MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

The 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 had become the ritual. Eleven minutes, one for each month they'd been engaged. He knew it was a strange way to mark time. He'd never stopped doing it anyway.

His phone buzzed. He ignored it. It buzzed again.

"You need to pick that up," he said to Yuna.

Yuna, being dead, did not answer.

He picked it up. It was work.

✦

The Rift Response Bureau didn't hire civilians, but it hired civilians.

There was always rubble after a Breach. Collapsed structures, blocked roads, bodies the hunters were too valuable to spend time retrieving. So the Bureau paid men and women with strong backs and no abilities to do the cleanup, paid them badly, and called them "Auxiliary Response Personnel" so nobody had to say the word janitor.

Jae-won had been ARP for three years. He was good at it, in the way a man can become good at anything if he's willing to stand in the exact place where the worst thing happened.

"You look like death," Sang-hoon said when he climbed into the van.

"Thanks."

"I mean it. Like, medically. Did you eat?"

Jae-won stared out the window. "I had coffee."

"Coffee is not food. Coffee is a threat."

The van smelled like wet canvas and industrial cleaner. Sang-hoon drove the way he did everything, too fast, with total confidence, narrating the whole time.

"C-Grade over by the west market," he said. "Collapsed overnight. Buckled a parking structure, so we're on shovels until the Bureau clears the Hollows out. Should be a boring day." He paused. "You want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Great." Sang-hoon turned up the radio. "Because I have a theory that today is going to be very weird."

Jae-won closed his eyes.

✦

He remembered the night.

Not all of it. Grief had sanded the edges off the details the way water rounds a stone, until what was left was smooth and useless. He remembered the sound first, a low tone like a struck bell, that he later learned was a Gate collapsing. He remembered concrete dust. He remembered running.

Yuna had been beside him. He remembered the exact pressure of her hand, two fingers hooked around his wrist, pulling him, because she was faster and stronger and she'd spent four years learning how to keep people alive, and none of it mattered now.

He did not remember deciding to fall. He remembered being down. He remembered her standing over him, and her expression, which was not fear. That was the part he could never file away. Everyone assumed she'd been afraid. She hadn't been. She'd looked resolved and tired and oddly relieved, like she'd been waiting for a bill and it had finally arrived.

She pressed both palms flat against the air.

He remembered the light. He remembered a sound like a chord being held underwater.

Then he was on the other side of the rubble, forty meters away, with no memory of how he'd gotten there, and the corridor behind him was gone.

They found no monster. They found no Yuna. They found a Gate that, according to the report, had been "a C-Grade Breach, contained and closed."

(Something was wrong with that sentence. He wouldn't know what for three years.)

✦

The parking structure had folded like a paper box.

Jae-won worked the south face with a pry bar and a headlamp, hauling chunks of concrete into a wheelbarrow and rolling them to the staging line. Above him two hunters, C-Class from the look of them, stood at the perimeter with weapons drawn, waiting for the Bureau to finish clearing the interior.

"Six in, no out," one said to the other.

"Whole night shift," the other said. "Nasty way to go."

"Heard it was an Echo."

"Heard a lot of things."

Jae-won kept his head down. Echoes, the Hollow types that copied sound, were the worst ones. He'd heard a man on his crew describe an Echo that had learned to sound like his daughter. The man had quit that week. The Bureau had later found his actual daughter, alive, in a shelter three blocks away. Nobody told him that. Nothing about that story ended well.

Around midday, the alarm went.

Not the perimeter alarm. The other one, the rising three-tone siren that meant containment above them had failed and something was coming down through the structure toward the staging line.

"Breach!" someone screamed. "Breach, breach, breach..."

The south face came apart.

Jae-won had been standing near the staging line, which meant he had the clearest view of the thing as it came down out of the dark. It was wrong, that was all he could say about it. Nothing about it was impossible on its own. It just had too many joints. It moved like something copying a person it had only ever heard described.

He didn't run. That was the thing he would hate himself for later. He stood there holding a pry bar and watched, because some part of him had spent three years standing in the exact place where the worst thing happened, waiting for the worst thing to happen again, and when it finally did, his body had no plan for it.

The two C-Class hunters moved. They were good, they were fast, and they were not enough. The first went down with a sound Jae-won would hear in his sleep for a week. The second got a blade into the Hollow's neck and got thrown into a wall for it.

And then, from the collapsed north face, someone came running out through the smoke.

A hunter. Young, Jae-won's age at most. Blood down the whole left side of his face, one eye already swelling shut. He was dragging someone.

He saw Jae-won. He stopped. He shoved the person he'd been dragging, a woman in a Bureau vest, unconscious, toward the staging line.

"Take her," he said.

"What..."

"Take her."

Jae-won took her. Behind them, the Hollow turned.

The young hunter turned to face it. He was already dead, Jae-won could see it, in the way the blood was coming, in the way he was holding his left arm. He was dead and he knew it and he stood there anyway and raised what was left of his blade.

But before he did, he looked back. Right at Jae-won.

And his face did something strange. His good eye widened. Not with fear. With recognition. No, worse than recognition. With the specific, disbelieving shock of a man who has just seen something he'd only ever heard about.

"You're..." he said.

The Hollow hit him.

Jae-won couldn't look away. He watched the young hunter go down. He watched the light leave. He watched the man's hand twitch once against the concrete and then go still.

And then it happened.

Something pulled. Low in Jae-won's chest, under the breastbone. Not a sound, not a thought, but a direction, like a compass needle deciding north. A thin line of light, so faint he wasn't sure it was there, lifted off the young hunter's body and drifted toward him. Slow. Reluctant. Like a hand reaching a long way.

Jae-won's pry bar clattered to the ground.

The light touched his chest and went in.

The world went white for one second.

And in that second, in the space between his own heartbeat and the next, he heard a voice. Not the young hunter's. Not his own. A woman's voice, low and familiar and three years dead, saying two words with the exhausted finality of someone who had been waiting a very long time in the dark.

"Finally. You."

Then the Hollow turned toward him, and everything went black.