Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Battery Low, Dignity Lower
Ahn Taeyoon had a rule about the last train: nobody talks, nobody looks, and nobody, God willing, recognises the guy in the black mask.
Which is a shame, he thought, tugging his hood lower, because I’m in excellent form tonight.
It was 11:31 p.m. on a Tuesday in late October. His shift at Mrs. Baek’s bookstore had ended half an hour ago, and he’d spent every minute since carrying the stink of old paper and tangerine peel across the old town to Platform 2. His feet hurt. His throat was scratchy. The mask was medical-grade, matte black, and, he had to admit, doing wonders for his cheekbones. He had a sore-throat excuse for it. He also had a secret second reason: after eight hours of being Ahn Taeyoon, with the waves and the whispers and the phones, the mask was an off switch. The only place in his life where nobody expected a performance.
Which sounds peaceful, he thought. And is. And I hate it.
Because here was the thing about Taeyoon, the thing his friends found tragic and his father found hilarious: he loved being looked at. Loved it. A hundred people going quiet when he walked into a lecture hall? Best part of his week. A girl in a cafeteria whispering his name behind her hand? A tiny, perfect sugar rush. It was a flaw, probably, but it was an honest one, like loving karaoke or being unreasonably good at parallel parking.
So, naturally, the one place he’d chosen to be invisible was the one place that made him feel like a ghost.
Tragic, he told himself. Truly. Somebody should write a song about it.
The platform was nearly empty. A janitor named Gu, according to the tag on his vest, mopped the far wall with the unhurried calm of a monk sweeping a temple. A drunk office guy slept upright against a pillar with his tie knotted round his forehead. Somewhere at the other end, four guys in leather jackets were loudly arguing about whose turn it was to pay for something.
Taeyoon dropped onto the bench, stretched his legs, and put in his earbuds.
The music came on at once: a low, rough, tired voice, singing like someone who’d stopped caring who was listening.
Lumi.
He didn’t know her name. Nobody did. The account had no photo, only a small grey window with the curtains half drawn, and eleven songs that sounded like someone whispering her worst secrets into a pillow. No face. No interviews. No socials.
He’d been listening for fourteen months.
Which is fine, he thought, leaning his head back against the wall. Healthy, even. She doesn’t see me. I don’t see her. Nobody’s performing. It’s the only relationship I’ve ever had where nobody’s playing it nice.
It should be said, for the record, that Ahn Taeyoon was not a sad man.
He was twenty-one. A business junior, a former model, the only son of a man who sat on the international Forbes lists three places above a tech billionaire and four below a guy who owned islands. His family’s house was so big that he’d once lost a cousin in it for forty minutes. He drove whatever he wanted: tonight’s choice, a matte-black Lamborghini, was sleeping peacefully in the campus garage, while its owner took the metro like a peasant, because the streets near the bookshop were narrower than a handshake. He could play tennis against college seniors and win, run a full-court basketball game without losing his breath, and had once, at a charity gala in Macau, dropped a man twice his size in four seconds for the crime of grabbing a waitress. He worked out five days a week. He had, if he was being honest, the kind of body that made people say oh in changing rooms.
His life was, by any measure, ridiculous.
And he’d dated. A lot. Twenty-one girlfriends in six years, each of them lovely, each of them polite, each of them eventually sitting him down with a gentle, apologetic face and saying, you’re so sweet, but I don’t think I really know you.
I’m an open book, he’d always wanted to say. I told you what I ate for breakfast. I told you I loved you on the second date. What else is there to know?
But they’d always been so careful with him. So nice. Like they were handling something expensive.
Maybe that’s the problem, he thought, as the song swelled in his ears. Everyone’s so busy being the perfect girlfriend to “Ahn Taeyoon” that nobody’s actually my girlfriend.
The chorus hit. A huge, lifting thing that stood the hairs up on his arms.
He closed his eyes.
The bench shifted.
He opened one eye.
Somebody had sat down at the other end. A girl. Long grey coat, a guitar case propped between her knees, dark hair tied loosely at the back. She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the tracks, with the faraway, flat expression of someone who’d been awake too long and was fighting for the last of her patience.
Oh, his brain said, in the tone of a man noticing a car crash.
Oh, okay. That’s a face.
He’d been around beautiful people his whole life. Models, actresses, heiresses with skin like polished marble. And this girl, with her hair half falling out of its tie and her eyes tired and her mouth set in a tight, stubborn line, wasn’t doing anything. She wasn’t arranged. She wasn’t lit. She wasn’t trying. She was just sitting on a dirty bench at midnight, and she made every one of them look like a rough sketch.
Don’t stare, he told himself. You’re a gentleman. You’re a professional. You’ve got a mask on, which is, honestly, a significant advantage. Stare at the janitor.
He stared at the janitor.
The janitor looked back with the dead eyes of a man who had seen things.
At the far end of the platform, one of the leather-jacket guys had noticed her too. Taeyoon saw it in the corner of his eye. A nudge, a murmur, a low, slick laugh. Two of the four had stopped arguing. They were looking at the girl in the grey coat the way a cat looks at a bird it hasn’t decided to catch yet.
Huh, he thought, and, without quite deciding to, shifted a little on the bench. Sat up straighter. Rolled his shoulders back.
Not yet. Just, keep an eye.
Then, with no warning, no beep, no polite little notification, his earbuds died.
Both of them. At once. A tiny, pathetic bloop, and the Bluetooth dropped, and his phone, which he’d left on full volume because he was an idiot, took over.
From the little speaker, at full blast, across the entire empty platform, came Lumi.
Not whispering. Belting. It was Last Light, Platform Nine, the one with the enormous chorus, the one he’d saved at three in the morning last April and had never told a single human being about. It rang down the tiled tunnel like he was throwing a concert.
FUCK.
Fuck fuck fuck, what is wrong with this thing, where’s the button, which one is the button.
His thumb slipped. The volume went up.
“Sorry!” he yelped, to the platform in general. “Sorry! Sorry, it’s, my phone, it’s, I’m so, sorry.”
The drunk office guy didn’t even stir. The janitor slowly rotated his mop with the quiet menace of a man composing a complaint. And the four leather-jacket guys at the end of the platform had gone completely quiet, staring down the platform with expressions of dawning, fascinated delight.
Taeyoon finally mashed his thumb on the right side of the screen. The song died mid-breath.
The silence afterwards was brutal.
He risked a glance sideways.
The girl had turned to look at him. And her face wasn’t annoyed, which he’d braced for, or amused, which he’d half hoped for. It was blank. Wide-eyed. Frozen, like she’d been caught stealing something. Her fingers had gone white around the strap of her case.
She hates me, he thought. She hates me, and she’s going to file a complaint with the station.
“It’s a good song,” he blurted, because his mouth had decided to ruin his life. “I mean, it’s not mine, obviously, I didn’t, I’m just a fan. Of her. The singer. I listen to her a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Fourteen months. That’s not a flex, that’s, I should stop talking.”
Stop talking. Ahn Taeyoon, close your mouth. Close your mouth, you absolute traffic cone.
The girl’s lips parted. She stared at him for a very long second, long enough that he started to wonder if she was about to cry or call the police.
Her eyes moved, quickly, over his face. The hood. The mask. The black fabric covering everything below his nose. And there was something in her expression, a flicker of confusion, almost of searching, like she was trying to work out who she was talking to and couldn’t.
She can’t see me, he realised. All she’s got is the eyes.
It was, oddly, a novel sensation. He’d spent six years being recognised before he’d even opened his mouth. Hardly anyone had ever looked at him and not known.
“It’s fine,” she said.
Two words. Quiet. A little rough, a little careful.
And then, before he could say anything else, the PA crackled, the train rolled in with a long, tired groan, and the doors slid open.
She stood so quickly the guitar case clipped the pole. She stepped toward the doors, stopped, turned her head just enough that he caught the edge of her profile, and then walked away, fast and straight, in the opposite direction, toward the stairs.
At the far end of the platform, one of the leather-jacket guys said something low, and two of them laughed.
Taeyoon stood up.
He did it slowly, without drama, the way you stand when you’ve decided something and don’t want to announce it. He settled his bag on one shoulder. He rolled his neck once, left, then right. Then he stepped onto the train, turned in the doorway, and, very calmly, watched the stairs until the grey coat had vanished around the bend and a quick, businesslike clatter of boots told him that nobody had followed.
The four guys had gone back to arguing about who was paying for what.
Okay, he thought. Good. Nothing.
You’re being paranoid.
He dropped into the corner seat, pulled the mask up over the bridge of his nose, and let the train carry him out of the station.
That, he thought, was the most humiliating minute of my life. And I’ve done a lingerie campaign.
He replayed it in his head, in detail, the way people replay car accidents. A lot a lot. A LOT a lot. He groaned, quietly, into his mask.
But under the embarrassment, under the cringe, something else was happening. A small, lopsided, oddly warm sort of thing, like the first sip of tea on a cold day.
She didn’t know who I was.
She didn’t look at me like, like I was somebody. She looked at me like I was a guy with a dying phone.
That’s, honestly, kind of nice.
He realised, with mild surprise, that he was smiling under the mask. Nobody could see it. Nobody could see anything. It was just him, alone in a rattling carriage at midnight, grinning at his own reflection like an idiot.
Weird, he thought.
Not bad. Just, weird.
He took a tangerine out of his bag, peeled it under the mask with a lot of dignity and a little bit of cheating, and ate it slowly, watching the dark slide past the glass.
His chest, he noticed, felt completely normal. No skipping. No fluttering. No cosmic nonsense. He pressed a palm flat against his coat, just to check.
Nope, he thought. Totally fine. Perfectly healthy. Not a thing.
Just a girl on a bench.
He let his head fall back against the window and shut his eyes.
Somewhere in the tunnel, the train rocked round a long, slow curve, and a thought drifted up from the back of his mind, unbidden, quiet, and a little bit sly:
She had a guitar case.
I wonder what she plays.
