Chapter Text
Lara wiped down the counter for the third time that hour, her shoulders stiff from leaning over the spotless surface. Mokpo’s streets were quiet tonight, the kind of quiet that made the neon signs glow brighter, reflected in puddles from an earlier drizzle. She loved her night shifts—low stakes, easy tips—but her friends had warned her more than once: “Stay careful around hybrids. Some are harmless, sure… but others? Deadly.”
She used to laugh it off. A city myth, no different than ghost stories told to spook new arrivals. But Mokpo wasn’t Suncheon. Her hometown went to bed with the sunset, and the worst thing you could stumble into at night was a drunk fisherman looking for his boat.
Here? Here, she’d already heard whispers: a customer whose cousin disappeared after walking home late; a delivery boy who swore he saw glowing eyes in the alley behind the pharmacy. Lara had filed it all away as gossip—until tonight.
꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦
Her first few months in Mokpo were interesting enough, to say the least. The hospital felt bigger than it was, with too many hallways that smelled faintly of bleach and something metallic beneath it. Most nights she bounced between scan rooms and the cafeteria, learning the quirks of old machines and newer patients.
Her specialty was rare. Ultrasound techs weren’t scarce, but hybrid pregnancy techs? That was a niche nobody else in her graduating class had touched. Which meant Mokpo General had snapped her up before the ink on her certification was dry.
It also meant she was often the youngest in the room, the only one without some hardened story about “back when hybrid regulations were looser” or “before the accidents started.”
And though she never admitted it aloud, she wondered if her mother had been right. Maybe moving away from Suncheon—away from Sophia and little Yoonchae—wasn’t bravery at all, but reckless curiosity.
꒷꒦︶꒷꒦︶ ๋ ࣭ ⭑꒷꒦
That night, the doors rattled open just after midnight.
Lara looked up from her notes, expecting another insomniac patient or a nurse cutting through the clinic. Instead, she froze.
The man—or hybrid—standing in the doorway was soaked from the drizzle outside, his hair plastered to his forehead, his shirt torn along the side like he’d been in a fight. His breathing was uneven and ragged, but it was his eyes that rooted her to the spot.
Not brown. Not hazel. Something else entirely.
They reflected the fluorescent lights in a way that didn’t belong to any human. For a second, neither of them moved. Lara’s pen slipped from her fingers and clattered against the counter.
And then, softly, he said, “Are you the one who works with hybrids?”