Chapter 24

“I thought I’d never get to see you again,” he breathed, his eyes shining bright red. “Inside the hallway, I really thought it was the end. I wanted to call you so badly, hyung, before it was over—only I realized you don’t have a phone number…”

“Ji Gyu-hwa, breathe. Look at me.”

“I just wanted to hear your voice once and say thank you,” he choked out, throwing both arms around my neck and clinging to me with desperate strength, burying his face into my wet collarbone as his breath hitched violently. “After everything you gave me, I thought I was going to die without ever telling you thank you…”

“Nobody’s dying, kid,” I rasped, hoisting him straight up into my arms off the cot and patting the sharp ridges of his spine over and over until his shuddering breaths began to slow. “You’re alive, and I’m right here. I’ve got you.”

Only after a long minute did he loosen his grip around my neck. Lowering him carefully back onto the canvas stretcher, I tipped his chin up with my thumb and reached for his reddened left forearm.

“Show me the wound on your arm.”

“…It’s not my blood, hyung.”

It took every ounce of moral restraint in my body not to blurt out Thank God in the middle of a schoolyard where other people’s children lay under white sheets. Swallowing the words down, I ran a rapid, systematic field-medic check from his crown to his ankles.

“Keep talking to me so I can hear your lungs,” I ordered briskly, checking his airway and the pulse at his carotid before palpating his collarbones, ribs, and knees. “Any tightness when you inhale? Dizziness? Turn your neck slowly to the left, now the right. Lift both hands for me.”

Obediently following each command without a word, Gyu-hwa never once took his eyes off my face.

“Excuse me—are you this student’s parent?”

As I finished checking his ankle joints, a haggard-looking man in a dress shirt stained with chalk dust and sweat stepped up beside the stretcher, introducing himself as the homeroom teacher for Class 2-2.

“I’m Gyu-hwa’s guardian, yes,” I said, straightening up.

“We tried calling the father’s number on file half a dozen times, but no one picked up,” the teacher explained, exhaling in relief. “We were about to put him on the county evacuation bus.”

That worthless piece of garbage didn’t even answer a bloody emergency call from his son’s school. Keeping my expression civil took heroic effort. “I’ve got him from here, sir. I’ll take him home.”

“You’re his older brother, then? Please write down an emergency contact number for our roster before you leave—”

I froze internally. I still didn’t own a cell phone. Catching my micro-hesitation instantly, Gyu-hwa tugged the teacher’s sleeve: “Sir, my brother needs to check my shoulder one more time.” At that exact moment, a paramedic carrying a plastic clipboard stepped between us and held out a pen.

“All students from Class 2-2 have been cleared by triage. Just sign the guardian release line at the bottom and you can take him home.”

Taking the clipboard reflexively, I clicked the ballpoint pen and wrote Seon Na— before catching myself with a cold jolt, scratching out the second syllable in a jagged black tangle and writing Seon Jun-geon beside it. Looking down at the three crooked, violently trembling characters on the form—handwriting that looked like a first grader’s—I realized just how badly my own hands were still shaking.

“Mr. Kim! Ji-woo’s mother is over by the gate!” another faculty member shouted across the pavement.

As the homeroom teacher glanced over his shoulder in harried confusion, Gyu-hwa took the roster sheet from him. “I’ll write our number down for you, sir.”

Once the teacher hurried off, I pulled the boy into my chest one more time, burying my palm in his short hair. In six years of special-operations warfare—through subterranean ambushes, cut radio lines, and suicide breaches against insurmountable odds—I had never once tasted the bottomless, paralyzing terror that had gripped me on the run down that hill. Had I walked out here to find Ji Gyu-hwa under a white tarp, my heart would have stopped on the asphalt.

“Let’s go home, Gyu-hwa,” I murmured, helping him to his feet.

Holding the teacher’s roster clipboard, he glanced up at me. “What should I write for the phone number?”

“Scribble down any eleven digits that start with 010. If the office complains tomorrow that it’s disconnected, tell them you were in shock and transposed a digit.”

Shooting me a look of profound admiration—practically radiating What an evil genius—Gyu-hwa jotted down a bogus number, handed the clipboard back to a passing medic, and paused as his fingers brushed my damp cotton undershirt.

“Aren’t you freezing, hyung?”

Only then did I look down at myself: a soaked white undershirt clinging to my ribs, thin loungewear sweatpants, and rubber shower slides in the middle of a chilly spring dusk. Immediately, Gyu-hwa stripped the silver thermal blanket from his own shoulders and tried to wrap it around mine; growling at him to stay warm, I bundled the foil back around his neck and tucked him firmly under my arm all the way home.

By late that night, the initial death toll of eight on the evening news had climbed to twelve as critically injured students passed away in operating rooms. One victim was a faculty member; the other eleven were middle schoolers—including one of the bright, polite boys I had bought tteokbokki for outside the snack shop only weeks earlier. Although separatist cults frequently used explosives to lure creatures into civilian centers, military investigators reported no traces of bombs or artificial lures, concluding that a subterranean anomaly had likely migrated through an old storm drain beneath the campus.

Sitting cross-legged on our living room floor long past midnight, Gyu-hwa stared unblinking at the news anchor’s solemn face until I reached for the remote and clicked the television dark.

In the black mirror of the screen, the boy’s hollow, bloodless reflection stared back.

Watching his silent profile in the dark, my mind drifted back to the battalion locker room after a catastrophic joint operation that had cost us three men from our sister squad.

That night, after washing rivers of blood down the shower drains, the survivors of Charlie-2 had sat on the wooden benches in suffocating silence, staring at the concrete floor while the same merciless questions chewed through our skulls: What mistake did I make? If I had cleared that corner half a second faster, would he still be breathing? Even veteran sergeants like Choi Ho-gyeong had sat with their heads in their hands.

Then the heavy, unhurried tread of Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa’s combat boots had echoed across the tiles, stopping in the center of the locker room. Looking down at his shattered squad without a flicker of hesitation on his face, Jaguar had spoken in a voice like cold iron:

“You all saw the men we left behind at the forward operating base.”

“Yes, sir,” we had chorused hollowly.

“Every one of them was already scheduled to die—just like every man sitting in this room. Once when we signed our enlistment papers, once when we volunteered for Special Operations selection, and every single morning since that we chose not to file for discharge, we signed a contract agreeing that dying in the next five seconds was acceptable.”

And as he turned toward his office door, he had left one final sentence hanging in the air:

“Men who were bound to die simply died on schedule.”

Back then, brutal as those words were, they had perversely allowed me to breathe again; when every single one of us—me, Park Chan, Hong Kwon-jin, Choi Ho-gyeong, and Ji Gyu-hwa himself—was already a dead man walking on borrowed time, mourning a comrade meant mourning someone who had simply stepped through the door five minutes ahead of us.

“Hyung,” a quiet voice called out in the dark living room.

“Yeah.”

Should I repeat his future self’s words to him tonight—tell him that the boys who died on that athletic field were simply fated to die? No. Thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa didn’t live in a bunker where men signed away their lives; he was a child who shouldn’t have had to learn the weight of corpses at all.

Instead of speaking, I simply opened my arms on the floor, and Gyu-hwa crawled straight into my lap, burying his face against my chest.

“Don’t die, hyung,” he whispered, his fingers twisting into the back of my shirt. “Please don’t ever leave me behind.”

It was the one plea I had no right to answer.

“Why are you so good to me?” His voice trembled against my ribs. “Taking in a stranger who isn’t even real family, breaking your back every day just to feed me and buy me things… After doing all that for me, you’re going to stay here with me, right?”

For a long, agonizing beat, I stared at the dark ceiling, wondering if I should tell him the truth about the six hundred and sixteen days ticking down on my clock. Yet feeding a scarred kid a comforting lie was a cruelty far worse than honesty.

“…No,” I said quietly.

Before the syllable had even faded, Gyu-hwa stiffened and nodded rapidly against my chest—as if he had braced himself for that exact rejection from the moment he asked.

“I’m a wanted man, Gyu-hwa,” I lied softly, resting my chin on the crown of his head. “That’s why I wore a mask and why I can’t open a bank account or a phone line under my own name. I can’t promise I’ll stay on this island forever.”

If he pressed me on what crime I had committed, I planned to tell him I had hunted down and killed the terrorist who murdered my family—a clean, understandable vengeance not unlike what I had done to his father. Yet the boy didn’t care what crimes I carried.

“You’re right here with me tonight, though, aren’t you?” he asked.

Today, while every other parent on the island had clawed at the military barricades to reach their children, his biological father hadn’t even picked up the phone. I remembered the empty, resigned stillness on Gyu-hwa’s face as he sat alone on that ambulance cot before he saw me—expecting nothing, hoping for nothing.

Patting his narrow back in a slow, steady rhythm, I nodded. “Right now, yeah. For now, I’m right here.”

Even when I warned him that if he ever came home from school one day and found me gone, it meant the authorities had closed in and forced me to flee without looking back, he simply murmured a quiet “Okay.”

“I won’t ask you to stay forever, hyung,” he whispered, his eyelids finally growing heavy against my chest. “Just stay with me for now. And… if you ever get even a minute’s warning before you have to run, promise you won’t vanish without saying goodbye first.”

“I promise,” I whispered, stroking his hair until his breathing deepened into sleep.

Listening to the steady beat of his heart in the dark, a dangerous, seductive clarity settled over my mind. Everyone I had ever loved—my mother and father, my older sister in Seoul, and a Ji Gyu-hwa whose heart was still warm and alive—existed right here in this era. What was waiting for me sixteen years in the future besides cold graves and a shattered timeline?

For the first time since opening my eyes in the past, I realized I no longer wanted to go back.

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