his confidante. “I will save Father from the Catholic purge and make him call me his son. Someone he would not be ashamed to call his true son.”
“So it is shame that drove you,” I whispered.
“It was justice,” he corrected. “Justice stamps out evil.”
“And you stamped out the lives of Lady O and Scholar Ahn—” I froze, remembering Woorim’s hand gripping mine, her plea for help. My voice shook as I asked, “Did you kill Maid Woorim too?”
A menacing stillness followed. Something about his face changed, as if a shadowy veil had drawn across it. There was a sudden chill in the air. He continued to unravel the rope slowly.
“She is dead,” I whispered. Grief choked me and panic swelled up in my chest, making it hard to speak on, but I did. The horrible question prickled up my throat. “You killed three people?”
“There was another, long before Lady O.”
I knew I shouldn’t look, but he was gazing intently at something behind me, his eyes growing so red. I took another step back, creating more space between us, then cast the quickest glance over my shoulder and saw what Shim was staring at: the grave. His mother. She hadn’t committed suicide by hanging herself: her own son had killed her.
Now, a panicked voice in me urged. I had to run now—
Suddenly I felt a roughness tighten around my own throat. A rope.
Pressure built in my temple, my skull about to crack as blood filled it to bursting, and a hazy darkness closed in around my vision. Then I saw no more.
* * *
Seol, Seol, I told myself. Wake up!
Ignore the painful ripping sensation in your throat. Ignore the confusing stabbing pricks in your eyes, the squeezing of your brain.
You mustn’t sleep forever.
* * *
In the darkness, I heard a voice speak, muffled, as though I lay under-water. “He said to get rid of her quick.”
A beam of hazy light shone through; someone had pried my eye open, holding up a torch. The faces of two men, grimy like peasants, floated before me.
“I think she’s dead.”
Their faces faded away again.
* * *
A dragging sensation woke me up. A tug, and my entire body shifted forward, then another tug, and I realized four hands were pulling at my arms, the earth passing by under me. I tried to move but could not, weakness tingling in my arms and legs, making me want to never move again. I was aware, on some level, that I should be alarmed.
The two men dragged me as if I were a sack of rice, talking with a dialect used by those from the eastern coast. “Abooji, Abooji.” A young man’s whispered call for his father, tense with fear and uneasiness. “Her pulse, it’s beating still.”
“I told you, she’s dead. And that is what you tell Officer Shim too, do you understand me?”
“But I don’t trust him, Abooji.”
“What do you mean?” Panic and fury contorted the older man’s voice.
“The shaman, she recognized Officer Shim as Madam Byeol’s son earlier today. She called him a killer. What kind of man murders his own mother?”
“We do what we are told to do. It’s not our business to know these things.”
“He looked ready to beat me for calling him ‘Officer’ in front of that shaman. What if he murders me too?”
“If you keep on spewing nonsense, he will kill us both! Now pull harder!”
The odor that clung to their rags drifted into my nostrils. The gamy smell of lamb and blood. Only baekjeongs, the outcast group, butchered living things—whether animals or criminals. Through my dizziness, a realization pushed through, like a figure stepping out from the fog. The police bureau had hired baekjeongs to execute criminals. Had Officer Shim taken advantage of them from the capital, luring them with promises of acceptance and respect, if only they helped him?
It seemed entirely possible. I remembered Young Master Ch’oi’s words: Evil comes from the unfulfilled need for significance.
As I weighed the possibility, my body was hoisted off the ground, my head lolling in the air. How strange.
I blinked against the darkness of night, trying to clear the painful confusion beating in my head, but before I could figure out what was happening, I felt a rushing sensation. My entire body falling in cold air. My stomach leaving me. Weightless.
A loud splash fractured the silence.
Water filled my mouth and nose, rough against my blinking eyes. I grabbed onto something as I thrashed in the panic of pitch black. Whatever it was lifted me upward,