There Is No Such Unit
From Captain Choi I got what there was to get on Mask, and the whole of it collapsed into a single line.
A settlement that doesn't deal with the outside? My ass.
Command here had been trafficking with the world beyond the wire, behind the soldiers' backs. They had a postman in a mask to thank for it. When Mask needed a civil servant's face he wore a postman's, and when the work turned illegal he simply took the face off. Through him, AAA's command had been supplied not only with news of the outside but with the daily necessities of life. Now and then he even delivered mail to ordinary soldiers or civilians—provided the request came from someone with power out there.
Jo Yong-han, that compulsive explainer, had been one of those clients.
By age, then: Jo Shin-hye, Jo Yong-han, and Jo An-na. The three of them.
The first letter Yong-han sent his sister had reached AAA only because he put it in Mask's hands. Shin-hye, for reasons she never gave, asked that no more letters be brought, and Mask was kind enough to oblige. It would not have been a kindness given for free. There would have been a price. At any rate, because he refused Yong-han's next delivery, I was the one who ended up walking in.
Sitting on the illegal routes out here, that bastard must have raked in ammunition by the crate.
Illegal delivery is not an easy trade. Get reported and you don't walk away with a simple dismissal from the postman's service. That was why he had chosen AAA. Everyone in this place had already walled themselves off from the government. He could run contraband in the open, and there wasn't a soul who would inform on him.
"You weren't in a position to have a line to Mask, were you, Captain."
"As you can see."
Captain Choi lifted a ragged strip of zombie meat and gave it a shake. Proof he was starving, the same as his soldiers.
"Anything more on him?"
"He was in this office a little while ago, actually. A few minutes before you arrived."
He'd come here himself? A little worse luck and I would have walked straight into him.
"Explains the stench."
"That's the zombie meat. It's old."
A man who can't take a joke.
"If Mask came all the way here, do the two of you know each other?"
"If you mean are we acquaintances, not in the least. He comes on his own to see whether I've got mail to send. I tell him every time there's nothing, and he comes anyway."
So that was it. I could see the shape of the thing.
"He's sounding you out. Whether you mean to talk to the outside."
"That's my read as well. Let them think I do, and command will have me removed. That postman has volunteered to be their dog. He does their sniffing for them."
Mask, command's dog. I didn't think so. It was the other way around. They were his.
No proof of it, not yet. Only the feel of the thing.
"Nothing else?"
"That's the lot."
I could take it back to Headquarters and report the illegal deliveries. There was no reason to take on a nuisance like that. Whoever was breaking the law, it wasn't my business. The trouble lay somewhere else.
Mask will be thinking I might report him.
He would already know a postman by my name had come through. A man who spoke with command would have this place's secrets in his pocket long before I did. He was certainly sitting somewhere now, turning over what happened if I went back and named him. I'd been dragged into a tedious mess. And I could hardly look him up to say don't worry, I won't tell. What had I ever shown him that he ought to believe?
"Strange, though. You, asking after a postman in a mask."
"How so?"
"I had you figured for a man who wasn't curious about anything."
People do love other people's business.
"I'm indifferent by nature."
"And yet that indifferent man wants to know about this particular postman."
"Wear a mask all day starting tomorrow, Captain, and I expect everyone will wonder what you're doing."
"Fair."
I glanced at Jo An-na, asleep where she had slumped against the wall. Her hand was locked around the long pressed-powder ration I had given the captain. Even in sleep, as if the gesture had worn itself into her, her thumb worked the squared corner of the bar.
"I could make a fair guess at the two of you without asking."
"Our story's obvious enough, if obvious is the word."
A settlement with no future in it. Soldiers going mad. Commanders gone rotten. Inside all of that, the one thoroughly ordinary choice left to anyone who could still tell sense from ruin: escape. Feeling for each other piled on top of that, and they had thrown in together. Lovers, and there was nothing left to explain.
"We'll need weapons for the breakout, regardless. Firepower doesn't count for much if the weapon's unpracticed, so each of you should carry what your hands already know. As for An-na—"
Her name must have reached her. Jo An-na woke and stretched, long and hard.
In her sleep she'd been rubbing the corner of that ration with her thumb.
A habit beaten into the body by repetition. I had seen a few like her before.
"Throwing knives are your specialty, aren't they?"
Throwing knives—an attack built on the cast of a blade. Dagger-throwing, some called it.
"Uh... Did my brother tell you?"
"Not a word. He never mentioned you. Shin-hye, then?"
"My sister wouldn't tell just anyone a thing like that..."
There hadn't been many clues. I'd hit it anyway, and that was enough.
"Shin-hye didn't tell me."
Knife-throwing. Set beside a firearm it was a poor tool for a real fight, but a thrown blade was a far cheaper thing to spend than a round. Ammunition meant moving good powder and stamping cartridges to spec in a factory. A throwing knife could be made without much trouble.
And the habit of working a thumb along the corner of whatever the hand was holding.
Repeated drill had left it in her. The ordinary throw was to fist the butt of the knife and shove the edge with the thumb, spinning it as it left the hand. The basic grip, then, was a thumb laid along that edge at all times. Rub the edge for the feel of it, and the tic set in. I'd even known a man who flicked his thumb at empty air when he was holding nothing at all.
"How I knew doesn't matter. Knives alone may not be enough, so bring a firearm as well."
"Ah, that's..."
"You've never been a soldier, the way your sister was."
"No... I did train a lot with the K2, though."
"Live fire?"
"Not even once..."
"You've never fired a rifle at all?"
"I haven't..."
Then putting a rifle in her hands for a real fight was out of the question.
"Captain. What firearms can we actually get?"
"There's a list in the drawer. Everything held in the armory."
"On your authority, can you walk weapons out of there?"
"Procedure makes it difficult."
Then ignore the procedure.
"We're escaping anyway. Procedure can be ignored."
Good. He's ready.
"Here's the list."
What he set down included pieces you almost never saw in this country. Mask's procurement, maybe.
"A pistol, then."
"Which?"
"Of these..."
I ran the list fast and pulled the ones that fit the moment and whose workings I knew.
"As many M&Ps as you can carry, and two Model 60s."
Knowing the workings meant weapons of the old era, learned through the Old Man.
"All that, for An-na alone?"
"Your soldiers are armed with rifles and nothing else, aren't they? The pistols will be shoved in a warehouse somewhere, and I'd bet no one's maintained them."
"That's... true."
Even in the regular army, units that issued a pistol as a sidearm on top of a rifle were uncommon. Nothing strange in it.
"An automatic left to rot malfunctions more often than not. We don't have time to service them, so we find the ones that still work."
"More of them, better odds of a sound one. Then why only two Model 60s?"
"Those are revolvers. They don't fail the way an automatic does."
Captain Choi nodded, a low hum in his throat.
"And if every one of them is junk, I can repair them. Don't lose sleep over it."
"All right. But..."
He set an elbow on the list and propped his chin on a closed fist.
"What unit were you with? A man that easy with pistols—I'd have said special forces."
No point hiding it.
"A place with a lot of madmen."
"...That is special forces. Which? The strongest?"
He meant the Heart Unit. The unit that moved for no reason except to keep Headquarters alive.
"Not that one."
"Bit of a disappointment, then. The way Sergeant Jeong told it, I had you for an elite out of the Heart Unit, or near enough."
"Sergeant Jeong was under me for a while. A leg wound got him transferred out."
"Ah. Mind you, Sergeant Jeong is no madman."
"Which is why the transfer was the right one."
He had been a fine soldier, and not a madman. Stay in that unit even a little longer and he would not have lived. The leg that sent him away had been luck.
"The madmen I mean aren't on his level. You've never seen a real one."
The captain went quiet, thinking, and then he had it.
"...The most dangerous unit, then."
"Well. I wasn't mad enough to stay, which is why I washed my hands of it and took up as a postman."
"Coming out here with the mail, and helping me escape—that's fairly mad already."
No. Set beside what I had been through there, this didn't even qualify.
"Anyway. Can you get pistol ammunition for her as well?"
"That's the difficulty..."
"I have spare pistol rounds. I'll lend them."
A hunter's pistol is built to take more than one caliber, so you end up carrying several kinds of ammunition. Among mine were rounds that would fit an M&P and a Model 60. Good thing I had brought the extra magazines.
"Thank you. I'll pay you back. I mean it."
An-na dipped her head at the offer. She had better mean it.
"Then we move."
"I'll see you again tonight."
I was on my way out of the office when I stopped.
"An-na."
"Yes?"
I wasn't sure yet that the throwing was anything I could trust. The habit said she had drilled enough for it to settle into her hands. Still.
"Hit this."
"Ah—!"
I didn't wait. I crumpled the plastic that had wrapped the ration and flung it into the air. A thin whistle, then a crack. The knife was already there, punching through the plastic and carrying on into the far wall, striking the brick dead-on, perfectly square, and bouncing back with a clatter.
Jo An-na hadn't broken the pose of the throw. She stood bolt upright. The mild face she had worn all this time was gone. For that one moment she was nothing but a warrior.
"So it wasn't luck that kept you alive. That's a relief."
The door shut behind Jeongguk as he left the office.
The captain let out a long breath and set himself down on the spindly chair, as if to admit there was no turning back now.
The moment the two of them were alone, An-na spoke as if she had been waiting on it.
"That man just now. 'No ordinary postman' doesn't even start to cover it, does it?"
When she had first heard the captain's plan to escape, the thing she could not understand was why a postman would help with work that dangerous. Twenty-five Cores was a tremendous payment, yes. It still hadn't seemed like enough to stake a life on. Then she had watched what he did in this office, and she understood.
"Telling exactly how many rounds are in a magazine from the weight alone. And somehow knowing knife-throwing is my specialty..."
That was why he had agreed to help. For him, this escape was not a thing on which his life hung in the balance.
Captain Choi nodded.
"When Sergeant Jeong first brought him up, I thought the man was laying it on. Maybe he wasn't."
"What did he say?"
The captain turned over the stories Sergeant Jeong had told him, back when he had asked leave to admit a postman he knew. Tales you couldn't credit—that the man had put down an entire squad of the Heart Unit by himself. Even now the absurdity of it pulled a laugh out of him. So he left the believe-it-or-not stories where they were, and passed on only the last thing the sergeant had said.
"A man who throws the dice and always comes up six."
An-na turned the phrase over, almost grasping it and not quite, and the captain sank into his own thoughts.
"And I don't think that's the whole of it."
"Hm?"
His eyes narrowed.
"What Sergeant Jeong knows is the tip of the iceberg. That postman—what was he, before he was a soldier?"
The quiet held for a moment.
"Oh. Right—so which unit was he with, back then?"
She had tossed it off. Captain Choi could not answer it the same way. Every soldier knew that unit. No one liked to say its name. He squeezed his eyes shut and spoke as if he were only whispering.
Slowly his eyelids lifted. The pupils inside them had lost their light.