Chapter 27

Gasping loudly in the dark, I dragged a palm across my sweat-drenched forehead—just as a soft knock sounded against my bedroom door and the latch clicked open.

A dream. Why had that memory surfaced tonight, of all nights?

“Gyu-hwa?” Thanks to years of field discipline, my voice came out remarkably steady despite my hammering pulse. Quickly wiping the remaining cold sweat onto my sleeve under cover of the dark, I squinted toward the doorway. “It’s past two in the morning—why are you awake? Did you have a nightmare?”

“You were the one having a nightmare, hyung,” Gyu-hwa said quietly, stepping inside.

“Me?” Shit. What on earth did I mutter in my sleep with a fourteen-year-old in the next room? “I’m wide awake now, so go on back to bed.”

Instead of retreating, Gyu-hwa padded across the linoleum and burrowed straight under the corner of my quilt. Out of sheer reflex, I lifted the edge of the comforter to let him in, and the boy slid his arms around my waist, resting his cheek gingerly against my bicep—light as a falling leaf, or like a kid cautiously offering his palm to a wounded beast, without asking a single intrusive question.

Just last week, on his school career counselor’s survey form, the stubborn brat had written down Military Officer as his first choice again.

“See this?” I muttered into the dark, staring at the ceiling. “If you enlist, you’ll end up having nightmares just like me.”

A low, quiet chuckle vibrated against my ribs. “Alright. I’ll reconsider enlisting.”

“Good boy, Gyu-hwa.”

Because he was holding himself so stiffly to avoid jostling me, I deliberately hooked both arms around his back and hauled him roughly against my chest in a bear hug.

“Hyung, you’re crushing my windpipe.”

“You’re talking just fine.”

“Mmph.”

“Suffer through it.”

“If I suffocate to death tonight, I’m leaving you my study tablet in my will.”

“Sweet. I’ll list it on Onion Market tomorrow morning.”

Though it had visited me in the shape of a nightmare, every frame of that basement room had been real—a past that hadn’t happened yet in this world, carried inside my skull alone. Slowly, as the boy’s steady warmth soaked through my T-shirt, the phantom smell of bleach and copper faded from my nostrils, and I closed my eyes.

Ever since the creature attack at his middle school, not having a phone line had felt like walking around without a sidearm, so the very next week I had swallowed my pride and begged the boss at the day-labor agency to register a prepaid smartphone under his name in exchange for covering the monthly bill plus a generous bonus. In a county this small, rumor had already made the rounds that Ji Gyu-hwa’s deadbeat father had abandoned his home for the gambling dens, leaving the boy in the care of his older cousin. Since my own real-world identity was unusable—and since framing a degenerate gambler for identity theft didn’t cost my conscience a single wink of sleep—the cover story worked like a charm.

The day I handed Gyu-hwa my new phone number and registered it with the school administrative office, the boy’s entire posture changed. Merely knowing that an invisible wire connected us whenever we were apart seemed to melt the last layer of ice around his ribs. With three square meals a day, a warm room, and a phone number that always picked up, Ji Gyu-hwa began to bloom at a terrifying clip.

Having already become a campus legend after receiving the Governor’s Righteous Citizen Commendation in the spring, he closed out the final week of eighth grade by taking first place in the school-wide physical fitness evaluation and winning a three-million-won athletic scholarship. Hearing the news from the landlady on my way home, I proudly held out my hand for the award certificate and the ceremony photo—only for Gyu-hwa to wordlessly heave a three-foot-wide foam prop check out from behind the shoe rack:

When I asked where the actual commemorative photograph was, he blinked at me with a completely straight face. “I didn’t take one.”

According to him, he suffered from an acute medical condition where looking into a camera lens caused instant syncope—a fascinating claim coming from a kid who never once flinched when I snapped pictures of him eating ice cream on my phone, yet who had fought me tooth and nail (and won) to skip his seventh-grade class yearbook photo too.

“If you weren’t even going to stand for the picture, why the hell did we spend thirty thousand won getting your hair styled on Sunday?!” I demanded.

Sweeping a nonchalant palm over his freshly trimmed, ink-black hair—so thick not a speck of scalp showed through—Gyu-hwa looked me dead in the eye. “You said my bangs were getting shaggy, hyung. Come on, let’s go eat Hanwoo beef with the scholarship money.”

And before I could launch into a lecture, he bolted into his bedroom to change his shirt.

Is this puberty? Watching his closed door, I rubbed my chin in solemn dread. Give it another six months, and he’d probably be dressing head-to-toe in Grim Reaper black and blasting underground gangsta rap about spilling my brother’s blood on the asphalt despite living in a cozy two-bedroom villa and carrying a tutor-checked math binder.

Wiping away an imaginary tear, I gazed out the window toward the distant mountain ridge.

Thanks to that string of accolades—coupled with his rapidly filling frame—Gyu-hwa had become an undeniable celebrity at his small middle school. Whenever I walked him into town, half the kids on the street brightened up and bowed to us first.

“Hyung,” Gyu-hwa said one afternoon as we walked down the main avenue toward the bookstore to pick up his winter-break prep workbooks.

“Yeah?”

“Are you really going to keep walking around downtown without a mask on?” He shot me a pointed side-eye that practically shouted, ‘You told me you’re a wanted fugitive, remember?’

“What’s with the sudden nagging?” I narrowed my eyes, wounded. Wait—now that you’re a big-shot campus star, are you embarrassed to be seen with your guardian?

Before I could put him in a headlock, three cheerful voices rang out from across the crosswalk.

“Oh! It’s Gyu-hwa’s hyung! Good afternoon!”

“Hello, hyung!”

“Whoa, you aren’t wearing your black mask today!”

It was the trio of classmates I’d treated to spicy rice cakes a few months back. Seeing their jaws drop as they took in my bare face, I puffed out my chest slightly. Obviously I couldn’t tell them I’d only worn the balaclava to hide my identity from their friend here, so I gave a tragic, fugitive’s sigh.

“Yeah, decided to let the face breathe for a change.”

“Dude, Gyu-hwa’s brother is ridiculously handsome!” the round-faced boy gasped.

“I hear that a lot.”

“Why aren’t you on TV or in the movies, hyung?”

“The Korean entertainment industry is too small a bowl to hold a vessel of my scale,” I replied gravely.

“Then you should go to Hollywood!”

“Right? If my English pronunciation were a little sharper, I’d have swept the red carpet at Cannes three years ago.”

“Wait, hyung, isn’t Cannes in France?”

“Well, right after I master conversational French—”

A sharp, insistent tug on my jacket cuff cut off my monologue. Glancing down, I found Gyu-hwa—who had given his classmates a millimeter-deep nod—glaring up at me with dark, urgent eyes as if the bookstore were about to self-destruct in sixty seconds.

Look at this ungrateful little brat. You’re really ashamed of your own brother’s jokes in front of your friends?!

When I pretended not to notice him yanking my sleeve, Gyu-hwa stepped squarely between me and the three boys. “We’re running late for an appointment. See you guys at school.”

What appointment?! Were the ninth-grade algebra workbooks going to hang a sign on the bookshelf and clock out if we didn’t arrive by four-fifteen?

Letting myself be dragged down the sidewalk by his fist on my sleeve, I poked his ribs with my elbow.

“Look at our popular Mr. Campus Celebrity.”

He stared straight ahead, pretending to be deaf, though the tips of his ears twitched like a cat’s. Even after we stepped inside the quiet aisles of the bookstore, I kept leaning over his shoulder to needle him.

“Hey, when you get a girlfriend, you have to introduce her to me first, alright?”

“Final exams are in two weeks,” he muttered, flipping through a geometry workbook. “What girlfriend?”

“Aha—so you’re saying once finals are over, you’re opening applications?”

Slap! Gyu-hwa clapped the paperback shut between his palms and turned his dark eyes squarely onto me.

“What about you, hyung?”

I blinked. “Me? What about me?”

“Are you going out on that blind date with the landlady’s niece?”

Aha. Instantly, every piece of his weird, prickly behavior on the street clicked into place.

Three days earlier, our landlady had climbed the stairs carrying a lacquer tray heaped with ripe persimmons and autumn pears. Being a polite young man who never refused an elder’s generosity, I had bowed ninety degrees and reached for the tray—only to discover that the woman’s fingers were clamped around the handles with the hydraulic grip strength of a hydraulic vise. Even when I subtly engaged my biceps and lats to tug the tray toward me, her entire torso slid across the threshold without her knuckles budging a millimeter.

While I was still marveling inwardly at the martial prowess of Hwaryeong-do housewives, she had flashed a dazzling smile and revealed her true objective:

“Bachelor Jun-geon! You see, my sister’s youngest daughter in the city—oh, she’s been sharp as a whip since she was in diapers! Skin like porcelain, sweet temper, and blessed with fortune! Sailed straight through a top university in Seoul, wham, straight through her master’s degree, wham, and just landed a full-time research post at a national institute!”

SLAM!

Before the landlady could utter a fourth wham, fourteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa had stepped up behind my elbow and kicked the steel front door shut right in her face.