Agent Kwon was doing push-ups in the living room when Yeji came out of the bedroom at six-fourteen in the morning.
Not the showy, wide-armed push-ups of someone performing fitness. Tight. Military. Elbows tucked against the ribs, the movement a vertical piston — down, pause at the bottom, up. The kind of push-ups that came from institutional training rather than personal motivation. Kwon's Bureau field jacket was folded on the couch. Her sidearm was on the coffee table beside a thermos and a spiral-bound notebook, the weapon positioned with the barrel facing the wall and the grip angled for a right-handed draw, the spatial arrangement of someone who placed weapons the way other people placed reading glasses: within reach, correctly oriented, part of the furniture.
Yeji stopped in the hallway. The apartment was cold — the radiators had warmed overnight but the windows leaked, the thermal efficiency of a building that had been constructed in the '80s and maintained with the enthusiasm of a landlord who collected rent in person and fixed things by phone. Through the kitchen doorway she could see Nari on the refrigerator, still dimmed, the ghost child's spectral form a faint luminous smudge against the ceiling tiles.
Kwon noticed her. Finished the rep. Stood. The motion was fluid — not the stiffness of morning exercise but the ease of someone who'd been awake for hours and had used the push-ups to fill time rather than to wake up.
"Good morning, Miss Ahn." Professional. The voice of a woman who'd been assigned to a laundromat apartment to observe a summoner and was treating the assignment with the bureaucratic courtesy that the Bureau expected of its field agents. "There's hot water in the thermos. The kitchen has instant coffee — I checked the cabinet."
"Thank you."
"Your party members are still sleeping. Mr. Park's shoulder showed improved range at the 4 AM check — the stimulator's passive mode has been running since midnight." She picked up the spiral notebook. Opened it. The pages were covered in handwriting — small, precise, the documentation of a woman who'd been recording observations all night in a notebook because electronic devices left digital traces and Director Yoon's division apparently shared its director's preference for paper. "I noted your movement at 2:17 AM. Kitchen. Approximately forty minutes stationary. Would you like me to log a reason or should I mark it as personal time?"
The cost of protection, itemized.
"Personal time."
Kwon wrote something. Closed the notebook. Her expression wasn't cold — that would have implied an emotional state. It was professional. The face of a person executing a duty that didn't require her opinion and therefore wouldn't receive it.
Yeji went to the kitchen. Made instant coffee with the thermos water. The brand was something cheap — the yellow packet kind that convenience stores sold for 500 won, the coffee of people who needed caffeine but didn't need it to taste like anything. She stood at the counter and drank it and looked at Nari on the refrigerator and listened to Kwon resume her push-ups in the living room and understood, with the clarity of a morning after a crisis, that this was her life now. Observed. Logged. The recipient of protection that came in a package with surveillance tape wrapped around it.
*Sixty-four point three percent.* Eunsoo's voice. The healer woke early — or never slept, the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness being unclear for spirits who didn't have circadian rhythms. *Left temporal pathway. Up from sixty-three last night. The microtears are responding to rest. Marginal improvement but measurable.*
"Good."
*Not good. Adequate. Good would be seventy-eight. Good would be baseline. What we have is a damaged pathway recovering at a rate of approximately one point three percent per twenty-four-hour period, assuming complete rest, which means full baseline recovery in—*
"I can do the math."
*Eleven days. Assuming complete rest. Which you won't take because you never take complete rest because you are constitutionally incapable of not using the thing that's breaking you.* The clinical assessment, delivered before 7 AM, with the healer's precision that was indistinguishable from irritation.
Yeji sipped the bad coffee. Through the wall, she could hear Changwon's heavy breathing — the man slept like geology, deep and slow and layered, the specific unconsciousness of a body that had been wounded and was making repairs with the same structural patience that had made him a tank in the first place. Junghwan was silent. The fire-type slept like smoke — light, diffuse, sometimes not there at all.
*You're thinking about exercises,* Eunsoo said.
"I'm thinking about coffee."
*You're thinking about channel rehabilitation exercises. I can feel the ideation through the covenant bond. The cognitive pattern of a person planning to use an injured pathway before the injury has healed. I've catalogued it. You do it every time.*
"Catalogued."
*Three instances. Post-right-channel destruction, you attempted [Requiem] extension within six hours. Post-parking-structure overload, you attempted spirit communication within four hours. Post-Gwanak-facility contact, you attempted combat manifestation within two hours. The interval between injury and ill-advised use is decreasing. The trend line suggests that by the next major channel event, you'll attempt [Requiem] operation during the event itself.*
Yeji put the coffee down. The mug was a laundromat promotional item — white ceramic with a cartoon washing machine and the slogan "Clean Living in Mapo-gu!" in cheerful blue text. The kind of object that existed because someone had ordered five hundred of them for a marketing campaign and the leftovers had migrated to every flat surface in the building.
"What if I don't push it?"
Silence. The silence of a healer recalibrating an assessment because the patient had said something unexpected.
*Clarify.*
"Recovery exercises. Not full perception. Not combat manifestation. Low-intensity channel activation — the spiritual equivalent of physiotherapy. Controlled. Monitored. Within parameters that you set."
*I'm listening.*
"You're a healer. You understand tissue recovery better than anyone in this covenant. If I do nothing for eleven days, the pathway heals passively. If I do controlled exercises — carefully, within limits — does the pathway heal faster? The way muscle recovers stronger when you work it correctly during rehabilitation instead of just lying in bed?"
The silence extended. Yeji could feel Eunsoo processing — the healer's consciousness moving through the analytical framework that she'd built from a lifetime of medical practice and three years of posthumous observation. The assessment running. The variables being weighed.
*Three conditions,* Eunsoo said. The clinical mask back in place. The professional who'd been offered a medical question and couldn't resist providing a medical answer. *First. Maximum activation of twenty percent pathway capacity. Not twenty-one. Not twenty-two. Twenty. I will monitor in real time and if the load exceeds the threshold by any margin I will override the covenant bond to force channel closure. The override will hurt.*
"Understood."
*Second. Duration. Five minutes maximum per session. Three sessions per day with minimum four-hour intervals between sessions. The pathway needs recovery time between activations and the microtears are most vulnerable during the thirty-minute window following any use.*
"Understood."
*Third. I direct the exercises. Not you. You don't choose what to perceive or how far to extend. I choose. You execute. The moment you deviate from my protocol — the moment you feel something interesting and push toward it instead of pulling back — we stop. Permanently. No second chances.*
"Understood."
*Your compliance history suggests the word 'understood' and the action of understanding occupy different hemispheres of your brain.*
"Noted."
*Begin when you're ready. First session. Five minutes. I'll guide the activation sequence.*
Yeji closed her eyes. The kitchen was quiet — Nari still dimmed on the refrigerator, Kwon's push-ups paused in the living room, the laundromat below not yet open, the building holding its morning breath. She placed both hands flat on the counter. The gesture of grounding. Palms on a solid surface. Fingers spread. The physical anchor that she'd learned — when had she learned it? — to use before any [Requiem] activation, the body's declaration that it existed in physical space before the mind entered spiritual space.
*Activating left temporal pathway. Five percent capacity. Perception mode: ambient. Range: zero. You're not reaching outward. You're listening inward.*
The channel opened. Barely. A crack — the spiritual equivalent of opening a door half an inch and listening through the gap. The left temporal pathway engaged at the lowest setting Eunsoo could calibrate, the mana flow so minimal that the sensation was less like perception and more like remembering perception. The ghost of a sense. The shadow of an ability.
Through the crack, Yeji heard her own spirits. Not their voices — she could hear those through the covenant bond without [Requiem]. Their resonances. The spiritual frequencies that each consciousness produced simply by existing within her, the ambient hum of three dead people sharing a living body's mana architecture.
Minwoo: warm. A sustained low note, the kind of sound that heated rooms and filled silences. The frequency of a man who'd been a father and remained one in death, whose spiritual presence carried the warmth of someone who'd spent nine years making a child feel safe.
Eunsoo: precise. A sharp, clear tone. Calibrated. The frequency of a healer's consciousness, organized and analytical, every harmonic in its correct place.
Nari: flickering. Not a sustained note but a pulse — bright, dim, bright, dim. The spiritual heartbeat of a thirteen-year-old ghost who was sleeping on a refrigerator and dreaming whatever ghosts dreamed and whose presence in the covenant bond was an intermittent signal, the consciousness of a child who was still learning how to be constant.
*Seven percent. Holding. No distress on the pathway wall. The microtears are... stable. Minimal load, minimal strain. Good.*
Good. Eunsoo said good. Yeji filed the word away.
*Now. Narrow the perception. Don't expand range — compress focus. Instead of hearing all three resonances, isolate one. Choose the weakest signal and track it. This exercises the pathway's discrimination function — the ability to separate signals in a dense environment. It's the fine motor control of spiritual perception.*
Yeji narrowed. Nari's flickering pulse — the weakest, the most intermittent, the hardest to track. The signal appeared and disappeared in a rhythm that wasn't quite regular, the spiritual equivalent of a sleeping child's breathing: mostly even, occasionally hitched, once in a while punctuated by the deeper rhythm of whatever processing was happening underneath.
Tracking it required attention. Not force — attention. The left channel held at seven percent, the load minimal, the effort coming not from the pathway's capacity but from Yeji's concentration. Following Nari's pulse through its irregularities was like following a candle flame in a draft — the flame existed, it was always there, but its position shifted and if she stopped paying attention for half a second the tracking was lost and she had to find the rhythm again.
*Good. Nine percent. Still within parameters. The pathway is responding — the discriminatory function is engaging secondary neural connections. This is what rehabilitation looks like. Controlled stress on recovering tissue.*
Four minutes. Three. Yeji tracked Nari's pulse. The ghost child's sleeping consciousness drifted through patterns that Yeji couldn't interpret — the interior life of a spirit, the private processing of a dead girl's psyche, visible as rhythm variations in a resonance that Yeji was using as a rehabilitation tool. She wondered if it was invasive. If listening to Nari's sleeping spiritual heartbeat was the equivalent of watching someone sleep — intimate, uninvited, the observation of a state that existed because the person didn't know they were being observed.
*Five minutes. Closing.*
The channel narrowed. Closed. The crack in the door shut. The kitchen returned to its physical dimensions — no spiritual perception, no resonance tracking, just a cold apartment above a laundromat with bad coffee and a government agent in the living room.
Yeji opened her eyes.
Kwon was standing in the kitchen doorway. Notebook open. Pen ready. The agent's expression was the same professional neutrality — but her eyes were focused on Yeji with the attention of someone who'd observed something she needed to record.
"That was a spiritual perception exercise." Not a question. The statement of a woman who'd been trained to recognize mana channel activation and had recognized it. "Duration approximately five minutes. Low intensity. No visible strain indicators."
"Rehabilitation exercises. Under my spirit healer's supervision."
"I'll need to log the activity. Time, duration, intensity level, purpose." She wrote without waiting for confirmation. The pen moved with the quick efficiency of someone who'd been logging observations all night and had perfected the shorthand. "Director Yoon will want to know."
"Director Yoon can ask me directly."
"She will." Kwon closed the notebook. "She always does."
The agent returned to the living room. Yeji stood in the kitchen with her instant coffee and the residual awareness of three spiritual resonances and the understanding that every rehabilitation exercise, every controlled channel activation, every small step toward recovery would be documented in a spiral notebook and reported to a Bureau director who'd traded protection for oversight and was getting her money's worth.
---
Jihoon emerged at seven-thirty. His arm was still in the pillowcase sling, but the fingers moved better — the neuromuscular recovery progressing, the mana stimulator's passive treatment doing its designed work. He stood in the kitchen doorway and assessed the room with the sweep of a man checking a perimeter: entrances, exits, lines of sight, positions of friendlies. The assessment took three seconds. The habit of a lifetime.
He didn't sit. He leaned against the doorframe and accepted the coffee Yeji poured — the same cheap instant, the same laundromat mug, a matching set of cartoon washing machines — and drank it standing because sitting meant relaxing and relaxing was not in his operational vocabulary at six hours post-compromise.
"Rebuilding," he said. One word. The subject and the verb and the object compressed into a single declaration because Jihoon's morning briefings had the word count of a telegram.
"From scratch?"
"From scratch. New protocol. Compartmentalized contact architecture. Every person in the network knows one other person and one location. No chains. No single points of failure. Pilsoo knows nothing about the next safe house. The next safe house contact knows nothing about Pilsoo." He sipped. His jaw did the thing — the assessment muscle, the tell that Yeji had learned to read as the physical manifestation of operational planning happening in real time behind the face of a man who processed strategy the way other people processed digestion: continuously, automatically, without choosing to. "Gonna need new phones. Burner devices. Cash purchases. Kwon—" He glanced toward the living room where the agent was writing. "Kwon logs our communications. I've been using this phone since we arrived. She's probably catalogued every number I've called."
"You think she's reporting to Dohyun?"
"I think she's reporting to Yoon. And I think Yoon is operating in a Bureau where Dohyun controls the infrastructure. The phones, the databases, the communication networks — Strategic Operations built those systems. Special Affairs uses them. The question isn't whether Kwon is trustworthy. The question is whether the systems she reports through are secure."
The institutional paranoia of a man who'd operated independently for fifteen years and had spent the last twelve hours inside an institution's protection and was already mapping the institution's vulnerabilities because that was what Jihoon did: he found the cracks in every structure, including the ones he was sheltering inside.
"Don't make her an enemy," Yeji said. "She treated your shoulder."
"She treated my shoulder and logged the treatment and noted the injury type and the weapon that caused it and the exact grade of mana discharge. Every piece of medical information she collected is a data point about our combat capability. I'm not making her an enemy. I'm recognizing that her job and my job have different— objectives." He almost used a different word. Yeji saw it — the substitution happening in real time, the operational mind selecting the diplomatic term over the accurate one.
"Different objectives."
"Roger that."
Changwon appeared next. The tank moved through the apartment with the careful geometry of a large man in a small space — shoulders angled through doorways, steps placed to avoid the furniture, the physical awareness of someone who'd learned that his body's natural dimensions exceeded most interior architecture's assumptions. His right arm was bandaged — the field dressing from last night replaced by something cleaner, probably Kwon's work during the small hours.
"How's the arm?" Yeji asked.
"Burning." He said it the way he said everything — direct, unadorned, the verbal economy of a man who'd worked as a delivery driver and a tank and in both professions had learned that accurate reporting saved time and embellishment wasted it. "The mana contamination. Kwon's paste neutralized most of it. The rest is working itself out. She says twenty-four hours for the burning to stop. Forty-eight for full strength."
"Can you hold a shield?"
"I can hold a shield now. Holding it well is the forty-eight-hour question."
He sat at the kitchen table. The chair protested — a creak of wood under mass, the complaint of furniture that had been built for average occupants and was hosting someone who exceeded the specification. Nari shifted on the refrigerator. The ghost child's glow brightened fractionally — the sleeping state lifting, the spectral awareness registering Changwon's proximity. Nari had attached to the tank. Not the way she'd attached to Yeji — the covenant bond, the spiritual link, the summoner-spirit relationship. A different attachment. Familiarity. The recognition that Changwon was large and quiet and occupied space without filling it with demands, the safety that a child found in the presence of a large, gentle adult.
"She was glowing brighter around 4 AM," Changwon said, noticing Yeji's glance toward the refrigerator. "I got up for water. She was watching me. Didn't say anything. Just watched."
"She's processing."
"The guilt thing? About being seen?"
"About existing visibly in a world that punishes visibility."
Changwon looked at the ghost child on the refrigerator. His expression wasn't the complicated emotional landscape that other people brought to conversations about Nari — not the pity, not the discomfort, not the uncertainty about how to treat a dead thirteen-year-old. Simple regard. The look of a man who saw a person and recognized them as a person regardless of the person's relationship with physical reality.
"Hey, kid." Changwon's voice. Low. The address wasn't casual — it was deliberate, the tank choosing to speak to Nari the way he spoke to everyone, which was without adjustment, without the special handling that people applied to ghosts and children and things they didn't understand. "You want to come down and sit with us?"
No response. The glow flickered. Nari's spectral eyes — the dead-cat pupils, wide and dark — tracked from Changwon's face to his bandaged arm and stayed there.
"The arm's fine. Had worse." He held up the bandaged forearm. Rotated it. The motion was careful but the message was clear: functional, present, not broken. "Got hit by a C-rank stone golem in Chungju once. Left side. The bruise was shaped like the Korean peninsula. Jihoon took a photo. I'll show you sometime."
*That's not true,* Minwoo said from inside. The dad voice, amused. The tone of a man who recognized another man's technique — the dad-specific strategy of telling stories to coax a scared child into engaging. *The bruise was shaped like a boot. Jihoon told me. But the Korea thing is a better—* He trailed off. The mid-sentence dissolution. The moment when the word "story" would have led to "I used to tell Somin stories about—" and the sentence chose to die rather than arrive at the destination. He cleared his throat. The ghost-throat, the spiritual equivalent. *Anyway. Good technique. Kid's not buying it, though.*
Nari descended. Not all the way — from the refrigerator to the countertop, a half-step down, the ghost child choosing the intermediate elevation that kept her above the seated adults but closer to them. Progress.
Junghwan stumbled out at eight-fifteen. The fire-type's mana reserves were still in single digits — the external device drained, his natural regeneration operating at the speed of a phone charging through a frayed cable. He sat at the table. Didn't speak. Accepted coffee. The state of a man whose body had made decisions about resource allocation and conversation had been triaged to the bottom of the list.
---
Yoon called at nine.
Yeji took it in the bedroom. Kwon didn't follow — the agent's observation protocols apparently included a provision for phone privacy, or at least the performance of phone privacy, the distinction being unclear and possibly irrelevant.
"How's recovery?" Yoon asked. Her voice was morning-brisk. The vocal efficiency of a woman who'd probably been at her desk since six and had already processed three reports and was fitting this call into a schedule that was organized down to the quarter-hour.
"Progressing. Eunsoo — my healer spirit — is supervising channel rehabilitation exercises. Low intensity. Controlled."
"Agent Kwon reported the exercise. Five minutes. No strain indicators."
So much for phone privacy.
"I have an assignment," Yoon continued. The word landed without ceremony. Assignment. The vocabulary of institutional authority, the term that transformed a suggestion into an obligation. "Three days from now. A D-rank dungeon in Gimpo. Cleared twice by regular Bureau teams, but the third survey reported anomalous spiritual readings. Voices in the walls. The survey team couldn't identify the source. Two members reported headaches and one filed a complaint about hearing whispers that she later retracted because she didn't want the psychological evaluation."
"Spirit activity."
"Probable spirit activity. Which makes it my division's jurisdiction rather than regular operations. The dungeon is cleared — no active monster population. The threat level is essentially zero. But the spiritual anomaly needs assessment, and assessment requires someone who can perceive and communicate with trapped spirits." A pause. Deliberate. "It's as close to a zero-risk operation as exists. D-rank structure. No combat threats. A controlled environment for your first operation under Special Affairs oversight."
A test. Wrapped in institutional language and operational logic, but a test. Yoon wanted to see [Requiem] in action. Wanted her agents present to document and observe and record everything in their spiral notebooks. The first data collection session in the research arrangement that protection had paid for.
"Who comes with me?"
"Your party. My agents — Kwon and one additional. Standard observation protocol. We monitor, we document, we don't interfere with your process unless safety concerns arise."
"Define safety concerns."
"Channel strain exceeding parameters set by your healer spirit. Physical collapse. Hostile spirit interaction. The standard thresholds." Another pause. "Miss Ahn. This is not a trap. This is not a test designed to push your limits. The dungeon has spirits. You can talk to spirits. I need to know what they're saying because my division's mandate requires it and you're the only person alive who can provide that information."
The honest version. The institutional need stated plainly, without the packaging of favors or the wrapping of concern. Yoon needed Yeji's ability the way a construction company needed a crane: specific capability, specific application, get it on site and put it to work.
"Three days," Yeji said.
"Three days. Time for your party to recover. Time for your channel to heal. And time—" The briskness softened. A degree. The adjustment that Yoon made when she was transitioning from director to person, the slight shift in register that humanized the bureaucrat. "Time for you to decide how you want this arrangement to work. I won't pretend that oversight is comfortable. I will promise that it's survivable."
The call ended. Yeji sat on the bedroom futon and looked at the wall and processed the assignment with the discomfort of a woman who'd been independent until yesterday and was now receiving instructions from a Bureau director who'd arrived in an alley at the right moment and was collecting on the debt in increments of documentation and dungeon deployments.
Three days. Gimpo. A D-rank dungeon with voices in its walls.
She could do that.
---
The second rehabilitation session was at two in the afternoon. Four hours after the first, per Eunsoo's protocol. Yeji sat on the bedroom floor. Kwon stood in the doorway — invited, this time, because if the exercises were going to be logged regardless, Yeji preferred the observation to be direct rather than inferred.
*Left temporal pathway activating. Five percent. Ambient perception. Same protocol as this morning.*
The channel opened. The crack. The resonances of her three spirits filling the narrow aperture with their familiar frequencies — Minwoo's warmth, Eunsoo's clarity, Nari's flickering pulse.
*Seven percent. Holding. Good. Today we add a new element. Instead of tracking a single resonance, I want you to extend perception outside the body. Not far. Not [Requiem] range. One meter. The absolute minimum external radius. You're going to perceive the ambient spiritual environment of this room.*
"You said no outward extension."
*I said I direct the exercises. This is directed. One meter. The spiritual equivalent of opening a window instead of opening a door. The pathway needs to remember how to process external input. If we only exercise internal perception, the rehabilitation builds a channel that can hear what's inside but can't function in the field. One meter. Twelve percent capacity. I'm watching every fluctuation.*
Yeji extended. One meter. The perception slipped through her skin and into the room's air like breath through a mask — filtered, contained, the left channel engaging its external function at the minimum viable setting.
The room's spiritual environment was quiet. The apartment had no mana infrastructure — no channeling systems, no spiritual anchoring, no dungeon proximity. The ambient spiritual energy was Seoul's baseline: low, diffuse, the background radiation of a city built on land that had been soaked in mana since the first dungeon break. Nothing to perceive. Nothing to track.
Almost nothing.
At eleven percent capacity, one meter range, in a cold apartment above a laundromat in Mapo-gu, Yeji's left temporal pathway caught something.
Not a resonance. Not a voice. A vibration. Deep. Below the floor. Below the building's foundation. Below the laundromat and the utility lines and the geological substrate that Seoul was built on. A vibration that traveled through the earth the way sound traveled through water — slow, persistent, arriving at her perception not as a signal but as a pressure. The spiritual equivalent of standing on a bridge and feeling a train pass underneath.
It wasn't Sunhee. Sunhee's dispersed fragments had a signature — the academic precision, the researcher's consciousness, the frequency of a mind that had organized itself for transmission. This was different. Unstructured. Dense. The vibration of something that wasn't trying to communicate but was producing spiritual output simply by existing, the way a furnace produced heat whether or not anyone was standing near it.
Old. The word arrived in Yeji's mind with the certainty of a perception rather than a conclusion. Old. Not old like Sunhee's five-year-old ghost. Not old like the dungeon spirits she'd encountered — hunters who'd died in the last decade, their consciousnesses measured in years. Old like geology. Old like the ground itself. Whatever was producing this vibration had been doing it for a long time, and the vibration had been present in the city's spiritual baseline all along, buried under the noise of dungeons and hunters and mana infrastructure, and Yeji was only hearing it now because Eunsoo's rehabilitation protocol had stripped her perception down to its barest function and the bare function, uncluttered by range or intensity, could detect the signal that the noise had always covered.
And it was angry.
Not a human anger. Not the directed rage of a wronged person or the hot fury of a combat scenario. A slow anger. Tectonic. The kind of anger that existed on a timescale where human lifetimes were rounding errors, the sustained displeasure of something that had been angry for so long that the anger had become structural, load-bearing, the foundation on which everything else was built.
*Twelve percent. Pathway holding. But your cortisol response just spiked. What are you perceiving?*
"Something under the city."
*Elaborate.*
"I don't know what it is. A vibration. Deep. Below the building. Below everything. It's old, Eunsoo. Really old. And it's—"
*Fourteen percent. You're pushing. The perception is engaging secondary processing networks. Pull back.*
Yeji pulled back. The vibration faded — not disappeared, faded. The signal dropping below the threshold of her reduced perception, sinking back into the spiritual noise floor where it had always been, where it would continue to be, where it was right now beneath her feet and beneath the laundromat and beneath Mapo-gu and beneath whatever geological truth held Seoul above the things that lived in its deep places.
*Channel closing. Session complete. Three minutes forty-two seconds. Early termination due to unanticipated perceptual contact.*
The bedroom returned to its physical parameters. Cold plaster. Stained ceiling. The distant sound of a washing machine beginning its first cycle of the day, the laundromat opening to the neighborhood's domestic needs.
Kwon was writing in her notebook. She'd observed the entire session — Yeji's closed eyes, the posture, the moment when something had changed and Yeji's breathing had shifted. The agent couldn't perceive spiritual energy. But she could perceive the physical indicators of someone perceiving spiritual energy, and the indicators had been clear enough to generate a full page of notation.
"Miss Ahn. Was that part of the rehabilitation protocol?"
"No."
Kwon wrote that down too.
Yeji sat on the bedroom floor. Her hands were flat on the cold surface. Through the floor, through the building, through the earth, the vibration continued. Unaware of her. Unaware of anything, maybe. Just present. Just old. Just angry.
She needed to talk to Yoon. She needed to talk to Eunsoo. She needed to understand what existed beneath Seoul that was ancient and furious and had been there long enough that its anger had become part of the foundation.
But first she needed to breathe. And to acknowledge, in the quiet of a rehabilitation session gone sideways, that the world kept getting deeper and she kept getting smaller and the distance between what she could perceive and what she could handle was not shrinking.
The washing machine downstairs changed cycles. Nari's glow pulsed once from the kitchen. Kwon's pen scratched against paper.
Yeji pressed her palms against the floor and felt the earth hum.
