The tide carried him deeper into the city, and the city was dying around him.
The gray streets ran with the wreckage of the evacuation, abandoned cars, overturned stalls, a child’s shoe lying alone in the middle of a crossing.
The shadows swept through the district ahead of the lines of refugees, tearing the monsters apart so the people could run, and Min-jae killed with them, and he searched.
Strike.
Look.
Strike.
Look.
He had learned the rhythm in the first street and it had not left him since.
His shadow-sight swept the gray crowds at the edges of every battle, looking for the shape he had kept, the shoulders, the head, the way she ducked when she ran.
The glimpse from the barricade had been nothing.
A trick of the smoke.
He knew that.
He had told himself that a hundred times since the will had wrenched him away.
He did not believe it.
The evacuation was converging now, the lines of people funneling out of the side streets into a wide avenue that led toward the rally point.
The shadows were holding the avenue open, a black wall on either side of the fleeing crowd, and the people ran between them without looking at them, because they were afraid, because they were right to be afraid, because he was one of the things they were afraid of.
And then he saw her.
Not a shape this time.
Not a trick of the smoke.
Her.
His sister, alive, in the gray world, twenty steps past the shadow wall, walking with the crowd, and he knew her the way he knew the sound of his own name.
The hair pulled back.
The set of her shoulders.
The way she moved, quick and certain, the way she had always moved, even when everything else in the world was falling apart.
Ji-woo.
The relief was so total it was almost pain.
It flooded him, the first warmth he had felt in this gray world that was not a memory, and for one long moment he forgot the compulsion, forgot the battle, forgot the war, forgot everything except that she was alive, she was here, she had made it.
He watched her.
He could not stop watching her.
She was not running.
She was walking against the flow of the crowd, looking at the faces around her, searching.
Looking for someone.
She stopped at the edge of the avenue and pulled out her phone.
He watched her press it to her ear, watched her wait, watched her face change, the hope draining out of it by slow degrees.
She lowered the phone.
She looked at it.
She pressed it to her ear again.
Min-jae felt the world tilt.
The hospital.
The white room.
The window over the parking lot.
She was calling their mother, and the call was not being answered, and his sister was standing in the middle of a dying city trying to reach a woman who could not answer.
He did not know what it meant.
He could not know.
He only knew that Ji-woo lowered the phone at last and stood there, very still, in the middle of the gray crowd, and that she looked, in that moment, terribly alone.
She did not see him.
She never once looked at the black wall of shadows that held the avenue open, and he was glad of it, and it broke him, both at once.
He wanted to go to her.
The wanting was not a thought.
It was a pull, a physical thing, stronger than anything the compulsion had ever done to him, and for the first time since he had died, he did not want to fight, did not want to kill, did not want anything in the world except to cross twenty steps of gray street and stand in front of his sister.
His body moved with him.
One step.
Another.
The will did not stop him.
The leash was there, he could feel it, but it had gone slack, or it was waiting, or it simply had not noticed the small black shape drifting toward the edge of the crowd.
The gray world narrowed to her, to the back of her head, to twenty steps becoming nineteen, becoming eighteen.
Then the crowd changed.
It was not a sound, not at first.
It was a shift in the way the people moved, a loosening, a turning of heads.
The refugees were looking past him, at something on the far side of the avenue, and the fear in their faces was changing into something else, something Min-jae had seen a thousand times in his life.
Relief.
Hope.
Faith.
A man was walking through the crowd toward the rally point, and the crowd was parting for him the way water parts for a ship.
He was not wearing clean armor, not the armor Min-jae had last seen at the mouth of a gate.
This armor was smoke stained and dusted with rubble, and there was blood on one gauntlet that was not his own, and he was carrying a small girl, alive, clinging to him, and the crowd was making a sound that Min-jae could not hear, a sound he could only see in the shape of their mouths and the way their hands came together.
A rescuer.
A hero.
Min-jae’s body stopped.
The wanting drained out of him like water through a sieve.
It did not stop because he understood.
He stopped because something else had taken hold of him, something older and colder than the wanting, something that rose up out of the place where his anger lived, the wound without an object, the rage he had carried since the tunnel and never been able to aim.
The face.
He did not know the man.
He could not name him.
The face was a stranger’s face, broad and calm and tired, the face of a man who had been saving people all morning.
There was nothing in Min-jae’s mind that could tell him who this was.
But his body knew.
It knew the way a hand knows a burn, the way a mouth knows the taste of something poisoned.
Every part of him that was still a man went rigid with a hatred so sudden and so total that it was indistinguishable from terror.
The rage rose and rose, and it had no name, no face of its own, nothing to attach to, and that was the worst of it, that was the wound, that he could feel the shape of the thing this man had done to him and could not remember the thing itself.
The man set the child down.
He said something to the crowd, and the sound of his voice meant nothing to Min-jae, and that, somehow, was its own kind of wrong, a shape without a weight.
Then he turned, and for one moment, through the smoke, he looked directly at the black wall of shadows, directly at the shape that had been drifting toward the edge of the evacuation.
Min-jae saw his face clearly.
And nothing came.
No name.
No memory.
No reason.
Only the rage, burning in the hollow of his chest, and the terrible certainty that this man, whoever he was, had once stood at the center of his life and had once destroyed it.
He could not understand why his sister was looking at the man the same way.
Ji-woo had gone very still.
She was standing a few steps from the hero with the smoke stained armor, and she was looking at him, not the way the crowd looked at him, not with relief or hope or faith.
She was looking at him the way Min-jae’s body was looking at him, with a cold, searching fury, with the face of someone who had been studying a wound for a long time.
She knew.
Min-jae did not know what she knew.
He could not know.
He only knew that his sister, who was alive, who was whole, who had made it, was standing in the gray smoke and staring at the hero with the face of a person who had found the thing she had been looking for.
And then the will moved.
It came down on him like the weight of the sky, cold and absolute, and it seized the small black shape that had drifted toward the edge of the crowd and wrenched it around, away from the avenue, away from the girl, away from the hero, toward the front, toward the fighting, toward the heart of the city where the real battle was gathering.
The command said advance.
His will said go to her.
The leash stretched, thin and bright, and for one long terrible moment Kang Min-jae hung between them, pulled in both directions, and he understood, with a clarity that cut through the gray and the smoke, that the man with the smoke stained armor and the cold look in his sister’s eyes and the rage with no name in his chest were all the same knot, and that the knot was going to come apart, one way or another.
The compulsion won.
His body turned and marched, and the avenue fell away behind him, and Ji-woo’s face, alive and whole and searching, dwindled in the gray world, and the last thing he saw before the smoke swallowed her was the hero bending down to lift another child out of the rubble.
He hated him.
He did not know why.
And that, somehow, was the worst part of all.