Chapter 7: Room Six

"Somebody called him in the night," Ha-yeon said. "Somebody told him Haetae was finished before I'd even played the tape."

Byun was already walking away across his own yard, talking into his phone.

"Who wins if the Lamp holds the contract?" Woo-seok asked.

"The Lamp," she said. "Only the Lamp."

The party registration form had a box for a name.

Chil-seong filled it in on the hood of his old silver taxi with the pen from his fishing vest.

He wrote "Nobody Gets Left".

"That's what you say," he told Woo-seok. "Every raid. You say it under your breath at the door."

Woo-seok hadn't known he said it out loud.

The Association accepted the name, and on the last Monday of March, Nobody Gets Left took its first contract.

It was a C-grade gate in a karaoke building in Hongdae, five floors of singing rooms with mirrored walls.

The crew drove there in Chil-seong's taxi and the twins' delivery van, with Gyeol following on his scooter.

The inspector on the contract was Shin Ha-yeon.

She had asked for it.

The permit was late.

Woo-seok hadn't slept since Friday, so he lay down across the back seat of the taxi and closed his eyes.

"Permit's here, Fireman," Chil-seong said, shaking his shoulder. "Twelve fifty-two."

They went in at one.

The gate had turned the building's halls into a loop of identical doors, each one humming a song nobody was singing.

Woo-seok found the master in Room Six on the fourth floor.

The room was empty, with a mirror for a ceiling.

He looked up.

In the mirror, something long-armed and white was looking back down at him, and then it wasn't in the mirror anymore.

It dropped onto him from the ceiling, and he heard his own neck break.

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