What We Had to Do Was Simple
"Kyahahaha! Jeong-ah, I'm counting on you."
"...Haa. Understood, boss."
I bowed to the boss, then stepped out of her office.
My junior, who'd been waiting outside the door, flashed a grin and sauntered over, teasing me about what had gone down. Instead of answering, I simply handed her the file folder I was carrying.
Inside were the personal details, medical records, and assorted materials on the child we'd been assigned to watch this time.
Still beaming, she took the folder and fell in behind me — until her footsteps slowed, then stopped altogether.
I'd expected exactly that reaction. I turned back to face her. She met my eyes and asked, dead serious, whether this was the government's way of setting us up to take the fall.
I let out a quiet sigh and told her it probably wasn't.
But even I couldn't say that with any real conviction.
Because this job was strange. That strange.
Our assignment was to surveil a boy — a victim of the Invade that had hit Yongin Amusement Park two years ago. Ordering us to watch a seven-year-old child, not even an adult, was enough on its own to make us wonder if the company was being mocked. And once you turned the page, your expression hardened the same way my junior's just had.
This world had cracks.
They could appear anywhere, at any time — jagged rifts that looked as if someone had taken a razor-sharp blade and torn open empty space. From those tears, a hazardous energy source known as Erosion Particles slowly bled into the surroundings.
The particles mixed easily with the air, settling little by little into people's skin, blood, and organs. When they accumulated in the body, women felt little more than fatigue — or nothing at all — while their superpowers grew stronger. For men, the same particles caused permanent organ damage, or worse, death. That was why superpowered women had to monitor every crack that formed and keep them from spreading.
And if a crack was left alone long enough for the Erosion Particle concentration around it to thicken, the rift would tear wider, and monsters — creatures we called Invaders — would start pouring through from the other side.
We called that an Invade.
The one at Yongin Amusement Park had been no small affair. A dimensional gate had taken root, unnoticed, beneath a ride that hadn't run in years, steadily raising the Erosion concentration. When years of densely packed particles finally detonated along with the Invade, the Invaders that came flooding out swallowed the entire park.
Over a thousand dead. More than a hundred missing. Nearly ten thousand injured. For a South Korea that had gone half a century without a major disaster, the Invade was a catastrophe.
Almost every man on the grounds had died. Of the handful who survived, most were left in a semi-permanent vegetative state, or failed to last a year and died anyway.
So when the official record listed every rescued male as effectively deceased, the discovery of a male survivor — a boy, no less — was already unbelievable. What made even less sense was that across the mountain of medical examinations performed on him, not a single one had registered any Erosion Particle reaction.
After reading those records, I'd gone back to the boss more than once and asked whether the kid might simply be unrelated to the Invade, or whether someone had mistaken a girl for a boy. She'd only laughed her kyahaha laugh and dodged every question.
The message was clear enough: she'd been handed the government's file as-is, and knew nothing beyond it.
If this was some elaborate prank the state had cooked up to screw over our company, it was an awfully thorough one. The massive official seal of a government document and the stacked opinions of countless physicians all insisted that every word written in that file was the unvarnished truth.
I sighed, turned forward again, and kept walking.
"Come on. We need two more people besides you. The government wants two-person, two-shift coverage."
"Whoa… we're going to make a killing."
I fished around in my coat pocket for the USB the boss had given me, then let it go. The chill of the metal tip bit into my fingers more sharply than usual. It was a cold winter day.
I arrived at the hospital with the junior I was close with, the one who'd be handling day shift with me.
The doctors welcomed our arrival and led us down the corridor to a room at the far end. Stepping inside, I found a counseling suite flooded with bright light occupying one side of an otherwise dim space.
Soft sofas and shelves stuffed with cute plush toys filled the counseling room — though with the one-way glass we were sitting behind, the whole setup was really just a plush, adorable interrogation chamber.
I nodded when the doctors asked us to wait a moment, then sat with my junior where we had a clear view of the counseling room and pulled the file open again.
A short while later the door on the counseling side opened, and the doctors expertly flipped a switch so the voices from that room came through to us.
The child was telling the counselor about how he'd traveled through another world.
I asked my junior, who was still going through the papers, in a low voice:
"His father was a writer, right? Fantasy novels?"
"One second… No. He was a writer, but pure literature, looks like. Modest popularity. More of a hobby than anything."
"Still — a few fantasy novels lying around the house wouldn't have been that strange…"
My junior dug through the file until she found the papers on the child's parents and answered my questions. I followed up on the mother's occupation and her superpower. Ordinary office worker, she said. Her ability was common telekinesis. No grandparents or cousins on record.
At the word telekinesis I absently clenched and unclenched my palm, then half-listened to the fantasy stories spilling from the child's mouth, letting them drift in one ear and out the other.
After hearing enough, I glanced back. The doctors seated behind us looked faintly unsettled. The boy's tales were a bit brutal and detached for a child, sure — but not enough to frighten anyone, I thought. When I asked the doctors if there was anything unusual about him, they seized the opening and poured everything out at once.
He didn't cry even when they used a fairly thick needle. He showed no fear of sharp instruments nearby. No one had ever seen him struggle or look distressed. Most of it boiled down to the same thing: the child didn't act like a child.
I had my junior jot the points down roughly, then asked how he was on ordinary days. They hesitated a beat before answering that he was a perfectly good, ordinary kid. He greeted people properly, answered every question without lying, and always said thank you — a kind of grown-up goodness you didn't expect from a seven-year-old.
That dissonance, I suspected — the kindness paired with a complete absence of fear or dread — was what had unsettled doctors who'd dealt with countless children.
I nodded along appropriately and turned my attention back to the boy and the counselor.
The things he said were far too detailed, far too concrete, to dismiss as a seven-year-old's imagination.
When the session ended, my junior and I left a little later and headed for the child's room. We needed to install the CCTV that would keep him under watch.
At his door, his attending physician greeted us. She was a well-known doctor — one of the top five in the country in Erosion Particle detection, someone both my junior and I recognized.
I offered a brief greeting and watched as she knocked. Permission came from inside; she opened the door and stepped into the ward. My junior and I followed, and for the first time I faced the child directly.
Seeing the face I'd only watched through one-way glass up close, I couldn't help being a little startled.
I had two daughters of my own, pretty enough that no one ever called them plain — and yet the boy standing in front of me, bowing his head in a small, polite greeting, was more beautiful than either of my beloved girls.
I returned his greeting with a faint smile and explained about the cameras I was going to install.
"With these, people will be able to watch from far away and make sure no one does anything bad to you in your room. Will that feel like too much?"
"No, it's fine. Thank you, actually…"
I smiled lightly at his thanks, nodded, then set the cameras so there were no blind spots and left for the security office.
The wall of black monitors filling the security room stayed black even after the computers powered on, showing nothing at all.
I took a short breath, then plugged the USB from my coat pocket into the machine.
No matter how many times I did this, I never got used to it.
The computer made a noisy racket, and the monitors lit up one by one. Each screen flashed the letters OFS, then began displaying the child's room from different angles.
From now on, all we had to do was keep watching these monitors for twelve hours at a stretch.
Two shifts, no days off — and if anything suspicious ever turned up with that child, what we had to do was simple.
"Senior, I'm going to step out for a smoke."
"Don't overdo it. You'll get chewed out smoking in a hospital."
Click on the child on the monitor screen, and kill him.