The summons came the way it always came, cold and absolute, and the black tide marched.
Min-jae had stopped counting the battles.
There had been a burning city and a gray plain and cities after that, each one the same in the way of a nightmare, each one different in the way of a wound.
He had killed until the killing stopped meaning anything, and the only thing that kept him from hollowing out completely was the small bright window in the dark of his mind where Ji-woo still stood at the stove.
He did not know, when the tide began to march, that this time the dark was carrying him home.
The world opened.
Gray.
Everything was gray through shadow-sight, the color of a photograph left out in the rain, and the city that waited on the other side of the dark was gray the way all the others had been gray.
Towers of glass and steel, their windows blown out like dead eyes.
Streets full of wrecked cars.
Smoke rising in fat black columns.
But Min-jae knew it.
The knowledge hit him before the sight of anything specific, a wrongness in the shape of the skyline, a familiarity in the way the streets bent.
And then the tide swept him around the corner of a fallen tower, and the plaza opened out in front of him, and he stopped.
His body did not stop.
The compulsion would not let his body stop.
But Min-jae, the small bright part of him that was still Kang Min-jae, stopped dead.
The department store.
It stood at the far end of the plaza, a shell of a building now, its glass front shattered, one whole corner collapsed into the street.
But he knew it.
He had known it his whole life.
He had stood in this plaza a thousand times, checking his phone, waiting for a gate to open, and on the last day of his life he had stood here and read a message from his sister.
*Dinner tonight.
I’m cooking.
Bring money.*
The memory came back warm, warmer than anything in this gray world had any right to be, and it hurt, and he held it.
This was his city.
This was her city.
The terror was so sudden and so total that for a moment it pressed out everything else, even the compulsion.
Ji-woo.
She was here.
Somewhere in these gray streets, in the smoke, in the fleeing crowds, his sister was here, and the world she lived in was coming apart around her, and he did not know if she was alive.
He did not know if she had made it out of the apartment.
He did not know if she was in the hospital with their mother, or at the university, or running through a street full of monsters.
He did not know anything except that he had to find her.
The compulsion moved his body forward, and he let it, because forward was where the fighting was, and the fighting was the only way he knew to move through this world.
The shadows were clearing the plaza, tearing apart the gray things that poured out of a rent in the air where a gate had once been, and Min-jae killed with them, and all the while his shadow-sight swept the edges of the plaza.
The evacuation was happening at the margins.
Lines of people moving between the barricades and the trucks, mothers with children, old men leaning on each other, a girl carrying a cat in a carrier, her face white. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
He looked at every face.
He looked at every shape.
He could not read them the way he had once read faces.
The color was gone.
The light was gone.
But he knew her shape.
He had kept her shape.
He would know it anywhere.
She was not there.
The shadows pushed deeper into the city, and Min-jae went with them, killing, searching.
He learned the rhythm of it, the way a man learns to breathe underwater.
Strike.
Look.
Strike.
Look.
He cleared a street and scanned the fleeing crowd and did not see her.
He cleared another and did not see her.
The wanting in him grew so large it felt like a second self, pressing against the inside of his chest, and he used it the way he had used the crack in the cage, pushing the compulsion just a hair, just enough to turn his head a moment longer than it wanted.
He could speak now.
He had a voice.
He had not used it since the plain, since the name that had been torn out of him.
He used it now, low and rough, a rasp of shadow that no one in the gray world could hear.
“Ji-woo.”
The name went out into the smoke and was swallowed.
Nothing answered.
He passed the hospital.
He knew it before he saw it whole, the wide low building with the emergency entrance and the awning, and the monster that had collapsed the wall, and the people being dragged out of the wreckage by men in masks and by shadows.
His mother was in there.
His mother had been in there for two years, in a room with white walls and a window that looked out on a parking lot, and Min-jae felt the world tilt as he understood that he was looking at the place where his mother was dying, and that it was falling down around her.
He did not know if she had been evacuated.
He did not know if she was under the wreckage.
He did not know her face anymore, not clearly, she had been slipping from him for a long time, but he knew her shape, and he knew the sound of her voice, and he knew the way she smiled through the painkillers.
He could not go to her.
His feet carried him past the hospital, past the wreckage, into the next street, and the next, and the not-knowing was a knife in him.
The kid’s words came back to him then, out of the dark of the ranks, the way they always came back at the worst moments.
*You’d march and kill for a Monarch who does not even know your name.* He was doing it.
He was marching and killing, and the bitterest part was that the killing was saving people.
The shadows were holding the streets, tearing the monsters apart so the evacuation could run, and the people running did not look at the black shapes that saved them.
They looked through them.
They were afraid of them.
He did not care.
He had stopped caring about being known a long time ago, or maybe he had never started.
He cared about one face, and he had not found it.
The plaza was behind him.
The department store was behind him.
The hospital was behind him.
The city was burning, and somewhere in it his sister was alive or dead, and he could not stop, and he could not search the way he wanted to search, because the compulsion held him and the tide carried him and he was a sword, and swords do not look for their families.
But he was not only a sword.
He had learned that.
He had learned it in the doorway with the people and the red scarf.
He had learned it on the plain when he held the breach alone.
He had learned it in the dark when the leash loosened and he spoke her name with his own voice.
He pushed.
Not against the compulsion.
Not yet.
He pushed against the tide itself, a hair’s breadth, just enough to turn his body toward the evacuation lines instead of away from them, just enough to buy himself one more look.
And he saw her.
A shape on the far side of a barricade, small, moving fast, a gray blur in the gray world.
A girl with her hair pulled back, carrying something, running toward the trucks.
His shadow-sight could not give her color.
It could not give her light.
But the shape was right.
The way she moved was right.
The set of her shoulders, the way she ducked her head when she ran, the way she looked back over her shoulder at something no one else was looking at.
His sister.
“Ji-woo,” he said, and this time the word was a shout, a rasp of shadow that tore out of him.
The compulsion slammed down.
Not the way it had on the plain, cold and patient.
This was the will itself, vast and absolute, and it seized his body and wrenched him around, away from the barricade, away from the shape, away from the girl, toward the fighting, toward the front, toward wherever the black tide needed a sword.
He could not turn back.
He could not stop.
His body marched, and his mind screamed, and the shape of his sister dwindled behind him in the gray world, and he did not know if it had been her at all.
He did not know if she was alive.
He did not know if he would ever see her again.
But he knew that the city was still burning, and the tide was still marching, and somewhere ahead of him the smoke was full of the sound of things worse than broken gates, and the black tide was being drawn toward the heart of the city, where the real battle was waiting.
The compulsion carried him forward, and behind him, in the gray and the fire, the shape that might have been his sister reached the trucks and vanished into the crowd and was gone.
He did not see it.
But he felt it, the way a man feels a light go out in a window he has been watching all night, and he did not know if the light had gone out because she was safe, or because she was not.