The streetlights stayed dead.

I stood in the middle of the road with a warm coin in my fist and counted my own breaths, because they were the only thing still running on schedule.

Four. Five. Six.

Nothing turned back on.

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

It wasn't okay. But my mouth wanted a job.

I dug out my phone and turned on the flashlight. The beam shook. That was my hand, doing that.

The page was still there at my feet, face up where I'd left it.

The ending. The first word of the actual ending of The Pale City was on that paper, and this time I was going to read it if I had to memorize it letter by letter.

I crouched and put the light on it.

Blank.

...What?

I picked it up. Turned it over. Blank on both sides. I held it so close to the light that the paper glowed, hunting for indents, ghosts of type, anything.

Nothing. A clean white sheet.

It smelled like fresh ink. Strongly. The way a page smells one second out of the printer. All that smell, and not one word on it.

"You were there," I told it. "I read you."

The page did not comment.

I couldn't make myself throw it away. I folded it once, carefully, and zipped it into the chest pocket of my jacket. The pocket I never use, because it's the only one things can't fall out of.

Then I did the reasonable thing. The citizen thing.

I called 119.

[Emergency ▸ 119]

[Calling...]

[00:07]

It connected. That's the part that got me. No bars, no signal, and it connected on the first ring.

To a hum.

Not a busy tone. Not a recording. An open line, and behind it a low, even hum, like a room with the ventilation running and every person removed from it.

"Hello? Something's happened in Gyoha-dong. Everyone is..."

Hum.

I hung up and tried 112. One ring. Same open room. Same hum, patient, like it could hold the line for a thousand years.

My skin was crawling now in a slow, organized way.

The owner. Mr. Kwon. He picks up at 2 AM when the freezer alarm trips. He'd pick up for the end of the world.

One ring, then his voicemail. Except it didn't start from the start. It was already playing, mid-greeting, mid-word, like the message had been running before I ever dialed.

"...ave a nice day. Beep."

I lowered the phone and looked at it.

Phones don't do that. None of this is what phones do.

And then, I don't fully know why, I opened my contacts and scrolled to the M's.

Mom.

Her number has been disconnected for two years. I know, because I kept calling it for four months after the funeral, until the telecom robot got tired of telling me the number was not in service. I kept the contact anyway. Deleting it felt like a second funeral.

I pressed call.

[Mom ♡]

[Calling...]

It rang.

It rang.

The cold went through me in one pour, like water down the inside of a wall.

It rang a third time. I heard myself make a sound that wasn't a word. A number that does not exist rang a fourth time, in my ear, in a dead city, and I gripped the phone with both hands like it was a railing.

"Mom?"

The ringing stopped.

Hum.

The same hum. The same empty, ventilated room. I stayed on the line anyway. I don't know how long. I said hello into it twice, and the hum didn't change, and eventually my thumb ended the call because the rest of me was never going to.

I sat down on the curb.

Don't. Don't take it apart. The network is breaking. Everything is breaking tonight. It rang because things are broken.

That's what I told myself, sitting on a curb, crying a little, exactly like a man who believed it.

* * *

12:40 AM.

I went back into the store because it was the only lit box in the world, and because I work there, and because standing in the road had started to feel like standing on a plate.

The fridges hummed their broken hum. Fine. Company.

I took a basket and shopped my own store.

Water. Lighters. Batteries. The good flashlight from the shelf nobody buys from. Triangle kimbap, chocolate, painkillers, bandages. My hands wanted retail work, so I let them have it.

Nineteen items. I bagged them like a customer's order.

Then I stood at the register and couldn't just walk out. Three years behind that counter. The counter has rules, and the rules were the last thing still standing.

I took the memo pad and wrote:

Taken for emergency. Yun Seojin. Will pay.

I read it over. Added the date. Put it in the cash tray, on top of the ten-thousand-won notes, and slid the drawer shut.

If someone finds that note next week, I thought, and the world is back on, I will die of embarrassment. Please. Please let me die of embarrassment.

I turned off the hot-food warmer out of habit, and I left my store.

* * *

2 AM. Gyoha-dong, the long way home. My own neighborhood, in the dark, with a flashlight and a shopping bag.

The buildings were all still there. That was the trick of it. Every wall, every parked car, every sign. A city is its stuff, and the stuff was present and accounted for. It just didn't have anyone in it.

Kim's Rice Soup had its shutter half down. Stopped at knee height, like it had been on its way closed when the hand pulling it stopped being there.

The light inside was on. I crouched. Smelled burning.

"Hello? I'm coming in."

I got on my back and slid under the shutter, which was apparently a thing I'd decided to do.

On the stove, a pot sat over a live flame. Boiled dry. Gone black. The kitchen smelled like the end of a soup's whole life. I turned off the gas, and the tick of the cooling metal was the loudest sound in the district.

A phone lay on the counter next to a ladle. The screen was still open to a message that never got sent.

[To: Daughter]

[im coming home now so]

So. So what? So wait up. So heat the soup.

The sentence just stood there with its arms out.

I set the phone down slowly, face up, the way you'd put down something that was asleep. Then I slid back out under the shutter and stood in the street breathing.

Two buildings on, a fourth-floor window flickered blue, and a voice was talking down into the street. My heart jumped. A person.

A phone. Propped on the windowsill, playing some video into an empty room. A woman's cheerful voice walked through a tteokbokki recipe, step by step, to nobody, at two in the morning.

I stood under it for a minute anyway. It was a nice voice.

This looks like.

No. I wasn't saying it. Even inside my own head, I put that thought down on the ground and stepped on it. Things don't look like novels. A whole city does not catch a webnovel like a flu.

The empty bus. The page. The warm coin.

Not saying it.

But my feet had stopped walking home. I noticed that. My feet had formed an opinion.

* * *

Fine. A test, then.

Not believing. Testing. Those are different things, and the difference felt very important at 2:11 in the morning.

Chapter 2. I didn't have to look it up. It's the chapter where Mu-hyeon finally leaves his apartment, and he crosses Haedong Plaza at three in the morning, and the fountain turns itself on. It runs for eleven minutes. Dark red. He stands there and doesn't understand it, and the story never explains it, and readers hated that. The comment section called it edgy nonsense. That's the chapter where most of the forty-eight quitters got off.

The fountain runs dark red at 3 AM. Eleven minutes.

If nothing happened, then I was a man standing at a dry fountain in the middle of the night, and everything else tonight was a disaster with some normal name, and I'd go home and wait for the army to arrive.

If something happened.

I didn't finish that one either.

Haedong Plaza is a twenty-minute walk. I did it in fourteen and hated every dark block of it.

* * *

2:58 AM.

The plaza was a gray field. The fountain sat in the middle of it, a wide stone ring, drained for the season. Dead leaves in the basin. Somewhere overhead a banner flapped its one flap, over and over.

I stood at the rim and put the flashlight on the drain grates.

Dry. Bone dry.

"There's no water," I said out loud, and laughed one syllable of a laugh. "It's drained. There's no water, so nothing can happen. Good. This is how we find out it's nothing."

2:59.

The wind pushed a leaf along the basin. My phone said no signal in one corner and 2:59 in the other, and I stared at the 9 like it owed me money.

Sixty seconds is long. Nobody ever tells you how long.

3:00.

Under the plaza, something thudded. Once. Twice. Then a shudder came up through the stone and into my shoes, machinery taking up its old work, and the drain grates began to breathe.

The pumps had started.

There's no water, I thought. It's drained. There's nothing down there to pump.

The first of it came up through the grates anyway, welling, filling the basin from below.

It caught my flashlight.

It was dark.