Whap! Jongdae winced, freezing momentarily in the doorway as the sound of impact on flesh echoed into the subdued silence of the conference room. The guard who’d just been struck climbed slowly to his feet, one hand held against a red imprint blooming across his cheekbone. Jongdae eased inside, the door whispering shut behind him as Director Choi stumped down the line of polo-shirted guards, a club of rolled newspaper gripped tightly in one hand. His cane slammed against the floor with every step, beating out a percussive ode to his ire until he reached the end of the line. He glared up at the barrel-chested man standing there rigidly at attention and tapped the commander’s patch over his chest.

“Worthless,” the director spat, and the man’s jaw muscles bulged. Choi raised his cane to indicate the shame-faced cohort. “Sixteen of your men on duty, hundreds of cameras, electronic locks on every door, and you let my patients just… walk out.”

“We didn’t-” the guard commander’s words coughed to a halt, cut off by Choi’s swift jab to his solar plexus.

“Sixteen guards on duty,” Choi repeated as the man doubled over, “and only one of you even laid eyes on my patients.” He prodded another guard with his cane. “What’s Wilson’s status?”

“Still unconscious, sir,” she answered immediately. “But the doctors say he’ll live.”

The director nodded, moving on to a round-faced, owlish man. Choi glared at him for a long minute, eye twitching, then batted his head with his newspaper. “What happened to the alarms?” he demanded as the man cringed, his glasses askew from the slap.

“It wasn’t our fault!”

Choi beat him around the head until he tripped backward over his own feet, falling against his neighbor. “It’s true, sir,” the other guard came to his rescue, holding his colleague upright. “The alarm system triggered properly. We just checked all of the bells on this level— the signal wire was cut.”

The director’s eyebrows drew tight, his scowl darkening even further. “Now you’re claiming there’s a saboteur?”

“There’s no other explanation. We run diagnostics on the system every week. Most of the alarm bells are in heavily trafficked corridors, in full view of our cameras.” The man shifted from one foot to the other, dropping his gaze to the floor, “ It had to be someone with high-level access. The GPS tracking program for the anklets was completely corrupted, too. The chase team has been following a false signal.”

Jongdae barely had time to feel a prickle of alarm before an iron grip clamped down on his neck from behind. The assailant yanked him off-balance and, before he could react, propelled him face-first into the nearest wall. As the white light cleared from his vision, a dull, throbbing ache spread from his nose, accompanied by a warm wetness leaking back into his sinuses. The nosebleed quickly lost significance when sharp, white-hot pain stabbed into his side as his assaulter twisted his arm up into his back.

“He had something to do with it,” Sarai’s voice announced, her small hands tightening on his wrist as he tried to free himself. “Jongdae blindsided me in the parking lot earlier. If he hadn’t interfered, I could have ended this.” Jongdae’s shoulder was screaming in distress from its unnatural position, tingling bursts of electricity shooting down his arm, but Sarai’s grip was unbreakable. He wished he’d hit her harder.

“Let him go,” the director admonished, waving off her claim impatiently. “I’ve had him under constant surveillance since he arrived. It’s not him.”

“How are you so sure?” Sarai wrenched his arm another few centimeters, and Jongdae bit back a groan as he rose onto his tiptoes. “He could be working with a partner! You recruit him out of the blue and less than week later Phoenix wipes out our teams and our patients suddenly stage a jailbreak? Connect the dots!”

Jongdae wished that his actions had actually been part of some intricate, well-planned scheme, but knocking Sarai out had been a spur of the moment decision. She’d had a clear goal, and after holding back these past few days, he’d been overcome with the need to screw her over somehow. Saving someone’s life in the process was just icing. However, like all of his unplanned life choices,while immensely cathartic, that path had quickly taken a downhill turn.

“You’re going to dislocate his arm, Sarai.” Director Choi’s voice took on a warning sharpness. “Release him. Now.”

Sarai released him with a shove, and Jongdae stumbled away from her, clutching his strained shoulder. The analyst/medic--ninja eyed him as he backed away, her nostrils flaring in frustrated anger. An ugly bruise purpled the left side of the woman’s face, and cement dust flecked the knit of her sweater. Jongdae felt only the slightest twinge of remorse for ruining her sweater as he rotated his tweaked shoulder, trying to dispel the tingling numbness in his fingertips.

Choi turned back to the line of guards, and they hastily snapped back to attention. “Which one of you was responsible for monitoring Mr. Kim’s movements?” The line stepped back as one, leaving a short, stocky man standing alone, and he shot a look of betrayal at his colleagues. “The rest of you can go,” Choi said curtly, dismissing the others. “I’ll decide which of you to fire later.”

The disgraced sentinels filed out, shoulders slumped, none of them meeting the panicked eyes of their singled-out comrade. The door swung shut behind the last of them, and Choi planted his finger in the man’s chest, switching to Korean.

“Song, right?You’re NIS, aren’t you? Civil servant, not a contractor?”

Song’s adam’s apple bobbed sharply. “Grade 7.”

“You were recommended for this post,” Choi circled him like a lion. “’Exemplary at his job’ your section chief said. So?”

A sheen of sweat glowed on the luckless guard’s balding head, his collar wilting under Choi’s predatory regard. “S-so?”

“So, did you do your job correctly or not?”

“I-I” Song glanced at Jongdae, the desperation of a drowning man in his eyes,but Jongdae merely shrugged at him. If he was about to be thrown under the bus, at least he’d have company. “There was-was one time…”

The man spluttered as Choi’s fist flew up. “You lost track of your surveillance target and didn’t report it?!”

“I thought…” Song glanced miserably at the door, then clasped his hands, shoulders hunched in anticipation of a newspaper flogging. “I lost him on Level 3. I looked back through every camera feed, but it was like he vanished. It was hours before I found him again. ”

Sarai’s head swiveled, owl-like, her knowing gaze skewering Jongdae where he stood. His shoulder throbbed anew as she mimed snapping him in half.

“You checked the patient rooms?” Choi continued the interrogation.

“He did enter one of the rooms on L3,” the guard admitted, “but he didn’t speak to the patient. I thought he might have entered one of the restricted areas that Dr. Han monitors.”

“He doesn’t have clearance,” Sarai said, still glaring daggers at Jongdae.

“I thought Dr. Han would…” Song fumbled for an excuse, “If he wasn’t supposed to be there…”

“So you failed completely at your only job,” Choi finished for him, and the guard shriveled. “I appreciate your honesty.” He turned his back on him. “Pack your things. You’ll be reassigned shortly to a position better suited to your lack of useful skills.”

As the guard fled from the room, Choi’s narrowed eyes shifted to Jongdae. “So you found Level 4. What did you see?”

Jongdae considered lying, but it would be pointless. It was time to lay his cards on the table and see what kind of game they were actually playing. “I saw what you did to Minseok. And I saw what he could do.”

Choi nodded thoughtfully, tapping his leg with his paper club. “Is that why you attacked Sarai?”

“She was pointing her weapon at an unarmed man,” Jongdae said truthfully. “It was instinct.” And just a tiny bit of payback for the helpless.

“You could have said something,” Sarai hissed. “Instead, you let three carriers for a highly contagious, mind-altering disease back into the general population!”

“They weren’t in the patient records.” Jongdae replied and tapped his temple. “I never forget a face.” Technically true. He’d memorized the details of all of the vivus cases flagged within the last month, but a suspicious three had no pictures and -out names.

“We’re a quarantine facility,” Sarai’s words were all teeth, “We have procedures. If they aren’t staff, you should’ve assumed they were patients—”

“They seemed a lot more like prisoners than patients,” Jongdae shot back. “Explain how blowtorching someone is a way to cure disease, Nurse Frankenstein.”

Sarai started toward him again, her fingers clawed, but Director Choi stepped between them, one hand upraised.

“This won’t solve anything.” He turned to Sarai. “You wanted more people to know about the outliers so we wouldn’t be misunderstood like this,”he reminded her. “You got your wish.”

“I wanted to tell our research team, not the whole world!” Sarai jabbed a finger at Jongdae. “For all we know, he’s the one who’s been leaking intel to Phoenix!”

A leak? Jongdae’s ears lifted curiously. He’d been trailing a certain glittery someone all day, hoping to catch him doing something sneaky, only to find him sprawled out in the intake room next to a half-drowned guard. There was a vanishingly small chance that Baekhyun wasn’t the saboteur, and it didn’t take a great leap of logic to assume he was also the whistling hole in their organization. Yet, Sarai and Choi treated his comings and goings with such indifference, they couldn’t possibly suspect him.

“We both know Jongdae’s not the informant. Calm down.” Choi gave Sarai’s arm a fatherly swat, then rapped Jongdae’s shin with his cane. “Apologize to Sarai,” he ordered. “She was doing her job, and you interfered.”

“Shooting some driver in the face is her job?” Jongdae asked in disbelief, trying to rub away the stinging.

“Yes, actually,” Sarai retorted. “It’s yours too. Read the employee handbook.”

“The patients that escaped have a very rare form of vivus infection,” Choi explained patiently. “We call them outliers, and the full nature of their condition is classified. Within this NIS quarantine facility, only myself, Sarai, and Dr. Han have clearance. In exchange for their organization’s cooperation, select leaders of the militia receive updates on the progress of our research, with, of course, permission of my superiors at the NIS.”

“So, in the parking lot…” Jongdae’s voice trailed off as he remembered his phone. If everything he’d seen here was sanctioned by the Service, anyone who tried to release that video would be hunted and squashed without mercy. Instead of giving them a tool to protect themselves, he’d accidentally given the outliers a backfiring gun.

“What you interrupted in the parking lot was, in fact, a necessary precaution,” Choi said, misinterpreting Jongdae’s sudden silence. “Until we find a suitable treatment, vivus must remain a secret. Most days that means quietly isolating the infected in one of our quarantine facilities so this plague doesn’t spread. Today that meant letting Sarai shoot “some driver” in the forehead so we wouldn’t lose three outliers in one shot. Understand?”

Jongdae didn’t agree. Couldn’t agree. They were asking him to approve of the incarceration and possible execution of people who’d done no wrong, committed no crime. The very idea chafed at the badge pinned on his soul. But. He closed his eyes in resignation. But he did understand. There had been dozens of cases reported this month alone, yet barely any survived long enough to make it to Level 3. How would the body count rise if he went back two months, two years, two decades? He didn’t even want to think about the lives lost indirectly, the unfortunate souls who became collateral damage in a single-celled organism’s fight for survival. Like his brother. He opened his eyes, the sour taste in the back of his throat fading as his resolve firmed. He held out his hand towards Sarai.

“I’m not sorry,” he told her. “I’d do it again.”

Sarai scoffed as she took the handshake, crushing his fingers as she pulled him closer. “The next time we have a problem, come fight me like a man.” If Jongdae were a more honorable person, he would agree to fight fair and he would die promptly during their next argument, his limbs tossed to the four winds. But Jongdae was a practical person, so he pried his hand out of hers, trying not to wince as he vowed to sneak-attack her from behind, always. Straightening, he turned towards Director Choi.

“I’m not one of your minions,” Jongdae told him. “I don’t follow orders blindly, no matter what I signed. If you want me to be a member of your team, I need to know everything, right now.”

Choi sighed his agreement and sank wearily into a seat at the conference table, motioning for the other two to do the same. If he saw Sarai stab Jongdae’s foot with her chair leg, he made no comment. Folding his hands over his cane, he began, “I’ll start with the informant. Here’s what we know.”

“The raid on the motel in Seoul was green-lit because militia believed Phoenix was alone and badly injured. When it failed, the militia leaders blamed us for faulty intel, and I blamed their methods.” Jongdae nodded his understanding; he remembered that particular face-off. “But our analysts picked apart the events of that night, and they all reached the same conclusion- the raid should have been a success. The operation had the benefit of complete surprise and overwhelming manpower. All of the variables had been accounted for.”

“But?” Jongdae found himself leaning forward, and pulled back.

“But Kyungsoo received a text from an unknown sender which sent him back to the motel, and he warned Phoenix.” Choi laced his fingers over his crossed knee. “The operation was already in motion, those few seconds of advance warning would have meant nothing for a normal person, even if they’d had an arsenal hidden inside that room. But with his ability, a few seconds is all Phoenix needed to mount a defense and burn that motel to ash.”

“Since then, “ Sarai continued, “Every time the militia catches so much as a whiff of Phoenix, he vanishes before they even have a chance to deploy. James —from Canada— told me it’s been driving everyone nuts.”

“Someone’s tipping him off,” Jongdae agreed, brow furrowing. “Except… the militia teams have all shipped out, so there’s no way anyone here can eavesdrop on their orders.” An unexpected twist. Unless Baekhyun was hiding a government satellite under his bed, he wasn’t the leak. “There’s also no way to get calls in or out when we’re underneath all of this rock.”

“Cleared staff can make calls through the facility’s network,” Sarai said smugly. “But you aren’t on the list.” Good to know, Jongdae filed that tidbit away for later.

“We can safely assume that the informant is an active member of the militia,” Choi forged on, ignoring their sparring, “and that the militia is aware they’ve been compromised. But finding one person with suspect loyalties in that nest of mercenaries would be like finding a particular grain of sand on a miles-long beach.”

“When you came to my apartment, you said you needed me. Why?” Jongdae asked, his curiosity thoroughly piqued.

“Takes one to know one,” Sarai sniped. Choi shot her a look, and she subsided with a roll of her eyes.

“Until they patch their leak, the militia will always be a step short of catching Phoenix. But if we can predict where Phoenix will go we can get ahead of them, and the informant will never know. The key is Kyungsoo.” The old man smiled wryly as Jongdae’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“They’re together, sure, but how is Kyungsoo the key to all this?” Jongdae asked.

Sarai steepled her fingers on the table. “Over the past few years, my team of analysts developed a psychological profile to anticipate Phoenix’s movements.”

“She’s very proud of it,” Choi added.

“Phoenix is a runner,” Sarai continued. “As soon as he thinks he’s been found, he puts as much distance between him and whoever’s chasing him as possible. Land, sea, air -he uses whatever method is immediately available. Since the prison fire, the militia has been monitoring all paths in and out of Korea, waiting for him to make a break for it. But the last time we found him, he was in a motel in Seoul, barely an hour away from the prison. None of the sightings since then have been near any major ports or border crossings. ”

“He was injured,” Jongdae reasoned. “He can’t go very far in his condition.”

“Even if that was the case at first, he seemed perfectly healthy at the motel,” Sarai reminded him. “Yet, facial recognition from the CCTVs in all of our major cities came up empty. My team has even been trawling the backgrounds of pictures posted on social media, but there’s nothing.”

“Is it really so strange that he would lay low for a while?”

Sarai nodded. “When we couldn’t find a trace of him, our behavioral algorithms crashed, returning a 98% chance that he was dead. If he’s alive, he would have tried leaving the country by now.”

“Unless he’s with someone who doesn’t want to run,” Jongdae realized, snapping his fingers. Of course. Kyungsoo never ran from the schoolyard bullies. He was so small, he would simply wedge himself into the tiniest tunnels in the playground, or when he got older, the crawl space behind the bleachers. More than once, Jongdae had been forced to scatter a crowd of taunters around a ventilation duct or, in the worst case, a storm drain. Kyungsoo always emerged unscathed though, and he called it his “glass door strategem.” The bullies could see him and hurl insults and threats all they wanted, but they could never reach him.

“It’s very likely that Kyungsoo is calling the shots right now,” Choi echoed Jongdae’s train of thought. “We never thought he would be taking such an active role in helping Phoenix evade us. Frankly, I thought he’d be dead by now. Phoenix never keeps his ‘friends’ for long.”

“So you’ve said before,” Jondae said darkly. “A ’discarded tool’ is the term you used to describe my brother.”

“Yoondae wasn’t infected, though,” Sarai pointed out. “Kyungsoo is an outlier, just like Phoenix. Maybe that’s why they’re sticking together.”

“So regular people be damned, vivus puppets unite?” Jongdae laughed bitterly. “Really?”

“Wolves travel in packs for a reason,” Choi said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “A year ago, Phoenix was an exception to the rule, a freak accident of genetics. But, counting Kyungsoo, three new outliers have surfaced in the last week alone. Whether by design or coincidence, they’re grouping.”

“It could take months for us gather enough data to create an accurate profile of Kyungsoo,” Sarai said. “You were his friend. You know him better than anyone. You know his patterns.”

Kyungsoo wasn’t a fool, he’d know that all of his bank accounts and contacts were being monitored around the clock. Another flash of memory- Jongdae happening across Yoondae and Kyungsoo behind their middle school, stuffing their faces with red bean buns they’d stolen from the local convenience store. The little thieves offered to share with him in exchange for his silence. He’d confiscated everything, and blackmailed them into being his personal servants for months. Kyungsoo told him later that he’d taught them a valuable lesson—how to cover their tracks. Stripped of all of the resources he used to survive in adulthood, Kyungsoo would fall back on his childhood habits - steal what you need, and find a hole to hide in.

“I can help you find Kyungsoo,” Jondae said slowly, “ but then what?”

“We’ll quarantine them,” Choi said, as if it was barely worth a second thought.

“So, shoot first and scrape the remains into little plastic baggies?” Jongdae sneered.

Choi squinted at him. “The militia has a very rigid policy on dealing with Phoenix—”

“And others like him,” Sarai added.

“—which is why we don’t tell them about outliers until after they’re in our custody. We need to reach Kyungsoo first if we want to prevent another Seoul incident.”

“Or another Singapore, another Bangkok, another Hanoi,” Sarai ticked off cities on her fingers.

“What happens after you catch them?” Jongdae pressed. “You’ll lock them up in your torture dungeon—”

“It’s not-”

“I saw what I saw,” Jongdae cut Sarai off. “Call it 'research' if you want, it doesn’t change what you were doing.”

“I admit our methods can be unconventional,” Choi’s reasonable tone made Jongdae grind his teeth. “But we need to find a way to kill this parasite. The outliers are the only ones who live long enough to allow us to study them.”

“I’m not helping you just so you can turn Kyungsoo, or anyone else, into a lab rat for your magical cure.” Jongdae retorted, shaking his head vehemently. “If you want my help, find a different way.”

“And if we refuse to change?” Choi challenged, rising slightly from his chair. “The militia will find Phoenix again. They will try to kill him, and Kyungsoo, and if they fail, whatever tragedy unfolds next will be something you could have prevented. Can your conscience handle it?” Choi’s head tilted as he studied Jongdae. “Your father was a righteous man, and you’re very much like him. Can you live with someone’s blood on your hands?”

Jongdae smiled tightly, but his heart lightened a bit at the mention of his father. “My dad treated Kyungsoo like his own son,” he said. “If you had a son, would you let Dr. Han experiment on him? Even if you were certain you could find a cure?”

Sarai went still as Choi’s expression froze, something fierce and protective burning in his eyes. “Never.” He ground out the word as if it hurt, his hands white-knuckling on his cane, and Jongdae knew he’d won.

“Then we can make a deal.”