Chương 17: The Rohonc Copy

"This area is off limits." One of the guards said it. Kichan tried to hide the wake-up rod behind his back, then gave up because it was too long.

"I know. That's why I came in." The guard's expression hardened. Kichan sighed.

"So please move while I'm still asking nicely."

"Get down on the floor."

"Oh. I guess I understand that one in English too." The stun gun came first. Kichan shifted half a step to the side. The movement wasn't so much fast as it was a matter of already knowing where the other man would come from. The angle of the wrist, the direction of the elbow, the weight loaded into the ankle reached his fingertips before his eyes could catch it. The wake-up rod snapped upward from below in one short motion. Thwack. The stun gun fell from the guard's hand. The second guard swung a baton.

Kichan blocked it with the wake-up rod. The sound of metal striking metal rolled low through the basement. The other man's baton bent. Kichan's wake-up rod did not change at all.

"Oh." Kichan said it before he could stop himself.

"This thing's good." He had no idea whether the guard heard him. A moment later, the man was down on one knee with one hand on the floor. Kichan did not want to kill anyone. He did not want to break bones either. So he struck just off the joints and chose places where the muscles would loosen for a moment. The people he hit were in pain, and they would have trouble getting up, but they would not be permanently ruined. That was the line Kichan had set for himself, and it was the line his father had talked about too.

Keeping that line was much harder than he had expected. If he hit hard, it ended quickly. If he broke something, he could pass through faster. Instead, he had to hit weakly and leave things unbroken. Kichan caught his breath and dragged the two fallen guards toward the wall.

"I'm sorry." He said it again, quietly.

"But honestly, thanks for not carrying guns." The inner safe was smaller than he had expected. It had a thick door. It looked like an old lock from the outside, but an electronic lock had been mixed into it on the inside. Old on the surface, modern inside. It resembled the entire building. Kichan placed his fingertips against the door. The feel of metal came through. At that moment, the back of his throat went numb. Rohonc. The name pressed against his head first.

Kichan stood in front of the safe for a long time without moving. Beyond a single door, there was paper. He had never seen it with his eyes, but he felt as if he could vaguely tell how the bundle inside was arranged. Too little to call a book, too old to call loose pages. Every piece of metal he had handled until now had been an object. A rusted iron bar. A pot. A door handle. A camera bracket. Those things knew very well what they were.

They endured solidly, wore down after long use, or bent when force was placed on them. But the paper inside the safe was different. It was paper, yet it held on like metal. It was ink, yet it had sunk down like mineral. Kichan held his breath and felt his way through the safe's lock. At first, the electronic lock shoved him away roughly. No code, no card, no authority. That cold refusal came back through his fingertips. But there was metal inside it in the end.

Tiny springs, contact points, thin paths where current moved. Kichan shifted those paths slightly aside without breaking them. Clack. The safe door opened. Inside was a transparent storage case, and inside that lay a thin bundle of copied pages. The paper had yellowed, but the lines along the edges were strangely firm. It did not look like writing someone had made long ago. It looked like the shadow of metal that had been enduring since long ago. Kichan could feel that it was dangerous without opening the case.

Still, he needed it. When he carefully opened the case, the moisture-controlled air escaped in a tiny breath. He reached toward the cold air, then stopped. Stolen novel; please report. Very carefully, he pressed the edge of the copy with the tip of one finger. In that instant, every sound in the basement vanished. The vibration of the machines, the dripping water, even the footsteps faintly audible in the distance were cut off. In their place, an ancient pressure pushed in.

The time it took for stone to cool underground. The time it took for minerals, pressed from different directions, to become a single crystal. The difference between metal ruined by impurities and metal that took those impurities in and became harder. Kichan clenched his teeth. The wake-up rod rang quietly in his hand. Until a moment ago, it had only been a heavy iron bar that happened to fit well. Now it was different.

The density inside it, the rounded-off end, the minute grooves adjusted to his grip came through more clearly. It was nowhere near complete. He had only copied the first sentence.

"Ah." He spoke low.

"This is kind of..." Good. Because he hated admitting that, Kichan immediately scowled. He could avoid things that were frightening and unpleasant. But things that felt good kept pulling at his hands. The sensation of plants coming back to life had been like that, and so had the feeling of metal fitting into place in his palm. This copy went deeper than either. Somewhere inside Kichan, something said it wanted to read more. He forced his hand away. The fourth branch at his fingertips had grown clearer.

Between the line that curved like a root and the line that ran straight like metal, a small branch had formed. Rather than growing, it looked as if it was holding fast. Kichan placed part of the copy into a moisture-proof pouch. Then the basement lights went out. Emergency lights came on. Under the red glow, a speaker rumbled low.

"Han Kichan." The voice coming through the speaker was Korean. It was Lee Seoyoon's voice. Kichan looked up at the ceiling.

"London has nice broadcast equipment too."

"That document is not something you can take."

"It's already in my bag." A brief silence. Lee Seoyoon said,"Then as of today, you are no longer a civilian who made a treatment drug." Kichan adjusted his grip on the wake-up rod.

"I was about to say the same thing." He started walking toward the door beside the safe.

"Then as of today, your side is a suspicious watcher. The kind that loiters in front of my house." Footsteps gathered beyond the door. Kichan sighed.

"Let's see if you can live up to your name." The wake-up rod gleamed dully under the red emergency lights. Because it was not sharp, it was somehow more frightening. When he opened the door beside the safe, the smell of hot plastic rushed out instead of the cold smell of paper. Inside the room were small server racks and encrypted storage devices. Cooling fans turned low, and blue status lights blinked at regular intervals in the dark. Kichan hated that regular blinking.

It made him think that things people had suffered through, recovered from, cried over, and felt grateful for might have been put into that cold blinking. One monitor was on. Folder names were lined up across the screen. Most of them were combinations of English and numbers that Kichan could not understand. A few, however, he could recognize. `RAONBIO` `WOUND_RECOVERY_TRIAL` `KOREA_CONTACT_CASE` Standing in front of the screen, Kichan felt a chill at the back of his neck.

Korea, Raon Bio, wound recovery trial, contact case. The wounds he had treated in the neighborhood for the price of a meal had become folder names for someone. The fact that someone had healed, the fact that an old woman had climbed the stairs, the words a child's mother had let slip at the pharmacy—all of it had become data. Kichan moved through the screen. There were photos. They were not clear. They were CCTV images, enlarged until they had blurred. In front of the pharmacy, in an alley, at a bus stop.

Some photos had Kichan's profile in them. Some photos showed the wrist of the child he had treated. One document listed an age, and another contained the phrase recovery speed. For a while, Kichan could not say anything. More than the thought that someone knew what he had done, the fact that those things could be reduced to a few words was horrifying. There was no face of the grandmother smiling as she said she could finally manage the stairs now.

There was no hand of the child's mother, bowing her head as she offered him an envelope. Recovery speed. Contact case. Unofficial observation.

"You people really do everything." His voice cracked low. At that moment, a new window opened on the screen. New York. Research material storage server. Analysis related to the Book of Soyga. Document transfer scheduled. Kichan clenched his teeth. Originally, he had meant to go home. He had planned to secure the Rohonc copy in London, confirm the name Golden Dawn, then go back home and eat the stew his mother made. Not another airport sandwich. A proper meal. But the word New York was fixed on the screen.

The connection between Raon Bio and the Golden Dawn, experiments turning treatment into money, the Book of Soyga, and the records of sick people were all caught on one screen. He took out his phone. There was a message from his mother. `If you arrived, tell me whether you ate first. ` Kichan started to type a reply, then stopped. He had arrived, but he had not eaten. He might have to go to New York. Neither of those was a proper answer. In the end, he sent this. `I will. Don't worry.

` Kichan took a few sheets of paper from the small printer beside the server. English sentences kept scrolling up on the screen, and he could not understand even half of them. Still, his fingertips knew. The data around the name Raon Bio was tied in the same direction. The name Book of Soyga was opening like the next branch. The moment he pulled out one storage device, an alarm sounded.

"Oh, come on." Several blue status lights changed to red. The footsteps above multiplied. The London Reading Society was no longer a quiet gathering. Kichan grabbed the equipment bag and ran toward the emergency exit. When he pushed the door open, the raw smell of rain came in first. Outside, rain was still falling. The alley at night was narrow, and the puddles tore the lamplight apart. Someone shouted in English behind him. Kichan could not understand the words, but he understood enough to know they meant stop.

The wake-up rod swung heavily inside the equipment bag, and his shoulder began to ache a little. That pain at least brought reality back. Kichan had no time to look at a map app and turned down alley after alley. Instead, he felt for metal with his fingertips. Drainpipes, railings, lampposts, the metal sign at the entrance to an Underground station. The metals of the city did not exactly show him the way, but they at least told him where he could run without slamming into things. Once, his foot slipped.

His body tilted over the wet stone, and the equipment bag hit the wall first. The wake-up rod inside rang dully. Kichan caught the wall with his elbow and barely regained his balance. At the mouth of the alley behind him, someone in a black coat appeared. Kichan swallowed his breath and ran again. Usually, climbing subway stairs two at a time left him gasping. Now his legs held. His heart beat fast, but his body did not collapse. After touching the Rohonc copy, something inside him had locked together more firmly.

When he reached the entrance of the Underground station, Kichan stopped halfway down the stairs. His face was reflected in the glass of an advertisement panel. Wet hair. Tired eyes. An extremely abnormal tourist clutching one bag. Kichan looked at himself for a moment and muttered,"I look great. Really." He never did eat dinner that night. It was dawn by the time he returned to the cheap lodging near the airport. The room was still narrow, and the wallpaper was still peeling.

Kichan took off his wet clothes and sat on the bed. He shoved the equipment bag under the bed, then placed part of the Rohonc copy and the storage device on the desk. Water dripped from his wet socks. The sound felt far too loud in the room. His phone rang. It was his mother. Kichan stared at the screen for a long time before answering.

"Yeah." `Did you eat? ` Kichan looked around the room. On the desk were a bottle of water and one emergency snack.

"I ate." He tore open the snack package. `Why does your voice sound like that? `"I'm tired." That was true. `Don't push yourself too hard. ` Kichan was late to answer. Don't push yourself too hard was the least fitting thing anyone could say to him right now.

"Yeah." Only after hanging up did Kichan put the snack in his mouth. He searched for a plane ticket to New York. When he saw the price, he closed his eyes.

"This is honestly too much." His finger rested above the payment button. For a long time, Kichan could not press it. Beside the screen, the call record with his mother remained. Below it, an unsent message window was still open. `It might take a few more days. ` He deleted that sentence. `Things got a little longer. I'll still keep in touch. ` Send. Then he pressed the payment button. This time too, Kichan told himself, it was so he could go home.