Going Home (4)

......Ah, forget it.

"Noona. I'm sorry for the way I spoke earlier. I got angry because you tried to touch the talisman."

Kim Eunha hadn't expected me to apologize first. Surprise crossed her face, and then her brow drew in, a whole knot of feelings written across it at once. She had some common sense, at least. The usual sort — a head full of noodles where a brain ought to be — would have come back with Of course you're the one who should apologize! She bowed her head to me properly instead.

"No. I did something worth getting angry over first. I'm sorry."

"That's......"

"Getting on the wrong side of a promising future ability user wouldn't do my career any favors, so you'll forgive me, right? Hehe."

The words were sarcastic if you looked at them straight. The face that went with them — smiling, tongue flicked out — was only teasing, and not in a way that made you want to hit her.

"I'm not rotten enough to grab an apology and pick a fight with it. Don't worry."

"......Mm. Thanks."

She turned away, and I could see the lobes of her ears gone red. Kim Eunha and Min Nayoung must have finished calibrating the measuring device, because they told the old man they were ready. He cracked his neck, shot a glance at Kim Eunha — the flush still lingering on her face — and opened his mouth around a rotten little smile.

"I like that you don't act like an asshole. We've burned enough time, so let's measure this and be done. You're tired, and I've got a measurement report to submit to that branch chief bastard."

He must have hit Enter. A crisp tap of the keys tickled my ear, and at the same moment a faint watery light spilled from the orb under my index finger. Energy stirred my Phase Power the way an appraiser did, and ran in through that finger, into my body.

Huh. Is this Phase Power too?

I focused on the feel of it popping and darting through my veins, and the old man, midway through another strike of the keys, lifted one eyebrow.

"Hoh. You can feel raw Phase Power, can you?"

"......Something's tickling inside me."

"Measurement and appraisal use Phase Energy plates — drawn out of Phase Stones and processed — and set them repelling against the Phase Power in your body, so the device can read the form and the numbers. Ability users sensitive to Phase Power say that repulsion tickles...... Looking at you, I'm starting to think it may have something to do with aptitude."

Hm. So it was repulsive force, turned to a use. Something about that sat wrong. More than that, I realized the mass of light that had swallowed my Phase Power when I returned from the Phase World wasn't so different from the measuring device and the appraiser pushing Phase Power into my body. If I held on to this sensation, I had a feeling it would help me charge Franc's Soul Stone.

When would I get the chance to try? I'd need a Phase Stone first.

Beep.

I'd been following that slightly foreign Phase Power as it moved through me. The beep came, and the flow into my body stopped. I opened my eyes. The old man and both researchers were staring at the monitor as if their souls had left them — faces that said this was absurd. The old man muttered, small.

"An F-Class......"

"I'm F-Class?"

I blinked, not quite believing it, and he nodded with a sullen look on him. Then he sighed, and waved me off with both hands.

"The exam's over, and you've got nothing left to do, so get downstairs. The appraisal and the measurement will be delivered by courier in a few days, along with your Certifier."

Asked me this and that like he had every question in the world, and the second the measurement ended, I was useless and out the door. Well. If they say go, I go. I was on edge about Franc's Soul Stone being found anyway, and I wanted to see Mom, and Noona, and Dad.

"Thank you for your trouble."

I said it to the old man, who never took his eyes off the monitor, and to the two researchers writing up their documents, and I left the measurement room. Kim Eunha set her pen down, came after me, and asked in a sheepish voice.

"You all right? Can you walk? Want me to call a nurse to help you?"

"I can walk on my own."

I turned the offer down, and she followed me in silence as far as the elevator. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, looked away, and spoke like someone making an excuse.

"The doctor clicks his tongue and talks in that obnoxious way, but he isn't a bad man by nature. He's carrying a deep wound, so he's like that with people of high standing too, not just you...... Don't take it personally."

"I'll chalk it up to an occupational hazard. He never introduced himself, so I don't even know his name, but still."

"Dr. Woo Mingu. He's famous around here. Look the name up if you have the time."

"If I happen to think of it."

She snickered at that and waved.

"Take care of yourself. Don't die."

Ghk. What a terrifying thing to say. I'm going to live a very long time, thanks.

There wasn't even a call button. I stood in front of the elevator and the doors opened like an automatic door. I stepped in. Kim Eunha gave me a short wave, white coat fluttering, and went back to the measurement room.

The doors shut, and the elevator started down on its own. Was someone flying it by remote, from a control center somewhere?

There was a black dome jutting from the ceiling, the look of a surveillance camera. I turned Search on it. Sure enough, inside was a lens that could swing freely through a hundred and eighty degrees in every direction. So that was how they confirmed who was riding, and sent them where they were meant to go.

I tilted my head, and sensed another elevator in the same building. That one had ordinary buttons, floor by floor. This one had been built special, then. For returnees.

Not a machine. A person's voice. I listened, and stepped out, and the elevator shut its doors and went on down to the first floor.

I walked the corridor slowly. Not a single window. This hall, and the one outside the exam room on the thirty-second floor — no lights anywhere, and still bright. What was the principle? Some device set into the walls?

......What. These aren't cement. They aren't even concrete.

A material I'd never seen. I set my hand to the wall, and light spilled from the place I touched.

......Ignore it. Mild headache. Can't be bothered to think.

At the end of the corridor I pulled the hinged door open, and there it was, just as the announcement had said — a skybridge. Special glass, above and below and to both sides. I looked down, and my legs went a little weak.

Crossing it, I sent Search past the door on the far side. A desk about half the size of the information desk on the first floor, a receptionist standing there alone, and two ability users resting in chairs beside her. The picture drew itself in my head. The Phase Power inside both of them was flowing without a fixed shape. A Physical Reinforcement type would have been a vortex, and a Special type a Möbius strip, like mine. They wouldn't post two Healing-types as security. Elemental, then?

I finished the body scan. The two of them only smiled and chatted, and gave no reaction beyond that. At this point, it seemed safe to figure Search wasn't going to be noticed.

"Kahaha! So then that prim little gentleman grabs my leg and hangs off it, begging me not to throw him away, telling me he loves me~ God, it was pathetic. A face I wanted to step on."

"I feel bad for the guy~."

"What are you saying! I'm the pathetic bitch — the one who kept spreading her legs for a man like that!"

As I got close to the door, a voice that sounded like it had a temper and a voice that was soft and calm were in the middle of a conversation that was decidedly not fit for polite company.

The door creaked. I opened it and went in, and the two women stopped talking and stared straight at me. Ability users, sure enough — pale, finely drawn faces, the features balanced, and genuinely pretty. One wore a bob that fell to her chin. The other had her hair twisted into a coil and pinned neatly at the nape. The bob's eyes were narrow, and a little fierce. The coil-haired one's were large and round, and set in that face they looked quite gentle.

"Welcome~ Congratulations on making it back~."

"Thank you."

The coil-haired woman beamed and waved. So the soft voice beyond the door had been hers. The bob looked me up and down, then simply shut her eyes and folded her arms. Her brow pinched hard, and the meaning was blatant. The coil-haired woman's smile was only formal — I could see that plain as day — and I sighed, inwardly.

Right. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Franc, pouring goodwill all over me from the first second we met, was the weird one......

Anyway. The coil-haired woman had a Phase Power around 1,200, and the bob around 900. If I was F-Class, maybe the two of them were about the same class as me.

......Mm. I'd only meant to look at their Phase Power, and I'd seen straight through to both of them naked.

I was forcing the naked bodies — bob and coil, floating around in my head — out of the way, when the coil-haired one ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠smiled and pointed at the receptionist.

"We're Association ability users~. On duty guarding the passage, so~ go get your guidance from Miss Seri, all right~?"

"......Yes."

Just listening to that voice drained the strength out of me. I walked over to the receptionist, sneaking looks at the two of them as I went. Both were dressed in black, like a police tactical unit — matte black protective gear of some material I couldn't name on the torso, the same gear on the arms and thighs, gauntlets and hard boots, a three-section baton at the waist. Heavily armed. I couldn't shake the thought that it was preparation for when a returnee went on a rampage.

I stopped in front of the desk. A gentle-looking woman in the same uniform as the receptionist in the central hall bowed at the waist.

"Welcome, Mr. Jung Seoha. Congratulations on your safe return. If you open the door on the left, your attending physician is waiting, so please follow the guidance and complete the procedures for admission and examination. If you have any questions, please ask them now."

I said I had none, and she bowed again. I answered with a nod, opened the white door on the left, and went in — and in a waiting room not far off, I found Mom and my sister pacing.

My breath caught. My heart started to pound.

"Mom! Noona!"

I ran for the waiting room. They turned, and tears burst out of them, and they ran for me.

"Son!"

"Seohaaa!"

They'd cried a long time. The skin around their eyes was swollen red. Even so, the sight of me — gaunt, worn down to nothing — must have brought the grief up hard, because great fat tears spilled out of them as they called my name over and over. I'd kept myself from thinking of home and family, afraid my heart would go soft. But on that night black as pitch, in rain coming down like a flood, when I swam alone with nothing but a log to cling to, the fear and the loneliness had been enough to drive me mad, and I'd endured by thinking of nothing but their warmth. I don't know how badly I'd wanted Mom then. How badly I'd wanted my sister. I don't know how much I'd missed being inside Mom's arms.

I pulled them in — Mom and my sister, crying, stroking my arms and my face — and my chest was so stopped up I could barely breathe. Dad appeared from wherever he'd been, a doctor with him, and stroked my head, and his voice was gentle.

"You came back. I'm glad you made it home safe."

Dad wasn't a man used to showing what he felt. Both his eyes were faintly bloodshot, and when I saw that I couldn't hold it, and I cried too. In the warmth of my family clutching me, I finally felt it — that I had come back to the place where I belonged.

The measurement was done, and the reunion with them was done, and then came a health checkup and a disease screening that took three hours. Aside from being underweight, they told me, there was nothing wrong with my body. I took the papers and told Mom I wanted to go home and rest. My sister opposed it as if I'd die the moment we left.

"What if you have a seizure out of nowhere!"

"What seizure? The doctor said I was fine."

"They said you're underweight! You barely weigh a hundred pounds!"

"Did you forget the part where they said rest and recuperation would fix it, underweight or not?"

"Don't you dare brush off being underweight!"

I stared at my sister in disbelief — dozens of times smarter than someone like me, and acting like ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a fool — and then Mom took my hand, and her voice was earnest.

"Mom feels the same as your sister. At home, we couldn't handle it properly if something went wrong."

"But—"

"And you lost so much weight in so little time, didn't you? If you went into shock, Mom would — Mom would......"

Her eyes were shaking. She looked a breath away from tears, and I couldn't bring myself to say I wanted to go home. It was only that I'd lost some weight from swimming. To Mom and my sister, I must have looked like I was about to die. I have Search, so I know my own body. I thought of insisting I was fine, that resting at home would be enough, but it wouldn't land. Not a word of it. In the end Mom had me by the hand, and I was admitted to a first-class room just like that.

If I dug my heels in and made Mom cry, Dad might take my allowance card and my computer.

And the day after I was admitted, Mom and my sister's fussing — fussing past the point where you could even call it fussing — saw to it that I received every test the hospital could run, for two days straight. Mom had ties to the hospital herself, and she demanded every examination under the sun with a ferocity that could have irritated any doctor. The doctors and the nurses never once frowned. They met us with smiles, and I respected them for it. So I thanked the attending physician, and he smiled, gentle even to look at.

"Not at all. It isn't uncommon for the families of returnees to show symptoms of acute stress disorder. Your family is among the more rational of them, so they aren't difficult to manage. They should settle in a few days. You're the one in good condition — please comfort them."

And so, armed with his opinion that I was nutritionally deficient, Mom and my sister took turns keeping watch beside me, and brought food piled like a mountain, and stuffed it into me. They wouldn't even feed me anything someone else had made. They cooked it themselves. Honestly......

The doctor had said his piece, and I wanted to rest, so for five days I did nothing but eat and sleep, eat and sleep — a stretch of idleness a grasshopper would have envied. That didn't mean I was at ease.

Dad was the director of a small general hospital, and he couldn't leave his post for long, so he'd gone back first. That was fine. The problem was Mom. She handled the hospital's management across the board, and the work was hardly light, and still she'd tried to take my nursing on herself as well. My sister kept watch beside me through the day. At night it was Mom, nursing me, and the shadows under her eyes went black, and she wore down so fast that I got scared — scared she would be the one to collapse.

I didn't even have a killing disease. And still she was stubborn about it, wouldn't even sleep in any comfort, wouldn't rest properly...... I understood that while I'd been suffering near to death in the Phase World, Mom had been suffering in her heart, back in reality. But this was too much. So I threatened her, and coaxed her, and even acted cute — I wasn't going anywhere, I'd stay right here, and if she didn't rest properly I might collapse too — and only then did I finally get her down on the caregiver's cot.

I'd asked her to come up on the bed and sleep beside me. Mom said I'd be uncomfortable, that a patient's bed was for the patient alone, and she pulled a single thin blanket over herself on that hard, miserable cot and dropped into sleep as if she'd fainted. Seeing her curled like a shrimp, I hurt in the chest. She called my name in her sleep, her exhausted face slack, and my chest closed up so tight I nearly cried.

I forced the tears back, gathered her up carefully so she wouldn't wake, and laid her on the bed. And when I lay down beside her, Mom — even half-lost between sleep and waking — reached out and held me tight. I could feel her love. That night, in Mom's warm arms, I slept deep, and I didn't dream.

To Dad, Mom was...... well...... it wouldn't be too much to say she was his entire life. Of course he loves me and my sister too — though it feels like he loves her more, her being his daughter — but his love for Mom is so particular it feels as if it's left the category of family altogether.

Mom, who sometimes calls a man like that a nuisance, turned thirty-six on the first of January this year, and passed beyond the threat of forced summoning to the Phase World. The instant the hour hand, the minute hand, and the second hand all pointed at twelve, he scooped her clean off her feet and spun her round and round the living room. Happy or not, there are limits...... I'd thought he might restrain himself in front of his son and daughter. Try to understand the mortification of a child watching that, at the exact moment the New Year's bell rings out and the year begins......

Anyway. That Dad, whose devotion to his wife was past all reason, first met Mom twenty-one years ago, in the examination room of the hospital where he took up his first post as a specialist. He'd earned his specialist's license at thirty, and on the very day he started at a large hospital, he fell at a single glance for Mom — a second-year middle schooler who'd happened to come in with her mother for a checkup — and confessed on the spot, down on one knee. Mom, of course, and her mother beside her, and the nurses beside her, and even the patients sitting outside the examination room, all froze solid at the sight. Mom's mother told me so herself.

After that, every day off, without fail, Dad chased her, until he finally won permission to court her and they started seeing each other. And then, the very next summer. The moment she turned sixteen and became what the law called a simplified adult — old enough to marry — he went and got her pregnant.

......Even thinking about it again, Dad seems insane. How could he, with a girl fifteen years younger......

Anyway, Mom was the only daughter of an ordinary family, and the moment she learned the truth she dropped a bombshell on her father and her mother. She was carrying my sister. She would marry Dad. Right after that, her father scolded her so hard it was a wonder she had any tears left, and locked her in her room. Of course he did. What father, in that situation, is going to say, Oh, is that so? Then you have my blessing!

I heard later, from Mom's mother, that once he'd locked Mom in, her father tried to go out with a club in his hand...... If she hadn't held him back so persistently, he really would have gone. And that beating, born of pure rage, would have come down on someone. For the record, Dad and Mom's father are four years apart. Mom's father is the older one.

......

Dad already knew she was pregnant. The moment he heard she'd been locked in her room, he put in for leave at the hospital as if he'd been waiting for the news, and knelt before the gate of her father's house. To wring permission to marry out of the man. On the first day of kneeling, of course, he took a thorough beating with a broom. If Mom's mother hadn't already put away anything that could serve as a weapon — a length of lumber, a baseball bat — I think that day would have been the anniversary of Dad's death.

Beaten to a pulp, he held out on his knees with a single bottle of water, not sleeping, not eating. On the fifth day he finally collapsed. The neighbors had been watching him closely since the third day, and the moment he went down they tried to call an ambulance and send him to the hospital. He shoved away the paramedics who were trying to load him in, and he shouted, and then he knelt in front of the gate again.

That was when the gate opened, and the one who came running out was Mom. She'd been watching him collapse from the second-floor window, and she'd kicked her door open and run. At that sight, her father nearly collapsed from sheer rage, or so the story goes. She clutched the half-fallen Dad and wept, and she shouted at her father, come out after her, that she would die if he didn't allow the marriage. He felt how desperate she was, and how sincere, and he gave his permission with a heart that wept blood.

Dad and Mom were happy they could marry. Mom's mother was glad to have a decent son-in-law, even if he was a bit old. The neighbors were delighted to have a good story. The only unhappy person in the whole place was Mom's father. Even now, the moment he drinks, he glares at Dad as if he means to kill him.

Anyway, her father said it would be better to hold the engagement first, have the child, and only then the wedding. Dad ignored this with perfect cleanliness and threw the wedding together at lightning speed. His argument was, how could they hold an engagement when there was already a child in the womb. The image of Mom's father clutching the nape of his neck in sheer dismay comes to me without any effort at all. And the one born eight months after that wedding was my sister.

In exchange for allowing the marriage, her father had set a single condition. That Mom stay at her parents' home until she gave birth. Dad heard it and didn't hesitate for a second. He spent a portion of what he'd saved and bought a foreign sedan that looked expensive at a glance. Her father and her mother had lived frugally their whole lives, and even Mom was furious that he'd bought an expensive car without a moment's thought and without so much as asking anyone. He shut every mouth in the room with one line, and the name in it was Mom's.

She'd married young, and she was carrying a child besides. It was inevitable that a hundred mouths would work her name over. That it hadn't gone as badly as it might have was probably because Dad was a handsome doctor of thirty-one, and because the two of them had married with the formal permission of both families. Come rain or snow, every single day without missing one, he drove her to school and drove her home. It was devotion enough to make the local paper, so that said everything.

Thanks to that, she could attend school in peace — and thanks to Dad keeping watch, she could go in comfort and in health, without men sniffing around her and without the whisper of gossip. Mom told my sister and me this behind his back. She said there was a little more to the story, but that it wasn't for our ears, and she didn't tell it. I can guess well enough. The thugs who'd spat abuse at her, or come creeping — he must have smashed them. With money, and with power.

Dad was the second son of a family that was a little out of the ordinary. In every other way it was like any other house. The only small difference was that Grandfather and Grandmother had been orphans. Between a Grandfather with a temper that burned like fire and a Grandmother who never showed it but was tender, Dad — the second of two sons and one daughter — had been clever and sharp from childhood. I'd heard that from Grandmother.

An unspeakable misfortune came crashing in on that peaceful house. Grandmother said it had begun with Grandfather. On the day my aunt was born, Grandfather, at thirty-five, was dragged into the Phase World before Grandmother, my eldest uncle, and Dad, and he never came back.

Grandmother had worked as a translator. After she gave birth to Dad her health failed, and she quit the work to recover, and she said giving birth to my aunt had made her worse. Grandfather and Grandmother had come from the same orphanage, and there wasn't a single relative between them. The people they'd called friends drifted away on their own after Grandfather vanished. She couldn't ask anyone for help. On the childbirth subsidy from the state, and the money she had saved, she began raising the three children alone.

She hauled her sick body upright, took on any work that paid, whatever came, and started up again the translation she had set down. Was it Victor Hugo, in France, who left the line that a woman is weak, but a mother is strong? Beneath the Grandmother who struggled to raise them, my eldest uncle, Dad, and my aunt grew up before their time, and word spread through the village of three siblings who studied well, who were kind, and who were diligent. Grandmother was content with that. She said she was happy.

And then, when my eldest uncle was nineteen, Dad eighteen, and my aunt seventeen, disaster came down on the house again. It was my eldest uncle, who had studied with everything he had, declaring he would be the one to achieve Grandfather's dream of becoming a doctor. That effort bore fruit. On the day he entered the medical school of Euihan University, said to be the finest in the country, on a full scholarship.

Before Grandmother, shedding tears of joy, and before Dad and my aunt, smiling brightly at their proud older brother, my eldest uncle was sucked into the Phase World. Fifteen days later the water droplet vanished like foam, and it gave Grandmother despair, and it gave Dad and my aunt an enormous pain, and the feeling of loss.

......

Grandmother endured on a strength of will that was hard to believe, and went on supporting Dad and my aunt. Dad threw himself into his studies in silence and, following after his eldest uncle, succeeded in entering the medical school of Daehan University — the finest of the national universities — on full funding from the state. But with his eldest uncle's fate as precedent, Grandmother broke down in grief rather than joy, and it was a day, I was told, when neither Dad nor my aunt could stop their tears......

And the following spring. The third disaster, and the last, fell upon Grandmother and Dad. My aunt, Jung Soorin, third child of that house, followed Dad into the medical school of Daehan University on full state funding, only to be sucked into the Phase World before Grandmother's eyes, and Dad's.

Grandfather. Uncle. And now Aunt, too......

Grandmother blacked out where she stood. Dad held her, unconscious, and stared, empty of himself, at nothing but the water droplet. The next day the papers ran an article on the tragedy that had struck a single family, but nothing in reality had changed. The comfort of all those people never reached Grandmother or Dad. She sat before the water droplet that had appeared where my aunt vanished, and waited, without end, for her to come back. Dad studied like a man gone mad, and haunted the university athletic field every day, in and out, praying with everything in him for his aunt's return.

And fifteen days later, she returned. A miracle — and yet......

Her left arm and her left leg severed at the root, grave wounds over her whole body, the marks of gang rape carved into her flesh — my aunt, returned alive like that...... One year later, in a psychiatric hospital for ability users, she hanged herself.

The day after I returned from the Phase World in good health, when the tests came back and said I was in my right mind, Father told them everything. Grandmother was there, and Mom's father, and Mom's mother, and Mom, and my sister. He looked at me, and he said it. That when he heard I'd been pulled into the Phase World at school, it had felt as if the sky were falling. That when I came back from the Phase World unharmed, he had felt the great scar carved into his chest begin to close.

It was the day I learned, in one tear from my father — the first I had seen since I was born — just how much pain and sorrow lay ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠carved in Dad's heart.