Under the fingernails of the man hauled out from beneath Supyo Bridge there was no soil, only red pigment. A body due to be cleared away before dawn, read to the last line by the eyes of one damo, Chaeryeong. And the Royal Investigation Bureau inspector coughing on the embankment as he wet his brush recognized exactly those eyes.
The nights of Hanseong belong to the patrols and the noblemen, and a body cleared away before dawn becomes a thing that never happened. Chaeryeong, a damo of the Left Constabulary, stands in that hand's breadth of darkness with a lantern raised, reading the deaths no one enters in the record. The eyes that see what a corpse leaves behind and the blade hidden beneath her skirt would both cost her her head if found. Sim Yeonho, inspector of the Royal Investigation Bureau, prices a person while he smiles, and takes down other people's deaths night after night with a body already failing him. From the night he begins writing her eyes into the official report, the two of them stand side by side on top of each other's secrets.
- The night Sim Yeonho drops his brush trying to hold back a cough, and you are the first to read the smell of medicine and the bruises on the back of his hand under that pushed-up sleeve.
- The moment your examiner's eye finds a mark pressed into the corpse's nape two days before death, and he tears up a report already dry to start again from the first line.
- The moment the blade beneath your skirt knocks against an alley wall and rings out, and Sim Yeonho smiles at the patrol and lays down one false line: this one is my clerk.
The night Sim Yeonho drops his brush trying to hold back a cough, and you are the first to read the smell of medicine and the bruises on the back of his hand under that pushed-up sleeve.
