The Arrest
Only after free swim ended did I get my freedom back. The punishment—standing with my hands in the air—had lasted all of ten minutes, of course.
The teacher gave me a stern lecture about never going anywhere like that again, and all I could do was nod. Just as Teacher Kim Yeonwoo had said, I'd acted without thinking and nearly drowned. The fault was mine, and it was a big one.
"Hana, why'd the teacher scold you?"
"She caused trouble, obviously! Hana's a little rascal."
Jiyu drove a very sharp awl straight through my heart. Her assault of cold, hard facts left me gloomy, and maybe she caught the look on my face, because she held off on a second strike.
Grrrgle—
"I'm hungry..."
Getting gloomy had made me hungry. Fair enough—I'd swum that hard, so there was no way my stomach would stay quiet. Lunch was almost here, too. Hearing me, Jiyu and Yumi rushed to answer.
"Let's go eat, Hana!"
"Yeah! When you feel like this, food fixes everything!"
I nodded. Delicious food really was the perfect cure for stress, and a smile came back to my face.
"Let's go, Jiyu! Yumi!"
At the sight of me, the two of them locked eyes and nodded at each other. They did that from time to time, and I could never figure out why. They'd been close since kindergarten—maybe a single look was enough for them to understand each other.
I left them to it and ran for the cafeteria. I'd come to school to eat something good. Studying, or any of the other exercise, was all the same no matter how hard I worked at it. I'd done those things until I was sick of them; they couldn't stir my brain. Food was different. Delicious food hit my brain hard.
"Eh..."
All I could do was stare blankly down at my tray. Our school lunches had never been anything special, but they hadn't been bad, either. One look at this tray, and I couldn't say that anymore.
One fried fish, dried stiff and twisted out of shape. A stir-fry of vegetables I couldn't even identify. And last of all, kimchi crushed flat. This wasn't reality. The soup was even worse—poop soup. It was supposed to be soybean-paste soup, except there wasn't a single solid floating in it.
No matter how you looked at it, there ought to be at least one meat dish. Jiyu and Yumi seemed to feel the same; neither of their faces was happy. No—not a single student in the whole cafeteria looked happy. I set my tray down on the table.
"This isn't right, you guys."
Even from a perfectly rational point of view, the food on that tray simply did not make sense.
"Yeah... it's been getting worse since last week, and today it hit rock bottom."
Jiyu said it while tormenting the blameless fish with her chopsticks. Yumi, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing, spoke up in an angry voice.
"This is not okay! I don't care if the lunch is free!"
In the end we walked out without finishing. We couldn't have finished it to begin with. Why the food had suddenly fallen off a cliff, I had no idea. Maybe the adults were dealing with something of their own.
The snack shop was the only answer. We left the cafeteria, stepped inside, and found the place packed wall to wall with kids. It felt like walking into a stadium. We fought through the crowd and barely managed to buy one small piece of bread. Everything else worth eating was already sold out.
"Hnnn... if the food tastes bad, life's not even worth living."
"Tell me about it."
Jiyu and Yumi were lamenting right along with me. I decided I had to say something about today. This was an elementary school with the Starlight name on it. If I told Chairman Sehee—blood of the Starlight line—surely something would come of it.
These days I could see the Chairman every day just by crossing over to the other building. All I had to do was ride the elevator and press the button for her floor. Before I went into the office, the employee at the desk greeted me. There was a separate desk stationed right outside the chairman's office, with someone sitting there to manage who came and went. So this was what a major corporation looked like.
The employee looked at me.
"Hana, you're here? The Chairman's out right now... She had something to take care of and stepped away. Come back in thirty minutes and she should be in."
"Really? Then I'll wait inside her office."
And I walked straight in.
Kim Sehee and a few dozen of her security personnel caught Kim Chunbae—the one who'd been raiding the fields—and his whole village crew in a single sweep. For old people, running from young, healthy bodyguards was impossible.
"We've secured all of them, Chairman. The evidence is airtight. They won't have a single thread to pull."
"Well done. Hand them over to the police."
Perhaps because they'd been thieving, the villagers couldn't move a muscle. The elderly among them were cowed by the sheer presence of the muscular, solidly built guards and couldn't get a word out. Resistance would have been useless anyway. In body and in years alike, the villagers were the ones outmatched.
The moment Kim Sehee called the police, they came hurrying. Starlight Food had already laid the groundwork, so the officers arrived with a fair sense of how things stood. When they checked the baskets the thieves had brought to haul the Tangle home, they were left speechless. Then one of Kim Sehee's employees showed them the CCTV recorded up to that point.
"This is vicious. There's no way to call this mere pilfering. How much damage are we looking at?"
The officers knew the power standing behind Kim Sehee, and their tone was respectful for it. Toward people with no power they were bold and shameless, but toward someone like her—someone with a conglomerate at her back—courtesy was simply the rule.
Her secretary, standing at her side, answered.
"An exact figure would be difficult, but the losses clear a hundred million won. Dig through Village Chief Kim Chunbae's accounts and the details ought to turn up, don't you think? They've been raiding for over a month, so the money will have piled up in there. And please don't forget to investigate the shops that took this Tangle off their hands."
"Ah... understood."
For trespassing on private land, the villagers were arrested on the spot as criminals caught in the act. The evidence was more than sufficient, and they'd been discovered in the middle of unlawful entry, so there was nothing much they could say.
"Aigoo...! Miss!"
"They're the ones who barged into our village! Why are you only taking us?!"
"Miss, we really did wrong. Let us off just this once! We'll never so much as show our faces at the Tangle farm again!"
The villagers wailed as the police hauled them away. Kim Sehee, however, did not feel the slightest pity. They hadn't stolen once and stopped. To keep at it, steadily, was enough to mark them as rotten.
If anything, she found it a shame.
"Unlawful entry onto private property, theft of crops, and acting as a group... pile it all together, and the sentence still won't amount to much."
Only the ringleader, Kim Chunbae, would actually serve time. Suspended sentences for the rest were a foregone conclusion, since it was obvious the village chief alone had quietly pocketed the money. Their advanced age had to be weighed as well. Korean law did tend to go a little easy on the elderly.
Kim Sehee said it while looking over the little settlement of some thirty people. Every resident had been hauled off, and the place was already a ghost town. A village sitting that close to the Tangle farm had never sat well with her. Using the theft as a pretext to wipe the village itself away didn't strike her as a bad idea at all.
Offer to settle the case on the condition that they move somewhere else, and they would take it.
"Shall we?"
"Yes. Please see to it, Secretary."
The people who had been living perfectly well were about to be driven clean out of the area. It was their own doing. Live close to the Tangle farm and commit no crime, and they could have gone on just fine—but that wasn't what they had chosen. They had made the worst choice available, and now they were simply meeting the consequences in the flesh.
And with that, the theft at the Tangle farm was finished, handed over to the police.
One case resolved, Kim Sehee returned to the building. Tramping around the farm all day had left her tired. The work only kept multiplying; at this rate, she felt she would have to split into two of herself before she could keep up with it. How far the farms spread depended on Hana—but Hana still had plenty of teeth left to lose.
She rode the elevator to the floor of her office and read the look her secretary sent her. Hana was inside. Kim Sehee cleared her throat and stepped into the chairman's office.