The Visit (3)
She could not send a reply.
......What am I supposed to do?
She had broken the contract with her biological father.
Lee Sera. She truly had not expected the woman to come at her that way.
How much must she have been hurting...
How much must the very existence of a Commander have disgusted her, for her to say a thing like that?
...She made her decision. Once the Great Calamity had been safely held at bay, she would disappear cleanly. For their sake.
"......"
In her memory, her father had said it without leaving room for doubt. For the rest of her life, she was not to stand out. It meant she was not to obstruct the road ahead of him. What she had gained in exchange was this very seat.
......And yet, why? A faint, unsettled feeling, as if she were staring at a puzzle whose pieces had been forced into place—awkward, unnatural, wrong.
Why?
Had she missed something?
"......"
However carefully she turned it over, she could not see it. Only one thing rose to mind: the condition her father had set.
Live quietly. Do not draw the eye.
......With yesterday's incident, she had failed it completely. The gaze of the entire nation had begun to pour onto the Commander—onto the Commander whose qualifications Lee Sera herself had demanded be put to the test, and onto the person who had pulled strings from the shadows so that she could be kept in that seat. Those eyes would gather. On her father.
So, for the moment, she had written it and sent it. I'm sorry. Five characters, and nothing more.
With that message, the phone gave no further vibration.
"Ah......"
What was she supposed to do?
"President Jin is a case of lame-duck status arriving absurdly early in constitutional history. The senior figures of the ruling party have all turned their backs on him, so there isn't much the man himself can do."
"The financial reform bill he ran on has come back and stamped squarely on his own foot. Public opinion and the popular mood are both at their worst. Didn't the ruling and opposition parties jointly introduce an impeachment motion, on the grounds that he was overturning the financial order? At this point you might as well say the outcome is already decided."
......Ah. She had been dozing through her subway commute when the sound of a political broadcast reached her. The old man in the seat directly ahead seemed to have the volume turned up very loud.
"......Then let me change the question. With an early presidential election looking likely, Assemblyman Kim, who do you believe would make a suitable candidate?"
"Whatever anyone else may say, wouldn't it be our own party leader, Shin Gyeong-jun—the man who has whipped up an electoral storm three elections in a row? He is a talent with truly no precedent in constitutional history. That man—"
She flinched. Why was her body trembling of its own accord?
Shin Gyeong-jun. Her father's name. More precisely, the Commander's biological father.
"......"
She was going to meet that man today. Leader of the great opposition party. A formidable contender for the presidency.
She rode the subway a little longer than usual, then walked the rest of the way to the Security Bureau. Picket protests were still going on here and there, but none of them approached yesterday's scale. The demonstrators themselves amounted to only a handful.
Luna's speech really did land.
She would have to thank the woman. And apologize to her as well. With that thought, she stepped into the first floor of the Bureau.
"......"
Watching the guard's face for any change, she tapped her ID card and headed for the elevator.
"......Oh."
Lee Sera. She, too, happened to be waiting for it. An awkward silence hung between them, and only for a moment.
"I hate you."
"......"
"But. Commander. Because of you...... I ended up hurting everyone."
Ah. So she had seen it. Yesterday's speech. What Luna had said.
"I— I just, really, all I wanted was for the person who did wrong to be punished."
The Commander nodded. The guilty, the wicked, ought to receive a fitting punishment.
......It simply isn't this moment.
She was prepared for the same. An end that suited her. Only, that end would wait until they had stepped onto the branch where everyone survived—until around the time those women could cut her away without regret. She meant to accept it while playing the part of someone thrashing, ugly and desperate. Not now.
"......"
She turned a cold gaze on Lee Sera. She had wanted the woman to hate her even more than this.
Any further than this...
She couldn't. Truly. She had already given far too many wounds. None of it showed on that blank, frigid face, but Lee Sera, in this moment, was in turmoil. She was feeling guilty toward Luna. Watching her like that...... was a little hard to bear.
For now, she ought to stop. A pause. Above all, she had made a promise to Kim Hana.
Even so, the bond between them had to plunge still further, into the worst place it could reach. Only then would the branch where everyone survived come into being. And so... she bowed her head low.
"What. Why do you look so beaten down?"
"......"
"Like you're...... actually sorry. Like you regret it."
......Her? Beaten down?
Ah.
Just now, it seemed, she had failed to keep hold of her expression. Lee Sera was too pitiful, too wretched. ......And too beautiful.
She held the screen up for her to see, then stepped off at the very next floor.
I had to get off here anyway.
Luna had summoned her. She had to go and meet the woman. She left without a backward glance. ......Though she had wanted, just a little, to look.
"You— Commander...... wait."
She forced herself to ignore the voice catching at her back.
Luna Luvia faced the Commander with a face sunk deep in dark circles.
"......This time, I wasn't disappointed."
"......"
"So raise your head."
The Commander looked as though the spirit had gone out of her. Yesterday, it seemed, was still weighing on her mind.
Hah. Seen like this, she really is a good child.
Luna Luvia hesitated. Could she tell the Commander this? Now of all times, with the visit of one of Korea's leading politicians looming just ahead. ......Did she even have the right to say such a thing to her, when she didn't have to?
"I looked into your history, your identity, and everything else, and cross-checked them all."
The Commander nodded.
Luna intended to keep the word she had given yesterday: a personnel review of the Commander. If she truly judged the woman unfit, she had been prepared to take responsibility and drag her down by whatever means she could. But the deeper she dug, the more grotesque things lay tangled together, like a spider's web.
"I'm not blaming you personally. The very person who made it possible for you to climb as far as that seat."
"......"
"That one is the most suspicious."
This was no longer a matter of the Commander as an individual. This girl—the Commander—was being used.
"I'll ask you once more. Are you certain you're sitting in the Commander's seat of your own free will?"
A nod. Another, and another. The Commander nodded as if frantic. There was no trace of mental contamination to be found.
"Hah."
Then she could be relieved.
......Can I really be relieved?
Luna stared straight into the Commander's face. Then, just once, she resolved to press her.
"I'll tell you why we came to hide the identities of the Security Bureau's key personnel so thoroughly."
She brought up several photographs on her tablet and turned the screen toward the Commander. In them was the playground of an apartment block in the old Eastern Bloc, long since abandoned. At its center hung an enormous violet sphere, a perfect circle.
"It was taken in the Czech Republic, in the nineties."
Material classified at the highest level of secrecy.
"The first photograph humanity ever captured of an angel."
Luna showed her one more. Across the surface of the sphere, as if it had recognized the camera, human eyes were budding—one, then two. In the photograph taken after that, the sphere was rushing the photographer at tremendous speed. Motion blur, afterimages, left little that could be clearly seen. And then, with a thick ripping sound, the largest of the eyes split open to left and right, and a countless number of teeth showed themselves within.
"This is what angels looked like in the early days."
A vast circular orb. Eyes embedded beyond counting. Wings that looked as though they had been torn to ragged strips.
"And this."
The stereotype everyone pictured when they thought of an angel. The unidentified enemy appearing now in every corner of the world. Luna showed her a photograph of a humanoid one.
"Do you understand what I mean?"
"......"
"An angel that once stood as far from humankind as heaven from earth."
From some moment onward, it had begun to imitate the human form.
"To the point that, if not for the color of the skin, we could no longer tell them apart."
They had grown similar to human beings.
"This is the conclusion we reached."
An angel could mimic whatever it devoured. Whatever it absorbed. It could imitate. It could assume the shape. And—
"It isn't only outward appearance that they can copy."
With that, Luna showed her a video. What appeared on the screen was a café somewhere in Europe.
A chime. The door opened, and through the blur of the footage came a blonde woman whose beauty was obvious even at that poor resolution. She carried on a fluent conversation with one of the staff. Then—
Pop.
"Ah......?"
With nothing more than the flick of a single finger, she burst both of the employee's arms, cleanly. The worker screamed and collapsed over the spot where they stood, and she walked toward them. Then, stroking the fallen employee with something almost gentle, she began, slowly, slowly, to melt the whole body down. To the worker, who writhed without end in the grip of that pain, the woman pressed a kiss. More precisely, she drew what she had melted, elegantly, into her mouth. Only after the writhing stopped did she lift her head again and look up into the CCTV camera. She smiled wide, baring white teeth, and in the same instant unfurled wings of pure, spotless white. The footage cut there.
"......"
When the video ended, a strange silence settled over the room. The one to break it was Luna Luvia.
"Commander."
The Commander flinched. Luna's voice had dropped, markedly, and her complexion had darkened with it.
"You."
The reason she had shown all of this. Luna said it plainly.
A dull thud.
The Director's Office. From beyond the door left standing open, she sensed a presence. Someone had been listening.