Chapter 16

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to walk back out of this boy’s life without leaving footprints in the mud. Taking a multi-week expedition contract in the mountains hadn’t cured me of my weakness either. At heart, I was the kind of hopeless bastard you could lock in a subterranean black site for six months of ideological re-education without shifting my stubbornness by an inch. And if six months of waterboarding and sensory deprivation couldn’t rewire my brain, a little time apart certainly wasn’t going to do the trick.

Ji Gyu-hwa was being beaten under his own roof. Even if stepping in turned me into an intergalactic timeline terrorist who set the whole universe on fire, I didn’t have it in me to look away.

“Aaargh! Agh—ugh! What the hell are you doing?! Who are you?!”

Back in my original timeline, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had summed up my operational competence in two clipped words: Not bad.

Not bad. Though you still have a long way to go.

If the commanding officer who spoke those words were standing in this muddy courtyard tonight, he would have ordered me to stand down and let the boy take the beating rather than jeopardize the future of everyone we knew. He would have stepped into my path without a tremor, pointing out that the fractures hadn’t killed him, that he had survived into adulthood, and that his own breathing body was proof enough that the past required no interference. Hell, he would have put a bullet through my boot the instant I even considered climbing the steps to this villa.

Trading my own flesh to snap the enemy’s bone was a calculus I had never mastered. That softness was probably why I had remained a not-bad operator instead of becoming a legendary one. It was the ceiling of my caliber—and tonight, I was perfectly fine with it.

Crouching in the dark yard, I dragged my bloody knuckles across the rain-soaked dirt to wipe them clean. The downpour had thinned to a mist on my walk back from my apartment, leaving the night quiet enough for every ragged, bubbling groan of the man sprawled at my feet to carry clearly through the alley. After weeks of holding back, his agony was music to my ears.

“Listen closely, mister,” I said, resting my forearms across my knees. “I only have a few things to say.”

Because Ji Gyu-hwa was still a legal minor, prying him away from his biological parent through proper channels would have taken months of police reports, welfare investigations, and bureaucratic red tape—none of which an undocumented ghost without a resident registration number could file anyway. And when the law couldn’t separate a child from a monster fast enough, a man had to improvise.

“Lecturing trash like you about paternal duty would be a waste of breath,” I continued evenly. “Cut off all four of your limbs, and you’d still crawl to the nearest den with the stumps just to roll the dice.”

“Guh—! Wh-why are you doing this to me, boss?! Who sent you?!”

“Which is why I’m only going to give you this warning once.”

“Gaaah!”

I ground the heel of my boot down squarely onto his scrawny hand, crushing the thin skin and brittle metacarpals against the gravel.

“Don’t lay a finger on the kid.”

Bone snapped with a wet, splintering crack beneath my sole, and my pulse didn’t even flicker. Whatever pain this waste of skin was feeling right now, thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa had swallowed ten times worse in silence. That boy was my commanding officer; giving him headaches was my exclusive prerogative as the youngest smart-ass on his squad, not a privilege reserved for a deadbeat who didn’t deserve the title of father.

“Mister,” I murmured, leaning more of my weight onto my heel. “I said don’t touch the kid.”

Having wallowed at the bottom of the underground gambling food chain for most of his son’s life, the man understood predators far better than he understood decency. Men higher up the chain never wasted time explaining who they were or why they had come; they swept through like a typhoon, broke what needed breaking, and left with what they wanted. Tonight, I spoke the only language he respected.

Someday down the line, once the terror faded, he might piece together that I was just a neighborhood day-laborer with no syndicate backing me up. For now, however, he wouldn’t dare harbor a single suspicion, much less come looking for his son.

“If you ever spot him on the street, cross to the other side and pretend you’ve never seen him before,” I said. “And don’t you dare touch a single coin of his welfare stipend. Do we understand each other?”

“Kh-heuu… k-kh… Aaaagh!”

“I asked you a question, mister.”

“Aaaagh! I understand! I understand, I swear! Please stop—I got it!”

That was all I needed to hear. Straightening up, I flicked the remaining specks of blood from my fingers into a murky puddle, vaulted effortlessly over the villa’s low perimeter wall into the neighboring lot, and strolled out through the adjacent building’s front entrance as if I lived there. With my hands tucked casually into my jacket pockets and my stride unhurried, I was just another unremarkable resident out for a late-night walk. The steady drizzle would wash the rest of the courtyard clean before dawn.

As I started down the narrow, sloping cement alley, a solitary silhouette materialized dead ahead beneath the amber cone of a streetlamp. For half a beat I didn’t recognize him; then the light caught the thin plastic bag dangling from his fist, and I stopped in my tracks.

It was Ji Gyu-hwa. Through the translucent plastic of the supermarket bag, the familiar logo of a standard pharmacy burn ointment showed clearly.

“I told you to go to the licensed byproduct dispensary,” I said, halting a few paces away.

“Creature-burn salve was reclassified as a basic household medicine a few months ago,” Gyu-hwa replied, his voice flat in the damp air. “Regular supermarkets stock it now.”

I blinked behind my balaclava. Wait—really? In my memory, that deregulation bill hadn’t passed until several years later. Had I known he could buy the stuff at a local corner mart in twenty minutes, I would have sent him across the island on a much longer wild-goose chase. Feeling sheepish, I reached up to rub the back of my neck—and froze as Ji Gyu-hwa’s dark eyes tracked methodically from my damp jacket to my mask, and finally to the rust-red smears dried along the knuckles of the hand I had just raised.

“…”

“…”

Under that unblinking stare, an absurd wave of embarrassment crept up my spine. Half of it came from the fact that thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa looked exactly like someone had selected my terrifying squad leader in an image editor and hit Ctrl+T to shrink him down to miniature scale; the other half came from the acute awareness that, rather than looking like a dependable adult, I looked like a back-alley thug caught red-handed after a brawl.

“…Is that because of me?” Gyu-hwa asked quietly, his gaze locked on my knuckles. “Is that my father’s blood?”

Straight for the jugular, as always. After a brief hesitation, I cleared my throat. “Do you know the thought experiment about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Yes.”

“Consider this Schrödinger’s father’s blood—”

“Stop talking nonsense!”

…And now I’m getting scolded by a seventh grader. Shutting my mouth, I rolled my eyes toward the darkened rooftops while the boy exhaled a long, shaky breath to steady his temper.

“Why did you do it?” he asked a moment later, his voice dropping to a much quieter register.

“He picked a fight with me first.”

“That’s a lie. You went back there because of me.”

“Nothing of the sort,” I lied breezily, rocking back on my heels. “The guy rammed right into my shoulder in the alley and refused to apologize. Pissed me off so badly I tuned him up a little. Honestly, it felt so good I was whistling on the way out.”

It was a petty, lawless brand of catharsis that serving the greater good never once afforded a soldier.

Gyu-hwa stared up at me through the drizzle. “…Did you kill him?”

“Wait—killing him was an option?” I pivoted halfway back toward the villa. “Hold my bag for five minutes.”

The only reason I had stopped at breaking the bastard’s hand was that hospitalizing a drunken gambler and burying a homicide victim carried vastly different butterfly effects for the timeline. Had I known the kid would look at me with such solemn, almost hopeful expectation, I might have slit the man’s throat and taken my chances with the universe.

“It wasn’t an option!” Gyu-hwa lunged forward, catching the hem of my sleeve. “If the police catch you—!”

“What if they catch me?”

“…They can’t.” His fingers twisted tightly into the damp fabric of my cuff, his head ducking low. “You can’t get arrested, hyung.”

There was no point asking him to elaborate. Even at thirteen, Ji Gyu-hwa would sooner bite off his own tongue than utter a sentimental plea; he was born with the kind of fierce, brittle pride that chose silent ruin over begging for warmth.

Dropping to one knee on the wet pavement so our eyes met on the same level, I studied his pale face. If I teach this boy to lean on me, how badly will the ripples warp his future? If meeting a soft-hearted idiot like me dulls the razor edge that kept him alive, will he die on some battlefield years before I ever transfer into his squad? Am I stripping away his armor?

One by one, the ruthless lessons Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had hammered into my skull during my six months under his command echoed through my memory.

—If you can’t pull your weight, your existence on this team has zero value.

He had never sugarcoated a single truth on the line.

—You’re relying on your teammates at a moment when you should be relying on your own reflexes? Why don’t you ask them to breathe for you while you’re at it? Move out.

Even when he spoke of unit cohesion, his trust was measured out with a scalpel. Once, while waiting in an ambush position outside a separatist compound, I had muttered a joke to break the tension: To these cultist lunatics, we probably look just as fanatical as they do, don’t we? And I don’t even go to church.

Without taking his eye off his rifle scope, Jaguar had replied in a voice like dry ice: Worse. To them, soldiers aren’t even candidates for conversion. Have you ever seen a missionary preach to a rifle?

Having put on the uniform solely to exterminate the fanatics and monsters tearing the country apart, he treated himself no less mercilessly than an expendable weapon.

—If the tinnitus is ringing too loud to think, drown it out with a scream.

During hand-to-hand sparring in the garrison gym, his training methods bordered on sadism.

—Why are your eyelids flinching when a fist comes at your face?

—Isn’t blinking human instinct, sir?

—Does your heart rupture and stop beating if you keep your eyes open while taking a punch?

—No, sir.

—Then it’s a habit, not instinct. Keep taking the hit until you stop blinking.

Every natural human flinch I possessed, he had systematically burned out of my nervous system through sheer repetition. Those cold, almost inhuman edges of his had forged me into an operator who could walk out of hell alive. Hard as his words had been to swallow at the time, not a single syllable had ever been false, and every brutal correction had been aimed squarely at keeping me breathing. I owed him my life a dozen times over.