That Place
We'd reached the destination in the end.
"I've got work to do."
"What's with that tone? Bro, you saying I'm in the way?"
Him tagging along the whole way had never been part of the plan.
"Yeah."
"Wow. Cold."
The load was heavy enough that the road had already been twice as hard as usual, and this was one more headache I didn't need. Most of the weight in the bag was cores, so throwing any of it out wasn't an option. I'd already hauled plenty out of Headquarters, and on top of those I'd picked up two more I suspected were Ability Cores.
"What work? A mail run?"
"Already done."
"Air-raid warnings?"
"Those too."
"Then what?"
"How long are you planning to follow me?"
"Until a new job comes in?"
"You're not even trying to get one."
"Stick with you long enough, bro, and one'll turn up."
"And why would that happen?"
"Because manufacturing work is your specialty, bro."
He wasn't wrong.
Clack.
A welcome rang down from the top of the barrier wall. The muzzle was pointed at me. This wasn't a place that would normally level a gun at me; the problem, clearly, was Clock-out Man standing at my side.
"Halt!"
"It's me. The postman."
"And the beanpole next to you?"
"He's—"
Clock-out Man stared at me, wide-eyed and blank. Figure it out and introduce me somehow, that look said.
"My pet."
"What!?"
"Yeah? Come in."
The settlement's great gate swung open onto a place where pets were gathered in droves. Animal Farm.
"Pretty lively place, huh?"
Animal Farm was what outsiders called the settlement, and the name was literal. The place was full of animals, every one of them a pet with a master of their own.
Clock-out Man, though, was acting strange. A tracker mercenary who lived on information had no business not knowing this.
"You don't know it well, bro? Yeo-jin never told you about me, did she?"
"She keeps her mouth shut about the useless parts."
"I haven't been back in Seoul long. So I don't really know what's happened these past few years."
"Hm?"
"Right after I quit being a Hunter I went straight down to Busan. Stayed there the whole time and only just came back."
Then it made sense that he wouldn't know. Back when Clock-out Man was active, this place had looked nothing like it did now. It hadn't even been called Animal Farm.
"You went a long way."
"You want to avoid Seoul, you go to Busan. That is the best place!"
Fair enough. If someone this conspicuous had been in Seoul the whole time, the rumors would have reached me too. So that was why he'd left no trace of himself.
Wanted to avoid Seoul, did he.
Clock-out Man hadn't gotten along with the other Hunters in his active days, so it figured. Not that he had any right to feel wronged. The bad blood had been entirely his doing. The moment the set withdrawal time hit, he clocked out and left.
"Still, I was kind of a big deal down in Busan, you know?"
"Then why'd you come back? You could've stayed."
"The money was a little... Turns out Seoul's Seoul for a reason."
After the collapse began, every organ of state power in the country had concentrated in the Geofront and Headquarters. Seoul became the center of the nation as a matter of course, and within Seoul, Yeouido.
Seoul had been the capital in the old era too, but back then there had at least been talk of balanced regional development and the like. The balance had already broken, so they'd tried to develop their way back toward it. The mere fact that someone had made the effort suggested things had been better than now. These days even the effort was gone.
Plenty of people living in Seoul heard "the provinces" and pictured nothing but ruins without a single intact settlement. Few of them knew anything reliable about the neighboring countries, either. If you knew that the Kingdom of Jeju, out in the South Sea, was a country whose specialty was tangerines—or was it mangoes?—you already counted as well informed. Dokdo, which belonged to the Kingdom of Ulleung in the East Sea, was widely believed to be our land.
The Old Man said all of it came from the death of public education. What a person knew and what they didn't depended entirely on who had taught them and which books they had happened to read. There was a master cartographer who had never studied world geography and couldn't name the countries next door. There was another who had a rough grasp of the Joseon period and of Korean history after the Korean War, and knew nothing at all of the decades in between, because every page covering that stretch had been torn out of the only book he had ever read.
"Anyway, bro, where are you headed now?"
"There's something I need to pick up. I know where the house is, so I go there, collect it, and I'm done."
What Jo Yong-han had asked for was a blueprint. It didn't look like it would be difficult.
Clock-out Man, meanwhile, had been rubbernecking nonstop since we'd come through the gate.
"This place is something else..."
"The most developed settlement in Geumcheon-gu."
Machines of every kind drank power cores without pause. Not a single hungry face in sight—abundance, clean streets, neat clothes, the sound of laughter. Growing a settlement to this point took more than ability. It also took the luck of never once being hit by a destructive air raid.
And then Clock-out Man's face sank into disappointment.
"Disappointing. Not so much as a whisker."
"Of what."
"The animals? Where is the animal?"
"They're everywhere. What do you mean you can't see them?"
His face had gone far graver than the time I'd called him a hypocrite.
"What is this? Something only bad people can see?"
"...Don't people usually ask if it's something only the good can see?"
Come here with your hopes inflated by the name Animal Farm, and disappointment was the likely result. It wasn't full of the animals people pictured, the kind you rarely saw in the flesh—dogs, cats, that sort of thing.
The pets here were—
"They're all over the place. The humans."
Everyone wearing a leather collar was a pet. No leash came with it, but it was a mark all the same: an animal with an owner.
"Huh?"
"That's the kind of place it is."
"This is actually weird."
Weird, yes. From an outsider's point of view.
"It ought to be pet person. Why pet animal?"
"...That's the part you find weird?"
"Then what?"
"People are animals too, for one. And if that's what they want to call it, what am I supposed to do about it?"
Every settlement had at least one corner that was hard to understand. Here, the notion that a person could become a pet was plain common sense.
Besides the leather collar, a few other things set a pet apart from a master, and a name was one of them. It was written into the Pets' Seven Commandments. Before you became an animal, you discarded the surname and given name you had used and received a new one chosen by your master. The rest of the Seven Commandments was stuffed with useless clauses of the same kind: A pet may not sleep in a bed.
"So earlier, when you introduced me as your pet, that wasn't a joke?"
"It's your first visit. The entry process for first-time visitors eats up hours."
"And if you're a pet, it's fine?"
"Right. They don't treat you as a visitor."
"Tch."
He'd worked out how he was supposed to carry himself while we were here. He could read a room, so he'd manage. The only time he refused to was at clock-out.
"So while we're here, you keep quiet and do as you're told."
"I'm still allowed to talk like a person, right?"
Obviously.
"Speak Korean."
"Yep. Koreean."
The building at the location Jo Yong-han had given me. Calling it a house would have been generous. It was a barn.
I knocked. No answer.
"Huh? It's just open?"
And when we opened it, no one was inside. Nothing but machinery.
"Hm? Who're you folks? What's the idea, throwin' the door open?"
A neighbor, apparently. I identified myself as a postman, and the wariness fell away.
"And beside you?"
"A pet."
"Woof!"
"Korean."
"Meong."
But when I explained that I'd come for a blueprint, what came back was this:
"Look at the sky. Clouded over, ain't it? Plain as day it's about to dump rain!"
Weather, out of nowhere. And what was I supposed to do with that?
"Try the Clock Tower. She'll be at her nonsense again."
With that, the neighbor vanished without a backward glance.
"What's that guy want us to do?"
"No idea. One thing seems certain, though."
Whoever had the blueprint was no ordinary person. Not that I'd expected otherwise.
The Clock Tower.
Animal Farm's totem.
Ringing on the hour, the Clock Tower was the symbol of Animal Farm, and the pets' work lived under the rule of time. The masters said it was to guarantee rest and a proper clock-out, but the truer reason was that it made them easier to manage. Fail to finish inside the allotted time, and there was no clocking out anyway.
Once the tower trained you, you picked up the habit of starting every task on the hour. A few minutes vanished from every hour, in other words. Glance up and find it was fifty-seven past, and the remaining three became rest you hadn't asked for.
"Wow, the pets are all gathered here."
The ones in leather collars had knelt in a ring around the Clock Tower. Another strange superstition, then. A few masters had come out to watch from the edges. Masters, at least, you could talk to.
"Bro? Ask them what they're doing?"
"I don't care about superstition. I need to find out who lives in that barn."
The moment I mentioned the barn with its door left open, the masters pointed as one to the top of the Clock Tower.
Up on the tower's flat roof, in the middle of a space that wasn't particularly wide, a lightning rod stood planted. And in one corner, a small girl. Even from a distance the leather collar made itself known. She had both arms spread toward the sky, gesturing at it, and then—
Shaaaa.
The rain came down at once.
"Bro?"
"Get the raincoats out."
Every hatch in the steel roof swung open to catch the rain for daily use. The masters drifted off one by one to get out of it. The pets ringing the tower spread their arms to the sky and took the rain with their whole bodies. So did the girl above them. No—she went further, shaking as if in a convulsion.
"Tsk."
"Why's everybody you're after end up like that, Bro?"
He had a point. That included him.
Shaaaa.
And so the pets stood in the rain for a long while.
After the squall let up—
Achoo!
All that remained were pets sniffling and shivering. As if they'd been waiting for it, the masters came out and started leading them away one by one.
"Now that I think about it, it's weird. If you're right, bro, the masters get nothing out of these guys catching colds. Why leave them to it when they know they'll get sick?"
"Which means it was something they couldn't stop."
Animal Farm's totem. What kind of superstition was this?
Once every pet had left, the girl in question showed herself as well, down from the top of the tower. What set her apart from the others was simple. No master came to collect her.
"Hey."
Achoo.
She ignored him and kept walking.
"I came for the blueprint."
The words might have been a key. Her steps paused, just for a moment, and then—
"Don't have it."
Useless.
"She says she doesn't have it?"
"Still, we got something."
"What the something?"
For a result, it was a fine one.
"I got a few words out of someone who looked like she wouldn't so much as part her lips."
There was hope.
"Hey, where are you going?"
I wasn't getting that blueprint out of her right now. If I wanted to move around in here without trouble, this was the only way.
"How may I help you?"
"I've come to officially register a pet."
"Huh!?"
The other masters hadn't said it outright, but their eyes had been unfriendly the whole time. Clock-out Man wasn't wearing a leather collar.
"Who's a good boy?"
"Go to hell."