Chapter 9

Over the channel, he rattled off windage adjustments and sector coordinates. When he finished, I waited for the customary Out, yet faint white noise continued to hiss in my earpiece—he was still holding down his transmit key. That hesitation was unheard of. Whether in the barracks or under heavy fire, Ji Gyu-hwa was a man who never wasted a single syllable.

Then, through the static, four quiet words dropped into my ear.

“Be deliberate. Don’t waver.”

Was it sheer luck that allowed me to catch the glint of the enemy sniper’s scope shifting behind a blown-out window a split second later, or was it the culmination of years of blood and sweat? Or perhaps everything had simply unfolded according to Ji Gyu-hwa’s design from the very start. Without a flicker of hesitation, as if possessed by a ghost, I squeezed the trigger. Before the recoil even slammed the buttstock into my shoulder, I knew the round was true. The bullet tore across three hundred meters of empty air as if pulled by a magnet, punching straight through the target’s center of mass.

Crack!

The sharp report of a training rifle jolted me back to the present.

Looking back, Lieutenant Ji must have known my barrel wasn’t shaking. Those four words hadn’t been a correction for my aim; they had been aimed squarely at my mind—a command not to let my faith in myself falter. Then again, knowing his foul personality, maybe he had just pictured his greenest rookie missing the shot and getting his head blown off, and tossed out a dry warning so he wouldn’t have to file casualty paperwork. I should have asked him what he meant after we got back to base. If I wanted to ask him now, I was going to have to wait a good sixteen months.

Watching the boy’s thin shoulders jerk under the kick of the rifle, I shook off the memory. By some absurd twist of fate, my commanding officer’s past had become my present. Whatever the reason, as long as I was standing behind him on the firing line, I wasn’t going to do a half-assed job.

Having fired five rounds in rapid succession, young Ji Gyu-hwa bit down hard on his lower lip. As the target monitor flashed his scattered hits, raw frustration and disappointment in his own inadequacy darkened his brow. In the taut, stubborn lines of that thirteen-year-old profile, I caught a sudden mirror image of my twenty-three-year-old self.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I said.

“Yes.”

Stepping right up behind him on the mat, I kicked his stance wider with my boot and clamped both hands firmly over his upper arms. “You trying to dislocate your own collarbone?”

To drive the point home, I gave his right shoulder a sharp, exaggerated shove backward, mimicking heavy recoil. Pain pinched the bridge of the boy’s nose, yet he didn’t let out a single grunt.

“Lock your frame,” I murmured, leaning in close enough for my voice to cut through his earmuffs. “Eyes on the target. Control your breathing.”

Be deliberate. Don’t waver.

“Shh…” I steadied his trembling elbows with my palms, returning the exact words he would one day give me. “Be deliberate. Don’t waver.”

Even if you didn’t tear yourself down from the inside, the world, time, and fate were always waiting to shake you apart. There was no need to do their job for them.

Beneath my hands, the boy’s upper body locked into clean, grounded tension. His narrow chest, rising and falling in shallow breaths, gradually went still.

Bang!

The sharp ring of gunfire echoed through the indoor range. When the smoke cleared, Ji Gyu-hwa lowered the rifle and looked back over his shoulder at me. The grin splitting his face—wide and unguarded, showing the dimpled corners of his mouth—belonged purely to a thirteen-year-old boy. Reaching out before I could think twice, I ruffled his cropped black hair.

“Quit smiling like that, kid,” I muttered, pulling my hand back. “I might actually get attached.”

There wasn’t an ounce of lie in the joke. For the first time, I was genuinely afraid of growing used to that boy’s smile.

* * *

Because the blocks surrounding the combined middle and high school served as the island’s main commercial hub, the streets outside the gates were lined with bustling franchises, cafés, and student diners. After wrapping up at the range, I steered the kid into a popular ice cream parlor. Maybe it was my unrefined, working-class palate talking, but I usually preferred buying a giant family tub from the supermarket and attacking it with a soup spoon over paying top won for a dainty little scoop in a paper cup. Still, after weeks of surviving on canteen rice and cheap ramen, the rich dairy flavor hit the spot.

“Hyung, what’s your name?”

Forget it—the second I finish this cup, I’m hitting the convenience store across the street for an Ensemble vanilla bar. Wait, does the rural bus driver let you eat ice cream on board? The sign says no food or open beverages, but technically a popsicle on a stick is neither a meal nor a drink, so maybe if I eat it really fast in the back row… Deep in that critical logistical dilemma, I registered the boy’s question a beat late.

“Wait,” I said, blinking across the small round table at him. “You’ve been taking firearms instruction from a guy whose name you don’t even know?”

“You never told me, hyung.”

“You never asked.”

“That’s why I’m asking now.”

“Now you’re suddenly curious?” I scoffed, scraping the bottom of my cup with the flat pink plastic spoon. “Why not wait until you graduate high school and move out on your own to ask?”

He looked straight at me. “Are you going to stay here with me until I grow up and move out?”

…The little punk caught me completely flat-footed. For a kid who barely spoke ten words a day, he sure knew how to throw a counterpunch.

“Seon…” I started, then caught myself and waved my spoon at him. “Look, you haven’t even seen my face. What do you need my name for? Just keep not knowing. It’s simpler that way.”

My given name, Seon Na-won, was rare enough to stick in someone’s memory for decades. For the exact same reason I kept the lower half of my face hidden behind a mask, I couldn’t afford to hand him my real name.

“If someone asks me about you, I won’t have an answer,” he said.

“Who’s asking about me? Your classmates?”

True to form, Ji Gyu-hwa had a habit of going selectively deaf whenever a question didn’t suit him. Averting his dark eyes, he stared intently down at the tiny pink spoon between his fingers. “Besides, if you don’t tell me, I can just ask the mister at the dispatch office or your landlady.”

…Fair point. He had me there. Letting out a breath, I gave him the alias I had scribbled onto the labor agency roster. “Seon Jun-geon.”

“Seon Jun-geon…” The boy tested the three syllables quietly under his breath.

Truth be told, I had always secretly envied my father’s strong, rugged name. Next to Seon Jun-geon, didn’t Seon Na-won sound far too soft and round, like a smooth river pebble? Personally, I felt a name that gentle didn’t suit a six-foot-plus human weapon in the slightest—so I had borrowed my old man’s name for the duration of my stay in the past. Thank you, Father. I’m sorry for stealing your identity, and I love you.

Offering up a silent prayer of gratitude and contrition to my dad in one breath, I changed the subject. “So, what were you doing during those two years you missed school?”

With the flat pink spoon still wedged between his lips, the boy lifted his eyes.

“Fifth and sixth grade,” I clarified. “You said you barely attended.”

“I worked on a boat,” he said, pulling the spoon from his mouth. “Helped my father with his work. And whenever he didn’t come home for days, I went around the port looking for him.”

From before Ji Gyu-hwa was old enough to form lasting memories, his old man had been a degenerate gambler.

“What kind of boat?” I asked.

“My dad’s fishing boat.”

“What happened to it?”

“He lost it at the tables.”

That, the boy added in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, was how the two of them had ended up washing ashore in a rural village on Hwaryeong-do.

“Honestly, I like it better here,” Ji Gyu-hwa said, stirring his melting ice cream. “I don’t have to go out on the boat anymore, and I get to go to school every day.”

Sitting there in a faded, secondhand uniform issued by the county welfare office, miles behind his peers in class and covered in bruises from loan sharks, he spoke of liking school without a single trace of self-pity. Self-pity is a luxury reserved for people who have known both warmth and the gutter. A child who has spent his entire life at rock bottom doesn’t even know he’s in the dark. To thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa, misery wasn’t a tragedy—it was just the weather.

“When I get off work early,” I said, tapping the table, “I’ll tutor you some more.”

He looked up. “Where?”

“There’s bound to be an empty lot somewhere around the village. Worst case, we can spread out your books on the wooden bench outside the supermarket.” Speaking of which, a belated parental alarm went off in my head, and I leveled my spoon at his nose in stern warning. “By the way, don’t you ever go following some strange adult whose face and name you don’t even know like you did with me. I’m dead serious. That’s how kids wind up kidnapped, brainwashed, and used as cannon fodder by terrorist cults. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life chanting slogans in some compound and dying in a ditch, do you?”

Staring at me as if I had just grown a second head, Ji Gyu-hwa let out an incredulous scoff and dropped his plastic spoon into his empty cup with a sharp clack.

“You’re the one who needs to watch out, hyung,” he shot back. “Following a random kid around to feed him, teach him how to shoot, and buy him snacks—stop letting people take advantage of you like a pushover.”

“Hey, there’s nobody else but you,” I protested, bristling. “This is a one-time deal, got it? It’s hard enough keeping my own belly full of spicy pork every day—why the hell would I go around feeding and tutoring any other brat?”

Perhaps startled by the heat in my voice, Ji Gyu-hwa’s mouth snapped shut as if padlocked. As he ducked his head and stared fixedly into his empty paper cup, the round cowlick whorled at the crown of his black hair suddenly reminded me of the chocolate swirl on top of a vanilla cone. That settles it. I’m definitely grabbing an Ensemble bar on the walk to the bus stop.

* * *

Before long, collecting my daily cash at the dispatch office, buying an ice cream bar at the supermarket, and lounging on the wooden platform out front until the kid got off the school bus became my fixed afternoon routine.

“Eyyy, just looking at you makes me break out in a sweat!” the supermarket owner clucked one afternoon, shaking his head as I stubbornly maneuvered a popsicle stick up under my mask. “Young man, take that stuffy thing off while you eat!”

I paused, lowered my gaze toward the distant mountain ridge with a tragic, hollow expression, and murmured, “Actually, sir… I have a massive scar across my face…”

“W-well, why didn’t you say so sooner?!” Flustered ten times worse than I had anticipated, the owner practically dove headfirst into the outdoor chest freezer. “Here, take another bar on the house!”

If I accepted free food over a blatant lie, even my thick conscience would take a beating. Waving both hands, I declined politely. “I’m really all right, sir. Do you mind if I just stretch out on the bench here for a bit before heading home?”

“Ahem! Sure, sure, make yourself right at home!”

Once the mortified store owner retreated indoors, I stretched my legs out on the wide wooden platform and waited. Ten minutes later, amid the light, scattered chatter and sneakers of middle schoolers trickling up the road from the bus stop, a now-familiar stride caught my ear. Picking a single person’s footsteps out of a crowd was a novel experience even for me. Like a veteran tracker distinguishing the rustle of wind in the brush from the tread of quarry, my ears had naturally tuned themselves to filter out the village noise and lock onto the one cadence I knew.

And before long, the same held true for Ji Gyu-hwa.

“Hyung,” a soft voice called out.

Looking up, I saw the boy jogging across the lot toward the platform.

“Jun-geon hyung,” he breathed, coming to a stop in front of me with his chest rising and falling lightly.