Yes.
That someone is me.
Do you readers think I have some special method?
No.
I don’t.
Because I am just an ordinary girl…
Out here in the desert, in this deserted ruin, no miracles are going to happen…
Mm.
Who am I even talking to?
Alice’s hands were a little rougher than I had imagined, especially when I gripped them this tightly.
I understood the principle that sinking my chest into the water would make my body float on its own.
Knowing it was scientifically sound did not stop the instinct that made me struggle and try to lift my head to keep breathing.
This was still too hard after all.
Even if I could already swim a few meters, we needed to dive underwater.
That, I could not do…
At noon we rested.
Lunch was still half a piece of bread.
Staying by the water meant we did not lack drinking water and did not feel too hot, but after all that splashing around, half a piece of bread was already the limit for a body this age.
Before long, sitting at the water’s edge while the wind and sand blew across my soaked body, my stomach started growling again.
“Mm…”
As someone who only ate and contributed nothing, I had already consumed half of Alice’s rations.
If food were not so scarce, I doubted Alice would bring out only one piece of bread at a time, and from the look of it she had not even planned to eat herself.
I had no way of knowing how much food Alice still had left.
Even if I knew it would not mean anything, because I also had no idea how much longer we would wander the desert.
“How long has it been since Alice left home?”
Fighting down my craving for food, I went back into the water and came up beside her.
That was what I said.
That was what I thought.
I still could not stop my brain from flooding with images of fish, meat, shrimp, fruit.
Ah…
This is bad.
Hearing my voice, Alice turned to look at me.
“Mm… about a month, I guess. It’s about time to head back.”
Eh?
“Head back?”
I looked up at Alice, a little confused.
“Alice is planning to go back?”
“That’s right.”
She smiled as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“If we travel every night starting now, it should take about twelve days to reach the sandbar… Don’t look at me like this, though. I’m already the person from the village who has gone the farthest.”
“I-is that so?”
So it was not a journey with a destination in mind?
While I was thinking that, Alice looked up at the tower in the distance that blotted out half the sky like a curtain.
“From far away it looks like a tower. On clear days, with the telescope in the church attic, you can see it as if it has pierced the sky. But no one has ever seen what it really looks like. I… I suppose I am the first.”
Alice said this.
A gentle smile sat at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes shone with longing under the azure sky.
Then she looked at me.
“I have thought this tower was mysterious ever since I was little. It seemed to have a special pull on me. The noon I discovered it, all I could think was that one day I had to stand in front of it myself and look at it. In the village, whether it was the priest or the old nun, the young men who wandered outside or the traveling merchants who came to trade… no one knew what it was or why it stood there. Even travelers who were just as curious tried to go see it, only to lose their way and return to the village a few days later. Yes. I am the only one from the village who actually reached it. In a way, I fulfilled a childhood wish.”
It had taken her a month to cross the vast desert and arrive here.
Alice must have prepared for this journey for a very long time.
No matter how she planned, she probably never imagined she would run into a deadweight like me.
Was she preparing to return because she had factored me in?
“A wish…”
Yes.
A wish.
I looked up at the sky where the fierce sun hung.
Azure, azure sky, like a deep and boundless sea.
In the life I used to live, the sky was only a smear of gray-blue that fell through the window.
To me, that little corner seen through glass already seemed to be the whole sky.
A journey alone, across the desert, all for one small childhood wish.
And I, even though I missed Lingyin so much, never had the courage to step out of that comfortable circle and try searching even a little in the vast world.
“How nice, to have a clear goal.”
I knelt on the sand.
The cool lake water slapped my legs with the wind and gently tugged at my skirt.
I placed a hand on my chest and lowered my head as I said it.
In the water my reflection was blurry.
I could not make out the face.
Through the clear lake the sand on the bottom had turned a damp brown-gray.
Packed tightly together it looked like a wet carpet that had taken the shape of my knees.
My legs moved without thinking.
The fine sand below stirred like ink and sent up a pale brown cloud that slowly faded.
“But I still want to go farther. Much farther.”
It felt like I had made up my mind, and also like I had remembered Lingyin.
Everything in this world was new to me.
It was a little cruel as well, but…
The great mountains and rivers, the seas and skies I once wanted to take you to “see”—were they not exactly like this?
“I see.”
Gently, Alice shifted a little closer.
The two of us sat in silence at the shore for a while.
She said softly, “Then maybe I should stay a couple extra days.”
“?”
Hadn’t she already planned it?
In other words, Alice’s return trip really had included me?
Now that she had decided we would part, she could put it off a few days?
Seeing the confusion in my eyes, Alice put on a gentle smile.
“Because Yulin-chan looks like she really wants to explore the ruin. We can’t leave with regrets, can we?”
“Ha…”
Easy for her to say, but that should not have much to do with Alice.
I seemed to freeze for a second.
Then Alice realized we were not quite on the same page about something.
She spun around all at once, leaned in close, and said loudly, “Yulin-chan!”
“Mm??” (startled)
“Yulin-chan will come back to the village with me, right?”
“Eh? Ah? Mm?…”
“What Yulin-chan meant was we go back to the village together, get ready, and then set out traveling together, right?”
“Eh?”
So… so that was what Alice had been thinking?…
“Th… that works too.”
Once I understood what Alice meant, a warm feeling rose in my chest.
Compared with wandering alone through a world with no end in sight, two people… a journey for two was something I had never even imagined.
Yes.
She had said it and thought it that way from the very beginning.
I was simply unable to speak the truth in my heart as easily as she could.
Rumble rumble rumble…
Right then the ground suddenly shook.
The sound coming from underground startled both Alice and me.
We scrambled to our feet.
“Wh-what’s happening?”
Worry on her face, Alice looked toward the cliff.
The sudden quake shook rocks and broken buildings loose from the cliff.
Falling stones splashed into the lake and forced both of us to keep backing away.
Then, BOOM—
A thick column of water erupted from the lakebed and stabbed straight into the sky.
Spray poured down like a rainstorm.
As the column shot up from the bottom, the shaking slowly faded.
The foaming white water column scattered a colored arc in the sunlight, like a seven-colored ribbon swaying in the mist.
Eh…
Some pipe at the bottom probably could not take the pressure and burst, I thought.
I was still staring at the scene in a daze when a black shape suddenly shot out of the mist, and then…
Smack!
That hurt!
For an instant my brain went buzz and went numb.
My vision blacked out and golden stars popped.
After I sat there stunned for a moment, the thing that had plopped onto my face fell to the ground.
Why did it feel like it was still moving?
Alice and I looked at it with the same puzzled gaze at the same time.
In the sand, the object that had left a red mark on my face hopped and wriggled at my feet, struggling to get back to the water.
No matter how you looked at it, this was—
“A fish?”
Alice murmured in confusion.
Before either of us could react, more black shapes began falling from the sky.
Aaaaaah, ah???
All we could do now was run.
Even though both of us reacted quickly enough, we still took a few hits while we were turning to flee.
Of course, seeing fish when you are hungry is a blessing.
The premise is that they are not falling in sheets from the sky…
If the hunger did not kill us the fish would.
About ten-odd minutes later the water column in the lake gradually died down.
The fish that had been dropping from the sky from time to time also stopped.
I carefully poked my head out from behind a dune.
The far side of the dune was completely flooded.
Most of the fish that had fallen from the air had been saved by the rising lake.
Only a scant few still lay in sand pits, twitching now and then.
They really were fish.
That meant there had to be quite a few fish in the ruin at the bottom of the lake, at least enough to form an ecology where fish could live and breed.
By that logic, Alice and I… could we stay here as long as we wanted?
Before I could pull myself out of that thought, Alice beside me turned into a gust of wind and snatched the fish that was sliding down the dune before it could fall back into the water.
Then Alice showed the brightest smile I had seen since I met her.
Both hands holding a fish as long and thick as her upper arm, she shouted, “Yulin-chan! There’s fish~~”
Yes.
It was a fish.
I saw it.
Even I could understand Alice’s joy.
After several meals of half a piece of dry bread, the sight of meat was a feeling that truly could not be put into words.
Ah.
Thank Heaven.
Even I could not help sighing that.
With a feeling that I was about to shout “Yahoo~,” and after making sure no more fish were falling from the sky to hit anyone on the head, I rolled out from behind the dune and slid toward the silver gleam of scales shining in Alice’s hands.
The fishy smell would have seemed a little disgusting before.
Right now that smell even carried a hint of sweetness.
The fresh fish was still thrashing its tail in Alice’s hands.
If she had not been gripping it tightly it felt like it would slip away at any moment.
Alice looked down at me and smiled, holding the fish in both hands, then held it out in front of me.
“Yulin-chan eat first~”
Ah…
Huh?
Eat it raw?!
Well.
Yes.
In this barren desert that did not even have a scrap of rotten wood, I had somehow failed to realize we could only eat it raw.
I looked up at Alice.
Her brilliant expression really made it impossible to say I wanted cooked food.
I could only silently glance aside and swallow.
“A-Alice eat first…”
“Eh?”
“You eat first. I’m not hungry yet.”
If I did not say it with a smile she would never eat.
I put on a smile, gently pushed her hands back, and said with a laugh, “I ate a lot of fish before I met you. I don’t really want any right now.”
“Is that so?…”
Such an obvious lie.
Alice looked half convinced.
Looking up into her eyes, I could not let both of us refuse to eat.
We had finally gotten meat.
So I smiled again.
“Hurry and eat. I’m really not hungry.”
“Mm…”
After a long silence Alice glanced back at the scattered fish on the dune.
“All right. I’ll go pick up a few more in a bit.”
“Mm~”
She really was a very, very good person.
She had lasted this long in the desert on dry bread, and she still thought of me first.
If I could, I actually did not want to part from her either.
The second after that wave of emotion, a blob of fishy-sweet liquid splashed across my face.
I reached up and touched it.
Slippery.
Blood.
…
When I lifted my head to look at Alice again, her face was already splattered with blood.
The fish in her hands had been torn open at the belly, white bones showing.
Alice, meanwhile, was chewing huge mouthfuls of fish while wiping her cheek with a blood-soaked right hand.
“Mm~~ So good~~ It’s tender.”
I…
How scary…
Too unrestrained.
I realized once again that I had underestimated the cruelty of the wilderness.