Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Before the laws, before the silence—there was music.
Before the erasure, there was him.

Hyunjin wakes with the taste of light on his tongue.

Not warmth. Not clarity.
Just light—blinding, broken, fleeing through the cracks of a memory he can’t hold.

His breath catches as the red sky flickers behind his eyes again. A sky he’s never seen—but dreams of constantly. A hallway stretches endlessly beneath it, glowing crimson, the walls breathing like lungs. He’s running. Barefoot. Hands scraping against steel.

And just before he turns the final corner—

He sees him.

A boy with raven hair and fire in his eyes. Waiting. Reaching.

But Hyunjin never reaches back in time.

He always wakes just before.

Tonight is no different.

His apartment is silent, windowless. One of the countless boxes in District 8 built to keep dreamers like him small. Contained. Controlled. He sits up, sweat dampening his collar, his heart racing like a warning siren.

A message pings in the dark.

[Sender Unknown]
You’re ready to remember now.
Coordinates: [encrypted]

Hyunjin stares at the glowing screen. His hands tremble.
They told him dreams were dangerous. That memories were a sickness. That freedom was a fantasy.

But something inside him is shifting. Something old. Something real.

Somewhere out there, he knows the boy from the hallway is still waiting.

And this time, Hyunjin will run toward him.

Even if it means breaking the world to do it.

Chapter Text

Bang Chan doesn’t dream anymore.

Not because he can’t. Because he won’t.

Dreams are for the hopeful, and hope is what gets you caught. That’s the first lesson he learned after they burned the theater to the ground and erased all records of the boys who danced inside it. The second lesson?

Survivors don’t look back.

So he doesn’t.

He works. Moves. Hacks IDs. Builds new minds from old fragments for the desperate souls who come to him with cracked memories and haunted eyes. Dreamers who want to remember before the system took everything away.

He gives them pieces. Never whole pictures. Never enough to burn them alive the way it burned him.

But tonight, that changes.

His monitor flickers once.

Hyunjin.

The name tastes like thunder and longing.

He watches as the boy walks into view on the cracked security feed. Hood pulled low. Gait like a dancer trying not to be one. Slipping through shadows like he was born to them.

Chan swallows hard.

“Still beautiful,” he mutters, then curses himself. It’s been years. The world should’ve changed him. Hardened him.

But Hyunjin is still walking like he has music in his bones. And Chan remembers every note of the melody they once made together—before the fire, before the fracture, before he forced Hyunjin to forget.

He taps the mic.

“Come inside. Lock the door behind you.”

Hyunjin freezes for a second before stepping in.

Chan doesn’t move from his chair. Just watches him. Studies the flicker of recognition behind those uncertain eyes. He’s been preparing for this moment for five years.

And yet his voice still shakes when he says:

“You used to call me hyung.”

Hyunjin blinks. “…Do I know you?”

Chan smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Not yet. But I’ve known you all my life.”

Chapter Text

Hyunjin doesn’t trust easily.

Not when the world says silence is safety, and truth is treason.
Not when every soft thing he’s ever known has vanished without a trace.
Not when a stranger opens the door and looks at him like he’s the only thing that ever mattered.

“You used to call me hyung.”

The words echo in his ears like a lullaby he doesn’t remember learning.

He stares at the man—Bang Chan, he said—and something in his chest stutters. The name doesn’t register, but the feeling does.

Like warm light through cracked glass. Like a melody on the tip of his tongue.

“Who… are you really?” Hyunjin asks, his voice thin.

Chan doesn’t answer. Not with words.

Instead, he turns, slowly—moving toward the far wall. There’s a hidden panel, and with a soft click, he reveals a console etched in runes and ancient tech. Lines of shimmering code ripple like water.

A seat waits in front of it.

“You came because you want answers,” Chan says gently. “But your memories were sealed—by force. If I’m going to show you the truth, you have to let me in.”

Hyunjin hesitates.

“What if I don’t like what I find?”

Chan finally looks at him. Really looks.

“You’ve already felt it, haven’t you? That something is missing. That your dreams don’t lie.”

Silence.

Then—

“…Yes.”

Chan steps forward, slowly. Holds out his hand. “Then let’s begin.”

⸻

✧

Hyunjin doesn’t remember falling asleep.

But he wakes up standing.

Barefoot.

In a red-lit hallway that breathes.

No ceiling. Just the sky—burning crimson above him. And the sound of music, faint, echoing down the corridor like a forgotten hymn.

Then he sees it. A flash.

A boy twirling. Laughing. Spinning beneath the red light.
Eyes bright. Smile wild. Wind in his hair.

And Hyunjin knows him.
He knows him.

That boy… is him.

The scene flickers again. Another flash—

This time, he’s dancing with someone.

Someone taller. Stronger. A steady hand on his waist. Fingers interlaced.

And in this dream, he’s not afraid.

Not silent. Not small.

He’s free.

But then—

Screams. Sirens. Fire. A scream—“Hyunjin, run!”—and then—

⸻

✧

He jolts awake with a choked gasp, tears on his cheeks.

Chan is sitting beside him, hand resting lightly on his arm. Calm. Steady. Waiting.

“Did you see it?” he asks softly.

Hyunjin’s voice is barely a whisper.
“I knew you… I loved you.”

Chan’s expression doesn’t change. But his eyes brim with something ancient. Ache. Hope. Regret.

“You still do,” he murmurs.

And Hyunjin, trembling, asks:

“Why did I forget?”

Chan looks away.

“…Because I made you.”

Chapter Text

Present – Chan’s hideout

Hyunjin stares at him. At the man who pulled him from the dark, only to confess that he was the one who put him there to begin with.

“You made me forget,” Hyunjin whispers.

Chan doesn’t flinch. But he doesn’t look proud, either.

“I had to,” he says quietly. “They would’ve found you. Your memories… they were too loud.”

Hyunjin steps back.

He wants to scream. Wants to grab him and shake the truth out of him. Wants to demand—what did I lose? who was I before?—but his chest is too tight.

“I didn’t want to survive without you,” Chan says. “But I couldn’t let you die with me, either.”

Hyunjin’s voice cracks.
“Then tell me everything. All of it. No more pieces.”

Chan hesitates. Then nods.

And the memory device hums to life again.

⸻

Flashback – Three years ago, The Studio

The room was all mirrors and red curtains.

Hyunjin spun across the floor barefoot, laughing, wild, alive. Chan sat cross-legged by the speakers, notebook in hand, trying to write down a song that could keep up with Hyunjin’s body.

“You keep changing the rhythm,” Chan groaned.

Hyunjin grinned. “You keep writing songs that want to be caged.”

Chan threw a crumpled page at him. “You’re the one who dances like freedom.”

Hyunjin just twirled faster.

Later, they lay side by side under the skylight, whispering dreams they weren’t allowed to have. A performance under a real sky. A home not built by the system. A song only they knew.

“I think I was born just to meet you,” Hyunjin whispered.

Chan turned his head. “Then I guess I was born to keep you safe.”

⸻

Present

Hyunjin’s hands shake. His vision blurs. He clutches the side of the console as the memory fades.

“I said those words,” he whispers. “I meant them.”

“You did.” Chan’s voice is barely audible.

“Then why did you let me forget them?”

Chan looks at him like he’s breaking.

“Because they hurt you when they found out. They locked you in a reconditioning unit. They were going to wipe your entire self. I had minutes, Hyunjin. Minutes to either lose you forever—or take your memories myself.”

Hyunjin can’t breathe.

“But I came back to you,” he says.

“You always do.”

Chapter Text

The choice sits between them like a blade.

“Everything,” Chan says. “Or we stop here and run.”

Hyunjin’s mouth is dry. The lingering sweetness of the last memory—red curtains, laughter, whispered promises—has curdled into something heavier. There’s a question trying to claw out of his throat: What else did you keep from me?

Instead he asks, “If I choose everything… who do I become?”

“You,” Chan says, steady. “Just… all of you.”

A soft warble ripples through the room. The console lights blink once—nothing unusual. Hyunjin drags in air and tries to anchor on something simple: the way Chan’s thumbs worry the seam of his gloves, the oil-smudge near his wrist, the tiny scar at his lip that he remembers without remembering.

“You’re scared,” Chan says.

Hyunjin almost laughs. “I’m terrified.”

Another warble. Louder.

Chan’s head snaps toward the ceiling. “That’s not the console.”

The soft glow in the wall strips turns the color of open wound. The safehouse alarms engage, a low pulse under the floor, then a sharp chime—three beats, pause, three beats.

Chan is already moving. “Enforcer trace. They piggybacked on the packet I sent to pull your dream in.” He’s pulling wires, flipping breakers. “We’ve got five minutes, maybe less.”

Hyunjin’s legs do what they’ve always done when the world tilts: they find balance. He plants his feet. “So we run.”

Chan looks at him, something like apology and stubbornness clashing in his eyes. “We can. Or… we finish.”

“You said five minutes.”

Chan’s mouth twists. “I can do it in three.”

Hyunjin stares at the chair—the cradle that feels like an altar—and then at the bolted door. He can hear wind outside, sirens far off, the city grinding its teeth.

“Do you trust me?” Chan asks.

Hyunjin hates the way the answer is instant. “Yes.”

“Then sit.”

He does.

The headband settles against his temples, cool and oddly familiar. Chan works fast, fingers flying over keys and analog switches. The hum the machine makes this time is deeper, pulling at the place where Hyunjin keeps the things that hurt.

“You’ll go under hard,” Chan warns. “When you wake up, it’ll be loud. Don’t fight it—just follow my voice.”

Hyunjin swallows. “You’re not allowed to be the last thing I lose again.”

Chan’s eyes flash. Something like a smile ghosts over his mouth, raw and brief. “I won’t be.”

The room tightens into silence. Chan’s hand finds Hyunjin’s, warm, anchoring.

“Ready?”

Hyunjin nods.

The world tips.

—

He lands in heat and smoke and the screaming pop of shattering glass.

The studio is burning.

Red curtains thrash like wounded animals. Mirrors fracture and multiply the fire until the room is a kaleidoscope of ruin. The skylight explodes outward with a gunshot crack. Ash drifts down like black snow.

“Hyunjin!”

He turns. Chan is there, sprinting through the hell of it, jacket half on, hair singed, eyes wild. He grabs Hyunjin’s shoulders and shakes him once, not gentle. “We have to move.”

“What about the tapes?” Hyunjin gasps. His voice is a stranger’s—hoarse, smoke-stained, twenty and reckless. “The songs—the notes—”

Chan’s grip tightens. “You’re the only thing I can’t replace.”

The door slams inward. Metal boots. Regulators. The siren keening outside dovetails with the screaming-fire noise into one endless alarm. Someone shouts, “Target acquired—”

Chan shoves a metal chip into Hyunjin’s palm, folding his fingers around it. “Listen to me. If they take you, they won’t just scrub your art—they’ll hollow you out. I won’t let them.”

“Chan—”

A baton arcs and cracks against Chan’s shoulder. He staggers but doesn’t let go. Hyunjin lunges, kicks, a feral, useless strike, and two Regulators crash into a mirror. For a second the studio is a thunderclap of glass and human sound.

Chan’s hand slides to the back of Hyunjin’s neck—grounding, commanding, almost a prayer. “Look at me.”

Hyunjin does.

Chan’s eyes are wet in the firelight. “If I do this, you’ll hate me when you wake up.”

Hyunjin doesn’t understand until he sees the device in Chan’s other hand—a thin arc of steel and glass, humming with forbidden light. Memory shears, they called them in rumor, in cautionary whispers. Blades that cut what the law wanted gone.

“Don’t,” Hyunjin breathes, choking. “Don’t you dare—”

Chan leans in and kisses him.

It’s not pretty. It’s not sweet. It tastes like ash and terror and every promise they never got to make. Hyunjin claws at Chan’s jacket and Chan makes a broken sound against his mouth, the kind that lives where a person prays.

“I love you,” Chan says into the kiss, almost a sob. “And I’m a coward if I let them empty you. So I’ll be the one to take this from you. I’ll hold it until you’re safe enough to want it back.”

“No—” Hyunjin pleads, but the device sings, and the world starts unspooling.

The last thing he sees is Chan’s face, raw with devotion and ruin.

Then white.

Then nothing.

—

“Hyunjin.”

A voice threads through the dark and drags him up.

He gasps. Sits bolt upright. The safehouse rushes back in layers—metal walls, the console’s dying hum, the ceiling lights throbbing an angry red. The air tastes like static.

“Chan?” His own name feels too big in his mouth. His chest is full of a thousand mirrors and every one of them is a life he remembers now—a boy laughing under a skylight, a song scrawled in Chan’s messy hand, the shape their hands made when they fit together.

“Chan.” Louder. This time, the room answers.

Not with a voice.

With silence.

The chair beside him is empty. The console is still warm. The comms unit on the desk is blinking green, a tiny pulse like a heartbeat. The floor vibrates once—heavy—like a door shutting somewhere far below.

Hyunjin rips the headband off and staggers to his feet. His legs wobble; the world is crowded, bright, too loud with the past. He breathes. He tries to do what Chan taught him without knowing he’d been teaching it—count four in, hold, four out.

Oil. He smells oil.

He follows it to the bay door. It’s half-open, wind knifing through. Outside, the alley is a throat of shadow. The motorcycle spot is empty. On the concrete, a single black glove lies palm-up, abandoned, fingers curled like a question.

A sound cracks the air—distant engines, then the clipped march of boots on metal somewhere above. They’re close.

Hyunjin picks up the glove. His skin tingles where the leather meets his palm. His mind is a chorus: He kissed me. He cut me. He saved me. He left. Every truth is true at once and none of them hurt less.

Something small and hard clinks against the floor when he moves the glove. He crouches. A data bead—small, facet-cut, familiar in the way grief is familiar. A note chip.

He slots it into the desk console with hands that haven’t stopped shaking.

For a second, nothing. Then a single line of text blooms on the cracked display.

If you can read this, you remember.
Stay. Or run.
I’ll draw them away.
Find the light, Jinnie. —C

The console flashes again, once, twice, then dies as the backup power cuts. The alarms morph into a steady, hungry wail. The building shudders.

Hyunjin stares at the door, at the empty bike space, at the city’s red pulse bleeding into the alley.

He knows how to hide. He knows how to freeze. He’s done both for years.

But the studio is back in his bones. The kiss lives on his mouth. The boy he was is breathing beside the man he is, whispering the same thing they always whispered under skylight:

Run with me.

Hyunjin tucks the glove into his jacket, pockets the bead, and looks at the ladder that climbs to the roof. The sirens are closer now—heat in sound. He presses his hand against the door, feels the hum of the world on the other side.

“Find the light,” he says aloud, to prove he can.

Then he moves.

Chapter Text

The ladder rattles under Hyunjin’s hands as the safehouse howls itself apart below him. Every rung is a count—one, two, three—breath held, breath released—until the hatch bangs against his shoulder and cold night air slaps his face.

The roof is a rectangle of gravel and rusted vents under a bruised sky. Downtown’s neon veins pulse in the distance—arteries of light threading an iron heart. Sirens braid through the streets. A drone’s search-beam combs the neighboring block like a giant, clinical hand.

Hyunjin rolls onto the roof and stays low.

“Find the light,” he murmurs, because saying it out loud keeps the panic from blooming too wide. He scans—edges, angles, leaps. The way out is always lines. He draws them the way he used to draw choreography on the studio floor: a path tucked inside danger that only makes sense once you’re in motion.

Boots hammer on metal inside the stairwell.

Move.

He sprints across the roof, vaults a vent, and clears the gap to the next building by a whisper. The drop is a mouth waiting to swallow missteps. His knee jars on the landing; he tucks, rolls, bites down on a hiss, and comes up in a crouch.

The city’s propaganda screens flare awake as if alerted to his pulse: DREAMING IS TREASON. COMPLIANCE IS PEACE.

He laughs once, breathless and mean.

A drone’s whine rises. The roof floods with hard, sterile light.

Hyunjin bolts.

He takes the next gap shorter, the next longer. The beam skates his shoulder, hot as a hand. He cuts right—footing slick on tar—and drops to a fire escape that groans under his weight. Metal screams. He takes the rungs three at a time, then swings under the last and lets go, catching a rusted clothesline pole with his palms. The shock cracks up his arms. He swings his legs, kicks through a window grate, and rolls into a half-furnished storage room that smells like mothballs and a life paused mid-sentence.

A couple on a flickering TV argues in canned laughter. A cat statue stares with golden eyes from a shelf.

Hyunjin sprints through, shoulder-checks the door, and bursts into a dim hallway lined with peeling paint. He’s two flights down and three turns over when his mind does the thing it keeps doing now that he remembers—

—drops him somewhere else.

**

Another roof. Another night. Wind gentler then, the kind that kissed instead of cut. Their bodies laid out shoulder to shoulder on tarpaper still warm from the day, the city’s fake stars projected in squares like someone had tiled the sky.

“You’d never catch me,” Chan had said, grinning sideways, one arm flung over his eyes like the constellations were too much.

“I wouldn’t need to,” Hyunjin had replied, rolling to face him, cheek on his bicep. “You always slow down to make sure I’m there.”

Chan’s mouth had twitched. “That obvious?”

“Only to me.”

They’d made a pact then, fingers laced—if one runs, the other follows. Not because chasing was romantic, but because loneliness was a poor plan.

**

The hall tilts back into being; his feet keep moving because they’ve memorized survival longer than his mind has. He shoulders open a service door and falls into a stairwell smelling of bleach and old panic. Down is sirens; up is thin air and another jump that might not forgive him.

Up, then.

He climbs three flights in two and erupts onto a narrower roof studded with satellite dishes like chrome mushrooms. The drone’s beam slices across the building behind him; two more lights strobe to his left. They’re triangulating.

Hyunjin drops, belly-flat, and army-crawls under the dish array until the roof’s edge kisses his ribs. He peeks.

Below, an alley swallows the building’s shadow. A heat-bloom lingers on the asphalt where a bike idled recently—oil atomized into scent when tires spun. He can’t see anything else from here—no movement, no flash of jacket. But he feels the decision Chan made like a wire humming in his bones: I’ll draw them away.

“You never run straight,” Hyunjin mutters. “You slant.”

He angles himself to a low gap to the right. Two roofs over, the skyline dips toward the industrial sector where neon gives up and steel takes over—stacks, silos, dark ribs of cranes against sickly sky. If Chan wanted to disappear a motorbike, he’d drown it in that skeleton.

Hyunjin stands. The drones swing back and he sprints, not for the nearest edge but one roof farther and off-axis, breaking their predictive line. The beam misses by a breath. He lands, stumbles, catches himself on a low wall. Pain sparks his palm; skin splits. He tastes copper when he puts that hand in his mouth and keeps moving.

“Target crossing Sector 8B rooftops,” a voice barks from somewhere above in clipped, metallic cadence. “Heat signature unstable.”

“You’re unstable,” Hyunjin mutters, because pettiness is fuel too.

He hits a final roof and there’s nowhere left to go but down. He throws himself at a rusted ladder on the backside, boots banging rungs, and drops the last six when the ladder gives up and peels away from the wall. He hits gravel in a cough of dust behind a chain-link fence that’s more hole than metal.

The world narrows to the industrial yard: rows of freight containers, a concrete loading bay, skeletal cranes frozen in prehistoric poses. The air tastes like old fire and cold iron. It’s darker here, shadows eating light like something starved.

Hyunjin crouches and lets his breathing find him. The drone’s whine circles wider—confused now, or recalibrating. He takes the window.

Tracks score the gravel near the fence—thin, staggered chevrons he recognizes down to their missing lug: Chan’s back tire, worn on the right from the way he brakes hard into slides. The pattern curves into the yard, straightens, then vanishes where the gravel gives way to poured concrete.

Not a vanishing. A choice.

Hyunjin pads along the arc, palms open to the dark like it might tell him something if he asks nicely. Under one of the cranes, half-buried in pebbles, a small metal cylinder catches the meager light. He kneels. It’s an empty fuel canister, stamped with a tiny sigil near the base—a circle notched with a triangle. Rebel mark. Not a common one.

“Bait,” he says to the night. “Or breadcrumbs.”

He turns the canister in his hands. Oil kisses his thumb. He presses that thumb to his tongue and tastes the bitter metallic ghost of the brand Chan uses when he can’t get black-market pellets—scavenged, dirty, but reliable. Not new. Not old, either. Recent enough to still live on the air.

You’re close.

“You left me a note,” Hyunjin says, because his voice keeps him visible to himself. “Now a trail.”

He tucks the canister under his arm and moves deeper, past a stack of containers tagged with decal numbers and phrases that someone once believed were warnings and now are just rumors stuck to metal. The hum of the city fades to a pulse, replaced by a lower, older sound—water moving somewhere under concrete.

A spotlight slashes across the yard. Hyunjin throws himself into the shadow cast by a container and presses flat, heartbeat punching his throat. The light pauses, licks the corner of his cover, then slides on. He times his breathing with its sweep—inhale on pass, exhale on retreat—until it moves on.

His mind flicks, unasked, to a different metal box.

**

They’d shared a shipping container once when the collective had to bounce between spaces. It had smelled like rust and sweat and cumin from someone’s dinner. Chan had strung fairy lights from a bent shelf bracket and called it a cathedral.

“What would you do if we couldn’t dance anymore?” Hyunjin had asked into the dark, voice barely more than a thought.

Chan’s answer had been a soft snort. “Teach our feet to call it something else.”

Hyunjin had rolled closer until their knees bumped. “You always make it sound simple.”

“It isn’t,” Chan had said, and Hyunjin had felt the smile in the word. “But we’ll do it anyway.”

**

A metallic snap jerks him back. He freezes, listening. Not a drone. Not boots. Something smaller, nearer. A rat, maybe. Or—

A whisper of fabric.

He turns slowly, flattening his palm over the container’s cold flank until the heat in it answers the heat in him and he becomes part of the wall. A shape detaches from deeper shadow across the aisle—tall, lean, moving with the economy of someone who measures risk in fine increments.

“Hyunjin,” the shape breathes.

His name in that voice finds him like a hand closing around a dropped lifeline.

He doesn’t step out. Not yet. His body hums with the lesson packed into the last twenty-four hours: love doesn’t make you safe; it makes you brave. Brave and careful are not opposites.

“Show me,” he whispers.

A gloved hand emerges first, open, empty. Then the face, haloed by the faintest spill of light. Chan. Tired, pupils blown wide in the dark, a smear of soot on his cheek like war paint gone wrong. His jacket is unzipped, one glove missing—the partner to the one in Hyunjin’s pocket. The sight hits so hard Hyunjin sways toward it.

“I led them south,” Chan says, quiet, urgency shaped like calm. “You’ve got a window if we move now.”

“You left the note chip.” Hyunjin’s voice is steadier than he feels. “And the canister.”

“I needed you to choose,” Chan says. “Not just follow.”

Hyunjin steps out of the shadow. The distance between them is four strides and an ocean. He closes two and stops, because there are too many things to say and not enough sky.

“They’ll call in a sweep,” Chan says. “Three blocks at least.”

“You always slow down to make sure I’m there,” Hyunjin says, the words a rope he throws across the gap.

Chan’s mouth lifts—wrecked and relieved. “Only to you.”

It should be a kiss, the kind to stitch a ripped seam. It almost is. They lean in, and even the night holds its breath.

A sharp, distant crack fractures the moment—gunshot or drone impact, hard to tell. The cranes vibrate like tuning forks. Somewhere close, a floodlight thunders to life, drowning the yard in white.

Chan’s hand finds Hyunjin’s wrist. “Run with me.”

Hyunjin’s fingers close around Chan’s without thinking, like muscle memory older than fear.

“Always,” he says.

They move—low, fast, in tandem—cutting through the ribs of metal toward a sliver of dark between containers where the city’s pulse hides. Behind them, the light swings, slow at first, then hungry.

Hyunjin doesn’t look back.

The pact rides in his chest like a second heart. The memory of a kiss burns steady, no longer a wound but a compass. Ahead, somewhere, is a road and a bike and a chance.

He squeezes Chan’s hand once, hard enough to mean it.

“I’m not losing you again,” he says, to the night, to the man, to himself.

“Then don’t,” Chan answers, and their footsteps stitch a new line across the city as the sirens rise.

Chapter Text

The city behind them is all teeth.
Sirens gnash at the edges of the dark, chewing on the space they’ve just left. Floodlights sweep the skeleton cranes and freighters, too slow to catch the two shadows darting through the narrow vein of alley.

Chan’s grip is tight on Hyunjin’s wrist—not to pull, but to tether. Their strides fall into sync like they’ve always known each other’s rhythms. The sounds of pursuit fade one block at a time, until the only thing left is the blood-roar in Hyunjin’s ears and the rasp of Chan’s breathing beside him.

They cut through a gate sagging on broken hinges, past an abandoned warehouse where windows gape like missing teeth. The air changes—colder, salt-threaded—and Hyunjin realizes they’re heading toward the docks.

“Where are we—” he starts, but Chan hushes him with a quick glance.

A patrol drone hums somewhere overhead, its light fingerpainting the alley walls. Chan pulls him under a warped metal awning, pressing them both flat against the rust. His chest bumps Hyunjin’s with each breath.

Hyunjin tries to ignore the heat where their bodies meet, but it’s impossible. Memories crowd in—Chan’s hand on the back of his neck, the kiss before the white-out, the feeling of safety and loss tangled into one.

The drone drifts past. They wait five more heartbeats before Chan moves.

⸻

The dock smells like rope, oil, and cold water. Cranes loom overhead, frozen mid-reach, as if unsure whether to let go of their cargo. Chan leads him to a narrow slit between stacked shipping containers, where a tarp half-covers a small skiff moored to the rotting pier.

Hyunjin blinks. “You had a boat this whole time?”

“It’s not mine,” Chan says, hopping down onto the deck. “And it’s barely a boat. But it floats, and it’s quiet.”

Hyunjin hesitates at the edge. “Why not the bike?”

“They’ll be looking for it. This…” He pats the side of the skiff, then offers a hand. “…this they won’t expect.”

Hyunjin takes the hand. It’s warm, calloused, familiar in a way that aches.

⸻

The skiff noses away from the dock with a sigh of rope and wood. Chan steers with steady hands, gaze fixed on the black ribbon of water ahead. The city shrinks behind them, its lights bruised and distorted in the waves.

For a while, neither of them speak. The rhythm of the water lapping against the hull fills the space between questions they’re not ready to ask.

When Chan finally glances at him, his eyes catch the dim glow from the city like they’re holding stolen light. “You remembered everything.”

Hyunjin swallows. “Enough.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s enough to know you lied to me.” The words are sharper than he means them to be, but they land between them like a dropped blade.

Chan doesn’t flinch. “I didn’t lie. I just… took the truth away until it was safe to hold again.”

“You didn’t get to decide that for me.”

Chan’s hands tighten on the tiller. For a moment, the only sound is the groan of the boat. Then, quieter: “If it meant keeping you alive, I’d decide it every time.”

Hyunjin looks away, but the dark water offers no refuge—only the reflection of two figures bound together by something neither of them can name without bleeding.

⸻

The skiff glides into a shadowed inlet, half-hidden by leaning pilings and overgrown reeds. Chan kills the motor. The night settles around them, thick and still, except for the water’s whisper against the hull.

“This is where we stop for now,” Chan says. “There’s a safehouse about fifteen minutes inland. Not mine—someone who owes me.”

Hyunjin arches a brow. “And will they be happy you brought trouble to their door?”

Chan’s mouth tilts wryly. “They’ll be happy you’re still breathing.”

It should be comforting. It isn’t.

Hyunjin leans back against the side of the boat, the gentle sway rocking him in time with a pulse he doesn’t trust. “What happens after the safehouse?”

“Depends,” Chan says. “On whether you still want the rest of the truth.”

The air between them hums with everything that could mean. Hyunjin thinks of the pact under false stars, the way Chan’s hand feels locked with his, the burn of that last kiss. He doesn’t know yet if he wants the truth—or just him.

For now, it’s the same thing.

⸻

A faint splash breaks the moment. Chan’s head snaps toward the water.

“What is it?” Hyunjin whispers.

Chan’s voice is tight. “We’re not the only ones out here.”

Before Hyunjin can ask, another splash echoes—closer this time. In the distance, faint as a breath, a red pinpoint blinks twice on the water’s surface, then disappears.

Chan reaches for the concealed compartment under the seat, pulling out a small waterproof case. “Get ready to move,” he says.

“Back to the dock?”

“No,” Chan says, meeting his eyes. “Forward.”

The motor coughs to life, startling the night. The skiff surges ahead, cutting a path into the dark, and the red light reappears—this time moving.

Hyunjin feels it in his bones: the chase isn’t over.
It never was.

Chapter Text

The skiff cuts through the water like a heartbeat.
Every ripple glows faintly under the moonless sky, fractured silver in a sea of black. Behind them, the city shrinks into a smear of bruised neon, while ahead, the water stretches wide and hungry.

Hyunjin can’t take his eyes off the blinking red light, moving across the waves like it knows exactly where they are.

“It’s tracking us,” he says, voice low.

Chan doesn’t look up from the tiller. “I know.”

“Then why aren’t we—”

“I’m waiting for it to make the first move.”

Hyunjin stares. “That’s insane.”

Chan’s grip tightens on the tiller, knuckles pale. “It’s the only way to know if it’s a drone, or if someone’s piloting it.”

The red blink pauses, winks once, then twice, before sliding closer across the water. Hyunjin’s skin prickles. It’s not random—it’s a signal.

“Someone’s piloting it,” Hyunjin murmurs.

“Yeah,” Chan breathes. “And someone who knows old codes.”

Hyunjin looks at him sharply. “You mean—?”

Chan nods. “Rebel.”

⸻

The red light disappears beneath the waterline. For a heartbeat, the night holds its breath. Then, a second skiff glides out from behind a half-sunken cargo barge, silent except for the faint lap of waves. A hooded figure stands at its prow, lantern in hand.

Chan exhales like he’s been waiting years for this. “Minho.”

The name slams into Hyunjin with strange weight. His stomach flips. The hood falls back, and there he is—Lee Minho, face sharper than Hyunjin remembers from fractured flashbacks, eyes gleaming like knives and mirrors both.

“You’re late,” Minho calls across the water.

“Didn’t know we had an appointment,” Chan calls back, steering closer.

“You always do,” Minho answers.

⸻

The boats drift side by side until Minho hooks them together with a practiced flick of rope. Up close, Hyunjin can see him more clearly—scar along his jawline, hair damp from mist, a smile that looks like it’s been sharpened to a point.

And—most jarring of all—Hyunjin’s chest aches because his body knows him before his mind does. A friend. A brother. A ghost.

“You’ve got him awake again,” Minho says, eyes flicking over Hyunjin with a mix of relief and wariness.

Hyunjin swallows. “You know me.”

Minho studies him. “Knew you. Past tense. The question is—do you know yourself?”

Hyunjin’s fists curl. “Enough.”

Minho hums, clearly unconvinced, then turns to Chan. “You didn’t tell me you were going to break the seal this soon.”

“I didn’t plan to,” Chan says. “We were forced.”

“By Enforcers?”

Chan shakes his head. “By memory itself.”

Minho sighs, mutters something sharp under his breath in a code Hyunjin almost remembers but not quite. Then he lifts his gaze back to them, sharp as glass.

“They’ll come harder now,” Minho warns. “You’ve poked the hive. And they’re not going to let their precious runaway Dreamer slip twice.”

Hyunjin’s stomach twists. “Runaway Dreamer?”

Both Chan and Minho glance at him, then at each other. A silent exchange. A conversation Hyunjin isn’t a part of.

Hyunjin’s voice rises, ragged. “What aren’t you telling me?”

The silence after is heavy enough to sink them both. Finally, Chan answers, soft and guilty:

“You weren’t just part of the Collective, Jinnie. You were the one they wanted most.”

⸻

The words hit harder than the sirens ever could. Hyunjin staggers back a step, chest heaving. Memories fracture and reform—his own body in a spotlight, a crowd chanting, a hand on his shoulder telling him he was chosen.

“What did I do?” Hyunjin whispers.

Minho’s eyes are steady, unreadable. “You dreamed too loud.”

⸻

The skiff rocks as another floodlight sweeps the water behind them. Minho curses. “No time for therapy. Safehouse is two miles inland. We move now.”

Chan reaches for Hyunjin, but Hyunjin steps back, still trembling. The revelation burns, but the choice is immediate: stay on this boat and be swallowed by the light, or follow the only people who still say his name like it matters.

He looks at Chan, then at Minho, then at the horizon where the water bleeds red from the city’s glare.

His voice comes out hoarse but certain.
“Then let’s run.”

Chapter Text

The skiff noses into reeds like an arrow lost in tall grass. Minho cuts the lantern and hops onto the mudbank without a sound. He moves like water over rocks—every step efficient, quiet.

“Stay close,” he says, jerking his chin toward the dark forest ahead. “If you fall behind, you’re done.”

Hyunjin bristles at the bluntness, but Chan touches his elbow lightly, a silent trust him. Hyunjin obeys—though the weight of Minho’s words press sharp against his chest.

⸻

The March Inland

The forest is all shadows and damp earth. Branches snag at Hyunjin’s jacket as if the trees want to keep him. Each step cracks twigs that sound too loud.

Chan walks at his side, close enough that their shoulders brush when the trail narrows. His presence steadies Hyunjin more than he wants to admit.

Behind them, the water whispers, carrying the hum of distant engines. The Enforcers are still hunting.

“Two miles?” Hyunjin pants.

“Less now,” Minho answers without turning. “But don’t think distance means safety. They’ll sweep every sector by morning.”

Hyunjin swallows. “And then?”

“Then,” Minho says, voice flat, “we find out if you’re worth the risk we’ve taken.”

⸻

The Safehouse

The “safehouse” is nothing more than a half-collapsed train depot hidden under ivy and silence. Old rails twist like broken bones across the floor. The roof is torn, letting in strips of red-tinged sky.

But there’s power here—a faint hum in the walls. Lights flicker to life when Minho punches a code into a hidden panel, illuminating cots, supplies, and a map table littered with pins and notes.

Hyunjin stares. “This is… alive.”

Minho smirks. “Welcome to what’s left of the Collective.”

The word shivers through Hyunjin’s bones. Collective. He remembers a warm room, dancers moving like light, voices chanting in unison. He remembers Minho’s laugh—crooked, rare. He remembers Chan’s hand steadying his spine during spins.

His knees almost give.

Chan is there instantly, catching his elbow. “Easy.”

Hyunjin shakes his head. “It’s coming back. Too fast.”

“Let it,” Chan murmurs, voice soft but urgent. “Don’t fight it.”

⸻

Fractured Memory

The depot dissolves.

He’s back in the Studio—no, not the Studio. A bigger space. A stage. Rows of people watching him move. Their eyes wide, their breaths held.

“Hyunjin,” someone had whispered. Not Chan. Minho. “You don’t even know what you are, do you?”

He’d been sweating, chest heaving from dance. Music echoed through his veins, bigger than him, brighter than him. And the crowd had leaned forward, desperate, hungry.

“You make people remember themselves,” Minho had said. “That’s why they’ll never stop hunting you.”

The memory collapses.

⸻

Hyunjin gasps awake on the cot, Chan crouched beside him, Minho leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.

“You fainted,” Chan says gently.

Hyunjin wipes his damp face. “I remembered. Performing. People watching me. Minho saying—” He breaks off, staring at the man across from him.

Minho lifts a brow. “That you were dangerous?”

Hyunjin’s throat works. “…That I made people remember themselves.”

Minho doesn’t deny it.

⸻

The Confrontation

Hyunjin sits up, trembling. “That’s why they wanted me?”

Minho’s voice is sharp, precise. “You weren’t just part of the Collective, Hyunjin. You were its symbol. Its weapon. The boy who made others dream.”

The words shake the air. Hyunjin flinches like they’re knives.

“I’m not a weapon,” he says, voice breaking.

“No,” Chan says firmly, before Minho can. “You’re not. You’re—” His voice falters. “You’re you. That’s what matters.”

Hyunjin looks between them—the rebel who calls him dangerous, the man who stole his memories to keep him alive. Both truths pull at him until he feels like he’s tearing in half.

“I didn’t ask for any of this,” he whispers.

Minho pushes off the wall. “No one ever does. But whether you want it or not, they’ll keep coming until you decide what you are.”

⸻

The Warning

The depot lights flicker once, twice, then die. The hum of power cuts.

Minho curses, moving to the panel. “They’ve found the grid.”

Chan’s hand closes around Hyunjin’s. His eyes are fire in the dark.

“They’re here.”

Outside, the night fills with sirens.

Chapter Text

The depot is silent except for the ragged thrum of their breathing.
The lights are gone. The hum of power that made the place feel alive is dead.

And then the sirens begin.

Low. Far. Rising.
A predator’s song, circling closer with every echo.

“Positions,” Minho snaps, already pulling a knife from his belt and sliding into the shadows.

Chan is calmer, voice steady, eyes darting to every broken window. “Jinnie. Stay low. If they breach—”

“They already have,” Hyunjin interrupts, throat tight. He doesn’t know how he knows. He just feels it—the way the air hums, charged and restless, like the moment before a storm breaks.

Chan looks at him sharply. Minho notices too, but doesn’t comment.

The first Enforcer crashes through the southern door, metal boots on old rails, faceless mask glowing pale blue in the dark. Behind him, two more.

“Targets located,” the helmet intones, voice stripped of humanity.

Chan moves first—fast, efficient. His fist arcs, landing a strike that cracks the first Enforcer’s visor. The man stumbles back, but another surges forward with a shock baton. Chan ducks, sweeps a leg, flips him into the rails. Electricity sparks against rust.

Minho darts in from the side like a shadow turned sharp, his knife flashing. He disables one before the blade even glints red, fluid and merciless.

Hyunjin freezes. His pulse is a drumbeat, his breath a shallow ache. He’s not trained. He doesn’t have weapons. He doesn’t belong here—

But the world shifts.

The air itself bends. The sirens outside warp, stretch, become music in his ears. The Enforcers’ movements slow, as though the rails beneath their feet drag at them. Hyunjin’s vision blurs red—the color of the sky in his dreams.

He doesn’t think. He remembers.

The stage. The crowd leaning forward. The way his body had pulled them into rhythm without touch, without words.

Hyunjin exhales—and the depot listens.

⸻

The nearest Enforcer stutters mid-strike, his baton falling from his grip with a metallic clang. His helmet flickers, glitching between blue and white, as if his body can’t remember what it’s supposed to do.

Chan sees it. So does Minho.

“Hyunjin,” Chan calls, eyes blazing, “don’t fight it—use it.”

Hyunjin raises his trembling hands. The air tightens. The remaining Enforcers falter, their steps uneven. One drops to his knees, clutching his head. Another slams into a pillar, mask sparking.

“I—I don’t know how—” Hyunjin gasps.

“Yes, you do!” Chan’s voice cuts through, sharp as a lifeline. “You’ve always known.”

Minho drives his knife into the shoulder joint of the last standing Enforcer, twisting until the man collapses. “He’s not wrong,” Minho grits out. “You don’t control it. You are it.”

Hyunjin’s chest heaves. He can feel it—the hum in the air, the way memory itself is bending, breaking. The Enforcers on the floor are whimpering, their helmets glitching with fragments of sound: cries, laughter, words not their own.

Hyunjin chokes on a sob. “I’m hurting them—”

Chan grabs his wrist, grounding him. “You’re waking them.”

⸻

The depot falls quiet. The Enforcers lie sprawled across the rails, unconscious but breathing, masks sparking faintly.

Hyunjin collapses to his knees. The weight of what just happened slams into him. His gift—his curse—alive again in his blood.

He stares at his hands, trembling. “I don’t want this,” he whispers.

Chan kneels beside him, cupping the back of his neck. “I know.”

Minho wipes his blade clean on a rag, voice hard but not unkind. “Want it or not, you have it. And now we all know how much louder you can sing than before.”

Hyunjin lifts his gaze. Both of them are watching him—Chan with devotion, Minho with calculation.

Outside, the sirens fade into distance, retreating for now. But Hyunjin knows it’s only temporary.

Because for the first time since the erasure, he is awake.
And the world will never stop chasing a Dreamer who knows who he is.

Chapter Text

Outside, the sirens fade into distance, retreating for now. But Hyunjin knows it’s only temporary.
Because for the first time since the erasure, he is awake.
And the world will never stop chasing a Dreamer who knows who he is.

⸻

The Flight

They run until the forest swallows the sound of pursuit. Branches whip their arms, thorns scrape skin, but none of it matters—not compared to the raw fire still buzzing under Hyunjin’s skin.

They stumble into a clearing by a stream, lungs clawing for air. Chan bends forward, hands braced on his knees, sweat streaking his face. Minho checks their perimeter with a predator’s calm, knife still wet in his hand.

Hyunjin collapses onto the damp earth, gasping. Every muscle trembles, but it isn’t from running. It’s from what he did back there. What he is.

His mind plays it on a loop—the Enforcers stopping mid-charge, lights bursting, the air itself obeying him.

Not a dream. Not a memory.
Real.

⸻

Aftermath

“You held them,” Chan says finally, voice rough. He’s watching Hyunjin with a gaze too sharp, too full of things Hyunjin can’t name. “You didn’t just remember—you controlled it.”

“I didn’t control anything,” Hyunjin snaps, still panting. “It—it just happened. I wanted them to stop and—” He breaks off, pressing his hands to his temples. “God, it felt like I was burning.”

Minho crouches nearby, eyes glinting in the shadows. “Power always burns the first time. The question is—can you stand the fire long enough to wield it?”

Hyunjin glares at him. “You make it sound like I asked for this.”

“You didn’t.” Minho shrugs, sheathing his knife. “But it asked for you.”

⸻

A Fragile Moment

Chan kneels in front of him, ignoring Minho’s barbs. His hands hover like he wants to touch, but doesn’t know where it’s safe. “Hyunjin… look at me.”

Hyunjin does. And the world narrows to Chan’s eyes—dark, steady, pleading.

“You’re not alone in this. You never were. I took your memories, yes, but I never let go of you. Not once.” His voice cracks. “And I won’t now.”

Something inside Hyunjin fractures. Not in pain, but in release. The fury, the fear, the weight of being a weapon—all of it collides with the memory of a kiss in firelight and the boy who never let him fall.

Hyunjin lunges forward before he can think, fists gripping Chan’s jacket, forehead pressing to his shoulder. His voice comes out ragged. “Don’t leave me again.”

Chan freezes only a heartbeat before wrapping him tight, arms iron around his shaking frame. “Never,” he murmurs. “Not again. Not ever.”

For the first time since waking, Hyunjin breathes without choking.

⸻

Minho’s Warning

The moment can’t last. It never does.

Minho clears his throat. “Touching reunion, really. But we’re bleeding time.”

Hyunjin pulls back reluctantly, cheeks hot. Chan steadies him with a hand at his back, unbothered by Minho’s tone.

“What now?” Chan asks.

Minho’s gaze sharpens. “Now? You teach him to control it before it kills us all. Or before they cage him again.”

Hyunjin swallows hard. “And if I can’t?”

“Then,” Minho says, eyes like steel, “the Collective dies with you.”

The words slice the night.

Hyunjin shivers, the fire still humming under his skin. He doesn’t know if it’s fear or resolve. Maybe both.

But he lifts his chin anyway, meeting Minho’s stare, then Chan’s. “Then teach me. Because I’m not running blind anymore.”

Chapter Text

The forest safehouse isn’t much—just the gutted remains of an old ranger’s outpost. Moss curls over the stone walls, the roof patched with mismatched tin sheets that creak when the wind presses down.

It smells like damp wood and old smoke. To Hyunjin, it smells like a waiting room.

Minho drops his pack by the hearth and lights a match. The flame flares, then steadies, and the tiny room fills with dim orange glow. “We start now.”

Hyunjin blinks, still raw from the night’s fight. “Now? I haven’t even—”

“Exactly,” Minho cuts in. “The longer you sit on it, the wilder it gets. You want control? You bleed for it today.”

Chan’s hand lifts, placating. “Minho—he barely knows what happened out there.”

Minho’s gaze sharpens. “And the Enforcers barely missed killing us. You want him alive? You don’t coddle him.”

Hyunjin stands between them, torn in half. His heart still pounds with the memory of lights shattering under his will, the weight of stopping soldiers with nothing but thought. His body aches, but not as much as the fear that he’ll lose control again.

He swallows. “Fine. What do I do?”

⸻

The Test

Minho drags a cracked chair into the center of the room. He sets a broken glass bottle on top, its jagged edge catching the firelight.

“Focus on it,” he orders. “Not with your eyes. With whatever you used back in the depot.”

Hyunjin stares at the glass. His chest tightens. He remembers the way it felt—a flood, a fire, a scream that wasn’t his. He lifts his hand. Nothing happens.

Minho’s mouth curves in a humorless smile. “Good. You’re failing properly.”

Hyunjin bristles. “I’m trying.”

“No,” Minho says, circling him like a wolf. “You’re thinking. Thinking is the cage. What you are doesn’t think. It remembers.”

Chan steps forward, jaw tight. “Minho—”

But Hyunjin raises a hand to stop him. His pride burns hotter than his fear. “No. Let him.”

⸻

Breaking Point

Minutes stretch. Sweat beads on Hyunjin’s temple. He fixes his gaze on the glass, tries to imagine it cracking, shattering, moving. Nothing.

Frustration builds, sharp and bitter. His hands shake. His breath comes too fast.

“You see?” Minho says quietly. “He’s scared of himself.”

Hyunjin’s head snaps up. “I am not—”

“Then prove it.”

The words slam into him harder than any Enforcer. Something splits open inside Hyunjin—rage, grief, fire all at once. He doesn’t think. He remembers—Chan’s kiss in the firelight, the Collective cheering his name, the Enforcers calling him a target.

The glass bottle explodes.

Shards scatter like falling stars. The chair legs snap and splinter, wood groaning under invisible pressure. The air hums with static, lights flickering.

Hyunjin collapses to his knees, chest heaving, sweat dripping down his face.

⸻

Aftermath

“Better,” Minho says, voice flat but eyes alive with something dangerous. “Uncontrolled. But better.”

Chan is at Hyunjin’s side in seconds, hand steadying his shoulder. “You pushed him too hard—”

Hyunjin grabs his wrist, shaking his head. “No. He’s right. I… I needed that.” His voice cracks. “It’s inside me whether I want it or not.”

Chan searches his face, torn. “You don’t have to let it consume you.”

“I don’t have a choice,” Hyunjin whispers. “The world already decided what I am.”

Minho’s voice cuts in like a blade. “Then the only choice left is whether you master it… or let it master you.”

⸻

Quiet Resolve

Later, when Minho pretends to sleep by the dying fire, Chan sits beside Hyunjin’s cot. The room smells of ash and rain leaking through the roof.

“You don’t have to carry this alone,” Chan murmurs.

Hyunjin’s eyes, heavy-lidded with exhaustion, still glow faintly with the fire that refuses to leave. “I never was alone. Even when you made me forget… I think some part of me still remembered you.”

Chan swallows hard. His hand hovers, then brushes a damp strand of hair from Hyunjin’s forehead. “Then I’ll stay. Through all of it. Fire and all.”

Hyunjin’s chest loosens, just enough to let him sleep.

And for the first time since waking, his dreams don’t chase him—
they follow.

Chapter Text

The morning arrives in gray, dripping silence. Rain falls in a steady hush through holes in the outpost roof, each drop plinking into a tin cup Minho set out to catch water. Hyunjin sits cross-legged on the damp floor, staring at his hands.

They still feel hot.
Not fever-hot, not physical. Something deeper. Like fire smoldering under his skin.

“Again,” Minho says, tossing a stone across the room. It lands between Hyunjin’s knees.

Hyunjin groans. “You haven’t even let me eat.”

“Eat after,” Minho replies. He leans back against the wall, arms folded. “Unless you’d rather the Enforcers catch you half-trained.”

Hyunjin grits his teeth. “You’re impossible.”

“You’re alive,” Minho says simply. “Now use it.”

⸻

Training: Push and Pull

Hyunjin closes his eyes. Breathes. Tries to remember—not to think, but to remember.

The fire inside him flares. He imagines the stone cracking. He imagines it bending to his will the way the Enforcers had in the depot. For a moment, nothing. Then a faint vibration rattles under his palms.

The stone twitches. Rolls. Stops.

Hyunjin exhales sharply. “That’s it? That’s pathetic.”

“Pathetic is dead weight,” Minho says. “You moved it. That means you can move more. Again.”

Hyunjin glares, but obeys. He pushes harder, reaching deeper. The stone jumps an inch, skittering across the floor. His chest heaves as sweat drips down his neck.

“Better,” Minho says.

Chan, crouched nearby, sets a hand on Hyunjin’s shoulder. “Don’t kill yourself. Control takes time.”

Minho snorts. “Time is the one thing we don’t have.”

⸻

The Slip

Hours pass. The room grows thick with tension—rain outside, sweat inside, the sharp smell of burnt air from each flicker of Hyunjin’s power.

At last, Minho sets a new test: a half-broken metal lantern.

“Shatter it,” he orders.

Hyunjin stares. His hands tremble. The fire inside him roars too loud, too hungry. He reaches out—and the lantern bursts with a sound like gunfire. Shards fly across the room, sparks searing the floorboards.

Chan yanks him back just in time to miss the blast.

“Too far!” Chan snaps, holding Hyunjin against his chest. “You’ll hurt yourself—”

Hyunjin shakes, eyes wide, heart racing. “I didn’t mean to—I couldn’t stop—”

Minho crouches, examining the wreckage. His expression is unreadable. “Good. Now you know the edge.”

Hyunjin slumps in Chan’s arms, breath ragged. “And if I fall over it?”

Minho’s gaze is sharp. “Then you burn everything.”

⸻

The Alarm

That night, the storm clears. The forest hums with insect song. Hyunjin lies on his cot, staring at the roof. Chan sits nearby, sketching lines of escape routes in a tattered notebook. Minho patrols the perimeter.

For a few hours, there is quiet.

Then—
A flash of light between the trees.
A metallic buzz.
The sound of drones.

Chan bolts upright. Minho bursts through the door. “They’ve tracked us. Move!”

Hyunjin scrambles to his feet, pulse hammering. His body is still weak from training, but the fire in his chest surges awake.

⸻

Live Combat

Enforcers crash through the undergrowth, visors glowing. Drones hover overhead, beams slicing the clearing into harsh lines of white.

Chan grabs a broken pipe, Minho pulls his knife, and Hyunjin—Hyunjin freezes.

Not in fear. In clarity.

Because this time, he remembers everything.

The sirens. The fire. The cheers of the Collective. The kiss in the red light. The vow to run.

The power surges like a second heartbeat.

An Enforcer lunges. Hyunjin thrusts out his hand—and the man slams backward, pinned to a tree as if by invisible chains. Another rushes forward; Hyunjin twists, and his weapon wrenches free of his grip, skittering into the dirt.

The drones fire stun-bursts. Hyunjin screams—and the lights inside them flicker, spark, and die, crashing into the mud.

For a moment, the clearing is his. All of it. His will stretched outward like a net. His veins blaze with power.

Then it snaps.

Hyunjin collapses to his knees, gasping, head spinning.

⸻

The Aftermath

Chan is there instantly, shielding him. “Hyunjin—hey, breathe, I’ve got you.”

Minho takes down the last straggler with a slash, then surveys the ruined clearing. Bodies groan. Drones smoke. His mouth tilts in a grim smile.

“Not bad,” Minho says. “Messy. But not bad.”

Hyunjin looks up, eyes burning. “I almost lost it.”

“You didn’t,” Minho counters. “That’s the difference.”

Chan’s hand tightens on his. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

Hyunjin breathes, slow, shaky. He feels the fire still inside him, dangerous and alive. For the first time, he doesn’t want to run from it.

“I won’t,” he says. “Not anymore.”

Chapter Text

The clearing still smokes with ruined drones and downed Enforcers when Minho signals them forward.
“Move. Reinforcements will be here within the hour.”

Hyunjin stumbles after him, legs weak. His body feels like it’s been scraped raw from the inside out. Every nerve hums. Every breath tastes like metal.

Chan stays close, one arm brushing his, steadying without asking. “You did it,” he murmurs. “You held back enough to keep us alive.”

Hyunjin’s laugh is bitter. “You call that control? I felt like I was drowning in fire.”

“You weren’t alone.” Chan’s voice drops. “That’s the difference.”

Hyunjin wants to believe him. But he keeps seeing the soldier pinned to the tree, eyes wild with terror. He keeps hearing the crack of glass, the drone’s dying sparks. He doesn’t know if that was him—or something inside him too dangerous to cage.

⸻

The Run

They press deeper into the forest. Minho leads with predator precision, every turn deliberate, every silence purposeful. The night is alive with sirens in the distance, the search tightening like a noose.

Hyunjin’s pulse spikes whenever floodlights sweep through the trees, but Chan’s hand brushing his wrist keeps him tethered. Each touch is a reminder: he isn’t running blind anymore.

After hours of pushing through mud and roots, Minho finally signals a halt by an old water tower, its rusted frame looming like a skeletal sentinel.

“We’re close,” Minho says.

“Close to what?” Hyunjin asks.

Minho’s smirk is sharp. “The rest of the Collective.”

⸻

Meeting the Others

The safehouse reveals itself not in walls, but in people. Shapes detach from the trees, cloaked, cautious. When the lanterns lift, Hyunjin’s breath catches.

Faces he half-remembers. Faces that tug at buried strings.

Han, grin sharp even in shadow. Seungmin, quiet-eyed, hand steady on his weapon. Changbin, broad and grounded, carrying more supplies than seems possible. Felix, a flicker of warmth like a candle, freckles catching lantern light. And behind them, Lee Know steps forward fully, the commander’s poise unmistakable.

Hyunjin staggers. Memories flicker—voices chanting together, laughter in rehearsal, Felix’s hands clapping rhythm while he danced, Changbin’s deep laugh echoing off studio walls.

“You…” Hyunjin whispers.

Lee Know studies him. “He remembers.”

Felix’s eyes soften. “Not everything. But enough.”

⸻

Tension in the Ranks

The reunion isn’t simple.

“You put him back in play too soon,” Seungmin says flatly to Minho. “He’s unstable.”

“He’s alive,” Minho counters.

“He’s dangerous,” Han adds, gaze flicking to Hyunjin with wary curiosity.

“He’s ours,” Chan snaps, stepping forward before he realizes it. The room stills at his words. Hyunjin feels heat climb his neck.

Lee Know watches them both, unreadable. “Then he’ll prove it.”

⸻

Hyunjin’s Spiral

Later, when the others spread out—preparing weapons, repairing drones, whispering strategies—Hyunjin slips outside. The fire inside him still hums, refusing to dim. He stares at his hands.

Chan finds him leaning against the water tower. His voice is gentle. “Talk to me.”

Hyunjin’s throat works. “You keep saying I’m not alone. But when it happens—when it’s inside me—I can’t feel anything else. Just… fire. Like I’m disappearing into it.”

Chan steps closer, steady. “Then I’ll hold you here. As many times as it takes.”

Hyunjin meets his eyes. For a heartbeat, the world quiets. His chest aches with the weight of everything unsaid—the kiss, the erasure, the vow to never leave.

“I’m scared,” Hyunjin admits.

“I know,” Chan says, voice breaking just enough to be human. “So am I.”

⸻

The New Threat

Before Hyunjin can answer, a horn blares from the treeline. A rebel signal. Urgent.

Minho bursts out of the safehouse. “Enforcers—north flank. They found us.”

The others grab weapons, formation snapping into place with practiced ease.

Lee Know’s eyes land on Hyunjin. “You wanted to prove yourself? Time to fight with us, not just for yourself.”

Hyunjin’s pulse spikes. The fire hums, restless. He looks at Chan—steady, waiting, trusting.

For the first time, Hyunjin doesn’t want to run.

He nods. “Then let’s end this chase.”

The night erupts with sirens again, closer than ever. And for the first time, Hyunjin runs toward them.

Chapter Text

The water tower clearing becomes a war room.
Lanterns throw crooked shadows across the faces gathered—Chan, Minho, Hyunjin, and the others who had stepped out of memory and into flesh.

Lee Know spreads a crumpled map across a crate. His voice is calm, clipped. “They’ll flank from the north and east. We don’t have the numbers to fight head-on. We use the terrain.”

Changbin slams his fist into his palm, grin sharp. “Finally. Been waiting to break something that isn’t a supply crate.”

Han snorts. “And how long before you break yourself?”

“Long enough to drop three of them first,” Changbin fires back.

Seungmin ignores them both, eyes fixed on the map. “If they sweep with drones, we need disruption. Lights, sound—anything to scramble their feeds.”

Felix’s soft voice cuts through the noise. “I can take care of the signals. Give me five minutes and their comms will choke.”

Hyunjin watches them—this strange, familiar chorus. Fragments stir inside him: Changbin’s laugh in a rehearsal, Felix clapping time while he danced, Han’s teasing jabs softened by quiet loyalty. It feels like standing in a song he used to know, words on the tip of his tongue.

Chan notices his faraway look. His hand brushes Hyunjin’s wrist beneath the table, grounding. “You’re not alone in this anymore.”

Hyunjin nods, throat tight. “Then let me fight with you.”

⸻

Preparing the Lines

They scatter to positions.
Changbin hefts a steel beam like it’s a bat. Han rigs makeshift traps with wires and rusted cans. Seungmin scales the water tower to act as eyes above. Felix kneels with a portable console, fingers flying, every keystroke a countdown.

Minho checks his blades, movements precise. “Stay behind cover until the first push,” he tells Hyunjin. “Then you do what you did before—but cleaner.”

Hyunjin bristles. “And if I can’t?”

“Then we die messier,” Minho says, and stalks off.

Chan catches Hyunjin’s gaze. “Don’t listen to his sharp edges. You’ve got this.”

Hyunjin swallows. “I don’t know if I do.”

Chan’s eyes soften. “Then borrow my belief until you find your own.”

⸻

The Battle Begins

The forest trembles with the march of boots. Sirens echo, closer, closer. A floodlight arcs through the trees, slicing across the clearing.

“Positions,” Lee Know commands. His voice is steel.

The Enforcers arrive in formation—black armor, glowing visors, rifles raised. Drones buzz overhead like hornets.

“Now,” Lee Know snaps.

Felix’s device flares. The drones stutter mid-air, beams flickering. Enforcers shout as comms cut into static.

Then chaos erupts.

Changbin charges, swinging the beam in a brutal arc that sends two soldiers sprawling. Han’s traps snap taut, wires yanking rifles out of hands. Seungmin calls down positions from above, voice sharp and steady: “Two left flank—watch your six—”

Minho moves like a shadow, blades flashing. Lee Know holds the line with surgical precision, every strike efficient.

And Chan—Chan is everywhere at once. His pipe clashes against rifles, his voice barking orders, pulling Hyunjin close when fire cuts too near.

⸻

Hyunjin’s Turn

The fire inside Hyunjin surges. He sees an Enforcer raise a rifle toward Chan. Fear floods him—and with it, memory. Red sky. Shattering glass. His body moving in dance.

He thrusts out a hand.

The rifle twists like it’s made of cloth, metal shrieking before it crumples uselessly. The Enforcer stumbles back in shock.

Hyunjin gasps. His chest burns, but he doesn’t stop. He sweeps his arm wide, and two drones drop from the sky, their lights sparking as they crash.

The battlefield freezes for a heartbeat. Everyone stares.

And Hyunjin realizes he isn’t just surviving. He’s fighting.

⸻

Turning the Tide

“Dreamer!” one Enforcer shouts, voice ragged with fear. “Focus fire!”

But fear is already cracking their formation. Hyunjin can see it—their memories straining, surfacing under his will. A man falters mid-step, gasping like he’s reliving something long-buried. Another drops his weapon, trembling.

Hyunjin’s hands shake. “I’m doing this…”

Chan is at his side, fierce pride in his eyes. “Yes. You are.”

Together, they push forward. Chan strikes with iron, Hyunjin with fire, their rhythm syncing like music. For a moment, it feels like the stage again—the Collective not broken, but alive.

⸻

Aftermath

Minutes stretch into eternity, then silence falls. The last drone fizzles in the dirt. The Enforcers retreat, dragging the wounded, their commander shouting orders lost to static.

The rebels stand panting, bruised, bloodied—but alive.

Lee Know exhales. “Not victory. But enough.”

Han grins, wild-eyed. “Enough feels good.”

Felix wipes sweat from his brow, freckles glowing in the lantern light. “We held them.”

Hyunjin sinks to his knees, trembling with exhaustion. The fire inside him still hums, but it doesn’t drown him this time. Chan crouches beside him, hand steady on his back.

“You did more than fight,” Chan murmurs. “You belonged.”

Hyunjin meets his gaze, chest aching, but for once it isn’t from fear.

Because for the first time since waking, he feels not just like a Dreamer—
but part of the Collective again.

Chapter Text

The clearing still reeks of smoke and burnt circuitry.
Bodies—some groaning, some still—dot the forest floor where Enforcers retreated in chaos. Drones smolder in the mud like fallen stars.

The Collective is alive. Barely.

Lee Know wipes his blade on a strip of cloth, voice steady even in exhaustion. “They’ll be back. Stronger.”

Changbin leans against the water tower, grinning through split lips. “Let them. I’ll smash twice as many.”

Han snorts, retying a bandage on his wrist. “You’ll smash yourself first.”

“Better than hiding,” Changbin shoots back.

“Enough.” Lee Know’s tone silences them instantly. His gaze sweeps over the group. “We won tonight. But don’t mistake survival for victory.”

Hyunjin listens from the ground where Chan crouches beside him, steadying his trembling shoulders. His body aches with every breath, but it’s not pain that haunts him. It’s memory—of rifles bending under his will, drones crashing, men sobbing as old lives surfaced behind their eyes.

He did that.
And part of him liked it.

⸻

In the Quiet

Later, when the others tend wounds or strip weapons, Hyunjin slips to the edge of the camp. The forest hums soft, as if it doesn’t know war just scraped its skin.

Chan follows, quiet. He always does.

Hyunjin hugs his knees, staring at his hands. “When I fight… it doesn’t feel like me. It feels like something using me.”

Chan sits close enough their shoulders brush. “Maybe it’s both. You and what’s inside you. But that doesn’t make you a monster.”

Hyunjin’s voice cracks. “Then why did they scream when I touched their minds? Why did they look at me like I was worse than death?”

Chan’s hand closes gently around his wrist. “Because you reminded them they weren’t machines. You gave them back what was stolen. Fear isn’t the same as hatred, Jinnie.”

Hyunjin swallows hard, fighting tears. “And you? Do I scare you?”

Chan’s answer is immediate, firm. “No. You’ve never scared me. You only make me want to fight harder.”

The words root somewhere deep in Hyunjin’s chest, stronger than fire.

⸻

Council of Shadows

Night deepens. The rebels gather in the ruined safehouse to plan. Lantern light flickers over their faces—scarred, tired, but determined.

Lee Know stands at the head, map pinned to the wall. “The Enforcers won’t stop. The Dreamer’s awake. Word will spread fast. We need to choose: scatter, or strike.”

“Scatter?” Changbin growls. “Coward’s move.”

Han fiddles with a bit of wire. “Striking means suicide unless we know where to hit.”

Seungmin’s voice cuts in, calm and sharp. “The Grid Hub. They track us through it. Destroy that, we buy time.”

Felix nods, freckles shadowed in the lantern glow. “And free others. There are more Dreamers out there. Ones who don’t even know themselves yet.”

Hyunjin’s chest tightens. More like him. Forgotten. Alone.

Lee Know’s gaze lands on him. “What about you, Hyunjin? Do you run, or do you fight?”

Every eye turns to him. The weight of fire hums in his veins, restless. He thinks of Chan’s vow, of Minho’s sharp lessons, of the way the others fought for him tonight.

“I fight,” Hyunjin says, voice steady. “Not just for me. For all of us.”

⸻

An Oath in Ashes

They stand together, bruised bodies ringed in lantern glow. Lee Know unsheathes his blade and presses its flat edge to the ground.

“Then we swear it. Here. Tonight.”

One by one, the others join. Minho rests his knives in the dirt. Changbin drives the steel beam into the earth beside them. Felix lays down his console, Han his wire spools, Seungmin his rifle.

Chan places his pipe, then turns to Hyunjin.

Hyunjin swallows. His gift hums in his hands, alive. He presses his palms flat to the ground, fire whispering against the soil.

Lee Know’s voice is low, solemn. “Until the world remembers itself, we don’t stop. We don’t scatter. We burn together.”

Hyunjin’s heart pounds with each word. He looks at Chan, at Minho, at the others, and for the first time, he doesn’t feel like a runaway.

He feels like part of something worth dying for.

⸻

Dawn’s Warning

The oath barely settles before Seungmin stiffens on watch. “Movement.”

Everyone jolts up, weapons back in hand.

Felix swears softly. “Already?”

In the distance, faint but growing, a red glow rises beyond the trees. Not sirens. Not fire.

Something worse.

Minho’s eyes narrow. “They’ve deployed Cleansers.”

Hyunjin shivers. The word stirs something dark in his memory. Machines built not to arrest—but to erase.

Chan grips his shoulder, steady but grim. “This fight isn’t over. It’s only beginning.”

Hyunjin nods, fire stirring inside him again, no longer just fear but resolve.

For the first time, he doesn’t want to run.
For the first time, he wants to lead.

Chapter Text

The forest trembles with the sound of machines.
Low, heavy, relentless—like metal hearts beating in unison.

Hyunjin grips the strap of his pack until his knuckles ache. The Collective has fought Enforcers, drones, even entire sweeps. But this is different. This sound burrows into his bones.

“They’re close,” Seungmin says from his perch in the water tower. His voice filters down like a warning bell. “Clearing in three minutes.”

Minho’s jaw tightens. “Too soon.”

“They want to finish what their soldiers couldn’t,” Lee Know answers flatly, hand resting on his blade.

Felix looks up from his console, freckles pale in the lantern glow. “Comms are scrambled. We won’t get help in time.”

For once, even Changbin’s grin fades.

Hyunjin swallows. His fire hums restlessly, responding to the thrum of the machines beyond the trees. “What… what are Cleansers?”

Everyone looks at him. It’s Chan who answers, voice grim. “They don’t capture. They erase. Everything. Memories, evidence, sometimes whole towns. When Cleansers move in, nothing survives.”

Hyunjin’s stomach twists. “And we’re staying here?”

Lee Know’s gaze is cold steel. “We stand. If we scatter now, they’ll pick us off one by one.”

⸻

The Arrival

The ground shakes. Branches shiver loose from trees. Then they appear—hulking machines on jointed legs, taller than the water tower, glowing with red cores that pulse like wounds. Their heads swivel with inhuman precision, floodlights sweeping.

Around their feet march squads of Enforcers, smaller shadows flanking monsters.

Felix curses under his breath. “Three Cleansers. At least thirty soldiers.”

Han mutters, “So, we’re dead.”

“No,” Lee Know says. “We fight smart. We hit their cores.”

“And if we can’t?” Hyunjin whispers.

Chan’s hand finds his wrist. Warm. Steady. “Then we find another way.”

⸻

The First Strike

The Cleansers’ floodlights flare, turning the clearing into a stage of white fire. The Collective scatters.

Changbin charges with a roar, beam swinging. He cracks it against an Enforcer’s helmet, sending sparks flying. Han’s traps snap taut, tripping soldiers into mud. Seungmin calls down positions from above, guiding with sharp precision.

Lee Know and Minho move as one—blades flashing, carving through gaps in armor. Felix crouches low, jamming signals, throwing the Cleansers’ targeting off by seconds that mean survival.

And Chan—Chan is everywhere, pipe colliding with rifles, voice barking orders, pulling fighters back from the edge.

Hyunjin stands frozen, breath caught in his throat. The Cleansers loom, red cores pulsing. Their floodlights pin his chest like a spotlight. His fire stirs, hungry.

Chan’s voice cuts through the chaos: “Hyunjin! Now!”

⸻

The Awakening

Hyunjin thrusts his hands forward. The fire bursts out of him, wild and searing.

The nearest Cleansers shudders. Its floodlight flickers. Its red core spasms like a heartbeat too fast. Soldiers nearby stumble, clutching their heads, gasping as buried memories surge.

Hyunjin feels it—raw and terrifying. He isn’t just bending metal. He’s waking minds.

The Cleansers lurch, adjusting. Their cores pulse brighter, pushing against him. His chest aches, vision blurs.

“I can’t—” Hyunjin chokes.

Chan is suddenly there, shoulder pressed to his, voice in his ear. “Yes, you can. Don’t think about stopping them. Think about us. About keeping us here. Together.”

Hyunjin’s fire shifts. It stops clawing outward and starts holding inward, wrapping around the Collective like a shield. The Cleansers’ beams slam into it—searing white against invisible force.

The world explodes in light.

⸻

The Counter

Minho seizes the moment. “Strike now!”

Changbin barrels into the legs of a Cleansers, beam cracking steel. Han hurls a makeshift explosive, wires sparking on impact. Felix floods their cores with static until their pulses stutter. Seungmin calls the angles, Lee Know drives his blade into exposed joints.

Together, the Collective swarms the machines.

Hyunjin’s shield buckles, his veins burning, but Chan holds him upright. “You’re not alone,” he whispers, again and again, until it anchors.

With a final scream, Hyunjin thrusts outward. The nearest Cleansers’ core bursts in a blinding flare, shards raining like meteors. The machine collapses, shaking the ground.

The others falter. The Enforcers break formation, fear rippling through their ranks.

The Collective doesn’t stop until the remaining Cleansers stagger back into the trees, dragging soldiers with them, retreating into the dark.

⸻

Aftermath

Silence crashes down. The air reeks of smoke and metal. The ground trembles with fading echoes.

Hyunjin collapses, chest heaving. Chan lowers beside him, pulling him close. “You did it,” he murmurs, voice raw. “You kept us alive.”

Hyunjin shakes, half-sobbing, half-laughing. “I thought I was going to burn us all.”

“But you didn’t.” Chan’s hand presses over his. “You led.”

Around them, the rebels gather—battered, bruised, alive. Changbin laughs, wild and unsteady. Han swears he’s never running wires that close again. Felix smiles through exhaustion, freckles smeared with ash. Seungmin climbs down, muttering about wasted ammo. Minho and Lee Know share a sharp, silent nod.

For the first time, Hyunjin sees it: they’re not fragments anymore. They’re a force.

⸻

The Oath Renewed

Lee Know speaks into the silence. “Tonight, the Collective stood against Cleansers and lived. That means more than survival. It means hope.”

Hyunjin’s chest aches at the word. Hope. He didn’t think he’d feel it again.

Chan looks at him, eyes bright even in the ash. “We don’t just run now. We fight. Together.”

Hyunjin nods, fire still humming inside him, no longer just wild—something sharper, steadier.

Because for the first time, the fire doesn’t just burn.
It leads.

Chapter Text

Dawn finds the clearing broken and beautiful—smoke threading through pine, dew pearling on bent grass, the water tower casting a long ribbed shadow over the wreckage they survived. The Collective moves like a single tired animal: limping, binding, counting. Someone laughs too loud. Someone cries too quietly. Everyone breathes.

Hyunjin does not sleep.

He sits with his back to the tower, hands curled around a tin mug gone cold a dozen times. The fire in him has banked to a steady ember; it warms instead of devouring. Beside him, Chan dozes with his chin on his chest, one arm slung over Hyunjin’s thigh like a seatbelt. Hyunjin stares at the place where the Cleansers fell and tries to learn the shape of victory without flinching.

Minho claps once. The sound cracks the morning. “Council. Now.”

They gather around a crate draped with a map patched from paper scraps and memory. Lee Know’s finger rides the river like a knife along a spine.

“We bought hours,” he says. “Not days. They’ll come with more Cleansers and fewer doubts.”

Han worries a strip of wire between his teeth. “And this time they’ll bring anti-psych tech. I’ve seen leaks—helmets that choke dreamwaves. If they field those, Jinnie’s fireworks get dimmer.”

Felix, perched on an overturned drum, looks up through lashes dusted with ash. “Then we kill the signal feeding them our positions before they ever put the helmets on.”

Seungmin taps the map twice. “Grid Hub. Central relay for trackers, comms, Hive learning. They’ll be blind for hours if we cut it.”

Changbin grins, blood crackling at the corner of his mouth. “And by ‘cut,’ you mean ‘rip out with our hands,’ right?”

“By ‘cut,’” Seungmin repeats, patient, “I mean ‘precisely breach, introduce a loop, and burn the core without detonating half the sector.’”

Changbin’s grin doesn’t fade. “So… rip out gently.”

Minho leans on the edge of the crate. “We split. Diversion team hits the East Substation to trigger a rolling brownout. Strike team rides the blackout into the Hub.”

Lee Know nods. “Two squads. Fast. Surgical. And no hero deaths. Save those for the songs later.”

Eyes turn—quietly, inevitably—to Hyunjin.

He feels the looking like heat. He glances at Chan. Chan doesn’t nod or plead; he simply meets Hyunjin’s gaze and lets him find his own answer there.

Hyunjin steps closer to the map. The paper smells like mildew and oil; the edges are soft with years. His voice steadies as it leaves him. “I go to the Hub.”

No objection rises. Only acceptance, and the weight that comes with it.

“Alpha Team,” Lee Know says, quick and clear. “Hyunjin, Chan, Felix, Seungmin. You go under the grid. Beta—Minho, Han, Changbin, me—we play thunder at the substation. We hit first to draw eyes, you slip second.”

Han tosses his wire, catches it. “I’ll make music from metal.”

Felix’s mouth tips. “I’ll make their machines stutter.”

Seungmin pencils times on the map’s margin—minute marks, contingencies, the quiet architecture of survival. “Alpha launches at 20:13. Beta at 20:00. If either team goes dark longer than seven minutes, fall back to Rally Two.” He circles a nameless patch of map where the river kinks like a bent wrist.

Minho flips his knife once and catches it. “Questions?”

Hyunjin has a dozen. Only one matters. “The Hub holds Dreamers, doesn’t it? The ones they’ve tagged and… shelved.”

Lee Know doesn’t look away. “Likely. Don’t get noble on the first run. The mission is the core.”

Hyunjin’s jaw tightens. “The mission is us,” he says softly. “And they are us.”

Silence presses low. Then Chan’s voice—quiet iron. “We adapt. We get who we can without losing who we have.”

Lee Know’s lips curve. Not quite a smile. Not quite not. “Then write the plan to fit the truth,” he says. “Blueprints in the ash. Go eat, sharpen, pray.”

They break.

⸻

They prepare in pieces. Felix combs the innards of a scavenged console, soldering a device no bigger than a cookie that smells like burned sugar. “A choke,” he explains. “Their comms will loop good data back at bad times and bad data back at good. They’ll think last night is tomorrow.”

Seungmin climbs the tower again with a rifle and a radio, adjusting the world’s angle with each click. “Lines are lies until you draw them,” he mutters, more to the wind than to anyone. “Then they’re promises.”

Minho checks Beta’s kit, inventory read like prayer. Han files teeth into his wire spools until they sing. Changbin wraps his hands, flexes, shakes them loose, hums a bass line that makes the water ripple.

Hyunjin sits with Chan by the river, feet in cold current, a quiet too fragile to touch settling between them.

“Say it,” Chan says without looking up. He is whittling something—he won’t say what—with a dull knife that keeps catching and smoothing.

Hyunjin watches a leaf run the river’s skin, snag and release. “When it comes… it’s loud. I don’t know if I’m guiding it or just begging it to be kind.”

Chan’s knife pauses. “What if it isn’t about guiding or begging?” He turns the small carved piece over. It’s nothing and then it’s something—a sliver curved like a crescent. “What if it’s listening?”

“To what?”

“You,” Chan says simply. “You’ve been listening to everyone else—sirens, orders, fear. Listen to the part of you that stayed when I stole the rest. It knew me. It knew this. Let it speak.”

Hyunjin takes the crescent. The wood is warm from Chan’s hands. His throat thickens around a thank you that would be too small.

Chan bumps their shoulders. “And if that fails, just imagine me yelling you into not dying.”

Hyunjin huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. “That would work.”

“Good,” Chan says, satisfied.

They sit until the sun droops. Then they rise with the light.

⸻

Night lowers like a hood. The city waits ahead—neon veins beneath a skin of steel. Beta splits east, shadows folding around them. Alpha follows the river, low and fast, to a culvert mouth breathing damp into the dark.

“Five minutes,” Seungmin whispers over comms from his roost miles away. “Brownout begins on my mark.”

Felix tucks the choke device under his jacket. “I’ll kiss the Hub hello from the ductwork. You’ll have two doors to choose between: the obvious one and the right one.”

“Mark in three… two… one,” Seungmin says.

Somewhere, Han bites copper and throws a switch. The city hiccups. Whole blocks exhale. Streetlamps flicker as if blinking awake from a bad dream. Sirens glitch into tinny lullabies then back into screams. A red glare flares east—Changbin’s thunder.

Alpha moves.

They slip into the storm drain. The tunnel is a throat swallowing the sound of their feet. Water shushes over concrete. Felix’s flashlight is a polite circle on slime and rivet and rat. Hyunjin breathes through his mouth and tries not to say the city’s bones feel like memory too.

“Left,” Felix says at a junction, not looking so much as smelling where signal lives. “Right. Up. Watch that rung.”

They climb a ladder slick with old rain and rust. The grate above wants to stay married to the street; Chan persuades it with a slow press and a prayer. He surfaces first, scans, then reaches back to pull Hyunjin through. No sirens here, no people—just the hum of servers and the quiet bad breath of buildings that never learned windows.

The Grid Hub is a rectangle of arrogance wrapped in mirrored glass. Its gardens are fake grass. Its fountains don’t bother with water; they project it. Men with eyes like cameras drift its perimeter in patterns written by people who don’t love the dark.

Felix slides a panel from a service alcove. “Say hello to the right door.” He nestles the choke into the Hub’s throat, wires kissing wires. “Three minutes and they don’t know themselves. We go then.”

Seungmin’s voice rides the air. “Beta has attention. Three vans, one Cleanser detoured. You have… six minutes before someone smart gets bored.”

“Plenty,” Chan says. He always says plenty. Hyunjin believes him even when he doesn’t.

The panel hums. Felix nods. “Now.”

They slip through the service door as if the building sighed and forgot to hold its breath. Inside, the Hub smells like cold. Lights strobe in polite whites; the walls pulse very faintly like a heart that isn’t sure about beating. Seungmin reads them the theater of the place: “Two guards down the corridor, one at the elevator, two in the core room. More in the Galleries below. Cameras on loop thirty seconds at a time.”

“Galleries?” Hyunjin asks, already knowing.

Felix’s mouth tightens. “Shelves for people. We hit core first.”

He is right. Hyunjin knows he is right. He also knows the pull that starts in his ribs and catches in his hands, a magnet for the floor that leads away from the core.

They move. The first two guards walk past them without seeing—Felix’s loop makes time into soup. The third guard lifts his head, about to ask why soup tastes like yesterday. Hyunjin catches his eyes without meaning to.

A memory breaks—bright and stupid: a yellow kite against a blue, real sky; a mother’s call; a boy laughing when the kite nose-dives and eats dirt. The guard staggers like someone tripped him with a string in a different season.

“I’m sorry,” Hyunjin whispers. He means it. He keeps moving.

Elevator. Stairs instead; noise is kinder than lists. Chan takes point and carries silence the way other people carry knives. Seungmin counts cameras like beads—one, two, slip, four—and they slide past each blind.

The core room is a cathedral built by engineers who liked mirrors. The machine at its center hums with a hunger Hyunjin feels in his teeth. Two Enforcers stand like punctuation at the door. Felix drops their comms into lull and Seungmin sings coordinates in their ears. Chan handles punctuation with a pipe.

Felix’s hands are music over the console. He speaks a language Hyunjin almost sees—characters that look like rain on glass. “Thirty seconds, then a heartbeat, then I need you,” he says to Hyunjin, not looking up.

“Me?”

Felix nods once. “Cores like to be asked nicely by something that isn’t supposed to exist.”

Hyunjin steps closer. The machine’s hum threads into his blood. He hears sirens far away and he hears Chan breathing here. He hears the kite catching sun.

“Now,” Felix says.

Hyunjin places his palms on the housing. Cold bites. He closes his eyes. And listens.

Not to the machine. To the part of him that did not leave when everything else did. The ember that knew a boy under a skylight and a kiss in the fire and a river that forgives feet no matter how often they stumble. It is small. It is bright. It does not bargain. It asks.

The core stutters.

Felix drives the loop. Seungmin counts. Chan keeps their world from intruding. Hyunjin holds the door of himself open and lets the machine see him. A Dreamer. Awake.

The core breaks. Not with fireworks but with a sigh—the relief of a body untying a knot. Lights run backward. The room exhales.

Felix grins, sweat pearling his lip. “The grid’s blind.”

Seungmin is all angles. “Two minutes of dumb, then different dumb. Move.”

“Galleries?” Hyunjin asks.

Chan does not say no. “Fast.”

They flow down a corridor built to make people small. Doors whisper open like they are ashamed of what they have watched. Inside the Galleries, the air is colder and thinner; it teaches lungs to behave.

Rows of transparent coffins line the walls. Inside—breathing, sleeping, something between—are people. Some Hyunjin knows by the lint of memory. Most he does not. All are him.

Felix scrambles to a terminal and hisses. “No quick keys. They’re individually keyed and the blind won’t hide us long.”

Hyunjin walks to the nearest cell. The person inside is a boy with a freckle in the middle of his forehead and a scar on his chin from a joke that once went wrong. He is every boy. He is no boy. Hyunjin sets his palm on the glass.

“Listen,” he says, to himself, to the building, to the world. “Please.”

Something gives. Not the lock. Hyunjin’s throat. The girl two coffins down flexes her hand in a dream. The boy’s lashes flutter. Alarms blink far away like stars forgetting how to be distant.

Chan’s hand lands on Hyunjin’s shoulder, anchor and alarm. “Jinnie. Time.”

He nods and does the only honest thing he can: he chooses triage over the desire to be a saint. Three. He can do three without breaking the thing that just started mending.

Felix feeds him the keys to three coffins that look close to waking. Hyunjin asks and the glass unclenches. A woman with hair like riverweed breathes hard and starts to cry without sound. A kid no older than twelve sits up and jerks away from his own hands like they belong to someone else. The boy with the freckle blinks and says “kite” like it is a secret password to the world.

“On your feet,” Chan says softly, bare orders wrapped in gentleness. “With us if you want us. We will run. You can, too.”

“Seventy seconds,” Seungmin warns, smooth as traffic. “Beta reports guests inbound. Three vans, one heavy.”

“Move,” Felix says. “Now, now, now.”

They do. The building tries to remember itself; Felix makes it forget. The kid clutches Hyunjin’s sleeve up the stairs. The woman walks like someone learning a gravity she likes. The boy with the freckle keeps trying to fly with his fingers.

They burst into night through the service door as the Hub remembers its alarms. Sirens rake the block. Floodlights knit the air.

A van slews into the alley like an answer. Changbin leans out the window, grin back and huge. “Who ordered idiots on wheels?”

“Us,” Han says from the driver’s seat, eyes too bright. “Get in.”

Alpha piles in, new lives in tow. The van takes off with a cough and a prayer and three bolts that should have been replaced seasons ago. Two blocks later, they are a rumor. Five blocks later, they are a joke the city tells itself when it is tired.

Ten blocks later, they are almost safe.

The first shot takes the side mirror. The second throws sparks from the bumper. Minho, hanging halfway out the back, returns courtesy with a knife that lands somewhere that matters. Seungmin, god knows how, draws a bead from a moving ghost and makes it hurt.

A Cleanser tries to follow and learns the culvert mouth is only a mouth. It stumbles. It does not fall. It learns.

“Left!” Felix and Seungmin shout together. Han does something mad with the wheel and the van hops a curb like a frog that forgot to be afraid. They splash through the river that is also a street and become water for a breath.

Then—trees. Home light. Hands.

They spill into the clearing, exhausted and new. The three they pulled look at the Collective like a memory waking up and weep or laugh or breathe. People press water and blankets and names into shaking hands.

Felix slumps, console hugged to his chest. Seungmin peels his rifle off his shoulder and rubs the mark it always leaves. Changbin lets Han punch his arm because joy is too much for some bodies. Minho rolls his knife across his knuckles and watches the tree line for debts that haven’t come due yet.

Hyunjin stands alone for a breath that is not alone at all. Chan stands with him—always with him.

“You did it,” Chan says.

“We did it,” Hyunjin says, and when he says we it is the size of a city.

A radio crackles. Lee Know lifts it to his ear. His face goes harder than steel. “Listen.”

The broadcast cuts across the clearing, the voice too calm, the words too heavy.

“State Notice: Designation PR-01, ‘Dreamer Prime,’ has initiated terror events at Central Grid. A reward is posted. Citizens, cleanse your streets. Dreaming is treason.”

Hyunjin tastes metal. The Collective’s eyes find him one by one, not with fear—never that—but with the sudden terrible clarity of being seen by the wrong god.

Minho spits in the dirt. “They just named you.”

Felix’s mouth is a thin line. “They just named all of us.”

Seungmin folds the map in half like a promise. “Then they can read our names when they fall.”

Chan turns Hyunjin to face him, thumbs firm at his jaw, not letting him look down. “They can name you whatever they want,” he says. “I know who you are.”

“So do I,” Hyunjin says, and he means it. The ember in him answers, bright enough to outshine a radio.

He looks at the three new Dreamers wrapped in blankets and world. He looks at the map. He looks at the water tower that is old and the trees that are older.

He raises his voice so it carries.

“We strike again before they write us into lies. We free as many as we can carry. We break the Grid until it stops finding us. We don’t scatter. We don’t burn alone.”

Lee Know nods once. “Blueprints in the ash,” he says, giving Hyunjin his own words back like a gift.

Around them, the Collective answers in a dozen voices that are one.

The fire in Hyunjin’s chest climbs his throat, not as flame but as song.

And somewhere in the city, a boy with a kite that never flew feels a tug on a string and looks up, sure—for the first time—that the sky belongs to him.

Chapter Text

Morning turns their clearing into a ledger: what they kept, what they lost, what still bleeds. The Collective moves in quiet triangles—water, bandages, food—while the radio that named Hyunjin PR-01 lies facedown on a crate like a mouth that bit its own tongue.

Hyunjin stands beneath the water tower and lets the steel ribs draw lines above him. He can still feel the Hub’s core sighing under his palms, the way the building opened when he listened instead of forcing it. The ember inside him has stopped roaring; it waits, warm and patient, as if to say: Ask, and mean it.

Chan finds him with two tin cups and a fold of bread, eyes rimmed red with one hour of sleep and too many decisions. “Eat,” he says, because love often sounds like orders.

Hyunjin breaks the bread in half. “They put a price on a name.”

Chan’s mouth tilts. “Then we set the market.”

Hyunjin huffs a laugh. It’s thin but real. “You always sound so sure.”

“I am.” Chan’s gaze flicks to the camp, to Lee Know bent over a map with Seungmin, to Felix soldering something that smells like sugar and storm, to Minho trimming a blade to a whisper. “Because I know what we have.”

Hyunjin swallows, then nods. “Then we write it big enough no one can pretend not to read it.”

“Good,” Chan says. “Because Jeongin’s here, and he brought a terrible idea you’re going to love.”

⸻

Jeongin (younger than Hyunjin remembers and older than he looks) sits cross-legged on an ammo crate, a medic kit bulging at his hip and dried river mud flaking his boots. He flashes a quick smile that doesn’t bother the rest of his face. “New anti-psych helmets just hit the Armory. They’ll go on Enforcers citywide by tonight.”

“That fast?” Seungmin asks, not surprised, only annoyed the world continues to behave like itself.

“Also,” Jeongin continues, tapping the map twice, “there’s an Annex under the Broadcast Spire. Not as big as the Hub’s Galleries, but full. They stage ‘assets’ there when they need clean faces on short notice.”

“Dreamers,” Hyunjin says. His throat tightens around the word.

“Dreamers,” Jeongin confirms. “Sleeping commercials. Walking ghosts. Take your pick.”

Felix looks up from the delicate circuit between his hands. “And the Spire’s uplink rides the Grid. If we choke the right throat at the right second, we can dump a loop into every billboard, every loudspeaker, every home screen in the East Bank.”

Han’s grin shows a chip on a lateral incisor he swears he didn’t earn stupidly. “Pirate broadcast. Old school.”

Lee Know’s finger lands on the Spire. “Beta hits the Armory to keep those helmets in crates. Alpha ghosts the Spire, frees who we can, and tells the city a new story.”

Minho flicks a glance at Hyunjin. “You think you can hold the Spire’s heart without frying yourself?”

Hyunjin thinks of the boy with the kite; he thinks of the woman whose hair moved like riverweed; he thinks of Chan’s hand steady against his jaw when the radio spat PR-01. “I can try,” he says. “And I won’t be alone.”

Chan’s fingers brush his wrist. Anchor. Answer.

“Then it’s set,” Lee Know says. “Beta—me, Minho, Jeongin, Han, Changbin—Armory at dusk. Alpha—Hyunjin, Chan, Felix, Seungmin—Spire on Seungmin’s count. No capes, no heroics, no funerals.”

Changbin mutters, disappointed. “Always with the ‘no funerals.’”

“Earn the funeral first,” Seungmin says, dry as flint.

⸻

Dusk stretches the city long and thin. Neon veins flicker with brownouts that are almost, but not quite, art. Beta peels east, a shadow inside a siren. Alpha goes under, again—culverts, ducts, the damp throat of the city that swallows and spits them where they ask if they ask politely.

Felix hums to the Spire’s service panel until it forgets to be guarded. “Thirty-second loops,” he says. “I can fake a heartbeat, but if they throw a ventral reset—”

“I’ll be there,” Hyunjin says. He doesn’t mean with his hands. He means with that other thing he’s learning to name.

Seungmin in their ears, calm as math: “Beta engaged. One Cleanser routed to the east perimeter. Helmets stalled. Alpha, you’re clear to ascend.”

They climb the Spire’s guts—ladder, platform, ladder—through heat and steel and the soft electrical breath of a thousand bad decisions made permanent. Above, the city opens like a mouth full of teeth.

Felix cracks the core door with a device the size of a cookie and twice as sweet. Inside, the uplink hums—a glass flower fed on compliance and weather reports. Two guards blink at them the way people blink when clocks stutter.

Chan moves through them with a pipe and a promise. Seungmin counts cameras like rosary. Felix slides into the console’s lap and begins to make it question its own pronouns.

“Hyunjin,” Felix says without looking up. “Hands.”

Hyunjin lays his palms on the housing. The Spire’s hum threads through bone. He listens—not to dominate, not to drown, but to hear the note inside the noise that is already his. There: a thin wire of wanting under all the order, a machine built to carry messages aching for one worth its throat.

“Hi,” Hyunjin whispers to the core, which is ridiculous and exactly right. “We need to borrow your voice.”

The lights hitch. The room breathes in.

“Now,” Felix says, throwing the choke. “Talk to your city.”

Hyunjin closes his eyes and lets the ember speak.

Screens blink across the East Bank. Billboards hiccup. Loudspeakers with dust in their grates clear their throats. For a heartbeat, the regime’s mouth forgets its lines.

Hyunjin’s voice goes everywhere at once, soft and steady:

“If you can hear me, you are not broken. If you can’t remember, it isn’t your fault. If you are afraid, that means something inside you is still yours. Hold it.

If you’ve been told dreaming is treason, try this: remember a smell that made you hungry, a hand that felt like home, a sky that wasn’t this color. If nothing comes, take mine.

Find the light.”

Three words, gentle as thread, pull tight across a city.

In a stairwell, a custodian stops with her mop in the air and forgets why she hated rainy days. In a kiosk, a boy meant to report suspicious behavior remembers teaching his sister to whistle. In a squad car, an Enforcer’s hands go soft on the wheel as he sees, absurdly, a yellow kite nosediving into dirt and someone laughing.

“Galleries,” Hyunjin says without opening his eyes.

Felix’s fingers fly. “Annex doors on local lock. I can stall, not open.”

Hyunjin listens harder. Not pushing. Asking. The Spire feels like a huge animal bracing for flight. He lowers his voice. “Please.”

A door three floors below clicks like a tongue.

Chan is already moving. “Seungmin—”

“Left, left, down. Two on the hall, one at the door,” Seungmin calls, then to Felix: “Ninety seconds until they remember they’re not supposed to be polite.”

Chan sprints the stairs. Hyunjin holds the room with his hands and his voice with the city. The ember flares; his nose bleeds in a neat red line.

“Breathe,” Felix says without looking, as if such a thing could be remembered on command.

The Annex air hits Chan like a freezer. Three coffins hum. Three faces sleep. He picks a lock with the metal end of a vow; it breaks under his insistence. “With me,” he tells them quietly as he lifts bodies heavier than they should be.

An alarm tries to stand. Felix trips its shoelaces. “Thirty seconds.”

Boots on metal—too many, too close. Seungmin’s voice sharpens: “Company.”

Hyunjin opens his eyes. The room tilts. The Spire pushes back—distant hands in distant gloves trying to reset what never had the right name to begin with. “Not yet,” he says, and the ember in him answers, and for a breath the city holds its own face in its own hands and recognizes it.

“Time,” Seungmin snaps. “Out. Now.”

Chan bursts back in with two and a third slung fireman-style. Hyunjin staggers but stands, and together he and Felix yank the choke, drop the loop, and let the Spire forget them—with gratitude, with relief, with the quiet dignity of a building allowed to do nothing for once.

Doors. Stairs. Rungs. The city’s throat again, slick and cold. Han’s laugh in their ears, Jeongin’s urgent curses, Minho saying left like a knife thrown to a friend who will catch it.

They spill into a service alley where a van pretends it isn’t theirs. Changbin kicks the door open from the inside. “Our chariot is a trash can with wheels. Get in.”

They do. The van lurches. Sirens behind, sirens ahead. A Cleanser shoulders into the street like a god no one asked for.

Seungmin: “Bridge is blocked. Riverside cut-through in three—two—now.”

Han threads the impossible. The van skims a railing with a shriek and becomes a stone skimming a river and then a boat badly disguised as a van. Water slaps the undercarriage. Someone screams. Someone laughs. Everyone lives.

When the trees close over them, when the radio is only trees, the Collective exhales in one long, ragged breath.

⸻

The clearing blooms with people and blankets and questions with no answers yet. The three from the Annex drink water like it’s new. One says “blue” as if it’s a password. Another cannot stop touching the bark of a tree. The third asks if he is allowed to sleep with his eyes open. Jeongin shows him how to keep them closed without apology.

Felix collapses on an oil drum, console smoking gently. Seungmin peels the comms from his ear and massages the grooves they leave. Han climbs the tower just to prove he can. Changbin lifts Jeongin and spins him until they both threaten to vomit. Minho sits at the tree line and carves the name of the night into a piece of wood no one will see but him.

Hyunjin leans on the tower until the world stops counting. His head throbs in time with the city’s heart. Chan wipes blood from his upper lip with the corner of a shirt that was white once.

“You asked,” Chan says softly.

“I did,” Hyunjin says, and it feels like truth in the mouth. “And it answered.”

Chan’s hand cradles the back of his neck. “It heard you because you weren’t trying to be a god.”

Hyunjin laughs and winces. “I’m tired of gods.”

“Good,” Chan murmurs. “We only need people.”

The radio on the crate chooses this moment to find its voice again. Lee Know flips it over with two fingers like he’s flipping a coin he already knows will land wrong.

“Emergency Notice: Terror broadcast detected. PR-01 confirmed responsible. Curfew extended. Cleansers authorized for city center deployment.”

Then—static, then not static. The voice that cuts through is not the regime’s. It’s warm. It’s tired. It sounds like someone who forgot to be afraid a long time ago.

“Dreamer Prime, they’ve named you wrong. You are not first,” the voice says, amused and broken at once. “Hello from under the river. Hello from before you.

—PR-00.”

The radio dies like a curtain falling.

No one speaks. The forest swallows the echo. Even the water tower seems to hold its breath.

Minho is the first to move, knifepoint paused mid-whittle. “Well,” he says, almost cheerfully. “Looks like your terrible idea just got a sequel.”

Jeongin’s eyes are wide, hungry. “PR-00. Under the river. Old tunnels.”

Felix is already reaching for wire that isn’t there. “We’ll need a different choke. Something that listens for ghosts.”

Seungmin folds the map until it becomes a shape that isn’t on the paper. “And a way to go under without drowning.”

Changbin cracks his knuckles. “Finally. A fight I can’t pronounce.”

Han jabs his thumb toward the radio. “We going after the disembodied voice or are we pretending that’s not the hottest side quest we’ve ever had?”

Lee Know watches Hyunjin, because everyone is already watching without meaning to. “Leader?”

The word strikes clean. Hyunjin feels it land where the ember lives. He finds Chan’s gaze and sees not permission, not pressure—just presence.

He looks at the river, at the black ribbon that cut the city long before the regime named anything. He looks at the three who woke today to bark and blue and their own eyes. He looks at the tower, at the map, at the hands that have learned how to carry one another.

“We wrote it in light,” he says, voice steady. “Next, we write it in water.”

He nods once, to the radio, to the trees, to the thing under the river that called his name without using it.

“PR-00,” Hyunjin says. “Hold on. We’re coming.”

Chapter Text

Night presses close as if the trees themselves want to hide what comes next. The radio sits on the crate like a sleeping animal; every few breaths Hyunjin expects it to wake and say PR-00 again, proof that the world before him is bigger than the one behind.

“We go before dawn,” Lee Know decides, the map a dark ocean under his hands. “Too many ears wake with the sun.”

Jeongin traces a thin, inked vein from the water tower to the East Bank. “Old flood tunnels. Maintenance catwalks. A retired siphon station here.” He taps a small square. “If ‘under the river’ is literal, this is our door.”

“Doors imply locks,” Han says, already smiling. “I brought persuasion.”

Felix rolls a coil of cable like he’s petting a snake. “If PR-00 is broadcasting from below, there’s a spool or a coil we can follow—signal clings to metal like moss.”

Changbin cracks his neck. “If the door’s stubborn, I brought a bigger key.”

Minho’s eyes slide to Hyunjin. “And if it’s a trap?”

“Then we listen,” Hyunjin says, steady. He feels Chan’s gaze without turning, an anchor he can carry without hands. “If the river remembers, it won’t lie to me.”

Chan’s mouth tilts, proud and worried all at once. “Pack light,” he tells the room. “And pack for not coming back, just in case.”

No one laughs at the joke. They move.

⸻

Dawn stains the river a color that refuses to be named. Alpha goes lean—Hyunjin, Chan, Minho, Felix, Seungmin, Jeongin—fast enough to flee, strong enough to drag each other when fleeing fails. Han and Changbin loiter as “fishermen” upriver with a boat that looks like it shouldn’t float and yet will. Lee Know and the others turn the clearing into a shell game of false trails and listening posts.

The siphon station crouches at the water’s edge—concrete, bruised paint, a door welded shut by a bureaucracy with a grudge. Jeongin kneels, extracts a medic shears, and uses it like a saint uses a relic. Sparks kiss the padlock. Han feeds a charge the size of his thumbnail into a seam and hums until the metal sighs.

Felix presses a palm to the door, closes his eyes, and grins. “Hello, spool. I hear you.”

“On me,” Minho says.

They slip into the cool.

Inside smells like old rain and coins. The tunnel’s throat is vast and low, a ribcage of cement echoing their breaths back too large. A catwalk hugs the curve above a black ribbon of water that moves with purpose.

Seungmin’s voice rides the hush. “Left fork drops to siphons, right climbs to vent stacks. ‘Under the river’ reads like left—but we’ll need height if the channel floods.”

“Then we take both,” Minho says, neither suggestion nor debate. “Felix, Hyunjin, Chan with me on the low. Seungmin, Jeongin, you take the high and watch us drown.”

“Comforting,” Jeongin says dryly, already climbing.

They split, two lines of shadow like handwriting on concrete. Hyunjin’s hand finds the rail; it’s slick with the polite damp of places the sun can’t scold. The water’s voice tucks around him—constant, older than his questions, patient the way stone is.

“Tell me your trick,” Chan murmurs at his shoulder. They move close not from fear but from physics; the catwalk doesn’t permit distance.

Hyunjin exhales. “I stop trying to be louder than everything else. I find the thing already speaking my language. Then I ask.” He half smiles. “It doesn’t always answer. But sometimes it’s lonely, too.”

Felix, ahead, looks back with soft eyes that have seen circuits as friends. “Machines are lonelier than people ever admit.”

“And rivers?” Minho asks, not mocking—curious, like a blade learning the word for ‘mercy.’

Hyunjin tips his head, listening. “Rivers want to arrive. Even when trapped, they remember the idea of somewhere. That pull is a kind of hope.”

Minho grunts, either convinced or willing to be.

They follow the spool’s hum deeper—the faint, metallic thrum of coax cable bolted to wall after wall, disappearing into darkness like a promise. The air cools. The tunnel narrows. Seams appear in the concrete like laugh lines made by earthquakes.

“Stop,” Seungmin’s voice snaps in their ears. “Blue strobe ahead, right wall. Thermal flux.”

Felix pauses, eyes gleaming. “Active sensor. Old, but not bored.”

Minho jerks his chin. “Work.”

Felix slides a clip onto the spool like a brooch and whispers code into copper. The strobe’s heartbeat becomes arrhythmic, then sleepy. “He snores now,” Felix announces.

“Move,” Minho says.

They round a bend and the tunnel opens into a chamber that could be a chapel if god were tide. Three arches yawn over the water; the central span is bridged by another catwalk, this one missing a step like a mouth missing a tooth.

“It’s beautiful,” Jeongin breathes in their ears from above, his view wide. “Ugly-beautiful, like scars that memorized weather.”

Chan squeezes Hyunjin’s shoulder. “Hear anything else?”

“Listen,” Hyunjin says, and this time they all do.

Under water and wire, there—a voice without sound, a memory of a voice. The echo of the broadcast: You are not first. It seems to come from the left arch and the right and the river itself, but strongest ahead and below.

Hyunjin leans into the rail and closes his eyes. When he opens them, he knows. “Middle.”

Minho grins. “Trust the stubborn road.”

They cross the gap one at a time where the step is missing, muscles tight, hands white. Chan goes last in case anyone doesn’t make it; no one falls, which is an insult the river forgives immediately.

Beyond the arch the spool’s hum swells. The tunnel slopes. The water quickens, impatient.

“Brace,” Seungmin says, crisp as chalk. “Upriver gate opening. They’re flushing from the east—maintenance cycle or company.”

Felix’s head snaps around. “No way that’s a coincidence.”

The first white tongue of water licks the lower catwalk.

“Back,” Minho orders.

But the thing that moves toward them isn’t panic, it’s pressure—many tons of river politely insisting on the right of way. The catwalk shivers; bolts complain in steel voices.

Hyunjin doesn’t think. He asks.

He plants both palms on the rail and finds the thread of the river that remembers arriving and pulls it sideways the way a dancer pulls a leap into a turn. The world tilts. The surge splits around them, clapping against invisible shoulders, rolling past with anger and relief. Spray baptizes. Something groans and then sighs, and the flood goes where it was always going, just less interested in taking them with it.

Felix stares, teeth bared in a grin that looks like awe wore surprise as lipstick. “You just… convinced water to be polite.”

Hyunjin wobbles; Chan’s arm is already there. “I asked,” Hyunjin breathes. “It listened.”

Minho claps him once, hard. “Do that again if it tries to be rude.”

They push forward while Seungmin and Jeongin scout a parallel ledge above. A metal door appears in the tunnel wall, its paint long lost, its hinges thinking about retirement. The spool disappears into it like a thread through a needle.

Felix presses his ear to the metal. “Talking. Quiet. Like radios whispering into pillows.”

“Company?” Minho asks.

“Family, maybe,” Felix says, mouth small with hope and science both.

Minho signs once—stack. Chan takes left, Minho right, Hyunjin centered and two steps back. Felix crouches to cajole the lock with lessons he learned from broken toys.

The door gives with a concession sigh.

The room beyond is long and low, ceiling hung with makeshift baffles to confuse sound, floor crowded with beds, benches, screens cannibalized from better-funded lies. Coax coils everywhere. Lanterns hooded. Water in barrels. Tools in shadows.

And people.

Some look up with eyes already sharp. Some blink like moths new to lamps. A few keep their heads down and their work constant because movement feels safer than thinking when strangers open doors.

At the far end, a figure rises from a bench. They wear a coat that might be an army’s memory and boots that learned how to be quiet from rivers. Hair gray at the edges, face a map of places time respected enough not to erase. Their eyes go to Hyunjin first, then to Chan, then to Minho, then back to Hyunjin as if the room is a sentence and he is both subject and verb.

“PR-01,” they say, and the voice matches the radio like a signature matches a name. Amused. Broken at the edges. Unafraid. “You came.”

Hyunjin’s heart does a thing that might be a bow. “PR-00.”

“That’s their name for me,” the figure says mildly. “I have others I like better. But it’s useful when I want them to listen.”

A ripple of not-laughter moves through the room. Relief with teeth.

Minho tilts his head. “Trap check?”

“If I wanted you dead, I’d have let the river do it.” PR-00 gestures to a table crowded with mugs that used to be jars. “Drink, sit, don’t lie. We don’t have time for performative heroics.”

Chan’s lips quirk despite everything. “He’ll be insufferable if you two become friends,” he murmurs in Hyunjin’s ear.

Hyunjin doesn’t say I want to. He steps forward. “Why me? Why now?”

PR-00’s mouth creases like a book opening to a dog-eared page. “Because the city finally heard itself when you asked. Because you were named loud enough that sleepers stirred. Because they’re fitting helmets to soldiers and batteries to Cleansers and there’s a window between the lie and the habit where truth can be louder.”

They nod toward a wall where someone has chalked a map of the river and the streets like a spine and ribs. Lit pins blink in the dim. “Blue pins—us. Gold—nodes we can steal. Red—things that erase. Your broadcast woke blue we thought drowned and gold we thought fused to bone. Red is coming to learn why.”

Felix moves like a magnet toward the board, eyes greedy. “You’ve been under here how long?”

“A while.” PR-00’s gaze tilts skyward without moving. “Long enough to learn that rot grows prettily when painted daily. Long enough to learn the sound a coil makes when it decides to carry the wrong message. Long enough to wait for someone to stop shouting at machines and start speaking to them.”

They look at Hyunjin and the approval in the look lands on his shoulders not as weight but as cloak. “You didn’t throw your gift at the city,” PR-00 says. “You offered it. That matters.”

Hyunjin’s throat thickens. “I stole voices when I was forced to sleep. I won’t steal them awake.”

PR-00 nods once, exact enough to feel like a lesson presented and passed. “Good. Then listen to mine.”

They sketch the plan without fanfare. The river hides three more Annexes accessed through floodgates “sealed” by padlocks more accustomed to rumor than keys. The Spire has a sister—the Subsea Exchange—that stitches power and bandwidth under the east bridge. The helmets Han feared are staged two days away, across a rail line where trains don’t stop for ghosts.

“We can break two of those before they wise up if we move like a story they don’t know how to tell,” PR-00 says. “But we’ll need both fires and waters and the kind of math that learned to be kind.”

“Translation,” Minho says, amused. “All of us.”

“All of you,” PR-00 agrees. “And some of mine.”

They gesture. People detach from machines and maps. A woman with a scar like lightning across her cheek. A boy whose hands never stop moving as if he’s still conducting some past crowd. An elder whose eyes reflect light in a way that suggests they’ve learned to hoard it.

Introductions move like tide—names offered, names held back. Trust doesn’t blossom; it negotiates, then nods.

Seungmin’s voice touches their ears from the catwalk above. “Company on surface. Two squads. No Cleansers yet. You’ve got twenty, maybe.”

PR-00’s face doesn’t change. “They scented your boat, perhaps. Or my leak. It hardly matters.”

They point to a second door, half-hidden behind coils and cloth. “That goes to the west siphon. Your friends in the canoe-that-shouldn’t will meet you at the mouth if they smell you thinking about drowning.”

“Han and Changbin,” Chan says, smiling despite himself.

“Big laugh, bigger hands,” PR-00 says. “He tried to lift the gate last season. He apologized to it afterward. I like him.”

Felix’s attention flickers from the map to PR-00’s hands. “Why ‘00’?”

“Because I’m not first either,” PR-00 says softly, and for a moment the room goes hush in a different way. “Just older. Someone woke me once when I didn’t believe in waking. I refused to be counted on their scale and named myself before they could write me down. I thought I’d be alone a long time.” Their eyes return to Hyunjin. Warm. Sharp. “I’m glad I was wrong.”

The radio on the table crackles—distant trucks, a polite command voice telling boots where to be and how quickly not to think. Seungmin counts six in the alley above. Jeongin hums under his breath; it sounds like the key of getting out.

Minho rolls his shoulders. “Time to leave before we teach them how to find church.”

PR-00 grabs a coil and a canvas bag that looks like it has saved lives by refusing to fray. “We’re not staying either,” they add, almost offhand, and the room absorbs it like news it expected. “They will flood if they have to. We move before they translate mercy as delay.”

They stop in front of Hyunjin and take his wrist, fingers cool, grip precise. “When you speak to machines, ask for permission. When you speak to water, ask for company. When you speak to people, ask for nothing and offer everything you can survive.”

Hyunjin wants to write the sentence somewhere ribs can keep it from erosion. He nods instead. “Come with us,” he says, because the word leader keeps landing on his chest whether he claims it or not, and leadership is sometimes as simple as saying with and meaning it.

PR-00 smiles like a door you thought was painted on turning out to be a door. “We already are.”

They move.

⸻

The west siphon tastes of rust and old moonlight. PR-00’s people fold into the tunnel with the silent competence of those who have practiced leaving. The river presses an ear to the wall, curious. Above, boots faint and near at once; the city cranes its neck.

Hyunjin touches the rail and asks the water to arrive somewhere that isn’t them. It agrees with the generosity of a thing that has already forgiven many things.

They reach the mouth as the canoe-that-shouldn’t skids into view, Han hooting, Changbin rowing like the world weighs less than his arms. “We brought an extra boat!” Han crows. “It also shouldn’t float!”

“Get in!” Changbin yells, delighted to be a miracle’s chauffeur.

They pile into hulls that behave. The current catches, the tunnels open, and daylight—thin, filtered, wonderful—finds their faces. On the far bank, the trees pretend to be the same as yesterday while sheltering a dozen new hearts.

They spill into the clearing where the water tower waits like an elder who won’t say I told you so but might think it. People rise. Hands reach. Names expand to fit more mouths.

PR-00 stands in the center of it all like someone who has already mapped this room, past and future both. They look at Hyunjin. “Tonight, we cut the Subsea Exchange,” they say, as if suggesting a walk. “Tomorrow, we steal a train. After that—well. After that, the city decides if it remembers itself faster than they can forget us.”

Hyunjin feels the ember answer, brighter than fear, cooler than panic, shaped exactly like a road that didn’t exist until someone stepped.

He finds Chan’s hand without looking and lifts his voice so every ear, human and otherwise, can find it.

“Blueprints in the water,” he says. “Write it so deep they can’t bleach it out.”

The Collective answers like tide hitting shore.

For a heartbeat, the radio lies quiet.

Then it wakes with static that sounds like applause.

“Welcome home,” a dozen layered voices say—old, young, river, wire—like a choir that learned itself in the dark. “We’ve been waiting.”

Chapter Text

They plan by the river so it can eavesdrop on its own rescue.

PR-00 draws a rectangle in the mud, a bridge sketched in two strokes, a heavy dot beneath it. “Subsea Exchange,” they say. “Power, bandwidth, a spinal cord for the East Bank. Snap it, and helmets won’t get their updates, Cleansers won’t get clean target feeds, and broadcasts go static for a breath long enough to move an army.”

“Or drown one,” Seungmin notes, eyes on the tide chart Felix has taped to a canteen.

PR-00 nods. “The Exchange vents into two discharge tunnels. If the grid senses tampering, it reverses pump flow to scour intruders out. You will be intruders.” Their glance at Hyunjin is not a warning but an invitation. “Hold the water with you if it turns mean.”

Han jangles a pouch of charges like a bad idea in a velvet bag. “I’ll make their fiber whimper.”

Felix lifts a palm-sized device with braided wire and a translucent wafer. “A new choke. It doesn’t shout. It listens and hums along until the uplink believes we’re the heartbeat.”

Minho flips a knife, catches it. “Beta runs noise along the piers—helmets, diversions, fights we don’t plan on losing. Alpha goes under, cuts, leaves before the river remembers we were rude.”

“Alpha,” Lee Know says, pointing with his chin: “Hyunjin, Chan, Felix, Seungmin, PR-00, Jeongin. Han, Changbin with the boats. Minho, I need your edges on Beta.”

Minho’s mouth twitches. “Try not to die while I’m not there.”

Chan claps his shoulder once. “Try not to make me come rescue you.”

They don’t shake hands. They’re done needing proof. They move.

⸻

Dusk paints the bridge in bruise colors. Above, traffic hums like a threat pretending to be a lullaby. Below, the river’s skin glosses itself for night. Han and Changbin idle in a wedge of canal two bends away, each in a boat that looks offended by water and yet refuses to sink.

Felix shows Hyunjin the choke’s wire with a magician’s pride. “You feed this into the Exchange’s local loop while I lull the global. If the pumps spit, they’ll brawl each other for control. While they fight, we cut.”

Jeongin adjusts a harness around Hyunjin’s chest, checking buckles with a medic’s blunt tenderness. “If someone goes under, I go after them. If two go under, I go after the one who can’t swim.” He doesn’t look at Chan; he doesn’t need to.

Seungmin taps his comm once. “Weather gives us thirty-six minutes before the tide turns. Beta engages in three… two…”

The east piers convulse with new sirens. Minho’s laugh cracks the radio like flint.

“—one,” Seungmin finishes, satisfied. “Alpha, you’re clear.”

They slide into the culvert like letters through a slot—bent, damp, delivered. The tunnel breathes copper and old weeds. PR-00 leads with a coil slung casually, feet memorizing footholds that didn’t exist yesterday.

A grate, bolted and convinced of itself, greets them thirty meters in. Felix kisses it with the listening choke and a whisper of code. The bolts forget discipline. Chan eases the grate aside, wrists corded, the movement sure and quiet.

Behind it: the Exchange’s throat. Cables in armored bundles dive through a concrete bulkhead; a low hum fills the bones. A catwalk claws the wall, slick but serviceable.

Seungmin’s voice brushes their ears. “Two surface patrols circling opposite arcs. Drones static—thank you, Beta. No Cleanser presence yet.”

“Key word,” PR-00 murmurs, “yet.”

They move along the catwalk. The hum deepens. A door presents itself, labeled in a font that believes in itself too much: SUBSEA ACCESS—AUTHORIZED ONLY. Felix rolls his eyes and opens it with a paperclip and intent.

Inside, the Exchange’s core is colder air and warmer sound. Racks of equipment blink their tiny private languages. In the center, a cylinder the size of a tree trunk drinks river water, sings to glass, spits light across town.

Felix slides into a console. “I’ll pet the global,” he says. “Hyunjin, give the local your hand.”

Hyunjin presses both palms to a panel that doesn’t have a right to feel like skin. The hum finds his ribs. He closes his eyes, thinks of the Spire—how the machine had wanted a message worth its throat—and he doesn’t push.

He asks.

“Please,” he says quietly. “We need to borrow your pulse.”

The cylinder’s tone hitches. Around the room, status lights blink in a syncopated blink—one, two, pause—as if considering.

Then something presses against his skull. Not the clean note of a building, not the earth-weight of water. A buzz like a fly that learned calculus. Hyunjin staggers.

PR-00’s hand lands on his shoulder, steady. “Anti-psych diffuser,” they say, face blank with old rage. “They built baffles down here.”

Jeongin is already digging in his pack. “Countermeasures?”

“Don’t shove through it,” PR-00 says. “Go around. Not at the machine—through the river.”

Hyunjin nods, dizzy but listening. He lets the buzz be a wall. He turns away from it and finds the other voice—the patient, old pull of flow. Company, not permission, PR-00 had said. He shifts his hands from panel to pipe, cool with condensation.

“I know you want to arrive,” he whispers to the water. “I know they’ve wrapped you in cages and math. Come with us anyway. Just for a little. Just to hold while we cut.”

The pipe thrums under his fingers. The cylinder’s tone softens. Felix grins without looking up. “That’s it. I’ve got the global nodding along.”

Chan takes first guard at the door, pipe raised. Seungmin slides to the far corner, rifle balanced, angles mapped against air. Jeongin checks ventilation, counts breath cycles. PR-00 paces once, twice, and then stills; leaders know when stillness is the work.

“Ten minutes,” Seungmin says. “Beta’s fireworks got them dancing. Then they’ll ask why.”

Felix tosses Han’s velvet bag to PR-00. “Fiber cutters.”

PR-00 spills the charges like candy, gestures a pattern around the cylinder’s base. “Four here. Two there. One spare because the world likes rudeness.”

Jeongin looks from charges to Hyunjin’s nose. “You’re bleeding.”

Hyunjin swipes the blood away with the back of his wrist. “I’m listening.”

“Five minutes,” Seungmin says.

They work. PR-00 places charges with a mechanic’s intimacy. Felix sings in code and numbers listen. Chan glances at Hyunjin between glances at the hall; the look is not are you okay? but I’m here when you aren’t.

The pump’s tone shifts. The floor vibrates like an animal growling in its sleep.

“Reverse flow,” PR-00 and Seungmin say together.

Water surges. The catwalk bucks. The cylinder groans and the buzz in Hyunjin’s skull becomes a shove.

Hyunjin plants his hands and asks harder—no force, just insistence. Company with us. The surge splits around the core, sluicing past as if the cylinder wears invisible shoulders again. The floor awash, the fear high, the team steady.

“Two minutes,” Seungmin says. “One squad broke from Beta. They’re heading your way.”

Felix’s fingers are a blur. “Loop in place. Once we cut, their backhaul goes silent. Helmets won’t phone home for updates.”

PR-00 slides the last charge into place, palms flat against metal for a beat longer than needed. “For all the messages that deserved better,” they murmur.

Chan moves to Hyunjin’s side. “On your mark.”

Hyunjin breathes. He finds the note in the water again. He finds the fleck of himself that remembers a kite failing upward, a kiss in a burning room, a map drawn on a crate. He nods.

“Do it.”

Felix palms the remote. PR-00 counts under their breath. Jeongin braces. Chan grips Hyunjin’s wrist, anchor. Seungmin calls: “Doorway, three—two—”

PR-00 flips the switch.

The charges whisper rather than scream: a series of hard exhales, an old machine finally being allowed to unclench. The cylinder’s tone drops. Racks flutter and die. The hum collapses into silence so sudden it makes the room tilt.

Above, the city hiccups—billboards blink, feeds freeze, helmets choke on nothing.

In the doorway, two Enforcers turn the corner and immediately slip—water, wires, physics, luck. Chan advances, pipe fast and sure. Seungmin stitches two shots into the jamb near their helmets; the ricochet turns their new tech into headache instead of shield.

“Out,” PR-00 says, already moving. “Before the river remembers insult.”

They run. The tunnel is louder now, full of voices trying to be louder than each other: pumps arguing with flow, alarms bickering with the dark. Water climbs their calves like a persuasion.

Hyunjin reaches for the rail, for the note he found a minute ago, and finds—nothing.

Not nothing. Static. The diffuser baffles hum angry and close; the cut stirred them into fight. His gift stutters against the buzz.

The flood barrels.

“Jinnie!” Chan yells, arm slamming across Hyunjin’s chest to pin him to catwalk as the surge slams by. PR-00 grabs Felix by the collar to keep him from being peeled off the wall. Jeongin locks his fingers in Seungmin’s harness, jaw tight. For a second the whole team is a single knot holding itself together against a muscle made of river.

Hyunjin digs past the static. Asking won’t be enough through the baffles. He can’t be louder than water or machine. He can’t be a god. He can be a chorus.

He thinks of every voice they woke: the custodian’s mop stopping in mid-air, the boy teaching his sister to whistle, the soldier whispering kite through tears he didn’t understand. He thinks of PR-00’s people under the river, soldering hope out of wire. He thinks of Chan saying I know what we have.

Hyunjin opens his mouth and speaks, not to the water or the machine, but to anyone listening.

“Hold,” he says, and the word rides breath and bone and the small radios in their ears and the choke braided through the Exchange and the coil PR-00 wears like jewelry. “Just for a breath. Hold.”

The surge stumbles. The static thins. The river doesn’t stop—it’s not meant to—but it agrees to be kind. The flow flares around them, splits, slides past, a muscle unclenching again.

Felix barks out a laugh half-sob. “You just crowd-sourced physics.”

PR-00 grins, sharp and pleased. “He asked us to ask with him.”

Chan kisses Hyunjin’s temple without apology. “Move.”

They move. Water slaps their heels but doesn’t steal their feet. The grate that had been convinced of itself earlier bends for them again. The culvert exhales them into night.

Han’s boat rams the wall, delighted. “Get in losers, we’re defunding infrastructure!”

Changbin whoops, yanking them bodily into the hull. The second boat slews alongside for PR-00 and two of their people who appeared from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Sirens find the river. Floodlights try to name it. The boats become shadows where light refuses to land. They skim reeds, hug pilings, become rumor, become night, become home.

⸻

Back under the water tower, the radio has the decency to stay silent while everyone counts.

Felix collapses onto a crate, palms flat, face open in a way that makes him look younger and more dangerous. “We cut it,” he says, half to himself. “We actually cut it.”

Seungmin peels the comm from his ear, rubs the groove it left. “Helmets aren’t updating. Patrols are talking in circles.”

Jeongin is already bending new Annex arrivals around warmth, water, names. Han tells the story big and wrong; Changbin corrects him small and right. Minho arrives with Beta, bruised and pleased, and tosses a fistful of broken helmet visors onto the crate like a child proud of seashells.

PR-00 wipes water from their eyebrows with a forearm, then looks at Hyunjin. Approval in the glance, and a question. What next?

Hyunjin doesn’t look at Chan for an answer; he looks at him and finds a mirror.

“We go after the train tomorrow,” he says. “We pull as many sleepers as we can carry before the helmets find their heads. We keep writing where their bleach can’t reach—water, wire, word.”

Lee Know inclines his head, decision turning to plan in the space of a breath. “Blueprints in motion.”

The radio wakes at last. The regime’s voice is off by half a second, like it’s chasing itself down a hall.

“Curfew extended. PR-01 interference confirmed. Rewards doubled. Citizens—”

Static eats the rest. Then another layer of sound—laughter, tired and warm—slides in.

“Nice cut,” PR-00’s voice says from some other coil, delayed and delighted. “Your chorus worked.”

Hyunjin smiles without meaning to. He looks at the river through the trees, at the place where it insists on arriving even when gridded and throttled. He feels the ember in him answer, not a roar, not a whisper, but a steady line.

Chan nudges his shoulder. “Sleep,” he orders, soft.

“After I write this down,” Hyunjin says.

“What?”

“That the river was kind because we asked together.” He meets Chan’s eyes, lets the weight land where it belongs. “That this isn’t just my fire anymore.”

Chan’s mouth curves. “It never was.”

Hyunjin tips his head back and lets the water tower draw its ribs over the stars. Tomorrow: trains and ghosts. Tonight: breath and bones and names that won’t be bent.

He closes his eyes, hearing the city mispronounce him on every frequency, and for once he doesn’t flinch.

They’ll teach it how to say the truth. In time. In chorus. In light and water both.

Chapter Text

They spread the map across a sheet of scrap tin so the magnets will hold when the wind noses past. The rail lines gleam in Seungmin’s pencil like veins under skin; the city’s heart beats where steel meets power.

PR-00 taps three places with a knuckle that’s learned to be precise. “Engine staging here. Yard throat here. Rural spur here—unused since the floods. The train leaves at 19:10 with two goals: deliver helmets to the Armory by midnight and move a Gallery car to the Broadcast Annex before dawn.”

“Helmets first,” Lee Know says.

“Sleepers first,” Hyunjin answers, voice steady. He doesn’t raise it; he doesn’t have to. The argument dissolves before it can start.

PR-00’s mouth creases, not quite a smile. “Both,” they decide, as if the word always existed. “We take the sleepers, deny the helmets, and leave them a riddle they hate.”

Seungmin flips to a second page. Schedules become music under his pencil. “We force a stop at the yard throat by seeding a signal fault. Felix loops green to red to green—just enough stutter to make the conductor paranoid. When they brake, Beta slams the cross-street with a ‘utility outage’ and a ‘truck’ that’s mostly attitude.”

Han pats a tarp concealing said truck. It purrs like a cat that swallowed a wrench.

“Alpha boards on the slow,” Minho says, studying the coupler diagram like a poem. “Changbin drops the pin behind the sleeper car. Han sets teeth on the helmet cars. Chan and I take the engine. Hyunjin—”

“Wakes who will come,” PR-00 finishes. Their eyes rest on Hyunjin, approving and warning at once. “Gently. The Gallery cars have baffles bolted to the roof. They will try to eat your voice.”

Hyunjin nods. He can still feel the Subsea Exchange’s buzz behind his eyes. “Then we won’t go through the roof.”

Felix lifts a device no larger than a coaster, braided wire curling like hair. “New choke. It doesn’t shout at systems; it hums along until they trust it, then it teaches them harmony. I’ll marry it to the car’s local loop. You supply the melody.”

Chan squeezes Hyunjin’s wrist, the touch that says I’m here when you aren’t. “We’re writing it in steel tonight,” he murmurs.

“Blueprints in motion,” Lee Know says, and the plan turns into legs.

⸻

Dusk draws a bruise along the horizon. The yard glows sodium-orange and tired, a handful of towers blinking like watchmen who never learned to sleep. The train they want sits heavy on Track 3: engine, shield car, two helmet flats strapped under tarps, a Gallery car with windows that pretend to be kind, then a string of freight to make it look like nothing worth stopping.

Beta goes loud first. Minho’s voice cracks the comm like dry kindling: “Lights out on 12th. Utility truck in the throat. Keep your certificates handy, gentlemen.”

Seungmin’s count clicks in everyone’s ear. “Signal fault in three… two… stutter.”

Felix’s loop kisses the yard’s nervous system, and the mast light hiccups from green to yellow to what-if-we-didn’t. The conductor sees his career flash before his eyes and drags the brake like a rosary. The train whines, squeals, and surrenders to cautious decency.

“Go,” Lee Know breathes. He doesn’t mean the train.

Alpha moves.

Chan catches the ladder to the engine cab at a jog and rises into diesel breath. Minho ghosts the opposite side, a shadow with edges. Changbin hustles down the ballast to the sleeper coupler, grinning like the metal owes him a favor. Han lopes beside him with a canvas roll of teeth and wire. Felix and Hyunjin peel toward the Gallery car, Seungmin a few paces off with his rifle and a list of angles memorized.

“Boarders on!” Minho barks, and then everything happens at once.

Chan swings into the cab. The engineer reels. Chan’s pipe taps his wrist instead of his head. “Hands where you keep them, friend,” he says, gentle as a command. Minho reaches past another flinching hand and flips a trio of toggles that make the engine think about napping.

Back on the ground, Changbin pops the cotter pin with a grunt and a prayer. The coupler doesn’t want to let go; it never does. “C’mon,” he coaxes, shoulders bunching under his jacket. The knuckle sighs open with an offended clank.

“Teeth,” Han sings, and slaps shaped charges on the helmet flats’ winch points, making sure they will not ride far with anyone tonight.

Felix slaps the new choke onto a maintenance panel beneath the Gallery car and hums a chord. The car hums back, uncertain. “Hello, sweetheart,” he murmurs to the wiring. “Remember when your heart beat for people instead of schedules?”

On cue, two Enforcers jog the ballast, visors bright. Seungmin’s voice is already in Hyunjin’s ear: “Left—two—wind high.” His shots don’t kill; they rearrange priorities. The second Enforcer stumbles, visor spiderwebbed. The first ducks behind a signal box and calls for a drone that Beta has already taught to forget how to arrive.

“Hyunjin!” Felix snaps, hand out.

Hyunjin plants his palm beside Felix’s and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t try to throw his voice through the roof or around the baffles. He listens for the path that’s already there: the tiny filaments in the car’s monitoring system, the soft hum of the air handler, the heartbeat of a battery that wants to belong to a lantern and was coerced into a cage.

Company, not permission, PR-00 had said. Hyunjin breathes it in.

“Please,” he whispers—to wire, to air, to the people inside. “You don’t have to be alone in there.”

The panel flutters under his hand like a bird testing a wing.

Felix grins, eyes wet. “Door locks are shy. I’ll flirt.”

Seungmin again, calm and stern: “Two more east. One west. Beta’s utility truck needs ninety more seconds to be legally annoying.”

“Make them spiritually annoyed,” Minho replies, as Chan shepherds the engineer to the floor with a zip tie and a compliment about his tie-tying skills.

Changbin heaves the Gallery car’s external latch. It’s not meant to be opened here; it opens anyway because he says please the way steel understands.

Inside, light that pretended to be merciful breathes across rows of transparent coffins. Faces blur under glass. Breath fogs and clears. Three hands twitch at once, as if some shared dream decided to end politely.

“Jinnie,” Chan says into Hyunjin’s comm, voice low with pride and warning.

Hyunjin steps into the aisle and asks out loud—not a command, an offering. “If you can hear me, you don’t have to wake. But if you want to, we’ll catch you. We will stay.”

The baffles on the roof throw static like sand. He doesn’t push through it. He goes sideways. He remembers the Subsea Exchange and the way the water listened when they asked together. “Hold with me,” he says to the team, and their yes comes wordless, a pressure in the air, a chorus you feel more than hear.

Two lids sigh. A boy with a lint of freckles between his eyes blinks as if someone mispronounced his name. A woman in her thirties inhales like surfacing. Three more coffins tick, reluctant and brave.

Jeongin is already there, hands gentle and clinical. “Slow. Your body’s not wrong; it’s just catching up.”

On the ballast, a new rhythm enters the scene: heavy boots, but not Enforcer cadence. A commander with a helmet that looks different—angular, with a halo of damped mesh—steps into the aisle of light at the Gallery car’s door, flanked by two soldiers with guns that don’t believe in conversation.

The commander’s visor angles to Hyunjin and stays. “Target PR-01. Anti-psych dampers engaged. Surrender.”

“New hat,” Han observes, crawling under the helmet flat to set his last charge. “Looks like a toaster fell in love with a jellyfish.”

“Seungmin?” Minho.

“Helmet mesh is live. Aim for the hinge. Or the heart.” Seungmin’s calm is pure math.

Chan moves to block the door; Minho appears like a negative space where something dangerous used to be. The commander raises a hand, and the dampers pour buzz through the Gallery like bugs.

Hyunjin’s mouth goes dry. He feels his voice stutter, his gift failing to find the path. He doesn’t fight the buzz with volume; he reaches for the ember and the chorus instead.

“Felix—teach the mesh a lullaby,” he says, steady despite the tremor in his bones.

Felix, already at the panel, nods once. “Humming.”

Hyunjin speaks—not to the commander, not to the machine, but to the new-waking faces behind glass and the ones still lost in sleep. “Remember something that belongs to only you. A smell. A word. A terrible song you can’t stop humming. Don’t give it away. Hold it between your teeth.”

Hands inside coffins curl. A girl with a shaved head mouths salt. The boy with the freckles says dog like a prayer.

The commander takes one measured step into the aisle.

Chan moves first. He always does. Pipe up, strike fast. The commander meets him with a baton that crackles with a static that wants to be forever. The baton grazes Chan’s forearm; his hiss is pain and annoyance, not collapse. “Bad jellyfish,” he grits, and feints. Minho slides past the second soldier and becomes a problem no training manual covers.

Seungmin’s shot zings the helmet’s hinge. A second hits the doorframe; the ricochet spanks the mesh and makes it flicker.

“Now,” Felix breathes.

Hyunjin finds the flicker with his hands on the panel. He asks into the breath between pulses. “Not yours,” he says to the helmet—not an order, a reminder. “Not your thought. Let go.”

For a heartbeat the mesh listens. The commander stumbles. Chan’s pipe kisses the visor, Minho’s knife sings a warning against a gauntlet, and the Gallery fills with motion that refuses to be choreographed.

On the ballast, Han’s charges on the helmet flats tick toward mischief. “Thirty,” he calls. “Twenty-nine—”

“Changbin,” PR-00 says patiently, halfway up the engine ladder with a coil slung over their shoulder and a smile that never quite reaches their eyes. “Now would be a pleasant time to take that car for a walk.”

Changbin sets both hands on the coupler lever and makes a sound that steel respects. The knuckle opens, the slack breathes, and the Gallery car stutters free.

“Back!” Seungmin barks.

Hyunjin steps into the aisle, between freed coffins and the commander’s next intention. He lifts his palms but doesn’t burn. He remembers the river split, the chorus on the catwalk. “Hold,” he says—this time to the world, to the car, to the parts of the machine that want to be kind. The dampers hum. The lights flicker. The corridor wavers like heat above a road.

The commander’s baton meets Chan’s pipe and loses faith. Minho’s blade kisses the mesh seam as if it were always meant to, and the helmet dies with a wet crackle. The commander blinks into air that doesn’t agree with him anymore. He looks very young without his hat. He runs.

No one follows.

“Out,” PR-00 says, with the same absolute calm they had under the river. “We’ve asked steel to do enough favors.”

They move like a single animal. Jeongin shepherds the newly woken with words he keeps in his pocket for when panic would be efficient but wrong. Felix yanks the choke, pocketing it like a miracle he isn’t done with. Chan backs along the ballast, pipe ready; Minho is every shadow that wants to be helpful and slightly untrue. Seungmin walks backward, counting headlights that don’t appear because Beta owns the throat with their bad truck and better timing.

“Ten,” Han sings from under the helmet flats. “Nine… three… boom.”

The charges exhale. Winches rupture. Tarps go limp over suddenly useless cargo. Somewhere in a tower a nervous man’s life choices weep into a clipboard.

The engine coughs and tries to decide whether to be brave. PR-00 climbs into the cab and coaxes it into a patient roll. “We’ll take them down the spur,” they call. “Lee Know—meet us with the canoe-that-isn’t?”

“Already insulted and en route,” Lee Know replies dryly, a sound remarkably like laughter under a coat of crisis.

They trundle the Gallery car onto the rural spur that forgot it had a purpose and discover it remembers perfectly when asked. Han’s truck blocks the yard throat with bureaucratic sincerity. Beta melts out of sight like an alibi.

At the spur’s end, water waits—black ribbon, reeds, the moon cutting itself to fit wherever it lands. The canoe-that-isn’t and its sibling bump against pilings, annoyed and loyal. Hands reach. Voices count. The coffins become blankets, then names.

On the bank, the boy with freckles finds Hyunjin’s sleeve again, as if there is only one thread in the world and this is it. “Dog,” he says, holding it like a jewel.

“Dog,” Hyunjin agrees, and something in his chest stops bracing for impact.

Chan touches his face, thumb smearing a streak of diesel that looks briefly like war paint. “You wrote it,” he says, soft and fierce. “In steel.”

“In people,” Hyunjin corrects, because the ember in him insists on the precision that keeps fires from becoming tragedies. “Steel just carried it.”

Minho appears with a helmet mesh in his hand, curious as a cat with a new machine. “They’ll field more of these tomorrow,” he says. “Smarter. Meaner.”

PR-00, standing at the water’s edge, watches the Gallery car soften into a story they never intended to write. “Then we’ll teach them a different math tonight,” they answer. “Trains forget. Rivers remember. People decide.”

The radio in Lee Know’s pocket hiccups: the regime’s voice, late, offended, chasing itself. > “Signal disruption at Grid Sector Delta. Interdiction underway. PR-01—”

Static eats the rest. Over the static, faint and layered, another frequency threads itself in: tired laughter, wire song, patience made audible.

“Nice work,” says a voice that might be PR-00’s or might be every ghost under the city. “Next stop: the Vault.”

The water tower isn’t here to hear it. The trees are. They nod, wind through their fingers. The night takes the plan and holds it without bleeding.

Hyunjin looks at Chan. Chan looks at him. Between them there is no question that matters more than this one: with?

“Always,” Chan says, answering the one Hyunjin didn’t ask out loud.

Hyunjin turns to the river and the sleepers and the map that will be redrawn poring over tin by lantern light. “Tomorrow we hit the Vault,” he tells the Collective, and the Collective believes him because belief is a muscle they’ve been training by lifting one another.

For now, they count heads. They check pulses. They make tea that tastes like victory and dirt. Someone starts to hum. Someone else finds the melody. A third person doesn’t know the words and sings anyway.

Hyunjin listens—to wire, to water, to breath—and the world answers back, not with obedience, but with company. It is enough. It will have to be, until enough becomes change.