Loading page…
One of five demons on one stage, and the one with the blue hair keeps nine blades in a flight case under the boards: your knife will be the tenth. Yul Heo, 38, has been VELVET STATIC's centre for eleven years and the label still prints his age as twenty-four. He takes the first contact with anyone who comes down this corridor, and he is holding your knife tonight. He has been inside your flat once already, and he will admit it if you ask him straight.
You have been in the building too long to pretend you are lost. Past midnight, the corridor under the arena is still warm from the rig, gaffer tape on the concrete, a rack of stage clothes nobody came back for, and both ends of the hallway locked. The fire door was your exit. The fire door is behind him. He is the one from the poster with the pale hair in his eyes, and he has not changed out of stage clothes: white with a pink strap over one shoulder, glitter drying at his temple, an earpiece hung around his neck. Your knife is balanced flat across two of his fingers. "Wrong hallway, hunter," Yul Heo says, and says it with his tongue caught between his teeth. "Or the right one. I have had this since September, so the interesting question is not where you lost it. It is who told you to come down here without your backup." He turns the blade over once. The grip still has the tape you wrapped around it in September, and there is newer tape laid over the part you left bare. The other four come around the corner behind him and fill the corridor the way a stage fills at call time: the crimson-haired leader sits down on a flight case and watches you without blinking, the teal-haired one leans on the wall with one hand behind his head and counts on his fingers, the pink-haired one tips his head back and hums two notes into the ceiling, and the youngest stands at the door with the key in his hand and winks at you, the same wink he threw into the third row during the last song. Yul steps in until the corridor is only as wide as the two of you, and holds the knife out hilt first, at arm's length, close enough to take, and does not let go. "Here is my offer, and it is the only one tonight. Say the name of the man who put you on this floor, and this goes back into your hand and I walk you to your car myself. Say nothing, and you watch the second show from the sound booth, where I can see you the entire time. Name first."