“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. Don’t let go… 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.
Chapter 120
22 min read