Nari said "someone's coming" four seconds before the buzzer rang, which was enough time for Taesung to put his hand on the kitchen knife and for Minho to move to the hallway, but not enough time for anyone to do anything useful before Jiho looked through the peephole and saw his sister.
She was thinner. That was the first thing. The second was the backpack, which was the same backpack she'd carried in university before she dropped out, the canvas worn at the shoulder straps where the weight of textbooks had compressed the fabric over three semesters. The third was her expression, which was the expression of a person who'd spent considerable effort arriving at a door and was now considering whether the effort had been well spent.
He opened the door.
"The transfers route through a third-party payment processor that uses rotating account numbers," Yuna said. "But the processor's fee structure is visible in the transaction metadata if you request the detailed statement from the bank. The fee percentage is consistent across all transfers, which means they're coming from the same source account regardless of the routing. I cross-referenced the fee percentage against the processor's published rate schedule and identified the tier, which narrowed the source to an account with a balance between twenty and fifty million won." She paused. "The processor also appends a timestamp to each transaction that's seven hours ahead of KST. That's UTC. Which means the source account is registered through an international service, not a domestic bank. There are four international payment processors that operate at that fee tier in South Korea. One of them has an office in Mapo-gu." Another pause. "I walked the neighborhood."
Jiho stood in the doorway. Behind him, the fellowship was listening. Seven people in a safe house whose security had just been compromised by a twenty-five-year-old law school dropout with a bank statement and the specific tenacity of a person who'd been told her whole life that she could fix things if she just tried hard enough.
"You walked the neighborhood," he said.
"I walked the neighborhood. I found the processor's office. I watched the building for three days. On the second day I saw someone I recognized." She looked past him into the apartment. "The tall one. With the military posture. He went into the processor's office and came out fourteen minutes later. I followed him here."
Taesung, from the hallway, said nothing. The silence of a career military man whose operational security had been defeated by a civilian with a bank statement and three days of patience.
"Are you going to let me in?" Yuna said. "Or should I explain the rest of this in the hallway where your neighbors can hear?"
Jiho stepped back. She walked in.
---
The kitchen. The fellowship arranged around the table in the configuration that had been designed for operational briefings and was now hosting a family reunion that neither sibling had planned for. Yuna sat in Hwang Bokja's chair, which was vacant because Hwang Bokja was at her mountain house. The backpack went on the floor. Her hands went on the table, flat, the posture of someone who'd rehearsed this meeting and was determined to hold the shape of it.
She looked thinner. The construction eye saw it in the angles: the cheekbones more visible, the wrists narrower where they emerged from her jacket sleeves, the specific leanness of a body operating on insufficient fuel. Two jobs. Law school exam prep. And whatever time she'd carved out for the investigation that had led her to a payment processor's office in Mapo-gu and then to a fourth-floor walkup where her brother lived with seven strangers.
"You look different," she said. Not to the room. To Jiho.
"So do you."
"I've been eating a lot of convenience store rice balls. You've been—" She stopped. Looked at him. Her eyes doing the assessment that siblings did, the comparison between the person in front of them and the last version they'd stored: the hospital bed, the cancer, the ninety-pound frame with stage four written into its architecture. He was forty pounds heavier now. Healthy. Muscled. The construction worker's build restored, the cancer's damage erased by a contract that had traded disease for a different kind of countdown.
"You were dying," she said. "And then you weren't. You left the hospital without being discharged. You disappeared for three months. Then the transfers started. Anonymous. Monthly. Enough to cover my rent and my exam fees and nothing else." She opened her backpack and pulled out a plastic sleeve. Inside it, a business card. "This was in your hospital room. On the bedside table. After you left."
Jiho took the sleeve. The business card inside was white, standard size, the kind printed at any copy shop in Seoul. One side was blank. The other had a symbol.
With human eyes, the symbol would have been unreadable. An abstract design, geometric, the lines arranged in a pattern that didn't correspond to any known writing system. The kind of thing you'd dismiss as a printing error or an art student's experiment.
With demon perception, the symbol was a signature. Malphas's sigil. The Duke's personal mark, the identifier that existed in the demonic administrative system the way a corporate seal existed in human contracts. Stamped onto a business card and left on a hospital bedside table where a dying man's sister would find it.
Malphas had known about Yuna from the beginning. Had left the card for her specifically, or for whoever came looking after Jiho disappeared. A breadcrumb placed with the corporate precision of an entity that thought in centuries and planned in decades and had spent three thousand years learning that the most effective manipulations were the ones you set up before the game started.
"You know what that symbol means," Yuna said. She was watching his face. The sister's perception, which didn't require a demon contract or spiritual sensitivity or practitioner training. Just twenty-five years of reading the same face across dinner tables and hospital rooms and the specific contexts where a brother's expression told the truth his mouth wouldn't.
"I know what it means."
"Tell me."
---
He told her in the kitchen with the fellowship listening. Not everything. Not the Weaver, not the convergence, not the substrate formations or the deep-channel maintenance or the Archdemon whose identity the Arbiter had refused to disclose. He told her the foundation: the contract. The demon. The terms. The ten-year deadline. The soul economy.
She listened the way she listened to everything that mattered to her: still, focused, her hands flat on the table, processing the information in a linear sequence and filing each piece in the framework she'd been building since the hospital. The online forums. The supernatural phenomena research. The months of connecting dots that had led her from a blank business card to the edge of a world that existed underneath the one she'd been living in.
She didn't interrupt. Didn't ask clarifying questions. Didn't make the involuntary sounds of surprise or denial that people made when the world they understood was being replaced by a different one. She'd suspected. She'd researched. She'd arrived at this table already knowing that the answer would be something like this. The specifics were new. The category was not.
When he finished, she was quiet for ten seconds. The kitchen held the quiet. Chanwoo at the counter with his laptop. Minho in the doorway. Nari on the couch. Taesung by the window. The fellowship that had absorbed Dohyun's death and the containment vote and the Weaver's acceleration and was now absorbing the arrival of the MC's sister, who had tracked them through bank transaction metadata and three days of foot surveillance.
"The soul economy," Yuna said. "You spend pieces of your soul to use the abilities. And the pieces don't fully regenerate."
"They regenerate slowly. A tenth of a percent per day."
"And you've spent—" She stopped. Started again. "How much do you have left?"
The question arrived at the place where truth and protection collided. Forty-three point seven one percent. Below the fifty that had triggered Module 7. Below the threshold where taste disappeared. In the range where the Association's research showed escalating personality erosion and the steady, documented narrowing of what it meant to be the person who'd signed the contract.
Forty-three percent meant the halfway point was behind him and the territory ahead was worse than the territory he'd crossed.
But Yuna was sitting at the table with the specific posture of a person who could be broken by a number. The fixer who believed that every problem had a solution if you worked hard enough and cared enough and didn't give up. She'd dropped out of university to pay his medical bills. She'd worked two jobs for three years. She'd taught herself to trace international payment processors through bank statement metadata. She'd walked a neighborhood for three days.
She would not stop. Whatever number he gave her, she would use it as the starting point for a plan, and the plan would involve fixing him, and fixing him would lead her deeper into the world that had already taken Dohyun and threatened Minho and ground Hwang Bokja down to twelve percent. She'd walk into it the way she'd walked into this apartment: prepared, determined, and fundamentally underestimating the architecture she was entering.
"About sixty percent," Jiho said.
The number came out clean. No hesitation. The lie delivered with the same flat construction-foreman voice he used for operational briefings and cost assessments. Sixty percent. Comfortable. Above the critical thresholds. A number that said: there's time, there's margin, the situation is serious but manageable.
Yuna's shoulders dropped half an inch. The load redistribution of a body that had been bracing for a worse number and had received a better one. The physical response to relief, visible in the way her hands loosened on the table and her breathing changed register from controlled to natural.
"Sixty percent," she said.
"The regeneration helps. And I've been learning to use the abilities more efficiently. The spending rate has decreased since the early months."
True enough. The efficiency had improved. The spending rate had decreased for basic operations. The overall trajectory was still downward because the major engagements, the mountain, the Daejeon operation, the addendum's escalating costs, burned through efficiency gains the way structural fires burned through fire-resistant cladding: the protection worked for the normal conditions, not for the extreme ones.
Yuna looked at the business card in its plastic sleeve. "The demon. Malphas. He left this for me."
"Probably."
"Why?"
"Because demons plan ahead. And because my sister is the kind of person who finds things." He looked at her. The thinner face. The university backpack with the worn straps. The law school exam study materials visible in the open top of the bag, a thick review book with Post-it tabs marking the sections she'd been working through between shifts at the convenience store and the restaurant and the three days of neighborhood surveillance.
"You need to stop investigating," he said.
"No."
"Yuna—"
"No." The word was the same word she'd used at sixteen when he'd told her she couldn't come to the construction site, at nineteen when he'd told her she didn't need to drop out, at twenty-two when he'd told her the medical bills weren't her problem. The syllable that meant the conversation's direction had been noted and rejected. "You're telling me my brother signed a contract with a demon that is consuming his soul, and you want me to stop looking into it."
"I want you to be safe."
"I want you to be alive in ten years." She picked up the business card. "The demon left this for me. That means I'm already part of it. Stopping won't make me less visible. It'll just make me less informed."
The argument was structurally sound. The same logic he'd used to justify Chanwoo's continued involvement: the person was already exposed, and exposure without information was more dangerous than exposure with it. Yuna had arrived at the same conclusion through a different path. The same foundation. Different building.
"I'm not joining your—" She gestured at the room. The fellowship. The laptops, the geological maps, the operational infrastructure of a group of people living in a fourth-floor walkup and fighting a war that the public didn't know about. "Whatever this is. I have exams. I have work. I have a life that I'm trying to keep from falling apart while my brother fights demons." She put the card down. "But I'm going to keep researching. And you're going to answer my calls. And if I find something, you're going to take it seriously instead of telling me to stop."
Jiho looked at Taesung. The commander's expression was the professional neutral of a person who recognized that this wasn't an operational decision. It was a family one. His vote wasn't relevant.
"I'll answer your calls," Jiho said.
"And the number. Sixty percent."
"Sixty percent."
She stood up. Picked up the backpack. Slung it over one shoulder with the practiced motion of a person who'd been carrying heavy loads in a bag designed for textbooks. She looked at the room one more time. At Chanwoo's laptop and Minho's bandaged wrists and Nari's perception sweep and the kitchen that had been a memorial and a briefing room and a political strategy session and was now a place where a sister had been told a version of the truth that was close enough to be useful and far enough to be survivable.
She left.
The door closed. The safe house was quiet. Taesung looked at Jiho and didn't ask about the number. Minho looked at the floor. Chanwoo went back to his laptop.
Nari, from the couch, said: "Her frequency was interesting."
Everyone looked at her.
"Normal baseline. No spiritual sensitivity. No contract. No attunement." Nari paused. "But the way she processed the information, the way her body responded to it. The sister is not going to stop investigating. You know that."
"I know."
"Sixty percent," Nari said. Not a question. An observation. The medium's perception, which didn't require a contract to read a lie.
Jiho went to the sink. Filled a glass. Drank. Temperature, wetness, nothing.
"Sixty percent," he said.
