The official report said Choi Min-jun fell.
Four pages. Most of it was black.
Do-yun had requested the report through the victim family disclosure act that he'd found on the police department's website at 1 AM, three days after the funeral. He'd filled it out in his brother's name, forged his mother's signature because she couldn't hold a pen without her hands shaking, and submitted it. It took 7 days to arrive. When it did, he sat at the kitchen table, opened it, and understood immediately what really happened.
There was almost nothing left.
Page one: incident summary. The date. The location — rooftop, east academic building, Hanguk Arts & Trades High School. Time of discovery, 6:15 AM. Cause of death: blunt force trauma to the back of the head. Case classification: accidental.
The rest of page one was black bars.
Page two was almost entirely black bars, with three legible fragments: no signs of struggle, case reviewed and closed, and a detective's name — Han Mu-jin — below a signature that looked like it had been signed in a hurry or signed without caring. Do-yun looked at that signature for a long time. He'd never seen a signature that looked like that on something that mattered. He'd seen them on forms nobody read and papers nobody kept.
Page three: fully redacted. Every line. Not even the section headers were legible.
Page four: a blank form field for family response, with a number to call if the family had concerns.
Do-yun did not call the number.
He folded the report back into its envelope, put it on the table, and looked at it for a while. Then he put it in his bag, which was where he kept things he needed to stay angry about.
The funeral had been 2 weeks before.
Small. Their mother had wanted small, or she'd said she wanted small, though Do-yun suspected she'd said that because small was the only option when you had no money and no support network left and a son who needed to be buried in the middle of winter.
The ceremony was at a funeral home in Dongjak. Gray carpet. Flowers from a place that sold them in bulk. A photograph of Min-jun in his school uniform, third-year, the picture from his student ID, where he was looking slightly to the left of the camera, which had always been a habit — he hated looking directly at lenses, said it felt like being pinned.
People came. Not many. Relatives Do-yun saw twice a year, some of Min-jun's classmates from his previous school, and a few people from the church their mother attended sometimes. Normal people. People with the sad and slightly uncomfortable faces of normal people at funerals.
And then two others. Toward the back. Standing rather than sitting, which Do-yun noticed because everyone else sat, and the room was arranged for sitting.
Two men in their thirties, maybe forties. Dark coats, nothing distinctive. They were not crying. They were not performing the face of grief or the face of paying respects. They were watching — the room, the attendees, his mother at the front. Doing what Do-yun did, which was reading the room. He clocked this immediately because it takes one to know one.
They stayed for twelve minutes. He kept track. When they left, he turned to watch them go and caught the eye of one of them — the shorter one, broader across the shoulders — and the man held his gaze for one full second before looking away.
Not an apology. Not discomfort. Just: I see you seeing me.
Do-yun filed them under unknown and turned back to the photograph of his brother and said nothing to anyone.
Three weeks after the funeral, he went through Min-jun's things.
Their mother had left the room untouched. Do-yun had understood this as grief but also as an invitation — she couldn't look at it, and she couldn't ask him to, so she left the door closed and neither of them spoke about it, which was a kind of permission.
He went in on a Sunday afternoon when she was at church. He told himself he was looking for something specific. He wasn't yet.
Min-jun's room was the same as it had always been. Organized in the particular way of someone who knew where everything was without it looking like a system — books in an order that made sense to him, cables coiled and tucked, a pinboard above the desk with scraps of notation paper and bus transfer cards and a small photograph of the two of them from two summers ago at the Han River, squinting into the sun.
Do-yun sat at the desk.
He went through the top drawer: pens, earbuds, a dead battery pack, a folded receipt from a convenience store, a student handbook. Nothing.
Second drawer: composition notebooks, six of them, the small kind with the grid paper that Min-jun used for music. Do-yun opened each one. The first four were what they looked like — melodic sketches, chord progressions, lyrics in Min-jun's cramped, diagonal handwriting. The fifth was different.
It started as a music notebook. Then, somewhere in the middle, the grid paper started being used for something else. Numbers. Names — some with question marks, some circled. References to what looked like document identifiers, the kind of alphanumeric codes that appeared on administrative records and official filings. And then, near the back, written in smaller handwriting than the rest, a sentence that Min-jun had underlined twice:
The grant money doesn't go where the grant says it goes.
Below it, on the next page: BN → JS → city. The logic of a pipeline.
Do-yun stared at the page for a long time.
He knew what BN was. He'd heard the name in the edges of things — the Baek Network, the quiet money, the organization that didn't appear in news articles because it was better at being invisible than the organizations that did. He hadn't known what JS was, not then, but he would learn: Jeokseong Syndicate. Oldest and most feared. Port district south.
His brother had found a financial pipeline between two criminal organizations and a municipal grant structure.
And then he'd been on a rooftop at 11:40 PM, and then he hadn't.
Do-yun closed the notebook and held it in both hands and breathed. The room was very quiet. He could hear the street outside — a bus, someone's music through a window, ordinary city afternoon. The same sounds as always. The world did not care; it continued on.
He opened the notebook again. Read every page. Cross-referenced names in his memory and started building the architecture. Near the very back, on the last written page, Min-jun had written a name and a title:
Baek Jae-won — external partnership coordinator, Hanguk Arts & Trades.
And below it, in different ink, like it had been added later: He knows I found it. I don't know who I can tell.
Do-yun read that line six times.
I don't know who I can tell.
He'd told someone. He had to have told someone, because people like Min-jun — people who trusted, people who reached out to others — didn't sit on something like this alone. He'd told someone he thought he could trust. And whoever that was, they were connected to what happened on that roof, or they were the reason it happened.
That person was still alive. Still inside that school, probably. Walking its halls, using its lockers, sitting in its homeroom.
Do-yun put the notebook in his bag, next to the redacted report.
He sat in his brother's chair and looked at the desk where Min-jun had studied, written music, and discovered something that got him killed. He thought about the two men at the back of the funeral home. He thought about the one who'd looked at him.
He thought about what it meant that the report was four pages of black bars and that weird signature.
He thought about the fact that he was fifteen years old with no money, no connections, no street history, and a notebook full of dead leads and a brother who was in the ground because he'd been the kind of person who believed in telling the truth to people he trusted.
Then he stopped thinking about it. Or he stopped thinking about it in the way that made his chest feel like a room with no air in it. He redirected the feeling into a part of his brain where it would burn slowly and cold.
He pulled out his phone and searched the enrollment process for Hanguk Arts & Trades High School, mid-year transfer.
It was possible. Late February start, pending approval. He'd need a residence address in the district — there was a relative, a distant uncle, who'd offered after the funeral and been told no thank you. Do-yun called him back that evening.
Two weeks later, he had a new school.
He was going to find out who was on that roof. He was going to find what Min-jun had found, and he was going to build something with it that couldn't be buried. He didn't know yet what that would cost him. He would, eventually…
But that was later.