Chapter 8

　　[18:09]

　　The appointment time’s already come and gone.

　　It took nine full minutes past Hyeseong’s booked slot before real unease finally settled into Hangyeom’s chest. Kim Hyeseong was meticulous about punctuality—the kind of person who’d show up ten, twenty minutes early and wait rather than ever be late. Yet here he was, nine minutes deep, and not a single word from her.

　　When one more minute crawled by, making it 6:10, he couldn’t stand it any longer and pulled up her contact. Just as he was about to call—

　　Buzz—

　　Her name flashed across the vibrating screen. The second he saw it, he snatched up the phone.

　　“Noona, where are you? Nothing’s wrong, right?”

　　Silence answered him. Nothing but dead air on the other end. It was as if someone were simply listening, letting his voice fill the quiet.

　　“Noona? What’s going on?”

　　He asked again, bewildered, and only then did the other person speak.

　　“This woman’s your last appointment for today, isn’t she?”

　　A man’s voice. Not Hyeseong’s. Gooseflesh prickled cold down his spine. He’d heard this voice before—he was certain of it.

　　It belonged to the clone he’d guided for the very first time in his life. The one who’d nagged at his memory, strangely, for reasons he couldn’t quite name. Maybe because Hyeseong had sent him personally.

　　Wait—where’s Hyeseong noona?

　　The thought hit him like ice water, and he went rigid. For Hyeseong to break an appointment and go completely dark like this—it was wrong on every level. And this suspicious man, calling from her number, no less.

　　An alarm he couldn’t ignore blared through his skull, shrill and insistent. Dread climbed up from the soles of his feet until it lodged, thick, at the base of his throat.

　　“If you’ve got more booked, tell me now. I’ll clear the whole schedule.”

　　Hangyeom’s lips parted at the man’s icy words, but nothing came out.

　　What does that mean? Clear them out?

　　Overwhelmed by the wave of dread crashing over him, he hung up on the spot and scrambled for Song Jaewoo’s number. If anyone had caught his voice echoing inside the barrier and clocked that something was off, it’d be Jaewoo. He’d pick up faster than usual—maybe he was already tearing across the city toward him right now.

　　Appointments were only ever booked through 7:00 PM. The barrier could hold for twelve hours, no more. Jaewoo would arrive just before seven in the morning, right ahead of the first client, to raise a fresh barrier—and they only scheduled appointments across the twelve hours his power lasted.

　　After the six o’clock slot, he’d swing by before seven to settle the accounts and recast the barrier, which was usually when they shut down for the day. Right now it was 6:15. Forty-five minutes before the barrier dissolved.

　　If Jaewoo made it back in time to seal off every entrance or throw up another protective barrier, they could at least keep the two of them safe. But as Hangyeom dialed, the voice bleeding through the phone forced him to rethink everything.

　　“The number you have dialed is turned off. After the tone—”

　　He didn’t need to hear the rest. Emergency. Every single client booked for the day—Hyeseong included—had vanished.

　　He couldn’t reach Jaewoo, the one person he could actually lean on. And the barrier protecting this house was running out of time. Above all, the man who’d called from Hyeseong’s phone knew exactly where he was. There’d even been a faint thread of amusement curling through his voice when he asked about the appointments.

　　No more wasting time. Without hesitation, Hangyeom snapped the phone clean in half. It was an old-school flip phone, and bending it backward against the fold broke it with surprising ease.

　　Snapping it wasn’t enough. He dug out the thumbnail-sized SIM card and crushed that too. He’d always used an untraceable phone on purpose—this was the only way to shut down any chance of them harvesting his data.

　　Tossing the wreckage aside without a flicker of regret, Hangyeom bolted out of the house. He couldn’t just hunker down and wait for the barrier to burn out.

　　He didn’t know exactly who the caller was, but the man had picked off unregistered espers one by one and then called him up, cool as anything, chatting about appointments. And the fact that Jaewoo was unreachable—things were spiraling into something genuinely dangerous. That much was certain.

　　The instant he burst outside, he caught movement at the mouth of the alley. Sure enough, men in black suits jabbed fingers toward him and shouted.

　　“Grab him—move!”

　　“Don’t let him get away!”

　　He hated black suits. The Association’s ability users always paraded around in them, playing at sophistication, so even a passing glimpse of that look set his teeth on edge.

　　Is the Association behind this?

　　He’d half expected it. When it came to hunting unregistered ability users, the Association was the only group that came to mind. He’d wondered if their search team had rolled out a surprise sweep over all the recent no-shows—apparently that hunch had been dead-on.

　　Dodging the crowd of black suits that loomed like reapers, he planted both hands on the wall at the dead end and vaulted up. It stood about his height, and being light and quick on his feet, he cleared it in one clean motion.

　　The moment he hit the ground and tore down the empty alley, a woman dropped out of the sky and blocked his path. Young, delicate-looking—but she balled her fists and came at him like she meant it.

　　“Stay still!”

　　Aiming a fist straight at his solar plexus while telling him to stay still—was she serious? He barely twisted clear of the strike and clamped a hand around her arm. Anyone who’d fallen from the sky like that had to be an esper, so he flooded her with a violent burst of red energy—the wellspring of his guiding.

　　Nothing. Not the slightest reaction. Instead, seizing the moment while he had hold of her arm, she flipped him clean over her shoulder.

　　His vision spun in a nauseating arc, and then his back slammed into the ground, the impact punching the air from his lungs.

　　NGH—!

　　He swallowed the cry and shoved himself upright at once. The woman had let her guard down, sure the throw had done its job—so he ripped the knife from the small of his back and slashed.

　　“Ah!”

　　She flung herself backward, but the blade still bit into her arm. In that heartbeat of opening, Hangyeom sprang up and launched himself into a run.

　　She hadn’t seen the weapon coming—not for a second—and she shrieked, rattled.

　　“W-wait! Stop right there!”

　　She chased him, desperate. But Hangyeom trusted his own speed, and more than that, he knew every twist of this neighborhood’s maze of alleys by heart. Cutting left, right, threading the narrowest passages, he’d soon left both her figure and her voice far, far behind.

　　Tucked behind a corner to catch his breath, he replayed the woman in his head.

　　She wasn’t an esper.

　　Whenever the Association went hunting or hauling in unregistered ability users, they sent espers—always. Since they never knew what kind of power or how much ESP their target carried, they’d hedge their bets and dispatch a whole team of them.

　　But that woman was no esper. Moments ago, he’d tried to use his guiding to tear apart every pathway threading through an esper’s body. Other guides could only smooth those channels into a single clean line—but as the one and only guide of that place, a perfected guide, he could do far more than that.

　　And what good did it do?

　　If his opponent was an ordinary human and not an esper, his gift was worthless. The suspicion took root: maybe the people after him weren’t Association at all. The woman was proof enough. The Association would never put a non-esper on a search team.

　　Then who the hell—

　　Thwip—

　　While he was still grinding his thoughts down to a headache, something sank into his shoulder. A sharp, stinging itch—he glanced down to find a finger-length dart lodged there.

　　The instant he wrenched it free and hurled it away, dizziness crashed over him. He lifted his head, face draining white, and saw a man in a black suit—perched somewhere overhead, God knew when he’d climbed up—leveling a sniper rifle straight at him.

　　What is this, some kind of movie…?

　　A man wielding a tranquilizer sniper rifle in a rundown hillside back alley in Korea. Whoever had sent these people was out of their mind—no question.

　　Numbness raced through his whole body, spreading fast from the shoulder where the dart had struck, and Hangyeom sank slowly to the ground. The last thing he saw was the black-suited figures converging on him—then his eyes slid shut.