YeoWoo grinned. Marazul was telling her without telling her that he had something she ought to see, but that he absolutely wasn’t showing her, nor could show her, according to his bond and on pain of death. In which case, there was nothing for it but to play along and see what it was that she needed to see without getting the merman killed.

  “I told you not to hide things from me,” she said coldly, and his head jerked back in surprise. “Take your hands off the table and raise them above your head.”

  Marazul’s eyes met hers, faintly dazed, and then cleared. “There’s nothing here you’re allowed to see,” he said. “It’s just lists and pictures.”

  “That’s my decision to make,” YeoWoo said; yet still, aware of just how much a misstep could cost him, she hesitated. And that hesitation was just long enough for Marazul to speak once again.

  “I heard a story,” he said. He looked down at the hands that covered what was most likely his small tablet computer, and YeoWoo knew in that moment that whatever else he was doing, Marazul had also prepared well enough that he could either destroy or hide whatever information he had on his table with the touch of a finger.

  He wanted something, and if he didn’t get it, he would make sure she didn’t get what he had prepared for her.

  She sniffed a small laugh, losing her previous tension in the realisation that Marazul was still very much looking after himself, as she ought to have expected. She said, “If you wanted something else, you should have asked for it already. I’m not interested in listening to stories. Remove your hands from the table.”

  “There was a girl I heard about,” he said, and he did move his hands, slowly. He didn’t stop talking, however, and the words that dropped from his mouth jarred her to her core. “In the 1920s. A girl who was human but became gumiho.”

  “It’s a common enough story,” YeoWoo said, through the buzz in her teeth. She could have snatched his little tablet away from him, but her hands wouldn’t move.

  “Not very,” said Marazul, and a real smile seemed to flash across his face—wondering, or perhaps just disbelieving. “This girl in particular lived on the south side of the Han river. It was all agriculture there in those days, from what I heard. Parties of dorai would come out of the city for fun and hunting, and they took young men and women with them to turn or to eat, whichever they felt like at the time.”

  YeoWoo tried not to let her teeth show as she said, “I know the history.”

  “This girl lived quietly, keeping her head down and protecting her family,” Marazul said. “She knew that the quickest way to die was to be in the roads and fields after dark, or to push back against what she thought were gangs of Japanese soldiers, so she kept her sisters in the house and shut her ears when there were screams in the dark.”

  “There wasn’t anything to be done,” YeoWoo said roughly, compulsively. “All I could do was look after the people in my own house. And then YeoReum didn’t come home one afternoon—or that night, or the day after.”

  Marazul, as if she hadn’t spoken, said, “She found her youngest sister the next week—or all that was left of her. She and her sister’s fiancé went out to prod the darkness until they found out exactly what was going bump in the dark—then she went to the dorai elders and asked to be turned. They said she could be taken into the number if she joined the young men who were already initiates, and killed her own prey. She survived until the end—hunting criminals and soldiers to feed on their livers and bringing back a piece for the dorai elders to see and confirm—but she didn’t count on the last body being part of a ceremony. She didn’t know it would be someone the dorai chose.”

  YeoWoo mechanically pulled down the cuffs of her jeogori over her wrists. “Don’t talk about it like that,” she said. “It’s not a story. It’s not edifying. It was just bloody and necessary. I wasn’t going to kill him—I told him I wouldn’t.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yes.” The word fell into the silence of the room. “I thought that I’d be able to choose the last victim as well, but they took YeoReum’s fiancé in the final sweep—they thought it would be funny to give him to me. He begged me to kill him.”

  “I didn’t hear that,” Marazul said, looking away. “I heard that you loved him, and that he loved your sister.”

  “He was my brother,” said YeoWoo scornfully. “Of course I loved him! But when she died, the only thing that kept him sane was helping me to get vengeance. He helped me hunt and kill, and he sat with me on the nights I had to eat what I killed, and he was angry all the time. For all I know, he wanted to get caught in the end—I know he didn’t want to live without her. He told me that night that if I didn’t kill him, he’d never forgive me.”

  “So you killed him.”

  “I had to kill him,” YeoWoo said, her lips numb. She had gone over that decision in her head time after time, parsing out every moment to come to some lasting conviction that she’d done the right thing. She had never yet arrived at any satisfactory conclusion, but she did remember the burning necessity of it all—and the burning of YongChul’s blood on her face. “If I hadn’t, all the deaths would have been for nothing, and my sister would still be unavenged.”

  “They said you killed six elders,” Marazul said, in a rather hushed voice. “Their tails—”

  “What else was I supposed to do with their tails than hang them on the temple wall?” YeoWoo said impatiently. “I wanted the last one to know that his days were numbered. He hid from me, but he always knew I was coming.”

  Marazul appeared to think that over in silence, gazing at her. His hands, which had hovered so close to his tablet, now dropped down to the arms of his wheelchair. YeoWoo nearly seized the tablet, sick with recollection and a remnant of that fierce determination that had once burned brightly enough in her to bear her through blood and fire, but refrained with the last of her self-control. If Marazul didn’t trust her, even what she learned today would do her no good—he could and probably would give her away to the den mother with the same kind of quiet cleverness by which he had given YeoWoo a taste of what she needed.

  The silence grew heavy, dragging her back down into memories that she didn’t want to revisit, and YeoWoo managed to surface for long enough to say bitterly, “Did the Steward tell you to check on me?”

  “No,” Marazul said, and again his gaze dropped. He said, speaking down at his hands once again, “The difficult thing about trust is that you’re always most suspicious about the thing you’re most culpable of. People who have betrayed are more likely to suspect that they’ll be betrayed.”

  “It wasn’t betrayal,” YeoWoo said. “Not in the way you’re thinking. I suppose you could say that I betrayed YongChul by not refusing to do what he wanted me to do, but it felt like a worse betrayal to refuse him.”

  A faint smile curled his lips for a moment. “I wasn’t talking about you. You’re not the only one with a past they’d like to forget. I just wanted to know more about you.”

  “Now you know more about me,” YeoWoo said, smiling thinly. “And I know nothing about you. What good does it do either of us?”

  She didn’t expect him to say so honestly, “I wanted to know if you were someone I could trust. I felt that you were, but I didn’t know for sure. Now I do.”

  So she was direct when she asked, “Are you saying that you’re not going to help me?”

  “Of course I’m not going to help you,” he said. “It’s against the terms of my contract. I couldn’t break that even if it wouldn’t be stupid of me to trust you not to do the same thing I couldn’t be trusted not to do.”

  He said so, but he hadn’t put his hands back to cover the tablet. And then, slowly, as she had told him to do earlier, he put his hands on his head.

  “Caught you,” YeoWoo said mechanically, her skin cold. “You shouldn’t have been doing that on my time.”

  “I’m allowed to be in the systems,” he said, and there was a swift, warm smile. “It’s part of my job.”

  “Yes,” said YeoWoo. “And I wonder what you mean by it.”

  “I’m trying to be someone that I was once thought to be,” he said. “And I’m trying to get out of here in time to make it to a local wedding, since I’m here anyway.”

  YeoWoo stared at him, the world sharpening around her as several things came into focus. “You’re connected to the same Pet as the Steward?” She couldn’t help laughing, short and sharp, without humour. “That human girl attaches to everyone and everything. I’ll swear she’s the biggest part of the reason Lord Sero doesn’t kill the Steward—and probably the biggest reason that he wants to do it.”

  Marazul’s smile was lop-sided. “She has that effect on people. You want to be better than you are when you’re around her, but the wanting doesn’t make you capable.”

  “That’s probably why the old man is so intent on getting her into his hands again—that connection to Sero,” YeoWoo muttered, more to herself than to Marazul. “Turn around,” she said to him a moment later. “I’m not going to have the den sister think I’m encouraging you to misbehave if she comes in.”

  That made him smile, too. She saw the warmth of it still in the plumpness of his cheek as he spun his wheelchair to face the corner of the room. It took a moment to pull away from that warmth, away from her still-humming nerves, and focus her gaze on the tablet that Marazul had been concealing when he walked into the room.

  The first thing she saw was a face; beside it, information that included name, age, parentage, and skill level. A linked invoice was attached with a small icon, and when she flicked her finger toward the left, another popped up. YeoWoo forgot everything else in the white-hot knowledge that this—this—was what Peregrine had told her he needed to find and preserve. This was the contract café’s list of contracts who were too important to make it into the main directory for anyone and their Steward to pore over.

  Hot on the scent, YeoWoo flicked a finger across the slick screen to scroll through the files, her mind sharp and bright, and with the scent of blood in her nose. A small thought tickled at her briefly: if the den mother knew how deeply the merman had gotten into their systems—if she knew how close their house of cards was to being threatened by blackmail when the merman closed out his obligations to them, or how much money he had already stolen from them—Marazul would barely live long enough to understand that he had been caught.

  She said aloud, without looking away from the screen, “When you get out of here, you should leave the country—otherwise, that wedding is as likely to be your funeral.”

  There was a small stir of movement over in the corner that YeoWoo ignored. She ignored it when he said, “Are you concerned about me?” too, because she heard the smile in his voice, and she had already decided that she would not attempt to seduce him. There was no time to do so, even if she had wanted to, so she continued to scroll through the profiles, briefly noting names and faces and discounting them as she went.

  There was silence for a few minutes, but YeoWoo didn’t expect she had heard the last from the merman; nor had she.

  “Why are you working so hard to…” Marazul paused, and YeoWoo was well aware that he was trying to find a safe way to express his knowledge of what she was doing so that he would never be obliged to divulge it unless he so wished to do. She wished he would think better of it and let her concentrate on what she was doing. He finished, “…working so hard to bring down institutions?”

  “Because I can,” said YeoWoo, and added impatiently, “because I need something I can get from doing it. I told you that already.”

  Marazul sank into silence for another few moments before he said, “You’re still trying to make me think you’re someone like the Steward. I don’t believe that. You only snarl—you don’t bite.”

  YeoWoo stared at his half-turned head, nonplussed. “I’m saying it because it’s true,” she said. “And because I don’t like lying about things. I’ve killed—you know that—but I’m not…I’m not the Steward.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  “Don’t count on me too much,” she warned him. “I’m not the Steward, but whether or not you believe it, I do bite, and the only reason I started doing anything in this place is because I wanted something out of it.”

  “It’s something you want badly?”

  “Very,” YeoWoo said, with a hint of tooth and blood to her voice.

  Marazul took that without fear; he said softly, “Why don’t you ask me? About just that thing? I won’t help you with that, too.”

  “You’re already—” YeoWoo broke that particular sentence off, aware that it would be pulling together a great many threads she didn’t want pulled together right now. She found herself laughing at the absurdity of it all. “It’s not something that a merman who can neither swim nor walk should be concerning himself with. If you can’t even defend yourself, you shouldn’t be getting into trouble.”

  Marazul turned his face back to the corner, and one hand rubbed at the back of his neck as if he was working through his own thoughts. At last, he said quietly, “Maybe you’ll find out that I’m more than I seem, too.”

  “Maybe I will,” said YeoWoo absently, looking at the scroll bar at the top of the shiny page to see that she was very nearly at the end of the list.

  It was there, third to last, that she found it. The one photograph she had been looking for without realising she had been looking for it. The single card that, if she played it well, could bring down the entire café in a moment—or if not in a moment, at least in a day or two.

  YeoWoo stared at that one photograph, and it seemed to her that the entire world came apart and reformed in an instant.

  “This one sold last month in a batch lot with four others?”

  Marazul huffed out a breath that seemed to be as rueful as it was irritated.

  “All right, I know you can’t tell me,” YeoWoo said crossly. She had spoken aloud mostly to herself; a matter of form. “I’m already looking at the invoice.”

  The photograph she was looking at was the young human girl she had found in Myeongdong a few days ago—less broken, less wary, but somehow still subtly angry—and it bore the name Lee BoRa. YeoWoo’s eyes dropped to the section that listed the seller and saw the name Han SoRa; she heard herself chuckle in dark enjoyment. She had found it.

  The girl she had met in Myeongdong had said that her father sold her, but the incoming invoice bore the mother’s name—a name that YeoWoo had already seen when she and Athelas wheedled the information of who they were really trying to find out of Peregrine. Whatever else BoRa knew, she knew that her father was involved in the world she had been sold into, and she had assumed that her father sold her. The poor kid didn’t realise that her father had been moving heaven and earth to find her again, and that it was her mother who had done the selling.

  YeoWoo grinned to herself. She had told BoRa to take her revenge as best she might, but if the human girl went to her father, she was likely to discover that there was even more to the world than she had once thought. She would also never be sold again, and the father would find himself stuck with a daughter he had tried to keep at a distance. That pleased YeoWoo. It also pleased her to know that even if the world into which the girl had been sold had teeth and claws, the father BoRa thought had sold her had even bigger teeth and claws.

  BoRa would no doubt have other problems to contend with in her new world, but at least she had someone strong and ruthless behind her to sponsor her.

  “That should get things moving,” YeoWoo said to herself, in savage satisfaction.

  She had everything she needed to bring down the contract café, and when she had done so, YeoWoo would have also gained access to the information she needed to reveal to her final quarry.

  She had almost forgotten about Marazul, who asked, “You found something? What’s going to move?”

  YeoWoo, her mind buzzing with possibilities and probabilities that moved too swiftly to follow, had enough presence of mind to say briefly, “I don’t know anything, and there’s nothing happening.”

  “When is the nothing not going to be happening?”

  “Probably tomorrow,” YeoWoo said. That was one thing that was clear enough. She would need time to set things up with Peregrine and Athelas, not to mention time to approach the girl once more, but there was no sense in drawing things out and inviting disaster. “And when nothing is happening, it’s a good thing to make sure you’re somewhere that nothing can happen to you, too. Your room—no, you won’t be able to tell me where that is. This room, then. Come here as though we’ve set up another meeting—come at two o’clock.”

  He nodded—rather numbly, she thought. Marazul, when out of water, was confined to his wheelchair; it wouldn’t be easy for him to get out of the way expeditiously if he was caught unawares. He possibly felt nervous about the entire thing—though YeoWoo was rather certain that she caught the tail-end of a look that was almost assessing. She was aware that Marazul was playing his own game; he was probably hoping that she didn’t discover too much of what he was working on, whether or not he got out of the café.

  By way of reparation for services rendered, she would do him the favour of not digging too deeply into his actions. YeoWoo insensibly tucked the tablet closer to her chest, and found that Marazul had wheeled around and was watching her, his eyes fixed on her face.

  She sharpened her eyes on him. “What? Don’t stare at me; I don’t like it.”

  “I very much want to know what it was you found that made you so happy,” he said. With a rueful smile, he added, “I know you won’t tell me. I just want to know.”