Chapter 7: Red Bloom
881 Words
She avoided him for two days.
Min-woo didn’t press. Not directly. He was too clever for that. But the space between them had changed.
He no longer called her to his study. No side remarks at dinner. But every time she passed him in the hall, he paused too long. Every glance lingered one second too deep. He watched her like a knife on a table—harmless until touched.
Yena could feel the echo of his fingers on her jaw. The weight of his eyes on her lips.
She hated how she kept thinking about it.
This body is not mine.
This desire is not real.
This is survival noise. Hormonal static.
She repeated those truths like a mantra.
It didn’t help.
---
On the third day, the sky changed.
It began with the stillness.
Not the peace of a lazy Sunday or a late evening breeze. This was wrong stillness. No birds. No wind. No hum of traffic from the city edge. Just weight—heavy and patient.
Yena stood on the western balcony with a cup of tea she hadn’t sipped, staring at the clouds above the mountains. They were thick. Unmoving. Tinted faintly… pink?
No.
Red.
Ha-eun joined her a moment later, tying her hair back in a careless ponytail.
“Why does the sky look like that?” she asked, peering up. “It’s like the clouds are… bruised.”
Yena said nothing.
Ha-eun sipped her coffee. “You’ve been weird lately.”
Yena glanced at her. “Have I?”
“You’re always quiet, but now you’re stormy quiet. Like you’re thinking too hard. Or trying not to think.”
Yena looked back at the sky. “I don’t like feeling watched.”
“That’s funny. Min-woo-oppa says the same thing about you.”
Yena’s spine stiffened.
Ha-eun gave a sly smile. “He’s been acting weird too. Not yelling at the staff. Not threatening lawyers. Just walking around like he’s haunted.”
Yena turned to go.
“Where are you going?” Ha-eun asked.
“To see what the government’s lying about today.”
---
The footage wasn’t supposed to leak.
But it had.
On an obscure streaming site buried under layers of encryption, someone had uploaded a two-minute clip titled RED_BLOOM_GGP-4.
Yena found it within seconds of its posting. Not because she was lucky—because she remembered the name. GGP-4. The fourth outbreak zone.
The screen opened with a hallway in a rural Gyeonggi Province hospital. Lights flickered. Red alarms bathed everything in emergency hue. Bodies lay on the floor—some twitching, some eerily still.
The audio was garbled, but screaming cut through.
The camera tilted as if dropped. Just before the video cut to static, something moved in the background.
Long limbs. Crawling. Too fast for the angle.
Then—nothing.
Yena didn’t breathe for several seconds.
It wasn’t the image that terrified her.
It was the timing.
This outbreak had come too early.
We’re ahead of schedule.
That meant the first wave had already begun.
---
Dinner was suffocating.
Ha-eun picked at her rice, scrolling articles with a frown. Yena said nothing, eyes on her plate. The staff tiptoed like mice sensing a fire.
Min-woo arrived late.
He looked calm. Too calm.
He sat, removed his watch, and poured himself a glass of wine.
Then: “You saw the footage?”
Yena didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“Initial reports say it was a gas leak.”
Yena cut her meat with surgical precision. “That’s a lie.”
“I know.”
Silence.
Then Min-woo leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“You know what it is, don’t you?”
Yena didn’t answer.
He stared at her, dark eyes narrowed.
“You’ve been preparing. Not just physically. You’ve been mapping locations. Tracking data. Your pattern of behavior is calculated.”
She finally met his gaze.
“You’re not surprised,” he said.
“No.”
He set his wine down.
“I want the truth.”
“I’ve told you all I can.”
“You haven’t told me anything.”
Their voices didn’t rise, but the words cracked through the room like slow-breaking glass.
Ha-eun looked between them. “What’s happening?”
Min-woo didn’t look at her.
“I don’t know,” he said. “And that’s what scares me.”
Yena stood.
“Excuse me.”
“Sit down,” Min-woo said softly.
She stopped.
“I’m not your enemy, Seo-jun. But if you keep acting like a stranger, I’ll treat you like one.”
Yena’s hands curled into fists.
“I’m not the one who changed first.”
Then she walked out, the weight of her own heartbeat deafening.
---
She didn’t go to her room.
She climbed to the roof again. The only place that still felt real.
The air was thick. The sky above pulsed faintly red.
A flicker of light split the atmosphere—not lightning. Something silent, long, tendrilled.
Like a flower blooming in the dark.
Yena pressed her palm against the stone railing.
It’s started.
The thought came not with fear—but certainty.
There would be no clean warning. No official broadcast. No hero’s call.
Only what came next.
And this time, she would not die quietly.
---
- Writer
