Shim remained silent, only breathing in and out the cold night air, a night that was coming to an end. With anyone else, he would likely have withheld the truth, but before the man who had haunted his life for years, the word slipped out.
“Four.”
Lady O, Scholar Ahn, the shaman, his mother. That was four.
“Is Woorim still alive?” I blurted out.
“Councillor,” Shim said, ignoring my question, his gaze still fixed upon his father. “Please. My crimes were indeed dreadful, but I thought to myself, perhaps this path I walk is neither black nor white, perhaps it is gray—”
“Answer the girl!” Councillor Ch’oi bellowed.
Officer Shim flinched as a boy did under his father’s raised hand, and in a hoarse whisper, he said, “She may still be alive.”
* * *
A narrow path wound through the mountain. To one side was a thickly wooded slope that fell away steeply for about five hundred cheok in distance, and to the other side a cliff wall with plant life sprouting from its cracks.
No one seemed to know where Senior Officer Shim was leading the whole team, which included Councillor Ch’oi, and I wondered if Shim even knew himself. The forest stretched on and on, an endless landscape of trees after more trees, so unchanging that I paused at one point, wondering if we had not crossed this path before.
The uneasy sensation that we were being led in circles coiled tight in my stomach several more times before Officer Shim finally stopped in his tracks. His stare drifted down the trail, which wound around granite slabs, down toward a small crevice in the plateau. “Here” was all he said.
Inspector Han cautiously descended with a limp, along with two other officers. In a few moments’ time, he returned and signaled for the rest of his officers to join him. He hadn’t looked my way, hadn’t signaled me, but I followed anyway.
Woorim, please be alive, please, I begged with each step down the trail and into the crevice, with each hollow thump of my heart. Please.
“Why did you lead us here,” Inspector Han demanded, “and not to Madam Byeol’s house?”
Shim kept his gaze lowered as he replied, “Her house was our meeting point, but this cave was where I intended to hide for the night.”
“So your helpers are inside?” The inspector’s lips were as pale as a dead man’s, his jaws clenched against the excruciating pain I imagined he was in. The strip of fabric bound tightly around his waist was already wet with blood. “Then order them to come out.”
“Come—” Shim’s voice cracked. He tried again, his voice this time loud and clear and strained with a grief-stricken note of defeat. “Come out!”
At first there was silence, the air within the cave so still. Then there came a timid scraping of footsteps, and soon our torchlight illuminated two figures. One was a grime-covered youth, and the other a deeply wrinkled and deeply familiar man. It was the executioner, the one I had often seen washing blood off himself in the backyard of the police bureau. And today, even today, his hands and ragged garment were stained with streaks of dried blood.
“Whose blood is that?” I demanded, panic rising to my throat. “Wh-where is Woorim?”
The executioner hung his head. Repeatedly, he sobbed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
My knees went weak. As the police arrested the two rogues, I grabbed the torch from a manservant and rushed into the cave. The orange glow of light illuminated the walls, black from woodsmoke, and I flinched as memories swept into my mind—of Woorim hurtling into the stone wall, struck so hard her bones snapped. Lying there on the ground, mouth open, eyes staring at me.
The day seemed to repeat itself right before my eyes, for I found myself standing before a girl curled up on the floor. The torch shook in my grip as I drew the flame closer. Blood from her head covered half her face, dried and crusted down the side of her neck, staining the collar of her hanbok.
“Woorim,” I whispered.
She did not move.
Then the torchlight shifted, exposing a different angle to this horror. The blood had flowed not only from her head, but from the gaping wound where her nose had once been—and was no longer.
“No … no, no, no.” I shook my head, darkness pulsing through my veins. I wanted to crush something and scream. Guilt clawed at my chest. Woorim was dead because I had asked her to show me to the