by Paula Stokes
“Sure. But I need to make a quick phone call. Meet you over there?”
“All right. I’ll be in the English books section.”
I reach into my purse to activate the badge cloner and stroll into the smoking section. I find a place within clear view of the guard and frown as I go through my purse, pretending to look for my cigarettes. He takes the bait and holds out his pack. “Would you like a smoke?” he asks in Korean.
“Thank you,” I say. “It’s been a rough day.” I’m close enough now for the device to start copying. I sneak a quick look at his badge. His name is Jason Choi. That name was definitely on the list Baz showed me.
Jason pulls out a lighter and it suddenly occurs to me I’m not even sure how to smoke. Do I put the cigarette in my mouth before he lights it? I have no idea. I try to remember how Gideon used to do it, but I always thought smoking was kind of a foul habit, so I never paid much attention. I settle for holding the cigarette between two fingers the way I’ve seen people do on TV. My fingers tremble slightly in the cold and Jason has to hold my hand steady to get the cigarette to flare up.
“Thank you,” I say again. I hold the cigarette to my lips and pretend to inhale. “I’m Jae Hwa. It’s nice to meet you.”
“I’m Jason. You’re new, right?”
I nod. “I’m from Cheonma Staffing. What about you?”
“I’ve worked here for two years,” he says. “Ever since I got out of the military.”
The cherry at the end of my cigarette is getting quite long and I do my best to flick off some ash in the receptacle. I take another fake puff, but this time I inhale for real and smoke pours into my throat. I nearly drop the cigarette as I start coughing.
Jason laughs, and then when I keep coughing, he starts to look worried. “Are you okay?”
I extend the fit out a few extra seconds to give the badge cloner time to copy Jason’s credentials.“I’m fine,” I say. “I actually quit smoking when I started college, but this job … it made me want to start up again.”
“Ah, so that’s it.” He grins. “I was hoping maybe it was all a ploy to come talk to me.”
“Well, I have enjoyed talking to you,” I say somewhat demurely. Rose? Once again I feel like maybe she’s helping.
Jason’s cheeks color slightly. He glances at his phone. “I should get back to my post, but it’s been a pleasure. Have a nice evening.”
“You too.”
Jason grins again. “See you around.”
“I hope so.” I grind out my cigarette and place it in the trash bin. Then I head for the bookstore.
* * *
Jesse texts me while I’m browsing the shelves of Kyobo Books with Yoo Mi.
Jesse: Are you headed home yet?
Me: Soon. I’m actually hanging out with a friend.
I wonder if Jesse thinks it’s strange that I’m making friends at UsuMed.
Jesse: Okay. Be careful.
Me: I will. See you in an hour or so.
Yoo Mi looks up from a display of meditation coloring books.“Everything all right?”
“Yes.” I slip my phone back into my purse and pretend to check out the stack of books.
“I like this idea,” Yoo Mi says. “My younger sister is in her junior year of high school and all she ever does is worry about her college placement exam. Do you think coloring would be therapeutic for her?”
I flip through some of the intricate designs. “I don’t know. The drawings are beautiful, but they look like they’d be hard to color in some places. I’d probably get anxious about what the end result would look like.”
Yoo Mi selects one with illustrations based on the children’s book The Little Prince. “This one seems a bit more forgiving.”
“Good choice,” I say. My sister loved The Little Prince when we were young. That’s probably the reason she chose the name Rose for herself. I think about the Rose from the story. She was fierce, yet vulnerable. She never wanted anyone to see her cry.
As much as I don’t want to regain my lost memories about some of the abuse I suffered in Los Angeles, what if other things have slipped away too—images of who my sister really was? Would it be worth it to accept the bad memories if I could have all the good ones back as well? I lift my hand to my chest and trace the petals of the rose pendant with my index finger, the snowflake flash drive nestled behind it.
I follow Yoo Mi to one of the registers, where she pays for her purchase. Then together we head for the subway station. Yoo Mi pauses between the sets of stairs leading down to opposite platforms. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says brightly.
As I start to reply, a kid running for his train bumps into her and Yoo Mi’s shopping bag and purse both fall to the floor of the subway station. The top snap of her purse has come undone and part of the contents have spilled out. Yoo Mi sweeps everything quickly back into her bag, but not before I see a flash of something I recognize—it’s a scarf, green wool trimmed with silvery threads, just like the scarf the woman watching me was wearing at Namdaemun Market.
CHAPTER 36
My jaw tightens as I consider Yoo Mi’s height and the shape of her face. They definitely feel like a match for the woman at the market. I couldn’t tell how young she was that day because so much of her face was covered.
“Jae Hwa, what is it?” Yoo Mi furrows her brow.
I’m not sure what to do, if I should accuse her or pretend like everything is fine. My breath catches in my throat as I take a step away from her. I can see by the look in her eyes that she realizes something is very wrong. There’s no point in lying about it. Just once I wish someone would tell me the truth. “Have you been following me?” I ask, accusation hardening my voice.
“Following you?” Yoo Mi tosses her pigtails back from her face. “What do you mean?”
I pull her out of the path of a wave of disembarking passengers. “Don’t play dumb with me. I recognize your scarf from Namdaemun Market.”
“I got this scarf from a shop at Gangnam Station. A hundred other women probably have the same one.”
“Let me see your arm, then.” Before Yoo Mi can even protest, I grab her left arm and push up her sleeve. Sure enough, she has a tiny black tattoo of a butterfly on the inside of her forearm. “At the market I thought it was a bird, but that’s just because I wasn’t close enough.”
Yoo Mi tugs her sleeve back down. “I think I know what’s happening—”
“I thought you were my friend. Are you actually working for Kyung?”
She tilts her head to the side. “Who is Kyung?”
“He’s the only one who could possibly be paying you to follow me. I hope you know he’s a terrible man who is responsible for the deaths of two people I loved.” I spin on my heel and start to walk away from her.
“Jae Hwa, wait.” She hurries after me.
Tears well in my eyes. I spin around. “Wait? Why? So you can lie to me some more? No thank you.”
Yoo Mi sighs deeply. “I won’t lie. You’re right. I was following you that day. But not for anyone named Kyung. For a man called Mr. Faber. He told me he’s a friend of yours.”
“Baz? Unbelievable,” I say through clenched teeth.
But nothing is really unbelievable to me anymore. From the very beginning I questioned Sebastian’s motivations for involving himself in my plans. Then his words and behavior convinced me he was on my side, but maybe he just manipulated me. But why? Is he the one who’s working for Kyung?
“Do you know if he goes by any other names?” I ask Yoo Mi. “Like Erich Cross, perhaps?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard that name,” she says.
I sigh. “So your job at UsuMed is a total setup? You’re just there to spy on me?”
“Not spying. Watching out for you. Mr. Faber hired me to keep an eye on you and your brother. It was just for—”
“My brother?” I say with a gasp. “Wait. You know where my brother is?”
Yoo Mi goes pale. Either she wasn’t aware Baz had
been keeping this a secret from me or she wasn’t supposed to tell me. “You really need to talk to Mr. Faber about all of this,” she says.
“Oh, I intend to,” I say grimly. “How well do you know him?”
“Not at all,” she admits. “He’s a friend of a friend of a friend—that sort of thing.”
“And he told you not to tell me about Jun, didn’t he?”
She nods. “I wasn’t thinking. It just slipped out.”
“Did he tell you anything else specific? Do you know about the ViSE tech?”
“I know UsuMed stole something from you, but I don’t know what. I’m protective detail only. I don’t get any information unless I need it to do my job.”
“Protective detail?” I ask. Yoo Mi is thinner than I am and about three inches shorter.
“I’ve trained in martial arts since I was little and I’ve worked as security personnel for some of Korea’s minor celebrities.” She grins. “I may be little, but I’m tough. A friend told me an American was looking for someone to keep a girl safe. When I met Mr. Faber, he told me about your condition, but not much else. I think that’s the main reason he wanted someone keeping an eye on you at UsuMed, so you didn’t end up blowing your own cover.”
“How thoughtful.” I grit my teeth. “And my brother?”
“Supposedly, he comes to UsuMed every Friday night for the Science Scholars Program.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Not there, because I just started watching him a couple of days ago. I watch his apartment sometimes.” Yoo Mi taps at the screen of her phone and a picture pops up. “Mr. Faber gave me this picture.”
I suck in a sharp breath. The boy is tall and thin, with high cheekbones and distrustful eyes. “He reminds me of me,” I whisper.
“Me too,” Yoo Mi says.
“Where does he live?”
Yoo Mi shakes her head, her thin lips hardening into a straight line. “You have to talk to Mr. Faber about it. I can’t give you that information.”
“I could just follow you, you know.”
She shrugs. “You could try, I suppose. But I’m not watching tonight anyway. Someone else is on duty.”
“Will you at least tell me who he’s living with? Is it my mother?”
“According to Mr. Faber, it’s your aunt.”
My aunt—just like the boy in Los Angeles said. Maybe everything he told me was true. “Will you send me that picture?” I ask. As Yoo Mi nods, I add, “And don’t say anything to Baz about me knowing, all right?”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not sure if I can trust him.”
“All right,” Yoo Mi says. “But he seems to have your best interests at heart. And I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but I swear you can trust me.”
They’re nice words, but she’s right. I’m not sure I can trust her either.
* * *
I return to the apartment in Itaewon, where Baz has Kyung’s latest phone call queued up for me to listen to. I never catch the name of the person he’s speaking to, but I can tell from the conversation that it’s a specialized engineer from the Singapore office of UsuTech whom he’s asking to consult on a classified project. The man is scheduled to arrive on Monday.
At one point Kyung tells the person on the other end of the line that he’ll send a car to the hotel with a company representative, who will personally escort him down to Lab 6.
“Down sounds like B-1 or B-2, just like you thought,” Baz says.
I nod. I’m dying to confront Sebastian about Erich Cross and about my brother, but I still feel like Jesse and I won’t be able to steal back the tech without him. We might need his explosives in order to break in to wherever it’s being kept. I might need his help with documents that will get me back to the US. I have to keep playing along until we’ve gotten everything we need from him.
“Winter?” Baz arches an eyebrow. “Are you still with me?”
“Yes. Sorry. Down, like you said.” I rise from the floor and walk a lap around the living room, stopping to turn down the heat and then in front of the wall of glass to open a window. My insides are simmering from sitting on the warm floor, and every time I look at Baz they threaten to boil over from rage. How could he keep Jun a secret from me? “Where’s Jesse?” I ask.
“He said something about getting food,” Baz says. “So now we just need to clone a badge from that list. Maybe I can follow—”
“I have one. I got it today. Jason Choi.” I hand the badge cloner with Jason’s clearances on it over to Baz. “I think you should make one for each of us. Just in case one gets damaged or we have to split up.” Just in case it turns out you’re working against us.
Baz nods. “Good idea. I think we should plan for Friday night. Do you know what time the building is usually empty?”
“Not Friday,” I say. I don’t want Jun anywhere near the UsuMed building when we break in. “What about Thursday? I heard one of the girls at work talking about a K-pop event for Valentine’s Day being held near the building. That could make for nice cover.”
Baz looks up the event on his phone. “It’s an amateur sing-off contest being held on a platform outside of Gangnam Station from nine p.m. until midnight, hosted by some of K-pop’s hottest new stars. Good idea. If we need to make a quick escape, it’ll be easy for us to get lost in that crowd.”
“The coffee shop closes at ten. Most of the UsuMed staff are gone before then.”
“Perfect. Unless the components I need are delayed, Thursday is go night. We’ll take my bike and park in the garage. Ramirez will take the subway and meet us. We can enter the stairwell at B-3. We can just walk up the stairs to B-2 and B-1 and find Lab 6. Then all we have to do is blow open whatever case or safe the tech is being kept in, grab it, and get out. Sound good?”
“And Kyung?”
“Well, he’s not going to be in the building at ten p.m., so we can go back to the SkyTower and deal with him there.”
I nod solemnly. There’s still no tug of guilt or shame at the idea of executing someone.
“So that’s it, then. Can you think of anything else we need?”
“I don’t think so. About Jason,” I say. “He’s going to end up being implicated in the theft.”
Baz shrugs. “If he can prove he was somewhere else when the badge was swiped, maybe he won’t get blamed.”
“But he might.”
“He might,” Baz agrees. “This is war. There will be collateral damage.”
CHAPTER 37
The next night, Baz, Jesse, and I decide to move all of our stuff out of the Itaewon flat and into a hotel close to the UsuMed building. Baz is going to stay in the penthouse suite at the Seoul SkyTower but suggests Jesse and I get a suite elsewhere, just so there’s no danger of Kyung recognizing me.
Once again, it seems a little suspicious. More and more I’m realizing that Baz is saying all the right stuff but acting like a solo operative. “Why don’t we all stay someplace else?” I ask. “I don’t like the idea of splitting up.”
“I need to do some work on the explosive charges,” Baz says. “It’s technical work and it’s not exactly safe. I don’t want you guys with me if anything goes wrong.”
“Goes wrong?” Jesse asks. “Like what? One blows up in your face?”
“It’s not likely, but you can never rule it out when you’re working with explosives.”
“Okay, then,” Jesse says. “Separate it is.”
* * *
The two of us end up getting a room at the hotel next door to the SkyTower.
The desk clerk gives us each a key and we drag our suitcases to the elevator. I feel a small rush of pride when the doors open on the sixth floor and I realize I made it all the way without even feeling anxious.
Jesse takes the bed closest to the door. “We can push the desk in front of it. That way if you try to leave in the middle of the night, I’ll hear you.”
“All right.” I sit on the edge of my bed.
Jesse paces back and forth. Finally he goes to the window and looks out at the skyline. “This is weirder than I thought it would be.”
“Do you want me to get my own room?”
“No, because I don’t want you to have to sleep in a headset.” He flops down on his bed. “It’s just hard, you know.”
“What is?” I perch on the very edge of my bed.
He rolls onto his side and looks over at me. “It’s hard not to think about what sleeping next to you felt like. Holding you.” He swallows hard. “Kissing you. It’s hard to accept it’ll never happen again.”
“Jesse. Come on. I told you I’m still attracted to you.” I lie down on my side so we’re facing each other. “It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you. I thought about it on the plane. I thought about it the day we sparred up on the roof. I think about it a lot.” I sigh. “I think about you a lot.”
Jesse blinks rapidly but doesn’t say anything. He reaches out across the space between us. I scoot closer to the edge of the bed so that when I reach for him, our hands touch. My fingers slip easily between his, pale next to his naturally dark skin.
He massages my palm with his thumb. “You think about me?”
“Yes. You have no idea.”
He moves from his bed to my bed. I scoot back into the center to make space. A tremor races down my spine as he lies down next to me and takes my right hand in both of his. He lifts my hand to his mouth, pressing his lips gently against my palm. Heat blooms inside me.
Jesse rests my hand on the side of his face. “If you want to kiss me, why don’t you, then?”
Beneath my fingertips I feel the ridge of his scar and the almost imperceptible prickle of freshly shaved skin. I lift my other hand to his right cheek, cradling his face between my palms. His eyelids fall shut. “Because I shouldn’t take what I want from you if I can’t give you something meaningful in return.”
Jesse lifts his hands to my face. I rest my forehead against his. “This is meaningful,” he says.
“It’s not enough,” I choke out.
