Chapter Thirty-One

In a dark room, someone was shaking me.

Hard.

“Wake up! Jinny! We’ve got to go—you have to wake up. We don’t have much time.”

Etienne. She was back, but I didn’t have the luxury of being happy about it. I was so disoriented. And in so much pain.

“Oh god, I’m too late,” she said. “What did they do to you?”

In the dim room, she looked like a little sunflower blowing in the wind, her hair bobbing up and down as she shook me.

I exhaled in pain. “Heart. They put something in my heart.”

“Jinny,” she whispered. “You were right. About everything. I stole the all the files. Tae-min’s not planning to save you. We need to go. Can you stand?”

I groaned again—I felt so weak. Drugs were definitely in my system, but they must have been wearing off, because my chest was on fire. Open-heart surgery will do that to you.

“Yes. I think so. I have to,” I said. “Help me get all this off.”

Unhooking myself from the pain medication—this wasn’t going to be pleasant. I remembered what Tae-min said about how the mesh drugs caused extreme pain, and I’d had surgery on top of it. But staying wasn’t an option, and I finally had Etienne on my side.

With the chip already in my heart, and the plans in Etienne’s possession, I might have a chance. If I could reach Mokpo, Alice could help us. If she could rescue Gavin and Royce, then Royce and Alice might be able to save me.

Working frantically, Etienne pulled sensors and wires off my body, helping me remove all the IVs, except the big one in my neck.

“I don’t know if I should touch this one,” she said.

“Leave it. It’s a central line,” I said, remembering the one Royce put in me for the other surgeries. “Just close it off and tape it down.”

When I was free from all the equipment, I swung my legs off the bed, pausing to catch my breath, holding my head to stop the dizziness.

“Here,” she said. “I brought you some clothes.”

Gently, but quickly she pulled off the hospital gown. Wasn’t the first time she’d seen me naked, but with all the bandages, you could barely say that anyway— bandages covered my body from navel to neck.

“Oh Jinny, you poor thing. This looks terrible.”

Blood was soaking through the bandages around my sternum. Not pretty.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said, partially to convince myself.

She pulled a sweatshirt over my head and helped me into a pair of loose-fitting pants and tennis shoes. Now we could run.

I tried to access my mental map of the building, tracing out the best escape route.

“I have access to the service corridors—we can use those to escape,” she said. “But we need to move fast, before Tae-min finds out. He wasn’t feeling good again earlier, but I don’t want to bet on that. There’s still plenty of security around.”

I took her hand. “You remember me—I can escape anything. And I know this building. I’ll lead the way. Just don’t let me fall,” I said.

She smiled. “You saved me before. This time, it’s my turn.”

 

***

Seoul. At night. With all its fantastic beauty, in the last twenty years it had only become more magnificent than I remembered it. All those lights, the food, the smells of kimchi and pots filled with boiling spicy rice sticks, soju being chugged at street side carts.

My town.

Even as a teenager, I’d owned the streets.

Don’t get me wrong, L.A. will always be home, but Seoul? Part of my heart would always live there.

“How’s your English?” I asked…in English. “Might be safer for us to talk in another language.” Etienne had been trilingual—fluent in English, French, and Korean, but that was a long time ago. Plenty of people in Seoul spoke English, but if we talked fast enough and quietly enough, it could provide some extra cover.

“Fantastic, of course,” she said in English. “Good idea.”

“We need to stay in crowded areas, otherwise we’re going to have another issue,” I said. “I had my marrow tags taken out. I don’t want to get caught wandering around without ID tags.”

If we stuck to the really crowded spots, we’d be less likely to get flagged. As far as I knew, my retinas should still be altered—Royce said it would last for at least a month, but I didn’t have any of the other precautions. Without the prosthetic mask and Caramel’s hideous clothes, there was still a possibility that a very savvy scanner might pull my true identity, which was even worse than being caught without any ID tags.

“Your tags. That’s right,” she said. “We need to be very careful.”

“Or just very fast.”

“How are you holding up?” she said, keeping her arm around my waist, trying to give me some support without putting pressure on my wounds.

We’d wiggled through some tight service corridors and air ducts—I kept worrying that my heart was going to come spilling right out of my chest.

“Adrenaline’s keeping me going. We can’t stop moving here for long—they’re bound to be right behind us,” I said.

We were right at the edge of Myeongdong, a bright tunnel of neon-studded businesses that stretched into the sky, crammed from edge to edge with people shopping and eating. Perfect place for us to disappear.

“We can jump on the subway at the other end,” she said.

The subway was a risk, but a cab driver would individually scan our tags, and we’d be caught for sure. In my condition, walking for much longer wasn’t even an option.

“If we can make it to Mokpo, there’s someone there that can help us,” I said. “Is there still a KTX station nearby? Does it go to Mokpo?”

The bullet train—there used to be a line that went directly from Seoul to Mokpo, but you never could be sure how much things had changed.

She nodded. “That’s the fastest way down there. We’ll have to keep moving around the train cars—they’ll be scanning periodically, and security might be checking IDs.”

Wouldn’t that just be perfect? Escape the Chaebol, only to finally be brought to justice for my twenty year old crimes? Then I’d get to die in a literal jail cell.

I kissed her cheek. “Thank you. Thank you for this.”

She pointed to the backpack she was carrying. “I didn’t want to believe it, but you sounded so sure. It’s all there, in my bag. You were right. I can’t read all of it—some of the plan are encrypted, but it was more than enough to know that Tae-min wasn’t planning for you to survive this.”

“How did you manage to get ahold of all that?” Last time I checked, Etienne wasn’t a hacker, but a lot could happen in twenty years.

She smiled. “You know I’ve always been persuasive. Everyone has a weakness for my pastries—let’s just say I had a chat with a few lonely people from the tech staff.”

I laughed. “Social engineering, with pastries—I love you.”

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Let’s go. Promise me—if I get caught, you leave me. Run away. There’s no reason to ruin your life too.”

She shook her head, took my hand. “I already made my choice when we left the building. There’s no going back. All or nothing.”

I squeezed her hand once, and it was all that needed to be said. We raced into the night, letting the living swell of Myeongdong swallow us into its irresistible glow.