MY DEAD FIANCÉE LEFT ME AN SSS-CLASS ABILITY

Chapter 8

Sang-hoon was at the fence when Jae-won came out. He'd brought the van.

"You're bleeding," he said.

"I'm not."

"You are." Sang-hoon grabbed his arm and turned it to the light, and there was nothing there, no cut, no wound. He let go, slowly.

"Get in the van," Jae-won said. "Drive."

✦

The next week was a blur with sharp edges.

Se-hee took the photographs and made copies and hid the originals in three places. Ha-ri, after Jae-won finally told her most of the truth, no voice, no resonance, just "I found a drawer and a man was there," pulled the Namsan-C incident file and found, as she said she would, inconsistencies: the report was signed by two people, one of whom had been on medical leave that week; the site survey had been done four days after the incident; and the Gate closure log had been filed from a terminal inside a building that was not a Bureau facility.

"Ma Dong-chul," Ha-ri said. "Your fiancée's team leader. He's the second signature."

"So what, he forged it?"

"I don't know yet." She looked older than she had a week ago. "Han Jae-won, do you understand what you've walked into?"

"Not yet," Jae-won said. "I'm working on it."

And then, on the ninth day, Tae-sung called him.

✦

Kwon Tae-sung, S-Class, Baekho's golden heir, called an F-Class nobody at eleven at night and asked him to come to a Gate.

"I need you at Hwaseong-9," he said. His voice was wrong. It was the voice of a man who had just seen something he couldn't file away.

"Why."

"Because a man is going to die in there in about forty minutes, and I've already done everything I can do, and I heard you're the one who can... do something." A pause. "I heard you can find the dead."

"That's not how it works."

"I know that's not how it works," Tae-sung said. And for the first time, Jae-won heard the other thing in his voice, under the arrogance, the shakiness, the need. "I know what you are. I've known since the Conduit-7 scan. And I'm asking you anyway." A beat. "There's a B-Class in there named Nam Ji-hoon. He's not going to make it. And I think he knows something, and I think you can reach it, and I think if I lose this one I'm going to..."

"Where," Jae-won said.

✦

The Gate had been cleared. Barely. Tae-sung's team had taken it in ninety minutes, fast and clean, and the Heresiarch had been killed.

Nam Ji-hoon hadn't been.

They found him in the far chamber, slumped against a pillar, with his eyes open.

B-Class. Fadestep, short-range spatial displacement, ten meters, three times a minute. On paper, a nightmare to fight. In the flesh, a man in his forties with a cheap watch and a hole in his chest and something in the angle of his jaw that said he'd known it was coming for a long time.

"He walked into it," Tae-sung said, from the doorway. "I told him to retreat. He walked into the chamber. On purpose."

Jae-won knelt beside him.

Up close, Nam Ji-hoon was not a hero. His jacket was good but not new. His hands were calloused in the wrong places. His wallet was in his breast pocket, Jae-won saw the corner of a photo and stopped looking, because he didn't want to know yet.

"Don't," Yuna said. She had been quiet for two days. She was not quiet now. "Jae-won. Don't touch him. He's not..."

Jae-won put his hand on the man's chest.

「 RESONANCE INITIATED 」

Target: Deceased Awakened, Nam Ji-hoon

Ability detected: FADESTEP

Compatibility: 6%

Warning: Compatibility critical. Deployment will cause serious physical damage and incomplete ability expression. Proceed?

"Jae-won..." Yuna's voice was tearing.

"Proceed," he said.

「 RESONANCE ESTABLISHED, 45 SECONDS 」

The world came apart in his hands.

He was in the memory before he understood he was in a memory, the same thing as the first time, but more, deeper, the man's last minute playing in his skull like footage he was forced to watch.

Nam Ji-hoon in the chamber, alone. A phone in his hand, an old Bureau handset, black, reinforced, the corner inked with the character 이유. He was breathing hard and speaking fast.

"...done. It's done. I've got the ledger, and I've got the list, and if you think I'm going to..." A pause. A laugh. "You're going to kill me for this. Fine. But I want you to know I saw it. I saw the room, and I saw the transfer, and I saw what happens to the ones that don't hold. I saw the woman. I saw Requiem."

The audio distorted.

"You don't get to take her and then take me..."

A figure stepped into frame. Jeong Hae-il, in a grey suit, hands in his pockets, looking at Nam Ji-hoon with something like disappointment.

"You're a fixer, Nam Ji-hoon," Jeong said, in the memory. "You've spent your entire career arranging deaths for money. I assumed you'd have the professional courtesy to accept your own."

"I'm not going to be a battery..."

"No," Jeong said, gently. "You're not. You're going to be a lesson." And he turned and looked, right down the line of the memory, right at Jae-won, as if he could see him, as if he'd known Jae-won would be here, and he said one more thing.

"You can bring your fiancée next time. She's overdue."

「 RESONANCE ENDED 」

Jae-won came back to himself on the floor of the chamber, screaming. He was screaming and he didn't know it and the iron had not come and the fade had not come and his left arm from shoulder to wrist was cracked and grey and wrong, not wounded but changed, like something inside it had gone cold and stayed cold.

Tae-sung was shouting. There were people around him. Yuna was saying his name over and over, fast, frightened, small.

And Jae-won, lying on the floor of a Gate with his arm going grey and a dead fixer's phone number written in memory in his head, understood three things at once.

That Nam Ji-hoon had been killed not for betrayal but for witness.

That the thing in his memory, Jeong Hae-il looking into the memory like a camera, should not have been possible.

And that whatever was in his chest had been expected. By the man in the suit. Three years ago, four months before she died, on a page in Yuna's handwriting. If he ever hears me.

She had written it four months before the attack.

Four months.

She had known he would awaken. She had known before she died. Which meant she had known something the Continuance did not.

Which meant she had not been a victim.

Which meant she had planned.

✦

He couldn't feel his arm for six hours.

He sat in the Bureau medical bay with it wrapped and Tae-sung sitting across from him in a plastic chair, not leaving, not speaking, looking at the floor like a man doing penance.

"Tell me," Jae-won said.

"Tell you what."

"Whatever you're sitting there to tell me."

Tae-sung was quiet for a long time. Then: "My father is on the board. Baekho's board. He's been signing off on Gate assignments for eleven years." He looked up. "He's being investigated. Quietly. By people I've never met." A pause. "I brought you here because Nam Ji-hoon was my assignment. He was on my team. And I've been told, in writing, by my own father, that the incident report I filed would be revised." He said the word like it tasted bad. "I'm S-Class. I've been told my whole life that I'm the strongest person in any room. And I'm sitting here because I don't know what a revision is and I'm afraid to find out."

Jae-won looked at him.

"Why are you telling me this," he said.

"Because you're F-Class," Tae-sung said. "And everyone in this building thinks you're nothing. And I watched you put your hand on a dead man's chest and come back with something in your eyes that I have never had." He stood. "I don't want to be the golden boy. I want to know what's underneath. And you're the only person in this city who's already looking."

He left.

Jae-won sat alone with his grey arm and Yuna's voice and the memory of a man in a suit, and he said, out loud, to nobody:

"She knew."

And Yuna, who had been silent since the chamber, said, quietly, in a voice that was hers and was not:

"She knew too much.”