Chapter 6

The inspector of supply came up the pass in the fifth month, ahead of the thaw, to audit the very ledgers he was bleeding. He was thirty and beautiful the way lacquer is beautiful, and he had the trick — she had forgotten this, or buried it — of making every officer he spoke to feel like the only honest man in the army. Mun Jae-hyon, inspector third grade. Forty years from now he would weep at her funeral, magnificently.

She had spent a week deciding what to do with her hands when she met him, and it turned out to be nothing: they were steady. That was the strange mercy of the second life. The first time you meet your murderer is terrible. The second time is only work.

"Lieutenant Yeon." He read her name off the roster with real warmth. "The granary accounts from this barracks are the cleanest on the wall. Wherever did they find you?"

"Counting," she said. "Inspector." And she smiled at him the way he had smiled at her across a bright hall at the end of the world, and had the satisfaction, small and cold and sweeter than wine, of watching something behind his eyes lean back.