Chapter 19: Echoes Before the Storm
1068 Words
The morning felt rehearsed and wrong at the same time—like a play everyone had memorized too quickly.
Students moved in practiced lines; teachers spoke in precise, clipped tones; posters for the exhibition went up in neat grids that would have pleased Rihan. And under it all moved the rumor that wasn’t a rumor anymore: something had happened at the delivery gate, and Yoo Mirae had stopped it from being worse.
Respect followed her in odd, reluctant glances. So did suspicion.
At the logistics table behind the auditorium, Yuna slapped a stack of laminated signs down in front of her. “Directional arrows for the useless,” she said briskly. “Blue goes to vendor check-in, green to stage load, red to ‘no, seriously, don’t enter.’ Can you string these along the back hall?”
“On it,” Mirae said.
Yuna handed her a roll of tape like a baton in a relay. Her expression softened. “You slept?”
“A little.”
“That’s generous.”
Mirae smiled, thin and real. “You?”
“I don’t sleep.” Yuna waved a hand. “I blink more slowly.”
They worked in synchronized silence. The hall smelled like floor polish and paper. Footsteps came and went; somewhere far off, a piano bled scales through a practice-room door. Mirae taped blue arrows at knee height, then eye level, then one more at a corner where someone would inevitably panic and turn wrong anyway.
She noticed the small changes first. The way a group of first-years stopped whispering when she looked up. The way a teacher said, “Good initiative, Miss Yoo,” with genuine approval that made her want to laugh because it was approval for telling a van to reverse. The way the security guard at the stage entrance actually nodded at her, like she had become part of the machine.
Harim trotted up mid-morning, cheeks flushed, a lanyard of keys bouncing against his chest. “I bribed the AV club,” he announced. “We have two extra microphones that won’t cut out when you breathe.”
Yuna signed a box without looking. “Bless you and all your future endeavors.”
Harim grinned at Mirae. “I also brought this.” He held up a small plastic bag of convenience-store cream buns like a treasure. “Energy.”
“You’re going to get diabetes by seventeen,” Mirae said.
“Worth it,” he said solemnly, and handed her one. “Eat.”
She took the bun, feeling the light press of his fingers against the back of her hand—a bump of warmth that steadied her more than sugar. “Thank you.”
He leaned against the wall, watching her tape another green arrow. “You’re getting good at pointing.”
“It’s just lines and doors,” she said.
“It’s clarity,” he countered, echoing Rihan, and his eyes flickered as if he realized who he sounded like. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Mirae glanced past him toward the double doors. “Have you seen…?”
“Joonseo?” Harim supplied, reading the gap. “He’s around. Doing the thing where he’s invisible until he’s not.”
“And Taewoo?”
Harim rolled his eyes. “Circling. He thinks people forget if he moves in loops. He’ll show up when it’ll cause the most noise.”
Mirae raised a brow. “And Rihan?”
“Everywhere,” Harim said dryly. “And nowhere. He texted the council at six a.m. with action items labeled ‘urgent’ and ‘extremely urgent,’ which, in Rihan, means ‘already finished.’”
Mirae snorted. “Of course.”
Harim tilted his head, studying her. “You look… lighter.”
“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just… facing the door.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
He grinned. “Good answer.”
Yuna clapped once, jolting them back into motion. “Break’s over. Harim, go be useful with your microphones. Mirae, map me a path to the vendor check-in that even a goldfish could follow.”
“On it,” they said together.
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By noon, the auditorium wing hummed. Vendors lugged crates. Students rehearsed on stage with serious faces, making minor disasters look intentional. Rihan passed through like gravity dipped wherever he walked—exchanging fifteen-second instructions that solved half-hour problems. He didn’t linger. He didn’t need to. What he set in motion kept moving.
He paused once when he saw Mirae at the end of the back corridor, standing on a chair to tape a final arrow above a fire extinguisher.
“You chose visibility,” he said, mild approval threaded through the neutrality.
She smoothed the tape flat. “You chose everything else.”
He accepted that with a single, infuriatingly polite nod. “I’ve traced a payment,” he said, voice lower. “Kangsan’s second heir, Han Minjae. Sloppy. If I push, he’ll fold.”
“What happens if he folds?” she asked.
“He bows. The headmaster thanks him for his honesty. The foundation gets an unofficial warning.” Rihan’s mouth tilted by a degree. “The machine looks like it functions.”
“And me?” Mirae asked.
“You look like someone not worth targeting,” he said. “Which is an improvement.”
It was brutal and true. She swallowed it.
“I want to be there when you confront him,” she said.
Rihan’s brows lifted a fraction. “No.”
“Then I want to confirm the handwriting,” she pressed, pulse quickening. “It’s on the roster. I saw the note. If it’s his, I’ll know it when I see him write.”
“Handwriting analysis by hoodie,” Rihan murmured, almost amused. “You don’t need to—”
“I do,” she said, strength in the say of it this time.
A long beat. He weighed risk like a jeweler with a loupe. “You’ll stay in the hall,” he conceded, finally. “You don’t speak. If he sees you, he’ll change the story.”
“I won’t be seen.”
“Then learn from me,” he said. “And be a shadow.”
He walked away before she could tell him that being a shadow was the part she had always known how to do.
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- Writer
