Chapter 14

As luck would have it, a long-term expedition contract landed on the dispatch agency’s board the very next morning. The job involved entering a dormant subterranean nest to harvest high-grade creature byproducts—a site where more than ten day-laborers had already come out in body bags. Having been passed around and rejected by every major subcontractor on the mainland before washing up on Hwaryeong-do, the contract sat on the boss’s desk like a starving beast with bloodshot eyes, waiting for fresh meat.

Whenever the military and provincial authorities refused to clear a nest themselves, there was always a dirty reason behind the scenes—usually some connected conglomerate executive paying under the table to farm rare biological catalysts from a live breeding colony. With ten men already dead and the harvest behind schedule, the daily hazard pay had skyrocketed, and the lump-sum completion bonus was astronomical. Frankly, though, the payout wasn’t even my main priority. I just needed a meat grinder grueling enough to wring every last drop of idle thought out of my skull for weeks on end.

“It’s a two-week camp-in gig, and the client pays out death benefits if a worker buys it inside, right?” I asked, tapping the clipboard.

Ignoring the agency boss’s sputtered protests, I uncapped the pen and scrawled Seon Jun-geon across the liability waiver.

“If I don’t walk back out,” I added, sliding the clipboard across the desk, “hand my death payout to the kid who lives in Unit 202 of the villa by the field. Name’s Ji Gyu-hwa.”

“Jun-geon, you crazy bastard…” The boss half-rose from his chair, his weathered face paling. “You’re not—hey, you’re not signing up for that pit because you’re looking to die on me, are you?! Eh?”

“What the hell kind of talk is that, Boss? Don’t jinx a guy before roll call.”

No matter what operation I suited up for, I always stepped across the line knowing it could be the last thing I ever did in this life. This harvesting gig was no different from a Special Operations breach, or any of the day-labor hunts I had run over the past three months. In our world, there was no such thing as safe work. Death was an old neighbor—an inevitability every living soul owed a debt to. The only variable was the due date on the ledger.

And my due date was still a long way off. With well over a year remaining on my 616-day sentence in the past, I couldn’t afford to die in some damp cave. I just needed to put miles of rock between myself and that boy before my resolve caved in. Nothing scrubbed sentimental rot out of a soldier’s brain quite like the stench of death and a two-week flood of combat adrenaline.

“I’m walking back out of there in one piece, Boss, so keep your wallet open for your agency cut,” I said, slinging my gear bag over my shoulder. “Once this contract wraps up, though, you won’t be seeing me around here for a while.”

My plan was simple: collect the completion bonus in cash, pack my sparse belongings at the guesthouse, and take the first ferry off Hwaryeong-do. It wasn’t a sudden change of heart; it was merely returning to the original rule I had spent the past three months pretending to forget.

The agency boss couldn’t stop me.

* * *

Half-frozen sleet was lashing down sideways on the afternoon I finally trudged back into the village after fourteen days underground. It was the dead of winter, and the wind-driven rain, just shy of freezing into snow, sliced through wet cloth like razor blades. Left unheated and empty for two straight weeks, my room at the guesthouse was guaranteed to be an icebox.

Thinking of nothing beyond cranking the floor boiler to maximum and passing out for twenty-four hours, I kept my head ducked against the gale and shoved open the guesthouse’s rusted iron gate—only to stop dead in the courtyard.

Huddled beneath the narrow concrete overhang outside the building entrance stood a familiar figure. Winter had settled in full force—a heavy blizzard had blanketed the island just a week ago—yet Ji Gyu-hwa was standing out in the storm wearing nothing but that same thin autumn jacket. Plumes of white vapor drifted from between his bloodless lips, looking like the last wisps of smoke rising from a furnace that had burned through every scrap of fuel inside.

Although the boy knew which building I lived in from walking past it on the road, I had never once brought him inside, which meant he didn’t even know which door was mine. If he had knocked on the landlady’s unit on the ground floor, she gladly would have let him wait inside by the stove—yet lacking even the savvy to ask an adult for shelter, he had simply planted himself under the dripping eaves in the freezing wind and rain, his face bleached as gray as wet cement.

Peeling off my heavy waterproof poncho, I crossed the yard and stepped under the overhang in front of him.

The boy’s hollow, defeated eyes told the whole story before he even moved. Yet the instant his gaze locked with mine through the eye slit of my balaclava, his hand dove into his schoolbag and pulled out a small square of paper. Because he had kept it tucked deep inside his bag, only the outer corners were damp; the sheet itself was dry. As I reached out with my bandaged hand to take the paper—folded neatly down to less than half the size of my palm—our fingers brushed. His skin was as icy as a corpse’s, trembling with a fine, uncontrollable shiver.

Unfolding the square, I found myself looking down at a heavy cardstock rifle zeroing target.

Right across the center bullseye sat a tight, clean cluster of bullet holes. The shots that had climbed erratically up and to the right during our last session at the range were now punched at a uniform elevation in a single coin-sized group, as if wrestled into submission by sheer force of will. It meant his shoulder mount and breath control had held rock-steady through the entire string.

He shot well.

Right on the heels of that automatic assessment, my eyes caught the range date stamped in purple ink along the bottom margin. Ten days ago. The target had been shot ten whole days ago. Has this kid been walking over here after school to stand under my eaves every single evening since then?

While I stared down at the frayed paper in silence, Ji Gyu-hwa waited quietly for a single beat, bent at the waist in a stiff, formal bow, and turned to leave. Outside the narrow strip of the eaves, the sleet was thickening into a freezing downpour, and he was about to step straight out into it without an umbrella. Shooting a hand out, I grabbed his soaked shoulder, stripped my rain poncho the rest of the way off, and shoved it against his chest.

“Put this on,” I ordered.

“I don’t need it.”

“I told you to put it on.”

“And I said I don’t need it.”

In my timeline, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa was the kind of superior who would dislocate my wrist if I talked back to him once, yet at thirteen, the bastard was a stubborn, sharp-tongued mule who matched me word for word.

I almost asked him how school had been, or whether he’d been keeping up with his homework—or if winter break had already started—before the memory of why I had thrown myself into a lethal creature nest for two weeks slammed my teeth shut. At my sudden silence, the boy’s jaw tightened, and he turned his face toward the rain in quiet resignation.

“…I saw that you’re alive,” he murmured. “That’s enough.”

The wind was howling hard enough to blow sheets of icy water straight under the concrete overhang, pooling around our ankles. Looking down, I saw that his canvas sneakers and uniform trousers were already sodden through to the skin. Yet he had stood out here in the freezing slush for hours—all just to hand me this single square of paper. Clinging to a zeroed target sheet as his sole, hard-won pretext to come looking for me. I hadn’t been there at the range ten days ago, yet I could picture with aching clarity how his eyes must have lit up when he saw that tight grouping—realizing he finally had an excuse to knock on my door. The edges of the cardstock were soft and fuzzy from being thumbed over and over in his pocket, yet the four creases dividing the sheet were ironed razor-sharp, without a single stray wrinkle. That tiny square of paper betrayed far too much.

“Come inside and eat something before you go,” I said.

What the hell am I doing? Mocking every vow I had drilled into my skull over the past fourteen days, it took one soggy piece of paper to blow my resolve to smithereens. Right. Just one hot meal. I’ll get some warm broth into his belly, dry his clothes so he doesn’t catch pneumonia, and then sit him down and tell him calmly that I’m moving away from Hwaryeong-do.

“I already ate,” he lied, his teeth chattering.

“Then sit there and watch me eat,” I snapped, turning to unlock my door. “The brat I used to feed and boss around vanished on me two weeks ago, and I’ve been bored out of my skull eating alone.”

Staring up at my back as if he couldn’t believe his ears, Ji Gyu-hwa knitted his dark brows. Does this guy seriously not know how to talk like a normal human being? He seemed to mutter something along those lines under his breath—which only drew a dry snort from me, considering the adult Jaguar’s venomous tongue had sent more grown men to the infirmary with emotional trauma than I could count on both hands.

Still, in a thirteen-year-old kid’s eyes, I had to look like the world’s most unhinged, capricious bastard—an adult who hurled cruel insults in his face out of nowhere just because he was in a foul mood, vanished without a word for two weeks, and then dragged him inside to feed him the second he showed up in the rain.

“…What happened to your hands?” Gyu-hwa asked, halting just inside the threshold.

“Burned ’em.”

In the creature-harvesting business, occupational injuries were par for the course. A clean claw gash would have been infinitely preferable, but the subterranean species we’d cleared out spat caustic acid, leaving me with chemical burns—the one kind of wound that never stops screaming. Even with the acid neutralized and no flame anywhere near my skin, deep burns had a nasty way of replaying the exact moment of blistering agony around the clock, day and night.

“Working a dispatch job?” he asked, his eyes fixed on my thick white gauze wraps.

“Boiling ramen.”

“Did you put burn ointment on it?”

“What’s a little hot water need ointment for?”

Staring fixedly at the heavy bandages swathing both of my palms and winding all the way up my left forearm, the boy went quiet for a beat. Then he looked up and said flatly, “I’m hungry.”

It was the most sensible thing he’d said all evening. Stepping inside, I flicked on the entryway light. Whether the landlady had turned on the floor heat earlier or the neighboring units had kept the walls warm, the room wasn’t nearly as frigid as I had feared.

“Get in there and wash up with hot water,” I said, tossing a clean set of my dry sweats at his chest and jerking my chin toward the bathroom door.

His bluish lips twitched as if he wanted to argue, but after a second, he clutched the clothes to his chest and ducked into the bathroom. Cranking the wall boiler dial to high, I walked straight into the kitchenette, filled a pot with water, and set it on the gas stove.

Right around the time the water began to bubble, the bathroom door clicked open and Gyu-hwa stepped out in a cloud of steam. I was just reaching for a packet of mild ramen with my bandaged fingers when the boy marched across the floor, twisted the stove knob to shut off the flame, and planted himself in front of me.

“You need to put medicine on your arm first,” he declared.

“I already put some on earlier.”

“When?”

“Don’t remember.”

Is this grown man completely out of his mind? Shooting me a glare loaded with that exact sentiment—bordering on treason against his future superior, really—Ji Gyu-hwa let out a long, long-suffering sigh. “Don’t you even keep a first-aid kit in the house?”