Dialogue in this chapter is in Korean, translated to English.
Nuna hadn't changed in three years, apart from one thing: her smile was beautiful to behold.
I could only remember years of her wearing the same glum expression, perpetually whining at Kang-min for nothing at all. When was the last time I'd seen her smile? Before we lost Abba? Didn't matter; there she was, smiling right at me.
"I don't have long." She was in a canteen with a stethoscope around her neck, and what was probably the millionth coffee of the day in her hand. "Jun-su! It's you!"
"How did you find Will's number?"
Nuna glared at me like I was an idiot. First time I'd ever been happy to get that look from her. "From your email."
"My email?"
"Your email asking me for money for a flight home. And to call you on William Graz's phone. I read it five minutes ago! I didn't think I still had that email address. I only checked it to contact one of my old anatomy tutors for help with a conference!"
Of course. My email, sent from my shitty teenage k-mail address to Nuna's shitty teenage k-mail address. Weeks of calling the Korean Embassy, when my email to Nuna had just been sitting there, waiting for her.
"Jun-su, I need to call Eomma and the Korean Embassy to tell them you've escaped. The ransom is off now, so we can-"
"Wait, what?"
"The ransom!" Nuna waved her arms like I knew what the fuck she was talking about.
"Ransom?"
"Your ransom, idiot."
Shibal.
What the fuck had Sigma done?
"I don't know about any fucking ransom, Nuna."
"The ransom! We've been negotiating for two weeks. But very slowly, since Eomma won't talk unless I'm there to translate, even though her English is fine. And she refuses to let me talk to the negotiator without her, so we can only negotiate at weekends. They sent photos and videos of you, but Eomma keeps asking to talk to you on the phone before she'll pay. And they're getting tired of it. I kept begging her to just pay, but you escaped so we don't have to now!"
My heart felt like it was plunging off the cliffside in Santa Elena State Park. Of course I was being fucking ransomed. Sigma was ransoming a hostage who'd escaped seven fucking weeks earlier.
"Who the fuck have you been talking to about a ransom, Nuna?"
Who in Sigma took photos and videos of me? Were there cameras in Seven's TV room? At La Rosa, when I was playing piano? In the Suites?
"The Korean Embassy in Maria contacted L.K. asking for Eomma's phone number, saying that they'd been contacted by your kidnappers. They asked for Eomma to help with negotiations."
"Who asked?"
"The contact in the Korean Embassy who was receiving information from the kidnappers. She's our negotiator. Ana Maria Santiago."
I fucking knew it. Ana Maria had known Eomma's whereabouts for two weeks. Exactly when she called me to introduce herself.
I held my face to my phone, my heart boiling with so much fucking rage that I was close to smashing my fist through the porch window. "Call Eomma right now. Tell her not to talk to anyone from any Embassy. I need to call the police in Maria."
"What's happening, Jun-su?"
"Ana Maria Santiago is in the gang. She wants Eomma to think that I'm still trapped so that she'll pay."
I should have fucking known. Every fucking tearful phonecall with Ana Maria where she'd told me that she couldn't find Eomma. Every blabbering conversation about telenovelas. She'd been holding me still, ready for Sigma to plunge in their final blade.
"Jun-su, I don't understand."
"What was the date on the email I sent you? Didn't you look at it?"
Nuna grabbed at her hair, overwhelmed. "I read it just now! I didn't look at the date!"
"Will rescued me from the fire on March twenty-eighth. I emailed you the next night. That was seven weeks ago! They've been trying to make you think that I'm still trapped in the gang all this time!" Not even Eomma and Nuna's necks had been kept safe from Sigma's filthy choking fingers. "How much money did they want?"
"One point five million dollars. How do you know all this?"
"Because Ana Maria Santiago has been calling me for weeks, telling me that Eomma is untraceable, and persuading me not to contact anyone in Korea. She's been trying to stop me from finding you."
Nuna looked wild-eyed, getting up and sitting down again in her canteen chair in a blind panic. "What do we do now?"
"The Detective Inspector in Maria Police Department will know what to do. I'll call her now. I'll fix all of this, OK? Please don't talk to anyone from America until the police call you. I'll fix this."
Nuna wept noisily into her coffee cup, her colleagues steering past her in a wide arc as the hospital canteen filled, perhaps an afternoon shift-change. Sigma was gonna fucking pay.
"Don't cry, Nuna. It's gonna be OK. I'm coming home." I walked the phone around the room on an impromptu tour. "Don't cry. See, Nuna? Check out Will's piano."
"It's beautiful," Nuna sniffed. "You're at William Graz's house?"
"Yeah. It's amazing here."
"Is he a friend from summer school?"
Sweet innocent Nuna.
"No, he's the man who rescued me from the gang."
"He rescued you? Can I thank him? Where is he?"
A towering wave of guilt crashed headlong into me, washing brine through every crack in my heart. Will was probably in bed with a day-old bandage on his stitches, crying tramadol-induced tears.
"I'll introduce you tomorrow. He's asleep."
How selfish, reckless, irresponsible of me. I'd not only startled the deer, I'd killed it point blank with a rifle. Will's phone still lay on the rug beside me. I'd talk to him after Nuna's videocall. I'd fix it all between us. Somehow.
"OK. You look fatter with a beard."
Already? Seriously, Nuna.
Should have guessed we'd fall back into our old bickering. "Did you get a nose job?"
"Moron."
"Just asking!" I waved my hands around in appeal. Was this how all our conversations used to be?
"Wouldn't you have noticed if I'd had a nose job?" Nuna prodded a finger into her stubby nose, a passing nurse looking at her in bewilderment as she carried a tray across the canteen.
"I have no fucking idea, Nuna."
"You're so foul-mouthed."
"You're such a prude."
"Idiot."
"Doctor."
"Pianist."
We both fell into a fit of giggles, Nuna getting her shit together before her colleagues saw her, wiping away stray tears.
"Tell me about Eomma, and Kang-min, and Halbae and Halmae. Tell me everything."
"You first, Jun-su. Tell me about the gang."
I stiffened; I wasn't ready. But there'd never be a good time to tell her.
"Four days before my flight home, I was at a party, and I met this guy. He..." courage, Zeph, "...he turned out to be a human trafficker. He took my passport, and another man put a gun to my head and said that I had to work for a gang."
"Working? Selling drugs?"
I could lie. Tell her that it was drugs. Keep things simple. But things hadn't been simple in Sigma. I'd always intended to keep the worst details away from Nuna and Eomma, but I was tired of secrets and lies. Will had been right that I'd crave comfort from them.
"No, Nuna. Men would come." I shuddered, my hands clenching and unclenching, white-knuckled. "Old men. They made me...entertain them."
"Jun-su. Please. No." Nuna's tears were unbearable. "How many men?"
"Not many. One or two a week. They didn't hurt me. They were in their sixties. I wasn't scared of them."
Nuna's eyes stretched wide with horror. "What did you do the rest of the time?"
"Sit locked in the gang's finance building, playing piano."
"Did they hurt you?"
"No. Nobody ever hurt me. But I was scared of the man who pointed the gun at me."
Nuna lay her phone screen-down, her tears uncontrollable, leaving me staring at a black screen for long minutes while she absorbed the shock. When she reappeared, her features were set.
"Did you wear a condom? Did you get S.T.I. tests?"
"Yeah, Nuna. The gang was careful. It was a business. I was a product."
That only made Nuna's tears fall harder. "Forgive us, Jun-su. Forgive us."
"I don't need to forgive you for anything."
"You've been suffering for years."
"I was with other workers. They became my friends. They took care of me, Nuna."
"Is William Graz one of them?" she sniffed.
"No. He was walking past the building and saw the fire, and he went inside to rescue people. He found me."
A huge smile appeared through Nuna's tears. "He's a hero."
"Yeah. He is."
I needed to fix things with Will. Explain to him...something. But I was going home. There wasn't anything to explain.
"Eomma thought that she'd pushed you too far. That you ran away. She's been feeling so guilty all this time."
How could they have thought that?
"I didn't run away, Nuna. The gang took me. I always wanted to be with you and Eomma. You know that, don't you?"
"I...I know now," Nuna said, pawing at her tears. "I missed you so much. We emailed you for weeks begging you to come home. Then to say that you didn't have to come home, but to let us know that you were safe. We thought we'd failed you."
"You never failed me, Nuna. I missed you so much too. But they would have killed me if I'd tried to leave. Can we call Eomma now? We need to tell her that the ransom is fake."
"I'll call Eomma tonight. I need to make sure that she's...OK about everything...before she talks to you."
OK about everything?
I held my phone close to my face. "What happened? What's wrong with Eomma?"
"When you went missing she went to America to find you, but you didn't show up. She was ill after that. And then we lost Halmae; she had a heart attack."
"From the diabetes?"
"Yeah. Halbae was heartbroken. He didn't recover, and we lost him soon after. Eomma didn't cope well."
Just as I'd guessed. Halmae and Halbae couldn't stay apart for long. "Did it make Eomma more ill?"
"Yeah. She'd lost all three of you. It was too much for her. She got sick and...last summer she started stalking Son Heung-min ssi."
"Who the fuck's Son Heung-min ssi?"
"The C.E.O. of L.K."
Shibal.
I should have known that Eomma would start shit with L.K.. Eomma was ill in all the wrong ways.
"What...what did she do to him?" I didn't wanna hear the rest.
"She didn't do anything! She wasn't gonna hurt him, and she didn't want money. She just asked him to admit that Abba got cancer from the solvents in the L.K. polymer reactors, and to give a public apology. What she's always wanted from L.K.."
"Shibal." The same tired old shit from when we were kids, except I hadn't been around to stop Eomma from doing the unforgivable. "Did he press charges?"
"No, fortunately. She broke into his apartment, and his bodyguard called the police. The press found out, and it was reported everywhere: disgruntled employee Lee Eun-Mi plans attack on CEO of LK."
I couldn't fucking believe Eomma. "Was she on news reports on TV too?"
Nuna's voice quivered. "At first. I was freaking out. There were paparazzi everywhere. But Kang-min had a plan, and just...fixed everything. He was amazing."
"What plan?"
"He found out about a commune run by Jogye Buddhists just north of the Donghwa Temple in Daegu. They take care of Daegu's elderly and homeless, replant forests and clear old Nakdong river canals to make new wildlife habitats. He donated money to them and asked them if Eomma could join the commune for a few months, until she was better.
"Eomma finally realized that there was something seriously wrong with her. She was totally ashamed of what she'd done. She wanted to go to the commune. She wanted to get better. It was the best thing she's ever done.
"Kang-min organized to sell the apartment in Busan, and Halmae's house. He sold the farmland too, and he set up a new bank account for Eomma. He took her off databases, bought her a new phone that's paid on my contract, cancelled all her subscriptions. It was like she'd disappeared.
"Kang-min and I did the same; we changed our phone numbers, we moved apartments, got new bank accounts. Everything."
The hours I'd wasted talking to Erica Choi at the Embassy. If I'd known that Eomma and Nuna had erased themselves a year earlier I'd have been home straight after busting out of Seven. But I wouldn't have been there for Will when he lost Mozhgan, and when he was sick. And he'd not have been there for me when I was having nightmares and starving myself and baking up until my brain dried.
"Does Eomma like the commune?" Eomma had been through so much, and I hadn't been able to help.
"She is so happy! She loves the Joyge monks and nuns. I go to Daegu most weekends to see her, and she's better. I mean, she's better than before. She's almost like how she used to be, before we lost Abba."
My throat rolled with tears. "Nuna, I can't believe this."
I'd been too young to remember what Eomma had been like before we lost Abba.
"I haven't finished. A few weeks ago, something wonderful happened. The press had been trying to find out about Eomma for months. They came up with nothing, because Kang-min had been so thorough in helping her to disappear.
"Some journalists from Chosun Ilbo[1] looked into L.K.'s polymer synthesis programmes to find out more about Eomma. Chosun Ilbo convinced some L.K. employees to anonymously leak lab designs, solvent lists, reactor processes. Teacher Yeona found out about it, and she started a campaign to turn the public against L.K."
"Teacher Yeona did that?"
Yeona. The badass salamander-saving activist nun of my heart. She knew about Eomma! But I couldn't believe that Yeona would champion Eomma's quest for compensation. It was too small a cause, too personal. And there was no environmental connection with Abba's death.
"Teacher Yeona is so nice! Her eco-activist disciples started a social media campaign demanding compensation for Eomma for Abba's death. And it worked! L.K. admitted guilt for Abba's cancer."
"No way! You're serious, Nuna? So Son Heung-min ssi resigned?"
"No. Of course not. He's not that ashamed. It was only when the campaign went viral, and the L.K. share price dropped to the lowest stock market value in forty years, that Son Heung-min ssi apologized and did a keunjeol[2] to Eomma live on T.V., and offered her two billion Won[3] in compensation, to save face and try to restore the company's share price.
"There were two interviews with Eomma published in Chosun Ilbo after that, and they interviewed some anonymous sources at L.K.'s chemical engineering division about Abba's death. Eomma did it. She got what she'd been dreaming about since we were kids. She got her keunjeol from L.K.. And everyone knows about what really happened to Abba."
Eomma had finally done it. But not by making a compelling case to L.K.'s lawyers, and not by reasoning with Son Heung-min. She'd gotten her keunjeol in the worst possible way, by giving up her sanity, reducing her career to nothing in the process. She was a ghost in Korea, no kmail address, no phone number. Nobody knew who she was, apart from a few monks and nuns in an obscure Buddhist community in northern Daegu.
All those years as kids, having to listen to Eomma's wishful talk about reasoning with L.K. until they finally recognized what they'd done to Abba. In the end it had taken all the efforts of Chosun Ilbo and Yeona's eco-activist social media campaign to get anything done for Abba.
Still, Eomma had gained more than justice for Abba. Eomma must have become a completely different person, free of the shadow of Abba's death. Did that mean that Nuna and me could become different people too? Could we all finally move on?
"Wait a second, Nuna. Did you say two billion Won? Motherfucker."
"You're so disgusting. Do you swear in front of William Graz?
"He doesn't care," I sniggered.
"Eomma wasn't bothered about the money, but yeah. She's two billion Won richer. She has six billion Won in a Chinese bank account from the sale of the houses and the farmland, but she doesn't really use money in the commune. Kang-min and I are earning well, so we don't need her money. Eomma stays with us at the weekends sometimes, and she'll buy her own house in Busan when she leaves the commune."
"Nuna! I can't believe that all of this happened to you all. I missed all the drama."
Really, Zeph? Getting kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery for nearly three years not enough drama for you?
I switched on a smile, and changed the subject to what I'd wanted to all along. "Nuna? Can I use your address for my passport application? And can I stay with you and Kang-min for a couple of weeks, until I find a job? And can you buy me a flight home? I'll pay you back...one day, for all of this."
Nuna burst into laughter, and immediately after started to cry, smiling away through her tears. "Of course, moron. And no, you can't pay me back. I just want you home, Jun-su."
I'd never seen joyful tears on her before. I'd never seen her joyful, in fact. Perhaps she had been when I was a little kid, before we lost Abba.
"Can I talk to Kang-min soon?"
"Sure. We'll videocall you when we get home from work later. But the time difference will-"
"Call me when I wake up. Six a.m. in California is eleven p.m. Korea Time."
Nuna's mouth hung open, like the fact that I work up early was more of a revelation than all the rest of the shit I'd told her. "You wake up at six a.m.?"
"Yeah," I replied with a shrug. "Will and I usually work out at six a.m. But he's ill at the moment so I do it alone."
"William Graz has got you willingly waking up at six a.m.? That man is a Grand Master[4]."
Nuna hung up to warn Eomma about Sigma's failed fake ransom attempt while I left frantic voicemails to Teresa and Sofi to fucking do something.
In the midnight stillness of the house, I couldn't help worrying that Nuna's videocall was a dream, and that I'd wake up any moment in my bed, still in the twilight between Sigma and Busan. But there was her number and call history, saved right there on my phone. It was real.
I was going home.
But first, there was a fake ransom to derail. Seven weeks since I'd escaped, and Sigma still had me working hard.
I knocked lightly on Will's door and tiptoed into the musky warmth of his room to leave his phone on his desk. He was asleep, or pretending to sleep. His crumpled bandage lay on the floor next to his bed. The familiar beating pulse of guilt ran through my blood; I hadn't been there to change it. Not that he really needed it anymore. His stitches were healing well. I'd been changing his bandages the previous two days just as an excuse to be close to him, to indulge myself when I was supposed to have been taking care of him. The pulse of guilt turned into a torrent.
I'd hurt him so much. We should have left our wish unspoken, our path untrod. I'd been greedy. I'd wanted more. I'd needed more, and stupidly, I'd guided him to me. And then I'd snatched it all away from him with one phonecall from Nuna.

Author's Notes:
[1 Chosun Ilbo: real-life Korean national daily broadsheet and online newspaper, based in Seoul
[2] keunjeol: Korean, deep bow (body bent at ninety degrees) used for special occasions like weddings, funerals, public apologies
[3] Two billion Won is around $2 million. Eun-Mi therefore has a total of around $8 million after receiving compensation from L.K. and selling her property
[4] Grand Master: Honorific title for highly skilled and distinguished taekwondo teachers. It's difficult to translate into English how much Sora admires Will by giving him this title; the Korean term is "Sahbum Nim."