Still Only Human
Maria flared up all of a sudden.
"India? Mm, want some barley tea? You can drink water, right?"
"I can eat anything a human eats. Don't look down on me just because I'm a vampire."
"Well, that's a relief. Barley tea was all I had."
Seo Rin opened the fridge, poured barley tea into a cup, and handed it over. Then he sat down against the wall himself.
"Alright. Time to talk, then? So, there's this girl I happened to meet…"
Seo Rin explained the situation. It was a fairly long story, but Maria listened with the rapt attention of a housewife glued to a weekend soap opera. Human affairs, after all, would make for rather interesting material from the standpoint of a noble vampire shut away from the world of work.
When Seo Rin finally finished telling her about Hwa-young, Maria's eyes sparkled as she asked,
"So then we just make that girl one of our bloodline, right?"
"…Hey. How exactly did the conversation get there?"
Seo Rin stared at her, flabbergasted. Maria put on a coquettish little act.
"Aww… but usually the way you solve a situation like that is you just turn the person into something more than human, and it takes care of itself. It's even in the Talmud, you know? Better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish. Once she's a vampire, those problems sort themselves out. Don't they?"
It was true enough—if she stopped being human and became a vampire, human problems would probably mean nothing. From a vampire's or a lycanthrope's point of view, humans were fragile things that might die if you so much as touched them wrong. In that case, the people crushing Hwa-young under their heel would end up dead as surely as night follows day.
"I won't allow that! I don't want to turn her into a murderer or a monster."
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. He clapped a hand over his lips in shock. Murderer was one thing—but monster? Maria and Seo Rin were both monsters in exactly the same way, weren't they?
"Murderer? That's nothing special."
Maria sipped her barley tea and spoke in a flat voice.
"Nothing special…"
"Then what are they? They didn't kill anyone—they just locked people up, beat them, and forced them into prostitution. So no matter what they did, as long as they didn't actually kill anyone, they're somehow better than murderers?"
"Th-that's…"
Seo Rin found himself at a loss for words. Maria had a point. Even if the law ranked those crimes below murder, what those people had done was hardly any different.
"Mm. Give me that phone."
"Huh?"
"Anyway, I just need to pull the information off this, right?"
Maria took a tiny pouch from her clothes, pinched out a pinch of white powder, and put it in her mouth. Seo Rin caught the scent—plain salt. She held the salt between her teeth and laid her hand on the shattered phone.
Beep-beep-beep.
And just like that—the screen lit up, and the phone's OS began to boot. She fiddled with it a few times, then set it down on the floor.
"Ugh, what a drag. This is exactly why I hate doing this stuff."
She held out her cup. Seo Rin refilled it with barley tea and asked, bewildered,
"H-how did you do that?"
"Magic."
"Th-there's such a thing?"
"…"
Maria gave him a look with her blue eyes. Come to think of it—there were vampires, and he himself was a lycanthrope. Why wouldn't there be magic?
"A simple parlor trick. Thanks to how far electronic devices have come, salt's gotten more useful as a magical catalyst. I've picked up a few odds and ends… So. What are you going to do?"
"What do you mean, what am I going to do?"
"Whether you're going to apply extralegal sanctions."
The broken phone board danced between Maria's fingers. Seo Rin was startled by how attractive her words suddenly sounded.
"Extralegal?"
It was an absurdly American-comic-book idea—becoming a hero who metes out justice beyond the law against evil. And Seo Rin's abilities already put him beyond ordinary humans; as long as he was careful, the law would never touch him. He had never even considered it before, but done that way, everything would resolve itself cleanly.
"…No."
Seo Rin shook his head. Having power greater than a human's and using it freely would only turn him into a monster. There were things he had to protect, and he could only protect them while he remained human.
He glanced at Maria, suddenly worried. She had offered the idea out of goodwill, and he had refused out of sheer stubbornness. She might resent him for it.
From the perspective of someone who had been a vampire since the Industrial Revolution—or far earlier—Seo Rin's habit of treating killing or the free use of one's power as monstrous might well be offensive.
But Maria was smiling. For all that she looked like a girl in her early teens, the smile made her seem impossibly adult, impossibly mature.
"Heh heh… I'm glad. Glad you answered that way. Still, I'll leave you the contacts and the information."
She grabbed a scrap of paper and began writing at high speed. Seo Rin watched her, feeling oddly awkward. Contrary to his fears, she seemed relieved that he had rejected her proposal.
For a while there was only the sound of the ballpoint pen racing across the paper. Then she handed him the finished note.
"Mm. Ah—thanks for the help."
"Please. It's nothing. In return, Seo Rin."
"Yeah?"
"If something ever happens to me… would you try this hard to help me, too?"
She looked at him with a mischievous expression. Seo Rin stared back, startled.
"W-what are you talking about? Of course I would. Favors ought to be repaid."
"Good. I'm glad you're a decent person."
She stood and dusted off her backside.
"Then I'll leave the rest to you. Or do you need more help?"
"No. The rest is something I should handle myself, right?"
Seo Rin looked at the memo she had written and clicked his tongue. Maria clapped her hands.
"Come in."
"Huh?"
Something came flying in through the window. Seo Rin startled into a defensive stance—but what landed in front of him was not an attack. It was a large suitcase.
"…What's this?"
"A present. People are going to be after you from now on. Use it."
Maria walked toward the door and looked back. Seo Rin opened the case. Inside, sure enough, was a full-body suit and a submachine gun.
"Huh?"
"It's a full-body ballistic suit similar to the one Han Se-gun uses. Base materials are Starbond and polyamide fiber, and the padding has ballistic coolant so you can keep moving without getting too miserable. It'll stop nine-millimeter rounds anywhere on the body, but rifle rounds are completely out of the question. I put a gun in there too, but you shouldn't need it against humans."
Seo Rin lifted the submachine gun in shock. The weight was real. This was a genuine firearm. How had she even gotten something like this in Korea? But there was another word that bothered him more right now.
"W-wait. What do you mean, people are after me? Are lycanthropes that rare?"
"No. What's rare isn't lycanthropes. It's you."
"…So why is that?"
But Maria only left him a smile and melted into the darkness on the wind, vanishing without a trace.
A young woman in shredded stockings, hair a mess, clothes in disarray, was walking the corridor of a run-down Jugong apartment complex. Walking alone should not have left her that exhausted, yet she was sweating coldly as if she had come down with the flu.
"Hah… hah…"
She staggered down the hallway and collided with a bicycle left in the corridor.
Crash!
The clatter rang out, and she herself jumped and began to tremble violently. The shaking was so bad it looked like a seizure. No one seemed to care what happened outside their doors, though, and the corridor fell quiet again.
"Hoo…"
She let out a breath of relief and went back to checking apartment numbers as she walked.
"503… Is this it?"
She hesitated, then pressed the bell. A hesitant woman's voice answered from inside.
"…Who is it?"
"Unnie… It's me."
"…"
The voice inside died away. She had half expected this visit, but clearly had never wanted it. After a brief silence, the door slowly opened.
"Hwa-young? You… what are you thinking?!"
A middle-aged woman in an apron appeared. Her face was twisted with anger and fear. Shin Hwa-young bit her lower lip as if she had been wronged.
"But you said if anything ever happened, I should come find you…"
"I said that, but that was then! You… look at the state of you."
Blinded by anger, was that what they called it? Only then did she really take in Hwa-young's condition. She looked less like a person living in modern Seoul and more like a war refugee.
Hwa-young caught the woman's hand with trembling fingers.
"…I need medicine. You have some, right?"
"I… medicine? I quit that a long time ago."
She avoided Hwa-young's eyes. The lie was transparent. That drug was not something you quit so easily. Even without that, her whole manner made it obvious she was lying.
When Hwa-young kept staring in silence, the woman bit her lip.
"…Fine. I have a little, so stop looking at me like that. Just get inside first. Other people might see."
She pulled Hwa-young into the apartment and shut the door. The indoor light spilling into the corridor vanished.
Inside, dinner was clearly being prepared; a stew bubbled on the stove, filling the place with a savory smell. At a glance it might have looked like a happy home. The conversation taking place there had nothing to do with happiness.
"Alright, I can guess the story without hearing it. You ran?"
"Yes. More importantly, the medicine first."
"There's only a little. I'm trying to taper off. I've got a husband now, you know."
As she spoke she took a paper box from the wardrobe. Inside was nalbuphine hydrochloride, the cheap narcotic commonly known by the childish street name "whoosh juice." It got used here and there as a "fatigue recovery" drug, and it was almost too petty to call a real narcotic—but its dependence and stimulant effects kept it circulating heavily through the black market.
"Then… can I take all of it?"
Hwa-young stared at the vials with greedy eyes. On the run, with almost no way to get more, she could not help coveting this much of a supply.
"Take it all. This much should last you a bit."
"Th-thank you."
"You should cut back soon too. Though if you're on the run like this, you won't be able to even if you want to."
"…"
Hwa-young immediately opened the box, took out a syringe, and stabbed it into an ampoule. With shaking hands she drew the dose, pushed the air out, and drove the needle into her own arm. It was less an injection than a form of self-harm.
She had stabbed so hard that blood backflowed into the barrel and stained the drug red. The woman who had been trembling moments before finally exhaled in relief, as if satisfied at last.
"Haaah."
"Have you eaten?"
"Ah—no."
"I can tell just looking at you. Poor thing. Tch… When my husband gets home I'll say you're a friend, so why don't you stay the night? It's not like you have anywhere else to go, right?"
She turned off the gas range and set the table. Only then did Hwa-young feel the hunger gnawing at her stomach, and her face flushed.
She had been wandering on an empty stomach ever since the meal at Seo Rin's place, but the withdrawal had been worse than the hunger, so she had barely noticed. Now that the drug had put out the immediate fire, the hunger finally reared its head.
"Th-thank you."
Hwa-young sat at the table looking as if she might burst into tears at any second.
By the time dinner was over, the so-called husband still had not come home. From the looks of things, her unnie's married life was not exactly smooth either. Unlike people who dated a little and then got married, she was a woman who had sold her body at the absolute bottom of the trade. A peaceful marriage would have been the stranger outcome.
Her name was Jang Young-soon. When Hwa-young had first entered the business, Young-soon had already climbed as high as junior madam, so everyone called her "Jang Unnie" with a double meaning. She had worked hard, exploited the younger girls when she had to, paid off her debt, and washed her hands of the whole thing—one of the few success stories.
Cases like hers were rare. Most women, as they aged, simply drifted from countryside towns to remote islands, selling their bodies until the end.
The system worked like this: the women were forcibly lent money on a daily-interest basis, and the interest was crushing. For every imaginable reason the handlers withheld pay while the interest snowballed. Women in that line of work could not exactly punch a clean time clock, so no matter how hard they worked themselves to the bone, the debt only grew. There was no normal way out.
But she had somehow paid it all off and gotten free. Whether the pimps respected her diligence, or simply wanted a shining success story to keep the others from resisting, they had let her go without much of a fight.
"Strip and put these on. Sleep here tonight and get out first thing tomorrow. One day I can cover as 'a friend,' but any longer and it's impossible. Got it? You leave tomorrow. No exceptions."
She shoved a change of her own clothes into Hwa-young's arms and pushed her toward the bathroom.