The Test
June 24th. Sunday morning.
A sharp voice rang out from the comprehensive examination room of the Endocrinology Department, on the second floor of Hanyang University Hospital.
"Have you confirmed all the lab values? What about the electrolytes?"
A plastic name tag glinted on the chest of the middle-aged man pacing the examination room in a flurry.
"Yes, Doctor. We drew the blood and ran it three times over… everything came back normal. There's no edema at all."
Suyeon answered with the chart in her hands, her face a mixture of bewilderment and a peculiar sort of joy.
Between them, in a chair at the center of the examination room, sat a girl whose jet-black hair was her most striking feature.
Iseor.
She watched the doctor and nurse bustling about with a vacant stare.
It was a strange situation. Just moments ago, Suyeon had reported to Yunseong with a grave expression — that Iseor had gained a full three kilograms. Her weight as a boy had been thirty-two kilograms. Now, as a girl, and shorter than she had been before, she weighed thirty-five.
Isn't that a good thing?
The girl blinked blankly. She already knew she was severely underweight. How could she not be? The only proper meals she had ever been able to eat were the ones at school. So if she had put on weight, that surely meant she was getting healthier. Vaguely, she thought it was something she ought to simply be glad about.
Yunseong approached her.
A snap. He shut the chart with a decisive clap, sat down across from her, and held his silence for a moment.
"That's a relief."
Then he shook his head and smiled, warm and faint. Just as Iseor was beginning to worry, privately, that something truly terrible had happened after all—
"Why… are you looking at me like that?"
Her voice was taut with tension. Yunseong closed his mouth again. He seemed to be choosing his words.
"First of all, I'm sorry. As your attending physician, I ought to stay composed in front of you. I failed to do that just now."
Unlike last time, his tone had softened considerably. Only those who knew Iseor's circumstances well remained in the room now.
"I think I should tell you this first. In patients who develop TS Syndrome, the body often exhibits symptoms that don't follow the usual mechanisms."
Iseor nodded silently. She had already researched this herself, combing through the internet and medical texts. Honestly, she even had a faint idea of the cause — but she had decided not to speak of it. It would only be asking for trouble.
If I told them these symptoms happen to people who've experienced supernatural phenomena, they wouldn't believe me. They'd just question my sanity.
Besides, she couldn't even be sure whether the other patients had encountered something anomalous the way she had. Silence was the wisest course.
Unaware of the girl's inner thoughts, Yunseong opened the chart again and continued his explanation in earnest.
"When a child who's been starving the way you have gains three kilograms in just two weeks, that's never a good sign. There's a life-threatening condition called refeeding syndrome."
Only after hearing the explanation that followed did Iseor finally understand the two adults' reaction.
Refeeding syndrome. A collapse of the body's equilibrium that occurs when a large quantity of food is suddenly introduced into a body that has withered from prolonged malnutrition. Even a diet that would be ordinary by a healthy person's standards could send the body into shock. In the worst cases, it could kill you.
"Of course, your body showed remarkably stable findings from the moment the change occurred. You were so well that no one would have taken you for a starvation patient. That's why the hospital was able to move you to outpatient observation instead of admitting you."
Yunseong pressed his fingers into his brow and let out a long breath.
"But when you put on weight so suddenly in such a short time, my heart dropped. I was afraid it might have put a strain on your organs."
When he took his hand away, the middle-aged doctor's face looked as though he had aged several years in those few seconds. The sense of responsibility he felt toward Iseor was written plainly across it. A kind smile settled into the deeply weary lines around his eyes.
"But don't you worry. Your body is astonishingly healthy. I think you could even start some moderately strenuous physical activity now without any trouble."
Only then could Iseor relax. As the girl sank back into her chair, Suyeon came over and handed her a yogurt. Around the time Iseor bit through the foil lid with her teeth and swallowed the contents, the nurse, who had drawn her chair in close, asked casually—
"And since then… how have things been with your mother?"
Suyeon's brow was tightly furrowed. Even attaching the word "mother" to Chae Jian seemed to leave a bad taste in her mouth. The look on Yunseong's face across from her was not so different.
A gentle curve touched Iseor's lips. Utterly natural.
"It's fine. These days she cooks me a proper breakfast every morning, and she's started working. On the weekend she even… took me to the department store. We spent time together."
"Really?"
Despite the calm reply, the two adults studied Iseor's face closely. The suspicion that she might be suffering emotional abuse or gaslighting was written plainly on them. Iseor offered nothing more. There was no reason to. That she was far more at ease than before — that was the unvarnished truth.
A silence of some ten seconds passed. Meeting Iseor's clear eyes, the two of them slowly let their expressions ease.
"It would seem… your mother has finally come to her senses."
As Yunseong offered the cautious conclusion, Suyeon wrapped her arms firmly around Iseor's shoulders.
"But if anything bad happens again, or if that woman turns on you, you tell me right away. I don't care how busy I am — I'll come running. Don't you hesitate. Call me. Understood?"
"I understand."
"And from now on, don't skip meals. Make sure you eat plenty of protein."
Suyeon did not let go of the child's hand for a long while. She rattled off a barrage of health precautions Iseor would need to keep in mind going forward. Yunseong piled on as well, and it was a full twenty minutes more before Iseor was finally released from the examination room.
Footsteps. When Iseor stepped out into the corridor, the woman sitting ramrod-straight on a nearby bench turned her head. It was an eerie motion, as though a mannequin had suddenly become a living person.
"Finished?"
"Yes."
Iseor held out her hand first, and her mother took that small hand in hers. Sunlight fell between the two of them.
The mother and daughter leaving the hospital. Yunseong and Suyeon watched their retreating figures in silence.
"…She really did look all right, didn't she?"
Suyeon murmured, her voice uneasy.
"We have no grounds to intervene. Whatever may have happened, if that child has found some stability now, it seems right to leave it be for the time being."
Yunseong nodded heavily, wiping a smudge from his horn-rimmed glasses with his sleeve. The nurse let out a deep sigh.
"Honestly, I still think we should take that child away from that woman right now. An alcoholic doesn't become a good mother overnight. It's not right. Who knows when she'll go back to her old self…"
"We'll have to hope she doesn't."
Yunseong shook his head. They were operating on the assumption that Iseor's TS Syndrome had been triggered by the stress of severe abuse. They had not closed the door on that possibility even now. In fact, they were quietly running a background investigation through an investigator they had connections with.
But if Iseor herself was content with her current life — and if one considered her long-term future and emotional stability — then forcibly separating the two of them was not necessarily the right answer.
"For the child's happiness, if nothing else."
Suyeon nodded, though it cost her. If at all possible, a child ought to have a parent. Even she could not disagree with that principle.
And yet, even as they reached this understanding, a deep shadow lay across both their faces as they gazed out the window. The Iseor they had met today had not seemed particularly unhappy. And still, a peculiar resignation lingered at the corners of her mouth — a shadow that had not lifted.
A remnant of the abuse? Or is there something we haven't grasped yet?
Unable to guess at the reason, the worry nested in the adults' hearts showed no sign of fading.
The night before — late, after they had returned from the department store. Iseor lay in bed, sunk in deep thought, her hands having found their way, unconsciously, to the crown of her own head.
I need to know how far she'll tolerate.
That monster — no. Her mother might play the part of a mother all the way to the end. But that was Iseor's hope alone. Where the line she had drawn actually lay. How thick it was. She knew nothing. And so she had to find out.
It'll be dangerous, of course.
If she crossed that invisible line by accident, that thing would shed its mother's skin on the spot and reveal its nature as a predator. Even so, it was necessary. So long as she could not gauge the weight and volume of that line, the girl would have to cower forever before that being's darkness.
Of course, there was no guarantee that understanding the monster's thoughts would make it any less frightening. She might well find herself in something even more terrible the more she learned. Iseor had not even properly seen that monster's true form yet.
In the end, Iseor decided to go through with the test. For the sake of the one ordinary life she had left — and the safety of the people she wanted to protect.
And the next day, Sunday afternoon.
"…She held my hand."
Back from the hospital, Iseor entered her room and looked down at her own hand. When she had left the examination room today, Iseor had held her hand out to her mother first. A small test.
Her mother had not let go of that hand. Even though cold sweat of tension had soaked Iseor's palm — she held on until the end. When Iseor had deliberately tripped over a curb, her mother had caught her. When she asked to eat in the city, her mother had agreed without a word of complaint. Like any other family's mother.
They had been nothing more than experiments conducted out in public, but her mother had not rejected a single one of Iseor's small, childish demands. It was a tremendously encouraging result. And it rested on one certain premise.
Mother can read my heart. Maybe even my thoughts.
Her mother would notice dissatisfactions and questions Iseor had never spoken aloud, and answer them first. Things that could never have been inferred from the situation alone. It was likely a power born of the bond between familiar and master. Which meant she had seen straight through this insolent test and every intention behind it.
And yet her mother had neither stopped Iseor nor punished her. Looked at hopefully, it meant the monster felt no displeasure at that degree of childishness. Of course, the opposite assumption also existed: that she felt anger, but simply saw no need to express emotion toward her "livestock."
Iseor decided to keep that pessimistic hypothesis in her head and nowhere else.
"Haa…"
A faint smile brushed Iseor's lips as she opened her textbook. A small success, won from a tightrope walk with her life on the line. And a great step forward.
"All right. Watch your answer-sheet markings. Those of you who finish early, don't put your heads down and sleep — review until the end. Nobody moves until the bell rings!"
The proctor's blunt voice came down over the students' heads.
June 25th, 2029. The day of final exams.
The first test Iseor would sit since this cohabitation had begun.