Counterattack (1)
Jihye did not regret what she had done. Not the unauthorized early leave from school, not running all the way to a dangerous place — and probably not even spending every last bit of her money to buy all those things, either.
Thanks to it, she had been able to see with her own eyes that Jieun was safe, and to help her in whatever small way she could.
But not regretting something didn't mean it wasn't frightening.
Jihye had always found adults awkward and intimidating to deal with. Perhaps it was because, in everyday life, the adults she ever saw were pretty much limited to the orphanage caregivers and her schoolteachers.
The orphanage staff looked after the children — Jihye and Jieun included — as attentively as they could, but every kid who lived there knew that no caregiver could stand in for a father or a mother. There were simply too many children for the teachers to care for them all.
Donations came in generously, at least, so she had never once felt a lack of money — and maybe that was exactly why. Jihye had never found it easy to face adults.
And if those adults happened to be the police?
"Miss Jihye?"
A woman who didn't look all that much older than her called her name in a gentle voice.
The room they occupied seemed to be some kind of lounge. There were other spaces where other people could have been waiting, but every one of them stood empty.
Consideration? Jihye found herself recalling the bare interrogation rooms she'd glimpsed in movies and dramas.
So she wasn't being treated as a criminal — not yet?
She'd heard that you weren't supposed to enter restricted zones, but she had never heard what punishment awaited anyone who did. Which was only natural. School didn't bother teaching you details like that.
"Miss Jihye."
When Jihye failed to answer properly, too busy glancing around the room, the woman seated across from her called her name a second time.
"Y-yes."
She had been so tense that the answer didn't come out right away. Her voice cracked a little.
"You shared a room with Jeong Jieun, I understand?"
Jihye herself had never told this woman any such thing.
Of course, there were plenty of ways to find out. The two of them did share a room. A single inquiry to the orphanage would have settled it.
"...Yes."
Knowing that a lie would be pointless, that was how Jihye answered. She was simply afraid of whatever question would come next.
She studied the woman's appearance.
The person who had brought her here was a police officer, but this place was no police station. Probably a government building of some sort, though.
So did that mean the woman in front of her wasn't police either? She wore a business suit, and clothes alone made it hard to guess at anyone's position.
"Then... would it be fair to say the two of you were quite close?"
Jihye opened her mouth, then barely managed to close it again.
What was she supposed to say to that?
But before long, she remembered that a lie would be every bit as useless here, too.
The moment Jihye had received that text message, she had deliberately run to that dangerous place. Shaking off everyone who tried to stop her, sprinting with everything she had — she had pressed something to eat and something to drink into Jieun's hands.
Would anyone go that far for someone who was merely 'a friend'? People said friendship was a bond so thick that no one could break it easily, but in practice it could shatter over the most trivial things.
Even Jieun wouldn't have found it strange if Jihye had never appeared. At the time she hadn't thought at all — she had simply run — but looking back now, that had not been an 'easy call to make.'
Deny it here all she liked; this woman was already convinced that Jihye and Jieun shared a deep bond.
Above all, Jihye herself didn't want to deny it.
Besides, they weren't friends who had been close. They were still close, even now.
"..."
Her choice was to give no answer at all.
Jihye knew nothing of psychological warfare or political calculation. All she'd ever heard was that it was best not to say too much in front of the police.
To her opponent it must have looked like terribly flimsy resistance, but she had no intention of laying everything bare for the people hounding Jieun.
Seeing that Jihye would not answer, the woman let a faint smile touch her lips, then picked up the file lying on the table between them.
She flipped through the papers with a soft rustle, spread one page open, and read its contents for a while in silence.
A brief stillness hung between the two of them.
After nearly a full minute of reviewing the documents, the woman finally spoke.
"I understand you went through something unfortunate, the other day."
"..."
Jihye said nothing at all.
"Were you aware that Jeong Jieun visited that place, that day?"
"..."
"When you found yourself in danger, Jeong Jieun cast aside even the possibility of arrest and came to help you. That is hardly the behavior of an ordinary friend. Aren't the two of you like sisters, raised together since childhood?"
"..."
When Jihye stubbornly refused to open her mouth, the woman paused as if in thought, then closed the file.
Setting it down on the table, she spoke as though gently making a case.
"Jeong Jieun is entangled in a number of charges. But it is still all right. No one has been seriously hurt, and no one has died."
It was the words no one has died that made Jihye's chest tighten all the same.
Because it sounded exactly like a warning that such a thing might yet happen, given time.
"Of course, other charges do remain. She fled in the course of uncovering them, so there are those who doubt her. That is... well, let us say she was simply frightened. It is quite common for girls her age — for girls your age, Miss Jihye — to run away because they believe the investigation itself will count against them."
The woman rested one arm on the table and leaned her upper body slightly forward. Her expression remained, throughout, that of someone offering earnest advice.
"Jeong Jieun is still a minor. Resolving the situation even a little sooner may work in her favor. The law can be kinder to the young."
"..."
"And if this drags on as it is..."
The woman began, in a careful voice.
"Is there anyone who has left the orphanage that you still keep in touch with? As I understand it, one of them has since gone to prison."
Jihye knew that much, too.
No matter how devoted the caregivers were, not every 'child' grew up to be a good person.
Some children became adults without ever learning to accept their circumstances; others went through so much, so early, that they lost the ability to think of anything else.
And above all, many who struck out on their own after the orphanage simply failed to find their footing in society.
What little they could carry out with them was severely limited. There were subsidies, yes, but in most cases they fell far short of what 'independence' actually required.
Plenty of them had no relatives elsewhere to turn to, either.
And so, inevitably, some of them ended up going down very bad roads.
"..."
Jihye glared at the woman.
The woman's expression did not change.
She simply kept wearing that look of someone a few years further into adulthood, offering sincere counsel to someone younger.
She was pretending to be concerned. This was a threat.
No — perhaps she simply saw Jihye as an easy mark. Perhaps the idea was to persuade her this way, and let Jihye persuade Jieun in turn.
Would Jieun... do that?
If Jihye pleaded with her, would Jieun truly turn herself in?
She couldn't know the answer. But she had no desire to find out.
The fact that Jieun had gone this far meant, surely, that she had reasons enough to be this angry. Jieun could be a little prickly, but she never raged without cause.
"...Should Jeong Jieun contact you, please direct her to reach us here. We will help her as thoroughly as we are able."
The business card carried the woman's name and contact information.
So she had been police after all, it seemed.
The woman rose from her seat.
"Then we will see you home—"
"...This is Seoul, isn't it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"If we haven't come too far, I can get home on my own."
"..."
The woman stared blankly at Jihye for a long moment, then smiled a little awkwardly.
"Even so, we can—"
"...No. I'd rather not. Riding in a police car again would be... frightening."
Perhaps that reason of Jihye's carried some weight.
The woman closed her eyes, considered briefly, and nodded.
"Very well. If that is what you wish... there is nothing to be done."
Jihye stood up as well.
Whether the woman walked ahead of her or not, Jihye went straight out of the building.
And she dropped the business card into the first trash can she saw.
She might come to regret that choice. Perhaps the woman had genuinely meant to help Jieun with everything she had. Perhaps she had intended to shave the sentence down as far as possible, to minimize every disadvantage that would fall upon her.
But that was not what Jihye wanted.
Jihye believed in Jieun. In a way different from what everyone else was saying.
She didn't kill anyone. She probably never committed any acts of terror. Maybe she's been wronged.
That was not the belief she meant. She believed that Jieun truly was caught in an unjust situation — that Jieun was not the kind of child who would ever commit terrorism.
And she believed that the situation Jieun was in now was simply her way of declaring her own innocence.
She believed that Jieun was fighting, at the very least, for her own sense of justice.
There was not a shred of logical evidence behind it. Truthfully, it was nothing more than believing because she wanted to believe.
Anyone watching might have called it absurd. Even Jieun herself might have found it ridiculous, if she ever heard it said.
But even so — even so, she just wanted to believe it anyway.
Because to Jihye, Jieun was one of the very few people she could feel was family.
Because she had thought — she hoped Jieun would never, ever disappear from her side.
Even with the food brought in and set down, I felt anything but good.
That was probably why I had set the heavy convenience store bag down without ceremony and stepped outside.
Of course it was. Who knew how much money Jihye had burned through to buy all of that?
To anyone else's eyes it might not look like such a fortune, but for Jihye it was money you could fairly call nearly her entire life savings.
Just as I liked to buy the occasional music CD, Jihye liked going to the movies now and then.
Unlike me, she had plenty of friends, which meant she needed money to hang out with them, too.
So I knew perfectly well that money was not light in her hands.
I knew, too, how terrifying it must have been to run all the way to that place, ringed round with police. Even adults would have found it daunting — and a girl barely in her mid-teens had forced her way through all of it and shouted my name.
Where had Jihye gone? Had the police taken her away? Was she suffering some kind of consequences for it?
Thinking that, I couldn't bring myself to feel pure, simple joy at having received any of it.
If only I hadn't said those things — if none of it had been broadcast — then even Jihye would never have come looking for me, would she?
I wanted to contact her this very second. The kids had phones among their things, so it was entirely possible — but James would almost certainly object.
"Jieun."
I was staring blankly up at the sky when Hayun called to me from behind.
I turned to find her standing there in clothes torn and frayed in a dozen places.
"...Are you okay?"
Hayun asked it after a moment of hunting for the words.
I couldn't give any answer.
Because I wasn't.
But saying so outright felt too much like throwing a tantrum at Hayun's expense, and I didn't like the feel of that, so I said something else instead.
"...Let's check the supplies."
Good mood or bad, received was received.
I couldn't let Jihye's effort go to waste.
The kids, considerate as ever, hadn't laid a finger on the things I'd been given.
I walked over slowly and opened the plastic bag sitting forlorn in the middle of the room.
There was a lot inside.
Truly, it looked as though she had grabbed everything her hands could reach — every manner of canned good and instant food, even instant rice and packs of ramen.
"..."
I looked up at the kids without a word.
The eyes of the children standing around me were locked on the bag.
Silently, I pulled out several cups of ramen. They were bulky things, and the bag visibly deflated the moment they left it.
It wasn't dark outside yet. If we meant to keep moving for the rest of the day, we would need to put something in our stomachs.
When I pushed the ramen toward the kids, their faces lit up.
At the sight of them — I felt something that was, in every sense of the word, hard to describe.
Right. Fill our stomachs first; think after. About what to do with everything in that bag.
...And about how I ought to act, next time.
This much, I had to admit.
The smell of 'proper food' — the first in ages — was genuinely overwhelming.
Most people might quibble at attaching the word 'proper' to a meal consisting of a single cup of ramen.
But for us, who had gotten through our last several meals on little more than a few vegetables, canned ham, and tuna, one finished, assembled dish more than deserved to be called 'proper' food.
"Whew..."
Dalia, who had drained her ramen to the very last drop of broth, let out a long, light breath. A deeply satisfied sound.
Her face was faintly flushed; she looked genuinely moved by the taste.
"I don't think I've ever known this stuff could taste this good."
"I'd bet everyone here is thinking the same thing."
Rose heartily agreed.
I didn't say so out loud, but I thought much the same. The ramen, after so long without, had been delicious — delicious enough that I suspected we'd finish the whole stock within days unless we steeled ourselves.
If a cup of ramen could taste like that, I could only imagine how the instant rice and curry alongside it would go down.
But soon enough, all of the kids set their faces with resolve, as though forcing themselves back to their senses.
The food in our hands had a limit.
If we ate it all right now, giddy with the taste, we might well spend the days afterward stretching out canned rations morsel by morsel just to survive.
No matter that we could draw energy from mana — going days on end without eating was impossible.
James said his goal was to reverse entropy, but he hadn't yet claimed to have succeeded. The total energy our bodies could generate could never, in the end, exceed the energy currently remaining inside them.
There was no telling when the next summons would come. Even if we went out under a summons, there was no guarantee of finding food. And simply wandering out on our own to forage could be dangerous in itself.
Which meant, in the end, that we had to set things up so we could be at least partly self-sufficient here.
Perhaps she had arrived at the same thought, because Delphinium spoke up.
"...Was there no cultured meat among the things she brought?"
At that, I set down my cup ramen, dragged the bag over, and spread it out in front of us.
Would a convenience store even stock uncooked cultured meat? Most of it would be instant food, surely. And even if the ingredients were cultured meat, tissue that wasn't alive was useless for the purpose of 'growing' anything.
"...Found some."
But against all of my reasoning, Delphinium had apparently been thinking along entirely different lines.
What she produced was a single refrigerated item.
"What's that?"
"Something you grill."
Saying so, Delphinium checked the ingredient list on the hamburger steak.
"It hasn't been cooked yet."
It had struck me as odd from the start that convenience stores would sell anything entirely raw, but even granting that, it was just a frozen product — one that had simply slipped into the pile while Hayun was picking up one instant food after another.
"It could fail."
When I looked at her doubtfully, Delphinium said it flatly, without expression.
"But there's a way to try. As long as I can keep even a single cell definitively alive, it'll work."
In the era I came from, cultured meat was still far too expensive for real commercialization, but this world was different.
Even in an age of warp travel, there were times when ships had to explore in person. To study celestial bodies, or to conduct research in places hostile to life, a vessel naturally had to be stocked with mountains of food.
Cultured meat was what you used for exactly that.
...Which raised the question of why on earth 'usable cultured meat' was being sold at a convenience store in the first place. Perhaps it had been imported with aliens in mind.
Just as some Earthlings loved space, some aliens felt the same way about it.
And among aliens who had traveled as far as Earth, that tendency ran especially strong.
Plenty of them, of course, had only come for a few days of sightseeing — but the number of wealthy souls who drifted idly through the cosmos for the pleasure of travel surely exceeded the entire population of Earth.
"...Looks like the store had a fresh-food section after all."
I couldn't tell whether that counted as her being pleased, but I decided to take it as such.
"If it works, that means we can keep producing meat?"
"Yeah."
Delphinium nodded.
"But it might fail. Better not to get your hopes up."
No — don't hand out all that hope first and then say that...
...
Well. Either way.
At the very least, we had food for the next few days. No — rationed carefully, it might even hold for weeks.
All that remained was to hope that this 'magic' of hers proved powerful enough.
The mood that had lifted, however briefly, sank again as we finished eating and fell into conversation with the kids.
Reality still sucked. Honestly speaking, the view ahead was as pitch-black as ever. And in some corner of my head, that bullshit of a question kept circling: Shouldn't I have just given up back then, after all?
But even so.
At least I had confirmed it — that in this world, out there beyond these walls, there was someone who believed in me.
Jihye's face rose in my memory.
It had cost her dearly, but she had smiled at me. There had been no trace of fear of me anywhere on that face.
If anything, she had shaken off every one of those hardships and run to me, just to see me with her own eyes.
Jihye... even after living through all of that, she hadn't been afraid of me. She hadn't resented being tangled up in my mess.
And that one thing — that, at least, was a comfort.