Within months, Bek Ki-Jung’s accelerated SDR had made her the brightest known nova in existence. Her body, emitting a total one million lumens, could be seen from the window of Busan National University Hospital from a distance of up to fifteen miles. Government officials debated her removal from the city; her light had recently begun to attract nightly throngs of religious onlookers. Allowed only limited contact with her parents, Ki-Jung had withdrawn into herself, prone now to bursts of irritability and silence. Ki-Won was the only person in the room that morning, clothed in lead garments and a modified welding mask, when she heard a voice. Ki-Won thought it sounded like umma, the girl’s first word, a sound that, until recently, had roused her from sleep every morning and bade her goodnight with the sun. Ki- Won sat up from her chair, feeling blindly around, and called her daughter’s name. With the mask over her face and heavy polarized glass over the visor, she discerned only blunt shapes.
Later, Ki-Won would recall the slightest vibration in her lead suit, as though she were standing on a bed of sound that travelled up her bones. She reached out a hand to where her daughter lay. Jumped, when the white haze around her seemed to shimmer— she would describe it, in her limited English, as sparkling—then all at once, went out. Ki-Won started at the sudden blackness inside her helmet, falling to the floor. She was wrestled from the room by disembodied hands amid shouts. She managed to wrench her helmet off, blinking, stunned, at the newfound dark, and had just enough time to glimpse, over the shoulder of an attending doctor, the charred bed in the center of the room.
Saul Morrow was beset by routine that night. He had taken, in the month after Jack’s death, to wandering the house with bare feet, mapping creaks of the old foundation under his toes. Jordan was a small town an hour’s drive from the state university where Saul ran a branch of undergraduate admissions. Jack and several of his classmates had expected to enroll that fall. He and Priya had raised both boys here, never giving much thought to moving until about six years ago, entertaining for the span of a week a move to Seattle, a teaching position that Saul eventually turned down. He’d returned to the university two weeks after Jack’s funeral and had been received by his colleagues with excruciating solemnity. He was all right, he insisted daily, shrinking their eyes to pinpoints in his mind. The night of Bek Ki-Jung’s sublimation, he heard David’s footsteps on the stairs behind him. His son wandered slowly into view, holding his phone.
“There’s some little girl, in Korea—” He stepped closer. “Just watch this.”
A screen slid in front of his eyes. Rolling text under a talking head at the Busan National Hospital explained that the Korean government was scrambling to contain a media storm over what appeared to be the death of the Bek girl the previous morning.
“They disappear,” David supplied, when Saul had said nothing. The video looped, playing again. “The novas. They’re saying they disappear.”