Episode 2: His Neverland

Holding hands, they fell into the abyss—

Huh…?

Surfacing from sleep, Kieli blinked groggily several times at the sight before her.

It wasn’t the darkness of a rugged valley floor that she’d expected. She was lying in a simple but clean and comfortable bed.

Did someone save us…? With her cheek still resting on the pillow and her mind still foggy, Kieli scanned her surroundings. They consisted of a room with such a bare-bones layout she could probably call the place a “shack.” The construction of the bed was equally bare-bones in its simplicity, but maybe it belonged to a big person, because it was also very big.

It was when she peeled away the blanket covering her and slowly tried to sit up that Kieli realized.

Beneath the blanket was a redheaded young boy, sleeping snuggled up against her torso. Her right hand and the boy’s left still gripped each other tightly. Although his body was as covered in cuts and bruises as ever, most of them had been bandaged; he was tucked between Kieli’s body and the clean white sheets and sleeping quietly. It looked like it was a nice rest, too. Kieli sat up in bed without letting go of the boy’s hand and gazed down at his sleeping face for a while.

When she stroked lightly at his disheveled copper hair, he opened his eyes. Two eyes the same copper as his hair roamed the empty air in front of him.

“Are you okay?” Kieli asked. At the sound of her voice, the boy shifted his gaze toward her and tilted his head a little. Maybe he really couldn’t understand her words. His sluggish, clumsy movements and spaced-out expression made him seem a bit slow. What was different from before, though, was that he seemed to be properly aware and attentive of Kieli now.

There was an unadorned square window next to the bed. The world on the other side of the window was still falling to pieces; she saw rock slides happening here and there in the vast wilderness outside. Even inside the shack Kieli could hear a muffled rumbling, but right now there was a sense of security, as if she was wrapped up safe inside its walls. Who could it belong to?

The door of the room opened with a creak.

When she and the boy looked that way, a man appeared. He had such a big, sturdy build that she thought he’d probably hit his head if he didn’t duck coming through the doorway. Somewhat frightened, Kieli wrapped her arms protectively around the boy.

“So you’re awake,” the man said in exactly the low and deep voice she’d imagined from the way he looked, though his tone was mild. His short, stiff hair and the bristly stubble on his chin, both of which were the sandy color of the morning sky over the wilderness, matched exactly with the image Kieli’d always had of teddy bears. The boy slipped out of Kieli’s arms and slid out of bed to hop barefooted over to him without any sign of shyness. The man hugged him around the shoulders with a hand big enough to wrap clear all the way across his slim body and then turned his gaze to Kieli, too.

“I bet you’re hungry.”

Some warm, good smell was wafting in from the room on the other side of the door. Kieli’s stomach abruptly started complaining at her about the hunger she hadn’t registered until now. She nodded emphatically. A faint smile appeared on his rugged face. “Come this way.” Herding the boy in front of him, he disappeared into the other room. Kieli slid out of the bed and put on her boots, which had been placed right next to it, before following them out of the room.

The door led to a modest kitchen almost completely taken up by a simple table and chair set. Gentle steam rose from the pot in the center of the table. It carried the delicious smells of milk and butter. Kieli giggled a little at the sight of the boy already sitting in his chair and swinging his short legs back and forth.

When she sat next to him at the dinner table, the man ladled stew into tin dishes and set one in front of each of them. It was ridiculous that they were sitting there enjoying a leisurely dinner right in the middle of the ruin of the world, but at the same time it gave her a strange feeling of relief.

Kieli scooped up a bite of stew with her spoon and put it in her mouth, and then her eyes widened at the old familiar taste spreading on her tongue.

It tasted just like the milk stew of poultry, eggs, and chickpeas that’d been the standard dish at Buzz & Suzie’s Café in South-hairo…! With her spoon still sticking out of her mouth, Kieli stared at the man sitting across the table from her. He was crammed into an awfully small chair for a man of his size, head bent over a shoe he was silently cobbling. Maybe that’s his job? He wasn’t a sociable man and he didn’t talk much, but he had a placid atmosphere about him. In that he was a large man of few words, he did kind of remind her of Buzz, the chef who made that stew; but he was definitely a different person. All the same, the air about him gave her a vague sense of déjà vu. Who is this man…?

She glanced at the boy next to her at the dinner table, who was applying himself to the task of eating his stew, gripping his spoon awkwardly and bringing his face to his bowl to sip at it instead. She remembered that he hadn’t liked milk at this age. Sure enough, after a sip of the milk stew he grimaced a little sadly. But then he stole a quick upward glance at the man across from them and tackled his stew again with a serious look on his face. She’d thought something was strange; now she realized he was holding his spoon in the wrong hand.

This place is…

Kieli put down her spoon and looked around the room. A simple, ascetic shack with only the bare minimum of things needed for survival. Almost like the solitary cell of a prisoner in exile. The ruin of the world went on outside the kitchen’s single window. In the small yard that she could see through it stood a bunch of grave markers made of carved white stone. Each one was inscribed with a tribute to the deceased in neat lettering, perhaps carved by this man. As though they were his atonement of sorts.

It all brought back the memory of an old locomotive engineer, all alone on an abandoned train platform with his back facing her, planting stick after stick in the ground. What she felt from these grave markers, though, wasn’t the same anger at the world that the engineer had. It was a painful, even distressing mix of regret and sadness.

“Um, where are we right now…?” she asked the man a little hesitantly.

The man answered briefly, his hands not pausing in their work. “His world.”

“…‘His world’?”

Kieli remembered how just before white light had filled her vision, the ghost girl had guided her hand to touch the inside of Harvey’s body. This is Harvey’s world…? Was she peeking into the world inside Harvey?

Come to think of it, she did feel as though she’d seen fragments of Harvey’s memories showing up in this world. The endless dry wilderness, the tiny scraps of memory from his boyhood days as Ephraim, the taste of the stew in South-hairo. And this sandy-haired cobbler sitting in front of her—this large man with the calm and stoic air about him that the boy was so fearlessly friendly with must be…

…Jude…?

And this boy is…She looked at the profile of the boy locked in desperate battle with his milk stew, his forehead practically touching the table. The boy who’d been trying to patch up this world, not even caring if he got hurt in the process. Who didn’t talk.

This boy is Harvey himself.

A crevice opened up in the ground right outside the window of the shack. One corner of the garden graveyard collapsed, and white gravestones were swallowed up by the chasm. The boy lifted his face from his stew. Hopping down from his chair, he ran over to the window and plastered his face to the glass. His coppery eyes looked steadily out at the world. This small boy was trying to save the world, the body, the mind called “Harvey” from collapse, even though he got hurt in the process.

“This shack probably won’t last much longer,” the man said quietly. “You hurry on ahead.”

“Ahead…?” Kieli asked, turning her worried face to him. “What should we do, sir? How do we stop this world”—stop Harvey—“from breaking?”

“Go to the end of the world.”

“The end of the world?”

The man stopped working and raised his head, pointing straight out the window over the shoulder of the boy still gazing outside.

“If you head straight east, you’ll come to a station. Board the train there.”

Kieli nodded meekly at his explanation. The boy came back from the window and grabbed Kieli’s sleeve with his delicate, scarred hand. He looked at her expressionlessly. Still, she could see that he was trying to tell her something.

“Yeah, let’s go. I’ll go with you. Let’s go together.” Smiling, Kieli nodded firmly to him.

“Take these with you.”

The man rummaged around in the kitchen cupboard for a minute before finding a bit of paper and handing it to Kieli. It was a little packet with what looked like two tickets in it. They were blunt tickets, with nothing printed on them but an arrow pointing to the words “The End of the World” in faded ink. The arrow went only one way.

“Once you leave the shack, you won’t be able to come back here. You go straight east and never look back. You mustn’t look back no matter what; you got that?”

“We won’t ever be able to come back…?”

“That’s right. You mustn’t come back. I can’t go with you, so…” The man bent his knees and sank down in front of the boy. “Take these.” One by one, he took the boy’s bare feet by the ankle and slipped on the shoes he’d been cobbling. The boy lifted his legs without protest, teetering a little, and let him. The shoes had been tailored to fit perfectly over those feet as scraped up as his hands. The man looked up from his position on the floor and placed his big hands on the boy’s shoulders.

“Ephraim.”

The boy reacted faintly to the name, turning his empty gaze to the man. Pressing his forehead to the boy’s shoulder, the man said in a strained voice, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me…No, I don’t have the right to ask for that…”

Kieli couldn’t bring herself to interrupt the heartbreakingly sad words of apology. She just watched the two of them, gripping the tickets tightly. She couldn’t tell whether the boy heard any of it or not; he stayed silent, his empty eyes gazing vaguely at the man’s hanging head. Paying no heed, the man kept on apologizing. His broad shoulders trembled as he spoke.

The sight overlapped in the back of Kieli’s mind with that of her father, Sigri. He regretted having done something that couldn’t ever be taken back, and even though he knew there was no way he’d ever be forgiven for it, even though he knew he’d never be able to atone for it no matter what he did, no matter how cruelly he was rejected, all he could do was apologize. The sight of this man apologizing to this boy was a heavy blow to the chest. Kieli had rejected her father, swearing she’d never forgive him for abandoning her and her mother. Even though she knew he’d probably regretted it and punished himself for it all these long months and years, Kieli still couldn’t accept him.

This boy, on the other hand…

As the man went on saying he was sorry, the boy tugged on his sleeve.

The man lifted his face from the boy’s shoulder. The boy looked at him with his head tilted to one side, as if he didn’t understand what the apologies were for. Then he took the man’s face in his small hands, drew it close, and conked his own forehead lightly against the man’s.

That was his only expression of emotion.

It was more than enough to send tears running down the man’s cheeks, though.

Still holding the boy in his arms, he tilted his head down and whispered a trembling “Thank you.”

They left the shack with the man to see them off. Kieli linked her fingers firmly with the boy’s again and stared east, where she’d been told the station was. All she could see in front of her was an ever-so-gently sloping red-brown wilderness that stretched all the way to the horizon. The rumble of the world’s ruin was still endlessly shaking the earth and skies. She wondered uneasily whether there really was such a thing as a station in this world, but she felt in her pocket for the one-way tickets to dispel her worry with the feel of them.

Once they left the shack, they couldn’t go back. The man had warned them multiple times that they mustn’t look back, no matter what.

“Let’s go.” Gripping the boy’s hand, she stared straight ahead and stepped forward.

“Nggnnghhh…”

As soon as she started walking, she heard something like the low moan of a beast behind her, and then a loud rustle. She almost turned around without thinking, but she managed to hold herself back. The boy looked absently forward, not seeming to have noticed anything.

You mustn’t look back no matter what. She silently repeated the man’s words to herself like a mantra, and as nervous as she was of whatever was back there, she kept on walking briskly forward next to the boy and never slackened her pace. Her heart pounded faster at the feeling that a beast was approaching them from behind. A large, thickset shadow blanketed the two small shadows stretching faintly out in front of them, wiping them out. Something was definitely following them.

You mustn’t look back. You mustn’t look back. She chanted it to herself and kept walking. The earth kept splitting around them and fragments of rock kept raining down from the sky, but those shards never fell on their heads; they scattered left and right, falling on the ground around them. Could the shadow behind them be protecting them? But what in the world was it…? The urge to turn and find out almost drove her to dart a quick glance behind her, but she remembered the man’s words, and fixed her gaze straight ahead.

After a good interval of walking, an ash-gray slab of concrete came into view on the horizon. It was still small and faraway, but it was there. A platform? That must be the station he told me about.

“Thank goodness!”

When she smiled at the boy next to her in relief, Kieli saw the misshapen, taloned arm of a beast stretching toward his neck from behind.

The talons snagged the collar of his pajamas, and his slight body was yanked backward. A hunk of rock fully as big as the boy’s own head plummeted down right in front of their eyes so close that it scraped the tip of the boy’s nose. Looking totally unperturbed by his narrow escape, the boy turned his head casually to look behind him.

You mustn’t look back—

“Don’t!”

Kieli abruptly threw herself in front of the boy’s face to cut off his line of sight and wrapped her arms around his head.

In that instant, she accidentally caught sight of the form behind them in her peripheral vision.

With her arms still around the boy, Kieli gulped. A misshapen monster like a giant rotting mass of flesh with bits of different corpses stuck to its surface looked sadly down on the two of them with cloudy sand-colored eyes that peeped out from between folds of meat.

Owooooo!

The monster gave a roar that split the heavens. Kieli pulled at the boy’s hand and tried to run, but he remained stock-still where he stood, looking expressionlessly up at the monster. It swiped out with its talons and gouged his cheek. Deep gashes opened up there, and fresh blood spattered.

Screaming, Kieli yanked hard at his hand. “Run!”

The two of them took off running, tripping and almost falling over the cracks in the ground as they went, covering their heads against the rain of rock. The monster followed them with a bellow. The gray train platform that had looked so small across the wilderness finally seemed to get closer. There was no station house or shelter; the open concrete just lay there like a long snake. Its only feature was a simple signpost standing all by itself in the middle of the platform. It said TO THE END OF THE WORLD next to a one-way arrow, just like their tickets. A steam train with a long chain of passenger cars was parked there.

Choo………

It sounded its whistle long and low and began belching steam. Apparently it was just about to depart.

“W-wait!” she screamed at it as she ran at full speed, pulling the boy along by the hand. His foot caught on something and he toppled forward. The monster that had just caught up with them bore down with its talons for the boy’s back. Kieli dove underneath them with hardly a hairbreadth to spare, whisking him to his feet and taking off running with his hand in hers again.

Chug, chug, chug…

In a puff of light-gray steam, the train began to pull slowly away from the platform. Car after car slid out of reach.

Kieli sprinted up onto the platform and managed to jump onto the ramp of the last car’s deck just in time, dragging the boy up after her. The train accelerated with a lurch. Their car cleared the end of the platform not a moment before the monster caught up to them.

Then a fissure opened up in the earth right underneath the concrete platform, and it began to crumble. When Kieli leaned out over the railing of the deck and squinted, she saw the monster’s great form fall into the chasm and get swallowed up by the world’s abyss.

“Ah…”

A sound escaped the boy watching with her for the first time.

“Ah…ah, ahh…”

It didn’t form words. With the thin gasping of a baby looking for its mother that broke Kieli’s heart, the boy reached out with both hands for the monster vanishing into the ground. When it looked as if he was about to throw himself over the railing and fall, Kieli embraced him from behind and lifted him back up. The train picked up speed as though it were trying to outrun the fissures chasing it down the track.

Holding the boy to her and panting, Kieli watched the white platform steadily disappearing into the ground for a while. The now-warped sign that had read TO THE END OF THE WORLD was the last thing to be sucked into the crevice, and the station disappeared. Behind them and on both sides of the tracks, there was nothing to see but the wilderness ever rumbling with destruction.

They’d boarded a train of no return.

“Are you okay?…Does that hurt?”

She fished a handkerchief out of her skirt pocket and pressed it gently to the awful scratches in the boy’s cheek. She carefully wiped away the blood, but the four deep wounds remained swollen and festered red-black on his pale white cheek. The boy didn’t look particularly bothered or pained by them; he looked right past Kieli’s gaze into nothingness. It was just as if his spirit was coming to pieces along with the world…

Kieli drew her face close to his. “Harvey?”

When she whispered his name, his gaze twitched toward her just the slightest bit. Kieli pulled herself back together and took the boy’s hand, squeezing tightly. “Let’s go to the end of the world.”

They left the rear deck and went inside the train. They made their way forward through several cars, but there didn’t seem to be any other passengers on board.

They chose a set of facing seats in a car near the middle of the train and sat down across from each other, and then all of a sudden a stocky man in a dark blue uniform stood in the aisle. She hadn’t even heard him coming. His face was pale as a ghost’s, and beneath the brim of the conductor’s hat he’d pulled down low over his forehead, he was looking down at her with a sunny smile creepily at odds with that bloodless face.

Kieli hurriedly jammed her hand into her skirt pocket, took out the tickets she’d gotten from the man in the shack, and offered them to him. The conductor silently looked from their two tickets to their two faces. Kieli waited, wondering nervously if there was something suspicious about them, until eventually he stamped their tickets with two firm clicks and handed them back to her.

“Um, what sort of place is the end of the world? How far from here—” she started to ask, trying to get whatever information she could, but before she could finish he’d already gone silently on his way down the aisle. When she leaned out of her seat, the uniformed back of the man drifting along just slightly above the floor melted into the air around him and disappeared.

A rhythmic muted throbbing pervaded the air, but otherwise all was quiet inside the train. Outside the window the ground was splitting as fast as ever and the rain of rocks kept on falling, but the train kept right on going, indifferent to the ruin outside. It was like another dimension separate from the rest of the world.

Clackity-clack, clackity-clack…The familiar throbbing of the train that her body knew so well by now brought her an interval of rest. The boy sitting across from her was looking vacantly out the window, swinging his legs back and forth. There was an awful claw mark on his cheek. He was even more of a wreck than ever.

A train bound for the end of the world…Kieli didn’t know what kind of place the “end of the world” was exactly, but whatever it was, would they be able to stop the collapse of this world when they got there? Could she help the boy?

But.

Would stopping the collapse really mean saving him…?

She felt a sudden stir of doubt. Her heart squeezed painfully.

This world was Harvey himself. Harvey was always a wreck, just like this world; he always seemed on the verge of collapse, always battered and only hanging on by a thread. Just like this boy in front of her. And even so, he was still desperately trying to patch the world up. And each time, he injured himself more instead. His whole body was battered and fragile, and even so he was still trying to resist.

Stopping the collapse of this world—wouldn’t that end up meaning hurting his body even more? Wouldn’t that mean him suffering even more than he already was?

I don’t want to see it anymore…I don’t want to see him get any more wrecked.

With a soft pat, the boy’s scraped-up hand landed on the back of Kieli’s where it rested on her knee. When Kieli looked up, puzzled, he tugged on her hand as if to say: This way, this way. She let herself be pulled up out of her seat and deposited on the one next to his. Pressing his injured cheek to the windowpane, the boy squinted down the tracks behind the train. Kieli stuck her own cheek against the glass next to his and peered in the same direction.

An admiring sigh escaped her. “Whoa…”

A magnificent sunset painted the whole sky. On the horizon where the track disappeared into the far distance behind them, a burning scarlet sun bigger than any she’d ever seen had begun to sink beyond the edge of the land, shimmering with heat. That evening sun beautifully colored the wilderness even though the world was crumbling.

It’s gorgeous, Kieli thought with simple honesty. Even as it was swallowed up by ruin, Harvey’s world, this world the same copper color as his hair and eyes, was still so heartbreakingly gorgeous.

The sun hung suspended in place there, never sinking fully away, and its dying orange glow lit their faces as they pressed their cheeks and hands to the train window, spellbound by the view. The train they rode kept on going, vibrating quietly beneath them.

At some point she realized that the boy had lifted his cheek from the window and was looking at her. His coppery hair was brilliant in the setting sun. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but Kieli thought those copper-colored eyes that hadn’t shown a scrap of emotion so far were smiling at her now.

A tear slid down her cheek.

The boy cocked his head curiously, and Kieli turned her face away from him to wipe it away.

“It’s nothing…I-it’s just that the sunset’s so beautiful…”

…This tattered, collapsing world was so beautiful, and the tattered boy who didn’t speak still gave Kieli such a beautiful smile. Why? How could collapsing things be so beautiful?

It was sad, touching, heartbreaking; the tears wouldn’t stop.

For a while after that, the boy just gazed out the window, swinging his feet back and forth in the shoes the man from the shack had made for him, and Kieli let the vibration of the train lull her into a half doze. Since the boy was so bedraggled otherwise, the brand-new shoes stood out. They’d been made sturdy, to protect his frail feet. As though they carried the feelings of the man who made them for him.

A twilit wilderness where the setting sun caught on the horizon and the evening never ended: It was the perfect symbol for Harvey’s world, where time had stopped. The ruin of the world flowed by outside the train window almost as if it had nothing to do with them.

Was there really no one else riding this train? She hadn’t seen a single soul since that ghostly conductor from before. Kieli was just pondering whether anybody even lived in this world at all besides the boy and the man in the shack when she heard the forward connecting door open.

A young girl’s innocent laughter and chatter filtered through it. Kieli popped her head out into the aisle.

A pair of small passengers closed the connecting door and walked toward them. The one in front was a girl in a skirt. She broke off talking to the other child trailing after her and turned with a flutter of her skirt to look at them.

She was a beautiful girl maybe about the same age as Kieli, with golden blond hair that flowed in gentle waves all the way down to her waist, clear ice-blue eyes, and a flattering red coat.

Becca…!

No, that’s not Becca. That’s…

“Beatrix?!”

Kieli half-rose from her seat without thinking. The boy acted faster, promptly jumping down from his seat and leaping out into the aisle to glom on to the girl. “Eep! You scared me. What’s wrong?” she asked him, blue eyes widening at this boy who’d charged at her and latched on like a wild animal, burying his face firmly in her chest. Then she patted him gently on the head. Kieli stood up, too, and stared with both hands over her mouth and her eyes swimming with tears at the beautiful girl’s face. As she patted the boy’s head, the girl lifted her head and smiled at Kieli, too. “Hello!”

Kieli managed to choke out maybe half a “hello” in response to her cheery greeting.

This isn’t a dream. Or, well, maybe this whole world is kind of a dream to begin with, but—this isn’t a dream. She was happy, she was confused, and the moment she opened her mouth the tears threatened to spill, so she couldn’t talk right.

Kieli couldn’t believe she had the chance to see her like this again: not the hideous corpse that had been sucked into the monster, but someone moving and smiling and speaking.

“Are these seats taken? Can we sit here?” the girl asked, gesturing with a glance at the seats in their box while she gently peeled away the boy clinging to her. Kieli nodded furiously, still unable to speak, and moved aside to make room for her.

That was when she finally remembered the existence of the other kid who’d stood hiding behind the girl. He was a boy even smaller than the boy Harvey, and in stark contrast to the carefree, animated girl, he wore a sort of timid scowl as he peeked at them from behind her. Kieli thought he looked about eight or nine years old. The eyes giving her an upward glare were a clear, beautiful slate color.

Is this boy Joachim…?

When the golden-haired girl and slate-eyed boy sat down with them in their set of facing seats, their almost lonely little cube of space all at once took on a lively atmosphere. Kieli and the boy Harvey sat next to each other, and Beatrix and the boy Joachim sat across from them.

The boy Joachim, the smallest of them, constantly darted glances up at the other kids with a scowl on his face. He clearly prized the paper bag he held, which seemed to be full of snacks; he never let go of it for one second. When he noticed the boy Harvey staring at it with a vaguely wistful expression, he shifted it out of sight with a start and said, “Y-you can’t have any!” Beatrix whacked him over the head. The boy Joachim glared up at her with teary eyes, but apparently she was the one in charge; he only gave her a bitter look, clearly unable to backtalk her.

“Don’t be mean. If you’re a man, be generous and give him some.”

So the boy Joachim reluctantly held out the bag to the boy Harvey as if he were doing him the world’s biggest favor. The boy Harvey stuck his little hand in the bag and grabbed the biggest fistful of biscuits he could, without any restraint, without any subtlety, and without any expression on his face. “Hey!” the boy Joachim cried, horrified. He clutched the bag to his chest and looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

“You’re not getting any more! No more for you, got it?!”

The boy Harvey didn’t even appear to be listening to him. He’d already started munching away, getting biscuit crumbs all over his hands and face. Kieli and Beatrix met each other’s eyes and grinned at the boys’ childish exchange.

“How far are you going?” Beatrix asked her. Kieli glanced at the boy Harvey sitting next to her (who was cramming biscuits into his mouth like there was no tomorrow, the point of their trip seemingly forgotten even though it revolved around him).

“The end of the world.”

“Okay, then we’ll be together for part of the trip.” Beatrix beamed. Kieli smiled back, feeling heartened. She’d always been their strong, straightforward, heartening big sister.

…In the real world, though, she was gone…

In spite of herself, Kieli remembered what she’d looked like at the end, and her heart grew heavy again.

Suddenly something hit the outside of the window with a rubbery squeak. When Kieli looked, she saw a balloon animal floating there with a carefree smile on its face that dispelled the gloom. The boy Joachim, who was sitting by the window, half-rose from his seat and plastered himself to the glass. “It’s the circus!” he cried excitedly.

All sorts of different balloon animals floated lazily in the air outside the window.

A caravan of trailers that sparkled with lights of all different colors was traveling parallel to the train. Stages were set up on the sides of the trailers, and on the round platform of one of them a fat clown in a costume with a ruffled collar made balloon animals and released them into the sky. The clown’s face was painted white with blue stars: He was the one she’d met a long time ago at the carnival in Easterbury.

Trailer after trailer followed each other in a line, the artists on each of their stages giving merry performances. Balloons of all colors danced through the air as they passed. On one stage actors in giant-headed bear and mouse costumes put on a silly comedy, whacking one another and tripping and whacking one another again. In another trailer, a musical troupe decked out flamboyantly in red-and-green-striped breeches and yellow tights haphazardly played trumpets and cymbals; and in yet another, three tin dolls wearing matching sailor collars and mismatching triangular hats colored red, green, and yellow performed an adorable dance with quick little steps. In still another trailer, a fortune-telling girl shuffled cards with a practiced hand. One of the trailers was a dining car, even, and Kieli could see dear, familiar faces: There was Suzie busily carrying trays of the “parent-and-child stew” made of poultry, eggs, and chickpeas, and there was Buzz manning the stove.

Kieli’s gloomy mood vanished. The glittering spectacle of the show on the other side of their window captivated her. Even the boy Harvey, who hardly ever changed expressions, had a faintly happy look on his face. His gaze was riveted on the succession of performances. Both his hands were pressed against the glass.

So many people she and Harvey had met on their travels together were living and breathing here in his world. She saw people among them that she didn’t know, too—people who must have featured in his life before he met Kieli. But still, the vast majority of these faces were ones Kieli knew. That made her feel a little shy, and happy, too. Happy that these few short years since he’d met Kieli, these days together that were just a tiny fraction of his long life, stuck with him so vividly that they took up most of his memories.

Sput, sput, sput.

The line of trailers gradually receded into the distance as the train overtook it, and then something else noisily approached them from behind. When Kieli brought her face up to the window and squinted, curious what it could be this time, she saw another train pulling up alongside theirs from behind. She was pretty sure there’d been only one track, but now another one was unrolling out ahead of this new train like a carpet. It was a rugged one painted in an earth-toned camouflage pattern. The boy Harvey plastered his own cheek to the glass next to Kieli’s.

“Watch out! Duck!” Beatrix’s sharp voice cried suddenly. She pushed down at Kieli’s and the boy Harvey’s heads until they dropped into a crouch below the window frame. Beatrix crouched down, too, shoving down the boy Joachim’s head the same way. Before long the camouflaged train started running alongside them at the same speed as their own train, so close that the side walls were almost scraping against each other. When Kieli just half-raised her face to peer out the window, she saw soldiers dressed in dark greatcoats with high collars peering intently into their train from just a short distance away, weapons drawn. She hastily ducked back down.

“It’s a squad of immortal soldiers,” Beatrix whispered from where they sat on the floor. “The only things they leave behind them are bodies and gunpowder smoke. They’re the worst soldiers of all—people say the plants never even grow back where they’ve been. Hold your breath, or they’ll find us. Any living human they find either gets killed or made into one of them.”

Kieli clapped both hands over her mouth as she draped her body over the boy Harvey’s to shield him. The four of them huddled together beneath the window and tried to breathe as quietly as they could. The earth-toned train on the other side of the window gradually picked up speed and overtook theirs.

Around the time Kieli really couldn’t hold her breath anymore, its very last car finally passed them.

They all sucked in huge gasps of air, raising their heads and slowly peering outside. When the final earth-toned car was gone, the track rolled up again and disappeared in just the opposite way from where it had come.

Kieli’s eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of the new scenery it left behind.

Somehow the train was now cutting through the middle of a charred battlefield. A wilderness battlefield where blood spray and gunpowder smoke hung in a thick fog along the rocky ground. People in military uniform were piled on top of one another, lying with their limbs sprawling every which way or slumped over bayonet guns and sabers; shot through the heart or stabbed in the back; all a mess of wounds and all dead. The unsinking evening sun dyed it all orange, the whole ruined battlefield where nothing moving remained, where there was only the smell of death left, in a sort of belated homage.

The only thing moving in the sea of corpses: the arms dealer’s truck matter-of-factly going through the dead soldiers’ bodies and collecting the promising ones. Their train passed through the endless sea of bodies at the same unchanging speed.

“Ah…ah…”

Still gazing expressionlessly at the sea of bodies, the boy Harvey let out a wordless cry.

“Augh, ah, ahhh…”

The grieving voice was as halting as a baby’s, but it tore at the hearts of everyone who heard it. Plastering himself to the window, the boy banged against the glass with both fists. He kept on banging long enough for his slender battered fists to get even more hurt. “Harvey!” Kieli hugged her arms around him from behind and forced him back away from the window. The boy kept struggling in her tight grip, reaching both hands toward the window and panting as transparent tears dribbled down that face that never held any expression.

The scars from this war still ruled a big chunk of his heart, still tormented him even now. Even after decades they hadn’t faded; they were as fresh as ever and torturing him.

“Harvey, don’t cry…”

Kieli cradled the crying boy’s head and wished. Don’t carry all this on your shoulders anymore. Don’t hurt yourself anymore. You’ve already been hurt enough…

“Here,” the boy Joachim said, thrusting his bag of snacks sullenly at the other boy. The boy Harvey blinked teary eyes at him in surprise. “You can have as many as you want…so don’t cry,” the boy Joachim spat in an undertone, looking away with a ferocious scowl on his face. When Beatrix butted in with, “Sheesh, just give him all of them,” he groaned and glared not-quite-confidently at her, then steeled himself like a man bound for the firing squad and roughly shoved the whole bag into the boy Harvey’s hands.

The boy Harvey gaped down at it for a second and then patted the pockets of his pajamas until he stuck his hand into one of them. To Kieli’s surprise, he fished out a small object and shoved it just as roughly into the boy Joachim’s hands in return. The boy Joachim’s eyes went round. It was a model steamship carved out of pretty, blackly gleaming stone just the right size to fit in a child’s hand.

“C-cool…! You’re giving me this?” the boy Joachim asked, his eyes gleaming. The boy Harvey nodded. Before he could even get out a “Yay,” Beatrix thwapped him and scolded, “Say ‘thank you.’”

By the time the boy Joachim mumbled “Thanks,” blushing bright red and dropping his gaze to the floor as if it was a struggle to get the word out, the boy Harvey was eating his new snacks with a look on his face that said he’d already forgotten all about the boat.

“Hey, listen to me!” yelled the boy Joachim, stricken. The boy Harvey continued to eat with an air of perfect innocence, swinging his legs back and forth. Kieli stifled a laugh.

Their relationship must have been like this ever since they were tiny. These two were the Joachim and Beatrix that Harvey held inside him. Inside Harvey, the two of them were still shining with life, moving and talking and laughing.

“Wow, look!” Beatrix cried brightly. All four of them crowded around the window and squinted out. The wilderness Kieli’d thought would go on forever had abruptly broken off, and a sandy sea spread out in front of the train. The train barreled on along an extraordinary track skimming the surface of the waves.

“Wow, we’re riding on the sea!” Kieli cried in delight. They all worked together to get the window open so they could lean out and feel the dry ocean wind whipping at their hair. It was the Sand Ocean, so infinitely, boundlessly vast that she couldn’t even make out the horizon where sea met sky. A flock of migratory birds whose pale sandy hues threatened to disappear against the color of the ocean flew in a lazy circle in the sky. For a while the four of them were wordlessly enthralled by the grand scenery.

The birds spread their wings wide and left their circuit to make a beeline for the train.

“Whoa!”

Flap flap, rustle rustle!

At the hostile sound of countless wings beating violently right next to their window, they all instinctively shrank back. When they cautiously opened their eyes, however, the birds were gathered around the boy Harvey’s bag of sweets, pecking at the biscuits.

At first they sagged, drained, and then they all looked at one another and laughed. The boy Harvey was the only one who didn’t react as the birds flocked around him. He just looked dazed.

Boom!

A distant cannon sounded, and the birds scattered in surprise. Kieli looked out the window to see two ships firing their cannons at each other in the distance. One was a rugged, sturdy-looking armored ship covered in black paint; the other was a battered little boat flying a flag with a skull and crossbones on it. She could make out soldiers in fancy white suits of armor on the black ship, and muscular men who looked like sailors wearing rough clothes and matching yellow bandannas on the skull-and-crossbones one.

“It’s a pirate ship! Yay!” The boy Joachim’s eyes shone with boyish excitement as he clutched his model boat and waved to the pirate ship with all the enthusiasm of a child that age.

“Moron!” Beatrix grabbed Joachim by the scruff of his neck as he moved to lean out the window and yanked him back inside the train car. “Don’t you know kids who get found by pirates get captured and have their hearts ripped out and sold?! Kids’ hearts are jewels. Pirates collect them.” The boy Joachim instantly turned white as a sheet and hid behind Beatrix’s back.

The children on the train all retreated to the shadows on either side of the window and watched the battle between the armored ship and the pirate ship. Kieli recognized several of the men on that pirate ship. They were the sailors from the Sandwalker, the heretics who believed in laying their dead to rest in the sand. The most prominent of them, the one with the manly face who stood at the prow of the ship giving orders to his minions, was Ol Han. He wore a black eye patch over one eye, and the arm he waved to give his men the order to fire the cannons ended in a hook instead of a hand. He really did look like a pirate captain straight out of one of those old stories. She saw Ka Rif, the low-ranking shipmate who’d been so kind to her, too.

Kieli darted a glance at the profile of the boy pressed cheek to cheek with her watching the pirate ship. He had his eyes glued to the battle between the two ships, but his facial expression was as spaced-out as ever.

The armored ship’s cannon dealt a direct hit to the pirate ship’s deck, which listed sharply. The men standing on it screamed in their deep voices.

The boy Harvey let out a soft cry.

He gripped the window frame with both hands and stared at the pirate ship as if he were silently cheering it on: Hang in there! You can do it! The pirate ship fired back with its own cannon and opened up a great hole in the hard bottom of the armored ship. This time the boy Harvey opened his mouth wide in a sort of silent Yay! and leaned out of the window.

Before they knew it, Kieli and the others were rooting for the pirate ship right along with him. “Go pirates! You can do it! Shoot!” they cheered, pumping their fists. These were the same pirates who supposedly collected children’s hearts, but when all was said and done, the pirates in storybooks were always the ones children adored. And they were a necessary ingredient for any satisfying great adventure.

The pirate ship successfully sank the armored one, and all the children joined hands and cheered “Hooray!”

Captain Ol Han with his black eye patch and hook noticed them from his position at the tip of the deck. He pointed the silver gun he held in his flesh hand at the sky and fired a round, pointing straight at their train with his hook and bellowing, “I see children! Catch ’em! A reward for anyone who gets a jewel!”

The pirates’ war cry echoed through the sky on the heels of the gunshot. Shrieking, the children pulled back into the train car. The ship unfurled its sails all the way and started coming after the train.

It cut across the surface of the Sand Ocean until it caught up and began running side by side with the train, and Captain Ol Han’s hook reached in through the window to grab the boy Joachim’s collar. He hoisted the boy up with no trouble at all. The boy Harvey promptly grabbed on to his feet, and both boys’ slight bodies were fished out of the train through the window.

“Harvey! Joachim!”

Kieli and Beatrix leaned outside, too, and tried to rescue them, but they were already too far away. As they were raised aloft by Captain Ol Han’s hook, the two boys tried to squirm and kick their way free. The violently churning surface of the Sand Ocean spread beneath their feet.

“Quit yer flailing, runts!” the captain hissed, pointing his silver gun at the boy Harvey’s head.

Bang!

A shot rang out. The boy Harvey’s right eye flew apart like a chunk of sand. He lost his grip on the boy Joachim’s legs, and his pajama-clad body plunged headfirst toward the sea.

“Harvey!”

Kieli reflexively threw herself out the train window and dove after him. She was sucked into the sand swirling on the surface almost immediately. The flow of sand pretty much had her at its mercy, but she still managed to grab the drowning boy’s wrist just before he slipped out of reach. The fierce whirlpool of sand forced her eyelids closed and jostled them both this way and that.

And then before Kieli knew it, instead of the sand she remembered diving into, the two of them were being sucked under by real, turbid water. It was just like when she’d fallen into the underground waterway in Gate Town and black, heavy water like sludge had clung to all her limbs.

Wait, I can’t swim…!

Panic took over her mind and brought her even closer to drowning. Still, in the midst of it all she held on to the boy’s hand for dear life.

I’ll never let go, no matter what, she thought firmly. Under the water where she couldn’t see it, she managed to just barely feel the boy’s wrist in her hand.

It suddenly struck her that the two of them had held hands like this many times before. She thought of the smiles of the people she’d seen performing in those trailers earlier. Harvey wasn’t the only one who’d enshrined them in his heart as precious memories. They were even more than that to Kieli: they were the most precious memories of all, the ones that took up most of the space in her own life so far. And in all those memories, it was his hand that had always been there next to her. All along, ever since the first time they’d held hands that day he came to find her in the carnival town in Easterbury…When Kieli had reached out a hand to Harvey the day they met up again at the transfer station and he was sitting all battered and bruised at the bottom of the stairs, and when she’d hauled Harvey to the boat with the wire after he’d fallen into the Sand Ocean and then helped him up into it, and when she’d reached out to Harvey the day she went to get him at the spaceship ruins after he’d been missing and said Let’s go home, and after they’d met up again in Gate Town after six months apart, when she’d run up the station steps to take Harvey’s offered hand.

This hand of his had always been there with her. Sometimes Kieli’d taken it so she wouldn’t get left behind, and sometimes Harvey’d offered it to her to help her. And sometimes she’d clung desperately to it, determined not to let go of the tattered man who seemed as though he could blink out of existence any moment.

A voice flowed into her consciousness.

The clear voice of a girl. Beatrix’s voice…?

Don’t let go of his hand. He made it this far only because you’ve been holding on to him with all your might—

Kieli gripped the boy’s hand even tighter in answer. As the cloudy black water tossing them about robbed them of their sight, their eyes met for just an instant.

I won’t let go!

She couldn’t say it out loud. But in her heart she thought it loud and clear, and she nodded to the boy to let him know. His hand squeezed hers back.

Then, out of nowhere, she felt a force abruptly shoving her upward from below. It swiftly propelled their bodies toward the surface of the muddy water that had them at its mercy.

By the time they broke the surface and regained their sight to look around them, the black water of the underground waterways had transformed itself back into the Sand Ocean again.

When Kieli looked down to see what had brought them up to safety, her eyes widened into saucers. Rising from the ocean, avalanches of sand cascading from its bumpy, coarse-skinned body, was a gigantic tube-shaped monster like a great segmented worm. A sandworm—!

She wasn’t sure which end was the head, but on the one she thought was the sandworm’s head she saw the boy Joachim riding, too.

The sandworm’s great, long body swam effortlessly along the surface with Kieli, the boy Harvey, and the boy Joachim hanging on to its bumps. It left a wake of sand behind it as it outstripped the pirate ship chasing after them and firing on them with cannons. It sped across the sand to pull up alongside the train and eventually reached the train car window Beatrix was sticking her head out of.

With Beatrix’s help, the three of them managed to tumble through the window into the car.

Then it was time for a coughing fit.

They sat up as quickly as they could, though, even before they’d finished panting and coughing up all the sand in their mouths, and looked out the window. The sandworm was stretching its long body up from out of the ocean and getting in the pirate ship’s way, sending huge waves of sand rolling toward it from all directions. The one-eyed, prosthetic-handed Captain Ol Han, Ka Rif, and all the other pirates were hanging on to their listing deck for dear life.

Kieli and the others stuck out their tongues at the pirate ship as it beat a hasty retreat, and then they all waved together at the sandworm that had rescued them, calling, “Thank you! Good-byyye!”

Beatrix’s parting shot at the pirates was, “Kids’ hearts are treasures, and that makes them too good for you!” They all doubled over laughing. The pirate ship and the sandworm gradually grew farther away across the sand until they faded from sight, still fighting, and the train rushed straight down the track on the sand as before.

The boy Harvey’s right eye was still gone. It was as if it’d been part of a doll made of hard sand and had just crumbled away when the bullet loosened it. When Kieli gazed sadly at his now even more injured face, he just looked back at her with his expressionless copper left eye, seeming as unconcerned about his own body as ever.

Then without warning he thumped his own forehead lightly against hers.

She could feel the warmth from his pale forehead, slight but certain.

Almost like a message: I’m okay.

“You’ve been holding on to him…” Beatrix’s gentle voice said overhead. “That’s how he made it this far. He managed to pull through this far without giving up. And he still hasn’t given up yet.” He hasn’t given up yet. He’s trying to live—This was just like what the radio had told her. When she drew her forehead away from the boy’s and looked up, she saw a soft smile in Beatrix’s blue eyes. “Thanks for tugging him along this far. Keep taking care of him, okay?”

Without Kieli noticing it happen, suddenly the never-ending sunset was gone, and the blue-gray color of night was beginning to take over the sky. The boy Joachim pressed his hands against the window glass and peered outside with clear eyes the same color as that sky.

Against the backdrop of the slate-blue sea, Kieli made out what looked like the remains of ships, masts, and the tips of sails, jutting up from the sand at all angles. There were other things, too. Smallish things like sabers and bayonet guns, stuffed animals and toy cars. Bigger things like rusted train cars and clock towers, tanks and trucks…

“Is this…the final destination of the Sand Ocean…?”

The Sand Ocean Graveyard, where they said everything set adrift on the flowing sands went in the end.

The sounds of the sliding sand and the dry wind that blew over the ocean were both gone; even the sound of the train’s wheels on the track had been sucked away, and the sea had come to a complete halt, as if time had left them behind in a ruined world so soundless that it hurt Kieli’s ears.

There were many, many things she recognized here. The clockwork dolls that sang and danced back in the park in Westerbury, the remains of the park’s trolley trucks, a radio tower covered in red-brown rust…And off in the distance, even the remains of a giant dilapidated spaceship that looked almost like a bayonet gun stuck upright in the sand. The hazy light of the twin moons hanging beyond the thin slate clouds picked out the outlines of all sorts of different things and cast their long, thin, bluish shadows on the sand.

Everything that the long life of this world’s owner had left behind, or that had passed by it to die before him, must be here now…Kieli leaned out over the window frame and watched the endless moonlit driftage—the grave markers for all the many people and things that had touched his life, however slightly, before dying away and coming to rest here.

Eventually a white platform came into view among the driftage. In the exact center of the platform stood a lone gas lamp bleeding dull, yellowish light. The train on its oversea track slowed its speed and pulled into the station.

“Okay, then,” said Beatrix, getting up from her seat and nudging the boy Joachim. “We have to get off here.”

“What?” Startled, Kieli turned her head to look up at them. “You’re getting off…?”

“Mm-hmm. But you two have to keep on moving. You’ve got a ways to go on your journey yet.”

The boy Harvey jumped out of his seat and jogged over to Beatrix, yanking her sleeve in a wordless plea for her to stop. This child who almost never asserted himself was suddenly shaking his head and almost throwing a tantrum. Beatrix patted the peevish boy’s head awkwardly.

Kieli was equally at a loss for what to do with him, but she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him away from Beatrix anyway. He wiped his cheeks with his pajama sleeve. His tears were infectious, and Kieli felt them welling up in her own eyes, too.

“Beatrix, please stay…”

The girl shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” A sad-looking smile danced in her blue eyes. “The two of you have to go it alone from here. I can’t help out anymore. We’ve already retired from the stage of your travels.”

“Retired from the stage…?” Oh…that’s right. Kieli almost forgot it sometimes, but it was true: In reality she wouldn’t be able to journey with these two anymore. She couldn’t get help from Beatrix anymore. She couldn’t go to her for someone to talk to, or ask for her advice, or fight with her anymore.

Beatrix was selfish and she talked big and she was bossy and she was hopeless with money, but Kieli had loved her. Kieli had taken as much secret pride in her strength and beauty as if they’d been her own.

Choking back a sob, she forcefully wiped away her tears. She held on to the boy Harvey as he wailed. Now, Kieli would have to be stronger. So she could get even the littlest bit closer to her friend’s strength. So she could protect what she wanted to protect. “Thank you for everything, Beatrix…I love you…”

What she really wanted was to thank her directly in the real world. She decided to be grateful, though, for the chance to say now what she hadn’t been able to before. Maybe getting to take this short trip with them again at the end was a little unconscious gift from the owner of this world.

The boy Joachim looked reluctant to leave, but Beatrix tugged him by the hand, and they made their way out through the connecting door, leaving Kieli and the boy Harvey behind. At the last moment, the boy Joachim turned around, held up the model boat he’d gotten from the boy Harvey, and waved. “Bye-bye.”

Kieli and the boy Harvey went back to their set of seats and stuck their heads out the window. They saw the two of them step down onto the white platform that stood all alone in the sea of driftage. Belching steam, the train began to pull away from the platform again.

Kieli leaned out the window and waved to them as hard as she could. The boy Harvey leaned out, too. The train picked up speed and sent his coppery hair flying every which way.

“Beatrix! The good-luck charm got broken! I’m sorry!” Kieli shouted at the top of her lungs as she waved.

The train was picking up speed; the wind tore away the sound of Kieli’s voice. But she waved back with a smile and shouted back just the same, “Well, you don’t need it anymore, do you? You got to see Ephraim, after all—” The sight of the girl and boy standing side by side and seeing them off in the glow of the gaslight on the platform receded into the distance behind them.

And so the train carrying Kieli and the boy, leaving all kinds of things behind and feeling each individual loss, began driving down the track on the sand once again. Their tears mingled together as the wind took them before scattering them in the night sky.

Now that it was just the two of them in the train again, all at once it was only about a tenth as noisy. It felt awfully quiet. Outside the window, it was nighttime. Clackity-clack, clackity-clack…Rhythmic throbbing and the dull soft glow coming from the train-car lights gently enveloped their set of facing seats, but everything else was dark.

A round ball of fire drifted by outside their window. Wondering what it could be, Kieli pressed her face against the glass and squinted out at the night sea.

“Ah…!”

That’s not the sea—! Somewhere along the way the train had pulled past the Sand Ocean, and now it was running on tracks that floated in nothingness. There was no ground and no sky and no way to tell where the horizon was; only a dizzying pitch-black void surrounding them on all sides. Two enormous spheres of rugged rock were floating so close to the train that Kieli was afraid they might collide.

Are those the twin moons…?

When she pressed her cheek to the window pane, she saw that they were riding on an arcing track suspended in the void, and behind them on that track floated a huge sand-colored planet wrapped in a hazy layer of atmosphere. Fragments of rock streaming past their window were pulled in by the planet’s gravity, catching fire as they plummeted toward it. One after another after another after another, balls of flame were sucked down to the planet far below Kieli.

Before her eyes, one of the twin moons floating in the void split clean in half without a sound. A chunk of it became a giant meteor wreathed in flame and plummeted toward the planet just like the other balls of fire.

The world—it’s starting to completely break down—

The air inside the train began vibrating wildly. She realized that while her mind was elsewhere, the ruin of the world had finally begun to overtake even the train itself. When she checked out the window, the cars at the back of the train were breaking off one by one without a sound, just like the moon, becoming nothing but pitiful fiery wreckage.

“Oh no…!”

Taking the boy Harvey’s hand, Kieli stood up from her seat and rushed out into the aisle. They ran away from the destruction toward the front of train. It was all they could do. The boy behind Kieli fell after a particularly abrupt shake of the floor, and she crashed down with him. As she tried to help him up, the floor cracked and a gaping hole opened up at the boy’s feet. His body started to disappear into the gap. Just in time, Kieli threw her upper body over the edge and grabbed his arms. Then she opened her eyes wide.

The boy’s body was cracking, too, as if in sync with the ruin of the train, and beginning to crumble away like dry sand. Chunks of his arms and legs fell off.

“No, not yet! Hang in there!”

Kieli used every ounce of her strength to haul the boy’s body up, and they took off together in a stumbling run.

Then the boy suddenly gave Kieli’s hand a sharp tug. Stumbling backward a little, she turned around and followed the path of the boy’s gaze to look out the window. A misshapen sphere of rock was coming into view like a solitary island in the sea, radiating a muted, hazy light in the center of pitch-black outer space.

Somehow the train managed to pull up alongside the lonely platform even though most of its wheels were gone. That body of rock was rumbling violently, just as the wilderness had been before, with fissures forming here and there across the land.

The boy Harvey jumped down onto the cracked and crumbling platform ahead of Kieli, and she followed after him. It looked about to break down and be swallowed up by the ground any second. When she stepped outside, the sky above her was a jet-black void with no atmosphere separating her from it. Shooting star after shooting star rained down around them. Near the middle of the cracked platform stood a tilted sign. Printed on it in a scratchy font were the same words that had been on the tickets, the words proclaiming this place THE END OF THE WORLD.

On the far side of the platform Kieli saw what looked like a giant stake sticking up at an angle. The boy Harvey jumped off the platform and went running up to it. When he got there, he put both hands around the stake and tried to pull it out of the ground. That iron stake, like a thick tree trunk, was so big the boy’s arms only just barely fit around it; he obviously wouldn’t have an easy time prying it out with his small, powerless arms. As if to mock his efforts, it only bit even further into the rock, forcing the crevice in the ground wider. Each time, the world rumbled its scream of agony. Fragments of rock raining down from the sky mercilessly struck the boy’s shoulders and arms. Still the boy clung to the stake, gritting his teeth, and tried to hold together his crumbling world, his wrecked self.

A bit of falling rock slammed into his shoulder, and it turned to sand and crumbled away. He fell to his knees with a little cry. The ground shook violently, the world synching with the boy. The stake bit even deeper into the land, and the world screamed.

The boy crouching on the ground collected sandy shards of his own scattered body and began using them to fill in the gouge that the stake had dug into the land. Each time a stone struck him and he lost a piece of his body, he picked up the fragments of himself and went about repairing the ground with them. On top of the eye and shoulder he was already missing, he lost an arm, a knee, a shin…Little by little, the boy’s whole existence was flaking away. And still he didn’t stop working to repair the world.

“Stop…” Kieli whispered hoarsely where she stood frozen behind him. She ran up to him, tripping whenever the land shook along the way. She threw her arms around the small back that just kept on getting smaller as pieces of it crumbled away and shouted, “It’s enough. Stop! Please, just…just stop working so hard…!” She wrapped her arms around his shoulders as she begged him.

When that ghost girl had shown her what Harvey’s body was like inside, she’d directly seen, felt, known just how wrecked it was, and it had left her terror-stricken. But in spite of it all, his body had struggled to stitch his veins and skin and bone and muscle and nerves, his very self, back together. It’s too much, it’s too much, just…

The boy shook off Kieli’s arms, though, and his small body, so wrecked now that he was almost beyond recognition, silently collected up the fragments of himself and filled in the ground with them as he tried to get it to hold out as long as possible. He tried to fix the collapsing world.

“Harvey!” Kieli screamed tearfully as she sank to the ground. “Just stop…! I don’t want to see you like this; I can’t take it anymore!” she cried, covering her face with both hands and shaking her head.

The moment Kieli said those words, the boy who’d just ignored her presence up until now stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her for the first time since he’d started working.

He stood still, letting his hands fall limply at his sides, and his face started to crumble away. It started around his missing right eye and seemed to drag his whole body after it: It turned to sand and began to break down. The land shook even harder than before—so hard that Kieli could hardly stay sitting upright no matter how desperately she held on. The stake bit in deep, pushing the rift in the ground open wide in the blink of an eye.

Don’t let go…

Beatrix’s clear voice echoed in her mind again.

No, you can’t give up. You can’t be the one to let go of his hand. Please, don’t turn your eyes away.

Never turn your eyes away. That’s what Beatrix had said to her in the cathedral. Kieli raised her face with a start. The boy on the verge of losing himself was looking at her with sad, pleading eyes.

“Harvey…”

Wiping away her tears and pressing her lips resolutely together, Kieli stood up. Standing as firmly as she could on the shaking ground, she stumbled over to stand next to the boy. Reaching out from beside him, she wound both arms around the stake piercing the ground and held it. She hugged it securely in her arms as though she were supporting his body itself.

“…Okay. It’s all right; I’ll hold you up. I won’t let go, no matter what.”

A bit of falling rock slammed into Kieli’s shoulder. Still Kieli clung to the stake, gritting her teeth.

“Let’s hang in there. Let’s do this together. You’re not alone, so let’s work together. I won’t give up, okay? I won’t give up!”

When they’d fallen into the Sand Ocean together only a little while ago, she’d vowed in her heart never to let go of his hand, no matter what. If Kieli’s strength was holding him up, if he needed her, she wouldn’t let go come hell or high water. She wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t turn her eyes away.

The ruin that had been eating away at the boy stopped.

He looked up at her with his one remaining copper eye. As she kept on supporting the stake, Kieli nodded emphatically back at him.

Kieli held the stake’s weight, and the boy repaired the fissure in the ground by filling it with broken bits of his own body. The two of them kept on working and working, trying their best to slow down the ruin as much as they could so that the world wouldn’t end. Single-mindedly, losing all sense of time and self, they held the world together.

It was quiet. Ba-dum, ba-dum…The sound of a heartbeat dimly permeated the air.

Kieli found herself slumped on the ground at the base of the stake with her arms still wrapped around it. At some point she’d fallen asleep with her cheek pressed against it. She opened her eyes slowly, squinting at the sudden bright light and blinking.

The rumble of the world’s collapse that had dominated Kieli’s hearing for so long was gone, and everything was awfully silent. The gentle arc of this little planet’s horizon sprawling at the far reaches of her vision was starting to lighten. Faint, soft light began to filter through the vault of space that had been blanketed in pitch-black darkness so far.

She groggily lifted her cheek from the stake and sat up straight, tracing the stake upward with her gaze. It had stopped still here without widening the fissure in the ground any further. The earth tremors and fissures that had rumbled all around them had calmed, too, and there weren’t any meteorites raining down on them either. She only heard the occasional pattering of tiny falling rocks like an aftertaste of the storm.

The world’s collapse had stopped.

Kieli looked around her with a start. “Harvey!”

She saw a pair of slim legs lying on the ground on the other side of the stake from her, one of them still wearing a shoe. When she crawled over, clinging to the stake for support, she found a boy in tattered pajamas lying there as still as the dead. A chill ran down Kieli’s spine.

“Harvey…?” she ventured tentatively. The boy lying limply on the ground cracked open an eyelid. An empty copper eye turned toward her. She took a relieved breath and lent the boy a hand to help him up. His body was horribly light, but it was here—he hadn’t broken or disappeared; he existed here in her arms right now.

They sat down on the ground side by side and leaned their backs against the base of the stake in the earth. The narrow rays at the horizon gradually expanded, piercing the pitch-dark sky with a soft light.

“It stopped, huh? I…wonder if that means we’re saved…”

At Kieli’s half-formed question, the boy silently raised his face up to look at the stake overhead and then lowered it to survey the various parts of his own body. Miraculously, the missing parts were gradually returning to the way they’d been: a tide of sand coming into shore. The crevices in his body began to fill, catching and reflecting little twinkles of light as they went. For a while the boy stared wonderingly down at his hands, experimentally making rock-paper-scissors gestures a few times, even, before lifting his eyes to look at Kieli. The sand-colored light shining on this little planet lit his face just enough to let her see it break into a soft smile.

A familiar scent wafted in on the breeze. The scent of their planet, wreathed in coppery wilderness and ashen smog.

Choo……

The train parked by the cracked platform sounded its whistle. Ash-colored vapor drifted toward them on the wind. Along with the vapor came the faint sound of static-filled music—the bouncy tones of stringed instruments, coming from the radio.

As if drawn to the music, the two of them took each other’s hands and stood up. The wrecked train that was down to just a few cars now puffed steam, waiting for them to board. They looked at each other and smiled. The smoggy wilderness wind caressed their cheeks.

“Want to go home?”

Joining hands, they started walking toward the train.

Let’s go home.

Let’s keep up this journey together a little farther, a little farther.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum…

She could feel the warmth of someone’s body heat against her right hand. Ba-dum. Ba-dum…The sound of a slowly pulsing heartbeat traveled faintly along her fingers into her consciousness. When she opened her tightly shut eyes one by one, Kieli saw the big palm and long angular fingers wrapped around her own right hand—she would have recognized that beloved left hand anywhere.

The radio’s speaker was playing them a stream of noise at low volume. It didn’t quite form music, but it had a lilt to it like a lullaby. Just like the melody that had come to escort them back home in the end, the one coming from inside the train at the end of the world.

Kieli lifted her cheek from the cold floor of the colonnade and sat up. Her eyes fell on the hand linked to hers and slowly traveled up. There was the long arm that always protected Kieli. The lean, battered body crashed out on the ground next to her. Copper-colored curls lying sloppily against the nape of his neck. And when she let her eyes travel even farther, his coppery right eye and dark brown left eye: They looked a little vacant and kind of listless, but there was unmistakably light and awareness in them as they gazed up at her face.

Kieli felt his hand squeeze hers, a little weakly still. His dry lips moved a fraction.

“I…”

The scratchy murmur ended there, but it sounded like a question.

“Mm-hmm. What is it?” Kieli whispered tenderly. She brought her ear to his lips as he tried to speak.

“…I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t move, and I was alone in a dark place for a long time…and I wondered if maybe this was the end…and I got…scared. But I could hear your voice somewhere in the distance. I heard your voice calling me the whole time. So, I couldn’t see very well, but I walked toward your voice, Kieli…and I tripped and fell sometimes…but I could hear your voice the whole time, so I could walk here without getting lost…” His halting words went straight to Kieli’s heart, and tears formed in her eyes. She shook her head to stop him from saying anything else, gripping his left hand in both of her own and pressing her forehead to it.

“Mm-hmm…Welcome home, Harvey.”

Ba-dum. Ba-dum…

With her face this close, she could just make out his heartbeat. It was weak, but it was undeniably there.

The blue-gray night was already half-gone, and the capital was still in chaos. And yet right now, she felt as if it would all work out somehow. She felt as though, as long as the owner of the hand in hers stayed with her, right now she could do anything.