CHAPTER 1The rain stopped an hour before Jae-won reached the bridge, which was the only reason he could still read her name.He stood at the railing where the walkway crossed the river, hands in the pockets of a jacket that had been Yuna's and was now three years out of fashion. Below him the water ran grey and indifferent. Above him the Namsan skyline glowed through the last of the storm clouds like something dying slowly."Hey," he said.The plaque wasn't official. Official plaques went to the dead who'd died somewhere the Association could put on a map. Yuna had died in a corridor between two collapsed buildings, and the corridor had since been torn down, so the city had put her nowhere.Someone had bolted a small steel plate to the bridge railing instead. Twenty six names. Hers was nineteenth.SEO YUNA. A-CLASS. REQUIEM.He traced the letters the way he did every year, in the same order, with the same finger. Then he stood there and did nothing for eleven minutes, because that ha

CHAPTER 3The Conduit-7 site was a drainage facility on the eastern edge of the city, concrete channels built to move stormwater, now repurposed because someone had found a Gate seam in the bedrock underneath it.They sent him in with the cleanup crew, because that was what F-Class utility was for."They want confirmation of the seams," the crew chief told him, handing him a headlamp. "You walk the channel, you tell us if you feel anything. Nothing to it.""Nothing to it," Jae-won said.Forty minutes later, the Gate Breached.It went the way these things go: without warning, without dignity. The alarm came late. The channel was supposed to be cleared. It wasn't. The Bureau's containment team was mid-rotation. Somebody had signed off on a clearance form that shouldn't have been signed, and eight people walked into a channel that had a Hollow in it.Jae-won found out later that six of them made it out. He was one of the six. He found that out much later. In the moment, all he knew was t

CHAPTER 5He didn't sleep.He sat on the floor with his back against the wall and the page in his hands, and he read it until the words stopped being words and became shapes, and then he read it again. Recognizing her handwriting wasn't a skill he'd ever thought of as a skill. It was just something that had happened over four years of reading her notes: grocery lists on the fridge, passive-aggressive notes to the landlord, the little scrap she'd left in his jacket on the morning of the accident that said you're out of coffee, I take it back, you're handsome.He knew her handwriting the way you know a person's laugh.This was her handwriting.Four months before.If he ever hears me, don't let him trust the voice on the other side.There were three problems with the sentence and he could only hold one at a time.The first: if he ever hears me. Not if he ever awakens. Not if he ever joins a guild. Hears me. She had known he would hear her. She had known that if he awakened at all, she wo

Chapter 7The photograph did not sleep.Jae-won spent three days staring at it. Blue walls. A table. A phone in the middle, exactly centered, like an altar. And the man in the corner, blurred, off center, the only thing in the frame not arranged.He ran the image through every free enhancer he could find. He took it to a print shop and had it blown up to A3 and stared at it on his kitchen floor for six hours. The man was a shape. He could have been anyone. He might not have even had the shape of a man at all.What he could see was the phone. It was an older model, the kind the Bureau had used before the last equipment refresh, a black handset with a reinforced casing. Somebody had written on it in marker. Two characters, small, in the corner of the casing.He found them the fourth time he looked at the A3 print.이.The character for the family name Lee.Also the character for reason, written alone.He sent the photo to Se-hee. She replied in eleven minutes with an address in the city'

Chapter 9Ma Dong-chul drank at a bar under a bridge near Yongsan, and he had been drinking there for three years, which Jae-won knew because Sang-hoon had found it in about an hour, because Sang-hoon was the most useful person alive when it came to finding out where a man hid from himself.The bar was a concrete room with four tables and a sign that had lost most of its letters. Ma Dong-chul sat at the back with a bottle and a glass and the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting for someone to walk in for a long time.Han Jae-won walked in.Ma didn't look up. "A-Class Ma Dong-chul," he said, to his glass. "Ran Team Seven for nine years. Lost four people. Retired two years ago. Drink?" He pushed the bottle across without waiting for an answer. "You're Han Jae-won. You're the one who's been asking about Namsan-C.""How do you know that?""Because Ha-ri called me this morning and told me not to lie to you." Ma drank. "She's a good woman. Terrible instincts." He finally looke