The assistant put Kieli down when they got to the observation deck midway up. “Please stay here. I left your radi-o be-hind,” he said, and climbed down the tower again. When Harvey looked down over the guardrail, the sea of static had overflowed out of the station office and begun to spread across the deck. The sudden appearance of what looked like a swarm of mysterious black insects threw the soldiers into a panic. Soon they were running in all directions, some falling off the edge of the rocking deck, and a few even deliberately throwing themselves off. The officer he’d talked to earlier was calling out this way and that, trying to calm their agitation, but Harvey doubted any of them had experienced this sort of unusual situation before; the command had totally broken down. “They’re coming this way, too.” Mane, who’d climbed a little higher up and was gazing at the whole scene from above, gave this urgent report in an incongruously carefree voice. The noise wasn’t just spreading out like water; tendrils of it were starting to crawl vertically up the steel tower, too. “Kieli, climb! Move your own legs!” When he put his left arm around her side to drag her with him and his right elbow against the ladder, and began climbing in that extremely precarious stance, Kieli moved with him. On her own power, if slowly and groggily, she placed her feet on one rung after the other. Evidently the confusion in her mind was finally starting to clear. Harvey had a few seconds to savor his relief before there was a ponderous screech of metal that made him want to cover his ears, and the steel tower started to list to one side. A rock wall was careening toward him at high speed right in front of his eyes. The steel tower wasn’t falling down: the entire ship itself seemed to have come up on a rock or something and lurched dramatically to one side—before its flank crashed against the rock wall next to it, and the ship was skewered with a blow and a crashing roar. And even that didn’t stop them; the radio station careened on through the gorge, out of control, with its side scraping along the rock wall, taking out chunks of it as it went. Clinging tightly to the ladder with his arm around Kieli so they wouldn’t be thrown off, Harvey gritted his teeth and bore it out. There was one last jolt even harder than the rest, and a high-pitched metallic wail echoed above them. By the time the sound had stopped bouncing painfully around inside his skull and the reverberations had died down at last, the roar of the ship scouring the rock wall was gone too, and everything was so weirdly quiet that he thought maybe he’d busted his eardrums. After a beat of unnatural silence, the howl of the wind blowing through the valley came back to his ears as if remembering itself. “…We’re stopped.” At the sound of Mane’s somewhat dazed voice, Harvey peeled his forehead away from the rung he’d been pressing it against and lifted his face, letting go of the breath he’d unconsciously been holding. He’d be willing to bet he’d scraped his forehead up. The first thing he did was check on Kieli, who was still clinging to him, stiff as a board. Then he looked up— his whole field of vision was tilted on its axis—and saw Mane dangling upside down from a steel pole by the talons of his hind leg and swinging back and forth in the wind. He was looking just a tiny bit miserable. Even farther above Harvey than that, the tip of the steel tower had plunged straight into the rock wall tilted about thirty degrees, and its antenna was pitifully flattened. Here and there fragments of rock broke off and fell down to earth. The radio station had finally come to a stop. “No, crap, this is bad.” Mane turned just his head to face down as he rotated his upper body, got his forelegs around the steel pole, and swore. When Harvey looked down, he could see something exploding directly below the steel tower, right around where the power reactor was. An invisible shock radiated from the steel tower across the deck like ripples across water. A beat later the blast came, and fire along with it, but before it could spread, the familiar wave of decay on its heels swallowed it up. The network of pipes rapidly collapsed, exactly like shriveling blood vessels, and started rusting over. The static fog that had covered the entire deck was swept up as the decay moved forward, too. It squirmed painfully as it died away. The soldiers who’d escaped being thrown off the runaway ship and were holding on to the tilted deck for dear life stared with dumb amazement at the phenomenon sweeping over everything around them. Then a stir arose from one section of them. They snapped out of their trance at the sight of a peculiar-looking armored man appearing on the half-collapsed station office roof and aimed their rifles and, efficiently if timidly, set about surrounding him. “Ah…!” Harvey could see the radio held up in the assistant’s hand, but the decay had already engulfed both metal-plated legs all the way up to his lower back. Rust covered every inch. Though he seemed hard-pressed to even walk, he moved forward one step at a time, apparently to intimidate the soldiers surrounding him, who backed away in fear. “Stay here. Stay here and hold on tight. Do you understand? Mane, get over here!” Harvey took Kieli’s hands and forced them into a tight grip around a rung of the ladder as Mane descended smoothly down to them. Leaving her in the animal’s care, he climbed down the tower. The station assistant noticed him when he’d made it a little lower down than the observation deck. “I’m thro-wing it.” He wound up as he spoke, and he’d already pitched the radio up to Harvey by the time the words finished leaving his mouth. Harvey leaned out and managed to catch its strap with the tips of his fingers, and then cried, “Hurry!,” waving at the assistant to climb up. But the assistant only shook his head sadly and gestured toward his feet. Both legs of the armor were completely immobilized. They’d become one with the rust covering the roof, planted in it from the ankles down. “Hang on; I’ll be right there.” “No! Do not come down. Please, climb back up quick-ly and get a-way from here.” “What are you talking about?! We’re going togeth—” “No!” Harvey’s leg momentarily froze in the process of stepping down to the next rung. He’d never heard that violent inflection in the assistant’s voice before. And that was when the shot rang out—one of the soldiers fired right at him, more than likely snapping under the strain of all the commotion. Harvey escaped a direct hit, but the bullet scraped just the shallowest path across his shin to rebound against the rung he was standing on, and the heel he’d jerked away midstep missed its footing when it came back down. “Crap—” He tried to grab hold of the rail with his left hand, but the radio it held got in the way and he missed. Losing his balance, he fell backward. Before he felt the impact of his body crashing into the station office roof, he made impact in midair against something invisible. It felt as though he’d smacked headfirst into a pocket of a different, high-pressured dimension. KKCHK… A dull, baffling sound right in front of his eyes, the sensation of something foreign embedding itself in his body— Half of his field of vision abruptly left him. “Harvey!” Kieli screamed when she saw Harvey fall from halfway down the tower. Just as she took her next step, there was a metallic creak above her—the peak of the tower that had stabbed into the rock face broke off and the tower jolted down even further, shaking her grip free from the rung she’d been holding. After the briefest of moments when it felt as if she were floating, she began to fall upside down. “Ack!” “Kieli!” Mane chased after her, running down the face of the tower and finally leaping off one of the supports and launching his black body into the air. “Grab hold!” Quicker than thought, she reached out in midair and clutched at the hair around Mane’s neck. He was curled up like a black cannonball; pulled after him, she plunged even farther down. The wind howled, cutting at her cheeks. The deck got rapidly closer. Meanwhile, Harvey had crashed into the roof of the station office, bounced, and then rolled off and down toward the deck. Mane managed to slide underneath him, dangerously close, and scoop him onto his back. “—!” As she clutched Harvey’s clothes, Kieli’s eyes opened wide. Two rifts opened up along Mane’s shoulder blades, and with a creaking sound, armlike protrusions attached to some viscous membrane and sticky with coal-tar blood thrust out. They spread out wide, membranes unfolding into bat-like wings, and caught the breeze. “Hold on tight to him!” Just before they would have crashed into the deck, they got some lift, and suddenly they were skimming just above it in level flight, shooting forward with all the speed they’d had in free fall. Mane’s unsteady wings missed streams of air over and over. Each time Kieli and Harvey were shaken, and each time they came close to falling off. Stretching herself across Harvey’s back and holding him in her arms, Kieli clutched Mane’s hair as hard as she could. They almost plunged straight into the agitated group of soldiers until Mane veered away at the last moment—and she saw a wall of rubble looming in front of them— We’re going to hit it!, she thought— But then they swerved to the side with so little room to spare that Mane’s wings scraped most of the way along the side of the wall before they shot through a gap in the piping over the deck and soared into the air. “Wah…” All at once the sky spread out before her. The sea of clouds covering the whole tiny gorge sky was closer than she’d ever seen it before. It looked as if they’d shoot out of the valley and straight into the clouds, and Kieli felt dizzy. Mane rotated high in the air, and the radio tower below them entered her vision again. Rust swept up the steel tower from its base toward the summit. The whole thing changed from gray to red even as she watched. Like the spreading roots of a great tree, the pipes on the deck swiftly went red-brown with rust too, starting at the steel tower and spreading outward in every direction—and though the spreading phenomenon was definitely, unmistakably decay, what it looked like was a bed of red flowers putting down roots in a gray, barren land and blossoming, and Kieli watched it play out below her, wide-eyed and wordless. The red steel tower cloaked in rust all the way to its tip seemed just like a colossal petrified tree. And at the great tree’s roots stood a solitary smaller tree. Such a tiny tree compared to its companion, and yet it had been plenty big enough to protect them. A red-brown tree in the shape of a large-bodied man in misshapen armor. One lone branch stretched up in the sky as if to wave to them; in that position the assistant had turned into an unmoving hunk of steel and rust. “Mane, go back…!” Mane did move to go back once, but in the end all he did was circle once in the air above the radio tower, and then he turned his back on it and began flying away, apparently giving up. The great tree that was the remains of the radio tower and the tree of armor that stood nestled up against its base grew steadily smaller in the distance until they were swallowed up by the valley and disappeared from sight. Whether it could truly see them or not, Kieli didn’t know, but the tree of armor seemed to watch them go the whole time with one hand held overhead. Owooo…nn… Was that the sound of the sharp wind against her cheeks, or was she hearing Mane howl for the first time? The sorrowful sound made her heart squeeze. Low, and long, and lingering before it vanished into the sky above the gorge. “What the hell just happened…?” The officer looked dazedly around him at the results of the bizarre phenomenon that had just happened before his eyes, wanting to doubt his own senses and his mind itself. A landscape of decay, everything blanketed with seasoned rust as though decades, maybe even centuries, had passed in the space of just a few minutes—but when he thought about how long ago this place had been built, he seemed to feel at the same time as though this moldering wreck was its true form, and it didn’t strike him as strange—a fact which itself struck him as strange. He assumed what had started it all was a power surge in the reactor, but oddly enough, there wasn’t much fire damage. The violent quakes had died down, too. Time might as well have frozen, it was so quiet. “How many casualties?” he asked his adjutant, recalling his job even if he hadn’t quite recovered from his shock. “Report immediately.” The other man had been standing stock-still, looking as stunned as he felt, but at his order, he anxiously set about confirming their status. “Eleven men with minor injuries and two with major injuries. No deaths.” “I see…” Whatever that might have been, for the moment he could feel relief that they hadn’t lost anyone, at least. It’d be tough to clean up the mess caused by a big problem happening while he was using the unit for a private errand, so there was that— but more importantly than anything else, he didn’t like to let any of his men die. That should go without saying, but unfortunately, lots of people tended to forget it once they were given a large command. He looked into the distance of the night-dark gorge ahead, in the direction where a funny-winged beast the likes of which he’d never seen before had fled after saving the man who’d fallen from the steel tower. That one-armed redhead had struck a chord in his memory, though he hadn’t been able to figure out exactly why right away. Now he remembered: the description of a certain fugitive the Undying Hunters had a bounty out on fit him like a glove. Anybody the Undying Hunters were paying a reward for wasn’t just some ordinary human, obviously. He must be one of those. And, although just for a brief moment, he’d clearly seen a girl clinging to the beast’s back. He was fairly certain he wasn’t mistaken about who it was. Although he found himself somehow wanting to doubt his own eyes… “Get Lord Sigri’s envoy on the line.” After they’d zigzagged wildly through the gorge for a stretch, they eventually crashed into a protruding rock, and it was just too much to hold on through; this time Kieli was thrown off. “Gyah!” Fortunately she was saved by a ledge sticking out just far enough from the rock wall, so while she slammed her back hard, she escaped more or less unscathed. Just as she began to sit up, coughing, Mane’s black body thumped down next to her in an artless heap. One wing was bent unnaturally underneath him when he landed, broken from its base. It hurt Kieli just to look at it. “Mane!” “Don’t worry about it. It’s not like these originally belonged to me,” Mane declared bluntly. He pinned the broken wing down with a hind leg and ripped it off. “Is he alive?” Harvey was lying over by the edge of the rock ledge. Kieli crawled over to him on all fours and peered into his face. “Harvey?!” Harvey shifted his head slightly with a little groan, but put it right back down again and pressed his cheek into the rock. He had a horrible sore on his left cheek that went all the way up to his temple; it looked just as if the iron rust had infested his skin. “Got caught in the fallout from it, eh? Can you see?” A beast’s snout thrust itself forward beside Kieli to peer down at him. At Mane’s question Harvey cracked open his left eye, only to shake his head slightly, just once, and cover it with his hand. The hand itself looked as if it might break at the slightest touch: sunken flesh, bones standing out with grotesque sharpness. Half-crying, Kieli threw her arms around him. “Harvey, no, not this…!” His lips parted just a fraction, and she heard a scratchy voice say something she couldn’t quite catch. “……li……ine…” “What? Harvey, what is it?” She crouched down low and brought her face close to his, straining to hear him. “I’m fine……so, the Corporal…?” He repeated the same thing several times in a painfully raw voice. He almost sounded like someone in a nightmare. Jolted, Kieli looked around her. She spotted the radio on the ground on Harvey’s opposite side, and went to fetch it. All the parts had been put back together again, but no matter how much she fiddled with it or shook it, she didn’t hear the usual white noise, or the Corporal’s voice, either. “I dunno; I can’t hear anything. I don’t think he’s working…!” she reported tearfully. “We’re walking a little farther. We can get out of the gorge.” Mane grabbed Harvey by the scruff of his neck and dragged him. Kieli helped by leaning Harvey’s tall form onto Mane’s back, and they started walking, more or less dragging him with them. The path of narrow ledges along the rock wall stretched on, twisting and turning uncertainly until it disappeared into the darkness far ahead. “Whoa…” The small patch of night sky visible from the gorge was beginning to lighten faintly into the sandy color of morning. Captivated by the view that spread out beneath her eyes, a little exclamation escaped her along with her sigh of relief. In the dimness ahead of them, at the end of the path of rock ledges, a single thin thread of weak light had seeped in through a gap in the rock walls as they walked. Now they’d passed through that gap to the other side, at a point about halfway up the towering rocks of the fault. Blue-gray predawn wilderness spread out far down below, shrouded in a light mist. She could see the outlines of a ghost town in the foothills at the base of the fault, and a single railroad track that curved in a gentle arc out of sight. In the pantry of a kitchen blanketed with dust she found a sealed bottle of alcohol. When she stumblingly read the type and proof on the label out loud to Harvey, he said, “Eh, that’ll do it. Give it here,” and carelessly accepted the bottle. He was slumped heavily against the wall. He felt around for the cork without looking at it, and used his mouth to pull it out when he had to. No sooner had he brought the bottle to his lips and tossed back a gulp of it than he suddenly choked. “A-are you okay?” Harvey coughed. “I’m fine,” he said, shoving her off with an elbow when she tried to rub his back. Rather than drink the rest of it, he tilted his head back to face the ceiling and up-ended it over his face. Clear liquid dripped from the inflamed skin around his left eye all the way down his neck, soaking his clothes. They were in a humble shack that consisted of just one room with an attached kitchen, plus a little loft underneath the roof. It showed no signs of use; Kieli guessed it had been abandoned decades ago now. Mane, who’d gone up to the loft to look around, descended smoothly back down to sit beside her. “Want me to do it?” he offered, displaying the sharp talons of a great bird that crowned one leg. Harvey shook his head without uncovering his eyes. “I’ll do it myself.” Kieli alone didn’t quite grasp what Harvey planned to do next. When she directed a questioning glance at Mane, who looked sort of disappointed that his offer had been refused, he told her calmly, “He’s going to gouge his eye out.” Kieli forgot to exhale. Struck speechless, she couldn’t immediately formulate a reply, and Mane’s detached explanation continued. “Hopefully it’s only the eyeball itself that’s done in, but probably the decay’s eaten at some of his optic nerve, too. If he leaves the eye in, there’s a possibility it’ll travel farther and farther inside him. Right now there’s no other way, and there’s no time to hesitate. If we’re unlucky, it’ll get all the way to his brai—” “Kieli. You go wait outside,” Harvey interrupted in a slightly offhand voice, cutting off Mane’s easy flow of words. He looked as if he wanted to tell him Don’t explain it in that much detail. “I’ll be done fast, so wait outside…please.” After this repeated plea, she heard him add in a barely audible voice, “I don’t want you to see this.” He was covering his face with his hand. Between his slim fingers, though, she caught a glimpse of the left eye beneath them, pointed down and to the side at nothing in particular. His copper eye had darkened to a cloudy blackish color. Kieli’d wanted to stay with him, but after seeing that, she couldn’t insist anymore. She could only nod. “Hey, Kieli…” When she moved to leave the room, entrusting the rest to Mane, Harvey suddenly called out to stop her as if he realized he’d forgotten something. She stopped moving halfway through the process of standing up, propped on one hand. Harvey’s hand scrabbled anxiously along the floor, found hers, and gripped it lightly. “Mm. What?” “About the Corporal…I think things maybe turned out for the best this way.” At that, Kieli pressed her lips together and looked down at the radio hanging around her neck. It dangled from her neck just like it always did; it looked ready to speak up any moment just like it always did. And yet the radio didn’t say anything to her anymore. Apparently they hadn’t gotten the repairs done in time. When she stayed stonily silent and didn’t answer him, Harvey rested for a breath and then went on. His normally gravelly voice sounded even scratchier than usual. “Kieli, it’s just, I want you to understand…Let’s bring him with us to Easterbury. I want to take one last journey together, just the three of us, and go back to Easterbury…and let the Corporal relax and rest in peace. I’ll be with you, Kieli, I’ll still be with you…Won’t that do…?” She could tell that he was thinking hard, carefully choosing words that felt strange on his tongue. He was being good to her, trying with all he had to convince her after she’d stubbornly refused to listen to him. Even though really, the Harvey she knew hated to talk for so long…If he wanted to, he could’ve done what he always did: decide on his own and just do it, whether Kieli agreed or not. But instead he was trying to consider her feelings. There was an uneasy silence while he waited for her answer. After a little bit, Kieli blinked back the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks and nodded. Harvey kept waiting, though, the unease not gone from his face yet. She belatedly realized he couldn’t see her very well with only his right eye, so she opened her mouth and answered again out loud. “…Okay.” She turned the hand he gripped palm-up and squeezed it back, and Harvey’s expression relaxed a little, relieved at last. The northwestern mining district. This was the district where countless mine shafts were dug along the enormous ore-containing fault, and Kieli and the others had come out of the gorge into its outskirts. It was an old mineral vein that had been mined even before the War; here were the remains of an old mine where people even found relics of the high-level civilization before the War. There was a market for those relics, too, and this area had been prosperous once (apparently the mobile radio station Mane had lived in had stayed in the western part of this region for a long time). But fossil resources were running dry even here, and according to Mane the number of mine shafts left was less than half of what it had been in its heyday. Kieli sat on the stone steps in front of the shack, looking down at the view before her. A desolate mining town clung to the foothills of the fault down below, where the land was hazy with white morning air. That town had almost certainly been a lot livelier once, but there didn’t seem to be a single operating shaft in the vicinity, and all the tunnel entrances that dotted the middle stratum of the rock face were boarded over. She thought the shack they’d found while walking along the rock wall must have been a rest area for miners once, but it wasn’t in use now. There were several other ramshackle buildings here that looked to have been storehouses and processing stations. Steep stairs and paths jutted out of the rock face and stretched down to the town in the foothills. Shovels, carts, and various other tools of the trade lay forlornly here and there, abandoned like children’s toys scattered at the park and forgotten. “Corporal…” Kieli called experimentally, pressing her forehead against the radio she hugged between her knees and chest. Her only answer was the cold feeling of the metal. The angular parts of the speaker hurt where they ground into her forehead, but she pressed against it even harder anyway, and started whispering to him. She didn’t even care if he didn’t answer back. “Corporal, get angry with me…I’m—a really bad person…” She was just like that woman from the mansion. No, that woman had just been simpleminded; Kieli knew her own heart must be even uglier inside. She hurt people without a second thought when she thought they’d take something precious from her. I don’t mind killing a person or two if it’s for you. In that moment the words had just flown out of her mouth without passing through her brain, but when she considered it now, she didn’t think she’d lied. In the end, what she’d said without thinking was what she really felt. No matter what Harvey said, even if Mane had killed that man, Kieli might as well have been the one to kill him. Because in her mind, she’d been bringing the ax down on his head. If something like that happened again, and she happened to have an ax in her hand, she’d bring it down on the attacker’s head without hesitation. She was sure of it. She hated that part of herself, and it scared her, and she wanted to run away from it, and yet she was sure that’s what she would do. But that would also pierce Harvey’s heart at the same time. The bad things Kieli did always came back to bite Harvey and hurt him when she’d meant to protect him. She didn’t want to hurt people anymore. She didn’t want to make any more missteps. Suddenly it struck her that in that case, maybe it would be best to just leave everyone’s lives. Maybe I should just go away somewhere where I won’t cause anybody any trouble. Where would I go…? She couldn’t think of anywhere to go but to Becca or her grandmother or her mom. But she was sure not one of them would welcome her the way she was now. …What am I thinking? Kieli shook her head back and forth. The hard body of the radio chafed her forehead until it stung, which thankfully cut off her line of thought that was getting so mixed up. She pulled her head back from the radio a little and gazed into the speaker. She got the feeling it was silently telling her Nobody’s going to give you advice about something like this. Could she really become someone who could protect the people she loved on her own, without relying on anyone else, without hurting anyone else? Somehow she thought that might be way, way beyond her. By chance, her downcast eyes found something that looked very much like an exposed water pipe. A good ways down the slope sat what looked like a tap for drinking water. A pail was lying on the ground nearby, even. Water… Kieli looked over her shoulder at the door of the shack. Harvey might want some water to drink. She’d left her flask back at the radio tower along with her bag, and he’d been gulping alcohol when he hardly ever drank anything…Although she was disappointed in herself that a tiny little thing like this was the best help she could think of to give him, it was something, and she couldn’t stand to sit there much longer anyway. So she put the radio around her neck again and stood up. Kieli walked somewhat unsteadily down the steep, rocky incline, as if magnetically pulled toward the place where she’d seen the water. There was a big hole in the bottom of the tin pail, but luckily the spout was working at least, and rust-red water trickled out when she turned on the faucet. It must be drawing from a layer deep underground, because as she let it run it started coming up relatively clear. Kieli felt a little moved. It still smelled thickly of rust when she brought her face to the faucet, but she put her mouth under it and drank a little, and then let both hands fill up with it so she could wash her face. “Fwahh!” Letting the cold water contact the skin of her face seemed to perk up her feelings a bit, too. She ended the ritual by slapping both cheeks a few times, and then told the radio, “Okay, Corporal, I’m awake now.” She spoke to him just like always, even though she knew he wouldn’t answer. She did it to convince herself to behave just like always. “I’m sorry I whined at you, Corporal. It’s okay; I’ll try to do my best on my own…I’m fine without you now, so don’t worry.” She had to admit her voice as she said so sounded too feeble to be very convincing. Plop…a sphere sticky with blood and slime and wisps of nerve fiber fell on the floor in front of his face. Lukewarm fluid spilled out of his empty eye socket onto the cheek resting on the floor. He’d cut off his sense of pain, but more than the pain it was the unbearable unpleasantness of it all that made him feel like throwing up. Harvey pressed his palm over his hollow left eye, then closed his right eye too to shut off all visual input from the outside. “Huh,” said a boyish voice at his side, sounding impressed. “First time I’ve ever seen a human do that in his right mind.” “I’m not in my right mind,” Harvey spat tiredly without getting up. “…I’m guessing you know this, but that’ll probably only be a temporary fix no matter what. I think the decay will still eat its way into your nerves. That’ll only slow down the progression.” “Better than dying now,” he answered half-automatically, without actually thinking about it, and received a somewhat surprised silence in reply. Harvey himself was surprised at his words too. He couldn’t help the thin, self-deprecating smile that came to his lips beneath the hand over his face. “Is that funny? Heh, it is funny, isn’t it? Me, struggling to survive like this. Right now…I’m clinging to life no matter what I have to do. I mean, what choice do I have, Corporal? It’s…it’s your fault for ending up like that. Now if something happens to me, Kieli’ll be all alone and…” Ugh, he thought, I’ve been talking up a storm today; I hate that, but somehow he kept going, and the more he talked the less he knew what he was saying. With his eyes closed he felt as though he were drifting in deep, dark water, and it sucked his consciousness down into the darkness with it. A guy with no will to live isn’t worth killing. The Corporal had told him that. Harvey could still remember it vividly. Does that mean right now I’m worth killing, at least? I wonder if you finally acknowledged me in the end. I hope so… He mumbled to himself for some time with no real awareness of whether or not he was doing it out loud. At some point he realized, Huh, I think I might be talking crazy right now, but he couldn’t think about it very clearly. Apparently he really actually wasn’t in his right mind; his thoughts spun dizzily. Wait, who was I just talking to…? Splish. With a warm, wet sound, a thick drop of water fell on the floor in front of him. About a tenth of his brain was wondering skeptically what the sound meant when a damp muzzle loomed toward him and prodded his cheek. Foul animal breath and the smell of old blood and new blood. The beast’s snout pushed aside the hand he’d been holding over his left eye— —and with no warning, something was shoved into the empty socket. “Augghhh!” The anguish attacked him out of nowhere, no time to prepare, and ripped the scream right out of his lungs. Unable to take it, he rolled around on the floor, hitting a wall after about three rolls and not even caring because he was just trying to claw the foreign object out of his eye—but someone seized his shoulders and pinned him down. It took every ounce of his strength to crack open his right eye and look up. Mane was straddling him, and his left eyehole was empty and dripping cloudy, viscous fluid. “What—?!” “Just bear it for a little while. Don’t take it out; I don’t just hand that out to people every day.” All Harvey’s concentration was scattered by the agony and the feeling of wrongness, as though someone had stuck a chunk of rock in his head, and he couldn’t quite manage to shut out the pain. The creature’s face was right in front of him, but the voice seemed warped and far away. “This is my owner’s eye. I got it when I ate him. It ought to stick right to you too, so I’ll let you have it. You should be able to use it for a while, anyway.” In just that eye his senses were bizarrely amplified into hypersensitivity, and he could clearly feel the severed ends of nerve fibers stretching from the intrusion, crawling like tentacles deeper behind the socket. He tried to grind his teeth together and accidentally bit the inside of his mouth instead. The taste of blood spread on his tongue. When it came, the sensation of those tentacles pulsating as they encroached into his brain was too much. He vomited pure gastric juice. While Kieli was walking around by the watering place looking for something to serve as a canteen, she heard a sort of muffled shout. She looked toward the shack and heard what sounded like a violent struggle in the distance coming from that direction. After a little while, it went quiet. Harvey…? When she wondered what was happening, she felt afraid. She started climbing up the path, thinking she’d go back and check on him, but on second thought, maybe she shouldn’t go back inside yet; she changed her mind, and stopped. She went back and forth on it for a while. Just when she’d decided to go back down to the water after all, she caught sight of a group dressed in white approaching from the foothills. They were still a long way off, but the wind carried the sound of metal chinking against metal up to her. Church Soldiers—! After freezing on the spot for a moment, she started and hid herself behind a rock, holding a hand over her racing heart as she peeked out at them. It was a safe bet that they were coming after her and Harvey and Mane, but evidently they hadn’t actually pinpointed their location yet, because it looked as if they were methodically searching everywhere. A “platoon,” is that what that’s called? It was a group of about a dozen men in white clerical robes reinforced with armor plating over their vital points, carrying rifles at their shoulders. What do I do? We might not be able to move Harvey yet. But I have to go let them know; that’s the first thing. Kieli avoided the path the platoon was climbing, circling around to a narrow staircase between two rock walls, and ran smack into another platoon coming down from the other side. “Oh!” She’d stopped still and let out the gasp before she could think. But apparently the soldiers hadn’t expected the encounter any more than she had; their reaction was simple surprise. So Kieli took advantage of that opening to turn around and take off like lightning. “Stop!” someone ordered behind her. Ignoring it, she fled down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. I can’t let them go toward the shack; I have to go in a different direction and confuse them. Her own momentum ran away with her and two steps turned into two and a half, making her miss her footing on the next one and fall. She heard the smack of the radio hitting rock and cradled it to her stomach the best she could, curling herself up into a ball as she tumbled down the stone stairs. There was a flat rock ledge immediately below it, so she stopped there, but she’d hit her elbows and knees badly enough that she couldn’t get up for several seconds. In that time the metallic footsteps of several soldiers overtook her. A square, gloved hand grabbed her upper arm and dragged her up. Squirming and flailing all her limbs, Kieli shouted random noises at the top of her lungs. Best-case scenario, she’d make her captor flinch, and hopefully even if she didn’t manage that, Harvey or Mane would hear her and realize that something was wrong. “H-hey, pipe down! Just come quietly!” “Waahhh! Waa—” Along with the nonplussed soldier’s shout came a blow to the back of her head, and for a moment the sound of her own voice faded from her ears. “Hey, she dropped her letter. Pick it up for her,” the radio ordered him in an Obviously that’s your job sort of way. Resignedly, Harvey stooped forward and collected the stationery that had slid to the floor and landed by his feet. He slipped it as softly as he could underneath the girl’s hands where they lay on her lap, sighing. “Where is she gonna send that letter?” “She’s got nowhere to send it.” “Why did she write such a pointless letter?” “Everybody has someone they want to write a letter to, even if they’re not gonna send it.” “I don’t.” “That’s nothing to be proud of.” The put-down that came as quickly as Harvey’s own response ought to have been just another of their exchanges, sickeningly routine, and yet Harvey felt strangely as though it had been a long time. He was oddly relieved, somehow. He leaned his head against the cold window glass and let his gaze roam the scenery outside the train. The vast red-brown wilderness and sand-colored sky were sickeningly routine, too, and they flowed sluggishly by without inspiring any particular emotion. Chug, chug, chug… The constant thumping vibration against the bottom of his seat reinforced the unchanging ordinariness of it all even more. When Harvey took his eyes away from the boringly familiar scenery in the window, the portable radio who seemed to live for nagging him was sitting by the sill just as always. The soft sounds of sleep came from the seat kitty-corner from him. He glanced at the girl’s face, and his shoulders twitched a little when he thought about how unguarded her face looked in sleep. “Herbie.” “Harvey.” “Are you enjoying this?” “What is this all of a sudden…? I don’t enjoy talking to you.” Harvey was lighting a cigarette, giving vague answers without paying overmuch attention to the conversation. “I’m serious,” said the radio in a lower tone, like Harvey’d hurt his feelings. “Do you wish you’d stayed dead at the abandoned mine, or—”…Huh? Wait a second. Isn’t this something he already said to me, way back in the day? No, more like this whole conversation is from back then. “—are you glad that you’re alive right now?” When he belatedly registered his déjà vu, the scene inside the train car warped like melting taffy, and then immediately it began to be pulled away, stretching farther into the distance before his eyes. Kieli and the radio were taken away along with the rapidly stretching train, and he was left behind alone. “Wait…” The instant he stood up, the floor at his feet vanished. No tracks sprinting by, no train car; just a void that swallowed him up when he fell into it headlong. Where am I…? Now he was walking all alone along the floor of a dark valley. He didn’t know when he’d started walking or where he was going or why, but here he was, walking. Through a long, long winding ravine wrapped in dimly staticky darkness. The air felt disgusting. Cold and coarse. Owooo…nn… The sorrowfully moaning wind had a grainy texture that filed away at his skin rather than caressing it. He had the sense of pain to feel that, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any evidence of his presence. He tried holding up his hand to get it into his field of vision, but nothing happened. Did he really have a body in the first place? He started to lose confidence that he’d existed as a discrete individual at all. There was a lump of nausea and pain somewhere at the core of his consciousness, and he clung fast to it as the only fragile thread that let him perceive his own existence. Somehow he tripped over something, even though he didn’t have any legs as far as he could see. When he looked down, there was a corpse there. The corpse of a redheaded man lying in a patch of wilderness where some battle had taken place, with the right half of its body burned to cinders—Who is that, again? he wondered. After giving it some thought, he realized it was him. Oh yeah, that’s what my face looks like. Remembering that made his existence feel just that little bit more real. Seeing himself dead just as he was finally starting to feel real seemed like kind of a shame. When was this self from, again? I guess it must be from a long time ago, when I was still fighting the War. Looking around, he saw other selves lying here and there too, ones who probably would’ve died there if they’d been a little unluckier. Most of them were from the War era, but there were also a lot from pretty recently. The one buried in the sand with all those white-boned corpses at the bottom of the sand ship, and the one lying like a rag doll in front of a white town wall early one morning, and the one lying faceup at the bottom of the mine lift with his heart gouged out… Oh, this one’s from Easterbury… He looked up along the dangling wires of the lift overhead to see the shaft’s exit. But the top of the deep shaft was painted over in black so that it looked as if it were the bottom instead, and he felt as though he might start falling upward. If the timing of anything at all had been even a tiny bit different, it wouldn’t have been surprising for any of these selves to have died for real. And the fact was that he remembered once thinking that he was fine with dying anywhere at any time…but now, gazing at each corpse in turn, he thought with all his heart, I’m glad I didn’t die there. I have to go home. I’ve still got things to do. As he started walking in search of the way back home, something grabbed him from below. He looked down. The corpse of the self buried in sand was hanging on to his ankle. Not that he could actually see his ankle; still, the leg that as far as he knew wasn’t there was nevertheless being dragged deep down into a whirlpool of sand. He tried to fight back, but there was no way to fight when he couldn’t perceive his own limbs, and so he was buried up to his face in no time. Coarse grains of sand scraped off bits of his skin and even invaded his mouth, until at last he couldn’t breathe. No, not yet…! He tried to shout, but the sand filled his throat and no sound came out. His whole field of vision was buried in sand. No, I need a little longer; I can’t die yet! Someone— His eyes abruptly surfaced out of the sand. Someone’s hand was there, grasping his arm and pulling him up. Through the touch of that someone’s hand the existence of his own arm felt clearly real, and in the same moment he experienced it as real, his invisible arm became visible as something physically real. The hand that hoisted him out of the sand was the rugged hand of a man in a shabby dark green military uniform. With the hand still tugging him along, he climbed up the mine shaft toward the top. A thin ray of light shone down from the exit that had been colored solid, opaque black. The slightly clouded sand-colored light that shone on all the land on the planet. The hand let go of him when they came into the light, and he was flung all alone into a white space where he lost all sense of which way was up. He heard a final sharp whisper of warning in his ear, and then the man’s hand dissolved into static. Wait, Corporal—! he shouted for all he was worth, and tried to grab on to the disappearing hand. Even to his own ears he sounded like an abandoned kid now. No, Corporal. Wait, I don’t want this after all. I don’t want you to go yet— The sound of his own voice pulled him back to himself. “Ugh!” Instantly, a sharp agony behind his left eye. Harvey doubled over and writhed until he hit the wall, fell back the other way with a thud, and planted his face into the floor. Gathering his scattered thoughts, he managed to bring the sharp throbbing under control, but the dull pain weighing heavily on the center of his head remained. “You okay?” He cracked his eyes open at the sound of a boy’s voice. A vague gray floor floated in front of him. Then his eyes started to adjust a little better, and he could see the forelegs of the black beast standing beside him. “You passed out for a second there.” “A second…?” His throat was bone-dry. “Not even a minute’s gone by. Are you starting to see out of it a little?” “……” Without lifting his cheek from the floor, Harvey let his muddled brain take in what he could see. His left eye’s field of vision covered his right eye’s with a hazy film. He was in the same boat he’d been in not long ago, just with left and right reversed. The daylight filtering through the tiny window from outside cut a single, slanting beam of sandy light through the dimness of the room, making a pool of sunlight on the floor. Just like the light that had filtered down into the mine shaft: light the color of their planet. Harvey spaced out for several seconds before abruptly coming back to his senses and lifting his head. It felt heavy, as if his brain had turned into a dense mass, and he felt dizzy. His left eye’s focus was still fuzzy. Relying on his good right eye, he stood up, letting his hand follow him up the wall for balance. Mane’s voice followed him. “You should wait a little longer. It’ll take some time for the nerves to finish hooking up.” “Kieli’s…” The Corporal had warned him. Kieli’s in trouble…! The back of her head throbbed. She was being pressed against the ground where she’d fallen forward when she was hit, and her hands were restrained behind her back. The radio cut into her stomach where it was trapped underneath her, and her face twisted as she glared hard up at the soldiers in front of her. Blood seeped out of her cheek where it’d scraped against the rocky ground. If only Harvey—no, if only Mane would come…But they were a long way from the shack here, so maybe even Mane hadn’t heard her. Kieli stuck to her brave attitude, but on the inside she felt ready to cry any second. Harvey…! Help came from a totally unexpected direction. “Hey, hold on! Stop that! What are you doing?!” a voice broke in. But she’d never heard that intonation before in her life: something without the hard tones particular to Church Soldiers, something relatively soft. “She’s not some kind of rebel. There’s no call for violence! Let her go right now!” At his order, the soldier holding her down relaxed his grip somewhat. When Kieli raised her head from the ground, the person climbing up the mountain into view wasn’t a Church Soldier in a white robe; he was a man in a long, jet-black greatcoat—a priest. Her arms were still held captive, but the grip around them had relaxed, so she sat up on the ground, coughing, and looked suspiciously up at the priest running toward her. He was a comparatively young, wimpy-looking man; Kieli doubted he was the soldiers’ superior. Priests and Church Soldiers weren’t even in the same organization to begin with.
Chapter 93
43 min read