Geun Dae-won had a bag over his head and a blindfold over his eyes. His weapons were confiscated, his amulets impounded, and his own powers sealed by crippling interference from a jammer collar that his captors forced on him. He sat shackled to a heavy chair for an uncomfortably long time, stewing over his troubles until a woman entered and tore the bag from his head.
She spoke good Japanese in an Osakan accent with a cadence reminiscent of a variety show comedian. “So, ah, anyway, you know when a doctor tells you, ‘this may pinch a little’ and you feel a stabbing pain as they push the needle in? Yeah?”
Geun looked up sullenly at the woman in front of him, trying to keep his composure. The blindfold kept him from seeing her but he could still make expressions at her. He decided on keeping his mouth shut. Spitting at her would just lead to her putting the bag back.
She waited a moment longer before continuing, “Not going to answer? No? Well! Trust me, they do that sometimes. So, I think it’s a lie told so that the patient expects a small thing, and then the memory of it is less than it was. But, you know, in the moment the lie doesn’t really help.”
She laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles. Then she very deliberately unbuttoned his shirt, her breath warm against his face as she leaned in close. He glanced down at his chest, more than a little confused by the turn things seemed to be taking, until she pressed her bare palm against him. It was unbearably warm and rested directly over his heart.
Not quite mirthlessly she asked, “Ah, now, tell me the truth of why you were here, would you?”
He wanted to remain silent. He wanted to be anywhere else. He said, “I’m a freelancer. It was just another job.”
Her voice acquired a lilt. “Uh huh, really? Someone hired a mercenary just to deceive one of my agents, kill a man, and commit all the other mischief you did?”
“No. Things got out of hand."
She pushed his head back with her other hand, her palm cupping his forehead. She was unreasonably strong and she shoved him against the chair’s back easily.
“Hey,” he protested, suddenly upset all out of proportion about the minor indignity of being pushed around. That he was already helpless was bad enough.
She spoke slowly, each syllable a labor. “Well, you did not lie to me. So I won’t lie to you: this will be quite painful if you resist,” and then she brightened up again and said, “If you cooperate, it will merely be, uh, uncomfortable. And maybe kind of, you know, humiliating. But I’ll try to let you keep what dignity I can. Okay?”
She started physically shoving her hands against his chest and forehead, but fear didn't grip him until his skin began parting and peeling away from her bare hands like greasy sausage casing under a knife.
His senses, supernatural and mundane, left him keenly aware she was pressing her hands into his flesh like clay. His blood pooled under her palms instead of pouring on the floor. Lights started dancing on the back of his eyelids as his heart raced. He shouted, “Wait, I’ll tell you everything; you don’t need to do this Lyubov!”
She paused. She didn’t deny he’d guessed her name and instead said, “I’d like to skip it too, Geun, but. Well, with so many signs of previous surgery to your mind and soul, I can’t actually trust you’re not just operating according to someone’s programming. It is an imposition, but, ah, I need to perform due diligence.”
“I can explain it; I can explain all of it,” he shrieked.
“I am sorry; uh, really. But do not resist.”
Energy crackled over Lyubov’s hands and with the smell of ozone and copper Geun’s blood started to boil. He felt a tingle very much like the sensation of holding a nine volt battery against his tongue scrabble over every fold of his brain, and he found he had little real choice in what he was thinking about.
He was thinking about himself.
Memory washed over him, a babble of his own words, speaking in a roil of meaningless gibberish. From the confusion the occasional word would become prominent, an idea strongly associated with it made obvious. Emotional words like:
Death the job Family the job Hate Bardard Duty Surgery Blood the job Family Belonging Loss Family the job [https://i.imgur.com/wCC5fSh.png]
From the babble Geun could hear those same words repeat. He felt an ugly sinus pressure build rapidly, dull and hard against his eardrums. Dark spots danced in his eyes, a sudden stuffiness in his forehead just behind his nose built, and a touch of vertigo rolled over him besides. But despite the unpleasant side-effect sensations of that woman pawing through his memories, when Geun felt himself starting to think about the job, panic swelled in his heart and he steered his thoughts wildly until they crashed into an older memory.
The memory was crystal clear: Geun had just turned six years old and was slowly sounding out the words on a pile of pawn tickets in his mother’s desk.
"R, i, n, g. Rhe- rhe -hin -ge? Ring?"
He stared at the paper as he slowly put the pieces together. Syllables into words, words into ideas - and ideas into evidence. His mother’s jewelry, what little of it she owned, had slowly disappeared over the past few months.
She’d been selling it off. Or putting it into hock, but to a six year old the difference was hazy. She was getting money for things she loved. Geun felt a pang of anxiety; he knew they were not rich, but were they so desperately poor as that? How close to starving were they?
He reflected on how his birthday presents had been necessities: a new pair of shoes, a jacket he knew she'd gotten on clearance (last season's style but no wear and tear), new underwear, and new socks. No toys. A little cake, but nothing like previous years.
Mom hadn’t updated her wardrobe lately at all, as far as he could tell. They hadn't gone out to the movies in months, not even for his birthday. Most nights she would come home late and too tired to do much more than check that he’d eaten the dinner she left for him. But this night, the night so prominent in Geun’s memories, was the night she was supposed to have off.
The sound of keys in the front door made his heart skip a beat. He put the pawn ticket back where he found it. Then he rushed into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, hoping that she would not think about why he wasn’t watching television or doing homework.
She entered the front room and called out, "Don’t forget to wash your hands, young man."
He obliged, glad the little deception worked.
"Get your coat when you’re done in there, we’re going out tonight."
He asked, "Where will we go mama?"
"To visit someone. Get your coat and we will take a bus, it’s not too far."
As he pulled his coat off the coat rack Lyubov said, “No, this is definitely not what I am looking for,” and Geun felt a disorienting headrush while she shuffled along through his memories. He remembered he was not six years old, and was not with his mother, and that he had to try to keep this woman from learning about the job. He thrashed against the restraints as she tried to steer his thoughts toward something interesting, and together they found Geun thinking about that same night, just after the bus trip.
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Geun hung his jacket up on the coat rack and sat down alongside his mother. The memory of the room itself was hazy; a general impression of knick-knacks on shelves and a round table in the center of the room. A little wood stove merrily pumped heat. Beside the stove sat a little old lady wrapped in a voluminous layered garment dyed blue and topped by a red and white shawl. Atop her head was perched a funny little red hat, which Geun fixated on and remembered particularly well. She was seated on the other side of the table.
Mother set a bulging envelope on the table and the old lady took it without comment. She opened it and ran her thumb along a considerable bundle of paper money before closing the envelope and secreting it somewhere inside her gown. Only then did she say, "Welcome. It is a pleasure to finally meet you in person."
Geun’s attention wandered at this point, as the adults fell into making polite small talk prior to whatever his mother intended. The memory of what they were talking about specifically became fuzzy, a surussus of uninteresting adult concerns that Geun ignored in favor of tracing his fingers against the wood grain on the table in front of him.
"Dae-won," his mother said in a warning tone that indicated he should have been paying attention after all.
He looked up from his musings about the table as the old lady pushed an inexplicably heavy biscuit into his hands. It was about the diameter of a tuna can and thick as his finger. It felt like a rock.
"Go on boy, eat it," she prompted.
He doubtfully looked at it and politely nibbled. It had the consistency and flavor of a puck of used chewing gum. He made a face and tried to set it down, only for his mother to hiss, "Dae-won, don’t be rude."
He turned in his chair and protested, "Don’t want to; full from supper still Mama."
"Dae-won be a good boy okay? It’s just like eating medicine."
He relented and went back to gnawing on the disgusting puck. He hated it, but it wasn’t worth an argument with mom in front of another adult. While he struggled with the puck the shaman lit incense. And while he gagged on it, she prepared a number of paper strips cut from Joss money. Geun knew about Joss money from talking to kids at school mostly; Hell money, a paper offering to the deceased so that they could bribe their way through the afterlife.
For just a moment Geun could feel alien thoughts brushing against his; Lyubov intruding, Why give the dead real money when fake money would do just as well?
Before he could contemplate the unintentional thought, he finished the horrible puck of medicine. The shaman lady took his hand and quickly pricked his fingertip. He tried to jerk away but the old woman was stronger, and she went about the business of collecting the blood on the paper strips while he cried. Mother did nothing and said nothing; she sat stock still and tried to keep her expression neutral. In retrospect Geun realized she was trying very hard not to show how upsetting she found the display.
The shaman took some small pity on them both and, soon as she was done, said, "Be strong, boy. Stop your weeping and your mother will get a sweet from the tin for you."
Geun was pacified enough by the promise that his mother did give him an actual sweet. The old shaman swept the bloodied paper strips into a ceramic incense burner and dropped a chunk of burning resin inside. The smell of ozone and copper permeated the room as she stirred the bowl with a bamboo chopstick.
She stood abruptly and recited what sounded like utter gibberish to Geun. The resin burned with the intensity of a limelight, and the old woman clapped over it twice before dropping the end of a silver chain into the burner. She quickly withdrew it with the chunk of glowing matter hooked to it and clipped the slack of the chain to itself, forming a necklace. She handed this over to Geun’s mother and said, "It is as expected. Show this to the boy’s father."
Her mouth moved to form other words, but Geun instead heard Lyubov say, “Geun, every life is interesting, but I don’t want to go through every moment of yours. Stop fighting me on this.”
The memory faded as she tried to reassert control over the mind reading. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck as Geun contemplated how best to not think of the job. He couldn’t resist her totally, but he could try. He waited until the moment when she started tearing back into his mind and he cast his focus about wildly, trying to find something useless to her.
He was handcuffed to a chair in his suite’s master bedroom in the Hidden Hotel while Yeon was sleeping in her own bedroom. He had the room’s privacy enchantment active because he had a guest, and she had the most intriguing Russian accent. Her blue eyes and fair hair caught the dim light in stark contrast to the dark leather she wore. She made a show of walking around Geun, twirling the keys to his handcuffs on her finger.
Abruptly, Geun realized he was still in the interrogation room and his chest was still split open; the memory of his fun evening faded. Lyubov said, “That was, yeah. Sorry. I stopped as soon as I realized it was private. Um. Let’s just- I’ll just keep going.”
As Lyubov started to dig her way back into his mind, Geun felt another errant thought. Lyubov was distracted. Might be best to leave that part out of the report, I don’t want to upset Hyougo’s mother.
For a heartbeat he experienced Lyubov’s memory of Hyougo’s mother, Haruna, complaining sotto voce, a tiny Japanese woman looking up at- not him, but at his interrogator- her face livid with anger; then the vision changed to Geun’s mother. She was looking up from the ground, her face twisted into a similar expression of outrage.
Geun’s mother was screaming as she was being manhandled away from Geun, until one of the men dragging her off planted a gloved hand over her mouth. She was clutching the necklace the shaman made; Guen’s aunt tore the glowing amulet from her hand, the metal chain snapping as she violently yanked it away, and said, "You brought my brother’s bastard back to us, and for that you have my gratitude, but you have no place here."
Geun shrieked for his mother, his voice adult, his emotions childish. His panic and pain as his older cousins dragged his mother down the driveway was just as real and raw as it had been when he was a boy. He tried to chase her, but his aunt now had both her hands clamped around his wrists. She looped an arm around his neck, cupped his forehead with her hand, pressed a hand against his chest; he leaned forward and felt himself being pulled back, and then the memory cut again.
Lyubov sadly said, “You were warned.”
Geun was sobbing. The blindfold was getting soaked through, and he was helpless all over again.
She softly said, «We all have pain. It touches everything, infiltrates each memory, provides the common thread to the human experience.»
He wasn’t hearing her funny Osakan accent, and he wasn’t working at understanding the Japanese. She wasn’t actually speaking. She said, «I have a hotline to your head, of course I’m not going to bother with language when I want to genuinely communicate.»
“Stop this.”
«I can’t. I have a duty; people I love.»
“Please,” he sobbed.
He was fourteen years old, and he was sobbing again; pleading with his aunt. “Please, Auntie,” he sobbed.
She ignored him and continued working, pushing him into a reclining medical examination chair, her hands on his chest and head. Her husband, his uncle, started binding him to it.
As they worked, she said, "The boy will be most useful as a soldier anyway. His blood will need the extra capacity the ritual grants, in light of his," she paused for emphasis, "mixed heritage."
"Dear wife, you’ll be taking away his ability to be a proper man."
Auntie said, "Doesn’t need it. His duty is always going to be as one of our soldiers; unsuited for anything else."
"It is your choice to make," his uncle unenthusiastically said.
Lyubov’s discomfort spiked as they started sticking hot needles into Geun, his body thrashing under her hands as he relived the trauma. She skipped her probe through Geun’s memory, leaving him mentally reeling as they whiplashed through the two most prominent adults in his teenage life burning ritual scars into him: etching the bones of a spell into Geun’s flesh as they prepared to do even worse.
The skipping stone of Lyubov’s memory probe splashed into a pool of emotion. Geun’s uncle picked up a set of tools made for crushing testes, emasculators intended for gelding sheep. In that moment Geun and Lyubov both felt horror, and the memory died as Lyubov stopped forcing him to relive that torment.
He could feel the tension in her heart as she pulled her hand away and broke contact with him.
Geun’s heart was racing. He felt emotionally numb. His scars were screaming in remembered pain and his blindfold was wet with tears. He took a deep breath and tried to get himself under control. Lyubov had her explanation, ugly as it was.
He could hear her rustle in the room, hear her sniffle as she got her emotions under control. Finally Lyubov said aloud, “That’s- those horrible rituals aren’t anything anyone should be forced into. But it did do what they wanted it to do. Your bloodline’s empowered by denying you the ability to pass it along. It’s the ‘safest’ sort of soul surgery. No wonder you didn’t read as normal to me.”
Was that a touch of sympathy in her voice? He decided to take a risk and asked, “Isn’t that enough? Can't you just stop here?”