Junghwan pulled a folded site map from his back pocket and spread it on the kitchen table between the teacups. Hand-drawn. Pen on graph paper, the kind you bought at a convenience store for 1,200 won. He'd sketched the Gwanak fragment site during his eight-hour perimeter watch with the precision of a man who processed the world through spatial relationships and heat signatures.
"The fragment is in a natural cave system, thirty meters below the hiking trail." He tapped the map. "Bureau security has two teams rotating twelve-hour shifts. Four agents per team. They've set up monitoring equipment. Mana sensors, temperature probes, the standard dungeon-adjacent surveillance package. The cave entrance is gated. Access requires Bureau clearance."
"How's the fragment itself?" Yeji asked.
"Active. More active than Songpa." Junghwan traced a circle on the map around the fragment's position. "I could feel it from the surface. Not mana — heat. The stone around the cave entrance is three degrees warmer than ambient. The Bureau agents said it's been like that since they established the perimeter six days ago. Consistent warmth, no fluctuation."
Hayeon looked up from her laptop. "Fragments don't generate heat. They process mana. Heat would indicate—"
"Resistance," Eunsoo said.
The bond carried her voice to Yeji, and Yeji relayed it. The arrangement they'd developed. Eunsoo's analysis filtered through Yeji's speech, the healer's clinical precision softened by Yeji's translation but never diluted.
"Eunsoo says resistance. The subject inside the fragment may be actively opposing the conversion process. The friction generates thermal energy as a byproduct."
Junghwan's eyebrows went up. "Someone in there is fighting?"
"The fragment showed me the conversion process last night." Yeji kept her voice level. The facts, not the feeling. "Soul energy gets scrubbed — memory, personality, everything that makes it a person gets stripped and the raw energy feeds the grid. If the subject inside the Gwanak fragment is generating heat, it means they're spending energy to resist the scrubbing. Which means they're still coherent. Still a person."
"For how long?" Junghwan asked.
Yeji looked at the map. The hand-drawn cave, the neat circles marking Bureau positions, the X where the fragment sat underground.
*Eunsoo.*
*Impossible to estimate without direct contact. The resistance could sustain for weeks or collapse in hours. It depends on the subject's original capacity, their psychological resilience, and how long they've been fighting.* A pause. *The thermal signature suggests significant energy expenditure. If they've been generating that heat for six days straight, they're burning through whatever reserves they have.*
"Eunsoo says weeks or hours. No way to tell from the surface."
Junghwan sat back. Folded his arms. The fire-type's resting posture, arms crossed over the chest where the heat core sat. "Monday's three days out."
"I know."
"If this person's been burning hot for six days and they run out before you get there—"
"I know."
The kitchen. Boyeon's barley tea, Hayeon's laptop, Junghwan's hand-drawn map. The arithmetic of a woman running at 4.2% substrate margin whose body needed forty-eight hours of recovery before she could safely push [Requiem] into another fragment. Her schedule was three days away from a site where someone might not have three days.
"I can't go early," Yeji said. The words came out flat. Not defeated. Diagnostic. "If I push [Requiem] at this margin, the substrate fails. If the substrate fails, I lose the two stabilization broadcasts I'm already running. Junhyun in Songpa and Daeun in Suwon lose their signal. Two people I'm already keeping alive go dark so I can maybe reach a third."
Junghwan processed this. Ten seconds. The practical math, not the moral math.
"What if you dropped one broadcast temporarily?"
*No.* Eunsoo, immediate. *Junhyun in Songpa is at critical coherence. His broadcast has been running for less than a week. Interruption at this stage risks permanent fragmentation. The cognitive scaffolding we've built is still setting. Pulling the broadcast would be equivalent to removing a cast from a broken bone before it's healed.*
Yeji relayed it.
"Then we wait," Junghwan said. Not happy about it. Accepting it. "Monday. And we hope whoever's in Gwanak is still fighting when we get there."
---
Changwon called at 11 AM.
The shield-type's voice came through the phone speaker because Yeji had put it on speaker because Boyeon was in the room and Boyeon had earned the right to hear everything about Jihoon's recovery without having to ask.
"He ate breakfast." Changwon's voice. Steady, the way a shield held steady. Too dense to move. "Rice porridge. Complained about the texture. Asked for his phone. I told him no."
"You told Park Jihoon no?" Yeji said.
"The surgeon said no screens for twenty-four hours. Something about neural rest and mana-tissue integration sensitivity. Jihoon said that was, quote, 'not how tissue works.' Dr. Kang said, quote, 'your tissue, my rules.' They stared at each other for about ten seconds and then Jihoon asked for a book."
"Did you give him Boyeon's book?"
"He's reading it."
Boyeon, at the counter, smiled. The small smile of a woman whose care package had landed.
"The arm," Yeji said.
"Still immobilized. Still monitored. Jisun came by at 9 for a spot check. Said the integration markers are... hold on, I wrote it down." Paper rustling. "'Preliminary acceptance patterns continuing. No rejection indicators. Consistent with positive trajectory.' She said the same thing she said on the phone this morning, basically. We're still in the window."
Fifty-five hours left. The arm, deciding.
"He asked about you," Changwon said. "Not directly. He asked if 'the Friday briefing had anything new.' I said I'd check."
Jihoon, in a hospital bed, reading a book he wouldn't normally read, eating porridge he didn't like, asking about the briefing without asking about Yeji. The man who finished other people's sentences because he was paying attention to everyone but himself.
"Tell him Hayeon's managing the investigation, Junghwan's back from Gwanak, and the substrate is recovering on schedule. Tell him everything is under control."
"Is it?"
"Tell him that."
Changwon paused. The shield-type who'd known Jihoon for ten years, who could read his party leader's questions underneath the questions.
"Roger that," he said.
---
The afternoon was Eunsoo's.
Yeji sat at the kitchen table with her eyes closed while the healer mapped. It wasn't painful, not like the deep push into the Bureau fragment. This was internal. Eunsoo threading her awareness through Yeji's channel architecture the way a plumber ran a camera through pipes, cataloging junctions and capacities and the structural tolerances of a system that had been built by the System and was being used against it.
*Channel baseline capacity at current bond load: 67% of estimated maximum for your developmental stage.* Eunsoo's voice, clinical, the researcher dictating findings. *The six active bonds consume approximately 38% of total capacity. The two stabilization broadcasts consume 14%. Passive [Requiem] reception, the ambient field that lets you hear spirits within range, consumes 8%. Substrate maintenance takes 3%. That leaves a 4% operational margin.*
"Four percent."
*Which is exactly the 4.2% I measured yesterday, allowing for rounding and fluctuation. The question is: what percentage of total channel capacity triggers the conduit function?*
"And you can answer that?"
*Not precisely. The fragment's historical memory showed me five other conduits. Their activation points varied. The lowest was at approximately 85% capacity utilization. A man in São Paulo who'd bonded nine spirits and was maintaining three external stabilization threads. The highest was 94%, the woman in Osaka, seven spirits, no external threads, but her bonds were unusually dense.*
Yeji opened her eyes. "I'm at 67%."
*At current bond and broadcast load, yes. But channel capacity isn't static. Every new bond increases your maximum capacity. The channel grows to accommodate what you ask of it. The splinter was designed to encourage this growth. The more you use [Requiem], the larger the channel becomes, which allows more bonds, which increases utilization, which pushes you toward the threshold.*
"The conduit function activates at a utilization percentage. Not a raw capacity number."
*Correct. It's a ratio. The System doesn't care how large your channel is. It cares how full it is. And it designed the splinter to ensure the channel stays full by expanding capacity in step with demand. Like a road that widens to accommodate more traffic but always stays congested because widening it attracts more vehicles.*
"So there's no safe way to grow."
Four seconds. The pause. Eunsoo's pause, the one Yeji was learning to read the way she read Jihoon's compressed expressions. A pause that meant the healer was deciding between the comfortable answer and the true one.
*There may be. The conduit function requires activation from the System, the signal that the Enforcer's frequency was preparing you to receive. The fragment showed me conduits whose thresholds were reached but whose conduit functions remained dormant until the System sent the activation command. The threshold makes you eligible. It doesn't make you active.*
"So crossing the threshold doesn't automatically open the conduit."
*No. But it makes you vulnerable to being opened. Once you cross, the System can activate you at any time. Below the threshold, the activation signal has nothing to latch onto.* Eunsoo paused again. *The room you're looking for, the space between where you are and where the conduit becomes possible, is approximately 18 to 27 percentage points of capacity utilization. At current growth rates and planned operations, I estimate you'll reach the lower bound in—*
She stopped.
*I need more data. The Bureau fragment's historical records are incomplete. Five samples is insufficient for a reliable model. I need to examine the fragment's deeper archives. Older conduits, earlier iterations of the splinter design. The session I proposed, when your margin recovers to 8%.*
"Sunday."
*Approximately.*
Yeji sat in the kitchen with the afternoon light coming through the window and the numbers arranging themselves into a shape she could work with. Sixty-seven percent utilization. Threshold between 85 and 94 percent. Eighteen to twenty-seven points of room. Every new bond, every new broadcast, every expansion of [Requiem]'s reach would push her closer to the line where the System could flip the switch and turn her bonds into drainage pipes.
The room. The space she had to work in. Eighteen points at minimum.
It sounded like a lot. It wasn't. Not if she was going to extract five people from fragments, which would require five new bonds. Not if she was going to build her capacity to handle the coordination that extraction demanded. Not if the channel grew with every push and the road widened and the traffic filled it and the ratio crept up.
She had room. Not much. And the room was shrinking every time she used the thing she needed to use to save the people she'd promised to save.
---
At 4 PM, Junghwan's phone rang.
He answered. Listened for twenty seconds. His face didn't change but his right hand, the one not holding the phone, pressed flat against the kitchen table. The fire-type's grounding gesture.
"When?" he said.
Listened.
"How much?"
Listened.
He hung up. Looked at Yeji.
"That was Taeyoung's team at the Gwanak site. The thermal signature spiked fifteen minutes ago. The stone around the cave entrance went from three degrees above ambient to eleven. The Bureau's mana sensors are reading fluctuations inside the fragment that don't match any baseline pattern they've seen at the other sites."
Eleven degrees. The person inside the Gwanak fragment wasn't just resisting. They were surging. Burning through whatever reserves they had in a burst that could mean they were rallying or could mean they were spending everything they had left.
"Taeyoung wants to know if you can advise remotely. Through the bond, through [Requiem], anything. He says his agents don't know what they're looking at."
Yeji stood. Walked to the window. Seoul, Friday afternoon, the city that didn't know what was under its mountains. The Gwanak fragment was eight kilometers away. [Requiem]'s range at her current tier: one kilometer. She couldn't reach it from here.
*Eunsoo. If I pushed [Requiem] directionally, not a full broadcast, just a pulse, a ping toward the Gwanak site, could I get a read at eight kilometers?*
*At 4.2% margin?* Eunsoo didn't pause this time. *No. The signal would dissipate before reaching the site. You'd burn margin for nothing.*
Eight kilometers. A twenty-minute taxi ride in light traffic. An impossible distance for an ability that operated on the architecture of grief.
"I can't reach it from here," Yeji said. She turned from the window. "Tell Taeyoung to document everything. Temperature readings every five minutes. Mana sensor logs. Any visual changes to the fragment's surface. I need the data when I get there Monday."
"And if whoever's in there doesn't have until Monday?"
The question sat between them. Junghwan asked it without accusation. The practical man, stating the practical problem.
"Then they don't," Yeji said. "And I'll carry that."
Junghwan held her gaze for three seconds. Nodded once. Picked up his phone.
In the bond, Nari was quiet. The seven-year-old who'd been quiet since last night, since the fragment showed them what they were. Quiet, but present. The warmth still there, dimmer than usual. The pilot light of a child processing something too large.
*Yeji,* Nari said. Small voice. *The person in the mountain. Are they scared?*
She thought about lying. The kind reflex. The adult instinct to shield a child from the thing that couldn't be shielded against.
*Probably.*
*Can they hear us? From here? Can they hear that someone's coming?*
Eight kilometers of stone and soil and mana and distance.
*No, sweetheart. They can't hear us yet.*
Nari's presence dimmed another fraction. Then steadied.
*Then we should hurry,* she said.
