This must be the place || PURINZ

I

Chaewon wondered if she could jump out of the moving vehicle and run away into the forest. It was an appealing bad idea.

The road shimmered with the heat outside but the air con was blasting in the car, drying out her eyes and aggravating the lingering hangover sandpapering at the inside of her skull. The radio was turned up just a little too loud to a country music station blasting a song about a man who loved a no-good woman, and Chaewon tried desperately to tune it out. She stared out between the trees instead, into the deep forest, and considered the feasibility of a future as a wood nymph.

She had hated cars ever since she was very young. Other transport was fine - planes, boats, she even went so far as to enjoy the close-packed people-watching of buses and trains. Cars made her anxious though, had done since her mother died crashing one, and this kind of car was particularly bad. It was big and expensive, insulated so thoroughly that she could barely even feel the rumble of the engine, and far too wide for the dirt track roads they were navigating down. Christopher Chan had to slow down at every turn, frowning to himself as he slotted the car past the conifers and pine trees lining the road. It felt like a car trying to trick her into believing it wasn't one, but it would crumple all the same when it hit something.

To distract herself she kept her hands and mind busy playing with the strap of her camera bag, pulling the slider up and then down again, satisfied with the whirring noise it made each time. Schaefer glanced over at her and then at the strap of the bag, and she caught a slight adjustment of his position in his seat, a determination not to be irritated by her.

"We're nearly there," he said. He'd said that five minutes ago too, but she nodded as if she believed him.

"I didn't realise it was so far from town." Then again, she hadn't realised much of anything about this place. She had meant to look it up last night when she was getting drunk at the bar of an airport hotel, or this morning as she took a bus to Chan's office. Every time her phone had buzzed with a new missed call she'd turned away from it though, dived into her drink or stared out of the window instead. All she knew was the handful of streets she'd seen that morning, the bleach-clean smell of the Chan Legal Services offices located above a laundromat, the hard leather of his car seats.

She half considered pulling her phone out now, doing some belated research, but the thought had barely formed in her brain when they rounded a corner and a house crept into view. It was tiny, only one storey and surely no more than a few rooms, built from dark wood and grey stone and blending so effortlessly into the landscape that it might have always been there, planted when the first trees began to grow. For a hopeful second Chaewon thought that this was her house, the one they had come to see, but no - there was someone already outside.

From the road, Chaewon could only make out their broadest features: a woman in a white tank top, her muscled shoulders tanned from the sun, an axe dangling casually in one hand. She had already placed a log in front of her, and as Chaewon watched she lifted the axe above her head and swung it downwards in a single fluid motion, the taut muscles of her arms working so perfectly with the axe they might have all been one. The log split easily into two, as though she were cutting through paper, and the woman picked up the two halves to place them into a neat stack nearby.

Chaewon half considered telling chan to stop the car so she could watch her do that again.

"Ah," Chan said, catching the line of her gaze, "That's Yunjin. Your new neighbour. Don't mind her too much, she's a little... eccentric."

Chaewon liked eccentric. She also liked women who looked like they could tear her in half without too much effort. She had a feeling she was going to like Yunjin a lot .

They drove past the house, and when Chaewon glanced backwards she saw that Yunjin was watching the retreat of their car go, one hand held up to shade her eyes from the sun, a dog wagging its tail by her side.