15. Live Burial
Fully recharged, I slowly stood up.
Side by side with Oto, we looked down at Rin's corpse.
But the cicadas were so deafening I could barely see her face.
The Venusian air was heavy; their cries vibrated the space like a metallic membrane, battering our eardrums.
"What do we do now?"
When I asked, Oto let her gaze wander around us.
"…We have to dig."
But we hadn't brought a shovel.
And there was no chance some convenient tool for digging would be lying around on the back mountain.
I looked, but there was nothing usable in sight.
"I guess we have no choice," Oto murmured. "Yeah. We'll have to dig with our hands."
She crouched and, with the casual motion of a child starting a sandbox game, thrust both hands into the earth.
I crouched opposite her and began to dig facing her.
The cicadas' chorus rang like a choir of madness.
We said nothing, carrying only that sound and our silence like a soundtrack, and kept digging wordlessly.
Climbing the back mountain had been hard; this was worse.
As time passed, I could hear Oto's breathing turn ragged.
Side A of silence ended, switching over to the B-side: "rough breaths."
Our breathing alternated,
a rhythm tinged with a strange excitement, rallying back and forth like a ping-pong match.
The hole grew deeper, little by little, but surely.
The excavated earth piled up beside us.
It was as if our shadows had turned three-dimensional and were forming another pair of us.
The ground smelled of metal.
Yes, the soil of this planet wasn't soil at all but metallic powder.
Its color wasn't earth-brown like on Earth, but a dark gray—metallic.
The trees were artificially reproduced, but the coldness of this substrate made everything look like a ruin.
And the layer of metallic powder was abnormally hard.
Our fingers didn't sink into it like real sand; every scrape met resistance so fierce it threw sparks.
Even so, we kept digging with bare hands.
When I immigrated here from Mars, I'd equipped reinforced skin to endure Venus's brutal environment.
And yet—even though the hole still wasn't deep enough to bury a single girl—
the skin of both my hands had already worn down and peeled away,
and the internal alloy layer—an aluminum alloy tougher than steel or titanium—lay exposed.
Oto was the same.
The skin on her hands had peeled; cable-like wiring showed through like blood vessels.
Faint bluish sparks sputtered from the metal tips of her fingers.
I stopped and called to her.
"Oto."
She stopped, raised her head.
Her eyes were bloodshot, her expression a tangle of anger and urgency—
like a craftsperson furious at having their work interrupted.
I flinched a little but spoke.
"If we keep digging bare-handed, our hands will break."
"…"
"If our hands break, we can't do anything. Hands are the most important components in a humanoid. I'm sure the company that made us poured the most care into designing them."
Even to me it sounded like an excuse.
But Oto just stared at me in silence.
That silence thrummed in my inner ear like a heavy electronic tone.
"So let's stop digging bare-handed," I went on.
"We should look for tools… We've only dug, what, a third? We've got a long way to go."
Without a word, still in that crouch, Oto slowly stood.
Then, as if dizzy, she swayed toward me.
Instinctively, I moved to catch her.
She fell into me, and I spread my arms to receive her—
to catch her.
Her body sank into my chest, and she tilted just her neck to look up at me.
Her body's heat and mine—glued together by the distant shriek of cicadas—slowly melted into one.
Maybe because of that, the anger pasted on her face softened a little.
"Kiss," Oto ordered.
"Do it."
Without hesitation, I pressed my lips to hers.
For three seconds—an eternity—we kissed.
In the end, it wasn't a mistake. After the kiss, the anger vanished from her face, replaced by the blissed-out look of a dopamine-addled kid from the candy shop.
Probably some remnants of the drop, half-melted in my mouth, slipped onto her tongue.
Either way, thanks to the kiss, she seemed to regain a little sanity.
Soon Oto lifted herself out of my arms and stood. No dizziness this time.
She hadn't been crouching like before; she'd simply been held by me.
She walked over to Rin, who lay tossed on the ground like discarded cargo, and crouched.
Gripping Rin's shoulder and arm, she pulled with force.
—It tore off.
From the cross-section where the arm separated at the shoulder, circuits and wiring stretched like muscles—or like fine ramen noodles—snapping apart in sparking strands.
She repeated the process with the other arm.
Then, holding both, she returned to the hole we'd been digging.
She handed one to me and said tersely,
"Arm-shovel."