From the next morning onward, Min-Jae began going to church every day.
Not because he had suddenly become devout.
If anything, faith sat uneasily inside him now, like a language he had once spoken fluently and then abandoned for too many years. He still knew the shape of prayer. Still knew when to bow his head, when to cross himself, when to kneel. But belief was harder. Belief had been damaged by too much history, too much compromise, too many nights spent translating orders that should have made heaven close its doors against him.
And yet each evening, when his work at the administration ended, he found himself walking to the small Catholic chapel tucked between older stone buildings near the western quarter.
The church was modest compared to the grand cathedrals built for men who wished to be seen praying. But Min-Jae preferred it for exactly that reason. It smelled faintly of wax and old wood and incense that had seeped so deeply into the walls it would probably remain there long after all of them were dead. Candles flickered beneath the statues of saints, their tiny flames trembling each time the door opened and let in a draft.
He knelt in the back pew where the shadows were thickest.
At first he did not know what to say.
He had spent so long speaking only what was useful that the thought of saying something honest, even to God, felt unnatural.
So for the first two days he said almost nothing.
On the third day, he bowed his head and whispered, "Keep her alive."
By the fourth, the prayer had changed.
"If there is a price for what I have done, let me pay it before she does."
By the fifth, he was no longer certain whether he was praying or confessing.
Because the truth was uglier than devotion.
The truth was that he had begun measuring his entire existence against one impossible desire: that So-Eun might live, even if history refused to grant him anything else.
On the sixth day, rain struck softly against the chapel windows, and Min-Jae sat alone in the last pew long after the priest had finished evening prayers.
The sanctuary was nearly empty. Candlelight trembled over the saints' faces. Somewhere beyond the confessional, a floorboard creaked.
Min-Jae looked toward the altar and spoke under his breath.
"I do not know if I still have the right to ask anything of You."
His voice sounded foreign in the silence.
"I have served men I should have despised. I have carried out orders I told myself were small enough not to matter. I have stood beside cruelty and called it survival because I lacked the courage to call it what it was."
His hands clenched loosely together.
"But if mercy still exists in this place," he whispered, "then let it find her before it finds me."
His throat tightened.
"I am willing to become whatever she needs. A liar. A thief. A traitor. Her accomplice. Her shield. If I must crawl through every office in this city and stain my hands with every secret the Japanese keep, then fine. Let it be done."
He closed his eyes.
"I'm willing to become her servant if that is what it takes. So use me. Use me however You must. Just do not let me arrive too late."
The candle flames trembled again, and Min-Jae sat there with his head bowed, breathing like a man trying very hard not to break in a holy place.
——————
It happened three days before the mission.
Hae-Wan had barely cleared the market road when Min-Jae saw the plainclothes police turn after him.
There were four of them. Not soldiers. Worse. Men trained to look ordinary while doing the empire's dirtiest work.
Min-Jae was stepping out of the records office with a satchel of copied notes hidden beneath ordinary files when he caught sight of them from across the street. Hae-Wan had his hat pulled low and was moving at a measured pace, but Min-Jae saw the subtle shift in his shoulders, the instant of awareness, the calculation, the knowledge that he had been noticed.
Min-Jae did not hesitate.
He crossed the street before good sense could stop him.
"Hae-Wan!" he called sharply, loud enough to carry.
Hae-Wan turned with perfect irritation, as if the interruption offended him.
Min-Jae reached him and caught his arm like an impatient acquaintance. "There you are. Do you intend to keep the district office waiting all afternoon?"
The police slowed.
Hae-Wan stared at him. For half a second, the urge to punch him was visible in his eyes. Then he understood.
He lowered his head in a curt bow. "My apologies, sir. I was delayed."
Min-Jae turned deliberately so the plainclothes officers could see the interpreter badge at his chest.
"Come," he said coldly. "You can explain yourself on the way."
The policemen stopped a few paces off. One of them frowned.
"Is there a problem?" Min-Jae asked, already summoning the clipped arrogance he reserved for Japanese offices.
The oldest of the four bowed slightly. "No, sir. We believed we were following someone else."
"Then I suggest," Min-Jae replied, "that you become more competent before you start tailing men attached to administrative work."
The rebuke landed.
No one wanted trouble with the bureaucracy unless necessary. Not when paperwork could destroy a career more quietly than a blade.
The men muttered apologies and backed off.
Min-Jae did not breathe properly until they had turned the corner.
Only then did he release Hae-Wan's arm and drag him into the narrow passage between a pharmacy and a shuttered tea shop.
Hae-Wan rounded on him immediately.
"Are you insane?"
"Yes," Min-Jae snapped. "And so are you, if you keep walking through the market with half the police force at your back."
Hae-Wan stared at him, chest rising and falling hard.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Hae-Wan let out a short, incredulous laugh and leaned back against the wall.
"You really have changed."
"No," Min-Jae said. "I simply ran out of ways to pretend I hadn't."
That silenced them both.
The alley smelled of damp brick and medicinal herbs drifting from the pharmacy. Somewhere close by, a woman shouted at a child to come inside before rain started again.
Hae-Wan looked at him for a long moment.
Then, more quietly than before, he said, "You should have stayed away from this."
Min-Jae gave a tired smile with no humor in it. "That would have required me to stop loving her."
Hae-Wan's expression shifted, somewhere between sympathy and resignation.
"Love makes men foolish."
"Then I am beyond saving."
Hae-Wan studied him, then reached into his coat and pulled out a folded scrap of paper.
"Patrol adjustment," he said. "Second checkpoint moved twenty minutes earlier. So-Eun needs to know."
Min-Jae took it.
Their fingers brushed. It felt, absurdly, like the remnant of another life, two boys once standing barefoot by a river, swearing they would always choose the same side when they grew older.
Hae-Wan looked away first.
"Try not to die before the mission," he muttered.
Min-Jae almost smiled. "You first."
Hae-Wan snorted and disappeared into the alley's mouth.
Min-Jae stood there alone for a moment, the paper hidden in his palm, and understood with terrifying clarity that there was no longer any path back.
Not to the administration.
Not to safety.
Not to the man he had been before Kim So-Eun walked into his life and taught him that survival without conviction was only another kind of surrender.
And somewhere deep in his bones, the dread remained:
the mission was coming,
So-Eun was keeping something from him,
and history had already begun to gather its hands around all of them.