Quit Your Waning (Over the Moon #3)

JIHAE

“Sure you don’t want help roundin’ up the toys, Jihae? Sunny?”

Siobhan’s thick bronze hair curled up around her face full of freckles as she hung on the doorway, bag slung over her shoulder and her shoes on, ready to dash. She always asked on her way out, and Soyeon and I always said no.

“Nope,” I said as Soyeon set a box in the middle of the playmat.

“Really, I can help.”

“Ani— Shoo!” I teased, waving my hands like she was a nuisance. “Just say hi to Ciara for us, okay?”

She rolled her eyes but looked relieved, favoring her bad knee. “Okay, fine. But you know I’m good for it. Cheers, Sunny, love.” She gave the little girl a sweet smile and a wave, making her face brighten.

“Go, go,” I insisted. Siobhan blew us each a kiss, then disappeared in a whirlwind of frothy layers and clattering metal bracelets.

I craned my neck to watch the school pod door close, a stack of plasdocs and foam toys piled in my palms, then immediately blew the hair from my forehead with a decisive nod at Soyeon.

“Gone?”

“Gone,” she confirmed in the serious way of a ten-year-old as we switched to Korean. She opened the box to reveal a plethora of surprise decorations. Bats, hats, cats… Halloween grinned up at us in the form of cut-out jack-o-lanterns, toothy witch drawings, and bags of universal hard candies in colors that we liked. I waggled my eyebrows at Soyeon with a little grin.

“Wanna try all the flavors while we watch I Fell in Love with the Mudang?”

She giggled. “Yes!”

The blank wall we used as a projection screen lit up with the opening credits of the silly K-drama series. The camera swiped left, then right, pausing on Taehun’s ghostly superhero pose, Soin’s puffed up cheeks as she ate jjajangmyeon and dribbled it on her shaman’s hanbok, and her grumpy but lovable grandmother with her broom to shoo the ghosts away...

It was Soyeon’s favorite. She loved romantic comedies, and since she wasn’t old enough to partake in my horror movie addiction, supernatural K-dramas were where we landed most of the time. So as soon as the Renata Rag released rumors about Mrs Fareshi’s plans for a Halloween Festival, both Soyeon and I jumped on board immediately.

I was hesitantly optimistic. Truth be told, the Winter Festival had taken a lot out of me. Christmas was a couple’s holiday in Korea. We ate cake, exchanged gifts with our lover, went on dates to see twinkle lights… But I’d been eating my own jjajangmyeon during lonely couple holidays for years. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, White Day, Bbaebbaero Day. Since I’d had no office colleagues to set me up with their friends, my mother’s friends’ sons had been it. The height of my dating career. Middle-aged men in the same boat as me, having no prospects but their mother’s friends’ daughters.

Aysh.

“Can I have the tape, Miss Jihae?” Soyeon asked, staring at Taehun’s baby-smooth skin as she waved her hand in my general direction. I put the tape in her hands and brushed off the malaise of loneliness. I had Soyeon and my coworkers here. I had my life and a future.

And now I had a Halloween Festival too. One that might feel more like home than anything else had so far, thanks to the steaming heat. Though the holiday was popular in the fall, Koreans traditionally found the summer to be the creepiest time of year. Even I Fell in Love with the Mudang had originally aired in July.

Maybe I could reinvent the holiday for myself instead of letting something I’d always enjoyed continue to fester in the nightmare of my abduction. Halloween didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve that. And if I could still watch most of my favorite horror movies, surely I could let go of the image of my black cat phone charm tumbling down the stairs.

I took a deep breath and picked up a black cat drawing. Holding it in my hands, I stared at it hard, letting that night wash over me again. Knocking over the charms, bowing to the vendor, dropping my phone. I let the entire experience shiver through my skin. The countless months in a harem, naked and withdrawn, hugging my water-logged shoes to my bare chest. The synth-cuis rations that made me throw up. Pulling the disintegrating stitches out of my own neck. Bruises and blood and fear.

My hands trembled, but it wasn’t anything new. They’d never changed. Neither had my voice, forevermore a raspy squeak like a jazz singer with a cold. But I was okay. I smiled at the drawing, proud of myself for healing so much. For being able to give back to myself so many of the things I’d loved before and lost.

The Halloween Festival was an opportunity for me to buff out the bad and replace it with good memories and traditions. Infuse it with the parts of Korea I missed so much now that Soyeon and I were the only ones in Renata that spoke our own language.

I tilted my head, falling back into my designerly habit of ideating projects. What I really wanted was a stabilizing stylus so I could draw sticker sheets and posters and paper plate designs, but since that wasn’t in the cards for me anymore, I thought about events instead. A Korean zombie movie marathon, drinking games for the adults, ghost stories and campfire rice cakes, kimbap, paper memorial lanterns…

My mind turned to the shadows in Naksan Park when the heat was oppressive and the shadows were deep. Where insects buzzed so loudly they drowned out the city. I missed our stone sidewalks and the creepy feeling of an empty Seoul subway station at night. A taxi passing you by with the words VACANT glowing above the windshield, even if you hailed. How the hot air dampened the sound of your clothes and your shoes and clung to your skin like someone standing too close.

Goosebumps rose on my arms and I gave a shiver of delight. Oh yeah. Tonight was definitely a horror movie night.

“No! That’s so embarrassing!” Soyeon exclaimed, rubbing her cheeks of a bright pink blush. My eyes snapped up to the holoscreen to find that Soin, the shamanic love interest, had just vomited ectoplasm on the handsome ghost Taehun. I smirked.

“Oh no,” I said mischievously, creeping closer. “I don’t feel so good—”

“Eee!” Soyeon jumped away as I made blegh noises and tickled her sides. She collapsed into giggles, slapping my face with a wad of black tinsel.

As the laughter faded, I cleared my throat out of habit, feeling the pull of my old surgical scar, and divided our treasure trove of decorations into piles. “Alright, time to get serious. You work on this pile and I’ll get dinner programmed.”

“Could I eat with Ciara and Miss Siobhan tonight?”

The question made me blink, my finger hovering over the holotab display above my forearm. I tsked with hesitation. “I think it’s better not to… Miss Siobhan’s leg looked like it hurt a lot tonight.”

Soyeon’s smile drooped, but she didn’t complain.

“Yes, Miss Jihae.”

I felt bad, but bit my tongue to stop myself from giving in. Soyeon had already gone to her best friend’s unit four times that week, and Siobhan surely needed a break.

Soyeon was quickly roped back into the drama, though, taping cut-out pumpkins onto the walls while her eyes were glued on the holoscreen. I breathed a sigh of relief, instructing our home unit’s food bay to print kimchi fried rice in half an hour. Then I hung the black tinsel around our lightboards and shelves, tying off the corners with orange sparkly bows.

The sun had set behind the red jungle trees well before we stepped out into the humid evening and the sound of Yaspur’s noisiest insects. I set the trash by my foot as Soyeon hoisted her bag onto her shoulders and pulled out my key fob to lock the building.

My trembling fingers fumbled, and the fob fell into the black grass.

“Aysh,” I grumbled, lifting one side of my lip in a snarl and shaking out my hands.

“Are you okay?” Soyeon asked. I squeezed her shoulder.

“Yep. Come on.”

I descended to the footpath, getting my shoes and hands wet as I rummaged around the jumble of long, bent grass blades. I really needed to start wearing my key on a bracelet. Every time I left the school—

Something skirted along the edge fo the jungle. It caught my attention in the periphery of my vision near the playfield littered with discarded sports equipment and goalie nets. A shadow with long legs and a thick coat of dark fur watched us, reflective yellow eyes catching the glow of the walkway lights.

A zing of exhilaration and fear raced to my toes at the sight.

It was Sizzle, the bilong on our security team. I usually didn’t leave school late enough to cross paths with him on his patrol, but when I did, it gave me that rush of skirting death for fun. Like a drop ride at an amusement park or getting a jolt from noises in the hallway after watching a zombie movie.

“He’s nice, right?” Soyeon asked, gripping my fingers. I held her hand nice and tight, then smiled.

“Of course he is. He helps protect us.” I stretched up onto my toes and waved at him, swinging my arm wide over my head to make a point. “Hi!”

Sizzle cocked his head with an ear twitch of confusion. Then he lifted his face to the sky and trumpeted a greeting in that eerie, hollow call. Birds erupted from the canopies, spraying into the lavender darkness like black bats. Then he slinked into the ferns without rustling a single frond.

Now that was a monster. Not the kind that masqueraded as men, but the kind that prowled through the pages of ancient folklore. That people told stories about in hushed tones at night and defined the flavor of their histories.

“See?” My voice chose that moment to squeak, and I swallowed it down. “Come on, dinner will get cold if we don’t hurry.”