My sister finds me in the garden at four in the morning.
I don't hear her coming because she is deliberately quiet, which means she has been watching me long enough to know that I come here and that I come here specifically at this hour. This is not a comfortable realization.
She sits on the bench across from me and she looks at the flame in my palm with an expression that is completely unreadable, which is the most unguarded I have ever seen her face.
I close my hand. The fire goes out.
We sit in the dark for a moment.
"How long," she says.
"Four years," I say. There is no point in lying to a person who has watched you enough to find you at four in the morning.
"You never told Father."
"No."
She is quiet again. Hana at seventeen is not the same person as Hana at fifteen. The House Mun negotiation fell through three months ago. The reasons given were polite and structural and what they actually meant was that a branch family with limited prospects had been presented with a better option and taken it. My father absorbed this without visible reaction. Hana absorbed it the same way, and then she went very quiet for two weeks, and then she came back to family meals with the same composed face she always wears and has not mentioned it since.
The quietness in her now is different from her usual management. This is the quiet of someone deciding whether to say a true thing.
"Mother could do it too," she says.
I look at her.
"I was seven when she died. You were four." She looks at where the flame was, at my closed hand. "I remember her practicing. In the north room. She used to let me watch sometimes." A pause. "Father locked that room the day she died. He's never explained why."
"Do you know why he locked it?"
She looks at me for a long moment. In the dark her face has shed about three years of practiced composure. She looks like what she is: a young woman who has been carrying information alone for ten years and is tired of it.
"Someone came to the house the week before she died," Hana says. "A man from the inner palace. Not a servant. Something more than that. He and Father were in the study for a long time and when he left, Mother started spending more time in the north room." She pauses. "And then she got sick."
A man from the inner palace. Before my mother's illness started.
I keep my face where I put it, the way I always keep it. Calm. Attentive. Not reacting before I have enough to react to.
"Do you remember what he looked like?" I say.
"I was seven." She says it without apology. "I remember he was tall. And the servants were frightened of him." She pauses. "I heard one of them say later that he was from the Emperor's household. Not the current Emperor. The last one."
The last Emperor. The current Emperor's father, who died of a stroke four years after my mother died, when Seo Jeong-min was nineteen.
I sit with this.
My mother had a strong spiritual fire ability. A man from the previous Emperor's household visited before she fell ill. Her practice room was warded shut from the outside after her death.
The previous Emperor's household.
The current Emperor has a spiritual fire ability that is the strongest in his family's recorded history. My ability, according to the system, is the same type as his. The same type that has not appeared outside the ruling family in four hundred years.
I think about the system's first day note. The last person to have this ability was the First Emperor, four hundred years ago.
Was my mother, perhaps, not the last one before me?
"Hana," I say.
She looks at me.
"Thank you for telling me this."
She looks at her hands, folded in her lap. "I've been waiting," she says, "to tell someone who would actually do something with it."
I look at my sister and I see her clearly, maybe for the first time. Not the beautiful one, not the girl being managed toward a marriage she didn't want. A person who has been keeping records for ten years, waiting for someone trustworthy enough to hand them to.
"I'm going to need more time before I can do anything useful with this," I say. "And I'm going to need you to not tell anyone that you found me out here."
"I haven't told anyone anything in ten years," she says. "I'm not going to start now."
She stands, smooths her skirt, and walks back toward the house with the unhurried composure of someone who has never been in a garden at four in the morning. She is very good at that.
I sit in the dark with the weight of what she told me and the fire I cannot summon again tonight because my hands are not steady enough.
The question in my notebook has a new shape now.
What happened to Mother is not separate from the question of what I am doing here, in this body, with this ability, in this empire. The system arrived with me. The ability was already in the body when I woke up. Someone, or something, arranged for me to be here with this specific tool in a situation that specifically requires it.
I don't believe in coincidence. I spent seven years in data analysis. Everything has a pattern. You just have to find the right level of zoom.
THREE YEARS AND SIX MONTHS REMAINING.
"I'm going to need to move faster," I say to the dark.
The system does not respond. Even it, apparently, knows when to be quiet.