The person on the rooftop had been in the same spot for three days straight.
They came up at ten at night and went down at four in the morning. No shift changes. Just a thermos. Sometimes they rubbed their hands together. So the Bureau worked late, too.
Five nights before my summons for questioning, I went out the front door.
There was no back door. The entrance to a multi-unit building was the only way in or out. I shut off my ability, didn't even put on a hat, and just walked out. A gaze dropped from the rooftop across the street. It touched the crown of my head, then slid away.
No yin energy. Just a constitutionally gifted kid on his way to the convenience store.
That was probably how I looked to them. A zero wasn't worth chasing. I'd learned that in the testing room hallway.
The northern foothills. Another forty minutes on foot from the bus terminal.
They said there used to be a temple here. More accurately, it was supposedly where a temple had once stood. The map showed only a hiking trail passing through. A few foundation stones, a collapsed stone wall, moss.
My palm had been pointing this way for a week. It wasn't pulling me along like it had at the factory. It was pressing down. Something heavy was buried in the ground, and my hand sank in that direction.
I switched my ability on.
My breath stopped.
There were too many layers. If the ceiling in my house had three or four, I couldn't count the layers here. They were stacked underground. Faint above, darker the farther down they went. I couldn't see the very bottom. It was a darkness so old it had lost all its color.
There were no ghosts. That was strange. There should've been a swarm of them in a place like this. Not a single minor spirit, just yin energy. Ownerless yin energy. Like a bowl left behind after someone had eaten everything in it a long time ago.
There was a gap beneath the stone wall, narrow enough that I had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Stone steps led inside. Eleven of them.
It was a stone chamber.
The ceiling was low. If I stood up straight, my head would hit it. The light from my phone touched the walls and was swallowed. The stone gave no light back.
An old man sat in the corner.
My palm went cold first. Jangmuk twitched once beneath my heart. It was the first time since the new wall had formed.
He was thin, dressed in clothes I couldn't tell were gray or brown. Barefoot, hands resting on his knees, eyes closed.
I shut off my ability. The old man was still there.
I turned it on. Still there.
The living were visible whether my ability was on or off. The dead disappeared when it was off. This old man was there either way. And yet, whether my ability was on or off, he was somehow a little less there. The edges of his outline blurred. When I blinked, he looked like a breathing person. When I blinked again, he looked like clothes left hanging for a long time.
I extended my fingertips and read the yin energy. My fingertips could read even raw energy. Every last thread spread across the factory's steel frame.
I couldn't pick up a thing.
Zero.
Oh. So that's what I looked like to everyone else.
The old man opened his eyes.
“Before the Spirit Gauge was made...”
His voice was cracked, like a hinge that hadn't been used in a long time.
“There was another way.”
I didn't answer. The old man didn't wait for me to. His eyes moved from my face down to my chest. Below my heart. Where Jangmuk was embedded.
“You swallowed it.”
“Without even chewing.”
One corner of his mouth lifted slightly. I couldn't tell if he was smiling or if his wrinkles had simply folded.
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“You all.”
The back of my neck turned cold. It wasn't Jangmuk's chill. It was mine.
The old man wasn't talking to me like I was just one person.
I counted. The boiler room. Two in the underground parking garage. Three at the abandoned hospital. The goshiwon. The Grade Five in the alley. The factory. Fifteen. Or was it sixteen? One was missing. I remembered catching it, but not where.
“I don't know.”
“Right. You don't.”
The old man raised a finger. Long and thin, with a blackened nail. He pointed it at my chest.
“Is what's inside you yours?”
A beat.
“Or do you belong to it?”
I opened my mouth. To say it was mine. That I had caught it, subdued it, endured it.
Before I could speak, something moved beneath my heart.
It wasn't a word. A twitch. A single beat. Like someone had started to interrupt my answer, then stopped.
I closed my mouth.
The old man saw it. This time, he smiled for real.
I blinked once.
The old man was gone.
There wasn't even a patch of dust where he'd been sitting. The floor looked as if no one had ever sat there. Whether my ability was on or off.
I kept it on and lowered the light to the floor.
There was a line.
A line carved only into the Other Side. About as thick as a finger. It began as a circle, branched outward, then the ends curved back in. The way out and the way in were the same line.
I'd seen that shape somewhere before.
I opened my palm. A faint black pattern showed between the lines of my palm. The pattern of the new wall. It was the same shape. Not exactly the same. Mine was a scribble. The one on the floor was that scribble drawn all the way to the end.
I pressed my palm against the pattern.
It was cold. Not the cold of stone. The sensation of fitting the right key into a lock traveled all the way up my wrist. Click. Then nothing happened. The door still wasn't on my side.
I took a picture. It showed only the stone floor. If it didn't register on the scale, there was no way a camera would catch it.
On the bus home, I traced it on my thigh with my finger. About thirty times.
Three thirty in the morning. The person on the rooftop was still there. They glanced at me as I went in, then turned back to the window. It was the sort of look that said, That was one long convenience-store run.
The house was cold. Tap, tap, tap went the pipes inside the wall. The boiler was acting up again.
Before I even took off my shoes, I went to the utility room.
I struck the underside of my palm against the third pipe joint twice, at an angle. Then I loosened the valve half a turn and tightened it again.
Pssht. The tapping stopped.
I looked down at my hand.
I didn't know how to fix boilers. I'd lived in this house for thirteen years and never touched the pipes in the utility room. When the boiler broke down, Grandma called the building manager.
But my hand knew the third joint. It knew the angle. It knew half a turn.
Jangmuk had been a plumber. The one who died in the basement of this building.
The space beneath my heart was quiet. Too quiet. Like someone who'd finished the job and set down their tools.
Is what's inside you yours?
My hand had fixed the boiler.
For the first time, I couldn't immediately answer whose hand it was.