MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The 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's old industrial district, a warehouse the Association had decommissioned four years ago after a Gate incident, and which, according to Se-hee, had never actually been empty.

✦

He went at night, which was stupid, and he told Sang-hoon he was going to see his mother, which was a lie, because his mother had been dead for nine years.

Sang-hoon called him at midnight.

"You're not at your mother's."

"You don't know that."

"Jae-won. I've known you for five years. You get the same voice when you're lying as when you're about to do something pointless and dangerous." A pause. "Which one is it?"

"Pointless."

"No." Sang-hoon's voice was tighter than usual. "Where are you?"

"Go to sleep, Sang-hoon."

"I'm coming to get you."

"Don't."

"Jae-won."

"I'll call you in an hour."

He didn't call in an hour.

✦

The warehouse had a Gate seam in the basement.

He only knew that because he felt it. Standing at the chain-link fence in the dark, with the empty neighborhood around him and the city humming far away, that compass-needle thing in his chest turned, slow, steady, down. A direction. A pull. Something below him was dead and had been dead a long time, and his body knew it the way your hand knows a hot stove before you touch it.

「 DETECTION 」

Residual awakened trace, GATE SEAM

Depth: about 9m. Estimated age: 3 to 4 years.

He stood at the fence a long time.

Yuna had been quiet for two days. Not gone, he could tell the difference now, the way you can tell whether a room is empty or someone is holding their breath behind the door. She was there. She was holding still.

"You know what's down there," he said.

"Yes."

"You've been down there."

"I don't..." A pause. "Maybe. I might have. I don't have the memory, I have the..."

"The feeling."

"The fear."

He climbed the fence.

The warehouse was a shell, a concrete floor, steel beams, the bones of machinery that had been cut apart and hauled off in a hurry. His flashlight found a stairwell in the far corner and a portable sign zip-tied to the rail, so faded he nearly missed it.

이유, REASON

R&D, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

He went down.

The basement had been a lab. That was obvious even ruined. There were benches along the walls, stripped; there were floor drains, which he did not look at for long; there were cable runs in the ceiling that had been cut at the connector so nothing could be traced. Somebody had done a thorough job of making it into nothing.

Somebody had missed one thing.

In the corner, half under a collapsed shelf, was a filing cabinet. Not metal. A cheap plastic drawer unit, the kind an office buys by the dozen, the kind that gets left behind because it's not worth carrying out.

The top drawer was open. The rest were empty.

He crouched in the dark and pulled out what was left inside.

Photographs. Dozens of them, stapled to index cards.

Each photograph was of a person. Each card had a name, a class, a Gate designation, and a phrase. He went through them fast, faster, faster, and then he stopped, because he had found a face he knew.

OH SE-JIN. C-CLASS. IRONHIDE.

GATE: CONDUIT-7. STATUS: RESOLVED.

NOTE: SUITABLE. RETAIN AND REPOSITION.

Retain and reposition.

He flipped to the next card.

NAM JI-HOON. B-CLASS. FADESTEP.

GATE: HWASEONG-4. STATUS: RESOLVED.

NOTE: NON-COMPLIANT. TERMINATE.

And the next.

And the next.

Twenty two faces. Twenty two names. He read them all, and somewhere around the fourteenth he stopped being a man looking at a file and became something else, something with a direction and no brakes, and he read the rest with his jaw set and his hands shaking.

The last card was not in the drawer.

The last card was in his pocket, because he had picked it up off the floor without seeing it, and he looked at it now in the flashlight beam and he had to sit down on the cold concrete floor.

SEO YUNA. A-CLASS. REQUIEM.

GATE: NAMSAN-C. STATUS: RESOLVED.

NOTE: HIGH VALUE. NON-COMPLIANT.

FINAL ACTION: TRANSFER BY ANCHOR.

He was still sitting there when the light came on at the top of the stairs.

Not a flashlight. The overheads. The whole basement lit up at once, buzzing and flickering, and Jae-won was sitting in the middle of a decommissioned research facility with a dead fiancée's card in his hand and a pile of twenty two corpses at his feet.

Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Unhurried. One person.

"Hello," a man's voice said, pleasant, almost gentle. "You're earlier than I expected."

Jae-won stood up. He put the cards in his jacket. He turned.

The man at the bottom of the stairs was in his fifties, in a grey suit, with the kind of face that had been described as kind in a hundred official documents. He had his hands in his pockets. He was not armed. He was not afraid.

"You found the basement," he said. "I did wonder who would."

"Who are you."

"Chairman Jeong Hae-il." A small bow. "Of the Continuance. I believe you've been looking for me for about a week." He looked past Jae-won, at the drawer, and something crossed his face that might have been regret. "Ah. You've read the notes. That's unfortunate. They're clinical, aren't they? I've always found documentation to be the coldest part of any worthwhile enterprise."

"You killed them."

The man's expression didn't change.

"I used them," Jeong Hae-il said. "Which is more than most people in this world ever manage." He stepped forward, unhurried. "Tell me, Han Jae-won. Do you know what happens when the Gate lattice destabilizes?"

Jae-won didn't answer.

"Nothing spectacular," Jeong said. "At first. A few more Breaches. A few more channels. And then, in about thirty years, one Gate opens somewhere. And it never closes." He stopped a few meters away. His voice stayed even. "I have watched the models for eleven years. Eleven. I have watched three of my colleagues go mad looking at them. And I have come to a conclusion that I suspect you will find monstrous, and which I am prepared to defend: that the life of a dying twenty-four-year-old, weighed against the survival of a species, is not complicated arithmetic."

"You harvested people's souls."

"I anchored them. You'll forgive the distinction, it's the whole point." Jeong looked genuinely tired then, and Jae-won hated him more for it. "We don't take souls. Souls dissipate. We hold them, in the lattice, where they do a kind of work that is, forgive me, not unlike what your fiancée did for a living." A pause. "Which is, I imagine, why she was so valuable. And why she..."

He stopped himself.

"Why she what," Jae-won said.

Jeong Hae-il looked at him with something almost like pity.

"Has she started talking yet?" he said.

The room went very quiet.

"I'd like to tell you something, Han Jae-won," Jeong said. "As a courtesy, and because I think you deserve it. Your ability is not F-Class. It never was. It was never even properly classified. What you have is not a party trick and it is not a curiosity. It is the single most valuable thing in this country, and about eleven people know it exists, and I am one of them." He tilted his head. "The others are going to find out about you within the month. And then they are going to come for you, not to kill you. To use you. Because you're standing at the crossing point of every question we've ever failed to answer." He smiled, sadly. "The difference between me and them is that I'm telling you the truth."

"You want me to work for you."

"I want you to survive me," Jeong said. "The others won't offer you that." He looked at his watch. "I've had a difficult conversation with your fiancée's former team leader this week. Did you know Ma Dong-chul was there, that night? He signed the incident report. He signed a document that says no body was recovered and that the Gate closed from the inside, and then he went home and did not sleep for a year." He turned and started up the stairs. "Ask him what he saw. But before you do, ask yourself why he lied."

"Wait..."

"Your friend's name is Park Sang-hoon," Jeong Hae-il said, without turning around. "D-Class. Five years in ARP. He's been following you since midnight. He's standing outside that fence right now, because he refused to let you do something stupid alone." A pause. "I'd say goodbye to him. I don't think you'll have many chances left."

He walked up the stairs. The light went out behind him, row by row, like something being swallowed.

And Jae-won stood alone in the dark with the sound of someone running toward him outside, and his hands full of the dead, and a voice in his chest that had stopped speaking entirely.