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She’s been having those dreams again.
Dreams of waking up on a beach of ash, rocks digging into her palm and the sharp bite of iron in her mouth. An island bright with sunlight. Bright and dead. The hollow stare of a camera lens. The crawling sensation of being watched. The crack of a gun.
She rips herself awake from these dreams, chest heaving, heart racing, and every time it takes several minutes watching the rise and fall of Cheol’s breathing, the warm press of his leg, to calm herself down. To remember where she is.
Here. Home. Safe.
She tries not to think about how it all feels so familiar. The dream. The island. The blood in her mouth and the ghost of violence crawling under her skin.
She pulls on a jacket and steps outside.
They’re on Jeju Island, her and Cheol. It was a last-minute flight. A surprise vacation squeezed right before the start of Cheol’s school semester, an impulse that arrived one day without warning and tugged, hard, with the feeling that this is where she had to be. Like remembering an old promise.
Despite the trip’s abrupt start, the rest of it passed at a languid pace.
Days drenched in sunlight, the two siblings running around the island and eating their weight in hallabong. Fingers permanently sticky with citrus, patting the stony heads of the hareubang statues and taking turns posing for pictures, the best ones being chosen by Cheol and uploaded promptly to the family group chat, where it’s met with an enthusiastic flood of responses from their parents down in Andong. Are you eating well? How’s the weather? Cheol-ah don’t forget your sunscreen, you’ve gotten so tan!
Saebyuk scrolls down the chat, the corners of her lips tugged into a small smile, and types out a short response before slipping her phone back into her pocket.
Dirt road turns to sand as she steps onto the beach.
The beach here is different from the one in her dreams. Softer. Warmer, even though the sun still hasn’t risen above the horizon. Right now, the water and the sky are the same shade of blue-grey. The line blurs where one ends and the other begins.
She thinks she likes it like this, here where boundaries start to merge, filling the space in-between. The world in transition, holding its breath. Soft shadows moving under the surface. The sense that something is quietly waiting around the corner, something kind.
“It’s dawn.”
Saebyuk turns around, startled at the sound of her name.
It’s a girl around her age, short dark hair with pretty round eyes, her gaze fixed straight ahead, towards the ocean.
The girl lifts her hand and points. “Look, the sun’s coming up.”
Saebyuk looks to where she’s pointing, squints and sees only the same blue-grey.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look harder. It’s there.”
After a moment of looking, Saebyuk slides her gaze from the horizon back to the girl and finds that her stare is already fixed on her, calm eyes holding her own with an unreadable kind of sharpness. It slips past her defenses with startling ease, almost as if it knows its way around. Like it’s been there before.
A jolt runs through her skin. Something like recognition—or—remembering—something that sits on the tip of the tongue, frustratingly close but far.
She opens her mouth. Closes it before the question slips out.
Do I know you? Have we met before?
The girl steps forward and holds out her hand. “I’m Jiyeong.”
Saebyuk reaches for it, hesitant. “Saebyuk.”
Jiyeong smiles, and a strange surge of emotions, unidentifiable and overwhelming, pushes into Saebyuk’s chest, floods it with warmth, presses it tight with what might be grief, or relief, or both. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She can’t look away.
“Pretty name.”
A pauses stretches between them. Waves climb up the shore, then hiss as they recede. At a distance, a seagull caws, and the sound carries over to where they are, faint and echoing.
Jiyeong breaks the quiet with a laugh. “I came here to see the dawn and ended up finding another dawn. What are the odds?”
“Not odds,” Saebyuk says, quicker than reflex. An unconscious flinch. For some reason, the thought of anything to do with probability, with games of chance, makes her insides turn.
She remembers her dream. Islands of blood and ash.
“Okay, not odds,” Jiyeong says with a nod. She lets outs a thoughtful hum before leaning forwards, eyes bright with mirth. “Fate, then?”
Saebyuk blinks, breath caught by the sudden proximity.
“Destiny?”—She can count her eyelashes from here—“What do you think?”
“I think you’re very close.”
Jiyeong grins, narrows her eyes. “I can get even closer. Wanna see?”
Saebyuk tilts her chin away, keeping her face an unaffected blank that’s betrayed, ultimately, by how her ears flush a deep red. “You don’t even know me.”
Jiyeong leans back, her voice dropping some of its teasing tone. “Ah, see the weird thing is, it feels like I kinda do. Crazy, right?”
There’s that stare again. A part of Saebyuk wants to stay here until she understands what it means. Until she knows how to read every expression that flickers on her face before it disappears with a flash under the surface. A part of her feels like she can. A part of her recognizes. Reaches out.
“I think I know what you mean.”
A cloud shifts. Breaks way to make room for the sun and the world turns several shades brighter. The first light of dawn, and all Saebyuk can think about is the way it falls on Jiyeong’s face, how it glints off her piercing, how it cups the curve of her cheeks, pulled into a smile. Soft. Safe.
Nothing can touch them here, she thinks quietly. Nothing but light.
“Well, Saebyuk-ssi. I’m glad I found you.”