Baek-gu tapped the fuel tank twice. Two fingers, then the flat of his palm.

"Okay," he said. "The company agrees to the route."

"The company is a motorcycle," Haru said.

"The company has a perfect delivery record and you have a windbreaker. Show respect. You're cargo today."

"If I'm cargo, what's he?"

"Also cargo. Cargo that pulls the cart."

I pulled the cart. It was a flatbed handcart from the station's storage room, and Haru had already written a name on the handle in marker. SERGEANT PULL. She patted it like a horse.

"He's had names for three days and a rank already," I said.

"He works hard. Promotion was overdue."

Before we left, Yeonhwa had come down to the bay with a folded paper and taken my wrist while she handed it over, two fingers on the pulse, the way she did to everyone, like a toll.

"The pharmacy list," she said. "Read it to the shelf, not to the room. And the bottom three lines. Fill them. Don't say them out loud."

"Why not?"

"Because I asked nicely."

Now the list sat in my zip pocket, and the morning sat on Gyoha-dong, bright and wrong the way every morning was now, and my arm under my sleeve said six days.

Baek-gu walked the bike beside us, crates strapped where a passenger would go. At the first intersection he stopped, pulled out a laminated delivery map gone soft at the folds, and studied it like scripture.

The map had marks all over it. Red crosses. Circled numbers. And here and there, a small careful B.

Haru leaned in. "What's B?"

"The standing ones." He said it flat and kept his eyes on the map. "Where they were yesterday. They mostly don't move. Mostly."

"And the red crosses?"

"Streets we don't take."

"Why not?"

He folded the map. "Because the signal's red."

I looked down the crossed-out street. The traffic light hung dead over the empty lane, no power anywhere in the city, and it was glowing. Faint. Red. Like a coal at the bottom of a fire.

...The power's been out for four days.

"How is it red," Haru said, very quietly.

"Don't know. Don't care. Three years riding this district, never dropped an order, never dropped the company. You know how? When a street lies to you, you give it no business." Baek-gu turned the bike. "We go around."

We went around.

* * *

The pharmacy on Onnuri Row had its shutter down to knee height. Baek-gu held it, I rolled under, Haru came after me and named the shutter (GATEKEEPER KIM) before she was even off her knees.

Inside smelled like dust and vitamin syrup. Our flashlights made the aisles into little stages.

"Bandages, gauze, burn stuff," Haru read off Insik's list, wandering. "The section chief writes lists like a poem. Everything's in categories. There's a subsection."

"Take the whole shelf. He can categorize it at home."

I worked Yeonhwa's list behind the dispensary counter. Blood pressure tablets. Antibiotics, three kinds. Insulin for the Hwangs' cold-box. Reading glasses, plus two.

Then the bottom three lines.

I read them once.

I stood there with the flashlight in my mouth and read them again.

I knew those names. Not from a pharmacy shelf. From a paper bag handed across a hospital counter, every week, the last year. I used to carry those names home on the bus and not look at them.

They weren't the kind of medicine that fights anything. They were the kind that makes the losing quieter. My mother started them in her last spring.

At dinner two nights ago Yeonhwa had said months, said it with her chin up, said mine started first and dared anyone to pity her.

These weren't months drugs.

...She knows. Of course she knows. She was a midwife for forty years, she can read a body like I read a page.

She just didn't want it read aloud.

"Receipts!" Haru's voice from the front. "Do we need the fish-shaped vitamins? Asking for me."

"Take them," I said. My voice came out normal. I was almost proud of it.

I found all three names, filled all three lines, and put them at the bottom of the bag, under the gauze, where the list said they lived. Then I zipped the bag shut and carried it.

That was the whole job. Fill it, don't say it, carry it.

* * *

The route home passed the end of my old street, and I knew what was coming before Haru's face lit up.

"Wait. Wait wait wait. Star Mart. That's YOUR Star Mart."

"We're not stopping."

"We're stopping."

We stopped. The window glass was dusty and the aisles behind it were dim and perfect, like a museum of a normal life. Haru pressed both hands and her forehead to the glass.

"There's a note on the register," she said.

"There's no note."

"Taken for emergency," she read, in a news anchor voice. "Yun Seojin. Will pay."

Baek-gu came over to look. Even the company got leaned so it could face the window.

"The world ended," Haru said, turning to me slowly, "and you invoiced yourself."

"It's the owner's stock. I took his stock."

"The world ENDED."

"It's still his."

She looked at me for a long second, and the laugh she'd been building didn't come. Something else came instead.

"No, I get it," she said. "First night I moved to Haeseong, I was in a goshiwon the size of this window. Everybody's door in that hallway just had a room number. First thing I did, before I even unpacked, I wrote BAEK HARU on paper and taped it to my door."

"Why?"

"So the building would know somebody lived there." She knocked one knuckle on the glass, soft, like greeting the store. "Things with names on them don't disappear as easy. That's a fact. I've done studies."

"Is that why the cart's a sergeant?"

"The cart's a sergeant because he earned it." She pushed off the glass. "But yeah."

Baek-gu had already turned the bike. "Museum's closed. Route says we move."

* * *

The route did not say we would pass the math hagwon. The red signal two blocks up said it for us. Baek-gu stood at the mouth of the detour for a long moment, map out, jaw working.

"There's a B on this street," Haru said, reading over his arm.

"Far side. Forty meters of margin. It hasn't moved in three days." He didn't sound happy. "We walk the west sidewalk, we don't talk, we don't run. Running is interesting. We are not interesting."

I saw it from the corner.

It stood at the hagwon's shuttered door the way it had stood on Day 1, close enough to the glass to fog it, if it breathed. Adult height. Clothes gone the gray of old newsprint. Where the face should be, nothing wore a smooth suggestion of a face, like a page waiting for type.

We walked. West sidewalk. Quiet.

Twenty meters in, its head turned.

Not toward a sound. There was no sound. The head came around first, smooth as a globe, and stopped on me. Then the shoulders followed, one grinding stage at a time, like something being rotated by a hand we couldn't see. Then the whole body faced us across the empty street.

Nobody said walk. We were already walking.

It lifted its chin.

It tilted that blank face up and back the way a man stands in a doorway in spring and smells rain coming, and under my jacket, under my shirt, the coin-sized place on my sternum went cold, then warm, then awake.

...It's not looking at us.

It's smelling me.

My phone buzzed against my leg.

[Readers: 39 → 43]

[Four Readers have turned to this page.]

The Blank held its chin high for three more steps' worth of forever. Then the head came back down, the shoulders ground back around, and it returned to its post, face to the shuttered door, a tutor waiting for a student three days late.

We reached the corner. We turned it.

"Walking now," Baek-gu said, not slowing. "Company says we walk. Fast is walking. This is walking."

We walked so fast the sergeant's wheels sang.

Three blocks on, Haru finally spoke.

"It looked at you."

"It looked at all of us."

"No." She wasn't teasing. Her eyes were on me, and there was a first-night-in-the-goshiwon flatness to them. "It picked you. Out of three people, it picked you, like there was a name taped on you."

"Maybe I smell like the store."

"Maybe," she said, and let it go, and didn't let it go. I watched her not let it go all the way home.

* * *

We rolled into the bay at dusk to applause from Dohyeok, who applauded everything, and an inventory ambush from Insik, who met the cart with a clipboard like a customs officer.

I carried Yeonhwa's bag up myself. She took it, took my wrist with the other hand, and read whatever was in my pulse.

"Good boy," she said. That was all. That was everything.

Dinner was loud somewhere above me. I went down to the dark kitchen for water, not bothering with a light, because I knew where the cups lived.

I was wrong about the dark. It wasn't empty.

Minseo sat at the little table, hands folded, spine straight, the way people sit in waiting rooms. Her dead phone lay on the table in front of her, face up, screen black, placed exactly square to the table's edge like a place setting.

She'd been waiting. In the dark. For me.

"Seojin-ssi." Her voice was quiet and swept clean. "Can I tell you the thing I haven't told anyone?"