Chapter 29

When March rolled around and Ji Gyu-hwa entered the ninth grade, a major shift rearranged our weekly routine: on the recommendation of the school’s physical education department, he officially joined the varsity shooting team.

Not air rifle, either—true to Jaguar’s bloodline, the coach slotted him straight into the 50-meter smallbore rifle roster. Because varsity practice ran until dusk every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we fell into the habit of meeting at the county bus stop after my agency shifts and riding home together.

“Hyung, do you really want me to become a civilian sports athlete instead of enlisting?” Gyu-hwa asked one mild spring evening as we strolled up the hill from the bus stop, each of us unwrapping a chocolate ice-cream cone.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. Starting competitive smallbore in ninth grade was late by elite academy standards, but when freakish natural talent met Ji Gyu-hwa’s terrifying work ethic, catching up was only a matter of months.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Listen, kid—if you told me tomorrow that your lifelong dream was to fry French fries at McDonald’s for forty years, I’d buy an apron and stand right beside you checking the oil thermometer,” I said around a bite of chocolate cone. “Just stay out of uniform. Somebody’s gotta keep the nation supplied with crispy fries.”

“Somebody’s got to pick up a rifle and guard the perimeter, too.”

“Doesn’t mean that somebody has to be you.”

“Same goes for the deep fryer.”

I gasped in mock outrage. “Are you looking down on the noble culinary art of French fries right now? Are you insulting the backbone of the global fast-food industry?”

Instead of rising to the bait the way he used to at thirteen, fifteen-year-old Gyu-hwa didn’t even spare me a glance, calmly crunching through the waffle cone.

“Seriously, though,” I added, softening my tone, “if you only joined the shooting club to humor me, you can quit whenever you want. Don’t force yourself.”

Secretly, when the varsity coach had called to ask permission to recruit him, I had been grinning so wide my cheeks hurt. The skinny seventh grader who couldn’t even seat a stock in his shoulder pocket without bruising his cheek was now towering over his peers and outshooting kids who had trained since elementary school.

“I’m not forcing myself,” Gyu-hwa said, tossing the paper wrapper neatly into a street-corner bin. “It’s fun.”

“Then just enjoy it while it stays fun. Don’t stress yourself out over going pro or winning medals—if you get tired of it, you can always try something else.”

Gyu-hwa stopped and furrowed his brow at me as if I’d spoken heresy. “What are you talking about, hyung? Once you pick up a discipline, you burn your body and soul to ash until you take first place.”

“…”

I had tried my damnedest to raise him with a relaxed, easygoing philosophy—like diluting water with water or wine with wine—and somehow the kid had grown up to chuck raw metallic potassium straight into both. No wonder he ran our squad until our tongues hung out in the future. Just remembering the mountain endurance marches under Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa made my knees ache.

“…Work hard, Student Ji Gyu-hwa.”

“Yes.”

Terrifying little bastard. And less than a month into his ninth-grade spring term, he proved those words weren’t empty bravado by sweeping first place in the intramural trials and locking down the school’s starting slot in the 50-meter rifle three-positions event. Seeing his perfect hundred-point strings in the prone position gave me literal goosebumps; back in the battalion, someone had once mentioned that Jaguar held every marksman record at the academy, and clearly the legend hadn’t been exaggerated.

“Hyung, did the coach call you today?” Gyu-hwa asked at the dinner table a few weeks later. “He said he was entering me in the provincial qualifiers.”

Every winter and early spring, the national youth shooting championships drew thousands of student athletes from across the country to compete for spots on the junior national standing roster. To qualify for nationals, however, a shooter first had to place in regional governor’s cups and youth tournaments—where the real battle for a newcomer wasn’t technique, but nerves.

“Yeah, we talked this afternoon,” I said, ruffling his hair as he cleared our bowls. “Guess your old brother needs to pick up extra shifts to pay for competition ammo.”

“Provincial tournaments pay cash stipends to medalists,” Gyu-hwa replied evenly. “All I have to do is sweep first place. You need to start cutting back your hours, hyung.”

Smiling as he carried the dishes to the sink like a dutiful son, I felt the smile slowly fade from my lips as the coach’s actual words over the phone echoed back through my head.

“—Gyu-hwa’s ceiling is extraordinary, Mr. Seon. Mechanics can be taught, but that boy has ice water in his veins. Even when the wind shifts or the lane next to him misfires, his heart rate doesn’t budge a single beat.”

Sitting at our kitchen table with a notepad, I had nodded in proud agreement, ready to buy a secondhand sedan with my saved cash if driving him to mainland tournaments required it—right until the coach mentioned the date of his debut match.

“—We’re registering him for the Hwaryeong Governor’s Cup Youth Championship first to get him used to live tournament pressure. Let’s see… the opening round is the second week of June.”

My ballpoint pen had stopped dead on the paper.

June.

Two weeks after Day 616. A month I would never get to see in this world.

With the final grains of sand running out of the hourglass, the fear that had kept me away from the mainland for nearly two years finally broke against a deeper hunger. The very next morning, as soon as I saw Ji Gyu-hwa off through the school gates, I walked straight to the Hwaryeong-do intercity terminal and bought a round-trip bus ticket to Seoul.

I won’t walk up to them, I promised myself as the highway signs blurred past the window. I’ll just sit across the street for ten minutes, see their faces with my own eyes one last time, and catch the afternoon bus back.

Calculating backward from the calendar year, my younger self would have just started the fourth grade that spring. Following muscle memory down the quiet, tree-lined slopes of Seongbuk-dong, I turned into a familiar residential lane and sat down on a wooden bench inside the tiny neighborhood playground directly across from our old two-story brick house, pulling my black cloth mask high up over the bridge of my nose.

Because I had timed my arrival for late afternoon, I didn’t have to wait twenty minutes before a bright yellow taekwondo academy van rumbled up the alley and hissed to a stop before the iron gate. When the sliding door clattered open, two small figures in crisp white doboks hopped down onto the pavement—faces I had only seen in faded family albums for the past seven years: my eleven-year-old sister and ten-year-old me.

“Tae-kwon! Master! Thank you for the lesson! Have a great evening!” ten-year-old Seon Na-won bellowed at the top of his lungs, snapping a crisp ninety-degree bow toward the driver’s window.

Beside him, eleven-year-old Seon Na-ri gave a half-hearted two-inch nod of her chin. “Tae-kwon, ’sup, bye.”

“Tae-kwon!”

Watching the instructor in his blue dobok laugh and wave as the van pulled away, a breathless, watery laugh slipped through my mask. God, that’s right—I used to bow like a little soldier even in fourth grade. How had I lived so long forgetting that I was once that small and noisy?

“Hey, Na-ri, where are you going?” my ten-year-old voice piped up across the narrow street.

“Inside the house, obviously.”

“Look down the hill—Dad’s walking up right there! Dad! Seon Na-ri! Seon Na-won!”

Turning my head toward the bottom of the lane, my breath caught in my throat. Walking up the slope with a white volume-rate supermarket bag swinging from each hand was my father—retired from active service around the time my sister started fifth grade so he could cook our meals and watch us grow up.

“Dad, what did you buy at the mart? Did you get Ensemble ice-cream bars?” little Na-won shouted, bouncing around his knees.

“Check the bag inside and grab the tofu carton before you drop it, rascal,” Dad chuckled, handing a light bag to my younger self before waving my sister ahead. “Go on in first, Na-ri—your mom’s waiting upstairs.”

Looking at the scene with twenty-five-year-old eyes, I finally realized why Dad had always timed his afternoon grocery runs to meet our academy van at the gate: if he took the two of us inside the supermarket with him, we ambushed the shopping cart with fifty thousand won of junk food before he reached the checkout aisle.

As the iron gate clanged shut and the two kids clattered noisily up the exterior stone steps, my father followed at an unhurried, steady pace, pausing on the second-floor landing to open the front door.

I’m home, Noona.

The exact second I mouthed the words in my chest, my father’s warm baritone floated out across the spring air:

“I’m home, noona.”

Because my mother was one year older than him, Dad had called her noona and used polite speech with her for their entire marriage—a quirk that had convinced seven-year-old me that noona was the official legal title every husband used for his wife.

Click.

The front door closed, and warm yellow light glowed behind the frosted glass of the second-floor living room window.

In the sudden quiet of the empty alley, the dam inside my chest gave way all at once.

I shouldn’t have come. Even from across the street, seeing them alive and whole was poison. A fierce, suffocating greed clawed up my throat, screaming at me to vault that playground fence, bang on that frosted-glass door, and throw myself into their arms. Clutching my knees on the wooden bench, I bowed my head and gasped for air as hot, silent tears soaked straight through the fabric of my mask.

“…Excuse me, young man.”

At the sound of that deep, achingly familiar voice directly above my head, I froze and whipped my chin up.

Standing two paces away under the playground lamp was my father—looking ten years younger than the last memory I carried of him, his hair still thick and dark, his eye-creases lined with warmth rather than grief.

Seeing my soaked mask and bloodshot eyes, Dad stopped in surprise. “Ah… my wife looked out the kitchen window and noticed a young man sitting all alone on the bench for the past half hour, so I stepped out to see if you were lost. I had no idea you were crying…”

Reaching into the pocket of his cardigan, he pulled out a small stack of brown unbleached coffee-shop napkins—still carrying the faint, roasted aroma of the franchise café down the avenue where he and Mom always bought decaf americanos while Na-ri and I split a lemon ade on evening walks.

“For a grown man with shoulders like yours to sit out here weeping alone in the dusk, whatever you’re carrying must hurt like hell,” Dad said gently, holding the napkins out to me.

Unable to trust my voice if I looked into his eyes, I ducked my head at an angle, accepted the brown napkins with both hands, and pressed them beneath the damp edge of my mask. Every nerve in my body screamed to call him Dad—to warn him never to stay in Seoul six summers from now, to give him the exact date and hour of the cult’s bombing—and the terror of what that paradox might do made me bite down on the inside of my lip until copper filled my mouth.

“I don’t know what’s weighing on you, son, but hang in there—storms always pass if you keep breathing,” Dad said, resting a brief, warm hand on my shoulder before giving a polite nod. “Sorry for intruding. Make sure you get home before the night chill sets in.”

Clutching the coffee-scented napkins in a white-knuckled fist, I sat motionless on the bench long after the iron gate across the street clicked shut behind him. In the end, I hadn’t managed to utter a single syllable. I had come to Seoul thinking I was brave enough to say goodbye, only to discover that I was still a terrified child who couldn’t bear the thought of watching them die a second time.

“Hoo…” Dragging in a hollow, trembling breath, I pushed myself off the bench and walked back down the hill toward the bus terminal.

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