Chapter 90

Then Mane had left, telling them “Wait here” before launching into a four-legged run toward somewhere deep in the gorge. He used protrusions in the rock as footholds, vaulting easily from one to the next, until before long his black form melted into the night and disappeared. They’d slipped out of town, and now they were camping out by the fault line to the north for the time being. Rock ledges so sheer that Harvey couldn’t even see the tops cut in front of and behind and back upon each other to form an intricately winding ravine; he could make out only one of the twin moons, indistinctly visible in one of the thin, irregular scraps of night sky above. Owooo…nn… Wind groaned along the rock walls, echoing faintly and sounding very much like a beast howling in the distance. In the beginning Harvey sat down with his back propped against the rock wall, but before long sitting up straight was too hard, and he doubled over. Probably the stone had taken out part of his digestive organs or something around there, and now they were malfunctioning. He had to say, the fact that this didn’t present a clear and present danger to his life meant his body was a pretty crude piece of work. Anyway, he had a feeling it was going to take some time to get used to the uncomfortable sensation that half his insides were made of papier-mâché now. “Are you okay?” Kieli peered at him worriedly. He shoved her a little farther away with his elbow. Once there was just the right distance between them for talking, he consciously pitched his voice downward. “Kieli…why did you say a thing like that?” Kieli was kneeling on the ground with her feet tucked under her now. From the look on her face, she clearly didn’t understand what she was being scolded for at first. “That man died, you know. He wasn’t a Church Soldier. Just one of the townspeople. He could barely handle his gun.” Come to think of it, Harvey got the feeling something gross was still stuck to him, right around the edge of his peripheral vision, so he wiped his cheek off roughly on his sleeve. Kieli shifted a little, looking uncomfortable. Evidently she understood what he was saying now. She pouted and defended herself, though, even if she did it in a soft, cowed voice. “But,” she argued, “it was to save you, Harvey. That makes it self-defense, you know.” “I—” Harvey’s voice choked up before he could finish the sentence, and he had to swallow. There was a burning pain deep in his throat that made swallowing rough. “…I don’t want you saying things like that. For my sake or not.” He knew that he was imposing his own selfishness on her by saying this. He did get that. He did get that he had no right to talk when he’d killed so many people himself. Nonetheless, he didn’t want Kieli of all people to have those savage feelings. “Promise me you’ll never say that again. Please…” His voice splintered painfully coming up his throat. He couldn’t go on any further. He stopped talking there and watched Kieli’s face. He’d figured she’d agree, but Kieli stubbornly shook her head without looking up. Clenching both hands into tight fists on top of her knees, she said quietly and rapidly, “I…I don’t mind killing a person or two if it’s for you.” Smack. Harvey reflexively slapped her. The radio couldn’t let that pass by without intervening. “Master…!” He—he hadn’t hit her that hard, but the fact was that he had hit her. Kieli put a hand to her cheek, looking stunned. Harvey was even more stunned by what he’d done than she was, though. “No, Kieli, I didn’t mean to hit you—” He could say that all he wanted, but it didn’t change reality. He was just making excuses. When he leaned forward with that same hand to touch her cheek, Kieli flinched back, maybe expecting him to hit her again. That reaction was so heartbreaking that he instantly snatched his hand away. In the same instant Kieli popped to her feet, bag and coat whipping out around her, and took off running in a random direction. “Kieli, wait…” Harvey tried to go after her, but he fell over again before he’d quite managed to stand up. Swearing quietly, he used protrusions in the rock to help himself to his feet and began tottering after her with one hand on the cliff wall for balance. But Kieli was gone, vanished somewhere among the crisscrossing rock ledges. She did have the radio with her, but he couldn’t depend on it in that state—if they got separated in a place like this— BoooOOOOOOooo… There was a low rumbling sound and the ground beneath him began to shake enough for him to lose his footing and almost fall down again. The rock walls on all sides vibrated until he could feel the tremors reverberating in the pit of his stomach. What the…? A narrow beam of light similar to a searchlight’s shone through a gap in the rock walls ahead of him, lighting up the area. Unable to pinpoint the source of the earth tremors, Harvey pointed his feet toward the source of the light and started walking. As soon as he made his way through the narrow gap between the rock faces into the relatively open valley beyond, a great circle of light assaulted his eyes. The abrupt change from dark night made him dizzy; he shielded his eyes with his hand and peered until somewhere between the phantom afterimages burned into his retinas he could just about make out an enormous shape covering the whole valley floor, with that light like a single giant eye in the center—a structure with rows of great gray wheels on either side fully the height of an adult person; a structure Harvey thought must be a vehicle. He couldn’t judge how long it was, since the end of one side disappeared beyond what he could see of the valley, but in both size and appearance it reminded him of the ships that traveled the Sand Ocean. The crucial difference between this and a sand ship, however, was that it was kicking up sand as it drove along the ground. Then he saw Kieli, frozen like an animal in the headlights. When he tried to run up to her, a section of the structure slid to one side to reveal a rectangular tunnel like a hatchway, and someone’s arm shot out and grabbed Kieli by the waist. In no time, she disappeared into the wall, leaving only an echo of her scream behind. “Kieli! After a moment so stunned that he almost forgot to go after her, Harvey snapped back to himself and followed, jumping through the hatch door just as it closed. It thudded heavily back into place immediately afterward, cutting off the roaring noise and the bright light so that his senses of sight and hearing both felt smothered. The inside of the place reminded him of a sand ship’s bottom, too. It was a closed-off, darkish space thick with the smells of iron rust and fossil fuel. A steep staircase stretched out in front of him. He could hear footsteps somewhere near the top: shrill against the sheet metal flooring, but coming in long, unhurried strides. And there were Kieli’s muffled pleas for release, too. Harvey put his hand to one wall and climbed up after her, carefully but quickly. Once up the stairs and through the narrow doorway above them, he came out into the open air again, into a place that was probably equivalent to what you’d call the “outer deck” of a sand ship. “Whoa,” he blurted when he took a good look around the deck in the pale moonlight. It was less like a vehicle here, and more as though a (very small) city had been constructed right here on deck. A very different sort of city than modern-day ones, though. Before his eyes were rows of structures you would never see in the average city, tall and shaped like smokestacks. Thick pipes stuck out of the tips and sides of each smokestack, crisscrossing each other like meshwork over his head. Here and there columns of white smoke rose into the sky. The sight made Harvey feel exactly as if he’d been sucked into some enormous machine, which automatically reminded him of a certain other place in his memory. “What? No, no,” said a boy’s voice from overhead. Harvey looked up to see a beast black enough to be almost indistinguishable against the night sky sitting on one of the pipes all curled up into a ball and looking as if someone had perched him there for decoration. His amber right eye stood out eerily in the darkness. “It wasn’t the girl I wanted you to carry here; it was the man…The girl can walk on her own.” “Let me go!” The owner of the arms that had snatched Kieli, the large form carrying her over his shoulder, had so far ignored her struggles and walked sedately onward. At the sound of the voice, though, it obediently deposited her on the deck. Harvey ran over to her where she’d flopped down on her rear, and shielded her with his own body as he looked up at the unknown figure. When he got a good look at it, his eyes widened. A large, misshapen man with slack green-tinged skin as though his cells had grown and grown and then melted away— it took no thought whatsoever for Christoph to spring to mind—but junk parts and scraps of metal that must be wreckage from some of these structures on the deck were stuck all over its body like poorly made armor, and two or three bent pipes stuck out of its back at an angle in just the same way they were sticking out of all the smokestacks overhead. “I apo-lo-gize,” the figure said in a mechanical voice, and took a step back. About half of its face was hidden behind metal plating, preventing Harvey from reading its expression; that and the lack of any inflection in its voice gave him an impression of emotionlessness. “I keep telling you, quit automatically being on guard all the time. That’s way less dangerous than I am,” broke in a boyish voice with all the easy inflection his companion lacked. Apparently Mane was actually aware that he was dangerous. This place… Harvey took in the sights around him. Everything was covered in rust, so old it was a miracle it was still running, and very definitely not made with today’s technology. He knew another city existed elsewhere that was very like this one, but even bigger. All the buildings were relics of the pre-War culture’s technology, from back when fossil fuels had been plentiful. “The ‘first radio tower’…?” “Ah, I thought you might know it. It is sometimes called that, so you’re right.” When Harvey looked up, he could see a steel tower even taller than all the rest, piercing through the network of pipes that formed a thick ceiling overhead and jutting into the night sky. It was topped with an antenna. This was the truth behind the mirage he’d seen from the train— It was what, for a while after the War ended, people had called “the first radio tower.”