Page 14

Chapter Fourteen

K i s a

C urled up in her bed in the tiny, windowless cabin she shares with a dozing Hajun, Kisa uses a weak flashlight to write in the notebook she filched from the security room. Her writing is a mess of scribbled words. There is, of course, the suspect list. But so far, only Hwanung’s name is written in the blue ink.

She’s not working on that right now. Instead, on a different page, Kisa is fervently writing in English: her first language, the one she spoke in England as a child, after her mother’s death and her father’s grief. He mourned her loss by staying in her London hometown until the memory of her had faded enough for him to return to his birthplace of New Sinsi with his daughter, but without feeling a crushing guilt. His new wife helped with that, too.

Kisa wonders if they miss her—or if her father has dulled her loss by spoiling the children he shares with her stepmother. If he’s replaced her, just as he did her mother.

No matter how hard Kisa worked, no matter how much greatness she accomplished, her stepmother never spared her a passing glance. Kisa had wanted very badly to love her, tried to like her, and eventually settled for tolerating the hawk-nose woman. It wasn’t that Eunjeong disliked her, exactly—only that she wasn’t interested at all in her husband’s daughter.

Kisa wonders, not for the first time, what was said at her funeral. Did her father cry? Did her half-sisters mourn the sibling that was always tucked away in an academy or hospital? In a morose sort of way, she wishes she could have been there to see.

She takes a shallow breath. She’s gotten distracted.

In English, Kisa writes notes. Notes on the red thread, how it behaves. Observations regarding cerebration transference. The red thread, at times, even seems to have some form of consciousness. She details how it twisted into little hearts between herself and Seokga. How it will shake, sometimes, in what seems like it could be laughter.

Ink smudges her hands as she records the imbalance of emotion between them: how in love Seokga seems with her due to who she was in her past life, a woman she can’t remember. Falteringly, she writes of her own attraction to Seokga, as small and hesitant as it is—before hastily scribbling it out. It’s ridiculous. They’ve just met. Kisa went twenty-two years without forming any sort of romantic attachment. If she were to develop a…a crush, it surely wouldn’t be so sudden. Yoo Kisa is not a spontaneous person, nor is she a character in one of her favorite romance books. No matter how badly she wishes to be at times.

Seokga is attractive, of course, and there’s a…lingering sense of familiarity. One that she didn’t feel at first, but just might now. He can make her laugh, something that not many—aside from Hajun—can do. It’s the kind of familiarity that leads people to say, “It feels as if we’ve known each other forever, even though we just met” in one of those exhilarating, clinch cover novels. She winces as a pang strikes deep in her heart and rubs it absentmindedly.

And why do you think that familiarity is? a little voice asks sarcastically in her head.

Kisa ignores it. She is not going to get distracted. She is not going to develop a crush.

They have a bargain with Yeomra. Find the murderer, and she leaves this ship for good. She lives again. Kisa is so very sick of being dead.

After filling out all she’s observed thus far, Kisa moves to a different page and dutifully writes down all the details they know regarding the heavenly emperor’s death. This fevered writing is a remnant from her days at NSUMD—there, her frantic, stressed mind calmed itself only when she was plowing through her piles of assignments. She lists all the guests she saw leave after Hwanin when he left the party. After watching the recording the first time, they’d tracked Hwanin’s steps through the ship. He’d gone straight down to the I-95 from the party, meaning that it’s possible he was followed directly from the greenhouse disaster. Yet nobody else showed up on the cams as stalking him.

There was the therapist. Kisa writes down Dr. Jang’s name thoughtfully, remembering the woman in the rubber-duck dress. Then, there was Lim Chaeyeon, carrying the tray of broken glass. Kisa chews on her pen as Hajun snores softly in his sleep and rolls onto his side.

“Don’t touch my hair,” her friend mumbles nonsensically in his sleep.

If Seokga had been the one attacked, perhaps she would consider Chaeyeon more seriously. But Hwanin himself, to her knowledge, hadn’t done anything to anger the server. Would she seriously kill the emperor to infuriate his brother? Likely not. Still, it’s worth investigating. Perhaps Chaeyeon is a creature, one with claws. The cruise director, Soo-min, had been there, too—and had been so upset at the night’s turn of events, although she’d left later than Hwanin. Soo-min is also a samjokgu, with four claws on each of her dog form’s three paws. Yet try as she might, Kisa literally cannot imagine the easily ruffled cruise director somehow finding the courage to kill a god.

Growing frustrated, Kisa writes down another list: this time, of creatures with the ability to summon talon-like appendages. Gumiho. Yong. Inmyunjo (although there is no evidence of an Unruly inmyunjo ever existing). Samjokgu. Bulgae…

Haetae.

Pen moving to the list of greenhouse party suspects, Kisa hesitantly writes down Shin Korain’s name, remembering the small altercation between the two men. Korain had tried to insert himself between Seokga and Somi, Hwanin had held him back. She’d seen resentment on the haetae’s face. But is that enough of a motive for murder? No.

“Not in the practice room,” grumbles Hajun. “No Yakult in the practice room…sticky…”

Unless Hwanung, who—to Kisa’s knowledge—doesn’t have claws, decided to take out his father by hiring somebody on the ship to dispose of him. After all, if Hwanin dies (or, more aptly, is reverted to baby form), Hwanung takes the throne for an extended period of time. Instead of being the god of laws, he’ll spend years as heavenly emperor. Not quite “the god of sex, drugs, and rock and roll”—but it’s close enough that she underlines his name once more and adds an exclamation mark.

Still, something doesn’t feel right. Kisa is no Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, a fact that she’s sharply reminded of when she stares despondently down at the mess in the notebook. Admitting that she is completely out of her depth is almost revolting to her, but the greatest scholars aren’t afraid to admit that they don’t know. And Kisa absolutely does not know.

All names should be investigated, of course, but she has the sinking feeling that she’s not getting anywhere.

The feeling continues into the morning, as Kisa slips on her light-blue scrubs and tucks the small notebook into her bag with the pen. As she and Hajun wearily begin their shift in the sick bay, Kisa’s mind continues to stumble over the mystery.

How has nobody showed up on the cameras, following Hwanin and then moving the body? Teleportation is something she jots down in her notebook, but the number of creatures with claws and the ability to move through the confines of space are low…practically nonexistent.

“Is Somi coming?” Hajun asks nervously as she writes.

Kisa glances up at him in amusement from where she stands behind the reception desk of the sick bay. “You know, I can’t tell if you’re terrified or excited to see her.”

The idol grimaces, rubbing the nape of his neck. His ears have gone blue. “I’m actually not sure, either,” he admits ruefully. “But I could say the same thing about you and Seokga.”

Kisa jolts and drops her pen onto the tiled floor. Blushing furiously, she ducks out of sight to grab it. When she slowly straightens back to her feet, she sees that Hajun has snatched the notebook and is riffling through it. Mortification spreads through her as her friend squints down at a messy page.

“Kisa,” he says, like he’s trying very hard not to snicker, “I’m not as good at reading in English as I am in Korean, but…did you write ‘he has a good arse’ before scribbling it out?”

She closes her eyes and wishes that the ground would swallow her whole. “No,” she says, with what she hopes is a stern finality. Unfortunately, her voice squeaks a bit at the end.

“Are you sure?”

“Positively certain.” She opens her eyes and crosses her arms, ignoring Hajun’s amused grin. “And if I had, hypothetically, written something about his…posterior…it wouldn’t matter. We’re getting off this ship, Hajun, and I-I refuse to be sidetracked by bums. ” Besides, she has never been one for staring at men, and she’s certain she’s gone a bit insane. There’s really no good reason why she should have been admiring Seokga’s arse while he spoke with Yeomra, or as they walked down to the I-95 from the sick bay. It’s ridiculous.

Hajun’s smile fades as he slides the notebook back over to her. “It’s okay to like him,” he tells her slowly. “I mean…I know you don’t remember him, but you loved him in a past life. And it’s pretty clear that he loved you. That must mean something, right?”

Kisa swallows hard, and when she speaks, her voice is tense—almost brittle, on the verge of breaking. “I’m not made of pine. I’m made of oak.” She stares down at the battered notebook as her friend makes a small uncomprehending sound of complete confusion that grates on her nerves. Can’t he understand? Can’t anybody? Never has she felt so unheard, so—so unseen. “And I want to—to live again. I want to read my favorite book while it’s storming outside, and feel the sun on my skin, and do all the things I was too busy to do this time around—”

“You felt something!” Hajun is staring at her, looking equal parts triumphant and concerned. “You’ve felt it already. You’ve felt something for him, and now you’re scared. Kisa, you’re pulling away because—what? You think you won’t leave the Flatliner if you let yourself stare at his butt?”

“Yes,” she snaps, finally giving up the act. “Yes, Hajun, that is precisely what I’m afraid of. How discerning of you.”

“Oh, Kisa.” Hajun is snorting, pressing a hand to his temple like he has a headache. He just might. Kisa certainly does. “I’ve never seen you like this before. So frazzled over somebody’s posterior.”

“It’s a great bum,” she whispers sadly, anger flickering and fading to a pathetic sort of longing. She massages the spot over her heart where it’s lodged itself, panging in desolate despair.

“Please, Kisa, for my sanity…” He drags that hand down his face, pulling on his eye and giving her a grotesquely woeful look. “Have some fun with him while you wait for reincarnation. You need it, and I think you’d like it—”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know how,” she interrupts in a mutter. It’s the ugly truth.

“You don’t need to know how. ” Hajun frowns in clear concern. “Fun isn’t like medicine, where you need a giant textbook and time to study. You don’t need to do anything but be in the moment.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Kisa shakes her head stubbornly, avoiding Hajun’s eye. “We have a deal with the CEO, and there’s no point in getting distracted by—by anything.” And she will not let herself get distracted by a certain green-eyed trickster god.

Her friend hesitates, like there’s something more he wants to say, but evidently thinks better of it. For the next half hour, they wait for the others and lapse into their daily routine. Day 2 of the cruise means that there are virtually no patients, many having already been treated for seasickness.

This routine of cleaning the sick bay and checking medicine stock is only broken when Kisa’s head jerks up from the shelf of medicine she’s hunched over and—in a markedly improved mood—exclaims: “ Blueprints! ”

“Uh,” says Hajun in bewilderment, “what?”

Kisa whirls to him, curls slipping from their band to flutter around her face. “I’ll be right back,” she says excitedly before dodging out the door and racing down the hallway and back down the stairs that will take her to the security room one deck below.

The door is ajar, and Kisa peeks inside, hastily drawing back when she sees Korain leaning against the table and wearily drinking a cup of hot coffee. Her hand floats to her scrub pockets, where the little notebook rests, Korain’s name jotted down inside it. Keeping quiet, she leans back so she can watch the haetae as he takes another long sip of coffee.

He looks tired, she realizes. His mouth is bracketed with lines of exhaustion, and his white shirt is rumpled. Kisa narrows her eyes as Korain sets down the coffee and pulls a cellphone from his pocket. He types in a number, waits. “Hey,” he finally says in a voice like gravel, hoarse from disuse. Whoever he’s speaking to, he’s speaking to in the informal. Kisa grimaces; she can’t hear anything on the opposite end. “Yeah. I took care of it.”

Took care of—what? Kisa hesitates before drawing closer. Although he’s the only one in the room, Korain’s voice lowers. “There’ll be no trace—yeah. As we agreed.”

She lurches back as he heads toward the door, and flattens herself around the corner. Korain’s footsteps draw near, and Kisa strains to hear as he begins to speak in a whisper. “You promised you’d put in a good word…uh-huh. Great. Thanks. Bye.”

His footsteps recede down the hall. Mind whirring with what she just heard, Kisa wastes no time slipping into the security room and—with slightly trembling fingers—filches what she needs from one of the unlocked file cabinets.

When she returns to the sick bay, a babbling Hwanin greets her from Seokga’s arms. The god looks immensely displeased with the squirming bundle in his arms, but his green eyes soften when he catches sight of her. “Good morning,” he says almost hesitantly.

—looks—beautiful—want—it hurts—

Kisa blinks, cheeks heating. No. No. Stop. No distractions. “Good morning,” she manages, struggling to meet his stare. Seokga’s gaze is like molten gold, warm and glittering. She swallows hard and holds up the snatched ship blueprints. “I, erm, I have some updates.”

Seokga’s face falls and a dart of regret shoots through her, but she hardens herself a moment later. Oak, not pine. Kisa, not Hani. It’s not her that he wants anyway. She’s doing them both a favor, really, by squashing this potential crush underfoot. Saving him from the inevitable disappointment, and her from a missed opportunity to escape this horrid ship.

It’s for the best.

“Let’s hear it,” a new voice says from behind her, and Somi waltzes in, looking refreshed. She makes her way to stand beside Hajun, whose lips twitch into what’s either a smile or a grimace. Kisa isn’t sure.

She takes a deep breath and spreads the stolen blueprints over the counter before carefully flipping to the page in her notebook listing suspect names. Briefly, she explains why she chose those names, before turning to the blueprints. “I spent last night wondering how the murderer avoided the ship’s security cameras to dump the body where Seokga would find it,” she says. “I couldn’t make sense of it. Teleportation was a possibility, but no creature with claws—to my knowledge—also possesses that capability. It’s reserved for deities. I thought—perhaps—the camera avoidance was instead a mundane feat, achieved without magic. And the only way I thought that could happen was, well…” She hesitates, suddenly aware of how ridiculous this might sound. Seokga’s eyes meet hers, and his gaze is somehow reassuring. “Hidden passageways,” Kisa finishes, quickly looking away. “It sounds ludicrous but some ships have them, for the workers to move about more quickly. Like the I-95, but spanning across the boat. So I stole down to the security room to grab some blueprints, just to see if it might be a true possibility. Shin Korain was there.”

Somi makes a thoughtful noise, tapping his scribbled name with a glossy nail. “He’s a haetae.”

“And he was at the party last night. He and Hwanin had a brief altercation while you and Seokga were…”

“Beating each other to a pulp,” the gumiho concludes.

Seokga rolls his eyes. Hwanin giggles up at him.

“Right. Well—Korain took a phone call on his personal cell.” She hesitates, something niggling at her. Something that explains why a simple phone call is bothering her so much. “ None of us have phones. None of the crew, I mean. Everybody we’re allowed to contact is already on the ship.”

“So how does Korain have a phone?” Hajun murmurs. “Who was he talking to?”

Kisa quickly explains the conversation. “I couldn’t hear who was on the other end. But he was so furtive about it, that I found it of interest. Last night, I had thought…” She huffs in weary frustration. “We have so little to go on, so few clues, and I know that hypotheses need some sort of solid observational foundation at the very least—but, well, I’ve never done this before and couldn’t think—I thought maybe—or if it’s too soon and it’s better to go in blind, I—”

“Kisa,” Seokga says kindly, “it’s all right. Tell us your idea.”

Her nervous rambling trails off, and a small kernel of reassurance glows within her as she looks at Seokga’s expectant expression. Kisa doesn’t quite feel like examining why. “What if Hwanung hired somebody to go after Hwanin? From what you’ve told us, he could have a motive. With Hwanin a baby, Hwanung gets the throne and a break from being the god of laws. He might have hired somebody on the ship to kill him without having it trace back. The claws tell us that Hwanung enlisted a creature. But he didn’t come onto the boat himself. He distracted his father with a phone call, giving the murderer the element of surprise.”

The trickster god is silent, considering. “It’s a good idea,” he says slowly. “It’s a very good idea,” he adds with a wicked grin. “If I’d thought of that myself back in the day…”

Exasperated—and before she can stop herself—Kisa gives him a that’s not funny and you know it look.

He smirks, and she grimaces, wondering—not for the first time—at how natural it feels to speak with him. Squash this immediately, Kisa chides herself, and is rewarded (or punished, really) by the bemused expression forming on the trickster’s face.

“Erm—We need to focus on Korain,” she manages to say, her gaze breaking away from Seokga. “Someone should come with me to subtly obtain an alibi and confirm it with the security footage.”

“I’ll go,” Somi offers at the same time Seokga does.

The two glower at each other.

“We’re Threaded,” Seokga sneers.

“I was her best friend,” Somi snaps.

“Until you betrayed her,” the god hisses, and evidently lands a punch on his opponent as Somi shies away.

Exchanging a tired glance with Hajun, Kisa shakes her head in a mixture of reluctant flattery, exasperation, and deep exhaustion. Somewhere in the mix, there’s also an itching curiosity that Kisa ignores for the moment. “It really doesn’t matter who comes with me,” she interrupts, although part of her secretly wants to choose Somi, putting as much distance between herself and Seokga—with his reassuring smiles and sparkling eyes—as possible. “But there’s more to do.” She stares down at the blueprints, the mammoth ship sketched out in concise white lines. Her finger taps Deck 10 before moving to the etched stairwell where the body was found. “This stairwell doesn’t have a camera,” she murmurs, reminding them of their discovery the night before. “If it connects to a passageway…” There’s no indication, however, of any on the blueprint. Her heart falls.

“It can always be checked in person,” Seokga offers, shifting Hwanin in his arms uncomfortably. Kisa sighs and gently repositions the baby emperor in his brother’s tense grip.

“You’re not supposed to hold children like you’re scared they’re going to bite you. He doesn’t even have teeth yet, Seokga.” Honestly, it’s hilarious how frightened Seokga seems to be of the tiny god. It should help Kisa in her squashing endeavor, but unfortunately seems to be having the opposite sort of effect. Drat.

“ Greeeeeh! ” agrees Hwanin, wide blue eyes shining with mirth.

Seokga’s mouth twitches in what she hopes is amusement. “So we’ll take Korain?” he asks, but a moment later, Somi is breezing toward Kisa, looping her arm around hers, and dragging her out of the sick bay.

“ We’ll take Korain,” Somi calls over her shoulder. “You two boys can snoop around the stairwell. Ta!”

When it’s just the two of them, it’s as if Somi’s mask begins to fray. Kisa watches with quiet interest as the loud, confident gumiho draws into herself and occasionally peers at her with wide brown eyes riddled with guilt. It’s as if Somi suddenly becomes very young and uncertain. As they descend the stairwell leading down to Deck 2, Somi abruptly grabs Kisa’s narrow wrist, bringing her to a halt.

Warily, Kisa waits for the words that seem to be stumbling around inside the gumiho’s mouth. “You really don’t remember anything?” she finally whispers, holding tight.

“No,” she replies softly, twisting her wrist from Somi’s grip. “All I know is this life, the one I lived as Yoo Kisa.” Memories make a person. It’s in the literature on nature versus nurture, in the question of the Ship of Theseus.

In Kisa’s opinion, it is not the same ship.

It is physically incapable of being the same ship.

The two ships are separate. And if the sailors are upset about that, perhaps they should reduce their bloody expectations for the new ship. Ships made of oak are just as nice as ships made of pine—and it can even be argued that oaken ships are more durable than easily rotted pine ships. Plus, oaken ships would never steal from an ATM—

Kisa wants to throw her hands exasperatedly up in the air. What she would give, truly, for her mind to be quiet sometimes. What does it matter? she chides herself. It doesn’t. Stop it.

There must be a way to stop a crush from taking root within her, some sort of—of concoction to make the inconvenient thing shrivel and die.

“I remember nothing from Hani’s life,” Kisa continues to the gumiho, an ache beginning to pulse in her right temple as she tries, very hard, not to ruminate on her dilemma.

Something almost like relief crosses Somi’s face before it’s replaced by sadness. “I’m assuming you know some already.”

Kisa can’t keep a wry little smile from turning the corner of her mouth slightly upward. “From what you and Seokga have quarreled about, I know, at the very least, that we were friends. That my name was Hani, and you betrayed her—me—somehow during the Dark Days.”

Somi gnaws on her bottom lip. “I’d say that’s mostly true…” But she doesn’t follow as Kisa makes her way down a few more steps. “I could tell you, if you want to know. About you and me. About you and Seokga.”

As Somi’s offer floats through the air, Kisa’s fingers twitch imperceptibly at her sides, as if she might grab it. For some unknowable reason, she thinks of Seokga’s green eyes and how they might light up if she remembered…If the two ships didn’t have to be so separate after all…

Slowly, Kisa turns. “You can tell me about you and Han— me, ” she says with difficulty, “but I’d rather not hear about myself and Seokga.” It fills her with an anxious dread to think of what Seokga might expect from her if she learns about their past.

What she might…feel for him.

And a tiny part of Kisa has decided if, at some point—for whatever reasons she cannot fathom now—she does want to hear their story (for purely scientific purposes, of course, nothing more), she wants to hear it from Seokga.

If the gumiho is confused by Kisa’s refusal to learn more about her Threaded partner, she doesn’t show it. It is something that Kisa is beginning to appreciate about Somi. Despite being a former mass-murdering Unruly gumiho (Kisa is still, admittedly, wrapping her mind around how the petite woman with a French bob and manicured hands can possibly be a serial killer), Somi is, well, polite. To a degree.

She’s polite to Kisa, at least, she amends. She tried to take a large chomp out of a guest, after all.

As the two women slip toward the security room, Somi begins to tell a story in a low voice. It’s a story about two gumiho who worked together in a café. Somi and Hani. The portrait that Somi paints of the older gumiho is vibrant. A woman full of life and mischief, an older sister, in many ways, to the younger Somi.

As they carefully trail Korain out of the security room and toward the upper decks, Somi tells Kisa in a whisper of how Hani killed two NSU men and brought her the livers. How Somi began to spiral, suffering from the Jitters, feeling unwell in both mind and body. How scared she was.

They’re careful to blend into the morning crowds on board as they follow the haetae, hoping he’s heading to a café or somewhere equally casual, where Somi can—in her words—charm an alibi out of him. Cautious not to be spotted, or to lose him, Kisa keeps her eyes on the officer’s retreating back as Somi continues.

Hyun-tae was the name of the possessed jeoseung saja. As Somi speaks of him, there’s a sense of real grief—the first time she met him, in the café, he was fully himself and maybe even smitten with her. The next day, Eodum—the eoduksini—had slipped into his body. What follows is a saga of manipulation, in which Somi seems like a pawn…Although Somi never puts it in those terms. Instead, the gumiho’s voice is heavy with regret as the Dark Days begin, and her killing spree starts. Kisa gets the sense that Somi isn’t very upset about the murders themselves, but rather her decision to side against Hani.

“You let me go,” Somi whispers, shamefaced, as they trail Korain up a winding staircase, a dozen or so feet behind and hidden by throngs of breakfast-hungry guests. “I ran from you, and you let me. I would have lost that fight,” she adds with a bitter smile. “You were the Scarlet Fox—”

Kisa chokes on her own spit. “ What? ”

“You have the same eyes, you know,” whispers Somi. “The same eyes as Hani. I always thought they were so pretty…”

It was enough of a shock hearing that she had been an Unruly gumiho.

Hearing that in her past life, rule-abiding Yoo Kisa had been, like Somi, an infamous and centuries-old serial killer— a terrifying urban legend that she shivered to as a child—is enough to turn her legs into jelly. The two ships are most certainly not the same. At this rate, Kisa is not a ship at all. She’s a perfectly respectable airplane.

They learned about the Scarlet Fox in the shaman academy, and then later in NSUMD. Her upperclassmen’s anatomy class’s autopsy portion focused heavily on Unruly murders, and diagrams of the Scarlet Fox’s victims had been pulled from the archives.

She had been brutal.

Kisa…had been brutal.

Her vision swims. Somi grimaces, grabbing Kisa by the shoulder before she can fall. “I see I left out that particular subplot,” the gumiho mumbles as Kisa has an existential crisis right there on the spiraling staircase, underneath the ship’s ginormous chandelier. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a rather lovely place to have a midlife crisis. Or an afterlife crisis, in Kisa’s case. “But, Ha—Kisa, I…I shouldn’t have been so angry at you, all those years ago. You gave me the greatest gift of all.”

Gods.

Kisa is an enabler of serial killers.

Extremely woozy, Kisa staggers up the remaining stairs to Deck 7, where Korain is turning in to a corridor of suites.

“You introduced me to my true nature,” Somi is saying, hand sliding down Kisa’s back and rubbing soothing circles. “You told me it was okay for me to be who I really am…”

The hand on her back is too much. Kisa lurches away, hating the feel of it and despising how her neck erupts into a sweat. She pretends not to see Somi’s brief expression of hurt, turning away from it. It’s not personal, Kisa wants to say, but that’s not the truth, is it? Her inability to allow anybody behind her, for anybody to touch her back, is deeply— deeply —personal.

She sincerely regrets ever letting Somi tell her their story. It is, succinctly put, all shades of incredibly bollocksed up. “…and thanks to you, I came into my power,” the gumiho continues, faltering only slightly. “I reached my—my potential. When I heard you’d died in the warehouse, I mourned you. I’d come back to New Sinsi, to…to apologize”—her voice breaks on the word—“but you weren’t there. I looked everywhere. Seoul, Itaewon, Jeju. Geoje.” Somi’s eyes are glassy. “Aeri, a yojeong on Daegeumsan, told me you were gone. You burnt out your fox bead saving Korea. No—saving the whole mortal realm. Eodum’s motive had been to turn Iseung into the Dark World.”

The more Kisa hears about her past life, the more she’s convinced that she’s having auditory hallucinations. “Gamangnara,” she manages to rasp, leaning against the wall, unable to go farther—even to follow Korain. “The locked realm.” Locked, by Hwanin and the rest of the pantheon after Seokga’s infamous (and, if Kisa is being honest, pathetic) attempt at a coup. “How could Iseung be turned into Gamangnara?”

Somi hesitates, guilt flashing across her face, but Kisa’s sharp mind is already whirring and piecing together an explanation. She’s read about Gamangnara, of course—in its heyday, the realm was nothing short of notorious, a breeding ground for Unrulies, a cesspool of chaos and evil. After Seokga’s coup, it was shut down, creatures thrown from it. Some, like the eoduksini, were dispatched to Jeoseung. But once, Gamangnara was alive, teeming with Unrulies…And even before that, if Somi is to be believed, it might have been a place just like Iseung. Until the demons of darkness came.

“Oh,” croaks Kisa as comprehension settles in. “ Oh. ”

The world doesn’t know just how narrowly it dodged a bullet with the Dark Days. Even now, hearing it herself, Kisa has to take deep breaths to calm herself.

Gamangnara is always a point of debate in the creature communities. The politics surrounding it are as intricate as a spider’s web. Some believe that it should be unlocked (no matter how impossible that is), and that all Unruly creatures should be clustered there, leaving the mortal realms alone. Others are perfectly content with its being locked, arguing that giving Unrulies a realm of their own is a terrible idea—the wars they could wage, the power they could exert. Besides, the dark magic of Gamangnara is steeped with ancient evil. The Mad God, Mireuk, is said to have once loved the realm before his imprisonment. And anything the Mad God loves, one must be wary of.

“Kisa?” Somi asks.

“I’ll be fine in just a moment,” she manages to gasp out, peeling herself off the wall and swiping a film of cold sweat from her forehead. “Where has Korain gone?”

The abrupt refocus on the haetae is, Kisa knows, a coping mechanism—the same one that prompts her to dive into piles of work rather than to sit with her own emotions. Even so, they’ve delayed for too long, and have lost sight of Korain. Somi winces, and with a silent agreement to speak more later, the two women hurry off down the hallway.

“Does he have a room up here?” Somi asks as they pass Room 7340. The door is agape, a housekeeping cart sitting a few feet away, piled high with towels.

“He shouldn’t,” Kisa replies warily. All staff sleep on Deck 1, in the small windowless cabins like the one she shares with Hajun. Looking ahead, Kisa’s eyes widen, and she hastily tugs Somi down so they crouch behind the cart together, side by side. Korain is leaving a suite just up ahead—and he’s not alone. Heart in her throat, Kisa counts down the doors and when she reaches the door he’s just exited, her blood grows cold. Room 7346.

The room that connects to Room 7345, Seokga’s room. Which means that Room 7346 is—

“Why is he leaving Hwanin’s room?” Kisa hisses, and although her knees are beginning to ache from sustaining an uncomfortable crouch, she hunches even lower and peers around the cart. Korain isn’t alone. A young woman with long, inky black hair is with him.

Lim Chaeyeon. The serving girl from the greenhouse party.

“My,” Somi whispers. “This suddenly got very interesting.”