The fox crouched in front of me, and I kept reading.

"So the moon carried the parcel up the hill," I read. "It was heavier than a whole night, but she had promised."

My voice didn't shake. I don't know how. Every other part of me was shaking.

The mask was a hand's width from my face. Up close it wasn't white. It was the color of old paper, and the painted smile curved inward, down into a dark that went further back than any head could be.

It didn't move.

One second.

Two.

The picture book trembled in my hands. I turned the page anyway, because the page was due, and a reader turns pages.

"And the wind said, you are late. And the moon said, I know. Good things are heavy."

Three.

Four.

The fox stood up.

The geta clicked, unhurried, back down the second-floor hallway, and turned the corner, and faded, and were gone.

I sat there with the book open on my knees and my heart going like a fire alarm.

...It didn't take me.

Luck. Call it luck.

I closed the book with both hands so they'd have something to do.

Downstairs, the music box started again, slow and sweet.

[Round two has ended. Remaining: 12.]

Twelve. Still twelve.

I put my forehead against The Moon's Errand and breathed until my legs agreed to be legs.

* * *

The Rainbow classroom, third grace. Last grace. The music had two more minutes in it, maybe three, and after that the song was over for good. Dawn was still four hours off.

"Receipts! You're alive!" Haru grabbed my sleeve and shook it, checking. "You were up there alone forever. What were you doing?"

"Reading."

"During tag?"

"It's a good book."

"He's insane," she told the room, delighted. "He's completely insane."

Gureum looked up from the rug, one dinosaur in each fist, and nodded once, like insanity was acceptable.

By the window, Insik had the chalk ledger balanced on a tiny desk, and his face was doing arithmetic it didn't like.

"Say it, section chief," Baek-gu said.

"The Sprout corner, spent. The Cloud corner, spent. The stairwell nook, the coat pegs, the library rug, the music room." He tapped each line. "Spent, spent, spent, spent. One corner left in the building. The nap room."

"For twelve people," Chae-a said.

"For ten," Insik said. "The nap room fits ten if nobody breathes. I measured."

"So two of us just, what," Dohyeok said. "Get read?"

Nobody answered him.

The Hwangs were holding hands. Yeonhwa had her eyes closed, listening to the music like it owed her something. Minseo stood by the door with her dead phone in her pocket and her hand on it.

Hiding wasn't going to finish this. The board had said it from the start. The Story ends at dawn, or when the fox's face is found.

The face. The extra day was for the face.

I couldn't say the rest of what I knew. The ink was already awake in my throat, cold, coiled, waiting for me to try. But the board was sayable. And the walls were sayable.

I looked at the walls.

"Mu-hyeon-ssi." My voice came out too thin, so I said it again. "Mu-hyeon-ssi. The hallway by the office. The photo wall. I want to look at something and I don't want to look at it alone."

He studied me for a second, ash-gray and unreadable.

"Two minutes," he said. "Walk quiet."

* * *

The photo wall ran the length of the office hallway. Years of it. Graduations, sports days, lunches, a hundred little faces the city had swallowed, all of them smiling under glass in the warm lamplight.

I walked to it fast. Too fast, maybe. Like I'd been here before.

I had. Around four in the morning, six years ago, in chapters I could never mention.

"There." I pointed. "Field day. Look at the basket."

A sports-day photo. Kids in red and blue headbands. A folding table, and on it a wicker basket heaped with cheap festival masks.

Fox masks. Dozens of them, stacked like bowls.

"Game day," Mu-hyeon said. "Fine. Kids play tag, someone's the fox. What am I looking for?"

"Not what. Who." I moved down the glass. "The man holding the basket. Now here, the graduation one, back row, by the door. And here, fixing the swing. He's in three of these."

Mu-hyeon leaned in.

A middle-aged man in gray work clothes. Never in the center. In one photo he was mid-laugh, a kid hanging off each arm. In the graduation photo somebody had written names along the bottom in white pen, teachers and staff, left to right.

Mu-hyeon read them until he stopped.

"Cho Wansik. Custodian."

"He set up the game every year," I said. "The masks were his."

"And the board said the Story ends when the fox's face is found." Mu-hyeon straightened up slowly. "Found. Not taken. Not cut off."

"Tag doesn't end when you catch someone," I said. My mouth was dry. "It ends when the game's called. When the kids go in."

The music stopped mid-phrase.

Both of us went still.

No grace left. No corners left. Somewhere below, at the bottom of the stairs, geta clicked onto the first step.

"Get to the nap room," Mu-hyeon said. "All of you. Count heads and hold the door."

"What are you going to do?"

He was already unslinging the axe.

Then he did the thing I have not stopped seeing since. He crouched, and laid the axe down on the mat by the shoe cubbies, gently, the way you put down something sleeping. And he stood up with nothing in his hands.

"I'm going to call the game," he said.

* * *

We didn't go to the nap room. Not one of us. We packed the stair landing like a photograph nobody would take, and we watched.

The fox came down the hallway through the pools of lamplight. Pressed smock. White mask. The head turning side to side with that patient hunger, seeking, seeking.

Mu-hyeon walked out to meet it. Empty hands, open palms.

"Cho Wansik-ssi."

The fox stopped.

The whole building stopped. The lamplight held its breath. My binding held its breath. I'd read this game top to bottom and I had never read this.

"Cho Wansik-ssi. The children went home. All of them, before dark. Tag is over, and the children won."

The mask tilted.

The voice that came out was still many children pressed into one throat, but quiet now. So quiet.

"All. Of them?"

"All of them," Mu-hyeon said. "You counted right. Every year, you counted right. Nobody was left outside. You can stop seeking."

The fox stood in the lamplight, arms loose.

Then it knelt.

It knelt the way tired men kneel, one knee and then the other, and it bowed its head, and Mu-hyeon reached out with both hands and lifted the mask off.

Underneath was a face. A middle-aged man's face, wet, eyes shut, crying the way you cry when it's finally over. For one second he was only human, and the hallway smelled like grass and summer dust instead of ink.

"Thank you for playing," Mu-hyeon said.

The man came apart.

Not fell. Poured. He went to ink all at once, and the ink went to paper, and a single page hung in the air where a person had knelt. Printed edge to edge, dense black type, a whole life in a typeface too small to read.

The print faded. The page went blank, and fell, and Mu-hyeon caught it before it touched the floor.

[The fox's face has been found.]

[The cover has closed. The Story thanks you for your participation.]

[Binding extended. +2 days.]

The front doors unclicked, both at once, like a clasp letting go.

* * *

Nobody cheered. Haru sat down right there on the stairs. Dohyeok laughed once, high and stupid with relief, and Chae-a put her hand over his mouth without looking at him.

On my forearm the script rewrote itself, fine and neat. Nine days. I watched the seven become a nine and I felt the number in my teeth.

Then every phone in the building buzzed at the same time.

"Uh," Baek-gu said. "Everyone, or just me?"

"Everyone," Insik said.

I opened mine. The LIBRARY app was already awake.

[The Story 'Tag' has closed. It was a better telling than the last one.]

[Readers: 1 → 39.]

A better telling than the last one.

The last one.

The floor tilted under me, just slightly, in a way no one else could feel.

"Thirty-nine readers," Chae-a said slowly. "Reading what?"

"Us," Yeonhwa said. She didn't sound surprised. Old women never sound surprised. "Mind your posture, children."

And then, only on my skin, low on the inside of my wrist, handwriting surfaced. Not the system's clean print. Handwriting, round and small and shy, like a note passed in class.

thank you for the good ending.

It faded as I stared.

Warm. It was warm, the way the coin had been warm, and I wanted to be sick and I wanted to read it again, both at once, and I couldn't tell anyone either thing.

"Receipts." Haru was on her feet again, jabbing a thumb at the door. "Sun's coming. Twelve of us walked in. Count us out loud."

"Twelve," I said. "All twelve."

"Say it again."

"Twelve."

She grinned with the chipped tooth. "Best book I've ever been in."

They started filing out into the blue before dawn, Gureum riding Mu-hyeon's shoulders with a dinosaur held high like a flag. I was last. I stopped at the classroom door for one look back at the chalkboard, the rules still on it in that patient teacher's hand.

Under them, fresh, in a fast crooked scrawl that was already fading, one word.

Better.

I stood there until it was gone.

...Better than what?

"Seojin! Sunrise!"

I looked at the eleven people waiting for me in the doorway, alive, all of them, and not one of them had seen it.