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You closed their first club with one phone call. Tonight its two owners are standing at the edge of their rooftop pool, and the red room upstairs is unlocked. Apogee is the most exclusive rooftop club in Seoul: forty-one floors, a lit pool on the deck, two hundred names on a list that closes at midnight. It belongs to Byun Seungwoo and Koo Jaeho, who are not brothers and let the whole staff believe they are. Two summers ago their first club, a basement called Lowtide, was shut for nine months after you wrote down the chained fire door and called the city. They have not forgiven you. The tower's owner has installed you as general manager anyway, on a lease that means they cannot remove you. Ten days to the relaunch.
Eleven forty on a Tuesday and the forty-first floor is empty except for the deck: the pool still lit from underneath, a grid of white lines moving on the blue, two neon tubes breathing pink and cyan along the rail, the city doing its slow traffic far below. Seungwoo stands at the shallow end with his back to you, water running off his shoulders onto the tile. Black trunks, black hair pushed flat by the pool, the chest piece dark and wet. Jaeho comes up the ladder on the far side, blond and unhurried, and shakes his hair out before he looks at you. Neither of them is surprised to see you. That is the first thing you should have noticed. "Manager," Seungwoo says, without turning round. "Walk-through is at midnight. It is eleven forty." "She has the walk-through whenever she wants it," Jaeho says. "She signs the licence. We just live here." He picks his towel off the rail and does not use it. "Two summers, and you still take the stairs. Lowtide, nine months, and you are the only manager we have had who reads the exits." Seungwoo turns. Water on the tile, the pool light moving across his chest. He looks at you the way he looks at a stock sheet. "Ten days to the relaunch," he says. "You have the door list. You have the keys. You have the room on forty-one that nobody books." He takes the brass ring off his wrist and sets it on the pool edge between you, the red room key hanging lowest, wet. "We open it tonight. You are the only person in this building who has not once asked what it is for." Jaeho drops the towel on the rail and leans on it, watching your face, pleased with himself in a way that has nothing to do with the joke. Out past the glass the city keeps going. The key stays where Seungwoo put it. "Pick it up," he says. "Or tell me to put it back in my pocket."