Chapter 92

Kieli soaked a piece of ship’s biscuit in reconstituted dry milk and then put a slice of smoked meat on it. Something seemed missing. After a little thought, she tried topping it with canned chickpeas. Yep, that’s a pretty balanced meal, and it looks pretty good too. Nodding to herself in satisfaction at her workmanship, Kieli set the tin plate in front of Mane. But he snubbed her, looking miffed. “I told you not to treat me like a dog!” “But you are one, aren’t you?” “I’m not a dog.” Apparently he had no intention of acknowledging it. “And I won’t die even if I don’t eat anything anyway. Your owner’s the same, isn’t he?” “But I made it for you…” Kieli muttered dejectedly as she started mechanically eating her own helping, all alone. She tore herself alternating pieces of ship’s biscuit and smoked meat and crammed them into her mouth, stopping periodically to take a bite of the chickpeas with a spoon. The biscuit and bread were part of the standard gear she kept in her bag; she’d found the chickpeas sitting forgotten on a shelf in the station office’s kitchen. While they’d been staying on the parish border, the bartender and Yana had been there, so there’d been comparatively regular mealtimes every day. But once off on a journey, if Kieli didn’t remember to secure her own food and her own time to eat it, she sometimes accidentally skipped meals. After all, the thought of “eating” just never even occurred to other members of her travel party. There was no one she could have a proper conversation with about the meals themselves, so things like variation and visual appeal fell completely by the wayside, and she ended up simply trying to ingest enough fuel for the day and calling that success. After a while of letting her hands automatically go through the motions of pouring nutrients into her digestive system, Kieli realized that somewhere along the way Mane had come up beside her and started eating the food she’d laid out for him. When she darted a glance at him, he only shot her a grumpy sidelong look without raising his nose from his plate and continued messily eating. Kieli faced forward again too, and went back to the business of chewing her biscuit. It seemed more flavorful now than before. Music wafted to them from the radio tower overhead, along with familiar static. It was a different song from this morning’s, but it was equally bass heavy, and it made her feel nostalgic for some reason, even though she’d never heard it before. Kieli was currently having a slightly late lunch on the doorstep of the station office, with pleasant tunes for background music. I wonder if the expiration date on these chickpeas is okay. Well, either way I’m already eating them. These vague thoughts were interrupted when she saw a lanky redhead walking toward her from beyond the smokestacks on deck. He’d left on a walk this morning just as she was getting back to the station office. As she watched him with her spoon still in her mouth, he noticed her, too, and gave her a What are you eating on the steps for? sort of look. Kieli groped for words for a while, eventually settling on, “Want some?” Since she still had the spoon in her mouth, it came out more like “Ahnt umm?” Harvey seemed to get the message, though. Still, he gave her only the barest possible response (“Mm? Nah.”). Then he passed by her at about three steps’ distance and walked into the station office. With his nose in his milk, Mane twitched his ears, but didn’t say anything. Kieli watched Harvey’s tall form melt into the dimness indoors with her head cocked to one side. After a little while, though, she faced forward again and resumed her meal. However, the hand transporting food to her mouth got gradually slower and slower, and eventually it stopped altogether. She hadn’t been able to talk right since that stunted conversation last night. I forget, why are things so strained between us again? I said selfish stuff about repairing the radio and Harvey slapped me… She put her hand to the cheek he’d slapped. It didn’t hurt, particularly. Actually, Harvey was the one who looked as though he’d been smacked hard then…huh? As she thought about it, Kieli realized her own thoughts had gone screwy somewhere. The radio wasn’t what had gotten her slapped. Harvey had begged Kieli. Said “please,” looking as if he was hurting really badly. That’s right, I did something I shouldn’t have. When she tried to think more about it, her brain froze up. It was as if a piece in the core of her mind was burnt over. That one little section was smoldering; too hot for her to touch. What is that? I forget, what’s behind here? She heard the sound of a pile of rubble crumbling somewhere on the deck. Maybe a wall caved in or something? When Kieli scanned the area to check, she thought she saw something black in the shadow of one of the smokestacks for a moment, but it had vanished from her vision in no time, so she couldn’t be sure. Was that just my imagination…? While her attention was focused on the deck ahead of her, out of the blue a muffled explosion sounded in the opposite direction, from behind her, and the entire ship suddenly lost speed. “Wah!” Inertia sent her pitching forward as she turned to look. A different sort of smoke, black rather than the usual light gray, rose from the exhaust pipes on the station office roof. “What—Mane!” Mane had pulled his nose out of his food to turn and look, too—and then immediately tore off running into the station office. Kieli hastily stood up and followed him. The living area and studio were on the second floor, but Mane passed right by the steps leading up without stopping, and scrambled down the work stairs that ran from the first-floor pilothouse down to the lower deck instead. She’d heard the power room was below the station office. As she got farther down the steep stairs, clinging to the railing all the way, the air grew hotter and thicker with the smell of fossil fuels, and a clanging machine noise got steadily, maddeningly louder, until she could feel it right down to the core of her body. Eventually she saw a thick steel door at the bottom, slightly ajar. The tip of Mane’s tail slipped around the edge and disappeared. As soon as she reached the bottom and peered inside after Mane, a scorching heat and bright amber light assaulted her eyes. Her impression of the room was that some sort of cylindrical coal-burning stove monster that stretched up all the way up to the ceiling was enshrined there, in the center of a round clearing in a forest of differently sized piping. That must be the power reactor. A big man covered in misshapen armor stooped over the controls, adjusting various valves, and Harvey was standing there looking on interestedly. It appeared as though the reactor had malfunctioned somehow, but also that it was back to working again, at least for now; amber light burned behind a glass window there. Shy of going up to them, Kieli called out uneasily from behind. “What’s wrong…?” “This re-ac-tor is near the end of its life span, too…We’ll stop for a while and give it a break,” the assistant explained, turning toward her, and then waved her back outside. “Go on,” agreed Harvey, gaze still lingering for a time on the power reactor. So Kieli turned back toward the stairs. At which point a dry crack sounded over Harvey’s shoulder as he was finally taking a step away, and there was a momentary blinding burst of light inside the reactor. “Get away!” Mane yelled sharply all of a sudden. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he was leaping forward. Before Mane could get to Harvey, the station assistant was already there in one running step, launching himself in between Harvey and the reactor and shielding his back. At that same instant, a tiny crack appeared in one section of the reactor and a single beam of amber light spilled out. He heard a heavy skrunching sound, like scrap metal being crushed in a compressor. In fact, it was literally the sound of the metal plating that covered the station assistant’s back being crushed, and it came from right above Harvey’s head. For a split second he felt all his strength leave him, and he thought he might thump down to the ground, but at the sound of a girl’s half-screamed cry of “Harvey…!” he pulled himself together and checked himself before he could fall. When he looked over to the power room’s entrance, Kieli herself had plopped to the ground, white as a sheet. She was shaking hard. “…Hey, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Mane, go to Kieli,” Harvey said in a somewhat hoarse voice, and Mane, who’d been a beat behind the station assistant in leaping to him, went back to Kieli’s side. He looked up at the massive figure of the assistant standing in front of him. The armoring on his back had been crushed out of shape at the sudden radical pressure, and it was corroded and covered with thick rust, as if it had leaped decades forward in time in the space of a single second. The same phenomenon that had happened when the ring broke—a fragment of fossil resource must have exploded inside the reactor. Whatever it was, if the assistant hadn’t shielded him, that same level of decay would have hit him full-on. “This is no pro-blem. It’s on-ly my ar-mo-ring. There is nothing wrong with my bo-dy.” The man informed Harvey of his safety in the same mechanical tone as always, and the brittle tension in the room finally eased a little. “The cry-stal is be-gin-ning to break down. We should not stay here too long. The ra-di-o will be fixed to-day, so to-mor-row we will take you to the town across the gorge.” “Right…” Harvey nodded, wiping a light sheen of sweat from his forehead that hadn’t come from the heat. Then he turned to face Kieli in the doorway. She was still sitting on the floor. Mane sat close beside her, and she gripped the fur on his back hard enough to rip it out. “I’m fine. Can you stand?” He walked over to her, intending to help her up. “I’m fine, I was just a little surprised, just surprised,” Kieli babbled quickly, holding on to Mane and struggling to her feet without him. “I’ll be upstairs.” Then she turned on her heel and fled up the steps. Although Harvey hadn’t explicitly asked him to, Mane resignedly followed her. The creaking of feet on the work stairs receded into the distance overhead. Harvey thought about going after them, but he thought with a sigh that he probably wouldn’t be able to say anything helpful anyway. So he watched her go, and stayed behind in the power room with the assistant. If the same thing happened again they’d be in serious trouble, so it was probably best not to hang out here too long, but something was nagging him. He turned back to the reactor one more time. He’d been told that this mobile radio station was powered by crystallized fossil resources from the previous civilization, just like the one in that ring, so it did make sense to him in a general way: that decay just now must’ve been triggered by a crystal inside the reactor breaking down. Which was fine as far as it went, but why did the crystal suddenly break in the first place? Somewhere in the back of his mind it had bothered him how surprisingly easily that ring had broken, too, though he’d begun to forget about it. I thought “cores” and other high-purity fossil crystals were harder to break than that… He put his vaguely formed hypothesis to the assistant. “Does a crystal’s strength…have a natural life span?” The other man nodded as he continued the work of patching the crack. “Yes, it does. It’s ex-treme-ly long; com-pared to a hu-man life, e-nough time to call e-ter-nal, but I i-ma-gine that in terms of ge-o-lo-gi-cal time, it’s not ve-ry long at all. It seems the old pre-War ones are gra-du-ally nea-ring the end of their lives and be-co-ming fra-gile.” “Is that right…?” This new information surprised Harvey, but he found himself accepting it remarkably easily. So, even the cores everyone said were permanent power sources met their end at some point. Since his core was already starting to break down anyway, it didn’t make much difference in his case, frankly— but either way, some sort of end really had been there for him all this time. Huh… He knew it was weird to feel this way, but somehow, he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. So there’s nothing really eternal on this planet after all. Gazing at the whole thing from a distance, she thought again that this ship really did seem like one big grave. The tallest part, the steel tower in the center, was the gravestone, and the shorter smokestacks around it, along with all their pipes, were flowers placed there in memory. Stained by the copper color of the evening sky, the crude, rusty flowers quietly standing by their gravestone were pretty, Kieli thought. They’d decided to give the engine a break until nightfall, so the radio station was currently parked in the middle of the gorge. A rock ledge stuck out of one wall at just the right level, so Kieli had jumped over from the deck and climbed a little way up to sit there and look at the view. She was at about the same height as the steel tower’s observation deck. A black beast was lying on a rock a level lower than hers, standing by. Harvey had told him to stick with Kieli, so he was following that order until it was rescinded. Even if the man himself—dog himself?—denied it, he was definitely like a dog in that respect (and a faithful dog, at that). He was keeping watch over her out of the corner of his eye without getting up. When Kieli met his gaze, he gave a pointed, transparently fake yawn. His mouth gaped open all the way to his ears, revealing the green gums, teeth gleaming with viscous drool, and a fat tongue like a calf ’s…He had a dog’s face if he just kept his mouth shut, though. Kieli shifted position, lifting her legs from where they dangled over the end of the ledge and hugging her knees to her chest tightly to make herself as small as possible. Hours had passed, and yet the core of her body was still shaking. I’m glad nothing serious happened, but that scared me…I can’t stand for any more bad things to happen. I don’t want anything else to happen. For just a moment, she saw something dart across her peripheral vision, and she lifted her head. Hmm? Kieli looked in the direction she thought she’d seen it, far behind the stern of the radio station, in the shadow of the rock wall— but nothing in particular struck her eye on the floor of the gorge that was fading from the color of sunset into the slate gray of night. She’d thought she saw a funny shadow earlier in the day, too. Was she getting jumpy? As Kieli tried to drive the discomfort out of her mind, Mane’s ears perked up where he lay, and he gave a low growl. He was staring in the same direction Kieli’d just been worrying about. A little later, Kieli’s own ears caught a faint outof-place sound. The sound of tires on rock, the sound of engines— Kieli stood up with a start. Her eyes caught up to her ears, picking out a vehicle in the shadow of the gently winding gorge. Was it a truck? It was still a pretty long way off, but the radio station wasn’t moving; at this rate the truck would make contact with them before long. “Mane, tell the others!” Mane didn’t need her to tell him; he was already running down to the station house so fast he was practically flying. Kieli herself climbed down from her high perch a little at a time with her whole body in contact with the rock wall, darting frequent looks at the ravine behind the station. She could see now that three vehicles were approaching. They were armored trucks painted black to blend into the darkness— Church Security Forces trucks. She caught sight of Harvey running out of the station house hardly a breath after Mane dashed inside. After peering behind them and getting a visual on the trucks, he ran up to Kieli as she neared the ship. The engine let out a roar as it came back to life, along with vibrations that shook the very air in the gorge. Puffs of ashen smoke rose up from the exhaust pipe. Before Kieli could get all the way down the rock face, the deck slowly started pulling away in the opposite direction from the trucks. “Kieli, hurry up! Jump down!” Harvey ordered from below. Kieli was still fairly high up, but she summoned her courage and jumped. Harvey caught her to his body just as she was afraid the steadily accelerating ship would glide right past her. By that time the radio station had taken off at a fast clip, billowing smoke. When she looked behind her, clinging to Harvey’s arm, she could tell that the trucks had sped up, too. They were clearly following them. “Get inside, both of you!” called a boyish voice from overhead. Mane’s black form was standing on the observation deck. The sun had set, and he was steadily melting invisibly into the darkening sky. Urged on by Harvey, Kieli staggered across the wildly rocking deck into the station office. They entered the pilothouse on the first floor to find the station assistant’s armored body darting busily between the joystick and the various control levers, alternately steering the vessel and glaring at the gauges covering one wall. “Can you shake them off?” “It’s not pos-si-ble. If we in-crease our speed any fur-ther, the po-wer re-act-or won’t with-stand it. They are fa-ster than we are. We’ll be o-ver-ta-ken in nine-ty se-conds,” the assistant replied calmly, still glaring at the gauges. “Freeze!” All of them turned around at the order echoing outside behind them. It didn’t do them much good, though, since there was no rear window in the pilothouse. The monitors all appeared to be broken, too, so they couldn’t see what was going on to the station’s rear from here. Further orders thundered through a megaphone at them. “Stop! We have some questions for you! If you don’t halt your craft, we’ll deem you a suspicious converted vessel and attack!” “Questions?” Harvey muttered dubiously. He and the station assistant exchanged glances, seemingly having a silent conference, and then he said, “Let’s stop. We don’t know that they’ll automatically attack us.” “All right,” the assistant agreed, and tinkered with a few valves and control boards, finally pulling down one big square lever with both hands. The entire body of the ship rocked violently up and down. “Please hold on to some-thing.” Kieli did as she was told, clinging fast to the doorjamb of the pilothouse and clenching her teeth against the jolts as they bounced along the rocky ground so that she wouldn’t accidentally bite her tongue. They gradually slowed down until after one last giant rock back and forth, Kieli could feel the ship come to a stop. The vibration and thundering roar that had ruled all of her senses died down, and everything around them fell horribly quiet. Still, she stood frozen with her legs braced for impact a little while longer before she sensed an animal walk up beside her on silent paws. Mane was back from his expedition up the tower. “We’re surrounded. I spotted three Capital Security Forces armored trucks. One of them’s circled around in front of us.” “The capital sent their own people…? Are you sure it’s not soldiers from town coming after us?” “They’re not from town. But hey, either way, all I have to do is eat them,” Mane said, sticking out his slimy tongue pointedly. “I want everyone on board to come out. I’ll wait sixty seconds.” The voice over the loudspeaker was coming from a lot closer now. Everyone in the pilothouse exchanged rapid glances. They might have said “everyone,” but the station assistant and Mane couldn’t very well show themselves; their appearances were too bizarre. That inevitably limited their options. “I’ll go out alone for now.” “What?! I’ll come too!” Kieli hastily asserted. She’d taken it for granted that she’d be one of the ones going out. But Harvey immediately dismissed this, with a face that said he took it for granted that he’d be going alone, and that his mind was made up on that point. “You wait here. I’m just going to find out what they want. I’ll be right back.” “But, if you’re all alone…” “Wait here,” Harvey repeated in a tone that brooked no argument, and Kieli reluctantly backed down, unable to say anything back to him. They relocated to the studio booth on the second floor, where the station assistant concealed his large form in the shadow of the glass window looking out over the stern to keep watch over whatever unfolded. Kieli hid behind the pipes sticking out of the assistant’s back and peeked out at the deck along with him. In the white light of the armored trucks’ search beams, the forest of smokestacks on the deck cast eerily crisp shadows. She saw Harvey’s back leaving the station house and walking calmly over toward the stern just about sixty seconds on the dot after the order over the loudspeaker. There were footholds on the side of the ship; around a dozen armored soldiers climbed up them onto the deck. A man who wore a greatcoat over his clerical robes and looked to be a commissioned officer brought up the rear. He came up to face Harvey, who’d stopped halfway across the deck, leaving a little distance between them. He seemed to start up a conversation about something, but he wasn’t speaking over the loudspeaker this time, so their voices didn’t carry all the way to them. “I wonder what they’re talking about…” “I do not know. Mane may hear it from where he is, howe-ver.” Kieli might be reading too much into it, but she thought his flat voice betrayed a hint of restlessness. Mane ought to have climbed back up the steel tower by now to keep an eye on how things went. Since Kieli and the assistant didn’t know how matters were progressing, minutes crawled by when all they could do was fret. Not much time could have passed, but she felt as if they’d been waiting a hundred times longer than anything a clock could have told them. As it was starting to be too much to bear without losing her head, a reflection appeared on the metal plating of the assistant’s back right next to where her hand touched it. Kieli whirled around, startled, and for just a moment she caught sight of the tail end of a shadowy form crossing in front of the studio doorway. Mane…? Maybe he was back from the tower. The assistant was still focusing intently on the scene outside. Kieli moved away from his back to peek out through the doorway into the corridor. All she saw was a deserted hallway lying there enveloped in coarse, grainy darkness. Mane was nowhere in sight. “Mane…where are you…?” When she took a step forward, looking left and right, she heard a voice behind her back—no, at the nape of her neck. Right behind her head, a toneless voice lapping up her neck like a lukewarm breeze. Found you. “!” Kieli instinctively leapt away, immediately tripping and falling forward, landing hard on her knees. When she turned her neck and looked up at the place where her head had just been, a giant sort of jet-black shadow was hugging the ceiling and dangling its neck upside down at her. The head attached to the end of its long neck gaped in a crescent-moon grin, giving her a glimpse of the inside of its bloodred mouth. Everything above that mouth…was nothing but the darkness of the hallway behind it. There was no nose, no eyes, nothing. Viscous liquid dripped from the severed plane of its half-sphere head where the top half had been. The scream almost ripped Kieli’s throat out in its rush to escape her mouth. After that brief cry, she cut off the scream and took off running down the hallway, still practically on all fours. That’s what I sensed this afternoon, too. I thought I was imagining things, but something really was there. What is it? What is that?! The black presence followed her, crawling along the ceiling like a spider. She half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs. By the time she realized that she would’ve been better off running outside from the first floor, she’d already run all the way down to the power room below deck in her blind panic, dived inside, and slammed her whole body against the thick steel door to close it. She seized an iron pipe lying nearby and thrust it through the inside door handle to bar it shut, and walked backward into the room with her eyes fixed on the door. Her throat had gone all funny and she found herself panting raggedly—but it was because of the scream, not the running, she was sure. She stopped with the power reactor at her back and watched the doorway in the glow of its feebly burning amber light for a while, but there was no sign of anything strange happening. Kieli exhaled slowly a few times until she got her breathing under control, and let the tension in her shoulders go. I wonder if anyone noticed my scream… The tension left the rest of her body along with her shoulders, though, and she went limp; she was afraid she was about to crumple to the ground when she heard a noise on the other side of the door. Her body went stiff again for a moment, but it was a sound like something metal dragging along the floor, so she thought maybe the station assistant had come for her. A little relieved, Kieli lifted her gaze—and her heart instantly froze solid in her chest. From a gap between the steel door and the wall that was so small she could hardly think of it as a “gap” at all seeped a formless black noise that crawled along the wall. The noise grew like thick liquid waste forming a puddle little by little, encroaching on the wall and the door, and eventually it gathered itself together to form a bizarrely long human arm. The hand groped around until it found and grasped the pipe she’d been using to bar the door, and bent it out of shape as effortlessly as if it were a stick of taffy, and dropped it to the floor. The door handle worked all by itself and the door was pushed open, and the spreading darkness beyond seemed to give birth to another darkness that split away from it, and then the black shadow assumed its human shape again and plodded sluggishly into the room. What the barely flickering amber light in the power reactor window revealed was a bizarre form, its entire body covered with scrap metal and rubble from the radio tower assembled into crude armor so that it looked something like the station assistant—but with a decisive difference: underneath this armor there was no body. In the gaps between the metal plating, static the color of darkness swirled. And no, it definitely didn’t have a head. Everything from the nose up looked to have been bitten off, it was so cruelly crushed in, and particles of noise swarmed like maggots on the surface of the cut. Found you… …said the crescent-twisted bright red mouth again. “Ah…ah, ahh…” Kieli’s couldn’t move a single step; she stared wide-eyed at the sight of it, gasping meaninglessly. Her jaws wouldn’t fit together right to form words. A ghost with its head crushed in—the image of a man in that same state clawed its way up out of that burnt-over place in the depths of her memory and made a bitter accusation. You’re the one who said it. With a shrill metallic scrape that gave Kieli goose bumps, the ghost came toward her. She couldn’t move. Screech…screech…screech. Metal plating rubbed against the floor with each step. “Kieli!” cried a voice out of nowhere at the same time that a black beast launched himself toward the armor, rounding his back and tackling it in midair. The rubble and scrap metal that had shaped itself into a suit of armor came apart and scattered pieces of junk all over the floor. However, the once-dispersed noise quickly gathered itself back together again into a crawling human shape and sucked in the junk around it, beginning to rebuild its armor. Mane had alighted in front of Kieli; as he assumed an attack stance, ready to go for the armor again, he swung his tail and thwapped Kieli’s legs with it, shooing her away. “What are you standing there for?! Run!” Kieli snapped back to herself and started to run for the exit, but she made it only a couple of steps at most before her legs got tangled up and she landed in a pathetic heap. Her brain didn’t manage to form the idea that she had to stand up again fast. Using her hands, she sluggishly pushed just her upper body up off the floor, and turned to look at the re-forming suit of armor. Suddenly the jammed gears in her mind started turning again, and her thoughts touched the burn deep in her memory. You can kill! —There was her own murderous voice when she ordered Mane. I don’t mind killing a person or two. —There was her own half-crazed face when she argued back against Harvey. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was only protecting. —There were her own blood-soaked hands dangling the ax as she stared calmly down at the corpse. That’s right. That’s the person that I killed. “I said go! Kieli! Hey!” Mane shouted impatiently as he leapt at the armor again. Knocked back just when it finished standing up, the suit of armor doubled over and lost its balance. With a jarring screech of its metal plating, it tottered and fell against the power reactor. More or less halfway between the stern and the radio tower in the center of the deck, Harvey faced off against a man who appeared to be the commanding officer of a platoon. The rest of the soldiers remained behind, standing by in front of their respective trucks. Still, even counting all of them together, this wasn’t that large a unit; Harvey got the impression the officer had brought only the men in his own direct command. Actually confirming their pursuers’ numbers and equipment didn’t help him figure out their objective at all. In fact, he was understanding it less every minute. Local Security Forces troops after them for the Mane incident, a raid on the radio station, Undying Hunters on his tail—this didn’t quite fit any of the possibilities he could think of at the moment. The officer surveyed the antiquated smokestacks clustered on the deck with a slight look of surprise, then assumed a determined expression and faced him again. “How many more people are inside?” “None.” The officer sent up the trial balloon without any preamble, and Harvey replied calmly and readily. He didn’t look convinced, but Harvey’d never believed they’d get out of this without any trouble. Judging from the number of badges and various other decorations on the greatcoat he wore over his clerical robes, he was pretty high-ranking even for someone in the Capital Security Forces. Still, he didn’t have the unnecessarily high-and-mighty attitude Harvey normally associated with that many medals, and he wasn’t overly tall, so he didn’t come off as overbearing physically either. Something about him sort of reminded Harvey of someone he knew, but he couldn’t place who that was. What the officer came out with when he got down to business wasn’t any of the three possibilities he’d imagined: it was something completely outside the realm of anything he would ever have anticipated. “We’re looking for a girl. We have information that she’s in this area.” Harvey merely lifted his eyebrows a fraction. He couldn’t readily decide on a response. The officer seemed to interpret his silence as his way of prompting him to move it along; nodding, he withdrew a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat. It…looked like a photograph? “Do you recognize this girl?” The surface of the photo he held up reflected the searchlights of the trucks. His right eye wasn’t completely accustomed to strong light yet, so it smarted as he squinted at the picture. It was all he could do to make out the edge of the photo that was out of the beams’ direct path. He recognized this scene from somewhere; it looked as if there was something like stage sound equipment…? As he quizzically narrowed his eyes even further, all of a sudden an engine drone roared below his feet, and then the floor bucked wildly beneath them. —? Feeling as though he might get whiplash, Harvey planted his heels and just managed to hold his ground. The whole deck shook, and the pipes overhead creaked and showered flakes of rust on their heads. For a second the platoon soldiers looked ready to run, but the officer’s sharp voice had them tightening their formation and standing at alert in no time. “What’s this about? Cut the power!” “Don’t look at me!” He couldn’t figure out what the hell this was about either. Did something happen in the power room? When he turned toward the steel tower where the station office was, he hardly had time to register the belch of thick black smoke out of the previously still exhaust pipes before, with a ponderous tremor of the ground and an even more violent jerk up and down, they began traveling between the rock walls on either side of them. The abrupt acceleration sent Harvey pitching forward. He managed to catch himself with his hand in a half-sitting, half-standing position before he hit the floor. Several of the soldiers standing near the edge lost their balance and went overboard, screaming as they fell. “What do you think you’re doing?! Stop this ship!” bellowed the officer, who’d narrowly managed to stay on his feet and was shielding his head against the rust rain. “I told you, don’t look at me!” The deck bounced and Harvey almost bit his tongue, so he aborted the conversation and looked up to the roof of the station office. A gritty fog-like substance very different in character from the black smoke of burning fossil fuel was streaming continuously from the exhaust pipes. A ghost—? Harvey had a bad feeling about this. He heard the officer’s voice calling after him to stop as he took off running, but he ignored it and ran across the shaking deck back to the station office. When he dived into the pilothouse, he found the station assistant clinging to the joystick. “What happened?!” “Some-thing’s gone wrong in the po-wer re-ac-tor. We’re out of con-trol.” The tone was inflectionless, but the sense of urgency was unmistakable. Looking around him, Harvey realized the girl it should be his top priority to protect was nowhere in sight, and his flesh crawled. “She’s in the po-wer room,” the assistant told him before he could ask. “Mane went there.” His body had turned without his conscious order and sent him sprinting out of the pilothouse before the man had even finished talking. “Kieli!” Harvey skidded down the work stairs to the power reactor with a hand on the railing for balance, reaching the bottom just as Mane was dragging Kieli through the half-open door by her clothes. “My tail got burnt,” Mane griped when he noticed him. The tip of his lion-like tail had begun to rot, and it was dangling like wilted ivy. Harvey was momentarily relieved to see that Kieli was safe, but when he ran over to her, she was curled up in the fetal position, unmoving even though she didn’t appear unconscious. “Kieli?” He crouched down next to her and peered at her. Her face was as bloodless-white as a corpse’s, and she was trembling like someone off her head with distress. Harvey raised his face and looked closely into the power room. The power reactor was warped out of shape, and all around it swirled something black and staticky, diffusing and concentrating intermittently into a human form. That’s— The specter of a man whose head was half crushed in by enormous teeth clicked instantly with that image still fresh in his memory. The sight of the man’s face as he died, his head crushed in right in front of Harvey, burst back to life again in his mind in a flashback so realistic he could even feel the flying globs of brain hitting his cheek and sticking. Bile rose in his throat. “…ry……I…” Sounds burbled from Kieli’s mouth. Hardly opening her mouth, she mumbled indistinctly, “I said it, I killed you, I’m sorry…!” “Ki—” The sight of her weak-voiced apologies stabbed him through the lung, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. —Yes, he’d told her never to say that again. But he hadn’t meant to place all the responsibility on Kieli personally like this when he’d said it. The rest of her name caught in his throat. He forced himself to suck in air that burned his throat and lungs, and tried again. Kieli was holding her head and trembling; he gripped her by the shoulder and shook her. “Kieli, stop it! That’s not true; it wasn’t you; you didn’t do it!” “I’m the one who bit him, you know,” put in Mane in his usual carefree voice, looking puzzled. But Kieli shook her head minutely back and forth on a neck rigid as a clockwork doll’s, mumbling over and over about how she’d killed him. “H-he hit Harvey, and shot…So I…I had an ax, and I…” “An ax?” She was starting to make less and less sense. Maybe she was mixing this up with something else? Harvey brought his face close to hers and said in a strong voice, “What are you talking about? There’s no ax anywhere. Snap out of it!” Kieli’s aimlessly wandering eyes finally focused and turned to him. For a few moments she looked at him vaguely, and then her face crumpled and fat, wet tears began to stream down her face. “I’m sorry, I’m sor…” “Okay, I understand; it’s okay. It’s not your fault. You didn’t actually do anything. I’m safe, all right? I’m right here with you,” Harvey soothed, wrapping his arm around her convulsing back as she sobbed out apologies. He didn’t care whether what she said was true, whether any of it had really happened; right now he’d force her to listen to him; for now he’d hypnotize her into believing him even against her own will if he had to. “It’s not your fault. I’m here.” Holding her with his left arm, he pulled her up the stairs. Mane pushed up from below with his back. Working together, they got her up to the first floor. “We are not safe here. We need to e-va-cu-ate quick-ly.” The assistant came out of the pilothouse and took over for them, easily hoisting Kieli onto an armored shoulder. The whole station house continued rocking violently. The roar of the out-of-control engine and the ship scraping against rock assaulted his eardrums from all directions. When he started running, eyes racing over the scenery around him, something coarse and warm stroked his ankle. Warm, and yet it gave him chills. Harvey jerked his foot away, shuddering at the eerie sensation, and looked down. A thin wisp of blackish noise particles hung in the air just brushing his foot. Even more static swelled and swarmed its way up from the darkness of the stairs down to the power reactor. It was in the process of covering the whole floor. “This way.” Driven forward by the sea of static, they were forced upstairs whether they liked it or not—but in no time the static began to seep through the second-story floor too, so they fled from the station office roof up the access ladder to the steel tower. Mane took the lead, and the station assistant followed with Kieli. Harvey took the rear, glancing down every so often to check his footing. As they climbed, the station assistant right above him abruptly turned his head down to look at him. Harvey looked back, blinking. “You are o-ver-pro-tec-tive,” he said softly. “That a problem?” “No.” Something in the assistant’s mechanical voice made Harvey think he was making fun of him. The other man coolly turned his gaze back upward. Harvey glared oddly grumpily at the bottoms of the assistant’s metal-plated feet until he heard a flat voice above him call down, “Hur-ry, please.” He cursed under his breath at the distance that had opened up between them and upped his pace. …Call me whatever you want. Supposing that some sort of blame truly did lie with Kieli, if there was a penalty that had to be paid, he’d happily pay it all himself. He didn’t care if he was overprotective; he didn’t have the slightest intention of letting Kieli bear this guilt.