Scene 1. The Beast's Bloodtrail
The alley was tilting.
No—what was tilting was not the alley. It was him. His right shoulder struck the wall. The rough surface of the brickwork scraped against his shirt. The shirt was no longer a shirt. The right half was soaked with sweat and plastered to his skin; the left half was heavy with blood, dyed a blackish red.
He took a step. A wet squelch came from beneath his left shoe. Blood. It had run down from his left arm, tracing his waist, soaking his trouser cuff, and pooling inside the shoe. With every step, the blood shifted inside the leather. Shk. Shk. Shk.
The back alleys behind Gyeongseong Station were narrow. The walls on either side were barely shoulder-width apart, and the eaves of the buildings overhead sealed out the sky. No sunlight reached here. Everything was damp. Moss between the bricks held the moisture, and the stench of sewage rose from below.
Beneath the sewage, something else. A burning smell. Not gunpowder. Burning flesh. Rising from his left hand. The heat of the explosion had cooked the skin inside the leather and wire. It wasn't the kind of smell that stings the nostrils. It was the kind that claws at the inside of the skull. The brain cannot reject the smell of its own flesh burning. Because the brain recognizes it as its own.
Nausea surged. His stomach clenched and shoved upward against his esophagus. He stopped, pressing his shoulder into the wall. He kept his mouth shut. He couldn't vomit. Vomiting would spike abdominal pressure, and spiking abdominal pressure would drive the rib fragment deeper into his lung. That's what Doctor Jang would have said.
He swallowed. Forced the bile back down. His throat burned going down.
One step. Then another.
Bloodstains were printing themselves on the wall. Each time his right shoulder dragged against the brick, the blood soaked into his shirt smeared onto the surface. Not the neat stamp of a red palm. Long, irregular streaks left by a shoulder and forearm scraping past. The trail of a wounded beast.
The end of the alley came into view. The mouth opening onto the main road. Turn right there and it's Jongno. From Jongno to Changsin-dong. Climb the Changsin-dong slope and there's Doctor Jang's wooden door.
The distance wouldn't calculate. Inside his head, the map lay folded. He tried to open it but couldn't reach. His brain was counting something else instead of distance.
Tick.
Tick.
The countdown on his left arm. The clock that had started the moment Doctor Jang wound the wire. Two hours. Forty minutes from the clinic to Gyeongseong Station. Thirty minutes of waiting at the station. Maybe twenty for the explosion and escape. Time remaining—thirty minutes? Forty?
He didn't know. He had no watch. The clock inside his body ticked but gave no numbers.
One thing was certain. The numbness in his left hand had climbed past the elbow and was creeping up toward his upper arm. If the wire wasn't removed, the tissue would die. Doctor Jang's words echoed inside his ear. Two hours. Go past that and you lose the arm.
It wasn't just the arm. Inside his left ribcage, something scraped with every breath. The sensation of a bone fragment grazing the pleura. Breathing deep felt like it would tear, so he breathed shallow, quick, rationing each intake. He was running on half a lung.
He reached the alley's end. The sunlight of the main road stabbed his eyes. His vision whited out, then returned. When it returned, the world had lost its color. Buildings, road, people—all gray. Blood-starved eyes giving up on pigment.
He stepped onto the main road. People were passing by. Word of the Gyeongseong Station explosion hadn't reached here yet, it seemed. A streetcar rattled along. Its bell clanged, reverberating through his eardrums. But the sound shattered and spread inside his skull. His hearing was wrong. The residual blast still hung over his eardrums like a curtain, turning every sound in the world into something heard underwater.
He walked toward Jongno. Right foot, left foot. Right foot, left foot. If he stopped counting the rhythm, his legs would stop.
His left arm swung like a pendulum. With each stride, the limp limb rocked at his side, and each rock flung droplets of blood from the torn leather. Dots appeared on the pavement. Red dots. One per step. A dotted line of blood stretching from Gyeongseong Station across the open road.
A passing woman stopped. Looked at him. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened. The scream rising in her throat was smothered by both hands clamped over her lips. The child beside her tugged at the hem of her skirt and pointed. The mother covered the child's eyes with her hand.
He walked. Their reactions entered his eyes but didn't reach his brain. The amount of information his brain could process was shrinking. All remaining capacity was allocated to two things.
One: taking the next step.
Two: the direction to Changsin-dong.
From a distance, a whistle shrieked.
PHWEEEE—
A long, sharp metallic note. Not the police. A military police whistle. Following it, the staccato crack of hobnailed boots striking asphalt. Running. Coming from the direction of Gyeongseong Station.
The lockdown had begun.
He left the main road. Into the right-hand alley. Narrow streets. Between low-roofed houses. Under clotheslines. He crossed a plank bridge over a drainage ditch. The boards rocked beneath his feet. No balance. He reached out with his right hand and braced against the wall. The moment his palm touched brick, the back of his hand—where Yeonhwa's letters were written—entered his field of vision.
'Thank you. I'm sorry. Live.'
The trace of Yeonhwa's fingers on the skin of his hand—even drenched in blood, it still felt like it was there. No. It couldn't be. The letters were invisible. But the skin of his hand remembered. The path her fingers had traveled.
He pulled his hand from the wall and walked on.
Behind him, the whistle blew again. Closer now. The boot-falls split in two directions. Searching the main road and the alleys at once. They hadn't identified him yet. They didn't have a description of the bomber. But they would know one thing.
The smell of blood.
The bloodstains on the ground.
He stopped and looked back. The alley floor behind him was dotted with a red line. From Gyeongseong Station to here. An unbroken trail of blood screaming his location.
With his right hand he tore a strip from the hem of his shirt. The fabric, already half-ripped, came away without a sound. He jammed it into the torn gap in the leather wrapping his left arm. Plugging the leak. The cloth went dark red in seconds, but the amount hitting the ground decreased. The dotted line thinned to scattered drops, and the drops began spacing further apart.
Not enough. But it could buy him time.
He walked again.
The alley forked. Left, right. Left led back to the main road. Right led uphill. Changsin-dong.
He turned right.
The slope began. The incline bit into his calves. Each step upward sent his thigh muscles screaming. Inside his left ribcage, the fragment scraped the pleura. He couldn't breathe. He opened his mouth. Air came in. Whether that air carried oxygen, he couldn't tell. His lungs had stopped filtering.
His vision strobed. Dark, light, dark, light. Not a streetlamp flickering. His eyes were flickering. His brain was intermittently shutting down visual input to conserve power.
Between the blackouts, what he saw: the slope. Shanties. Clotheslines. Stone steps.
One step.
One step.
Behind him the whistle still sounded. But farther away now. Had they gone toward the main road? Had plugging the bloodtrail worked? He didn't know. He had no capacity left to check.
Halfway up the slope, his legs quit.
His knee buckled. One kneecap struck the stone step. He had to get up. He needed to get up, but his legs had turned to stone. The command didn't reach them.
His right hand pressed against the ground. The cold touch of stone beneath his palm. The back of his hand—where Yeonhwa's letters were written—faced upward.
'Live.'
The third word.
The last word Yeonhwa had written.
'Live.'
Strength entered his knee. No—not strength. Not willpower either. Like the moment his dead fingers had closed around the dud, it wasn't an order from the bones. It was an order from the blood. The tiger's blood ignited its last ember inside the muscle fibers.
He stood.
He climbed.
The shanties of Changsin-dong entered his vision. Low roofs, leaning walls, narrow alleys. Somewhere at the top of this crumbling slope was a wooden door. Behind that door was an operating table. Beside the operating table, a bottle of Scotch.
He'd told him to pour two glasses.
A promise is a promise.
He walked.
* * *
Scene 2. The Ticking Body
The world went dark three times on the way up the Changsin-dong slope.
The first was at the twelfth stone step. The instant he placed his left foot, his vision cut out. Sound cut out. Touch cut out. Nothing but darkness, and inside it, the thing called him, floating. Three seconds. Maybe four. When sight returned, he was facedown on the stairs, his forehead driven into the stone edge. The corner of the step had stamped itself into his brow. Blood ran into his eyes. He wiped it with his right hand. Wiping it only spread it around.
He got up.
The second was at a bend in the alley. He saw a white jeogori hanging on a clothesline, flapping in the wind. White fabric. In that instant his vision flared white. The surgical lamp's light. The white glare above the operating table ten years ago. Father's footsteps. The dark-red liquid spiraling inside the syringe—
He shook his head. Clenched his teeth. His jaw joint creaked. The pain of his molars locking together stabbed into his brain. That pain drove out the surgical lamp's light. His vision returned. The jeogori was still flapping on the line. A jeogori. Not a surgical lamp.
He walked.
The third was as he squeezed through a narrow gap between two shanties. The gap was so tight he had to turn sideways. His left arm grazed the wall. The severed end of the wire wrapped around the leather snagged on a plank. It pulled. The sensation of wire biting into the flesh inside the leather—
There was no sensation.
There shouldn't have been—but there was.
Pain rose from the arm that had been dead. From beyond the wire, beyond the leather, beyond the shattered bone. From the place that numbness had been walling off until now, agony burst through like a blocked pipe exploding. It was the final scream of tissue on the edge of necrosis. The kind of signal the brain refuses to accept.
Vision cut. His knee buckled. This time it was his right shoulder, not his forehead, that hit the shanty wall. The wooden wall shuddered. A voice inside the house shouted something. He couldn't hear it.
Vision returned. Blurred. The world's outlines wavered as if submerged in water.
He peeled his back off the wall. He walked. Verifying the sensation of each foot meeting ground. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.
The air on the Changsin-dong slope was changing.
That morning the alleys had smelled only of mildew and moss, but now something else was threading upward. The scent of coal briquettes. Someone's morning rice cooking. Doenjang soup on the boil. Layered over those, the smells rising from his own body. Charred flesh. Dried blood. The salty steam of evaporating cold sweat. The smell he was giving off was swallowing the smell of the alley.
'Scent.'
He turned his head suddenly. Looked back down the way he'd come. The bloodtrail on the ground had nearly stopped since he'd plugged the wound with the shirt scrap. But the smell couldn't be plugged. Charred flesh, blood, and gunpowder—the cocktail of scent was unspooling an invisible thread behind him.
A scent a dog could follow. Not just a dog. Any beast with a good nose.
A chill ran down his spine. Not cold sweat. A warning rising from the deepest pit of his brain. The way a predator detects another predator's presence—the tiger inside him had sensed something. Something behind him. Not yet visible. But something that could ride the trail of his blood.
'Faster.'
He pushed strength into his legs. No strength came. So instead he did not slow down. Not stopping was its own kind of speed.
The top of the slope came into view. A dead-end alley veering right. At its end, a wooden door.
Doctor Jang's door.
Twenty steps.
Inside his left ribcage, the fragment shifted. With every inhale, something slid between his ribs. Not stabbing the lung. Scraping it. Where it scraped, foam seemed to be rising. A cough ripped through.
"Ghk—"
He clamped his right hand over his mouth. Something hot smeared his palm. He pulled his hand away and looked. Not red. Pink. Blood mixed with foam. Blood from the lung.
Fifteen steps.
His vision narrowed. A tunnel. The edges charring to black, leaving only the wooden door at the center. He walked toward it. He could see the grain of the wood. Cracked timber. Nail holes. The rusted iron of the latch.
Ten steps.
He reached out with his right hand. His fingers trembled. Not trembling—spasming. The signals his brain was sending were splitting apart before they reached the muscle.
Five steps.
He made a fist. He had to knock. Twice, then a kick. The agreed signal. But lifting his fist was like hoisting a boulder. His shoulder wouldn't rise.
Three steps.
His knee tried to buckle again. This time he didn't fight it. He didn't have to. His body hit the door before the knee could fold.
His forehead struck wood.
Thud.
A dull sound. The door shook. Whether the sound had come from his forehead or the door, he couldn't tell.
Second time.
Thud.
He was knocking with his forehead instead of his fist. He didn't have the strength to lift his fist. So he used his head. Literally.
Third. His foot had to come up. He raised his foot. The toe of his shoe touched wood.
Tap.
Not a kick. A nudge. The foot that had caved in the military policeman's skull could no longer deliver a proper kick to a wooden door.
A sound came from inside.
Not a bolt sliding shut. A bolt sliding free. Iron leaving its groove in the wood. Then bare feet crossing a wooden floor. Hurried steps.
The door opened.
Doctor Jang stood there. Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. Glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose. He saw Ian's face. His gaze dropped. The blood on the forehead. The pink foam on the right hand. The blackish-red half of the shirt. And the left arm.
Torn leather. Severed wire. What was visible between them.
Nothing could be read on Doctor Jang's face. It was the face of a surgeon. The face that shuts down emotion and enters assessment mode the instant it sees the wound.
"…You're late."
The sound took time to reach Ian's ears. The waterlogged voice didn't arrive at his brain until his legs were already giving out.
His knees folded. He collapsed across the threshold. His shoulder struck Doctor Jang's leg. Doctor Jang staggered but held. His ruined right hand seized Ian's right shoulder. A trembling hand. But a hand that catches patients.
"Get up. You die on my doorstep, you leave a bloodstain in front of my door."
Ian tried to smile. Whether the corners of his mouth actually moved, he couldn't tell. The muscles of his face had stopped taking orders.
His lips moved.
"…Two glasses."
"What?"
"Scotch… two glasses…."
Doctor Jang hauled him up. Draped Ian's right arm over his own shoulder. Locked one arm around Ian's waist. They lurched down the stairs together. Ian's feet weren't stepping on the stairs. They were dragging.
The kerosene lamp's glow touched his eyes. Jaundiced light. Not warm. But not dark, either.
He was lifted onto the operating table. The cold of stainless steel met his back. The same cold as the operating table ten years ago. But this time was different. No leather straps. No gag. No sound of Father's shoes.
Instead, on the shelf beside the table, a glass bottle stood filled with amber liquid. Scotch. Next to it, two glasses.
Two glasses.
As promised.
Doctor Jang began cutting away what remained of the leather on the left arm with a pair of scissors. The sound of metal severing leather reached his ears. Snip. Snip. Snip. Between the snips, he could hear Doctor Jang's breathing. Rough. Whether the roughness came from exertion or something else, he had no strength left to ask.
His vision narrowed. The ceiling beam came into view. The cobweb above the beam came into view. The cobweb was swaying. Trembling with the currents of air Doctor Jang stirred each time he moved.
'I made it back alive.'
His eyes closed.
The back of his right hand was still warm.
* * *
Scene 3. Two Glasses on the Operating Table
In the darkness, sound came back first.
Clink. Clink. The sound of metal biting metal. Forceps seizing and extracting something. After each, a clatter—whatever was pulled dropping into a steel tray.
Clink. Clatter.
Clink. Clatter.
A rhythm. A repeating pattern. The rhythm Doctor Jang's hands were making.
His eyes wouldn't open. The lids were heavy as lead. Sensation was returning from his back outward. The cold weight of the stainless-steel table pressing against his spine. His shirt was gone. Bare skin on metal. Not cold, exactly—his body heat had leached out until the steel was lukewarm beneath him.
Clink.
This time, pain followed the sound.
From the left arm.
The sensation of something sharp rooting through flesh. The tips of forceps prying muscle fibers apart, gripping something, pulling, extracting. To call it pain was to misname it. Someone was fishing inside his body. Not for bait. For splinters of bone.
"Nngh—"
A groan leaked through his teeth. His eyes opened. The ceiling beam. The jaundiced glow of the kerosene lamp filling his field of vision. The cobweb above the beam was shaking harder than before. Doctor Jang was moving faster now.
He turned his head to the left.
He shouldn't have looked.
His left arm was spread open on the table. The leather had all been cut away and lay in a heap on the floor. The wire, too, had been removed and sat coiled on the steel tray, slick with blood. What remained could not be called an arm.
The skin on the back of the hand had burst. Through the gaps, something white was visible. Not bone. Bone fragments. The finger bones had been shattered to pieces and were embedded in the flesh like shrapnel. The palm had lost its shape. When the explosion detonated inside his grip, the muscles and tendons of the palm had been turned inside out. The edges were charred black. Burned flesh and raw flesh mingled without border.
Doctor Jang was digging through it. His left hand—the one holding the forceps—plunged into the flesh and withdrew. Each time it withdrew, something was clamped between the tips. Bone fragments. Wire shards. Leather fibers. Each one dropped into the steel tray with a clatter.
His right hand was shaking. The left held the forceps; the right held the wound open. The spreading hand was seizing. The old damage from the interrogation. But he didn't stop. Each time the right hand spasmed, he clenched his jaw, and in the instant the tremor calmed, he drove the forceps in. He was threading the gap between tremor and precision.
"You're awake?"
Doctor Jang asked without looking at Ian's face. His eyes were locked on the left arm.
"…The bones."
"I know. Shut up."
"How many."
"I said shut up."
Clink. Clatter. Another bone fragment dropped into the tray. Fragments were piling up. White tinged with pink. He didn't count. He didn't want to count. But his eyes were counting. Five. Six. Seven.
"The finger bones are powder."
Doctor Jang spoke. Unprompted. It wasn't a doctor informing a patient of his condition. It was talking to himself. The kind of muttering that happens when something incomprehensible is laid out before you.
"Three of the five metacarpals are destroyed. The other two are cracked. The wrist… the distal radius is crushed. Crushed, not broken."
The forceps stopped. Doctor Jang raised his head. For the first time, he looked at Ian's face.
Behind his glasses, his eyes were bloodshot. Not the eyes of a man who had pulled an all-nighter. The eyes of a man forcing something down. Beneath the surgeon's face, something else showed through. Doctor Jang snapped his gaze back to the left arm before it could be seen.
"Twelve fragments. The big ones are out. The small ones stay until the tissue pushes them out on its own."
"The tiger blood—"
"I know."
Doctor Jang set down the forceps. He picked up a gauze pad. Soaked it in iodine. The brown liquid spread through the fabric.
"Your lunatic blood is already fusing the bones back together. I can see new bone growing at the crushed end of the radius."
The gauze touched flesh. Iodine met the torn skin.
Fire.
"AAAGH—!"
His back arched off the table like a drawn bow. Both hands—no. His right hand seized the edge of the operating table. The left couldn't grip. It wasn't certain the left hand even existed anymore. His vision whited out. His teeth locked. Between his molars, a grinding shriek.
The heat of the iodine burrowed into the flesh. Not disinfection. Immolation. Brown fire crawled across every gap in the torn skin, over every stretch of charred tissue.
"Hold on."
Doctor Jang's voice was low.
"No anesthetic. Opium would stop your heart. In your condition, opium is poison."
The gauze moved. From the back of the hand to the palm. From the palm to the wrist. From the wrist to the forearm. Every inch the iodine touched, the flesh screamed. Each in a different voice. Burned skin stung. Torn skin throbbed. The flesh around the crushed bone ached deep. If pain had color, his left arm was a rainbow.
Doctor Jang set down the gauze. He picked up a needle. Threaded it. The thread missed the eye three times. The tremor in his right hand. On the fourth try, it went through.
"Suturing."
"…Yeah."
The needle pierced flesh.
The first stitch drew a sound from him. At the second, he clenched his jaw. At the third, his jaw went numb. At the fourth, he felt nothing at all. Not because the pain had disappeared. Because his brain had tripped the circuit breaker. It had refused the signals it could no longer absorb.
His vision blurred. The ceiling beam doubled. Two cobwebs.
While Doctor Jang sutured, Ian stared at the ceiling. Nothing to see. Beams and cobwebs and the kerosene lamp's jaundiced glow. Inside that glow, his eyes drifted slowly to the glass bottle on the shelf.
Scotch.
The amber liquid held the lamplight inside it. The same color as Yeonhwa's eyes. Beside it, two glasses. Two, as promised.
His right hand released the table's edge. Finger-shaped dents were gouged into the rim. The stainless steel was crumpled. The tiger's grip had crushed metal even through the agony.
He raised his right hand and held it before his eyes. The back of the hand. Where Yeonhwa's letters had been. Blood and sweat and iodine caked the surface. No trace of the letters was visible.
But the skin remembered. ㄱ, ㅗ, ㅁ, ㅡ, ㅇ. ㅁ, ㅣ, ㅇ, ㅡ, ㄴ. ㅅ, ㅡ, ㄹ, ㅡ.
'Thank you. I'm sorry. Live.'
"…Done."
Doctor Jang's voice came from far away. The sound of the needle being set down. The snip of thread. Instruments laid onto the steel tray.
Ian turned his head and looked at the left arm. It was wrapped in gauze and sutures. It had more shape now than before. It looked like an arm. But the fingers were swollen purple, and the joints had lost their proper angles.
"Try to move it."
Doctor Jang said. Ian stared at his left hand and gave the order. Make a fist.
The index finger twitched.
That was all.
"…It'll take time."
Doctor Jang sank down beside the operating table. He leaned his back against the wall. Pulled off his gloves. The insides were soaked with blood. Ian's blood.
He closed his eyes. Five seconds. He exhaled. A long, slow breath. The kerosene lamp's flame bent in the current.
He opened his eyes. Reached toward the shelf. Picked up the Scotch bottle. Pulled the cork. Pop—the sound rang through the clinic. From the bottle's mouth, amber fragrance rose. The heavy sweetness of malt and the vanilla of oak cask pushed out the reek of ethanol and iodine.
Doctor Jang poured into both glasses. The sound of liquid filling glass—a soft, trickling murmur—replaced the clinic's silence.
He kept one in his own hand. The other he set on the operating table, beside Ian's right hand.
Ian picked up the glass with his right hand. His fingers trembled. The glass clinked against itself. The amber liquid rocked inside.
Doctor Jang raised his glass. Ian raised his. They didn't touch. This wasn't a toast.
Doctor Jang drank. One sip. Closed his eyes.
Ian brought the glass to his lips. The amber liquid slipped through the gap. It touched his tongue. Behind the searing heat of alcohol came a heavy flavor of honey and smoke that filled his mouth. Nothing like the plaster-lump eggs from the breakfast table. His sense of taste had returned. This single mouthful was washing away the taste of blood and gunpowder that had coated his mouth.
He swallowed. The heat of the alcohol slid down his esophagus. Hit his stomach. The Scotch on an empty stomach bloomed warm.
"…That's good."
His own words. His voice was cracked, but they were words.
Doctor Jang leaned his head against the wall, gazing up at the ceiling.
"It better be. It was expensive."
"I said I'd bring it."
"It's a loan. Interest accruing."
Silence fell. The kerosene lamp's wick sputtered. The clinic's air hung thick with the mingled scents of Scotch, iodine, and blood.
Doctor Jang set his glass on the floor.
"Ian."
"…Yeah."
"Gyeongseong Station. It went off?"
"It went off."
"Was it a success?"
Ian stared at the ceiling. The cobweb on the beam was swaying. In Doctor Jang's breath.
"…I don't know."
That was the honest answer. The bomb had gone off. He had crushed the dud bare-handed until it blew. But whether it had changed history, he couldn't say. Whether the general was dead or alive. Whether the resistance fighters had escaped or been caught. He hadn't looked back after the blast. The only thing in his head had been getting back alive.
"If it went off, that's enough."
Doctor Jang said, staring into his empty glass.
"Success or not, your bones proved it."
Ian looked down at the glass in his right hand. The amber liquid was half gone. Lamplight rippled inside it.
The same color as Yeonhwa's eyes.
He set the glass down. Spread his right hand flat on the operating table. Looked at the back of it. Beneath the blood, the sweat, the iodine—invisible letters.
'Live.'
He had come back alive. Not yet to where the bell could reach. But once he got off this table, walked down the Changsin-dong slope, and opened the door to the annex—Yeonhwa would be there. Clutching the bell in trembling hands, waiting.
His eyes closed.
This time it was not the lights going out. It was sleep.
On the operating table, wrapped in the scent of Scotch, with the pain in his left arm for a lullaby.
He slept.