Chapter 7: Pepper Paste

Bom's lance came out of her right palm white and straight.

It went one meter across the Hanbat parking lot, then two.

At three meters it guttered and went out.

She stood with her hand out and counted to ten, and tried again.

Two meters this time.

Before the thorn, it had gone thirty, through a floor-17 boss and the wall behind it.

She still dreamed about that floor, the gray thicket where every branch moved toward warm skin.

She put her hand in her coat pocket so the gate guard wouldn't see it shake.

The guild called people like her faders.

Hanbat's headquarters was an old wedding hall in Dunsan-dong, with the chapel turned into a gym.

Yook kept his office in the bridal suite, because he said it had the best light.

He was eating tangerines at his desk when she came in, and he peeled one for her without asking.

"Sit," he said.

She sat.

"Ki-tae thinks the seller is his cousin," Yook said. "The F-rank from the breach."

"Ki-tae thinks a lot of things," Bom said.

"He does. But the term about the grandfather was family."

Yook split the tangerine and gave her half.

"Next time the seller puts up a lot that brings you close, win it. Whatever it costs."

"And then?" Bom asked.

"Then look at his face, and come and describe it to me," Yook said.

She ate a piece of tangerine.

She was thinking about the hood at the back of the hall, and how still it had stood when Ki-tae laughed.

"What does Hanbat want with a farmer?" she asked.

"The same thing it wanted with you," Yook said. "To look after him."

He nodded at her coat pocket.

"Have you had your medicine today?"

She took out the gray bottle and drank, because he was watching.

It tasted like wet bark and pennies, as it had every night for twenty months.

Yook had brought the first bottle to her hospital bed himself, the week the thorn went through her arm.

He had brewed it from the same floor-17 thorn, he said.

"You cure a thorn with the thorn," he had told her, and patted her cheek.

Hanbat had paid for everything after that, the surgery and the bed and the bottles.

When she couldn't raid anymore, he had made her the guild's bidder instead of letting her go.

She owed him, and they both knew it.

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