Chapter Text
Seo-yeon didn’t hesitate.
She ran back into the vault, ducking under a tangle of wires, and kicked a stray hard drive in the process. Eon jolted upright instantly—years of paranoia baked into his reflexes.
“Eon, wake up. Now.”
He blinked, groggy. “Did you find something?”
“We’ve been compromised.” She tossed the burner at him. “I just got a call. They knew my name. Knew about you. And there’s a camera in the stairwell.”
His eyes sharpened instantly. He stood in a single motion and yanked open a nearby drawer. Inside: a jammer, a pair of burner routers, and a blunt screwdriver that looked disturbingly well-used.
“Where?” he said.
“Vent above the landing.”
Eon was already moving. He shoved a drive into a fireproof case, threw it into a duffel bag, and snapped the jammer on. A low hum filled the room like an artificial migraine.
Seo-yeon followed him to the outer hallway. Eon climbed a half-broken stool, unscrewed the vent cover, and ripped out the camera in a single wrenching pull.
“No brand. No visible ID. But definitely pro.” He held it up to her. “Someone installed this fast and knew exactly where to put it.”
She didn’t need to be told who. L had found them.
Eon turned to her, deadly calm now. “We move. Ten minutes. We wipe what we can and burn the rest.”
Seo-yeon paused. “Burn Jay’s drive?”
“No. We split it. Half stays with me. Half goes with you.”
“I thought you didn’t trust anyone.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But I trust my backups more.”
They returned to the vault and began the silent, desperate work of tearing down months—maybe years—of carefully hoarded truth. Eon handed her a secondary drive the size of a matchbox.
“This has the raw vocal files Jay left. Stuff I haven’t touched yet. Could be nothing. Could be nuclear.”
Seo-yeon took it, stuffing it into the lining of her coat. “Where do we go?”
“We don’t,” he said. “We split now. Different exits, no contact. You’ll have to vanish.”
“I already have.”
Eon gave her one last look. “Seo-yeon. If they knew where to plant that camera, they might already know your next step.”
She nodded. “Then I’ll make a step they won’t expect.”
And with that, they went dark. Again.
______________________________________________________________________
The rain started just as she stepped out into the back alley. Cold. Thin. The kind that soaked you not from force, but from persistence.
Seo-yeon didn’t look back.
She pulled her hood low, took the burner phone from her pocket, and stared at it for a long second. The last tether. The last traceable piece of herself in this city.
She thought about Yujin. About the voice on the call. About Jay’s half-burned journal whispering secrets from the grave.
And then she hurled the phone down a sewer grate.
A quiet splash.
Signal: dead.
She was officially off-grid now. No phone. No ID. No footprint.
She made her way down to Guro, blending with the night market crowds—vendors shouting under plastic tarps, steam rising from bubbling pots, the sharp scent of tteokbokki and motor oil hanging in the air. It was a city still moving, unaware it was crawling with rot.
She followed back alleys and service routes until she found what she was looking for: an abandoned jjimjilbang with its sign burned out and windows boarded up. Years ago, it had been a retreat for low-level idol trainees trying to detox between rounds of “rebranding.” Now it was just dust and rust. Perfect.
Inside, she cleared a path through the debris and found a locked storage room in the basement. She picked the lock with shaking fingers—muscle memory from her internship days when being curious was still allowed.
It was dry. Bare. Safe enough.
She sat down hard against the wall and pulled out Eon’s drive. Tiny. Silent. But heavy in her hand like a loaded gun. Somewhere on this were answers—maybe even Jay’s voice again, clearer this time. But playing it now would be reckless.
First, she needed to disappear a little harder.
Tomorrow, she’d dye her hair. Change her clothes. Create a new alias. She had a contact—an old fixer named Ha-jin—who owed her a favor from a case that never made it to publication. With a few hours and the right tech, Seo-yeon could vanish even to herself.
But tonight, in the cold, in the dark, in the silence of Seoul’s underbelly… she let herself breathe.
Alone. Free. And closer to the truth than she’d ever been.
Two days passed in silence.
In the daylight, Seo-yeon became someone else. A delivery rider in an oversized helmet. A print shop assistant at a place where no one asked questions if you paid in cash. She spoke little, watched everything, and wore her anonymity like armor.
Guro was perfect for vanishing—a district layered in gray: tech graveyards, underground internet cafés, and tinkerers selling rewired phones and parts out of basements that looked like fallout shelters.
She slept in shifts, on a roll-out mat inside the gutted jjimjilbang. Ate from stalls where the ajummas never looked up, just took her coins and handed over hot food in cracked bowls. She blended in. Not invisible. Just irrelevant.
But at night, she worked.
She cracked open the drive Eon had given her using an old ThinkPad salvaged from a recycling shop. Air-gapped. No Wi-Fi. She wasn't about to make the same mistake twice.
Inside the drive, she found five folders:
/vocals_raw/
/voice_tests/
/static_filter/
/confess/
do_not_play_last.mp3
Each file was cryptically labeled—timestamps, initials, occasional emojis. But it was the /confess/ folder that chilled her.
The first recording was of low quality. Jay’s voice, hoarse. Hushed.
“—told me to delete it. Said the deal was done, and if I kept digging, they’d make me disappear. That was two days before Hyun-mi vanished. Two days before the contract, I never signed somehow got notarized with my seal.”
She paused the track, mouth dry. Jay had known. He’d seen it coming.
The second file was a conversation—Jay and another voice. Seo-yeon didn’t recognize it at first. Then she caught the clipped tone, the smooth PR cadence.
Lee Chan-woo.
Jay: “You told me this was just about control.”
Chan-woo: “Control is survival, Jay.”
Jay: “And what about the others? Hyun-mi, Yeon-ji?”
Chan-woo: long pause “Collateral.”
Seo-yeon clenched her jaw. She rewound. Listened again. Saved it separately. This alone could reopen everything.
But then, her gaze shifted to the last file.
do_not_play_last.mp3
It was an obvious trap. Or a desperate breadcrumb.
She stared at it for a long minute. Then hit play.
Jay’s voice came through—clearer this time. Older. Tired. Not performing. Confessing.
“If you're hearing this… then I’m already gone. And if she’s hearing it… then I was right to leave it with you, Eon.”
“Seo-yeon, I always knew you’d chase the truth. You were never built for silence.”
“But the truth isn’t clean. It’s coded. Buried in static. You want to take them down? Then find the master track. The one they buried at that final showcase. It wasn’t just a performance. It was the cover. Everything’s layered in the background. Frequencies they thought no one would decode.”
Then silence.
Then something else.
A low-pitched sound that twisted into white noise, and behind it, just barely audible—a girl’s voice, crying. Then a name.
“Hyun… mi…”
The audio cut.
Seo-yeon ripped out her earbuds, chest heaving.
She knew where she had to go next.
The showcase. 88VIBE’s final public event before Jay vanished—held at a private venue in Gangseo. Closed to the public. But she’d been there once before, years ago, with a press badge and naïve questions.
She shut the laptop. Tomorrow, she’d have to risk surfacing again.
But tonight, she sat there in the dark, the name still echoing in her ears.
Hyun-mi hadn’t disappeared. She’d been erased.
______________________________________________________________________
The showcase venue was still there.
A minimalist glass cube wedged between a Gangseo parking tower and a row of sleek boutiques that now sold streetwear to influencers who’d never ridden the subway. From the outside, it looked like nothing—just another private performance space with coded entry and guards who rotated every six hours.
Seo-yeon stood across the street, sipping from a convenience store coffee cup she didn’t want, her reflection distorted in the glass.
She wasn’t Seo-yeon today.
The ID tucked into her jacket read Kang Ha-eun, junior producer for a mid-tier entertainment firm that hadn't existed in five years. She’d even printed the old business card herself—just enough detail to pass a quick glance.
The trick wasn’t to be invisible. The trick was to be forgettable.
She got in through the back—technically, through the loading dock, which now operated as a staging area for equipment rentals. Two fake emails, a phony work order, and one rented audio console later, and she was wheeling a flight case through the sliding doors like she belonged.
Inside, the building felt haunted.
The showroom was dark, stripped of its old 88VIBE branding, but the layout was still the same. Stage at the center, sound booths flanking the sides, acoustic panels that hid everything but secrets.
She made her way to the archives room.
It wasn’t easy—she had to stall a security guard by pretending to be lost, then duck into a maintenance stairwell while he checked the clipboard. Her heart pounded with every floor she climbed.
On Level 3, she found what she was looking for: Recording Bay B.
The same studio that Jay’s final showcase had been routed through.
She slipped in, shut the door behind her, and pulled out Eon’s matchbox drive. Plugged it into the console. Opened her laptop and ran the decoder software they’d patched together over the last week.
Then, she pulled up the raw audio from the showcase—found in the public archives, just as Jay had said.
To the naked ear, it was a performance like any other: stylized vocals, backing track, crowd noise.
But under the right filters?
Layered beneath the beat, under the reverb and production sheen, there were embedded frequency modulations. Data. Morse code. Someone had hidden a message in the music itself.
She applied the static filter Jay left.
Her screen began spitting out fragments of text. At first, nonsense. Then:
CONFIRM: BLACKBOOK ID 3F9-D // NAME: SHIN HYUN-MI // STATUS: OBSERVER REASSIGNED TO SAFEHOUSE BETA // AVOID PRESS CONTACT
Seo-yeon froze.
Hyun-mi wasn’t dead.
She wasn’t missing.
She’d been relocated. Hidden. Protected—or imprisoned.
Suddenly, her laptop blinked.
A pop-up.
Incoming connection request.
Origin: Unknown.
She yanked the drive, killed the Wi-Fi toggle—too late. The IP trace had already begun to ping the building’s network.
And then—footsteps. Fast. Heavy.
Someone had followed her in.
Footsteps—closer now. Not the slow, casual kind.
Purposeful.
Seo-yeon grabbed the drive, slammed her laptop shut, and yanked her flight case into motion. It was empty now—just a prop. But the heavy metal wheels still echoed across the studio floor like a siren.
She slipped out the side door of Recording Bay B, heart hammering. No alarms yet. No shouting. Just the sense—deep and primal—that someone was behind her, matching her every turn.
She couldn’t take the elevator. Cameras. Traps. Delay.
The stairwell.
She ducked into it just as the door behind her creaked open. She took the steps two at a time, heading down, down, down—past the glassy sheen of Level 2, past the muted light of the lobby floor.
Basement. That’s where she had to go.
There was an old service corridor down there. She’d seen it once during her intern days, following a tech during a wiring failure. It hadn’t been used in years. Probably still wasn’t.
She hit the concrete landing and bolted right, pressing herself into the shadows just as two figures entered from the floor above—flashlights cutting through the dark like knives.
“Check Bay B again,” one voice said. Male. Sharp. “She didn’t log into the system, but something pinged the server.”
The other responded low. Too low for her to catch.
Seo-yeon counted three seconds. Then sprinted down the hallway, pulling a slim crowbar from inside her jacket—one of the few things Eon had insisted she carry.
She found the door at the end of the corridor, rusted and bolted. No keycard. Just screws warped by time.
Three hard yanks. It groaned open.
She slipped through into the narrow passage—barely lit, mold on the walls, pipes hissing above. This was a utility vein running beneath the showroom—a forgotten artery of the building.
Behind her, the voices got louder.
“You check storage. I’ll hit the archives.”
They were splitting up. Good.
She raced through the passage, her boots sliding on damp concrete, breath catching in her throat. At the far end was a secondary exit, meant for deliveries or waste disposal.
It had a keypad. One of the old 4-digit analog ones.
She tried the code she remembered from years ago: 1237.
Red light.
1109.
Red light.
She cursed. One more try before they caught up—
0426.
Green.
The door clicked.
She shoved it open into the blinding overcast daylight of a loading bay and emerged into a tangle of crates and dumpsters behind the venue.
A delivery truck blocked her view, engine humming. The driver stared at her. She didn’t hesitate.
“Emergency maintenance call,” she said, breathless, pointing behind her. “Stairwell’s flooding.”
He blinked.
Then nodded.
Seo-yeon hopped onto the back bumper, jumped down into the alley, and disappeared into the gray swarm of Gangseo traffic before anyone thought to stop her.
By the time she reached her fallback hideout in Guro—a shuttered internet café with dead neon letters—her hands were still shaking.
But she had it.
A fragment of the truth.
Hyun-mi was alive.
Now she just had to find her.