The tie was winning.
I want to be clear that I am not stupid. I have seventeen years of survival experience. I understand spatial reasoning. I once tracked a beetle's patrol pattern for thirty cycles and developed a counter-strategy that I am genuinely proud of even now. I am not someone who is beaten by fabric.
And yet.
The mirror showed a man in a suit holding two ends of a silk tie with the expression of someone who had been handed evidence that they were, in fact, slightly stupid.
The suit was Winston's doing. He'd laid it out the night before with the specific wordless certainty of a man who had already decided what was happening and considered the conversation optional. I hadn't argued. I was eighteen years old biologically and I was going to visit Lizzy's grave and apparently that meant a suit and that was fine, that was completely fine, I just needed to tie it.
How hard could it be.
I looked up at the ceiling.
"Alexa," I said.
"Good morning," said Alexa pleasantly. "How can I help you today?"
"How do I tie a tie."
"Of course," she said. "Start by draping the tie around your neck with the wide end on your right and the narrow end on your—"
"Can you come show me."
A pause.
"I'm sorry, I'm not able to—"
"Right." I looked at the ceiling for one more second. "Continue."
She continued.
I followed the instructions carefully, methodically, with the full focus I had previously applied to beetle combat, and produced something that looked like a failed noose.
I undid it.
She repeated the instructions.
I tried again. Got the first three steps right. Lost it somewhere around the fourth. Ended up with the narrow end longer than the wide end which Alexa said was wrong and I said I understood that, it's wrong, that's why I'm asking, and she gave me the instructions a third time.
On the fourth attempt I somehow pulled both ends simultaneously and the knot drew tight around my throat before I could get my fingers in.
I stood completely still.
Breathing was technically happening. Just happening with more commitment than usual. Like my body was completing it as a personal project rather than a reflex.
"You might want to loosen that," Alexa said.
"I know," I said, without much air to say it with.
"The wide end should—"
"Alexa," I said. "I know."
The door to my room was open.
I hadn't thought about that.
A girl walked past.
She stopped. Looked at me. Looked at the situation I had created for myself in the mirror. Something moved through her expression that she was actively trying not to let reach her face.
She came in without being asked.
"Here," she said.
Her hands moved through the steps the way someone moves through something they've done so many times they're not thinking about it. Efficient. Clean. Not showing off, just doing the thing. She straightened the knot, centered it, adjusted the length, stepped back.
Forty seconds.
I stared at the mirror.
She was already moving toward the door.
"Thank you," I said.
She raised a hand without turning around.
"What's your—"
She was gone.
I looked at the tie in the mirror for a moment.
Then I went to find Winston.
The main entrance was a construction site.
That was the only way to describe it. Scaffolding. Tarps. Three workers with tablets discussing something about load-bearing capacity and one man drinking tea in the middle of it all with the expression of someone who had already done his grieving for the entrance and moved on.
I stopped walking.
Looked left. Looked right. Looked at the place where there had presumably been a door before whatever had happened to it. Then I looked up, because up seemed relevant.
The workers looked up too.
"What," I said, "in the world did this."
"Not what," Soo-min said pleasantly from beside the tea. "Who."
I looked at him.
"Your lovely brother," he said. "He arrived last night under the impression that I had kidnapped you and was refusing to cooperate. He expressed this impression at some velocity."
I looked at the entrance again.
"He could have knocked," I said.
"He did knock," Soo-min said. "Subsequently."
Winston opened the car door.
I got in. Soo-min settled on the other side. The convoy was already assembled outside, which I noticed because the convoy was not small. Four vehicles in front. Four behind. The kind of arrangement that communicates either importance or paranoia and with Soo-min I suspected it was both.
Winston closed the door and then leaned down to the window before we pulled away.
"For a first-timer," he said, in the specific quiet voice Winston used when he was going to say something that required quiet, "that is an excellent knot, Mister K."
"It was a girl my age," I said. "In the mansion. She fixed it."
Winston looked at me.
Then he looked at the knot.
Then his expression did something that I had not seen it do in seventeen years, which was change rapidly and without warning into something that was not composed at all.
"Excuse me," he said.
He straightened up. Moved away from the car. I heard him say two words very calmly into the comms at his wrist.
The words were: lock down.
The car pulled away. In the wing mirror I watched the mansion activate like something with opinions. Security personnel appearing from directions that suggested they had been there the whole time and I simply hadn't known where to look.
I looked at the road ahead.
"Winston seems concerned," I said.
"There are no children in the mansion," Soo-min said.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I looked out the window and let it be someone else's problem for the next hour.
The cemetery was outside the city.
Cherry blossoms. I hadn't been expecting that. The trees lined both sides of the path in the specific way of things planted with intention, and the petals were coming off in the morning wind in slow, unhurried quantities, and it was the most beautiful thing I had seen in seventeen years, which admittedly was not a high bar but I'm counting it regardless.
I was holding flowers.
Soo-min looked at them when we got out of the car. Looked at me. Something moved across his face that he didn't explain.
"Her favourites," I said.
He was quiet for a moment.
"She would have been ninety-seven this year," he said.
I thought about that.
"Honestly," I said, "I'm surprised she made it that long."
Soo-min stared at me.
"I mean that as a compliment," I said. "She broke every rule of physics that I observed. Personally. With my own eyes. I watched her eat a full meal immediately after an operation that should have had her in bed for a week. I watched her run five kilometres at seventy-four because someone told her she shouldn't. I watched her take apart a training drone with a letter opener because it was in her way. The woman had no respect for consequence. The fact that she made it to ninety-seven is a testament to stubbornness, which is a trait I say with complete sincerity I was watching closely and trying to replicate."
Soo-min looked at me for another moment.
Then, slowly, he laughed.
Not a polite laugh. A real one. The kind that goes somewhere in the chest.
"She was always like that about resting," he said, when he had it under control. "There was this one time." He started walking. I walked beside him. "She took me halfway around the world. Singapore. Istanbul. Cape Town. I thought it was a holiday. I was very happy about it. Then in Cape Town she explains what we are actually there for."
"Saffron," I said, because I had heard this story and I had not heard this story and somehow I knew.
"Saffron," he said. "She needed Saffron spices. The good ones. We had used ours and she would not hear of buying them anywhere she had not personally approved." He shook his head. "Three weeks. Twenty-two flights. For spices."
"And then?"
"And then we got home and our son Robert had taken the original batch. He knew what she would do. He needed three weeks without supervision." He paused. "He had a party."
"How long."
"Three days. The neighbours still speak about it."
"What happened when she found out."
Soo-min's expression went somewhere quiet and satisfied. "She told him she needed Ambergris. He spent a month trying to source it. She knew full well he was allergic. He spent four months trying to find a workaround." He looked up at the blossoms. "She never told him she no longer needed it."
We walked in silence for a moment.
"I don't have those stories," I said.
"No?"
"Mine are different. She dropped me on a private island and gave me four days to study the terrain and then blew it up and told me to swim." I paused. "I was thirteen."
"You survived," Soo-min said.
"I survived. Which was her point. It was always her point." I looked at the path ahead. "I hated it at the time. I hated her, sometimes, when I was in the middle of it. But afterward, when it was over and I was still here—" I stopped. "She made me someone who was still here when things tried very hard to make me otherwise. I didn't understand that when I was doing it. I understand it now."
Soo-min put a hand on my shoulder briefly, without ceremony.
"Out of everyone," he said, "who has stood at her grave. My children. Agents she trained. Board members. AXILE staff." He looked at me. "You are the only one who has made me remember her. Not mourn her. Remember her." He paused. "You are different, Kicks."
I didn't say anything.
We reached the grave.
I set the flowers down.
Looked at her name for a moment.
You absolute monster, I thought, with complete affection. I had sixty years of training left in me. How dare you not still be here.
I didn't say it out loud.
Some things are private even when the other person is already gone.
I heard my name.
Didn't turn around immediately.
I know her voice. I have had seventeen years plus the seventeen before them to know her voice. You don't lose something like that. You could wake me from a dead sleep in the middle of a pocket dimension with no sun and no sound and I would know that voice.
The shiver went up my spine before she'd finished the second syllable.
My face was already doing the thing where it needed a moment to get organized.
I took the moment.
Then I turned around.
She was different and she was the same and both of those things were happening at once, which is what people mean when they say time is complicated. The same face but seventeen years of it. Eyes that had been eighteen when I last saw them and were thirty-five now and had been somewhere in between without me.
I looked at her hands.
The ring.
I knew the ring.
I knew the ring because she had described it to me once, very specifically, in the particular detailed way you describe something you have thought about for a long time. The shape. The setting. What she wanted it to feel like.
I had listened very carefully.
I had remembered everything.
Soo-min looked at me once. Then at her. Then at the particular atmospheric pressure of the space between us. He excused himself with the efficiency of a man who understood when he was in the wrong scene.
The wind moved the cherry blossoms.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
"I had a plan," I said. "Worked on it for a while. There's a place in Itaewon—" I cleared my throat. "Rooftop. Good view. They do tteokbokki and they have karaoke on Friday nights and I was going to take you there and say something specific when you asked why I'd chosen it." I paused. "I had the phrasing and everything."
Ari looked at me.
And then she said: "I need to tell you something."
I already knew.
"I'm married," she said.
I already knew.
"It's to Chang-Ho."
I already knew that too.
I looked at the ring again. The design she had described to me when we were seventeen, in the specific careful way of someone confessing something without wanting to call it a confession. The design I had looked at on my brother's hand yesterday and had not let myself fully think about because I wasn't ready to think about it.
I was ready now.
"I feel disrespected," I said. "And hurt." My voice was level. I needed it to be level. "You could have married anyone. Literally anyone in the entire world. And you chose the second best option available." I looked at her. "I saw that ring on Chang-Ho's finger yesterday. I knew exactly what it meant. You want to know why? Because that was the design you told me about. Specifically. That exact design." I paused. "The one you described to me."
She didn't look away.
"The reason I'm telling you," she said, "is because I don't want you close to my family. Or to Chang-Ho." She held it. "I hope you find what you're looking for. I do." Her voice was careful and kind and completely final. "Goodbye, Kicks."
She walked away.
I stood at Lizzy's grave with the cherry blossoms coming down slow and the convoy waiting on the road and Soo-min somewhere behind me giving me whatever space I needed.
Something stopped.
Not metaphorically. Not emotionally.
Actually stopped.
My chest. The rhythm in it. The thing that had been going consistently for eighteen biological years without ever once requiring my attention.
I noticed it stop the way you notice a sound that you didn't know was there until it isn't.
Then the pain came.
Not grief. I know what grief feels like. I had seventeen years to understand grief in its various configurations and this was not that.
This was physical. This was structural. This was something in the architecture of me that had received information it did not know how to process and had decided, unilaterally, to stop processing anything at all.
I looked down at my hands.
They looked normal.
I couldn't feel them.
I thought, distantly, with the part of my brain that was still doing its job: this is a heart attack.
I thought: I am eighteen years old.
I thought: I was going to take her to Itaewon.
The blossoms kept falling.
I went down.