They ran.

Eunhae had not run in years. She had walked, steadily, tirelessly, in all weathers, the long unhurried walk of a woman who had the whole night before her, but she had forgotten what it was to pound along a pavement with her heart slamming against her ribs and the cold air tearing at her lungs. Haeseul ran ahead of her. She ran well, in her low white shoes, with her coat flying open and the red cord of the key swinging at her wrist, and she did not look back once. The old quarter was just waking. A baker unrolled his awning. A girl in a school uniform pressed against a wall to let them pass. The sun had cleared the hills and laid long gold bars across the street, and in all that clean bright morning there was no reason on earth for anything to be wrong.

But Eunhae could feel it. It reached her halfway up the slope, a dull, low, grinding pressure behind her breastbone, like a stone dragged across a floor in a room far below. It was the old, unmistakable weight of the Hushed. And it was wrong. It was the wrong hour. Daylight thinned them, as water thins ink, and a Hushed that could stand in a lit shop at sunrise was a Hushed that had been feeding.

"Haeseul!" she called.

"I know!"

"Wait for me! Do not go in alone!"

"He is twenty-three years old!" It came back over her shoulder, ragged and furious and frightened. "He is not alone!"

The green cross glowed over the door of Dawnbridge, pale in the daylight, and Haeseul hit the handle with her whole palm and went in. Eunhae came after, and the bell rang, and stopped.

It was not quiet inside. That was the first thing. There was a noise, a low, wet, endless sound, like a person weeping into a pillow in the next room, and it was coming from everywhere at once. It came out of the shelves. It came up through the floor. It thrummed in the glass of the display cases and trembled in the little bottles of vitamins, and the white morning light that fell through the front window seemed to curdle as it crossed the threshold and go dull and gray and thick.

Gyeol stood in the middle of the second aisle.

He had both hands pressed over his ears, and his eyes were screwed shut, and his whole body was shaking. His white coat hung off him crooked. There was a pallor on his face that Eunhae knew, the greenish transparent pallor of someone who has gone too long without sleep and is beginning to see through his own skin. And behind him, rising out of the corner by the cold storage, tall as the shelves and thick as smoke, stood the thing that had come before.

It was the mother.

It was the same Hushed, she was sure of it, the stooped, drowned, weeping shape that had crawled along the tile on the night of the second moon. But it was no longer a faint thing, a smear of dishwater on the air. It had put on weight. It had a body now, of a kind, with shoulders and a bowed neck and long, ruined hands, and it had grown to the height of the ceiling, and its head was turned toward the boy with an expression of blind, hungry, unbearable longing.

"Gyeol!" Haeseul's voice cracked across the shop. "Han Gyeol, it is Noona. Look at me."

He did not open his eyes. "I cannot make it stop," he said. His voice was a thread. "I cannot make it stop, Noona. I have not slept in four days. I thought it had gone. I slept for one night, and then it came back, and it is so sad, it is so sad, and I keep thinking if I only listen hard enough I will understand what it wants..."

"Do not listen. Do not listen to it."

"It wants her baby back."

"I know."

"It wants her baby and there is no baby, there is no baby..."

"Eunhae!" Haeseul had turned. Her eyes were enormous, her face white. "Do something!"

Eunhae had already drawn the watch.

She flicked it open with her thumb, and the little pale face looked up at her, and she felt the count rise in her throat like a tide. "Stand back," she said. "Both of you. Haeseul, get behind me. Gyeol, keep your eyes on my hand. Do not look at it. Look at the watch."

She began.

One. And two. And three.

She sent it out in a steady stream, low and level and sure, as she had a thousand times, and for the first three counts she felt the old familiar response, a thinning, a falter, the dark leaning back on its heels. The weeping wavered. The great gray head turned, slowly, a few degrees toward her. Four. Five. And it stopped.

She felt it stop, as a hand stops against a wall.

It had not receded. It had not softened. It simply stood, and its blurred face turned and fixed upon her, and something in it hardened, a vast, blind, desperate stubbornness, the stubbornness of a creature that has spent a very long time looking for one thing and has just been told to leave. It leaned toward her. The temperature in the shop dropped ten degrees. Her breath smoked in the air.

"No," Eunhae whispered. "Rest. Rest, now. There is nothing here for you."

Six. Seven. Her voice was strong, but the count was thinning. She could hear it, and so could the Hushed. It was too tired. It was her own voice, and it had nothing under it, no ground, no floor, no deep still water to draw from. It was only a woman in a cold room, a day and a night without sleep, counting into a wind.

"It is not working," she said.

"What do you mean it is not working?"

"It is too strong. It has been feeding on him for weeks. I cannot hold it alone." She felt the sweat start on her forehead. "I need..."

She did not finish. She did not need to.

She heard the step behind her, quick and light, and then a hand closed over her left wrist. It was warm. It was steady. And a voice at her ear, quite calm, said, "May I?"

"Haeseul, no. It is not the dark. It is not the right..."

"You said the Hushed flare. You said you might need me." Haeseul's breath was quick and shallow against her cheek. "Is this not a flare?"

"It is. But I cannot promise what it will..."

"Eunhae." It was said very softly. "That boy has not slept in four days. May I?"

She should have said no. She would think about that afterward, a great many times, in a great many ways, lying awake at three in the morning with her own hands folded on her chest. She should have said no. She should have taken the watch and gone forward alone, and let the thing take her instead, and trusted in the strength of her own failing arms. She should have said: the price is greater than I told you. She should have said it now, there, in that cold gray morning light, with the weeping rising round them like water in a cellar.

She said, "Yes."

The floor opened.

It was nothing like the first time. It was nothing like the new moon, when the tie had been new and shy and had drawn upon Haeseul's strength a little at a time, like a tide on a shallow shore. This was a flood. This was a dam breaking. It went through Eunhae like a bolt of white lightning, so fast and so total that she gasped aloud, and the watch leapt in her palm, and for one moment she was no longer standing in a pharmacy at all, but on a wide, bright, silent plain with the whole sky open above her and no weight on her shoulders whatsoever.

She was strong. She was so strong that it hurt.

"Eight," she said, and the count rang out through the shop like a bell. "Nine. Ten."

The Hushed screamed.

It was not a sound the ear could hear. It was a pressure, a shuddering in the bones, a white wail of grief that tore at the edges of her sight, and it came up out of the gray shape like steam from a boiler, and she did not flinch. She held. She set her feet. She gathered all that surging, glittering strength into her chest, and she poured it into the count, and she said, with a voice that she did not know she had: "Enough. You have wept enough. Let it go."

The great shape trembled. Its hands rose to its face. For a long, strange, suspended moment it hung there, bowed and shuddering and enormous, and Eunhae thought: I have it. I have it.

Behind her, Haeseul made a small sound.

It was not a loud one. It was only a catch of breath, soft and surprised, the sound a person makes when she has been struck in the stomach. And the hand on Eunhae's wrist went slack.

She turned her head.

Haeseul had gone the color of paper. She stood with her eyes wide and glassy and fixed on nothing, her lips parted, her free hand pressed flat against her sternum as if to hold something in. She was swaying. A bead of sweat ran down her temple, and her knees were beginning, very slowly, to give. And along the inside of her left wrist, where the cuff had slid back, the pale ring of the seal had changed.

It was glowing.

It was a faint, cold, silver glow, like moonlight on frost, and the twelve little ticks were standing out from the skin like a row of pins. And beside it, creeping outward across the pulse, beginning from the base of the palm, a second ring was forming, a second pale circle, delicate as breath on glass, with marks that were not yet finished, that were being drawn, as Eunhae watched, by an invisible hand.

"Haeseul," she said. "Stop. Let go."

"I am all right."

"You are not. Let go. I can hold it. I have enough."

"I am quite..." Her voice faltered. "I cannot feel my hands."

Eunhae wrenched. She did not stop to ask, or to wait, or to remember the second condition. She tore her own wrist out of the loosening grip and felt the tie snap like a cut cord, and the strength went out of her in one long, appalling rush, and the whole shop lurched. Haeseul folded. She went down slowly, like a coat sliding off a hook, and Eunhae caught her, one arm under her shoulders, the watch clattering to the floor.

The Hushed, freed, swung its head.

It looked at them. And then, with an expression that was not triumph, exactly, but a wild, mournful, terrible relief, it let go of the corner and flowed, in one long gray ripple, toward the boy.

"Gyeol!" Eunhae screamed.

He had opened his eyes. He was looking straight at it, and his face, in that last instant, was perfectly peaceful. He smiled. He said, quite clearly, "Oh, there you are," and the great gray shape settled over him like a shawl. And Han Gyeol's knees folded, and he sank to the floor of the pharmacy among the cough drops and the lip balm, and lay quite still, with his head pillowed on his arm and his eyes closed and a look of such profound, such complete, such utterly childlike rest on his young face that Eunhae's heart stopped.

The weeping ceased.

The light came back. It came flooding through the glass as though a curtain had been drawn, warm and gold and ordinary, and the refrigerator started up with a hum, and a bird sang outside on the signboard. The thing was gone. There was nothing in the corner but the cold storage unit and a stack of boxes. There was only a young man asleep on a floor.

"Gyeol," said Haeseul.

She was on her hands and knees. She had crawled across the tiles with her hair hanging in her face and her breath coming in short, whooping gasps, and she took his shoulders and turned him, gently, onto his back. She pressed two fingers to his throat. "Pulse is steady. Eighty. Respiration even." She pulled up an eyelid. The pupil contracted. "He is breathing. He is all right. He is only..." She shook him. "Gyeol. Han Gyeol. Wake up. Wake up, it is Noona. You are all right. It has gone."

He did not stir.

She shook him harder. She said his name again, and again, and slapped his cheek lightly, then not lightly, with a flat, professional, terrified rhythm. There was no response. His head rolled on his neck. His lips were slightly parted, and his breath came slow and deep, and in the clear light the color was returning to his face, a healthy pink, but his eyes did not flutter, and the hands lying open on the floor did not so much as twitch.

"It is only sleep," said Eunhae. Her voice sounded to her like someone else's. "It took him in. It is not a harm, it is only..."

"Then why will he not wake up?"

"I do not know. It will pass. They do not kill. It is the first rule. They only..."

"I am calling an ambulance," said Haeseul.

She did it with a hand that did not shake. She pulled out the phone, and gave the address, and the symptoms, and the age, and said that the patient was breathing and unresponsive to pain, and that there had been no trauma and no known ingestion. Her voice was crisp. It was the voice of a woman in command of herself, and Eunhae, kneeling on the floor with the watch in her fist, understood that she was watching something very much like a person holding a door against a flood.

Haeseul put down the phone. She sat back on her heels and looked at her hands.

Then she turned her left wrist over in the light.

There were two rings now. The first, the old one, had darkened from pale silver to a faint pewter gray, and the ticks stood out against the skin like tiny scratches. The second lay below it, narrower, newer, still faintly shining. And on the second, Eunhae saw, with a slow cold lurch of her stomach, there were already seven marks.

"What is that?" said Haeseul.

"It is the seal."

"It has doubled."

"Yes."

"It was one ring, yesterday. One ring of twelve." She was speaking very softly, very evenly, quite without inflection. "You said it grows as the tie grows. And just now, you took a hand that was not offered to you in the dark of the moon, in broad daylight, in the middle of a flare, and it went through me like..." She stopped. She drew a slow breath. "I cannot feel my fingers. Look at them. I have been a pharmacist for six years. I have watched people go into shock. This is not tiredness."

"It was never so fast," said Eunhae. "I swear. On the first night it was gentle, it was a slow draw, I did not think..."

"You said it would be like running a long way."

"I did."

"You said I would be exhausted for a day or two and then recover."

"I..."

"You said it, Eunhae. I remember it exactly. It was in the back room, on the floor, over rice rolls. You said it was only tiring."

"I told you what I understood."

"That is not what I asked you." Haeseul lifted her eyes. They were dark, and perfectly dry, and so quiet that Eunhae almost wished she would shout. "I asked what it took. And you said rest. And I have been sitting on my bed for two weeks, looking at a ring on my wrist, and I have been telling myself that I was being foolish. That you had told me the truth. That you were a woman who chose her words with care because she was shy, and not because she was..." The word hung. "Because she was managing me."

"Haeseul, please."

"Did you know?"

It was the simplest question in the world. It sat in the sunlit air between them, among the cough drops and the sleeping boy, and every clock in Eunhae's mind stopped.

She could have lied. She could feel the lie rising, smooth and fluent and warm, and it would have been so easy. I did not know. I never imagined. My grandmother never wrote that it would be so. She had the whole of it ready, like a coat held out. And across from her, kneeling on the tiles in the clear gold light, Haeseul waited, with her ruined wrist turned up in her lap and her face as open as a child's, and Eunhae thought: I wrote the word. Agreed. I wrote it with my own hand, not an hour ago, in the same room as the key.

She opened her mouth.

Outside, very faintly, the siren began.

"I knew it cost sleep," Eunhae said. It came out in pieces. "I knew it was a price. I knew that..." Her voice broke. She forced it on. "I did not know it would be so quick. I did not know about the second ring. I did not know about any of it."

"But you knew there was more."

"Yes."

"And you did not say."

"I was going to. I swear that I was going to..."

"When?" Haeseul's voice was still very quiet. "At the next dark of the moon? After I had agreed? After I was tied?" She laughed, once, a short dry broken sound. "I told you. I said it, an hour ago, in the shop. I said that if I learned there had been a cost I was not told of, I would go. And you wrote the word. Agreed. You looked me in the face and wrote it."

"I know."

"You knew then."

"Yes."

"You knew when I took the key."

"Yes."

The siren was louder. It swelled up the hill, a long wavering whoop, and the light from the window pulsed gently blue across the floor. Haeseul rose. She did it slowly, holding the edge of the counter, her knees trembling visibly, and she stood with her back very straight and her face quite white. She did not look at Eunhae. She looked at the boy.

"I am not your anchor," she said.

"Haeseul..."

"I am not your anchor. I am not anyone's." It was said steadily, almost gently. She had pulled the key from her wrist, with its red cord, and she laid it on the counter in front of her, very carefully, as one lays down a thing that might break. "I will stay with him until the ambulance has taken him. I will go to the hospital. And I would like you not to follow me."

"Let me explain."

"You have had two weeks. You have had a night, and an afternoon, and a morning. You have had your three conditions, and your four." She picked up her bag. "You have had every chance in the world to tell me the truth, and each time, you chose your words with tongs. I am not angry. That is the strange thing. I thought I would be." She pushed open the door, and the cold bright air poured in. "I am only very tired. And I think I have been tired for a very long time, and I have only just noticed."

The bell rang.

She went out onto the pavement and stood in the sun with her arms wrapped around herself, a small straight figure in a white coat. The ambulance swung round the corner and braked in a flurry of blue light. A paramedic jumped down. She stepped forward, and her voice carried back through the open door, clear and professional and perfectly steady, rattling out a list of figures, a name, a date of birth, a plan.

Eunhae did not follow.

She sat on the floor of the pharmacy, with the watch in her hand and a young man breathing softly beside her, and she did not move. She could not. There was a cold, flat, spreading numbness in her chest, and she knew it for what it was. It was the feeling of a thing being put down. It was the sound of a latch dropping into place. For two weeks she had felt, in some deep part of herself, the faint, steady, patient warmth of a presence beside her in the dark, and it had gone, all at once, like a lamp being carried out of a room.

She looked at the key on the counter. A small old brass thing on a faded red cord. She did not touch it.

"I am sorry," she whispered, to the boy, to the empty shop, to nobody. "I am so sorry."

Gyeol sighed.

It was a long, soft, contented sigh, the sigh of a sleeper turning over. And then his lips moved. They shaped words, slowly, drowsily, as if from a very great distance, and the voice that came out of them was not his. It was lower. It was older. It had a tone of immense, gentle, ancient patience, as of a mother speaking to a child in the dark, and it spoke quite clearly, to the sunlit ceiling, in the stillness of the shop.

"Tell her," it said, "that the moon is not the only thing that wanes."

Eunhae stared.

"Gyeol," she said. "Who is that? Who is speaking?"

But he had gone quiet again. His breath came slow and even. The lines of his face smoothed out, and he lay on the cold tiles with his hands open beside him and a faint smile on his lips, as though he had never said anything at all.

The paramedics came in with a stretcher. Haeseul came behind them, quick and pale and professional, and she did not look at the woman on the floor. And Eunhae stayed where she was, with her back against the shelves and her heart going very slowly in her chest, and listened to the words go round and round in her head like a pendulum.

The moon is not the only thing that wanes.

Outside, in the bright and ordinary morning, the siren began to wail again, and a gull cried over the harbor, and somewhere down the hill the first shutters rattled up for the day. She sat in the middle of it all, and she did not feel the sun.