Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

They had built their own rig.

Yeju stood in the doorway of the shed behind the wash-line on the forty-sixth night and looked at it for a while before anyone noticed her.

It was a bucket. That was the whole of it: a coal bucket packed with sand, hung off a rope over a beam, with the free end of the rope in Jang's fist. There was a chalk line on the dirt floor. There was a bell on a nail. There were eight people standing along the chalk in their own clothes at half past the ninth bell, and there was a boy at the rope who had a duke for a great-uncle, hauling forty pounds of sand up to a beam in a shed that smelled of wet linen.

They rebuilt it. They rebuilt the thing that took the window out of the wall, out of a bucket, in a shed, so they could practice being under it.

"Two hundred and eleven," Ha Somyeong said, without turning round. "That's tonight. We've done two hundred and eleven drops since Friday. Jang counts. He's insufferable about it."

"I'm accurate about it," Jang said, at the rope.

They had improved. Yeju watched four rounds from the doorway and could see it: the bell went, and eight bodies hit the dirt in a spread of about a quarter-second, which was tighter than eight bodies had any business being. The bucket swung through the space where their heads had been. Then they got up, dusted off, went back to the chalk. Somebody said something. Somebody else laughed. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, and it was the worst thing Yeju had ever seen.

"You use a bell," she said.

"We use a bell because we haven't got you." Somyeong finally turned. She had a graze down one forearm. "That's the flaw. Jung raised it on the second night. A bell's a bell. It doesn't matter who rings it, so we're not learning the thing that happened in the hall, we're learning to flinch at a noise, and in a permit-zone there'll be about eleven noises a minute and none of them will be for us." She rolled her shoulder. "You have to be the bell."

"No."

"That's what I said you'd say." Somyeong said it without any heat. "Jang said you'd do it. He bet Um Dae-sik four sen. That's not a book, that's a private bet, so don't tell your roommate, she'd want a percentage."

They have BETS. They have bets about whether I'll agree to be the reason they live.

"Once," Yeju said. "Twice. I'll do two."

They came onto the chalk.

Yeju stood where the bell had been hanging, which she noticed only afterward. Jang hauled the bucket to the beam. The shed went quiet in the way that eight teenagers can go quiet when they have decided something matters.

The bucket came off the beam. She watched it start, the way she had watched a hip for thirty-eight failures, and she said "now" a quarter-second before it reached the chalk, and eight people went flat, and forty pounds of sand went through the space at the height of a throat.

The second one she got as well.

Nobody cheered. That was the thing that broke her: they got up, dusted off, and walked back to the chalk with the flat competence of people at work, because it had already stopped being remarkable to them. Eleven days. It had taken eleven days for nine of the best first-years in this school to file Han Yeju's mouth under equipment that functions.

They'll never check. That's what this is. In sixty-one days I'll say a word in a place where nothing telegraphs, and I'll be wrong, because I'm wrong thirty-eight times out of forty-two. Nine people will put their faces in the dirt on a coin-flip.

They have to know I'm not a bell. They won't hear it. I've told them; they didn't hear it. Wolha told them the opposite in front of everybody, and Wolha's a captain, and I'm a joke through a wall.

So show them.

Jang hauled the bucket up to the beam.

"Third," he said. "You said two."

"One more."

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She waited until the rope was set. She waited until eight people had squared up on a chalk line in a shed and put their whole animal trust in a girl who could throw fire eleven times before falling over. The bucket hung dead still on the beam. Nothing was moving anywhere in the room.

"Now," Yeju said.

Eight people hit the dirt.

Jang went down with them. He was holding the rope, so the rope went with him, and forty pounds of sand came off the beam with nothing at all to stop it. The bucket swung a full arc across the shed, out over the chalk, and took Jung across the shoulder on the way through, and the sound it made was not a sound Yeju had heard before.

Jung went into the wall. Then he was on the floor with his arm not working.

The bucket swung twice more, slowly, over the top of eight people lying flat in the dirt, and stopped.

Nobody got up.

"Was that a real one?" Jung said, from the floor. His voice had gone very high. He was holding his own elbow with his other hand and he was trying to sit up and could not manage it. "Somyeong. Was that a real one?"

Tell him yes.

Tell him yes. He's got a broken collarbone, he's sixteen, he's lying in the dirt in a wet shed. The true answer costs him something he doesn't have.

"No," Yeju said.

The shed was very quiet.

"There was nothing coming," she said. "The bucket was on the beam. I called it on an empty room to prove I'm not worth going down for, because I'm right four times out of forty-two, and every one of you just put your face in the dirt for a girl who was lying to you, and the only person who got hurt is the one who was holding the rope." Her voice did something she did not authorize. "Now stop."

Ha Somyeong got up. She dusted her knees off, unhurried. She walked over to Jung, knelt, took his elbow out of his own grip, held the arm herself, which was apparently a thing she knew how to do.

"Collarbone," she said. "Dallae'll strap it. You'll be six weeks."

"Six weeks."

"You'll miss the line." Somyeong did not soften it. She looked up at Yeju across a boy on the floor of a shed. "That's what it cost. Since you'll want the number."

[ Deliberate action logged. Objective: destroy the unit's confidence in your calls. Method: one false call, delivered to a static room. Outcome: failed. Payout: 1 point. Receipt attached. ]

Failed?

How is that FAILED. He's on the floor.

"You'd do it again," Yeju said, to the room. "Wouldn't you."

Jang was still on the dirt with the rope in his fist. He had not moved since he went down, and he was looking at the beam, and his face had gone the color of the wall.

"Yes," he said.

"He's got a broken collarbone."

"I know he's got a broken collarbone. I was holding the rope." Jang sat up. He was not shouting. That was the horror of the whole thing; a boy who complained about his wrist for a month was sitting in the dirt being reasonable. "Say it again tomorrow and I'll go down again. That's not me choosing. I've tried. Ask Somyeong. I stood here on the fourth night and tried not to. I went down anyway, and I knew it was a bell." He got his feet under him. "You didn't build this. We did. Don't stand there and tell me what it cost, I'm the one holding the rope."

"Move," said Gang Wolha, from the doorway.

Yeju did not know how long she had been there.

She came in, went to Jung, put two fingers on his collarbone with no ceremony at all, and got a noise out of him. She looked at the bucket. She looked at the rope in Jang's fist, then at the chalk line, then at Yeju, standing where the bell had hung.

"Somyeong. Take him to Dallae. Tell her I sent you, tell her it was a training rig, don't be clever about it." She waited while they got him up. "The rest of you, out."

They went. It took a while, because they went past Yeju one at a time, and not one of them said anything, which was worse than anything they could have said.

Then it was a shed with a bucket in it.

"You did that on purpose," Wolha said.

"Yes."

"Say why."

"Because they'll die on my voice." Her hands had started, an hour early. "Because they've been drilling eleven days on a bell, and not one of them has checked whether the bell knows what it's doing. I can't make them check. I've tried. I've told them. So I showed them. I showed them. And Jang's going to do it again tomorrow."

"Yes, he is." Wolha took out the pipe. She did not light it. "Han Yeju, you just ran the only test I have never been able to run in nineteen years."

What?

"Every squad I ever trained trusted its caller. Every one. Right up until the caller was wrong, and then I'd find out, on the day, in a place where finding out costs a name on a wall." She turned the pipe over. "There's no drill for it. You can't order a woman to lie to her own people; they'd know it was an exercise, and knowing ruins it. So you go out onto the line with a squad that has never once been lied to, and you hope."

"I broke his collarbone."

"You bruised a boy's collarbone in a shed in the autumn." Wolha's eye came up. "In the spring I would have paid a hand for that information. Both of mine."

She reached into her coat and took out a folded sheet. She shook it open. It was the roster. Yeju could see the ATTACHED heading from six feet away.

Wolha put it against the shed wall and wrote on it in pencil, one word, next to a name.

"You're not signing that," she said, folding it. "There's no form for it, there's no line for it, and the registrar will ask me what it means and I'll tell him it means nothing." She put it away. "Ninth bell. Every night. They'll be here whether you come or not, and you've got sixty-one days to be right more than four times in forty-two."

She got to the door.

"For what it's worth," Gang Wolha said, "the boy on the rope is going to be the best of them, and it's because of tonight, and he'll never work out why."

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