I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 174 174: Poke, poke.

She glanced briefly at the ring on his finger, then back at his face. "And don't worry about her. She's probably just resting."

Si Hon looked at her hand.

Then he pulled his knees up to his chest, turned his head sideways toward the wall, and said nothing.

Jisoo's extended hand remained in the air for a moment.

Then she lowered it slowly.

She didn't say anything immediately. She just stood there in the chaos of the hallway— students still running past in both directions, someone knocking into her shoulder without apologizing, the dragon doing something loud and structural to the classroom behind them—

And looked at the side of Si Hon's face while he very deliberately looked at literally anything else. Her jaw shifted slightly. One finger tapped against her own thigh twice, then stopped.

(This guy,) she thought, (is genuinely pissing me off. (⁠ ⁠╹⁠▽⁠╹⁠ ⁠)...)

She crossed her arms. Tapped her chin once with two fingers while her eyes stayed on him, running over the details the way she always did when something didn't add up and she couldn't stop herself from picking at it.

Dark circles. Hands that had stopped shaking only recently. The way he'd been breathing wrong since before she even walked over. The ring on his finger that he'd held up toward the ceiling like it was the only real thing in the room.

(Still.) Her fingers moved to her elbow, gripping her own arm slightly while a student sprinted past close enough to disturb her hair. (He's unique. No— everything happening around him is unique. That's the more accurate way to say it.)

Because the thing was— in every regression she'd lived through, the variables changed but the shape of things stayed roughly the same.

People panicked in predictable ways. Events followed recognizable patterns. The dragon always came. The school always collapsed. And the people inside it always forgot, always reset, always woke up the next loop with clean slates and no idea anything had happened before.

Every single person.

Except him.

Jisoo's eyes moved briefly down to the ring again, then back to his face. He was still looking at the wall. Still ignoring her hand. Still hugging his knees like if he made himself small enough the situation would agree to leave him alone.

(He retained the memory.) She turned that fact over carefully in her head, tapping her chin again without realizing she was doing it. (Every time I reset, he comes back remembering. Not pieces. Everything. Which means whatever is happening to him is operating completely outside the rules I know about.)

A pause in her own thoughts.

(And before everything started— he said they were prisoners. That they were forcefully thrown here or else they'll die.)

Her eyes narrowed very slightly. (They. Plural. Which means he's not alone in whatever this is. Which means there are other people in this school right now who came from somewhere that isn't here and got dragged into a scenario they didn't choose and— yes I'm yapping… I already saw them all… one red girl, one blue girl, two kid and one green freaky girl… I'm talking about is… is there more of them?)

Another student crashed into a locker nearby with a loud bang and sprinted away immediately without looking back.

Jisoo blinked once, pulled out of her own thoughts, and looked back down at Si Hon still curled on the floor beside her.

He hadn't moved even slightly.

She exhaled through her nose.

(Who even is this guy.)

Not a question she had an answer to yet. Which was, genuinely, the most interesting thing that had happened to her in a very long time.

And Jisoo Park did not have a good relationship with things she didn't have answers to— they had a way of lodging themselves somewhere behind her chest and refusing to leave until she'd turned them over from every possible angle until they made sense.

She reached down and extended her hand again.

Same position. Same expression. Completely unbothered by the fact that he'd already ignored it once.

"I'm not going to keep standing here forever," she said flatly. "So either you take it, or I drag you. Both work for me… I'm pretty strong if you know."

"I know."

Jisoo blinked once.

Just once. A small involuntary thing, the kind that happened when your brain received information it hadn't prepared a response for yet. She looked at Si Hon— still curled on the floor, still not looking at her— and then looked at her own extended hand, and then back at him.

"I know," he had said.

Two words. Flat. Completely unbothered. Like stating that the sky was colornlue.

She sat back down.

Not dramatically. Just lowered herself onto the hallway floor beside him with her legs crossed and looked at his face from this new angle, tilting her head slightly. Then— poke. Two fingers against his cheek.

Poke.

Poke.

Unhurried. Like she was testing whether something was still functioning in there.

"Tell me," she said. "How do you know?"

Si Hon was quiet for a moment.

Then— "I'm too lazy to say."

Jisoo stared at him.

And then, slowly, Si Hon unfolded.

His knees came down.

His hands pressed against the floor. He pushed himself upright with the energy of someone who had decided to rejoin the living out of mild convenience rather than any genuine enthusiasm for it, brushed the front of his uniform twice, and stood there looking approximately like a person again.

"Fine," he said. "Let's go. I'm good now."

(This bitch.) The thought arrived in Jisoo's head with startling clarity and zero guilt.

She smiled anyway— the particular smile of someone filing away extreme irritation for later— and stood up, rolling her shoulder once before falling into step beside him.

"Rooftop?" she said.

"Of course." Si Hon answered without looking at her. "Where else."

They moved.

The third floor hallway stretched ahead of them while the building continued its slow structural complaints around every corner— distant crashes, the groan of metal somewhere below, alarms cutting in and out from damaged wiring.