Tak.

The geta came off the last stair and touched the hall floor.

I was in the nap room reading corner with my back against the shelf, Gureum's hand in mine, Haru crouched on my other side. The little lamp above us burned warm and steady. Under it, the rug with the ducks. A reading corner in a kindergarten, and I was hiding in it for my life.

It stepped into the hall.

An adult's body in a kindergarten smock. Pale yellow. Pressed flat, like it had come off an iron a minute ago. The name tab was blank. Bare ankles over wooden sandals.

And the mask.

A festival fox mask, white with red around the eyes. The cheap kind. Two thousand won at any night market.

Except a mask sits on a face, and a face pushes it outward. This one curved inward. Like a bowl. Like it was resting on nothing, and the nothing was pulling.

Gureum's hand tightened. I squeezed back and didn't breathe.

The corner shelters. The rules said so. The rules don't lie.

The fox turned its head. Slow. Left, then right. The painted smile swept the room like a lighthouse.

Everyone was where Insik's ledger put them. Minseo and Baek-gu in the Star room corner. Dohyeok and Chae-a in the office nook. The Hwangs upstairs, in the Cloud room window corner, holding hands the whole way up, probably holding hands now. Mu-hyeon standing in the open by the cubbies, axe low, because someone had to see how it moved and he'd assigned himself.

Insik and Yeonhwa had the book nook by the front doors.

Insik wasn't in it.

He was three steps out of it, flat against the wall, halfway between the nook and the kitchen door. Frozen there. Caught out when the music died before he could decide.

Get back. Get back in the corner.

The fox's head stopped turning.

It was looking at him.

"...ah," Insik said. Just air.

And he broke the wrong way.

Not the three steps back to the nook. Forward. Toward the kitchen, toward the metal door, the way a man runs for a room with locks in it, because fifty-two years of doors had taught him doors work.

The fox went after him.

It didn't run. That was the worst part. The geta clicked, unhurried, tak, tak, tak, and it still crossed the hall like the floor was moving for it.

"Kitchen's a dead end!" Baek-gu shouted from the Star room. "Section chief! Turn around!"

Insik grabbed the kitchen door handle. Rattled it. Locked. He turned around with his back against the metal and held up the ledger notebook, both hands, like a shield. Like paper would help.

Mu-hyeon came off the cubbies at a dead sprint.

"Down!"

He swung the axe from the shoulder, full turn of his hips, a rescue man's swing that could open a car roof. It caught the fox square in the back.

And sank.

No sound of hitting. No jolt. The blade went in like the smock was wet paper, and stopped, the way a pen stops in a thick book. No wound. Nothing came out.

The fox didn't even turn its head.

Mu-hyeon wrenched the axe free. It came loose with a long tearing sound, like a page pulled slowly out of its binding, and the smock was smooth again before the blade cleared it.

...You can't cut it.

The fox raised one hand. Two fingers out, index and middle, gentle, the way a teacher taps a child who's it.

"Wait," Insik said. "Wait, I'm, I stepped out, I only stepped out for a moment, that's not, "

The two fingers touched his neck.

Tag.

Insik went flat.

I don't have better words for it. One moment he had a body, and the next he had a side, then an edge, a man closing like a door, and where he'd stood there was a sheet of paper standing upright in the air. For one second I could see him printed on it. Dense black type, edge to edge, a whole man in a serif font.

Then the print faded. Line by line, top to bottom, fast.

A blank page drifted to the floor.

The fox bent, picked it up, and slid it into the smock's front pocket. It smoothed the pocket flat with two fingers.

[Participant Gong Insik has left the Story. Remaining: 11.]

The window hung in the air over the spot where he wasn't.

Under it, a second line. Different hand. Thinner, faster, wrong.

[Three Readers turned the page. They want to know what happens next.]

Somewhere above the ceiling, the music box started playing again, mid-phrase, sweet and slow.

The fox walked back across the hall and went up the stairs. Tak. Tak. Tak.

* * *

Nobody moved for ten seconds. Then everybody did.

Yeonhwa got to the kitchen door first. She stood on the spot where he'd flattened and turned her palms up, like there should be something to catch.

"He was three steps," she said. "Three steps from the nook. I had his sleeve. I had his sleeve and then I didn't."

The ledger notebook lay by the wall where it had fallen. His handwriting all over it, neat columns, the corners numbered one to eight, our names distributed in pencil so he could erase and rebalance. He'd argued for pencil. Ink is arrogant, he'd said. Plans change.

Chae-a picked it up. She had to peel the cover off the floor because his hands had sweated into it.

The ledger survived its author. I looked away.

"Okay," Dohyeok said, too loud, voice cracking. "Okay, so we hit it harder. Two axes. I'll hold it, hyung swings, "

"I opened his back," Mu-hyeon said. Flat. He was staring at the axe blade. Clean. Not even dust. "Full swing. It didn't notice, Dohyeok. It did not notice."

"Then we, "

"We don't fight it." He set the axe down on the mat. It cost him something to do it. I watched it cost him. "We hide better. That's the whole game. That was always the whole game."

Minseo was already kneeling in front of Gureum, moving a penlight across his eyes, holding his wrist. He let her. He was watching the stairs.

"Fox," he said quietly.

"Yeah," Haru said. She crouched next to him and pushed her windbreaker sleeve up like she was getting down to business. "Rude one, too. Didn't say hi to anybody. From now on his name is Smiley and we don't like him."

"...Smiley."

"We don't like him," Gureum agreed, barely a sound.

She could still do that. Insik was four minutes gone and she could still do that. I wanted to tell her what she was. Nothing in my throat objected, for once, because it wasn't about the novel. I just didn't have the words in time.

"Corners," Chae-a said. She had the ledger open. "Listen. Used tonight: the nap room, the book nook, the Star room, the office, and the Cloud room window upstairs. Five spent. The rules said each corner shelters once. So what's left is the library nook upstairs, the Rainbow room, and the stair cupboard. Three corners. Eleven of us."

"The music plays three times," Baek-gu said. "That was round one. So it hunts twice more."

"Then we spread across three corners and nobody improvises." Chae-a looked around the circle, and her voice was nineteen years too old for her face. "Nobody runs for a door. Doors don't count. Only corners count."

Yeonhwa was still at the kitchen door. Mrs. Hwang had come down the stairs and put an arm around her.

"He counted all of us at dinner," Yeonhwa said. "Twice. He apologized for pointing."

The music box played on above us. Sweet. Slow.

Winding down.

I heard it before anyone. The notes going long. The spring going soft. It had played for four minutes, maybe less. The first grace had been half an hour.

No. No, it's too fast, it's supposed to,

The music stopped mid-phrase.

"Corners!" Mu-hyeon roared.

And everything went wrong at once, because Gureum wasn't in the circle.

He was at the coat pegs by the entrance, reaching up into his jacket pocket, where the second dinosaur was. Ten meters of open floor away.

Tak.

The fox was already at the bottom of the stairs. It didn't sweep the room this time. Its bowl of a face was pointed one way.

Straight at him.

"Gureum!"

Minseo got there first. She scooped him up sideways, dinosaur and all, and ran, and the fox followed, and the whole room broke like a wave for the staircase because every living corner was upstairs.

We went up in a crush. Baek-gu hauling Yeonhwa by the arm. The Hwangs, Dohyeok, Chae-a shouting corner assignments that nobody could hear. Mu-hyeon at the rear, walking backward up the stairs, empty hands spread, giving it a bigger target that it ignored.

Tak. Tak. Tak.

At the top, the corridor split. Minseo cut left with Gureum, into the Rainbow room. Chae-a shoved Yeonhwa and the Hwangs toward the library nook.

And Haru broke right.

Toward the Cloud room. Toward the window corner with its warm little lamp, wide and close and looking exactly like shelter, the nearest corner to the top of the stairs.

The corner the Hwangs had used in round one.

Spent. It's spent, it's in the ledger, she never heard the list, she was talking to Gureum,

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

Two hundred times I'd read that line. It had eleven words in it too.

I ran.

Not a decision. My legs were moving before the thought finished, past the library door, into the Cloud room, where Haru was folding herself into a dead corner under a lamp that would not count, and the geta were coming down the corridor behind me, tak, tak, faster now, and I hit her with both hands and all my weight.

"It's used!"

She flew clear, rolling, out of the corner, toward the door.

I didn't.

I was standing in the spent corner, in the lamplight, and the lamplight dimmed. Around me. Only around me, the warmth pulling back like water finding a drain, and my shadow on the wall grew a second shadow with ears.

A voice made of many children, all pressed into one throat, said:

"Found. You."