"Meeting," Chae-a said, and put her phone face up in the middle of the table. "Everyone open your LIBRARY app. Now, please."

Day 5, late afternoon, the watch room of Station 3. Rice and two kinds of kimchi and Insik's careful ration of tuna cans, and now nine phones coming out of nine pockets.

Dohyeok groaned. "We just got back from the train thing. Can't we have one day where nobody learns anything?"

"No," Chae-a said.

"You heard her," Haru said, chewing. "No."

I opened mine. I already knew what it said. I checked it the way you check a sore tooth.

[Readers: 112]

"Read your numbers out," Chae-a said. "Left to right."

"Forty-four," Baek-gu said. "The company has more followers than me. That's fine. I'm fine."

"Fifty-one," Mu-hyeon said.

"Sixty!" Haru held her phone up like a test score. "Sixty people. I'd like to thank my agency."

"Thirty-one," Dohyeok said. "Whatever that means."

"Thirty-eight," Chae-a said. Then, without changing tone at all: "It was thirty-four this morning. It went up four when I kissed you."

Dohyeok choked on rice.

"What?"

"On the hospital steps. I checked before, out of habit, and after, out of a hunch. Four exactly." She turned her phone around so the table could see it. "So. Conclusion. It's not a score. Scores go up for winning. This goes up for moments."

The room got quiet in a specific way. Insik put his pen down.

"Moments," Yeonhwa repeated.

"Somebody is watching us," Chae-a said. "Not something. Somebodies. The number is how many. It climbs when we do things worth watching. Fights. Rescues." A beat. "Kisses."

"An audience," Insik said slowly.

"An audience."

Dohyeok pushed his bowl away. "No. I hate that. I hate that so much. When I fought the door thing on the train, people were, what, eating snacks?"

"You don't know they have snacks."

"Chae-a. When you watch something, you have snacks. That's the whole..." He waved his arm. "That's the point of watching!"

...He wasn't wrong. That was the worst part.

I'd known for days. Longer. The app calls them Readers and I had 112 of them and I could feel the shape of the truth sitting in my chest where I couldn't hand it to anyone. But this much was on every phone at the table. This much was sayable.

"The payout messages," I said. "After the train. 'The Critics enjoyed the ride.' Enjoyed. You don't enjoy a rescue operation. You enjoy a show."

"Thank you," Chae-a said. "Exhibit two."

"So we're a show." Baek-gu rubbed his eyes. He still hadn't slept, not really. "Great. I've been talking to my bike for five days on camera."

"The company knew," Haru said solemnly. "The company doesn't judge."

"The company better not."

Yeonhwa hadn't said her number. Everyone noticed at the same time, the way a table does.

"Auntie?" Haru said. "Yours?"

Yeonhwa turned her phone around like she was laying down a card she'd been holding all game.

[Readers: 9]

"Nine," Dohyeok read. "Since when?"

"Since the beginning. It has never moved. Not in the fox school, not while you were all underground and I was here teaching Gureum to make rice." She folded her hands. She looked pleased. Actually pleased. "I've thought about it. I think the audience can tell I've already decided how my story ends. No surprises in me. Nothing to bet on." She tapped the screen with one knuckle. "I'm proud of being boring. It took me seventy-one years. None of you can have it."

"I want it," Baek-gu said immediately.

"You can't have it."

"Nine sounds so peaceful."

"Get your own nine."

Haru was laughing. Even Minseo, in the corner with her tea, had the start of something near her mouth.

"Okay, but the numbers aren't even," Dohyeok said. He pointed at me, and here it came, the thing I'd been waiting for someone to say out loud since the hospital steps. "Explain his. Receipts has a hundred and twelve. That's double the captain. The captain solved the whole train alone."

Everyone looked at me.

"Maybe they like watching me fold receipts," I said.

"Nobody likes watching that."

"I like watching that," Haru said.

"When did yours climb?" Chae-a asked me. Quiet, precise. "Specifically. Do you remember the jumps?"

I did. That was the problem. I remembered every jump, including one that happened on a night none of them lived through, when a fox put two fingers on a man's neck and three Readers turned the page because they wanted to know what happens next.

"After Tag it said thirty-nine," I said. "And it went up the night Insik d..."

Cold ink, coiling, the whole length of my throat.

I bent it. Mid-syllable, teeth together, heartbeat loud.

"...did the ledger," I said. "The corner ledger. When you were counting the corners out loud for everyone, Insik-ssi. It liked that."

The cold let go. Slow. Like it was making a note.

"The ledger," Insik said, and sat up two centimeters straighter. "Well. Good record-keeping is dramatic. In its way."

"It really isn't," Dohyeok said.

"Twelve people alive says otherwise."

I picked up my water and drank so nobody would see my hand. Haru was looking at me. Just for a second, head tilted, the look she gets when a receipt doesn't add up. Then Dohyeok said something about wanting a refund on his thirty-one and the table rolled on without me.

Close. That was close.

* * *

It was Mrs. Hwang who saw the wall.

She was carrying dishes to the sink and she stopped in the doorway to the engine bay, and the plates went quiet in her hands, and she said, "Everyone. Come here, please."

We came. All of us, crowding the doorway, and then nobody went further.

On the bay wall, above Engine 3, where there had been nothing but paint and a faded safety poster, there was handwriting. Big, looping, unhurried. Wet-looking, like it was still being written, because it was still being written. The last word finished itself while we watched. The line sat there gleaming.

we like it when they talk about us.

Nobody said anything.

Gureum pressed his face against Haru's side. She put her hand on his head without looking down.

"It can hear us," Dohyeok said. Very quietly, for him.

"It could always hear us," Chae-a said. Her voice was level. Her hand found his sleeve anyway. "Now it's answering."

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Once. Then again.

I didn't want to look. I looked.

[Readers: 113]

Buzz.

[Readers: 114]

While we stood there. While we did nothing but stand in a doorway and be afraid in an interesting way, two more of them pulled up a chair.

Mu-hyeon stepped past us all, into the bay, and looked up at the wall the way he'd looked at the fox school doors. Then he picked up a rag from the workbench and wiped the wall clean, one long stroke, like it was nothing. Like it was a chore.

"Dinner's getting cold," he said.

The writing didn't come back. We went in. Nobody sat with their back to the bay door, and everyone pretended that was a coincidence, and that was the first meal since Tag where the banter didn't outlast the food.

* * *

I found Minseo on the roof at midnight, on watch, the dead phone next to her on the parapet.

She'd been quieter since Ward Six. Not worse. Quieter the way a room is quieter after you finally stop hearing a noise you'd lived with.

"Sixty-one percent," she said, when she saw me look at the phone. "It died at sixty-one. It'll say sixty-one forever. I used to think that was the saddest thing I owned." She turned it over, screen down, gentle, like tucking something in. "Now I think it's just a clock that stopped at the right time. Everything before sixty-one really happened. It's proof."

"You don't need proof."

"I know." She almost smiled. "I like having it anyway."

Below us the city was black to every horizon, and above us there were too many stars, the way there never were before, and somewhere out there nine thousand streets held their breath.

"Seojin-ssi. Do you think we get anything? At the end of all this. The ones who make it."

The gag lay quiet. It didn't care about this question. Nobody's written the answer.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't think there's a prize."

"Mm." She pulled her knees up. "Then we just get mornings."

"We just get mornings."

"That's not nothing," she said, and we sat with that until my watch ended, and it wasn't nothing. It really wasn't.

* * *

The page came at dusk on Day 6.

We were all in the yard. Baek-gu saw it first, a white flake over the roofline, falling the lazy way they fall, side to side, taking its time, taking four minutes, while every one of us stood still and watched it come.

It landed on the hood of Engine 3.

Mu-hyeon read it without touching it. His face didn't move. That's how I knew.

[The Story 'Gift Exchange' (Tragedy, Rank Four) seeks its guests. Venue: Baekrok Wedding Hall, Dalbit-ro. The cover opens when the guests have gathered.]

Rank Four. Tag was Rank One. The train was Rank Two.

And the venue was the pink-stone wedding hall, the one that put a cold finger down my spine on the walk here, because the draft had a Tragedy there on Day 5. Not Day 6. Not Rank Four. My map of this city was already a day wrong and a rank wrong and bending further while I stood there, which meant I'd be walking in half blind for the first time since the Turning.

That wasn't the thing that scared me most.

The thing that scared me most was one line of the draft, a throwaway line I'd read six years ago and never needed until now, about Tragedies and the things that sleep inside them.

Inside that hall, the cold coil in my throat wouldn't come.

Inside that hall, I'd be able to say all of it.

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