Sana Minatozaki is not what one would picture as your average cop– but that’s because she isn’t. Well, not technically.
You see, when Sana was 15 a hit was placed on her family. Her father was an investment banker who handled the accounts of some of Seoul’s most important people, but when the markets took a dip in the winter of 2010, those important people learned that her father wasn’t a particularly good investment banker. He had been once, of course. But then he’d gotten married, and three kids and a couple of mortgages changed all of that.
Her father had been borrowing money against his client’s accounts to pay his own bills for years. What started out as a house payment here or there soon became money to fund a vacation abroad or to pay for his kids’ private schooling. One thing snowballed into another, and soon enough her father was drowning in debt that he could never dream of repaying before his clients discovered it missing.
One of those clients didn’t take the news particularly well.
His name was Park Seunghwan. He was rumored to have a heavy hand in the rising gang activity in Seoul, and Sana’s father was the man who lost him his fortune. No amount of groveling would appease Park. He wanted Sana’s family to pay for her father’s mistake in blood.
And they did.
A hitman snuck into their house late one night while the family slept. He started with Sana’s parents in their bedroom, disposing of them with a single gunshot to the head before they could even scramble from their bed. He wasn’t kind enough to kill them while they slept– Park Seunghwan wanted Sana’s father to see the bullet coming for him.
When the hitman moved to her brother’s room to deal him the same fate, Sana’s older sister woke to the sound of the familiar creak of the floorboard down the hall. She must have sensed something was the matter though, because she quickly woke Sana from the bed beside hers and hurried her to the closet to hide. Still half asleep and half convinced her sister was pulling another prank on her, Sana went along without protest, content to tuck herself behind their heavy winter coats if it meant she could just go back to sleep.
She didn’t notice her sister closing the closet door back, didn’t see her hurriedly making Sana’s bed before trying to crawl beneath her own as the sound of footsteps neared their room.
Sana did hear the doorknob rattle.
She heard the crash as the door was kicked in, startling her fully awake. She instinctively curled on herself behind the hanging clothes and held as still as she could, clamping a hand over her mouth to quiet the sounds of her breaths as the intruder began pacing around their room. The closet door kept her from watching as the man drug her sister out from beneath the bed kicking and screaming, but Sana’s imagined the moment over and over again with such clarity that she could swear she watched him anyways.
She heard the hiss of the silenced bullet quieting her sister’s screams for good.
She heard the fall of heavy boots as the hitman paced their room looking for Sana, heard them hesitate as he considered her hastily made bed.
She heard those footsteps approach her hiding spot, each step quicker than the last, almost keeping time with her heartbeat.
And then she heard the piercing wail of a siren rising from outside.
A low swear and then those footsteps were retreating, faster than before until Sana had to strain to hear them at all. The intruder was gone just as quickly as he’d come, leaving no trace for the policeman to find him, only the bodies of his victims and the terrified teenager hiding in her bedroom closet to prove that he’d ever been there at all.
The weeks that followed were a haze for Sana. She was too young, too overwhelmed and traumatized to handle the family affairs herself, and so her aunt flew in from Japan to manage the funeral arrangements. The police investigation was dead in the water. Thanks to her father’s shady business dealings, he had too many enemies for police to narrow down the suspect pool, and with no physical evidence left by the hitman their hands were tied. Her family’s deaths were quickly forgotten by the police and the rest of Seoul.
As far as they were concerned, it was just another business deal gone sour.
Her aunt offered to take Sana back to Japan with her to live. It would be a fresh start, a way for her to escape the horrors of Seoul and all the ghosts waiting for her at home. In Japan, Sana would be safe. In Japan, she could walk down the street without her face being recognized from the headlines. She wouldn’t be forced to live her life in the shadow of her father’s crimes.
She wouldn’t be constantly hounded by guilt for being the only member of her family to make it out of that house alive.
But Sana turned down her aunt’s offer.
She returned to her empty home.
Fast forward three years, and Sana had become your textbook agoraphobe. She never left her house, ordering supplies online and having them delivered to her doorstep whenever needed. She had her family’s life insurance policy to keep the bills paid and her belly full, but she lived sparingly, subsisting off of ramen and rice.
The only thing that she invested real money in was her home security system.
Never once in the three years since her family’s death did Sana forget that their killer was still out there somewhere. Thanks to all of the news coverage of their case, whoever had ordered the hit on her family would have known that the job hadn’t been finished, would know that there was a living and breathing loose end left to tie off. While the police had long since forgotten her case, Sana relived that night every time that she closed her eyes. She couldn’t forget.
And she couldn’t sit there helpless and wait for the hitman to return and finish what he’d started, either.
So she began to build a surveillance system.
It started out modest. Her first purchase was a security camera that she carefully placed outside her front door (which had been quite an event, believe her). But then that single security camera multiplied until there was one at every entrance, ensuring that Sana had an eye on what was going on outside of her house at any given moment. That was when managing those cameras became tricky, and so she took to the internet to learn how to set up a more sophisticated security system.
From that point on, Sana spent her time learning code. She had only the internet to keep her company and all the free time in the world to learn the ins and outs of different systems. Her surveillance system became more and more complex as her knowledge grew– soon, she had hacked the street cams of the roads nearby and looped them into her feed, giving her a constant eye on everything going on in the neighborhood.
This became her window to the outside world. In the time since her family’s death, Sana kept herself isolated, never leaving the house or allowing visitors over (not that there was anyone left to visit). Her aunt still called her from time to time to check in, but she’d long ago given up any attempts to get Sana to come join her in Japan. The closest thing she had to human contact were the images on her surveillance screens.
In time, she began making up stories for the familiar faces she saw on her monitors. There was Mrs. Kim, the ahjumma who moved into the house across the street from Sana’s, who walked to and from work every weekday like clockwork. She lived alone and had no pets that Sana had seen, but she liked to think that she had a Siamese cat that was just as aloof and perfect as his owner. Sana had named the Siamese Keo.
And then there was Mr. Choi, the businessman who lived in the apartment complex a block over. He always wore the nicest suits when he was out and about and had a bluetooth headset permanently attached to his ear, which often made him look as if he were having a sort of epileptic fit as he marched down the sidewalk, arguing with someone on the other end of the call. Sana decided he was a lawyer, if only judging by his flashy clothes and the lavish apartment that he owned. A quick internet search had pulled up the property management’s website and the listings for that complex had made Sana choke on her ramen. However, the fact that he still walked to the metro stop three blocks over told her that he wasn’t quite as successful as he liked to appear.
There was a noodle shop down the street owned by Mrs Jo. Sana had gotten brave and ordered takeout from there once, and Mrs Jo had delivered the noodles herself because her son had apparently gone home sick and left her to run the shop by herself. Their conversation couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, but Sana felt as if they were the longest thirty seconds of her life, even with the ahjumma smiling at her so kindly as she fretted over the overgrown shrubs outside of Sana’s house.
Though she’d never risked ordering takeout from the restaurant a second time (both because she couldn’t risk anyone recognizing her face and because she wanted to avoid another awkward conversation with the sweet woman), Sana had always had a soft spot for Mrs Jo after that encounter.
Which is why when she saw the three men circling the woman’s shop on her CCTV, Sana felt her heart jump into her throat.
Mrs Jo was still closing down her shop for the day when the three men showed up and began prowling around the noodle store. If their all black clothing and face masks hadn’t suggested that they were up to no good, then the bats they swung carelessly in their grips certainly spoke volumes.
Sana panicked.
She could feel her airway beginning to close up as the panic took hold. It was an all too familiar sensation– she’d struggled with panic attacks ever since the night that she lost her family, but she knew that she had to push through this one because Mrs Jo’s son was out on his final delivery and that left Mrs Jo at the store alone. A quick glance at the street cams outside of the shop confirmed that the ahjumma hadn’t noticed the three men prowling about and had instead stepped out back to carry a bag of trash to the bin.
Hands shaking, Sana began to type, too choked by her own panic to think her actions through.
Over the years she’d poked around on the SPD’s server from time to time to check in on her family’s case. It had been the ultimate test of her hacking skills to gain access to it, but once she did she was careful not to snoop around too much lest she trip a back entry alarm. Not this time, though. This time she wanted their attention.
Using her remote access, Sana took control of the SPD’s network to broadcast the CCTV footage from the street cam outside of the noodle shop onto the computer screens of every monitor at the station. Her hands shook as her fingers flew across her keyboard, her cheeks damp with scared tears as her pulse hammered in her ears, but she pushed through it, sending the address of the restaurant to the station monitors at the same time as the men spotted Mrs Jo and began to circle her.
She held her breath and covered her face with her hands, peeking through trembling fingers at her surveillance footage to watch as the men knocked Mrs Jo to the ground. Two of them shoved past her into the store, undoubtedly making a beeline for the cash register, while the third hovered over her and bounced his baseball bat against his palm.
But then Sana spotted a cop car with its lights blaring speeding down the road a block over, and in moments it was screeching to a stop outside of the noodle shop.
With a disbelieving sob, she could only watch as a pair of cops rolled out of the car, weapons drawn and quickly advancing on the store. She lost sight of one of the officers as he went inside the shop, but the other cop rounded the building and held the third robber at gunpoint, forcing him to scramble away from Mrs Jo as his bat fell to the ground unheeded.
More cop cars began to crowd around the noodle shop as backup arrived. Soon, the three men were cuffed and loaded into the back of two of those cars, and Mrs Jo was taken inside to presumably give her statement while an EMT checked her over. Her son arrived shortly after the robbers were whisked away to the station. Sana watched as the man tripped over himself in his haste to reach his mother, the panic that had seized her chest so tightly finally beginning to ease.
She’d done it. She’d helped Mrs Jo.
Of course, there were consequences to her heroic act.
The police were not quite as impressed with Sana’s heroics. In fact, they were rather upset about the whole hacking into their systems tidbit– especially when their cybercrime division found that it wasn’t the first time that Sana had poked around their network. She avoided actual criminal charges by the skin of her teeth, and only when she agreed to serve her penance by working for the SPD. Though they didn’t approve of her methods, they couldn’t deny that she was a skilled hacker, and since her criminal act had resulted in the apprehension of three gang bangers the SPD was willing to look the other way. For a price.
At twenty-two years old, Sana has now been working for the Seoul Police Department as a forensic data analyst for three years. She still suffers from agoraphobia, but it is much more well-managed. She spends more time at the station now than she does at home, burying herself in work to keep busy, thriving on the purpose that she’s found working alongside the SPD.
