The self he saw in the pictures seemed so awfully foreign to him that it gave him an uncomfortable feeling. After all, until quite recently he’d never even imagined the day would come when he’d be in photographs like these. There he was, standing next to the woman who’d vowed to spend her life with him only a few days ago, dressed up just a little more than usual and facing the camera with a nervous smile that was nevertheless so stupidly happy that even he wanted to tease the guy wearing it. “What do you think? They came out well, didn’t they?” said that same woman, raising her eyes from the photos lined up on the counter and smiling. They’d been looking through them together. “Yeah, but I’ve gotta say they make me feel a little shy.” He gave her a strained smile to cover up his doubts. Maybe part of my problem is that I feel guilty for being the only one of us to get a happy ending. But no; thinking like this would only get him yelled at by the leader and the rest of the guys. It wasn’t quite time to open the bar yet. Lazy evening sunbeams filtered in through the windows. The bartender turned his gaze toward the far side of the hall, past the reach of those sunbeams, toward the little stage where nothing was left but some ancient sound equipment. After the night of his wedding party, the four-man rock band hadn’t appeared on that stage again. He still stayed behind by himself after closing every night, polishing glasses until bedtime in the faint hope that someone—his old bandmates, past regulars, anyone— would appear. There was a gaping void in his heart, but nonetheless, he suspected that nature would take its course in time and fill up the gap with the contents of his new life. Starting next week, a new band was scheduled to play here. It wouldn’t be rock music, of course; they’d be doing something safer. But hey, he was a music lover. “Here’s Kieli. She looks so cute!” Brought back to himself by Yana’s voice, he turned his attention away from the stage and back toward the photographs. When he looked down at the picture she’d brought to the top of the pile, his heart swelled, feeling warmed and broken at the same time. A girl smiling a little hesitantly in the wreath of artificial flowers and white lace that had been clapped on her head—how could this girl on the edge of seventeen look so painfully much like Setsuri? For all her eyes were modest, her strong will and dignity were plain to see there. They seemed to be an even deeper, more striking color now than when she’d first visited his bar. The bartender reached out to touch this photograph with far more emotion than he’d felt looking at his own. But when he picked it up, he caught sight of the edge of another one stuck to the bottom of it. …Oh God. He hurriedly covered it up with another photo. “Is something wrong?” “No, ah, no, it’s nothing. Well, it looks like it’s time to save the rest of these for later and open up the bar,” he babbled quickly. Yana gave him a puzzled look, but she soon smiled in agreement. “Yes, let’s take our time over them after we close for the night.” His conscience twinged. He…he hadn’t been married a week, and he’d already hidden something from her. “I’ll go open up,” said Yana. After she’d jogged outside to flip the sign, he wiped the cold sweat from his brow and covertly snagged one photograph out of the pile. It was the other picture of Kieli. Her smile was far prettier and more natural than in the first one, but… The bartender couldn’t have stopped the dry, grim laugh from escaping him if he’d tried. Kieli, sitting primly in the chair, wasn’t the only one in the photograph. His old bandmates were clustered around her, leaning forward and clamoring to be in the picture. The vocalist/guitarist, trying to casually put his arm around Kieli’s shoulders; the bass player on her other side knocking away his hand and trying to get an arm around her himself, the drummer striking a pose with a stick in each hand, and in the very back, the bandleader holding up his sax. “Aw, jeez, it turned into spirit photography…that’s Kieli for you, huh?” he said wryly to himself. Then he put a hand over his eyes for a moment. I really was blessed with good friends, and they’ve sent me off on the rest of life’s journey with all kinds of other good fortune. I’ve got a long way to go yet. And then he heard a little shriek coming from outside. With a start, he hurriedly wiped his eyes and lifted his head to see several people standing in the doorway, crowding Yana back inside. Soldiers in white clerical robes with armor plating, but these were large, muscular soldiers who radiated an extremely intimidating air: clearly on a whole different level from the town’s laid-back Security Forces outpost—! All at once the horrific raid fifteen years ago sprang to his mind in full color, as if it had happened only yesterday. His whole body went tense. “H-how can I help you?” he greeted his rude, unwanted guests in a hard voice as Yana ran to him. He hugged her from across the counter. It looked as though a few more Church Soldiers were standing by outside, but only two of them entered the bar. One of them came up to stand in front of the counter to loom over him. “Sir, we’ve been informed that there’s a girl working at this establishment.” The mechanical politeness was civil enough, and yet somehow it didn’t sound very sincere. This man must have come not from the town outpost, but from the Security Forces headquarters in the capital. The bartender couldn’t grasp the situation yet, so he decided to stall for the time being. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you’re looking for…” But as he spoke, the soldier’s eye settled on the photos scattered on the counter. Crap. It was too late; a rugged gloved hand was reaching for the one on top. The other soldier drew an old-looking photo out of his breast pocket, and the two of them compared the photos and nodded to each other. He caught a brief glimpse of that old photo, and the woman in it was— Setsuri—? The soldier put away the photo again while the bartender was still standing there bug-eyed, and gestured to the one left in his hand of the raven-haired girl in the wreath of artificial flowers. “Where is this girl now?” he said. He’d gone from the former polite attitude to something like cross-examination, but his tone was still just as mechanical—to the point where the change didn’t even worsen the bartender’s impression of him. A tense silence fell on either side of the counter until, after a long pause, the soldier brought out his trump card. “We’ve checked into this place. If you refuse to cooperate, we’ll be forced to take steps.” Yana stiffened uneasily, her eyes wide. The bartender hugged his wife’s shoulders tightly with one arm and ground his molars together. She didn’t know about the old bar, or the raid. He hadn’t wanted to get her caught up in the whole thing, and he hadn’t thought it would cause any problems for them anyway. If you refuse to cooperate, we’ll be forced to— If he refused them, he’d lose the peaceful life he’d only just—finally—begun. If he cooperated, though, he’d be betraying two people who had trusted him enough to tell him their circumstances and seek refuge with him. Harvey, Kieli… For the past few days he’d been dwelling on one painful question: why was something always lost in exchange for anything new you gained? This world was truly finely balanced. With some irony, he thought, Maybe there really is a God living on this planet. An ever-so-fair-minded God with an outstanding sense of balance. From the moment she’d seen this city’s skyline, she’d had the feeling it had reminded her of someplace she’d been before; she just couldn’t remember where. It was a relatively developed city for such a remote part of North-hairo parish, with well-maintained buildings and streets. There was a decent amount of traffic on the main street, too. Three-wheeled taxis with enormous cylindrical fuel tanks on top whizzed by, gushing exhaust and noise. From what she’d heard, a certain wealthy family who maintained an estate here had been investing money in the city for a long time. “Oh, I know. It’s Toulouse.” Something about the mood of this place reminded her of the “witch-hunt town” of Toulouse, which had been flourishing as a tourist destination despite its location far from the center of Westerbury parish. They even had the same geography: they were both framed by a gently sloping wilderness on one side and an intricate network of steep rock ledges on the other. “Too loose?” “‘Toulouse.’ We stopped there while we were traveling with Beatrix, you know?” She’d thought of it as an established fact when she said it, but the only response she got from the radio was a blank silence. Oh, right. When she remembered their situation, she felt a little glum. “I guess you don’t remember Beatrix either, huh, Corporal…The two of you were buddies, you know.” “Mmm?” Kieli kind of liked this more untroubled Corporal, but moments like this made her long for him to get better quickly and go back to normal. As she walked unhurriedly along the main street, she tried explaining the blond, blue-eyed woman to the radio. “You see, Beatrix is an old friend of Harvey’s, but she’s selfish and she lives however she likes and she talks big and she spends money like water—really, I don’t know what to do with her! And she can’t cook or clean, either…” She’d just said the first things that came to mind, but replaying them in her head, Kieli realized they really didn’t sound flattering. Surely there was something else she could say. She knit her brows and thought for a moment. “But you know, she’s a good person…and she’s really beautiful.” She couldn’t help smiling at the memories. Suddenly the honk-honk-honk of someone leaning on a car horn filled her ears. Kieli realized with a start that she’d been about to cross the street without looking. Shrieking, she tried to backpedal, but her heel slipped and she fell down right in the path of a car. Brakes squealed shrilly against the pavement, and the vehicle came to a stop just before it would have crushed her toes. That was close… She stayed sitting on her butt on the shoulder of the road, too petrified to move for a while. Her heart was racing in her chest. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Are you hurt?” a female voice called down from the car parked scant centimeters away. Slim and pale legs descended onto the shoulder of the road. Kieli’s heartbeat still hadn’t quieted down when she raised her eyes to see a beautiful lady with waist-length hair tucking up the hem of an expensive-looking dress and climbing out of the backseat—though in Kieli’s personal view, she wasn’t quite as beautiful as Beatrix. The car she’d been riding in was as high-class as her clothes. On the surface it was similar to a three-wheeled taxi, but it was longer, and the rear seemed to have a set of elegant facing seats in place of the standard backseat. A large man Kieli guessed was her private chauffeur climbed out of the driver’s seat after her. For a split second her nose detected something off, but the soft scent of perfumed oil wafting from the woman’s hair soon banished whatever it was. “I’m fine. I only fell because I was so startled. I’m the one who should apologize to you for not looking where I was going.” It looked as if the driver was about to help her up, so Kieli hastily declined and started to get up herself, but just then an arm seized her from another direction and yanked her upright. “Kieli,” muttered a voice overhead. When she craned her neck to look up, the familiar tall, redheaded form was standing there looking down at her. The tone of his next words didn’t change in the slightest, but she thought he probably was worried. “What’s wrong?” “I almost got bumped into, but that’s all. I’m not hurt,” she hastened to explain. Harvey appeared skeptical, and turned to regard the driver and the young lady in the dress with eyes that weren’t hostile, but weren’t exactly friendly, either. The moment the young lady saw Harvey’s face, she cried, “Oh!” and her eyes went round. Before Kieli could blink, her whole face lit up. “Please, I’d love to invite you to my house for tea, if you would be so kind,” she said, reaching out to grip Harvey’s hand and more or less shoving Kieli aside in the process. Kieli blinked, stumbling. At this abrupt request from a total stranger, Harvey’s “not exactly friendly” attitude visibly slid to “unfriendly.” “No thank you. Kieli, let’s go.” He brusquely shook off the slender hand touching his, turned his back, and began striding away. “R-right,” Kieli agreed, rushing to chase after him. He was walking fast; she had to jog to catch up. When she managed it and took up walking diagonally behind him, she turned her head to look back. The young lady they’d left behind was still standing stock-still in front of the car, gazing at them. Eventually, though, she addressed a few words to the driver and disappeared back into the car. “Didn’t you think there was something strange about that woman?” At Harvey’s gruff voice, Kieli turned back to look at him and tilted her head to one side. “Not really; why?” “What about you, Corporal?” “Ah, she was quite fine-looking, wasn’t she?” “…All right, then,” Harvey tossed carelessly over his shoulder, withdrawing the topic without even turning around. He was directing his feet toward their inn. “Could you see the mirage?” “No,” he answered flatly. He’d gone out to the outskirts of town today to have a look at the mirage. It was two days ago now that they’d disembarked (through the window) at the station closest to where Harvey said he’d seen a towerlike mirage from the train. Apparently the mirage Harvey and the radio had seen had started appearing in the sky above the rock ledge across from town about a year ago, and all the townspeople were talking about it. But they said you could see it only once every few days, and not on any sort of regular schedule, so now they were staying here for a few days waiting for its next appearance. It seemed as though Harvey’d had some ideas of his own about that mirage. It was nothing unusual for Harvey to summarily change the route of a journey (whatever he might say, Harvey was pretty stubborn when he got a hunch about something), but since she couldn’t rely on the radio to grill him about it this time, Kieli was even more strapped for information than usual. Just as she was looking up to check his profile diagonally in front of her, he abruptly stopped walking and swiveled his head to one side. “Did you notice something watching us just now?” By the time Kieli managed a flustered “Huh?” while trying not to trip, Harvey was already bursting into a sprint in the direction he’d gazed. “Harvey?!” Harvey’s back was retreating down an alleyway; Kieli took off after him, but in no time he was too far ahead, and she lost sight of him. When she emerged from the alley and into the next street she couldn’t figure out which way he’d gone, and she was at a loss. Happily, though, before long she made out a redheaded figure wandering back up the street. “What did you find?” “Nothing,” he said, but he was still darting his eyes this way and that, looking unconvinced. The radio asked in a worried voice, “Say, Master, are you maybe feeling a little tired?” “Yeah, and you’re not helping,” Harvey snapped in a way that left no possible response. Kieli privately thought he might really be a little tired. That hadn’t been his usual curtness; she’d sensed more bite to it. She hardly ever heard that tone coming from Harvey’s mouth. Normally the radio was the hotheaded one, and yet now it felt as if Harvey was on edge, as if he was being more impatient to make up for its complacency. “Hey, Harvey, we’re not in too much of a hurry, so why don’t we take a little break here before we go on…?” Kieli ventured tentatively. She wanted to fix the radio as soon as possible, of course, but she sort of got the feeling that Harvey was in an even worse state, somehow. Coppery eyes glanced sharply at her. She was pretty sure that if he’d used that tone with her it would have hurt a lot, so she’d felt a little apprehensive as she asked, looking up through her eyelashes. After a pause, Harvey was the one to break eye contact, and then he smacked his own cheek lightly with his left hand. Dazed, Kieli wondered what that behavior was all about. “Yeah, I guess…Sure, why not?” He was back to his normal slightly uninterested voice. Sighing, he said, “Thanks. Sorry.” She thought he was probably directing that to both her and the radio. Then he took the hand he’d struck his cheek with and ruffled her hair. Its ingrained tobacco scent gently tickled at her nose. Caught off guard by this gesture he hadn’t done much lately, Kieli felt a sudden sting of tears and promptly ducked her head to hide her face. While she pretended to wipe some sand off her coat, she gazed at the tips of her toes and thought, What a mess. Usually she could stay calm and composed, but every so often when she let her guard down she felt like crying. Sometimes she accidentally remembered the fact that she didn’t see a single good thing to look forward to after this. I really do wish the journey would never end… That night she dozed off in the middle of writing a letter and had a bizarre dream. An indistinct white figure stood in the middle of a dim space. She knew, vaguely, that it was somebody she knew, but when she tried to look closely the person’s face blurred, and she couldn’t tell for sure who it was. Whoever it was stood staring down with tousled hair and eyes fixed on a corpse lying on the ground—head crushed in, body so mangled Kieli couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman—while gripping a blood-spattered ax. Thick, red-black blood dripped—dripped—dripped down from the tip of the broad wedge-shaped blade. The person’s clothes and face were equally plastered with blood, but no attempt was made to wipe it off; the figure just stood there placidly gripping the ax. Kieli was thinking, I just did what anyone would do. I didn’t do anything wrong. He tried to take something precious from me. I was only protecting what was mine. All of a sudden it was Kieli herself holding the ax. The iron handle of the ax she gripped was so heavy she thought it might wrench her arm right out of its socket, and strangely warm when it should have been cool. The warmth came from the still-wet blood clinging to it. The ax got heavier and heavier as she held it, but she couldn’t let go of the handle, so it dragged her arms down until they stretched in a weird, slithery way toward the ground. It should have been frightening, but for some reason Kieli felt perfectly calm, thinking the same thing she was thinking. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only protecting. Kieli— When she looked up at the sound of her name, there was a person standing in front of her. She could tell now that it was definitely someone she knew, but she couldn’t recognize who it was. She couldn’t recognize her, and yet she could see the expression on the individual’s face with crystal clarity; something sticky clung to those familiar cheeks, and eyes that Kieli couldn’t place scrutinized her as if near tears. Why do you look so sad…? Kieli didn’t know what was wrong, and so she just looked up, still brandishing the ax. Just as the person’s mouth opened to say something, the dream dissolved. Kieli woke up with her face planted on the side table of her room at the inn, gripping the pen in her hand almost hard enough to break it. …She wasn’t holding an ax. When she fumbled her stiffened, cold fingers open, there were nail marks imprinted deeply into her palm. What an awful dream. I wonder what that was about. First things first: she pulled herself together and finished writing the letter, her hand still a little numb. The next day she set off for the post office just as Harvey was coming back from whatever walk he’d apparently gone on early that morning, so she left him at the inn. The letter was to the bar on the parish border, and she took the opportunity to report their change of travel plans, too. She’d wanted to write a letter to settle her feelings and cheer herself up anyway. And after she had that thought, she realized that without even noticing it, she’d found a place she could send a letter to anytime she wanted. In exchange, though, lately she’d stopped writing letters to Becca that she never planned to send…Most people might think that was the normal thing to do, but it still made her feel a little lonely. Next time, she’d write a letter to Becca, too. I’ve got to hang on and do my best… She was the only one here with both a sound mind and body. She couldn’t let herself feel blue. Telling herself the dream was probably just groundless fears, she forced it to the back of her mind, mailed her letter, and left the post office. She walked down the post office steps with her shoulder bag clopping against her side and came out on the main street at the bottom, where her eye caught sight of a car passing by on the other side of the road. Longer and classier than a three-wheeled taxi—it was the car that belonged to the young lady they’d met yesterday. The car was gone before Kieli could get a good look through the backseat window, but maybe she was riding in it right now. The next time she left the inn, she asked the doorman about the girl as they exchanged greetings. Apparently the young lady was so famous there wasn’t a single person in town who didn’t know her; the doorman understood whom Kieli was talking about as soon as she described the car. He explained that the young lady was the current head of the family investing so much money in the town. There had actually been a male heir, but there’d been some kind of trouble and he’d left home, or something, so his younger sister had inherited the family fortune. True, it was rare for a woman to be heir to such a prestigious family, but there was something that nagged at Kieli even more about the whole thing. According to the doorman it had been more than ten years since she’d taken over the family estate, and yet the lady had still looked quite young to Kieli. About Beatrix’s age, going by appearances. Could she be a woman Undying like Beatrix? she mused, and then immediately dismissed the idea. If she were, surely Harvey would’ve noticed right away. I wonder why she wanted to invite Harvey over all of a sudden yesterday. Kieli puzzled to herself for a moment. She couldn’t have a crush on him, could she…? She looked in the direction she’d seen the car heading. Faint traces of its thick fossil-fuel exhaust still hovered along the surface of the pavement, showing the path it had taken. Kieli doubted it meant anything, but technically that was the same direction as their inn. It probably doesn’t mean anything, though, she repeated to herself firmly, even as she unthinkingly began to lope back toward the inn. There was a faint, dully colored bruise on his left wrist. It was shaped almost like a set of fingers. What is this…? He held up his hand in front of him and stared at it for a while, but it was becoming too much of a bother to think about it. He let it drop back to his side and straightened out the cuff of his sleeve, which he’d tugged up with his teeth. Without a right arm, even trifling movements like these were slow going. Harvey rolled over and lay facedown in his bed, burying his face in the dusty pillow and feeling somehow drained. The end-of-winter air, still crisp but pleasantly, refreshingly so, streamed in through the window above him and ruffled the hair on the back of his head, bringing with it the smell of smog and the noise of the city. Evidently the mirage hadn’t shown up today either. He wanted to get another look at it and confirm what direction it was in. And then there was the other issue that wouldn’t stop bothering him: the issue of the voice he’d heard for a moment at the station and the form that had escaped into the gap between train and platform. And that feeling like discomfort that he’d had when that woman touched him yesterday, the one he just couldn’t explain the reason for—there was such a confusing jumble of things going on in his head that he couldn’t tell anymore what he should think about first. Or maybe he was overthinking things, making them more complicated than they had to be? Why was he so impatient to take care of all these different things at the same time, anyway? All it did was make him brood too much all at once and make him tired and pissy, until he almost took it out on Kieli and then she ended up worried about him. Pathetic. This is all the Corporal’s fault… Harvey turned his cheek against the pillow and glared resentfully at the unconcerned radio sitting on the windowsill. Any other time that radio would have butted in with “There you go again, thinking in circles about complicated stuff and not getting anywhere,” and Harvey would’ve gotten sick of the whole thing and just stopped thinking about it. But no, now there was nobody to put on the brakes, so his thoughts had gotten so snarled up that there was no untangling them anymore. He was actually starting to think that maybe in some sense the Corporal’s insufferable nagging had acted as a tranquilizer for him. Harvey dragged himself upright and half-crawled to the window like a lazy animal, reaching for the radio. He grabbed it by the cord and suspended it out of the third-story window. It seemed like a good way to vent his frustration. “…Master, do you have something against me?” “Not particularly.” Dangling his arm out the window and letting the radio swing in the breeze, Harvey propped his chin on the sill and looked down below. Their room was only on the third floor of the inn, so it wasn’t all that high up. From here he could take in the street beneath them. This town was no Westerbury, but there was still a fair amount of traffic. His right eye’s lag had cleared up quite a bit in the last few days. If nothing else, he didn’t get dizzy anymore. He was mindlessly watching the pedestrians go by when he noticed someone watching him from across the street. That gaze—! “Wah, Master, I’ll fall! I’ll fall!” shrieked the radio. Harvey realized that he’d abruptly stuck his upper body out the window, and the radio was in serious danger of getting flung away. By then it was already too late: the owner of the gaze tore off in a single bound, disappearing into the alley behind it. The glimpse Harvey’d caught was of an all-black creature, and he had the impression it had run on four legs. Was it…an animal? That took him enough by surprise to momentarily delay his reaction, but after a beat he slid out of bed and burst out of the room. He ran down the stairs, impatiently hanging the radio around his neck one-handed, bolted past the cheap hotel’s cheaply paid doorman standing at the entrance with about as much enthusiasm as his salary warranted, and came out into the street. Which way did it go? Harvey turned in the direction he’d seen the shadowy figure run off, and was just starting to cross the street when a vehicle pulled up on his right, announcing itself with the sound of a clamorous fossil-fuel engine as it appeared out of the edge of his vision, just where a bit of a blind spot still lingered. He threw himself back into the shoulder of the road just in time, but— What the—?! The driver turned and, of all things, headed straight for him! He couldn’t avoid it in time; he ended up pinned between the car’s front bumper and the wall at his back. While he’d reflexively shifted the radio to spare it the brunt of the damage, Harvey himself took a heavy hit to his side. At the same time, the short, abrupt squeal of brakes sounded practically right in his ear, close enough to rattle his brain. The part of his brain that worked automatically without his conscious thought immediately determined that his injuries weren’t fatal, but they were sure enough to impair his sight and hearing for an instant; he heard a disturbingly excited female voice say “Oh dear, how awful!” but it sounded fuzzy and distant (“Oh dear,” my ass! You were blatantly aiming at me!). “Carry him quickly, Job!” “Hey! What—?!” Pinned between the car and the wall, Harvey couldn’t move. Hands yanked him roughly free and he was tossed over a man’s broad shoulders like a sack of potatoes before he could put up any resistance. The same sort of discomfort he’d felt from that woman yesterday tickled at his nose. Now he finally realized what had made him uncomfortable—this was unmistakably the stench of rotting bodies. Harvey was tossed on the floor of the car’s backseat, where he hit his back hard. He was ready to spring back up in a heartbeat, but a metallic clang made him jolt. When he looked up, his left wrist was bound in an iron manacle attached to a thick chain. The other end of the chain was fixed to a seat leg. “What the hell are you—” “I finally get to see you!” It was that same woman from yesterday, throwing her arms around him as if to cut off the violent struggle Harvey was seriously contemplating. The next thing she said, though, he reacted to. “Brother! You came back to me!” “Huh?!” he blurted. He had to admit, it came out as more of an undignified screech than anything else. “When did he leave?” “About fifteen minutes ago…I think…” She’d run straight back to the inn, but neither Harvey nor the radio was in his room. So she’d tried asking the doorman at the entrance, but all she got was that vague, dubious answer. Where could he have gone? He could have at least left her a message telling her where, or even just a couple of words scrawled on a napkin, but as usual, those little considerations were completely off his radar. Nonplussed, Kieli turned around and left the inn again without even putting down her bag. She figured she’d try looking around the neighborhood a little, just in case. “……?” After she’d walked for a while, she realized that something was following her. At first she thought it was just her imagination, but when she stopped and glanced behind her, it stopped short too, maintaining the same fixed distance. It was an animal a little larger than the average dog, with short black hair. It looked like a dog, yet Kieli had the distinct feeling it wasn’t one; she couldn’t figure out what it was, exactly. Does it have some business with me…? Not that she wasn’t skeptical about the idea of a dog having “business.” She was deliberating whether to approach the doglike thing when a commotion suddenly started up around her. “It’s the mirage!” “I can see the tower!” cried voices from somewhere in the distance, and the flow of people on the streets all turned in one direction as if pulled by an invisible magnet. The mirage…? Maybe Harvey and the Corporal had gone to see the mirage. Yes, that sounded right. Kieli was about to set off running that way too, when a cry sounded behind her. Not a human cry—something very much like a dog’s howl. She turned to see the animal being kicked as it tried to weave its way through the legs of the crowd. The man who’d kicked it merely said, “Where did this thing come from? Little piece of shit could hurt someone,” and began to hurry on, leaving it there on the ground. Kieli was just turning to go back to it when it leaped up and immediately sank its teeth into the man’s shin. The man cursed loudly as he shook his leg free, and for a short time the attention of the crowd shifted from the mirage to them—which was when Kieli saw something incredible. The animal landed nimbly on its feet, and its lips pulled back, mouth suddenly gaping open from jaw to ears. Closely packed sawlike teeth rimmed a mouth that was green like rotten meat; abnormally overdeveloped canines dripped with saliva. The animal launched itself into the air and latched on to the man’s arm with those two varieties of sharp teeth, sending a spray of tiny beads of blood into the air like fog. Everything from the elbow down was wrenched off. The man collapsed to the ground, one arm just a stump now, and rolled around there, blabbering deliriously words that didn’t even manage to become screams. The first truly scream-like scream came from the mouth of a nearby woman who probably didn’t even know him. Panic spread from there until people began running in all directions from the spot where the animal had landed, just as if someone had dropped a bomb there. Kieli herself had been rooted to the spot with horror; now, pushed along by the crowd, she stumbled into motion too and started to run mindlessly. That was—that was— Her brain was half-numb, and she couldn’t quite get it to work. The sight of that animal just now, its mouth greenish as if its cells were rotting and falling off in clumps, made a series of similar images flash through her mind—the monsters in Gate Town’s underground waterways, Christoph when she’d met him in Westerbury, and Joachim. Is it like they were? After someone passing her from behind knocked her off balance and almost made her fall, Kieli turned down a side alley to escape the chaos of the crowd. She kept running for a while, looking over her shoulder periodically to make sure no one was following her, until at last her legs faltered and she came to a stop, clinging to the wall for balance. As she put a hand to her chest and tried to catch her breath, she checked the alley behind her one more time. It looked as though she was the only one who’d come this way. The screams and pounding footsteps of all the people faded into a distant roar that bounced off the walls of the gloomy alley. Just when she returned her gaze to her own surroundings with a sigh of relief, a dark red droplet landed with a slow liquid plop on the gray pavement before her. Kieli gasped and tried to back away, but she found she couldn’t move. Petrified, she stared in terror at the puddle of blood forming right in front of her boots. When she forced her head to tilt up, frozen neck muscles creaking, that doglike animal was balanced catlike on top of one of the exhaust pipes along the alley wall. Blood dripped steadily from the severed end of the human arm in its mouth. It casually dropped the arm right in front of her, and with a strangled cry, Kieli managed to back away at last. Somewhere in the middle of her retreat she plopped down on the pavement and couldn’t stand up again. She thought she could see the arm lying in front of her boots, still twitching slightly. She felt bile rise in her throat. The animal that alighted across the arm from her gave her a blood-soaked grin—at least, she thought it was grinning. The corners of its mouth pulled back all the way to its ears to reveal a glimpse of its slimy green mouth. “Here. Your friend can have this. It’s gotta be inconvenient having one.” The creature spoke. Its intonation was a little weird, but it spoke, in human language. “Undyings can just stick on body parts, even ones that don’t belong to them, and the nerves will pretty much hook right up. Pretty convenient, huh?” it continued, giving a single wag of its tail (although its body was doglike, its tail was long and thin like the tail of a mountain lion she’d seen in a photograph once) and contorting the corners of its gaping mouth into what Kieli thought was probably another smile. When it closed its mouth, it went back to more or less looking like a dog. Kieli stared at the baffling animal standing before her eyes in openmouthed amazement, still sitting on her butt on the ground. It could speak in words, and it seemed fairly intelligent, too. And by “your friend” and “Undying” it could only mean Harvey. Which meant it was saying that it must be inconvenient for Harvey to be missing an arm, so it was offering him a new one. If she set aside the fact that it had torn a man’s arm off with its teeth (although she didn’t necessarily think that was an issue that could fairly be set aside), maybe this animal didn’t pose an immediate threat…? “Are you…um…a dog?” It was only when Kieli heard her voice come out scratchy that she realized her throat was dry. The animal seemed offended. “How rude. What part of me makes you think of some mongrel?” Kieli wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was built like a medium-sized dog, and its long-nosed face looked like a dog’s, as long as it kept its mouth closed. The pointy, triangular ears and short, jet-black fur made it look like one of those slender breeds of dog, too. On the other hand, the hair around its neck, which was longer than all its other fur and stood stiffly out, and the slender tail with just a poof of hair at the end reminded her of a mountain lion. The expression in its eyes—they were mismatching shades: one amber and one a dark brown—was oddly human, and as it continued to regard her she grew uncomfortable. …All in all, though, Kieli still felt it was more like a dog than anything else. After observing all its features and considering them, she only ended up at the same conclusion; she was at a total loss for a response. Eventually the animal said “Eh, whatever” in a sulky voice, and leaped nimbly back up onto the pipe again. Though it was a lot bigger than a cat, it had a catlike way of moving without making a sound. Kieli was getting more and more confused about what kind of animal it was. “I know where your friend is.” “What?!” Kieli cried, taken by surprise at the unexpected subject change. “You mean Harvey, right?! You know where he—” She leaned forward eagerly only to snatch her hand back in a hurry when she almost touched the fallen arm. Mismatched brown and amber eyes gazed down at her from the pipe, and the animal made a rumbling sound in its throat with another probably-a-smile. “He’s a pretty interesting guy. A little old to be getting kidnapped, isn’t he?”
Chapter 88
35 min read