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#04 Police Headquarters
Seola looks through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room, arms crossed. Bona, certainly aware she’s being both watched and filmed, sits still and placid. A light smile plays around her lips. Her hair falls in perfect finger waves with the tempting and dangerous touchability of a tiger’s fur.
Bona doesn’t look worried, not even to someone who can see past her flawless exterior to every tiny tell. It’s too early to have brought her in—if Seola really hoped to win this case, she’d have fought the sergeant harder to gather more evidence before hauling in the suspects. He pushed ahead, hoping Bona—or her known associate Sojung, being questioned by Eunseo in another room—will crack and give them all the evidence they need.
Sure.
Bona is going to win this battle, but Seola has to fight her side anyway. With a sigh, she straightens her tie and walks to the door.
#01 National Museum
The contemporary art gallery of the National Museum is fuller than Seola expected for the middle of a Wednesday. There are tourists, a big school group, and a few solo patrons who appear to be using their lunch breaks to look at the art. That would never have occurred to Seola, but then, she usually eats lunch at her desk or in the car.
She and Eunseo fall in behind a tour group of older students—late high school or college, maybe—carrying sketchbooks.
”These three Ju Haknyeon paintings demonstrate the artist’s perspective across his career,” the tour guide says. Three large paintings cover a whole wall behind her. “First, we see Wisdom Waits, done while the artist was still a student at the University of British Columbia. It’s one of his earliest pieces and shows his first steps from his young experimentation to more professional work. Ju’s technical skill with oils is already on display here, and we also see early exploration of some of the themes he has gone on to explore in more sophisticated ways later in his career.
“One of these is the erotic tension in youthful homosocial spaces and the association between maturity and sexual discovery,” she continues. “He was creating this piece when he met his life partner, a relationship that went on to influence many of his works, as we see here—”
Eunseo turns with the guide to the next painting—it’s the later Ju Haknyeons they’re interested in today—but Seola is stuck in place by the first painting. The girl in the center, holding knowing, strangely deep eye contact with the viewer, keeps her there. The rest of the girls in the painting move around her, except for the one peeking over the garden wall—she’s looking at the girl in the center, too, waiting for her next move just like Seola is.
But it’s only a painting, eternally still. When Seola finally rips herself away, she finds Eunseo waiting.
“I think this is it,” Eunseo whispers.
“Definitely.” Seola’s heart wouldn’t slam like this for any old painting.
As the tour continues into the gallery, they turn back toward the front desk. They flash police badges in unison choreographed through a thousand repetitions, and the guy behind the desk jumps in surprise.
“Could we speak to your director of security, please?” Seola asks.
#05 Interrogation Room
Bona fills the interrogation room—her perfume drifting through the air, her limbs draped casually off her stiff metal chair. “Hello again,” she says, smiling beautifully. She does everything beautifully. “I want my lawyer.”
“Of course, he’s on the way.” Seola keeps her voice calm and steady. “While we wait, we can talk about sports, maybe. Politics. Art?”
She drops some photographs on the table. It’s three open storage crates, which should have been holding the Ju paintings, taken when they were returned to the home of the private collector who loaned them to the museum. The canvases, matched in weight to the paintings, are blank except for crude drawings scrawled in black—a smile, a kissy face, a misshapen heart.
Bona purses her lips in a kiss, eyes sparkling. “I’ll wait for my lawyer,” she says.
#02 National Museum
“We have the finest security system available,” the director of security says proudly, gesturing to a slim silver computer. “It’s powered by AI, a model of efficiency.”
Seola can feel Eunseo trying to catch her gaze, but she keeps smiling pleasantly at the security director.
“What measures do you take for private events?” Seola asks.
The director, brow furrowing, repeats the gesture he made toward the computer.
Seola and Eunseo walk back to the car in silence, both of them thinking the same thoughts—mapping out the museum’s security over its calendar of events.
“Tteokbokki?” Seola asks. She wants something that will burn.
It isn’t until they’re sitting on the curb outside the restaurant with their snacks that Eunseo says, “I don’t think I believe in AI security. I’d want, like, actual intelligence. If it were me.”
Seola nods. A single virus—difficult to code and to feed into the system, but a single virus all the same—could leave the whole museum exposed. Security systems shouldn’t be efficient—they should be engineered with laborious redundancies and, in Seola’s maybe old-fashioned opinion, rely on a person with a gun for at least one key link in the chain. “Still,” she says, “their link to police dispatch is a strong point.”
She and Eunseo glance at each other quickly, then back to their cups.
“Yeah,” Eunseo says. “A thief would only have a minute or so to get out, unless they figured out how to delay the police.”
Seola nods. Better not to articulate any of the rest too clearly on a public street. They both have calls to make before they can finalize a plan, anyway. Instead of responding, she asks, “What is ‘erotic tension in homosocial spaces,’ anyway?”
“Did you ever go to a girls’ school?” Eunseo asks, and pops a rice cake into her mouth.
Seola shakes her head.
“I did, for high school,” Eunseo says around the bite in her cheek. “Everyone was always in love with the meanest girl in the class because that was the closest thing we had to a boyfriend. I think that’s what it means.”
#06 Interrogation Room
“How did you get out before the alarm notified the local precinct, that’s what I want to know,” Seola says. “A heist like this is out of your league.”
Bona’s eyes flash. She parts her lips to retort—that she plays in the highest leagues there are, that Seola should know, or something else that would give her away to the sergeant watching through the one-way mirror—but she catches herself, twisting her lips into a smile. “I’m not talking without my lawyer,” she says again, sounding almost amused.
#03 Seola’s Apartment
There’s a society wedding at the museum tonight featuring DJ Exy, Sojung’s stage name. The performance—with time for rehearsal and crates of equipment—will give her easy cover to case the museum or plant surveillance devices or whatever she and Bona might be planning.
But Seola stays home. Eunseo swore she could handle it. She probably wanted Sojung to herself. Seola didn’t ask.
She meant to keep her mind off work—take a bath or something, watch a drama, and maybe go to bed early. Instead, she moves through her apartment on autopilot, her head going back through their security walkthrough at the museum—the single camera in each gallery, the huge, dark storage room, the mildly smiling security director.
She tosses herself on the couch with a huff and lifts a glass of wine from the coffee table. She sips, and the dark red richness of the taste makes her think—immediately, inevitably—of Bona.
Not as she sees her now, of course, through security cameras and in and out of lockup, but as they met, side-by-side and bright-eyed in the police academy.
From the first, Bona seemed too smart and beautiful to be there. When they started winding around one another, trading wine-dark kisses in the corners of clubs after days standing straight-backed in training, Seola couldn’t believe she’d been chosen.
It wasn’t long until she realized all Bona’s choices had been strategic—not looking to join the justice system but only looking for weaknesses in it. And in Seola, she’d found one.
Bona never said goodbye. She’d shown up years later and said hello like she thought Seola would be happy to see her.
#08 Evidence Storage
Bona’s personal effects include a USB drive hidden in the base of a tube of coral-red lipstick. It’s not evidence—there’s no data on it, and there’s nothing illegal about carrying a novelty thumb drive, even if no one would use them anymore unless they were trying to work around layers of electronic security by exploiting a physical computer.
But that lipstick feels like the most incriminating thing in the case file, worse even than the dispatch notes Seola quietly made disappear. Like everyone who saw the bright cylinder of wax would think of Bona’s lips the way she did—like it was impossible not to know everything between them, Seola’s heart as open to the world as it somehow always was for Bona.
(It was the dispatch records, though, with an inexplicable five-minute delay between the alarm arriving and the officers getting notified, that were really important. The air in the evidence room is sterile and clear, but Seola can still smell the paper of the last backup copy burning.)
#09 Seola’s Apartment
It ends like it always does—at Seola’s window, opened with a magnetic device so discreet that Seola doesn’t realize she’s no longer alone until she catches Bona’s perfume filling the room like iridescent dust.
She turns to find Bona sitting on the windowsill. Her clothes are more practical but still all black. Her hair is still perfect.
She tosses a briefcase on Seola’s bed. “Your cut.” She winks. “Thanks for the help with the police dispatch. It’s always nice to play in the big leagues.”
Seola rolls her eyes. She doesn’t move closer, but she wants to, still. Eunseo has family debts, that’s how Sojung and Bona got their claws in her. Seola just has this chain around her heart, locked permanently to Bona’s.
“How did you know?” Bona asks. “That we’d go for those paintings in particular.”
Seola shrugs. “Eunseo said the later ones fit your m.o. Late career living artist, likely to gain value in the next ten years.” That’s true, but it’s not the truth, which is that Seola felt Bona in the room the moment she looked at the first painting in the series and wanted to cry. “Anyway, see you next time you need help.”
“Actually…” Bona trails off, voice lilting seductively up before it falls. “Sojung and I are going to get out of town. Go somewhere warm for a while.”
It’s goodbye, then? Seola imagines herself saying it, the shape of the word in her throat, but she doesn’t let it free.
In an entirely different voice, small and clear—Seola might call it true if she knew what that word meant with Bona in her room—Bona says, “You could come, too.”
Seola actually laughs, short and meaner than she feels. All she feels is terrified.
It’s dark in the window where Bona is sitting. Her face is hard to read but her eyes shine like stars. There was sweetness between them before everything went rotten and Seola dropped all the joyful memories down a deep well in her heart. No heist was ever as thrilling as those early kisses.
“We’re taking a train south at 11 tomorrow,” Bona says. “We’ll have an ID and a ticket for you if you decide to come.”
She leaves as quietly as she came, managing to disappear like magic even though Seola is watching and sees every banally high-tech step of her closing the window and scaling back down the wall.
Seola opens the briefcase before she does anything else, checking on her charmingly retro pile of cash. She’s been saving the cuts Bona brings her carefully—whether she goes or stays this time, she’ll only be able to derail investigations and destroy evidence for so long before she has to get out of town somehow.
On top of the money, Bona has left a flower, incongruously innocent. It’s strawberry pink, just like the ones in that first painting, the one that squeezed Seola’s heart so tightly she was careful never to mention the emotion out loud.
Seola should count the money, but she picks up the flower. It’s real, not silk—the stem bends, crushing greenly, in her hand.
#07 Interrogation Room
As Bona leaves the interrogation room with her lawyer, Seola sighs and pulls her tie loose. The sergeant enters through the other door.
“She’ll get away again,” he says, frustrated at his own rash choices.
Seola’s heart is racing, ill. This is the outcome she made, but she still doesn’t know whether she wanted it or not.
Not that it matters. It will work either way. Seola might feel bad, but she made it look good.
“She can’t fly forever,” Seola says to the sergeant, wondering if maybe Bona can. If she could, herself, and what it would take to try.