The Thief
"You need a swimsuit?"
"Yeah... we're having swim practice in the school pool tomorrow."
I had no choice but to tell Maru. Schools with their own pools were hardly common, but if it was Starlight Elementary, it was more than possible. The backing behind the place was absurdly solid — Korea's number-one company, a foundation with the kind of wealth that could throw up a school pool without so much as a wince.
"Didn't we buy a swimsuit last time?"
Bora was the one who said it. We had, in fact — a swimsuit we'd gone out and bought together.
"Yes. We still have the one from last time. Shall I bring it, sunbae?"
Maru started rummaging through the closet, and Bora, watching her, dug through it right alongside her. It wasn't long before a swimsuit turned up, one of the ones they'd bought for the trip to the beach. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had been so certain I would never again have to wear a little kid's swimsuit, and yet the ordeal had come for me far too quickly.
"This one's pretty! There's no rule about swimsuits anyway, right?"
"Can't I just... just swim with my clothes on?"
I offered a fallback. Bora let it slide right past her, holding the swimsuit up against my body as she spoke — checking the size, most likely. A bit of time had passed since they'd bought it.
"Feels like Hana's grown a little. Doesn't the swimsuit look small?"
"Really?"
Maru, beside her, fetched another swimsuit and started holding it up to me as well. I was still only a third grader, so growing was normal. Growing so much that I couldn't even get into a swimsuit, though, would be a serious problem in its own right.
"I can't really tell just by holding it up... Want to try it on, Hana?"
"Ah..."
"Come on, let's get it on~"
Bora started taking my clothes off. Only Bora, Haru, and Maru were in the room, so there was nothing to be embarrassed about — and still I squirmed frantically out of the hands trying to undress me. There was no escaping Bora.
"Waaah!"
Caught, I was changed into the swimsuit before I could stop it. Bora looked me over in it, smiled with deep satisfaction, and spoke.
"Must have been my imagination! Doesn't look like Hana's grown at all."
"It really doesn't."
I put on the swimsuit Maru handed me, too. Unfortunately, my body hadn't grown in all that time. A nervous thought flickered through me. Am I going to live my whole life as a four-foot-five halfling? Girls shot up when they were little, and once they got into middle school their height and their bodies stopped growing, didn't they?
Boys were different. People said boys kept growing until they graduated high school, but most girls stopped once they finished middle school. Now and then someone kept growing, but that was a slim chance. I looked at myself in the mirror. I had to admit the swimsuit suited me very well.
The girl in the mirror was exactly what a child of that age was supposed to look like.
"It looks perfect on you!"
For a good while I was trapped in Bora and Maru's hands, forced into a swimsuit fashion show. If it was going to be like this, I should have kept my mouth shut and just grabbed a swimsuit on my way out. If it didn't fit, I might have gotten away with not swimming at all.
"Want me to give you a ride, Hana?"
"No! I want to walk today!"
"All right..."
I left the building. Back at the old one, walking all the way to elementary school would have been nonsense, but now it made sense. Starlight Elementary stood only a short walk away, and I set off for school with a bright grin.
Of course, Maru had always been the one behind the wheel, so I'd never been the one getting tired. My entire job had been sitting in the passenger seat, watching the scenery and wondering when we would reach Starlight Elementary. Not anymore. Close as it was, walking was plenty. If I was running late, or simply didn't feel like walking, I could always take the car — though I doubted that would happen very often.
With the swimsuit packed in my bag, I headed slowly toward school. Which raised a question: where was I supposed to change? Did the school even have a locker room...? And I couldn't begin to guess whether I was allowed to go into one. Under any other circumstances, if someone had marched me straight to a police station I wouldn't have had a word in my defense. Right now, though, I was in a child's body.
Kim Minsu, a new employee at Starlight Foods, had been with the company for three months.
Everyone said the big corporations paid well, but they ground you down just as hard in return. Minsu had gone in braced for exactly that, and it hadn't been nearly as brutal as he'd feared. His seniors were all kind, and the work was simple and easy. He was only there to assist with the farming, so there was nothing hard about it to begin with.
He wasn't particularly anxious about the future every office worker dreaded, either. People said you got cut before you turned fifty, but Starlight Foods was different. They were still hiring even now, and there was far more work than there were hands to do it.
The plants Starlight Foods produced were wildly popular — so popular they sold out no matter how many they grew. It didn't look as if the company would collapse before Minsu turned sixty. A person could live without oil, and live without electricity. Food was different. The moment it disappeared, humanity was finished.
A world without food did not exist. Starlight Foods' goal was to become Korea's Cargill, the largest agricultural company in the world. It hadn't originally been an agribusiness at all, but the plants discovered recently had turned it into one.
"Hmm..."
Minsu's entire department had been transferred. He'd been moved to the unit that managed Tangle. Starlight Foods' plants were unusual. An ordinary plant spent a year preparing to fruit and then bore fruit only once; that was how it was supposed to work. These were different. They fruited once every two weeks, and the growth rate was staggering.
Temperature and climate didn't matter, either. So long as a storm wasn't blowing, the fruit set steadily. Perhaps that was why Starlight Foods' plants could boast explosive yields even on a narrow plot of farmland.
Today was the day the Tangle fruited. With the ease of habit, Minsu began overseeing the day laborers who had come to pick it. The plants were built so that farm machinery couldn't harvest them; every single one needed a human hand. That was why Starlight Foods hired so many people.
"All right — I'll go over today's precautions!"
Minsu addressed the day laborers gathered in the space laid out like an auditorium, covering what to watch for over the course of the day and the other miscellaneous notes. Picking every fruit in a single day was impossible, so the harvest usually ran across two or three.
Once he had passed the instructions along with the practiced ease of someone who had done it many times, Minsu moved on to other work. There was plenty to do today besides this. Tangle was selling extremely well in the United States, which was a good thing, if anything. He doubted Korea had ever produced a plant that sold this much abroad rather than at home.
Quitting time came. Work at Starlight Foods started at nine and ended at six, which was only natural. Most of it was farm work, and once the sun went down, it couldn't continue. There were streetlights, but they didn't reach every corner.
Someone might miss their footing while picking fruit and end up hurt, so the main work finished at five. The remaining hour was for wrapping up. After a day of hustling around, Minsu returned to the auditorium to settle accounts with the day laborers.
Starlight Foods paid the day's wage on the spot, by bank transfer or in cash — though most people took the transfer.
That was when something snagged Minsu's eye. A day laborer leaving after collecting his pay looked suspicious. His walk was awkward, and more than anything, his pocket bulged. It was the sort of bulge you would miss if you weren't looking closely.
"Excuse me! Sir!"
Minsu hurried after him. The moment the man heard himself being called, he bolted, looking for all the world like someone who knew exactly what would happen if he was caught.
"Stop that man!"
Fortunately, Starlight Foods hired an almost excessive number of security guards, and they caught the suspicious man as he fled. When a person was announcing catch me with his entire body, it would have been stranger not to grab him.
And so Tangle came tumbling out of the caught man's pocket. A single Tangle yielded five hundred to a thousand fruits, which in cash ran anywhere from five million to ten million won — and several of them had been stuffed in his pockets.