Leave
"Huh?"
"It's not a hard thing to say. Why are you dragging your feet? Leave."
I'd been sure I was meant to stay. I was a slave. I didn't think I had a choice.
"You haven't forgotten, have you. That you're a slave."
"So—"
"You're a slave, which means you don't get a choice."
"Right, which is why—"
"Doing as you're told is a slave's virtue. Quit talking and get going."
A hush settled over the hideout. At a moment like this the Head Cook would usually let a reaction slip when the Boss wasn't looking. He didn't so much as twitch.
Sudden, I'll give it that...
Maybe I'd simply settled too far into life here. Weighed cold, leaving was the better way to stay alive. Gwanghwamun, as it stood, was about to stake every life it had on a war.
So this was how a term of slavery with no end in sight got closed out. It had been a long one. I was a slave, so I could hardly call any of it a blessing, but I'd learned a great deal. I'd confirmed what a Core could do, too.
I looked around. Everyone in Gwanghwamun was watching me. Faces that had grown familiar by now.
But there was never a time they were truly family.
I didn't know how they'd thought of me. They hadn't been that, to me. I hadn't stayed because I wanted to, and the fact that I'd been a slave the whole way through was reason enough. The largest reason, though, lay somewhere else. I was not a person who could mix with them.
The reason the Boss lived. A small, plain life.
That was the fellowship Gwanghwamun had gathered.
It wasn't that any of it was wrong.
We were only different.
"Don't go getting the wrong idea. This doesn't mean your slavery is over."
"Ah?"
"I told you, didn't I? You beat me one-on-one, then you're free. Until that day, you're still a slave."
Hold on.
"You didn't go and read my words however you pleased, did you?"
Now that he said it.
He'd said I wouldn't be fighting with them. He hadn't said a word about throwing me out of the crew.
"It's dangerous right now, so you're to step away from this place for a while."
Why?
"Why only me?"
"What do you mean, why? I couldn't force the others to clear out, so I gave them a choice, and not one of them is going. You're a slave, so I do what I want with you."
So I'd been tying myself in knots for nothing. Well. It had at least settled my mind on Gwanghwamun. The moment a chance showed itself, I was walking out.
"Leave at first light tomorrow."
He could keep calling me a slave all he liked. If I put my mind to it, walking off down this road and never coming back was an option too. If Gwanghwamun was finished by the war while I was gone, the slavery ended with it.
"The rest of you, think it through. Come find me anytime before dawn. Anyone going into the fight learns the operation."
So tonight was the last night.
The smallest room in the hideout. My room.
I finished getting ready to leave and lay down. Sleep was never going to come easy. On an ordinary night the place would have been dead quiet at this hour. Now and then a low murmur of talk drifted through.
Half of it was the Boss's voice. Most of what I caught sounded like an operations meeting, or like last well-wishes traded with crew who meant to leave the gang.
"Jeonggu. You asleep?"
The Head Cook?
"Not yet."
He barged in and wedged himself down beside me.
"It's tight enough in here as it is."
"Last time and all. I'm gonna miss this."
So he'd decided to say whatever he felt like saying.
"We'll see each other again once the war's over, won't we?"
"Course we will!"
Outside, the talking went on.
"Guess nobody's sleeping."
"Those guys signed on for real. Every one of them is in for the war."
The man with no family name, and the men under him.
"The second they leave this place, the army's going to be gunning for them — they were shaking in their boots over it. That noise out there? That's the shaking."
Same spot as the Boss, then. If they didn't fight and win, they died. No other way about it.
"What happened to the guns? The twenty used ones they brought."
"Hanging onto them was a good way to get ourselves in trouble, so I buried them a little ways off for now. Money gets tight, we'll clean them up and drip them onto the black market one at a time."
Good. They'd been put away properly. No telling when someone might come crashing in.
"A few of the crew have decided they want to leave."
Saying it with everyone gathered would have meant too many eyes.
"They're all slipping off to talk to the Boss."
"Leaving the crew for good? Or laying low for a while, like me."
"Depends on the kid."
He said they weren't even waiting for dawn the way I was. Leaving after everyone woke would turn heads too. They were paying their respects to the Boss and walking straight out.
"Still, not that many are going! The war's gonna be just fine!"
Even one man would be missed. The operation had been a long shot with every last one of them still here. There was basically no chance of winning.
"Don't you worry. Funny thing to say, but nobody's jumping in because they think they can win."
They'd all made their peace with it.
"Shouldn't you go get some rest?"
"I will. Just wanted to say goodbye ahead of time."
"We'll see each other in the morning."
"I don't know..."
"Something wrong?"
"Nah. We'll see each other in the morning. Just got a bad feeling, is all."
So the Head Cook was uneasy too. Maybe he wanted to leave and couldn't. Unlike the rest of the crew, if the Head Cook said he was going, the Boss would have taken it hard. He wouldn't have shown it, of course.
"Anyway! Well? I was right, wasn't I?"
"Huh?"
"The successor! I'm telling you, no doubt about it — the Boss has you pegged as his heir."
"Not as a slave to hand down, generation after generation?"
"Someday the line dies out, and then you'll be the successor, right?"
After that the Head Cook forced out two or three more jokes that weren't funny and went back to his own room. Wringing words out of nothing, when he had nothing left to say. Even so, once he was gone and I closed my eyes, I was asleep almost at once. Strange, how that worked.
I think the voices went on all through the night.
"I'm heading out, then."
"Go on. I'm busy."
The Boss really was busy. Not just him. Everyone was.
"If we're going to hit first, we finish getting this operation ready as fast as we can!"
"Yes, sir!"
I'd only come to say goodbye, and I hadn't even left yet, but already they were ignoring me like a man who wasn't there. They wanted me gone. I didn't add anything else. I walked out of the hideout.
The door eased shut.
Once Son Jeonggu was gone, everyone who had been rushing about let out a breath at the same time.
"Boss. Jeonggu left."
"I saw."
"Want me to clear out Jeonggu's room?"
"I'll do it. You lot straighten this place up."
"Yessir!"
Little was left in the narrow room. Calling it clearing out was almost generous. A moment was plenty.
"Boss! What about these?"
Laundry, hung out to dry. They'd been set aside as clothes for a slave, and putting them on anyone else felt wrong.
"Store them for now."
"Boss! And this?"
They were working through what remained when—
"...Ah!"
"Boss?"
The Boss broke into a run for his own room. The thing was there, inside a drawer with a lock on it.
"Damn. Jeonggu already a long way off?"
"He'll have gotten pretty far. Why?"
"Hah..."
Jeonggu seemed to have forgotten the thing existed, too.
"...Never mind. I'll give it to him the next time we meet."
It wasn't until I was well clear of the hideout that I realized.
It's gone.
I'd forgotten. The Boss had confiscated the P210. A slave wasn't allowed to carry a firearm, he'd said, and taken it. I didn't think he'd withheld it on purpose just because I was a slave. He'd forgotten too, by the look of it.
Should I go back?
It was expensive, yes, but more than that it was something I'd carried out of the hut, and it snagged on me. Going back to ask for it, though, didn't sit right either. He'd give it back. It was just...
Leave it.
If Gwanghwamun lived through the war, I'd get it back someday. And if I didn't, I'd cross paths with another one like it sooner or later. Not the very same piece. That was all.
Bang! Bang, bang...
Gunfire, a long way off. Not from the hideout. The opposite direction — the way I was heading. Had someone run into raiders?
You almost never saw another person near the Gwanghwamun Hideout. The army watched Gwanghwamun's back and kept the ground under its hand, so you almost never saw raiders, or the sort of drifter a raider would prey on. Someone must have slipped this far in through a slack in that control.
Better to watch how it played, then move on.
Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang! Tat-tat-tat!
The shots were drawing closer. A fight, coming this way. Someone running, and someone else hunting them hard. The reports crossed at different ranges, which meant both sides were dumping ammunition, and it wasn't a matter of one or two people.
I tucked myself into an abandoned building nearby.
"Throw it! Throw the whole thing!"
"A grenade? We've only got one!"
"You've only got one life, too! Just throw it!"
Huh?
"It went in clean!"
"Don't look back, just run! One of those isn't going to fix this!"
I know that voice.
I stepped out, and it was exactly who I'd thought.
"Son Jeonggu!?"
"You on your way out of the hideout?"
Gwanghwamun crew. Faces I hadn't seen that morning. The ones who'd talked to the Boss in the night and left ahead of the rest.
"You run too!"
"Huh?"
"Now! Just run!"
Their faces had gone the color of ash. I ran. They were headed back toward the hideout.
"What happened?"
"Fuck...! It's all gone to hell."
"Those bastards hit first!"
I stole a glance back, and I could see who they were. They were coming on through a pale boil of dust.
"Don't look back! We don't have that kind of time. Just run!"
The army.
"We're completely surrounded!"
"Surrounded?"
"Not just this side! Somebody saw them coming from the other directions too!"
"Half of us are already dead, fuck...!"
The crew had scattered as they left, been driven back by the army, and I'd met them on that road. The army was closing in from several directions at once.
"It'll be the same on the sides we haven't checked! These bastards have us boxed in completely, and they're tightening it!"
"Not one of us left alive. That's what they want, damn it...!"
The intent was plain to see. The moment they spotted the crew, they'd opened fire with no warning and no end to it. This whole stretch was a place where you could hardly find a human being who wasn't Gwanghwamun. They must have been ordered to slaughter everyone in sight. Because of it, about half the members who'd set out together were already gone.
"So what are you all going to do now?"
"Do? What else is there!"
"Those sons of bitches. It's all or nothing for us now, too!"
Every one of them had landed where the Boss already stood.
"It's war, you fuckers...!"
We ran a long way. At last the hideout was in sight again.
Gwanghwamun.
Soon, a battlefield.