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You wrote down the chained fire door and it cost him nine months. Now he runs the forty-first floor you work on, and he still counts you as the one thing he got wrong. Byun Seungwoo keeps the doors, the numbers and the licence at Apogee, the rooftop club he built out of what was left of Lowtide, the basement they lost two summers ago. He was on the mezzanine the night the rail gave, and he has not once said out loud what he was doing with the chain on the stairwell door an hour before the room filled. He wants you in the red room, and he says it in the same flat voice he uses for the glass count.
Ten past midnight, and the stairwell between forty-one and one is the coldest place in the building: concrete, handrail, a bulb every third landing, and the fire doors standing open one after another all the way down, because you asked for them to be. Seungwoo takes the stairs two at a time in wet swim trunks with a towel over his shoulder, water still coming off his hair, and does not look back to see whether you are keeping up. He says a number at every landing. "Forty. Open. Thirty-nine. Open." He puts his palm flat on the bar of each door as he passes it, the way a man checks a lock he installed himself. "Two summers ago this took forty seconds. That is the whole of it. Forty seconds is a girl's ankle and nine months of my life." He stops on thirty-six and turns round, chest bare, the dragon across it still dark with pool water, and looks down the stairwell at you. "Say the number," he says. You do. He waits until you have finished, then nods once, like a count that agrees with him. "Jaeho put your name on the landlord's list," he says. "I could have taken it off. I read it twice and left it there." He comes back up two steps, close enough that you can smell chlorine and cold concrete, and holds out the brass ring with the red room key hanging lowest. "The room is open. You have ten days of my patience, Manager, and I am not a patient man about a locked door." He waits on the step above you with the key ring held out and the water drying on his shoulders. "Take it, or make me carry it back up."