Chapter 91

Puckered skin as if all the cells had boiled, melted, and dried; gnarled and horribly crooked fingers. The armored man’s strange hand called up still-fresh memories of Christoph’s, and Harvey couldn’t help it: it hurt to look at them. The armored man had identified himself as the assistant of this radio tower’s late station chief, and although his hands looked clumsy, they were deftly gripping screwdrivers and tinkering with parts of the disassembled radio with an ease born of long practice. They were on the second floor of the steel tower in the center of the land ship’s deck—the radio tower’s station office. The room they were in was full of bulky mechanical equipment. Harvey guessed it was one of those “studio booths.” “If I use these parts, I can re-place the worn-out cir-cuit board. How-e-ver,” the assistant explained, raising his face from the radio, “I do not think that will hold a-ny mean-ing for you.” His words were polite and fluent, but they sounded almost flat, and his voice got thick and mechanical in spots. It made his speech as weird to listen to as Mane’s peculiar intonation, in a whole different way. The assistant’s professional conclusion was what Harvey’d more or less expected since learning that the partial amnesia came from a faulty circuit board. The Corporal’s spirit was completely dependent on that circuit board now—which meant that even though they could fix the radio itself by replacing it, it wouldn’t be able to form the Corporal’s character anymore. “Is there any other way?” “It’s al-so pos-si-ble to keep this cir-cuit board and patch on-ly the bad cir-cuits. But I be-lieve that will on-ly pro-vide tem-por-a-ry life sup-port. What-e-ver we do, this board will be dead be-fore long.” At the words “dead before long” Harvey thought he heard someone gasp outside the room, but that someone’s presence pulled away almost immediately, so Harvey kept his peace too, and let it be. The man’s toneless voice continued. “If I were to give my o-pin-ion…I think it would be best to leave it like this.” He sounded mechanical and emotionless, yet at the same time Harvey got the feeling he sensed something surprisingly human behind those words. The man probably had been a normal person, to begin with. Listening to him talk, Harvey had gradually figured out that the mechanical way of talking was due to some sort of artificial voice box in his throat. He couldn’t give a decision right there and then. “…Let me think for a little bit,” he sighed glumly. “That’s fine. Shall I put it back to-ge-ther for now?” “Please.” The assistant returned wordlessly to his task. Harvey peered out the doorway into the hall. There wasn’t any illumination in the corridor itself, and the soft glow spilling out of the room painted a dark gray rectangle of light on the floor. A black animal moved slowly within the dimness. His right eye looked once to Harvey, and then the fickle creature turned away as if to say he didn’t feel like listening to any heavy conversations, scrambled nimbly up the metal ladder on the wall, and disappeared. Right beside the door where Mane had just been, a slight girl was standing against the wall, looking down at the floor. “You understood him, didn’t you?” Harvey asked, but Kieli didn’t look up; she only held her body stiff, pushing her back into the wall hard enough to make Harvey wonder if she was trying to physically embed herself in it, and kept firmly silent. Although she at least hadn’t tried to run away again, ever since the incident (…the slap…) at the mouth of the valley, she hadn’t said a word to him and wouldn’t meet his eyes. They’d never finished that suspended conversation. So Harvey brought up a different conversation that he’d suspended in his own mind instead. “Kieli, I think it’s okay to leave the Corporal this way now.” Kieli’s shoulders shook, and she raised her face for the barest of instants to give him an accusing glare. But then she looked right back down again and continued to say nothing, so in the end Harvey just went on by himself. He’d been thinking about this ever since they’d been on the train. Knowing it would render this whole trip pointless made him keep freezing during the moments when he could have brought it up, though. He propped his elbow against the wall over Kieli’s head and leaned in, thinking hard and trying to remember what he’d been planning to say as he slowly began addressing himself to the back of Kieli’s hair. Probably he was partly trying to organize his own thoughts; to convince himself of them as much as he was trying to convince her. “Listen…back in the beginning, the goal of our trip was to take the Corporal to his grave, right? The one a walk down the Easterbury tracks, through the tunnel, at that place where you can see the winch tower at the mine. So I know a lot of time’s ended up going by, but…” Somewhere along the way his voice had gotten hoarse. Harvey was pretty sure he didn’t usually choose his words this carefully as he talked, but somehow his sentences kept getting drawn out like he was making excuses, though for what exactly, he couldn’t say. He swallowed, and tried again. “I think…it might be good for the three of us to go to Easterbury together again, and this time we can return the Corporal to his grave like he wanted.” He stopped talking there, and waited a little. Kieli stayed stubbornly silent, but Harvey’d gone into this intending to wait as long as it took to get some kind of response, so he settled himself into watch-and-wait mode. After a while like that, at last she grudgingly opened her mouth. “…The Corporal can’t go away,” she said, still glaring fixedly at the tips of her boots. And that was all. Harvey could tell he just wasn’t going to get through to her in this state, and the longer he went on the more he lost confidence that he was really all right with it himself, so in the end he gave up and didn’t say anything more. He wanted a smoke anyway, so he went out onto the deck by himself and took a little walk around the outside of the station office. “Brrr…” He knew it was the end of winter, but here in the ravine the air was bitingly cold. The strong wind groaned like a beast howling in the distance, whisking away his cigarette smoke almost too fast to see. They were making their way through the gorge at a relatively slow pace, but even so, out on the deck the noise of the fossil-fuel engine beat loudly at his eardrums, and the scrape of the wheels against the rocky ground sent vibrations right up through his legs. From here, the only visible sources of light were the round headlight at the ship’s prow that illuminated the rock walls along their path and the single moon shining indistinctly through the narrow scraps of sky above. The contours of the smokestack-like buildings making up the mobile radio station, the mass of piping overhead, and the rocky walls of the gorge on either side stood out faintly under their weak glow. Harvey had heard stories about a mobile radio station that had traveled to towns all around the planet for a little over twenty years after the end of the War, setting up the circuit boards of today’s guerrilla radio stations. That was the “first radio tower.” The guerrilla stations scattered around their planet today weren’t operating in concert as a single station; they were all just operated individually by interested volunteers, and had each built up their own individual histories. But legend had it that if you traced those histories back to their beginnings, you would find that all of them shared a common ancestor in the first radio tower. However, after twenty years of post-War operation, it had been all but destroyed in a Church crackdown. People said it had managed to escape, badly beaten up, but nobody had seen or heard of it since. To think that mobile radio station had been hiding in this gorge…“We weren’t actually hiding,” Mane had explained to him earlier. He said they’d been in a remote area even farther west than the northwest ruins before, but they were moving east little by little, and they’d been staying in this gorge for the past several years. That jibed with the time people in the town south of here said the mirage had started appearing; apparently the light refraction created by the crisscrossing rock ledges made the mirage of the ship appear in a different location than the ship itself, and that had been what started the town talking. When the radio tower came close to the gorge entrance, the mirage appeared and its own radio waves mingled with the local guerrilla station’s frequency. That must have been the sound the Corporal had momentarily picked up on the train, too. According to Mane, the only parts of this place that were in working order were the central steel tower with the antenna and the station office at its base; all the other structures, even the ones that looked intact, were more or less ruins on the inside by this point. Walking around the steel towers, Harvey could see the scars of a vicious attack. Made by Church Soldiers, and most likely ones with carbonization guns—the guns of the Undying Hunters. Maybe on paper their aim had been to crack down on the guerrilla radio stations, but their real goal must have been the fossil-fuel crystal on board. Mane said this mobile building with the smokestack-shaped towers so different from modern-day buildings at its core was built during the pre-War era. Which meant that while popular belief held that the only pre-War technology still in operation was that of the capital, the mechanical city, there were other specimens here that were still alive and kicking, if only barely. Apparently there was a power reactor with a pre-War fossil-fuel crystal directly below the station office, in what you’d call the lower deck if this were a sand ship. When Harvey directed his attention that way, he felt as though somewhere amid the engine noise filling the deck he could sense something ever so faintly resonating with the core inside him. He placed his hand on one of the steel tower’s supports as he looked up toward the top of it, and then abruptly lowered his eyes to focus on that hand. He glared bitterly at the thin fingers, the prominent joints, and cursed. …He couldn’t believe he’d raised a hand against Kieli, even if it had been a reflex. Why hadn’t he been able to say what he thought in words before it came to that? I don’t mind killing a person or two— Harvey thought she hadn’t really meant it—probably she was just being stubborn, and she’d blurted it out without fully digesting her own words first. He really believed that. But even so, had she always been so blind to the people around her? She’d always been pigheaded, but most of the time he’d been able to read what she was thinking, and yet now he couldn’t quite tell. It was as if an opaque wall had gone up between them or something. He squeezed his hand into a tight fist. Just as he was lifting it to punch the steel pole in front of him and vent some of his frustration, he heard a mocking laugh from somewhere above his head. “If you do anything too stupid, you’re going to break that hand, you know,” a boyish voice said, controlling its laughter. Harvey raised his face, fist still suspended in midair, to see the black beast’s shadow looking down at him from midway up the tower. He was curled up into a ball shape with his hind legs twined around the metal ladder, and grinning at him with that dog’s face that sometimes made eerily human expressions. From the moment Harvey’d first seen him, he’d sensed something kindred—he could vaguely tell that this beast had a “core” in the center of its torso. It wasn’t that he could clearly see it with his eyes, exactly; he guessed it was more like seeing a heat response with a thermoscope. The shape of the heat he could see wasn’t a perfect circle, though. It looked like a misshapen fragment. Harvey clicked his tongue irritably and brought his hand down, then brought it to his left side as he started to cough, doubling over a little. He could feel how wrongly his ribs stuck out even through his clothes. The hand pressing against them was more wasted away than before, too, and all the joints and blood vessels bulged unnaturally. The beast’s earlier words came back to him: This is his true form. He figured that was true enough. By rights, he’d have turned into a mummy or something long ago now, or else he’d have gone even past the decomposed body stage and be just a skeleton, like the woman in that mansion. Glaring sharply up the tower, Harvey changed the subject. “You got your core from an original Undying…isn’t that right?” “Yep. He was the station chief,” said Mane, and then added, “He’s dead now, though” in a voice that sounded almost disgusted, somehow. Dead. The beast had declared it so easily, but outside of some really seriously drastic circumstances, there was no such thing as “death” for a normal Undying. Which meant that Undying hadn’t been normal. The fact that Mane had a partial core meant the core left in the Undying’s heart had to have been partial too—so probably he hadn’t been able to rely on his ordinary imperviousness to death in that imperfect state. …Just like I can’t. “Say, if that girl happens to die before you do, will you give her your heart, too?” Mane suddenly asked, twitching the corners of his gaping mouth into an unpleasant smile. It was a question that didn’t even deserve an answer. When Harvey only raised an irritated eyebrow at him, Mane shrugged his shoulders in a way nothing like a four-legged animal, and withdrew it without fuss. “I’m joking.” Then he folded his ears, strangely canine in that gesture. Harvey still had questions to ask, but Mane didn’t seem keen on a long conversation. With one last grin that was really more ghoulish than human, he withdrew slowly into the shadows, disappearing behind the steel pole. His final whisper was swallowed up by the engine noise. “But she might be okay with that idea, you know…” Harvey went back inside the station office, and was just about to enter the booth on the second floor when he realized he could hear someone’s voice coming from the small room next to it. He’d thought she was asleep, so he was a little surprised. When he peeked around the doorway of the unlit room, he saw a camp bed set up in one corner. The black hair of the girl lying in it was escaping out the side of the blanket she’d pulled over her. “I first met you and Harvey when I was fourteen. I met you at Easterbury station—oh, I was wearing a boarding school uniform. I had an all-black uniform, and black shoes, and a shoulder bag, and a grouchy face. I pretty much looked just like one of those ‘apprentice witch’ girls…” Her voice was so soft you’d almost think she was mumbling in her sleep, but it looked as though she was talking to the radio by her pillow. She paid out each sentence slowly, dwelling lovingly on every word as if she were telling a favorite story. As Harvey listened, he felt as if he really might see that fourteen-year-old girl in front of him any moment. He remembered: an all-black uniform, and black shoes, and a shoulder bag, and a grouchy face—yeah, that’s exactly what she’d looked like when they met. Now that I think about it, I treated her really harshly back then, didn’t I? He grew uncomfortable remembering it, though he realized it was a little late for that now. “…and then you got mad at Becca for her prank, and you got all violent, and things were crazy.” “Who is this ‘Becca’?” “She was my good friend. She’s gone now…And then we got on a train, and went to all kinds of places. We even rode a ship on the Sand Ocean. I remember some sand got inside you, and you were complaining the whole time that it felt all rough.” “Mmm, it’s not coming back to me.” At the radio’s vague response, Kieli gave a short, slightly lonely sounding laugh. “Oh. Well, you and Harvey got in some big fights sometimes, too.” “What? I would never fight with the master!” “Ahaha. When you were your normal self, you and Harvey didn’t do anything but fight! Usually it was just you being angry, though.” “I just can’t believe that. Did I hate him, then?” “No, no. You were always chewing him out, but really you liked him a lot.” “Hey, don’t say that in the past tense,” the radio protested at once in a staticky voice. “Sorry, you’re right,” answered Kieli’s voice, giggling. “That’s right; you still do. You forgot about things, but you still like Harvey just like before. That’s one thing you never forgot, huh?…I’m glad. I’m really glad about that. Thank you…” Silence fell for a little while. The rustle of fabric sounded in the darkness and then went away again. Kieli’s voice started up again, muffled through the blankets she’d buried her face in. “Corporal, please remember…You’re fun the way you are now, too, but it just won’t do. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for saying this. But the way you are now won’t do. Please, please protect Harvey the way you did before…” Oh, crap. All at once it was just too much, and Harvey felt something about to snap. He drew back into the shadowy side of the doorway, out of sight. Then he slid down the wall to the ground and put his palm over his mouth to hold in his breath and his feelings both. He’d forced in more air than he could hold, and his lungs we burning. More importantly, his heart hurt…He wished he hadn’t eavesdropped. Come to think of it, her feelings had always been directed straight at him; that had never changed once since she was fourteen. He ought to be grateful, and he was, but even more than that, he felt heavy-hearted. Unless she took off her blinders and started to see the people around them more, too, he was pretty sure she was screwed. I can’t be the center of your world, Kieli; it just won’t do. I mean, if you stay like this, I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. I’ll never be able to leave you behind again. Once I’m gone, what are you going to do?! He sat there for a while, holding his head and not letting himself think anymore. He lifted his gaze a little when he heard metallic footsteps approaching. A man’s legs stood in front of him: misshapen metal plating stuck to puckered skin. “Are you all right?” “…Ah, yeah,” Harvey answered, nodding. He started to pick himself somewhat unsteadily up off the ground. The armored man held his arm and helped him stand. By then, he wasn’t hearing any murmurs from the other side of the doorway anymore. When he peeked inside, the blanket was moving up and down to the accompaniment of quiet, rhythmic breathing. He walked softly up to the bed, careful not to make any noise, and looked down at the sleeping face of the girl curled up in her blanket, which she’d pulled all the way up over her nose. Her forehead was wrinkled a little, as if she was frowning, and her cheeks were stiff. It wasn’t what anyone could call a placid face. Faint static bled from the radio at her pillow, and then Harvey heard a subdued voice. “Master.” “Mm?” It was getting to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to correct the stupid “Master” thing anymore, so he just let it slide. “Can I ask you to fix me? He can patch the bad circuits, right?” Harvey transferred his gaze from the girl to the radio, more than a little surprised. He hadn’t actually expected a request from the Corporal himself. He didn’t have real awareness of his amnesia, and Harvey’d gotten the impression that he didn’t have any particular interest in his own repair. He thought for a few seconds, but for now his opinion was still the same. “…I don’t like the idea.” The armored man, who’d been watching silently at the doorway, took over the explanation. “We would on-ly be ju-ry-rigg-ing them. You would not get much bet-ter. I be-lieve you will last long-er if we don’t inter-fere.” “I want to remember,” the radio interrupted him, raising his voice a bit for emphasis. Kieli stirred in her sleep, so he quickly quieted down, and the rest was low enough to almost get lost in the static. “…Listen. I don’t understand why this girl is tormenting herself so much about this. I listened to her talking just now, and frankly, I still didn’t really get it. So I can’t say anything to help—not ‘Don’t worry’ or ‘Cheer up’ or anything. I could’ve said those things before, right? I was more useful before, wasn’t I…?” The radio’s voice faded away into the static, and silence fell for a while. But when you came right down to it, if the man in question said to do it, Harvey had no reason to refuse him. “…Okay, then,” he agreed, sighing. Then he looked down at the floor and added a mumbled, “Thanks.” “The wind feels so nice…” Kieli murmured as soon as she went outside that morning, and then felt a little dismayed at herself. Apparently whatever was going on, a good night’s sleep made a person feel better, at least a little. Well, maybe “feel better” wasn’t quite it. It felt more like during the course of the night someone had cut off power to her head, and she was in a daze because her higher brain functions hadn’t started back up yet. I should take a little walk and get my brain in gear. When she left the radio tower with the station office and started walking around the deck, a four-legged black beast padded lightly after her, not too close and not too far away. Maybe he’s trying to be my guard, or something…? Kieli turned around a little without stopping, and asked flatly, “Did Harvey put you up to this?” “Yep,” agreed Mane, unruffled. She silently faced forward again. Mane followed her without saying anything either. A fresh morning wind blew through the gorge, dispelling the yellow-sand smog at the bottom. The mobile radio station was making its leisurely way through the spaces between the gradually winding rock walls. The deck was awash in sounds as she walked: the muffled sound of the engine, so much like a sand ship’s, and the sound of wheels scraping along rock, which on the other hand was definitely different from the noise made by a sand ship’s screw propellers. Maybe this whole radio station was one great grave. Kieli couldn’t quite say why, but that was the impression she got as she looked around her. Pale, sandy sunshine filtered down from narrow scraps of sky she could see through the web of pipes above her, faintly illuminating the crowd of buildings that looked like fat smokestacks. Now that she got a fresh look at the place in daylight, she could see that several of the smokestacks had been laid waste in an attack, and that even some of the ones that hadn’t were seriously damaged or bore marks that looked like bullet wounds. It must have been a livelier place once, with all of them operating noisily together, but now there was only the smoke rising out of a few exhaust pipes on the roof in the center, where the station office was. Kieli came through two smokestacks into a slightly more open area. Now the end of the deck was visible in front of her, and beyond that the ravine’s narrow, gently winding path stretching on and on, hemmed in by rock walls. A long tail of thick smoke from the exhaust pipes marked the way they’d come. It looked as though she’d come to what she’d call the “stern” if this were a sand ship. She had let her hair grow long; a strong gust of smog-filled wind sent it whipping in all directions. If she didn’t cut it again pretty soon, it would get as long as it had been before she cut it two years ago. I don’t think I want that. Maybe I should cut it… Come to think of it, hadn’t she thought that before, and then never gotten around to doing it in the end? When Kieli got it all back under control and raised her face again, she stopped walking and stood stupefied with one hand still holding her hair down. Someone was standing on the edge of the deck. It was a fairly elderly gentleman. He was pretty muscular, but he seemed like the gentle sort. Kieli was sure she couldn’t have seen him before, but somehow she still felt as if they’d met somewhere. Quite recently, in fact. And then all of a sudden the man, who had been standing at the stern watching the valley unroll behind them, turned his head. Kieli started, thinking he’d noticed her, when a casual voice behind her called “Hey!” and someone else came running right by her on his way to the man. The newcomer was a much younger man than the one at the stern. He was carrying a bulging cardboard box in both hands and tottering somewhat as he ran. A blackish dog of about medium size scurried after him. “Welcome back, Chief.” “Yeah, good to see you! Come on, just look at this. I made a great buy today!” In direct contrast to the old man, who welcomed him in exactly the calm tones Kieli’d expected, the youth bounded over shouting like a child, finally putting the box down in front of his elder, who watched with a wry smile while he crouched down right on the spot as if he couldn’t wait another second, and started rummaging among its contents. The man seemed quite a bit older, but from his deferential manner she deduced that the youth must be in the position with more authority here. Dozens of what looked like flat, square boards were crammed inside the cardboard box; the young man pulled out one after another and showed them off, explaining each one excitedly. “I got hold of some seriously great songs. Look, there’s this one, and this one, oh, and this one, too…I didn’t think there were any more copies left, but I guess it’s all about knowing where to look. Now, this one here is the last one by a band I really love. Heh, that old guy at the secondhand shop doesn’t have a clue what they’re worth, so I got them practically free! Man, what a good deal…” He chattered on in such high spirits that Kieli had to grin just watching him. “Chief, I can’t remember them all if you tell me all at once like that. I’ll learn them later while we listen to them one at a time,” the older man interjected, sounding a little put out, but smiling just like Kieli. Those were “records”…She recognized them; there was an old record player at the bar on the parish border, too. The bartender had only a few of them, so he didn’t use the player that often, though (evidently there’d been lots of them there in the previous bartender’s days, but since they were of restricted music, they’d been confiscated). “And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: this is today’s top find!” announced the youth dramatically, livening up the party enough for all three of them all by himself as he drew out the final record and thrust it proudly in front of the dog next to him, who’d been watching the whole affair curiously. Naturally, being a dog, the dog only looked confused. It was a mongrel; short-haired overall, but the fur around its neck was thick and stood stiffly out, and his face was long in kind of a goofy-looking way. The twin amber eyes set in its black face glanced about restlessly, trying to look at everything at once. Kieli was pretty sure the dog didn’t understand what was going on, but the youth insistently thrust the record jacket at him and demanded, “What do you think? Pretty great, huh?” as he stuck his other hand into the hair at its neck and started ruffling and scratching. Instead of showing interest in the record, the dog stretched its neck out as if to say “Pet me more!” “Aw, come on! You’re supposed to be happy about this! I’ve been looking everywhere for this, just so I could play it for you. It’s a really old song, from back before the pioneering era, even. It’s in here—you know, that lyric. Remember how I told you about it before? ‘In the lyrics of an old song’—” The image broke up with a poof and dissolved. The youth, the dog, and the man: all of them were gone, and so were any signs that they’d just been there at all. Instead, the tip of the deserted stern hosted a single pale, rectangular stone. A gravestone… Had that been a memory stitched into the air at this spot…? After Kieli had stood unmoving there for a while, her mind blank, she felt something fluffy tickle the back of her hand. Something warm and alive. A strange-looking, jet-black beast with a long coat of hair like a mane around his neck had come silently up to her and sat down at her side on its hind legs, like dogs were trained to do. “Mane, was that…your owner?” “Yeah, well. He’d lived all that time, but he was no better than a little kid. That assistant started out younger in the beginning, and before you knew it he’d passed right by him and turned into a proper old man, but he stayed a kid on the inside the whole time, never mind the outside,” railed Mane with a sniff of his black nose. Kieli wondered if all Undyings were like children, and then had to smile at the thought. “So, you really were a dog.” “So?! What the heck does it matter what animal I was before?” Apparently he really hated being treated as a dog (not that she hadn’t known that from the day they met). Mane turned his head away from her, miffed. The hind leg that had gotten shot in town was still swapped out for the thick new one with the talons that made Kieli think of a giant bird, and his tail was like a mountain lion’s. She had to admit he looked far different now than his original dog form had. “I ate all kinds of stuff and took it into my body, until after a while even I forgot what I started out looking like.” When he let his tongue loll out, Kieli realized it was more like a calf ’s than a dog’s: more cylindrical. And it was also dyed blood red. She turned her gaze back to the gravestone in front of her. Probably there wasn’t actually a body buried underneath it, since it was standing on a steel-plate-reinforced deck. This marker had been built even with no body to bury, just to record the fact that that person had been here, once. “…He was a fool,” his boyish voice murmured softly. “He would’ve been able to imagine what would happen if he put a core into someone else’s corpse if he’d thought about it for two seconds, but at the time he didn’t even try to think about it.” And then Mane told her a little bit about his past. About when they were traveling around the planet to tell people about restricted music and guerrilla radio stations, and about when they were attacked by Church Soldiers, and about when Mane and the assistant got hurt and died, and his Undying owner was hurt so badly his core cracked. Out of a fierce desire to save Mane and his assistant, Mane’s owner had planted fragments of his own broken core into their bodies, hoping it might help. It was only after trying it that it came home to him just what that would do, and he was thunderstruck. Mane thrashed and writhed at the anguish and the burning heat as if he’d swallowed molten lead. His owner, said Mane, had held him in his arms and kept him as still as he could, apologizing over and over. They went for days—probably many, many days—like that, until at some point Mane blinked awake to see a sea of blood and torn flesh all around him…and that he’d eaten half of his owner’s body. “…Did you resent him?” “No. I liked him.” It was a forthright, honest answer. “True, he did something he shouldn’t have done. But that didn’t matter to me. To me, the only miscalculation was…that he died before me.” After those last few words, Mane suddenly got cross and clammed up, maybe thinking he’d talked too much for too long. The two of them stood still before the gravestone, and neither spoke again for a while. Fresh morning wind ruffled through the hair at Mane’s neck, caressing the surface of the stone as it passed. A tear rolled down Kieli’s cheek. Mane gave a shocked yelp. One moment she was casting her gaze downward, and the next she’d plopped right down to the deck floor and buried her face in her knees. “What’s gotten into you?! Did I say something wrong?!” Mane asked in a panic, the tip of his nose as well as his animal breath tickling her ear as he tried to peer into her face. Kieli shook her head without lifting it. “I-I wanted to hang in there and do my best, and I tried, but nothing turned out right, and it kind of seems like I just made it worse, and we’re always just missing or not understanding each other, and…why won’t it go right…?” Her own teary voice sounded muffled to her between her knees. “It’s— it’s like the harder and harder I try to, to protect what I care about, the more something keeps going wrong…but, I know I’d regret it if I didn’t do anything! I just, don’t know what to do anymore…” “Hey—no, I don’t want you crying on me. Hold on, I’ll go get your owner.” She sensed Mane turn around, about to leave, so she instinctively reached out a hand and grabbed his tail, making him shriek. “Not the tail! Not the tail!” He wagged it violently, shaking Kieli’s hand off, but after circling around her a few times looking reluctantly resigned, he sat down in front of her, presenting her with his back. “Here,” he said gruffly. With a choked wail, Kieli pressed her face into the fur of his back to silence her sobs. The black hair there was stiff and wiry at the tip, but once she buried herself deeper into it, it was surprisingly nice and soft near the root. When she wrapped her hands around his neck and clung to him, beneath the lion’s-mane-like fur at his chest she could faintly feel the pulse of his stone-fragment heart. “ was,” began the station assistant with a word whose pronunciation Harvey couldn’t make out. Then he stopped for a moment, appearing to think before trying again. “…That’s right, you call him ‘Mane.’ Then I will call him that, too. I think I un-der-stand now why Mane was in-te-res-ted in you.” “……?” “You must re-mind him of the sta-tion chief.” “Oh, really…” From the way he said it, Harvey didn’t think he was being complimented. “I wouldn’t try putting pieces of my own heart in corpses to see what happened,” he argued, scowling, but the assistant just kept on tinkering at various parts with a soldering iron, his eyes cast downward to look at his work, and Harvey couldn’t tell what expression was hidden behind his rusty metal plating. He seemed to be making spare parts for the radio by hand. You must remind him—Harvey figured he’d probably phrased it as a conjecture because he had only hazy memories of the time before his death. Mane, on the other hand, had gained wisdom in the decades since he’d become immortal, transforming into something between monster and man, and supposedly he now had more precise, systematic understanding of his life before death than he’d had when he was just a dog living it. They were in the studio booth again. Pale morning sunlight streamed in through the large window taking up most of one wall. There was a space on the other side of the window that looked as if it had once been another room, but its walls and ceiling had caved in, and it was completely exposed to the elements. Harvey surmised that it had been what they called the “mixing suite,” and that all the equipment here in the booth had originally been over there, but was moved to this side after the collapse. The second floor of the two-story station office held the studio facilities and enough living space to house two or three people. The first floor contained the pilothouse, and down in the hull, functionally the “basement,” lived the power reactor and engine, which together were the heart of this mobile radio station. Harvey found himself once again subtly impressed with the accuracy of his gut. His decision to come looking for this place had been right on the mark. From the assistant’s examination so far, the Corporal’s radio was apparently even older than they’d thought; if they’d gone to the northwestern mining district as planned, most likely there wouldn’t have been anyone there with the necessary parts and technology to repair it. After the assistant had watched Harvey gaze at the giant sound board covered in countless dials and knobs with an air of great interest, fiddling with the knobs when it struck his fancy, he warned mildly, “I don’t mind you touch-ing that, but please don’t break it.” Harvey withdrew his hand, not feeling confident that he knew where the borderline between “touching” and “breaking” was. “A-bout that arm of yours…” said the assistant’s flat voice as he continued to repair the radio at his worktable. He looked down at the hand he’d just withdrawn. When he turned it palm-downward and fisted it lightly, the bones and veins stood out so sharply it was grotesque. The cause of it all pretty well had to be the ring that woman back at the mansion had had, the one with the fossil-fuel shard—the same moment the stone had broken, there’d been a wave of extraordinary decay that swallowed up all kinds of things in its path. “The crys-tal used to make that ring was quite old, wa-sn’t it? I don’t know how many gen-e-ra-tions the fam-i-ly had it for, but if no-thing else, it was made be-fore the War. I had thought there were none ex-tant out-side this ra-di-o to-wer a-ny-more, but…” According to the legacy of knowledge left behind in this radio tower, the fossil-fuel crystals of the advanced pre-War civilization were of even higher purity than the Undying “cores” manufactured during the War itself, and were spiritual-material objects that wielded enormous influence over things of spirit nature. As time went on, that power, sleeping in the planet’s mineral veins, was drained away. Now, eighty years after the War, the mineral dregs that could still be mined had hardly any power left in them. The pre-War crystals, though, had had enough power even to give the dead the appearance of their transient mortal lives. Hearing that, Harvey could finally see how that woman had been able to maintain her living form even after becoming a corpse. And why she’d started turning back into her true corpse form the moment the ring broke, too. “You must have been caught up in the ‘re-bound’ when the cry-stal broke. It seems you es-caped a fa-tal wound be-cause the cry-stal was ve-ry small, but if you had been un-lu-cky, you might not be a-ble to main-tain that bo-dy now…I am ve-ry glad it did not come to that.” As the assistant explained it, the crystals weren’t particularly destructive, and their power didn’t have any effect on normal humans. However, he said, “To you and me, they can be deadly.” Power working in the opposite direction of that power to keep the dead in their living form: power to restore the normal, rightful flow of time to the departed. Normal time, eh? Harvey picked up the pair of clunky headphones hanging off the end of the soundboard and casually toyed with them. After a few moments, the assistant, who had been focused on repairing the radio during their whole conversation so far, abruptly stilled his hands and looked directly at him. As always, his expression was hidden behind the metal plating, and Harvey couldn’t read it. “I see your ‘cry-stal’ is in the same state as our sta-tion chief ’s. I think you are al-rea-dy a-ware of this, but your crystal is ra-pid-ly nea-ring the end of its life span. I do not know how ma-ny more years it will last. It might be that if you were to live a qui-et life, it would last a-round the length of a human life span, but…” He took a breath, and something in his tone turned reproving. “You do not seem to be lea-ding the life-style of some-one who will live long.” “……” Harvey couldn’t find anything to say in his defense. He looked away and started messing around to evade the issue, putting on and taking off the headphones; when he risked a glance back, the assistant had already lowered his eyes to his table and resumed his work. He heard just one last murmur: “…Please take bet-ter care of your-self.” Harvey got the feeling that it was directed more toward the man’s old boss than toward him. When he climbed the fixed access ladder that began in the station office attic and made his way up the steel tower, he came to a place about halfway up that served as a simple observation deck, boxed in by handrails. The wind was pretty strong, and he hadn’t particularly been aiming to go all the way up to the top, so his motivation promptly evaporated, and he decided to take a break there. After lighting a cigarette with his back to the wind, he turned around again to sweep his gaze over the view beyond the rails. The towering rock wall on either side flowed lazily away behind them, as did the smog spouting from the exhaust pipes on the station office roof, and the smoke of his cigarette, too. Harvey might be only halfway up, but the steel tower was still a fair bit taller than the other smokestacks, so from his vantage point the smokestacks around him and the deck below still looked small. Sometime after he’d been leaning against the railing gazing at the view for a while… …Slam. One leg rose spasmodically and kicked hard at one of the railing’s supports. The impact set the whole observation deck shaking; the sound and the vibrations might even have made their way to the station office below, but Kieli was outside right now, so there was no need to be careful. Harvey moved to kick it again, but the first one already had his leg hurting, so he changed his mind. “It’s a little late to say that now…” he grumbled to himself, slumping his body so heavily over the railing that anyone watching might half-think he was trying to throw himself over it. It might be that if you were to live a qui-et life, it would last a-round the length of a hu-man life span… A human life span? It wasn’t as if he’d been wishing to die peacefully of old age like a normal person, and he didn’t think he had the right to, either. The next time he went to the capital, he’d go prepared never to come back—nothing anybody said could change his mind on that now…But what that meant was, he’d be deliberately discarding the option of living and dying like a normal person—the possibility that he might be able to walk through life with Kieli, in the same time as Kieli. If Kieli ever found that out…could he persuade her to accept it? I can’t tell her… He would go to the capital. That said, he couldn’t very well leave Kieli in her current condition, either. This was his fault. He’d pushed their situation to this weird breaking point because he’d been wavering back and forth, unable to make any real decisions about the future. What is this?! I couldn’t die back when I would’ve been glad to die anywhere, anytime, but now that dying would take hardly any effort, suddenly I can’t afford to yet? What the hell am I supposed to do? He was starting to feel like throwing up again, and not only because of the strange discomfort in his guts. …No good. I’d better stop. If he thought any more right now, something would snap. He’d actually started thinking that it might be easier if he just threw himself over the railing for real, which was even more worrisome, so he took a big breath, sucked the tobacco smoke into his brain, and forced all the thought to empty out of it. …dum… Out of nowhere, a faint sound entered his empty mind. Or maybe he’d been hearing it all along, and it just hadn’t consciously registered. …dum dum…dum. Thick static made it hard to pick out the tune, but the wind stroking the back of his head carried an easy melody. When he slowly lifted his hanging head and turned around, a speaker fixed to a support beam above his head was playing music at low volume. Medium-tempo, bass-heavy strains filled the air on deck as they left the dry sounds of string instruments behind them in the wind at the bottom of the gorge. At the bottom of the deep gorge, with the exit a long way off and the entrance already invisible in the distance even if they’d wanted to go back, the radio station slowly moved along, a tail of ash-gray smoke and the tones of stringed instruments stretching out behind it. Unable to see what lay ahead or behind, they still went on…moving toward some sort of conclusion, whether they liked it or not. Hearing music start up from somewhere, Kieli lifted her face from where she’d buried it in Mane’s back. She’d never heard it before, but the tune felt comfortable and calming in her ears. Mane’s ears perked up and he turned them toward the source of the sound, seeming happy, making her realize it was probably the “Mane song.” Kieli shut her eyes softly and listened too. If anything, it was a stumbling melody that didn’t really flow that well, like the guitarist was having trouble with his strings here and there. The low key should’ve given it a feeling of solidity, but for some reason it felt fragile and fleeting instead, somehow. It definitely wasn’t a pretty melody, but somehow it was deeply touching. “It’s a nice song,” Kieli murmured as she listened, and Mane answered, “I like to think so,” sticking up his nose as proudly as if he’d written it himself. Where the thin beams of sunlight hit the black hair around his neck they set it gleaming golden brown, just like a real mountain lion’s mane. A mangy animal planting its four painfully thin legs firmly on the peak of a rugged wilderness mountain, letting the wind blow through its dirty, tangled mane. Mangy and thin and dirty, and yet its sharp amber eyes at least never lost their vitality; they stared hard at the ground below, searching for prey. That was Kieli’s mental image of the mountain lion, king of this planet’s beasts. Kieli looked upwind at the steel tower that stood above everything around it, where the music seemed to be coming from, and saw someone perched about halfway up. He was facing in the opposite direction of the stern, letting his gaze roam toward the gorge’s exit, which must lie far, far ahead yet. Depending on how you looked at it, that copper-colored hair ruffled by the wind looked every bit as much like a mountain lion’s as Mane’s did. What was he fixing his eyes on, and what was he thinking? From here, Kieli couldn’t read his expression—but she thought that probably wasn’t just because of the physical distance. She got the feeling that maybe even when they were both looking in the same direction, those coppery eyes had always been fixed on a different final destination than the one she wished for.