The Great Barrier
"You all remembered your swimsuits, right?"
"Yes!!!"
I had spent the whole day praying the lesson would simply never come, but time kept moving no matter how badly I wanted to beat it to death. In the end, the hour for swimming class arrived anyway.
"Wooo!"
The kids whooped, swimsuits clutched in their fists. Surely they wouldn't commit the disaster of making an entire third-grade class change clothes in the same room...? Fortunately, I was right. The moment a few boys started to peel their shirts off, the teacher threw up a hand and stopped them cold.
"Siwoo! Minho! You change in the locker room!"
"Okaaay..."
The boys had no shame at all; they were already halfway out of their clothes. Under the teacher's watch I headed for the pool. Starlight Elementary was far larger than most schools, and sure enough it had a pool of its own. I scanned the water through the glass. This was no slapdash tank thrown together as an afterthought.
"All right, boys this way. Girls, you head over there and get changed."
The teacher kindly pointed out the locker rooms. I had every intention of changing in a nearby bathroom instead. No matter how I turned it over, stripping down alongside elementary-school girls was a crime. That plan died the moment my footsteps gave me away. My hair was simply too conspicuous. I was the only person in the school with green hair; everyone else was black-haired through and through.
"Hana, where do you think you're going?"
"Urk..."
I couldn't come up with a decent answer. If I said I was off to the bathroom to change, she would look at me like I'd lost my mind. From a teacher's point of view, none of it made sense. Why on earth would anyone abandon a wide, comfortable locker room for a cramped, smelly bathroom? Asked outright, I had nothing to say.
"Come on now, Hana. No mischief. Into the locker room we go."
"Waaah!"
She caught me and marched me in. There was no overpowering a teacher's grip. Once I was through the door, Jiyu and Yumi lit up at the sight of me.
"Hana, where have you been?"
"Right? You've been gone forever!"
"Eh...?"
My little protest out in the hall had not been wasted. Everyone else had changed into their swimsuits ages ago, which meant I would not have to see a single naked child. Only then did I let out a sigh of relief and reach for my own suit. Jiyu and Yumi, however, were staring straight at me.
"You two...?"
With both of them watching, I couldn't change. They looked at me with perfect, innocent cheer.
"Hana, hurry up and put your swimsuit on! We want to get in the water!"
"Ngh..."
Scarlet to the ears, I had no choice but to change in front of them. If it was going to end like this, I should have just walked in early and gotten it over with. An adult terrified of children's eyes... it didn't even make sense.
Through the racket of children, Jiyu, Yumi, and Hana appeared, and in that instant every boy's gaze in the class snapped to them. Jiyu and Yumi were striking in their own right, but the idol of Class 3-1 at Starlight Elementary was Hana.
Any ordinary boy would have fallen for her on sight. She had a look that was unmistakably Korean and yet faintly, exotically mixed, with clean-cut features and enormous eyes — a face that could have carried a career in entertainment without any trouble at all. More than a few boys had already confessed to her and been turned down flat.
And it wasn't only her looks. Her mind was just as exceptional. Among the third graders she ranked first in the entire school. People liked to say that beauty alone was enough for a woman to pass the three great exams; add a brain like hers on top of that, and the result was past imagining.
In ordinary clothes the effect was easy to miss, but a swimsuit made her looks stand out all the more. The swim cap, too, made her seem fresh and unlike the Hana they saw in class. The boys murmured among themselves and cleared a path as she went by.
Boys from other classes even drifted over for a look. Being children, their attempts to approach her were hopelessly clumsy. From Hana's side of it, a pack of little squirts was staring at her and confessing their feelings. Romance never entered the picture. It was more like watching her nephews, and they were cute.
"You can't even call this gleaning anymore, can you?"
Kim Minsu said it while looking at the thief he had caught. This was no harmless snatch of produce from the edge of a field. It was theft, and a particularly vicious kind. He had already checked every day laborer in the hall. Fortunately, no one else had been in on it with this man.
"We've always had people stealing, Mr. Kim."
The employee in charge of security said it plainly. Starlight Food was no fool, and the logistics center had a security system in place, including screening stations meant to catch anyone trying to walk out with goods hidden on their body. A single Tangle was worth far too much to leave unguarded.
Even so, people kept trying to steal them. They could round the thieves up and hand every last one to the police, but the fact that it kept happening was a bad sign.
"Turn this one over to the police. We've got the whole thing on camera, and we've secured the physical evidence. He isn't slipping out of this."
Kim Minsu handed over the thief, who had not stopped apologizing for a second. Stealing one piece was one thing. A thief brazen enough to take so much that it showed deserved no forgiveness. Everything connected to the theft was reported up the chain. For Starlight Food, it was a serious matter.
"Hmm..."
Kim Sehee read through the problems submitted by the department that managed Tangle at Starlight Food, and her brow could only tighten. Part-timers who came to pick the fruit were stealing it, and the larger problem was that Tangle was simply too easy to steal compared with the other crops Starlight Food grew.
At present the company handled five plants: cherry tomatoes, rice, grapes, Tangle, and coffee. Set Tangle aside, and the rest were poor targets for theft.
For the price, they took up too much space. Unlike Tangle, walking off with a single piece did not put several million won in your pocket. Steal as much as you dared and you might clear twenty or thirty thousand won, and anything beyond that was bulky enough to notice. Tangle was different. One fruit was worth at least five million won, and it was small enough that taking it barely raised a problem.
The day laborers, at least, had to pass through security checkpoints like travelers at an airport, so anyone hiding fruit on their body on the way out could be caught. Stopping people who came in from outside was another matter. Watching every acre of a twenty-kilometer radius laid out in concentric rings was more than the company could manage.
There were cases that looked uncomfortably like old-fashioned gleaning: outsiders slipping onto the farm and simply walking away with Tangle. Short of hiring several million guards, there was no catching every thief across farmland that vast. Kim Sehee had a decision to make. Leave the thieves to it, or catch them by whatever means it took.
However much it cost, she chose the latter.
"No matter what it costs, we put a barrier around it."
Like the plants of the great conglomerates, she decided to raise a massive wall around the outside of the farm. Hardly anyone lived in the area, and every bit of the land belonged to Starlight Food, so there was no real obstacle. Major factories sometimes walled off an entire complex to keep outsiders from walking in. Starlight Food resolved to do the same with the region where Tangle was handled.
Ringing a territory that enormous would take a long time, but it was still better than letting people keep walking off with the fruit. Dozens of gleaning incidents were already happening in a single day, and once the ones they failed to catch were counted in, the losses ran to hundreds of millions of won a day.
Even threatening to call the police could not curb the greed of people who stood to make a fortune selling Tangle. Asking the police for help was difficult in its own right, since the land was private property. Starlight Food would have to stop the theft itself.
The one small mercy was that they only had to worry about Tangle. The other farms might be picked over, but the losses there were nowhere near as severe. Even so, the gleaners on those farms would have to be caught as well. All of it was Starlight Food property, and no one was going to walk away with it for free.
"Haa..."
Faced with people's greed, Kim Sehee could only sigh. She wanted to see Hana.