"Wait."
I stop with one hand already against the wall's light, and turn back to find Yuna still standing exactly where she was, like moving might make what just happened more true than it already is.
"You don't have to stay there," I say. "It won't undo anything either way."
"I know." She doesn't move yet. "I just don't know how to walk toward a door like nothing happened behind me."
"Nobody does. You just do it anyway."
She looks at me like that's either the cruelest or the kindest thing anyone's said to her tonight, and maybe it's both, and she crosses the distance and steps through ahead of me without another word.
I don't blame her. I hate that the question still follows us through the wall.
Jung-su's waiting on the other side when I finally cross, Areum and Mrs. Bae a step behind him, all three of them standing in the exact loose half-circle we've started forming without ever agreeing to it, the shape a group makes when nobody wants to be the one who walks away first.
"Same time, three days," Jung-su says, which isn't really information, just something to say that isn't the thing none of us are ready to say yet.
"Same time," I agree, and we scatter into a Seoul that has no idea what just happened forty feet under one of its own tourist attractions, going home to four separate versions of a silence none of us actually chose.
* * *
Three days. My own ceiling, my own dark, the same silver mark on my wrist that's supposed to be proof and mostly just feels like a scar nobody else can see.
I don't cry the second I wake up. It comes later, in the shower, water running long after I've finished actually washing anything, and I let it, because there's nobody here to perform being fine for at four in the morning.
It comes in ugly increments—a sob, silence, then another one twenty seconds later. Grief this size will not move through me all at once.
By the time Mom's awake, I've already put the version of my face back together that doesn't worry her. I'm getting too good at that. Jung-su was right, and I still hate that he was.
"You look tired," she says, over rice she's made too much of, the way she always makes too much when she's worried and doesn't know what else to do with her hands.
"Didn't sleep great."
She doesn't push. She's stopped pushing, the same way I've stopped offering more than the smallest true thing I can get away with. Some nights I think this is what we've actually lost — not belief, we lost that days ago — this, the specific ease we used to have at this table, replaced with two people being careful with each other across a bowl of rice.
Areum texts that afternoon. Nothing dramatic. *You eating okay?* Three words, no explanation needed between us for what they're actually asking. I tell her I am, which is half true, and she sends back a single line — *Me neither, really. Text if you need to not be alone in it* — and doesn't push past that either. It's a smaller kindness than a phone call. It still holds more weight than it should for how little space it takes up on a screen.
Before I answer, my thumb types a joke.
Convenience-store rice does not legally count as food.
I stare at the message. The phrasing is Yohan's. So is the impulse to soften a bad answer before giving it.
I delete it.
Areum's reply arrives before I can replace it.
You were going to make a joke. Why did you stop?
I look at my own hand around the phone.
Because it wasn't mine, I type.
The typing indicator appears, vanishes, then returns.
Come outside, she writes. Now.
She shows up at the convenience store near my building that night instead, hood up, sunglasses she clearly doesn't need after dark, sitting across from me at the single plastic table outside like she does this all the time and not like she's a face half of Korea would recognize without the disguise.
"You could've just texted back," I say.
"I could've. I didn't want to." She unwraps a triangle kimbap she isn't actually eating, just turning over in her hands. "Some things don't feel real until you say them to someone's face."
"What thing."
"That I keep thinking it should've been me who called the wrong direction instead of her. I was closer. I could've seen it too, if I'd been looking the right way instead of watching the main fight."
"That's not how it works. You know that's not how it works."
"I know. Doesn't stop the thought from showing up anyway." She finally takes a bite, chews, swallows before she says the rest. "I don't actually think it's your fault either, in case you're keeping a list of people who need to hear that specifically from me."
"I wasn't."
"You were. You've got the exact face for it." She says it without judgment, just naming what she sees, the same clear-eyed read she's given every one of us since the night we met her. "For what it's worth, I don't think it's Yuna's fault either. I know I was watching her weird up on that platform. I still don't think what happened was her doing anything but a bad guess at a bad time."
"The joke in the text," Areum says. "Was that him?"
"I don't know."
"That means yes."
I turn the unopened kimbap over in my hands. "It felt natural until I saw the words."
"And now?"
"Now I can't tell whether deleting it was respectful or whether I erased him a second time."
Areum is quiet for several breaths.
"Next time," she says, "send the joke."
"What if people think it's me?"
"It came from you. It also came from him. Both can be true without either of you disappearing."
For once, I let somebody else hold the answer.
"You don't sound completely sure."
"I'm not completely sure of anything about her yet. That's different from thinking she did it on purpose." She shrugs, small, tired. "I just notice things. It doesn't mean they add up to something bad. Sometimes a person's just new, and grief makes everyone a little strange to be around."
We sit with that a while, neither of us in a hurry to fill the silence with anything that isn't true.
"Thanks for coming," I say, eventually.
"Don't thank me. I needed somewhere to be that wasn't alone with it either." She balls up the kimbap wrapper, tosses it, misses, doesn't get up to fix it. "That's the whole deal, isn't it. None of us are actually doing each other a favor. We're just the only people who understand why the favor's necessary in the first place."
I text Jung-su before I text no one else, mostly because I don't know what else to do with my hands for the next ten minutes. *You doing okay?*
It takes him almost an hour to answer. *Fine.*
One word. I stare at it long enough that the screen dims on its own.
*You don't have to say fine,* I type back. *Not to me.*
*I know I don't have to.* A pause, the three dots appearing and disappearing twice before anything else comes through. *Doesn't mean I've got anything better to say than that.*
I don't push it. Some part of me already knows pushing costs more than it gets back, the same instinct that's kept him alive through however many more of these rooms than the rest of us.
*Get some sleep,* I send instead.
*You too.* Then, a minute later, one more line, like he almost didn't send it at all. *He liked working with you. In case that's worth anything right now.*
It is. I don't know how to tell him that in fewer words than he'd actually want to read, so I just send back a single word of my own. *Thanks.*
He doesn't answer again. I don't expect him to.
Mrs. Bae doesn't text. She shows up at my door on the second evening with a container of doenjang jjigae still warm from her own stove and doesn't ask permission before setting it down on my kitchen counter like she's done this exact thing a hundred times before, for a hundred other people.
"Eat," she says. Not a suggestion.
"I'm not really hungry."
"I didn't ask if you were hungry." She's already finding a bowl in my cabinet without asking where it is, like kitchens are kitchens and she's stopped needing permission to move through one. "Eat anyway. Grief runs better on a full stomach. Empty ones just make people stupid."
I eat. She watches me do it, arms crossed, until she's satisfied I'm not just moving the spoon around for her benefit.
"He was a good boy," she says, once the bowl's half empty. Not a question. Not an opening for me to disagree with. Just a fact she's decided to state out loud once, plainly, and be done with.
"Yeah," I say. "He was."
"Good." She nods, like that settles something. "Lock your door after I go. And call your mother more than you've been calling her. I can tell you haven't, the same way I can always tell."
She leaves before I can ask how she knows that, taking the empty container with her, already thinking about whichever of her kids needs feeding next.
I lock the door after she goes, and I do call my mother, ten minutes I don't remember much of afterward except that I let her do most of the talking and didn't once tell her why my voice sounds the way it does tonight.
It's not the truth. It's the closest thing to it I've got room to give her right now, and for once that feels like enough instead of another failure to add to the list.
She tells me about a neighbor's cat before we hang up, some long, meandering story that doesn't matter at all and matters more than almost anything else that's happened to me in the last three days, precisely because it doesn't matter. For four minutes, I get to just be her son.
I hang up smiling, actually smiling, for the first time since the fence came down at Namsan. It doesn't last. Nothing here does. But it was real while it lasted, and lately that's started to feel like the only currency that still means anything to me.
I search his name that night. Kim Yohan. I already know what I'm going to find before I find it, the same clean nothing I've found every time before, and it still knocks the air out of me when the search comes back exactly that empty.
No graduation photos. No convenience store schedule with his name on it. No younger sister's account tagging a brother who apparently never existed to tag.
I think about her for a long time. Somewhere out there tonight, a girl is going to bed not knowing the person who texted her every single day of her life just stopped, and tomorrow she isn't even going to have the shape of an absence to miss. She's just going to wake up in a world that was always exactly this size.
I take the folded paper out of my wallet. Two names, already there, already familiar in my own handwriting. I almost couldn't add a third the last time I held this pen. This time I don't hesitate at all, and somehow that's worse — not because it's easier, but because some small, ugly, practical part of me has already made room for it.
Kim Yohan.
I fold the paper back up. It doesn't feel like enough, and I do it anyway, because somebody has to keep the only records the world's decided don't count.
* * *
I find the convenience store on the second afternoon. I don't decide to go there so much as notice, an hour later, that my feet already took me most of the way.
He mentioned the street name once, in passing, complaining about a closing shift, and it turns out that's enough to find a GS25 wedged between a hair salon and a shuttered pharmacy, fluorescent and ordinary and completely unaware of anything it's lost.
A woman I don't recognize is behind the counter, maybe fifty, reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
"Can I help you find something?" she asks, when I've been standing near the ramyeon shelf too long to still be shopping.
"I'm looking for someone who used to work here. Yohan. Kim Yohan."
She frowns, genuinely, not the performance of trying to remember but the real thing — searching an actual blank space and coming up with nothing to search. "I'm sorry, we don't have anyone by that name. Never have, as long as I've managed this location."
"Are you sure? Maybe a few months back."
"I've run this store for six years." Not unkind, just certain. "I'd remember an employee's name, especially one I don't recognize at all."
I thank her and leave before my face can do something I won't be able to explain to a stranger. Outside, I stand on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at a building that held an entire ordinary chapter of someone's life and doesn't carry a single trace of it now, not even the shape of an absence.
I think about the owner Yohan said reminded him of his grandfather. I don't ask if he's still around. Some part of me already knows that whatever kindness passed between them has nowhere left to live except in me, and I'm not ready yet to find out if that's true.
* * *
The call comes on the second night, close to eleven, a number I don't recognize.
I almost don't answer. I answer anyway, because lately I've started answering unknown numbers on the theory that anyone with a good reason to call me this late already knows something they shouldn't.
"Hi. It's Yuna." A pause, like she's not sure I'll remember giving her this number, though I don't actually remember doing it — someone must have traded contacts in the chaos before the wall, one more small human thing happening underneath the larger horror of the night. "I wasn't sure if I should call. I just — I didn't know who else would actually understand what tonight is like. Out here. Trying to be a normal person again."
"Nobody does," I say. "That's kind of the whole problem."
"Yeah." Her voice catches, just slightly. "I keep thinking about the gap. I know everyone said it isn't my fault. I know you said it. I just keep running it back anyway, like if I look at it enough times I'll find the version where I was right."
"I do that too. With different things." More than she knows. More than I'm going to say out loud tonight.
"Can I ask you something? Does it get easier? Being back out here, knowing what you know, and not being able to say a word of it to anyone who matters to you?"
"No," I say, because lying to her about this feels like exactly the wrong thing to start doing. "You just get better at carrying it where nobody has to watch."
She's quiet for a second. "That's not really an answer I wanted."
"It's the only true one I've got."
"Thank you for saying it anyway. Everyone else out here just tells me it'll be fine." A short, humorless laugh. "You're the only person who's told me the truth since I got back."
"You'll figure out who else in the group is safe to be honest with. It takes a while."
"Is that an invitation?"
"It's an observation. Jung-su doesn't do comfort, he does honesty, which is its own kind of comfort if you let it be. Areum notices everything and says almost none of it out loud unless it matters. Mrs. Bae will feed you before she asks you a single hard question." I stop, aware I'm listing them like a field guide, aware of exactly why that stings tonight. "Yohan would've told you the truth and made you laugh in the same breath. That was sort of his whole thing."
"I know," she says, quiet. "I got exactly one night of it."
"That's more than some people get."
"That's a genuinely terrible thing to have to find comforting."
"Yeah," I say. "Welcome to how all of this works."
I don't have anything else to say to that, so I just stay on the line, and she stays too, neither of us hanging up for a long moment, two people sharing a silence that at least isn't the lonely kind.
"He liked you," I say, eventually. "In case nobody's told you that part yet. Whatever this was going to be, it wasn't nothing."
She doesn't answer right away. When she does, her voice has gone somewhere smaller. "I liked him too. I didn't get enough time to find out how much."
"None of us ever do."
"Is that supposed to make it easier?"
"No," I say. "I don't think anything's supposed to make it easier. I think we just keep going anyway, and call that surviving it."
She thanks me again before she hangs up, quieter this time, and I sit with the phone dark in my hand afterward longer than the call itself lasted.
Talking to her helps. She knows the weight without asking me to translate it into something smaller.
It's a strange thing, being cared for by four completely different people in four completely different registers inside the same three days, and somehow needing every single one of them exactly as much as the others.
The relief unsettles me, but I let it remain relief.
* * *
I don't sleep well the third night. I'm already awake when the light finds me early, as if the System has stopped caring about its own schedule.
The bracelet wakes first. Five private lines confirm what Yohan's death changed before the last stage ended.
CURRENT ATTRIBUTES
LEVEL: 10
STR: 40
INT: 35
VIT: 32
AGI: 41
WILL: 34
MAX HP: 380/380
TOTAL ATTRIBUTES: 182
The totals have not changed since Namsan. They do not need to. I watched them rise while Yohan died.
WILL rose the most. Of course it did. The ability reduced everything he was—the jokes, the fear he carried without spreading it, the way he made frightened people breathe again—to three points I never asked for and cannot give back.
I grab the folded list from the bedside table before the room disappears.
Soo-ah. Dae-sung. Min-jun. Yohan.
The light takes the names with me.