Chapter 23

Lying with my cheek pillowed on my arm, I felt the perpetual knot between my shoulder blades slowly untangle. Out on dispatch jobs with ragtag mercenaries who didn’t know basic cover discipline, I spent every waking hour with my finger on the trigger and my nerves strung tight as piano wire, knowing that if I died in this era and left Ji Gyu-hwa alone again, nobody would catch him. Perhaps that suffocating weight of solitary responsibility was the very burden Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had carried every day of his command.

Yet the instant I walked back through this front door, into a room filled with the quiet scratch of a boy’s pencil and the hum of the refrigerator, life existed here—warm, ordinary, and whole, far removed from blood, duty, and sacrifice.

Before I could fight the drowsiness, sleep pulled me under.

When I finally pried my heavy eyelids open again, my T-shirt was damp with sweat and my right arm, dangling off the edge of the sofa, was completely numb from the shoulder down. Lifting my head with a wince to see what was cutting off my circulation, I found Ji Gyu-hwa sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the couch, fast asleep with his cheek pillowed squarely on my bicep.

Through the balcony glass, the late-afternoon sun was sinking in a blaze of molten copper and rose, flooding the small living room with deep amber light. Another weekend afternoon had melted away in peace.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I murmured, my voice gravelly with sleep. “Gyu-hwa, wake up.”

His eyelashes fluttered open, his dark eyes unfocused and thick with slumber.

“Go lie down in your bed before you wreck your neck.”

Blinking sluggishly like a waking owl, the boy braced his palms on the floor and pushed himself upright—only for his sleep-numbed legs to wobble beneath him. Before I could even catch him, he toppled forward right onto the sofa cushions on top of me, burying his face against my collarbone with a soft, sleepy murmur as he drifted right back out.

I should make him get up… check his math workbook… take him downtown tomorrow to look at tablets…

The intentions floated lazily through my head, but the solid, furnace-warm weight of the boy pressed against my chest snipped every thread of rational thought. Against a young Ji Gyu-hwa who didn’t know my future sins—and who trusted me enough to fall dead asleep in my arms—I didn’t stand a fighting chance.

Who could have guessed that the past would turn out to be the warmest shelter I had ever known?

* * *

One weekday afternoon in late spring, I clocked out after a half-shift at the agency. From our village, reaching Hwaryeong-do’s sole commercial district required an hour-and-a-half intercity bus ride followed by eight stops on the metro, and I planned to make the trip before dinner to pick up a high-spec tablet for Gyu-hwa’s online lectures.

Since my clothes were grimy from the morning’s haul, I ducked into the bathroom for a quick five-minute rinse before catching the bus. Just as I lathered soap across my shoulders, a heavy, frantic pounding rattled the apartment wall: Thump, thump, thump!

Turning off the shower valve, I cocked my head, dripping water onto the tiles. Construction next door? I reached for the faucet again—only for the hammering to resume twice as loud, vibrating straight through our front door: THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!

“Bachelor Jun-geon! Jun-geon, are you in there?!”

It was the landlady’s voice, pitched high with panic. Yanking a pair of dark sweatpants and a white cotton undershirt over my wet skin without even stopping to towel off, I sprinted into the foyer and wrenched the door open.

“Oh, thank heavens you’re home!” Clutching her chest as she gasped for air on the landing, the landlady grabbed my damp forearm. “I didn’t have your mobile number, and when I called the dispatch office the boss said you’d already knocked off for the day—I nearly lost my mind!”

“Calm down, ma’am. What happened?”

“Your little brother—has Gyu-hwa come home yet?”

“No, he stays at the school study hall until evening on days he doesn’t have range practice. Why?”

Her fingers dug into my wrist, her whole frame shaking. “Then he’s still on campus! You have to run over to the middle school right now!”

“Ma’am, breathe and tell me what happened.”

“An anomalous creature broke onto the school grounds!” she cried, her voice breaking. “Every parent in the neighborhood is running down the hill as we speak! Half the students are trapped inside, the military garrison has cordoned off the road, and people are saying the athletic field is a sea of blood!”

Like a floodwall exploding under a black tide, every drop of blood in my body seemed to detonate inside my chest.

To this day, I couldn’t tell how I got down that mountain road. I vaguely remember lunging into the street barefoot in my rubber slides, flagging down a passing taxi, and roaring at the driver to floor it. Half a kilometer from the school gates, a snarl of military trucks, ambulances, and abandoned cars brought traffic to a dead standstill; shoving a crumpled fistful of bills over the headrest without counting them, I kicked the door open and sprinted at full tilt down the asphalt, my shower-wet clothes plastered cold against my heaving ribs.

Vaulting over a plastic traffic barrier and shoving through the press of screaming adults, I reached the outer perimeter tape—and froze for half a heartbeat as the schoolyard came into view beyond the iron gates.

The landlady hadn’t exaggerated. Across the churned dirt of the athletic track, broad, glistening ribbons of crimson and mangled tissue trailed toward the main building where something massive had mauled and dragged its prey. Along the military cordon, armed garrison regulars stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rifles raised against a surging wall of sobbing, frantic parents, while paramedics in blood-spattered vests triaged rows of shock-stricken teenagers seated on the pavement.

Plunging into the sea of identical navy school uniforms, I shouted his name until my vocal cords tore.

“Ji Gyu-hwa! Gyu-hwa!”

I grabbed shoulders, checked weeping faces, and scanned every stretcher being wheeled toward the ambulances, but Ji Gyu-hwa wasn’t there. With every empty pass, a suffocating black terror swallowed my lungs. My heart hammered so violently against my ribs that my peripheral vision began to tunnel and shake; my legs turned to lead, and when I dragged my trembling palms down my face to force my eyes to focus, the skin beneath my fingers felt numb, foreign, and slick with ice-cold sweat.

Get a grip, Seon Na-won.

Through the roaring static in my ears, a phantom hand clamped like an iron vise around the scruff of my neck—the exact grip Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had used to haul me out of the dirt when a mortar shell burst ten meters from our trench and left me concussed and deafened.

—You intend to walk out of here alive, don’t you?

Every time panic had threatened to paralyze me in the field, that low, unshakable voice had kicked my brain back online.

—If you’re planning to fold, say so now. I don’t carry dead weight.

And layered right beneath Jaguar’s voice came the words I myself had spoken to a bruised thirteen-year-old boy across a kitchen table a few months ago:

—Even if your hands and feet are shaking, keep your head ice-cold. And if your thoughts are a tangled mess, keep your hands moving clean. That’s how you stay alive.

I sucked a deep, ragged lungful of air down to my diaphragm and locked my knees. Slowly, the tremor in my hands stopped, and battlefield clarity snapped back into my eyes.

Around the perimeter tape, the pandemonium was boiling over into violence.

“Why the hell are you soldiers standing out here blocking parents instead of storming the building?!” a mother shrieked, clawing at a corporal’s riot shield. “Our children are still inside!”

“Citizens, an elite rapid-response strike team has already breached the main hall—please stay behind the line!”

“You sent a single squad of twenty-year-old kids in there and call that a rescue?! You’ve got an entire infantry battalion garrisoned on this island—send them all in!”

“Out of my way, goddammit! My son is in that building!”

When a frantic middle-aged father wrenched a licensed hunting shotgun from his coat and leveled the barrel toward the barricade, a dozen soldiers instantly snapped their assault rifles to their shoulders.

“Drop the weapon! Step back from the line or we will open fire!”

“Su-min! Su-min, it’s Mom!”

“Kim Geon-hyeok from Class 2-3! Has anyone seen Geon-hyeok?!”

“Medic! This boy’s vomiting blood over here!”

“—Gyu-hwa’s hyung?”

At the sound of that small, hesitant voice cutting through the bedlam behind my elbow, I spun around fast enough to snap my neck. Looking up at me with wide, frightened eyes was the slight, round-faced boy who had shared hot-bar skewers with Gyu-hwa outside the stationery shop back in the winter.

“Where is he?!” I gripped the boy’s shoulders without meaning to. “You’re in Gyu-hwa’s class—where is Ji Gyu-hwa?!”

“You really are Gyu-hwa’s older brother, right?”

“Tell me where he is!”

“Over there—all the way at the back by the ambulance tailgate!”

Following the line of his trembling finger across the chaotic staging area, I rose onto the balls of my feet. Dozens of frantic teachers, medics, and wailing parents churned across my line of sight like a wall of static—and then, for less than a tenth of a second, the crowd parted.

A single blink would have missed him. Yet the hunting instincts drilled into my bones locked onto that lone, motionless silhouette instantly.

Tearing through the crowd like a hound off the leash, I skidded to a halt beside the rear bumper of an ambulance. Sitting alone on the edge of a folding canvas cot with a silver thermal blanket draped over his shoulders, Ji Gyu-hwa was staring blankly at the asphalt. Beneath the crinkling foil of the blanket, his left forearm was smeared crimson from wrist to elbow.

“Ji Gyu-hwa!”

At the roar of my voice, his bowed head jerked up. For a second, his dark eyes stared at me in utter, glassy incomprehension—as if he were looking at a mirage—before shock gave way to a tidal wave of raw, shattering relief. Biting down hard on his lower lip, he looked as though his chest might burst open on the spot.

“…Hyung,” he whispered.

“Ji Gyu-hwa!”

Closing the last two strides in a heartbeat, I dropped to my knees and crushed him against my chest, wrapping both arms around his shoulders so tightly my knuckles ached.

Trembling from head to foot inside the foil blanket, the boy lifted his blood-smeared hand and fumbled weakly at my damp cheek and the collar of my undershirt, letting out a ragged, breathless sound that was half sob, half laugh.

“Is it really you, hyung?” he gasped against my throat. “How did you know to come?”

“Why were you sitting out here all by yourself?” Pulling back just enough to cup his pale face in my hands, I scanned his pupils wildly. “Look at me, Gyu-hwa—where does it hurt? Your arm—did the creature slash you? Did a medic stitch it yet?”

Instead of answering my questions, he kept patting my jaw and my shoulder with trembling fingers as if checking that I was solid flesh, his words tumbling out in a feverish, unguarded rush.