The water came up dark and it stayed dark.

I stood at the rim of the Haedong Plaza fountain with my phone light on it and made myself look. Red. Not rust from old pipes. Deep red, moving slow, catching the light like it had a skin.

The stopwatch on my screen said 00:47.

I had started it the second the pumps kicked on. My hands were shaking so hard I nearly dropped the phone into the water, and I started it anyway, because the number mattered. The draft said eleven minutes.

Chapter 2 of The Pale City. Two paragraphs, barely a scene. The hero crosses a plaza at three in the morning, and the fountain is running red, and it runs red for eleven minutes, and nothing in the other four hundred and ten chapters ever explains why.

I used to think Magpie just forgot about it.

01:12.

The smell reached me over the water. Not blood.

Ink.

I sat down on the rim, a little way around the curve, and watched red water climb and fall in the dark. The plaza was empty. The city behind it was empty. Somewhere a traffic light was still doing its job for nobody.

04:30. 04:31.

"Stop at eleven," I said. "Please stop at eleven."

I didn't even know which answer I wanted. If it stopped early, or ran long, this was a broken city with red water in it, and I was a man going crazy alone at a fountain. If it stopped at eleven, the world was a book I had already read.

08:00. My legs were bouncing. I made them stop. They started again on their own.

10:40.

I stood up.

10:55. 10:58.

The pumps cut out.

The column of water folded and slapped down into the basin, and the red went with it, sliding toward the drains like something had called it home. Thirty seconds, and the basin held nothing but ordinary black water with the night in it.

I looked at my phone.

11:02.

Two seconds of that was me fumbling the button at the start.

One laugh came out of me, ugly, through the nose. Then my knees quit and I sat down hard on the rim and put my head in my hands.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Say it."

Nobody was there to make me. I made me.

"This is The Pale City."

The plaza took the sentence and did nothing with it. No thunder. No chime. The words just sat there in the cold air, being true.

The dead webnovel with forty-nine readers. The city where everyone vanishes at 11:47. The games that fall out of the sky. The hero with the axe and the dead sister, four hundred and twelve chapters of him, ending on a comma.

I was inside it now. Or it was outside. I couldn't make the thought sit still either way.

Magpie. What did you do.

What did you write.

* * *

I didn't move for a long time after that.

The cold came up through the stone into me and I let it. It was something to feel that made sense.

Around four I remembered the bag. The supplies from the store, the ones I left the note for. I dug out a triangle kimbap and ate it on the fountain rim with numb fingers, and I tasted exactly none of it, and I ate a second one anyway. My hands shook. My body wanted food. Terror didn't get a vote.

Facts. Small ones. I lined them up while I chewed.

Everyone was gone.

The fountain kept the novel's schedule, to the minute.

My mother's dead number rang four times tonight.

I stopped the line right there. That door stayed shut, or I wasn't going to be able to stand up again.

The sky went from black to charcoal to a thin gray with blue underneath. The river showed up first, then the buildings across it, one dead window at a time. No lights came on anywhere. No first bus. No old men walking to the mountain trail with their hands behind their backs.

Just me, a fountain full of ordinary water, and a city holding its breath.

* * *

At 5:11, the sun found the gap between two towers across the river.

The first line of light came over the water, crossed the plaza stones, and touched me.

And it caught.

Snagged. Half a second. Like a sleeve catching on a nail. The light dragged on me, and something in the middle of my chest felt looked at, and then it let go and it was just morning.

I sat very still.

"...What was that."

The light lay on the stones being normal light. Warm, even. Nothing anywhere offered to explain.

Then my arm caught fire.

Not real fire. Under the skin. A hot wire drawing lines down the inside of my left forearm, and I yanked the sleeve up and watched it happen.

Writing.

Fine black script, small and neat as print, rising up out of me the way a bruise comes up. Except fast. Except in sentences.

The city has accepted a new manuscript.

"Get off," I said, scrubbing at it with my thumb. "Get off, get off."

My nails did nothing. It wasn't on the skin. It was in it.

Every manuscript is numbered.

Your manuscript holds 7 days.

The wire cooled. The script stayed. Three lines on the inside of my arm, and beneath them, set apart like a signature, one figure.

7

I knew this. That was the worst part. My whole body was busy panicking and some traitor part of my brain had already pulled the file.

Draft chapter 3. The hero wakes up with script on his arm. Days. A countdown, and the unit was days, and the number dropped by one every midnight no matter what you did, on every arm in the city.

There were ways to earn days back. The games paid in days.

And there was exactly one thing waiting at zero. The draft called it the Ink, and the draft took a long time to show what the Ink left behind, and when it finally did, I had put my phone down and stared at my ceiling until my alarm went off.

I closed that door too. The doors were really stacking up.

Seven days.

I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, slow, the way you're taught.

It helped nothing at all.

* * *

My phone buzzed against the stone.

I came off the rim like it had bitten me.

One buzz. A notification sound. There was no signal, no data, no network in the world, and my phone buzzed, cheerful, like a text from a friend.

On the screen, an app was installing itself. No permission pop-up. No store. Not even a progress circle. An icon just faded up into the grid between my bank app and my bus app, like it had always lived there.

A closed book. Dark cover. No title.

Under it, one word.

LIBRARY.

For about four seconds I just looked at it.

Then I opened it, because not knowing was worse.

One page. Gray. Clean. A drawing of an empty shelf, and two lines of text sitting in all that empty space.

[Catalogue empty.]

[Please wait for tonight's acquisitions.]

Acquisitions.

Tonight's.

And at the very bottom of the screen, small, tucked away like a footnote nobody was meant to read out loud:

[Readers: 1]

I stared at that last line for a long time.

...One?

One reader. Reading what? The catalogue was empty. There was nothing in this thing to read.

Unless it wasn't counting what I was reading.

I looked up. Bare stone in every direction. Dead storefronts. The river throwing off early light. Nothing moved, nothing breathed, nothing was there.

The feeling of being watched didn't care.

* * *

Then, across the river, something white let go of the sky.

I saw it the whole way down. That was the thing. Paper doesn't fall in a straight line. Paper tumbles, drifts, gives up and dives. This came down in long, patient sweeps, side to side, and every sweep ended a little closer to me. It crossed the river. Paper doesn't cross a river.

Four minutes. I timed it without deciding to, the stopwatch still open in my hand. Four minutes of a white speck becoming a sheet becoming a page, and my feet never once moved, because where exactly was I going to go.

It landed touching my leg.

Not near me. Touching. The corner of it settled on my shoe.

It aimed.

I read it where it lay.

[The Story 'Tag' (Epic, Rank One) seeks participants.]

[Venue: Haedong Sprout Kindergarten.]

[The cover opens at sundown.]

And under that, in type so fine I had to crouch all the way down to it:

Attendance is voluntary. Binding is not.

Tag.

The word went through me like cold water, because I knew this one too. Not two orphan paragraphs like the fountain. Chapters. Whole chapters.

Draft chapters 5 through 9. The kindergarten with every window glowing warm, like the last lit house on earth. The music box that plays and rests, plays and rests. The thing in the fox mask that seeks when the music rests. The reading corners that shelter you exactly once each.

Eleven people walked into Haedong Sprout Kindergarten in the draft.

Six walked out.

I crouched there with the page against my shoe and the morning coming up gold and useless around me, and my memory, my loyal, stupid, four-hundred-and-twelve-chapter memory, served up the two lines I had read two hundred times. The two lines that always made me stop scrolling for a second. Back then, that was the whole size of the feeling. One second, and scroll on.

The girl in the yellow jacket did not make it past the second round.

Mu-hyeon did not learn her name.