Dark Matter | JJK

18. Fear Without a Name

She noticed the shift in the air the moment she stepped out of the domestic arrivals terminal of Incheon Airport.

The Incheon air was a tad lighter than that of Seoul, easier to inhale. Perhaps the pollution levels were lower here, or perhaps it was because she was more accustomed to breathing it in, having taken birth and lived in the city for twenty years.

Perhaps both.

Most people knew Incheon as a buzzing metropolis set to become Korea's airport city. But Petra had spent the years of her childhood not amidst twisting grey buildings, winding flyovers and posh shopping centres, but within the precincts of a small, prosaic town at the outskirts of the city.

Jung district was known most famously among its fellow town kin as the city of seafood. With its plethora of rivers, lakes and backwater sites, the main occupation of the townsfolk revolved around the wonders of aqua life: people were mostly fishermen, fish sellers, boatmen, pisciculturists, aquarists, seafood processors - sea somethings.

So it did not come as much of a surprise when the smell of salt and sea swarmed her as she walked down the cobblestone streets with a backpack slung across her shoulders. She felt different. Not the kind of different that a tourist experiences whilst exploring the roads of a foreign country, but the kind a traveller feels returning to their bedroom after a millennia of wandering the world.

The farther she travelled downtown the more relaxed her muscles became. These were the very streets where she had rowed paper boats in puddles of mud every rain; the very streets on whose gravel her footsteps had imprinted themselves and her knees had scraped against through the years she grew.

Nothing much had changed about Jung-gu since the day she had left. The narrow bylanes of the main market were still crowded at the margins with colourful bikes of children; Mr Son's little pink cotton candy machine still howled like a raging hurricane; the Hanbok tailor's unfortunate grandson still sat at the boutique's entrance with his thread and needles, cowering under his grandfather's scrutinising glare; and Aunty Areum still smelled like tuna and salmon from all the hours she spent scaling fish at the market.

When Petra entered the premises of her neighbourhood, she had lost count of the number of times she was stopped by the town's inhabitants and their curious questions, voices so mundanely familiar that they spun into a mesh of how is living in Seoul and is our Peter Pan a Seoulite now and come inside have some tea and there is no need to be stressed about getting a good job is there, you're studying in SNU, no pressure.

If only they knew.

There had been not a single Aenigmi attack on the city, she learned from Uncle Choi. And even if if there had been, the residents of Jung-gu were so full of life that they would continue to live as they had since the beginning of creation, zombies lurking on the streets or not.

She passed the umber and cream coloured walls of Henry's, the local café she used to sit in during late hours of the night, when switching on the CFL bulbs back at home to study while everyone else was asleep would mean being grounded in the basement by her mother. But when her feet crunched over the pebbles lining the pavement before her school, her limbs stopped on their own accord.

Petra remembered her first day of school.

As the three siblings had stood outside the its wide blue gates, Alec, the eldest of the three, had patted the back of Petra's head before sauntering to his biology class, casually reassuring her that she need not worry about bullies and that the first day of school was never as bad as most people made it out to be. Julius, however - though he had condescended to escort her to her classroom - was careful to explain that during school hours Petra was not to bother him, she was not to approach him with requests to enact an episode of Doraemon, to embarrass him with references to his private life, or tag along behind him at recess or noon. She was to stick with the first grade was he was to stick with the seventh. In short, she was to leave him alone.