Maggie Zhou was born as Zhou Wei Qiao but even her mother usually called her Maggie, probably because her mother still had trouble pronouncing Chinese names. If she had been the one to decide, Maggie would have been called 'Mirae', the Korean word for 'future'.

Korean slaves had always evoked Maggie's pity because her mother, though powerless, had been the youngest daughter of a family of Korean Special Citizens who had fled to China. Her mother had been sold as a bride to a farmer, Maggie's father.
Maggie knew that her father loved her mother, but the mere thought of human beings who were sold as goods made her stomach turn. In university she had taken part in student protests to abolish the semi-legality of slavery. Though ethnically half Korean, she saw herself as fully Chinese and to her Korea, the country that put its people into categories and allowed some of them to become even less than humans, at least on paper, wasn't her home but simply a nation that ignored basic human rights.
So when she got the position in the immigration office to deal with Korean immigrants, she was thrilled because it made her feel as though she actually did something useful.
But every day it became a little more depressing because there rarely was any hope. Her mother had actually been incredibly lucky to find a decent husband.
There were ways to grant Korean slaves Chinese citizenship but those were scarce. A runaway slave basically had two options, either they went back to their owner or to the country they fled. It was always the same. She questioned them and pitied them but at some point she just built up something like an emotional blockade. She stopped caring. Slave interviews were just workloads she had to fufill to earn her wages, not more, not less.

So when she entered the interview room to deal with 'Park, Chanyeol' she didn't do so with any emotional attachment. 'At least he has papers,' she thought. He had an owner who claimed him and official papers issued by the Korean police, so it was just a routine thing that was likely to go well. The previous person had spoken flawless Chinese but had been rather tricky due to a lack of papers, a false, incredibly misleading ID and a rather questionable work description. Maggie had to note every single detail and compared to that, this new case was perfectly easy to deal with.

She skimmed through the papers to find a nice introduction. It was important to create a comfortable atmosphere to increase the interviewee's readiness to give complete and truthful answers. Other agents started with boring conversations about the weather but Maggie had the advantage of a Korean mother, so she had some inside knowledge that, more often than not, prove to be of good use.

Park Chanyeol looked nervous and almost jumped up when she entered, just to be pushed back down on his chair by the officer who guarded him. Maggie smiled, introduced herself and told him that she was going to check his data. He calmed down a little, just as expected.
"Oh, we're the same age," she said cheerfully, although it wasn't true. He was twenty-four, she was thirty-one and he looked somewhat doubtful, but she knew that it usually eased the tension when Koreans thought that they were talking to a 'friend'.

"My mother came from District 59 by the way. I'm not sure if you can imagine it. It's rather far from 3, I think," she said. Sometimes she confused the numbers, so she usually didn't name the city, just in case 59 was somewhere else entirely. Personally she found it hard to think of districts, rather than cities, so in her eyes her mother had simply come from Chongjin. But she knew that Special Citizens usually viewed their district as their whole universe. Even if they knew which city it belonged to, they rarely considered themselves as inhabitants of it.
"Oh, really?" he asked and gave her a pitying smile. It was always the same, almost as if every Special Citizen had the same ranking in their head. The higher the number, the further a district was from Seoul, the centre of power. Seoulites considered anyone from further away as below them, even though they had nothing to compare their place of birth with but Chinese cities. "A while ago I've been to 54 and honestly, I had no idea how bad it is in the north. I bet your mother is happier outside."
And Maggie looked up, not sure if she had understood him right. "You've been to a different district before?" she asked in puzzlement.

"Ah," he said and looked caught as his eyes widened. "Yes, actually. We are, I mean, I am... Well, I work for a guy who travels a lot."
Maggie frowned and looked at the papers in front of her. She had never heard of any rights that would have granted Special Citizens to travel from one district to another, especially not from a place like Seoul to a place way north, and even less if they, like Park Chanyeol, were in exile after having been on death row. And then she noticed the owner's name, Wu Yi Fan.

"Oh, I see," she said and tried to suppress her disgust. "So you're with Ahn Sohee." It was appalling to think that there were people who sold their brothers and sisters to strangers. She had talked to hundreds of slaves by then, most of whom admitted that survival in their district had been easier than life in China after all. None of them ever reached the glorious future they had been dreaming of. They had been betrayed and alienated, stuck in a country that seemingly didn't know any social rules and where no one understood them. They were dependant on their owners and although their world became bigger, they weren't free. That Chinese smugglers sold them was terrible enough, but that there were fellow Koreans who would do the same just seemed too horrible to be true.
But Park Chanyeol seemed oblivious. "Ahn Sohee? Whos's that?"

Maggie blinked,  a little taken back and checked the papers again. That whole conversation with that hostile Ahn Sohee must have muddled up her brain so much she couldn't make any connections any longer. But the name definitely was right. Wu Yi Fan was Park Chanyeol's owner according to his papers and also the person Ahn Sohee supposedly worked for. Maggie didn't know how big that company was but those two must have arrived at the same time, so they couldn't not know each other.
"I'm sure you came together," she slowly said. "That boyish girl with the short hair. She looks very young and is about my height." Maggie really wasn't good at describing others and Park Chanyeol just looked at her with a blank expression. What else was there to say? "Ah, right, maybe you don't know her real name? What did she call herself again?" There were a couple of names that Ahn Sohee had spouted before she finally admitted  who she really was. "Jin Xiu Min?"


Talking to Ahn Sohee had taken up a lot more time  and energy than normal because at first she had refused to be honest about anything. Maggie's orders were to talk to every Korean immigrant in Korean but Ahn Sohee always answered in Chinese, although she clearly understood Maggie's questions. Her ID read that she was Jin Xiu Min, born in Chengdu, but it was obvious that those information were false. Maggie instantly knew a Korean accent when she heard it, no matter how faint, and that person sitting in front of her most definitely wasn't male.

"You're going to deport me anyway, right? So why do you even need to know who I am? Just dump me and that damn country will put me into some Special District," the girl had suddenly said in Korean after at least an hour of giving nothing but nonsensical answers that just never full added up. The room had gotten incredibly chilly and Maggie had started to rub her arms to warm herself at least a little. No matter how harsh the guard was in telling the girl to keep her powers to herself, it only got colder the more aggravated she looked.
"We don't know that yet," Maggie said, already tired and worn out. All she wanted was to finish the whole charade. "But, honey, I hope you realize that if we at least knew your identity, we could try to help you. Right now you're more likely to end up in a prison here and trust me, your chances to survive are bigger in Korea. You're not the first Korean I met who claims to be Chinese. If you at least had a barcode, Korea would take you without questions, but without papers and a family register you're no one in this country."

The girl sighed and bit her lips. "Ahn Sohee," she said after a while. "I was registered under that name. My birthday probably is correct but my official place of birth is definitely false. Officially I'm a normal citizen of Korea, but my record there might read that I'm dead."


Ahn Sohee was one of those cases that reminded Maggie of her anger at Korea and its rules on people with power. How deep her lies must have been became even more obvious when Park Chanyeol was in utter shock when he heard about her identity, although Maggie had only mentioned her real name.
Ahn Sohee was a victim of ridiculous policies who had become ruthless in return. That she sold slaves didn't really seem to mean much to her. On the contrary, she seemed to blame Special Citizens for existing. Not the state was wrong but them for being different.

In Maggie Ahn Sohee woke both disgust and pity and she wondered what would happen to her as she was informed that Wu Yi Fan brought the correct papers for both her and Park Chanyeol. Maggie and Park Chanyeol were still in the interrogation room then. They were brought outside where Ahn Sohee waited with a guard.

"You," Park Chanyeol said as he saw her. It was hard to tell whether he was angry or just confused, but Maggie instinctively took a step back to not get burned. "How could you-? Why didn't you just-?" He didn't seem to know what he was trying to say. His guard pushed him along, when he snapped, "What's so hard about saying that you're a girl?"

Oh god, I'm so sorry about this twist. But it was there since the very early, trashy beginning stages of the story and ghtjhtghjthjt. I know that genderbend is the kind of thing that should come with a warning but because the whole idea was based on it being a secret... Anyway, I hope it didn't offend anyone!