Chapter 103

Wait, who was in charge of my thoughts just now? Was it me? Who was it? Joachim put a hand to his temple. His thoughts were fuzzy, and there was a dull pain deep inside his skull. The sound of wheels came closer. He stood up with one hand against the wall for balance and went around to the front of the station house, where Kieli was standing on tiptoe at the edge of the platform, squinting down the track. From across the wilderness growing tinted with dusk, he could see a train car approaching in the distance. An armored train car, painted black—No way that overdone, gratuitously extravagant armor belongs to the normal Security Forces. They must be Undying Hunters. “Hey—you idiot!” Kieli was just standing there on the platform, so he grabbed her arm and yanked her back next to the station house with him. He was still unsteady, though, and he ended up on his rear end next to the wall with his arm sort of around her stomach. “Hey, let me go!” Kieli kicked her legs and struggled to get free. Then she noticed Joachim’s arms around her were rotting and gave a little shriek, squirming and flailing even harder. “L-let go of me!” But when he whispered into her ear, “It’s the Undying Hunters,” still holding her from behind, she seemed to understand. She stopped struggling. As the two of them watched with bated breath from the shadows, the armored train car clattered up to the platform with four times the awful roar of a normal one, coming to a halt with a burst of white steam. They saw the apprentice engineer sprint out of the station house shrieking about something. A stretcher with a patient on it was lowered out of the armored car. It was that old fool of an engineer. He looked badly hurt, with blood oozing thickly out of the first-aid bandaging they’d given him, but apparently he’d managed to not get eaten by the monsters. Joachim was a little disappointed. That geezer had been such a pain in the neck, yelling at them all the time, that he wouldn’t have minded the guy becoming monster food. Eyes frozen on the armored car, Kieli croaked, “What about Harvey…?” “Looks like he’s not there. Guess he got eaten, or maybe they killed him?” Kieli turned on him with a glare. Then she suddenly wriggled, trying to make a break for it, so he grabbed her torso harder and reined her in again—“Come on, wait!”—which naturally meant they wound up falling down in a heap again. “Hey, hey, are you stupid? What’s the point of going over there? Are you just going to walk up and blurt, ‘Did you see an Undying on your way here?’” “……” Kieli bit her lip and fell silent, glaring at the ground as though it were her mortal enemy. The hands she’d balled into fists were shaking slightly. She forcibly shook off Joachim’s restraining arms and stood up, but instead of dashing away, she stood in place and stared at the armored car from the shadow of the wall. After a brief conversation with the apprentice engineer, the soldiers who’d unloaded the stretcher went back inside, and the armored car rumbled off somewhere in a clamor of unnecessarily overbearing clanging and banging noises. After it was out of sight, Kieli dashed out of the shadows and over to the apprentice engineer, who was loading the stretcher into the parked locomotive. “What about Harvey? What happened to him?!” Joachim heard her ask the old man on the stretcher eagerly. But the old man seemed to be unconscious. No answer came. When Kieli just stood there, the apprentice asked her, “I’m going to go one more station farther and take him to the hospital there. What do you want to do?” as he pushed the stretcher up the rest of the way into the locomotive. “…I’m going to wait a little longer,” Kieli answered in a dark voice, and Joachim saw her shake her head. The apprentice only said, “Okay.” Once the train that was down to just one car pulled out of the station in a cloud of steam, she went back to standing on the edge of the again deserted platform and began gazing down the track. Oh, come on, we’re going to wait even longer? She showed no signs of ever budging an inch. Wishing she’d just give it a rest already, Joachim sat down with his back against the station house wall. The copper-stained evening sun was hanging about halfway above the horizon beyond the train tracks. When its outline sank completely below the horizon, it would be night. As the sunlight grew dim, the smell of water seeping out of the aqueducts began to thicken. There were lots of exit points around here for the underground waterways coming from the mountains. He didn’t know for sure whether they were nocturnal or not, but he wouldn’t put it past them to crawl out of there under cover of night. The evening sun was steadily swallowed up by the horizon until the girl standing alone was backlit, a silhouette trimmed in burnt orange. Just before the last rays of light disappeared, the whole horizon was dyed with copper-red light; when the rays finally sank away completely, that line of light steadily vanished, too, eaten away by the slate-blue of night encroaching at either end. Without warning, the girl who’d faded to a shadow that blended into the evening darkness whirled around to face him. Joachim blinked, puzzled. He’d been resigning himself to waiting here against the wall a good while longer. “I’m going to the capital,” she declared in a hard voice. “Given up, then? Admitted he got eaten after all?” he asked sardonically, grinning, but Kieli didn’t rise to the bait. She just answered crisply, “Harvey told me to go on ahead if he didn’t make it by the end of the day. He promised to come get me no matter what. So I’m going to go on ahead…and take care of what I need to take care of.” Her voice didn’t even waver. As Joachim watched in silence, a little daunted, Kieli resettled her bag on her shoulder and started walking quickly away. She looked as though she was keeping up that plucky attitude, but when she walked past him, her tightly clenched fists were trembling slightly. It was obvious she was desperately forcing that hard look on her face. Joachim mentally shrugged in disbelief. Sigh…I’m damned if I can see why she’d try so desperately to believe in that guy. Is he really worth getting that obsessed with? Kieli’s steps paused for a moment, cutting off that train of thought. She turned back to look at him where he still sat watching her go. “Aren’t you coming? You want to use me, right?” “Eh…Sure I’m going,” Joachim answered carelessly, but Kieli’s eyebrows drew together when she saw that he didn’t actually try to get up. “Can’t you stand?” “Nope. Truth is I can’t. Help me up.” “……” He gave Kieli a cool-as-a-cucumber grin. She turned back around again with an openly revolted expression on her face, and started walking off without him. Sheesh, she has no sense of humor. Whenever he tried to tame her, win her over, she ended up coldheartedly deserting him. Joachim swore under his breath. She reminded him of that damn tabby cat. Watching the girl leave out of his peripheral vision, he sank his head back against the wall and looked up. The sky was that gloomy blue-gray of nightfall. It looked the same color as his own eyes. He pondered what the difference could have been between him and that guy. He was fairly sure they’d stood at pretty much the same starting line in the beginning. We both become Undying, and we killed about the same number of people, too, and we both wandered through life for eighty years after we failed to die in the War—but somewhere along the way someone showed up to reach out a hand to him, and even though I’m pretty sure there was all kinds of stuff I wanted, it all slipped through my fingers in the end. What happened to make our paths split so far apart? When did it happen? If I’d been the one to meet her first, would she have reached out a hand to me?…Nah, probably not, he thought masochistically. And then something long and thin was reached out to him, right before his eyes. At some point while he’d been lost in thought Kieli had come back, and she was currently scowling and thrusting a stick she must have picked up somewhere toward him. When Joachim blankly grasped the end of the stick, she tugged with both hands to help him stand up. As soon as he was upright, she tossed it away and wiped her hands off on the hem of her coat as though she’d touched something dirty. Talk about being treated like dirt. “I don’t know how to get to the capital,” she said coolly. “It would be very inconvenient if you didn’t take me there.” By the time she’d finished delivering this parting shot, she’d already turned on her heel and started walking. “…Allow me to accompany you, miss,” Joachim called after her, snickering at her rapidly retreating back. Before he started out after the girl, he turned back to look at the platform one more time. The train tracks cut straight across the darkening wilderness toward the horizon. What made our paths split off in different directions? Where did I step wrong? If I didn’t step off the path, I— He abruptly turned his back on the tracks. Stepping on his own long, faint shadow against the concrete, he started walking.