He’d been able to extricate only her head and her upper body, with one arm still attached; the rest of her had already merged too completely into the mass of flesh to salvage. He hadn’t been able to find the core that should have been buried in her chest anywhere inside it. Maybe it had been absorbed into that giant monster’s body. That monster…Jude. She’d heard Harvey call it that. Was that thing really the Jude who’d been locked up in that lab…? Harvey’s hand carefully wiped off the coal-tar-like fluid stuck to her face and hair. He closed her empty blue eyes with his palm, and then he took off his own coat by tugging on the left sleeve with his mouth and spread it gently over her body. He’d carried out all these tasks carefully yet detachedly, with such sure and mechanical movements he might as well be running on autopilot. He didn’t show his feelings on the surface like the wailing Kieli did. In fact, it looked as if all emotion had completely left him. Kieli couldn’t help Harvey, or even say anything to him. His silent back seemed to be warning her off, saying, This is my job. Saying he’d known her ten times longer than Kieli had, and it was his job to mourn her. When she looked at his back, in her mind’s eye it overlapped with the back of the redheaded boy in that schoolyard trapped in the magnetic field in Westerbury, building stone grave markers for the younger kids. Decades later, that little boy had become an adult, and here he was silently, dispassionately mourning an old friend just like he had that day. He’d gotten a lot taller since then, but right now he looked every bit as small and fragile to her as he had in childhood. “Once…” Harvey murmured abruptly, still facing forward. Wiping at the tears that still wouldn’t stop, Kieli raised her face. The crouched form in front of her continued without turning around. “…Jude told me something. He said he had the same name as a man from the Church’s holy book, the one who betrayed the Messiah…” Why was he suddenly bringing that up? Without lifting his eyes from Beatrix’s body, Harvey continued in a dry, emotionless voice so soft he might have been talking to himself. “He said he had sins he had to atone for, too. But…those sins were too big, way too big for him to ever atone for, even if he spent his whole eternal Undying life trying, he said. And at the time I just thought, ‘What’s the old fogey going on about now?’” There was a pause. And then he spat gruffly, “But huh, I guess I get it now.” With no warning, Harvey laughed. It was only a short little laugh, but it sent a chill up Kieli’s spine. It was dry and cold as the winter wind in the wilderness. A strange, somehow un-Harvey-like laugh, as if it belonged to someone else, as if he’d been taken over by some other creature. “Harvey…?” “Ah, it’s nothing. It’s nothing,” Harvey said in an incongruously light tone, gently stroking Beatrix’s short hair and still not turning around. The hair that was still the same beautiful golden even now that its owner had lost all her life-force. “He—Jude—committed another sin today, against me, that’s too big for him to ever atone for. That’s why I need to kill him…” His murmur sank, low and sinister, into the gloom around them, and it unsettled Kieli deeply. She’d never heard him sound like this before. Harvey almost never bore ill will toward anyone; she’d never heard his voice sound threatening like this. “Har…vey…?” Daunted by the sight of that back shaking with quiet rage, Kieli hugged the radio fast and unconsciously took a few steps back. This wasn’t the Harvey she knew. Harvey stood up from where he’d crouched in front of Beatrix’s corpse and turned around. Thick, fat drops of blood dribbled down into the large pool at his feet—from the wound in the center of his chest that Jude had given him. “Harvey, stop…” Kieli began, but then her voice petered out. She was afraid of him. Something’s wrong with him right now. Something’s definitely wrong. Without warning, Harvey jabbed his arm straight to the left. Startled by the sudden movement, Kieli missed her footing on her next step backward and landed smack on her butt on the floor. So there was still a survivor in this area, then. A half-eaten failure had been in the act of leaping at Harvey from the shadow of a pillar. Harvey’s left hand had plunged unerringly through its chest to its heart. “Ungh…ngha…” The failure groaned in pain and flailed its limbs now that Harvey had stopped its advance. There was a bizarre creaking coming from inside its body. Harvey’s left arm worked so hard that ropy blood vessels stood out against the surface of his skin; the same thing happened to his left cheek where the sore was. The failure turned pleading eyes on Harvey. Ignoring it, Harvey ripped the stone heart he held out of its body right along with the bio-cables attached to it. The failure’s body slumped down the pillar to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Ah—” Kieli sank weakly to the floor, cradling the radio. She stared fixedly at Harvey’s profile as tiny tremors overtook her body. His dark brown eye looked emotionlessly down at the failure’s body. And all the while the red-black blood dribbled from his chest, into a puddle on the floor. “Har…vey…?” she called to him in a scratchy voice, and Harvey properly looked at her for the first time. A tiny spark of something like emotion finally lit in his deadened eyes. He abruptly covered his mouth with his palm, letting the stone heart slip artlessly from his hand. “Ugh…” Then he doubled painfully over and vomited a stream of blood and gastric juice. Kieli scrambled hurriedly to his side, half-crawling. “Harvey,” she called, and put her arms around him from behind, but even as he coughed and retched, he pushed her away and tried to stand up again with a pillar for support. “Jude…” It sounded as though he was forcing the whisper out of his throat. “I…I have to settle this. I have to settle it for you. I have to do this last thing for you…” Kieli felt something different in him now: not the malice from before, but something more like a grim resolve that ripped her heart out. She clung to his back. She couldn’t tell him “Stop,” but she couldn’t help him, either; she had no idea what to do, so she just hugged tight, half-crying. Harvey collapsed back down to his knees, covering his face with the hand slick with his own blood as though trying to keep the feelings in. He grabbed a fistful of his bangs and tugged. “How long does he intend to keep sinning in that—that messed-up body…?” A breath. “Let’s end this, Jude…Jude…” The agonized mutter that escaped from between the fingers over his face stabbed Kieli through the chest. For a moment she thought her breath would stop. Harvey hadn’t been angry. He’d been sad. He’d been stifling his feelings, but in his heart he’d been crying all along. For Beatrix; for Jude, who’d turned into that misshapen blob and still kept moving; and for the failures who’d died and lost their minds and still weren’t allowed to truly die. In his heart he’d been sobbing; hurting for them hard enough to vomit blood. He really was only ever thinking about other people. Harvey forced himself back to his feet again and started walking, scraping his shoulder against the pillar. Kieli just sat there and looked up at his back. She couldn’t tell him to stop. A few short steps. That was all he managed before he tripped over the body of a failure on the floor and fell flat on his face. He stayed there lying in an unnatural heap and didn’t move again. “……?” Kieli stood up unsteadily and went over to him. Since she’d been looking only at Harvey, she tripped over the same corpse he had and fell down more or less on top of him. Harvey’s copper and dark brown eyes stared into space, and he stayed there lying unnaturally limp like a broken doll on a trash heap and didn’t move. “Harvey…? What’s wrong?” She shook him and called to him with no effect. His empty gaze just roamed the air in front of him, never focusing on anything. Kieli put her ear against his chest and tried listening for his heartbeat. It was faint, but she could still make out the ba-dum, ba-dum of the stone heart. She experimentally slapped his cheek. She called his name over and over. In the beginning she did her best to assess his condition rationally, but as the minutes passed she started to panic. “Harvey…Harvey!” Growing desperate, she shook him hard. His head only bobbed back and forth like a doll’s. No response. “Corporal…!” She looked down at the radio for help. “Harvey won’t move! What’s wrong? Tell me, what’s wrong with him?” The radio’s speaker poured out noise, as if it was trying to tell her something, but Kieli just shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re saying; I can’t understand you. I can’t understand without Harvey…! Listen, Harvey won’t move. First Beatrix—First Beatrix won’t move, and now Harvey! Corporal, say something, tell me…!” She didn’t know and couldn’t think about what was happening, what to do. She just wrapped her arms around Harvey’s unmoving chest. “Harvey, no, I don’t want this!” She called for him until her voice went hoarse. She sobbed on and on until her throat hurt. But the left hand that could clumsily, kindly draw her head to his chest still just lolled there where it had landed on the floor, and didn’t move. It was quiet. Kind of like she was all alone in this place. Kieli slumped on Harvey’s chest just as though she were a tossed-away doll, too. She’d cried so long and hard over Beatrix that the tears had run dry; now it was almost as though she had used up all her feelings, even—everything in her heart had dried up, and she couldn’t summon the strength to move. The radio’s noise seemed awfully far away, and it never gave her any words. Almost as if the moment Harvey stopped moving, the radio had turned into just some radio, too. Harvey was the thread that connected me to everything else in this world, everything in the last two and a half years of our adventure and all the strange things we went through, Kieli thought. Now it was as if the moment that thread snapped, the whole two and a half years had popped like a bubble, suddenly turned meaningless. It was as if the radio had never spoken in the first place. It was quiet. Kind of like she was all alone in this world. All that crying had worn her out. She started to feel herself dozing, and maybe she even slept a little, but when her eyes snapped open she was still all alone, and nothing had changed. How long have I been here like this? It felt as if a long time had passed. Days and days, maybe. If people can cry themselves to sleep, she wondered, how come they can’t cry themselves to death? She found herself thinking that since she couldn’t do that, she might as well just stay here until she starved to death. Tee hee hee…she heard a voice say. A whisperingly soft girl’s laugh. Kieli recognized that laugh. She lifted her gaze from where it had been wandering vacantly along the floor and looked sluggishly around. “Who’s there?” she called, pleading. Her throat was bone-dry from all the wailing and crying, and her scratchy voice stuck coming out. Anybody would have done. Anybody would have done, as long as they got her out of this horrible aloneness. A girl in a white slip was standing there in midair. She’d recognized the voice, and now she saw the proof: It was that girl who’d come out of the painting in her room. “Are you crying?” the girl ask innocently in her cheerful voice. When Kieli nodded from where she lay limp from the exhaustion of crying, the girl smiled and offered her a pale, delicate hand. “Come here. I’ll show you something neat.” Kieli weakly took her hand. The moment the girl gave it a tug, her leaden body was abruptly freed from gravity and lightened until she floated in the air. “Ah…!” The girl holding her hand grinned at Kieli’s surprise. When Kieli looked down, she saw her own heavy body below her floating feet. Face sticky with dried tear trails, it was nestled up to Harvey’s fallen body, sleeping like the dead. “I’m…” She opened and closed her hands a few times, testing her sensations, and then surveyed her body. She could see the hazy outlines of the rest of the colonnade through it. Beatrix’s corpse, covered by Harvey’s coat, looked exactly like it had before, as did the collapsed forms of Harvey and herself. To all appearances, her spirit had risen up out of a world frozen in time. But if nothing else, the feel of the girl’s hand holding hers was clear and real. Following her lead, Kieli floated down to their fallen bodies and sat on her knees next to Harvey. He was still staring up into the empty air with unfocused eyes, just like before, collapsed on the floor like a doll. The weight she no longer had was transformed into feeling, sitting heavily on her heart. Kieli thought she might cry again. The girl gave her a faint smile and tugged on her hand. Kieli let her softly touch their hands to Harvey’s body. Her hand passed right through the surface. Ba-dum. Ba-dum… The sound of his slowly but surely beating heart flowed into her consciousness. The sound of his blood with its healing powers circulating through his arteries and veins. It was faltering and unsteady, yes, but that blood was reflecting its owner’s will even so, working its hardest to repair his tattered body. “Do you see? He’s a wreck,” the girl’s innocent voice told her. He really was a wreck, even more so than he looked. Even his insides were wrecked. His cracked stone heart pulsated with faint amber light; a little arrhythmically, yes, but still managing not to stop circulating blood, trying to knit together the battered vessels and skin and muscle and nerves. Biting her lip, Kieli brought her face up close to his cheek. The optical nerve to the left eye he’d gotten from Mane, the one that she was sure must’ve been able to see at least for a while, was wrecked already, too, and it was already putting pressure on the cranial nerves. She could sense it sort of clouded over with a hazy gray. “He’s gotten—he’s gotten so…” “But you know,” the girl’s voice said, “he’s still alive.” Kieli wordlessly shook her head. It made her want to say It’s enough. It’s enough. Stop. You don’t have to keep trying so hard even after you’ve let yourself get this wrecked… “Kieli,” she heard a different voice say. A low, staticky, male voice. The familiar, long-missed voice of the radio reached her in clear words now, not coming through her ears but directly into her brain. Kieli drew in close to her own collapsed body and put her face next to the radio. “Corporal!” She choked a little. “What should I do? I don’t know; please tell me…” she appealed, shaking her head. Her heart soaked up the radio’s strong voice. “Give him a hand. He hasn’t given up yet. He’s trying to live. You can hear him, can’t you?” At this, Kieli strained her ears. Yes; she could make out that irregular heartbeat, that faint sound of the breaking-down stone heart pulsating with its amber light. “I can’t do it…” The thing was, all she desperately wanted to say right now was Stop working so hard. “Kieli, don’t you say that to him,” the radio’s voice admonished patiently. “You’re the only one who can do this. Find him and bring him back. Please.” “But…what should I do?” The girl next to Kieli tugged on her hand. Grinning, she pressed it to the center of Harvey’s body. Ba-dum. Ba-dum… The heartbeat expanded in her ears until it permeated her entire consciousness and took over everything. Her field of vision bled away, bled white as if sucked into that faintly pulsing amber light. Ba-dum. Ba-dum… The sound of the heartbeat dimly permeated the air. “Where am I…?” When her whited-out vision recovered, Kieli was standing all by herself in a place she’d never seen before. The ghost girl and the radio were both gone. The bodies of Harvey and herself that had been lying at her feet were gone, too. She wasn’t in a colonnade of the cathedral; she was looking at a dizzying panorama of dried-out wilderness that stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction. Kieli stood there all alone in the middle of the wilderness, worry twisting her face. The rocky ground was shaking slightly. With no warning, the earth right in front of her toes crumbled with a deafening roar, and she hastily yanked her foot back and moved away. Now that the ground before her was gone, suddenly Kieli found herself standing on a cliff, watching fragments of rock plummet to the valley below. A chill went up her spine, and she looked around her to see the land shaking violently all the way to the horizon. Here and there across the wilderness, landslides were happening or new cracks were opening up in the ground. Even the hazy sand-colored sky above her rumbled as though it might break apart and come crashing down any second. Kieli planted her feet firmly on the unstable ground with everything she had. “What is this place…?” It was a world that looked as if it might break down any second. Another crack opened up in the ground nearby, and little fragments of rock kept on raining down on her from overhead, too. The whole world was enveloped in one big rumble that rattled her eardrums. Covering both ears with her hands, Kieli stooped forward and shielded her head as best she could as she scanned her surroundings. “Is anyone there?!” she shouted. At least, she thought she’d shouted, but her own voice was swallowed up by the rumble of the world so that she could barely hear it. Where am I? It was as if she was witnessing the collapse of the planet. For lack of any better ideas, she started walking, covering her ears and tottering as she made her way around the fissures. A crack opened up in the ground at her feet and robbed her of her footing. She fell down hard. What’s going on here? Where the heck did I get thrown to? Had she wandered into a time loop of the past made by ghosts, like before? Or…was this actually some world way, way in the future? The era when the planet would end? “Hello?! Anyone?! Corporal!” She called for help on all fours on the shaking ground. But her voice only vanished away, swallowed up by the rumbling. So Kieli just kept going as best she could, wriggling along on her stomach now. One of her feet skidded, and for a moment she almost went over the edge. She screamed and clutched the rock surface with both hands. Her legs swung back and forth over the sheer cliff that dropped endlessly down. The hem of her skirt fluttered in the wind. She used every ounce of strength in her body to claw her way back up onto the cliff, scraping both knees in the process. Just as she was heaving a sigh of relief, she caught sight of someone up ahead of her in the wilderness. A person…! The very first thing to catch her eye was the rusty copper hair fluttering in the dry wind. “Harvey!” she cried in a voice tearful with relief. But— It’s not…? That wasn’t Harvey. It was someone much smaller: a boy in simple clothes that looked like off-white pajamas. Kieli went still where she clung to the ground on all fours and stared, wide-eyed. The boy picked up a big hunk of rock that looked easily heavier than he was and tottered over to the crevice with it, where he tossed the rock in as though he was trying to patch up the broken ground. Then he walked back on slightly unsteady feet, picked up another equally large rock, brought it over, and stuck it in the crevice too. He silently repeated this task over and over like an automaton, or a prisoner forced into hard labor. He wore no shoes; both bare feet were as horribly scraped as in the pictures of criminals carrying their crosses. The simple white pajamas looked like a prison uniform more than anything else to her now. Cracks opened up in the rock he carried. A chunk of it broke off and fell, pinning his slender arm to the ground. “Ah!” Kieli stood up, teetering on the shaking ground, and ran over to him. “Are you okay?” she called, trying to help him, but he showed no sign of a response, as though he didn’t see Kieli there at all. He just shoved the rock away with his own ruined right hand and then moved to pick it up. Never mind Kieli; he didn’t even seem to pay any attention to his own body as he went about his work of filling the cracks in the ground. Shards of rock rained down his back, hurting him and leaving streaks of dirt and blood on his white pajamas. This boy is…Harvey. Not knowing what else she could say to him, Kieli only stood and watched him just carrying out the same task over and over with single-minded purpose like some sort of forced laborer. The longer she watched, the more she was sure of it. This boy’s back was much smaller than the one she’d seen mourning over Beatrix’s body; as small and thin as the back of that boy in the ruined schoolyard building stone grave markers, and though it was getting so cut and bruised now that it hurt Kieli just to look at it, he kept on silently repairing the cracks in this falling-apart world. Where am I? The boy tripped and fell as he carried over his next rock. Kieli ran to him once again and tried to help him up. But he was still as indifferent to her presence as ever, getting unsteadily up on his own and moving to pick up the rock again. His face was sickly pale. His coppery eyes just stared vaguely forward, never turning to face Kieli. “Stop it; this is dangerous! You’ll die! Stop it!” Kieli circled in front of him, trying to stop him, but her voice still didn’t reach him. Those young hands carrying rock after rock…It wasn’t only his crushed right hand; his left hand was a wreck too, missing patches of skin. “No, stop it!” The boy carried his latest rock right past her. She hugged him from behind with all her might to stop him. He stumbled, and the rock slipped out of his arms. Kieli wrapped both his battered hands in her own, cradling them in front of his chest in a prayerful position. “Come on, can’t you hear me? Don’t you recognize me?” Kieli asked tearfully, gazing at the boy’s face, but his eyes just vacantly roamed the empty air in front of her, as if perhaps he didn’t understand her language. As she sank to the ground, stunned, he shook off her hands and used his own tattered, nearly broken ones to pick up yet another fallen rock. Then the ground split beneath his feet, and the boy in white pajamas disappeared from sight along with the rock he held. Kieli immediately leaned down over the edge and seized his hand. The rock tumbled noisily down, and the boy’s small body swayed left and right in the wind at the edge of the cliff. Fragments of rock rolled down around them and were swallowed up by the ravine.
Chapter 118
21 min read