MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

He found her.

Not on purpose. That was the thing he'd never be able to explain to anyone: that he'd spent a week trying to find a black-market information broker named Ryu Se-hee and had failed nineteen times, and then on the twentieth night he walked into a convenience store at two in the morning to buy painkillers and there she was, standing at the register with a cup of instant ramen and a black eye, arguing with the clerk about whether the microwave was broken.

"It's not broken," the clerk said.

"It's slow."

"That's the same as broken, in my heart," Ryu Se-hee said, and paid.

She noticed Jae-won looking. She looked back with exactly no interest for about two seconds, and then her expression changed, a flicker, gone fast, and he knew she knew who he was.

"You're a long way from the fan club," she said.

"I don't have a fan club."

"You've got a hate club, which is close enough." She picked up her ramen. "Ryu Se-hee. You're Han Jae-won. I know your face from the forums. The F-Class." She scanned him head to toe, unhurried, the way a mechanic looks at a car. "You looking for me, or is this the universe being cute?"

"Both, probably."

"Okay." She walked past him toward the door. "Come on, then."

"Where?"

"For a walk." Over her shoulder: "You're not the only one who wants to be somewhere the cameras aren't."

✦

They walked along the river for twenty minutes. She ate the ramen as she walked, which was impressive. She didn't ask what he wanted until they were at the bridge, the bridge, the one with the plaque, which he realized later was not an accident.

"You wanted to talk," she said. "Talk."

"You worked with Seo Yuna."

"Three years. Requiem and I were on Ma Dong-chul's team. I was the B-Class. She was the A-Class. We hated each other for six months and then we were inseparable." She slurped. "She owed me four hundred thousand won."

"I'll pay it."

"Don't." Se-hee stopped walking and turned to face him. In the lamplight he could see the bruise properly, someone had hit her recently, and hard. "That's not why I'm here."

"Then why?"

"Because you're the only person who's asked about her in three years who wasn't doing it for a file." She tossed the empty cup in a bin. "Everyone wants Seo Yuna's incident report. Nobody wants Seo Yuna. You want to know what's weird? That's weird. I've been working this city's information lines for two years and I have never once met a person who asked about A-Class Requiem like she was a person."

Jae-won said nothing.

"Right," Se-hee said. "Engaged. Yeah. I know. She never shut up about you."

That landed somewhere under his ribs and stayed there.

"So what do you want from me," he said.

"Two things." She held up a finger. "One: I want to know what your ability actually is. Because I read the forums and I read your registration and I don't believe it. F-Class senses corpse traces. Fine. Then explain why, three weeks ago, the Bureau's medical scans flagged ability residue on the forearms of a cleaner." She held up a second finger. "Two: I want to know if your fiancée's death connects to my brother."

"Your brother."

"Ryu Jae-hyun. B-Class. Walked into a Gate four years ago and came back missing six months of memory and all of his ability." Her voice flattened on came back. "He's not dead. That's the thing. He's just not..." she gestured vaguely at her own head, "...there. He sits in a room and watches TV and sometimes he says a word that doesn't belong to him. Last month he said a woman's name." She looked at Jae-won. "He said Yuna."

The river went on moving underneath them.

"He never met her," Se-hee said. "They were never on a Gate together. He never saw her. There's no reason for that name to be in his head." She stepped closer. "So I'll ask you plainly, Han Jae-won. What happened to your fiancée?"

And Jae-won, standing on a bridge with a dead woman's plaque behind him and a dead woman's voice in his chest and a page in his pocket that said don't let him trust the voice on the other side, opened his mouth to say I don't know.

And Yuna said, inside his head, very fast, very quietly, with a fear in her voice he had never heard before:

"She's telling the truth. But she's being watched. Don't tell her anything."

He closed his mouth.

"I don't know," he said. "That's why I'm here."

Se-hee looked at him for a long time. Then she pulled something out of her jacket and pressed it into his hand.

It was a photograph. Blurry, taken from a distance through what looked like glass. A room. White walls, a table, a phone, and a man in a blue suit, standing in the corner, watching.

"You'll want this," she said. "It came off a dead man."

"Which dead man."

"Friend of mine. Info guy. He was going to sell me the original." Se-hee zipped up her jacket. "Two weeks ago. His apartment burned down with him in it. Officially: gas leak. Unofficially: he was found in a chair, and the chair was in the middle of the room, and the door was locked from the outside." She started walking away. "I've got more where that came from. Come find me when you're done pretending you don't know anything."

Jae-won stood on the bridge alone with the photograph in his hand.

The room in the picture was blue.

"Yuna," he said. "Whose room is that."

Silence.

"Yuna."

And she said, in a voice that was flat and even and utterly wrong:

"I don't know. Ask him.”