Chapter 15 — The Instructions for Breathing During a War
The sirens were supposed to be reassuring.
That was the stated purpose: familiarity breeds calm; drills prevent panic. A siren that people had heard often would not, in theory, turn bone to glass when it finally mattered.
The problem with theory was always reality.
At precisely ten in the morning, every device in the city shrieked.
Not politely. Not rhythmically. Not humanly.
Phones vibrated with more urgency than notifications had ever been designed for. Loudspeakers mounted on lampposts wailed without shame. Emergency text banners crawled across television screens whether shows liked it or not.
A recorded voice followed, surgically calm:
"This is a civil emergency preparedness exercise. Remain where you are. Follow instructions. Assist those near you. Do not run."
People ran anyway.
It wasn't rebellion.
It was biology.
The body experiences sound differently when it carries the promise of teeth on the other side. Hearts raced ahead of thought. Hands shook ahead of reason. Movement won arguments the brain hadn't finished making.
Kim Jae-hwan didn't run.
He watched.
He stood in the hallway of the school as the alarm drilled itself into the walls and studied how people behaved when they were instructed to behave well.
Some curled inward. Some laughed too loudly. Some filmed themselves participating diligently.
Teachers tried to channel students into orderly lines. Their voices floated upward, thin and strained, like ribbons attempting to restrain a tidal wave through decoration alone. The phrase "this is only a drill" repeated itself so often that it developed a nervous stutter.
The intercom crackled.
"All students move to assigned safe zones. This is not an evacuation. Do not use stairwells unless directed. Do not—"
The voice cut off mid-instruction, replaced by the siren again.
Unfortunate timing, or foreshadowing.
He felt it before he heard anything else.
The tilt.
The subtle rebalancing.
Like the world shifting slightly in its chair.
His hand moved to his side without conscious thought, palm finding the ache beneath bandages as though the scar were a tuning fork for wrongness. The sensation vibrated up his arm into his teeth.
Min-seok appeared at his shoulder, breathless though he had not run far.
"Is this—"
"No," Jae-hwan said. "This drill is government-made."
Min-seok swallowed. "…And the feeling?"
"Not government-made."
Students pushed past them in uneven streams toward posted signs with arrows labeled SAFE AREA C and SAFE AREA D as if typography could guarantee anything.
Yoo Ji-ah approached through the crowd.
Her face was composed.
Her eyes were not.
"They're overlapping," she said.
"Yes," he replied.
"By accident?"
"No."
The three of them stood in the river of motion, unmoving, like rocks shaping current. The world streamed around them, slightly annoyed at their refusal to be swept.
The siren changed tone.
Not louder.
Lower.
The recorded voice returned, less calm.
"This is now a live alert. This is now a live alert. Districts Three, Seven, and Twelve report unstable anomalies. Shelter in place. Repeat, shelter in—"
The intercom died again.
No one corrected it this time.
People didn't run now.
They scattered.
Orderly drills evaporated like paper in acid.
A girl cried openly.
A boy vomited into a trash can and apologized while doing it.
A teacher tried to block the stairwell and was brushed aside gently, then less gently, then not at all as pressure exceeded etiquette.
The sky outside dimmed without clouds.
Jae-hwan closed his eyes a moment.
He mapped the school by memory.
Not walls.
Not rooms.
Paths.
He opened them again and raised his voice just enough to cut cleanly through panic's white noise.
"Second-floor west wing," he said. "Empty classrooms. Windows. Two stairwells. Less crush risk."
People turned without knowing why.
Obedience borrowed his confidence.
He didn't lead them.
He pivoted the flow.
It was enough.
He walked the opposite direction.
Ji-ah fell into step without question.
Min-seok hesitated half a heartbeat longer, then swore under his breath and followed, as if annoyed by his own loyalty.
They reached a stairwell door already trembling from the force of bodies on the other side. He opened it a fraction. Sound roared through the crack—panic echoing down concrete chutes like weather in a canyon.
They didn't take it.
They took the service stairs.
Narrow, poorly lit, labeled STAFF ONLY in letters that assumed literacy could influence urgency. The air smelled like dust and old paint, and the bulb overhead buzzed in an accusatory tone as they passed beneath it.
The rooftop door was locked.
Of course it was.
He knocked once with his knuckle.
It opened.
The janitor stood there — thin, older, expression resigned and unsurprised, as if he had expected apocalypse to inconvenience exactly this part of his day.
"Don't stay long," the janitor said simply.
"We won't," Jae-hwan replied.
They stepped onto the roof.
The city presented itself like an open wound.
Not visually — yet — but in posture. Buildings leaned inward. Roads narrowed under invisible pressure. The horizon seemed closer, like a jaw closing.
Three places glowed wrong.
Not visible light.
Conviction.
District Three. District Seven. District Twelve.
He didn't need maps.
He had ache.
Micro-Gates pulsed and failed and reappeared in those zones, like a heart learning arrhythmia. Above District Seven, the sky folded briefly and smoothed out again as if embarrassed to have slipped.
"You see it too," Ji-ah whispered.
"Yes," he said.
"What are they doing?" Min-seok asked.
He didn't answer for several seconds.
Then:
"Looking for something."
He tasted the thought as he spoke it, assessing accuracy.
No.
Not something.
Someone.
The listener pressed nearer, pleased that he had tracked the logic.
He set his jaw.
"Ji-ah," he said quietly. "Count how many seconds between pulses in District Seven."
She closed her eyes.
Her lips moved soundlessly.
"Eight… twelve… fourteen… eight again… eleven…"
"Random," Min-seok said.
"No," Jae-hwan corrected. "Testing thresholds."
The rooftop door banged open again.
A teacher stumbled out, gasping, then froze when he saw them.
"What are you— Get inside! It's not safe out here!"
"No," Jae-hwan said.
The teacher opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, staring at their faces.
Not confidence.
Certainty.
He backed away, half-grateful, half-terrified, and retreated as if from a cliff edge.
Wind tumbled across the roof, hot and dry though clouds were forming from nowhere—shallow, unfinished clouds like thoughts that hadn't committed to existing yet.
He looked again at District Twelve.
The air blurred.
A line formed where no line should exist.
"Gate," Ji-ah breathed.
"Not yet," he said. "But yes."
The sirens below them became background texture.
The world narrowed to that line.
It split.
It widened.
It hesitated halfway open like an eye considering whether to wake.
He moved.
Not toward it—too far, too many streets between rooftop and forming tear. He moved inward, into the portion of his mind he didn't like acknowledging existed in daylight.
The scar in his palm burned cold.
The city fell away.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
He stood again in the long not-hallway, mirrors that weren't mirrors reflecting him across variations that might have been real if he had made slightly different decisions, breathed slightly different air, trusted slightly different people.
The listener waited.
Closer than last time.
No pretense now.
A silhouette inside darkness that had nothing to do with shadow. Not shape.
Attention.
He didn't bow.
He didn't run.
He spoke in the same tone he used with school administrators and monsters and his reflection.
Stop.
It did not stop.
The Gate above District Twelve dilated another inch.
He pushed harder — not with muscle or willpower, but with the strange leverage he had discovered inside pain and repetition. He found the seam not in the sky, but in the idea of permitted passage.
Not here, he said.
The listener responded for the first time.
Not with words.
With curiosity.
The Gate shivered.
It did not close.
But it didn't fully open either.
Held.
Balanced between potential and act like a sentence waiting for a verb.
He felt his own strength drain like liquid through a cracked bowl. His knees softened. The rooftop tilted. Hands caught his shoulders—Ji-ah on one side, Min-seok on the other, anchoring him without understanding how or why.
He exhaled slowly.
"Okay," he whispered through clenched teeth. "Okay. That's enough."
He withdrew.
The hallway dissolved.
Sky returned.
The half-born Gate sealed with a whisper, like water erasing footprints at the edge of an ocean.
Silence followed, heavy and watchful.
The sirens continued as if offended by irrelevance.
He sagged against Ji-ah for one unapologetic moment, then straightened.
"You did something," Min-seok said hoarsely.
"Yes."
"What?"
"Negotiated," he said.
"With what?" Min-seok demanded.
He didn't answer.
He didn't have a name he was willing to gift it.
They went back down before teachers decided to be brave again and search the rooftop. The drills had devolved entirely by then. Groups huddled in classrooms. Students cried into sleeves. Someone prayed quietly in the stairwell, words falling in pieces like loose change.
The alert downgraded an hour later.
Phones dinged apologetically.
"All clear."
No one believed it.
People didn't relax so much as stall, muscles unsure what posture to adopt in a world clearly uninterested in cooperating with schedules.
Classes were cancelled for the day.
They did not go home.
They met in the abandoned library basement instead, the one no one visited because the air tasted of dust and century-old paper. Lights flickered here out of obligation rather than utility.
A dozen of their core group arrived without needing to be summoned.
They had learned the weather.
Silence settled on them like shared weight before anyone spoke.
"So it wasn't just the drill," a girl said.
"No," Jae-hwan answered simply.
He didn't stand at the front.
He didn't climb onto anything.
He sat with them.
That was important.
"Three locations," Ji-ah said. "Seven tried. Twelve tried. Three tested failure conditions."
"That's what it felt like," he agreed.
A boy raised his hand reflexively like this were still school.
"Are they… learning?"
"No," Jae-hwan said. "They already knew. We're learning to notice them thinking."
That landed like a stone in a quiet pond.
Min-seok ran both hands through his hair until it stood up at angles.
"Okay. Hypothetically… if they want a specific place… or a specific person…"
"They will keep pressing until they succeed," Ji-ah finished calmly.
Students shifted, the air moving with their unease.
"Then we move first," one of the older girls said, voice trembling but not breaking. "We don't just wait for sirens. We figure out where they'll be. We map it. We tell people. Right?"
He watched her.
Fire behind fear.
Dangerous combination.
Useful.
"Yes," he said.
The word surprised even him a little.
He had crossed a line somewhere between rooftop and basement and had not marked where his foot hit down on the other side.
They leaned closer instinctively.
He spread out rough maps.
He explained calmly, clinically:
• how power grid fluctuations predicted reality stress
• how animals behaved near weak points
• how electrical hum changed in bad alleys
• how streets "felt" wrong before they became wrong
He did not give them mystical nonsense.
He handed them pattern recognition and responsibility like paired knives.
"We won't outrun this," he said. "We can only get ahead of it by a few minutes at a time. That few minutes will matter."
A hand went up again.
"What about the Bureau?"
"Use them," he said. "Don't wait for them."
"And guilds?"
"Don't."
They laughed nervously.
He wasn't joking.
"Rules," he said then, voice sharpening into command without theatrics. "Say them back to me."
They straightened unconsciously.
"Rule One," he said. "You are not a hero."
"Rule One," they echoed. "We are not heroes."
"Rule Two," he continued. "You don't fight things you don't understand."
"Rule Two: don't fight what we don't understand."
"Rule Three," he said. "You run early, not late."
They repeated.
He watched acceptance harden into muscle memory across faces.
This was how organizations began.
This was how movements began.
He did not want either.
He wanted fewer funerals.
After the meeting, after they dispersed like carefully dropped seeds across the city, he lingered with Ji-ah and Min-seok among the stacks of old books whose spines had forgotten their titles.
The light hummed.
Dust drifted lazily through it like tiny comets.
"You made a choice," Ji-ah said quietly.
"Yes," he replied.
"I'm staying," she said.
It was not a declaration of loyalty.
It was logistics.
Min-seok nodded, eyes tight with the terror of someone who had realized the future would not accommodate his previous plans and had chosen to show up anyway.
"Me too," he said. "Someone has to carry the bags."
Jae-hwan's throat tightened with an emotion he refused to label.
He extinguished it before it could become a liability.
"We should go," he said.
They went.
---
Night brought rain for the first time since the sky began remembering openings.
It fell uncertainly at first, as if double-checking gravity, then committed, striking pavement in sharp, precise impacts that washed the accumulated dust of unspoken fears into gutters where it belonged.
The city breathed differently in rain.
Gate-pressure abated.
Not gone.
Muted.
He walked beneath the awning of a closed bookstore and watched traffic smear itself into lines of moving light on wet asphalt.
The listener had gone quiet.
Not absent.
Patient.
He leaned against the wall and let the rhythm of rain mark time.
He felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with muscles or sleep.
The world had crossed its threshold.
There would be no return ticket.
He spoke aloud, softly enough that his words were swallowed by rain before reaching the street.
"We're going to change shape, aren't we?"
He wasn't speaking to anyone specific.
Or he was speaking to everyone.
His reflection in the darkened bookstore window looked back at him — older, somehow, than it had any right to be, eyes holding storms it had not yet earned in this life.
He pushed away from the wall.
He walked into the rain without umbrella or regret.
Somewhere in District Seven, a cat looked up at the sky and hissed at something no one else could see.
Somewhere in District Twelve, a streetlight flickered twice and decided to stay on.
Somewhere deep beneath the city, something listened back.