2Ep.. Eight Hours, and Three Years Ago

The lantern light wavered once.

Do-hyun crouched in front of it and twisted the base of the lantern open. He pulled out one of the batteries, rolled it across his palm, then turned it around and slotted it back in. The light settled back into place, pooling yellow. It was the motion of someone who had done this many times, sorting by fingertip what was dead from what still had life left in it.

"Two spares left." He gave the two batteries a little shake to show her. "If we're careful, they'll hold out till morning."

Ji-won looked down at her own phone. At the top of the screen, the battery number and the signal bars. The number was somewhere in the sixties; a single bar flickered in and out. The downpour must have been hammering a cell tower somewhere. A text she'd sent earlier was still stuck on 'Sending.' No reply had come.

"There's no signal," Ji-won said.

"When the lower floors flood, the repeater up here dies right along with them. It's a toss-up whether it comes back before the rain stops." Do-hyun leaned his back against the wall and sat down. Between him and Ji-won was the distance of one desk with one lantern set on it—a distance he neither closed nor widened any further. "The fire department's already up to its neck pumping out the lower floors. And it's not like we're somewhere dangerous."

Eight hours. Ji-won counted the number over again in her head. One bottle of water, a phone at sixty-something percent, two batteries. The doors out were either underwater or sealed off by shutters, and inside, the man she'd decided to cut sat with his back against the wall. Her habit of sorting what she could control from what she couldn't simply refused to work this time.

On the desk sat the bottle of water he'd set down earlier. Ji-won hadn't touched it again since taking that one sip.

"You're not drinking?" Do-hyun asked.

"I'm not thirsty yet."

"We're going to be up all night, so it's better to sip a little now. Drink it all at once and it's gone in no time." He paused a moment, then added, as if it were nothing, "Me, I'm used to nights like this."

Nights like this. Ji-won's gaze slid, without her meaning it to, across the lantern light. He had always been the one who stayed till the end. Not just tonight—for three years straight.

And that thought dragged her backward.

Same floor, a different night. Back then it wasn't red emergency lights but the ceiling fluorescents washing the whole floor white, and at every desk facing a deadline a lamp burned tungsten-warm, each one making its own small pool of light. A late night, but a night with the lights still alive. Ji-won's hair was a little longer then, covering the nape of her neck, and the shadows had not yet settled under her eyes.

The Ji-won of back then had ambition. She didn't think that was anything to be ashamed of. That project was the first the company had handed to her whole, and she meant to prove herself with it, under her own name. One of the few stretches when pulling an all-nighter wasn't hard but a pleasure.

That night, too, Ji-won had stayed till the end. So she'd believed. Past midnight, as she was closing her files, a single lamp was still on at the far end of the floor.

"Is someone still here?" Ji-won called.

A head rose above the partition. A junior staffer, not long with the company. She'd known his name, but that was the first time she'd really looked at his face. Lee Do-hyun. Back then his face wasn't steeped in exhaustion the way it was now. The corners of his eyes folded warm when he smiled, and no loneliness had yet seeped into the edges of that smile.

"I was going over the delivery spec sheet," Do-hyun said, pointing at his monitor. "The subcontractor drawings that came in this afternoon don't match the contract spec in one place. A thickness value was entered differently in one spot."

Ji-won walked over to him. The number on the screen was one she, too, would have passed right over. A single digit after the decimal. A place no one would have looked.

"Are you sure this is wrong?"

"I ran the cross-section calculation again, and if the order goes out like this it'll get flagged later in the load review. Right now it's just one drawing to fix." Do-hyun didn't say it as if boasting. His tone said only that it had caught his eye because he'd happened to stay late. "I was watching to see if you were leaving so I could tell you."

Ji-won remembered that night for a long time. Not for some brilliant result, but for a man who'd held onto a single decimal past midnight. A man who, with no one asking him to, had quietly picked up someone else's mistake. If she was going to build this whole thing under her own name, that was exactly the kind of hand she needed.

"Do-hyun," Ji-won said. "From now on, if something like that catches your eye, come straight to me. Night or dawn, doesn't matter."

Do-hyun looked at her, startled for a moment. Then he smiled. There was no shadow in the smile that day.

"Then you'd have to leave before I do, ma'am."

Ji-won let out a small laugh. That was the kind of time it was. When they competed over who stayed till the end, and that wasn't clinging but trust.

The lantern light was in front of her eyes again. A narrow yellow pool. Beyond it, three years older, Do-hyun sat with his back against the wall, a half-packed box at his feet.

Ji-won was thirsty. This time she picked the bottle back up and swallowed a mouthful. It was lukewarm.

"…That drawing, back then." The words left Ji-won before she meant them to. "The one you caught at night."

Do-hyun raised his head. That he remembered—his eyes said it first.

"The thickness value," Do-hyun said, finishing it for her.

"If you hadn't caught it, the order would've gone out just like that."

"And if it had, it had." Do-hyun was even about it. It was the tone of a man who left things past where they lay. "Back then everyone worked in sync."

Back then. Those two words hung a long while in the dark of the floor. Ji-won knew what came after them. That now was not then. How she'd ended up putting his name at the bottom of the list, where to even begin explaining that three-year gap—she didn't know. And part of her didn't want to know.

"Ma'am." Do-hyun looked at her across the lantern. "You're not asking the thing you want to ask."

Ji-won's fingertips went still on the bottle cap.

"Ask what."

"Anything." He didn't press. As always, he stopped one step short. "It's a long night."

Ji-won couldn't answer. Somewhere between what she ought to ask and what she ought not to ask sat the box at his feet. And a list no one yet knew about. She was pretending not to see either one.

Just then, the phone buzzed briefly on the desk.

Ji-won turned the screen to look. For an instant the signal bars caught at two. Through that gap, a single notification had barely managed to push its way in. One missed call. Reading the caller's name, Ji-won held her breath for a moment.

HR—Park Seon-yeong.

It was past eleven at night. There was no reason for Seon-yeong to be calling her at this hour. At least, there never had been until now.

As she went to call back, the two bars dropped back to one, then to none. It cut off before the ringtone had even begun. The words 'Call Failed' on the screen lingered, under the red emergency light, for an unusually long time.