Chapter 15

Shrugging, I rummaged through the overhead cabinet, pulled down a plastic pharmacy box, and set it on the floor. Dropping to his knees on the linoleum, the boy gestured for me to sit. Swallowed up in my extra-large sweatshirt and sweatpants, with the shoulder seams drooping halfway down his biceps and the cuffs rolled up three times, he looked even smaller and more fragile than usual.

Tsk. Why is this kid still so tiny? The Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa of my era was a walking mountain just shy of two meters tall. Was his growth stunted right now because he wasn’t getting enough nutrition? If I had my way, I would have locked him in this room and force-fed him three high-protein meals a day until he hit his growth spurt—but I couldn’t afford to do that. Once we finished this pot of ramen, once his clothes were dry, I had to send him back out that door for good.

“Your arm…”

As the boy carefully unwound the gauze wrap and peeled back the damp hydrocolloid dressing, his fingers froze. Along the outer edges where the acid had merely grazed me, angry red blisters had burst and peeled raw, while the center of my forearm—where the spray had hit direct—was a hideous trench of blackened, charred eschar.

“This is going to leave a massive scar,” he whispered, his voice tight.

At thirteen, young Ji Gyu-hwa didn’t have enough field experience to know better, of course, but the high-grade regenerative salves synthesized at licensed creature-byproduct dispensaries worked literal miracles. Those compounds could regrow severed fingers from the knuckle; a chemical burn like this was child’s play. Slather on a tube of 3DB-grade ointment, and even a blackened third-degree crater would slough off and heal down to a faint pink mark within a week.

Having apparently spent his entire time in the bathroom scrubbing his hands raw so he wouldn’t infect my wound, the boy unscrewed the tube of standard pharmacy burn cream with water-pruned, wrinkled fingertips and scooped up a generous white dollop.

“Ah—!”

The instant the cold cream touched the raw, exposed dermis, I flinched on reflex. Startled, Gyu-hwa’s narrow shoulders jerked—yet the moment he glanced up at my wince, he clamped his free hand firmly over my deltoid to pin me in place.

“Ow, hey, that stings! Ah—aah! Hey, go easy, you little brute!”

Across my raw, weeping forearm, the two of us bickered like a pair of stray dogs.

“Hold still,” he ordered, his brow furrowed in fierce concentration. “You said it was just a little ramen burn that didn’t even hurt.”

“When the hell did I say it didn’t hurt?!”

Bracing my uninjured wrist against his knee as he spread the ointment over the blistered skin, the boy paused for half a second. The corner of his mouth twitched, as if mentally reviewing the transcript and conceding, …Right, technically he never said it didn’t hurt.

“Bear with it,” he said anyway.

“I told you to be gentle!”

“You should have gone to a hospital.”

“What do I need a hospital for? I just need to pick up a tube of regenerative salve from the byproduct dispensary.”

Having heard of the specialty medicine before, Gyu-hwa glanced between the cheap over-the-counter tube in his hand and the blackened trench on my arm. “This is just regular pharmacy burn cream, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the creature-byproduct dispensary[1]? Tell me and I’ll run over and buy it.”

From our village, reaching the nearest licensed dispensary took a thirty-minute bus ride each way into the county seat. My bones were begging for a bed tonight, and tomorrow was Saturday; I figured I could just catch a bus and pick some up on Monday morning.

“Forget it,” I said, flexing my newly bandaged fingers. “Just sit at the table and do your homework while I make the ramen.”

“Quit talking about my damn homework!” Gyu-hwa flared, bolting to his feet. “Tell me where the shop is—I said I’ll go buy it!”

“Agh! Ow, hey—watch the arm!”

Here I had let him out of the rain, given him dry clothes, and started boiling water to feed him, and instead of showing an ounce of gratitude, the little punk was barking orders at me. For a kid who barely came up to my chest and weighed soaking wet what I bench-pressed for warmups, I had no idea where he was hiding this freakish strength. As he tried to wrench himself past me toward the front door, I hooked my good right arm around his waist, hoisted him effortlessly off his feet like a sack of rice, and planted him squarely in a chair at the kitchen table.

Just sit still and do your homework, kid. Homework.

Fetching his damp backpack from the entryway, I dropped it onto the table in front of him. Ji Gyu-hwa snatched the bag against his chest with a sharp yank, glaring up at me with the rims of his eyes flushed a fierce, aggrieved red.

“Look at those laser beams,” I chuckled, reaching out with my right hand to ruffle his still-damp hair—and then my hand froze in midair.

When he first walked out of the bathroom, my oversized sweatshirt had hung down past his thighs, and during our tussle over the ointment I’d been too distracted to look closely. In the scuffle to plant him in the chair, however, the wide neck of the sweatshirt had slipped halfway down his shoulder, and the rolled-up sleeves had bunched above his elbows.

Stark against his pale skin were dark, mottled bruises—wrapping around his thin forearms and blooming across his exposed collarbone.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I said, the humor draining from my voice.

Before he could flinch back, I hooked my fingers into the stretched collar of the sweatshirt and yanked it down, shoving his sleeves up to the shoulders with my other hand. Moving at combat speed before his reflexes could even fire, I laid his gaunt arms and upper chest bare under the fluorescent kitchen light.

“What the hell is this?” I demanded.

“Let go,” he snapped, twisting in the chair.

“Why does your body look like this? What happened—who beat you?”

“Nobody beat me! Let go of me!”

Locking both of his thrashing, bony wrists in my single good hand, I pinned his arms above his head and yanked the hem of his sweatshirt up to his armpits. My breath caught in my throat.

It wasn’t just a stray bruise or two on his arms. Across his narrow rib cage, faded yellow-green contusions from weeks ago overlapped with fresh, swollen welts of angry violet and black. What robbed me of speech entirely were the dense, boot-shaped hematomas clustered right over the soft hollow of his solar plexus and between his small ribs. A kid could bruise a forearm bumping into a desk or roughhousing at school. Nobody got marks like this by accident. Unmistakable, methodical malice was stamped across every inch of the child’s torso.

“What is this?” My voice dropped to a low, vibrating rasp. “Who did this to you?”

“Nobody! I told you to let go!”

Twisting and bucking like a trapped animal, the boy fought with everything he had until his breath came in ragged gasps and he finally went limp, realizing all his thrashing couldn’t budge my grip by a millimeter. If his ribs looked this horrific just from pulling up his shirt, his back and legs underneath had to be a slaughterhouse.

The moment I released his wrists, Ji Gyu-hwa yanked the sweatshirt down to his thighs and glared at me with his chest heaving. During our struggle, the white burn cream from my bandage had smeared thick across his knuckles. Averting his face toward the wall, he bit down hard on his lip, an expression of raw, suffocating humiliation clouding his young features.

Turning on my heel without a word, I walked to the entryway and shoved my arms into the damp work jacket hanging by the door.

“Where are you going?” his voice cracked behind me.

“The hospital.”

“…Good. You should get your burn treated.”

“You’re coming with me,” I said, snatching my wallet off the shoe cabinet. “We’re getting an injury certificate, and then I’m calling the police.”

“Stay out of my business!”

“Who did it?”

“I said it’s nobody!”

“Hey.”

Striding back across the linoleum in two long steps, I towered directly over his chair and pressed the tip of my right index finger squarely into the dark bruise between his heaving ribs.

“This is your solar plexus,” I said quietly.

It was just the pad of a single finger, yet the boy froze solid in his chair as if impaled by a steel spike.

“Even if five-centimeter hailstones fell out of the sky, even if you tumbled headfirst down three flights of concrete stairs and put on a whole damn acrobatics show, a person doesn’t get bruised in this hollow,” I said, each word cold and distinct. “Do you know the only time marks like this show up on a human body?”

His light brown eyes wavered under mine.

“They happen when someone is curled up on the floor, completely helpless to fight back, while a grown bastard kicks and stomps them repeatedly. I haven’t checked your back or your legs yet, and I don’t need to—it’s obvious they look the exact same. Or should I hold you down again and check with my own eyes right now? Who did this to you?”

“…”

“Tell me who it was. Was it those two loan sharks from two weeks ago? The thugs I dumped in the flowerbed? Did they come back while I was gone? Say the word and I’ll go finish them off right now.”

“No!” Gyu-hwa shouted, shoving his chair back as he scrambled up. “I’m going home!”

“Home to the degenerate gambler father who beats you half to death?”

It was a blind shot in the dark, yet the instant the words left my mouth, the boy’s teeth sank into his lower lip so hard the skin blanched white. His silence was all the confession I needed.

Part of me had wondered if he was being ganged up on by delinquents at school, or if the loan sharks’ associates had come back for revenge—only to find the monster had been living under his own roof all along. Raking a hand hard through my hair, I exhaled a ragged breath to keep from roaring a string of curses in front of a thirteen-year-old kid.

“Ow… fuck, my arm,” I hissed instead, clutching my left forearm.

Mid-stride toward the entryway, Gyu-hwa froze, his wavering eyes dropping instantly to my bandages, where a fresh patch of bright red blood was seeping through the gauze.

“Look what you did,” I complained, thrusting my arm out at him. “You made me waste all that strength wrestling you down, and now the scab tore right open.”

During our scuffle a minute ago, the fragile sheet of healing skin along my forearm had caught and peeled back raw. In truth, it hadn’t been the kid’s fault at all—I had scraped my own arm against the edge of the kitchen doorway when I lunged to grab my jacket—but that detail didn’t matter right now. Guilt immediately swamped Ji Gyu-hwa’s face, his head dropping low as he stared at the red stain on my wrap.

“It stings like hell,” I muttered, sinking onto the edge of the kitchen chair and wincing for effect. “That dispensary salve you offered to go buy earlier—go get it for me right now.”

He blinked up at me. “…The byproduct shop in town?”

“Yeah. Tell the pharmacist it’s a chemical burn from a subterranean aberrant species and ask for a tube of 3DB-grade regenerative ointment.”

Flipping open my wallet with one hand, I pulled out a wad of fifty-thousand-won notes from my completion bonus and pressed them into his palm. Taking the rural bus into the county seat and back would eat up a minimum of sixty minutes in transit alone; factor in the long, erratic intervals between evening buses, and he wouldn’t be back for well over an hour and a half. More than enough time for me to take care of some urgent housekeeping without witnesses.

“Go on,” I urged, nudging his shoulder. “Hurry.”

“Okay,” he said, clutching the bills tight as if seizing the chance to atone.

Pulling his damp sneakers back on in the entryway, however, he paused and glanced back at me in confusion—wondering why I was still wearing my outdoor work jacket and swapping my thick winter face mask for a tight black synthetic balaclava. Tilting his head, he lingered on the threshold for a beat before pulling the front door open.

Swoosh…

The roar of freezing rain rushed into the warm room.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I called out.

Halfway across the threshold, the boy looked back over his shoulder.

“Which apartment number is yours again?”