Mu-hyeon lined us up outside the kindergarten at eight in the morning like it was a drill he'd run a hundred times.

"Column of two. I take the front. Baek-gu takes the rear. The tail walks in the middle."

"Which one of us is the tail?" Dohyeok asked.

"Anyone I'd have to run back for."

He picked Gureum up and set him down dead center, next to Yeonhwa. Then he looked at Insik until Insik shuffled in beside them.

"I'm fifty-two, not eighty," Insik said.

"You're carrying the ledger. Paper walks in the middle too."

Nobody argued. It was strange how fast we had all decided the ledger mattered.

The station was forty minutes on foot. Station 3, off Dalbit-ro, past the river branch. Mu-hyeon said it had bunks, a generator, a kitchen built for thirty, and doors made to be slammed.

"And it's mine," he added. "I know where everything is in the dark."

We walked.

* * *

The city on Day 2 looked exactly like the city on Day 0, and that was the bad part. Nothing rotted. Nothing burned. The signals kept changing for no one.

Halfway down the block, Mrs. Hwang stopped at a parked sedan.

A phone was propped on the dashboard, still playing. A variety show on loop. Canned laughter spilling out every few seconds into an empty car.

She opened the door, reached across the seat, and turned it off.

"They'd hate it," she said, to no one exactly. "Being laughed at by nobody."

Mr. Hwang took her hand on the other side of the car. They didn't say anything else for a block.

Ahead of me, Chae-a walked with the ledger open across her forearm, copying it into a second notebook without breaking stride.

"You already have the original," Dohyeok said.

"Two copies is a database. One copy is a bonfire that hasn't happened yet."

"Three copies is a better database."

"Three copies is you wanting a job."

"I'm serious. Flood. Fire. Fox. I could carry the third copy on my body at all times. I'd guard it with my life."

"Mm," Chae-a said, not looking up.

Dohyeok grinned like he'd won something. Being ignored by her seemed to feed him.

Behind them, Haru had Gureum by both hands, walking backward in front of him, teaching him a clapping rhyme.

"Dino, dino, mister dino." Clap, clap. "How many teeth have you got?"

Gureum didn't sing. He clapped, both claps, exactly on time, watching her hands like they were the most important thing in the city.

"He's got the claps," Haru reported over her shoulder. "Words are extra. We're negotiating."

* * *

We passed the wedding hall a little after nine.

Pink stone, four stories, gold lettering over the doors. Baekrok Wedding Hall. There were ribbons still tied to the handles from somebody's Saturday.

A cold finger went down my back.

I knew this building.

The draft put a Story in that building. Day 5. A Tragedy.

Three days from now.

I opened my mouth. Something safe. Route planning, maybe we avoid Dalbit-ro after dark, anything.

The cold coil moved in my throat before I had even picked the words.

Fine. Understood.

I closed my mouth and kept walking. My eyes stayed on the ribbons until the building slid out of view.

Haru dropped back beside me.

"You looked at that place like it owed you money."

"It's pink," I said. "It's very pink."

"Four floors of pink," she agreed, and skipped ahead again.

She hadn't noticed anything. Good.

It didn't feel good.

* * *

Station 3 was a squat concrete box with a red door big enough for a truck, because there was a truck.

Engine 3 sat in the bay, red and patient, keys in the ignition.

Mu-hyeon put his palm flat on the hood as he walked past it. The way you'd greet a horse.

Inside: the kitchen, the bunk room, a watch room with a wall of radios, all dead. And a brass pole through a hole in the ceiling.

Gureum stared at the pole. Dohyeok stared harder.

"Can I..."

"No," said Mu-hyeon and Chae-a at the same time.

By the lockers hung a squad photo. Seven firefighters in front of Engine 3. One of them was Mu-hyeon, years younger, caught mid-laugh, getting shoved sideways by a big man with a buzz cut.

I stopped in front of it without meaning to.

I had read this man for four hundred and twelve chapters, and I had never once seen him laugh.

"Kang Cheol-min," Mu-hyeon said, behind me. I hadn't heard him come up. He nodded at the big man. "He laughed at his own jokes so nobody else had to."

Then he walked on. That was all he gave.

* * *

Insik claimed the watch room table within ten minutes and set the ledger down square in front of him.

"Census," he announced. "If we're going to be a household, we're going to be a documented household. Name, age, what you did before. One at a time."

"Why the before part?" Baek-gu asked.

"Skills." Insik said it like a complete sentence.

"Ryu Baek-gu, thirty-four. Delivery. The company's parked outside, so put down driver as well."

"The company is a motorcycle," Chae-a said.

"The company is a motorcycle," Baek-gu agreed, with dignity.

"Baek Haru, nineteen. Put professional."

"Professional what?"

"Just professional. Leave it open. I like options."

"Mo Yeonhwa. Seventy-one. Midwife, forty years." She held out her wrist rather than her hand when Insik glanced up, out of habit, then laughed at herself. "Write the retired part small."

Haru answered for Gureum, one hand on his head. "Yoon Gureum, six. Dinosaurs."

Insik wrote it without comment, in careful block letters. DINOSAURS.

It looked right.

Then me.

"Yun Seojin. Twenty-seven. I ran a convenience store register. Nights."

The pen moved. YUN SEOJIN, 27, CONVENIENCE.

Haru read it upside down. "Convenience. That's the most you word that exists."

"Thanks."

"It wasn't a compliment. It's a census."

* * *

There was hot water.

Real hot water, generator and tank, and Mu-hyeon rationed it like fuel. Four minutes each, no negotiations, Gureum gets six.

I went last. I stood in the spray and felt two days of the end of the world come off my skin, and I looked down to scrub my chest.

I stopped.

There was a mark on my sternum. Dead center.

Round. Coin-sized. Gray-black, but not on the skin. Under it. Ink dropped into water and stopped mid-bloom, sealed beneath something clear.

I scrubbed it. Nothing changed. I pressed it with two fingers.

No pain. But not nothing, either.

It felt occupied. Like knocking on a door and knowing, through your knuckle, that the room isn't empty.

...When.

The fox's fingers landed on my shoulder, not my chest. Nothing else had touched me. Except dying. Dying had touched all of me.

Coin-sized. The hundred-won coin from the store had sat warm in my fist all that first night. It was exactly that size.

I stood there until my four minutes ran out and the water went cold on its own, like it had been counting too.

Then I got dressed, and I went out, and I told no one.

What would I say? Yeonhwa would want to look at it. She takes wrists. She notices everything. And after her first question, the second question, the third, somewhere in there sat an answer with ink in it, and I'd stand in front of everyone coughing black.

So. Later. I'd deal with it later.

I'd made that same face in the mirror once about a tooth. The tooth won.

* * *

Lights out was ten. Firehouse rules, Mu-hyeon said. Nobody fought it. Everyone was more tired than they were admitting.

I stayed up.

I sat in the watch room in the dark with my sleeve rolled to the elbow, and I checked my phone while I waited. The LIBRARY icon sat there, a closed book.

[Catalogue empty. Please wait for tonight's acquisitions.]

[Readers: 39]

Thirty-nine. Steady since the payout.

Thirty-nine of something, somewhere, following along.

I put the phone face-down.

On my forearm, the fine script lay quiet under the skin, the way it always did.

Your manuscript holds 8 days.

11:58. 11:59.

Midnight.

The ink moved.

Not the whole line. Just the number. It thinned, like a breath drawn in, and settled again.

Your manuscript holds 7 days.

No sound. No feeling. I watched a day of my life get spent and it didn't even itch.

"Okay," I said quietly. "Rude."

And from the bunk room, a voice answered.

"You count the beds."

I went still.

Flat. Clear. Not a whisper, a full speaking voice, in the dark on the other side of the doorway.

Mu-hyeon's voice.

I got up. I crossed to the bunk room door on the sides of my feet and looked in.

Everyone asleep. Haru face-down. Gureum a small hill of blanket. And Mu-hyeon flat on his back, arms at his sides like a man laid out for inspection, eyes shut, chest rising slow.

Talking.

"You count the beds before you rest. You check the exits twice. You give the food away first."

Asleep. He was asleep. And the voice wasn't shaped like dreaming. It was shaped like reading aloud.

You. You. You.

"You will always pick up the axe," Mu-hyeon's mouth said, calm and even, to the ceiling. "It is already written further down the page."

Silence. Just breathing, nine people's worth.

I stood in the doorway with my heart going like a fist on a door.

Behind me, in the watch room, the dead radio clicked.

Once.