The box cutter was 2,500 won.

I know because I scanned it. The register still worked, which felt insane, so I scanned my own supplies and paid with the cash from my locker. Then I stood in the empty store holding a box cutter like it was a sword.

I extended the blade. Click, click, click.

"Okay," I told the snack aisle. "I've never won a fight."

The snack aisle said nothing.

That's not an exaggeration, by the way. Not even in elementary school. In sixth grade Kim Taeyang put me in a headlock and I apologized to him. That's my entire combat career.

I retracted the blade and put it in my jacket pocket anyway. Zip pocket, opposite side from the blank page. A weapon in one pocket and a mystery in the other. Very balanced.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

[LIBRARY]

[Tonight's acquisition: The Story 'Tag' (Epic, Rank One)]

[Venue: Haedong Sprout Kindergarten. The cover opens at sundown.]

[Readers: 1]

Still one. Still reading. Whatever it was.

I pulled up my sleeve and looked at the script on my forearm instead, because that at least I could do math on.

Your manuscript holds 7 days.

Seven days. Minus one every midnight. At zero, the Ink comes, and I stop being a person with a face.

Clearing a Story pays days back. Rank One pays one.

So. Say it plain, Seojin.

"If I hide, I starve in a week. Not of food. Of days." My voice sounded thin in the empty store. "If I play, I might die tonight instead."

Hide and definitely die, or play and probably die.

Put like that, it wasn't even a decision. It was arithmetic.

And there was the other thing. The real thing, the one I'd been walking around all day like a hole in the floor.

Draft chapters five through nine. The kindergarten. Eleven people walk in. Six walk out.

The girl in the yellow jacket did not make it past the second round. Mu-hyeon did not learn her name.

Two lines. I'd read them two hundred times and never once thought about them, because that's what those lines were written to be. Background. Cost. A number in the six-out-of-eleven.

She was going to be a real person in a few hours.

I zipped my jacket to the chin.

I've read the walkthrough. Nobody else on Earth has. A girl in a yellow jacket doesn't have to die tonight, and the only thing standing between her and that sentence is a convenience store clerk with a 2,500 won box cutter.

"We're all going to die," I said, and locked the store behind me out of pure habit.

* * *

I saw my first one at dusk, on Byeokje-ro.

There was a bus parked at a dead stop, and through its windows, across the street, someone was standing in front of the math hagwon. The shutter was down. The academy sign was dark.

The person was facing the shutter anyway. Perfectly still. Like a student who came early and would wait forever.

"Excuse me," I almost called out. The word was in my mouth. Another person, alive, standing, my whole chest lunged toward it.

Then the streetlight above it flickered on, and I saw.

No face.

Not a hidden face. Not a mask. A smooth page where a face goes, blank the way the fallen page in my pocket was blank, and the skin of it moved slightly, like paper deciding.

The draft had a word for them.

Blank.

I stopped breathing. I counted four of my own heartbeats. It didn't turn. It didn't move. It stood in front of a shuttered math academy the way a sentence stands on a page, waiting to be read, and I walked on with my eyes forward and my body cold all the way through.

One street later my hands were still shaking.

They used to be people. The draft said that too, and I'd read it like weather.

* * *

Haedong Sprout Kindergarten sat on a low hill behind a persimmon tree, and every window was glowing.

Warm light. Lamplight, orange-gold, the kind in photographs of houses you didn't grow up in. Every single window, both floors, and the city dark for kilometers in every direction around it.

It should have looked safe. It looked like bait, wearing safe.

From inside, thin and slow, a music box was playing. A lullaby at half speed, each note deciding to exist one at a time.

The gate stood open.

...Okay.

I went in.

The shoe cubbies still had children's sneakers in them. I stepped past those fast. In the main hall, under paper mobiles of fish and clouds, a middle-aged man in a company windbreaker was crouched over a pile of snack boxes, counting.

He pointed at me before I said anything.

"Twelve juice boxes, thirty rice crackers, seven chocolates. If you eat something, report it to me. I'm keeping numbers."

"...Understood?"

"Gong Insik. Daeil Paper, general affairs, section chief." He said it like the title still held the roof up. Then, quieter: "Numbers keep, even now. Somebody should keep them."

"Yun Seojin. Convenience store."

"Retail. Good. You'll count honestly."

The gate creaked. A man wheeled a delivery bike halfway in, decided against it, leaned it against the fence, and patted its seat twice like an apology. He came up the path reading me the whole way.

"Ryu Baek-gu. Delivery." He stopped in front of me. "No offense, but you don't look like you fight."

"None taken. I don't."

"What do you do?"

"I read."

Baek-gu looked at me for a second. "Well," he said, "somebody's got to die first, might as well be literate," and something in me actually relaxed, because that was a joke, and a joke meant a person.

The old woman arrived on foot, alone, with a hiking pole she clearly didn't need. She shook my hand and then didn't let go. She turned my wrist over, two fingers on the pulse, eyes somewhere else. Ten seconds.

"Mo Yeonhwa," she said, releasing me. "Midwife, retired. Your heart's racing, young man. Eat something."

"Does everyone here introduce themselves like a business card?"

"Everything else got taken," she said. "Names held."

The couple in their fifties came in holding hands and didn't stop holding hands, not to bow, not to sit. Hwang. They said it together and then sat close together on the child-sized bench like one person.

Then the argument arrived, before its owners did.

"All I'm saying is, if it's a prank show, where are the cameras."

"Dohyeok. Everyone vanished. Everyone. What prank show has that budget?"

"A really good one?"

They came through the gate mid-fight. A big young guy, loud, bright-faced, and a girl a head shorter who was steering him by the sleeve without looking at him.

"Im Dohyeok! Twenty-three!" he announced to the whole hall, like good news. "This is Chae-a. We're together. Three months."

"Seol Chae-a." She scanned the room in one pass. Windows, doors, us. "Nobody here believes it's a prank show. Because it isn't. Moving on."

"You don't know that."

"Cameras, Dohyeok."

"Hidden ones."

Insik, without looking up: "Two more juice boxes just became six ration units. Report your eating."

A young woman came in last of that wave, alone, in a hospital-blue windbreaker, and introduced herself to nobody. She picked the chair nearest the door and sat with a dead phone in both hands, holding it like it was still deciding something. When Yeonhwa brought her a rice cracker, she bowed maybe a centimeter.

"Joo Minseo," she said. Two words. That was all of her we got.

I counted without meaning to. Nine.

The draft said eleven.

The gate banged.

"Sorry! Sorry. Not sorry, actually, I stopped for supplies."

Yellow.

A yellow windbreaker, coming up the path at a jog, a stuffed backpack, a girl maybe nineteen. She dropped the bag on the hall floor with a thud that made Insik flinch for his snack pyramid, looked around at the warm windows, and nodded.

"At least it's warm. Five stars."

My whole body went quiet.

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

"Baek Haru, nineteen," she said, to the room, cheerful as a delivery notification. "Resume: I'm strong for my size, I don't snore, and I have never lost rock-paper-scissors when it mattered. Hire me."

"Rock-paper-scissors," Baek-gu said.

"Undefeated."

"That's not a skill."

"Says the man who's about to lose at it."

She grinned. Chipped front tooth. Nineteen years old, and in a book I loved, she was two sentences long.

Not this time.

I didn't say it out loud. I said it wherever it is you say the things you mean.

The last light went out of the sky while Haru was naming the snack pyramid ("His name is Mount Insik") and Dohyeok was demanding a rematch, and I felt the dark arrive through the windows like water rising past a line.

Full dark.

The gate did not creak this time. I just looked up, and he was in the doorway.

Big through the shoulders. Rescue jacket, worn to gray. An axe held low against his leg, edge turned back, the polite way, the way you hold something so it can't scare anyone.

He ducked under the doorframe and his eyes went around the room before his feet came in. Door, windows, hallway mouth, second door. Exits first. He counted them exactly the way the draft always said he counted them, and my heart was up in my throat like a fan meeting a celebrity at a funeral.

Cha Mu-hyeon.

Four hundred and twelve chapters. Six years. The man whose last line ended on a comma, standing in a kindergarten in the flesh, and ash-gray eyes passed over me and registered one adult male, no injuries, no threat, and moved on.

"Has everyone eaten?" he said.

Eleven of us looked at him.

"Eat first. Then we talk about this calmly."

Haru raised her hand. "I like him. Vote to keep."

And behind Mu-hyeon, with nobody near them, both doors swung gently shut.

The lock turned by itself. It didn't click like a door.

It clicked like the clasp of a book.

The music box played one more note and held it, and every phone in the room lit up at once.

[The Story has opened its cover.]