeated the same word over and over and over. Nonononono—

“Ungh…na.”

With a monstrous groan he couldn’t believe would ever come out of the mouth of an intelligent human—or at least, not his superior’s mouth—the thing in front of him lashed out with one arm. Harvey didn’t even move to defend himself. It clocked him in the head, and he and the carbonization gun both skidded along the floor. His mind swam.

“Ju…de…” Harvey ground the name out of his throat as he propped himself up on his right elbow and tried to sit. His opponent, who was moving to grab him, stopped short. For a few moments they gazed searchingly into each other’s eyes.

“Ungh…ahh…”

Without warning, it clutched its head and moaned in pain, taking an unsteady step backward.

“Ngh, na, nghaah!”

It waved its arms around wildly, destroying a few nearby columns, as it backed away several more paces. Turning around with heavy steps that shook the ground beneath them, it began to move ponderously away.

“Wait…” Harvey tried to get up and follow, but a stabbing pain behind his left eye sent his vision askew and he fell over again. He heard Kieli’s voice calling him from somewhere at the edge of his hearing. She sounded muffled. He just barely managed to look up at the retreating figure making its way out of his seriously warped and tilted field of vision.

The retreating back of a mass of carrion and scrap metal. The retreating back of his former superior officer. That sturdy, masculine back in army uniform overlapped with this one in his mind’s eye.

“No…It’s not true!” Harvey screamed with all the air in his lungs as he doubled over and slammed his fist into the ground.

“Father,” a child’s innocent voice called to him, and Yoshiu looked down from where he’d been clinging to the barricade. A young girl who came up to somewhere around his waist stood at his feet. She was pressing both hands to her torso and squirming.

“I gotta pee.”

“What?” Yoshiu leaned away from her for a second, taken aback, before crouching down so that they were the same height and meeting her eyes. “Uh-oh. Do you think you can hold it for a little longer?”

“Uh-huh. If it’s only for a little bit, I’ll try my best.”

“All right. Good girl.”

She nodded, clenching both fists to fire herself up. When he patted her on the head, she seemed happy about the praise, and grinned proudly.

“I’m sorry, Father,” a woman said, running up to them and putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders. This must be her mother. “Honey, you shouldn’t get in his way. It’s dangerous here, so let’s go back to the other side of the room, okay?” She took her daughter’s hand. Their group of more than twenty people was still holed up in the supply room. The women, children, and elderly were huddled together nervously in the back of the cramped space, watching the men stand at the doorway bracing the barricade of pews.

“Will the angel come back again, Father?” the girl said, suddenly turning back to look at him as her mother pulled her back to the rear.

Yoshiu blinked. Her mother was the one who flushed red and hissed, “Stop it! That was not an angel!”

“It wasn’t?” the girl questioned innocently, looking up at her mother with big, rounded eyes. “But she was really pretty, and she saved us, too!”

“How could you say that in front of a priest?!” her mother interrupted her in a hiss. She met her daughter’s eyes, crouching down, and shook her as she said, “That was a Demon of War! We’ve talked about them before, remember? They’re horrible, scary monsters. Bad children who say things like that get their hearts gouged out by Church Soldiers!”

“Ma’am,” Yoshiu broke in reprovingly. When the woman looked up at him, ashamed, he favored her with the soft smile that he’d deliberately perfected during those sermons in the country-town worship services so that even if he was third-rate, he’d at least look the part of a priest. “Please don’t worry. A Church Soldier would never gouge out a child’s heart.” It was just one of those stock threats used to frighten children, of course, and there wasn’t an adult in the world who seriously believed it, but Yoshiu counseled her in a perfectly serious voice that left her looking baffled.

He drew the girl away from her mother’s frozen hands, leaned in close, and whispered impishly in her ear, “Did she look like an angel to you?”

“Yeah! I even saw sparkly angel wings!”

“I see; you even saw her wings.”

“Mama says she didn’t see them, but I did. An angel protected us! Right, Father?” the girl chattered happily with sparkling eyes. She looked puzzled toward the end, though. Yoshiu had tilted his head down and put a hand over his eyes. She peered curiously at his face and said, “What’s wrong, Father? Are you crying? Do you hurt somewhere?”

“No, it’s nothing.” Yoshiu shook his head slightly without looking up. He wrapped his arms around the young girl’s small body in a hug and whispered “Thank you…” into her ear with all his heart. To this girl in front of him, and to those country kids who’d brought the angel to him that day, too.

Surely a child’s eyes, looking without resistance or prejudice, really could see her angel’s wings. Yoshiu believed that. He wanted to believe it.

“It’s okay. The angel will come back.”

“Really? We’ll get to see the pretty angel again?”

“Yeah, I’m sure we will,” Yoshiu answered, half-assuring her and half-telling it to himself. Something warm was spreading over him, outward from his torso where his body touched hers. I want to see her again. Please let me see her again…he prayed. Not to the Church’s God, but to Something, something that might perform a miracle for them.

“Father…” the girl said in his ear, in a suddenly reluctant and quiet voice.

“Hmm?” When he raised his face from her shoulder and pulled away, she squirmed, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry…I couldn’t hold it after all.”

“Oh dear…”

Warm stains that smelled of ammonia were spreading on the crotch of her pants and the front of his robes. “I-I’m so sorry, Father!” the girl’s mother cried, red-faced. She hurriedly pulled her daughter away. The girl clung to her and began to sniffle. Looking at her, Yoshiu mustered up a stiff, awkward smile.

“I-it’s okay. It’s not your fault if you couldn’t hold it…”

He sighed and turned back to the barricade as he stripped off his outer robes. The gaping hole in the barricade from when she’d come charging in had already been reinforced with other pews, which the men were holding in place as they peeked outside through the cracks.

Please come back, he prayed silently. He wanted to tell her, to make sure she knew. It’s not only me and that girl—there are all kinds of other people who are grateful to you, too. I’m sure of it. And more than anything, he wanted to see her again. She was a first-class angel and he was just some low-level priest who couldn’t get ahead in the world—a horrible match for her. But still.

I want to see you again.

Let’s celebrate your next birthday, no matter what! On the day in the middle of summer. It’s a promise, okay?

Okay, okay.

You promise. No matter what.

No matter what.

No matter what…

She hiccupped. “Beatrix…”

Kieli squeezed Beatrix’s broken good-luck charm tight in her hands and pressed them to her forehead, calling her name over and over as she sobbed. It felt as if she’d been crying like this for hours now, and she was completely exhausted from crying, and she’d cried so much already that she half-thought all the moisture in her body must have been used up fueling the tears, but no matter how many she wrung out of herself, they just kept coming.

The memories paraded through her mind: all the words they’d exchanged, her always crisp and resonant voice so full of confidence, the way she was far too decisive when she shopped, the face she made when she was feeling sulky, her sharp gaze staring straight-on at an enemy, and her beautiful smile.

She’d promised they’d celebrate her next birthday. She’d promised, “no matter what.” This can’t be real. It has to be a nightmare.

Your happiness is always top priority—

Kieli had wanted the woman who told her that to be happy, too. It was only right that she be happier. How beautiful, how amazing would her smile be when she was happy? It was sure to shine even brighter than any smile she’d ever given Kieli before.

While Kieli sobbed as she thought about all the memories of Beatrix welling up one after another in her mind, Harvey squatted with his back to her, cutting Beatrix’s body away from the fusion of failure parts that made up the mass of flesh on the ground. In contrast to Kieli, who went on crying long after her face was an undignified soggy mess, he’d been silent for a long time now. Just working, without saying a word. He scraped away bits of the mushy, foul-smelling lump of meat with his hand as unflinchingly as if it were ordinary sand or dirt, patiently dragging her body out.

He’d been able to extricate only her head and her upper body, with one arm still attached; the rest of her had already merged too completely into the mass of flesh to salvage. He hadn’t been able to find the core that should have been buried in her chest anywhere inside it. Maybe it had been absorbed into that giant monster’s body.

That monster…Jude. She’d heard Harvey call it that. Was that thing really the Jude who’d been locked up in that lab…?

Harvey’s hand carefully wiped off the coal-tar-like fluid stuck to her face and hair. He closed her empty blue eyes with his palm, and then he took off his own coat by tugging on the left sleeve with his mouth and spread it gently over her body. He’d carried out all these tasks carefully yet detachedly, with such sure and mechanical movements he might as well be running on autopilot. He didn’t show his feelings on the surface like the wailing Kieli did. In fact, it looked as if all emotion had completely left him.

Kieli couldn’t help Harvey, or even say anything to him. His silent back seemed to be warning her off, saying, This is my job. Saying he’d known her ten times longer than Kieli had, and it was his job to mourn her.

When she looked at his back, in her mind’s eye it overlapped with the back of the redheaded boy in that schoolyard trapped in the magnetic field in Westerbury, building stone grave markers for the younger kids. Decades later, that little boy had become an adult, and here he was silently, dispassionately mourning an old friend just like he had that day. He’d gotten a lot taller since then, but right now he looked every bit as small and fragile to her as he had in childhood.

“Once…” Harvey murmured abruptly, still facing forward. Wiping at the tears that still wouldn’t stop, Kieli raised her face. The crouched form in front of her continued without turning around. “…Jude told me something. He said he had the same name as a man from the Church’s holy book, the one who betrayed the Messiah…” Why was he suddenly bringing that up?

Without lifting his eyes from Beatrix’s body, Harvey continued in a dry, emotionless voice so soft he might have been talking to himself. “He said he had sins he had to atone for, too. But…those sins were too big, way too big for him to ever atone for, even if he spent his whole eternal Undying life trying, he said. And at the time I just thought, ‘What’s the old fogey going on about now?’”

There was a pause. And then he spat gruffly, “But huh, I guess I get it now.”

With no warning, Harvey laughed. It was only a short little laugh, but it sent a chill up Kieli’s spine. It was dry and cold as the winter wind in the wilderness. A strange, somehow un-Harvey-like laugh, as if it belonged to someone else, as if he’d been taken over by some other creature.

“Harvey…?”

“Ah, it’s nothing. It’s nothing,” Harvey said in an incongruously light tone, gently stroking Beatrix’s short hair and still not turning around. The hair that was still the same beautiful golden even now that its owner had lost all her life-force.

“He—Jude—committed another sin today, against me, that’s too big for him to ever atone for. That’s why I need to kill him…” His murmur sank, low and sinister, into the gloom around them, and it unsettled Kieli deeply. She’d never heard him sound like this before. Harvey almost never bore ill will toward anyone; she’d never heard his voice sound threatening like this.

“Har…vey…?” Daunted by the sight of that back shaking with quiet rage, Kieli hugged the radio fast and unconsciously took a few steps back. This wasn’t the Harvey she knew.

Harvey stood up from where he’d crouched in front of Beatrix’s corpse and turned around. Thick, fat drops of blood dribbled down into the large pool at his feet—from the wound in the center of his chest that Jude had given him. “Harvey, stop…” Kieli began, but then her voice petered out. She was afraid of him. Something’s wrong with him right now. Something’s definitely wrong.

Without warning, Harvey jabbed his arm straight to the left. Startled by the sudden movement, Kieli missed her footing on her next step backward and landed smack on her butt on the floor.

So there was still a survivor in this area, then. A half-eaten failure had been in the act of leaping at Harvey from the shadow of a pillar. Harvey’s left hand had plunged unerringly through its chest to its heart.

“Ungh…ngha…”

The failure groaned in pain and flailed its limbs now that Harvey had stopped its advance. There was a bizarre creaking coming from inside its body. Harvey’s left arm worked so hard that ropy blood vessels stood out against the surface of his skin; the same thing happened to his left cheek where the sore was. The failure turned pleading eyes on Harvey. Ignoring it, Harvey ripped the stone heart he held out of its body right along with the bio-cables attached to it.

The failure’s body slumped down the pillar to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

“Ah—” Kieli sank weakly to the floor, cradling the radio. She stared fixedly at Harvey’s profile as tiny tremors overtook her body. His dark brown eye looked emotionlessly down at the failure’s body. And all the while the red-black blood dribbled from his chest, into a puddle on the floor.

“Har…vey…?” she called to him in a scratchy voice, and Harvey properly looked at her for the first time. A tiny spark of something like emotion finally lit in his deadened eyes. He abruptly covered his mouth with his palm, letting the stone heart slip artlessly from his hand.

“Ugh…”

Then he doubled painfully over and vomited a stream of blood and gastric juice.

Kieli scrambled hurriedly to his side, half-crawling. “Harvey,” she called, and put her arms around him from behind, but even as he coughed and retched, he pushed her away and tried to stand up again with a pillar for support.

“Jude…”

It sounded as though he was forcing the whisper out of his throat.

“I…I have to settle this. I have to settle it for you. I have to do this last thing for you…”

Kieli felt something different in him now: not the malice from before, but something more like a grim resolve that ripped her heart out. She clung to his back. She couldn’t tell him “Stop,” but she couldn’t help him, either; she had no idea what to do, so she just hugged tight, half-crying. Harvey collapsed back down to his knees, covering his face with the hand slick with his own blood as though trying to keep the feelings in. He grabbed a fistful of his bangs and tugged.

“How long does he intend to keep sinning in that—that messed-up body…?” A breath. “Let’s end this, Jude…Jude…”

The agonized mutter that escaped from between the fingers over his face stabbed Kieli through the chest. For a moment she thought her breath would stop.

Harvey hadn’t been angry. He’d been sad. He’d been stifling his feelings, but in his heart he’d been crying all along. For Beatrix; for Jude, who’d turned into that misshapen blob and still kept moving; and for the failures who’d died and lost their minds and still weren’t allowed to truly die. In his heart he’d been sobbing; hurting for them hard enough to vomit blood. He really was only ever thinking about other people.

Harvey forced himself back to his feet again and started walking, scraping his shoulder against the pillar. Kieli just sat there and looked up at his back. She couldn’t tell him to stop.

A few short steps.

That was all he managed before he tripped over the body of a failure on the floor and fell flat on his face.

He stayed there lying in an unnatural heap and didn’t move again.

“……?”

Kieli stood up unsteadily and went over to him. Since she’d been looking only at Harvey, she tripped over the same corpse he had and fell down more or less on top of him. Harvey’s copper and dark brown eyes stared into space, and he stayed there lying unnaturally limp like a broken doll on a trash heap and didn’t move. “Harvey…? What’s wrong?” She shook him and called to him with no effect. His empty gaze just roamed the air in front of him, never focusing on anything.

Kieli put her ear against his chest and tried listening for his heartbeat. It was faint, but she could still make out the ba-dum, ba-dum of the stone heart. She experimentally slapped his cheek. She called his name over and over.

In the beginning she did her best to assess his condition rationally, but as the minutes passed she started to panic. “Harvey…Harvey!”

Growing desperate, she shook him hard. His head only bobbed back and forth like a doll’s. No response.

“Corporal…!”

She looked down at the radio for help. “Harvey won’t move! What’s wrong? Tell me, what’s wrong with him?” The radio’s speaker poured out noise, as if it was trying to tell her something, but Kieli just shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re saying; I can’t understand you. I can’t understand without Harvey…! Listen, Harvey won’t move. First Beatrix—First Beatrix won’t move, and now Harvey! Corporal, say something, tell me…!” She didn’t know and couldn’t think about what was happening, what to do. She just wrapped her arms around Harvey’s unmoving chest.

“Harvey, no, I don’t want this!”

She called for him until her voice went hoarse. She sobbed on and on until her throat hurt. But the left hand that could clumsily, kindly draw her head to his chest still just lolled there where it had landed on the floor, and didn’t move.

It was quiet. Kind of like she was all alone in this place.

Kieli slumped on Harvey’s chest just as though she were a tossed-away doll, too. She’d cried so long and hard over Beatrix that the tears had run dry; now it was almost as though she had used up all her feelings, even—everything in her heart had dried up, and she couldn’t summon the strength to move. The radio’s noise seemed awfully far away, and it never gave her any words. Almost as if the moment Harvey stopped moving, the radio had turned into just some radio, too.

Harvey was the thread that connected me to everything else in this world, everything in the last two and a half years of our adventure and all the strange things we went through, Kieli thought. Now it was as if the moment that thread snapped, the whole two and a half years had popped like a bubble, suddenly turned meaningless. It was as if the radio had never spoken in the first place.

It was quiet. Kind of like she was all alone in this world.

All that crying had worn her out. She started to feel herself dozing, and maybe she even slept a little, but when her eyes snapped open she was still all alone, and nothing had changed. How long have I been here like this? It felt as if a long time had passed. Days and days, maybe. If people can cry themselves to sleep, she wondered, how come they can’t cry themselves to death? She found herself thinking that since she couldn’t do that, she might as well just stay here until she starved to death.

Tee hee hee…she heard a voice say. A whisperingly soft girl’s laugh. Kieli recognized that laugh. She lifted her gaze from where it had been wandering vacantly along the floor and looked sluggishly around.

“Who’s there?” she called, pleading. Her throat was bone-dry from all the wailing and crying, and her scratchy voice stuck coming out. Anybody would have done. Anybody would have done, as long as they got her out of this horrible aloneness.

A girl in a white slip was standing there in midair. She’d recognized the voice, and now she saw the proof: It was that girl who’d come out of the painting in her room.

“Are you crying?” the girl ask innocently in her cheerful voice. When Kieli nodded from where she lay limp from the exhaustion of crying, the girl smiled and offered her a pale, delicate hand.

“Come here. I’ll show you something neat.”

Kieli weakly took her hand. The moment the girl gave it a tug, her leaden body was abruptly freed from gravity and lightened until she floated in the air.

“Ah…!”

The girl holding her hand grinned at Kieli’s surprise. When Kieli looked down, she saw her own heavy body below her floating feet. Face sticky with dried tear trails, it was nestled up to Harvey’s fallen body, sleeping like the dead.

“I’m…” She opened and closed her hands a few times, testing her sensations, and then surveyed her body. She could see the hazy outlines of the rest of the colonnade through it. Beatrix’s corpse, covered by Harvey’s coat, looked exactly like it had before, as did the collapsed forms of Harvey and herself. To all appearances, her spirit had risen up out of a world frozen in time. But if nothing else, the feel of the girl’s hand holding hers was clear and real.

Following her lead, Kieli floated down to their fallen bodies and sat on her knees next to Harvey. He was still staring up into the empty air with unfocused eyes, just like before, collapsed on the floor like a doll. The weight she no longer had was transformed into feeling, sitting heavily on her heart. Kieli thought she might cry again. The girl gave her a faint smile and tugged on her hand. Kieli let her softly touch their hands to Harvey’s body.

Her hand passed right through the surface.

The sound of his slowly but surely beating heart flowed into her consciousness. The sound of his blood with its healing powers circulating through his arteries and veins. It was faltering and unsteady, yes, but that blood was reflecting its owner’s will even so, working its hardest to repair his tattered body.

“Do you see? He’s a wreck,” the girl’s innocent voice told her.

He really was a wreck, even more so than he looked. Even his insides were wrecked. His cracked stone heart pulsated with faint amber light; a little arrhythmically, yes, but still managing not to stop circulating blood, trying to knit together the battered vessels and skin and muscle and nerves.

Biting her lip, Kieli brought her face up close to his cheek. The optical nerve to the left eye he’d gotten from Mane, the one that she was sure must’ve been able to see at least for a while, was wrecked already, too, and it was already putting pressure on the cranial nerves. She could sense it sort of clouded over with a hazy gray.

“He’s gotten—he’s gotten so…”

“But you know,” the girl’s voice said, “he’s still alive.”

Kieli wordlessly shook her head. It made her want to say It’s enough. It’s enough. Stop. You don’t have to keep trying so hard even after you’ve let yourself get this wrecked…

“Kieli,” she heard a different voice say. A low, staticky, male voice. The familiar, long-missed voice of the radio reached her in clear words now, not coming through her ears but directly into her brain. Kieli drew in close to her own collapsed body and put her face next to the radio.

“Corporal!” She choked a little. “What should I do? I don’t know; please tell me…” she appealed, shaking her head. Her heart soaked up the radio’s strong voice.

“Give him a hand. He hasn’t given up yet. He’s trying to live. You can hear him, can’t you?”

At this, Kieli strained her ears. Yes; she could make out that irregular heartbeat, that faint sound of the breaking-down stone heart pulsating with its amber light.

“I can’t do it…”

The thing was, all she desperately wanted to say right now was Stop working so hard.

“Kieli, don’t you say that to him,” the radio’s voice admonished patiently. “You’re the only one who can do this. Find him and bring him back. Please.”

“But…what should I do?”

The girl next to Kieli tugged on her hand. Grinning, she pressed it to the center of Harvey’s body.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum…

The heartbeat expanded in her ears until it permeated her entire consciousness and took over everything. Her field of vision bled away, bled white as if sucked into that faintly pulsing amber light.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum…

The sound of the heartbeat dimly permeated the air.

“Where am I…?”

When her whited-out vision recovered, Kieli was standing all by herself in a place she’d never seen before. The ghost girl and the radio were both gone. The bodies of Harvey and herself that had been lying at her feet were gone, too. She wasn’t in a colonnade of the cathedral; she was looking at a dizzying panorama of dried-out wilderness that stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction. Kieli stood there all alone in the middle of the wilderness, worry twisting her face.

The rocky ground was shaking slightly. With no warning, the earth right in front of her toes crumbled with a deafening roar, and she hastily yanked her foot back and moved away. Now that the ground before her was gone, suddenly Kieli found herself standing on a cliff, watching fragments of rock plummet to the valley below.

A chill went up her spine, and she looked around her to see the land shaking violently all the way to the horizon. Here and there across the wilderness, landslides were happening or new cracks were opening up in the ground. Even the hazy sand-colored sky above her rumbled as though it might break apart and come crashing down any second. Kieli planted her feet firmly on the unstable ground with everything she had.

“What is this place…?”

It was a world that looked as if it might break down any second. Another crack opened up in the ground nearby, and little fragments of rock kept on raining down on her from overhead, too. The whole world was enveloped in one big rumble that rattled her eardrums. Covering both ears with her hands, Kieli stooped forward and shielded her head as best she could as she scanned her surroundings. “Is anyone there?!” she shouted. At least, she thought she’d shouted, but her own voice was swallowed up by the rumble of the world so that she could barely hear it.

Where am I?

It was as if she was witnessing the collapse of the planet.

For lack of any better ideas, she started walking, covering her ears and tottering as she made her way around the fissures. A crack opened up in the ground at her feet and robbed her of her footing. She fell down hard.

What’s going on here? Where the heck did I get thrown to? Had she wandered into a time loop of the past made by ghosts, like before? Or…was this actually some world way, way in the future? The era when the planet would end?

“Hello?! Anyone?! Corporal!” She called for help on all fours on the shaking ground. But her voice only vanished away, swallowed up by the rumbling. So Kieli just kept going as best she could, wriggling along on her stomach now. One of her feet skidded, and for a moment she almost went over the edge. She screamed and clutched the rock surface with both hands. Her legs swung back and forth over the sheer cliff that dropped endlessly down. The hem of her skirt fluttered in the wind.

She used every ounce of strength in her body to claw her way back up onto the cliff, scraping both knees in the process. Just as she was heaving a sigh of relief, she caught sight of someone up ahead of her in the wilderness.

A person…!

The very first thing to catch her eye was the rusty copper hair fluttering in the dry wind. “Harvey!” she cried in a voice tearful with relief. But—

It’s not…? That wasn’t Harvey. It was someone much smaller: a boy in simple clothes that looked like off-white pajamas.

Kieli went still where she clung to the ground on all fours and stared, wide-eyed. The boy picked up a big hunk of rock that looked easily heavier than he was and tottered over to the crevice with it, where he tossed the rock in as though he was trying to patch up the broken ground. Then he walked back on slightly unsteady feet, picked up another equally large rock, brought it over, and stuck it in the crevice too. He silently repeated this task over and over like an automaton, or a prisoner forced into hard labor. He wore no shoes; both bare feet were as horribly scraped as in the pictures of criminals carrying their crosses. The simple white pajamas looked like a prison uniform more than anything else to her now.

Cracks opened up in the rock he carried. A chunk of it broke off and fell, pinning his slender arm to the ground.

“Ah!” Kieli stood up, teetering on the shaking ground, and ran over to him. “Are you okay?” she called, trying to help him, but he showed no sign of a response, as though he didn’t see Kieli there at all. He just shoved the rock away with his own ruined right hand and then moved to pick it up. Never mind Kieli; he didn’t even seem to pay any attention to his own body as he went about his work of filling the cracks in the ground. Shards of rock rained down his back, hurting him and leaving streaks of dirt and blood on his white pajamas.

This boy is…Harvey.

Not knowing what else she could say to him, Kieli only stood and watched him just carrying out the same task over and over with single-minded purpose like some sort of forced laborer.

The longer she watched, the more she was sure of it. This boy’s back was much smaller than the one she’d seen mourning over Beatrix’s body; as small and thin as the back of that boy in the ruined schoolyard building stone grave markers, and though it was getting so cut and bruised now that it hurt Kieli just to look at it, he kept on silently repairing the cracks in this falling-apart world.

Where am I?

The boy tripped and fell as he carried over his next rock. Kieli ran to him once again and tried to help him up. But he was still as indifferent to her presence as ever, getting unsteadily up on his own and moving to pick up the rock again. His face was sickly pale. His coppery eyes just stared vaguely forward, never turning to face Kieli.

“Stop it; this is dangerous! You’ll die! Stop it!” Kieli circled in front of him, trying to stop him, but her voice still didn’t reach him. Those young hands carrying rock after rock…It wasn’t only his crushed right hand; his left hand was a wreck too, missing patches of skin. “No, stop it!”

The boy carried his latest rock right past her. She hugged him from behind with all her might to stop him. He stumbled, and the rock slipped out of his arms. Kieli wrapped both his battered hands in her own, cradling them in front of his chest in a prayerful position.

“Come on, can’t you hear me? Don’t you recognize me?” Kieli asked tearfully, gazing at the boy’s face, but his eyes just vacantly roamed the empty air in front of her, as if perhaps he didn’t understand her language. As she sank to the ground, stunned, he shook off her hands and used his own tattered, nearly broken ones to pick up yet another fallen rock.

Then the ground split beneath his feet, and the boy in white pajamas disappeared from sight along with the rock he held. Kieli immediately leaned down over the edge and seized his hand. The rock tumbled noisily down, and the boy’s small body swayed left and right in the wind at the edge of the cliff. Fragments of rock rolled down around them and were swallowed up by the ravine.

“Hold on tight!” Kieli shouted as she desperately channeled all her strength into supporting the boy’s weight, but he just dangled there passively. He didn’t grip her hand back. His wrist slipped in her hold with a jerk, and she was sure he’d slip from her grasp any second. “Please! Please…Harvey!”

At that shout, the boy’s dazed eyes flitted up to look at her for the first time.

Did he recognize his name? Kieli hoped breathlessly.

Just then—

A crack opened up in the edge of the rock ledge where Kieli was hanging on, and the whole thing split apart with a crash.

They became just like the falling rocks around them, plummeting together down into the ravine between the two steep cliffs.

“Harvey…!”

In response to his name, she felt the boy finally return her grip at the very last moment.

And so, holding hands, they fell into the abyss—