Chapter Text
“I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.”
“Yongbok. Lee Yongbok.”
Felix gave his shoe laces a poisonous look and knotted them a bit more tightly than he should. That was unfair; none of this was their fault.
“Bokkie.”
“I’m here,” Felix grumbled, catching the flurry of papers his supervisor threw at him. “What’s this.”
“Your next assignment.” His supervisor sat across from him, on the other bench in the gym’s changing room. Felix stared up at him for a moment, allowing himself a brief display of annoyance in the same way his supervisor allowed himself a familiar nickname. “We’ve thrown pretty much everything else we have at them, but they’re straight-up cockroaches.”
“You want me to…?”
His supervisor sighed, and shrugged with his entire body. “Do what you do best.”
It was a delicate way of saying that the Districts wanted them dead. Felix flipped through the papers, placing them back into the manila folder they came from, noting citizen identifications and surveillance camera footage among witness accounts and photos of crime scenes. The file seemed plenty thick.
“There’s only seven of them, it’ll be easy enough for you.” The words were a sigh. “Well. It should be. We’re giving you a small squad to use for them; you’ll have full operational discretion, of course. I don’t have to tell you that they’re expendable.”
“Great,” Felix mumbled. “Thanks.”
They sat in silence for a moment longer. Felix’s workout was long over, with him showered and his hair pressed flat — there was nothing stopping him leaving, save the way his supervisor’s foot hammered lightly against the floor, the way he stared up at the ceiling with words on his lips.
“What is it,” Felix said, breaking the silence and leaning forward slightly.
“You can ask, you know,” his supervisor said, the words bursting out of him.
“It’s not in the file?”
“It’s — they’re insurgents,” he said. “That much is in there. It’s just. They’re making a facsimile of the Districts, calling it District 9 of all things.” With a small break, his supervisor gained control of himself again. “It is rather more personal this time around. We want you to exterminate them with extreme prejudice.”
Felix nodded slowly. “Just for that?”
There was a wry smile on his supervisor’s face. “I didn’t tell you this, but they’re very prideful, our leaders. They won’t ever admit it, but they love their image far too much. This District 9 is a stain on their faces. As if they’re spitting on them. That’s why they’re sending you, you know. We all trust you to make a good example of them.”
“Right. Extreme prejudice.”
“You get it. See you around, Yongbok.”
Felix sucked his lips into his face. “You too.”
He didn’t, of course; supervisors came and went just as quickly for any number of reasons, this one’s moment of familiarity costing him more than Felix cared to know. It was part of the reason he never bothered to learn their names. Ultimately, they remained unimportant.
The case stayed with him, however, as Felix narrowed his eyes at the fresh squad he was given every time they failed to live up to his expectations. They were all far too young, and an unexperienced lot; he was allowed small instances of personality that he hoarded jealously, though the squad hadn’t seemed to notice that they were hardly allowed the same. Most people assumed the same thing; that proximity to him allowed them more than they were used to. Felix would never report them for indiscretions, but he never had to. None of them were suddenly reassigned, at least, and he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to waste time training anyone new.
His nights were spent studying the contents of that file, committing each of the seven names and faces to memory. Surely they were operating under false identities at the moment, but those were easy enough to figure. There wasn’t anywhere for them to hide that they wouldn’t be found. He meant it literally — cameras covered every inch of the world, their sophisticated AI system keeping track of each face as it moved through cities and countrysides alike. Beyond that, as Felix moved closer to his hunt, he wanted to know the faces of his prey.
Two entirely new supervisors later, Felix finally got the go-ahead to disappear with his squad into the city where this District 9 was assumed to set up their latest base of operations. Felix sucked on his teeth when he learned it was in what had been Korea; technically, his family was supposed to have been from there, but all he had known of his very short childhood was hot deserts and thickly accented English. They’d all gone through thorough language training, and Felix could claim fluency in most Pacific Ocean languages and some European ones, but Korean looked at him as if it wanted more from him. Still, he was fluent and that was all that mattered.
His squad was nervous on the airplane over; they must all be unused to air travel. They all acted the same, with superficial differences, so Felix had never bothered to learn what those differences were. Presumably they had names. Most people still did. It was a little soon in the process to transfer fully over to I.D. numbers, though everyone had them already. Felix could rattle his off by heart. Most people could.
That’s how he entertained himself on the long flight over; 1784le756flx. 1784le756flx. 1784le756flx. Over time, it became utterly meaningless, and he could sleep.
“Sir.” Hot breath landed on his neck, and a hand trembled as it shook him. “Sir, we’re almost landing.”
Felix cracked open his eyes to glare at the squad member sitting to his left. He had let the kid get the window seat, but now he was regretting it as it seemed she had become too familiar with him. As such he relished the gulp of fear as the kid sat back and stared firmly ahead. Felix pretended not to notice nervous glances back at him as they happened far more frequently than he would like.
“Do you speak Korean?” he asked the kid. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as she jumped, most likely spooked by the gravelly tone of voice.
“A — A little, sir. Enough.”
“Partner up with someone who’s fluent,” Felix said. “It’ll be easy for you to be quiet in the background.”
“Yes, sir,” the kid mumbled.
“I’ll assign you partners when we land,” he muttered, registering the kid’s words and letting them fall to the wayside as he managed his sleepy thoughts aloud. “We’ll sleep for the first day, brush up on the language, get food, scatter through the city. 25 gu… We’re lucky Seoul has kept its districts, we know what happened to New York and London… I suppose they’re not distinct enough here, as it were. We’ll go through the city a district at a time. It won’t take us more than a year. Less time than we’ve been allowed.” The Districts liked him to be thorough; they wanted him to finish the job as soon as he could, but rarely did he get a real, pressing deadline.
The muttering let him wake up more, and he sat up in his chair, blinking at how close the seat in front of him was. “Is this guy reclining?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” the kid next to him whispered.
Felix blinked and turned to look at her, both actions as slow as he could manage them. “Did you hear all of that.”
She was red as anything. “Yes, sir.” Not quite as embarrassed as Felix, but he could hide it better.
He kicked viciously at the seat in front of him. “Most crashes happen when the plane is taking off and landing,” he growled, and the seat shot up.
Incheon Airport had not changed through the years. Felix made his way through the terminal thanks to the English on the signs, avoiding the Hangul’s round, staring eyes, his squad following him like ducklings. At the luggage carousel, after everyone had taken care of themselves after that long flight, he paired everyone off. A good majority of them claimed to speak Korean fluently, but he couldn’t care if they were lying to him and paired them off accordingly. Standing around at the luggage carousel was nothing more than a meeting point, with all of their items in their carry-ons, and they left the airport in their pairs, leaving Felix to indulge in a cup of awful airport coffee before taking a taxi to his hotel.
In a lot of ways, the world was the same under the Eight Districts legislative and executive system. Most of the changes were on a federal level, meaning that for the regular citizen, although there was now no official difference between them and someone halfway across the world from them, there weren't actually any changes in their regular, day to day life. Sure, they were all united under one flag. Or eight, as it were, though these eight districts were meant to be nothing more than a temporary placeholder for the official world government to come. The point was that awful airport coffee was awful airport coffee. Had been before this and would be until the end of time, most likely.
They’d struggled to find a hotel with thirty-odd free beds, even if it was for only a few nights. As such they were split between a few low-cost hostels and hotels, Felix in the most expensive with a room to himself. It was the little luxuries.
As night fell around them, Felix found he wasn’t tired, and so dedicated himself to a map of the city. The 25 districts were outlined in red, but he went over them again, lumping a few together and separating others. The internet told him how densely populated each district was, and Felix wanted to spread equal amounts of time searching through equal amounts of people. Small notes scattered over the map, in Hangul and English both, each small circle of Hangul staring out at him.
At midnight, even if he still wasn’t tired, he folded the map back up and turned out the light. The city in the frame of his window glowed. It distracted him far too much and he turned his back to it.
His phone alerted him to the time. It automatically adjusted to time zones, and he hadn’t turned his alarm off, so like most days of his life he woke up at seven in the morning. Unlike most days, Felix spent a fair amount of time blinking at the wall before deciding to shut his phone up.
His squad wasn’t meant to meet up for another couple hours, so Felix took a quick shower and changed into one of his spare outfits, a sort of non-uniform. All black — the Districts had a certain aesthetic they wanted to operate under, and Felix couldn’t care less what clothes he put on his body. It wasn’t meant to stand out, which meant it did. People knew well enough to stay out of his way for the most part, but this was meant to be a mission with a fair amount of stealth and discretion, so he’d have everyone go shopping.
There was a café near the hostel. Despite the low cost of the hostel itself, the area wasn’t so awful — close enough to the centre of the city to be convenient, if somewhat expensive — and it seemed as if the café had been a dance studio once upon a time. It seemed as if sound should echo along the walls, at least. Dance studios were hardly allowed nowadays, though Felix had spent his time in an officially ordained one to learn control of his body and grace. Here, the only sounds that echoed across the walls were clattering cups of tea and coffee, and low chatter between patrons. How has your day been? What did you do last week? Friendly interrogations; there wasn’t much else to talk about.
Once his coffee arrived, he opened his map once more, drawing small lines over the streets of each district and mentally assigning sets of his squad to their own sets of streets. He’d meant to do it last night, but the long flight and his own pitiful exhaustion took its pound of flesh. At least he had time now, and the meeting wouldn’t be awful.
They’d start at the bottom right of the city and work their way clockwise through it, he decided. Gangdong-gu and Songpa-gu would be manageable together, and an easy start. Their Wikipedia articles were short and to-the-point.
Someone slid out the seat across from him. Felix froze, and he stared holes into the map, unable to look up at whoever had just invaded his table.
“Hi,” the stranger said in Korean. She sounded like she had a smile on her face, and Felix raised his eyebrows at the table before staring up at her.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you new here?” The stranger acted just fine; more than just fine, really, acting like a concerned citizen about to suggest — “You’re studying that map so hard. Maybe I could show you around?”
It was acceptable flirting, Felix knew, though he was hardly experienced with it. Most people tended to see his non-uniform and figure he was too dangerous for them, which he was. “I’m from the countryside,” he lied. “My family’s moved up here and I’m getting acquainted with the city.”
“That’s so nice,” the stranger said with a dazzling smile. “You’re close to your family?”
“I am.” Felix hadn’t seen his parents in years; it had to do with his very short childhood. “We’ve always been pretty tight-knit.”
“How nice,” the stranger mused. “Well… You’re lucky to have found this café. Do you think you’ll become a regular here?”
“Maybe,” Felix said. No. “It depends on where my family ends up. My sister’s still in school, so we want to find somewhere with a good system for her.”
“You’re not?” the stranger asked, painted with surprise. “But you’re so young.”
Felix smiled tightly. “I’m older than I look, I promise.”
The stranger’s smile, on the other hand, was open and sweet. “It must be so hard, moving to a city you don’t know.”
In his experience, most cities were largely the same. Big places whose history couldn’t be written out of their narratives, though the Eight Districts were certainly trying their hardest. “It sure is,” Felix said, forcing himself to act like the character he’s made up would. “Thank you for your offer, but I think learning to walk around the city on my own would help more. I’m sorry.”
The stranger was obviously disheartened at the obvious rejection, though Felix didn’t let himself feel bad. She sat up in her chair and licked at her lips, stretching out her arms and pulling the sleeves over her fingers. As an afterthought she sent him a reassuring smile. Felix kept a smile on his face but said nothing more as she rose up and left, disappointment etched into the curve of her back as she returned to a table with another couple women sitting around cups of coffee and pastries. They seemed to console her as Felix packed up his map and deposited his coffee cup on the space of the café’s counter reserved for returning dishes.
Maybe if he dyed his hair black again, he wouldn’t stand out so much. A few of his squad were foreigners here, so it would be harder for them to fit in; officially, without borders, the world was supposed to be a more diverse mix of people. It seemed there would still need to be more time to see that become the regular practice. For now they would just have to live with their abrupt appearances and hope word of them wouldn’t spread.
The rest of the mapping was done in his hotel room, and with ten minutes to the meeting time, he gathered his things and made his way to the office space they had rented for this mission. Most of his squad had made their way to it as well, and lingered in cubicles, getting their identities fully committed to memory and looking up apartments.
“Conference room in five,” Felix called to them all, letting the resulting “yes sir!” cut abruptly off as he shut the door to that room shut behind him. He pasted the map over the whiteboard on the far wall, but there was little else for him to do other than linger over his already made decisions. After a moment of thought, he wrote out his simple to-do list with markers that had been provided. Or maybe they had been left there by whoever had been ousted from this space before they were moved in.
- Dye hair black
- Purchase street clothes
He stared at the empty number 3 longer than necessary, keeping it empty as the squad came trickling in. There were a few more people than there were seats, and the back of the room became crowded with standing bodies.
- Become acquainted with Korean food
4.
“Right,” Felix muttered to himself, before turning to his squad with hard eyes. They all looked at him expectantly.
“I hope you’re all next to the partner I assigned to you yesterday.” There came a fair amount of shuffling that Felix pretended not to see. He tore out a piece of paper from the notebook he’d brought and set a pen on top of it, sliding it over to the pair immediately to his left. “Write down your names together. What I need from you all is to blend in, so here — “ he gestured to the whiteboard behind him — “is a list for you all to complete to fit in. Any suggestions?”
A few hands raised. Felix pointed at the woman closest to him. “Where will we get hair dye?”
“The grocery store. You.”
“We should all know at least conversational Korean,” a man said.
“If you don’t already, work with your partner to learn to answer simple questions. Build from that. You.”
“Will we have an allowance to purchase clothes?”
“Yes, you’ll have enough money to buy anything you need as long as it isn’t too extravagant.” Another few hands went up at that, and Felix bit back a sigh of annoyance. “Yes.”
“What’s the currency here?”
Felix stared at her for a moment, struggling for words. “The same as it is everywhere?” He didn’t mean for it to be a question, but everyone else was too busy staring at her to make note of it.
The woman floundered under everyone’s stares. She was a little older than most people at the table, though still obviously a rookie within the organization of the Districts; she must be used to a world where boundaries were more firm, where places had different currencies and exchange rates. Now there were just universal monetary units — not worth as little as the yen, but not as much as the euro or the American dollar, either. Felix took pity on her and muttered, “It used to be South Korean won. You’ll have credit cards to use. They’ll come in the mail once you get your apartments set up.”
“Right,” the woman whispered.
The meeting moved on from that, as Felix explained his plan to move through the city one week at a time with most of his eighteen pairs of operatives taking a section of streets and combing through them thoroughly. Felix himself would stalk through the gu at night, and resigned himself to spend the majority of his time in this office space. What he wouldn’t give to be in the daylight hunt, though he knew most of these things happened once the sun went down. Rebellions loved the dark.
Half an hour later, the meeting adjourned with each pair assigned a part of the city and the simple to-do list had expanded.
- Dye hair black
- Purchase street clothes
- Become acquainted with Korean food
- Be able to answer basic questions
- Take walking and history tours around the city
- Read local news
- Befriend neighbors and foreigners
- Spend time at the grocery stores and cafés/coffee shops
- Find a way to spend your evenings
The last point was maybe a little excessive, and leaned too far into self-care for official standards, but Felix knew he could get away with it. Most people didn’t have to spend their entire days “on,” but Felix worked his squads hard. He’d fight for them to have time for self-expression, even if it was just an hour in a gym working over a punching bag. Not because he cared for them. He just needed them to work right. Obviously he couldn’t push it to things like painting or writing or even pottery — nobody could do that anymore, nor should they want to — but an hour of learning Arabic or how to bake macaroons would help with some basic skills and with the stress of relocating so quickly to a new city.
Felix didn’t think about it overly much as he photocopied the seven main insurgents faces and posted them up on the glass wall between the conference room and the floor that used to hold cubicles. He’d taken over the conference room as his main office, even though there was a perfectly fine executive office a few doors down. The whiteboard and large windows felt a little better to be around.
Three weeks into the investigation of the city, as Felix became comfortable running on naps snatched in the middle of the day and after they had cleared Gangdong-gu, Songpa-gu, Gagnam-gu, Seocho-gu, Dongjak-gu, and Gwanak-gu, a pair of operatives went missing.
The entire operation went into overdrive, tracking their last known movements and frantically trying to think of why they were caught. They had been combing through the Mullae-dong in Yeongdeungpo-gu, and Felix diverted everyone to careful examination of that area, creating missing posters in both English and Korean to tell everyone about the missing tourists and the families that missed them desperately. After calling the police and then the media, he gave a statement over the phone with a voice modifier that should sound appropriately teary. Nothing would come of it, he was sure, but at least if their bodies were washed up on the riverbed of the Han it would get media coverage.
It might not even be related to the insurgents, that elusive District 9. The squad was getting restless from three weeks of straight nothing — Felix knew how long the hunt could take, but the squad was still made of rookies, and that restlessness could cost them dearly. If it was their own stupidity that caused them misfortune, then Felix would not feel sorry for them.
Nothing more happened for a week, even as they kept their attention on Mullae-dong, Felix making nightly visits to the 7-eleven there and waiting for something to happen to him. He could feel eyes on him every time he picked up his dosirak dinner and strawberry milk. The weekend saw him add an Isul Tok Tok to his bag, as if he was ashamed of it, but with the three percent content it was honestly just a fruity soda.
He even wore his non-uniform of all black once or twice, but anyone that watched him did nothing but watch. With no little disappointment, Felix assigned a pair to watch over the busy intersections of Mullae-dong, but began to concentrate his efforts on his slow sweep over the rest of the city. They planned to finally cross the river in a couple weeks, and the north was an entirely different beast.
Then the pair assigned to watch over Mullae-dong went missing. Felix decided he had had enough, and sat in his office for two entire days, the blinds to the cubicle space closed tight. The faces of those seven insurgents stared out at the squad blankly, but Felix could care less about the nervous energy on the other side of his door. He was far too busy scanning through CCTV in Mullae-dong — more specifically, flipping through his route to and from the 7-eleven, as he dove deep into the alleyways at night. There were hardly any people around at that time, and searching for someone tailing him should have been easy.
His eyes burned.
There came a knock at the door, and Felix shot a poisonous glare at it, a dismissal for whatever complaint about the insurgents’s portraits already on the tip of his tongue. But the face that opened the door was bright and cheery, rather than nervous, and Felix stepped through entirely ready for whatever news he was about to receive.
“We got a shipment,” the rookie said, a bright smile on his face. He gestured at crates that were still being unloaded through the front door to the office space. “From headquarters in 1.”
“Good,” Felix said, nodding. His attention immediately left the rookie as he strode over to the delivery, signing eagerly for it and helping them bring all of the boxes from the truck to their office. Everyone with nonessential projects were press-ganged into helping as well, and the multitude of boxes were quickly moved up to the office in their entirety.
“Here we go,” Felix announced to the gathered squad. With a crowbar wedged between the lid and the walls of the box, Felix jumped on the lever with his entire weight. It had been nailed shut tight, so the lid only opened slightly, but it was enough for Felix to rip it the rest of the way off and reveal the contents to everyone.
Well-packed into sawdust and old newspaper were matte black pistols. Each had a small box of bullets nestled beside them. They did not glint threateningly in the light, but the shapes of them were unmistakably dangerous.