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Chapter 10
Chapter 10He didn't open the door.That was the one clear thought he had: don't open it. The phone was still on his ear, the voice still talking, pleasant and unhurried, and something in his chest was cold, not Yuna's presence, which he'd learned to feel like a hand on his shoulder, but the absence of it. An emptiness. A door he hadn't known was there, standing open in the dark."You can open it," the voice said. "Or you can run. Both are, honestly, fairly reasonable. I'm curious which you'll pick."Jae-won put the phone down, very carefully, on the table. He didn't hang up. He didn't know why he didn't hang up.The knocking came again.He went to the window. He had one window. It opened onto a fire escape that had been condemned for nine years, which meant it was the most reliable structure on the building. He got it open without a sound and swung out and went down, three stories, fast, the way he'd learned to move in rubble, and by the time his feet hit the alley, someone was enter
Chapter 9
Chapter 9Ma Dong-chul drank at a bar under a bridge near Yongsan, and he had been drinking there for three years, which Jae-won knew because Sang-hoon had found it in about an hour, because Sang-hoon was the most useful person alive when it came to finding out where a man hid from himself.The bar was a concrete room with four tables and a sign that had lost most of its letters. Ma Dong-chul sat at the back with a bottle and a glass and the particular stillness of a man who has been waiting for someone to walk in for a long time.Han Jae-won walked in.Ma didn't look up. "A-Class Ma Dong-chul," he said, to his glass. "Ran Team Seven for nine years. Lost four people. Retired two years ago. Drink?" He pushed the bottle across without waiting for an answer. "You're Han Jae-won. You're the one who's been asking about Namsan-C.""How do you know that?""Because Ha-ri called me this morning and told me not to lie to you." Ma drank. "She's a good woman. Terrible instincts." He finally looke
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 y
Chapter 7
Chapter 7The 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'
Chapter 6
Chapter 6He 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
Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5He 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 wo
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