Chapter 1

My clouded reflection eyes me

like a bird of prey, the profile of night

slanted against morning. I turn

this way—the stone lets me go.

- Yusef Komunyakaa

DAEGU, KOREA—present day

i.

First comes a diagnosis. A diagnosis, and many whispers, and then blood. The blood is unavoidable; he watched it drawn slowly out with a needle, before the tests, and he will see it run wide and red again, when the news begins to creep out.

He tells the doctor he has heard enough for today, and coughs into a handkerchief behind a locked door. Mu will come and visit him as he does every Thursday. He will tell Mu first, and Mu will tell no one.

It is Taejo's own body that will betray him, graying skin and tired eyes and weakness, so much weakness. Then she will know, and as soon as she knows, it is over.

ii.

"At this age," her mother says, "You should be worrying about getting a husband, not more education. Ha-Jin, you already have your degree."

Her father spends half the year in San Francisco, a world away. Why didn't her parents leave each other long ago? Why does her mother care so much about marriage, when her only daughter has come back so miraculously, from near-death? These questions about her future feel meaningless, like they are asked by people who don't know her at all.

"I'm twenty-six, omma." And she leaves it at that, because she's going back to the museum.

Again.

…

It doesn't help much, seeing the ancient, painstaking sketches. They are stylized to show heaviness as wealth, and they look nothing like him.

He lived into his fifties, the texts say. That was old age, in ancient times. That was thirty years beyond the days she knew and loved him.

"You come here often, miss?"

It's the curator. The one with Choi Ji Mong's face.

"Do I know you?" her voice sounds harsh to her own ears. It sounds like she's been shouting, or like she has been silent for a long time. Maybe both. Maybe the last time she was alive, she wanted very badly to be heard, and wasn't.

He blinks, expression neutral. "I don't think so." A half-bow, very courteous. Like she is some grand patroness of the Goryeo exhibit, and not just a girl in a skirt bought two seasons ago from an off-brand shop in Seoul. "Maybe I just have one of those faces."

Ha Jin clenches her fists. I bet you do. "Do you work here?"

"I do not." He strokes his short beard. "I—manage acquisitions for some prominent clients."

"Any emperors?"

There's a pause. It's too significant. "Don't know any emperors these days."

She wheels on him, but the lights are dimming—the doors are closing—it's time to go home.

"Good night, miss," he says blithely, and hurries away.

One of these days, she's going to catch him.

…

Life doesn't work so simply. Three whole months go by with weekly museum trips—sometimes twice-weekly, like that will do her any good at all—and she never sees him, the astronomer of the past.

Ha Jin—or is Hae Soo? Is it ever going to be Hae Soo again, or is that just a strange and terrifying dream?—is restless. She's also probably a little crazy, if her mother is to be believed. Her father cuts his trip short. He comes home. He tells her he almost died himself, watching her lay so still and quiet, for so many months.

It wasn't months, she wants to say. It was years…

But there it is: the craziness. She can't tell anyone that she changed the course of history, because history cannot recognize what it might have been, only what it is.

And people are blinder still.

She has lost her one connection. Choi Ji Mong is gone. She reads the news, and it is nothing that has ever interested her, nothing she cares to understand.

Before—well, before she drowned, that first and only time, she centered her life around a man who left her.

Her mother thinks she's had her head turned by feminism, or the coma, or both. Twenty-six, and won't settle down! (Twenty-six, dead and alive again.) If only omma knew, just how far she'd go for a man.

But that was hundreds of years ago.

Ha Jin actually laughs, at that.

…

Crowded with her parents around a cracked enamel table, she picks at her bibimbap and decides that maybe what she needs is to get drunk. That wouldn't be her doctor's orders, certainly—but it might do her some good. Maybe drinking will make her forget.

Maybe it will finally allow her to remember enough to do something.

iii.

"Yeon Hwa, I said, we'll be late."

"And I said, yeot-meog-eo."

"Is that any way to speak to your brother?"

She glances up and sees Wook's furrowed brow. His hands rest on the back of her chair. His nails are almost as well-manicured as hers are.

"I don't leave this house without a perfect face," Yeon Hwa snaps, beckoning the makeup artist to return. He'd fled at Wook's appearance. "If Queen Yoo can't deal with that, I'm sure you'll make it up to her somehow. Boot-licker."

"Aish, you're sour today." But Wook is smiling; he never stays severe for long. "It's important to make a good impression," he adds, all gravity and repose. "It respects our father's memory."

She narrows her eyes; these days she wonders if there is more on Wook's mind than honoring a ghost. "If you would get out of my rooms for two minutes," she suggests, "We would be there already."

This is an exaggeration, but he shrugs and saunters away. She parts her lips for the application of liner and Chanel Rouge. If So is there today, perhaps he'll notice.

Likely not. The knowledge of who she is, and who she may never be, curls her stomach.

"Hurry up," she tells the stylist, but she keeps her voice low so that Wook won't hear a hint of her changing mind.

iv.

It would be satisfying, Yo thinks, to press the trader's flabby throat between his fingers until it bruised, until the man was gasping for air rather than wheedling for a higher price.

He knows better, of course. He settles for words. "Do you take me for a fool?"

"Never, honored sir."

"Honored? Tell Dae-Ho he'd be better off sending an executive, not a sniveling shop-man." He plucks at a flawless lapel. "This? Is jacquard. That?" He lets the sample drop from his fingers to the floor. "That is shit. Now take your shit, and your honorifics, and get out."

The trader has barely limped through the door before Won starts up a chorus of congratulation. "That was brilliant, Yo. Brilliant. You skewered him! You could be a street-fighter."

"Brilliant?" Yo arches an eyebrow. That the eyebrow is the most flawless wing-shape that might ever grace a Vanity Fair close-up goes without saying. He could use a VF; all the Vogues are getting a little monotonous. "Save it, Won. We needed that deal."

"We did?"

Won is cloyingly slow, as always. Yo drums his fingers against his knee—also suited in jacquard, because why not go all out? (Power moves are always deliberate, and sometimes observable.)

"What do you bring to a party?"

"A…bottle of scotch?"

"Exactly. What do you bring to a funeral?" He doesn't wait for what will certainly be an inane answer. "A better bottle of scotch."

"Whose funeral?" Won asks.

Yo stands up, reaches for his gleaming obsidian phone, and scans for new messages. Seven, but none urgent. He'll need another deal lined up by the end of the day, something to sweeten the pot at dinner tomorrow.

A new message blinks: it's from his mother. We have company. Hwangbos.

He rolls his eyes—Wook's pandering is no threat, though it is transparent—and tucks his phone into his breast pocket.

"Whose funeral?" Won asks again, trailing him out.

Through a smile that is mostly teeth, Yo answers. "My father's."

SEOUL, KOREA—GANGSEO DISTRICT

v.

The man's tooth splinters under his knuckles, though that isn't so good for his knuckles.

"Have you had enough?" he asks, ground out.

A gurgling whimper.

"Yes, I take it." His hand hurts like a bitch, and it's raining in flat, ice-water sheets. He wants this to be over, but then, he always wants it to be over. That is the part of himself that he keeps held down, chained like a dog.

He reaches forward with his left hand and gets a firm grip on the man's collar, tight enough to bruise. "Three hijackings in two months? Someone's paying for that. I want a name."

The man wheezes, and he loosens his hold, just a little. "If they are paying," the man mumbles, breath whistling around the missing tooth, "For hired muscle, are you surprised that someone else is paying to destabilize shipments?"

"I'm not surprised," So growls. "I'm insisting. A name."

"I don't have one."

"You own the trucking company."

"I'm just a businessman."

"Who leaks routes, for a price?"

"Never!"

"You have thirty more teeth, give or take. I can keep going."

"There wasn't a name!" The man's voice ratchets up a notch of desperation. "The wire transfer came from Daegu."

"The textile capital. Where every rival would be?"

"It's not that simple." The man wrenches free from his grasp and actual grovels, hands splashing in the black puddles. "There's a line of hired operatives. They don't make deals in back alleys, they make them at galas. Tradeshows. Where everyone's talking about everything."

"I'm not leaving without a name." The pain in his hand has dulled just enough for him to start punching again, and So thinks his target knows it.

The man sputters and gasps, and then relents. "Woo Hee," he says. "The last contact I sent. Her name is Woo Hee."

NAMWON, KOREA

vi.

"Who is it, my love?"

The latest "love" giggles, tossing his phone from hand to hand. Baek Ah straightens the collar of his robe and frowns. This blue is mixed too dark; he wanted the frail hue of a robin's egg, and what he has is turquoise.

"He sounds handsome," the girl says, dancing her fingers along the back of his neck. "But not so handsome as you."

He plucks the phone from her hand absently, still distressed over his colors. A landscape should come alive, but gently…to smother it is a garish, ugly thing.

"Hello?"

"Answer your own damn phone." So's voice is clipped, which means he's short-tempered, which means he's probably injured.

Baek Ah forgets all shades of blue and stands quickly. "Where are you?"

"Seoul."

Baek Ah imagines him folded like a jackknife against some warehouse wall, a slight, tense shadow with blood pooling on the ground. An artist's vision is vivid, and cruel. "Do you need—"

"I didn't call you because I needed anything." This may be untrue, but Baek Ah knows better than to comment on it.

"Why were you calling, then?" He tries, gently, for humor. "You interrupted something very sweet and pleasant here."

"Spare me." Wherever So is, the coverage is bad. "I…called to tell you, I'm going back to Daegu."

Baek Ah suddenly feels much too far away. "Geugoya?"

"Yes. Really." There's a long pause, and then So adds, "I think my father is dying."

Baek Ah draws in a sharp breath. It seemed for many years that Wang Taejo was absolute, a stone-carved icon among chaebols, someone who would never die. Who could never die. Baek-Ah comes from a family without so much wealth and lineage, but he played with the Wangs as a child and has seen them grow up hardened in different ways. He wonders, off-handedly, if So found out this news in the middle of a fight.

"What happened?" Baek-Ah asks. He asks its gently; So, of course, never demands that anyone treat him with kindness, so Baek-Ah chooses for both of them. "How did you—"

"I don't know." So cuts him off, before sympathy can hang in the air too long. "I need to be certain."

And it would take that, Baek-Ah reflects, as the dial tone hums in his ear. It would take something terrible and possible, to drag Wang So back home.