Chapter 107

It was quite late at night by the time she got the phone call from her husband. He was calling to tell her they’d be staying over at the station that night and he couldn’t get home—and to remind her to make double-sure she locked up the whole house. She checked the rooms on the second floor and their balconies, then went to look at each of the windows in the first-floor hallway facing the front garden. The view of uptown Gate Town outside looked no different than any other night; it was wrapped in such still silence that somehow it seemed only natural to quiet her own breathing. In the last month or so, there had been a rash of attacks on citizens over in the downtown slums by mysterious monsters. There’d been that fuss last fall about the dead monster falling from one of the waterway exits, and for a while that had been all anybody in town talked about, but things had just quieted down at last—and then, before they’d had the chance to draw a proper breath, this. Her husband worked at Gate Town’s Security Forces outpost, and recent events had him on duty around the clock more often than usual. She herself wasn’t working now, but until about two years ago she’d been nursemaid to the son of a certain noble house at Church headquarters in the capital. I hope young master Julius is all right… She’d heard that several similar incidents had happened in the capital recently, too. Julius had just gone back to the capital the other day to prepare for the new semester after paying her a much-anticipated visit during his between-semester break. He’d answer her when she asked him how school was going and such, but it was rare now for him to guilelessly talk to her about whatever crossed his mind as he once had. On the one hand, she was proud of how he’d grown, but on the other hand, she missed what they’d once had, too. She and her husband had no children. To her, Julius was like her very own son. “Hmm…?” On the verge of locking the only open window, she stopped and peered into the front garden in the dim glow of their porch light. The garden gate was ajar. She thought she’d closed it, but perhaps a strong gust of wind had blown it open? A not-insubstantial thrill of fear shivered down her spine. E-everything’s fine, she told herself. She locked the window and double-checked it and was just about to walk away when she thought she saw a shadow moving in one corner of the garden. “Wh-what was that…?” She tried to persuade herself it was only her imagination, even though she knew better, but that was when something rustled outside the window. Her heart jumped with fright. She managed to swallow back a scream, but her legs were rooted to the spot and she couldn’t get them to move. Clasping both hands in front of her chest, she stared outside. D-darling, what should I do…?! But the husband she silently cried to for help wouldn’t be coming home tonight. Her limbs trembled. The lady scolded her uncooperative knees and determinedly began to shuffle away from the wall, when— Bam! Something smacked against the windowpane. This time she did let out a shriek, pitched much higher than her normal speaking voice, and in her rush to scramble backward, her foot slipped and she fell to the floor. Once down, fear robbed her limbs of their strength, and she couldn’t get back up. The thing plastered to the window slid down the glass and out of sight. What stayed behind on the pane were the blood-red human fingerprints. A hand…a person’s hand?! She came back to her senses with a jolt. Though she still felt limp, she immediately crawled over to the window again, gripped the frame with both hands, and pulled herself up to her knees. When she took a careful peek outside, someone was lying collapsed next to the wall underneath the window. There was a red streak along the wall where his fingers had trailed down from the glass. That lanky one-armed frame illuminated by the faint porch light was one the lady remembered very well. Leaning on the wall for support, she somehow managed to haul her shaking body upright and walk over to the front door. She opened it and dashed out into the garden, running toward the man slumped below her window. Still sprawled out, he was trying to gather up small bits of something or other that were scattered on the ground around him with his one tattered, blood-covered arm. “Oh, dear!” the lady gasped. For a few moments she just stood there petrified. Noticing her, he lifted his coppery head groggily. Yes, he was definitely the young man she remembered, almost unchanged. Now that she got a look at him, it was more than just his arm that was hurt; his whole body was horribly battered. After the young man had gazed up at her face for a while with mismatched eyes that couldn’t quite seem to converge on one point, he finally seemed to bring her into some sort of focus, and he opened his mouth uncertainly. “Oh—sorry, I just sort of ended up here…and I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go…I’ll leave right away, so—if you could maybe—lend me some tools…” His voice was scratchy and scarcely audible, and he was still trying to talk. The lady crouched in front of him and took his bloody upside-down body into her arms. “For now just come inside—please come inside—I need to bandage you—” “I’m fine—I’m—fi—” The young man seemed half-unconscious; he was talking in choppy, feverish-sounding bursts, both speaking and acting a bit off. Neither his gaze nor his gestures were quite steady. “Are there—still any parts on the ground? Can you look—for them for me…? My eyes—aren’t too good—right now…” He patted the ground with his lacerated hand. Come to think of it, she’d been wondering what he’d been trying to pick up all this time; now she saw what looked like parts of a machine littering her front yard. Beneath the fallen man’s body, he was lovingly sheltering an old radio. And with his gaze wandering aimlessly, he was feeling around for its scattered parts by hand. “Corporal—wait a sec—we’ll pick them up—sorry…” The poor thing must be very confused. He kept mumbling things that didn’t really make sense to her. “Oh, dear Lord…” the lady wailed tearfully, lifting her eyes to Heaven for a moment. Then she hurried to help him. She found herself silently complaining to God above before she could help herself. Why is he in such terrible condition every time we meet? Could this good-hearted young man really have committed so great a sin? Why do you give him such painful trials…? He’d thought the world was ending. When he couldn’t hear the radio anymore and even his field of vision was getting sketchy, he felt on the verge of losing track of the sound and light that connected him to the world. His visual field in the left eye he’d gotten from Mane had shrunk to almost nothing, putting pressure on the field of his right eye, too, until everything looked dark. Harvey’d faced death dozens—make that hundreds—of times before, but the next time something happened, he really might not be able to come back again. When that thought struck him, he realized he was terrified beyond anything he’d ever felt before. And now he was sitting in the entryway of the lady’s mansion. Using the tools he’d borrowed, Harvey clumsily tinkered with the radio one-handed, based on what he’d picked up from watching other people, until he’d more or less gotten it back together. When he was done, he apprehensively turned it on. He heard a feeble snap of static. He addressed it almost prayerfully. “Cor…poral…?” Ksh, kshht…bzzz…crrr…! “Corporal…?” Kshht, bzzz… The radio forced an uneven stream of noise out of its warped speaker, as though it was trying to say something. “……bie…kay…” It’s okay. I’m still here. That’s what it sounded like. Harvey felt something warm rising in his throat, and he bit his lip and pressed his forehead to the speaker. “That’s special to you, isn’t it?” he heard a voice say. When he raised his face to look, the lady was standing in front of him with a mild smile. He smoothed out the expression on his face, embarrassed, and nodded. Harvey remembered slipping past the Undying Hunters before they noticed him and veering away from the path of the train tracks, but after that point he had only scraps of memories. He’d found himself in Gate Town without any real idea how he’d gotten there or when he’d even decided to come. Half-madly, he’d retraced his memories from all those months ago to get to this house. Even though he’d intended never to indebt himself to this lady again, he just couldn’t think of anything else to do. She sank to her knees in her pinafore and sat next to him. Harvey flinched a little when he saw that she’d brought disinfectant and wet towels and things with her. “It’s okay—I think you know this, but—I’m…”…an Undying. The lady shook her head before he finished. “You’re going to get blood all over my floor like this. Injured people should quietly do as they’re told, I’ll have you know.” When she put it that way, he couldn’t protest anymore, and so he ended up quietly letting himself be treated. It was just the same as when he’d been in her care in lockup half a year ago, and it was thoroughly embarrassing. He’d already healed himself a good bit on his own power, but his left arm was still badly scratched up, and the disinfectant stung. It was a different kind of pain from being wounded in the first place; one he wasn’t used to. For a second he thought he might make a sound. For whatever reason, though, he didn’t shut out the hurt. Tending to his wounds in a businesslike way (Harvey wondered if she was so practiced at it because Julius had been a real little devil as a kid—he could picture that), the lady said mildly, “I’m glad to see you again. You’ve been in my thoughts. Is the young lady well?” “I think so…” he mumbled vaguely, nodding. He was worried like crazy about Kieli, but there was no way for him to find out how she was doing right now. “Sorry for…causing you trouble a-gain…” He bobbed his head at her on the last syllable. “Um.” Harvey couldn’t think of a good way to ask this. “Why did you help…” The words stuck in his throat, and he ended up sounding kind of pathetic. Frankly, he felt pretty damn pathetic right now, barging into someone’s house uninvited because he didn’t have anywhere else to go, and now indebting himself further by getting taken care of like this. “Because I think you’re not a bad person.” “…That’s all?” “Do I need another reason?” The lady stilled her hands for a moment and tilted her head. Then she smiled at him, looking a little amused. “You’re a normal human being, aren’t you? If I see someone who’s injured and in trouble, I help them. Isn’t that only normal?” Harvey hung his head, unable to answer. He couldn’t exactly place why, but somehow it made sense to him now that this was the woman who’d raised Julius. So normal human beings…are allowed to let other people help them? Oh. Huh. He’d never thought about that before. “……While I’m causing you trouble anyway, I have a favor to ask. Would you be able to contact Julius?” He found himself broaching the favor as if it was totally natural. He’d hardly ever asked someone else to help him for free before. He knew full well he was taking advantage of her kindness to ask too much. But the thing was, it was getting difficult to do all this on his own power. Maybe it would be okay for him to turn to someone else. Fzzsh…bzzz…crrrrrr… “…bie…” A barely audible voice seeped from the speaker on a wave of static. “Yeah…Yeah, Corporal. I hear you.” Harvey pressed his forehead against the speaker and spoke slowly. “What, you were saying you weren’t gonna kick the bucket yet, right?” Kshht. The radio answered him with slightly stronger static, as if to say You better believe it. That normal, everyday answer had him finally smiling a little, too. The horribly bent speaker only put out noise that barely formed meaning anymore, but Harvey could still sense for sure that their reliable guardian was there. “It’s okay. I get it. I get exactly what you’re saying.” “…m…kay…” “Yeah, I’m okay too. I still have to go meet up with Kieli, after all.” The lady went to bed first, and midnight found Harvey on his knees in front of the window facing the second-floor balcony, watching Gate Town’s nighttime skyline. To his extremely bad vision, the city lights were fuzzy like fireflies; he could only just barely make out the milky-white town wall looming far beyond them. On top of his failing eyesight, the fact that he was missing a big chunk of his memories of the journey here also worried him. There was an ever-present dull pain deep behind his left eye, slowly eating its way into his brain. The nerves will probably be infested little by little no matter what, so I think you’ll end up blind eventually. He did remember Mane saying that, but it made him somewhat anxious that things were going bad so much faster than he’d expected. You’re getting off easy if you only lose the eye, though… “……” Harvey squinted at the indistinct town wall in his vision. On the other side of that wall lay his destination, the capital. The work he had to take care of was waiting there, and so was Kieli. Harvey heard a dog barking off somewhere in the distance. The lady had told him that sightings of those failed Undyings were happening unusually often lately; he wondered if there was more outflow from the lab than before. According to her, there was some sort of disturbance going on inside the capital, too. All kinds of things that had been slowly growing closer were rapidly picking up speed now, starting to come together… Harvey let the grim look on his face soften and relaxed his shoulders. He dropped his gaze to the radio he’d placed on his knees and pressed his forehead lightly against the speaker again. When he closed his eyes, even though he couldn’t hear its voice, he could pick up the faint sound of its usual static. He drew a relieved breath. His vision might be bad, but this sound still let him feel how he was connected to the world. Without his consciously realizing it, all kinds of people’s help had gotten him here. If he’d chosen just a slightly different path, if he’d made just one decision differently, his future might have been a lot different than where he was now. Right now, though, he was glad from the bottom of his heart that he’d chosen how he had. He’d gotten sick of it so many times, and he’d tried to cast it aside or run away from it, but he was glad he’d managed to make it here. Right now he could feel genuinely grateful to have met all the people he’d encountered along this path. “Corporal…can you hang in there a little further?” Kshht, answered the noise. “Yeah…Let’s hang on and do our best.” A little further, a little further. That’s how they’d gotten this far, and that’s how the end was truly getting closer now.