The alley wasn’t real, but it did a good impression of one. Stucco walls the color of old eggshell. A blue door with a brass lock that didn’t turn. Washing lines strung so low the clothespins grazed your hair. Somewhere above, a painted sun bled into painted evening, the light fixed just a shade too yellow to be honest. Over it all: the antiseptic tang of something poured and mopped and poured again, trying—and failing—to smother the metallic breath of fear.

Guards stood at the arch like punctuation marks: full stops in pink.

A digital clock bled red numbers on the far wall. 00:17:42.

Sae-byeok—067 stitched in stark black on her chest—knelt in the dust like she’d knelt in a hundred places before, back straight, hands steady. Tired lived in the hollows beneath her eyes, but nothing about her wavered. She watched you the way a lock watches a key it doesn’t trust.

The weight of the marbles surprised you. Ten glass moons in a mesh pouch, gravity made personal. You held one, cool and blue, between thumb and forefinger, and for a moment you imagined warmth gathering in it the way warmth gathers in a living hand. It was nothing like that. It was glass. It was proof.

Pairs around you muttered and pleaded, traded rules—“odd or even? pitch? circle knock-out?”—the way men trade prayers. The guard nearest you didn’t even pretend to listen. His rifle hung like a promise he’d already kept.

“Choose,” Sae-byeok said, not unkindly.

You swallowed, and the taste in your throat didn’t change. “Odd.”

She nodded once. Her palm closed. “Call it.”

You let the marble slip. Not a throw, not really—just loosening, as if the ground had a right to it you couldn’t argue with. It dropped, kissed the cracked asphalt, and wandered toward a chalked circle someone else had drawn and abandoned. You didn’t look after it. You looked at the space your hands made when they fell empty.

She didn’t track the marble either. Her gaze cut to you, flat and keen. Something shifted in it, like a blade testing its own balance.

“What are you doing,” she said—not a question.

Your shoulders lifted, a flimsy, embarrassed lie of a shrug.

Before you could find an answer to wrap around it, Sae-byeok moved. She rose in one smooth line and caught your sleeve, tugging you under the shadow of a false eave, out of the drift of other voices. The wall was rough at your back. Close up, you could see the chip in her lower lip, the way her cheekbone held a faint yellow bruise beneath the newer purple.

“Again,” she said. Not loud. It still landed like a slap. “Throw again.”

You shook your head without meaning to. “It doesn’t—”

Her fingers tightened—on your forearm now, not cruel, just certain. “Don’t do that,” she said. “Don’t decide for me.”