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Even this many years later, Seulgi hasn’t grown accustomed to the sound of clouds opening over HQ. Rain pelts the roof in waves, and the entire spiderwebbing structure creaks from deep within. The walkways stay dry thanks to their domes of transparent roofing, water sliding cleanly off in curtains, but it’s the creaking that plucks at some buried queasiness in her gut. She imagines the bridge splitting in two underfoot, her body freefalling through granite sky into the underbelly of the city.
“Don’t be silly,” says Joohyun tiredly when Seulgi confides in her. She sets a demanding pace no matter the weather. A few raindrops speckle the line of her collar. “No amount of rain will shake this place down.”
“I know,” says Seulgi, lengthening her strides to match as they turn the corner. They clamp the rubber piping of their gloves between their teeth before the hovertube shoots them up. Debriefing is in the 70s today, and the altitude change remains a bitch no matter how many times they’ve experienced it. “It’s just a feeling.”
Joohyun glances at her sideways when the tube stills. You and your feelings, she always says. Seulgi flicks her gaze away, prepared to gloss it over, but whatever she was planning to say next withers at Joohyun’s touch against the small of her back. She runs warm year-round; the imprint of her hand burns pleasantly through Seulgi’s jacket after she’s pulled away.
The meeting unfolds with the usual culprits in attendance: Momo cleaning slime from her holster, Sana beside her with two hairpins pinched between her lips. Jongin tries not to doze against Sehun’s shoulder. At the head of the table, Director Kwon sifts through a barrage of holo maps and marks off the newest batch of reported casualties with neat slashes. Today, it’s half of Seungwan’s team torn limb from limb in Dongdaemun. The lucky ones are twenty floors down being fitted for prosthetics.
Hierarchy demands that Joohyun give the report, which is fortunate for Seulgi—the stomach for it is not a shared asset between them. They aren’t released until late. The usual line in the canteen has begun to taper off this month because the carnage has laid proper claim to the number of mouths to feed. Yerim waves, a soggy piece of bread dangling from her mouth. Joohyun waves back, halfhearted, and murmurs to Seulgi that she’ll take her meal in her quarters.
“I’ll come with you,” Seulgi says.
Joohyun looks away. “That’s fine.”
They know this routine. Her rooms are some of the lowest, housed in the belly of HQ underneath cake-like tiers of weapons stockrooms. They're perpetually warm, too, a perk that comes with being squad commander. Seulgi’s own rooms rest in the drafty west wing, a smaller block that oversees a grid of rookie dorms, and her bed seldom sees her anymore.
Dinner is not customarily a silent affair, though tonight a mutual understanding wins out. Joohyun pulls a couple soju bottles from her drawers and considers it for a responsible minute, after which she reaches for her water flask instead, tips her head back to wash down her daily supplements. Seulgi prefers to take hers in the morning. She uses the moment to gawk at the curve of Joohyun’s neck, bronzed by lamplight, and the want flares inside her ribs so fast it leaves her dizzy.
“I’m going to take a bath.”
“I’ll come with you,” Seulgi says again.
Joohyun divests herself of her chest plate, her shin guards. She offers to help and is granted permission. Her fingers still know how to be gentle, despite everything. “There,” she says when she’s unhooked the guards from Seulgi’s leggings, and she almost smiles.
Another luxury attached to the squad commander title is the relative privacy of their bathrooms. Joohyun shares with only one other woman who this week happens to be performing recon off-base. The stall is too narrow for two bodies, but Seulgi doesn’t mind. She is perennially enraptured by the way Joohyun’s layers unpeel, polyethylene and crystal polymer and leftover bloodstains. They wash those off first.
Seulgi’s hands wander first to the dip of Joohyun’s naked waist, making excuses with a bar of soap, then carefully lower. Joohyun voices a noise of reproach.
“I’ll do you first,” she sighs, looking up to face Seulgi under the showerhead. Her hair shivers in inky rivulets over her ears, plastered to her cheeks. She has to reach up to work shampoo into Seulgi’s scalp. Says, “Turn for me,” when she’s lathered all she can reach, and the tip of her nose grazes the highest knob of Seulgi’s spine. There’s no disguising the tremble that curls down Seulgi then, hot like molten glass, agitating the itch beneath her skin. Joohyun doesn’t mention it.
They crowd into Joohyun’s bed with their hair still wet, braided hastily out of the way, their cheeks rosy from the steam. The lamp clicks off. Seulgi wastes no time while her vision adjusts; she feels Joohyun out from memory. Here, her elbow. Here, the fluttering base of her throat. Here, the curve of her breast under her thin sleep shirt, her heartbeat a winged creature growing restless under Seulgi’s palm, and she’s reaching out with both arms to pull Seulgi on top.
Seulgi presses one open-mouthed kiss just above the shirt’s neckline. She knows better than to go any higher. That was the first rule Joohyun had set all those months ago, her stare hard and serious, cross-legged on this same bed while Seulgi sat on her hands to stop them from shaking. Only below the mouth.
(“What, is kissing reserved for lovers?” Seulgi had asked, trying for lighthearted.
And Joohyun had closed her eyes for such a long time, so long that Seulgi thought she might have fallen asleep, before she finally responded. “You’ve been here for five years now.”
“Yes.”
“It’s been a long time since you were green.”
“It has.”
“You would do well,” she had said, pausing to draw a breath, “to let your dreams go now.”)
*
Joohyun fires six rounds into the first mutt’s face. Its blood burbles up blue and thick from its snapping jaw, spraying in a boiling arc. She sidesteps the mess neatly. “Behind you.”
“I got it,” says Seulgi, hurling her knife as she pivots. It lodges in the second one’s shoulder, draws a furious shriek as it topples to the ground. She pulls her other knife from her belt and stoops over it, slicing the aorta. The creature lays there, convulsing, before Joohyun tires of the warbling and fires one more shot into its open beak. Seulgi yanks her blades free with a grimace. “You could have just let it die, unnie.”
“I’m not in the mood for swan songs.”
She’s lying. Seulgi had seen the hybrid up close. The slumped wolf carcass at Joohyun’s feet is recognizably full-grown, but this feathered thing is a fledgling, barely a few years old. Its features are still vaguely human. The blood puddling around its corpse is red.
The only place empathy typically gets you in this business is a body bag, but Joohyun has always worn the mask better than most. She delivers her reports stone-faced and unfeeling and boasts a record cleaner than anyone besides Director Kwon herself. If she wants to waste a bullet to put some hybrid infant out of its misery, Seulgi will look the other way as many times as she must.
Joohyun’s comm crackles. She holds down the speaker, and Doyoung’s tinny voice bursts forth: Clear?
“Clear,” she says. “How many on your end?”
Six dead. The last one got away. Johnny’s injured.
“Critical?”
No, it missed his vitals, thank fuck. Tore through his vest and clawed his side, though. He can’t stand on his own.
Seulgi recalls Johnny from her own training cohort. He was always kind, as well as amusingly terrified of Joohyun, who drawn up to her very fullest height stood equal with one of his legs. Although, she supposes, most people are intimidated by Joohyun in one form or another. Seulgi won’t even class herself as an anomaly because Joohyun can still make her own pulse quicken to double time with the right look.
“—call Taeyeon over for extraction,” Joohyun is saying presently. “Tell me if anything else comes up.” She hangs up and wobbles on her feet for a moment.
“Are you hurt?” Seulgi rushes to support her.
“No, I’m fine.” She exhales, collecting herself. “You can let me go.”
“If there’s something—”
Joohyun narrows her eyes. “Let me go, Seulgi.”
The hurt distorts Seulgi’s face before she can filter it away. “It’s just me. You don’t have to…”
“Yes,” says Joohyun, engrossed with her own blood-spattered boots. “I do.”
How unfair, Seulgi thinks, that she still looks so lovely with mud streaked across her temple and traces of hybrid viscera clinging to her neoprene jacket. That Seulgi still wants her so badly when she won’t ever confess to wanting Seulgi back, or wanting anything, really, in the wholly selfish way that every person alive must.
How ugly of Seulgi to imagine a reality that diverges from their occupied one following this very moment, in which Joohyun will cradle Seulgi’s jaw with all the tenderness in the world and hold onto her until the sun sets behind them. They’ll align their lips in the middle of this wreckage until their lungs are cycling the same single breath. Not even Joohyun’s touch is capable of making it all disappear, but surely it would ache a little less.
*
“Don’t go inside,” says Yerim.
Seulgi halts at the doorway and contemplates pretending like she had no intention whatsoever of doing so. Her silence is too long to be convincing.
“Seriously.” Yerim crosses her arms. “You shouldn’t. It won’t be good for you.”
“What do you know about what’s good for me,” says Seulgi, unintentionally waspish.
“Are you telling me that seeing Joohyun unnie in an infirmary bed is going to make you happy?”
“Of course not.”
“So you think she’ll be happy?”
“To see me?”
“Yeah. That’s your reasoning?”
Seulgi hesitates.
“I told you,” says Yerim. “You shouldn’t.” She’s wise beyond her years in her scrubs, the hand not on her hip resting on her cart of soiled bedclothes. Some of them have blood. Some of them have quite a lot of blood, actually. Seulgi tries not to think about it. “She’s recovering fine. I promise true love is not a substitute for rest and hydration.”
“Oh? When did you get so smart?”
Yerim softens. “I was keeping busy back here, you know, while you two were out saving the world every day.”
“You’re the one that does the real saving,” says Seulgi, momentarily overcome by fondness. She lets Yerim guide her to the exit because she would never go if left alone.
Target practice stifles some of the urge to creep back for an hour or so, but Seulgi’s aim is near godlike and the training rooms only stock so many projectiles. She picks the splinters from her hands and collects her rations from the canteen, then scrubs herself raw. Unsurprisingly, sleep does not come without Joohyun nearby.
There is no one to blame but herself when she reappears in the sick bay at midnight, hood drawn up over her hair. The night shift is understaffed and overcompensating, so she receives no second glances. Seulgi doubts she’d receive any serious objections regardless: everyone who knows Joohyun is aware that Seulgi comes attached to her side, and everyone knows Joohyun.
They’ve run out of single rooms. Joohyun’s cot is curtained off from her neighbors, several gray young men on ventilators, and Seulgi nearly sobs when she yanks it aside. Whether from relief or heartache, she can’t tell. She’s occupied memorizing the planes of Joohyun’s face anew, her delicate mouth, the supple curve of her cheek.
The blanket is covering the worst of it, she knows. Their last case had taken them to an abandoned shipyard, and a hydra from the nest inside had managed to sink a fang into Joohyun’s calf. Seulgi meticulously beheaded each snake and charred the stumps with kerosene and a lighter, but by that time, Joohyun was already feverish and prone on the floor.
Chief medical resident Sooyoung had personally pumped the venom out of her and assured Seulgi that not only would Joohyun live, she would be back on her feet before the month was up. But it’s hard to aim sights at an abstract date still weeks away. It’s hard to focus on working and sleeping and eating properly when Joohyun is here, surrounded by pictures of death in a hundred slow stages.
Seulgi studies Joohyun’s hands, pale and folded over her chest, then her own bandaged ones, gauze now filthy. Experimentally, she weaves their fingers together.
Joohyun’s lids flutter. She rolls over in her sleep, tucking Seulgi’s hand into the crease between her neck and shoulder. Turns her lips towards Seulgi’s knuckles and mumbles something into them.
“What?” whispers Seulgi, her chest tightening. She can’t have heard correctly.
“Stay,” breathes Joohyun.
Seulgi kneels on the tile and becomes peripherally aware of salt trickling into her mouth. She swipes her free hand over her eyes, trying to catch some of the errant wetness. “I am,” she says. “I will.”
*
The newest batch of rookies is perhaps the quickest ever to adapt. They were taken in so young that the stacked bunks of their dormitories and increasingly thin air probably constitute the earliest memories most of them can conjure. They clung to each other and loved as children did, linear, fearless. Somehow it hasn’t been scared out of them yet.
Jeno shyly asks Seulgi to critique his machete throwing form, then cleaves a dummy into perfect sagittal halves. Jaemin has grown tall and broad sometime when she wasn’t looking and now handles the recoil of a gun without blinking. She watches them in distant amazement from the corner. It doesn’t particularly seem to matter to them what they’re doing so long as they can do it together, and they don’t mind this being common knowledge, either.
Seulgi can’t wrap her mind around it. Despite the five years they’ve been partners, she knows little about how Joohyun grew up. The facts are as such: Joohyun was raised on a base in Daegu and transferred here at fourteen. She was officially deployed one year after that. She was the best of her cohort by leaps and bounds, and one of the meager handful of their original five dozen that survived past 20.
It was Seulgi’s 21st the day they met. Joohyun, infinitely more composed, untouchably beautiful, sized up her new partner without bothering to disguise it. Seulgi had thought right away that she’d like for them to be closer. And once it happened, not easily, won over the course of a thousand uniquely perilous missions, Seulgi was slapped with the realization that it still wasn’t enough. She wanted to be closer to Joohyun than anyone else had ever been. She burned for Joohyun’s attention. She dreamt of Joohyun taking her hands and smiling, dancing, twirling her in endless music box circles like the world was built for the two of them alone.
She dreamt, even later, of opening Joohyun’s thighs and knowing her there, too. How their voices might sound in symphony. If Joohyun might feel good enough to let herself slip out of the trappings of hierarchy that she normally wore so austerely, to laugh afterwards and kiss Seulgi long and hard on the mouth.
Naively, Seulgi assumed that all these wishes would tangle together. In practice, Joohyun is both sweeter and worse. She lets Seulgi trail after her into her quarters and pin her wrists down to the mattress. She makes encouraging noises, gorgeous keening ones, and bucks her hips right onto Seulgi’s eager tongue. And let it never be said that she is not generous; she will hold Seulgi in place with equal fervor and lick her open until she screams.
But afterwards she lies deathly still and stares at the ceiling until Seulgi asks her what’s wrong, to which she says nothing, then goes to rinse her mouth. Sleeping on the same bed is permitted, yet touching in their sleep is not. Joohyun throws off the covers while unconscious and suffers a range of terrible nightmares, wakes up three times a night shaking all over, and seems more terrified still when she remembers that Seulgi is not part of the dreamscape, that she is real, she cares.
The most severe of those nights, Seulgi will bite back her concern and make the shameful walk back to her own rooms, stealing a blanket or Joohyun’s fleece on her way. It gives her something to return. A reason to show her face again and hope that Joohyun will not only look at her but into her, the way Seulgi has wanted for years now. If Joohyun asked, Seulgi would claw the moon out of the sky with her bare hands.
Seulgi doesn’t much like to dwell on what Joohyun would do if asked the same.
*
“Big day tomorrow,” says Joohyun, stroking Seulgi’s hair idly. They’re glowing fresh from the baths. She’s in a good mood today, initiating contact, offering to do Seulgi’s braids unprompted.
“Hm?”
“New assignment.” She ties off the strands with an elastic and twists the rope up into their standard bun. “We’re getting sent pretty far out this time.”
At this, Seulgi sits up. “How far exactly?”
“You’ll be briefed in the morning.”
Seulgi scowls. “You’ve brought it up already. You might as well say.”
Joohyun leans back on her hands. “Daegu.”
Arguing is Seulgi’s first instinct. Daegu is a short voyage by airship, but the landing will be treacherous, surrounded by earth on all sides for longer than the eye alone can make out. The further you are from the ocean, the more wild colonies you’ll encounter. It’s drilled into their heads at this point and largely the reason why remaining civilians have relocated to the coast. Seulgi doesn’t even know if the local base there still exists. But then she recalls Joohyun’s clearance level and swallows the urge to fight—there’s no way this could be false intel.
“Don’t be scared,” Joohyun adds, perhaps tenderly, hooking her leg around Seulgi’s hip. “I’ll be there with you.”
“That’s where you’re from.”
“Yes.”
“But you haven’t been back since leaving.”
Joohyun turns cheek. “That too.”
“Unnie shouldn’t be afraid either,” says Seulgi, scooting up the bed. Her hands flutter nervously for a moment before finding home around Joohyun’s back. She’s bold enough to interlace her fingers so that they’re pressed together, woven tight. “I’m your backup. I’m meant to look over your shoulder so that nothing can sneak up on you.”
“Some things already have,” says Joohyun, though she lets herself be held. “It’s late. Would you mind getting the lamp?”
Come sunrise, they zip each other into their layers. Joohyun fastens the back of Seulgi’s breastplate, and Seulgi sits on the end of the bed and pulls Joohyun’s socked feet across her lap. “Your boots,” she explains. Joohyun pinks like hibiscus but decides to allow it. Seulgi wraps a hand around her slim ankle and pictures the scar that extends from above her Achilles tendon to the pit of her knee, the flesh puckered into stitches, still unsure of how to meet. She’s glimpsed it beneath the showerhead a dozen times now. She had imagined how the venom must have hurt and nursed the echo of that hurt inside her own body, between thousands of other days’ devoted records of Joohyun.
“My boots,” Joohyun reminds her softly.
Seulgi shudders into the present. “Right.”
The briefing table is solemn. Director Kwon at the head, upright, with Kibum by one side and Junmyeon by the other. Even without the heads-up last night, this itself is a warning. So many executives don’t gather easily in one place. Joohyun’s entire squad is assembled here today for orders, necks bent in deference or maybe a little more fear than usual. Momo’s hands don’t leave her holster the entire hour.
They’re shipped out immediately after the meeting adjourns. Seulgi keeps quiet while they troop up the docking ramp, while they’re strapped in for takeoff, while the control panel grows hot with exertion and tremendous clouds of steam billow out through the vents. She brings it up sometime after the flight has stabilized enough for the crew to walk about.
“We’ve never been asked to keep them breathing before.”
Joohyun is taking weapons inventory. Her finger comes to a halt over Nayeon’s twin revolvers, numbers 17 and 18. “We’ve never had reason to, until now.”
“They’re bigger than anything we’ve ever fought.” The diagrams that Junmyeon had shown them flicker menacingly in the corners of Seulgi’s vision. Mutations of mutations. The exoskeleton of ants, the height and bulk of bears, the glint in their six eyes discernible even from the satellite cam feed. Three heads. Cerberus mutts, Junmyeon called them. Supposedly, the research team has devised a way to extract antiserum from their brainstems. They just need the tissue alive.
“We can take them.”
Seulgi wants to agree, but—well. Reservations are best kept to oneself. She knows also that Joohyun has to say things like this, because that’s her job, and she’d fought damn hard for it. The prerequisite considerations for the title of squad commander comprise a long list, the beginning of which demands at minimum two hundred confirmed kills, no children or spouses for as long as you hold the post, and participation in an End of Days simulation. The details of the sim are not revealed to non-applicants, but Joohyun had come out of hers with shaking hands and refused to speak the rest of the evening. Seulgi is reasonably sure that ascending the ladder any further entails vomiting your beating heart up out of your chest into a box whose key is thrown out the penthouse window.
“Maybe this is what the finish line looks like,” Seulgi says finally. “A cure. Imagine that.”
Joohyun looks up at her properly for the first time since they’d left HQ. She’s tinted blue under the lights, the branchlike shadows of her lashes fringing her gaze. “I can’t imagine this ending,” she confesses.
“You’ve never thought about it?”
“Of course I have.” Frowning, Joohyun wrenches her eyes away. “Like everybody else. But I don’t know what I would do—who I would be—”
Ah. Seulgi understands now. Joohyun, after all, has sacrificed more than most. “Let me try to draw a picture,” she says, pulling Joohyun into her side. “You retire to the seashore. Someplace breezy where the light fills up the house in the afternoons. You start an herb garden. You wake up as late as you like.”
“Seulgi,” she begins.
“You have kids, maybe? If you want those. I always did.”
Joohyun’s throat quivers.
“I’d make them breakfast. And sing to them.”
“You sing?” Joohyun asks wetly. “What’s there to sing about anymore?”
Seulgi watches through the dashboard as the airship starts to descend, stirring the cracked and broken boughs of the few trees left standing. There was an orchard here, once. “I can think of a few things.”
*
A lifetime ago, before the draft and the Third Wave, when most families still lived under the same roof, Seulgi’s grandmother taught her an old lovers’ requiem. She had been a pianist in her youth, and though her hands were too arthritic to play anymore, she painstakingly tapped out the melody one key at a time. For a child, Seulgi possessed remarkable vocal control and even more striking expressiveness. She memorized the song back to front and wiped her grandmother’s tears afterwards, puzzled. Then the arts became a lost relic of peacetime and Seulgi forgot most of the notes.
They come back to her now, one delicate measure at a time. All active agents are gathered at Floor 0 tonight, holsters empty in respect. This is HQ’s version of a funeral.
In the years since antiserum production has begun, the tide has changed. They’re winning in ways that they can quantify. Census growth has emerged from the negatives for the first time this century. Casualty rates for ground operations have halved and then halved again, and they’ve received communications from towns and villages on the opposite shore of the country that were previously presumed massacred. The Director had not passed in combat, but here, in the sky, on a morphine drip.
The requiem crescendoes. Seulgi sings the accompaniment in her chest, soaring with the refrain. The casket thumps closed, the sound of its lid especially jarring after such a long silence, and four executives heft it up off the stand to begin the procession into the pit of blue flame where the body will be cremated.
Newly appointed Director Bae had given a eulogy that stirred even the driest eyes among them. Seulgi’s taken to calling her by her professional title even in her mind: accidentally betraying familiarity would not do, not anymore. There was no one better suited for the job, but still the board had hesitated before nominating her. And during her last night as Joohyun, she had come to Seulgi’s quarters instead of the other way around, and she had left the lamp on, and she pulled the covers up around them and kissed her on the mouth so long and so desperately that just the memory of it left Seulgi gasping for breath.
(“You deserve kindness,” she had told Seulgi in the afterglow. They hadn’t bothered to dress again. There were traces of silver in her hair now, decades early. “You deserve a choice.”
“I chose you ages ago.”
“But I'm—in return, I can't—” She stopped, choosing her words carefully. “They’ve taken my retina scans and my fingerprints and changed every lock in the building. Tomorrow, at the meeting, everyone will call me a different name. Before speaking, they'll look at me.”
“They’re late,” Seulgi whispered. “I’ve never looked at anyone but you, anyway.”
Joohyun had laughed, just to do something with her face besides weep, and grasped Seulgi’s cheeks with ardent hands. She didn’t say it back, but one defiant tear slipped free and settled to rest in the bowl of her clavicle. Seulgi forgave her. “Tell me that story again,” she said. “About the house by the sea.”)