3Ep.. The Doctored Line

It was nearly midnight.

The lantern's yellow pool had thinned noticeably since two hours ago. Jiwon kept measuring the light as it dwindled. Her habit of sorting the world into what she could control and what she couldn't kept spinning uselessly tonight. All she could count were the things running out. The lantern, the water bottle, her phone battery. She woke the screen: twenty-three percent. Nine hours until nine in the morning, and that was everything she held.

There was only the one bottle, the one Dohyun had set on her desk earlier. Half of it was gone. That half was the result of the two of them taking turns, a sip each, each nudging the other to drink more.

"We should save the lantern," Jiwon said. "Will it last till morning?"

"It'll last," Dohyun said, perched on the corner of his desk, watching the lantern flame. "Lower the wick and it goes longer. Staying up all night — that's something I'm good at."

It wasn't a joke in his tone. It was just the remark of a man who had known a lot of nights. Instead of answering, Jiwon turned the lantern down a notch. The circle of light shrank another handspan. Beyond it was full darkness now, and the partitions lay sunken in it, formless.

Just then the phone buzzed briefly on the desk.

Jiwon flinched. Since the blackout, the signal had been flickering — a single bar that came and died. The downpour must have been hammering some cell tower somewhere. She saw the name on the screen and her hand paused.

Park Seonyeong.

An assistant manager in HR. The one who had compiled this list at the working level. Not a call that should come at this hour. Jiwon glanced once toward Dohyun, then stepped a few paces back from the lantern into the darkness behind a partition. When she pressed answer, static poured out first.

"…Team leader?" Seonyeong's voice broke up as if soaked through. "Can you… can you talk?"

"Seonyeong. What is it, at this hour?"

"I… I heard from the security guard that you're still in the building. Are you all right? The water there right now, it's—"

"I'm fine. I'll leave when the water goes down in the morning. Is that what you called about?"

For a moment only static flowed. Jiwon heard Seonyeong steadying her breath. It was the silence of someone who hadn't decided what to say.

"I… I shouldn't be saying this." The ends of Seonyeong's words kept sinking downward. "That thing tomorrow… the final version. It's different from the draft you submitted."

"Different how?"

"In the draft I put together, there was… a different person in that spot. But in the final version that came down from the director's office… it had been changed to Manager Lee Dohyun. It's a part the director… touched himself."

Jiwon's fingertips went rigid against the edge of the partition.

That name at the very bottom of the list. The name she hadn't been able to look away from for days. She had believed it was a name she herself had cut. Because it was her list, the one she had submitted. But Dohyun had never been in that spot to begin with.

"…You're sure." Her voice came out low. So it wouldn't carry across the dark to Dohyun, seated by the lantern.

"It passed through my hands. I saw it," Seonyeong rushed on. "Team leader, please — keep it secret that I told you this. If this gets out, I'm fired. Really. I just… I thought you should know."

"Seonyeong—"

The signal died. The static cut off abruptly, and the call-ended screen glowed blue in the dark. Jiwon stood for a long while, her face washed in that blue light. Calling back would be pointless; the signal wouldn't hold. The battery was down to twenty-one percent now.

Her own name, all three characters of it, was stamped in the approval field. That was fact. Whether or not the director had tampered with that spot, it was she who had signed off on posting that final version at nine in the morning.

Dohyun's name landing on this list wasn't restructuring. Someone above had dug the spot and shoved him into it — she had only just learned that. And yet the fact lightened nothing in her. If anything, it pressed harder on her back. Because now she knew. If she knew and still posted that list at nine in the morning, the hand pushing him off the cliff would still be hers.

And separate from this night's cliff, there was another weight that had lain sunk for three years. Even if it was Director Kang who had dug this spot, that and what happened three years ago were different matters. That old debt was not light enough to be thinned by a single phone call. The three years' worth of guilt she carried toward Dohyun was still, wholly, hers.

Why. Why did it have to be Lee Dohyun.

The question was not a new one. It had been sunk inside her since three years ago.

Three years ago, this company still had no red emergency lights.

Late in the evening, the meeting-room fluorescents burned white, and beyond the window the city was still alive with light. The Jiwon of that time wore her hair a handspan longer than now, and her eyes held an edge instead of fatigue. A thirty-two-year-old planning team leader. She was steering the first project the company had ever pushed on a large scale.

"It'll be done within the quarter." Jiwon used to say that in front of Director Kang. Back then she was a person for whom little was impossible.

Dohyun sat beside her. A face not yet branded by anything, anywhere. He laughed easily, and even after an all-nighter the corners of his eyes didn't droop lonely the way they did now. When Jiwon drew the big picture, Dohyun made the numbers beneath it fit. The two of them worked in step often, without a word.

The first crack showed when the subcontractor list changed.

"Cut the unit price another fifteen percent from here." Across the meeting table, Director Kang adjusted his glasses. He smiled, but his eyes did not. "And the delivery — move it up a month. That's the picture drawn from above."

"Director." Dohyun lifted the documents. His voice was courteous but did not retreat. "At this price, the current vendor can't meet the material grade. And the structural review, in a month, can't—"

"Manager Lee." Director Kang cut Dohyun off gently. The gentleness made it colder. "The picture you draw is your picture. The picture drawn from above, those above will answer for. Team leader — what do you think?"

His gaze shifted to Jiwon.

Jiwon knew, at that moment, that Dohyun's misgivings were right. Anyone who understood numbers would have seen the strain. And yet she met Director Kang's eyes, and she wanted to win, right there.

"We'll make it fit," Jiwon said. "We'll find a way."

Dohyun looked at her. Not a reproachful look. Only a little startled, and a little tired. He said no more. That yielding — that it was the same as the retreat, three years later, when he would set down a water bottle in a sealed room and turn away — the Jiwon of that time did not know.

That night the two of them stayed late, redrawing the design to fit the lowered price. It was the work of forcing numbers that had no business adding up. Dohyun held out a coffee, and Jiwon didn't take it. Beyond the window, the city's lights went out one by one.

That somewhere in that overreaching picture the mistake that would collapse everything three years later had already been planted as a seed — neither of them knew.

When she came back to the lantern, Dohyun was perched beside the box again.

That box, half-packed. Jiwon could no longer pretend not to see it. The spot the director had tampered with, the name that had never been his to begin with, and yet the belongings packed away sometime before. The pieces rolled around in her hand, misaligned.

"Was the call all right?" Dohyun asked. Not prying — just a remark offered.

"…Yes. Work." Jiwon picked up the water bottle and fidgeted with the cap. She didn't open it.

Dohyun asked nothing more. That indifference felt like consideration now, and that made it harder to bear.

Jiwon looked at him. For the first time in three years, she looked at his face head-on, and long. In the lantern light he was composed. It was the face of a man who knew nothing — not that his name had been slotted in from above, not the list that would be posted come morning. At least, that was how it looked.

She had to ask. Why he had packed his things ahead of time. What, since that night three years ago, had made him so quiet. And perhaps, even the thing she herself had swallowed for so long.

Jiwon opened her mouth.

"Manager Lee."

Dohyun lifted his eyes from the lantern and looked at her. From that narrow border of light, neither red nor yellow.