The Road Opened Again

The Additional Practice Site was a building slated for demolition.

Garam didn't read that in the notice. He heard it. A living building makes different sounds on every floor: people, pipes, ventilation. This building made the same sound on every floor. The sound of nothing.

The goal was the marker box by the third floor window. Retrieve it for points, run over time for a deduction, fall and your practice eligibility would be reviewed.

"The stairs stop at the second floor." Mirae was looking at the floor plan. "This plan is from last year. The actual demolition has gone further than this." She had already drawn two lines in the margin.

"We can go up the outer piping." Seorin looked out the window. "Three of us hold on, one climbs."

"Whoever climbs is in the most danger."

"I'll climb."

"No." Mirae cut her off. "Yu Seorin's fixed decision sword hasn't recovered yet. You used it eleven times yesterday in the maze."

"That's my body."

"And it's our score." Mirae pointed at the number.

"Then attach a condition." Mirae drew a line on her notepad. "If two or more of the three fixed points are confirmed, you climb. If not, we find another route."

"That's not a clause, that's a safety standard."

"Right now it's a clause."

In the end it was Seorin who climbed. Mirae recalculated, and concluded that the combined arm strength of the other three fell short of Seorin's balance endurance alone. Mirae never got angry when her own conclusion argued against her.

Garam liked that. Few people can stand it when their own calculation defeats them.

Garam listened from below the pipe.

The pipe was anchored to the wall at three points. Garam listened to each anchor point separately. The first was solid. The second hummed a little. The third made no sound at all.

"The third anchor point, no sound."

"You mean it's not there, or you can't hear it?" Seorin asked.

"I don't know. Could be either."

"Then calculate for the worse case." Mirae wrote it down. "If we assume the third anchor point doesn't exist, based on Seorin's weight, it's only safe up to the middle of the second floor. We can't reach the third floor window."

"I only said I couldn't hear it," Garam said. "I didn't say it wasn't there."

"I know. That's why I wrote that we're assuming it isn't." Mirae showed him two lines side by side. Garam's words and Mirae's assumption, written separately. "This is what you said. This is my judgment."

Garam looked at those two lines for a long time. It was the first time he'd seen his own words stay standing next to someone else's conclusion instead of being swallowed by it.

"Then how do we get up there."

"Go in through the second floor window and climb from inside. The inner stairs might still go up to the third floor."

Sixteen minutes left.

The inner stairs were still there. About halfway to the third floor. The other half was a section where the floor had disappeared, and the corridor on the other side was two and a half meters away.

Two and a half meters. A distance you could jump. If you jumped and missed, it was three floors down.

Doyun was looking at that distance, and Garam was looking not at Doyun but at the person standing beside him.

A boy from the same class. His name was Jo Hyeonwoo. He'd been added to fill out a short team, and just a moment ago he'd said twice that he would jump.

Now he wasn't saying anything.

Garam heard the sound of that silence. When a person stops talking, a sound is left behind. When words halt in the throat, the breath catches for half a beat.

Jo Hyeonwoo had given up on jumping.

And Garam heard Doyun notice it too. Doyun's left hand moved. Not toward the glove's edge, but toward the wrist lock.

"Jo Hyeonwoo. You were going to jump." Doyun said.

"...No."

"You were. You just folded it a second ago." Doyun took a half step toward him. "I'm giving notice. I'm going to open the leap you folded. It'll take under ten seconds, and if I open it, you might forget part of why you wanted to jump. You can refuse right now."

That was the clause, followed exactly. Target, time, what would be lost. He'd said all three.

Jo Hyeonwoo looked at Doyun. Then he gave a short nod. "Do it. There's no time."

Notice given, consent received. Both lines of the clause had been honored.

At that moment, Garam looked down at his own palm.

There was a sound that should have been there but wasn't.

When Jo Hyeonwoo said do it, his voice had been clean. Sincere. That wasn't the problem. The problem came before that. When Jo Hyeonwoo folded his decision to jump, the sound of that folding had been strange.

When a person folds out of fear, the sound drops downward. When a person folds out of calculation, the sound goes flat. Jo Hyeonwoo's folding went neither down nor flat. It went sideways.

Garam had heard a sound go sideways twice before. Both times, the person making it hadn't known why they were doing it.

Garam didn't know what that meant. He knew only one thing. This wasn't a sound he recognized.

Ten seconds. Doyun's left hand rose. Jo Hyeonwoo stepped up to the platform.

Garam raised his palm.

"Stop."

Doyun's hand stopped. Completely. It was the same as with the pulley yesterday, and because of that Garam understood all over again how frightening that immediacy was. One word from him could truly stop another person's action.

"Why." Seorin asked.

"It's a clause, he doesn't have to give a reason." Mirae said first.

"I'll say it anyway." Garam said. "But it's not proof. The sound of Jo Hyeonwoo's folding isn't a sound I recognize. It wasn't folded out of fear, and it wasn't folded out of calculation."

"Then what is it."

"I don't know. I don't think we should open something I don't understand."

"There's always something you don't understand." Seorin said. "If we stop for every one of those, we can't do anything."

"You're right." Garam didn't argue. "That's why this is my last refusal. I only get one. I'm using it now."

Jo Hyeonwoo cut in. "I said I'd do it."

"I know. Your consent is valid." Mirae pointed at the clause. "But a refusal is valid even if it comes after consent. Third line."

"Then what happens to what I want?"

Garam didn't dodge the question. Dodging it would mean he'd decided for Jo Hyeonwoo instead.

"Right now, yes, I'm the one stopping your jump. I'm sorry. If it turns out later that I was wrong, that will be on record too."

"Five minutes." Mirae said.

"Then we can't retrieve it."

"We can't."

Garam had said those words himself. Once he'd said them, his throat went dry. What frightened him most was that Doyun said nothing at all.

Jo Hyeonwoo asked. "Can't I just jump? Without the ability."

"No." Seorin said. "The calculation for the third anchor point applies to that floor too. It hasn't been confirmed."

Five minutes passed. The marker box stayed at the third floor window.

"Lowest score." The proctor wrote it down. "Target not retrieved."

Mirae closed the scoring sheet. Seorin said nothing. Doyun was looking down at his own left hand, and Jo Hyeonwoo kept staring at the platform.

Garam heard the sounds of all four of them, and none of them held any resentment toward him. That was harder to bear. If they'd resented him, he could have paid it back somehow.

On the stairs going down, Doyun spoke first.

"Garam."

"You can be mad."

"I'm not mad. Well, I am, but that's my own problem." Doyun walked without touching the wrist lock. "When I raised my hand back there, I wasn't really asking Jo Hyeonwoo."

"You asked. You followed the clause."

"I said the words. But I hadn't decided what to do if he said no." Doyun stopped walking. "Asking without being ready to be refused isn't really asking."

Garam remembered that sentence for a long time. There was no offbeat in it.

The demolition crew arrived twenty minutes later.

"Did anyone enter the third floor corridor here?" A worker asked without removing his helmet.

"No." Mirae answered.

"Good thing." The worker showed them the floor plan. "The support beneath the corridor on the other side has already been cut. That work was scheduled for this afternoon, but the order got switched and it was done yesterday. We couldn't get a marker up in time."

"How much weight would it have held." Seorin asked.

"None. If you'd stepped on it, it would have given way." The worker tapped a section of the plan with his finger.

The four of them heard that sentence differently, each in their own way. Garam thought he still didn't know whether his own hearing had been right. The reason the folding sound had gone sideways and the fact that the floor had been cut could be two separate things. It could have been a coincidence.

Mirae wrote two lines on the spot. Refusal exercised: 1 case. Result: lowest score. Confirmed afterward: fall risk was real.

"Don't switch the order of these two lines." Mirae said. "The refusal wasn't right because the outcome turned out good."

"Then what made it right?" Jo Hyeonwoo asked.

"I still don't know." Mirae folded the sheet. "If we decide that now, we won't do the same thing the same way next time."

Seorin took the sheet and looked at it. Then she went to the proctor.

"I'm filing an objection. Please reflect the refusal exercised as a merit point under the lowest score category."

"That's not in the regulations." The proctor closed the paperwork.

"Then it needs to be made." Seorin didn't back down. "If the structure is such that using a refusal costs you points, no one will ever use it again."

"Yu Seorin's score has nothing to do with this case."

"It doesn't. That's exactly why I'm the one filing it." Seorin set down the request form. "If the person involved filed it, you'd say it was about his own score."

The proctor took the form. Taking it didn't mean it would be approved.

Garam looked down at his palm again while listening to that. It was still trembling a little.

He couldn't tell whether the trembling came from fear, or from deciding something for himself for the first time. He tried to tell the difference, and then, for the first time that day, he chose not to.

Instead he went over to Jo Hyeonwoo.

"Hyeonwoo. Can I ask you one thing?"

"...Sure."

"Back there, when you were about to jump and then stopped. What were you thinking?"

Jo Hyeonwoo opened his mouth to answer. Then stopped. The pause went on.

"That's the strange part." He said. "I wasn't thinking anything. It's not that I thought I should stop. I found out I'd stopped only after I already had."

Garam kept that answer in his memory. He didn't write it down. If he wrote it down, Mirae would turn it into a clause, and it hadn't taken enough shape yet to become one.