Chapter 30

By the time the last county bus dropped me off at our village stop on Hwaryeong-do, the rural roads were pitch-black. Only because the veteran bus driver at the mainland transfer terminal had recognized my face and held the doors an extra thirty seconds had I avoided being stranded overnight at the station.

Trudging up the dark residential slope with my hands shoved deep into my jacket pockets, I pulled out my phone out of habit. Zero missed calls, zero new messages. Usually, if I wasn’t home by eight, Gyu-hwa sent a terse When are you getting back? text; figuring varsity range practice had tired him out early, I tapped open our chat window just to be sure.

Staring at the screen under the streetlamp, my footsteps faltered. Beside the message I had typed at the bus terminal that morning sat a tiny red retry arrow—↺. Moving through the mountain dead zone on the highway, the text had failed to transmit.

Still, he didn’t call me either, I reassured myself, slipping the phone back into my pocket as I climbed the villa stairs. He’s fifteen now, not a little kid. He probably just ate dinner and went to bed.

When I unlocked our front door and stepped into the foyer, the apartment was dark and dead silent. Kicking off my sneakers, I picked up a clean towel to head straight for the shower, then paused and turned toward Gyu-hwa’s bedroom door just to check that he had kicked his blanket off—only for the door to wrench open from the inside before my knuckles could touch the wood.

Standing in the dark frame, Ji Gyu-hwa’s face was the color of bleached bone.

Dropping my towel onto the linoleum, I closed the distance between us in a single stride and gripped his upper arms. “Ji Gyu-hwa—what’s wrong with your face? Did something happen at range practice today?!”

Without a word, Gyu-hwa swung both forearms up and knocked my hands violently away. Startled by the force of the blow, I didn’t back off an inch, catching his wrists as he tried to shove past me.

“Hey, look at me! Are you hurt?! Ji Gyu-hwa!”

He had shot up so fast over the past year that wrangling him was like wrestling a young stag, his lean muscles corded like steel cable beneath his sleeves, yet I used my leverage to pin his back flat against the hallway wall and lock both of his wrists above his head with one hand. Chest heaving raggedly against mine, he glared up at me through the gloom.

“Talk to me, kid! What happened at school today?!”

“Where were you?” His voice came out raw, scraped down to gravel.

“What?”

“I asked where the hell you were all day!”

“I just… had to run up to Seoul for a few hours,” I said, blinking in surprise before a hollow breath escaped me. “Ah—I sent you a text this morning before I boarded the bus, but the signal dropped and it never went through. I only saw the error icon outside just now.”

“You promised me you’d never disappear without telling me!” Gyu-hwa roared, his voice cracking as he thrashed with every ounce of strength in his frame. “You swore to my face you wouldn’t pull this shit on me!”

Thud! Thud! Realizing he couldn’t break my grip on his wrists, the boy suddenly whipped his chin back to slam the base of his skull straight into the concrete wall behind him; with my heart leaping into my throat, I jammed my free palm behind his head a split second before impact, taking the full brunt of the blow across my knuckles.

Breathing like a cornered wolf, his eyes blazing blood-red with a tangle of betrayal, terror, and shattering relief, Gyu-hwa stared into my face.

“Why did you do this to me?!” he choked out.

“Gyu-hwa, I—”

“If you were going to walk out in the morning and vanish until midnight without a word, you shouldn’t have spent the whole year telling me you’re going to leave me someday!” His voice broke into a ragged sob as his shoulders shook beneath my hands. “Do you have any idea what it’s like sitting in this empty house waiting for the door to open after you’ve drilled it into my skull that you’re leaving?! Are you fucking toying with me?!”

“I’m sorry,” I breathed, every word he spat driving like a rusted nail through my ribs.

He was right—every single syllable was on my head. I was the one who had planted a ticking time bomb in the middle of his chest by constantly reminding him that our days together were numbered, and then I had waltzed off to Seoul assuming his silence meant peace of mind. Releasing his wrists, I hauled his trembling five-foot-ten frame straight into my arms, locking my hands behind his back until the violent heaving of his ribs slowly began to subside against my chest.

“…Did you really just go to Seoul?” he asked into my shoulder after a long minute, his voice muffled and hoarse.

“Yeah. Really.”

“Why Seoul out of nowhere? …Was it because of your family?”

“Yeah.”

Remembering a passing remark I had dropped months ago about having relatives in the capital, the frantic edge in his breathing finally began to settle. Pulling back just enough to look into his reddened eyes, I watched his chapped lips part and close three times without a sound. I didn’t need telepathy to read the terrifying question sitting on his tongue: Are you leaving Hwaryeong-do to go live with them now?

Instead, like a child squeezing his eyes shut before a cliff edge, he swallowed the question down and asked a safer one.

“…Did you get to talk to them?”

“No. Just watched their faces from across the street for a bit.”

He frowned slightly. “It’s a four-hour bus ride each way to Seoul. You spent eight hours on a highway just to look at your family from across an alley?”

“Because I was scared that if I walked any closer, my resolve would crack,” I admitted quietly, resting my forehead against his temple. “A wanted man begging his family to hide him would only drag them into the mud.”

Finding a crooked, unmistakable solace in the fact that I remained an outcast who belonged only to this island, Gyu-hwa let his forehead drop against my collarbone, his short, stiff hair tickling my jaw. Wrapping my arms tighter around his back, I rubbed the ridge of his spine in slow circles.

“Your hyung screwed up badly today, Gyu-hwa. I’m sorry.”

“…Even if I locked the door and told you not to go, you wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t ever leave you hanging in the dark like this again.”

As his trembling finally stilled in my embrace, a wave of bitter self-loathing rose in my throat. Look at him, Seon Na-won. One single lie—I’m never leaving you—was all it would have taken to let this boy sleep in peace, and I couldn’t even give him that.

* * *

“—Charlie 2-1 to all elements. Stand by at breach point. Hold for my mark.”

Over the tactical Bone-Conduction earpiece, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa’s ice-calm baritone clicked through the static, followed in crisp sequence by read-backs from Choi Ho-gyeong and Park Chan. Raising a gloved finger to the PTT switch on my plate-carrier strap, I keyed my mic.

“Charlie 2-6, copy. Standing by.”

No matter how many subterranean raids I logged, the metallic taste of adrenaline thirty seconds before blowing a door never dulled—and tonight’s operation carried a foul stench from top to bottom. Rather than a clean battalion strike, we were running a joint containment op with field operatives from the NSD[1] breathing down our necks.

“—Command reminder: primary objective is live recovery of the VIP, not elimination,” Jaguar’s voice cut across the net. “The NSD has reiterated that the target must be extracted breathing at all costs.”

“Copy,” I murmured, exchanging a dry glance in the dim staging corridor with Hong Kwon-jin and Park Chan.

“Wait—the NSD’s internal security clowns are the ones who lost the guy on their own turf, so why the hell is Charlie-2 wiping their asses?” Park Chan grumbled over the local squad channel. “Those spooks should stick to sitting in tinted sedans playing puppet master instead of playing soldier in the field.”

“Keep your voice down,” Hong Kwon-jin snorted, checking the chamber of his rifle. “Though I’ll give you ten thousand won if those suit-wearing bastards don’t trip over their own boots five seconds after breach.”

“Have you ever run a joint op with NSD field agents before, Sergeant Hong?” I asked.

“Hell no. Those bastards spend their whole careers skulking in the shadows like movie villains.”

Even trading gallows banter couldn’t fully scrub the bad taste from our mouths. Every man in our stack knew why tonight’s briefing had been a mess: less than six weeks ago, acting on top-secret NSD coordinates, Charlie-2 had flown overseas on a black insertion, snatched a middle-aged civilian physicist out of a fortified compound, and delivered him gift-wrapped to NSD headquarters in Seoul.

Back on that four-hour extraction flight home, strapped into the jump seat across from me inside the transport plane’s cargo bay, the scrawny professor had looked less like a national-security mastermind and more like a feral lunatic. We hadn’t even subjected him to a HALO jump—just two breaching charges, a brief firefight in the courtyard, and one minor SUV rollover during exfil—yet the man had been shivering like a wet Chihuahua and babbling quantum gibberish at a hundred miles an hour without pausing for breath.

“Whether the universe operates on a single fixed worldline or branching many-worlds manifolds, violating chronological causality inside a CTC triggers a destructive paradox that annihilates macroscopic self-identity—the conservation of quantum information!”

“Right, I hear you, Professor,” I had said soothingly, dabbing a crust of dried blood from his wrinkled forehead with an antiseptic gauze pad while the rest of my squad switched off their intercoms to nap.

“Yet quantum superposition and the uncertainty principle resolve the contradiction! To prevent a paradox from tearing spacetime apart, the timeline enforces Novikov self-consistency—a restorative inertia that drags aberrant variables back into place! Do you understand what I’m saying, young man?! The effect can precede the cause!”

“Uh-huh. Take a small sip of water so you don’t choke, sir.”

“A closed timelike curve is a worldline closed within a Lorentzian manifold—!”

Sitting beside me on the cargo netting, Park Chan had cracked one eye open and muttered, “Shouldn’t we gag him and toss him in the hold before our ears bleed?”

“Leave him be,” I had replied, peeling a protein bar for the trembling academic. “He’s just a fragile civilian whose brain got rattled by the flashbangs.”

Even as I handed him the ration bar, the gaunt professor had seized my gloved wrist with bony, freezing fingers, his sunken eyes boring into mine like a prophet of doom: “Listen to me, soldier! The effect can precede the cause!”

We had bled through hell to bring that eccentric old man back intact, only for the NSD’s vaunted safe house to get breached from the inside weeks later. Why both the separatist cult and the state intelligence apparatus were willing to burn entire battalions over one half-crazed physicist was above my pay grade; when command pointed, operators rolled.

Still, before boarding the transport chopper tonight, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had stopped beside my locker and remarked quietly that an operator’s one-year mark in the unit was when familiarity bred fatal carelessness. Remembering his warning, I rolled my shoulders and cleared my mind as the squad’s chatter continued.

“When we haul the old man out this time, I’m welding leg irons onto his ankles myself,” Park Chan muttered.

“Better yet, weld him straight to the NSD director’s desk—”

“—Cut the chatter,” Ji Gyu-hwa’s voice sliced across the channel, dropping the corridor into instant silence. “Eyes up. Cut main power. Breach.”

The exact millisecond the corridor lights died into pitch blackness, I snapped my quad-tube night-vision goggles down over my eyes. As the world bloomed into eerie, phosphor-green clarity—borrowing the night sight of a nocturnal predator—a familiar coil of cold electricity tightened in my gut.

“Charlie 2-6, moving in.”

The breaching charge blew the reinforced steel doors inward in a roar of white smoke, and our stack flowed through the fatal funnel like water. According to the structural blueprints we had memorized during the briefing, the physicist was being held in a reinforced panic room on B1, directly below the ground-floor atrium; our objective was to blitz the stairwell before the defenders could seal the blast bulkheads.