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The world between sleeping and waking had many names — 幽冥 yōumíng, the dim and dark; the threshold the dead cross in both directions; the country that shamans enter and return from bearing knowledge they cannot explain.
Megan had walked it before, in the long centuries preceding her arrival in Yoonchae's life, when she drifted with no thread to pull her home.
It was a place of grey water and pale light, where the wind had no source and the horizon withdrew as you moved toward it. One would have no weight and mass. The way in had no ceremony — sleep had simply given way to this.
It is also limited to those who bear the curse of immortality.
The other immortal stood at some distance, and Megan knew her immediately.
Immortality wore itself differently on the body than time wore itself on mortals. Urgency did not exist in their transcendent bones and muscles. You would not see them rush, for they have all the time in the world. They could never be tense.
She was young in face and ancient in bearing — Korean in her features, posture straight as a scholar's, eyes carrying fatigue of one who has outlived not merely people but entire ages of the world. And yet, underneath that fatigue, something had recently been lit.
Yoonchae.
Be as it may, they did not speak immediately. Two immortals in a between-world need no social machinery; recognition was already mutual, complete on both sides.
Megan regarded this Yoonchae and understood instantly that this was not the Yoonchae she had raised. The one she had followed — through ten borrowed faces and nine years, through dance studios and rainy cafés, through a recording booth and an audition stage — was eighteen years old still becoming.
This one had already become. Beyond that, she had continued becoming, and then continued again, until becoming itself had been exhausted and what remained was a woman worn smooth by the centuries.
The roughness that Megan's Yoonchae still carried — the mark of a person in the middle of being made — was entirely absent here.
"You know what I am," Megan said, calmly.
"And you know what I am," the other answered.
Her English was faultless. Megan thought of her own Yoonchae, who thought first in Korean and reached the English a moment later, whose sentences sometimes paused midway while she gathered the right phrase — not because her English was poor, for it was not poor, but because she had a mother tongue and lived inside it and translated herself outward for the world's benefit.
Yoonchae described nine deaths.
She described them the way one might describe the seasons: each arriving in its time, each departing, the interval between filled with the flat and purposeless waiting of the immortal.
The details changed; the structure did not.
The cruelty that Megan had not anticipated was that Yoonchae's love never remembered her. Each new Megan arrived without knowledge of what they were to each other, and Yoonchae had to let her fall in love from the beginning, had to watch her discover something that Yoonchae had known for centuries.
Each Megan arrived unburdened. Yoonchae carried all nine.
"She always finds me first," Yoonchae said. "I could go anywhere — and I have gone everywhere — and she finds me regardless of where I go or how carefully I keep myself from being found."
"I found her," Megan said at last. "I always found her first."
One was always sought. One always sought.
Yoonchae's love had a stubborn soul, a soul that found its way back to the same person across every configuration of birth and death the world could arrange, that could not be dissuaded by the inconvenience of dying.
Megan's love had a specific and finite life, a life that had been chosen deliberately, sought out across nine years and ten borrowed faces, tended from the time Yoonchae was nine years old and arrived alone at a dance studio carrying a backpack too large for her body.
One was the end of the thread that was pulled. One was the hand that did the pulling.
The Buddhist concept of 緣 yuán — karmic connection — was generally described as a symmetrical thing, a red string tied at both ends, drawing both parties toward each other with equal force. But these were two different geometries of fate, and neither of them was symmetrical. Yoonchae's 緣 was arranged at the universe's insistence; Megan's was arranged at her own. The thread was the same, but who held it was entirely different.
"She never remembers me," Yoonchae said, her eyes downcast. "Each lifetime she discovers me as though I am someone she has never seen. And I have to let her, because what else is there to do? I have to watch her fall in love with me as though it is the first time, knowing that when she dies and returns again, she will not know my name."
Megan thought of her own Yoonchae, who had always known her. Who had heard her heartbeat through ten borrowed faces and recognized it as the constant underneath the costumes, who had said I've always known, stating a fact that had never required confirmation. She had never been a stranger to the person she loved. A mystery, yes, but not a stranger. Those were different things, and the distance between them was the distance between longing and grief.
"Your Yoonchae always knew you," Yoonchae said, following the thought without being invited to.
"Yes."
"My Megan never does." The pause that followed contained several centuries. "Until now. In this lifetime, she chose to know."
Megan understood what that single concession cost — to say it plainly, without ornamentation, after nine lifetimes of carrying the story alone. 同病相憐 tóngbìng xiānglián: those who carry the same affliction understand each other without the usual scaffolding of explanation.
Even so, their afflictions were not the same affliction. They were inversions of each other. Yoonchae's grief was retrospective — it accumulated behind her, a procession of losses stretching back centuries, nine funerals, nine moments of waking alone in whatever era had taken her beloved. Megan's grief was prospective: it had not yet happened, and it might never happen, and what she carried was therefore not the weight of loss but the weight of possible loss. In other words, it was the flinch before the blow.
Yoonchae had been hollowed by waiting. Megan had been hollowed by becoming — by the ten faces she had worn and the ten names she had borrowed. Both of them had lost something essential to the years. Both of them had found it again in a mortal girl who could not last.
"Does she know," Megan asked carefully, "what you are? In this lifetime?"
"She knows everything," Yoonchae said. "She chose to ask. She made me tell her. She sat across from me on a practice room floor and asked me to tell her all of it, and I did, and she took my hand."
Megan said nothing. There was nothing to say to a miracle except to let it stand.
"And yours?" Yoonchae asked.
"She always knew," Megan said. "She waited for me to admit it." She paused. "I was the one who needed time."
Both mortals were stubborn, in their way. Both had refused to look away from what they saw. The universe had arranged one story in which the mortal discovered the immortal, and another in which the mortal had simply been waiting for the immortal to catch up to something she already understood.
What would have happened if they had met — not here, in the grey threshold, but in the living world, in one of the many centuries through which they had both moved? What would it have been, to find each other out there, to be two immortals among the mortal tides, with no stakes between them?
Will they have found love within each other?
Neither of them answered in words. Megan did not know afterward who had moved first, or whether the pale country had simply collapsed the distance. What she knew was that she was leaning in, and this Yoonchae was not withdrawing.
She kissed her.
This Yoonchae's stillness was wrong.
Her own Yoonchae was never fully still, even in sleep; she translated herself constantly. This Yoonchae put down her luggage, and stopped moving. The journey was over. There was nothing left in the stillness to wait for.
This is not her Yoonchae.
Megan's hands searched for it anyway — for a moment too long, and that moment was the first betrayal.
She was searching for the quality of her Yoonchae's body, the small tensions she had learned to read, the evidence of a person still in the process of becoming, and she found nothing of the kind.
She was using this Yoonchae as a test for something that had nothing to do with her. The name Yoonchae was not incorrectly applied to this woman — she had earned it across centuries, had worn it far longer than Megan's Yoonchae had. But applied here, in Megan's hands, it produced a sound that did not correspond to what Megan knew the word to mean. The name contained her love. This was not her love.
She drew back. This Yoonchae let her go without protest.
"Forgive me," Megan said. She did not specify toward whom the request was directed.
"There is nothing to forgive," Yoonchae said. "We asked a question in our heads. The answer was no."
She had promised herself, when her Yoonchae finally pulled her close on a practice room floor and said I've always known, that she would stop using things as containers. That she would be only Megan, always Megan, the face she had chosen and the name that was finally hers.
And then she had come to this pale country and done to another person precisely what she had spent nine years doing to herself — had pressed a name against a form that did not belong to it, had searched inside the contact for a weight that was absent. The crime was small, and what happened in between-worlds did not travel back through waking. But she felt it as though it was a small misalignment in the body.
This Megan — herself, the huli jing — had kissed her. And the result had been the same empty contact.
"Did you know," Megan asked, "that it would be like that?"
Yoonchae considered this. "I suspected," she said at last. "I have never been a good test of anything. She always finds me. I have never had to find anyone."
One always sought. One was always found.
To love an immortal was, in the end, to love a horizon. You could walk toward it forever and arrive nowhere.
And so Megan wept.
And wept.
And wept.
And wept.
"What is it?" Yoonchae asked. The question was genuine; this was a woman who understood this grief, who had experienced it herself across many lifetimes.
"My Yoonchae," Megan said. "If she dies—"
The sentence opened onto a room she had not yet entered — the room where Yoonchae was not present in any form, where neither the girl of nine whom Megan had watched learn to fall and stand again, nor the young woman of eighteen who had recognized Megan through all ten of her borrowed faces, existed any longer in any configuration the living world contained. She could not cross its threshold even in imagination.
"Your Megan reincarnates," she said instead, addressing the immortal Yoonchae, and the statement held the question she was too afraid to complete: does mine?
No silence in a between-world was reassuring, where the absence of sound was simply the absence of false comfort.
Yoonchae's Megan returned because the universe had arranged it so. No such arrangement had been made, so far as Megan could determine, for her own Yoonchae. 天命 tiānmìng — heavenly destiny — was not a contract but a tendency, and tendencies did not bind the cosmos to anyone's particular hope.
"She always comes back," Yoonchae said.
Thus, this mercy belonged to their story alone.
Megan wept the way foxes cry in the old tales — foxes have never developed the human habit of moderating their grief for an audience.
She wept for the room she had not entered, for the possibility that her Yoonchae might die and simply not return, might scatter into the great indifferent cycle of 輪回 lúnhuí and come back as someone else entire, bearing no memory of ten borrowed names, no echo of the heartbeat that Yoonchae had learned to recognize through all its costumes.
She wept for the asymmetry of it — that the universe had written one kind of story for Yoonchae and Yoonchae's Megan, threading it through centuries with the patient care of a calligrapher, and had written nothing at all in the margins of hers.
Yoonchae placed a hand on her shoulder. She knew this particular weeping from the inside. She had stood where Megan was standing now, in the knowledge that her love would die and the uncertainty of what would follow death.
"She will know you," Yoonchae said quietly. "Whatever face you wear. She will know your heart."
"I know," Megan said, and she did know this — her Yoonchae had always known her, through ten faces across nine years, had held the heartbeat as the one consistent thing beneath all the costumes.
Though, knowing was not synonymous with being unafraid, no?
The Buddhist instruction to release 執 zhí, attachment, was the instruction to become something less than fully alive, to practice a detachment that is known for its indifference.
She did not want to be detached. She wanted her Yoonchae to go on breathing and waking and thinking first in Korean and translating herself outward with that patience — the patience Megan had grown to love the way one loves a handmade thing, for the evidence of effort visible in it, the proof that a person had tried.
This Yoonchae spoke English with the fluency of centuries, without the half-second translation. She had been polished to it by time, every seam sanded smooth by the sheer volume of centuries in which the language had been used and absorbed and used again.
Her own Yoonchae was not polished to anything.
Megan had wished, in the quiet of her own long thoughts, that Yoonchae could be made immortal. That the practical difficulty of mortality could be resolved by removing the offending condition entirely.
Immortality for her Yoonchae.
The clock stopped.
No more fear of the room she had not entered.
However, now, standing in front of a version of a Yoonchae who is immortal, Megan understood that this was not what she wanted for her love.
The Daoists understood 道可道，非常道 — the Way that can be named is not the eternal Way.
Love made permanent ceases to be entirely itself.
Some quality departs when the impermanence is removed, and what remains, however vast and durable, is not the whole of what was there before. You do not preserve love by removing its conditions. You only change it into something that wears love's face, and the seam is visible if you know to look.
She would not wish immortality on her greatest love.
As it was, she would find her in another lifetime — if it came to that — and she would come to that Yoonchae wearing her own face, Megan's face, the face that this Yoonchae had grown to know as belonging to the one who loved her. And if that too was not granted — if the wheel turned and carried her somewhere Megan could not follow — then Megan would carry it in the body as much as the mind, for as long as the body endured.
The 無常 (impermanence) was not the cruelty. The 無常 (impermanence) was the point.
She woke. An ordinary Los Angeles hour before dawn.
Her Yoonchae slept beside her, chest rising and falling peacefully. They had rehearsed well, and they both deserved the rest.
Megan leaned in and kissed her. Her Yoonchae stirred without waking, made a low whine, and curled instinctively toward the warmth.
The nine tails that Megan kept folded and hidden in the waking world came loose in the privacy of the dark, and she let them, drawing them around her sleeping Yoonchae so that nothing of the cold could enter, so that whatever waited outside this warmth remained outside it, at least for now, at least for the length of this particular night.
In the old stories, the nine-tailed fox was a creature of deception and dangerous beauty, a warning to mortals who looked too long. Be that as it may, no story had accounted for this — for the fox with all its tails drawn around the one it loved, keeping her warm against a cold that had not arrived yet and would, in time, as all cold eventually did.
Yoonchae slept on, unaware. Megan watched her breathe, and in the space between one breath and the next, she made no wish and struck no bargain.