Cheolhwa pointed at the window and cried out. Even stripped of her position as president due to her indecisive management, she had not lost her fighting spirit.
“Reverse the discontinuation right now. Release the remaining stock to the market first, then get the production lines running.”
“……”
Sijin held her gaze in silence. The stillness was suffocating. A few seconds passed before the sound of a scornful laugh escaped him. His kin’s pheromones felt disgustingly rancid.
“Reversing the decision is not possible.”
“Sijin……”
“I understand your noble intentions, but——”
She couldn’t finish her sentence. She simply hadn’t noticed — Sijin had already been looking at her through the eyes of a killer.
“It’s too late. That production line has already been manufacturing Type G influenza vaccines for the past two months.”
The truth he laid bare was far crueler than anything reported in the news. The production equipment itself had been replaced with entirely different machinery.
Even if a restoration were ordered this very moment, it would take at least a month. No one could say how many people’s conditions would worsen in the meantime, how many would die. Cheolhwa’s vision went white.
“Re— restart it.”
“Stop being unreasonable. It can’t be done.”
“Start it up!”
“Then, please make a choice.”
In stark contrast to Cheolhwa, whose entire body was consumed by rage, Sijin’s face bore not a single crack. Aside from the swollen red mark on his left cheek, he was exactly as he always was — cool-headed to the point of being utterly unfeeling.
“Whom will you save? Shall I limit the options to the resident population of South Korea for convenience? One and a half million people — those within the production quota of that line who are scheduled to receive vaccines against the Type G influenza that will sweep the country this winter — or roughly 150 patients with rare diseases who rely on the discontinued treatment.”
“……”
“You’re aware that this strain of Type G is unusually contagious, aren’t you? The mortality rate is projected at anywhere from 0.08 percent to 0.12 percent. Run the math against 1.5 million people. How many will die?”
Sijin placed two kinds of lives into the palms of Cheolhwa’s hands. He forced her to weigh them against each other — the lives of 150 rare disease patients on one side, and on the other, 1.5 million lives, ten thousand times that number.
“If we restart production of the treatment right now, those 1.5 million people won’t see so much as a needle this winter.”
“……”
“Do you know the actual sales figures for the treatment?”
Cheolhwa’s scale refused to tip either way. He added the weight of capital to one of her hands.
“Take Allen-Park Syndrome, for example. The total number of registered patients in the Disease Control Agency is 55. Production of the treatment is matched to that figure — but the actual quantity being sold is enough for 3 patients, and the rest sits in a warehouse. Why? Because combined demand across the official market and the black market amounts to exactly that.”
His explanation could be compressed into a single phrase: insufficient profitability. Sijin’s tone grew progressively more aggressive.
“People who won’t even make the effort to treat their own bodies, yet never stop making noise.”
He raised a hand and pointed outside the window. The gesture placed the blame for the discontinuation squarely on the protesters.
Cheolhwa found herself no longer recognizing the cousin she had known for almost her entire life.
“What is the point of producing a product with no demand? Focusing on vaccine production that contributes to far more people is vastly more rational and desirable. That is precisely why the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety agreed to accept the discontinuation request.”
“But still, Sijin……”
Rationality is, without question, the most important virtue for an executive and a scholar. And yet a single human being was not the kind of thing that could be compressed into the number 1.
She pleaded with Sijin. As though he could see straight through her thoughts, Sijin dismissed it with a wave of his hand and rose from his seat.
“Let us stop here. I have a board meeting to get to.”
“Sijin, you have to value people. You have to value human lives.”
Tac.
The leather sole of his shoe struck the floor lightly. He clicked his tongue.
“I do value them. It is precisely because I value them that you are able to walk into this office and deliver that noble nonsense of yours.”
His voice was cold and dry, and beneath it ran a current of irritation. Cheolhwa flinched.
Though Sijin had taken the president’s chair from her, she had always seen him as a younger cousin — five years her junior. But the emotion Sijin was showing her now was nothing but hostility and contempt. A surge of wounded indignation rose up inside Cheolhwa.
“How could you treat me like this.”
“If you had wanted to run this company however you pleased, you should have protected it properly. If you had, I would never have taken off my glasses, walked out of the lab, and taken the president’s seat.”
Her mouth closed. In the past, she had pushed recklessly to bring in investors in order to expand the company, and that very decision had nearly cost them Eaton Biotech — it had almost fallen into the hands of those investors entirely.
Had Sijin not stepped in, the ownership of Eaton Biotech would have passed to people who didn’t even know what a genetic base sequence was. He had been holding that against Cheolhwa ever since.
“If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been demoted — you’d have been fired outright. And then you’d be in the same position as everyone standing out there right now. Waving picket signs all day under the blazing midsummer sun until your arms fall off, and still never getting to see me.”
Sijin no longer had any tolerance for Cheolhwa. He behaved like a tyrant who had seized every last drop of power and refused to share even a grain of it.
“I’ll say this once more because you’re family. Open your ears and listen carefully. You’re right. You and I built this company to save lives. And so, in order to save more lives, I made the decision to let 150 people die. Is that wrong?”
The number of production lines was limited, and the range of medicines that could be manufactured was finite. It would be wonderful if everyone could be saved — but if they couldn’t, someone had to make the call.
Who gets to live? You save the ones with the highest chance of survival first. In Sijin’s view, the mechanics of management were strikingly similar to triaging rescue priorities at an emergency scene.
People die eventually, no matter what. The only difference is timing. Sijin whispered it into Cheolhwa’s ear.
Crack.
She slapped him across the cheek a second time. The already swollen, reddened cheek flared even deeper.
“……”
“And that’s why you said what you said?”
She hurled the newspaper she had brought in her coat pocket at him with full force. Sijin bent down to pick up the crumpled paper that had hit him and fallen.
“The press certainly move fast when it comes to tearing someone apart.”
He looked at the open page and muttered without much concern. It contained a brief account of a minor incident that had taken place between him and the protesters on his way home the day before.
“What did you say? That it’s rational to just let a child who’s going to die anyway go ahead and die, then have another child and raise them instead? That’s what you say to the parents of a sick child? You say that in front of the child? What kind of person says something like that!”
“Clever as always.”
Sijin said it as he folded the newspaper and slipped it back into her coat pocket.
“So what was I supposed to say in that situation? Someone who never sought proper treatment comes shuffling out only after the medicine gets discontinued, and uses their sick child as a human shield in the blazing sun — what exactly am I supposed to do for a person like that?”
“The reason those people couldn’t get treatment is because the cost of the medicine was too——!”
Cheolhwa’s face had gone a dark, furious red. Unable to contain her rage, she swung her hand again. But this time it was different. Sijin snatched her wrist with swift precision and wrenched it downward.
Ugh. She let out a pained sound. Not a single crease formed on Sijin’s brow. His eyes carried a clear warning that he would not tolerate this any further.
“Two slaps ought to be more than enough to vent your anger.”
“……You bastard.”
Struggling against his grip, Cheolhwa kicked him in the shin. He didn’t budge, and gently pushed her away.
“Let’s stop here. I only let you hit me because you’re family.”
She stumbled backward like a paper doll. After a few unsteady steps, the armrest of the sofa caught the back of her calves and she dropped down onto it.
Sijin remained perfectly composed, swollen cheek and all. He slipped on his jacket, unhurried, and straightened his appearance with ease.
“I’ll excuse myself first.”
He gave her a parting glance as she sat there in a daze, then turned his back and walked calmly toward the door. Just before reaching it, he stopped.
“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Cheolhwa glared at his back with bloodshot eyes.
“I mean you’re free to sit in your old office and lose yourself in nostalgia. Until tomorrow morning — before I arrive for work, that is.”
With those words, Sijin returned the humiliation she had dealt him, impeccably, by reminding her of her own position.
No need for thanks. We’re family.
And with that, the door to the president’s office closed.
A furious shout rang out, followed by the sound of something crashing against the wall and shattering. It carried through the firmly shut door. Outside, the newly appointed secretary who had been waiting for Sijin flinched, his shoulders jerking upward, and instinctively adjusted his black thick-framed glasses.
* * *
When Sijin arrived at the meeting venue, countless pairs of eyes immediately fixed on his left cheek. Where Cheolhwa had struck him, it had swollen to a vivid red. Question marks surfaced in dozens of gazes. No one spoke aloud, yet the air around his ears felt loud with unspoken words.
“What is the reason for convening today’s board meeting?”
His expression was openly displeased. Though Sijin sat in the president’s chair, the board members routinely looked down on him.
The fact that he had not come from a family entangled in the web of political and financial connections through marriage and personal ties — but had instead built his fortune from the ground up through sheer brilliance — stirred in them a strange kind of inferiority. They seized every opportunity they could to drag him down and take what he had built, and it was far from unusual for them to call sudden meetings without even notifying him of the agenda — a form of harassment that occurred regularly.
