Chapter One

Both Ways

Seoul

Chapter One — Cached

They wiped her desk on a Tuesday, eleven days after she died, and Kang Dohyun got there in time to steal the hard drive only because he had been the one who set up her machine in the first place, and he knew that the IT team in this building did things in the order written on a laminated card, and that backup came before disposal, and that for one afternoon Seo Yuna's whole digital life would sit cached on a staging server with a password he had personally chosen eighteen months ago because she had laughed at him for using the same one everywhere.

The password still worked. That was the first thing that broke his heart, and it was not the last.

The official story was clean and the building had already accepted it, the way buildings do. Seo Yuna, twenty-four, junior performance analyst, had sold the team's penalty data to a betting syndicate, been discovered, and — the building lowered its voice here — had not been able to live with the shame. An accident, the report said carefully. A fall, late, by the river, after drinking. The kind of accident that everyone agrees to call an accident so that no one has to say the other word. The data leak was real; the syndicate was real; the timing was damning; and the dead cannot defend themselves, so the disgrace had settled onto her like the dust they were now wiping off her keyboard, and the department had a new junior already, and the world's tournament was three weeks away, and there was no time, there is never any time, to grieve a girl who shamed the team.

Dohyun did not believe it. He wanted to be honest with himself about why. He had hired her. He had argued for her against a hiring committee that wanted someone older, and he had been right, gloriously right, because she was the best young reader of football data he had ever seen, and somewhere in the eighteen months of late nights and shared convenience-store dinners and the thing between them that he had been too much of a coward to name, he had started measuring his days by whether she was in the office. So perhaps he did not believe it because he could not bear to. He was an analyst; he knew about motivated reasoning; he distrusted his own grief.

But he was also an analyst, and the story did not fit the data, and that, in the end, was the thing he could not put down. Yuna did not drink by the river alone. Yuna did not make the kind of mistake the report described. And Yuna, above all, did not sell. He had watched her refuse three job offers that paid double because she wanted to be where the football was real. A person like that does not sell the football. The numbers of her life did not support the conclusion of her death.

So he took the drive home to his apartment in Mapo-gu with the neon of the convenience store across the street bleeding red and blue through his curtains, and he plugged it in, and he started to read her, which is the only resurrection an analyst gets to perform.

It did not take long to find the first thing that was wrong with the official story. It took eleven minutes.

> /yuna/notes/_keep/ — folder created 11 days before death > *(folder hidden from sync. local only. why?)*

She had made a folder the team's servers would never see. A person selling data does not hide a folder from the buyer; she hides it from the people she's afraid of. He opened it.

> readme.txt — last modified 03:14, the night before she died > *Dohyun-sunbae — if you're reading this you already know the password still works, you idiot, you never change it.* > *I need you to look at this the way only you can. Don't trust the story they're going to tell. Read the data, not the obituary.* > *Start with the access logs. I was never selling. I was tracing.* > *I'm sorry I didn't tell you. You'd have tried to help and I couldn't let you near it.* > *— Y*

Dohyun sat in the red-and-blue dark and read it four times, and the grief that came up was not soft. It had edges. Because *if you're reading this* is a sentence a person writes when they are afraid they will not be alive to explain, and a folder hidden from sync is a thing a person builds when she knows someone is watching, and *I was never selling, I was tracing* meant that the story the entire building had swallowed in eleven days was not merely unkind. It was a frame. Someone had built it, deliberately, around a dead girl, and she had known they would, and she had left him a thread.

He opened the access logs, because she had told him to, because she was still, eleven days dead, the smartest person in the room and he had learned long ago to do what she said.

And the access logs said something the official report had not bothered to look at, which was that the penalty data — the thing the syndicate had bought, the thing Yuna had supposedly sold — had been leaking for *four months.* Long before the night they said she sold it. Long before the meeting they said she took.

It had been leaking, quietly, in a slow steady trickle, from a point of access that was not Seo Yuna's desk, and not Seo Yuna's hands, and the moment Dohyun saw where it was actually coming from, the whole shape of the thing tilted, and a girl who had drowned in shame became a girl who had drowned holding someone else's secret, and he understood that he had not come home to grieve her.

He had come home to finish what she started.

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