Be My Partner
"It's a wing."
"A wing?"
Pretending he'd never heard of such a thing. If you meant to stay alive, you learned to read a room, and you learned to do it fast—the twitch of a muscle, a tremor in the voice, every kind of gesture. You had to be able to look through clues like those and see what the other man was keeping inside.
Kkamagwi's testing me.
He wasn't blind to that sort of thing, of course. He'd rolled through the black market long enough to be a proper merchant; far from lacking an eye for people, he was probably excellent at it. The fact that he'd noticed I had an uncommon eye for goods made that plain enough. Still, a monk can't shave his own head. Being good at seeing into others doesn't mean you're any good at hiding yourself.
"This is a wing? Eh-hey, what kind of nonsense—"
"Believe it or don't. Whether you do or not, it doesn't change the fact that it's a wing."
"Then what was it attached to?"
Time to land the right answer.
"An airplane."
"An air... plane?"
He was straining to keep the act of ignorance going all the way to the end.
"First time hearing it?"
"Airplane... You mean a machine that flies?"
"That's right."
I went on, making a show of turning the wing this way and that.
"Usually it means an enormous machine that can carry people, but this one wouldn't have been that. Judging by the size of the wing, it would have been lucky to get a single rat aboard."
"A rat flew it?"
"...I'm saying nobody flew it."
The wing was covered in scars. From the belly landing, no doubt.
"Then it's incredibly valuable, isn't it?"
"Only when it's in one piece. A wing by itself is useless."
"And if the rest of it were all here too—would it fetch a decent price?"
By Tofu's design, this was an airplane that couldn't be reused. It couldn't take off without a launch rail, and the fuel tank was built to drop away mid-flight. But I'd only known any of that because Tofu had explained it. There was no way to deduce so much from the wing alone, so I'd have to play dumb on this part too.
"Sure. If the rest of it were all there, it'd be something."
"Even a plane this small?"
"Big or small, an airplane is the kind of thing you might see once in a lifetime. If you're lucky."
"Hm."
Kkamagwi closed his eyes. A moment later he nodded and flipped the crate beside him.
The rest of the airplane came into view.
"...So it wasn't just the wing."
"Don't get the wrong idea. I didn't pull the wing off on purpose. It was already separated when I got it from Boss."
The impact of the crash landing would have torn the wing free. You didn't need an eye that sees through things to know that—anyone looking at the crumpled fuselage could tell.
"You didn't separate it on purpose. You did show me only the wing on purpose, though."
"Aha! Caught me, did you?"
The way his voice climbed into a strange high register on that aha grated on me.
"If you're not planning to talk straight, I'm leaving."
"Eh-hey! Wait a second. I just thought, if it was you, maybe you'd see the whole thing from one piece. That kind of vibe, you know—a feeling-like feeling—"
Fine. From here on, he'd better give me something with substance.
"So the test is over. What's the actual point?"
"You really are incredible. I like you. You pass!"
No substance to that.
"Can that eye of yours also see whether this thing can fly again?"
He'd said Boss acquired the airplane and passed it on to him. Which meant Boss had judged it scrap. If it had been a precious machine that could still fly, there was no way he would have handed it to Kkamagwi, and Kkamagwi wouldn't have taken it without knowing that. He'd simply been holding a different hope from Boss's—the thought that Boss might have been wrong. If the thing could fly again, it would be a jackpot of a commodity.
Showing me goods Boss had already finished appraising.
Did he trust my eye that much?
"What did Boss say when he handed you the plane?"
"Well, you know—look into it a bit—"
"Talk straight."
"...Tsk. He just said it was scrap. Said it was wrecked so badly there wasn't even any point in looking at the internal design. So I paid scrap prices and brought it back."
"Boss read it right."
He hadn't only read the plane's condition correctly. He'd also judged exactly who that scrap was worth selling to. He would have expected Kkamagwi to get his hopes up and snap it up with a cheerful little oh-ho, and of course the deal would have been struck at a price that left Boss ahead.
"Even so—"
Kkamagwi still hadn't caught up, and his lingering attachment dragged on.
"There might be a way, right? If we patched it up somehow—"
"No chance."
"Eh-hey! Hear me out. I recently got to know a really capable technician. A new girl who just joined the machine-repair section—"
"Doesn't matter who comes to fix it. It won't fly."
"Even if it can't fly, if we only fix it enough to read the design, it'd be worth a lot more than scrap, wouldn't it? Design information has to be expensive. It's an airplane!"
Looked like I was going to have to teach him a little.
"Here. See this part?"
I let him know the thing was a long way from what people generally pictured when they heard airplane—kindly enough that even someone hopeless with machines could follow. I made him understand that core parts, like the fuel tank, had already fallen away, and that taking off would have required extra equipment besides, something like a launch rail.
"You get it now? Fixing it is already a stretch, and even if you did, this was an incomplete airplane built to be disposable from the start."
"Tch..."
"It's well made. But try to sell this design as an airplane, and sooner or later a customer will show up with a gun, saying they were conned."
"Then why did anyone build a plane like this."
"Who knows. Some shut-in technician, stuck somewhere, who still wanted to talk to the outside world?"
"Completely useless."
Kkamagwi brooded for a moment.
"Hah!"
Then he shook it off and got back up. Misjudging a thing's worth and taking a loss was ordinary for a merchant. If he'd risen and fallen over every deal like this, he wouldn't have lasted this long.
"Still, it feels clean, having it wrapped up so neatly. A little bitter, though."
"You bought this scrap off Boss at a high price, didn't you."
"There used to be a thing in the old days called a lottery. Something like that, maybe."
"So a savage loss."
"There's a nicer way to put it. I bought a dream."
Kkamagwi started fitting the wing back onto the fuselage.
"Anyway, your eye really is something. No—it isn't just the eye. You've got a fair amount of knowledge about machines, too."
"Going to pay me an appraisal fee, at least?"
"If you want one?"
And why, all of a sudden, was he being so intense about it.
"The part about it being a disposable airplane was interesting, too. Boss didn't see that far. He said the design didn't make sense to him, but he figured that was only because it was so badly wrecked."
"Being able to see that much is plenty."
He wasn't the black market's boss for nothing.
"A White Bat indeed. Just as Boss said."
Boss had been talking about me?
"What did he say?"
"Exactly this."
Kkamagwi cleared his throat and launched into an impression of Boss.
"Deal with that guy and there's almost no margin in it, I'm telling you. Not once have I properly come out ahead."
It was uncanny how much he sounded like the real thing.
"So I asked him. If there's no profit, why do you deal with the White Bat every single day? Isn't he the one you do the most business with? And then—"
This time even the gestures were Boss.
"Just knowing that guy is an asset in itself. You know I've got a hell of an eye for goods."
Secondhand or not, it was the first I'd heard of what Boss actually thought.
I'd figured he dealt with me because he liked hearing an interesting story now and then.
There had been another reason.
"Once I heard Boss talk, I got curious. Whether you were really goods of that caliber. He seems to trust you quite a bit."
"Hm."
"So I ran a little test. You're not sore about it, are you?"
"I doubt that's the whole reason you tested me."
"Well, it's not like I wasn't also wondering if this scrap might be gold! Turned out to be a bust."
The wing was assembled, and the airplane had its old shape back. Kkamagwi shoved it off into a corner.
"Speaking of which. When a crisis hits, I don't think there's anything as precious as a partner. What does our Bat think?"
"That came out of nowhere."
"You agree?"
"I like working alone. No partners."
"Aha! I didn't knooow."
"Keep talking like that and I'll replace your jaw."
"Eh-hey!"
Kkamagwi craned his head forward.
"So what I'm trying to say is, when a crisis hits, you wouldn't be opposed to being partners, would you? Something like that."
"A crisis?"
"The mood lately hasn't been right."
If Teacher Myeong had it right, the black market would be swept away before long. Had Kkamagwi caught a whiff of something too?
"Skip the cloud-grabbing talk about moods. Got anything concrete?"
"That really is all of it. Boss has been away from his seat unusually often these past few days, and something..."
"Something?"
"Something's really off."
He genuinely didn't seem to have any concrete information.
"It isn't just Boss. The customers, too. People buying things they never used to buy. A man who'd come in and talk for an hour, and now he keeps his mouth shut, makes the trade, and leaves. And on top of that—"
Taken together, everything Kkamagwi described amounted to nothing but a feeling—a feeling grown out of the instincts he'd sharpened over years of grinding through the black market. I couldn't tell whether the wrongness he sensed came only from the market closing, or whether it was the foreshadowing of something larger. One thing, though, had become certain. From the Future Technology Department, the highest elite organ inside Headquarters, all the way down to the black market spread across the bottom—
A dark cloud had settled over the whole of Headquarters.
In any case, what Kkamagwi wanted to say was simple.
"So, listen. If something comes up where I need help, could I ask you a favor? I'll make the compensation solid."
He was a man who'd planted himself properly in the black market and traded there a long time. Money wouldn't be the problem. Headquarters' black market in particular was a fairly safe place; he probably hadn't had to spend much just to keep his body in one piece. An ideal spot for saving up. The trouble was that if you only ever lived in a safe zone, you gradually lost the ability to survive. So long as he could stay in the market there was nothing to worry about, but the day he got driven out, there'd be no answer left. And Kkamagwi was missing a leg besides.
Taking Kkamagwi on as a money line.
Once the black market inside Headquarters vanished, business was going to get uncomfortably tight. There were black markets enough out in the wider world, of course, but none of them were as familiar as this one. Factor in the ugly mood on top of that, and there'd be plenty of places for money to go.
"If the pay is certain, I won't refuse—"
"Now that's what I like to hear!"
"But I'm not in a position to stay in the black market. I've got my own work. There's no guarantee I'll be beside you when your crisis hits. You're not asking me to stick to your side the whole time, are you?"
"I've already thought it all through!"
What he held out were two fairly heavy radios.
"One's for contact. The other's a gift."
So both of them were mine.
"They're a set of four."
Meaning one communication Core had been split into four, and a piece set into each radio. Only those four could talk to one another.
"And the other two?"
"I've got one. Another partner has the other."
So he already had a partner.
"I'll call when I need you. Carrying a radio around is work in itself, so think of the extra one as payment for that."
"Meaning the spare is mine to give to whoever I want?"
"Right. Even if I happen to hear whatever passes between you and your people, I'll pretend I didn't."
A transmission went out to every radio sharing the same Core. If even one of them turned traitor, everyone was in danger. I opened the bottom of the radio and found a hefty green fragment of Core inside. It must have cost a great deal. He meant it.
"It isn't just the Core that's high-grade. The radio itself is the same model the Future Technology Department uses. It'll run pickled in mud, and if a monster swallows it, no problem."
"If a monster swallows it, you can't use it anyway."
"Shout at the monster's belly and it'll probably get through."
That wasn't the problem. Range was. Even with a top-grade Core, distance had a limit—a few kilometers, barely. Getting the call through didn't settle anything. There was no guarantee I could actually go. If I had something urgent of my own, Kkamagwi would have to wait at the back of the line.
"And if you call while I'm outside radio range, so I never get it—or I get it, but I've got something more urgent?"
"Then I guess I wasn't born to live a long life."
Admirable. With a mindset like that—
"Fine. I'll take them."
"Whew... I feel a little easier now."
As for the spare, the sooner I handed it off to someone, the less weight I'd be hauling. Better that way.
Who would be good to give it to.
While I was turning it over—
"Then I'm counting on you from here on, partner!"
Kkamagwi, laying it on thick enough to turn the stomach. A question occurred to me. He didn't know I'd lived as a hunter, or as a soldier. Boss knew, but Boss wasn't the sort to go around carelessly broadcasting my secrets. And yet Kkamagwi had asked me for help. Did he think an eye that sees through things would be enough, on its own, to survive? When a crisis came, common sense said you thought of force first. Hunters turned up in the black market now and then, and soldiers were thick enough underfoot to trip over.
"But why me, of all people?"
"Hm?"
"I can glare all I want with this eye that sees through things. No lasers come out of it."
"Oh, you mean combat power? Nothing to worry about there."
What—was that other partner he'd mentioned the one in charge of the fighting?
"I can handle the fighting myself."
"...?"
"This was a secret, but I suppose the day has come to reveal it after all!"
What was he doing.
"If you ever need me, you can call first, too. If you need a combat asset, I mean. Understood?"
Behind Kkamagwi's mask, his eyes flashed.
"...And what are you supposed to be?"
His confidence had a basis.
In the one leg he still had.
No—the answer was in the empty space where a leg had been.