A Choice We Make

Mr. Specter’s Estate, Los Angeles, 2025

POV: Naga

It had been hours since the interrogation ended, but Laurent’s words still glowed in the dark like a coal I couldn’t shake from my palm.

The chandelier hung asleep above us like a frozen constellation. Beyond the glass wall, the garden stretched in neat, expensive geometry.

Makoto sat forward with his elbows on his knees, fingers laced tight. Aki paced a narrow track behind the couch, wearing a path into a carpet that would never remember her. Haru looked like a hinge holding the room together, standing at a window by the wall.

My gaze lingered on Shelby who perched on the edge of an armchair as if the chair might reject her at any second. She kept glancing back at me and then away, an orbit of caution.

And again there was Specter. He stood at the bar without pouring so much as a drop. His hands were braced on the counter, his posture loose but not careless. Ever the enigma.

Makoto didn’t look up. “We need to move soon.”

Aki stopped her pacing and anchored herself to the back of the couch. “Then we go,” she said. “Before Malice does.”

The leather under my hand creaked. I felt the room watching the sound instead of me, grateful for any noise at all.

Why should any of this matter to me? Haneul was gone. The syllables of her name still tasted like a punishment. What was one boy measured against a universe where she no longer breathed? But even so, the thought of her blood being twisted into a weapon pulled a line of heat through me that I couldn’t tidy into logic. Rage is a poor map yet a reliable compass.

Shelby’s voice arrived cautiously. “I don’t… I don’t mean this the wrong way, but Vinnie must be important to you, huh?”

“He’s one of us,” Aki said.

“I made a promise,” Makoto said, guilt chewing his words into rougher shapes.

Shelby’s shoulders tightened, not from offense but from understanding how much she didn’t understand. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, a clumsy gesture in a room that made clumsy feel expensive.

Specter finally peeled his reflection off the bottles and faced us. “Sentiment is a blade, if you know where to press,” he said mildly. “But there’s a cleaner cut. We don’t need to guess where Malice will move. We make Laurent show us. He knows how they think. That’s how we find Vinnie before them.”

Aki snapped toward him. “You want to trust him?”

“Trust,” Specter repeated, as if tasting the word for the first time. “Don’t be silly. The hound still knows the scent of his masters. He knows how they move when they’re nervous, where they hide when they’re bold. Put a gun to his temple and he’ll tell us. Even if he thinks he’s leading us away.”

Makoto lifted his head. “And if he refuses?”

“Then he can be bait,” Specter said, with the same tone. “People like Laurent never fall alone. They bring their hunters with them.”

The room shifted a degree toward ugly practicality. No one liked what he was saying. But no one had a better way.

“We’ll need him where we can see him,” Haru said. Not an objection but a condition.

“Agreed,” Specter said. “I’ll move him to the west stair bullpen for the night. I’ll have a word with him tonight and see what I can force out.”

No one spoke for a long moment. The chandelier above us watched like a jury that had already decided the verdict.

Haru straightened. “Then that’s the plan,” he said. “We use Laurent to find the trail. We move before Malice closes a fist. We find Vinnie. We deal with Malice after that, he comes first.”

Aki let go of the couch and found the floor with both feet. “Then we get some sleep and move at first light.”

“Sleep,” Specter echoed, blandly amused. “How pastoral. Fine. I’ll have rooms made ready.”

Makoto stood and stretched his hands. “I’ll take first watch on Laurent.”

Specter shook his head. “I’ll speak to him alone, I can make him talk. You get some rest. Fresh eyes in the morning, please.”

Makoto looked ready to argue, then seemed to decide that preserving the argument for later would be more expensive for Specter. He nodded once.

Haru crossed the room toward me, not quite nervousness on his face, something steadier. “You still haven’t said if you’ll help us,” he said.

I wanted to tell him I didn’t owe him that faith. I wanted to say the words and watch them leave my mouth, polite and insufficient. What I said instead was, “Get some rest.”

“You too.” He turned and walked away.

He knew I wouldn’t. He said it anyway.

They dispersed with the graceless efficiency of people too tired to pretend they weren’t.

I remained.

The garden beyond the glass had turned to a darker silhouette. The city beyond the garden belted its orange hum into the sky.

Haneul. I didn’t say her name out loud. The silence knew it anyway.

I left the lounge because the space had somehow began to feel suffocating, and I didn’t want to be swallowed by something that belonged to Specter.

The rooftop was clean and clinical, edges disciplined to the degree. The city threw itself at the horizon in broken beams of light.

I stood at the glass fencing until the reflection stabilized. The thing looking back at me was both mine and not mine.

“Nice view, right,” Specter said from behind.

He arrived without sound. It didn’t feel like stealth so much as consent, as if the night let him in like it had been waiting for him.

“You don’t sleep?” I asked.

“Sleep and I have an arrangement,” he said. “We borrow each other when necessary.”

He came to stand a pace away, hands in his pockets, posture relaxed but not indolent. The city lit his profile as if even the light itself owed him a debt. In the light, it was easier to see how young he was.

“Your wounds heal faster,” he said. “It seems like there’s always something new with you.”

“Get to the point,” I replied with a defeated smile. “What do you want to know?”

He glanced at me sidelong, measuring what the night made of me. “How many of these so-called divine blessings do you carry?”

I didn’t answer.

He waited. A man patient with very expensive clocks.

“Aside from everything you’ve already seen,” I said. “I can understand any language.”

Something small altered in his posture, the way a blade might lean toward a whetstone.

“Any language,” he said softly, almost to the wind. “You mean you can understand every single one?”

“It means what I said.”

“How very amusing,” he said, eyes brightening with thought rather than feeling. He smiled lightly. “Maybe I’ll use that.”

“Why?” I said. “Why are you so insistent in helping take down Malice? You could have done nothing. You could have watched. I know you haven’t been compensated a single penny.”

Perhaps I was projecting my own feelings more than I’d realized.

He turned to face the city as if the question had been addressed to it. “I wasn’t handed anything,” he said. “No angel cut me a line in the sky. No laboratory stitched me into anything useful. I wasn’t born with the sort of money or power that throws a blanket over your mistakes and calls it a duvet.” His voice didn’t heat up, instead it cooled. “I built everything I have. Brick and bluff. I chose to dethrone everyone who sat here before me, from dirt and soil, and claimed my place at the top of this city.”

He let a breath out through his nose, almost amused at himself. “But if I have to burn it all down to prove my point, I will.”

“What point?”

“That human will is stronger than any system man or heaven can design,” he said simply. “Malice worships science and cages. The heavens worship their own divinity.” He rolled one shoulder. “I worship nothing. I don’t need to. My empire is my proof.”

The words found a quiet place in me and began to hammer.

I had heard them before.

Not in that voice. Not in this century.

Petals on a river that never admitted to current. A garden that had called itself eternal. A woman with her hands shaking around a fruit because it was heavy with a future.

Eve’s eyes had asked me a question the sky refused to answer. I had said yes before I understood what that meant.

They told me it had been rebellion. That I’d wanted to watch the Garden bleed. It was easier to believe that than to admit I had wanted to see what humans would do if the ceiling lifted, if the cage door stood open and no one forced them to stay.

Specter stood here now, a man assembled out of refusal, and told me he had built an empire from scratch because he had chosen to. No divinity. No laboratory. Just will and an appetite that learned the name of hunger.

Yet here he was, ready to gamble it all away, solely in the name of his own beliefs.

The existence of a man like him in this era testified to my oldest crime. My oldest sin. And perhaps my oldest kindness.

Haneul’s face swam up from the back of my mind. She too had believed in choice more than doctrine, in cost more than comfort. That was the only reason I was even here, walking freely. The reason I now had a choice of my own to begin with.

The grief in me shifted. Not away. Not smaller. But different.

Specter watched the city. He spoke as if he were bored, which is to say he was being honest and it embarrassed him slightly. “This Jinho Kang. He makes cages and calls them progress. He makes prisons and calls them rebellion. He turns children into weapons. You don’t need me to tell you that. You can smell it. You were made to.”

“You’re very sure of what I was made to do,” I said.

“Nah, I’m just sure of what you can do,” he said. “The rest is faith.”

“In me?”

He considered that and laughed once, softly. “In your resolve. But Haneul had faith in you, didn’t she?”

Her name in his mouth felt like a hand reaching into my chest to check my heart was still there.

Specter shrugged, a small apology to the night for telling a truth out loud. “The heavens. The angels. Malice. They’ll all try to chain you. But chains only work if you accept their weight.”

He turned toward the stairwell and the city bent its light to flatter his exit.

“Get some rest,” he said, which was a joke he didn’t bother to sell.

He left me alone with the glass, the wrongness in my eyes, and a sky that didn’t care if it reflected my face or the one that waited underneath.

I let the quiet grow roots. The wind went about its business. The real wind, that Haneul once spoke of.

I closed my eyes and saw Eve’s hand again, the fruit heavy in it because the future is heavy when you realize it isn’t yet written. I saw Haneul’s mouth firm into a line when she had decided to do something gentle yet difficult.

For Haneul, I’d decide to burn their cages. Tear open their jaws.

The vow didn’t make a sound. It was my very own choice. One that I made.

The night heard it anyway. Something old in my blood uncoiled, not to strike, but to lengthen, to measure the ground it would cross.

When I opened my eyes, my reflection had settled into the more human face I knew how to carry. 

The serpent looked back from behind the glass with patient amusement and did not argue.