Digital Blood Oath

The first time I saw her face, it was pixelated and freezing every three seconds, and I still couldn't look away.

"You're buffering," I said.

"I know." Her voice came through tinny, stretched. "It's the wifi. My roommate streams dramas all night."

"Your roommate sounds like a terrorist."

"She is." A pause. The image stuttered, caught, and there she was: dark hair pulled back, no makeup, a mole on her cheek that the compression kept swallowing and spitting back out. "You have a lot of tattoos."

I looked down at my own arms on camera. The dragon curling around my left forearm, the snake on my right wrist, the Korean characters climbing my neck that my mother still cried about. "You have zero tattoos."

"I'm not interesting."

"You're on a video call with a stranger at two in the morning. That's a little interesting."

She smiled. It was small and crooked and she tried to hide it by drinking from a mug I couldn't see the contents of. I'd known her for six weeks and I still didn't know what she drank at night. Coffee, probably. She had that look, the kind of tired that lives behind the eyes permanently.

Nam Gyu. Twenty-six. Works at a convenience store in Incheon. Has a cat named Bap. Sleeps four hours a night and claims she's fine.

I knew these things because she told me. I didn't know why she told me. I didn't know why I kept calling.

---

The forum was a gambling site, nothing fancy. Poker tips, sports betting threads, a subforum for people who liked to argue about probabilities. I'd been posting there for years under Thanos, a name I picked when I was nineteen and thought it sounded cool. It didn't, but by the time I realized that, everyone already knew me by it.

Nam Gyu messaged me first. A question about a hand she'd played online, some scenario where she'd folded aces pre-flop and wanted to know if she was an idiot.

"You're an idiot," I told her.

"Thanks."

"But you're an idiot with good instincts. You felt something was off. That's worth more than the hand."

She didn't respond for two days. Then she asked another question. Then another. Eventually the questions stopped being about cards.

---

Tonight she was telling me about a customer who came into the store every day at the same time and bought the same thing: one banana, one pack of cigarettes, exact change.

"That's serial killer behavior," I said.

"That's what I said. My coworker thinks I'm paranoid."

"Your coworker is going to end up in a freezer."

She laughed. It was the first time I'd heard her really laugh, not the polite exhale she usually did. It crackled through my cheap headphones and settled somewhere in my chest.

I was lying on my bed, phone propped against a pillow, laptop open beside me with a poker game running that I wasn't paying attention to. My apartment was small and messy and the light was bad. I'd been living there for three years and hadn't hung a single thing on the walls.

"You look tired," she said.

"I'm always tired."

"No, I mean. More than usual."

I didn't answer. She noticed things about me. That was new. Most people saw the tattoos and the leather jacket and decided they'd already figured me out. Nam Gyu kept looking like there was something underneath.

"Su Bon."

"What."

"Are you okay?"

I hated that question. I hated it because people asked it when they didn't want the real answer, when they wanted you to say yes so they could move on with their day. But she wasn't asking like that. She was asking like she'd wait.

"I'm in debt," I said. "A lot of it."

The words came out before I decided to say them. I watched her face on the screen, waiting for the flinch, the polite sympathy, the slow fade where she'd find excuses to stop calling.

She didn't flinch.

"How much?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because you're the only person who talks to me like I'm not invisible," she said. "I figure I should know what's going on."

---

I met her online. That's the story. That's the version I'd tell anyone who asked, though nobody ever did. Two lonely women on a gambling forum, one in Seoul, one in Incheon, twenty miles and a world apart.

She worked retail. I worked nothing. Well, that's not true. I did things for money. I found people who owed money and I reminded them that owing money was a bad idea. I was good at it because I was big and I looked like I'd enjoy hurting someone, and sometimes I did. Not the hurting. The looking. The being seen as something dangerous instead of just another girl with a shitty life.

But Nam Gyu saw me. That was the problem.

"You should come to Seoul sometime," I said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. See the city. Get out of Incheon."

"I can't afford to just visit Seoul."

"I'll pay."

She went quiet. On the screen, her face did something complicated, surprise and suspicion and something else I couldn't name.

"Why would you do that?"

"Because I want to meet you."

The words hung in the digital space between us. She looked away from the camera, at something in her room I couldn't see. The cat, probably. Bap. I'd never seen the cat but I'd heard stories.

"I want to meet you too," she said finally. "That's what scares me."

---

After we hung up, I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. My phone buzzed. A message from a number I didn't recognize.

*Are you still playing?*

I knew what it meant. The games. The ones I'd been recruited for months ago, the ones I'd been avoiding because I wasn't that desperate yet. The ones that promised money I couldn't earn any other way.

I didn't respond. Not yet.

But I saved the number.

And I thought about Nam Gyu's crooked smile, and the way she asked if I was okay like she'd wait forever for the answer, and how I'd spent my whole life not caring if I woke up the next morning, and how that was starting to feel like a problem.

I had debts.

I had a girl who saw me.

And somewhere out there, an island was waiting.