MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

They found him in the channel at 4:20 in the morning, sitting next to the body, holding his own arm like it belonged to someone else.

He told them he'd gotten lucky. He told them a hunter had come in and cleared the Hollow and died doing it, and that he'd hidden, and that he'd stayed with the body because it seemed wrong to leave it.

He did not tell them about the iron.

He did not tell them about the voice.

He did tell them his arm hurt, which was the most honest thing he said all night, and the Bureau medic looked at it and went quiet and said, "This is necrotic," and Jae-won said, "It's not."

It wasn't. He knew that. It was something worse.

They kept him for observation for two days. The arm regained its color sometime in the first night, slowly, from the elbow outward, like ink running backward. By morning it looked almost normal. By the second morning it looked exactly normal, except that in the right light there was a faint grey sheen to the skin that no one but him could see.

Oh Se-jin's funeral was on the second day.

Jae-won went. He wasn't invited. He sat in the back. There was a young woman at the front in a black dress, holding herself very straight, doing the thing where you don't cry because if you start you won't stop. He assumed that was the sister. He was right.

He sat in the back and he listened to the Association's representative say valiant four times.

On the bus home, he opened the file the Bureau had given him as part of the incident close-out. He wasn't supposed to have it. Sang-hoon had pulled it. He would owe Sang-hoon something for this, and Sang-hoon would never say what, and that was the whole shape of their friendship.

DECEASED: OH SE-JIN. C-CLASS. IRONHIDE.

LAST KNOWN ACTIVITY: Off duty. Responded to Conduit-7 without authorization, having left his vehicle roughly 400 meters from the site. Reason for unassigned response: none recorded.

PERSONAL EFFECTS: One mobile device, one wallet, one short blade (regulation), one folded photograph (unidentified persons), one note card.

NOTE CARD CONTENTS (transcribed): "If you're reading this, it worked. Tell her I tried. Ask him about the blue room."

Jae-won read the last line eleven times.

Ask him about the blue room.

He sat on the bus with the file open on his knees and the city going by outside and thought about the memory: the white room, the phone on the table, the woman's voice, and the man in the blue suit who had no reason to be there.

It wasn't white.

It was blue. It had been blue the whole time. He'd just been too busy dying to notice.

✦

That night, the voice came back properly.

He was in his apartment, one room, a mattress, a kitchen that had never seen a real meal, and a shelf he never looked at that had a photograph on it and a ring box he'd never opened and one year of a calendar that had stopped being used in October. He was lying on the mattress with the file on his chest, staring at the ceiling, thinking about blue room and blue room and blue room in a loop, and then the ceiling was just the ceiling again.

"Yuna," he said.

Nothing.

"I know it's you." He said it to the ceiling. Very reasonable. Very calm. "You said my name in the parking structure. You said my name in the channel. I heard you."

The apartment did nothing. The refrigerator hummed. A car went by.

"I'm not..." He stopped. Started again. "I'm not afraid of you. If you're, if this is a symptom, if I'm finally cracking, then just tell me and I'll go to a doctor and get pills and you can..."

"Don't."

He stopped breathing.

"Don't do that."

"...Yuna."

"You're not cracking." Her voice was close. It was so close it was like being whispered to from inside his own skull, which, he realized, was exactly what it was. "I wish you were. It'd be simpler."

He didn't move. He was aware, with a strange precision, of the exact temperature of the room, of the particular wrongness of his own breathing, of the fact that his chest no longer hurt.

"Where are you," he said.

"I don't know."

"Is this..." He closed his eyes. "Are you a ghost?"

"No."

"Then what..."

"Jae-won." Her voice caught. There was a sound in it he had not heard in three years and had been starving for without admitting it, the small, private breath she used to make when she was about to say something true and was afraid of it. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't, I didn't think you'd have to..."

"Have to what?"

She was quiet.

"Yuna."

"They're listening."

"Who?"

"I can't..." Her voice stretched, like a signal failing at the edge of range. "It's not, it hurts..."

"Yuna!"

"Jae-won. Listen to me." Suddenly solid again. Suddenly sharp. "You can't tell anyone. Not your friend. Not the Association. Not..." A pause he could feel, though he couldn't see her. "...not the woman with the badge."

"What woman with the..."

"The one who asked you about me."

His blood went cold.

"How do you know about her?"

Silence.

"How do you know about her, Yuna?"

"You have to leave the city." Her voice was fracturing. "You have to leave and you have to..."

"Answer me!"

And then, in the dark of his one-room apartment, in a voice that was hers and was not hers, too flat, too even, like a recording of a recording, she said:

"Because I was there."

The shelf against the wall rattled once, hard, as if something had hit it from the inside. The photograph fell over. The ring box clicked open.

And Seo Yuna stopped talking.

Jae-won lay in the dark for a long time with his heart slamming and his hand pressed flat against his own chest, as if he could hold her still.

He got up at some point. He needed water. He needed to think. He walked to the kitchen, and he filled a glass, and he drank it, and he set it down, and he turned around.

The photograph had been lying facedown on the shelf. He picked it up without thinking. Old habit. Old grief. He righted it, the two of them on that trip to the coast, both sunburnt, both laughing at something he couldn't remember anymore, and he was about to set it back down when he noticed what was behind it.

The shelf had a small gap between the board and the wall. He'd never noticed it. Something was wedged in it. Something he'd never put there.

He pulled it out.

A single folded page. Old, soft at the creases. Not paper he recognized.

It was in her handwriting.

He knew the handwriting better than he knew his own. He knew the particular way she crossed her sevens and angled her lowercase g's, and he knew, with the specific, awful certainty of a man who has spent three years staring at everything a dead woman left behind, that he had never seen this page in his life.

He unfolded it.

At the top, in that handwriting, was a date.

The date was four months before she died.

And below it, in the middle of the page, was a single sentence.

"If he ever hears me, don't let him trust the voice on the other side.”