"Spine!" shrieked Rabbit.
He and Hatchworth ran down the stairs the best they could. The Spine had rolled all the way to the bottom. Rabbit crouched beside him, trying not to scream as he examined him and saw massive dents and a shattered photoreceptor. He flipped The Spine's manual override switch, trying to reboot his secondary processor. He looked inside his head, but it looked just the same. He flipped him over and checked his back, hesitating to remove the broken piece of sword embedded in his spine.
He gasped. It was jammed through it! The tip of the sword poked through his titanium alloy spine and was lodged in The Spine's blue matter core…
And the core was dark.
"That… that… can't…" He couldn't say it. They weren't supposed to be able to just die! They went through many things because of it, but it just didn't up and happen… even their blue matter was durable enough to take abuse.
But this blue matter was a shish kebab! And… he wasn't sure why he thought this made a difference, but The Spine had a reason to not want to go on living…
"I can't lose you both, buddy… not all at once… Don't give up like this…" He sank forward and rested his head on The Spine's still form, too crushed to even weep.
"Rabbit?" Hatchworth said, a note of anxiety in his voice. It wasn't easy for Hatchworth to register emotions, so this meant he was fairly worried.
"Hatchy…" he said flatly. "He… he's gone, buddy. The-the-the Spine is gone… I-I-I can't believe it…"
Hatchworth patted Rabbit's shoulder. "Now we must bury both of them."
"Are you so eager to bury 'em, Hatchy?" Rabbit bit, still leaning forward.
"No, brother," said Hatchworth, sounding far more serious than usual. "I am not eager at all. It will break my poor heart."
Rabbit sighed. "Not mine… that ship has sailed."
Rabbit and Hatchworth stood at the bottom of the staircase, staring at a boulder. It had taken all the strength they had between them to push it into place.
"We have to go, Rabbit. They are safe there."
"How can we leave him behind, Hatchy?" Rabbit moaned.
"His blue matter core is dark. What more can we do? We cannot lift him back up the staircase… not in time. You said you didn't know how long it would stay open."
Rabbit shuddered, remembering the terrifying image of The Spine, suddenly silent, eyes already dark, falling as if in slow motion down the staircase before either of them could stop him. Hatchworth had grabbed for him and caught only his wrist; not enough to suspend the fall of a robotic man of The Spine's weight and he had been forced to let go before being pulled along with him.
Once they'd accepted what had happened, if only grudgingly, Hatchy had found a cavity in the rock beside the stairs. They placed him in it, gently laying Chiyo beside him, wrapped in his arms, and pushed the boulder over them both.
It was good… but it felt wrong…
"I'm sorry, Spine… I was supposed to b-b-be the big brother… But you never tell us when you need help…"
He roared in sudden fury. "Why d'you always hafta act like yer okay?" he screamed, punching the boulder. "Why d'you have to be such a damned hero?"
He leaned against the rock and sobbed at last.
Through his misery, something nagged at his memory. Hero… what was it she'd said?
"The hero will draw life from the earth, light shall be restored, strength reclaimed, and memory pass into immortality."
There was more than one steely warrior… more than one hero…
"Come on, Hatchy! We don't have much time!" he called, already well up the staircase.
"That's what I was telling you!" Hatchworth cried, running up the stairs two at a time.
The gateway shimmered before them. Rabbit walked toward it, stopping when he felt a familiar sensation.
"Pinky!" he gasped. "Aw, I missed ya, baby…" His moment of joy dissipated in an instant. "But I can't take ya with me, little one. Ya gotta stay here with the other little yokai."
He set her on the ground. "Thanks, Pinky. You were the best little squirrel friend I ever had. Take care of yourself!"
He turned toward the gateway once more, oily tears flowing freely, unable to bear seeing her as he left her behind. "Hope we're doing this right… stay close." Rabbit held the bloodied sword in front of him and walked through the arch, ducking his head as he passed through, Hatchworth close behind. They emerged almost instantly next to the shrine. Behind them, there was a flash, and the shimmering faded.
"Why did we not fall this time?"
"I don't know," said Rabbit faintly. But there was no time to discuss it. He could hear his own voice calling to Bunny.
"We're early? Is this thing broken?"
He saw himself in the distance handing a twenty over to his brother.
"Spine…" he said miserably. He could see him now… shining, clean, in his concert attire, looking down the staircase with a smirk. If he didn't leave the sword, none of this would happen.
And Chiyo, though she had died, might be left to a still uglier fate. And then there was the prophecy of a world shrouded in darkness… and finally… The Spine had asked him to do this. He wanted it to happen, to feel all of it. That was so him… Let it be pain, but let me feel human…
Rabbit, hands trembling, put down the sword. He and Hatchworth slipped away, hiding in a garden shed. Rabbit curled up on the floor and tried to cover his ears, to block out the sound of himself screaming for help, of The Spine being pulled back to his fate. After the last scream had faded, they crept out to find Michael Reed.
Rabbit could hear Paige crying as he stumped around the corner of the building.
"Rabbit!" she cried.
"I knew it, you troll!" cried Michael Reed, turning around with a grin. "There's a back… door…"
They all stared at Rabbit and Hatchworth in shock.
He could explain later. "Mike, we need to go to the bottom of the stairs! Maybe there's still a chance… Maybe you can fix him…"
"Rabbit!" he gasped. "What happened? Your… your face? What's happened? Where's the Spine?"
"Come on, we have to see if he's still there…"
He ignored further questions and remarks about his tattered kimono and headed down the staircase with Hatchworth.
"It has surely been at least four hundred years, brother Rabbit," said Hatchworth. "Would he still be in a state to be repaired?"
"If any of us would, it would be him. And if he isn't," he added grimly, "I'm gonna have a few things to say to his mechanic, especially about badly programmed back-up processors."
"What?" cried Michael indignantly.
"You heard me."
At the bottom, they found the same boulder, in the same place.
"Back to where we got it from, Hatchy. Right?" He and Hatchworth positioned themselves side by side and began to push. But sediment had built up around it; it trembled but didn't move.
Steve Negrete shrugged, positioned himself between them, and began shoving as well. The others joined them, and the rock began to grudgingly shudder forward into the street.
"Good thing it's a quiet neighborhood," grunted Matt.
Paige squeaked in shock and stopped pushing. They all looked down at what she'd seen.
The Spine, coated in several hundred layers of rain-borne silt and dust, lay in the ground, his arms still wrapped around the barest suggestion of a skeleton, their clothes already turned to dust. One of the skeleton's arm bones crumbled before their eyes.
They all stared, too stunned even for questions, except for Rabbit. He'd had too much. He stared with the others for a moment, sank to the ground, and wailed.