A Debt of the Heart
The cabin was as quiet and dark as it had been before Jiyeon stepped outside. Only the weight on her heart had changed, and that change was unmistakable.
Louis Kane had come back alive.
She brought him in ahead of her, and Thomas—who had been using the sofa for cover while he loaded his gun—sprang to his feet. He must have caught the sound of them and gone on alert.
"Major!"
The moment Thomas saw Louis, tears spilled down his face in thick, unseemly drops. He had seemed to be bearing the whole situation with composure, and yet all of that, it appeared, had been nothing but an act.
It was Jiyeon who was thrown by how painfully human he looked. Louis, as if none of it much surprised him, gave a faint, offhand smile.
"I was worried you'd been delayed, sir."
Thomas said it while roughly wiping his eyes.
"I erased our tracks and left a false trail on the other side."
"I thought you would, sir. You're a thorough man."
"No one's been hurt, I take it."
"No, sir. Even if you hadn't come, we would have moved to the primary rendezvous. If the timing didn't line up, we thought you might go straight there yourself."
Louis nodded. The hard, bleak face that took the report was close to the Major Kane she had seen on the battlefield—the face she knew all too well.
Ella, asleep in the loft, woke at the sound of voices and came down, and a simple meal was laid on the table for Louis, who had gone hungry all day. After they ate, another bed was made up beside the sofa.
Through every step of it, Jiyeon worked not to meet his eyes. Watching him eat, and take the situation in piece by careful piece, she felt her mind slowly return to her.
What on earth was I thinking, kissing this man?
She had worried over him the whole time. She had prayed he would not die. She had even left her younger sister behind to go after him—an act of sacrifice, yes—but as reason came back, she did not want to admit that any of it had been a serious feeling for Louis.
It was only a debt of the heart, owed to a superior who had done something extraordinary. Nothing more, and nothing less. She repeated it to herself like an excuse.
That night, Jiyeon slept deeply for the first time in a long while. She had lain awake with open eyes from before the operation began; this was the first true sleep she had taken in nearly thirty hours.
"This is our current position. From here we follow the valley and make primary contact with the party at the third peak of the range. They're the team that has been tracking Dr. Kong Myungho's movements since five months ago. The report from a month back placed him moving north—most likely to obtain living specimens of the Vermin, as they claimed. The window is October 17th through the 20th. We agreed to wait exactly three days. If we don't arrive inside that time, each side leaves on its own. Questions."
Before they left the cabin, Louis gave a brief situation report. The stubble that had been coming in the night before, and the disordered hair, had been put neatly to rights. In a black athletic T-shirt and khaki cargo pants, he looked freer than he ever had in the bunker, though barely a day had passed since he left the unit.
"How many are on that team, sir?"
Jiyeon asked it while chewing her bread slowly. Louis's gaze turned to her. She kept her eyes on the map beneath his hand and did not look back at him.
He would have noticed, well enough, how strangely stiff she was.
"Five."
"And they're people we can trust, sir?"
"They won't know yet that the bunker has been overthrown. But they're the ones who stood with Kong Myungho when he left and argued his case to command—and as that should tell you, they read a situation fast. They'll have expected a day like this to come."
"To be safe, sir, we shouldn't make contact right away. It would be better if a few of us stayed concealed and watched how things stand."
"Agreed."
When the briefing ended, they packed. They gathered simple food and water for the crossing, and weapons. The cabin had been stocked with a wide array of arms, as befitted a plan long in the making. Jiyeon checked the pistol and dagger she had carried out the day before, still held against her chest, then slung a rifle over her shoulder.
The others were outfitted much the same. Thomas took several daggers and, not satisfied with those, tucked a few throwing stars inside his vest. She vaguely remembered hearing that knife-work was his specialty. To look at him, you would have thought him best in a bare-handed brawl, and yet his hands moved with an incongruous delicacy. There was no trace of the face that had wept in streams the night before, once the Major's safety was certain. Thomas finished his preparations quickly, his expression hard.
Jiyeon pressed a gun into Ella's hands and made sure she still had a firm hold on the method of shooting she had been taught. Fortunately, Ella loaded it without trouble, and her stance did not slip.
They were ready to leave. Ella, who had lived in the cabin for several days, seemed to have grown fond of the place in that short time. She tidied the grounds with care and erased the traces of their stay. Securing the doors fell to her and Thomas as well.
"It's a place my father loved. If things work out and the situation settles, we might come back here to live. If we don't lock it up properly, the birds will tear the place apart. There are still animals in this forest that haven't mutated, wandering all over."
Once again Thomas spilled out a sentimental speech, ill-suited to him. In the unit she had only ever seen him trailing the Major and carrying out his duties to the letter. She had had no idea he possessed a side like this.
"It is a beautiful place. I've grown quite fond of it already. But I hardly saw any animals."
"Several traps are set within a kilometer of the front. This isn't a zone where monsters appear, so snares meant for ordinary animals should be enough."
"Ah. I had a feeling. I heard animals now and then, but they never came close. I kept a gun in my hands and stood watch every night."
"There aren't any beasts fierce enough that you'd need a gun to take them."
Ella was the only one who entertained that idle talk.
Louis stood well apart with his arms folded, simply watching them speak. Jiyeon, for her part, walked along the stream and tried to reckon where the traps Thomas had mentioned might lie. The extra thought came with it: if she had set out on the mountain path in ignorance, she might have been the one those traps took.
After that, Thomas, who knew the paths, took the lead, and Ella followed. Yu Jiyeon came behind Ella, and the rear belonged to Louis Kane. Jiyeon tried desperately not to be aware of him coming along at her back, watching their surroundings. She wanted to put as much distance between them as she could, but in a spare little party of only four, keeping away from him was no easy thing.
Fortunately, since she did not speak to him first, Louis did not close within a certain distance of her either. She could not tell what he was thinking. At least he did not seem to be turning over any foolish ideas about the kiss she had poured over him like a madwoman the night before.
She still had not finished settling how she ought to treat him.
The fact that he had confined her by force and exploited her body had not vanished. Even so, she did not want to lay a charge against every single thing he had done to save her life and her sister's.
But now that there was no reason left for their bodies to come together, all that remained in that place—stranded, and bare—was a heart as embarrassed and disordered as the desire that had once burned so hot.