Chapter 82

The young arms clutching the doll were nothing but skin and bones, and the skin was yellowing with jaundice. The air around them was thick with the stench of bile and shit. “Captain, we’re the only survivors…from our unit now…Our food and water supplies…are exhausted…” The scratchy voice mumbling to the doll carried feebly to his ears along the yellow sand piled on the ground. The captain being addressed was a tin soldier in uniform. The monologue abruptly ceased, and hollow eyes rolled slowly up to meet his. “Do you have any water?” The child lifted one hand a little from the ground and reached weakly toward him. He didn’t think the kid could have been even ten years old yet, but those eyes were the cloudy yellow of an old man’s. He thought for a moment, then drew a metal flask out of his practically empty backpack. He started to toss it over before realizing that the kid probably didn’t even have the strength left to open the lid. So instead he opened the lid himself and pressed it into the child’s hand. Giving the water felt kind of hypocritical, considering it would probably only buy the kid a few more hours of life. But when the boy’s tiny hands brought the flask up to his face, and he put his mouth to it and drank in audible gulps, he looked as if he were savoring a small taste of happiness. Water spilled over, dribbling over his cracked lips and down his cheeks to form a dark gray patch on the parched ground. The thirsty ground seemed almost like a part of the thirsty boy. When he took his mouth away from the flask, his speaking voice was closer to normal, as if he’d come back to himself. “You’re not one of the charity people, huh?…I mean, even they don’t come here anymore. If you stay here you’ll get infected and die. Didn’t you know that…?” “I know,” he said, accepting the flask back and sitting down next to the kid. He leaned back against the crumbling wall of blocks. They were on a perfectly ordinary roadside on the edge of town. Still, when he looked at the cityscape he couldn’t sense any of the vitality of the people living their desperate lives there. A thick, putrid smell had settled onto the piles of sand and dust around them. Looking without much thought at the corpses lying along the other side of the road, he brought the flask to his own lips. The kid squeaked in surprise. He drank from the same place the boy had, unconcerned. Now the boy was watching him with something like wonder, dull eyes open wide, but eventually he murmured, “You’re weird…” and let his cheek fall limply back to the ground again. “Aren’t you scared to die? I am…Hey—I’m going to die soon, huh?” False comfort wouldn’t do the kid any good, so he just nodded. “Yeah.” “Huh. You don’t talk like the charity people.” “……?” He shot the kid a questioning look. The kid turned back to the doll in the soldier’s uniform without raising his cheek from the ground. He began casually moving its tin arms around, speaking as if to the toy and not to him at all. “They all say, ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. God is calling you to be with him.’ But you know what? I think it’s a lie that God’s world is a world of happiness…I mean, it’s full of people who hurt real bad and died looking all nasty, right? Sick people, people who died in the War. That’s who lives there. Mom died of the sickness too, but I know even if I go to God’s place I won’t be able to find her. See, before she died she got so skinny, and she was such a funny color, you could hardly tell her apart from the others…That’s why I’m really scared to go someplace where everybody is like that…” The words broke off for a moment, as if the boy was exhausted from all the talking, and he heaved a dispassionate, resigned sigh that didn’t suit his age at all. Then he finished in a voice that was almost a sigh itself: “But I’ll be just the same as them soon…” The wind blowing in from the city stirred up the yellow sand at his feet just slightly, leaving in its place a new rotten smell. He drank another sip of water to try to wash down the smell where it stuck in his throat. It tasted just like the air: yellow sand and rot. “…Want me to tell you how to not die?” he whispered softly, casting a sidelong glance at the doll in the kid’s arms, and at the time, he didn’t feel particularly interested or think particularly deeply about it. That was a long time ago now. Still, looking back on it, it wasn’t so long ago at all. “Kieli, hurry up.” The bell signaling the train’s departure echoed up and down the platform. People seeing their loved ones off and people who’d been reluctant to say good-bye all started picking up bags and hurrying them onto the train. Gazing out the window, he could see a girl running up from the direction of the station and dashing into the train car at the very end of the line of passengers. The clamor of the bell cut abruptly off, and after a beat the scenery out the window began sliding gently by, leaving the platform and the station behind. Around the time they made it past the platform completely, the somewhat flushed girl entered the car through the connecting door. “H-here are your cigarettes,” she said, panting. “These are the right kind, right?” Harvey accepted the pack with a simple “Thanks.” He didn’t really think he’d ever explicitly told her his brand, but she’d gotten the exact one he always smoked. “Sheesh, I can’t believe you didn’t notice you were out until the last minute! Next time buy them yourself.” “Yeah, sor—” “You just need to be thoughtful enough to buy him spare packs. Problem solved,” cut in the radio coldly before he could finish. Kieli made a miffed noise, glaring sidelong at it where it sat by the window and looking steadily more displeased. And then when she began to lower herself into her usual spot in their set of facing seats, the radio said in a scathing voice, “Know your place, girl. A servant never sits down without the master’s permission.” “What?!” “Okay, okay, you can sit down. Just sit down,” Harvey interceded tiredly. Kieli pulled a sour face and plopped down violently into her seat. As he was searching his pocket for something to light the freshly bought cigarette in his mouth, thinking things had finally quieted down, the radio burst out with another ridiculous criticism. “Hey, give him a light. Honestly, you’re completely thoughtless.” “…Harveeyyyy, do something!” Kieli entreated, giving him a reproachful glare. Harvey couldn’t muster the will to keep playing peacekeeper, though. He looked away from her and lit his cigarette for himself. I’m not making him say that stuff, you know! He leaned his head against the windowpane, sick of it all. When he gazed outside, relying on his good left eye, the crisscrossing rock ledges marking the fault line that cut through northwestern North-hairo towered in the distance. They’d fixed their destination as the northwestern mining district that supplied the capital. This was the second day of their journey along the railroad stretching out of North-hairo to the west. The mining district they were heading for was on the other side of that fault line to the north, but coming from North-hairo the rock ledges were in the way, and they had to travel far west to get around them. There was actually a direct route there from the capital, but going through the capital was a no-go for obvious reasons, so their only option was to go the long way. Harvey’d told his information broker to keep looking for clues about Beatrix before they left the border town, just in case, and given instructions to contact the bar if he found anything. Their departure had been pretty sudden, sure, but he’d been getting tired of staying in one place (and he wasn’t keen on getting in the way of any newlyweds, either), so he’d intended to leave anyway. This had actually been good timing, in a sense. There was no guarantee that they’d be able to fix the radio in the northwestern mining district. He hadn’t decided on his next step after that yet, but he could figure it out a little at a time during the trip… What was really pushing his limits right now was this situation. “What’s the matter, Master? You keep sighing,” asked the radio, puzzled, after yet another smoke-filled sigh of displeasure. In stark contrast to the verbal abuse it heaped on Kieli, the radio addressed him with ridiculous politeness. Shuddering at the chill crawling up his spine, Harvey said, “Cut that out. The ‘Master’ thing.” “What? But why?” “Because I said so. Just call me by my name.” “Your name…So, ‘Mr. Harvey’?” Harvey swallowed his drag of smoke the wrong way and almost choked himself to death. Wait a second, you can say ‘vey’! At first he’d thought its bad wiring had blocked off all access to its memories of the past—but thanks to God only knew what kind of memory mix-up, out of nowhere the partial-amnesiac radio had started treating him as its master. Considering that it meant he wouldn’t get nagged all the time, he initially thought this might not be so bad. That naive idea was gone in one minute flat. Getting chewed out would be a hundred times better than this disgusting feeling as if a pack of centipedes were crawling around in his stomach. “Corporal, are you sure you’re not doing this on purpose?” Right: meanwhile, Kieli was fed up for a very different reason. Glaring at the radio with an enormous scowl on her face, she added, “If you’re not, maybe another shock will bring you back to normal. Maybe I should try dropping you.” The dangerous look on her face as she grabbed it and lifted it overhead made Harvey think she might actually be serious. The radio screamed. “Cut that out! Cut it out, you stupid girl!” “What did you just call me?!” “…Kieli. Cut it out. It’ll be hell if he gets any weirder,” Harvey intervened, simultaneous headache and chill and heart-burn making him listless. Kieli pouted and said “He started it!” before grudgingly putting down the radio. Yes: as for how Kieli was being treated…the radio seemed to think she was some sort of handmaid. The radio’s normal attitudes toward Kieli and himself had flipped 180 degrees. Their loudly arguing voices pierced his temples, and he bent his head away from them, unthinkingly crushing the end of his cigarette between his teeth. Given the situation, you’d have thought the atmosphere on their journey would be more somber. What the hell was with this surprise turn for the ridiculous? “Where did this whole ‘Harvey is our master’ thing come from, anyway?” “Where did it come from? What, do you want to hear the story of how the master and I met? It’s a touching tale that leaves both the listener and the teller in tears, believe you me. It all started years ago, when a scoundrel of the blackest dye captured me and brought me to the gambling house to bet me on a card game. Now, during this game there were some accusations of cheating, and a brawl broke out. The man who lent me his aid in my hour of need was none other than our master.”