The summons came, and the black tide poured out of the dark and into the field, and Min-jae went with it the way he always went, because the leash said to go and the leash was still the shape of his world.
The field was not his city.
He knew the moment his feet found it, the old hunter’s geography of roads and rivers refusing to be erased by erosion or by death.
This was the valley that bordered the city, the low farmland where the evacuation camps had stood in the first weeks of the war, and the city was there, beyond the ridge, close enough that he could feel it the way a blind man feels a wall.
Close enough to hurt.
The command came down like a hammer, and the tide struck, and Min-jae struck with it, and for the first hour he did not think about the city at all.
He did not let himself.
The enemy was the Monarchs’ disciplined vanguard, probing toward the valley where the supply line ran, and if the vanguard broke through, the city behind the ridge would burn for the second time.
He had watched it burn once, and he had walked through its rubble with the tide, and he could not watch it burn again.
The wedge.
The wall.
The line that held.
The shield’s shape was his shape, and the god’s attention lay over the whole battle the way a sky lies over a field, vast and patient and reading him, and he fought as he had fought in the square: sharp and heavy, the Knight’s rank carrying him, the cold power at the bottom of him full and hungry and waiting to be spent.
And in the space between the movements, in the sliver of dark where the summoning let go and the enemy paused and the world went gray and muffled, the watch opened.
It had started somewhere in the nights since the examination.
Not a power the god had given him.
Not a crack in the cage, either.
Something of his own, the way the bright thing was his own: an anchor he had never named.
When the dark was quiet and the leash was slack, he could reach along the thread that ran from the center of him to her, and the thread was a window, and the window showed him the living world.
It was gray.
Everything on the other side of the window was gray and muffled, the way the living must look when you are not one of them: dim, slowed, wrapped in a mist that turned sound to wool.
He watched the way he had watched the shelter line from the smoke, unable to touch, unable to speak, able only to see.
He saw her in a long room with many tables, a building that had been something else once, a school or a hall, now crowded with cots and papers and people who had lost their homes.
She was alive.
He felt the fact of it before he saw her face, the way a man feels the shape of the sun before he opens his eyes, and then he saw her, and she was older.
Ji-woo sat at a table by the window with a notebook open in front of her, and she was asking a man questions that made the man uncomfortable.
Min-jae had seen his sister ask questions all his life, behind the door of their apartment, over the phone in the dark, her voice low and quick and relentless, and he watched the same voice work on a stranger.
She held a pen in her right hand and a pencil in the left, the old habit of a left-hander who had been forced to learn the other hand, and she wrote down whatever the man said in a neat hand.
The man said: the guild handled the evacuation of the survivors.
The man said: Hwarang sealed all that records.
The man said: your brother, they said he held the line.
Ji-woo nodded, and wrote, and asked the same question again with different words, and the man’s discomfort grew, and Min-jae watched his sister disassemble a wall of comfortable lies with the patience of a person who has nothing left to lose.
She was investigating her brother’s death.
She had been investigating it since the city, since the shelter, since the mother’s unreturned calls.
He had known this would happen.
He had watched her search a burning street for the mother before he had burned his memories to save her, and he knew her, the way she held a thing in her jaw and did not let go, the way her questions got quieter and quieter until they were pointed enough to draw blood. You are reading on novelping . com, the official source.
She was going to dig the truth out of the comfortable men, and the truth was going to tear her apart.
Because the truth was not what the records said.
The truth was a retreat order and a discarded rear guard and a guild master who had gone home to dinner, and the truth could swallow a young woman who was already alone in the world.
He had watched the guild master’s records close over his own death; he had watched the hospital wall come down on a white room he could not name; he had watched her pull an old woman from the rubble and look for a way out that did not exist.
And now the war had brought him to the edge of her city, and all he could do was watch her dig toward the man who had killed him, from the wrong side of a window, gray and muffled and powerless.
He tried, in the sliver of the battle, to reach her.
He knew the attempt was futile.
To a man on the other side of death there was a wall of glass between his world and hers, and he had stood on it since the night the hospital came down, and the leash would not let him.
But he tried anyway.
He put everything he had into the will, the same will that had held the line, the same will that had crossed a city and burned his own memories to move her forward, and he poured it against the window.
The glass of the world held, softly, like a wall of water, and she did not look up from her notebook, and the words she never wrote down stayed in her pen.
And then the sliver closed, the command snapped his head toward the enemy, and the battle returned, and he fought.
The battle was long.
The line bent where the enemy’s generals pushed, and he went to where the line bent, the way he had always gone, the Knight’s rank feeling out the shape of the fight before the fight finished making it.
He took wounded shadows twice, dragging them back from the charge the way he had dragged the fallen hollow on the plain, and the second time he did it he felt the god’s attention tilt toward him across the entire field, the way a scale reads a coin that has moved.
The god had told him to hunt the waking shadows, and he had not.
The god had told him to find and end, and he had closed gaps instead.
And now the god was watching him watch.
Nothing happened.
The attention lay on him like weather, and he fought, and the battle ground toward its end.
And in every gap, the window opened again, and he watched.
She moved through the day the way the living move through days, unaware that he stood in the gray and muffled shape beside her.
She had gone to the building with many doors, and she had questioned the nervous man and a woman who ran evacuation records, and for a while she had sat with the notebook spread open, reading the order of the dead in the Hwarang Gate break, her finger going down a list of names.
He watched his own name sit on the page and pass under her fingers, and he watched her eyes go still, the old eyes of the daughter who buried the family.
And in the evening light, the second woman came.
She came through the door of the building as the light was going long and the crowd was thinning, and she went to Ji-woo’s table and sat down across from her without a word, the way you sit down only with someone you know well.
Ji-woo looked up and smiled, a real smile worn thin by grief, and the woman smiled back, and Min-jae, watching from the wrong side of the veil, forgot how to be a corpse.
He did not know her.
He believed that first, honestly and completely, the way you know that rain is wet.
He did not know her face.
He could not have known her if she were sketched on a hundred walls, and he could not remember her name to save his own life, and it was all true, all of it true.
And at the same time, his body knew her.
The body remembered.
It was the warmth.
The warmth he had lost in the dark, on the stairs of the rank-up, the socket in his chest where a warm thing had been.
He would not have been able to say whether the torn-out name and this warmth were the same thing; the erosion kept that locked, the way it kept the face of the guild master, in the place where a face should be.
But the warmth lived there, and the woman’s face spilled over with it, as if she had been holding it for him all along.
She was a healer.
He knew it the way the body knows a practice, the way the eye knows a safe pair of hands.
She carried the healer’s kit slung over her shoulder, the soft cloth of it worn shiny, and she sat down across the table from Ji-woo, and their hands lay close on the wood, not holding, but in the shape that people make when they have carried a hard thing together.
And his chest burned and emptied at the same time, gray and muffled, and he strained his whole mind at the window to see her face clearly, to force the name up from the depths where the erosion had buried it, and nothing returned to him but the ache.
The name was gone, and the warmth was all that remained, and he could not tell her.
He could not ask her what it was, why the last warmth in the world lived in a woman he could not name.
The wall of the world was between them, and all he could do was watch them both: the sister whose name he still had, the woman whose name he had spent or lost or left on the stairs of a rank-up, and be nothing to either.
Ji-woo said something, and the woman laughed, a low warm laugh, and the warmth in Min-jae’s chest turned over the way a dog turns by a stove, and the summons pulled his head up and took the window with it, and the seam of battle rushed back in.
The second half of the battle was harder.
The enemy came again, and the line held again, and his body moved through the exercise of the war while his mind moved through the gray hall with many doors.
Who was she?
He had no hold on the name.
She had belonged to the guild, his chest said, the healer had been there, at the gate, on the way down, part of the last morning when he had been alive.
But the faces of that morning were gone, the names of that morning gone, and the warmth alone remained, and it had a face now.
He fought the rest of the battle with the strange doubled life, holding the line and holding the window at once, and when the enemy broke and the summons closed and the dark took the field, he stood in the dark between battles, still, the way shadows stood between battles, and the question turned in him like a knife in a wound.
Who was she?
And why did the last warm thing he had left live behind her eyes?
He did not find the answer in the dark, and the dark had no name for it, and the bright thing at his center burned a little lower because the socket near it had come alive again.
He had not known he could be a socket alive.
He had not known the want of a name could hurt the way of a wound.
Somewhere in the gray city, Ji-woo closed her notebook on her brother’s name and went home through the long streets.
The woman walked with her for a while, then went her own way, and when the woman left the streetlight she did something that made the whole watch go cold.
She looked over her shoulder.
Not at him.
It was not possible for her to see him, and the collar of her coat drew up as she looked, she was looking at the empty street behind her, at the mouth of the lane, at the parked car that had been at the mouth of the lane since the middle of the afternoon, and had never had its engine running.
And Min-jae, who had watched his sister all day, looked at the car with a socket of cold power in his chest where a moment before there had been a socket of warmth, because the man in the car had been there all day, and a soldier of the black tide had never once noticed him.
The window did not belong to a watch alone.
Someone was watching the watchers.
And the summons came again, and the dark took him, and the last thing the window showed him before the gray and muffled faded into nothing was Ji-woo, her notebook open in her lap, and the woman sitting across from her, and the two of them together against the long electric evening, exactly as warm as the socket in his chest, and exactly as unreachable as the whole living world.