Chapter 7: The Cap

One of the seven people in the hall was carrying a lead cap, and Seok-hyun did not know which.

He stood at the cage gate with the Ledger line still hanging in the corner of his eye.

He made himself look at the faces one at a time.

The woman with the mitten was staring up at the amber seams with her mouth open.

The old Songak porter had taken one step out onto the black floor and then crouched to put his palm on it.

The brothers were whispering, the heavy man was counting lamps with a finger.

The man with the good watch stood at the back of the group with his arms folded, looking at nothing.

Da-hae stepped up to Seok-hyun's shoulder and said, without moving her lips, "The sixth man's license has a prefix of thirty-one."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he sat his test at a Daewon academy." She wrote nothing on her hand. "It's not proof."

"Half the D-ranks in Gangwon sat at one."

"It's a reason to keep him close," Seok-hyun said.

"It's a reason to put him in the cage and send him up," she said.

"On what charge?" Seok-hyun said, almost to himself. "A taxi?"

She did not answer.

He understood her silence, because he had the same problem.

The Act gave the Association the right to stop a man for what he had done.

The Pit's ledger gave him only what a man carried.

He needed the man to do it, in front of everyone, and he needed nobody to die while he waited.

He turned to the group, and his voice came out steadier than he felt.

"Two rules. Lamps are the wall, and I am the only one who moves a lamp. You kill from inside the light, never past it."

"We stab out at them?" the heavy man said.

"You wait until they come to the edge, and then you do. They stop at the edge."

"Why?"

"Because of what lives in the lamps," Seok-hyun said, which was the truest thing he knew about them, and which was no answer at all.

He put the old porter and the brothers at the left wall, where the lamps stood closest.

He gave the woman the middle, because she could light a lantern in thin dark, and she took it without a word.

The man with the good watch he set beside himself, by the table, with a sack to hold.

"Carry the embers for me," he said.

"I'm a [Hook]," the man said. "I pull things."

"Then pull the sack."

He wanted to see the man's hands, and the man knew he wanted it, and neither of them said so.

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