MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

He 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 would be in his head.

The second: the voice on the other side. Which meant there was a voice on this side. Which meant she had been thinking of two voices. Which meant, and he had to stand up and walk around the room when he got to this part, which meant she had not been sure the voice he heard would be hers.

The third: that the writing was not finished on the page.

He looked at it again. Held it up to the lamp. Turned it over.

Near the bottom, in the margin, half-faded, was another line, smaller, faster, written like an afterthought, like a woman talking to herself.

"Neither side is lying. That's the problem."

He put the page on the table and went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror and said, out loud, "What the hell did you do."

The mirror, being a mirror, said nothing.

✦

Ha-ri found him at the Bureau the next morning.

He was there to file for reassignment to a different district, which was a lie he had prepared for one reason: Yuna had told him to leave the city, and he had decided that on principle he would not be doing what a possibly-not-real voice told him to do, and also that he was absolutely doing what she told him to do, and he didn't want to think about the contradiction.

Ha-ri sat down across from him without being invited.

"Han Jae-won."

"Inspector."

"You filed for reassignment to Busan."

"Yes."

"You've lived in Seoul your entire life. Your record shows no family, no dependents, and a three-year employment history in this city. You have exactly one reason to be here and one reason to leave."

"Which is?"

"You're one of two people who survived Conduit-7 on a night that killed four."

Jae-won kept his face still. "Six survived."

"Four of the eight who were inside the channel. The other two never went in." Ha-ri set a tablet on the table and turned it toward him. "You reported that a hunter came in from the perimeter, cleared the Hollow, and died. I've reviewed the perimeter footage."

"And?"

"Nobody entered through the perimeter."

The room did the thing where it got smaller.

"The gate logs are clean. The camera at the east entrance recorded four minutes of static, which I'm told 'happens.'" Ha-ri's voice was very even. "And yet Oh Se-jin's vehicle was parked four hundred meters from the site, off duty, and he was found in a channel he had no authorization to enter, holding a blade with a Hollow's residue on it." She paused. "Along with a dead C-Class's ability signature showing on your medical scan."

Jae-won didn't move a muscle.

"Physical residue consistent with activated Ironhide," Ha-ri said. "Say something."

"It was his blood."

"His blood doesn't explain the residue pattern on your forearms, Han Jae-won. Ironhide doesn't bleed onto other people's arms." She leaned forward. "I'm not here to arrest you. I'm here because I want to know what you are. And I think you want to know too."

He could smell the coffee on her breath. He could see the small tremor in her hand, which was the only honest thing about her.

"Why do you care," he said.

"Because eleven years ago my brother walked into a Gate and walked back out and hasn't been able to say his own name since." Her face didn't change. "And because six months ago I started finding inconsistencies in incident reports. Pattern-level inconsistencies. The kind that mean somebody, somewhere, is signing off on deaths that don't add up." She tapped the tablet. "And one of the earliest was a C-Grade incident in this city, three years ago, September. An A-Class died. No body recovered. No monster recovered. Gate closed from the inside."

Jae-won's hands were flat on the table. He kept them there.

"Seo Yuna," Ha-ri said. "Your fiancée."

"Everyone knows that."

"Yes. But nobody's ever asked why the woman who could hold a soul in place died in an incident with no corpse." Ha-ri sat back. "You should come work with me. Not for me. With. I'll tell you everything I find. You'll tell me everything that happens to you." A pause. "Including the things you can't explain."

The silence in the room had weight.

"What makes you think," Jae-won said slowly, "that anything happens to me?"

Ha-ri looked at him for a long moment.

"Because," she said, "the man who filed this report is not the same man I met in a medical tent two weeks ago. And I've been doing this long enough to know that when a person changes like that, it isn't because they slept well."

✦

He didn't agree.

He walked out of the office, out of the building, and into the street, and he stood on the pavement with the traffic going by and the crowd going past and he felt, for the first time since the channel, genuinely, completely alone.

"I'm not taking your deal," he said quietly, to himself. To the air. To the thing in his chest.

"Good," Yuna said. She sounded tired. She sounded almost proud. "She'd have used you."

"You said you were there." He kept his voice level; a woman walking past gave him a look and kept walking. "The night we met her. You said 'I was there.' What does that mean. Where were you?"

Nothing.

"Yuna."

"Jae-won." Her voice was strange. Flat, careful, like a person choosing each word off a shelf. "Don't ask me about that night."

"Why."

"Because I don't have it."

"You don't have it."

"I have..." a sound of frustration, a splintering sound, "...pieces. Some of it is missing. Some of it isn't mine to..."

"What does that mean..."

"It means I don't know what happened to me, Jae-won! I don't know! I remember being in the corridor and I remember you and I remember the light and then I remember..." She stopped.

"Remember what."

Quiet.

"Yuna."

"A blue room," she said.

The street tilted. He put a hand on a lamppost and held on.

"Whose blue room," he said.

"I don't know."

"You knew about Oh Se-jin. You knew about Ha-ri. You know things you shouldn't..."

"I know what I'm allowed to know."

"That's not an answer!"

"There isn't one!" And her voice broke, properly broke, into something wet and human and here, and Jae-won stood on the street with his hand on a cold lamppost and his eyes stinging and realized that whatever was in his chest, whatever had spent three years being nothing and had spent two weeks being everything, it was afraid. She was afraid.

"Jae-won," she said, very small. "I don't know how much of me is left. I don't know what I agreed to. And I think..."

"Think what."

"I think I'm running out of time.”