Chapter 4
Maybe it was the paper-thin walls of the cramped studio, but anyone standing outside with half an ear tuned in could catch most of what was said inside. That aside, the young man caught every voice that stirred in this “district” in real time—which was exactly why he’d been able to come tearing over so fast.
He barged in with a scowl and his sneakers still on—guiding broker Song Jaewoo—only to freeze under Hangyeom’s withering glare. He backpedaled fast, then, sheepish now, finally rapped his knuckles against the wide-open door. He didn’t forget to sneak a look at Hangyeom and flash a grin, playing at harmless.
Jaewoo toed off his shoes without touching them, kicked them aside, and strode in, pulling out a small slip of paper like he’d had it ready all along. He thrust the palm-sized thing, which at a glance looked like one of those ubiquitous loan flyers—right up in the middle-aged man’s face.
“Read past the warnings, would you? Right here. Emergency fee’s separate! Guiding’s ten dollars for five minutes! You see that or not?”
Against a garish, colorful background, the flyer proclaimed, Anyone with $10 can get guiding! and below it, in tiny print: $10 for 5 minutes (emergency fee extra). This wasn’t the man’s first visit, so there was no way he’d missed the fine print Jaewoo was jabbing at. He just looked mortified.
Jaewoo tapped the text with his finger, pointedly, like he was daring the guy to actually read it, then blew a puff of air through his nose and turned to Hangyeom.
“How much did he pay?”
Hangyeom knocked a cigarette loose from the pack lying on the desk, plucked it out, and answered flatly.
“Thirty dollars, not counting the emergency fee.”
“Hah! I was wondering how much you’d shelled out to be crying about freebies—and it turns out this guy…” Jaewoo scoffed.
Truth was, the barrier had already fed him the whole conversation—he knew down to the dollar exactly what the man had paid and how much guiding he’d gotten—but he snorted like he hadn’t a clue.
“You force a guide to give you more than you paid for, you land on the blacklist. Just like that. You get that, or no?”
He let out a low growl, glaring at the man like he might swallow him whole.
“Listen, pal. In this business, once you’re blacklisted, your options are: rampage and drop dead, or off yourself. Take your pick. You want me to put you on the list myself? Want me to cut you off? Huh? We done here?”
“N-no! I—I was just—”
The man’s shoulders sagged. He caved instantly, apologizing like it hurt.
“I’m sorry, Hangyeom. I got—I got a little greedy, that’s all. Won’t happen again.”
There was nothing pleasant about watching a man well past his prime grovel to someone who looked a good twenty years his junior.
Cigarette between his lips, Hangyeom looked away from the man, who’d bowed so low the crown of his head was on full display.
“Forget it.” A beat. “Bring a little extra next time and I’ll throw in ten seconds on the house.”
“Th-thank you!”
The man bobbed his head a few times and scurried out, careful even then to ease the door shut so it wouldn’t slam.
“On the house, my ass.” Jaewoo heaved a sigh and turned back to Hangyeom, eyeing him as he somehow coaxed a flame out of a disposable lighter running on fumes.
“He didn’t try anything, right?”
“You heard the whole thing. Nothing happened.”
Hangyeom smirked and handed over the crumpled fifty-dollar bill the man had given him, still wadded up. Then he dug into the back of the desk drawer and pulled out every last guiding fee from the morning’s appointments too.
One hundred thirty dollars, all told.
Jaewoo’s eyes lit up at the sight of the morning’s haul, and he yanked out his wallet.
“Let me settle up with you. Hang on—”
“Don’t bother. Too much of a pain. Just keep it.”
Radiating a distinctly can’t-be-bothered air, Hangyeom shoved the money carelessly into Jaewoo’s open wallet. Their deal was that the broker took twenty percent of everything—payment for a steady stream of clients, managing them, and keeping Hangyeom at least marginally safe. And yet Hangyeom brushed off his own cut like this all the time.
Jaewoo scowled down at the wallet stuffed fat with cash, brow creasing.
“Come on. At least keep enough for smokes and food today.”
“I’ve got that much.”
Hangyeom exhaled a slow ribbon of acrid smoke, tallying up in his head how much he’d already banked with Jaewoo.
“Barring anything weird, I’ll clear about one thousand dollars this month too.”
“One thousand dollars? At this rate you’ll hit two thousand dollars, easy.”
Open from seven in the morning to seven at night, the daily take averaged somewhere around three hundred dollars.
They could have pulled in more if they’d wanted, but Song Jaewoo put Hangyeom’s body above everything else.
Which was why they capped it at one client an hour, sessions never running past thirty minutes. He wanted Hangyeom to have at least half an hour to recover.
Hangyeom thought that was overkill. He wanted to run back-to-back with just a ten-minute breather, the way the other guiding peddlers did. But Jaewoo dug his heels in. In the end they’d split the difference: Hangyeom could take emergency clients during his breaks, at his own discretion.
Of course, even now Hangyeom’s stance was that if there was more money to be made, they might as well make it.
“You wanna actually go for it? If we opened up deep guiding instead of just hand guiding, we’d clear it no problem.”
Illegal guiding peddlers usually didn’t stick to hand guiding alone. For high-efficiency guiding fueled by arousal, some resorted to more intimate physical contact—kissing, petting, oral, all the way to sex. Officially it all got lumped under the term deep guiding, but everyone who heard the phrase jumped straight to the endgame: sex.
Maybe that was why Song Jaewoo went scarlet on the spot.
“Are you out of your mind?! Like I’d ever make you do something like that!”
Hangyeom had only been picturing kissing, tops—but with Jaewoo reacting that hard, better to just drop it.
Jaewoo fixed him with a mock-stern look.
“We do hand guiding, and that’s it. Anything past that and you’ll drop dead.”
The efficiency gap between hand guiding and deep guiding was staggering. It varied by rank and match rate, sure, but the rumor wasn’t hot air: a body that would need over ten hours of hand guiding to recover could be patched up clean with a single session of deep guiding—through sex.
The catch was that the guide, not the esper, was the one left wrecked.
Even while being flung around physically, dizzy and half out of it, the massive, unstoppable outflow of guiding drained a guide right down to the marrow. Every esper except the psychic types had far better physical builds and stamina that ordinary people couldn’t match—so nine times out of ten, it was the guide who gave out first.
That was why the other peddlers slapped a price tag on deep guiding dozens of times steeper than hand guiding. Take one deep guiding client and you had to be ready to close up shop for a day or two.
But for all that preparation, most of the unregistered espers who came looking for a guiding peddler were happy enough with hand guiding.
“I mean, bottom line—if we opened up deep guiding like the other outfits, sure, it’d get us noticed. But do any of our clients actually have the cash to book something like that?”
“Nope. They don’t.”
Hangyeom pictured the state of the clients who came through here, the amounts they scraped together, and huffed out a faint laugh.
What kind of money would a bunch of fugitives have?
Unregistered ability users—and among them, unregistered espers with the special powers people used to call superhuman—were already branded criminals by society, potential mass murderers waiting to happen.
Most unregistered espers despised the slur, potential mass murderer. But they couldn’t flatly deny it, either.
The power espers wielded sprang from ESP—the black energy rooted deep inside them. That was why you could catch glimpses of black current whenever they used their abilities. The trouble was, it cut both ways.
Everyone knew it: the more they leaned on their powers, the more that black current burrowed through them, devouring the body and seizing hold of the mind. And once the vessel of body and mind was hollowed out past the point of control, they’d erupt in a burst of destructive power hundreds of times over—and turn into a grotesque, mindless beast, self gone entirely.
Espers who crossed that line were monsters in every sense of the word. They became creatures that knew nothing but destroying and killing everything in sight, ripping the power they’d carried straight up to its breaking point and letting it detonate.
So the murderer label wasn’t exactly unearned.
Which made it seem obvious—necessary, even—to surrender to the Association before that happened, to submit to constant oversight and steady guiding and keep the power stable.
And yet there was another reason unregistered ability users kept slipping through the cracks, refusing to be bound.
Ability users broke down into two broad camps.
Espers: those who channeled black energy, ESP—Extra-Sensory Perception—into all manner of special powers.
Guides: those who used red energy, GP—Guiding Perception—to stabilize the channels through which another’s ESP flowed.
The instant they were flagged as ability users, they were bound to the Association and, inevitably, made into weapons for the state. Under total control, they were denied every scrap of freedom for the simple crime of being what they were, sentenced to live out their days on rails the Association had laid down for them. Depending on the power, some were locked in solitary confinement until the day they died; others were chained to a post somewhere and made to serve.
All of it for the state. For the greater good.
For the ability users who truly grasped what those words meant, there were no dreams. No hope. No freedom.
It was a truth ordinary people never saw. Between the Association’s polished image and the media’s steady drip of propaganda, the public just gazed up at them as champions of justice—indispensable pillars the nation couldn’t live without.
Idiots.
As if the people holding power like that could ever be anything close to righteous.