Oath Of The Crimson Moon

Chapter 9

It was the night of the design gala the Baekhwa Architecture annual client reception, held on the rooftop of a Gangnam hotel, all twinkling lights and the particular careful elegance of an industry event trying hard to look effortless when something shifted.

Ara had not expected him to come. The invitation was standard, sent to all active clients, and senior reps were not required to attend. But there he was in the crowd as she arrived with Mirae, who had been recruited as moral support and had responded by wearing a green dress that made her look like an architectural rendering of confidence, whereas Ara had gone for a structured black sheath that she felt represented her brand: functional, slightly intimidating.

Serin was talking to Senior Partner Hwang when he saw her across the rooftop, and she watched it happen the small interruption in his conversation, the three seconds of stillness before he redirected his attention to whatever Hwang was saying, the controlled return to normalcy. She should not have been able to read that sequence from twenty meters away. She could.

"That's him," Mirae said beside her, in the tone of someone updating a mental file.

"Don't."

"I'm just noting"

"Please don't."

Mirae drank her champagne. "He looked at you like you were the only fixed point in the room."

"That's a design term. Fixed point. It means the element that everything else orients"

"I know what it means, Ara."

The evening moved through its usual phases the formal presentation, the mingling, the careful dances of professional obligation. Ara spoke to clients and colleagues and navigated the rooftop with the practiced social efficiency of an introvert who had learned to perform extroversion for work hours. She did not seek him out. She was aware of where he was anyway, the way you were aware of weather.

They found themselves on the perimeter of the rooftop at the same time, late in the evening, when the crowd had thinned toward its closing act. The city stretched below them Seoul in full illuminated splendor, the Han River a black ribbon through it, Namsan Tower blinking its patient red signal against the sky. The moon was three-quarters full and sitting low over the eastern hills and doing something generous with the light.

"The project is going well," he said, and she heard, in the formality of it, the sound of a person defaulting to safe ground.

"It is." She looked at the city. "I found more subsurface evidence. I'm revising the entire northeast approach based on the Goryeo water management system. It's going to be better than the original design."

"I don't doubt it."

She turned to look at him. He was looking at the city too, or appearing to she had the impression that what he was actually doing was something more internal, a calculation or a decision or both. The moonlight did complicated things to his profile, finding the places where bone sat close to skin, and she thought, irrelevantly, that good light was just accurate light: it didn't flatter, it simply showed what was there.

"Why did you come tonight?" she asked.

A beat. "I was invited."

"All senior client reps were invited. Most of them sent junior delegates."

He turned to look at her. The amber of his eyes was dark in the evening light, and serious, and full of that thing she kept not having a name for. "I wanted to see you."

Ara held his gaze. Her chest was doing something irregular. "That's a significant thing to say. To a junior architect. On a project you're the client for."

"Yes." He didn't look away. "I know."

"You say that a lot. 'I know.' Like you know things about me that I haven't told you."

The pause this time was different longer, more weighted, the pause of someone standing at a door and calculating what is on the other side. "I do know things about you," he said finally. "Not everything. Not I'm missing years. Decades, in some cases. But there are things I know that I don't have a way to explain to you that you'll believe."

"Try me." She said it before she'd decided to, before the careful rational part of her brain could frame it in safer terms. "I told you. I believe primary sources."

He looked at her for a long moment. Seoul breathed below them. The moon sat steady in the east.

"I've been waiting for you," he said. "For a very long time. Longer than the number would be difficult to" He stopped. Started again. "Do you know why you dream about a forest?"

Her breath stopped.

"The dreams," he said quietly. "The forest. The fire. A language you don't speak during the day."

She had never told anyone not Mirae, not anyone about the language. About the way certain phrases cohered in the dream and dissolved by morning. "How," she said, "do you know about the language."

"Because I was there. When you first learned it."

The rooftop and the city and the moon all continued their unconcerned business. Ara stood very still and felt, for the first time in twenty-three years of being reliably and consistently fine, the particular sensation of a structural calculation encountering a load it had not been designed for.

"Tell me," she said.

He told her.