Oath Of The Crimson Moon

Chapter 7

Ara set a rule for herself: no thinking about Gu Serin after 10 p.m.

It was a reasonable rule. Professional distance was important.The Jungrang project would run eight more months and she needed to maintain her objectivity and she was absolutely not going to become one of those architects who got emotionally compromised by a client, no matter how regardless of despite his

She looked at the ceiling. 10:47 p.m.

"Fantastic," she said to Jung-guk, the water stain.

The problem was the dreams. They were getting clearer. Each night the forest resolved itself further more detail, more texture, the fire taking shape as a specific fire in a specific clearing, the language on her tongue cohering toward something recognizable. Last night she'd dreamed in something that sounded like archaic Korean, and she'd woken up with two phrases intact: 나는 여기 있어 (I am here) and 용서해줘 (forgive me).

Forgive me.

She sat up and got her laptop and searched, on a whim, for historical records of the Jungnang area in the Joseon period.

What she found kept her up until two in the morning.

The old records were fragmentary, accessible through the National Folk Museum's digitized archives, and most of what survived was administrative tax records, boundary disputes, the occasional incident report. But one document, a local magistrate's record from the late 1700s, mentioned a byeongpung shiboe a folding screen made for the residence of a family named Gu depicting a scene of a woman in a forest clearing. The description was brief but specific: the woman wore her hair braided with copper thread and stood at the edge of a fire, facing something the screen's painter had rendered ambiguously human-shaped but not quite human, eyes the color of amber, posture suggesting supplication or threat or both.

Ara read the description three times.

Then she closed her laptop and sat in the dark for a while.

Then she opened it again and searched for "Gu family Joseon period Jungnang."

She found a genealogical record. A very long one.

The Gu family had been in the Seoul area the area that was now Seoul since records began. The line was unusually continuous for a family of its period, surviving dynastic changes and occupations and wars with a consistency that the genealogical notes attributed to prudent strategic alliances and careful management of family interests and other diplomatic terms that she decided not to read too hard.

The current head of GS Holdings was Chairman Gu Hyunwoo.

His family register listed a son.

Gu Serin. Born 1987.

She stared at that date for a long time. 1987 seemed wrong. Not factually wrong clearly he was real, clearly he was thirty-eight or so, clearly he existed in this century and carried a phone and wore bespoke suits and drank Scotch according to Park Taewon who had mentioned it once in passing. But wrong in the way a translation was sometimes wrong technically accurate and somehow missing something essential.

She closed the laptop.

"I'm a rational person," she told the dark. "I believe in material evidence and structural engineering and the load-bearing capacity of reinforced concrete. I do not believe in"

She stopped.

Outside her window, a dog was barking in that particular sustained, alarmed way that Seoul dogs barked at three in the morning something moving in the street that they couldn't quite categorize. She lay in the dark and listened to it and thought about amber eyes and a forest and a man who looked at her like he was verifying mathematics he'd solved before.

She thought: he is not thirty-eight.

She did not know where the thought came from.

She thought: and you know that, don't you. Some part of you knows.

The dog stopped barking. Seoul settled back into its three a.m. self distant traffic, the hum of the building's ventilation, the particular urban silence that was not silence at all but so many sounds layered together they became a texture.

Ara lay in her small Mapo-gu apartment and breathed and decided, with the considered deliberateness of a person making a structural decision, that she was going to ask him.

Not about the forest. Not yet. But about the family the Gu family and its very long history in this very specific place, and why he'd known the Jungnang site so precisely on the first visit, walking it as though he'd walked it before, pausing at the northeast corner the corner where she'd found the mill foundations before the survey had flagged anything.

She would ask.

And then she would assess what he said.

And then she would make a decision, architecturally and logically, about whether she was having a slow breakdown or whether the world contained more structures than she'd previously mapped.