Chapter 113

There was a pause before his next line came. “…Let’s all go home together,” he said, staring at the ground as if he was embarrassed and glowering shyly. Beatrix blinked stupidly at him for a moment, then gave a suppressed laugh. He might seem as though he hadn’t changed underneath all those new scars, but it really hit her now how somewhere along the line, he had. He never used to show his feelings so openly on his face like this before. It had been only a few short years in a life almost a century long. And yet for them those few short years had brought new meetings substantial enough to effect at least a bit of change in what had dragged on and on unchanging for so long before. “Well, duh. I’ll catch up with you soon.” She reached up with one hand and dragged the coppery head even higher than her own into a light embrace and said, “You do your best on your own, too.” The same thing she’d said to her baby brother a long, long time ago. This time, she managed to make that line—the one she’d spat coldly as a young girl who couldn’t express her feelings right—come out soft and warm. Only a few short years, during which she’d undeniably changed, too. She didn’t regret them at all. With that promise to meet again, the two of them each took off running in different directions. Why aren’t any Church Soldiers coming? Isn’t it the Security Forces’ job to protect the people at times like these? Oh, dear Lord… The pile of pews they were using to barricade the door to the supply room they’d fled into gave a weird, squealing clatter. There was only one monster on the other side. Nonetheless, even with the combined strength of all the men pushing it back, the barricade creaked away as if it was ready to break at any second. They had a few young priests there in addition to the pilgrims; as Yoshiu joined them in bracing the barricade, he listened with half an ear to the whining and complaining gradually starting up among the women and children and elderly huddled together in the back of the supply room watching them. The Security Forces are probably doing everything they can, too. Far more packs of monsters were showing up in the city streets, and if this was what one of them was like, he doubted Security Forces equipment would be enough to easily hold them all off. And yet only a handful of them had made it all the way up to the Church building—these people who couldn’t come up with anything to do but complain at a time like this probably didn’t give a thought to the fact that it was the Security Forces’ hard work they had to thank for that. Still, he had no right to criticize anyone. He felt like airing a complaint or two himself. Whether he’d let his muscles slacken as he thought or it had just broken through, the monster’s arm abruptly thrust through a gap between the legs of two pews, ripping a scream from the priest’s throat. Bony fingers with slack greenish skin and sharp claws squirmed like an insect’s writhing limbs, trying to grab its prey through the barricade. The men at the barricade screamed in terror, and so did the people behind them. “Nngah!” The arm reached out and seized a young man right next to Yoshiu by the neck. His madly struggling body was yanked flush against the barricade from the other side; Yoshiu pulled it back with every ounce of his might from this side. Just when he and two other priests had managed to wrestle the man away from it, the monster’s arm snapped in half at the elbow with an eerie crunch that gave him goose bumps. Everyone around screamed and jumped away from where it had landed on the floor. The creepy wrenched-off forearm kept squirming, crawling along the floor with just its fingernails as if it were still searching for prey even now. They all gave it a wide berth, staring at it pale-faced. He heard a child’s shrill voice start to cry. The barricade started to creak again, and everyone desperately formed a wall to hold it up. “Help me! Please!” called a human voice unexpectedly from the other side. When Yoshiu pressed his face up to the crack between the pews and peered out, he saw a man who seemed to have fallen behind the rest standing there pleading. A pilgrim, he thought. The now one-armed monster noticed this new arrival and sluggishly turned its gaze to focus on him. “Help me, let me in, please! Now!” Some of the men slackened their hold on the barricade at his panicked begging, but then one of the onlookers behind them protested, “Don’t!” “Don’t open it, or that thing will get in, too!” Yoshiu couldn’t believe his ears. A normal civilian who hadn’t run as quickly as they had was outside, and this woman was telling them not to open the barricade. And even more unbelievably, a chorus of others cried out in agreement. “Sh-she’s right. Don’t do it!” “We’ve got no choice. He was just unlucky.” “But…” There were a few people who looked as if they wanted to object, but they were cowed into silence by the majority. “What are you waiting for?! Please, hurry up and open it! Help me!” They could still hear a man’s voice pleading for help from beyond the creaking barricade, but the people on the inside only exchanged dark looks. In the end, there wasn’t a single person who tried to relax the barricade. The man screamed on the outside, and everyone inside flinched. His voice, still screaming “Help me, help me,” grew steadily thinner and fainter. As he held up the barricade with everyone else, thoughts swirled in Yoshiu’s mind. What should I do? I have to help him. But that monster really will come in here the moment we let down the barricade. What should I do? What should I do—? Why won’t God reach out a hand to save us at a time like this? Is even this a trial? “You! Out of the way!” Out of nowhere, a sharp voice calling from outside. “You” wasn’t nearly specific enough to actually get anything done, though; they were all too flabbergasted to move, let alone get out of anyone’s way, when— Whump! A dull explosion like a blast of compressed air rang out on the other side of the barricade. One section of it collapsed with a clatter; a split second after the men nearby leapt aside, screaming, the greenish monster fell through along with a broken pew. Screams sounded around him, and the crowd backed up all the way to the rear wall. There was a beat of questioning silence. But the monster stayed slumped facedown over the pew, with no sign of movement. Just as the mood of the crowd was beginning to turn from fear to puzzlement, a figure leapt up and over the barricade from the other side, using the monster’s back as a springboard and landing on the floor with a loud bang. A stir swept through them as they looked up. The sight of her, her shortened golden hair floating up around her and scattering reflected light all around as she flew through the air as if on golden wings, was just like— Just like— “An angel,” he heard someone murmur with a sigh. She flew nimbly, gorgeously as an angel through the air and alighted on the floor without even a wobble. The next moment, though, the people’s reverent sighs were replaced by a stir of repulsion. They took in the sight of her properly, carrying a blood-covered man who must’ve been bitten by the monster slung over one shoulder and a black big-bore gun braced against the other. “Monster…” he heard the ones who’d seen her abnormal healing powers whispering to each other. Meanwhile, she just dumped the injured man rather roughly on the ground without appearing to pay any attention to their terror and said flatly, “Do you have a doctor or anything in here?” She scanned the faces of the crowd. “If somebody doesn’t patch him up quick, he’s done for.” The priests there who knew first aid rushed, if timidly, to help him. “Only one of them here? There were more, weren’t there?” the woman quizzed them further, gesturing with a wave of one hand at the monster, which showed no signs now of ever moving again. Yet nobody in the crowd moved to answer her question. Impulsively, Yoshiu cried out, “There were some people who ran into the other passageway! I think the others probably followed them…” When her crystal-clear, ice-blue eyes fixed on him, they stole his breath, and he closed his mouth. And then she flashed him a first-class smile that shot straight through the hearts of everyone who saw it, just as it always did. “Okay. Thanks.” She spared only a brief glance at the people still keeping their distance and looking on with those repulsed gazes before she spun around and flew back through the barricade, once again using the monster’s corpse as a springboard. Apart from the priests tending to the wounded man, the crowd around him just watched her go without reacting. “…Ah!” Yoshiu, who’d been just watching her go right along with them, jolted back to himself and elbowed his way through them, diving into the hole she’d left in the barricade. He hesitated to touch the monster’s body, but then he averted his eyes and crawled up over it anyway (the spongy feel of it, its sort of foul, bloody stench, and the burnt smell mixed in with it all made his stomach roil and his eyes burn with tears) to get to the other side. When he landed in the corridor outside the supply room, he cried, “W-wait, please!” At his call, the woman running down the passage with a carbonization gun on one shoulder stopped and turned to him. “What? It’s dangerous here, so go back and fortify the barricade or something.” “I—well—that is—” Yoshiu stopped a little ways from her, his tongue suddenly faltering. She blinked curiously at him a couple of times and then went, “Oh,” as if she suddenly understood, although he hadn’t actually said anything yet. “Right, I guess you need to capture me, don’t you?” “No, that’s not it,” he denied anxiously, shaking his head…You don’t really have to go help them, do you? You should just leave those ungrateful wretches to their fate. That’s what he’d dashed out here to tell her. But now that it was time to actually form the words, he hesitated. It was just such an awfully selfish thing to say right after she’d saved him. It disgusted him how cowardly and narrow-minded he was. There’s something wrong with this—did I really pass the priesthood exam? The idea was starting to seem incredible. “The one I need to capture is the weapon of massacre and the ‘Demon of War’ and the ‘Witch of Toulouse,’” he said, thinking hard about each word. “Not you.” She looked mystified. He himself didn’t really know what he’d been trying to say, for all the thought he’d put into it. He bit his lip, impatient with himself for not being able to put what he wanted to say into words. “When we first found you, the town kids were all excited, calling you an angel, and to be honest I thought it was ridiculous…but…” He took a breath, and then after a moment continued. “But the woman who arrived at my place out of nowhere that day really was an angel…” After the words were out of his mouth, he realized he might have just babbled something horribly cheesy. Fierce embarrassment seized him. He couldn’t bear to look into her astonished face, so he looked down, cheeks flaring. Wh-what the heck am I saying?! That almost sounded like a love confession! But staring at the floor in silence soon became unbearable, too, and before long he risked a glance up through his bangs to check her expression. “……Thanks!” She smiled—smiled that exquisite first-class smile just for him—and then sprinted off into the chaos where the monsters still roamed. “Out of bullets, huh…” The ammo belt was empty. She let the carbonization gun fall to the floor with a heavy thud. She was in a pillar-lined passageway toward the rear of the cathedral. At her feet, where gunpowder smoke was currently settling, lay the bodies of the failures she’d shot through the heart. They weren’t exactly giving the place a pleasant atmosphere. She’d used up her weapon, but she was pretty sure she’d taken out all the ones who’d gotten into the cathedral now. Maybe there were a few more who’d made it into the headquarters facilities farther into the Church complex, but if that meant they were attacking the Elders and high-ranking priests who’d hightailed it out of here without a thought for anybody else, Beatrix sure wasn’t going to waste any pity on them. Blowing out a deep breath, she sat down with her back propped against a pillar to take a little break. “Sheesh…” She grumbled in annoyance at the tears all over her clothes. This had been the simple black dress she’d liked the best out of all the ones that had been bought for her while she was imprisoned (ensconced) in the Sigri residence. Beatrix’s body was pretty tattered, too, what with little cuts and big cuts and bruises and all, but unlike the dress, her body was salvageable, so she wasn’t bothered about that (maybe normal people would prioritize things in the other order). She let her gaze drift casually over the bodies strewn at her feet. “You were victims, too, weren’t you? I’d like to give you a funeral service, but that’s not in my job description, you know? And this place is crawling with priests, after all.” She wondered if Ephraim had gotten to see Kieli yet. A wry laugh escaped her with the sigh. That boy just took so much looking after. Even an angel wouldn’t go this far looking after a stranger! An angel, hmm…? Remembering the priest’s words to her, she felt just the teensiest bit flattered. One minute she was being called a witch in Toulouse, and the next thing she knew somebody was saying she was an angel. Frankly, she preferred “witch.” It was a lot less work than being an angel. I mean, angels have to do “good things” for people. Then again, for today at least she thought she’d made a damn fine angel, if she did say so herself. In between two pillars she saw a large painting. The portrait of a flock of angels ascending to Heaven surrounded by saints was blurred with the smoke drifting along the floor of the passageway. Thank you! It’s wonderful! It’s wonderful! she heard a sunny voice say from within it. In the yard of the tidy white house, a golden-haired girl in a brand-new white dress laughed merrily as she danced around and around and around. A little boy chased his sister around as she ran until he tripped and fell flat on his face. Sheesh, don’t you know boys don’t cry? the girl lectured him when he looked ready to cry over his scraped knees, lifting him to his feet. You do your best on your own, too—why had she said the same words to Ephraim then that she’d said to her little brother at their parents’ funeral? Ephraim never stopped needing looking after, and deep down he was a scaredy-cat who couldn’t make up his mind about anything, and he was way too fast to get tears in his eyes for somebody that pig-headed…Yeah, now that she thought about it, she guessed he must’ve been pretty much just like a little brother to her this whole time. Let’s all go home together. Ephraim’s final words floated through her mind. Right, she couldn’t afford to be taking a break yet; she needed to get moving. So they could all go home together. “Okay, gotta go. I’d better do a little more babysitting.” She tried to stand up, but her still-tired legs lurched a little. “Get your act together,” she snapped at them, putting a hand against the pillar to steady herself. And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the monster corpse lying by the next pillar over slide a few centimeters. Beatrix’s eyes widened in disbelief. I shot that thing through the heart! How can it still move?! It crawled along the floor still facedown and disappeared beyond the pillar. Strange things that looked like broken-off cables were dragged along with it into the shadows. And then she began to hear the crunching of teeth on flesh and bone. “…?” When she stared quizzically in that direction— Shunk. Beatrix felt a baffling pressure as though something were bearing down on her heart from above. When she tried to stand up, she crashed back down onto her rear end, unable to support her own weight. She saw a giant misshapen form on the other side of the pillar. Dragging all manner of fat and thin cables and pipes of all sizes from various parts of its body like a scrapped machine, it lurched heavily out of the pillar’s shadow. Still sitting flat on the floor, Beatrix widened her eyes in horror. She couldn’t believe what they were telling her. Her voice trembled. “You’re…” The sensation of her father’s left hand pulling at her own right hand was frying Kieli’s brain. It didn’t feel like Harvey’s hand or Beatrix’s hand or her grandmother’s hand. She couldn’t find the words to describe it, couldn’t process it in her mind. Her thoughts were all mixed up. I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t get it… “P-please let me go,” she said weakly, finally finding the voice to refuse. “A-ah, right. I’m sorry.” Her father let go of her hand apologetically. They were both breathing pretty hard. They stopped running and just walked briskly for a while in silence. Her father’s glasses were gone, and a bruise was forming to one side of his mouth. She wondered if he’d taken a punch from someone in that frenzied chaos in the cathedral. …Because he’d helped Kieli. They’d managed to escape the chaos, and now they were walking along the colonnade connecting one of the headquarters buildings to another tower. Thin beams of outside light filtered in from between the thick columns; the space stretching out in a long line before them was wreathed in a dusky tranquillity very like the one she’d felt in the cathedral before. The distant commotion they’d been able to hear from that cathedral most of the way here had faded out of earshot behind them at some point. Their two sets of footsteps and still-irregular breaths echoed in the deserted colonnade. “Are you hurt…?” her father asked tentatively, and Kieli firmly shook her head. His bruised face broke into a smile, as if this relieved him. Even though he was the one who’d been punched, who was enduring a black eye, and he’d lost the sling for his right arm at some point, too, so that his arm hung painfully and unnaturally from his shoulder. The conversation petered out after that, and uncomfortable silence reigned again for a while. Kieli abruptly came to a stop, so her father stopped, too, looking at her as if he was wondering what was wrong. “This—this isn’t—” She looked down at the tips of her boots as she spat the words out, scooting backward a little to get away from him. “This isn’t—wh-why are you…? You’d better not think this is enough to win me over!” She knew as she spoke that she was blurting out horrible things, but her head was all messed up and she didn’t know what she should say. She wished somebody would come rescue her that very moment. No, I don’t want to be left alone with him. Harvey, Corporal, Beatrix…! The anguished expression on his face, lips pressed tightly together, made the atmosphere between them even more unbearable. “I…I have to go back to Beatrix.” “Wait—” She shook off her father’s hand when he reached out to stop her and took off in the direction they’d come. This time Kieli really was at her limit. She didn’t know what she might do if she stayed with him any longer. She was sure to blurt out something that would make Harvey look sad again. She’d hated herself more and more each day she’d been here. Your happiness is always top priority— Beatrix had said that, said it about her as though she deserved it somehow, and how could she face the people who felt that way about her if she kept doing this? Kieli heard a low, animal gurgle from somewhere nearby. She came to a halt, chilled to the bone. She could see a large human form in the shadow of one of the colonnade’s pillars. Posture stooped like an animal’s, swaying from side to side, it tilted its head and gurgled again inquisitively as if it was making sure it knew what she was. A failure— Kieli’s father stepped in front of her where she’d frozen in place mid-run. Still, the arm he’d thrust out to protect her with was quivering slightly. The failure took a step out from behind the pillar, and Kieli’s stiff feet moved jerkily backward at her father’s push. After that one step, though, the failure abruptly folded forward and collapsed facedown on the floor. Kieli’s eyes widened incredulously—it was just so sudden—and then she turned them away instinctively a moment later, swallowing back the rising nausea. Half the fallen failure’s body was missing, as if it had been bitten off. “This tastes nasty,” she heard a different voice say in the shadows. There, holding a bloody stone heart in his right hand and noisily slurping up the blood and meat sticking to the end of a bio-cable dangling from the corner of his mouth—someone Kieli knew— Horrified, Kieli made her lips form his name. “Joa…chim…?” “Sheesh,” the lean man in black robes muttered in an incongruously breezy voice, sighing and shrugging. “You said you couldn’t ever get it back, but that was a lie, wasn’t it, Pops? Or else what are you hiding behind your back?” Kieli shrank back in surprise when he fixed her with a look over her father’s shoulder. Her father took a step forward protectively. “You got something back, didn’t you…What a liar.” And out of the shadow of the pillar walked Joachim, with the same sluggish steps those monsters had. Kieli sucked in a startled breath when she saw how strange his appearance had become. Half the left side of his body, which he’d been hiding behind the pillar, had turned to a mass of rotting green flesh, and globs of rotten meat dribbled down from the fingertips of the left hand he dangled lifelessly at his side. As he nibbled at the stone heart in his right hand just as though he were sipping sweet fruit nectar, he gave a strange, hiccupping laugh. “Say, I wonder which of you it would be more fun to hurt by killing the other one,” he said, facing them and cocking his head curiously. “Run,” whispered her father, shoving Kieli back. She let him, and began to tear off down the passage, but before long she tripped over her own fear-stiffened feet. Her father caught her before she fell and tugged her hand; they began running together. A steel door was visible at the end of the dusky colonnade ahead. She could sense leisurely steps following them from behind. They made it to the other side, checking over their shoulders all the way, and her father seized the doorknob and pushed. This entrance evidently wasn’t used very often; the door was thick with rust, and all it did was creak under his hands. Unable to bear to watch any longer, Kieli stood next to her father and rammed her body into the rusty door with all the strength she could muster. Their only warning was a squeal of metal before it flew open with surprising force, and their momentum sent them half-falling through it to the other side. The darkness was deeper here than it had been in the colonnade outside, and the air was thick with rust and dust and a foul odor. They were in a sort of cylindrical tower. When Kieli looked up, she saw walls crawling with fine cracks and a spiral staircase running along them and disappearing into the darkness above. A low groaning sound like wind blowing down from above echoed dully against the walls. While they’d struggled with the door, the presence pursuing them had gotten much closer. Kieli was already panting, but her father dragged her forward by the hand and they ran up the narrow staircase that would allow only one fully grown adult to pass at a time. She could hear two sets of footsteps jogging up the concrete steps…And the thwacking of a third set of footsteps coming leisurely after them from behind. He was walking slowly, and yet the impression that he was steadily closing the distance between them set her nerves on edge. Kieli wasn’t sure how high they’d climbed, but her already leaden feet stumbled and missed the next step, and she tumbled forward and whacked her shin. She knocked her father off balance in front of her, too, through their joined hands. He managed to regain his balance, though, and lent Kieli a hand to help her up. But while they’d paused, the footsteps approaching from behind had grown quite close. In the dim stairway they had only a few meters’ visibility. A tall man appeared out of the darkness below. The arm he slashed out sent her father flying. The priest’s back slammed into the wall, and he slumped down onto the steps. With a little scream, Kieli immediately tried to run to him, but an arm hooked around her neck from behind and ripped her away. Her father only lay there on the floor, groaning, and didn’t get up. He had a hand to one shoulder. Had he hit the one that had been dislocated? “Let me go!” As she struggled, the hand around her neck grabbed her jaw and squeezed. The skin of his palm was squishy; the feel of it pressing into her jaw sent a thrill of horror down her spine. He pressed her back against the railing of the spiral staircase until she was half bent backward over it. Directly below her head was a column of fathomless darkness. “Stop…it…” she heard her father grunt. Joachim tossed a glance over his shoulder without releasing Kieli and clucked his tongue. “To hell with you. You have something you’re desperate to protect, don’t you? You got something, didn’t you? That pisses me off. You traitor,” he spat as he wrapped his hands around Kieli’s throat and began to choke her. “Ngh…” Kieli desperately tried to force her own hands between Joachim’s to buy herself an airway. Her vision flickered with the lack of oxygen. As she writhed in pain, Joachim drew his face in close to hers and licked his lips in anticipation. The stench of death assailed her nose. “Are—humans tasty…? That meat—before tasted—nasty…” His grip loosened by a fraction, letting air back into Kieli’s lungs. “Jo…a…?” she gasped out brokenly, trying her best to call his name through her fit of coughing. She thought he was acting weird. His eyes that had been the same pretty blue-gray as the night sky were clouded with white now, and they weren’t both focusing on the same point. “Joachim…Joachim!” she called to him, still coughing; his blue-gray eyes bulged and rolled around in his head just millimeters away from her face until they finally focused, and then he looked at her. “Ki—eli…help me…” he said in a hiccupping voice, his cheeks distorted into a bizarre, sad, pained smile. “It’s weird—my whole body keeps hurting—but I can’t shut out the pain…I can’t remember how…I can’t think—I can’t think. Hey, is there anything weird about me right now?” “Joachim…!” “Hey, do me a favor, Kieli.” Pushing her into the railing with one hand wrapped around her neck, Joachim used his half-rotten other hand to take Kieli’s and press it to his own chest. His eyes rolled and bulged again, and then he turned his gaze to her with a sad expression. “Dig my heart out,” he implored her. Kieli widened her eyes in terror. “Dig it out for me, come on…Help—me, let me rest…” “No! No! I can’t! Let me go!” As she struggled to get free, Kieli shook her head as hard as she could in refusal. Her hand sank effortlessly into his chest, which almost seemed to swallow it up. With a ragged scream, she tried to pull it back out. Traitor… In her dimming consciousness, she heard him curse her not with her ears, but echoing deep inside her skull. Bits of conversations she’d had with Joachim since they’d gotten to the capital floated into her mind and then disappeared again like bubbles. I’m going to kill your dad, you know. Whatcha crying about? You and I are birds of a feather. So you know what? I’ll give you a hand with this. I’ll kill your enemy for you. You’re nothing like me after all. Traitor—had she betrayed him? First she’d said she didn’t mind if he killed her father—she’d said her father was an enemy—and then when push came to shove she’d hesitated, and she’d tried to stop him in the end. She’d gotten all confused hearing her father’s words and feeling his warmth, and she’d been rejecting him as hard as she could, desperate not to be won over. Just now, when her father had been knocked down, she’d immediately tried to run to him. Was acceptance a betrayal? She didn’t know. She didn’t know what to do. Somebody help me— “Joachim!” It was like being shaken awake from a nightmare: the voice in her dimming ears abruptly snapped her mind back into focus. Joachim stopped moving. With her back shoved up against the railing and her neck bent backward, Kieli swept her gaze over everything she could see of the tower. A tall, lean figure ran up out of the darkness that sank over the bottom of the staircase. In those jet-black robes that melted into the dark, for a moment she almost mistook him for someone else, but there was no mistaking that dull gleam of red hair in the gloom, or the voice that reached Kieli’s ears loud and clear without his having to raise it. No mistaking it. Even though she was still being held captive, an inexpressible feeling of relief spread within her heart. The new arrival stopped a little ways below them on the steps, panting. “Yo. The hero’s showing up at the perfect time,” Joachim said teasingly, holding him in check by clenching a hand around Kieli’s chin. Grinding his teeth and aborting the step he’d been about to take, Harvey shouted, “What the hell are you doing, Joachim?!” “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m in the middle of a murder-suicide with your precious Kieli, obviously.” Joachim forced her even harder against the railing, until her upper body doubled over backward and began to slide down. Her entire field of vision was a darkness that stretched endlessly down, down, down, framed by black bubbles popping at the edges as her head swam. Joachim and Harvey glared at each other from their respective high and low positions. While they were distracted by the staring contest, Kieli sensed something moving behind Joachim. “Let go of my daughter!” Sigri pounced at Joachim from behind in a sort of tackle. Joachim seemed slightly surprised, but he shoved the Elder off with a jab of one elbow and then knocked him over with a merciless karate chop to his right shoulder. Sigri sank back to the floor by the wall again. But Kieli, who’d been released from Joachim’s arms in the meantime, had already slid to the ground and half-rolled down the stairs away from him. Harvey’s priest’s-cloth-covered legs appeared before her eyes as he stepped protectively in front of her. Cursing, Joachim rubbed some rotting flesh off his chin. Then he turned and sprinted unsteadily up into the towering wall of darkness that shrouded the top of the spiral staircase. For a moment Harvey moved to follow him, running two or three steps up, but he stopped almost right away. The sound of retreating footsteps was swallowed up by the darkness overhead. Holding a hand to her throat and gasping, Kieli looked up to where the sound of his footsteps was fading into the distance. He’d already vanished from sight. Sigri was lying midway up the stairs. Harvey stooped a little to check on him and then returned to the step where Kieli sat. Kieli still coughing a little, Harvey still panting slightly—their eyes met. The tall form squatting in front of her pulled her gently into a hug. Kieli bit her trembling lip and tried desperately to hold back her tears, but once one of them managed to spill out in a single fat drop, there was no stopping them anymore. “Aaaa…Aaaaaaa, Harvey…!” She wound her jelly-limp arms around his back as tightly as she could and buried her face in his chest while she gasped for breath. Tearfully, she called his name over and over again. “Harvey, Harvey, Harvey.” Over and over and over again. Each time, she heard him whisper “Yeah” into her ear. The familiar comfortable voice and the familiar tobacco smell. “Sorry I’m late.” She shook her head from side to side without lifting it from his chest. He’d come for her. He’d come for her just as he’d promised. He’d said he’d come no matter what, so he’d come when she was in trouble. That was enough for Kieli. “What about Beatrix?” “I saw her. It’s okay now. We can go home together soon.” She soaked up the quiet, comforting voice all the way down to the bottom of her heart, and the tears just kept coming. She’d just finished shaking her head, and now she was nodding over and over. We can go home soon. We can go home together. How long had she waited to hear those words these past few days? Each one had felt like a month. Clang. The sound of a door creaking shut far above them. With a groan, cool outside air flowed into the musty inside wind that had been echoing bitterly off the walls. Harvey looked up once, then drew away a little from Kieli. “Can you wait for a few minutes? I want to have a talk with that idiot. I’ll be back soon, okay?” Kieli made an uneasy face, but nonetheless she swallowed back the urge to stop him. She gave a tiny nod. She was sure this was another thing Harvey needed to settle for himself so they could all go home together…and if that’s how it was, Kieli couldn’t stop him. It was so they could all go home. Harvey nodded back at her reassuringly. He lifted the radio from his neck and handed it to her, then stood up and took off up the stairs. Hugging the radio to her, Kieli watched him go until his priest’s robes vanished into the darkness. The radio began to croon a quiet, lullaby-like static for the unease deep in her heart that she still couldn’t quite banish. “Corporal…” When she pressed her forehead to the speaker, she caught the faint sound of the radio’s voice through the static. Kieli crawled just one step closer to where Sigri lay and tried to assess how he was. He didn’t move. Was he unconscious? She closed the distance only that little bit, though; she couldn’t go any closer, and she couldn’t speak either, so she just curled herself into a ball a little ways away from her father, hugging the radio and feeling uncomfortable. There were still things weighing on Kieli’s mind that needed to be settled for them to go home together. Things that Kieli had to settle by herself—Kieli, and no one else. He took the stairs all the way up to the top. Once he’d cleared them in one long dash, he stopped and exhaled, then took just a few more deep breaths to get his lungs under control. Chilly outside air blew in through the half-open steel door in front of him. As soon as he stepped through it and came out into the open air, a strong mountain wind hit him hard enough to almost knock him over before he managed to grab the door frame. A long, open cloister stretched out in front of him toward a neighboring tower. He had the rock faces of the mountain range to one side of him, and to the other side he had one of the city’s sheer inner walls plummeting straight down into the distance. Far below him, Harvey could see the “mechanical city” enveloped in gray smog and the overpasses of the railroad that cut through it. And then he saw one knee crumple underneath Joachim and send him falling right about halfway through the cloister. The wind was blowing hard and Harvey was still breathing fast, but he closed the distance between them at a dead sprint. Joachim turned and jabbed a folding knife at him as soon as he’d picked himself up from the floor. Harvey parried it, though he did take a shallow cut to the back of his hand in the process, and grabbed his opponent’s arm. They both tumbled over and rolled along the floor of the cloister as they wrestled for control of the knife. When they came to a stop, Harvey was straddling Joachim, the tip of Joachim’s knife was pressed to his jugular, and Harvey’s hand was gripping the dead center of Joachim’s chest, right above his heart. They glared at each other in that position, where with the next moment’s movement either of them could put the other out of commission, at least temporarily. The decay was progressing. Harvey could see the skin of Joachim’s cheek crumbling horribly right before eyes as the other man stretched it into a smile and gave a bizarre hee-ha laugh. “Did you come to laugh at me? You came to laugh and call me pathetic, didn’t you?” “I’m not gonna laugh.” “So, what, are you gonna be nice and kill me, then?” “Yeah. It’ll be my pleasure.” Harvey channeled more force into the hand gripping his opponent’s chest. He felt the sensation of his fingers sinking into putrefied skin. However, he stopped moving there. “What’s the matter? Do it. Or else your head’s gonna roll.” He flexed his hand and a thin line of blood welled up under the tip of the blade at Harvey’s throat, but Harvey still didn’t push him any harder. Joachim twisted the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “What’s that look for? What, are you pitying me now? You know this was all your fault in the first place. You piss me off. You seriously piss me off full tilt, heart and soul, you know that?!” The last few words came out like a war cry as he flipped them over so that he was on top. They rolled together a few times until Joachim’s back hit the railing. Apparently it had grown brittle. A whole section of the stone rail gave way in a clatter of falling rock that kicked up clouds of mineral dust everywhere. Joachim fell backward right along with it. Quicker than thought, Harvey found himself bending his upper body over the edge of the cloister and grabbing Joachim’s wrist in the nick of time. His shoulder creaked under the burden of a grown man’s full weight. At the same time, a sickening sound like some viscous substance tearing apart met his ears. Joachim’s half-decayed left arm ripped at the elbow joint, until he dangled only by a few last threads of tendon or nerve fiber or something. Below the cloister plummeted the sheer inner walls of the city, oozing dirty sewer water from every crevice. Far beneath them he could see an angular rocky slope. Harvey wasn’t sure even an Undying could come back to life if he fell headfirst from this height and dashed his brains out, and he’d never tested it, either. Hanging by one arm over a drop of something like forty meters, Joachim arranged his face into a taut, mocking smile as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him. “You know, I don’t get you at all. You make no damn sense. Why’d you save me after that whole speech about killing me?” “You’re the one who makes no damn sense!” Harvey bellowed back as he supported Joachim’s weight with every ounce of his strength. “What were you trying to accomplish? What did you want?! First you hang around me, getting in my way all the time, and then you ask me to kill you? What the hell is that?! What the hell did you want from me?!” The words were coming out of his mouth without passing through his brain first. He hadn’t particularly intended to give this guy a lecture like this. Why was he getting so worked up over a guy like this? Harvey could feel certain that he was glad he’d taken the path he had, that he had no regrets. But this guy—had anything ever satisfied him a little? Had there ever been anything he could feel glad for? He always resented every stupid little thing; he always looked like he hated everything; what had he, himself, wanted all this time—? It wasn’t that Harvey pitied him or wanted to save him or whatever. He was just venting his irritation at not being able to understand. Sometimes their paths had crisscrossed and sometimes they’d run parallel to each other, but all the same, he felt as if he’d always been walking the same distance as Joachim. If he’d traveled just a slightly different path, maybe he would have ended up just like this guy. This guy was another him who’d traveled a different path. A him who hadn’t been able to find anything. The mocking little smile vanished from Joachim’s face. He looked straight up at Harvey with those sickeningly familiar blue-gray eyes. Their gazes met for a moment. And then Joachim said with a sigh, “You just never stop being a sickeningly softhearted moron, do you? That’s why I hate your stupid ass. What was I trying to do? What did I want?……No way am I telling you that. Moron.” The same old familiar invective, and then— With the folding knife in his right hand, he cut the tendon at his left elbow that was the last thing supporting his own weight. “Joachim!” Falling headfirst with his left forearm still in Harvey’s hand, Joachim smirked and pointed his right thumb to his chest. Then he plunged the folding knife into it dead center and slashed it sideways, wrenching away the bio-cables to yank out his own heart. As he thrust the stone in Harvey’s direction like one final gesture of spite, his figure grew steadily farther and farther away— Harvey heard a crash somewhere far down below. He could see the sky. Far, far beyond the peaked-hat roofs of the steeples, the sky growing tinged with the copper of evening ran from one end of the world to the other high, high above. The planet’s sky, blurred with fine clouds of dust. A sky so much lower than it seemed, and yet he knew that his hands could never reach it. Blah…am I still alive, then? His right hand, lying flung out against the ground, still held his own heart. What did you want? There hadn’t been anything he’d wanted anywhere, really. In the end he’d only been grasping after something that didn’t exist and that he didn’t even understand, so it was only natural that he’d never been able to get it, no matter how far he went or how high he climbed. Yeah, but just now, he’d figured a little of it out……I wanted to be like him. He’s a freakishly softhearted moron, he can’t make up his mind about anything, he’s totally hopeless—but that’s probably why he somehow wound up with all kinds of things I couldn’t get no matter how much I wanted them. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I was jealous of you all along… Our starting lines would have been the same—what made our paths split off in different directions? Where did I step wrong? If I didn’t step off the path, I— It seemed like kind of a shame that this was how it ended, just when he thought he was finally starting to get an idea of what he’d wanted. It’s been one long, pointless life, huh. Oh, well. A pointless, dumbass death like this suits me. He raised his right hand and grabbed at the sky. Not even the tips of his fingers could reach it, naturally, and then—