Jin’s gone now. His cat, too. Swallowed back into the labyrinth of Hak Nam’s alleys and stairwells. Off to sleep in that ramshackle shelter of his.
This is the first time I’ve brought someone up here, to my thinking spot. The place I go when I’m at my lowest. When I sit on the very edge of Hak Nam and trace the scar on my arm. Round and round.
Don’t do this, Dai! This isn’t you. You’re a good person. My brother’s final words float up on the wind, fill the empty space where Jin just sat. Another 747 rips across the sky. Its wake rakes through my hair and crams my eardrums. It should be all I hear: molecules of air splitting and screaming, torn apart forever.
I’ve tried my hardest to escape him—to forget all the things that happened between us—but my brother’s ghost is hunting me down. Slipping into my waking hours through Jin’s face, his motions. The kid even looked at the night sky with the same gleam in his eyes. I wonder what Jin would think of my brother’s brass-plated telescope, or the encyclopedia of star maps he read to pieces during his I’m going to be an astronaut phase. My brother always stayed up way too late, barefoot and bursting onto his bedroom balcony, babbling if I got too close about whatever new formation he saw. I always pretended not to care, but some things stuck. Like Cassiopeia. Like regret.
And the way the kid grabbed my hoodie and tried to stop me from falling: It was the exact same way my brother seized me that night. Same wide eyes. Same tight fingers.
My brother’s voice keeps swirling, reaching, clawing. Trying to stop me again.
Don’t do this, Dai!
“Get out of my head!” I scream the memories away. It’s so much better when the amnesia settles in and I’m numb.
I think about the kid instead. Part of me wishes I hadn’t brought Jin here. Hadn’t bought him breakfast. Hadn’t started to care. My risky-as-hell plan was so much easier to carry out when the people helping me were just chess pieces. Polished pawns without faces. Not a starving street kid and a trapped girl whose beautiful eyes twist and tangle my insides. Show me pieces of myself.
Hunger preying on hunger.
This isn’t you.
The dead don’t sleep easily. Just like me.
I shut my eyes, feel the wind whip up stories and stories of these rotting buildings into my face. I don’t see the long fall just inches from my toes. I don’t see the skyscrapers stabbing the morning sky.
You’re a good person.
I wish my brother had been right.
But he wasn’t. And now—instead of dreaming about dancing in zero gravity, making footprints in moondust—he’s six feet under. Shattered beyond repair, broken just like everything else I leave behind.