The Evidence Is in the Sky
Seo Hajin returned to Seoul that afternoon. Planes were not flying inside the Barrier, but the trains ran normally.
She spent two and a half hours sitting by the KTX window, refining the draft of the indictment on her laptop. It was the first case she had handled in a year. And it was the very case that had caused her demotion.
When she stood in front of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, she paused for a moment. A year ago, she had been driven out of this building.
On the day she packed her belongings and left, no one had said goodbye. Everyone had avoided any connection with her. Getting close to someone who had been marked meant you would be marked too.
She pushed the door open once more and stepped inside. As she crossed the lobby, several familiar faces recognized her. They were the colleagues who had pretended not to see her a year earlier.
This time, they averted their eyes again. But the reason had changed. A year ago they had avoided her out of fear of being tainted. Now they avoided her out of shame—for failing to stand beside her back then.
Seo Hajin said nothing to them. She had no time to waste on resentment. There was a matter she needed to finish.
In the office of the chief prosecutor of Criminal Division 3, the chief remained silent for a long time after seeing her. This was the man who had told her a year ago, “That’s what being an adult is.”
“Prosecutor Seo. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been reassigned. The order came from headquarters early this morning.”
Seo Hajin placed the reassignment notice on the desk. The chief picked it up and studied it for a while. Even with communications severed inside the Barrier, the personnel system continued to function. Both of them could guess who had made it so.
“Of all people, it had to be you.”
“I volunteered.”
The chief’s eyes narrowed. “This is the Ju Yeonghan case. You know that, right?”
“I do. I was the one investigating it a year ago.”
“…Which is exactly why it’s dangerous. Do you not understand what kind of family that is? Even if the chairman has been arrested, that network is not dead. Who knows what will happen when the Barrier comes down. You’ll—”
“Chief.”
Seo Hajin cut him off. Her voice stayed low. Dry. Concise.
“The evidence is floating in the sky. The whole country saw it. So what is there to hesitate over?”
The chief closed his mouth.
“A year ago we did not lose because there was no evidence. We lost because the evidence could be buried. This time it cannot be buried. The sky is shining on the very hands trying to bury it.”
She picked up the reassignment notice again.
“So this time, we win.”
Seo Hajin was given an empty office. A dusty desk, a broken chair. They were not about to offer a good seat to a prosecutor who had been demoted and then recalled. It did not matter. She did not need a nice room. She needed the case.
One investigator was assigned to her. A man around forty named Go Jinsu. As he entered the office he said, somewhat awkwardly, “Looks like I’m working with you again, Prosecutor.”
Seo Hajin looked up. It was a familiar face.
“We worked together a year ago too. Until the end.”
Go Jinsu. The investigator who had been pushed to a quiet post alongside her when she was demoted. The two regarded each other for a moment. No long explanation was necessary. People who had been shattered in the same place did not need one.
“How do you see this case?” Seo Hajin asked.
Go Jinsu pulled a chair over and sat. “Honestly? With the sky exposing everything, you’d think it would be easy. But it’s the opposite.”
“Why?”
“There’s too much evidence. And no one knows how the court will treat it. Does ‘the sky showed it’ have evidentiary value? The defense will attack that first. Where did it come from? Is it fabricated? Were the collection procedures legal?”
Seo Hajin nodded. She had already considered these problems.
“That is why we will use the sky footage only as support. The core evidence we will gather again ourselves. From the beginning.”
“From the beginning?”
“We will re-secure the physical black box, recover the original CCTV, re-interview the witnesses. The sky has shown us where to dig. The digging is our job.”
Go Jinsu gave a short laugh. “As expected. You haven’t changed.”
As soon as the investigation began, the wall appeared. It was the same wall Seo Hajin had faced a year earlier. The physical black box had been logged as “disposed of” in the evidence storage room. The management company claimed the original CCTV had been deleted due to “expired retention period.”
Witnesses had sealed their lips, and the prosecutor who had handled the case had submitted a leave request and vanished. The technique for burying evidence remained exactly the same.
“Prosecutor, look at this.”
Go Jinsu turned the monitor. It was the disposal record from the evidence room. The disposal date coincided precisely with the day after the case had been transferred to another prosecutor.
“Anyone can see it was deliberately eliminated. But on paper it is completely legal. Reason for disposal, approval chain, official seals. They killed the evidence in a perfectly lawful way.”
“That is their method,” Seo Hajin said, printing out the record. “They do not bury it illegally. They bury it legally. That way there are no consequences later.”
“Then what do we do now? All the evidence is gone.”
Seo Hajin looked out the window at the sky. The daytime sky was clear and empty.
“It is not gone. It is all up there. And this time the entire process of eliminating the evidence was captured as well.”
She set the disposal record down on the desk with a sharp tap.
“Killing evidence is also a crime. We will indict them for that too.”
Go Jinsu looked at her for a moment, then slowly nodded. What had been a dead end a year ago had become a new path.
The problem was the witness. The one who had recanted his statement a year earlier. The person who had seen the entire accident from the start. Because he changed his words, the case had gone to no charges. The sky had even displayed his name.
When Seo Hajin and Go Jinsu went to see him, he would not open the door.
“Go away. I don’t know anything.”
A trembling voice came from beyond the door.
“Sir, everything came out in the sky. What you saw that day.”
“That’s why I’m even more terrified!” The voice cracked. “What kind of family do you think they are? The Barrier? Who knows when it will come down. And when it does, what happens to me? Will you take responsibility? Who will protect my family?”
Seo Hajin stared at the closed door for a moment. This was the real fight. The sky had revealed the truth but had not removed people’s fear. Fear remained their burden. Overcoming it was their burden too.
She spoke quietly to the door.
“A year ago, I was just as afraid.”
The other side fell silent.
“Afraid of that family, so the case was taken from me and I was demoted. Everyone told me to stop. That I was throwing eggs at a rock. But this time…”
She paused briefly.
“It is not a rock. The sky is on our side. For the first time.”
There was no answer. Still, she slipped her business card through the crack in the door.
“Contact me when you have decided. I will not pressure you. Just know that you now have the chance to say what you could not say a year ago.”
On the drive back, Go Jinsu held the wheel and asked, “Will he come forward?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“Then we fill the gaps with other evidence. We can proceed without a witness statement.”
Seo Hajin looked out the window. The Barrier-enclosed city flowed past. The streets were the same as yesterday, yet they looked different. The way people walked, their expressions. Faces that seemed to be waiting for something.
“Prosecutor.”
“Yes.”
“Honestly, I still don’t know what that thing floating in the sky is. A god, an alien, something else. But there is one thing I like about it.”
“What?”
“That it handed everything to us. It didn’t do it all itself. Catching them, trying them—that’s on us. At first I thought it was irresponsible, but…”
Go Jinsu stopped the car at a light.
“When I thought about it, it’s actually treating us like adults. Not spectators.”
Seo Hajin did not reply. But inside she was thinking exactly the same thing.
When they returned to the prosecutors’ office, a woman was waiting in the lobby. A plainly dressed middle-aged woman holding a small thermos. When she saw Seo Hajin she rose slowly.
“You are Prosecutor Seo Hajin… correct? I called you last night.”
It was Yun Jeongsuk. Park Sang-woo’s mother.
Seo Hajin stopped for a moment. The victim’s mother from the case she had ultimately failed to protect a year ago. The person who had weighed most heavily on her mind after her demotion was now standing before her.
“How did you come all this way…”
“I wanted to see your face at least once. I couldn’t even greet you properly back then.”
Yun Jeongsuk held out the thermos. Her hands were shaking.
“It’s nothing special… just something warm. I heard you were working through the night.”
Seo Hajin took the thermos. It was warm. The heat passed into her palms.
“Ma’am.”
“Yes.”
“A year ago I could not see it through to the end. They took the case from me. I am sorry.”
Yun Jeongsuk shook her head. Her eyes reddened.
“No. Even then you stood up for my son… I held on to that one fact and endured the whole year. Knowing that at least one person in the world understood my child had been wronged.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“This time, please do not let them take it from you. And I will not run away either. I will not sign any settlement agreement again.”
Seo Hajin held the thermos with both hands. She would normally have kept her words short, but this time they continued.
“I will not let them take it. I promise. But I need one promise from you as well. Please stay with me until the end. You will have to take the witness stand. It will not be easy.”
Yun Jeongsuk nodded. This time there was no hesitation.
“I will stand. A hundred times if I must.”
That night Seo Hajin stayed in the office until late. On the dusty desk she spread the investigation records she had been unable to finish a year earlier. She continued from the exact point where the case had been taken from her. Time, stopped for a year, began to move again.
Around eleven her phone rang. An unknown number. She answered. A man’s hoarse voice came through the receiver. It was the witness who had refused to open the door earlier.
“…Prosecutor.”
“Yes. Go ahead.”
There was a long silence. Then—
“I will… give a statement again. Everything I saw that day.”
Seo Hajin picked up her pen. Her hand trembled very slightly.
“Thank you. You made the right choice.”
“But I have a condition.”
“Tell me.”
“Make sure people like me do not exist anymore. People too afraid to speak the truth. Please… create a country where that does not happen.”
Seo Hajin was briefly speechless. Then, slowly and clearly, she answered.
“That is not something I can do alone.”
“…”
“But we can do it together. If more people like you step forward one by one.”
After she hung up, she looked out the window. The night sky over Seoul. The same sky that had revealed the truth during the day was now black and quiet. As if its work was finished and the rest was up to them.
Seo Hajin returned to the blank indictment on her screen. She began to write the second paragraph where she had stopped. This time she intended to go all the way.
At that same moment, in an office somewhere in the city. Several people had gathered in a darkened room. Their exact identities did not matter.
They were remnants of the arrested chairman’s network, politicians whose positions had grown precarious, those who had suffered losses. People trapped together inside the Barrier, all in the same situation.
One of them spoke.
“The sky is showing everything. What can we even do?”
Another shook his head.
“Showing something and getting people to believe it are different things. People are shaken more easily by fear than by truth.”
“What are you saying?”
“Think about it. An unknown being suddenly appears, locks the whole country inside a wall, controls everything, and decides alone who to punish. How is that different from… dictatorship?”
The room fell quiet for a moment.
“Let’s set our own sins aside for now and plant that seed in people’s minds. That this being is dangerous. It strikes us today, but tomorrow it may strike you. Fear travels faster than truth.”
Someone laughed softly.
“Dictator… Not a bad frame.”
Seo Hajin did not know. That the fight she had only just begun would not be limited to the courtroom. The real battle was about who would first claim the hearts of the people. And that second front had just begun to open.