Chapter 199

“Baekgyeong.”

“Yeah?”

Baekgyeong was filling the grid in the sand with Hangul consonants and English letters one by one. It looked like a computer keyboard transplanted onto the riverbank.

“I... I think I know the answer to the uppercase card.”

At that, Baekgyeong finally raised his head toward Siron.

“What is it?”

“T.”

“T? An initial of what?”

“Tilda Swinton. The actress.”

“She’s famous?”

“Yeah.”

Baekgyeong shook his head, clearly clueless, and quickly scribbled a “T” in the sand.

“What’s the title of the movie?”

Siron hesitated for a moment, then reluctantly answered.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Baekgyeong gave a short laugh.

“Kevin? Sounds like a Christmas movie.”

Realizing Baekgyeong had thought of Home Alone, Siron gave an awkward smile.

“Well... I guess they both have troublemaking sons in common.”

Like Home Alone, We Need to Talk About Kevin also featured a mother troubled by her mischievous son. But while the former was a cheerful story of a boy left home alone over Christmas who cleverly defeats burglars, the latter was a grim tale about a son who slaughtered his father, younger sister, and classmates. Tilda Swinton gave a searing performance as the mother, trapped in guilt, terror, and confusion.

“Is it a good movie?”

“It’s just okay.”

Unfazed by Siron’s lukewarm reply, Baekgyeong went back to finishing his makeshift keyboard in the sand, letters in both Korean and English.

“I don’t think the answer is an English word.”

“You mean it’s Korean?” Siron said, gazing down at the sand.

Baekgyeong nodded, resting his chin on one hand propped against his knee, and with the other hand he scratched Hangul characters beneath the alphabet.

a h o f t k d w T ? ? ㅁ ㅗ ㅐ ㄹ � ㅏ ㅇ ㅈ ㅆ ? ?

After staring at the scrawled letters for some time, the two of them finally solved the riddle.

잘못ᅟᅢᆻㅇ

Baekgyeong stared at the crooked letters in silence, then muttered quietly to himself, as if confessing.

“I was wrong.”

“Yeah.”

“...That was easy.”

He let out a bitter laugh, hollow and tired.

“If the missing letters are ‘ㅎ’ and ‘ㅓ,’ then the unanswered quiz solutions must be g and j.”

Baekgyeong’s eyes narrowed as he looked down at the word, as if staring at a foreign, difficult term—or perhaps as if he understood but refused to accept it. Beads of water rolled down from his forehead, clinging to his wet eyelashes and glittering in the sunlight. He rubbed his face with his palm as if to shake the moisture off, then dragged the stick through the sand, erasing the word.

He flung the stick away in irritation and swam back into the river.

Siron looked at the messy, zigzagging lines left in the sand and whispered softly, careful not to let Baekgyeong hear:

“I was wrong.”

The password Choi Baekhee had left her son as an inheritance was I was wrong. Out of the eleven cards, Siron had managed to guess the content of only two.

PS. Your devotion to Yoon Siron gave me many thoughts. Looking back, I realized I still don’t know what you like. Using control as an excuse, I always chose only the things you hated.

PS. I felt like she was acting me, acting my life. Realizing I wasn’t the only one who felt that way was comforting. It freed me from guilt.

Perhaps all eleven cards were records of penance for the wrongs she had done to her son. Then “I was wrong” might have been the truest will she left behind.

Siron turned over the movie’s story again in his mind, wondering what part of it Choi Baekhee had empathized with.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the protagonist played by Tilda Swinton had become a mother through an unintended pregnancy. Throughout Kevin’s childhood, she never felt maternal love for him, and Kevin instinctively sensed it. Whether it was because hurting his mother was the only way he felt a connection, or simply his innate nature, Kevin used a crossbow given by his father to kill his entire family except for his mother, then locked his classmates in the gym and massacred them.

Branded “the monster’s mother,” she endured ostracism from the town, her house and car vandalized with red paint, and assaults in the street, yet she bore it all in silence.

You didn’t have to be this brutally honest.

Siron felt a pang of resentment toward the already-dead Choi Baekhee. By identifying herself with that woman, she had confessed to Baekgyeong that she had never felt maternal love for him, that she was sorry for not being able to love him—that she had wronged him.

“Good thing Baekgyeong hasn’t seen the movie.”

If he had, it would have felt like being shot through the heart with an arrow.

“What’s good?”

Siron flinched and spun around. With the sun at his back, Isaac stood there staring down at him. His gaze seemed to cut straight into Siron’s deepest thoughts, and Siron blurted defensively:

“Y-you should make some noise when you walk.”

“Your shadow would have fallen in front of you. Isn’t that noise enough?”

Isaac stooped, scooped up a handful of fine sand, and rubbed it over his hands like wiping off grease.

“Did you fix the car?”

“A temporary fix, but it’ll last to the airport.”

He answered as he stripped his clothes off, piece by piece. Finally naked, he stepped into the river, washing away his sweat in the cold water. Siron watched in silence as the glittering ripples ran over Isaac’s tanned body, crisscrossed with the scars of bullet wounds, knife wounds, healed injuries etched deep into his bare skin.

Baekgyeong glared at Isaac’s naked body with distaste and pulled away, swimming upstream. Once a slender figure with graceful lines, Baekgyeong had grown taller and broader after becoming an alpha, his wide swimmer’s shoulders, long arms, and narrow waist forming a balanced, inverted-triangle physique.

Siron couldn’t tear his eyes away from the two naked men. He thought that if he were a camera director, he would have zoomed in on the contours of their bodies, on their wet faces and bare flesh in the water.

I’m thirsty.

Instead of cooling, heat welled up inside him at the erotic charge of their bodies. Siron gazed blankly, dreamlike, at the two men bathing, until Baekgyeong noticed his persistent stare. Swimming over, he flicked water lightly at Siron.

“Close your mouth, you’re about to drool.”

Siron shot him a sharp glare, then abruptly dropped his eyes, his expression darkening. Baekgyeong’s face grew serious in turn as he asked, hesitant:

“Want a closer look?”

“...Of what?”

“My body. Isn’t that why you were staring?”

He grinned wickedly and started to climb out of the water to stand in front of Siron. But before he could, his body was yanked backward, plunging into the river. Seizing the chance, Isaac snatched up his discarded clothes and Siron both in one motion. By the time Baekgyeong clawed his way up from the water, gasping, Siron was already carried off in Isaac’s arms.

Siron struggled briefly in Isaac’s grip, then went limp, giving up. Watching them retreat, Baekgyeong felt himself sink into a pit of despair. It was unbearable—Yoon Siron, who had always been his without question, now unable to focus on him because of Isaac.

“Fuck, this feels like shit.”

But that wasn’t the only reason. It was also that the one thing his mother had left him as her will was the words I was wrong. He couldn’t bring himself to accept it. The woman who had always driven him and ignored him without wavering had, with death in mind, left those words behind. The realization that his long-forgotten past had remained lodged in her heart like a stone unsettled him, stabbing coldly at his chest.

After their meal, the three of them spent their last night in Belzoras separately. Isaac sat at a wooden table, quietly booting up his laptop. Beside it lay a muted, colorless external hard drive. He had found it a few days earlier in the basement safe of Marta Monto’s house.

It might be “data” Marta Monto had left him—or it might be a trap planted by Hybris, anticipating his intrusion. If a GPS tracker were embedded, their current location could be exposed.

Isaac first switched on a portable signal jammer with utmost care, then connected the hard drive to his laptop with a cable.

The screen flickered, and soon a black login window appeared. He recalled a string of phrases he had once shared with Marta, typing slowly but deliberately.

“Access Granted.”

A short, simple message appeared, followed by ten folders.

They contained filtered records of American passengers who had passed through Laseva Airport, the capital of Belzoras, in 2010. Luckily, it wasn’t a trap but data Marta Monto had deliberately left for him. The list had been narrowed to those fitting certain conditions. One name in particular seized Isaac’s attention.

Joseph Elliott.

It was a name Isaac had encountered repeatedly in his investigation between 2007 and 2009 into the ties between Hybris and the Belzoras human trafficking network. And it was also the name he had heard from Sonia, the middle-aged woman who had escaped the island with them.

Marta had clearly fixated on Joseph Elliott as well. His name appeared again and again in the filtered data. Yet she seemed to have failed to pin down exactly who he was. His flight records were meticulously falsified, even the U.S. CBP immigration system filled with fabricated entries. He was likely not a real person at all but a false identity constructed by the organization.

As Isaac sifted through Marta’s files, one entry caught his eye. In Joseph Elliott’s final departure record in 2010, the name listed as his companion was hauntingly familiar.

Inigo Mendoza. The man who had left the country with Joseph Elliott was Sonia’s son.