Surrounded on All Sides
When I made it back to headquarters, the sight that pleased me most was my personal locker.
I wanted that heavy pack off my body as soon as possible.
Tch. An emergency summons.
I briefly considered ignoring whatever fuss Jo Yong-han was making and stopping by the locker first, but then I remembered there was another option.
The cabinet in Jo Yong-han's office.
I'd already gotten his word that I could use it as I pleased. Since things had turned out this way, I might as well dump every last piece of gear in his office and stuff the place full of dusty luggage. That would serve him right.
Beep.
The office door opened to my fingerprint, and what greeted me was—
Hack.
Smoke. Thick enough to choke on.
"I've been waiting."
"Is something on fire?"
It was a sight I saw often enough on visits to Dr. Myeong's clinic: a room drowned in smoke, the man himself little more than a silhouette, a shadow in the haze. Jo Yong-han looked exactly the same now.
"A fire... There is one, yes. Right on the top of my foot."
"And you have the luxury of calling that a problem?"
This wasn't Dr. Myeong's clinic, though. It wasn't cigarette smoke. Something in it smelled like burning wood. Was the furniture on fire?
"Nothing to concern yourself with. It's tobacco smoke."
This was tobacco smoke? I'd never smelled anything like it. And now that I looked, a single ember was burning above the silhouette of Jo Yong-han's head.
"It's called a cigar."
"A ci... what?"
"They put out a great deal of smoke, and the smell is rather different."
His radio crackled at just the right moment.
"Ah, Mr. Jo Yong-han? Can you hear me?"
"What is it?"
Jo Yong-han's reply was perfectly calm. The voice on the other end was not.
"Has there been a fire in your office? Are you all right?"
Jo Yong-han lifted his head toward the ceiling. Following his gaze, I found a CCTV camera.
"It's nothing. I was smoking a cigar."
A cigar. So that was a kind of tobacco. All that money, and he was smoking cheap junk. What worthless material did they make these things from, to put out this much smoke?
"I thought you'd quit. Is something the matter?"
I hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but I heard every word. So Jo Yong-han had picked up a hobby he'd once dropped. Well, better to have a hobby than not. Anything in excess was bad, but a colorless, odorless man like him might be better off smelling of tobacco. People usually quit because it cost too much, and Jo Yong-han surely had money to spare.
In the old days there was supposedly some law—or superstition—against smoking indoors, born of the belief that tobacco was bad for the body. Cancer, I think they called it. They said it killed you slowly, over the course of decades. In a world where guns were more common than cigarettes and bullets faster than disease, that kind of talk didn't hold. These days people were desperate for a free taste of what they called secondhand smoke, and couldn't get enough of it.
"I'll contact you later."
Click.
He cut the transmission before the other man could so much as answer. Something was going on with this rigid man after all. All the more reason he needed a hobby.
"Does smoking that at least improve your mood?"
"Tobacco is harmful in every respect, and beneficial in none."
"Says the man who knows that?"
"There are times when something harmful is necessary. There is a phrase for it: a necessary evil."
He had his own way of justifying things. Still, it was just like him to keep a cigar clenched in his teeth and call it wholly harmful.
I waved a hand through the air above the desk, parting the smoke, and in the brief gap of visibility I set the blueprints down.
"The item you requested."
Thick smoke swallowed the blueprints again almost at once.
"The blueprints. You've had a hard time of it."
"I can't see a thing. Mind airing the place out?"
"I can make them out well enough. Is it that uncomfortable? Then I'll open a window for you."
Of course he could make them out.
"Aren't blueprints something you're supposed to check carefully?"
"Did you not handle the matter properly?"
"I did."
"Then that is sufficient. If you require ventilation, you have only to say so."
Did that mean he trusted me, or that he didn't care how it turned out either way? He'd raised hell telling me to come, and now the mood in here was ice. I found the cabinet I could more or less see and more or less crammed my gear into it.
"Then I'll more or less be going."
"One moment."
"Hm?"
"There is a reason I summoned you in such haste, Mr. Jeong-guk."
So it hadn't been because he wanted the blueprints in a hurry.
"Was the job manageable?"
"It was a bit different from what I'd heard."
"Was there a problem?"
"One of the parties wasn't particularly cooperative about handing over the blueprints."
Tofu's owner—no. Her former owner had been dissatisfied with the way the government handled its business. A Hunter was supposed to come, and in the end a Postman showed up. On top of that, the schedule had kept getting pushed back. The look full of resentment I'd seen at our first meeting was still vivid.
"You mean Miss Oh Jang-mi. Understandable. There were some setbacks in the process."
"They weren't small setbacks."
"At that scale, they were small. The large ones are separate. The project is not in an easy position to proceed."
"Hm?"
This, then, was Jo Yong-han's actual business.
"From now on, I would ask that any report you owe me come before your delivery-complete report. I have already made arrangements at the post office window, so there should be no difficulty."
"That wouldn't be hard, but why?"
Jo Yong-han exhaled again. It was closer to fog than smoke. He turned his head as if to spare me and blew it aside, but in a sealed room the courtesy meant nothing.
"There is a saying: surrounded on all sides. It means every direction is blocked. That is my situation at present. No—you are no exception either, Mr. Jeong-guk."
Quite the preamble.
"I'm a little busy."
"To put it simply, then."
Jo Yong-han reduced the whole situation to a single, very concise sentence.
"They may want to kill all of us."
What was he saying? Had he inhaled too much smoke?
"Kill all of us?"
"Yes."
Setting aside how absurd the story was, how could that man and I even be bundled together as us?
"You and I don't seem to have much of a life in common."
"We are the same in that we have a foothold at headquarters."
"I only dip a foot in the stream now and then. You live with your whole body submerged."
"Either way, we may be an eyesore to the owner of the stream."
"Streams have owners?"
"Whoever owns the land owns the stream as well. This place is no different."
This place where headquarters stood: Yeouido. Did Yeouido have a landowner of its own? It ought to be state land.
"What I can tell you at present is that the subway reconstruction project is being obstructed."
That much I'd expected.
"So that's why I was sent on a job that should have gone to a Hunter. And why we couldn't find anyone inside headquarters to draw the subway blueprints, and had to go all the way out into the outside world."
"Correct."
"Who's doing the obstructing?"
"That is not certain."
"Then you don't know the reason either."
"Correct."
"Any guesses?"
"None."
"You don't know a single thing, so how do you know they mean to kill all of us?"
"That part is entirely my own subjective conjecture. I did say, clearly, that they may want to kill us."
Jo Yong-han set the cigar down, but the unventilated room was still thick with smoke. I still couldn't see properly in front of me.
"Therefore, when you arrive at headquarters from now on, please report to me first. The mood here is ugly."
"Since we don't know what might happen, it can't hurt to be careful?"
"Correct."
Jo Yong-han, who claimed to know nothing—and yet the one thing he did know was that the mood was ugly.
"If you truly knew nothing, I doubt you'd even bring this up."
"This is as much as I am able to say."
"Hm."
He didn't seem to be hiding it on purpose. There was nothing for him to gain by leaving me suspicious of him. This really must be all he could say at the present moment.
So he does have some information.
Just not a thorough grasp of it. A man of his character wouldn't let anything uncertain past his lips. In that sense, maybe what he meant was that he couldn't talk about it yet.
"Look at the time."
Jo Yong-han rose.
"I have business, so I'll be going first. You came straight here, Mr. Jeong-guk, so I imagine you haven't had a chance to wash. Open this door and you'll find a private shower. Please make use of it before you leave."
"In an office whose owner isn't here?"
"I trust you will not resort to theft."
As he said it, he pointed at the CCTV camera on the ceiling.
"So is it me you trust, or the camera?"
"Both."
Creak.
The door he threw open to leave slammed shut again almost at once.
Thud.
The smoke never had a chance to escape. The office was still a fog in which I couldn't see an inch ahead.
The place Jo Yong-han went was a meeting point with a merchant who had come from the Geofront—an additional chance to trade, obtained only with difficulty.
"What's wrong with your face? Your eyes are glazed over."
"Did you get it?"
The supplementary detailed regulations that had been left out of the official notice: a document in which the Future Technology Department specified who would be sent into the outside world.
"Just as I thought, there was no way. If I can't get it, you can assume nobody can."
"......"
"I really did my best, you know? You don't distrust me, do you?"
Jo Yong-han shook his head.
"It's less that I distrust you, and more that I don't trust you."
"Wow. You say something that cold without batting an eye."
"I don't trust you. But I agree that if you can't obtain it, no one can."
"I'll take that much, at least."
The merchant gave his shoulder a light pat.
"It's not that I don't understand the urgency, but for now you'd better assume there's a good chance you'll be sent outside."
He didn't particularly care if he himself was the one sent out. The problem was his older sister and his younger sister. But the merchant had one hint.
"If it were me, I'd assume the worst and prepare for it."
"Prepare how."
"This is something I heard as a rumor, so it isn't certain—just let it wash over you. I'll give you this one for free. Call it a courtesy, for old times' sake. You know how fond I am of you, don't you?"
"If it isn't certain anyway, I can't put a price on it."
"Stiff. So stiff!"
It was valuable information, though neither Jo Yong-han nor the merchant knew, in that moment, just how valuable.
"Anyway. Know any civil servants who go out on dangerous operations a lot? They'd have to be someone you can rely on."
"Someone I can rely on?"
"The notice was about deploying people on operations outside the government complex, wasn't it? What do you think those operations are? You don't imagine they'd round up a crowd that's done nothing but desk work their whole lives and ship them out together?"
It was a point he had never particularly considered.
"They're not trying to kill everyone at headquarters. It's about discipline. Discipline! They mean to thin the ranks, within reason. So they won't hand everyone a job that gets them killed."
"And so."
"And so, what! I'm saying they'll slot the desk workers into the dangerous operations that already exist. Hunters, soldiers, the Waste Disposal Squad, the collection crews. What else was there... Ah. Postmen, too."
One person rose at once in Jo Yong-han's mind.
"There is one."
"Then that's perfect. Bound to be a capable Hunter, right? You'll be safe enough. Just make sure you hold on to that connection properly. When the time comes, the scramble to lean on one another is going to be fierce."
"You're saying we can choose which operation we go on?"
"That far, I wouldn't know. But isn't that your specialty? Making the impossible happen."
He was right. The problem was that the competition would be worse than Jo Yong-han imagined.
Left alone in the office, Jeong-guk went straight to the window.
Rattle.
He threw it wide, and the smoke that had filled the room began to pour out all at once.
"Now I can breathe."
Rattle. Rattle.
The windows opened one after another. Only after Jeong-guk set his hands to the work did everything that had been a blur come clear.