The first sensation was smoke.
Not the clean, remembered kind not a barbecue or a winter stove but thick,
structural smoke, the smell of a building consuming itself from the inside out. Han
Jaehyun had spent eleven years walking through structures on the edge of failure. He
knew what it sounded like when wood stopped burning and started surrendering a
lower, more patient sound, full of commitment.
Then came the other problem.
He was lying in hay. His hands the hands he could see when he raised them
against the orange glow climbing up the wall were small and dark knuckled and
belonged to someone else. The palms were calloused in patterns he didn't recognize.
The nails were broken. There was dried blood matting the hair above his left ear, and
when he pressed his fingers there, a white bolt of pain shot straight through his vision.
Someone had cracked this skull recently. Very recently.
He lay there for perhaps three seconds an eternity, given the fire and ran
through what he knew. He was dead. He had been dead. The parking structure on
Mapodaero had dropped six floors onto two while he was on level four with his
clipboard and his sinking certainty that the engineer of record had missed something
critical in the shear wall calculations. The last sensation had been vibration: a
frequency so low it registered in the chest before the ears, and then the floor had
simply stopped being a floor.
And now he was here.
He did not panic. Panic was an inefficient response to structural failure.
He rolled to his knees. The hay loft was a ten by twelve space above what
appeared to be an inn's stable, and the fire was eating upward through the floorboards
from below the feed storage, probably, dry tinder packed since summer. He had maybe
two minutes before the loft floor failed. The opening he'd come up through was already
orange. There was a single window shutter on the far wall.
He moved.
The body moved badly. Malnourished he could feel it in the way his legs shook
when he stood, in the way his vision grayed at the edges from the effort of simply
rising. Whoever this had been, they had not eaten properly in weeks. There was also a
deep, specific ache in the ribs on his left side: old bruising, recent enough to still be
angry about existing.
The shutter opened outward. Below was a drop of roughly four meters onto a
stone paved courtyard. A meter to the left, a water trough.
He aimed for the trough.
He hit the edge of it with his right shoulder instead of centermass, which sent
him rolling across the yard instead of into the water, which probably saved an ankle
but guaranteed he'd be feeling the shoulder for days. He lay on the cold stone and
breathed and assessed.
The inn the Crooked Pine, said the wooden sign swinging crookedly above the
entrance gate, half its characters worn away by years was not simply on fire. There
were men in the courtyard. Four that he could see, in rough working clothes, moving
with a purposeful economy that civilian people rarely had. The two near the inn's main
door were positioned to prevent exit, not to help with anything. One man stood with
his back to the trough, watching the door. The light was bad but clear enough to show
the brand on the back of his right hand: a coiled serpent, black against skin.
Inside the inn, someone was screaming.
Jaehyun pressed himself flat against the trough and thought.
He had no weapons. He had a body that could barely stand. He did not know
these people, could not protect them, and had no guarantee that entering the burning
building would help rather than add one more body to the count. He was also not
going to stay in this courtyard and die a second time in the same week.
The stable wall ran along the east side of the courtyard. Beyond it darkness,
mountain slope, pine trees, the cold smell of air coming down from higher elevation.
There was a gap between the stable and the outer wall, barely a shoulder's width.
He moved for it. Low, using the trough and then the stable wall as cover.
He made the gap. He pushed through into the dark on the other side.
Behind him, the Crooked Pine burned.
He climbed.