이 동네
“THE NEIGHBORHOOD”
SWEET AUBURN
By the time Tae got back on the wheel, the night had shifted again. Eerily vacant, but packed with a slithering tension.
She leaned forward and let the Inmotion pull her down MLK. The delivery bag knocked warm against her thigh. Her helmet hung from two fingers before she cussed under her breath and jammed it back on. The cat ears made her reflection in dark storefront glass look stupid and juvenile and somehow meaner than her face.
A pair of cruisers rolled parallel a street over, blue strobes washing across boarded windows and church brick and the side of a laundromat that had long ago given up pretending its hours meant anything.
Just moving slow.
Watchful.
Doyun had been right. That was what made it worse. She cut north-east where she normally wouldn’t, skimming past dark storefronts and shuttered food windows toward Sweet Auburn.
The city changed there without asking permission. The buildings sat lower and older. Murals and memorials and ghost-signs lived on the same walls as fresh security cameras and new locks and busted beer bottles in the gutter. The block felt watched from both directions in time. Every light looked like it had something to prove.
Her phone buzzed against the bag.
The delivery app.
CUSTOMER NOTE UPDATED:
don’t come to front
use side if police outside
call when close
Tae stared at it while rolling.
“Police outside?” she said to nobody.
Then another buzz.
TIP INCREASED +$20.00
She let out a tired laugh through her nose. “Oh, that side door. I got you.”
A helicopter thudded somewhere beyond the buildings.
The closer she got to Auburn proper, the less the streets felt random. People weren’t meandering anymore. They were gathering in pockets and stopping at corners and looking the same direction. That always meant one of two things in Atlanta after midnight: something had happened, or something was about to.
At the next light she saw the first real blockage.
Three APD cruisers camped crooked across the mouth of a side street. Another unmarked SUV sat dark with its engine running, its grille catching red and blue in wet pulses.
Officers in vests were casually out of the cars, which somehow made the whole thing uglier. One stood in the middle of the street with his hands on his vest straps, slowly turning his head from storefront to windows to parked cars like he was counting threats. Another was talking to a woman in pajama pants who held a little girl on her hip and kept trying to point toward a building entrance the officers clearly did not intend to let her reach.
Tae slowed.
The little girl’s backpack was pink and glittered every time the lights hit it. That gaudy gleam made Tae angry in a way she did not have time to unpack.
People lined the sidewalk in that half-involved way cities learn: not close enough to get grabbed, not far enough to miss the story.
A man in a security polo was filming from behind a newspaper box. Two college kids in too-good jackets whispered like they were on safari. An older Black woman stood with her arms folded under a shawl, her expression hard and unsurprised, like she’d seen this same script performed with different uniforms and street names her entire life.
A young officer stepped toward Tae and lifted a hand. “Can’t come through.”
Tae angled the wheel sideways to stop. “I’m not trying to come through. I’m trying to get around.”
He looked at the delivery bag, the helmet, then her face. “Then get around.”
Behind him, from farther down the block, came a hard metallic slam.
Then shouting.
Organized shouting. Doors. Commands. The kind that flatten everything human inside them.
The crowd reacted like one body, leaning without moving.
Tae felt the sound in the base of her neck.
Another buzz from the app.
CUSTOMER CALLING
Rubbing her forehead, she let it ring once before answering through her earbuds. “This is Lightwork.”
Silence for half a second.
Then breathing. Male.
Controlled in a way that felt practiced. “You close?”
Tae frowned and rolled a little farther from the officer. “Kinda on your street—”
“Don’t use the front.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Is there anyway I can—”
“Too much police.”
“No kidding,” she commented.
The voice did not laugh. “You from the area?”
“Yeah.”
“Go around the church side. Then cut east.”
Church side was not the address. Just church side, like she was supposed to know exactly what was waiting for her.
Tae’s grip tightened on the bag. “Can you give me a name to confirm?”
The line went dead.
She stopped rolling.
For one second the whole street seemed to hold still and bright around her. Red and blue light. Wet pavement. The little girl’s backpack. The officer’s gloved hand resting too easy near his belt. The old woman in the shawl. A mural of a dead leader looking down over a live inconvenience.
Then somebody in the blocked side street screamed, “That’s my son!”
Everything snapped back into motion.
The woman with the little girl started crying and cursing at once. The officer speaking to her stepped in closer, voice dropping into that calm tone cops used when they had already decided what mattered.
The crowd surged half a foot and stopped. A bottle rolled somewhere under a car tire. The helicopter got louder.
Tae slipped down Auburn on the edge of the crowd and cut north at the first opening, hugging curb and shadow, using bodies and parked cars to break her outline. The wheel hummed soft beneath her boots.
Her bag had cooled a little now. She could feel it. Gi would be furious. Her mother’s labor congealing one traffic signal at a time for somebody who talked like a ghost and tipped like bait.
Her phone buzzed again.
GI Momma
Tae almost ignored it, “Yes, mom.”
“Where you at?” Gi snapped, no greeting, all breath and kitchen noise behind her. “Customer called. Said you’re circling.”
Tae laughed once, sharp. “He called you?”
“Why are you surprised? He said police got the area jammed up. Did you deliver the food or not?”
“I still have it. He told me to—”
“Get him his food then! You think bulgogi gets younger in the bag?!”
Tae ducked under a low tree limb as she cut behind a row of parked cars. Ahead, another street emptied into Auburn under a wash of emergency light.
“Something’s wrong with this order. He wants me to deliver it somewhere else.”
There was a beat of silence long enough to mean Gi was offended by the suggestion.
“Everything wrong after midnight,” Gi said. “That’s why we charge extra. Drop it and come back.”
She hung up.
Tae rode another block and came out beside a church lot half-full of cars that all looked too expensive to be there this late.
The delivery app chimed again.
ARRIVAL WINDOW EXPIRING
Then, beneath it:
CUSTOMER NOTE UPDATED:
rear entrance only
don’t bring police attention
“Man, kiss my ass,” she muttered, killing the screen and looking up.
Across the church parking lot, Tae spotted Kennedy moving fast along the far sidewalk.
She was half a block away, cutting past the chain-link fence with her shoulders high and her head down, one hand shoved deep in her hoodie pocket like it still didn’t know whether to come out. The church lot sat bright and open between them, every parked car washed in white security light.
Beyond her, Auburn still pulsed blue and red where the police had the block choked up.
Tae lifted one hand and called across the lot. “Kennedy!—”
She noticed the two men.
They stood near the wrought-iron fence on the church side of the street, both in dark windbreakers, both too still. One had an earpiece wire disappearing into his collar. The other had the kind of posture that said he was there to watch, not wait. They weren’t looking at Auburn anymore.
They were looking toward her.
A cold thread pulled tight inside Tae’s chest.
Tae’s eyes escaped back to Kennedy as her head snapped up.
For one stretched second, nobody moved.
Tae rode through, the wheel humming beneath her as she cut straight across the church’s parking lot. The lights were too bright. Shadows failed to connect to objects. Tae through a wide sheet of white, every wet stripe and oil stain on the asphalt reflecting up at her. She could feel the men tracking her the whole way.
She kept her eyes on them as long as she could stand to, then hopped the curb at the far side and rolled up on Kennedy hard enough to make her step back.
“The hell are you doing still out here, bruh?” Tae asked.
Kennedy looked past Tae first, toward the lot, making sure the men were still where he thought they were.
They were.
One of them had turned slightly now, body angled toward the church entrance, but her attention was still on this side of the street.
She lowered his voice. “You shouldn’t be over here, T.”
Tae let out a short, tired laugh. “That’s everybody’s line tonight.”
“I’m serious.” Kennedy jerked her chin back toward Auburn. “Police got this whole block locked down.”
“For what?”
“They ain’t saying.”
Tae looked over her shoulder toward the glow of cruisers and emergency lights washing the cross streets. “Probably looking for something illegal.”
She let her eyes drop, just once, toward the pocket his hand had been guarding earlier.
Kennedy’s face shut immediately. “It ain’t that.”
“Didn’t say it was.”
“Pretty sure you just did.”
Tae looked her over. “You looked like you was about to make a real stupid choice back there.”
“And you look like you don’t know when to leave.” Kennedy’s eyes flicked to the delivery bag. “Aye, why are you even over here?”
Massaging her face, Tae groaned, “I feel like Atlanta has a personal problem with me finishin’ one last delivery and taking my ass home.”
Kennedy didn’t smile. She kept glancing toward the church lot, toward the two men, toward the police glow at the end of the block like all three things belonged to the same sentence and she didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Tae,” she said quietly, “go back downtown.”
She frowned. “I’m not going nowhere, because the police decided to act spooky.”
“It’s not just them.”
Tae paused.
The night seemed to pull tighter around the words as the church lights buzzed overhead.
Somewhere behind them, a siren chirped and cut off. Traffic hissed wet over Auburn.
“Look,” Tae shifted the bag higher against her arm. “I just want to drop this off and get back to my bed.”
Kennedy looked at the bag again. “Where?”
Tae pulled her phone from her pocket, glanced at the screen, and read the address. Kennedy went still. Her eyes came off the phone and lifted to Tae’s face, checking whether she was joking.
“Fuck,” she swore under his breath.
“What?” Tae asked.
She stepped closer. “That place is empty, T.”
“How empty?”
“Like, I’m sure some niggas trap out that hoe, empty.”
Tae looked down at her screen again as if the map might get embarrassed and correct itself. The route line still glowed obediently east. The pin still sat there like a fact.
Kennedy shook her head. “Ain’t nobody living there, T.”
Tae almost smiled, “This can’t be happening right now—”
“Tae,” she said again, sharper now, “you need to leave.”
Looking past Kennedy at the church lot, Tae scanned the two men who had stopped pretending not to watch.
Her grip tightened around the bag as her phone buzzed in her hand.
CUSTOMER NOTE UPDATED:
don’t be late
She stared at it then looked up slowly at Kennedy.
Seeing something change in Tae’s face, Kennedy groaned, smacking her lips. “Nah. You can forget whatever the fuck you got cookin’ right now—”
Tae slid the phone back into her pocket. “Don’t you wanna know what the fuck is goin’ on?”
Kennedy took a step back. “Hell nah!”
“It’ll be quick. I promise—”
“No, Tae!”
“Aight, whatever.” She pushed off, riding east along the far sidewalk.
OLD FOURTH WARD EDGE
The farther east Tae rode, the cleaner the block became.
Atlanta had a thousand ways of being dangerous after midnight, but this stretch felt awkward. Lawns trimmed evenly, hedges disciplined, and porches brightly lit. Even the rain looked curated here, beading on black wrought iron and painted shutters and expensive mailboxes with brass numbers polished clean enough to catch moonlight.
Her phone map chirped and rerouted her onto a narrow residential street lined with old homes wearing new money like church clothes.
The pin settled.
Tae slowed.
The house on her screen stood halfway down the block behind a low brick retaining wall and a white fence so freshly painted it still seemed wet. Two stories. Deep porch. Cream siding. Black shutters. Warm light in every downstairs window. Hydrangeas tied up neat against the damp. A wreath on the door. Somebody had even put out potted ferns.
Nothing about it looked abandoned.
Tae stepped off the Inmotion P6 and stood there a second with the bag in one hand.
“Ken, you raggedy liar,” she muttered, with half-belief.
Across the street, every other house looked sensibly asleep. A single porch light here. A dim upstairs lamp there.
Her screen buzzed.
CUSTOMER NOTE UPDATED:
don’t leave at curb
bring it to the door
Tae stared at the last line until the words blurred then looked up at the house again.
A gust moved through the trees and the porch chimes answered with one thin metallic tremble.
“Man, hell nah,” she smacked her lips.
She almost left.
Almost.
Gi’s voice was still in her head. The order still existed. The lights were on and the house was right there. Underneath all her irritation now was something meaner, more dangerous than pride.
Curiosity.
She set the wheel at the foot of the steps, tucked the bag under her arm, and climbed.
Every board gave a low complaint beneath her weight.
Up close, the house smelled clean: lemon polish, candle wax, and something mineral underneath it, like cold stone after rain.
She set the food bag beside the door. There was no doorbell.
Tae knocked once anyway with her knuckles, then backed up and hit call on the order.
The line clicked open immediately. The same controlled male breathing from Auburn.
Tae looked straight at the door. “I’m here.”
Locks turned on the other side in a slow, careful sequence.
One.
Two.
Three.
The door opened inward.
A man stood there in a pressed charcoal suit with no tie, white shirt open at the throat, sleeves buttoned neat at the wrist. Forty-something maybe. Clean skin. Neat haircut. He smiled with exact politeness, like he had practiced it in mirrors.
Behind him, in the warm gold of the foyer, stood a woman in a cream dress with her hair pinned back. She looked younger than him, maybe mid-thirties, maybe not. Her smile matched his too perfectly to be marriage and too naturally to be coincidence.
Neither of them looked hungry.
The man’s eyes moved over Tae once—helmet underarm, windbreaker, beanie, tired face, delivery bag at his feet—and softened with something so close to tenderness it made her skin tighten.
“Taeyang,” he said.
Tae did not move.
He knew better instantly than to act like that had slipped out.
The woman’s smile deepened by half a degree.
Tae’s voice flattened. “How do you know my name?”
The man’s gaze dipped to the bag. “You made it despite the roadblocks. Good.”
“Answer the question.”
Instead, he opened the door wider. The foyer beyond him was bright enough to hurt. Old hardwood floors. Crown molding. Framed photographs climbing the wall up the staircase.
Tae’s eyes caught on one and stopped.
Then another.
Then another.
Her mouth went dry.
They were pictures of her.
A ten-year-old Tae at a folding table under a red canopy at some church festival, missing front tooth, face shiny with heat. Tae in middle school standing beside Gi outside a different restaurant sign she barely remembered.
Tae and Doyun unloading boxes from a van. Tae in a cheap taekwondo dobok, serious and unsmiling. Tae at fourteen on a MARTA platform with headphones on, looking away from the camera like nobody had permission to take it.
Lightworkers were photographed too. Not the current restaurant. The old food-truck logo from before the LGHTWRK rebrand.
Tae took one step back on the porch. “W-What the fuck is this?”
The woman’s voice was soft and cultured and entirely without embarrassment. “Evidence.”
The walls held more than photographs. Symbols had been worked into the trim and wallpaper so thoroughly the house no longer looked decorated. It looked claimed.
Pressure swelled at the base of Tae’s skull. Her hand went to the bag out of pure instinct, absurdly protective of bulgogi and rice at the edge of whatever this was.
She slowly backed away from the door. “That’s neat—Listen, enjoy your food and next time you do your cult night? Call Panda Express, okay?”
The man stepped forward just enough for the foyer light to catch his face from below, and the practiced human softness in him altered.
“We can save you,” he said.
Tae was already turning.
At the curb, a dark SUV rolled silent to the curb.
One of the rear doors opened. The two windbreaker men from the church lot stepped out.
“Aw, come on,” Tae said, the words leaving her body before thought did.
The man in the doorway did not raise his voice. “Please don’t make this violent.”
Tae bolted for the steps. The woman moved faster than she should have. She kicked the food bag off the porch, and pushed with both hands, spinning her down the stairs off-balanced.
Tae toppled, and the jagged stairs tore at her forearms.
At the same time, one of the men below seized her Inmotion P6 and drove it hard into the brick path. Plastic and twisted metal exploded. The wheel screamed, skidded, and died under a burst of sparks.
Tae stared at it as she stood up. Her ride. Her way home. Her mother’s delivery route. Gone in one stupid second.
Something hot and white rushed up the back of her throat. “You motherfucker.”
The windbreaker man came up the steps two at a time.
Tae grabbed flower pot and swung before he could square his shoulders. The heavy metal slammed into his temple with a wet, bell-like crack. He staggered sideways into a porch column, cursing.
The second man lunged from below, catching her around the waist.
They hit the porch together. Boards boomed under them.
Tae drove an elbow backward into ribs and got half-free, but the woman in the cream dress was already there, barefoot now, expression unchanged, one hand reaching not for Tae’s head like a nurse checking fever.
“Don’t touch me!” Tae slapped the hand away and kicked backward hard. Her heel caught somebody’s knee.
White flashed behind her eyes. The porch lights dimmed. Every bulb on the house lowered at once to a dirty amber hush. The security lamp over the garage flared so bright it screamed in its housing. The foyer chandelier flashed. Porch sconces spat white. The shattered remains of her wheel sparked blue against the brick.
The wind went still. For a fraction of a second, the whole yard seemed to inhale.
Something in Tae answered.
Light came off everything at once—Toward her.
Threads of brightness yanked loose from bulbs, screens, reflections, wet leaves, window glass—thin at first, then thickening into trembling ribbons that bent in the air like they had found a drain.
Everybody froze.
The man in the doorway whispered, almost reverent, “There.”
The light hit Tae’s skin and went under.
Her whole body locked. For one sick, impossible instant she could feel the paths it took through her—down arms, across ribs, behind eyes, through teeth, around the old hidden architecture of herself like it had always known the route.
The world snapped into overclarity.
Rain beads on the porch rail.
Dust in the foyer light.
The pulse hammering in the wrist of the man holding her.
Every filament straining inside every bulb.
Tae moved on instinct. She tore her arm free and the gathered light came with it, hardening around her fist in a blunt white shape like a gauntlet made of frozen neon and window glare. She swung.
The light gauntlet connected with the windbreaker man’s chest and burst on impact into shards that hit the porch and skittered alive for half a heartbeat, each one leaving a bright streak in the dark before collapsing into nothing.
The man went backward through the railing. Wood cracked, and he disappeared into the hydrangeas below with a sound like furniture thrown off a truck.
Tae stared at her hand.
The gauntlet was gone. The light wasn’t. It streamed around her forearm now in frantic loops, trying shapes faster than thought—blade, baton, fan, broken halo—before collapsing again into naked brightness.
The second man rushed her. Tae threw both hands up without knowing why.
The porch sconces ripped white.
Shards burst into existence from the glow—angular, sharp, made of compressed porchlight and windowshine. They hit the man in the face and throat in a flurry so bright, he screamed. He stumbled backward off the steps, clawing at nothing solid.
“Oh my God,” Tae heard herself say.
The woman in cream did not retreat.
She stepped into the dimming light with those impossible calm eyes and spoke like she was soothing a child in church. “Don’t be afraid.”
Remembering the push, Tae became furious enough to act. She grabbed at the nearest brightness she could feel—the foyer spill, the brass glint, the wet shine off the paint—and dragged it forward. It answered as a thinner gauntlet, more translucent and pale as dishwater moonlight. The woman’s hand struck it and recoiled with a hiss, skin pinking instantly.
The man in the doorway looked at the symbols on his walls, then at Tae, and something dangerously worshipful entered his voice. “You are amazing.”
Tae backed down the steps, gauntlet flickering with unstable light. The pain in her forearms and shoulder screamed. The broken carcass of her unicycle lay in the yard in two jagged pieces, sparks coughing weakly from its split housing.
“I don’t know who the fuck y’all are,” she said, breath sawing, “but this was just a food delivery.”
The man’s softness vanished. “Enough.”
The woman retreated and drew a small black radio from somewhere in the folds of her dress.
Tae ran, half-stumbling through the gate, gauntlet flickering out, constructs dying in her hands as soon as she lost line to the house lights. She hit the sidewalk hard enough to jar every bruise awake and kept going, the wet street throwing shards of reflected porchlight into her eyes.
Behind her, the woman’s voice came clear and level through the radio.
“The target has been identified.”