“Keep playing the footage.”
Even interesting footage becomes tedious by the sixth replay. Unable to endure it any longer, Mio stretched all four legs out toward the ceiling light — and Cheongmyeong’s gaze followed. Not doing his work, just keeps getting distracted. The corners of his eyes, faintly visible beneath deep shadows, crinkled slightly.
“Indecent.”
“……”
“What are you doing showing that to other people. You should only show that to me.”
He whispered quietly and covered Mio’s lower half with two fingers. A subtle smile bloomed at the corners of his lips.
What is he saying.
Still — even Mio understood why he couldn’t focus on work. Even to Mio, who knew nothing of the world, the items on the meeting agenda had sounded strange.
True to people whose livelihood depended on strict secrecy, there was no disorder in the conference room even after the undignified meeting concluded. Glances were exchanged between them, but each person gathered their documents and tablets and headed out — and amid that, Cheongmyeong too rose with Mio, who was kicking his paws at the air.
It was then. Someone called out to Cheongmyeong.
“Cheongmyeong.”
Two pairs of eyes turned to the left. The woman, who had confirmed the cat with its chin propped over the edge of Cheongmyeong’s pocket, flickered her eyelids.
“Stay behind for a moment — I need to brief you on yesterday’s mission.”
Fully armed in black down to the undershirt beneath, the other person had a voice with little pitch variation and a cool edge to it. Even to Mio, who knew nothing, she looked like Cheongmyeong’s superior — and she was, in fact, exactly that. The team leader of the Industrial Security Team that Cheongmyeong belonged to — Joo Suhui.
It seemed they had something important to discuss that no one else should hear. Even the agents who had been lingering at Joo Suhui’s words departed, and only the two of them remained in the conference room. The team leader, once she confirmed the door was fully closed, moved to the seat the director had occupied moments before. Mio felt like he might burst out laughing and covered his small mouth with a front paw.
Fools. They’d never know in a million years that I’m a person. If they realized there were actually three people in here when they thought it was two, they’d be shocked out of their minds.
Mio was purring smugly to himself when sudden disaster struck. A bizarre, booming signal tone stabbing at his triangular ears. His fine fur stood on end.
Beeeeep —
That ear-piercing sound was almost like a recorder being played by someone with no skill.
Startled, Mio looked around hurriedly. Joo Suhui was at the spot the director had just occupied. She lowered her hand beneath the table — it seemed she had activated something underneath. It was a signal jammer — designed to block any possible recording or eavesdropping.
The signal jammer, which operated at a subtle frequency imperceptible to humans but capable of disrupting electronic devices, unfortunately also worked on Mio. All manner of loud, piercing sounds made it impossible to gather his thoughts.
My ears are going to kill me. Turn it off this instant……! It’s like someone’s blowing a clarinet directly into my ear!
“Is our kitty sleepy?”
Seeing the cat curling up small inside the pocket, Cheongmyeong said something utterly oblivious. On top of that he patted what would be the general area of Mio’s bottom and told him to sleep well — but Mio, because of the jammer, could no longer make out what he was saying and could only groan in distress.
Cheongmyeong glanced warmly down at his pocket, then looked up and returned to his usual self. Leaning his back against the chair and stretching his legs out long in that cynical manner disguised as casual ease, he made a pointed remark about someone who was absent — a subtle dig.
“When will you be announcing your candidacy for the National Assembly? If you’re going to go into politics, please do it sooner rather than later. Or maybe the shaman hasn’t given you a date yet.”
Cheongmyeong touched the back of his hand to his lower lip and continued. Joo Suhui maintained an expressionless face from start to finish.
“I’d have expected something more befitting an intelligence agency from you, rather than talk of a homeless man with cat ears. A moment ago I thought I’d walked into a career experience booth for children at an NIS open day.”
“There’s something the director doesn’t know yet. There’s work for you to do.”
She adjusted her glasses calmly — and at the words that followed, the corners of Cheongmyeong’s lips curved faintly into an arc. Between the screeching, splitting frequencies only Mio could hear, the words that fell from dry lips were enough to set even the back of Cheongmyeong’s neck tingling.
“There’s a traitor on the inside. I’ll reduce your caseload as much as possible for the time being, so find them. Information is leaking from within. It has to be handled alone, in complete secrecy — no one can know.”
“Who brought this intelligence in?”
“It’s a source from a partner organization. The reason I sent you on that mission alone yesterday was because of this too.”
At that, his brow furrowed slightly. So that’s why she’d sent him alone, saying it was nothing major…… The fact that he’d collapsed mid-mission was a somewhat painful matter — but thanks to passing out from the sleeping gas, Cheongmyeong had met a cute and lovable cat. In the end, it had worked out in his favor.
“I could be that traitor myself.”
Joo Suhui smiled for the first time. Cheongmyeong only lowered his hand to pat the squirming pocket. Whatever was so uncomfortable, the cat kept shifting — so he slipped his hand inside and stroked between the ears, and the restless, heaving little body went quiet. The team leader spoke.
“It’s confirmed that information from this side is flowing into Caeyang.”
Caeyang. The conglomerate of the Chae family, named with the grand ambition of becoming the sun.
“You could be a traitor — but you, who nearly died because of Caeyang, can’t be the one feeding information to Caeyang.”
Cheongmyeong answered only with lips pulled into a smile. She was referring to the incident from a few years back, when he had injured his head and lost his memories.
“Handle it so it doesn’t reach the director’s ears.”
Joo Suhui’s hand went down, and she deactivated the signal jammer. At the sound of a soft click, Cheongmyeong gave a light nod.
Mio dozed on and off in Cheongmyeong’s pocket and left the NIS with him. As they passed through the densely green forested hills and the city’s shape drew closer, even his small heart felt relief settle in. It felt as if the hope of being able to return home had come right within reach.
He did go home. Only it wasn’t his home he returned to. With his energy still drained, Mio was held in Yu Cheongmyeong’s hand and visited a pet mart for the very first time in his life. He needed to recover quickly and go back……
But the pure white lights and thousands of colorful items that filled his vision blurred the goal of going home in his mind.
The effects of the sleeping gas still ran deep in his small body. Mio dozed off at every other moment, and eventually propped his chin on the edge of Yu Cheongmyeong’s pocket and sank into a thick, heavy sleep.
He opened his eyes again at the moment a bright white light switched on with a click in a dark room. It was Yu Cheongmyeong’s house.
Out of habit, Mio licked his front paw and thoroughly washed his face first — and then was struck speechless with shock at the scene unfolding before him.
Yu Cheongmyeong was a fake doctor, and his real job was as a covert agent for the NIS. He didn’t know much, but surely someone who did dangerous work like a field agent would at least receive a substantial hazard allowance. Yet Cheongmyeong’s home was as tiny as a dollhouse.
You can see the entire living room at a glance.
Mio’s house had five living rooms alone, and the first-floor living room that cradled a glass-enclosed courtyard was wide and vast enough that even running around in it all day wouldn’t get old. On occasional afternoons when the sunlight was fierce, he would drape himself in the rays pouring in through the glass like a blanket and groom himself. That such a home was something out of the ordinary — well, Mio, whose very existence was something like fantasy from the start, had no way of knowing that.
“Our May, wait just a moment. Daddy will build your house.”
He meant the cushion bed shaped like a teepee they had bought at the mart. Cheongmyeong said this and lowered Mio to the floor with a remarkably gentle touch. The moment Mio narrowed his eyes primly and his soft pink paw pads touched the wooden floor — he bolted forward with everything he had.
“Bbyeok!”
He stumbled in his frantic scramble. Mio let out a chick-like cry as he tumbled over, then widened his diamond-shaped eyes in surprise and sprang right back up.
“Was that ‘bbyeok’ sound from May?”
Cheongmyeong watched the cat that had flopped over right in the middle of the living room having barely run any distance at all, and mimicked the chick-like cry. Mio pushed past the embarrassment, got up again, and crawled into a corner of the living room. Beneath the charcoal-colored sofa without a speck of dust. A pitch-black spot where no light reached.
“So cute.”
What do I do. What do I do. He had come all the way to this man’s house because there had been no other option, and now things were truly dire. What if he discovers me in human form.
If he was lucky he might be able to stay as a cat for a full twenty-four hours — but if he was unlucky, he could change at any moment right now.
You always have to live expecting the worst. Let me come up with a plan assuming the worst-case scenario. If I’m discovered as a human, what should I say…… What could I say to get out of it naturally.
Mio had propped his small chin on top of his overlapping paws and was about to start deliberating — when his attention was entirely captured by the flattened view from beneath the sofa. The man was going back and forth across the room, neatly stacking cans of cat food one by one into a tower. Just as Mio was focused on the illustrations on the cans, a zziiiick sound reached his ears, and Cheongmyeong suddenly started pushing a white roller across the floor.
Oh no.
Show a cat something like that, and there’s no resisting. While Cheongmyeong meticulously dealt with even the dust on the floor using lint roller tape, Chae Mio’s toes were going so itchy he couldn’t hold back. I want to touch it. I want to swat it……
I’d rather not look.
He pressed himself close to the wall to escape the movement of the lint roller. And there he found an unexpected reward. At the end of the sofa was a wall with a window — and even from Mio’s low vantage point, small as a fist, the outside opened up refreshingly wide.
Blinking his round eyes, he raised his front paws up onto the window. The glass pane had been warmed by the gentle sunlight, so his paw pads grew warm too. Outside the window, a vivid blue sky stretched wide — and beneath it, square apartment buildings rose tall, stacked like toy blocks piled endlessly high.
His front paws weren’t enough — he pressed his pink triangular nose against the glass too, and absorbed the sight he had never seen before with frantic eyes. It was the first time he had ever come up this high. The house he had lived in his whole life was only two stories tall.
Maybe…… I might meet him by chance.
Mio reached into the treasure chest hidden deep in his heart and drew out a cherished memory. He had been keeping it safe, afraid that thinking of it too often would wear it down the way an object wears from too much handling — that the memory of that day might fray and erode. Those short few days from childhood had kept him going all the way until now.
If we’re truly fated…… we might run into each other somewhere least expected.
In fairy tales and novels, things always happened like destiny — like magic. Would that kind of luck come to him too. The waiting had grown a little more difficult with each passing day, and he wanted to see him soon.
Mio’s…… Mio’s……
Just as the recollection deepened and the green of his eyes began to go soft with feeling — a thoroughly excited Cheongmyeong butted in and ruined it entirely.
