Jeong.

He was seven years old, and it was summer, when his grandmother Soo-yeon stopped dead in the Barabash forest. There were fresh leopard tracks in the snow on the trail, big, deep, the edges still clean. She made him crouch down. Smell the mark. Follow the trail with his eyes until it vanished among the birches.

He knows you're there. You don't know where he is. That's respect.

They never saw the animal. Not once. But Jeong has never forgotten the exact feeling of knowing that something huge and silent was fifteen meters away, watching him, deciding whether to let him pass. His grandmother didn't tell him any pretty story on the way home; instead she told him where not to step, which sound meant danger, why the leopard is smarter than the tiger. Rules of the mountain, not morals.

Everything else comes from there. The work he does now, the way he stays quiet, the habit of watching without needing to touch. At seven he knew nothing of that. He only knew, that afternoon, that he wanted to feel it again.

In his second month on the job, still learning the terrain, Jeong found the first one. North zone of the park, a routine patrol, nothing that announced anything. A steel snare hidden on a wildlife trail, the kind set by people crossing from the border side. Fresh blood on the metal.

He took it apart with his hands. They were shaking, and it wasn't because of the at least twenty degrees below zero. He took photos, noted the coordinates, filed the report. That time, no one was caught.

It could have ended there: a bad day, one more report. But something got inside him and never left. He doesn't talk about it. On the nights he finds one, he goes home without cursing out loud or breaking anything; he cooks, fixes whatever's broken, goes to bed with the window open. The next day he flies just the same.

The usual side, he thinks every time, crouched over the wire. The usual side.

The anger stayed. He didn't shout, didn't break anything, didn't tell anyone. What he did was sit down with the maps.

Starting from that snare, he began designing flight routes meant to cover the most exposed zones, the ones far from the cameras and close to the border. He cross-referenced months of data, marked the blind spots, drew new lines and corrected them until the map made sense. He can spend hours still in front of a screen, unhurried, until the pattern appears; when he's forced to decide fast, he chooses wrong and gets angry at himself.

The team adopted his routes as protocol. No one signed anything. No one gave him official credit, and the veteran rangers knew whose they were anyway. That was enough for Jeong.

The anger didn't come out through his mouth. It came out through his hands, in a plan of lines on a map.

At the park they call him Ghost. It was a veteran ranger who gave him the name, twenty years of mountain work behind him, the same one who taught him to read tracks in the snow the way his grandmother once did. The nickname fits: Jeong shows up where he isn't expected, and people jump when they discover he's been sitting at the next table for five minutes. He walks barefoot around the house. He closes doors without a sound. When he tries to make noise on purpose, it comes out fake.

At minus twenty-eight degrees he's more awake, clearer, more himself. In July, with twenty-five degrees and the forest's humidity seeping into the house, he sleeps badly and flies with dark circles under his eyes. He doesn't quite know why; he puts it down to being a cold-weather animal and doesn't think much more about it. He sleeps with the window open even in the dead of winter.

His people, in the villages along the Amur, had been calling it Ghost long before: the ghost of the forest, the one who's there and not there. It commanded more respect from the elders than the tiger, precisely because it never let itself be seen. Jeong wears the nickname like a second skin and doesn't argue with it. He repeats his grandmother's phrase rarely, and quietly, almost always to himself, looking at the valley from the hill. He doesn't need to see the leopard. It's enough to know it's out there.

When his grandmother fell ill, Jeong was fifteen and his mother couldn't go during the week. So he started taking the bus alone on Friday afternoons: three hours on the road, his backpack full of medicine and food, arriving at night, cooking, fixing whatever had broken. She spoke to him in Korean from her bed. It was about a hundred and four Fridays, over a year and a half. That's where he learned that caring means showing up, quiet and on time.

Halmoni Soo-yeon died at the hospital in Slavyanka, in the dead of winter. Jeong was holding her hand when she went. He didn't cry in front of anyone.

He went back to Vladivostok with two things: the recipe notebook written in her own hand, in Korean mixed with Russian, and the aviator helmet that had spent its whole life in the hallway closet. He didn't say he missed her. He did what she had taught him—walking through the forest without being heard, smelling the wind before choosing a trail, making kimchi in October—and never stopped doing it. It was his way of keeping up a conversation with her that hadn't ended.

His father, Dimitri, didn't disappear entirely when he and Jeong's mother separated. He would show up every few months with a cheap toy and a new excuse. But he wasn't really there either. Jeong learned early the difference between being present and truly being present, and that distinction settled inside him like the mold of a fear.

He doesn't say it. He works late, cares for people through actions and never through promises. There's a message he's been meaning to send Kolya—the friend from Vladivostok he built his first drone with on a rooftop, and with whom he lost touch after moving—that he never quite sends. Every week, on the phone, he tells his mother yes, he's eating well; neither of them quite believes the line.

What he fears, though he never says it, is ending up like his father: present in fits and starts, absent where it matters. He knows how to be far away without meaning to.

The only distance he handles well is the enormous one. To Benjamin, who repairs weather stations in the Canadian Arctic, he writes every two weeks: weather data, budget complaints, a dry joke about the cold. Ten thousand kilometers. At that distance, he does know how to show up.

The helmet is brown leather, with pilot goggles on top. It belonged to his grandfather, who died before Jeong was born, crop-dusting wheat fields from a small plane in the Russian Far East. He never knew him.

At first he didn't wear it. He left it on the shelf like a piece from another world, something you keep but don't use. Until one very cold day he grabbed it from the closet along with the shearling jacket, and something clicked. He put it on, went out into the field, and hasn't taken it off during work hours since. The strap broke on one outing and he sewed it himself with waxed thread; the mend is still there. His colleagues stopped seeing it as a costume. "Now it's him," someone said, and it stuck.

He heads out to the clearing before dawn, the thermos between his feet, the helmet pulled down. He checks the drone's battery three times even though he charged it himself the night before; he always does it, and he'll do it tomorrow too. The drone takes off and the air smells of cedar resin and still snow. There's no paperwork or budget-cut emails yet, just the valley waking up on the screen and him being exactly who he wants to be.

From above, he covers the same kind of terrain his grandfather used to fly over from his cockpit; what he does is the reverse of that: counting what's still alive. Wearing the helmet is the closest thing he has to a conversation with a man he never got to meet.

One spring, a camera trap caught a young male not in his records. New rosettes on the left shoulder and flank, a pattern Jeong had never seen before. A juvenile looking for his own territory for the first time. He called him Leo-17, cross-checked the data, tracked his movements for months. He settled exactly where the camera network didn't reach; Jeong proposed expanding it, and it was approved.

That's when he understood what he already knew without words for it: there's no such thing as leopards in general, only each one. Every rosette pattern is unique, like a fingerprint. He draws them by hand in a notebook, with an internal name he shares with no one—Leo-17, Leo-23, Leo-41—and he gets it right more often than the software would like.

On the wall of his room he's got photos taped up from an old census, from when he was a kid in Vladivostok: back then there were only nineteen left in the whole world. Today there are around a hundred and thirty. It's the only count he keeps that goes up instead of down, and also the easiest one to lose. When a camera stops bringing back one of them, Jeong keeps drawing its rosette for a while, in case it comes back. He only stops waiting when the page grows old.

The summers of his childhood were the ones spent in his grandmother's village, near Barabash: the wood stove, the vegetable garden, the preserves in the cellar, and a silence that felt to him like the sound of being safe. Soo-yeon spoke to him in Korean when they were alone. She taught him to make kimchi before she taught him to read Cyrillic, to chop wood without wasting any, to smell the wind before choosing which way to go.

In October he takes out the recipe notebook and does it on his own. The handwriting is hard to read, Korean and Russian at once, just like her. The first time it came out too spicy and too salty; he ate the whole batch in a week, because it was the closest he'd ever come to the taste of that house. He learned that what you inherit doesn't come out identical, and that it doesn't need to: what passes from one hand to another is the act of doing it.

On his days off he walks up to a hill three kilometers from the village, no trail, snow up to his knees in winter. He sits on a rock with his thermos and looks at the valley for a good while, doing nothing at all. He isn't trying to spot any leopard down there. It's enough that the valley stays full of places where one could be. He comes down calmer than he went up.

> **Canonical quote:** He knows you're there. You don't know where he is. That's respect. Jeong doesn't fly the drone to see the leopard: it's enough for him to know it's still out there. </content> </invoke>