be-ayan

Chapter 4 : Echoes

The transition back from the sun-drenched playground of Incheon to the damp, grey reality of Milan felt like being plunged into a tub of ice water. Taeyeon’s eyes snapped open in the back of the L’Angolo café. The espresso was stone-cold, a dark, stagnant pool in the bottom of a chipped porcelain cup. Across the street, the neon pharmacy sign continued its rhythmic, agonizing buzz—flicker, buzz, flicker, buzz—casting a sickly, artificial green light onto the Formica tabletop.

She had spent her first full day in the city walking until her shins burned, showing the pixelated photograph to anyone who would pause. She had been ignored by hurried businessmen, barked at by street vendors, and looked at with a hollow, terrifying pity by the local police. By the time the sun dipped behind the soot-stained skyline, she had nothing. No name, no address, not even a lead. Only the crushing weight of the realization that Milan was not a city, but a labyrinth designed to swallow the desperate.

She retreated to the rooming house she had found in Sesto San Giovanni. It wasn’t an apartment; it was a cell. The walls were a jaundice-yellow, peeling in great, dry flakes like dead skin. The only window looked out onto a brick wall draped in rusted fire escapes, and the radiator hissed with a violent, metallic frustration but offered no heat.

Taeyeon sat on the edge of the narrow bed, her coat still on, the dampness of the Milanese fog seeping into her very bones. The room felt suffocatingly small, yet too large for one person. In the silence, the corporate life she had abandoned—the glass offices in Seoul, the consulting prestige—felt like a dream she had had in another lifetime. She looked at her hands, which felt unnaturally cold, and tried to remember why she was here.

In the quiet of that yellow room, the memories of their “middle years” finally rose to the surface, filling the cold air with a phantom warmth.

In the years that followed that childhood ‘marriage,’ the pact hadn’t faded into a silly memory; it had deepened into the very fabric of their adolescence. What started as a shield against the world became the world itself. By the time they were twelve, the berry stains had been replaced by the electric, terrifying heat of a hand brushed against a shoulder, or the way their breath hitched when they shared a pair of headphones in the back of a bus. It was a slow-motion collision of souls. They didn’t have a word for it then—the world around them only spoke of such things in hushed, shameful tones—but to Taeyeon and Jessica, it was as natural as gravity. They loved each other with the terrifying purity of those who have no plan B. It wasn’t just a friendship that turned into a romance; it was a recognition. They were two halves of a language only they spoke, and as their bodies grew taller, the plastic rings remained the only things that stayed the same size—tightening around their hearts until the thought of a life apart felt like a slow, inevitable suffocation.

Taeyeon realized then that she couldn’t do this as an outsider. To find a ghost, she needed someone who knew how to navigate the underworld.

The next morning, she didn’t head for the tourist centers. She stayed in the communal kitchen of the rooming house, nursing a cup of tea and watching. She had analyzed her situation with the cold precision of the consultant she used to be: The workshops are unofficial. The workers are undocumented. They don’t speak to strangers, but they speak to each other. She needed a gatekeeper.

That was when she approached Gianna.

Gianna was a woman who seemed to be carved out of the very industrial landscape she inhabited. She sat in the corner every morning, shelling peas or mending heavy work trousers with a needle that moved with surgical speed. Taeyeon didn’t just walk up to her; she waited until Gianna struggled with a heavy bag of groceries near the stairs. Taeyeon took the weight without asking. She brought Gianna a tin of high-quality tea she had brought from Seoul—a small, expensive bridge built across a language barrier.

On the third day, Gianna finally looked at the photo. She squinted through taped-together spectacles, her weathered face softening for the briefest of seconds.

“Questa ragazza… silenziosa. Lavora duro. Come un fantasma.” This girl… silent. Works hard. Like a ghost.

Gianna didn’t give her an address—there were no addresses in that world. Instead, she offered to take Taeyeon on “the rounds.”

The journey was exhaustive. They spent the next ten hours traversing the northern outskirts of the city. They walked through mud-slicked alleys where the air smelled of burning plastic and raw wool. They visited hidden basements in Bovisa where the only light came from the flickering tubes over sewing machines. They stood outside garment warehouses in Cinisello Balsamo, watching hundreds of women with bowed heads file in for the night shift.

Each stop was a fresh heartbreak. Taeyeon’s eyes searched every face, her heart leaping at every slim silhouette, only to be crushed again and again. Finally, they reached the edge of an abandoned rail yard. And then, Taeyeon saw it.

Her breath hitched, sticking in a throat that had gone bone-dry. There, rising out of the weeds and the industrial rot, was the structure. The corrugated metal siding was warped in the exact same jagged pattern; the third window from the left was shattered in the specific, starburst shape she had memorized over a thousand sleepless nights in Seoul. This wasn’t just a building; it was a ghost made manifest.

A violent jolt of electricity surged through Taeyeon’s limbs. The grainy, low-resolution world of her phone screen had finally collided with the physical earth. She reached out, her fingers trembling as they brushed the rusted metal of the perimeter gate.

As her skin met the cold iron, the world hummed—a low, distant vibration that felt less like a sound and more like a pressure behind her eyes. For a split second, the air tasted strangely of salt and cold metal, and a steady, rhythmic thrum echoed in the base of her skull, fading before she could even name it. She blinked, the grey gravel of the yard swaying once like the surface of a dark lake, and then the heavy scent of diesel and wet soot rushed back in, grounding her in the cold Milanese night.

She gripped the gate tighter, her heart hammering. It was just the hunger, she told herself. Just the lack of sleep.

“Signorina? Tutto bene?” Gianna asked, her voice steady.

“I’m fine,” Taeyeon whispered, her eyes locked on the warehouse. “I’m just… I’m here. I actually found it.”

“Wait here,”  Gianna said.

Taeyeon didn’t wait. She approached a small group of women huddling near a side entrance, their faces obscured by the shadows of their hoods as they shared a single, glowing cigarette. Taeyeon pulled the photo from her pocket, her heart hammering against her ribs.

“Please,” she said, showing the photo. “Do you know where this lady went?”

The workers looked at each other, a silent communication passing between them. One woman, her hands stained a faint, ghostly blue, shook her head.

“No” the woman said. “They closed many lines here.”

“Anything you can tell…” Taeyeon’s voice cracked.

“Sorry.”

Taeyeon went to another group of women at the far right side of the complex.

“Please,” she said, her voice trembling again, but clear. “This woman. Do you know her? Was she here?”

The women went silent. They looked at the photo, then at Taeyeon’s expensive, mud-splattered coat. Finally, a woman with eyes as tired as the rusted metal behind her took a long drag of the cigarette and exhaled a plume of grey smoke.

“Si,” the woman said in a low rasp. “I remember her. The quiet one. She worked the midnight sorting.”

“Is she inside?” Taeyeon stepped forward, hope flare-up like a match in the dark. “Can I see her?”

The woman shook her head slowly. “Non più. She moved away a month back. They closed the sorting line.”

“Where?” Taeyeon’s voice cracked. “Did she say where she was going?”

The worker looked at her companions, a silent, cautious communication passing between them. “She didn’t say much. But she asked about the Indigo Basements. Down south. It’s hard work, Signorina. Dangerous. But they pay in cash and they don’t ask for papers.”

Taeyeon stepped back, the world spinning. A month. She was only thirty days behind a trail that had been cold for fifteen years.

The “Indigo Basements? What’s that?”

Gianna stepped out of the shadows, her face etched with weathered pity. “I heard, Signorina. The basements… that is a dark place to go.”

What Gianna explained to her was more like a death sentence disguised as a job, located in the deep industrial pockets where the city’s waste was hidden. They were illegal, unventilated underground workshops where workers use toxic chemicals and sandblasting to distress denim, trade-off their health for a few Euros in an air thick with indigo dust.

“Why would Jessica be there?!” she regained her composure. “I don’t care,” Taeyeon whispered, clutching the photo to her chest. “I’m going.”

The triumph in Taeyeon’s chest didn’t vanish, but it sharpened into a desperate, focused edge. After fifteen years, she was finally close enough to feel the heat of the trail.

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Diary Entry: September 20th

Location: Somewhere in Bovisa

“I stayed in my room last night and watched the shadows on the wall. The wallpaper is peeling, Jess, and it looks like the skin of something that gave up a long time ago. I think about those years after the rings—how we thought we were so clever, hiding our hearts in plain sight. I can still feel the heat of your hand on my shoulder in the bus.

The world is starting to feel thin. I tasted an orange today, but it was like chewing on a cloud—no juice, no tang. And I heard a sound today at the warehouse… that didn’t belong to the machines. I think the city is trying to tell me that I’m running out of road. But I found where you were. I touched the same rusted gate you must have touched. I’m following the thread, even if it’s the last thing I ever do. I love you.”