WhIP

by footfungus

nederlands verhalen over mijn otp

265. Attayear Chae Bonggu

Prologue

Park Jinsu had used her mother's lipsticks and makeup brushes to create a hopscotch at the top of the stairs. Three months ago, it was something that would have got her into a terrible amount of trouble.

"I want to play," she sang to herself as she hopped forward, wobbling as she tried to keep her balance on her left leg without dropping her favourite teddy bear. "I want to play." She jumped, landing loudly on the double space. "I want to play—" Another hop. "And Mummy's not home!" She trilled the last word and then almost shrieked, flailing her arms wildly as she realised she couldn't jump this one, as her mother's eye shadow rested in the left side of the double space, which meant that square was out of bounds. With a squeak, she toppled over, her right leg not prepared to take her full weight, and her teddy bear went sailing down the stairs. It squeaked as it bounced off individual steps and finally came to a halt at the bottom, where it started up with the automated message from her big brother that was recorded inside it.

"Jinsu! Jiiiiiiiinsu! You can't cry, okay? Oppa's going to come back to play with you soon and he'll sing you to sleep. They've got some really cool things in America and I promise I'll bring lots of them back for you, okay? And when you're all big and grown up and in high school, maybe you'll come out here too. Listen, oppa's got a funny joke to tell. What do you call a chicken crossed with a badger?"

Jinsu was more preoccupied with the pain in her ankle and the graze on her elbow from her hard landing at the top of the stairs, and at the sound of her brother's recorded laughter filling the stairwell, she burst into tears.

Jimin wasn't there to play. Jimin was a big boy, as he and Daddy were always saying, and big boys went to study abroad when they were sixteen.

Daddy wasn't there to play, but he never was.

Mummy wasn't there to play, and she always was. Apart from for these past three months. And Jinsu hated it.

Quick footsteps came running from the depths of the luxurious house as Jinsu sat there and continued to wail.

"Aw, deary me, miss, your mother's going to have an absolute fit if she sees what you've been up to," said the voice of the housekeeper, Mrs Kwon, as she pulled Jinsu to her feet. "Come on, let's get all this tidied up before she's home." Jinsu resisted with all her might, purposely lolling back as a deadweight.

"I don't wanna!" she bawled. "I want to play!"

"Not with your mother's makeup, deary. Up you get."

"I want to play with Mummy!"

Mrs Kwon was having none of it. "Jinsu, you are six and you will stand up and tidy up the mess you've made before your parents come home. Now."

In a fit of disobedience, Jinsu bit at the woman's wrist and was promptly released back onto the ground with a yelp. Mrs Kwon threw up her hands.

"Fine! I won't help you with it, then. I'll just tell your parents you've been a spoiled little brat and absolutely insufferable today, shall I?"

Still bawling, Jinsu shook her head. "I'll be good, Mrs Kwon, I'll be good!" Incurring the anger of her parents was the last thing she wanted to do. Her mother wasn't too bad, but when her father got angry...

It was a meek little child dressed in her pyjamas and a fluffy dressing gown who greeted her parents with a yawn when they returned just after she'd had her bath. For the first time in weeks, her father looked absolutely ecstatic, and for the first time in months, he was actually holding his wife's hand.

"I'm going to get the champagne," her father announced as Jinsu peaked out from behind Mrs Kwon, worried that her parents knew she'd been acting out earlier in the day. Her mother apparently had no clue, because as soon as she saw her youngest child, she beamed brightly and spread her arms.

"Jinsu! Darling, have you had fun today?"

Jinsu was torn between ducking back behind Mrs Kwon in protest of the fact that her mother hadn't been there to play and dashing into her mother's arms. Mrs Kwon solved the problem by picking the girl up and giving her to her mother.

"She made a bit of a mess with your things because she wanted to play with you, didn't you, Jinsu? But it's all right now, Mrs Park. We got it all neatly tidied up."

Jinsu nodded, snuggling into her mother's arms as the woman beamed down at her.

"Well, I can play with you from now on," her mother said happily. "We won against that nasty Chae family and now they won't be taking Mummy away from you anymore."

Jinsu sat up, curious. Her mother and father had been complaining about "that nasty Chae family" for days and days and days. Jinsu didn't know what they'd done, but she didn't like them either, because they'd taken her mother away from her and made her father constantly angry. Both of her parents had had to go to a place called "court" to "fight" the Chaes, and it had taken a while for Jinsu to stop being scared that one day, they weren't going to come back, because everybody knew that people got hurt and sometimes killed in fights.

Her father returned at that moment with two champagne flutes, and a mini one with a thimbleful of champagne for Jinsu. His smile was so broad it looked like his face was going to split in two.

"Here's to a case well won," he celebrated as his wife took her glass and clinked it with his. He made sure that Jinsu's hand was clamped firmly around her own champagne glass before he clinked it with hers. "And here's to the time machine we can finally build."

Chapter 1

"... So I'm going to bring her over at the weekend, and I really, really need you to be an awesome little sister and the best wingman that ever exists," Jimin's voice said over the phone as Jinsu skirted a puddle on the slabs of stone leading up to the front door. Jinsu sighed.

"Honest to God, Jimin, with the amount you hang out with Jungkook, we were all beginning to think you were gay. Mum and Dad are going to be more shocked you're bringing a girl home than over the fact she was expelled from three different schools years ago and has a minor criminal record. I really don't think I need to do anything."

"But you know what they're like!" her big brother whined. Jinsu fumbled for the keys for the front door. "The time machine's basically finished and they're so protective over it – they even thought our cousin Chanyeol was a spy! Chanyeol!"

"Chanyeol hangs out with the Chae kid at school, Jimin, that's why they didn't want him coming round until after the big launch. Or August. Or never."

"Why are you on their side?" her big brother grumped. "What did Chanyeol ever do to you?"

Jinsu finally got the front door open, but refused to answer the question. It wasn't so much what Chanyeol had done as opposed to what he hadn't. He hadn't stuck up for her when they'd started the same high school together and other kids in their class were teasing her about her OCD. He hadn't acknowledged that they were cousins. He hadn't stopped Chae Bonggu from being an irrational, irritating idiot towards her – Jinsu wouldn't have gone as far as to say that Chae Bonggu was a bully, but he really, really disliked Jinsu and he made it very obvious, and enough people had joined in for Jinsu to find herself the awkward, isolated nerd of the class. Which was Park Chanyeol's major failing: he'd done absolutely nothing to rescue her from it.

Jimin coughed awkwardly at the other end of the phone. "So... since we're on the subject of dating, how's the gloriously handsome Yu Hamin? What's he up to these days?"

"F*ck off, Jimin."

Her brother snickered. Jinsu had been shielding a flame for her tall, devastatingly good looking classmate ever since she'd first set eyes on him at the age of twelve, but there were two problems.

One: he was already taken. Seo Minju was the prettiest girl in the school.

Two: he was Bonggu's best friend, and consequently hated Jinsu. Jinsu would never have imagined that a lawsuit which resulted in a cheating company that tried to steal patents getting punished for their wrongdoing would set her against the popular kids in school, but sometimes life just sucked that way. Come to that, she wasn't totally sure how Bonggu himself had managed to score being one of the popular kids, unless it was by virtue of being associated with Hamin, who had the luxury of being associated with Do Eunho, who was universally acclaimed as the most popular boy in Gangnam. Bonggu was what in other schools would be dubbed the "charity case scholarship kid", and everybody knew that that earmarked you for the school bullies, especially if your family had gone, like Bonggu's, from being pretty well off to destitute within a matter of months. Granted, it had happened ten whole years ago, but Bonggu hadn't even been subjected to the typical rumours of living with rats and eating cockroaches.

Aware that her brother had been babbling to her again, and that she'd been spaced out long enough to reach her bedroom door as she mused over Bonggu's ridiculous popularity and Hamin's ridiculous good looks, Jinsu interrupted Jimin.

"Sorry, what was it you were saying?"

"I put the books I borrowed back on your shelf last night," Jimin repeated.

Jinsu froze. "Like, actually back on my shelf, or just in a little pile on the floor near my shelf?"

"On your shelf. I know you hate things being on the floor."

Eyes wide with horror, Jinsu whipped around towards the bookcase. Sure enough, her immaculate shelves were messed up, spines no longer aligned correctly, books not in the pleasing colour-coordinated and hardback-paperback arrangement she'd spent the weekend doing.

"Jimin!" she yelled. "Now I have to do the entire set of shelves again! Do you even know how much of Saturday I spent on it?"

"I put them in in alphabetical order – just straighten the spines."

"It's not that simple!" Jinsu fumed, her fingers itching. "You know I have to start all over from the beginning and check every single book is okay."

Jimin mock-gasped. "Wait, now you mention it, I'm pretty sure the third Harry Potter book was looking rather unwell. Better check on it."

Jinsu was not in the mood to be teased. She sucked in a deep breath, trying to fight the urge to go over to her desk and grab her ruler so that she could ensure that every book was exactly three millimetres in from the shelf edge. A lump rose in her throat.

"Jimin, don't, it's not funny. Mum said she'd make me go see a shrink if she finds me rearranging my books one more time."

"Jin, you spent the entirety of last Thursday evening making sure that everything in the fridge was lined up so the barcodes faced in the same direction and chucking out everything that didn't have a barcode. No offence, but there's obviously a problem there."

It took a great effort, but Jinsu wrenched her attention away from her shelves so that she could go over to her desk and collect her schoolbag.

"It's OCD, nothing big," she grumbled, largely due to habit because it was an issue, but most people didn't seem to think that OCD was a very serious one. "Now if you want to buzz off, I need to go to school."

"Be nice!" Jimin protested, before adding, "have fun oggling your crush in maths and play nice with the other kids, even Chanyeol. Unless they want to fight – then you can—"

"Question," Jinsu interrupted him. "Did you pick up your girlfriend by quoting Mulan at her, or does she not yet know what a ridiculous dork you are? Because if she doesn't, she's going to dump your ass the second she realises you can recite almost every line of that movie."

"Girls love that sh*t, Jinsu—"

"No, girls love it when you can play the guitar, knucklehead," Jinsu sighed. "What did you say her name was, anyway? Did you ever actually tell me her name?"

"Park Jimin."

"Her name. Her name." Jinsu smiled vaguely at one of the maids as she passed. "I know yours already."

Jimin snickered. "No, genuinely, her name is Park Jimin."

Jinsu waited for him to crack a proper laugh and say what this girl's real name was, but while his tone was still teasing, he said nothing of the sort.

"Thought your OCD might like it."

"Oh, dear God," Jinsu sighed. "Ji, I know you like to be romantic at times, but 'other half' and 'soul mate' do not mean 'female doppelganger'."

"She even has a little brother called Jinsu. It's basically like her family's a reflection of ours."

Jinsu didn't think it was worth replying to that one. Instead, she opened the front door and stepped back out into the cold, pulling her coat tightly around her. She could have taken one of the chauffeured cars, but she'd been up very late the previous night and then awake again well before dawn, and getting fresh air and exercise were going to keep her awake, while sitting in the comfort of a heated car was not. And with a full day of school ahead of her, she really needed to stay awake.

"Okay, okay, just joking with that one. She is still called Park Jimin, though."

"You do realise that this is going to be like talking to yourself every time one of you ever says something to the other, right?" Jinsu pointed out before deepening her voice in mock imitation of her brother's. "'Oh, Jimin darling, you look so sexy today!' 'Why, thank you, honey, I got this dress specially.' 'Well, you look sexy too, Jimin darling. Sorry, didn't realise you were out of bed. Just talking to the handsome fella in the mirror.'"

There was a long hesitation on the other end of the phone.

"Sleeping with each other sometimes does get a bit weird," Jimin admitted thoughtfully.

"Jimin!" Jinsu yelped, almost walking into a lamppost in shock. "Mother will kill you! What if she gets pregnant?"

"Well, we'll just have to call the kid Jimin too, won't we? Keep it to traditional family names. And when people ask, we can pretend it's all a really cool joke and be all like 'this is my family. I found it all on my own—'"

"Oh my God." His jocular tone was getting a bit too much for the usually reserved Jinsu, even though such a twee family did oddly appeal to her. "I'm hanging up. Ring me when one of you has changed your name. Bye." She took the phone away from her ear, but then had second thoughts and put it back again. "By the way, quoting Lilo and Stitch is just as unacceptable as quoting Mulan. Now bye for real."

He was still laughing when she hung up.

On reflection, Jinsu probably ought to have taken the car that day. It wasn't like she hadn't walked to school before, but people stared at her when she did, and she had grown to hate being the centre of attention, not just at school, but everywhere. Five years ago, it wouldn't have bothered her too much. She was introverted rather than shy, but back then, it hadn't been overbearingly terrifying for her to catch people's attention. Back then, people had also been in awe of her due to her family's towering reputation as the owners of the biggest technological conglomerate in South Korea. Despite not being exceptionally pretty, she'd been labelled the Ice Princess as people misinterpreted her introverted nature and lack of need to talk as some kind of cold aloofness rather than the reality that she was just awkward about it.

And then Chae Bonggu had happened, and suddenly everybody saw that silence either as unbearable awkwardness or as snobbery. Her achievements in physics and maths became extreme, undesirable nerdiness overnight, and a few days later, everybody was struck by the realisation that her beautifully pale skin was actually unhealthily pale. Bonggu was the first to have noted that, and also to have speculated that this was because her family was so rich that she could literally sit in her room all day and pay people to do everything for her. Including exercise.

Come to think of it, the ridiculous claim that Jinsu hired somebody to exercise for her might have been part of the reason for the astonished and creeped-out stares as she walked in through the school gates. She cringed, wanting to do nothing more than hide behind the nearest car or tree until everybody was gone, but it was only a few minutes to the first bell and she needed to swing by her locker.

The second she was inside the school building, she scurried down a little-used side corridor to get out of the way of the masses.

"Carriage gone missing?" somebody shouted after her. "Cinderella didn't walk to the ball, you know."

Jinsu itched to correct the girl that school in no way could be compared to a ball, but she had learnt it was best not to answer back as that usually resulted in the type of argument that caused her reputation as an ultra-nerd to rocket again and her confidence to plummet. It was stupid how she could rib her older brother so easily, but stick her with her peers and they could practically ride over her rough-shod.

Since they had the same surname, Jinsu's and Chanyeol's lockers were next to each other. Just as Jinsu came down the echoey hallway, she saw his tall, lanky frame as he swung his satchel up onto his shoulder. He was speaking to somebody shorter than him, body blocking the other person out. Yu Hamin was standing to his right, twirling a basketball absently with the long fingers of his left hand while his right ran through his hair, making it stick up. He laughed at something Chanyeol had said and tossed the basketball again.

Jinsu nearly drooled. Hamin with a basketball was one of her favourite images, alongside his smile, but he was not only smiling but laughing, and Hamin wasn't a big laugher. It was a rare treat to the ears: usually he just grinned broadly and shook his head before returning to whatever he'd been doing if he found something funny. Maybe today was going to be a good day, though. Jinsu's mood brightened at the gorgeous sound of Hamin's second chuckle, and she almost smiled.

The warning bell rang out as she halted by her locker, spinning the combination to open it. Chanyeol jumped with a guilty start, not even noticing his cousin, before bolting for the other side of the school for his first lesson of the day. The absence of his large, obscuring height revealed Chae Bonggu leaning against the lockers with his arms folded and a broad grin on his face. Jinsu made the mistake of glancing over to verify who it was just as Hamin realised that he and Chanyeol shared the same economics class and he was going to be late if he didn't run. Jinsu couldn't help watching him go.

"Chauffeur and personal exerciser quit? Pay not good enough?" a snide voice asked from beside her. Jinsu turned back to her locker, but refused to look over to her right, where Bonggu stood. She eyed her student planner, which was resting neatly on top of her stack of paper and books. Was she going to need it?

Deciding she was, just in case she'd forgotten part of her timetable even though it hadn't changed all year, Jinsu took it out.

"I mean, you walked to school today. And you're going to be late to class. It's unlike you."

Jinsu put her maths books, which she wasn't going to need until the end of the day, on top of the pile already inside. Bonggu was right: she had just two minutes to get up to her first class on the third floor, and that only took under two minutes if it was sprinted. If she left now, she'd make it, but...

The textbooks don't look neat. She bit her bottom lip and grabbed the maths book, lifting up a physics one on string theory to slide the maths one underneath. It was longer than the physics book, but not as wide, causing an ugly drape of pages to cascade down to the right. She gazed at the pile anxiously. Why couldn't all textbooks just be the same size? Did she leave the books as they now were, or did she swap the maths and the string theory one so that the widths all looked nice, but the lengths were horribly botched? Who even designed a book that tall?

"F*cking hell," she heard Bonggu snorting from next to her. Jumping, she snapped around in his direction. It only made her more anxious than she already was about the books that his hair hadn't been properly brushed. A little knotted tuft was sending hairs out at odd angles just behind his left ear, and Jinsu was torn between straightening it out and not saying anything at all.

"Just a word of advice," Bonggu said, still leaning casually against the lockers. He jerked his head in the direction Hamin and Chanyeol had taken. "Even if he was single, Hamin would still be way out of your league."

There was abruptly a massive lump in Jinsu's throat. Had she been that obvious?

"I don't have a crush on Hamin," she said. She wanted to add that would be as ludicrous as having a crush on you, but her nerve failed her, and besides, it was a lie. Or, at least, the part about not having a crush on Hamin was a lie.

Bonggu snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. Everybody has a crush on Hamin. Or me. It's a rite of passage."

The bell for the start of class screeched out around them, making Jinsu jump and nearly drop all her stuff. Slamming her locker door shut, she did up her satchel straps – because she couldn't go anywhere with the straps not firmly buckled – and made off down the corridor.

"Hey, Park Jinsu!" Bonggu yelled after her. Jinsu made the mistake of turning back. "I think your dermatologist needs to be fired. She missed a pimple!"

It was the accompanying gesture to his face that got Jinsu frantically patting around her own, because she hated pimples about as much as it was possible to hate anything that induced assymetry on the face, even though a logical part of her brain knew that Bonggu would use her reaction as fodder for some kind of narrative that she really did pay somebody a fortune to keep her skin clear.

"Oh, my bad," he said, squinting and sounding almost apologetic. "That's your nose."

Jinsu almost glared at him and told him what a pathetic insult he'd lifted straight out of the book, but his next one murdered any vestiges of the good mood Hamin's laugh had put her in.

"Your eye makeup's running," he told her, almost managing to sound sincere as he gestured awkwardly at his cheekbones. The fake sympathetic grimace he gave her directly after told her that he in fact wasn't. "Might want to switch designer brands. Makeup's supposed to enhance natural features, not make your skin look necrotic."

And then he turned on his heel and sauntered off in the direction Chanyeol and Hamin had taken, even though his first class was history – which Jinsu had also – and he was going completely the wrong way.

Still, it was better than walking with him to class. Self-consciously, Jinsu wiped at the area around her eyes with her fingertips, even though she knew she hadn't worn makeup for the past two-and-a-half weeks.

Were her eyebags from staying up during the night to help out with the Attayear time machine really that bad?

Chapter 2

School was routine, but by halfway through her second class, Jinsu was finding it very tough to stay awake. Under normal circumstances, Jinsu would never have stayed up most of a Tuesday night unless it was the holidays, but the interior of the Attayear machine had been so nearly finished and the idea of not getting it completely done had made her incredibly antsy. And then, of course, it had taken her significantly longer than expected because everything needed to be perfect, and then one of the technicians had proposed she test out staying there in one of the bunks. She only realised she'd dozed off in maths at the end of the day when somebody whacked her on the head from behind with a sheaf of papers.

Groggily, she turned and saw Kyungsoo, yet another of Bonggu's irritating friends, sitting there. He cast a critical eye over her sleepy face for a moment or two and then thrust the papers at her with a grunt of "pass them forward", nearly brusquely enough to give her a papercut.

To be fair, Kyungsoo wasn't nearly as bad as the rest, but Jinsu had never figured out if he was being intentionally cold to her or if he was just one of those people who was as awkwardly untalkative as she was, because outside his little posse of friends, he rarely ever opened his mouth. With them, though, he was constantly laughing and smiling and very talkative.

With another yawn, Jinsu passed the papers forward and then slumped back down on the desk, intending to go back to sleep. There were one or two snickers over to her right, which she knew from the seating plan was where Chae Bonggu sat, along with a girl called Do Minyoung who absolutely hated her for no apparent reason and a few more boys who weren't in Bonggu's in-crowd but who still had fun ribbing Jinsu when they had the chance.

Her teacher's voice jerked her back to reality.

"Park Jinsu, are you not going to hand your homework in?"

Oh. So that was what that stack of papers had been. Yawning, Jinsu sat up again, trying not to frown. Maybe Kyungsoo had been intentionally harsh when he was giving her the papers, because most people reminded each other if somebody was obviously going to miss out handing their work in on those occasions.

She thought she heard someone scoffing something along the lines of "do you reckon her work's even going to be worth reading when she's in this condition?" from somewhere on Bonggu's side of the room, though the voice was too deep to actually be Bonggu's and she couldn't be bothered to look to check. It wasn't worth getting wound up about, in any case, because Jinsu knew she was in the top five of the class, and she'd also done the work on the day it had been set, when she hadn't been exhausted, because maths was one of her favourite subjects. She passed her work forward to join the rest and then attempted to sit to attention for the rest of the class, though they were doing statistics, which involved decimals, which she found incredibly dull because her forte was pure maths, and which she also found anxiety-inducing, because recurring decimals were just not satisfying. Every time she saw something ending with a recurring three, she just wanted to write it as the number and a third, because it looked so much neater and didn't get her all wound up, but sadly, it got marks docked and so she wasn't allowed to do it.

Sungwoo the chauffeur was waiting for her when school finished and she was finally allowed out, and he handed her a strong black coffee as she slid into the passenger seat of the car.

"Mrs Kwon said you were out very late last night," was his response when she thanked him appreciatively. "Thought you might want this."

Jinsu just nodded. A comfortable silence descended as he pulled away from the school. Neither of the two of them ever spoke much, and even with the coffee, Jinsu was practically dozing off. It wasn't until they were several streets through Apgujeong that Sungwoo spoke up again.

"Do you have enough decent dresses or do we need to stop off to shop for one?"

Jinsu struggled to think about why this might even be an issue and turned up blank. "Huh?"

"Dinner tonight, Miss, with your parents."

Jinsu managed to yawn and frown at the same time. "What for?"

"Your father said you would know. I'm not allowed to because it's top secret, apparently."

It did absolutely nothing to alleviate Jinsu's frown, so she shrugged and buried her face back in her coffee, making sure her hands were both placed perfectly symmetrically around the cup so that they both received the same amount of heat.

"Will we need to stop for a dress?" Sungwoo prompted. "Though I think it would be you rather than me shopping in this condition."

Jinsu shook her head. "I think I have enough at home."

"All right, Miss."

She snuggled back into the heated leather seat, and the next thing she knew, Sungwoo was taking the cooling half-finished coffee out of her hands because they were parked in the garage at the side of the house. One of the maids who'd only been there a couple of weeks and whose name Jinsu struggled to remember in her exhausted state opened the door for her.

"The hairdresser will be calling in half an hour, Ma'am," she informed Jinsu, who groaned. There was no way she was going to be ready to have her hair done in such a short time.

"What time are we leaving for the dinner?" she asked, hoping that she'd be able to push back her schedule to get things done in her own time.

"In fifty minutes, ma'am. I believe that there is a drinks reception first with important government officials."

This was new. Temporarily shocked back into a state of alertness, Jinsu sat up and got out of the car, wondering if she did actually have a dress for the occasion that would suit.

"Okay," she said. "Uh... that's not a lot of time for me to get ready. Never mind. Do you know if Jimin will be there too?"

"Unfortunately he won't be, ma'am," the maid said as she led the way back into the house. "He flew out to China earlier today on business matters."

Jinsu's shoulders slumped. Of course he did. She'd been so taken aback by the news that he'd been dating somebody for nearly six months that she'd totally forgotten the reason he was ringing her was because he was going to be away until the weekend and wanted to let her know.

"Do you know if anybody my age will be there?" Jinsu asked, eyeing the stairs she was going to have to climb dispiritedly.

"I couldn't say, ma'am. I wouldn't know."

"Could you come with me?" She leant against the banister railing. The maid, three steps ahead, turned to stare at her in shock. Jinsu sighed and cut in before she could say anything. "You look like you're a similar age to me and if I'm going to be the only young person there I want a plus one."

"I really don't think that would be appropriate, ma'am."

Groaning, Jinsu hauled herself up a few more stairs. "In that case, how about we make a deal? You stop making me feel like an old lady by calling me ma'am and call me Jinsu like everybody else here except Sungwoo because he's a stick-in-the-mud, and I'll call you by your real name too."

The maid blinked at her.

Jinsu sighed again. "I was trying to be tactful about the fact that I've forgotten your name," she confessed, reddenning. "I'm so sorry."

To her surprise, the maid laughed as they started to climb again. "Oh, don't worry about that, Miss. I just wasn't expecting it at all, because when I was applying to work here, there were rumours you're a snobby little brat. I took the job because the pay was so good, but most of your family seems pretty nice."

They finally reached the first floor landing.

"My name isn't Miss," Jinsu said dryly. "And I still don't know yours."

"Kwon Saeeun," the maid told her over her shoulder.

Jinsu nodded and fiddled with the hem of her school shirt, trying to think of something else to say.

"Any, er, any relation to Mrs Kwon?"

"No."

"Oh."

An awkward silence fell and Jinsu nearly bolted into her room to escape, except Saeeun followed her in, having opened the door for her. The second she saw her bed and the relaxing, impeccably neat state of her room, a comforting wave of tiredness settled over her.

"Saeeun, do you reckon I can have a power nap, a shower and pick out a dress and get changed before the hairdresser arrives?" she asked hopefully. Saeeun ran a critical eye over her.

"No, Jinsu, I don't," she said bluntly.

Jinsu pouted. "Damn. I mean, darn."

Saeeun laughed again.

Jinsu concluded out loud that she really must look like that much of a tired wreck.

"I wasn't going to say so," Saeeun told her, "but since you mention it, yes, you do."

With regret, Jinsu cast a loving look at the bed that was going to have to wait probably until after midnight until she was allowed back into it.

"Tell you what," said Saeeun. "How about I pick out the dress for you while you go freshen up in the bathroom? You can take your time over it."

"I like you," Jinsu mumbled, fighting the urge to yawn again. "You're smart."

Saeeun raised her eyebrows, but she said nothing as Jinsu stumbled in the direction of the bathroom.

Twenty-four minutes later, Jinsu was marginally more awake, inhaling her third cup of coffee on the trot as Saeeun helped her to do up the flashy silver dress she'd picked out. While it was an incredibly flattering cut, Jinsu suspected it was more the kind of thing that Saeeun would have worn herself as it was something Jinsu considered too loud for her own tastes, but she couldn't be bothered to complain and make the girl start all over again.

She was still pretty much in a zombie state when the hairdresser breezed in a couple of minutes later and began unpacking his bags. He'd been several times before and was one of the few who hadn't managed to totally freak Jinsu out by trying to do something "new" and asymmetrical with her hair, which relaxed her at once. Sitting down in the comfortable office chair, she closed her eyes and allowed him to work his magic while Saeeun busied herself about the room, even though there was practically nothing for her to do.

Jinsu had all but nodded off when the hairdresser pronounced himself done fifteen minutes later. He held up a mirror so that she could see what he'd done to the back of her hair (most of it was put up in some kind of bun, and she had a curtain of loops sweeping the bottom of her hair like the edge of a design for something made of lace, which was incredibly pleasing to Jinsu's pernickety eye), though they didn't have time for him to start again or redo anything if she didn't like it, because it was about ten minutes until Jinsu had to leave, and she still needed to pick out shoes.

"Thank you," she told the hairdresser, who replied with a broad grin and a "no problem" before packing his stuff up again and vanishing. Swivelling around in the office chair, Jinsu looked for Saeeun. "Saeeun, I'm going to need shoes—" She stopped dead at the sight of the silver heels in front of her. Saeeun had already picked them out to go with the dress. Jinsu gulped: she'd forgotten that all her silver shoes were high heeled.

"Thanks," she said in a small voice.

"No problem," Saeeun said, abruptly lapsing into informal speech, which made Jinsu feel inordinately happy. "You do realise you have enough shoes in your closet to start a shoe shop, don't you?"

It struck a tiny chord of anxiety. "Is that a bad thing?"

Saeeun shrugged and continued rooting around on Jinsu's vanity. Jinsu internally cringed when she set down a hairbrush a little skewed to its proper position, making the display look messy.

"Not necessarily. It means you're either disgustingly rich or a stupidly good bargain hunter, or potentially that shoes are just what everybody gives you for presents. Where's your makeup? I can only find concealer." Saeeun turned around with a little stick of it in her hand.

"Oh, I don't have any," Jinsu replied, slipping her feet into her shoes and attempting to stand up without wobbling over.

Saeeun stopped dead, as if she'd walked into a brick wall, and stared. "Any? At all?"

Jinsu shook her head. Saeeun's disbelieving expression turned downright incredulous, and as the maid put the stick of concealer back on the vanity in completely the wrong place, Jinsu thought she heard her mutter, "you have got to be single".

"It makes my face feel dirty," Jinsu admitted in a mumble, pinching awkwardly at the skin on the back of her left hand.

Saeeun made for the door. "No normal sixteen-year-old girl goes out to a dinner like this with important government officials without wearing makeup. Or goes out without makeup full stop. Stay right there. I'll be back in a tick."

Jinsu barely even had the chance to open her mouth in objection before Saeeun had disappeared. She wondered if she had time to make a run for it before Saeeun got back, but as soon as she wobbled to her feet, she decided it was a no-go. Walking in those high heels was enough of a death wish – forget running – and if she walked anywhere, Saeeun would probably find her. Instead, she tottered over to her vanity to start neatening everything up to perfection again. She was halfway through placing the brushes down with precision for the third time when a horrible thought struck her – if Saeeun had wreaked such destruction on her vanity in such a short amount of time, what on earth did her closet look like after the girl had been in there for her dress and shoes?

She didn't have the time to check: Saeeun was abruptly back and pushing her back towards the office chair with a brisk "sit down, sit down, and let me take a good look at you!"

Flinching, Jinsu did as she was told. She could feel the blood draining out of her face as Saeeun plonked what was evidently a makeup bag down in front of her. The maid gripped Jinsu's chin and tilted her head from side to side so that she could inspect it.

"Huh. Your skin's pretty clear. Might as well start with a light base of foundation—"

"No!" Jinsu objected immediately, terrified. There was no way that she was going to allow her entire face to be covered in… in stuff. She could barely cope with the prospect of makeup, let alone being done up in it for an entire evening, and the last time two-and-a-half weeks ago for her aunt's birthday had been more than bad enough.

"No?" Saeeun looked a bit taken aback. "But Mi— Jinsu, if we're going to get proper contouring to bring out the best of your features—"

"No, I can't," Jinsu said weakly. "Please, just don't. I'll only spend the entire evening clawing it off and trying to wash my face."

Saeeun looked at her like she'd gone mad, but reluctantly set the foundation back in the bag.

It took some negotiation on both sides, but when Mrs Kwon came bustling in to say it was time for Jinsu to leave and that her parents were going to join her at the venue, Saeeun had convinced Jinsu that she had to glam up a bit, and Jinsu had managed to more or less preserve her natural face. She couldn't help herself picking at the tiny layer of mascara that Saeeun had talked her into letting her put on. It was like she could feel her eyelashes sagging under the weight, and her skin itched like something was crawling underneath it. Try as she might, she was finding it impossible to shake off the notion that she had dirt framing her eyelashes, and all she wanted to do was scrub it off again and again and again.

The other problem was that she couldn't help stopping by every reflective surface to check that the mascara was, as Saeeun had assured her at least three times, perfectly even on both sides. Sungwoo held open the passenger door of the car for her, hovering at her shoulder because he could obviously see how precarious she was in her shoes, and then they were off, Jinsu sitting on her hands so she wouldn't act on the urge to itch her eyes.

"Where exactly are we going?" she asked, peering at the satnav, but there wasn't a route set.

"I believe the reception is in the flagship hotel owned by the Kims, Miss," Sungwoo told her smoothly. Jinsu wracked her brains and pulled a blank. She knew so many Kim families who owned hotel chains.

"Which Kims?"

"I don't know, Miss. The ones who own the Blue Star near to the Blue House."

Jinsu thought some more, and then settled back in her seat. If it was the right Kim, then there could well be one or two people her age at the gathering.

Chapter 3

By the time they arrived, Jinsu was fully alert and awake, and even more conscious of the mascara. She considered herself extremely lucky that Saeeun had only had time to talk her into a little something to enhance the eyes, because if this was how jittery just one bit of makeup was making her, then having it all over her face would probably send her into a fit.

Intended or not, Sungwoo's timing was so impeccable that the car slid to a halt outside the hotel just as Jinsu's parents were getting out of the car ahead. Bidding a hasty goodbye to the chauffeur, Jinsu scrambled out of the car and almost tripped trying to catch up with her family. Her mother looked around at the commotion and pulled her father to a halt.

"I like that dress on you," her father commented absently as she came alongside them and they began to walk again, Jinsu's mother providing a steadying hand for the girl. "It's very bold."

"I don't feel bold in it," Jinsu grumbled, self-consciously tugging the bodice part up, even though her cleavage wasn't on display.

"Behave, Jinsu. You have an image to uphold."

Jinsu pulled a face at him behind his back before schooling herself into a more neutral expression. "Sorry, Father. Um, what exactly is the function today?"

"We're celebrating," her mother said, nodding to a waiter who was directing other smartly dressed guests – including a number of government officials, Jinsu noted – towards a ballroom on the ground floor.

"What are we celebrating?"

"Our success, darling. The Attayear's finished, thanks to your hard work on the interior last night."

"F-f-finished?" Jinsu stopped walking and almost tripped. "Already? But wasn't there so much more—?"

"We've been keeping progress of various individual parts secret for security reasons," said her father, accepting a glass of prosecco from a waitress passing by with a tray of them. On second thoughts, he reached out and pilfered two more, passing one to his wife and one to Jinsu. "The interior decor was just the last bit that needed doing, along with a bit of fine-tuning to some of the machine's computers."

"But isn't it too early to celebrate if we don't know whether or not it works?" Jinsu pointed out hesitantly. "And how come you got all this organised at such short notice?"

"Kim Minhyuk's nephew is on our engineering team. That's him over there." Jinsu's father pointed out a young man – if he was even old enough to be called a man, because he barely looked older than Jinsu – talking to somebody who looked incredibly like the president, one hand clutching a glass of prosecco as he used his fingers to gesture every so often, and the other tucked into his pocket. "He took the machine for its first hop today. Fifteen minutes back into the past – worked perfectly, no problems at all."

Jinsu's eyes widened, but at that moment, somebody in military uniform with a dazzling array of medals on his chest approached and shook Jinsu's father's hand, and just like that, his attention was gone.

"I'm just going to nip to the bathroom, dear," said Jinsu's mother, straightening her faux fur around her collar, and she was gone, too, before Jinsu could say she wanted to go with because hanging around on her own was only going to be very awkward. She scanned the gathering again, looking for people her own age, but the only possible candidate for that was the hotel owner's nephew, and Jinsu wasn't sure she remembered his name correctly. She thought it was Min-something, but that was about it.

A tap on her shoulder almost had her screaming, and her attempt to whirl around to see who it was nearly landed her on the carpet with a broken ankle.

"Oh, sh*t, I'm so sorry!" exclaimed a heavenly familiar voice, accompanied by the sound of a champagne flute smashing on the ground as the person grabbed Jinsu around the waist to keep her from falling. "I should have realised you were wearing heels because you're actually taller than me tonight. Oh, man, are you okay?"

Waiting a second or two for the rapid beating of her heart to return to normal, Jinsu nodded, and then looked up at the miscreant. Nam Yejun, heir to the Kim hotel chain, was standing in front of her and looking remarkably dishevelled for somebody in black tie.

"Y'all right, Jinsu?" he asked, letting go of her again.

"No. You dropped an entire glass of prosecco, you knucklehead. I'm physically pained you could do such a thing."

"Broken glass is better than broken bones," he said breezily. "Anyway, wanna get away from all the fuddy-duddy adults? Even my cousin's no fun tonight. I thought I was going to die of boredom until you walked in. Still not even sure why I'm here, to be honest. Dad just told me to get downstairs in black tie the second I walked in from school and help the staff set up."

Escape sounded wonderful, and Jinsu gladly let Yejun lead the way out of the room, the boy chatting ten to the dozen about anything and everything. He was two years older than Jinsu and absolutely adored Jinsu's big brother, because Jimin had been great at entertaining him at social gatherings when they were both younger. Both Jimin and Yejun had calmed down quite a lot since the days where they'd rampage around important people's funeral receptions shaking up bottles of coke to blast at each other, but Yejun still retained a fair amount of mischief that showed itself from time to time.

As they were passing through the hallway of the hotel to go further back into an area only Yejun and his family had keys for, Yejun stopped one of the staff and apologised profusely for broken glass on the floor in the ballroom, but the second the woman was out of sight, he turned back to Jinsu.

"Did you see the president was in the room?" he asked in a whisper. "My cousin was talking to him."

"Was that actually the president?"

"Yeah." Yejun let them through a pair of locked doors. They went down a passage near the kitchen that was staff only, and then he produced another set of keys for an even more private area of the hotel. "We probably shouldn't leave the function completely, so I'm going to take us up to the ballroom balcony – but yeah, the president came. That's why I'm still only really half dressed – only found out he was showing up about ten minutes before he did and I had to go haring around to make sure everything was okay with security. They've actually got snipers placed on the roof and all that sh*t."

Jinsu gave an involuntary glance upwards, even though she wasn't going to be able to see the snipers, before accepting the arm Yejun offered to help climb the set of stairs in front of them. At the top, they doubled back the way they'd come along a long, thickly carpeted passage.

"Must be something pretty important for your dad to get the president along at such short notice," Yejun mused. "I mean, it's basically his function. Noah might have winged things so it was possible to put on at such short notice, but still..."

"My father and the president are pretty good friends," Jinsu admitted.

"What, so you get him coming around for dinner and stuff?"

"No, barely ever seen him. Not in person. I think they went to university together."

They halted in front of a door that had a placard on it declaring it to be the balcony. Yejun fumbled for yet another set of keys, but then stopped and peered closely at the handle. Concluding it was already open, he pushed on the door handle, and they both stepped out onto the balcony. A buzz of noise hit them at once, and Jinsu could see people standing around through the balcony balustrade.

"Hi, Junmyeon," Yejun greeted a teenager sitting just inside the balcony door with his back to the wall. Junmyeon was wearing a pair of jeans and a light cotton jumper, a white shirt poking out at the collar. A laptop was balanced on his knees and he appeared to be taking notes from a thick physics textbook, glasses creeping down to the edge of his nose as he leant over to read. He acknowledged them with a brief wave of his hand. Feeling Junmyeon was familiar, Jinsu tried to think who he might be. The name rang a bell in conjunction with Yejun's father, for some reason.

"Still working on that physics assignment?" Yejun asked, propping himself up against the balcony balustrade. Junmyeon sighed.

"Yeah. Turned in the other one for the competition in the end. I was never going to get this done in time, but I still need to do it as a school project. I'm just tired of reading about string theory. Not really my thing."

The casual way they interacted jogged Jinsu's memory. The two boys were step-brothers, Yejun's father quietly remarrying to Junmyeon's mother after his first wife had died just a couple of years before. Junmyeon was a few months older than Yejun, though Yejun had barely mentioned him whenever Jinsu had seen him, but Yejun was still viewed as the heir to the family. Jinsu had heard a few unsavoury things about Junmyeon's mother, but the boy himself seemed perfectly happy not to attempt to usurp Yejun's birthright.

"But it makes quantum field theory so much simpler," said Jinsu.

"Not if you don't understand string theory in the first place," Junmyeon said firmly before looking up, slight confusion on his face. He set the laptop to one side and got to his feet, grimacing. "Ow, pins and needles. Sorry, I don't think we've met before. I'm Junmyeon."

"Park Jinsu," Jinsu replied, shaking the hand that he held out.

He nodded, gaze flickering between her and his step-brother. "And are you two...?"

Yejun laughed. "What, dating? God, no. No, Noah works for Jinsu's dad, who's throwing the party down there. I thought I'd rescue her from all the adults as she looked like a fish out of water and I know first hand how awkward it is to be stuck in that kind of gathering with no peers."

Junmyeon cocked his head inquisitively to one side. "Who's your dad, then?" he asked Jinsu. "How did he manage to get the president invited along to this?"

"Park Jiwoon," Yejun supplied before Jinsu could open her mouth to point out that Junmyeon's spectacles were a little lopsided. "As in, Dr Park Jiwoon of the Galaxy Foundation."

"No way," said Junmyeon, staring. "No way. Yejun, you never told me you were friends with the daughter of the Park Jiwoon." He straightened up his glasses, and to Jinsu's absolute embarrassment, gave her a full but brief ninety-degree bow. "Wow." Laughing, he dragged a hand through his hair.

Very taken aback, Jinsu looked to Yejun for guidance, but he was lounging gleefully against the railings of the balcony bannister, content to watch.

"Your dad's my science idol," Junmyeon told Jinsu. "And I've heard rumours at school you take after him."

Jinsu gave Yejun another hesitant glance.

He goes to my school, Yejun mouthed back. Jinsu nodded: it explained why she hadn't really come across Junmyeon much before, since he and Yejun were both at the International school while Jinsu was at the most prestigious national school in the country. The most prestigious and the most expensive.

"W-well, I... like science," Jinsu said lamely.

"I feel so underdressed now," Junmyeon said wryly. "I can't really ask you if you could introduce me to him when everybody's looking so smart and I'm like this. I'm beginning to regret ditching Yejun to do all the work now to get on with this and hiding out on the balcony where nobody would find me." But then his entire expression changed and he leant closer to Jinsu. "Are they true, though?" he asked. "Those rumours about a time machine?"

Startled, Jinsu jumped back. "I-I-I—" she stuttered.

"I'd ask Noah." Yejun shrugged. "He's been unusually obnoxious about keeping company secrets recently, so he'd probably be in the know."

"And wouldn't tell." Junmyeon sighed and straightened up. "Never mind. Is your dad going to be chairing the annual convention of young physicists again this year?"

"The junior version," Jinsu told him. "For high school students."

Junmyeon absolutely beamed. "Well, I hope my project does well, because then I'll get the chance to greet him there."

Jinsu couldn't help smiling back at him. He seemed like a pleasant, easy-going person and a hard worker, and she also really liked that she couldn't sense any bitter rivalry or tension between him and Yejun. Deciding to make herself comfortable, she kicked off her heels – Yejun joked that they looked like pretty lethal weapons – and sat beside Junmyeon, who gave up on his school work altogether. After Junmyeon asked Yejun why the president was there and Jinsu replied that her father and the president were friends, conversation became relaxed and trivial. It was only two hours later, when Yejun got a phone call on his work phone that Jinsu's parents were worried because they couldn't find her among the businessmen and important officials downstairs, that it struck her just how unused she was to relaxing and conversing freely with individuals her own age. Saeeun and the various maids who came and went in the house were a different matter because they were distinctly hired as staff, and at school, she was a bit of a loner. Her only sibling was a full ten years older than her, too, and because she was at school, she only really got to go to all the important company events and dinners during the holidays, or if they fell at weekends, and even then, the sons and daughters of the people holding or at the events weren't always there or even always her age if they were. Out of those that were, half of them were at her school anyway, which just made matters even more awkward.

"I need to let you back out," Yejun realised as Jinsu picked up her shoes. She eyed them for a second and then decided against putting them back on until absolutely necessary. Bidding goodbye to Junmyeon, who enthusiastically hoped that they would meet again at some point, she followed Yejun back off the balcony and into the bowels of the hotel again.

"Say hi to your brother for me, and tell him to drop by," he said as they paused by the doors through to the main part, Jinsu struggling to get her shoes back on. "It's weeks since I last saw him. And I guess I'll see you around. How come you're leaving early?"

"I think there's a dinner or something," Jinsu mumbled, staggering as she tried to stand up straight in her heels and internally cursing Saeeun for trying to make her look like a glamorous sixteen-year-old.

Yejun shrugged as if to say fair and unlocked the door to let them through.

To both their surprise, his cousin Noah was standing with Jinsu's parents, all of them with their coats (probably the one thing Saeeun had forgotten to provide Jinsu with, but apparently Saeeun went very much with the mantra of you have to suffer to be beautiful).

"Good evening, Yejun," Jinsu's father said a little stiffly when he saw Jinsu's companion. Yejun gave a little bow and hurried away, mumbling something about needing to check that everything was running smoothly, but not without eyeballing his cousin curiously first. Jinsu noticed Noah lift his shoulders in a confused little shrug before shooting Yejun a playful smirk back.

"Come along, Jinsu darling, or we'll be late for our reservation," her mother said, slipping her arm through her husband's. Park Jiwoon grunted and turned to head for the exit.

After a very awkward pause, Noah held his arm for Jinsu to take, looking nervously down at her heels. She accepted gratefully.

"Your father is terrifying," he murmured in her ear, steadying her carefully when she nearly tripped, and Jinsu decided immediately that he was a nice person. "He practically ordered me to come and eat with you like I was going to be court martialed if I didn't."

"Grandad was a general during the war," Jinsu mumbled back. Noah abruptly tensed up with a little hiss of pain and Jinsu felt her ankle buckling sideways. "Sorry – sorry, did I step on you? I'm so sorry."

"Don't worry about it," he told her, eyes watering. "My fiancée does it all the time."

Jinsu nearly gawped at him. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-five."

A blast of chilly air hit them as they stepped outside. Noah helped Jinsu into the back of the car her parents were already in and then slipped in himself. Silence descended with an atmosphere that felt more stifling than a graveyard as the car set off. Jinsu noticed Han Noah fidgetting nervously with his fingers and almost grabbed his hands to make him stop before he passed on the antsiness to her. Instead, she turned to her mother. It took several attempts at clearing her throat before she felt comfortable trying to break the silence.

"Where are we eating tonight?"

"The Wild Boar," her father answered. "It's just a few minutes away."

Noah seemed to think it was worth attempting to break the ice with this piece of information. "My friend's brother works there. It's a nice place."

"Son of the owner, I assume?" Jinsu's father replied immediately. "I've never been there before, but I hear the food is exquisite."

"No, he's one of the waiters—" Apparently struck by a sudden realisation, Noah clammed up. Jinsu snuck a peek at him and saw that he was now biting one of his thumbnails, looking guiltily as though he oughtn't to have said anything.

"Oh," Jinsu's father grunted, and that was the end of conversation until the car pulled up outside the restaurant in question. Park Jiwoon leant across to speak quietly to the chauffeur, and after a moment or two, Jinsu's mother opened the door and got out of the car. Faster than Jinsu could blink, Noah was out of his side of the car to go around to assist her. Jinsu eyed the treacherous heels and the wet ground – it had rained while they were at the hotel – and carefully tried to stand. Then Noah was back at her elbow, mumbling something about not understanding why girls wore such high heels.

"I didn't choose them," she admitted.

"Somebody is trying to get you killed," he told her with a completely straight face, and then they were in the warmth of the restaurant being directed towards a private room at the back with the promise that their best waiter would be with them very shortly. Jinsu was actually a bit surprised that her father's name was known in restaurant circles since he only really had contacts with hoteliers when it came to hospitality.

It was actually possible to see the tension drain out of Noah's shoulder at the words best waiter, and as they sat and Jinsu's father started to browse the wine menu, Jinsu turned back to Noah, who had taken the chair beside her.

"Is your friend's brother here tonight?" she asked in an attempt at small talk, absently straightening the cutlery at her place.

"I don't know," Noah admitted. "I'm kind of hoping not, but at the same time, they said they'd send out their best waiter and he's a bit of a wild child, so—"

"Can I take your order for drinks, sir?"

Jinsu felt the colour draining out of her face at that familiar voice. Noah looked a little pale as well.

Standing there, impeccably groomed in his waiting uniform and with just an ever-so-slightly lopsided name badge, was Chae Bonggu.

Chapter 4

It was one of those situations where Jinsu wanted nothing more than for the ground to swallow her up or for her to cease to exist. Her mother was either pretending to be oblivious or was actually so; Noah didn't look quite like he was in the same situation as Jinsu, but he was definitely uneasy, eyes darting nervously between Bonggu and Jinsu's father, and he swallowed when it became obvious that they recognised each other.

To be fair, Bonggu wasn't helping himself at all. His voice had barely been calm as he asked for drinks orders, and his hands were shaking so hard it looked like he was about to snap the pen he was intending to write with. His jaw, Jinsu noticed, was so tightly clenched that the skin around it was near bloodless, and his eyes looked about ready to shoot lasers.

The worst thing was that her father had obviously noticed, and even if he hadn't been able to see the name tag, Jinsu suspected that he would have known it was somebody from the Chae family purely by the hostility radiating off the waiter in front of him, regardless of whether or not he'd actually seen Bonggu since... well, Jinsu didn't even know when. And knowing her father, he was not going to take well to blatant hatred, especially from somebody he considered beneath him.

Jinsu saw irritation and disgust flickering in her father's eyes, but he did a much better job of masking it than Bonggu.

"I'll have a glass of the Le Pin, and my wif—" He abruptly looked up, frowning at Bonggu, who was halfway to the door. "I'm sorry, but do all the staff here just walk off halfway through serving their guests?"

"I'm a minor, sir." Bonggu's tone was clipped and bordering on derisive. "Anything involving alcohol needs to be done by somebody older than me."

"Then why can't we have a waiter who can actually tend to what we need?"

Bonggu evidently didn't think the question merited a response, rolling his eyes as he left the room. It was easy to see him doing so from Jinsu's vantage point, and she was inwardly relieved that her father appeared to have missed it.

"How unprofessional," Jinsu's father grumbled, but before he could say anything about complaining to the manager later, his wife placed her hand on his arm.

"I'm sure they're doing their best, darling. You did book at exceptionally short notice even though they said it was an incredibly busy evening and they technically weren't free. It was very kind of them to squeeze us in."

Park Jiwoon grunted, apparently still not thrilled. The door opened again and Bonggu returned with somebody nearly twice his height and looking distinctly older than him. Jinsu just about caught sight of a name that looked Thai on the name tag. It was clear the second waiter was either new or knew next to no Korean – quite possibly both – because he hovered incredibly close to Bonggu, looking rather nervous despite their obvious age gap. Seeing the newcomer had a pen out, Jinsu's father began again.

"A glass of the Le Pin, please—"

The Thai waiter turned to Bonggu, who scrunched his nose up as he listened to whatever the newcomer was saying. Then he turned to Jinsu's father again.

"I'm afraid we only sell that by the bottle, sir," Bonggu told him. Park Jiwoon ignored him.

"I still want a glass. My wife will the Domaine—"

"That's also only sold by the bottle, sir." Bonggu took the pen off the Thai waiter before he could write it down, now looking royally pissed. "The wines sold by the glass are all at the top of the menu if you want to pick from them."

Jinsu winced as her father's eyes wandered further down the page. He was deliberately being difficult.

"Noah, I hear that the Krug champagne is very good," he said, now brushing Bonggu off completely. "Can I offer you a glass of that? It's your success, after all."

Noah looked absolutely trapped. Jinsu could tell what was going through his mind: it would be rude for him to refuse and go for something much cheaper instead, but on the other hand, he didn't want to contribute towards being an awkward guest, not when this was the brother of his friend.

Bonggu snapped around towards Noah with a just audible sigh of relief, clearly expecting some kind of rescue, while the other waiter stood there quietly. Noah looked guilty for a moment and opened his mouth, probably to attempt some kind of compromise, but Jinsu knew that her father wouldn't just leave it at that.

"Dad, Noah's tee-total," she jumped in quickly. "It's rude to put him on the spot like that."

Bonggu and Noah both blinked, surprised and completely in sync, but Noah's shoulders became less tense. Jinsu wondered how well Bonggu must know Noah to be aware of his drinking habits, however slight.

"Rude," Jinsu's father echoed under his breath, accompanied by a tut.

"I'll just have lemonade," Noah said in an attempt to diffuse the awkwardness.

"Me too," Jinsu jumped in, and Bonggu's expression darkened again. Jinsu noticed he wasn't writing anything down. With obvious reluctance, Bonggu turned back to Jinsu's parents.

"Just a glass each of those two wines," Park Jiwoon said, now taking on an affable tone.

The other waiter started back into life and looked to Bonggu for guidance. Whether or not Bonggu noticed it was unclear.

"Sir, as I said, I'm afraid we only sell them by the bottle."

Jinsu's father just looked at him. Jinsu could almost sense Bonggu's desire to wilt under that gaze, not least because she'd been subjected to it so many times herself. She nearly – nearly – felt a smidgeon sorry for him.

It had to be admitted that Bonggu sort of made an effort at that particular point. "It would be expensive, but it may be possible to offer you the full bottles of each if you'd like, sir, and you could take the rest home. It's just that company policy is that wines sold by the bottle are only sold by the bottle."

"No, I don't think we'd have any need for it at home," Park Jiwoon said dismissively. "It doesn't taste as nice if the bottle's been open for more than a day. Speak to your manager about it."

Jinsu thought she saw Bonggu's jaw clenching again, but he gave up, murmuring something to the other waiter and sweeping away the wine menus to exchange them for food ones before they both disappeared through the door again. She slumped with relief, tension exiting through her mouth with a sharp sigh, and picked up the card that had more or less been tossed in front of her. It showed signs of previous use – faint creases here and there – and somebody must have played absently with the top right hand corner, because it curled a little and was noticeably thinner and fuzzier than the other corners. Sensing danger was over, Noah also relaxed. A very heavy silence descended over the table, though, and Jinsu fidgeted uncomfortably, wishing that Jimin was there because he was very good at handling this kind of situation.

"Why would he bring back somebody who doesn't even speak the language?" Jinsu's father grumbled. "Surely it would have been a better idea to get the manager?"

Jinsu wondered if he would have been so difficult were the manager there, but thought it wisest not to say anything.

It was Jinsu's mother who started conversation again.

"Noah, why don't you tell us about the hop you made earlier today? Jinsu and I only know that it happened; we're dying to know what it was actually like."

Noah managed a smile, and just like that, the entire atmosphere shifted back to something much lighter.

"It was a bit terrifying to begin with because I didn't know if it was going to work," he said. "We decided a short hop back was best. Just fifteen minutes."

Jinsu perked up. "So did you see yourself working on the machine?"

"Oddly, no." Noah put his menu down, apparently decided on his food. "We're unsure as yet exactly why that was, though our chief scientist reckons it might have something to do with molecular or cell regeneration or something, or potentially personhood in general. It wasn't like my existence had been completely wiped out, so my past was still there. It was just that I seemed to have an opportunity to rewrite what had happened fifteen minutes before without meeting myself from fifteen minutes ago, if that makes sense. We're unsure what would happen to somebody who travelled back, say, five or ten years into the past. Their younger self might exist there or might not – we don't know. Either way, it'll be interesting to find out." He shrugged and grinned.

Jinsu couldn't help a smile in return. "If your former self wasn't there, then how do you know it was fifteen minutes back?"

"The clocks," he said at once. "Everybody in the machine's geared up with a special watch, too, look."

He held out his wrist to her, and Jinsu saw a watch on it with two analogue faces, with a third circle with what looked like a digital stopwatch.

"These took a while to make," he told her, now getting so absorbed in the subject that he didn't notice the Thai waiter returning with all their drinks, Bonggu hovering in the doorway to ensure it was all going okay and announce that the manager sent his apologies for not being able to provide the wine desired, but that instead they were being given the best house wine on tap on the house. "The top face is for current time; the bottom one for the time that you're in, and the stopwatch for how long you spend there. It's automatically triggered walking out of the machine."

"That's so cool," breathed Jinsu, reaching out to touch. Noah beamed broadly at her, but then Bonggu cleared his throat and he jumped, hastily shaking his sleeve back down over the device.

"Is everybody ready to order?" Bonggu demanded, eyeballing Jinsu. She noticed one of his fists was balled tightly and that he seemed to be watching her father out of the corner of his eye, but apparently wasn't quite brave enough to direct his gaze against him. Jinsu hastily looked down at the menu to see that most of it was written in French – trust her father to choose a European-style restaurant. She picked the first item off the mains, not entirely sure what it was but figuring it would probably be good anyway, since the restaurant was supposed to have a good reputation, and pretended not to see the knowing smirk Bonggu shot her at her actions when he took the menu off her. The second Bonggu left the room – after spending a few minutes hovering irritably at Jinsu's father's shoulder while he took his time choosing – Jinsu turned back to Noah.

"Was there anything other than the clocks that gave it away?" she asked.

"People were asking me the same questions that they'd asked me fifteen minutes before," he said. "And somebody knocked over a paint can they'd knocked over fifteen minutes before I made the hop as well. The clean floor when I stepped out of the machine was a bit of a giveaway, really."

"And what would happen if you, say, got an injury or really sick or died or something in the time machine?" Jinsu's mother piped up. "Would you still continue to exist?"

Noah scratched his chin. "It's a very complicated bit of science," he admitted. "But whatever form you're in when you enter the machine, we're pretty certain that if anything happened to that form in a different time, you'd retain it until it naturally ran its course even if you returned to the present. What you're effectively doing is placing those in the machine into a time vacuum to allow them to travel. So no, if you died in the machine or in a time you'd travelled to, you'd cease to exist. I don't think that all traces of your entire existence would be wiped out, though. It's probably more that you'd just vanish from the timepoint at which you entered the machine and then never return."

"MIA, so to speak," interjected Jinsu's father.

"Yes, exactly."

A sudden thought that she was amazed she'd never had before abruptly struck Jinsu, and she turned to the man sitting opposite her. "Father, now that it's built and you know that it works, what will you be using the Attayear for?"

Her father didn't answer the question. "Oh, Jinsu darling, I almost forgot to tell you: for your help doing the interior up, we thought you might like to name the machine. Ships have names, and this is a time ship, so why not?"

Distracted, Jinsu gnawed on her bottom lip. "But I thought it was already called the Attayear."

"No, no, that's the model name," her father said absently, twisting around in his chair. "Where did that blasted waiter go?"

Right on cue, Bonggu returned through the door, looking even grumpier than before, with three plates balanced on one arm and holding the final one in his other hand. Without much ceremony, he plonked all four dishes down – Jinsu twitched a little due to the thud! not being quite as heavy on Noah's as for the rest of them, which all appeared to have been placed with equal aggression, not so much due to her classmate's obvious aggravation as the fact that the thuds would have sounded better if all of them had been the same – and replaced Jinsu's knife with a steak one before offering cheese and pepper to Noah and to Jinsu's mother, who'd chosen the same pasta dish. Just as he was leaving the room again, Park Jiwoon cleared his throat.

"Bring us some water, would you?"

Bonggu gave a smile that looked like a grimace and disappeared. Jinsu looked down at her rump steak. If she tilted her head and squinted, it looked pleasingly like Australia, which made her calm about its irregular shape.

"We were thinking about having the name painted on the side in grey," Jinsu's mother said excitedly as though there had been no interruption.

Jinsu dug into her steak, satisfied that she'd managed to order something she quite liked by pure accident. "Can't we just keep it as the Attayear?" she asked. "I like that name." Jimin was the one who had officially suggested Attayear years before, but it was the product of an entire sleepless night of talking to Jinsu about potential names that had brought it about when he videocalled her one night from America, horribly homesick. One of his friends had discovered the word attaboy and apparently kept using it the entire time, which had been annoying the heck out of Jimin, and after finding out what it meant, Jinsu had suggested somehow combining it with year for the name of the time machine, which he was supposed to be coming up with for their father.

Her father looked a bit miffed at her lukewarm response but managed a smile. "If that's what you want, dear, yes."

"Shame," mumbled Noah out of the corner of his mouth as everybody dug in. "We were hoping to paint it blue and call it the Tardis."

Jinsu choked as she attempted not to laugh with food in her mouth.

Bonggu swanned back in at that moment with a glass bottle of water bearing the restaurant's name and several glasses, and made to pour out the water for them.

Jinsu's father reached for his glass. "Just one moment. Is that tap water?"

Jinsu's mother continued eating, completely unaffected, while Jinsu cringed. She could see the cogs in Bonggu's brain working as he tried to figure out the better answer to the question, but she knew her father well enough to be able to tell it was a trick one. Much as she didn't get on with Bonggu, this was just embarrassing.

"No, sir, it's bottled water," he said smoothly, holding up the bottle so that everybody could see.

"Bottled from a source or from the tap?" Jinsu's father persisted.

Bonggu managed an almost believable smile. "Finest bottled spring water for our finest guests," he said. "We couldn't possibly allow you to drink dirty, cheap tap water. Now, if you'll allow me..." He gestured to the glass.

"Shouldn't you check with the guests first before slapping something on the bill like that?" Jinsu's father protested.

"It's normal customer policy to request tap water if that's what they want," Bonggu pointed out, his tone abruptly snappish again. Jinsu curled back into her seat. "However, if it really displeases you to add two thousand won to the bill, I'm sure the manager will let me give it to you on the house."

Yet another tense silence settled in as he glared at Jinsu's father, who glared right back. Noah broke it by draining his glass of lemonade and holding it out.

"Any chance of a refill?" he asked.

Bonggu's expression relaxed at once.

"Sure," he murmured in banmal, putting the bottle down on the table and disappearing once more with the glass. Jinsu looked at her own glass of lemonade and how low the drink had got, abruptly wishing she'd asked too. It was probably going to annoy Bonggu to send him on an extra trip, and that was the last thing she wanted to do right at that moment.

Her mother must have cottoned on to what she was thinking about, because she said, sympathetically, "Aw, honey, he should have taken yours too. Talk about service..."

"It's fine, Mum, I'll ask when he gets back," Jinsu murmured, though she had no intention of doing so. Better just to go for the water, which she did, and the meal continued, Noah filling them in on more details about the machine.

When Bonggu returned, he was looking marginally less tense but no less disgruntled. Exchanging Noah's full glass of lemonade for the now empty bottle of water, he scanned the table briefly.

"Anything else I can get for anybody?" he asked, blatantly reluctant at having to pose the question at all and already making to leave the room in the hopes that nobody would say yes.

He probably could have spared himself the trouble of optimism, Jinsu thought glumly as she chewed through a mushroom, because her father was never going to be happy to let something go.

"I'd appreciate some mustard to go with this gammon," he announced.

"Noted, sir."

Hoping probably as much as Bonggu that that would be the last of it, Jinsu started cutting up the roasted tomato on her plate.

It wasn't, though. When Bonggu returned with the house mustard, it was the wrong kind of mustard, and then why isn't there a mustard menu? and then apparently the meal was now too cold to enjoy. Bonggu offered to have it reheated, but the offer was refused because it would dry the gammon out and make it tasteless, and the compromise of gravy was ruined because Jinsu's father moved at the wrong moment and nearly sent Bonggu flying, the gravy ending up all down his uniform – he returned with what looked like minor burn marks on his face. Then it was an absent-minded more wine would be nice ("Sir, I'm a minor, let me just get somebody of age who you can repeat that to"), and finally, just as Jinsu's father settled with his meal and everybody else was almost finished, Bonggu asked for probably the fourteenth time if there was anything else he could get them – clearly some kind of company policy to ensure the answer was no and the guests were happy.

"Oh, dessert menus," Jinsu's father remembered, for once sounding genuine rather than spiteful, but it only lasted those three words. "And a different waiter for the desserts."

Jinsu almost thought Bonggu had signed his own death warrant with his reply.

"Oh, I've already asked the manager about that, sir, believe me," he said as he cleared the three empty plates, stacking them neatly onto his left arm. "Unfortunately he refused."

Jinsu noticed Noah wince: he was clearly thinking the same thing as her, and that was that her father looked likely to explode.

"I should like to see—"

"—The manager about my insolent behaviour dealing with incredibly difficult guests, of course," Bonggu nodded, heading for the door. "Our motto is know what your guest wants before they ask, after all. He'll be in in just a moment."

Deciding the jibes were getting a bit much and that she didn't want to be there for the confrontation with the manager – who, if he was determined to keep Bonggu serving guests he obviously was having problems with, was probably not the kind of complete pushover Jinsu's father would want to be handling in that kind of situation – Jinsu excused herself to go to the bathroom, saying that she'd be happy with ice cream for dessert. A massive hubbub of noise hit her as she crossed the main part of the restaurant and followed the signs for the restrooms down a passage near the kitchen. As she rounded the corner by the kitchen doors, she heard Bonggu's voice speaking frantically.

"Hyung, I can't go back in there, I just can't. Please can't you go in there and talk to them? If he starts doing it again I'm going to throw the dessert all over him, I just can't hack it!"

Frowning, Jinsu stopped. She was a little divided about whose side to take – Bonggu had never been pleasant to her, but even she thought her father had gone a little too far, whether or not he hated Bonggu's entire family.

A deep voice responded to Bonggu, but Jinsu couldn't make out what the man was saying.

"No it's not!" Bonggu almost wailed. "Hyung, I know we're short-staffed tonight with too many new people and everything and I don't care if I'm the star waiter or whatever you want to call me – it's just humiliating! My sister's best friend's fiancé is in there and it's the family that ruined mine – I can't do it! They're even talking about the machine in front of me when—"

The deep voice responded again, and Jinsu, feeling guilty about eavesdropping, hurried away in search of the bathrooms again.

There were already three other ladies there, so she had to wait her turn, but Jinsu whiled away the time looking in the mirror and trying to determine if her makeup really was looking just a tad uneven or if her eyes were playing tricks on her and sending her paranoid. Finally, once she was done and had washed her hands one extra time just to be sure that they were really clean, she left the bathroom and headed back down the passage towards the main part of the restaurant, absently inspecting a chipped fingernail.

She very nearly collided with Bonggu just outside the kitchen, and he looked absolutely furious.

"Watch it!" he snapped, vigorously dusting off icing sugar that had launched itself off the plate in his hand and onto his clothing. "God, do you have eyes?"

Jinsu gulped.

"Jesus, now I have to get yet another dessert for your bloody father," he hissed as he inspected the plate. "If I get fired for this then it's your fault." He raised his head to glare at her. "And now I have to change again or he'll have a fit about me looking unpresentable for a second time. You rich people are all b*stards."

He shoved the plate at her and began to stalk off.

"B-Bonggu!" she called out, unsure what she was supposed to do with the plate, and grimacing at the icing sugar which was now sticking to her hands.

He whirled around, seething. "What?"

"Y... your face..." She pointed lamely. "A-and your name tag—"

"F*ck off, Jinsu," he spat at her. "You and your family can just f*ck right off."

He stormed away before Jinsu had the chance or the courage to point out that if he didn't straighten up his name tag and get rid of the icing sugar on his face, her father wouldn't be letting things drop anytime soon.

Chapter 5

Jinsu's father wanted Jinsu to stay home the next day to talk about the Attayear and so that she could look round the machine, and Jinsu didn't actually know whether that or going to school was a worse idea. Her father had been excruciatingly embarrassing the previous evening and she just wanted a break from him and everything to do with time machines, but on the other hand, she doubted it was something Chae Bonggu would have taken well either.

In the end, she opted for feigning illness and refused to get out of bed. For good measure, she'd locked her door and wouldn't let anybody in so they couldn't check on her. She'd never played sick before and her parents knew that she wanted to be left alone when she was ill, and so they just left it. Jinsu suspected that some of it was to do with her father not wanting to waste time or energy on his supposedly ill daughter when he had better things to do.

"But Dad does that," Jimin told her patiently. "All parents are embarrassing. You just have to put up with it, Jin."

"Chae Bonggu is going to kill me when I get back to school." Jinsu picked moodily at the yellow pillow case. She was lying on her stomach with her duvet drawn up over her head, the phone on loudspeaker in front of her. "I don't even like the guy, but Dad was actually awful to him. And God, Ji, Yejun's cousin was there too and saw it all. Yejun's entire family is going to judge me so hard. And Noah seems like a nice person too – now he's going to project Father onto me."

"I think somebody clever enough to build a time machine is more than capable of figuring out that you're not your father, Jinsu, I wouldn't worry. But hey, aren't you supposed to be in school? What time is is?"

"I'm sick," Jinsu replied pitifully.

Jimin gave a fake, very unconvincing high-pitched cough. Jinsu would have given him the finger if it was on video call. Sensing that Jinsu probably wasn't going to deign him with a response, Jimin searched for something else to talk about.

"When you say Yejun's cousin Noah, do you mean a small kind of chubby guy with a fringe practically in his eyes who spends half his time speaking in Chinese and trying to get people to call him Xiumin?"

"What? No. No, Noah is buff, Jimin, very buff." Jinsu frowned, trying to call the man to mind again. "He's getting married soon—"

"Holy God, I think we are talking about the same person," Jimin interrupted. "Wow, he must have been working out. Amazing what a girlfriend can do for you. He was in the year below me at university and everybody kind of knew him because he was the sort of person we all expected to go off and become a librarian or a monk. And now he's working on a time machine. Rad."

Jinsu fake gagged. "Never use that word again."

"What, rad? But it's rad to use rad, Jin, you don't understand—"

"I'm hanging up."

"Love you!" he managed to call out before Jinsu rang off. Seconds later, a text popped up that read rude, but Jinsu merely texted back with the time (twenty-one minutes past nine) and pointed out that he ought to be working, and that just because he was the CEO of a small branch of the family company, it didn't mean he could slack off.

Too busy working to respond to your message right now, please try again later, popped up on her screen almost the second she sent her message and Jinsu snorted. If she hadn't known her brother was twenty-six, she never would have believed it. Rolling over, she poked her nose out of the duvet.

The blank ceiling stared back at her. Back when she'd been younger and afraid of the dark, it had had glow-in-the-dark stars up on it, but she'd organised and reorganised the little pieces of plastic so many times into constellations and then into symmetrical patterns (because the constellations didn't look neat enough) and then back again (because the patterns didn't look natural enough) that her mother had eventually taken them away. Now, the ceiling was just an expanse of white, recently repainted because a little discolouration due to the age of the house had constantly been bugging Jinsu.

Her room itself was a large one, over twenty square feet, and with a single gigantic window that was almost floor to very tall ceiling. and a good ten feet wide. The walls were a faint shade of magnolia on her mother's insistence, though since most of the rest of the house was in pastel colours, Jinsu really had no objection. Three large bookcases lined the wall against which the head of her bed rested. The wall opposite gave way to the en suite bathroom and the walk-in closet, and beside the door for the wall opposite the window, there was a desk and vanity, the former used much more regularly than the latter. The space in the middle of the room had housed a portable dance floor when Jinsu had been about ten, though she'd not used it very often, and was decorated with a lavish oval floor rug that clashed horribly with the fluffy white one Jinsu stepped out onto every morning when she got out of bed. Really, at some point, she was going to have to go through a textile catalogue to rectify that, though it would also mean reupholstering the covers of the two squishy armchairs by the oval rug since they'd been covered specifically to go with it. It was either that or swap her fluffy rug for something else, and Jinsu was averse to that. There was nothing better than sinking bare feet ankle-deep into warm material in a cold room.

By mid-afternoon, Mrs Kwon had bribed Jinsu out of her room for food, established that she wasn't actually ill, and got Jinsu to go down to her father's office to apologise. He wasn't nearly as angry as she'd thought or feared.

"You're home today; that's all I really care about," he said dismissively as Jinsu stood on the other side of his desk. Jinsu was well past hoping that it might be because he'd wanted to spend quality time with her. She couldn't actually remember the last time he had done – not because her memory was faulty, but because it had happened so long ago that she probably hadn't been old enough to remember it.

At long last, he looked up from the papers he'd been perusing while Jinsu had been speaking to him and scanned her up and down. Jinsu's hands were behind her back and she automatically started fidgeting, uncomfortable.

"Jinsu, must you dress so casually?"

Jinsu didn't bother to protest because she knew that it was useless, but she couldn't help feeling a bit hurt. She really hadn't wanted to get out of bed at all, and even though she wasn't ill, she had been feeling pretty miserable and so had picked out a light floral dress. Admittedly, it was more a summer one than a winter one, but it was pretty and fitted her well (and came down to mid-thigh, as per parental requirements), and she knew that she really didn't look that bad.

Her father sighed. "Never mind. Pointless to go and change now. I'll ring for the driver and we can go round to see the Attayear in half an hour or so. Sit down."

Jinsu did. Even if the wooden back of the chair hadn't been uncomfortable, she would have found it almost impossible to relax in her father's presence.

"I did a press release for the Attayear this morning," he announced, sliding a thin plastic file across the desk to her. "I suggest you read through it. Tomorrow I'll be going to a press conference with a couple of sponsors and a few governmental officials, but it's likely people at school will ask about it and there will probably be reporters too. You're not to tell them any more than in the actual release here."

Jinsu nodded.

"And since you're in the public eye, you're not allowed to let me down," he went on. "Your behaviour and presentation must be absolutely impeccable from now on—"

Jinsu opened her mouth to protest that she was more than presentable and well behaved in public already, but then realised that it was useless to argue.

"I was also discussing with your mother about you getting married," her father continued, apparently oblivious to how insulted Jinsu was feeling. "Not while you're still sixteen, of course – you must at least graduate high school first – but at least announcing your engagement at a time when everybody's already interested would raise the shares in the company quite considerably and garner outside interest as well. If you really didn't like the man then we could always break it off after a year or two when things have quietened down, but we'll probably never been in the spotlight in quite the same way again and it's worth squeezing it as much as we can."

It could have been worse, Jinsu thought, but it was genuinely unfair that he expected to dictate her life to such a degree, especially when Jimin was a full ten years older and nothing about marriage had ever even been mentioned for him. She stood up.

"Father, this is completely unfair. I'm not a commodity to give you points on the stock market, and I'm certainly not going to marry somebody you pick out for me. You didn't do this to Jimin—"

"Jimin is a man, Jinsu, of course I didn't. Don't be so ridiculous. We did actually look around for him when he was your age, but there was nobody suitable and so we gave up."

"There's nobody suitable for me either, and beside—"

"Before you start on any feminist nonsense or blow your sense of self importance out of proportion," her father interrupted, "the other reason I called you here is to talk about the Attayear's inaugural timehop."

Reluctantly, Jinsu sat back down. The seat was still warm from her body heat earlier.

"As you know, there have already been test runs, and the machine works well." Jinsu's father steepled his fingers together and appraised her closely. "We have official endorsement on the government, but we need to be seen to be charitable and also put to rest any fears or suspicions that we or the government are intending to use the Attayear to go back and change the past to manipulate present events. To symbolise the significance of time travel, the president and I have decided that the inaugural hop will be done by the students announced as project winners at the youth science convocation or whatever the thing I'm presiding at is, so that in the present, our future will go back to meet our past. There will be full security and everything, of course, and it will be done on a tourist basis – a time period far enough back not to have major repercussions on us now, or temptation for anybody to manipulate anything, assuming that we have the ability to manipulate at all rather than just being spectators of the period, and probably only staying the equivalent of a few hours. The hope is that the Attayear prototype will be used for research, and who better than our brightest young researchers?"

It took a strong effort not to purse her lips and narrow her eyes. Jinsu wondered how much of this was out of the goodness of her father's shrivelled heart or a publicity stunt – or even the president insisting that such a great invention had to be put to public use, like the internet, rather than private use where it would be all too easy to meddle without being accountable. It sounded like a very misguided idea to unleash a bunch of teenagers on a time machine, but the idea of going back into the past did seem undeniably cool. Jinsu's mind drifted to the possibilities – a time when the two Koreas had been united, what the country had been like when there had been a monarchy, whether the Korean archers really had been as formidable as they'd learnt about in history class.

"You're my daughter, so you are of course superior to all the other students who will be at the convention."

Jinsu winced at the snobbery.

"Self-evidently, this means that you will have to be on the podium alongside me. You have worked on the Attayear, so I see no reason why that shouldn't be the major project associated with you. Besides, as my daughter and one of the top young physicists in the country, I see no reason why you couldn't announce or present some of the awards with me." He looked down at his desk and started shifting papers about. "I expect a proposal of which periods of history you think the public would be most interested in sending a group of school children to on my desk by this evening. That's all."

So offended was Jinsu that once in the confines of her room, the first thing she did was ring her brother again to tell him about it.

"Just tell him to f*ck off," Jimin advised. "He's being a massive d*ck."

Jinsu flailed miserably on her duvet. "I still live at home, Jimin. He'll just make my life worse."

"I'll tell him he's being a massive d*ck, then," Jimin said. "You're his daughter, not a servant. He never treated me like this."

"Yeah, but you're not the neurotic younger child he never wanted who can't carry on the family name." Jinsu sighed.

"True." Jimin was pensive. "Listen, I can't talk long because my secretary will get annoyed. I knew Dad could be unreasonable, but seriously. On top of everything else, he even insinuated that your project on solar roof buckets to turn rain as well as sunlight into renewable energy wasn't worth it if he only wants you there in connection with the Attayear. It was a good project. I showed it to a couple of my friends' old professors and they said it was good."

A female voice spoke in the background. Jimin replied to it and then returned to Jinsu, promising that he'd ring her back in the evening because he had to get back to work. Mimicking her movements that morning, Jinsu flopped over onto her back, but she didn't have time to even start contemplating the misery of her existence before the door burst open and Saeeun swanned in.

"Jinsu, your father wants you smartly dressed and downstairs in five minutes. Something about going somewhere important?"

Jinsu only realised just how rotten her father had made her feel when she couldn't bring herself to muster up any enthusiasm about seeing the time machine. It was almost worse than the prospect of going to school and facing the backlash that was bound to appear from Chae Bonggu the next day.

Chapter 6

To Noah and Jinsu's mutual relief, her father more or less wanted to dump her at the Attayear warehouse with a strict briefing on ensuring she knew enough about it to hold an intelligent conversation and, in his words, "see off any nosy children at the convocation who think they know better than you". He granted them half an hour and left.

There was a very awkward silence as the two of them watched him walk away. Jinsu fiddled nervously with her fingers. Noah looked around him at the various workers. A few technicians were running tests, putting the various computers of the Attayear through their paces and seeing if they could do any refinements. Jinsu noticed a mechanic perched on the top of the machine who appeared to be measuring something.

"Well," said Noah. "The general has given his orders, so we probably ought to get on with it unless we both want to be courtmartialed." He turned away and surveyed the time machine before them.

Jinsu cleared her throat. "Sorry," she said. "A-about yesterday—"

Noah looked back over his shoulder at her. "I take it you don't mind me saying that your father can be an absolute douche sometimes?"

"Oh, no, no, not at all," Jinsu said hastily before realising what she'd just agreed to. "I-I mean—"

Noah snorted. "How unfilial," he teased. "Don't worry about it. You can't do anything about it, unfortunately. I was already aware of it because he's a tough boss to work for even though engineering something like this is more or less my dream job, and I heard about the lawsuits years before I signed the contract, of course, but I wasn't aware of quite how bad the animosity still was. I've never seen Bonggu like that before, much less your father. Baek's usually a very friendly kid."

Jinsu pursed her lips and said no more. Noah seemed to realise he was touching a nerve.

"I apologise," he said. "Anyway, shall we make a start?"

Even though she'd been inside the Attayear before while she was preparing the interior of the living quarters and then helping to decorate it, Jinsu had never properly had the chance to appreciate just how big it was. It was also the first time she'd seen it without it being covered in scaffolding, and at first glance, anybody would have thought they were building a very fat miniature rocket. It was about two storeys tall, the girth of a house, and gleaming white.

"So, first thing I have to say," said Noah, "the white was not my choice, because just imagine going back to the beginning of the Silla dynasty in something made from solid titanium with a white plastic coating. It'd probably be taller than all the buildings there and very conspicuous. How would somebody from 30BC even attempt to comprehend what they were looking at? I was all for camouflage instead, but alas I was not on the exterior design team and got overruled by showoffs."

It was going to be an entertaining tour, Jinsu could tell. Smothering a smile, she listened with interest as he moved on past the dimensions to all the prototypes that had failed until he was hired ("because nobody's as good as me, you see"), although with each one, significant steps had been made.

"You could get about twenty-five to thirty people on this comfortably," he said as they stepped over the threshold, bypassing what looked to be a series of state-of-the-art security instruments. The hydraulic doors hissed shut behind them, and as Jinsu gazed at the sleek trappings of her surroundings, she couldn't help feeling like she'd just stepped into a sci-fi movie.

Noah referred to the space they were standing in as the atrium and pressed an index finger to a dimple on the nearest wall. Immediately, there was a responding beep and a panel slid away to reveal a screen. He toyed about with it for a bit, and Jinsu saw him through maps, plans, statistics and various other data.

"This is just a general information screen," he told her. "Anybody can use it. Tells you where you are, the weather, map of the area from the time you're in – all the useful stuff. It's got a blueprint of the Attayear on it too, but this place is small enough for most people to get to know their way around pretty quickly."

The Attayear was circular, so they continued on round on the ground floor, circling the main room via passage that felt a little like a tube. The silver-grey carpet was thick enough to muffle their footfalls and for Jinsu to be able to feel her feet sinking into it, and the passage didn't have the austerity and harsh white glare of the atrium. She smile to herself as she recognised the colour scheme she'd personally picked out, alongside the various narrow shelves for decorations such as flowers and pictures every few feet to brighten it up. The place was lit by continuous strip lights, one to each side of the curved ceiling in a manner that reminded Jinsu a little of the emergency floor lighting on a plane. They went round the kitchen, the gym and all the other communal areas before taking the short flight of stairs up to the top floor.

It wasn't until they were on the walkway that was ringed on the outside by the sleeping spaces and bathrooms that Jinsu got her first ever glance of the heart of the machine. Noah stopped just a little way along the walkway and turned to look down over the railings, one of his toes scuffing almost childishly against the metal platform and making a harsh grating noise. Jinsu joined him to look over just in time to see several people staring up, curious as to who was upstairs.

The circular room in the middle housed banks of computers. There might have been other machinery in there, but it was frankly negligible compared to the vast array of screens, keyboards and motherboards. Even though it was much quieter than Jinsu would have expected, there was a steady, omnipresent hum coming from the room.

One of the men sitting at a computer took off his headphones and waved up at Noah. Noah waved back.

"That is currently the world's most advanced supercomputer," Noah told Jinsu with evident pride, "and by far the most ambitious thing I will ever build in my life."

"Oh, you're a computer engineer?" Jinsu asked, hardly able to contain her excitement.

"I'm kind of all three – engineer, IT specialist and computer engineer." Noah scratched bashfully at the back of his head. "That's why I was hired. But yes, I'm a fully qualified computer engineer and it's pretty niche. Most people don't think there's a difference between us and IT specialists, but no IT specialist could build what you're looking at right now."

Jinsu nodded, resting her forearms on the banister and leaning further over it.

"It took just over a year to get all the programmes correctly coded and written, and that was with a lot of them already drafted from previous attempts." Noah hummed to himself. Jinsu nodded again and then gave an abrupt start.

"Hang on. You told me yesterday you're only twenty-five."

"Correct."

"How did you manage to get all this done? How are you so good at it all already?"

Noah laughed. "I graduated four years ago, but I signed on here during the summer of my first year at university, so I've been here about six. My teachers considered me a genius so I actually did a couple of qualifications back when I was in high school. Occupied me instead of going to a hagwon, which most other people in my class did."

"What programming language did you use?"

Noah laughed again. "Honey, I can't give away all the secrets, you know." He hesitated at the blatant disappointment on Jinsu's face and settled for a compromise. "I can tell you that we wrote the operating system for it."

Jinsu's jaw dropped.

When Jinsu had recovered from the amount of information Noah continued to ply her with about the computers (he was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was studying computer science and offered to bring her back to take a proper look at the Attayear's control room when there weren't people working there), she found herself with questions.

The most important one was how the Attayear was powered. The computers alone probably drank up a phenomenal amount of energy, but the machine as a whole had to be powered to move, and all the electricity needed to be powered. On their way into the Attayear, Noah had pointed out massive cables that were currently providing all the energy for the machine to function, but if they got stuck back in the prehistoric age, or anywhere before about the 1930s, there would be no way of ensuring a constant supply.

Noah's response was first to take her up to the nose and out of a little window to a precarious metal walkway barely as wide as they were. Looking up, Jinsu saw something she hadn't spotted before.

The surface of the Attayear was not nearly as smooth as the eye was led to believe from a distance, or even from the ground. It was entirely made up of panels. With a grunt, Noah managed to pull one out a little, and Jinsu caught sight of familiar dark material.

"This is all solar panelling," she said with realisation.

"Mmhmm." He let the panel go again. "There are levels next to the doors of various rooms upstairs and downstairs, if you noticed them, and they swivel the panels around, which provides an automatic connection for energy to be transferred and stored. I'll take you down into the engine rooms in a second, but on the way we'll also see the storeroom with the tellurium and lithium and other essentials, though hopefully the metals won't be needed because I don't think many people have the expertise to repair solar panels or make lithium batteries."

The engine rooms presented another surprise to Jinsu, because they were accessible only by a pair of trapdoors directly opposite each other on either side of the Attayear on its lower level. A tunnel walkway connected the two, meaning that in an emergency – or even just a general hurry – there would be no need to go back into the main body of the Attayear and then circumnavigate the computer room.

"Were these built underground?" she panted, trying to keep up with Noah as he descended the latter into the left engine room at inhuman speed.

"No, actually, the floor of the warehouse you entered on was a false one because otherwise these beasties got in the way of the scaffolding and made it dangerous." He patted the wall the metal ladder was attached to. "I should probably mention there's also a pretty large emergency fossil fuel tank that we've just climbed past as well. Can't be too careful just trying to go off renewable energy. Don't want to get stuck in a different time."

Visions of being stuck a couple of hundred years in the future flashed through Jinsu's mind. "It wouldn't necessarily be that bad."

"It's basically a choice between being too hygienic for the past or too technologically inept for the future, sweetcheeks. I think I'd much rather be home."

Once she was duly impressed by the size and the horsepower of the twin engine rooms – Noah asserted that with a larger fuel tank, the Attayear would have had the power of a rocket at launch, and Jinsu wasn't sure whether or not he was exaggerating – Jinsu was taken back up to what Noah was now calling the main deck. Jinsu quietly filed away the information that Noah found it hard to contain his inner sci-fi buff and was tempted to call the computer room the bridge.

"I told you that each room has a separate mini-computer and can therefore have a separate climate, didn't I?" Noah asked absently as he poked his head into the computer room.

"Yep. And the time-lock things that aren't actually time locks."

He gave a theatrical sigh. "D*mn, I'm running out of fun nuggets to tell you. Oh well. People are still busy here – we can walk through, but it's best not to stop and distract." He grinned at her. "Besides, I think you'll like the pièce de resistance."

Intrigued, Jinsu followed him. It was very tempting to stop and inspect the motherboards and try to read the codes flashing across the screens, but then Noah tapped her on the arm and pulled her to a halt.

She let out a gasp.

"We call that the Lintel of Time," Noah told her. "Couldn't really give it a jokey name, all things considered."

Three staggeringly ornate clocks, somehow managing not to be gaudy in spite of the gold leaf decorating the lace-like patterns of iron framing the faces, were embedded in a large oak lintel. Despite the material of the Attayear being largely metal and plastic, the oak didn't even look out of place. She suspected her father's doing, given how polished the oak was, since it must have cost an absolute fortune for the lintel beam alone, let alone the clocks.

"The hands," Jinsu said dizzily. "The hands on the clocks are absolutely gorgeous."

Delicate and elegant, the hands lay motionless on two of the clock faces, but the second hand of the clock on the left was steadily making its rounds, the needle-sharp point tipped in silver.

"I will concede your father has good taste."

Mention of her father coupled with the time had Jinsu nearly in a panic. "Dad said thirty minutes and we've been here nearly three hours!"

Noah waved a cheeky hand. "He'll live. Besides, this is all I have to show you."

Not entirely relaxed, Jinsu stole another peek at the clocks. She was almost tempted to ask Noah if he could take her on a timehop a couple of hours back so that her father wouldn't rag her for lateness, but she suspected he'd say no. After all, there was probably still a lot of work to do if they really were going to let winners of the science competition take a trip in the Attayear. Home was written in gold leaf under the clock that was in motion, and the one on the far right had time spent under it, almost in gold leaf. It looked a little different to the others, but it wasn't until Jinsu squinted at it that she realised it was because it was designed like a stopwatch. She wasn't sure whether or not to grimace – the obsessively compulsively tidy part of her brain wanted the three clocks to match up perfectly, but then the utility of the last one would be lost, and besides, they already looked incredibly pretty...

Light suddenly shone on the three clocks and bright colours swirled around on the quartz surfaces before coalescing into dark blue numbers. The two unmoving clocks displayed 00:00, and under the central one, a panel in the wood also lit up, showing the words destination unknown: time period unknown. The clock on the left just had a digital display of the time that it was already displaying.

There was a triumphant yell of "it works!" from behind them. Rousing cheers followed.

"This is really cool," Jinsu said in awe. "Really, really cool."

Noah smiled at her and began to lead the way towards the Attayear's main doors. "It is. The lintel's not fully finished yet,"

Jinsu frowned. It had looked pretty finished to her.

"I mean, we still need to add the name of the ship to it. Above the clocks, in gold like the rest of the decorations. It'll look even more stunning."

Jinsu wasn't sure whether it was appropriate to label a time machine as a ship of any kind and so put it down to Noah's inner sci-fi nerd.

And no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible to hide her delight at the prospect of the name she and her brother had chosen for the time machine to be proudly emblazoned right above the most important part of it.

Chapter 7

Friday morning got off to a spectacular start. Jinsu was rudely awakened from reminiscing about the completed Attayear, and Noah's chipper personality as he'd shown her around it, by the realisation that she was running late for school. It felt like she was doing everything on the wrong foot as she scurried around her impeccably neat room gathering the things she needed and then high-tailed it down to the kitchen for food.

Mrs Kwon was already putting everything away when she got there.

"Sungwoo's waiting for you outside the front door," Mrs Kwon told her, pressing a tupperware box into her hands. "You don't have time to eat at the table so I suggest you get that down you while you're in the car. Have a good day at school, darling!" She bustled away into the pantry.

Jinsu almost whimpered with anxiety at being left the choice between ignoring Mrs Kwon and eating like a dignified person at the table, school timings be damned, or the potential and likely messiness of eating in the car. When she saw Mrs Kwon returning, she settled for punctuality and messy eating and hurried out to the front of the house.

The car's engine was idling and Sungwoo was flicking through radio stations when Jinsu skidded to a halt to yank open the passenger seat.

"You seem flustered this morning, Miss," Sungwoo commented. Breathless, Jinsu nodded. He checked that the doors were shut and that Jinsu was belted up before starting the car up and pulling out into the driveway. As they joined the main road, Jinsu surveyed her box of food with concern, and then decided it was better not to upset Sungwoo by eating in the car – which he hated – and that she could eat it as a snack instead, or use it to make up a larger lunch than usual.

Jinsu had just stepped out of the car when her phone pinged. Wondering what her brother might have wanted, she unlocked the screen, only to find a text from her cousin.

Confused, she looked at the name on her screen for a good long moment before opening it up. Chanyeol almost never texted her, and she was pretty sure the last time he had done so was the best part of a year ago when they'd been the only two youngsters at a gigantic family gathering her brother had been unable to attend and he'd wanted rescuing from a senile great-aunt.

Apparently, Chanyeol had decided it was time to repay the favour. The message was a simple don't come to school today.

Jinsu just stood there for several moments, trying to work out how to react. Sungwoo had already driven off, but it was just so unlike Chanyeol to message her that she wasn't sure what to do or what his motive behind the text might be.

Before she could make up her mind, the warning bell sounded, making her jump, and she scarpered into the building. She'd never received a black mark for being late before, and she wasn't about to start now.

Nothing seemed out of place during either first or second period, which she went directly to with all her books as she'd had no time to drop by her locker, and by the time she was heading towards her homeroom class, where her English class was held, she'd completely forgotten about Chanyeol and messages and anything else. There were a couple of girls chatting in the passage outside as people came and went, and she recognised the taller one as Yoo Dahee since they'd been in the same maths class together the previous year. Unshouldering her backpack in preparation to get into the room and set her stuff up for class, Jinsu headed for the doorway.

Dahee's head came up and a split second later, she and her friend were inside the classroom and closing the door, very deliberately, in Jinsu's face. Jinsu reached out with her right hand to stop them. For a moment, she and Dahee, faced each other through the small gap between door and doorpost, Jinsu fighting the lump in her throat to ask Dahee to stand aside and let her in, but then Dahee smiled sweetly.

"Oh look, Minyoung, it's the b*tch."

There was a loud slam and the next thing Jinsu was aware of was excruciating pain in her fingers. Breathless and with tears springing to her eyes, she stared at where her hand was trapped in the door. Then it opened a notch again.

Jinsu's backpack slid off her arm and she cradled her hand, too shocked to give voice to how much it hurt. Two of her knuckles were bleeding and she gazed blankly at her crushed fingers, vaguely aware of a bruise forming on one that was at an angle that suggested it was broken. She didn't even look up when somebody brushed past her and entered the classroom, but she heard Dahee laughing and Bonggu's voice, followed by Hamin saying something, and realised that they must have been the ones who'd just walked past.

For some reason, it was the humiliation of being so blatantly ignored – especially by her crush – that was the tipping point, and the tears spilt out. They must have seen her standing there like an idiot – heck, Dahee was probably laughing to them about what she'd literally just done.

Somebody cleared his throat beside her and Jinsu brushed away her tears with her free hand, glancing up to see her cousin standing there. He was scratching the back of his ear, looking incredibly awkward. His gaze dropped to her hand and he sighed, shaking his head.

"I told you so," he mumbled, stepping forward and reaching for her hand.

Jinsu snatched it back, cradling it into her chest.

"F*ck off," she told him tearfully. Chanyeol stopped, surprised, and Jinsu took advantage of that to bolt. She spent the remainder of the period hiding out in the girls' toilets on the school's third floor, and then the fourth too for good measure.

Her stomach was beginning to growl, reminding her that it was almost lunchtime, when the main door into the toilets abruptly opened. From her position seated on the floor in a locked cubicle with several paper towels soaked in cold water around her fingers, Jinsu counted three pairs of shoes. The girls were laughing.

"I can't wait to see her face when she finds out," a vaguely familiar one said. "God, it's going to be such a downfall for her. I always used to think Mr Song was such a d*ck for giving the same punishments whether you accidentally make one slip-up or you mess about the entire time, but seriously, just imagine how badly Park Jinsu's going to freak out when she discovers he's marked her down for a week of cleaning the hallways for skipping class."

"Yoo Dahee shut her hand in a door – he won't be able to punish her if she went to hospital. That's legit," pointed out another girl, and Jinsu froze, a cold feeling of dread trickling down her spine.

The first girl and the one who hadn't spoken yet laughed.

"She hasn't even been to the sickbay yet," said the first one. "I went there at the end of third period to get painkillers for my stomach cramps and I checked the log sheet. She's got nobody to vouch for her unless she quite literally walked off school grounds without permission to go to hospital, and Song will still have her up for that. You need permission to leave even if you're ill or you get in trouble."

Jinsu cursed her stupidity. She should have remembered that her maths teacher, Mr Song, was utterly unforgiving. She was going to be in so much trouble – and worse, if she got any kind of punishment or detention, her father was going to find out. Everything was digitally logged on an intranet database that parents could access to see how the students were doing, and a lot of them did monitor it as a good number of parents were very busy and didn't have time to drop off or pick up their children from school or meet the teachers even at parents' evenings.

"How long do you think it'll be before she's declared an outcast?" asked the third girl.

"Mihae, grow up. This isn't Boys over Flowers."

The third girl, Mihae, snorted. "She's only been labelled a target because of Bonggu oppa."

"He never said anything about doing this." The first girl giggled. "But everybody knows he'd be so happy if she was just gone."

There were footsteps again. "I heard her family tried to get Bonggu fired or something," the second girl said. "B*tch move, if you ask me. If I were Bonggu I would have beaten her up personally. Can I have my mascara back?"

The door shut behind them with a click.

Jinsu just sat there, wondering if she'd genuinely just sat through a situation that for all intents and purposes felt like it was straight out of a badly cliched teen novel set in a high school.

It was a good five minutes before Jinsu emerged from the cubicle, aware that if she waited too long, all the girls would come in to use the bathroom during the lunch break. After what she'd just overheard, she wasn't particularly sure she wanted to run into any of them, especially if they were from around her age group, and doubly especially if they happened to know, like, or be friends with Bonggu or somebody that he knew. If she stayed too long, then she'd have to hide in the cubicle the entire break because people would be constantly coming and going, and the lack of food she'd had that day was beginning to make her feel a bit lightheaded. Not just that, but she was going to need her books for her next lessons, and it might be a good idea to try to find Mr Song to explain to him what had happened. And any other teachers, for that matter. And to go to the sickbay so that the nurses could give her a sicknote or something.

It took some time to locate her backpack, which was no longer outside the classroom where she'd dropped it. Instead, just as she was beginning to panic, she found it tucked away between two sets of lockers near her own one. She had no idea who'd moved it there for her, but they'd also placed a chocolate bar on top of it with a little note in handwriting she didn't recognise that said cheer up.

It really did cheer her up. She felt a smile creeping onto her lips as she tucked the note into her pocket and picked the chocolate bar up, intending to open it, but her right hand was still in pain and absolutely useless. Her middle and fourth fingers were both bruised almost the entire way along and her index finger was still bleeding. She couldn't even bend her fingers enough to get a proper grip on the chocolate bar's wrapper to open it. Frustrated, and feeling very uncomfortable both at how undignified it was and at the prospect of all the chemicals that went into a wrapper of that kind being in her mouth, she bit a hole in it instead and ripped it.

"I thought it was just your father that behaved like an animal around people, but clearly it's genetic," said Bonggu's voice, making her whirl around. He was standing at Hamin's locker almost directly beside her, spinning a basketball around on his fingertips. Hamin was muttering to himself as he rifled through his locker, almost like a dog digging up a bone, with papers going everywhere as he searched for something. Jinsu assumed it was his student card so that he could pay for lunch, because there was nothing else urgent at that time. That said, she was very surprised that she hadn't noticed them arriving, because Hamin was hardly being quiet.

She gave Bonggu a disparaging look and turned away, biting into her chocolate.

"Anyway," Bonggu went on, raising his voice. "I guess congratulations are in order. I hear you got your first ever detention. Just a step or two away from being suspended now, eh?"

The jibe made Jinsu feel irrationally angry. She'd been so proud of having such a beautifully clean record, and the idea of her doing something bad enough to get suspended was just downright offensive. Not to mention that her father would probably murder her if that ever happened. She clenched her fists, only to let out a little whimper of pain when her right hand informed her it couldn't really move.

"To be honest," said Bonggu, now adopting a mock thoughtful tone, "the fact that you've never ever been in trouble before just goes to prove how lame your life must be. Probably explains why you have no friends – hey, are you even listening to me?"

Jinsu almost spat out a no before realising that that would reveal both that she was and also that what he'd said had got to her, but Hamin piped up at that moment.

"Maybe I gave it to Minju," he said. "Actually, wait, no, I did yesterday because she forgot hers and so I gave it her so she could get food. Let's go back to the cafeteria. She should be there now."

He started off down the corridor, only to stop a few seconds later. "You coming, Baek?"

More footsteps informed Jinsu that they were both leaving.

Then the basketball smashed off the lockers by her face, narrowly missing her head. She flinched, heart pounding in her mouth.

Bonggu had never done something that even came near physically hurting her before. It was a disconcerting shock.

Chapter 8

It was a bit of a struggle to open her box of food with only one hand, but thankfully only one hand was required to eat it, and by the time she was actually faced with the food, Jinsu wasn't feeling particularly hungry. She ate a few bites, struggled to close the box again, and then went off in search of the teachers whose lessons she'd missed.

She found Mr Song first, since he was still in the classroom marking test papers, and to her absolute astonishment, he was pretty sympathetic when he saw her hand. Jinsu wondered if she was going to have to explain anything because he fixed her with a knowing eye, but all he said was "give me the name of who did it and they'll be doing your detention slot."

Jinsu didn't dare because she knew that Dahee or somebody else would take it upon themselves to get revenge, so she tried to pass it off as an accident. He gave her a disbelieving look and she quickly amended to I didn't see, but it was somebody in my English class.

"Not like you can scrub floors with your hand like that anyway," he murmured as he cancelled the detention he'd registered her for on the school intranet. Jinsu winced: whether or not she was no longer going to have to do it, her father would still be able to see she'd been given it and he was not going to be happy. He turned to her. "That's struck off on the condition that I see a medical note about that hand on my desk within the next two hours."

Jinsu nodded and hurried away to find her English teacher.

Miss Jung looked like she was going to pass out when she realised Jinsu's hand was bleeding, but happily signed her as absent before giving her a stack of paperwork and telling her that everybody had been paired off for a mini-project that involved learning selected scenes from Shakespeare plays. Jinsu was absolutely horrified, hoping against hope that she wouldn't have been paired with somebody who hated her or that she didn't get on with, especially that it wasn't Bonggu, Minyoung or Dahee. Her relief was mixed when Miss Jung smiled brightly at her and told her it was Do Kyungsoo. The boy didn't particularly like her, but she'd been forced to work with him before for an assignment during their statistics module and she at least knew that he'd pull his weight rather than being spiteful. On the other hand, they only had a week and a half to learn the scenes to perform in front of the class, and she wasn't even sure how to begin approaching Kyungsoo to ask for study dates. He'd probably shoot lasers at her from his eyes.

It could have been worse, much much worse, but even Jinsu had to admit that it couldn't really have been better.

Miss Jung insisted on her going to see the school nurse, and before the woman had even finished inspecting Jinsu's unnaturally bent fingers, her big brother appeared in the sickbay, looking flustered.

"I got a text from Yejun, of all people," he burst out. "How the f*ck does he know you've hurt your hand?"

Before Jinsu was quite aware of what was going on, she'd been bundled into the back of her brother's car and from there into the A of the nearest hospital. Jimin was half concentrating on his phone and half looking out for the doctor who'd x-rayed Jinsu's hand mere minutes after they'd stepped into the building – sometimes the clout their family name had was incredibly useful.

"Dad is furious," Jimin announced, scrolling through his notification. "Your teachers have all signed you off for the day. Shares for oil are rising on the stock market. Your P.E. teacher wants a doctor's note. Yejun's asking how you are. Wait, he's saying Junmyeon's asking how you are. Oh well, practically no difference. My secretary needs me to sign paperwork. Jimin wants to su— oh my God, not for my baby sister's ears."

Jinsu turned to him in time to see him flush almost purple with embarrassment as he slapped a hand over his mouth and continued scrolling through his messages.

"Jimin wants to what?" she asked, momentarily distracted.

"Nothing."

"Are you two sexting?"

Jimin pretended he hadn't heard, but his ears were also turning pink and the flush was beginning to creep down his neck.

"Ew." Jinsu grimaced. "You guys are gross. That's not even romantic."

"Look," said Jimin, "when you're dating somebody, you'll understand."

"Oh my God! That means you are! Too much information."

"Jimin's really worried you're a prude now."

"No, I just don't want to know about my brother's sexual habits."

Jimin considered for a moment and then brightened. He returned to his phone to tap vigorously at the screen.

"Please don't do it in a public place when I'm sitting right next to you," Jinsu muttered, catching sight of a portion of the message. He glanced sideways at her and then deleted it. Jinsu saw him type laters, babe – I'm being cockblocked right now.

The doctor returned at that point with a couple of x-rays in his hand. Jimin put his phone away and straightened up so that he looked like the businessman he actually was as the doctor closed the door of the consulting room.

"Your middle finger is broken just between the two knuckles, as you can see here," the doctor told her without preamble, pointing to the relevant part of the photo with a pen. "And your fourth finger has a hairline fracture that you can see just along here. They'll take between four to six weeks to heal, and we need to straighten out your middle finger, so we're going to give you local anaesthetic and do that now, if you've got a guardian to sign for you."

Jimin cleared his throat.

"Excellent," the doctor droned. "We'd do it even if you hadn't got a guardian to sign for you, just saying." He looked back down at the x-ray. "Your other finger will be fine if we just tape it to its neighbour. You'll need a splint on your middle finger and it would be great if you could come back in a week or so for us to x-ray again and see how it's all getting along."

Half an hour later, the siblings left the hospital, Jinsu splinted up and Jimin muttering under his breath about insurance payouts and how they were going to break the news to their father. Jinsu's hand was still numb from the anaesthetic and she idly toyed around with poking the top of her thumb, which had come away from its encounter with the door with just a cut. It just seemed so odd to her that she could see exactly what she was doing to her thumb and yet her skin receptors were just completely oblivious to it.

They went back to Jimin's office for the remainder of the working day, and then Jimin drove her back home, opting to stay for dinner. Their mother and Mrs Kwon were both horrified at the state of Jinsu's hand, but her father brushed it off, saying that splints and casts (and crutches) always made things look worse than they were and that he was sure she'd be absolutely fine in just a couple of days.

Jinsu discovered two new problems when it was time for bed: dressing (and undressing) and bathing. Both were virtually impossible with only one hand, especially when the hand that was out of action was her dominant hand. She ended up calling Jimin in to help her.

"I'm not showering you," he refused adamantly. "You're just going to have to stink."

"Jimin!" she whined, distressed. "I can't not be clean! I need to clean myself!"

"Germs are good for the immune system."

In the end, he squatted beside her in the bathroom with his eyes squeezed shut and Jinsu frustratedly trying to direct him to help her with the flannel and then with her clothes. No matter how traumatising he claimed it was, there was no getting rid of him once she was in her pyjamas and tucked up in bed. Grabbing her desk chair, he straddled it backwards and placed his chin on its back.

"So what happened?" he asked. "I'm not enough of an idiot to believe you did that to yourself, Jin. You'd have to actually do that intentionally to get that kind of result."

Hesitantly, Jinsu told him, though she left out Dahee's name because he was in protective-older-brother mode and she knew that nothing would save the girl if he had enough information to hunt her down. The more she said, the more disturbed he looked.

"Jin..." he said slowly when she stopped talking, almost choking on her own voice. "You told me Bonggu and his friends were being mean to you, but you didn't say that this was literally the entire year and several people in the years above and below. This is practically a witchhunt for you."

"It's not that bad—"

Jimin interrupted her. "They're bullies, Jinsu. It doesn't matter if they haven't done it before – somebody purposely broke your hand in the door and we could press police charges."

"I..." Jinsu went quiet. He was right, but she didn't even want to think about how the student population would react if that went public. The trouble was that she probably wouldn't be able to get the witnesses needed to confirm that it had happened, given the climate in the classroom and how many of them would always side with Dahee over Jinsu.

Jimin must have realised what was going through her head, because he sighed. "You shouldn't have to put up with this. Do you want me to see the headmaster with you on Monday morning?"

"They hate me enough already," Jinsu mumbled. "I don't want to make it worse."

"Maybe we should ask Dad if you can transfer out, then. He sent me to boarding school in the States when I was your age and your English is pretty decent."

It was Jinsu's turn to sigh. "Yeah, but you were the perfect kid he'd always wanted. He's going to say no, Ji, and you know it."

He did. The conversation went as far as "stop making yourself out to be a victim, Jinsu," and that was that. Jimin was still fuming when his girlfriend showed up on her motorbike, completely geared up in black leathers. Jinsu thought her mother was going to have a heart attack, but it was the first time anybody in the family had ever seen her father speechless.

Girlfriend-Jimin, however unorthodox, was a breath of hilarity in the otherwise fusty home. Jinsu couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed until she'd cried, and she practically giggled herself to sleep on the Saturday night. On the Sunday, Girlfriend-Jimin decided that having a third wheel on their date would be good fun, so she and Jinsu's brother invited Jinsu to join them. It was a surprisingly entertaining afternoon a little way out of Seoul watching bikes dirt-track racing. It transpired that Jimin herself was pretty good at it, but she hadn't brought her racing bike with her when she'd ridden over to the mansion – the racing thing was something she and Jimin had decided it would be better to break later to the family – and so instead told them where to place their bets. Jinsu walked away from the afternoon with nearly a million won tucked into her splint and feeling pretty giddy.

After such a fantastic weekend, during which she'd practically forgotten what had happened the previous Friday, it was a real comedown to go back to school. Between her checking into homeroom, and leaving to go to the bathroom, several people had managed to club together to vandalise her desk, all in the few minutes between their form teacher leaving and the English teacher arriving. Jinsu stood by it, her head swimming – not because she was upset, which she was, but because it was so frightfully messy. Somebody had even stuck wads of chewing gum onto the top of it, and it looked like pieces of paper had been glued onto it, too.

Jinsu could feel her hands trembling and her brain going into meltdown. She either needed to get out of the class or clean that desk now until it was the smartest in the school, but she didn't have the time and—

"Okay, Jinsu clearly didn't do this herself because her hand is incapacitated. Everybody's staying in the classroom after class until I find out who did it, and I don't care if you have lessons next."

Loud groans greeted Miss Jung's words, and Jinsu heard several people muttering something that sounded like "nice one, Jinsu, shouldda cleaned it before she got here" and "stupid idiot, now we all get punished because she couldn't be bothered to clean it up."

Once they got separated into their project pairs, Jinsu spent several minutes trying to clean the desk surface. It was tricky with only one hand, and she was more than surprised when another set of fingers entered her vision, wrapped around a little penknife, and Kyungsoo used the knife blade to flick some of the chewing gumoff the table.

"This is so childish," he grumbled as the chewing gum sailed away. It lodged in the tips of Do Minyoung's hair. Jinsu looked at him, feeling the faintest inklings of respect stirring, which was a very odd notion. A few years back, she would have considered Kyungsoo a decent person, but then he'd fallen in with Bonggu and taken to laughing at her when Bonggu did and being unnecessarily hostile for no reason, and Jinsu's good opinion of him had been lost. And in a manner that would have made Pride and Prejudice's Darcy proud, once Jinsu's good opinion of somebody was lost, it was usually lost forever. Usually the only thing that could bring it back was if the person did something to really piss off her father – unless, like Bonggu, their mere existence annoyed him.

"Nice shot," she said.

Kyungsoo gave her a blank look. "I wasn't aiming for her. I was aiming for Miss Jung."

Jinsu narrowed her eyes and decided that he didn't deserve the respect after all.

Chapter 9

The downside of working with Kyungsoo was that his English was the best in the class – and that he decided about ten minutes in that it would be much more fun to join up with Bonggu and Hamin, in part because he weirdly found the extract from Julius Caesar that they were doing much more interesting than the passage between Othello and Desdemona that he and Jinsu were supposed to be doing. When Miss Jung came round to check that they were all working rather than goofing off a little later on, Kyungsoo thoroughly embarrassed Jinsu by reciting his lines passionately and word perfectly while she was still reading them from the script. Hamin was too busy writing notes in his to really focus on what was going on, but Bonggu leant back in his chair, snickering every time Jinsu stumbled or made a mistake. The second Miss Jung was gone, Bonggu sat up properly and engaged Kyungsoo in conversation about Jinsu as though she wasn't even there.

"I feel sorry for you having to get paired up with her," he said. "You were sounding so good and she has to read the thing off the script. Pretty obvious she didn't even understand what half the words meant."

"I know I don't," Hamin mumbled, still annotating. "Does anybody know how historically accurate Julius Caesar is? Who was Julius Caesar?"

"Some Roman dude." Bonggu waved an airy hand. "It's a play – most of it's probably fantasy. Pretty sure he did actually die on the Ides of May, though."

"March," Jinsu corrected. Hamin's eyes darted briefly to her and then he turned away.

"Oh, shush, nobody wants your opinion," Bonggu said patronisingly.

Fed up, Jinsu got to her feet and stalked back over to her vandalised desk. She slumped down in her seat and got out one of the English books they were encouraged to read in their free time each term, no motivation left to learn her lines. Kyungsoo came back over a few minutes later and took the book out of her hands, looking irritated, but the second he opened his mouth, Jinsu snapped.

"Get yourself new friends and I'll pull my weight for us to get the top mark. Otherwise, screw off."

He looked absolutely stunned.

Unfortunately, the remark not only got back to Bonggu and Hamin, but also out to most of the school. For the rest of the day, jeering laughs of "you're telling Kyungsoo to get new friends when you have none yourself?" followed her down the corridors, and Bonggu accosted her just before hometime.

"Rich," he spat at her. "Rich, snobby, rude – at least Kyungsoo has friends, which is more than anybody can say about you."

Jinsu felt anger bubbling up inside her, but then Chanyeol's body appeared between the two of them as he opened his locker and began transferring books between the locker and his schoolbag. Bonggu left to bother other people and Jinsu got back to sorting her own backpack out.

Chanyeol finished long before her and closed his locker door. Jinsu assumed he'd gone until he cleared his throat just as she was attempting to zip hers up.

"Er... how's your hand?" he asked her. Jinsu yanked on the zip, but it refused to cooperate. She waved the splint in his face.

"Broken?" he guessed.

Jinsu gave the uncooperative zip another fruitless tug and gave up with a sigh. "Chanyeol, you might at least pretend you care before something like this happens. Just go away."

He didn't respond. Jinsu morosely contemplated her backpack and then hoisted it up onto her back anyway. The sound of the zip going round reached her ears and she turned to see Chanyeol biting his lip, his hand still on her backpack.

"Are you trying to kill your reputation?" she demanded. "Go away before somebody sees you fraternising with the enemy. Seriously."

His adam's apple bobbed. "I'm your cousin," he protested weakly.

Jinsu rolled her eyes. "Jeez, I never would have guessed from the way you act." Then she glared at him, dropping the sarcasm for real bite. "Actually, wait, no, I actually never would have guessed, because you sit back and let your best friend insult me and laugh along with it when I'm supposed to be blood related to you." She slammed her locker door and stormed off, ignoring Chanyeol calling after her.

Things got progressively worse during the week, and it didn't help that Jinsu was also beginning to get stressed about the science convention to be held on the Friday evening. In fact, the only positive thing she could really name, what with the stress at home and the unpleasantness at school, was the mystery person who kept leaving chocolate bars in her locker every time something bad happened.

On Tuesday, somebody took the screws out of her chair in maths so that it collapsed when she sat down. Mr Song put the entire class in detention because the fall had resulted in Jinsu attempting to protect herself with her right hand, and she spent a good half hour or so of the lesson in the infirmary as a result. Naturally, the entire class was not impressed, and when she got back, she found that all her stationery had been nicked and that some of her papers had been ripped to pieces.

On Wednesday, she was taken by surprise going into one of the girls' bathrooms when she got a bucket of water thrown on her, destroying all the notes in her backpack and nearly taking out her phone too. That was another trip to the sickbay because her splint had been drenched and she wasn't even supposed to get it wet.

Bonggu couldn't resist sniggering about it in English, so much so that Jinsu was actually glad when he and Kyungsoo and Hamin ignored her to start talking Julius Caesar instead.

"So I was looking this guy up," Hamin said. "And apparently he was the veni vidi vici person."

Kyungsoo frowned. "Isn't that the name of a song?"

"It's a pretty good motto," Bonggu mused. "I came, I saw, I conquered. Might adopt it." He smirked at Jinsu. "Maybe even for the bedroom."

"You're disgusting," she muttered.

"You're a prude," he shot back. "Soon to be a shrivelled old prune."

It was the type of comment that would have made her snort if it was her brother, but it left a bitter taste in her mouth coming from Bonggu, not least because she knew he was deliberately goading her with the bedroom remark. As far as she could remember, Bonggu had only ever had two girlfriends, and neither had lasted long. People seemed charmed by him, but having bumped into him around school once or twice with the girls he was dating, Jinsu was pretty sure that he'd barely got passed kissing either of them.

Miss Jung showed up at that moment, wanting to make sure that they were actually getting on with something, and all four of them were obliged to do their scenes. Bonggu and Hamin were still using scripts to prompt, but had started staging it. Contrary to what she'd told Kyungsoo, Jinsu had actually worked at hers, but she still found the longer chunks of speech – when she switched to Iago's part – quite difficult to get through. Kyungsoo seemed frustrated by her mistakes, but Bonggu was openly laughing at them again. Jinsu was pretty sure he made some comment to the effect of her uselessness as Miss Jung moved on, but she did her best to ignore him. Especially since Hamin was sitting there.

Things reached a head on Thursday afternoon when somebody thought it was funny to crack a raw egg on her head as she sat eating by herself in a secluded corner of the cafeteria. Her shriek of horrified alarm got the attention of almost the entire school. Deserting her food she made for the door, pawing at her hair in an attempt to get the slippery egg white out. Her brain didn't even register the laughs, but she did hear the yell of "I'm sure Bonggu sends his regards" before flour landed on her.

Jinsu was fast enough to escape, and she bolted in the direction of her locker. Even though she wasn't allowed to do sport, she kept her sports kit neatly folded in her locker so long as they were clean, and there was no way she was going to continue going around school covered in flour. She didn't care what other people would think of her if they saw her like that: it was just dirty and itchy and it got absolutely everywhere and turned into a paste when in contact with liquid, and it needed to go. Needed.

Almost knocking Chanyeol over in her haste to get to her locker, she fumbled with the combination.

"I almost thought she was a ghost," Bonggu snickered behind her. "Not a good look. Totally washed out."

Jinsu slapped her hand on the locker and turned to glare at him. "Will you stop?"

She really wanted to slap the smirk right off his face. Chanyeol looked between the two of them nervously and then started backing away, a frightened look in his eyes.

"Stop what?" Bonggu laughed. "I'm not the one who covered you with flour."

"They did it because of you!" Jinsu bellowed. "God, you've never hit me, but your mere existence is enough to get practically the entire school trying to get me to learn my place or something—"

Bonggu's expression went chillingly cold. "You deserve it," he said, his tone initially sounding calm until Jinsu realised the shaking anger in his voice was actually so violent that even yelling at her wouldn't let it out. "Your entire f*cking family deserve it."

Jinsu scoffed. "What did I ever do to you?"

Bonggu mimicked her scoff before his expression grew even colder. "My family was ruined by yours," he told her. "Utterly ruined. And when you came to eat at the restaurant I've worked at for years, you humiliated me in front of my sister's best friend's fiancé, and then came back to complain to the owner of the establishment to try to get the place closed, all because you were served by somebody you happened not to like. Nearly a hundred people work at that restaurant and it's one of the best in the country, and my manager said that if you hadn't been special, high-paying guests who were given a slot at the last moment on the owner's behest when we were overworked and fully booked out that night, he would have thrown you all out for the way you treated us. Your father tried to get the owner to blacklist me so that I'd be unemployable. You can't deny you had a part to play in all that because you were f*cking there." He slammed Chanyeol's locker shut. "So screw you, and get out of my life, because I'm not going to stop them."

Jinsu actually hurled her flour-covered backpack at him, surprising herself, but he merely batted it away with another contemptuous scoff and stalked off. Chanyeol had long since disappeared. Feeling tears of frustration and anger burning at her eyes, Jinsu fumbled with the combination of her own locker again and yanked it open.

There was a hiss before the contents of the locker spilt out and onto her, completely blindsiding her. Jinsu stumbled back a couple of paces, spitting out what tasted like a mouthful of earth as she tried to work out what had happened. She always kept her things so neat and orderly – there was no way they should have fallen out, there was no way that dirt should have been in there, there was—

There was another sharp hiss and then something slithered down off her shoulder, over her splint, and dropped to the floor.

Jinsu screamed. A large slow worm was wriggling happily along the floor. Her skin still crawling where the slow worm had touched and moved over it, and she scratched frantically at her arm.

At the end of the corridor, somebody obviously alerted by the scream came around the corner, but nearly trod on the snake themselves and let out an equally ear-splitting yelp.

Jinsu scratched more frantically at her arm. Even her left arm was beginning to feel dirty, and bile was rising in the back of her throat like she was going to throw up.

Clean, clean, I need clean...

Forgetting all about clothes, she ran for the nearest bathroom, not even caring that it was a disabled one, and practically ripped the sleeves off her blouse in an attempt to shuck away the dirt.

Clean, clean, clean, ugh, dirt...

The water was blisteringly hot, but Jinsu didn't even care. She dunked both hands in it and scrubbed furiously at her skin and blouse, trying to get rid of the dirt and the horrible crawling sensation. The burn almost felt good and she continued splashing water over herself. Her right hand throbbed with pain, but the dirt was much more important. She had to get rid of it or she was going to go insane.

At some point in her frantic scrubbing, she became aware of the fact that her splint had come off, and that she was crying. Limply continuing to splash water that now felt lukewarm rather than hot over her, she slumped against the sink and closed her eyes. The palms of both her hands ached horribly and she felt so terribly, terribly guilty. It was ridiculously, frankly, to get set off by a small piece of dirt. It made her a weak, useless person, and she hated it – hated herself. Maybe Bonggu was right and she should just get out.

The door banged open, but she was too miserable and shattered to turn and look, instead methodically continuing to splash water onto herself with her injured hand and scrub with soap with the other.

"Babe," said a surprised voice. "Hamin, babe, it's occupied."

There was a loud smooch. "I don't care," murmured a smooth male voice. "They can get out for all I—Jesus Christ!"

Hamin's voice shot up several decibels and the next thing Jinsu knew, the soap dispenser had been snatched from her hands and somebody hauled her away from the sink. Her hands still reached for water, but then somebody else's hands entered her blurred vision and the sound of running water ceased.

"What the f*ck?" Hamin sounded bewildered. "Oh my God, Minju, go get a teacher or something, or the nurse, I think she's going insane."

Jinsu was vaguely aware of somebody moving around her and Hamin to the door.

"Do your shirt up, bae!" Hamin yelled after her before returning his attention to Jinsu. After a moment or two, the noise of running water returned, and he held her hands under the tap, carefully using his fingers to ensure that the water avoided Jinsu's bruises.

"What happened?" he asked, his voice soft.

"I need to feel clean," Jinsu choked out.

"Bae, I've never seen somebody so spotless." He pulled her broken hand over slightly so that cold water ran over her arm. "It looks like you've scalded yourself, though."

"It was dirty."

Hamin fell silent. The soothing numb of cold water began to relax Jinsu, but with it came the proper realisation of just what kind of situation she was in, and also what Hamin was doing there. She squirmed in his arms to face him.

"Were you and Minju going to shag in here?" she demanded. "Do you even know how many germs—?"

"How can you think about that right now?" Hamin spluttered in protest. "What happened to your splint?"

Jinsu mouthed a small oh and quietened down.

Sensing the hysteria had gone, Hamin carefully backed off and sat down on the toilet, reaching for the towel on the handrail. He beckoned to her.

"I thought those were burns on your hands," he admitted. "But it looks like it's from scrubbing or something."

That brought the last of reality back to Jinsu and she went bright red, trying to fight off the feeling of humiliation. Hamin and his girlfriend had just stumbled into her in the disabled toilets while she'd been having an OCD meltdown because somebody had packed her locker with dirt. She stuttered a bit, wondering if he'd even care if she told him – he was one of Bonggu's friends, after all – but she concluded that he looked genuinely concerned and managed to garble out something about a snake.

"Somebody put a snake in your locker?" he demanded. "Like, an actual, live snake?"

Jinsu nodded. Hamin looked absolutely horrified, but he reached out to start patting her hands dry.

"Some people are insane," he muttered, paying special attention to her injured hand.

They were both silent after that. Jinsu allowed him to turn her hands over to inspect them once he was satisfied they were dry, and then he put the towel back before placing a hand lightly at the small of her back and guiding her out of the toilet.

Minju was standing there, arm raised to knock, with the deputy head directly behind her.

"They want us all in the school office," Minju said quickly, but Hamin was more concerned about the teacher who had joined them.

"I was helping her," he said immediately. "We went after her because she seemed distressed."

Jinsu was just about settled enough to want to snort at the blatant lie, but she figured Hamin wouldn't take too kindly to her ratting on what he and Minju had actually been up to, especially when he'd been so careful in his attention to her.

"We'll settle that in the office, Mr Oh. Follow me, all of you."

Exchanging a worried glance with Minju, Hamin surreptitiously reached for her hand, though his free one didn't leave Jinsu's back. Jinsu nearly squawked with surprise when it actually drifted all the way round to her waist. She knew she was blushing as they walked along, Hamin glancing at her injured hand every so often, her brain simultaneously terrified because oh my gosh Yu Hamin is touching me and ecstatic because oh my gosh Yu Hamin is touching me! It was probably never going to happen again, so she forced herself to relax and enjoy it while it lasted.

Chapter 10

Hamin let go of Minju's hand as they arrived in the school office, but he gave Jinsu a gentle nudge in the direction of the school nurse. Jinsu saw with some surprise that the woman was sitting next to a terrified-looking Chanyeol. Standing just a few feet away with his arms folded across his chest, engaged in a heated but barely audible conversation with the headmaster, was her big brother, and he looked absolutely livid.

"Jin!" he exclaimed the second he caught sight of her. "Who the hell took the splint off your hand?"

"I found her like that," Hamin said, apparently unphased by the tense atmosphere in the room. Either he was just that oblivious at reading atmosphere, which Jinsu really wouldn't have put past him from what she'd seen, or he was leaping on the opportunity to ensure that he and Minju weren't going to get in any trouble for skipping class – or free period, or whatever it was (Jinsu didn't know because CompSci and Tech was about the only class she didn't have with all the regulars) – which she equally wouldn't have put past him, since he and Minju would both be suspended if anybody found out. "I actually think she washed it off herself or something because she had it when she left the cafeteria and it looked like parts of it were in the sink."

Jimin's expression softened a little and he turned from Hamin back to Jinsu. The concern in his eyes warmed her, and if there hadn't been anybody else there, she would have run over to bury her face in his shoulder for a hug.

"Jin," he said quietly, extending a hand. Jinsu automatically took a couple of steps forward to take it. He pulled her into his side and wrapped an arm around her. "Jin, I thought you said it hadn't been that bad for years."

There was no admonition there, no blame, just straight out worry. Jinsu sniffed, feeling tears pooling at her eyes again. He ruffled her hair.

"Your uniform's a mess," he murmured before his hand caught in the sticky mess of egg.

Jinsu froze, and he froze with her.

"This is egg," he said, picking at it. He sounded angry again.

"She was covered in flour when I saw her," Chanyeol piped up, and Jinsu wanted to smack him round the head. Jimin was going to blow his cool if he found out what happened.

"Well, her uniform was in shreds when I found her. There's mud on the floor of the disabled bathroom and she also mentioned something about a snake," Hamin chipped in, not to be outdone.

"A snake?" repeated the headmaster, absolutely incredulous.

"Oh, Yoonchul was talking about that," Minju said suddenly. "Nobody believed him, of course – he said it was a slow worm and apparently they're more native to Europe than here."

Jinsu could actually feel Jimin's body shaking with rage.

"I suggest you find out who did that if you don't want to be sued," he said icily to the headmaster.

Jinsu gripped at his suit jacket with her good hand, shaking her head. The last thing she wanted was more trouble. "Oppa, leave it."

"No!" he snapped. "I've trusted your judgement for a week when I didn't want to, but this is ridiculous. You wouldn't even tell me the name of the person who broke your fingers, and I know you know!"

Chanyeol's deep voice spoke again. "That was Yoo Dahee."

The headmaster looked scandalised. "Are you both suggesting that it was deliberate? I was assured by the nurse and by Jinsu's own report that it had been an accident following one of her classmates not seeing she was on the other side of the door and shutting it too hard."

"Well, I wasn't in the classroom at the time," Chanyeol admitted. "I only saw her after it had happened, but I think Hamin was there."

All eyes turned to Hamin and he looked incredibly uncomfortable. "I-I... wasn't actually in the..." he began, but then he swallowed, probably realising that he might well get a tongue-lashing if he admitted that he and Bonggu had seen what had happened and walked straight past it.

He brushed his hand through his hair and let out a long breath. "It was Yoo Dahee and Do Minyoung," he admitted in a small voice. "I have no idea who was behind the snake, though, and I didn't actually see who did the eggs and flour, though I was in the cafeteria when it happened."

He exchanged a glance with Chanyeol that seemed to say zip it or else.

As far as Jinsu was concerned, Chae Bonggu's unspoken name hovered like a thick black cloud, but she didn't dare mention it. Chanyeol and Hamin had both left out their friend's involvement and Jinsu suspected she'd only get in trouble if she tried mentioning it.

"I'm taking Jinsu home," Jimin said. "Our family will be withdrawing financial support from the school until a favourable solution is reached. Thanks, Chanyeol." He nodded to Hamin, Minju and the nurse and strode out of the room, almost dragging Jinsu with him. They were nearly halfway down the corridor before Jinsu managed to get him to slow.

"You're going too fast," she complained.

He ground to a halt.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm just really, really angry right now and I need to get out of here before I run into Chae Bonggu and break his face."

"What?"

"Jinsu, I'm not an idiot, and I do actually listen to what you tell me. I know he's the one responsible for most of this."

Jinsu chewed the inside of her cheek.

"It's because of what happened with Dad at the restaurant, isn't it?"

Wearily, Jinsu nodded.

"God, I hate him sometimes."

It was unclear whether he was referring to Bonggu or their father, but before Jinsu could ask, hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor, along with a bass call of "hyung! Hyung!"

Jimin turned, and a breathless Chanyeol skidded to a halt by them.

"Here," he panted, pulling a beanie he hadn't been wearing in the office off his head and placing it carefully on Jinsu's, masking the egg. She eyed him warily, but he ignored it as he kept pace with them when Jimin started walking again.

"Jin, I've cleared your locker out for you," he said, "and salvaged the work I could, but some of the books and paper had been ripped up, so—"

"Why?" Jinsu demanded frostily.

He looked like a kicked puppy, faltering for a second or two before he forged on anyway. "I rescued your backpack for you too." He held it out and Jimin took it from him, effortlessly swinging it up onto one shoulder. They reached the end of the corridor and Jimin looked down the two possible options, apparently lost. Jinsu was too busy side-eyeing Chanyeol to direct him, so it was their cousin who pointed down the right-hand corridor.

"And I'll find whatever work it is you need from today's lessons," Chanyeol went on, fiddling with something in his hands. He was sounding a bit unsure of himself now, but continued as if Jinsu wasn't trying to bore a hole through his head with her glare. "And tell your teachers and stuff. So if you need anything, just send me a message or something, and... yeah."

There was the sound of a tearing wrapper and Jinsu found herself presented with a chocolate bar. Surprised, she took it.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled before lumping a jumper into her arms. "I'll go now."

She didn't even have time to thank him before he hurried away. Jimin let go of her to help her put the jumper on, and Jinsu munched thoughtfully on the chocolate bar as they left the school buildings and got out into the car park. It was reasonably full, but different from many other school carparks both in its size – belonging to a very rich school meant that it was larger than most – and in the sorts of cars that were parked there. Granted, there were the scholarship students, but most of the students who drove to school rather than taking public transport or being chauffeured there had very expensive, very flashy cars. Jimin himself had a sleek white Masserati that was pulled up practically blocking the school entrance, suggesting that he'd been in too much of a hurry to bother parking properly.

Jinsu frowned as she got into the passenger seat and settled back in the soft leather, pulling the soft cashmere of Chanyeol's jumper down over her injured hand.

"What are you doing here?" she asked as her big brother got into his side of the car.

"I came to pick you up," he said, looking a little disturbed. Then he leant over, reaching to pick Chanyeol's beanie off Jinsu's head. "Don't tell me you hurt your head as well."

Jinsu brushed his hand away. "My head's fine. But how come you knew to come?"

"I got a call from Chanyeol about twenty-five minutes ago." Jimin adjusted his seat and started the engine up. "He told me you'd been egged and there was an ugly argument developing between you and Bonggu and that things had been particularly bad since the restaurant incident. Considering what happened to your hand last week, I took that to mean I was needed." Checking his mirrors briefly, even though there was nobody in sight, he eased the car forward and towards the gates. "That means you were probably washing your hands for about ten to fifteen minutes."

Jinsu looked down at her hands. The skin around her fingers was wrinkled a little from so much water, but other than looking a little pink, they actually weren't too badly off.

"Sorry," she whispered.

"Hey." He reached out and grasped her good hand. "Don't apologise for something we both know is hard for you to control. But we're going to see a psychiatrist, okay? We won't tell Mum and Dad, but this isn't good for you and I want to make sure you're going to be all right."

Reluctantly, Jinsu nodded.

"We need to go back to the hospital anyway go get a new splint for you. Plus the doctor told you to come back to check on your fingers around this time, so we might as well kill three birds with one stone." He paused. "And then we're going to go on a movie binge at the cinema and plan our Easter skiing trip. How's that sound?"

"Good," Jinsu told him, her voice cracking. He squeezed her hand tightly before letting go to concentrate properly on the road.

At nearly quarter to midnight, they ended up back at Jimin's apartment with Girlfriend-Jimin and a five-litre vat of a mixture of different Baskin' Robbins ice creams that Girlfriend-Jimin had put together. She appeared to have heard all about everything and thoroughly approved of her boyfriend's plan to cheer Jinsu up.

"So this Hamin dude," she said around a mouthful of ice cream as Jimin finished embarrassing his sister by describing in great detail what the fabulous Yu Hamin looked like, "just followed you into the toilets and watched you wash your hands for ten minutes before deciding, 'oh, wait, that's not normal'?"

Jinsu's face went red and she promptly scooped out more ice cream in an attempt to hide her embarrassment. "No. He and his girlfriend were planning on getting freaky when they realised I was there."

There was silence for several long moments. On the TV screen, a zombie roared as there was a close-up of its yellow-eyed face. Both Jimins burst out laughing.

"We at least used to find abandoned classrooms," Girlfriend-Jimin said. "The only problem was that a lot of them needed keys to be locked, so there was always the danger of somebody walking in on you."

"Which happened," added Jimin.

"Which happened," Girlfriend-Jimin agreed. "Wait, how do you know about that?"

Jimin smirked at her.

"Hamin had to remind her to button up her blouse when she went to get the teachers," Jinsu remembered, and both Jimins dissolved into laughter again.

"Now that's awkward," her brother said. Jinsu managed a proper smile, feeling properly happy for the first time since the weekend.

"There's just one thing I don't get," Girlfriend-Jimin said, scooping cookie-flavoured ice cream out of the vat with her finger. "Isn't he supposed to be one of Bonggu's best friends? I thought they were all ganging up on you."

"I know my sister," Jimin told her. "There's no way she'd crush on somebody if they were trying to beat her up. That's very messed up."

"Hamin's not that bad," Jinsu mumbled. "He's never actually been mean to me."

"He told Bonggu off for saying she looked like a scrawny rat back when they first were at school together," Jimin confided to his girlfriend. "She's adored him ever since."

Girlfriend-Jimin fake-gagged.

"He also has a girlfriend," Jimin added.

Girlfriend-Jimin's gaze snapped up immediately. "Hun, you've gotta step your game up."

"I'd really rather not. His girlfriend's actually quite nice."

"So she didn't have anything to do with slamming your hand in a door?"

"No, she's in the year below and kind of keeps herself to herself."

Girlfriend-Jimin nodded. "And what about getting Bonggu expelled?"

Jinsu sat up in shock, appalled. "I can't ruin his life like that!"

"Why not? He's sat back and laughed while you've been put through a week of hell on his behalf."

"Because... because..." Jinsu floundered, but her brother had perked up, looking like he was about to take notes off his girlfriend. Because why? Jinsu found herself wondering. Sure, Bonggu was an absolute ass to her, but it seemed unnecessarily vindictive to get him expelled. Not just that, but the backlash if people found out she was the one behind it would be absolutely terrifying.

"Look," said her brother. "I know that the greatness of the mind is determined by the depth of its suffering and all that, but if you're actually going to be masochistic about it, it either means there's something wrong with you or you're an idiot."

"I don't think it would be possible," Jinsu mumbled. "I mean, he's the top scholar, which is really good for the school's grades, and he's also the headmaster's nephew." And I don't want him to have another reason to say my family has ruined his life.

"Ah." Jimin nodded sagely. "So that's why Chanyeol and Hamin were nervous about saying anything."

Belatedly, Jinsu frowned at him. "Wait, did you just quote Nausicaa of the Valley Wind at me?"

"You banned me from quoting Disney!"

"That doesn't make Studio Ghibli an acceptable replacement! Those films need to be cherished, not memeified!"

Girlfriend-Jimin snorted.

"She persecutes me!" Jimin whined to her. "Look what I have to put up with when I'm at home!"

Girlfriend-Jimin gave him a quick kiss to get rid of the ridiculous pout he was pushing.

"But surely given the number of things that have happened to you over this past week alone," she said, returning to the matter at hand, "you'd have enough evidence to go straight to the police rather than through school authorities?"

Jinsu shook her head. "Nobody'd come forward as a witness and I'd need that to have an effective chance of winning a case, otherwise it's just my word against his – and besides, he's never actually touched me."

"Yeah, he's quite careful about that."

"So he's the main jerk but he lets all the others do the jerk work?" Girlfriend-Jimin surmised. "What does he think he is, like a gentleman gangster or something?"

"No, he's a very smart brat who knows which lines he can't cross if he doesn't want to get implicated." Jinsu's brother sighed. "Like, he's a massive jerk to Jinsu, but compared to what some of the other people at school have done to her, he's smallfry – except for the fact that it's all happening because of him in the first place."

"Oh, great!" Girlfriend-Jimin said sarcastically. "Why don't we go find him and give him a not-as-much-of-a-jerk-as-you-could-have-been award?"

"Ah, Avatar: The Last Airbender," Jimin sighed happily. "You're finally infected."

Jinsu groaned, though she wasn't sure whether it was from how lame her brother and his girlfriend were or the whole situation she was in regarding school and Chae Bonggu.

Chapter 11

It was almost two in the morning when Jimin dropped Jinsu back home, and she was startled to find the place crawling with police. Jimin stayed with her until they found their parents talking to the chief police inspector and realised that the home's security guards were also there. He was yawning too much to consider it worth staying to hear what the fuss was about and asked Jinsu to update him on it in the morning before he drove off.

Jinsu wandered up to her parents. Her father had left her mother to deal with the police officer's questions and was busily looking through his phone. After a little hesitation, Jinsu spoke up.

"What's going on?"

"Some goons tried to break into the Attayear warehouse," he mumbled. "Nothing serious. Noah will be awake at this time, won't he? I need him here right now."

Jinsu stared. "Father, it's nearly two AM. Any sane person will be asleep."

He absently reached out and patted her head. "I always knew you were a nutjob. Maybe I should try Yixing instead."

For a long, long moment, Jinsu was stunned. Unless she was delirious or very much mistaken, her father had just teased her, and she couldn't actually remember him ever doing that.

Maybe he'd mistaken her for Jimin. Deciding she didn't want to find out, she stumbled away in the direction of the house.

The house was alive and in uproar by five-thirty. Groaning, Jinsu stuck her head under her pillow and tried to roll over to get back to sleep, only to whimper when she accidentally crushed her broken fingers.

The resultant pain woke her up properly, and she reluctantly got out of bed to go in search of painkillers. Finding that there were none in the bathroom, she struggled into her dressing gown and then made her way downstairs to find Mrs Kwon. It would have been very surprising if the housekeeper wasn't awake with the chaos she could hear all the way up from her bedroom.

Sure enough, Mrs Kwon was bustling around the kitchen when Jinsu got there, and the strong tang of coffee filled the air. At least fifteen people were crammed in around the kitchen table. Scanning them for faces she recognised, Jinsu caught sight of a drooping Noah, who simultaneously looked on the brink of sleep and like he had half a mind to kill anybody who suggested he try to look a little more alive.

Mrs Kwon noticed her and bustled over before Jinsu could register anything else.

"Now's not a good time, honey – why are you out of bed?"

Jinsu held up her injured hand and stifled a gigantic yawn with the other.

"Hurts," she mumbled before looking around the kitchen. "What's going on?"

"There's been some kind of break-in at the Attayear's warehouse," Mrs Kwon told her. "The intruders were caught near the machine and I think they're doing checks to ensure that none of it's been harmed." She produced painkillers and a glass of water out of nowhere for Jinsu. "Isn't it supposed to be used for the first time tomorrow or something? Your father mentioned it in connection with the scientist thingy you're going to today and I'm pretty sure I saw it in the news."

Jinsu nodded, though she didn't really have a clue. She knew that a trip in the Attayear was a prize for all those chosen to have the most outstanding projects at the science convocation, but her father had also told her that she wouldn't be going on it, so she didn't know any details.

Somebody was talking at the table, but Jinsu was too tired to bother listening in. It was still before six in the morning, and now that the pain had reduced from sharpness to a dull throb, she decided it would be a good idea to go back to bed for another hour or so, maybe even two, and she turned to leave the kitchen.

Halfway up the stairs, she was almost mown down by her father, who was pulling on a suit jacket as he fumed into his phone.

"It was that snivelling Chae family," he growled. "They've identified the two perpetrators even though they refused to say a thing. They'll have been out to wreck the machine, I just know it!"

Blinking in the aftermath, Jinsu paused for a moment or two on the stairs before she continued on up.

The notifications light on her phone was flashing when she got back to her room, and Jinsu took the device off charge as she settled back under the duvet and unlocked the screen. There were two messages.

The first was from Jimin, with a timestamp from a couple of hours before.

Holy f*ck, it read. I think Dad is about to blow a lifetime of gaskets. Apparently something's happened to the Attayear?

Jinsu decided to respond to that when she had more information and went to look at the other one.

It was from Chanyeol and had only been sent a couple of minutes before.

Don't come into school today, it read. Just don't.

Wondering if he'd heard what had happened with the Attayear, Jinsu texted back.

Has my dad been ringing around your family or something too?

The response was instantaneous. About what?

There was a break-in at the Attayear warehouse.

A few messages came back in quick succession.

Attayear?

What's that?

Oh wait, is that the time machine thingy?

Wait, there was a BREAK-IN? What happened?

Oh my God.

Jinsu hesitated before sending her next message. I overheard him on the phone just now and he said the police identified the intruders as people related to the Chaes.

There was no reply for several long minutes. Eventually, Jinsu flopped down on her pillows with a sigh, just about to go back to sleep, but then the phone pinged again.

Okay, find yourself a nuclear bunker or something to hide in. Just, whatever you do, don't come to school today. It's going to be even worse now.

Jinsu nodded to herself around another yawn, but then realised something. Wait. If you didn't know about that, how come you were texting me at this hour telling me not to come into school? Bonggu's obviously going to be vile if those people really are related to him, but what else is going on?

Got a text from my ex.

Her phone has been pinging all night.

Stuff about the snake got around school after you left because the teachers were trying to find out who did it.

I mean, your family's crazy rich

And the school doesn't want to lose out on that kind of cash

So they were literally talking about the entire school doing community service until somebody owned up.

And needless to say some people really didn't like the idea of that.

Like, really really didn't.

So they were planning something – dunno the details

But she thought it was so crazy I had to know it was happening.

So it must have been bad

Like, life-threateningly bad

Because she never contacts me.

Okay, maybe not life-threatening.

I don't think anybody would kill you.

But still.

Jinsu remembered Chanyeol's ex as a loud, obnoxious girl who could barely tell her left hand from her right. She was pretty sure that the girl would have passed the news on as it was "gossip-worthy", even in the middle of the night, rather than because she was worried about anything, but for some reason, the barrage of texts still made Jinsu smile. That was more messages in the space of half a minute than Chanyeol had ever sent to her in her life. She wondered if the goofy little boy who'd tried to adopt a wild chipmunk he'd found in his garden as a pet was still lurking beneath the surface. Deciding it might well be, she sent one last message back.

Yeollie, you're babbling.

Apparently not to be outdone, he messaged back just as she was setting the phone down.

You're welcome. With a smiley face.

Jinsu scoffed gently, but she couldn't hide her own smile as she drifted back to sleep.

It really wasn't hard to stay off school that day once Jinsu had decided it was worth heeding Chanyeol's warning. After all, the last time she hadn't, she'd ended up with broken fingers. Her father was still busy raging about the security breach the previous night and Jinsu wasn't totally sure he knew what had happened to her at school the previous day (and if he didn't, then she definitely didn't want to be the one who told him), so she asked Jimin to ring her in sick and curled back up in bed. She still looked shattered enough for the lie to be believable when Mrs Kwon came up to ask why she wasn't down for breakfast.

Shortly before four in the afternoon, Saeeun swanned into the room without knocking.

"Your father says he doesn't care if you're puking up the Niagra Falls – he wants you dressed and presentable by— oh good, you're already up."

Jinsu looked up from her desk, where she'd been attempting to clean flour and mud off one of her textbooks without making the rest of her room too messy.

"Well, that just makes my life a whole lot easier," Saeeun said matter-of-factly. "How's the hand?"

"Immobile. The doctor says the bones are healing, though."

"Good, good." Saeeun headed for the wardrobe. "Well, I have orders to make you look out-of-this-world beautiful tonight, so shall we get started?"

"Please don't," Jinsu said weakly, but Saeeun was not to be dissuaded.

"No can do, honey!" she replied cheerfully, surveying Jinsu's dresses. "Ooh, do we want fierce and sexy or glamorous and sophisticated?"

Jinsu decided it was a lost cause and that it was just best to let Saeeun do whatever she wanted.

To Jinsu's surprise, she didn't actually regret letting Saeeun run wild when she was finally allowed to look at herself in the mirror some two-and-a-quarter hours later. They had argued a bit over Saeeun taking her splint off to replace it with taping her index and middle fingers together (Saeeun said she remembered breaking her own fingers a few years back and that the doctor had told her that once the bones were set to grow straight and had settled that way, there was nothing wrong with taping them instead of splinting them), because Saeeun said she didn't want the splint to stand out, not when Jinsu was supposed to be looking so elegant.

"And besides," she said, slapping Jinsu's good hand away as she picked at the tape, complaining that it looked like her hand was permanently in some kind of cult salute, "I'm training to be a nurse and I say you can do this, so there."

Jinsu gave her an inquisitive look. "Really?"

"No, not really, but I think you're being paranoid, so shush and do as I say."

Jinsu finally backed down and resumed looking at the marvellous creation of Saeeun's in the mirror, hardly able to believe it was her. Saeeun had dug out a shimmering silk burgundy dress that Jinsu had completely forgotten she owned. She couldn't ever remember wearing it, either, or buying it, so suspected it was something one of her parents had bought her a few years ago that she'd refused to wear. While it looked absolutely stunning on her now, Jinsu could see why she might have objected to it: it was a very grown up dress, and while modest in the bodice area, still exposed more cleavage than she was used to, and it was also floor-length, which she hated because it meant wearing heels, and that meant potentially tripping up.

However, now that she'd grown and her body had matured a little, she agreed with Saeeun's verdict that she looked glamorous, sophisticated and sexy (well, maybe not so much on the sexy part because Jinsu just didn't do sexy), but it also really, really felt like she was staring at an alien or something, because there was no way she could actually look that good.

She shook herself and then corrected her thoughts. There was no way she could look that good if she believed what her peers at school said about her looking like a frog or a dung beetle, but she wasn't going to let that get to her.

"Oh, sh*t!" Saeeun suddenly exclaimed, almost flinging her finished-with make up bag across the room. "I forgot jewellery! Where do you keep it? Do you have diamonds?"

"Uh..." Jinsu drew a blank. She knew she did have a pair of diamond cascade earring somewhere, but they were family heirlooms and the type of thing she'd usually ask her mother to lock away. Before she could say that, however, Saeeun was gone, with a screech of "Mrs Kwon!" ringing down the corridor.

Three minutes later, Saeeun was back with the heirloom earrings, an even more eye-wateringly priceless diamond necklace that matched the earrings, and a silver bracelet studded with yet more diamonds. Saeeun held up a ring that would have topped off the set, but on the discovery that the only finger it fit on was Jinsu's ring finger on her left hand, she decided against it on the grounds that it would be bad luck.

"You look gorgeous, darling," she pronounced, tucking the ring away into a drawer on Jinsu's desk. "Now you'd better get downstairs and into that car before Mrs Kwon whups my ass for making me late and your dad fires me."

For the first time that week, Jinsu let out a chuckle that wasn't a result of Jimin or Jimin.

"Thanks," she told Saeeun. "Go enjoy the rest of the evening."

"You too!" Saeeun practically shoved her out of the room. As Jinsu tottered towards the stairs in her high heels, she wondered if it was worth asking Saeeun if she could suggest any good things to do on a girls' night out in town or something. The only trouble was that the only girl she could think of to invite would be Saeeun herself, and she wasn't sure if Saeeun found her interesting enough to accept that kind of invitation. It would certainly be blurring the employer-employee boundary in a way that her father would highly disapprove of, but Jinsu wanted more friends around her age to hang out with. Or any, for that matter.

Chapter 12

Jinsu could tell Saeeun had done a good job when even the unshakable Sungwoo took a moment or two to stare at her before clearing his throat and turning to her father, who was sitting in the passenger seat.

"Might I comment on how splendid Miss Jinsu looks tonight, Sir?" he asked, ever polite. Park Jiwoon barely looked up from his tablet.

"Splendid," he echoed with little feeling. "Jinsu, you're to stay with me tonight. I need to show you off."

Jinsu's temporarily bolstered mood came crashing down and she stopped with her hand on the door of the car.

"I might be your daughter, but I'm there primarily because I was selected to go as a representative of my school," she protested. "My project was one of five short-listed for the awards ceremony."

"Well, you're going as a representative of the family today," he said, swiping through a news article. "And it's not like you're going to win anyway. Just get in the car."

Incensed, but knowing it was useless to protest, Jinsu got in and sulked in the back seat all the way to the venue, ignoring her father trying to talk to her. She did nearly laugh when she heard Sungwoo chip in with a diplomatic "I think you've offended her, Sir, it might just be best not to say anything" when Park Jiwoon started getting snappish. Amazingly, he actually took the chauffeur's advice.

Some of Jinsu's cheerfulness returned when she stepped out of the car and realised that the event was being held at one of Nam Yejun's family's hotels. It was one she'd been to a few times before, and it had probably been chosen over the Blue Star because Heart of Seoul had the biggest ballroom and biggest hotel conference venue in the city, even if it wasn't quite as swanky as the flagship hotel itself.

Jinsu deliberately dithered in the foyer as a smartly dressed, middle-aged man approached her father with a glass of champagne, her idea being to get herself separated from him as speedily as possible, but without him noticing. There were teenagers everywhere – she spotted one or two trying to steal full champagne flutes off a tray a waiter was carrying around, even though he politely told them that alcohol was only for the adults – and she really felt like the odd one out because she was the only one not in school uniform.

Seeing the striped blue-and-white blazer from her own school, she blanched and headed for the nearest table without any of those blazers near it, intent on getting herself some fruit juice.

"Made you jump!" somebody yelled behind her, digging their fingers into her waist, and Jinsu shrieked with surprise.

Turning, she found a tuxedoed Yejun doubling over from laughter, a slightly less amused Junmyeon tagging along beside him. She swiped feebly at Yejun, a little bewildered that he deemed them to be on friendly enough terms to be that casual. Nobody else except her brother was like that with her.

"You scared me," she whined.

"Sorry," he chuckled. "Junmyeon was convinced it wasn't you, so I had to do it."

"I didn't recognise you," Junmyeon admitted, reaching past her for two glasses of juice. He pressed one of them into her free hand. "You look gorgeous tonight, by the way."

Yejun frowned. "Yeah, aren't you supposed to be in uniform?"

"You're not," Jinsu pointed out.

Yejun's frown eased up, only for him to pull a face. "Yeah, that's only because I'm the heir to the hotel and I'm supposed to be simultaneously hosting this event and attending it."

"Good on you," said Junmyeon, way too happily, as he smacked Yejun on the back and made his step-brother choke. "Multi-tasking is good for you and it means you're turning into a proper businessman about five years too young."

Yejun relieved Junmyeon of his glass of juice and downed it, still spluttering. "Anyway, gotta dash! The mics weren't working earlier and I need to find somebody to blame for it, so see you around!"

He sprinted away. Junmyeon picked up another glass of juice and watched the carnage Yejun wreaked across the foyer as he went to find some poor lackie.

"Yes, you should," Jinsu told him.

"Sorry?"

"Follow him and put him on a leash."

Junmyeon laughed. "Okay. I guess I'll see you later then too, shall I? I'm assuming you'll be at the awards ceremony. Are you presenting or something?" He gestured to Jinsu's burgundy dress.

Feeling herself blush, Jinsu shook her head. "I'm here as the daughter of the inventor of the Attayear tonight." It was with difficulty that she managed to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

Junmyeon looked a little confused as to what her answer meant, but he gave her a smile and then disappeared in the direction Yejun had fled, though at a significantly more sedate pace. The sight of him turning his back almost had Jinsu regretting sending him after his step-brother to give poor Yejun some help (Yejun had seemed rather stressed, even if he was still playing the fool). Out of all the people in the room, Junmyeon and Yejun were the only ones she could guarantee weren't hostile to her, and even then, knowing the people they mutually knew and what those people might say to either of the boys if they saw one of them talking to her, she couldn't be sure that would stay. Knowing how well Yejun knew her brother, she suspected that he'd just ignore her rather than being outright mean to her, but Junmyeon was an unknown quantity in that respect. He seemed nice enough and Jinsu wanted to believe that that was Junmyeon through and through, but it was so hard to tell. She'd been burnt too many times to trust her instincts on that kind of thing anymore.

Sipping at her orange juice, Jinsu leant against the table and looked around the room, for lack of anything better to do. The place was now absolutely teeming, and poor Yejun was likely pulling his hair out at the stress of it all. Jinsu counted nearly thirty different school uniforms – it was really amazing just how many schools had either maroon or navy blazers, which meant that it was only possible to tell them apart by the ties or by the crests on the blazer pockets, if the school in question had one.

Aside from the sea of maroon and navy, there were three schools with black blazers (one distinguishable by the white piping around the lapels), and a handful with greeen. There was even one with mustard yellow, and then Jinsu spied the brown blazer of the international school that Yejun and Junmyeon went to.

A laugh Jinsu would have recognised anywhere distracted her from getting too bogged down in blazer details and automatically searched out Hamin, wanting to see what had made him happy. It wasn't too hard to spot him since he stood almost head-and-shoulders above most people there, and he was also standing with Chanyeol and another tall boy with his back to Jinsu who was also laughing.

She squinted at the boy, trying to work out who he was, but she couldn't make out anything beyond the sleek navy blazer, the shoulders of which poked up above the rest of the crowd, and the boy's dark brown hair. Something about him seemed familiar, but Jinsu didn't get a chance to work out what it was, because Chanyeol caught her eye at that moment. He frowned at her, clearly wondering what she was doing, and then looked furtively around before mouthing something across the room at her.

Jinsu frowned back, absolutely no idea what he'd said, and took another sip at her orange juice. He tried again, but when it was obvious Jinsu still didn't understand, he sighed visibly and made to detach himself from his friends, only to freeze a couple of seconds later and then turn away, pretending he'd never made eye contact.

Before Jinsu had time to wonder why, a hand landed on her shoulder.

"I thought I told you to stay with me at all times tonight," said her father, and Jinsu winced. She'd been caught.

"The crowd was a bit of a crush," she mumbled, hoping he was in a good enough mood to let it pass. To her surprise, he clapped her on the shoulder.

"You had the sense to stay in one place and try to spot me." He reached for a glass of orange juice, and Jinsu stared at her own one. Her lip gloss had left a noticeable mark just below the rip and it was annoying her.

"Who was the boy you seemed rather friendly with?" he asked her.

Warily, Jinsu glanced up at him. "Do you mean Junmyeon or Yejun?"

"Yejun's running the event in place of his father; he's too busy to mingle with the guests."

"He wasn't too busy to chat to me," Jinsu blurted out before realising that her father might find her tone of voice offensive and clapping her hand over her mouth.

"He wasn't?" Her father sounded thoughtful. Jinsu stared at the lip gloss mark on her glass again, internally braced against wherever this was leading. "Yejun's a good friend of Jimin's, isn't he?"

"Yes..." Jinsu said quietly. Her father nodded to himself.

"And what do you think of him? He comes from a good family and stands to have a decent inheritance—"

Jinsu looked back up in alarm. "Wait, what?"

"Well, if you like him and he has nothing against you and his father agrees to it, he'd be a nice match for a marriage. I'm not going to marry you off to somebody you hate," he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. Jinsu didn't know if she was more shocked by the idea of her marrying Yejun or by her father actually thinking it important that she at least got on with the husband in question if he wanted her to get married.

Her father patted her on the shoulder again. "We'll discuss it later. No point hashing out details while Mr Kim isn't here."

"Father, I don't want to get married! I'm sixteen—"

"Later." He passed her his empty glass of orange juice. "I see the keynote speaker has arrived – we should go and greet him."

Disgruntled, and worried that she might lose somebody she was hoping to cultivate as a friend due to her father's machinations, Jinsu trailed after him as he made his way through the crowd. They had only gone a few steps before he decided that she was walking too slowly and placed his hand on her elbow to ensure she stuck by his side. Jinsu smiled obediently as she was introduced to the tall man who was evidently going to be making the main speech to galvanise all the young scientists in the room. She wouldn't have been able to name him without him mumbling a quiet "Bang Daehyuk" as he shook her hand, but she recognised his face from various interviews he'd given on TV. Assuming she was correct, he was more or less the PR professor for the Korean Institute of the Sciences.

"Good to see you again, Jiwoon. We missed each other at the last dinner the Institute held because you were on business and I wasn't able to come to the launch of the fabulous news about your time machine just recently since I was out of the country. How are you, in any case?"

Jinsu zoned out as the smalltalk continued, wondering if she'd be able to get away with sidling off. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to get more than two steps before her father's hand was on her elbow again and he was turning her towards another middle-aged man who had joined them.

"Dr Park, we thought you might like to review the prize list and citations before the winners are announced," the man told her father. "The judges are still squabbling over which of the final three ought to take fifth place and since you're the most eminent scientist here and generously hosting the grand prize for the top five, the committee thought that it wouldn't be remiss to draft you in."

Park Jiwoon laughed, telling Bang Daehyuk that he'd see him later, and followed the newcomer, still with his hand on Jinsu's arm. Resigned, Jinsu followed him into one of the rooms just off the hall.

Five more men around her father's age were bickering around the table in the room, stacks of paper in front of them. The door clicked shut behind Jinsu and her father, the latch locking into place, and he finally let go of her. Jinsu dithered by the doorway, wondering if this was a good opportunity to escape. She heard one of the judges voicing irritation at the fact that somebody had seen fit to bother Dr Park with such nuisance when they were very nearly done anyway. To be fair, judging the project probably wasn't something that Jinsu's father wanted to do: he just wanted to announce the prize and the winners and make himself and his company look good. Jinsu's entire get-up that evening was to facilitate that.

She heard snippets of discussion on the various projects – something to do with lasers; another to do with storing energy; another vastly increasing the efficiency and efficacy of translating fuel into energy – but all she really wanted to do was get out of the room.

Her father appeared not to want to stay long. Presumably having had his input on which projects he liked best, he came back over to the door and put his hand on her arm again.

They had just stepped through it when yet another scientist appeared on the other side. He was wearing some kind of pin on his lapel that had initials on it that Jinsu took to be for the Institute, because he looked familiar.

"Ah, just who I was looking for!" the man enthused. "I wanted to ask you about the arrangements for the Attayear, since that's going to be the main prize this evening and I want to make sure that I introduce it properly. Getting a sneak peak at the winners you're going to be announcing?"

"Ah yes, all the material you need is in my briefcase in the cloakroom," Jinsu's father said, abruptly sounding pleasant and businesslike. "I was just heading back that way, if you care to walk with me."

The man from the Institute – Jinsu was now guessing a director or organiser or something of that ilk – quickly fell in step as Jinsu's father started walking again, Jinsu quietly walking alongside him.

"Any good ones?" the man asked with a quick glance at Jinsu. "Word on the block is that your daughter here has high potential."

Park Jiwoon laughed. "Well, I just had to disqualify her from the top five," he said as though Jinsu wasn't even there. Jinsu stumbled to a halt. "She was the only female and the only solo project to be shortlisted, but I suspect that was because they wanted to be seen attempting to diversify and because they were looking to flatter me by putting my daughter on the list or something. All the boys' projects are looking absolutely fantastic— Jinsu, come on."

"I need the bathroom," Jinsu told him, trying not to choke on the bitter lump rising in her throat. She wasn't sure what was worse: her father actually laughing as he lightly discussed disregarding her hard work and talent, or his derisive put-down of what he considered to be female potential in science.

"Be a grown up and wait," he growled out of the corner of his mouth to her. "This is the director of the Institute I'm part of."

Enough was enough. Stony-faced, Jinsu pried her father's hand off her arm. She could see a flash of anger in his eyes as he made to grab hold of her again, but she took a step back.

"Father, I have cramps," she said stiffly. "I will be back in a few moments."

He almost dropped her like a hot brick, turning back to the director. "I do apologise," he said.

Feeling tears beginning to burn, some of which were definitely from humiliation, Jinsu spun on her heel and headed blindly off in the opposite direction, brushing past one or two clusters of students. One of the boys called after her, but she ignored him.

She was out in a corridor before she realised that not only did she not know where the bathrooms were, since they were the best option to head for to compose herself, particularly when she felt like she was about to cry, but she barely knew the layout of the hotel she was in whatsoever. There were only three directions to go, though: back the way she'd come, left at the end of the corridor, or right. Deciding she wasn't going to go back, she sniffed, wiping away a few tears that had fallen, and started towards the junction.

With every step she took, the bitter self-disappointment and frustration towards her father that she'd kept bottled up started to spill out, cutting deeper and deeper into her heart. His blunt dismissal of her project was really the straw that had broken the camel's back. Jinsu loved science. She'd worked so hard on that project, half because it was the area of study and future she'd set her heart on, and half because she wanted to prove herself to her father, to prove his belief that women belonged in the kitchen rather than the lab wrong, and for him to sit up and take notice of her and finally acknowledge her, both as his precious and only daughter and as an aspiring scientist. Her tears were practically blinding her and she could feel them ruining her makeup. The itchy feeling of having a dirty face only added to her distress and she scrubbed furiously at her face, as if it would help anything.

The sound of voices jolted some sense back into her, and she gave her face one last, final rub in an attempt to look a little more composed before she had to meet anybody. When she looked up, though, it was to see that she was already too late.

Just coming through a doorway marked with a sign declaring it to be the men's toilets were three people she knew, and from the way their conversation tailed off, they'd evidently seen what a state she was in. For several mortifying seconds, there was absolute silence. The tall boy on the left frowned and Bonggu's eyes dropped from Jinsu's face to her hand before he turned to the boy and resumed his conversation, making his way around Jinsu. Chanyeol tagged along too, his eyes darting from Jinsu to Bonggu and back again. Just as he opened his mouth and it looked like he might turn back to ask her what was wrong, somebody came barrelling through from the other direction.

"Sorry, sorry, in a bit of a rush here – if I could just squeeze through—"

A pair of hands grabbed Jinsu's shoulders to move her to the side as the newcomer steadied himself from trying to get through all three boys, but as he let go of Jinsu and turned to apologise to her as well, she realised it was a very hassled-looking Yejun.

"Sorry 'bout that, Jinsu, just in a bit of a— oh my God, are you okay?" Without leaving Jinsu time to respond, he grabbed her hand and hauled her after him. Jinsu whimpered slightly at him crushing her injured fingers, but he must have heard her – or realised – because a split second later, he was holding her other hand instead. Two corners later and he was pushing her into a seat in a little alcove just off another hallway and pulling out a phone with the other. Jinsu heard him snapping at a member of staff and asking somebody to take over from him, but was a bit too dazed by the rapid turn of events to really figure out what he was saying until he set the phone down on the coffee table in front of her and crouched so that they were at eye level.

"What happened?" he asked, not even bothering with a more standard are you okay? "Is it your hand?"

Jinsu shook her head and sniffed, wiping her nose on the back of her good hand. "No, my father—"

But that and the fact that Yejun was currently right in front of her just reminded her of her father suggesting that Yejun would be a suitable candidate for a husband. She choked, her face going red. Yejun seemed to mistake her embarrassment for her being too upset to get her words out, because he sighed, his face completely serious, before moving back to sit on the coffee table. He picked up his phone again.

"Jinsu," he said, "would you like me to ring your brother and ask him to pick you up?"

The prospect was tempting, almost too tempting to deny. If not for the prospect of her father's reaction to her just disappearing, she would have agreed.

"No," she mumbled back. "Dad would prefer me here the whole evening if possible."

Yejun pursed his lips, the usual upward lift at the corners turned down.

"All right," he agreed, blatantly not happy about it, typing rapidly instead. "I'll ask for somebody to contact a beautician for you, then." Jinsu was surprised by the reluctance that laced his voice. It was like he knew... everything.

Before she could ask, his phone pinged. He glanced down at it and then sighed, his expression now looking a little torn.

"It's Park Chanyeol," he informed her when he caught sight of her querying look. "He wants to know where I've taken you and if you're okay." He set the phone aside.

The fact that he didn't think it necessary to reply, or ask if she wanted to respond, only compounded Jinsu's rapidly forming theory that he knew.

"How much has Jimin told you?" she asked in a small voice.

Yejun's reply was curt. "Enough."

Well, it was better than him finding out from somebody else. Jinsu swallowed and gestured to the phone.

"I thought you and Chanyeol were friends. Neighbours, even."

"Ye-es," Yejun agreed slowly. "He told me what happened to your hand because for some reason he doesn't have his own cousin's number but thought Jimin needed to know about it and figured I was the fastest way to get hold of your brother, but then Jimin gave me an absolute earful about what's been going on at your school recently." He looked away with a little pout, ruffling up the back of his hair. "I may or may not have punched Chanyeol for being a gigantic wuss the next time I saw him and he's been avoiding me ever since. I think it took him by surprise."

Jinsu was so startled by his admission that she giggled. He grinned back at her.

"Seriously," he said. "You're surrounded by an absolute pack of douchebags and I don't know how you put up with it, because I certainly wouldn't."

"Yeah, but you punch people," Jinsu shot back at him.

"Well, let's just hope you metaphorically punch them all by winning first place with your project tonight," he told her with an easy grin.

Even though he meant to cheer her up, it had the opposite effect. Jinsu wilted back into the leath armchair, fiddling awkwardly with her broken fingers until Yejun grabbed hold her of her wrists and forcibly separated them. He was looking worried again.

"You don't have to say anything—" he began.

"I was slated for the top five, but my dad saw the prizewinner list and kicked me off," she blurted out. Yejun leant back in shock.

"Wow. What a prick."

Jinsu was long past the stage of wanting to defend her father on that front. "I know."

"Why'd he do it?"

"Honestly?" Jinsu grimaced. "He doesn't think women ought to be doing science of any kind – that proper jobs are the man's prerogative. The only women who work for him are all in secretarial positions or marketing. I was the only female to make the winning list and because mine was a solo project and I'm his daughter, it was very easy for him to kick me off it on the basis that it would look biased as he's announcing the prizes so there's now an all-male, perfect list of winners."

"What a prick," Yejun repeated.

"Well, there might be girls in some of the group projects," Jinsu muttered. The trouble was, she knew her father, and if he had anything to do with it, those girls' groups would get kicked off it too. That or they would be receiving the lowest prizes possible.

Yejun's phone pinged twice again, but he ignored it. "The way I see it," he said, "the best way for the night to turn out is for the judges to decide they're not going to listen to him and reinstate you—"

"He'd notice."

More notifications from Yejun's phone. "Oh. Well, in that case, the best slap in the face would probably be Chae Bonggu placing in the top group, wouldn't it? I mean, the prize is going on the Attayear time machine, isn't it? Part of it, anyway?"

Jinsu nodded. The thought was a distasteful one, because Bonggu, but on the other hand, she wasn't sure who out of Bonggu and her father she disliked more. Bonggu going on the Attayear would probably send her father through the roof, and it would be unpleasant being around him for some time. Would it be worth it? Jinsu wasn't sure.

Yejun's phone rang, cutting Jinsu off from further rumination.

"Hey, Jun," he replied to whoever was on the other end of the line – most likely his step-brother. "Yeah, send her to the back foyer, and thanks." There was a brief pause. "Chanyeol can f*cking wait, the b*s— he can bloody well wait too. No, just say you don't have any idea and you couldn't get hold of me. I'll tell you later. Cheers."

Jinsu fiddled with her fingers again, suspecting that the phone call had something to do with her.

"Apparently your dad has noticed you're missing," Yejun said, "so I think we'll leave him to panic. He'll only embarrass himself if he makes a scene."

Trying to figure out the best way to frame her question and her worries, Jinsu pointed at the phone.

"Junmyeon will be fine," Yejun told her. "He says your dad's scary and Junmyeon looks harmless, but in all honesty, he's the king of put-downs if he wants to get nasty and if his science hero is a massive douche towards him, then he will."

Remembering the kind face, gentle voice and bespectacled person she'd only met twice in her life, Jinsu had difficulty believing that Junmyeon was capable of being unkind in the slightest. She didn't have long to dwell on it, though, because a glamorous woman with dyed-blonde hair slid into the alcove at that moment, unzipping a large shoulder bag.

"Oh, honey," she said kindly on observing Jinsu's tear-ruined makeup. "No worries. I can fix that all in a couple of minutes for you."

Yejun found chocolates as they took the long way back to the main venue, Jinsu feeling considerably better. He was holding her hand absentmindedly as he paused every so often, checking signs and the various corridors they came across because he wasn't as familiar with this hotel as he was with some of the others his family owned. It wasn't until they were nearing the hubbub again that Jinsu began to feel uneasy about it.

"Um, Yejun," she said, wriggling her hand out of his. "It's probably best if my father doesn't see you anywhere close to me. He seems to think it would be a great idea for us to get married."

Yejun blinked at her several times, apparently not registering what she'd said. "Pardon?"

Jinsu sighed, feeling her face flaring up. It was not something she wanted to repeat. "My dad's trying to arrange for us to get married."

"Oh." He blinked again several times, clearly put out, and then gave a faint smile. "Well, thanks for warning me."

Jinsu bit her lip, unsure how to reply. If she seemed too blasé about it, wouldn't it be offensive to him?

Yejun clearly had the same worry from the opposite side.

"It's not that I don't think you're a nice person or anything," he said hastily. "I mean, if it has to happen, it has to happen and I'm sure we're both mature enough to make things work out. It's just, I'm not really happy with the prospect of being related to your father."

"Me neither," mumbled Jinsu, causing him to grin again.

"Not to mention I think your brother would hunt me down with a shotgun," Yejun added. "I kind of get the impression he'd prefer you to marry a complete stranger than somebody he's known all their life."

The mischievous little wink he threw her at the end of that set Jinsu giggling for the second time that evening. He opened the door into the room the event was being held in and gestured for her to go through.

"Go stun them all with your beauty," he told her. "We both know you should have won." With one last smile, he stepped back and let the door swing shut, somehow already on his phone. Jinsu thought she caught her brother's name from Yejun's lips, but then a hand landed on her shoulder, making her jump with shock.

Heart in her mouth, she turned to see her father standing there with steam practically coming out of his ears. She tried to back off, afraid he was about to take his anger out on her.

"Where have you been?" he hissed. "I've just spent the past twenty minutes negotiating with the institute to give you special status – we've got a disaster on our hands! That blasted Chae kid is in the team slated to win the top prize and I can't kick him off. I am not having him going anywhere near the Attayear without a family member on board so it's going to have to be you and I need you there when I announce you're going to be the first honorary youth ambassador for the promotion of women in science because it's literally the only position we can give you that doesn't make putting you on the Attayear look like nepotism!"

Jinsu's jaw dropped open. She probably would have felt less stunned if somebody had dropped a brick on her head.

"I-I... could you repeat that please, Father?"

He was fuming far too much to acquiesce, but as far as Jinsu was concerned, it was beyond amazing that the words "promotion of women in science" had passed his lips. She allowed him to drag her through the crowd, still trying to compose herself as she attempted to smile at the students from various schools that she knocked into. Oh, Yejun was going to have a good laugh about this turn of events, probably her brother too.

Then it hit her and all the bubbling happiness drained out of her body, almost leaving her panicking.

She was going to be on the time machine with Bonggu.

Bonggu.

All she could do was sincerely hope he got food poisoning from the orange juice.

Chapter 13

Jinsu wasn't fully sure if she was naturally an incredible introvert or if it was just the people she'd had the misfortune to go to school with, but she would have swapped almost anything in her possession not to be on the makeshift stage as the director of the Institute tapped on a wine glass to get everybody's attention. It was well into the evening by that point (and Jinsu was having to stifle yawns), and they had long since migrated through to the dining room for food. That had been one of the few occasions that Jinsu was not relieved to have been separated from all her schoolmates – the schools had been arranged into circular tables of seven or eight, and the chances of her being forced to sit next to somebody who hated her were high – because her father had decided that she was going to sit on his table with all the important people. If he hadn't been there, Jinsu would have relished in the opportunity to speak to some of the leaders in the field, but it was pretty clear from her father's frosty glances that she was to speak only when spoken to, and he dominated the conversation so much that everybody was too distracted to talk to her.

The after-dinner speech, which actually came between the main course and dessert, was surprisingly dull. After the first minute and a half, by which point a stupor had descended over the room, Jinsu had expected to fall asleep, but Yejun must have contacted her big brother, because her phone blew up with a barrage of text messages. She had spent the rest of the talk surreptitiously texting Jimin back under the table. Reluctant as she was to admit her father was right, Yejun was the kind of person who'd make a truly fantastic husband. Jinsu just hoped that some other girl would be lucky enough to have him.

The director of the Institute tapped on his glass again, not satisfied at the low hum that was still present in the room. Jinsu's phone vibrated again and she glanced down at it.

"It is my great pleasure," the director announced, "to welcome you all here this evening for the annual conference and prizegiving for our youth scientists."

Really, Jimin had written, Jinsu focussing on his message rather than on the director's voice droning on in the background. I can't believe Dad did that. If your project is patented, it could be used all over the world for the advancement of renewable energy. Winning a prize like this would get good media coverage for that, and it would also be easy to media-play on it, not to mention that Dad would be well-placed to advance it in the market himself. What was he thinking?

Jinsu sighed, her shoulders slumping. I don't know. To be honest, I'm so used to it I don't even care anymore.

You do care, Jimin wrote back. In the words of the venerably wise Albus Dumbledore, you care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death from the pain of it. Yejun said you were distraught. The fact is that Park Jiwoon is your father and he's not acting like one, and that hurts worse than any b*tch.

It was so true that Jinsu couldn't even bring herself to scold him for being cheesy and using quotes. She sniffed, a lump springing to her throat, and the finished plate of food in front of her blurred as her eyes filled with tears. How many years had it been since she'd given up wishing for a father who would be proud of her and love her because of who she was instead of judging her by her gender and dismissing her achievements?

"... And we have decided, after some deliberation, that that honour shall go to Park Jinsu!"

Startled at the loud declaration from the director of the Institute, Jinsu looked up. The man was smiling benevolently at her, as if waiting for her to react or get up or make a speech or something. Unsure what she was honoured to receive, Jinsu hastily locked her phone and forced a smile onto her face as she looked around the room and waved.

Dead silence met her.

"Do stand up, Miss Park," the director encouraged. "I'm not sure everybody can see you."

Jinsu got to her feet and waved awkwardly again. This time, there was acknowledgement. A smattering of polite applause broke out across the room, and then there was a loud catcall and a boy Jinsu didn't recognise from a school in an emerald green blazer cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, "whoo, Jinsu for science, yeah man!"

The awkwardness vanished at once as laughter breezed through the room, and Jinsu felt herself turn scarlet. The boy in the emerald blazer settled back in his seat with a smirk, draping an arm across the back of his chair.

One of the doors at the back of the room opened quietly and Jinsu saw Yejun's figure slip through. He was now wearing his school uniform, and he smiled and gave her a double thumbs up when he saw her. Feeling her smile beginning to turn more genuine, Jinsu twisted around to face the institute director once again.

"I should add!" he began again, his voice rising over the renewed hubbub. "Jinsu's specific position is the Youth Ambassador for the Promotion of Women in Science, not just for young people in general, and if you take a good look around the room, it should be evident why."

"We gonna have a male one too, sir?" somebody yelled from the back.

"There are more than enough of us," the director said firmly, continuing before anybody else could heckle. "We are thinking about establishing a corresponding position for adults, but we will only have adult female scientists if we have youth female scientists, and what better person to foster that that the daughter of our very own Park Jiwoon, who will now present the prizes for our annual competition."

Jinsu would have broken the chair if she'd sat down any faster, but she didn't want to be in plain view as the director of the institute more or less informed the room that she only had the position because of her connections. She almost returned to her phone and Jimin out of nerves as her father stepped up to the podium, but he had a good vantage point of her there and she knew he would be furious if he caught her. It wasn't worth it. Reluctantly, she sat up to listen.

"Thank you, Director," he acknowledged with a smile before bracing both of his arms on the podium and leaning forwards a little. "Well, what a wonderful evening. Forgive me for being an indulgent father for a moment or two, but I would just like to share how proud I am of my daughter tonight. As the director has just made us aware, there are very few females at all in this room tonight – I can only see three from here—"

Jinsu frowned. She knew she'd counted at least seventeen females out of somewhere over three hundred students and there were probably more.

"—But I do believe that Jinsu is the only girl from her school here tonight."

That one was true.

"I should also like to add that Jinsu very graciously gave up the honour of winning first place tonight, not just because I am presenting the prizes, but also on the basis that as the youth ambassador for science, she should use her new position to encourage as many of her peers as possible, and what better way to do that, I ask, than opening up the opportunity for as many of you as possible to be the very first, in the world, to travel on a time machine?"

Jinsu choked on air, so incensed that she didn't even know what to think. Was he trying to make her universally hated?

Stunned, she sat there as he announced that all the usual prizes – certificates for honorable mentions, certificates and a small glass trophy for fourth and fifth, both, plus a year pass to an amusement park (excellent place to study Newton's laws of physics) for third, certificate and trophy alongside a week-long trip to Jeju Island for second, and the same for first, but with a trip to CERN in Switzerland instead for first – would be awarded, but that the top five prizewinners would also win a trip on the time machine the following day. Murmurs of excitement ran through the room.

She was still too focussed on trying to breathe properly to really take in the four groups that were called forward for the honorable mentions, but the ecstatic screams that pierced the air on her father's announcement of fifth place almost made her choke again. Eyes watering, she looked up in time to see seven boys in maroon blazers, looking beyond thrilled, piling onto the stage, bowing as they shook her father's hand one by one and received their certificates, and then moving on to get their trophies. Her father was wearing one of those smiles that was halfway between perfunctory and genuine as he congratulated them all.

Once the boys had cleared the stage, all nattering excitedly, her father returned to the podium.

"For the creation and use of a super-telescope sent into space through connections with NASA which has produced substantial evidence to suggest the existence of a major planet beyond Pluto and Sedna, fourth place goes to Do Eunho, Lee Taemin, Kim Wonsik and Nam Taehyun of King Sejong High School."

Four boys from the nearest table got to their feet. Jinsu recognised the tall, tanned one at the front as he strode confidently up onto the stage, flattening down his blazer below his lapels before giving her father a very courteous bow. He'd been with Bonggu, Chanyeol and Hamin earlier, and now that she had a proper look at him close up, she realised that he was more or less familiar. Do Eunho was, after all, a well known name in the circles her family moved in, even if she'd never actually met him. The others she wasn't able to put names to so easily, though she'd heard rumours that Eunho and Taemin were actually step-brothers via a mistress Eunho's father had had, and figured that he must be the one who bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

"For a cross-school project on the future potential of holograms, and the creation of a semi-functional model hologram of a phone handset, Jo Minhwan, Cho Kyuhyun and Shin Jaemin of the National Academy of Science and Computer Science, and Kim Junmyeon and Choi Minho of Seoul International High School, receive third place."

Three boys in green blazers rose to their feet, applauding with the rest of the room as they made their way up to the stage – one of them being the one who had shouted out when the director had announced Jinsu's ambassadorial position. He looked incredibly smug.

By complete contrast, Kim Junmyeon was sitting in his chair still, mouth half open and looking absolutely shellshocked. The boy who'd been sitting in the seat next to him was already on his feet, but it looked like he was trying to convince Junmyeon to stand up and go up to the stage with him. He was clearly Minho. From the back of the room, Yejun was cheering his step-brother loudly. Jinsu noticed her father catch sight of him and raise a disapproving eyebrow.

The disapproval evaporated when he started on the next prize.

"For a truly outstanding paper on the possibility of eradicating various illnesses through gene alteration, and the ethics thereof, Nam Yejun, Lee Soohyun and Shim Changmin of Seoul International High School: second place."

Yejun looked almost as surprised as Junmyeon had, but he was much quicker to recover and joined his beckoning prize winners as they waited for him in order to go up on stage.

"And in a very well deserving first place." Park Jiwoon's jaw twitched. Jinsu could tell that it was clenched. "For building, testing and patenting a model of car due to be properly trialed on the roads next year – sorry, for the creation of a robot that can fix the car on the move and can automatically detect any failings and move to fix them without being told to, the top prize goes to Do Kyungsoo, Park Chanyeol, Chae Bonggu and Yu Hamin of The Pride of Korea High School."

A storm of screams and cheers broke out on the three tables that Jinsu's school was sitting at. She saw Do Kyungsoo biting his lip in an attempt to reign in his smile as he stood up. Chae Bonggu turned to hi-five Chanyeol as they both got to their feet. Yu Hamin full on leapt out of his chair and onto it, making V-for-victory signs with both hands, before he regained his composure and straightened out his uniform to go onstage.

"Their citation additionally reads," Park Jiwoon finished up, "that this project is to be thoroughly commended as it was one of only three carried out without adult input or guidance. While the overall result is perhaps not as incredible as a holographic smartphone, it was done without the guiding influence and knowledge either of a teacher or a university professor, or even a trained academic or researcher in the field of study of the project, and it was fully completed with a fully working model for demonstration. To have come from mere sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, this is truly remarkable."

Possibly more remarkable, Jinsu couldn't help thinking, if Do Kyungsoo's family hadn't made their money from a car manufacturing company and hadn't allowed and helped Do Kyungsoo to build his own race car aged twelve. She was less willing to concede that Hamin had a similar advantage in that he was not only studying with a view to being an engineer, but that at least one branch of his parents' company built, made and sold robots, and there had been occasions when Hamin had brought miniature ones into school for entertainment.

Besides, it was much more fun to remember and laugh at the terrible slogan of Kyungsoo's company that even he groaned at. Do's goes! was something he'd managed to stamp out of the school population's sense of humour in a mere matter of days. Given her school, Jinsu personally thought that was a more astonishing feat than the auto-repairing car he'd designed.

Jinsu was expected to mingle as the evening wore on, but she settled for sitting in a quiet corner instead, as far as possible from the rubbish and the noise. There had been one or two mutterings of nepotism that the ultimate winners were from her school, even if she wasn't the winner herself, which really made her snort. She knew her father would rather strangle himself than let Chae Bonggu take first place under any normal circumstances, and whether or not she'd been the original first place, Jinsu was pretty sure her dad had only made a statement about her ceding the top spot to somebody else because the prospect of a super-talented scientific daughter was much better than the prospect of Chae Bonggu being scientifically superior to anybody in his family, male or female.

But still.

She was still going to have to go on the freaking time machine with Chae Bonggu.

At least Yejun and Junmyeon would be there. And Chanyeol and Hamin.

Picking idly at the tape wrapped around her fingers, she wondered if Hamin being on the trip into the past would be a good thing or a bad thing. She was going to be the only girl in the Attayear, which she wasn't particularly looking forward to, but when he wasn't around Bonggu, Hamin seemed nice enough and it might be an opportunity to get to know him better.

"Yo, genius."

Jinsu's head snapped up. Standing in front of her was one of the boys from the team that had one third place. It was the one who'd shouted Jinsu for science earlier, and he was wearing a cocky smirk. A quick glance at the nametag on his blazer told Jinsu that this was Jo Minhwan.

"Yes?" she asked, attempting to smile.

The smirk dropped for an expression that Jinsu couldn't place, but made her feel instinctively uneasy. He took a couple of steps forward, invading her personal space.

"Are we really supposed to believe you willingly gave up the option to go to CERN just to let some people you don't know go on a time machine? Either you're as f*cked up in the head as they say you are or you're such an embarrassment to your family your dad's trying to publicly save face."

Jinsu tried to shrink away from him, but the wall blocked her. She was used enough to people at school being horrible to her, but hearing it come directly from the mouth of a stranger was a shock.

"And then we all learnt from the little briefing your daddy just gave us that you're coming on the time machine anyway! Talk about nepotism! What kind of favours was your daddy getting you to exchange, huh?"

"Favours?" It took Jinsu a moment or two to click on exactly what he meant, and she let out an incredulous, gaspy scoff. "What... you are absolutely vile, you—"

He actually laughed in her face. Jinsu wrinkled her nose against the smell of the food he'd been eating that evening.

"And so Daddy got his friends to create a whole new important position so he could save face and still shove his talentless daughter onto his beloved time machine. What a joke." Jo Minhwan laughed before his face turned dark. He shoved his head forwards so that their noses were almost touching. "And of course, the project with the car beats out the students who've worked with NASA, patented hologram technology and studied the possibility of eradicating genetic diseases from humanity because they went to your school of rich, spoilt brats—"

"Minhwan, mind not harassing the guests? Do you want me to kick you out?"

As abruptly as the unpleasantness had appeared, it was gone. Minhwan straightened up with a sunny smile and turned towards Junmyeon, who had appeared behind him. Junmyeon gave Jinsu a faint smile.

"Oh, we were just having a friendly chat," he lied. "Jinsu and I are old friends."

Junmyeon snorted. "I've heard people say it's common knowledge Park Jinsu has no friends. While that's definitely not true because I count myself as one of them, I know that you most certainly are not. I also don't want our camaraderie from working on our project to turn sour, so now would probably be a good time to beetle off, don't you think?"

Semi-acknowledging he was caught, Minhwan turned back to Jinsu and grasped her right hand tightly in his. She gave a silent yelp of pain as he crushed her bruised and broken fingers.

"Pleasure to meet you, Park Jinsu. I'll see you again tomorrow."

It honestly sounded like a threat, and Jinsu breathed a sigh of relief when Minhwan stalked off. Junmyeon cleared a linen napkin off the seat beside her so that he could sit down. Jinsu merely continued nursing her painful hand.

"He's worse than Bonggu," she mumbled for something to break the silence, even though she hadn't experienced nearly enough of Minhwan to even compare him to Bonggu.

"He's not usually so horrible," Junmyeon mused. "I think he's just bitter about not winning a prize to send him to CERN. He's got his heart set on the place and this would have been a great opportunity for him to go."

"I can't imagine Chanyeol at CERN," Jinsu said, happy to change the subject. She winced as she absently tried to curl her fingers and pain lanced through them.

"I can't believe you'd really turn down an opportunity like that yourself."

"I didn't." Jinsu picked moodily at the tape again. "My dad's an a*hole and just decided I wasn't going to get a prize because he felt like it."

Junmyeon whistled in shock.

"Yejun thought that too," she muttered.

Abruptly reminded of something, Junmyeon snapped his fingers together. "Oh yeah! I forgot because Minhwan was being an idiot – Yejun told me to find you to tell you he told your brother to come pick you up because he thought you might commit murder in the car on the way back if you had to travel with your dad. So his question for you is, in his own words, 'do you want to escape this farce, because your brother is waiting for you at the entrance'."

Jinsu didn't need asking twice. If she was going to survive being on the Attayear with Bonggu and Minhwan, even if it was just a matter of minutes, she needed to mentally brace herself. If Jimin was offering to drive her home, then it would give her enough distraction to do that.

She was going to need it.

Chapter 14

For the first time in living memory, Park Jiwoon came personally to wake his daughter up. It was the first time in at least ten years that he'd actually set foot in Jinsu's room, and it was also just before five in the morning.

Groggily, Jinsu sat up in bed and blinked at him in the eye-wateringly bright light, not at all pleased that he'd thought it was a good idea to turn it on. Any protest, however, was unintelligible because her brain was hardly awake enough for her to think coherently, let alone put together a reasonable expression of displeasure. She gave a humongous yawn instead.

"Do be dignified, Jinsu, I can see your tonsils," he told her as he sat on the bed. Jinsu tried not to flinch at the way he inadvertently rumpled up her covers.

"S'erfff," she grumbled, scrubbing a hand through her hair before flopping back down onto the bed and attempting to pull her duvet up over her head. It was impossible with somebody twice her weight sitting on it.

"I wanted to talk to you about your trip on the Attayear," he said. "We need to make sure everything runs smoothly."

There was a pause as he waited for her to respond. It took Jinsu a good while to do so.

"Dad, it's early. Go away. Trying to sleep." It was about all she could manage.

He gave something that was halfway between a snort and a sigh. "You will need to be out at the warehouse by half past eight and you haven't even packed. I should have asked your maid to do it last night while we were out."

The prospect of Saeeun packing for her to go away for a week made Jinsu wince. The girl definitely had an eye for tasteful clothing, and that much couldn't be denied, but there was a vast difference between tasteful clothes Saeeun would be comfortable wearing and clothes that Jinsu would be comfortable wearing, and Jinsu got the impression that Saeeun lived vicariously through Jinsu wearing things in her closet that she would never have picked out herself. Especially when it came to high-heeled shoes.

"You missed the briefing last night because you were needed for other things," her father went on, "but you will be on the Attayear for a week, and you'll be both my representative – and company representative – and the representative of the Institute, since you now hold the position of youth ambassador. I've been in discussion with the National Institute of Archaeology as well as the Education minister and the president since the Attayear was completed and we decided that the most interesting time period to send you back to would be during the Balhae dynasty."

Jinsu let out another massive yawn. "But that's in modern-day North Korea. And China. And China will flip... be unhappy."

"Exactly," said her father. "The historians of this country and the world in general can barely get at Balhae and only have research and artifacts that was done before the war and moved away from the North, so this would be a prime occasion to actually go in and get some first-hand experience and knowledge of the times."

That interested Jinsu enough for her to prop herself up a little and open her eyes properly. She stifled another yawn. History was about the only non-scientific subject that she really enjoyed and this was a period of time that genuinely would be fascinating to go back to.

"It would be nice – really nice – if you could bring back some souvenirs. The others were given strict instructions during the briefing that they were to leave everything as it was, to blend in and then to leave – touch nothing, alter nothing, change nothing – because we don't know what kind of effects it'll have on the future. That said, we think that if you dress like a local, you should be able to trade for souvenirs. I've left some things downstairs for you to collect in my study. But one thing is very important."

Jinsu held back yet another yawn, blinking in an attempt to convey her interest.

"You've got to be the one who actually brings it back and presents it. Or at the very least, make sure that the one who does it isn't Chae Bonggu. I'm not having him stealing our thunder like that."

Too sleepy to give a verbal response still, Jinsu nodded.

It was another hour and a half before he left, after inundating Jinsu with instructions she was never going to remember, but she did process the fuzzy feeling of warmth when he looked down at her just before he left and said, "You look shattered. You should rest a bit more." He'd even given her a rather awkward pat on the shoulder.

When she woke up, Jinsu found herself wondering if it was really real. She was still tired, and was about ready to hit snooze on her alarm clock and roll over to go back to sleep again when her bedroom door burst open and her brother barrelled in.

"Jiiiiiiiiinsuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!" he yelled, dive-bombing onto her bed. Thoroughly squished, Jinsu squeezed and flailed.

"Jimin! Get off! What did I ever do to you?"

He responded by practically smothering her. "You have the makings of greatness!" he shouted in her ear. "But you have to take the helm and chart your own course! You're gonna be the only girl on the Attayear, Jinsu, and since I'm not coming with you, now's my chance to be suuuuuuuper over-protective of my little sis!"

"Jimin!" Jinsu whined, thrashing her feet in protest. "It's too early for you to be butchering Treasure Planet!"

He placed a large smooch on her nose. With a shriek, Jinsu attempted to whack her head back through her pillow and out of the way. Cackling with glee, her big brother sat up and scooted out of her reach. Jinsu glared at him.

"How on earth are you twenty-six?" she demanded.

"You need to get up and pack," he told her. "We're leaving in half an hour."

"Half an hour?"

"Just kidding. You have a full hour. Chop chop!"

Awake and panicking, Jinsu shot out of bed. Jimin, being the wonderfully helpful big brother he was, disappeared and left her to it.

Forty-five minutes later, with a holdall packed for the week, complete with medical supplies and toiletries, Jinsu was downstairs in clothes she was pretty certain Saeeun would have approved of. Mrs Kwon raised an eyebrow at the mildly distressed grey skinny jeans and the fluffy jumper she'd pulled over the top of them and kept dragging down to mid-thigh, but Jimin started stroking it like she was some kind of pet bunny. Jinsu scooted further down the table and looked at the large plate of bacon and fried eggs in front of her brother.

"These are for you," he announced, shoving them towards her. Jinsu looked from the plate to her brother in alarm.

"Don't worry," Jimin assured her. "Jimin's been teaching me how to cook. They aren't poisonous."

Still wary, Jinsu took a tentative bite. Concluding that he was telling the truth, she proceeded to scoff the rest.

"Well, I'm gonna put your stuff in the car," Jimin announced. "See you out front in ten?"

Still with her mouth full of egg, Jinsu agreed, and her brother left the table.

Ten minutes later, Jinsu was almost out at the front door when she remembered her father saying he'd left stuff for her in his office, and she doubled back to see what it could possibly be. He thankfully wasn't in the room when Jinsu entered it, meaning that he'd gone to the company offices for the day, or possibly to handle the press for the Attayear's launch. However, it wasn't too hard to find what he'd intended for her.

The first thing that caught her eye were the clothes neatly piled on his desk. Bright silks and rougher-spun cloth in less vibrant colours were piled almost three feet high, as though her father expected her to change her outfits every two or three hours while she was back in the past.

Then her eye fell to the leather sack resting against the desk with a smart luggage tag attached to its top with her name written on it. Jinsu bent to pick it up, but quickly released it, surprised at its weight. Curious, she looked inside, and her jaw dropped.

It was full of ancient coins and gold bars. Jinsu had absolutely no idea how her father had got hold of them, though she knew he was rich enough to splash out on something like this, but the mere thought of him actually lavishing this much money on her was mind-blowing. The other question was whether the ancient coins – so well polished they glinted in the study's artificial light – had been requisitioned from a museum that had a hoard of them, or whether Park Jiwoon had somehow persuaded the mint to run a massive bunch of them off. Either was perfectly plausible, knowing her father.

Deciding it wasn't something worth worrying about, Jinsu heaved the sack up onto her shoulder and reached out with the other hand to grab the clothes. Feeling like a rather inept thief and barely able to see where she was going, and made her way out of the room and to the front door, where Jimin was waiting rather anxiously for her. He took the clothes from her, calling back into the house for Mrs Kwon to bring another bag or suitcase for some kind, and told Jinsu to put the sack in the car and get in, which she did. When Mrs Kwon bustled up with another suitcase, Jimin stuffed the clothes into it and all but chucked it in the boot before getting into the driver's seat.

"I thought you were packed," he grumped as he started the car up.

"I forgot Dad said he'd left me stuff in the office."

"Oh."

Jinsu settled back in her seat. "He's given me enough gold for me to be a millionaire in Balhae and enough clothing for me to stay there for a year. I didn't realise he hated the Chae family so much and was still fussed about making digs at them publically."

Jimin gave a sort of grunt, and there was silence for the rest of the journey.

Finding a space in the carpark by the Attayear warehouse was like trying to catch mercury. Numerous cars were parked illegally as the place was overflowing, and there were people everywhere. Jinsu recognised a few faces from the previous night – a number of the students were obviously there with friends and family – and reporters and general members of the public were swarming all over the place. Pursing his lips, Jimin came to a halt behind a car that was also hovering in a vain attempt to find somewhere to park, and he cut the engine.

"I suggest you go out and I'll join you with your stuff in a bit," he said. "Though..." He side-eyed her. "God, Jinsu, Dad is going to freak if you appear on TV looking like that. It's far too casual."

"What?" Blankly, Jinsu pushed down the hem of her fluffy jumper with the palms of her heels. "What's the problem with looking casual?"

"You're going on national TV and you actually look your age. Seriously, Jin—"

"I'm sure I can sneak round the reporters if I don't have to carry my stuff."

There was a very pregnant silence. It looked like Jimin was chewing the inside of his cheek.

"Jinsu," he began slowly. "Did Dad not tell you that you're being interviewed on his behalf as part of the production team of the Attayear as he can't be here, and as the national representative of science?"

"No," Jinsu responded automatically before correcting herself, a frown beginning to form. "I mean, he might have done, but I don't remember. It was way too early in the morning and I more or less thought I'd dreamt him coming into my room because he hasn't done it since he sent you away to the States ten years ago."

Jimin mumbled a swear word under his breath and let out a heavy sigh. "Have you packed anything smart? Or anything that would make you look like a business woman? Or a dress?"

"Didn't really think I'd need them."

"Okay. It's okay, Jimin, we can sort this out." Mumbling what sounded like a pep talk to himself, he reached for his phone. Curious as to who he was dialing, Jinsu craned her neck to see, but he already had his phone up by his ear.

"Jimin, we need help."

The sight of Girlfriend-Jimin roaring up on a superbike in full leathers was surprisingly enough to distract the press from the excitement of the time machine for a good few minutes. Jinsu wasn't totally sure how Girlfriend-Jimin managed to get them away because reporters were smushed up against the windows of the car and her brother had got out to greet his girlfriend. Not that long later, Girlfriend-Jimin scrambled in, clothes tumbling out of a very large handbag she was carrying and sunglasses falling off her nose, and in a flash the car was locked from the inside and she was bluetacking jumpers up across the windows and windscreens despite all the windows being tinted.

"This'll have to do as a dressing room," she announced.

Five frantic minutes later, Jinsu found herself in a military-style red tunic dress that fell to just below the knee with a precipitously high pair of matching red heels (what was it with fashionista girls and heels?) and a very fine white silk scarf tied around her neck in a manner that reminded her of an air hostess. Girlfriend-Jimin had insisted on bright red lipstick to match (Jinsu had managed to convince her that red fingernails weren't necessary) and a white fascinator with a little net that Jinsu swore only belonged at weddings had been pinned into her hair, now done up in a smart bun. Jinsu's objection to mascara led to the use of eyeliner instead because Girlfriend-Jimin was adamant that Jinsu's eyes had to stand out, and then Girlfriend-Jimin slid a large silver cuff onto her right wrist to complete the ensemble.

"Go knock 'em down!" Girlfriend-Jimin told her enthusiastically. "And tell your brother he is not allowed to complain!"

Feeling hugely more self-conscious than she ever had done in something Saeeun had picked out for her, Jinsu cautiously made her way out of the car. The thick layer of lipstick felt suffocating on her, not least because it felt like there was something in the way of the air and her mouth since she was used to feeling a slight breeze against her lips, but she resisted the temptation to smudge it off. She'd have to wait until she was in the Attayear and out of the public eye, but then it was coming off immediately.

The biggest problem about wearing emergency red was that everybody noticed you. Jinsu had barely tottered two steps before she was besieged by reporters, and it was only another two seconds before she was recognised as camera flashes were going off like bolts of lightning and microphones were all but thrust in her mouth as people started asking questions. Flinching away, she looked around for help and caught sight of Jimin.

His expression froze when he saw her, but he quickly schooled it into something more neutral and fought his way through to her side.

"Space, please, space, space, space!" he called out, taking Jinsu's elbow and waving a hand around to force people to step back. "Jinsu will be answering questions when we get into the warehouse because there's more room there. Could you please clear a path through?"

It looked like most of the reporters were too excited to listen, because they scampered along beside the siblings, not stopping with the microphones or the cameras or the questions. Jinsu only tuned them out when she realised her brother was muttering angrily under his breath.

"What?" she asked.

"I did not mean Jimin could do this with you," he grumbled in an undertone so that it wouldn't be caught by the mics. "It's a massive improvement on before, but I think Dad is going to skin me. You look like the mother of the bride."

Jinsu couldn't help a bubble of laughter.

"Seriously," Jimin insisted. "Like one of those mothers of the bride who insists on stealing her daughter's thunder while insisting she's dressing very simply. And the worst thing is that I can imagine Dad trying to do that at your wedding, just not in the lipstick or the dress. Or the shoes."

"Maybe I should ask Jimin if I can keep the fascinator to give to him."

"Good idea. It would give Yejun an excuse to kick him out for being embarrassing."

The reminder of a pending arranged engagement punctured some of Jinsu's amusement. "Should have known he'd tell you about that," she mumbled.

"He looked like somebody had condemned him to death when he told me. I think I've been feeding him a few too many horror stories about our dad."

"There is no such thing as too many horror stories about our father." Jinsu paused. "Where is he, anyway? He wouldn't normally miss something like this, no matter what the reason."

"With a lawyer discussing the charges to press against the two goons who attempted to sabotage the machine. And discussing whether or not it's possible to sue the Chaes, because the two men are denying that they were commissioned to do it or ordered to in any way, but it's clear that there's a connection. I think he's hoping that if it all gets sorted out quickly enough, he might be able to create enough of a fuss to get Bonggu kicked off the machine, or at least to resign his place."

Jinsu frowned. It sounded so very like her father. It was actually possible it was something he'd said to her that morning, too, because it sounded slightly familiar.

Jimin looked around before bending a little closer to murmur in her ear: "He's adamant that the news about the sabotage isn't going to make big press, if it makes it at all, but if it does, he wants to make sure that he's nailed the perpetrator so that can be announced publicly, otherwise he'll lose credibility for allowing a group of school children to do the inaugural time skip in a machine that could be faulty, even though it's been checked over and we know it's safe."

Yes, that was something she did vaguely remember her father mentioning.

There was a momentary lull in the excitement of the press towards her as they reached the warehouse doors and two security guards came out to undo the enormous chains that locked them.

Collective gasps filled the air as the doors were slid back to reveal the enormous time machine, gleaming brilliantly in the darkness of the warehouse before the lights flickered on. Attayear was emblazoned across it in navy blue at round about the height of a first story building.

"Wow," Jinsu heard someone say, followed by somebody else exclaiming, "it looks like a fat miniature rocket."

Jimin pulled her to a halt with a quiet murmur of "here."

"Good luck," he told her as they turned around. "I have to go to work now, but I'll be back here for when you arrive back at five in the evening our time or whenever it is. Have fun in the past. Just remember that the creation of a single world comes from a huge number of fragments and chaos. That's Hayao Miyazaki. You guys are responsible for the future if you go back into the past, so make sure nothing gets messed up. We don't know what the repercussions will be like."

The interview was traumatising, as far as Jinsu was concerned. She knew the answers to most of the questions and was able to more or less repeat what her father had said about going back to the Balhae period and who had asked for it, and to provide rudimentary answers on the Attayear itself as far as possible, but she felt like a rabbit fixated on a road with a truck hurtling at it. There was too much going on at once, too many questions being fired at her, and she didn't know where to turn.

Eventually, she was rescued by the appearance of Noah, who came out of the main entrance of the Attayear with a spring in his step and a bullhorn in one hand.

"All right, folks, if you could all listen up!" he yelled into the bullhorn. "We're going to make history today, but we're only going to do it today if we keep on schedule, so if everybody who's not a licenced reporter or supposed to be going on the Attayear today could step back out of the warehouse, that would be lovely. We're going to turn on the engines now so it's going to be quite loud in here, in any case. For anybody wondering, there's about another hour until launch, so you have time to get your luggage on board and say your goodbyes and take photos, and we're due back at five-thirty tonight after spending a week touristing in the year 835, when you can take more photos. Everybody got that? Great!"

Whether or not everybody did get it, it was pretty clear they had no choice but to obey as the security guards appeared again, this time with poles and rope to fence the area off.

Moments later, everything was chaotic again. A lot of people were irritated that they couldn't get close to the Attayear, which they at least wanted to take photos standing near if they weren't the ones going on it, and then one of the reporters spotted Hamin standing head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd and correctly identified him as one of the competition top prizes members and scuttled off to interview him. The other reporters seemed to catch on, with the result that all the students who were arriving to go on the Attayear got mobbed. Jinsu spotted Chanyeol chatting happily to the journalists surrounding him, and others seemed perfectly happy to be interviewed as part of such a momentous event in history, but one or two looked very irritated, clearly wanting to get out of the spotlight and on with the reason why they were there.

Finally finding herself with breathing space, Jinsu discreetly turned her back and wiped the back of her hand firmly against her lips to get rid of the cloying lipstick.

"You all right there?" a voice asked through a loudspeaker directly beside her. Jinsu jumped and nearly went sprawling as she lost her balance. A hand steadied her and she looked up to see Yejun snickering at her, Noah's bullhorn still pointing in her direction. "You look hot. Just thought you'd like to know."

Jinsu tried to think of something to respond with, but her mind went blank.

"And also, probably not the best of ideas to rub your makeup off like that, especially with your broken hand. You look like you've been gorging yourself on the blood of innocents to retain your youthful beauty."

The deadpan delivery of his final sentence left Jinsu confused as to whether she was amused or insulted. She reached for the bullhorn, which he let her take, and placed the bell by his ear to repay the favour.

"You are a flirt, Nam Yejun."

He burst out laughing. "Come on. Let's get inside. It looks f*cking awesome and I want a personal tour before everybody else piles on and Noah said he'd only show me round if I rescued you. Cousins suck sometimes."

Jinsu tried to ignore a mental image of Chanyeol as she agreed with him. "You're right, they really do."

Looping his arm through hers, Yejun dragged her in the direction of the doors of the Attayear. Jinsu barely had a chance to glance up at the façade before she was inside and practically tripping over the luggage in the entrance. Yejun waltzed through it, Jinsu in his wake, and out into one of the curved passages, where Noah was talking to two men in overalls who had to be technicians.

"I have rescued the damsel in distress!" Yejun announced. Noah looked up at him.

"Did you steal my bullhorn?" He sounded unimpressed. Yejun wordlessly handed it back. Noah turned to Jinsu.

"I promised to take this thing and Junmyeon on a personal tour, so make yourself at home. I think your brother's dropped all your stuff in a room for you upstairs, so you might want to discover which one that is before everybody else piles in. You'll be by yourself since you're the only girl."

"Sexist," Yejun said automatically. Noah clocked him round the head.

"Shush, you. Jinsu, we'll meet you down in the main control room in forty-five minutes."

Inwardly laughing, Jinsu felt her trepidation at a week stuck in the same place with Chae Bonggu melting away, and she happily made her way upstairs.

Her brother had left her stuff in the first room she came to, and she used the opportunity to unpack. Once she was satisfied that everything in the room was neat and orderly, she headed out onto the interior balcony and peered down.

Compared to the last time she'd been inside the Attayear, the place was buzzing. A number of boys around her own age were gaping around them in excitement and astonishment as they stood in the middle of the computer room. Three men in smart white shirts were at the motherboards and computers, presumably monitoring what was going on, and the railing she was resting her hand on was thrumming with the power of the machine as it fully came alive.

Voices from nearby caught her attention, and she looked up. Directly opposite, Junmyeon was coming out of a room with the tall boy from his school who'd been in his team. They were deep in conversation, but both were gesturing animatedly with their hands. The taller one happened to look over the balcony and dragged Junmyeon over too, pointing down. Jinsu distinctly heard him exclaim "that is f*cking cool!"

Junmyeon laughed, his face lighting up. "Can you imagine how utterly awesome it would look if it was all holograms?"

"Seriously, that day's not far off. I'm disappointed, though – I think it would be much more interesting to go into the future and see how soon that day might be and how much cooler technology becomes as it advances."

They both turned away from the balcony and Junmyeon laughed again.

"Minho, the ethics of going into the future are much more controversial than going into the past," he said as they began walking towards the second set of stairs opposite the ones Jinsu was by. "You have grandfather clauses going into the past and everybody knows you never mess with that, but when people come back from the future, they try to take fate into their own hands to match or change..." His voice faded into the clatter of them descending.

Everybody had assembled in the main computer room by the time Jinsu finally made her way down there. They were all in a little huddle in the space in the centre, nobody brave enough to actually approach the computers or the people working at them. Jinsu automatically looked around for Yejun or Noah, as they were the people she was most comfortable with, but Noah was nowhere to be seen and Yejun was surrounded by a group of people, including the Minhwan person from the previous night, so she decided it was best not to impose. Junmyeon was with his step-brother, so he was also a no-go. Instead, she hovered at the fringes of the group in a spot where she had a decent view of Hamin.

Completely unsurprisingly, Hamin was with the others from their school and the incredibly tall Do Eunho, but to Jinsu's shock, the animated one of the group was Kyungsoo. Jinsu didn't think she'd ever seen him look so thrilled. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but it must have been interesting, because Chanyeol and Hamin and Eunho were nodding along, Eunho making the occasional interjection. Bonggu looked like he wasn't really paying attention, his gaze roaming ceaselessly around the room and never fixing on a place for more than a couple of seconds. When he caught sight of Jinsu, he wrinkled his nose up in obvious disgust and turned away.

It was too common an occurrence for Jinsu to feel acutely hurt, but she couldn't help wondering – hoping, even – if it might be because she hadn't realised she'd left some lipstick when she went to freshen up in the bathroom before coming down. She knew it couldn't be, though, because there was a mirror in the bathroom that she'd spent a long time staring into.

She was interrupted before she could dwell on it too long.

"All right, munchkins, listen up!" called Noah's voice. "If you're all quiet then I won't have to use this bullhorn!"

Silence descended at once and everybody turned to face him. He was standing on a chair he'd dragged up beside the largest motherboard, and he'd been joined by a dimpled man in overalls.

"All twenty-four of you are here, fantastic." Noah beamed and leant over to put the bullhorn down on the motherboard nearest him. "Welcome aboard the Attayear. I'm Han Noah and I guess you could say I'm the captain of this wonderful beastie. This is Yixing." He gestured to the man in overalls. "He's our chief engineer."

Yixing waved brightly at them. From somewhere nearby, Jinsu heard somebody ask "is that a Chinese name?" in a murmur.

"We also have a federal agent aboard," Noah went on, quieting the whispers once again. "I want to emphasise that this is not a school trip. You've been selected to go back in time because you're the cream of the crop of your generation. This is a rare opportunity, and it's also being used for research. Please respect that. The agent is authorised to arrest and contain anybody not keeping to the expected standards, in particularly if it has anything to do with messing up the timeline."

He paused and clapped his hands. "The timeline! We'll explain more about that once we get going. For now, if you'd all like to turn this way..."

Noah indicated with his hand. Everybody turned to face the direction he was pointing in, and more gasps and murmurings broke out. The Lintel of Time was still by far the most ornate part of the time machine, and just above it, as Noah had said he wanted, Attayear shone in large gold letters.

"You can see the stopwatch on the right is counting down the final two minutes until the Attayear will make the hop," Noah said. "The watches you were given as you entered are currently mimicking this."

Jinsu involuntarily glanced down at her left wrist. Her watch was presumably somewhere else, as she didn't have it yet. She returned her gaze to the Lintel.

As everybody watched, the middle screen suddenly became a blaze of colour.

Destination: Balhae was what it finally settled on, with Intended year: 835 flitting across the display shortly after. It was so quiet anybody could have heard a pin drop. The reality was finally hitting home to everybody there, and the teenagers watched the screen as though in a trance.

"Your watches should all put you at thirty seconds to ten," Noah called out. "Just check if that's the case. Twenty seconds!"

A rustle of movement followed as they all did exactly that. Someone, somewhere, began calling out a countdown.

By ten, the countdown had grown to a murmur, growing to a deep male rumble as it approached five, and then heading for a shout as the numbers dropped further and the droning engines suddenly revved with a deafening roar.

"Three!"

"Two."

"One!"

"Let's dive!" Noah yelled over the engines as the roar shook the entire Attayear with vibrations so hard Jinsu felt her teeth rattle in her head.

Everything went blindingly bright.

Chapter 15

Blind panic broke out at the blinding light. The notion rather amused Jinsu, who sat down once she had got over her initial fear so that she could wait it out. It took a good ten seconds, but vision gradually began to filter back in, and she could have sworn she saw Noah having a good chuckle to himself about the various boys clinging to each other in fright.

The engines were still roaring around them. Gradually, people became aware that they weren't dying and began to calm down.

This was replaced by excitement when some of them got enough courage and interest to start looking around them again.

"The clock!" exclaimed Yu Hamin's tall friend Do Eunho, pointing towards the central clock. "Look at the clock!"

Everybody turned towards the clock, even the technicians working at the computers, since it was their first proper trip on the Attayear too.

"Our watches, too!" another voice piped up. Jinsu thought it sounded Kyungsoo, except that Kyungsoo never sounded that excited. Heads dipped towards wrists, but since Jinsu didn't yet have her own watch, she stayed looking at the central clock instead. The hands were whizzing anti-clockwise around it, the second hand so quickly that it looked like a thin grey disk with a golden rim was spinning on the clockface.

Noah hollered to get everybody's attention and told them all to sit down, straddling a chair backwards to face them all once they were comfortable.

"What you've just experienced is what we call the Dive," he explained, and everybody was instantly riveted, eager to find out more about the incredible machine they were in. "The white light was the point at which we disappeared from the present – or the time we were in, whichever you want to call it."

A hand went up. "Does it actually take us ten seconds to vanish? The light lasted a long time."

Craning her neck, Jinsu could see that the questioner was Junmyeon's friend who'd won third place with him.

Noah held up a hand to show that he'd heard the question and then looked around. "Who heard the sonic boom as the light became blinding?"

Several hands went up.

"Was that what the massive piyooo! sound thing was?" Lee Taemin called out. "I thought something malfunctioned and that we were all going to die!"

There was a snort from somewhere in the crowd of boys and then Jo Minhwan spoke up, his sound scathing. "It wasn't nearly loud enough to be a sonic boom. Not for a machine this size. It would have deafened everybody on board."

Noah tilted his hand down to point at Minhwan. "True. I called it a sonic boom because it's the easiest thing to compare it to. It's actually a temporal boom, so it's much gentler. Now, who heard the second boom that came five seconds after, when the light was brightest?"

There was a scoff from someone, and Jinsu recognised the next speaker as one of Minhwan's friends, though she couldn't for the life of her remember his name. He had a very strong jawline, though, and his narrow eyes and low brow made him look very angry.

"What is this, school?" he demanded.

"I'm trying to teach you something," Noah told him dismissively. "You have the honour of being the first people in the world to travel on a time machine and one day your grandkids will want you to tell them all about it, and then you'll regret not taking advantage of learning everything you could at the time."

"This is the first trip," Minhwan agreed with his friend, doing a volt-face. "You could just be making it all up as you go along."

Noah laughed. It wasn't as derisive as Minhwan's tone had been, but it was enough to send shivers down Jinsu's spine, and she couldn't help edging back at the flinty quality that entered his gaze.

"Look, kid," he said, "if you think that's the case, you're welcome to take my place and try to bullsh*t your way through navigating the centuries, because if I'm making it up as I go along, there's no reason why any old ignoramus shouldn't be doing this. Wanna give it a go?" He made to get up from his seat.

"I meant we have no idea of verifying if what you're telling us is the truth. You could be feeding us a pack of lies to tell our grandkids," Minhwan threw back.

"He assumes he'll have kids with that attitude, let alone grandkids?" muttered a voice from beside Jinsu. "Wow."

She turned to see that Yixing had moved and was sitting near her, a large green cloth on the floor in front of him that was littered with what looked like tiny cogs. He was holding something round in his hand and focussing with a screwdriver as he deftly fastened the round object to another. He looked so utterly engrossed in his work that Jinsu was a little surprised he was aware of what was going on around him.

Noah seemed to think it wasn't worth engaging Minhwan in any more conversation. "Well, did you hear the second temporal boom?" he asked before moving on to the general group before Minhwan could reply. "Did any of you?"

Only two hands went up – Kyungsoo's and Bonggu's.

"It was much quieter," Kyungsoo said eagerly. Jinsu could see Bonggu looking around for other people who might have heard, and when his eye fell on her and he saw neither of her hands were raised, he gave a smug smirk and settled back happily. Jinsu guessed he was putting that as a point to his family over hers on the scoreboard.

"Bonggu and I hypothesise the first was the point at which the machine gathered enough momentum one way or another to sit in a time stasis, so we were no longer continuing along the time spectrum with everybody else in present time – home time, whatever it is – and then the second one was when we actually actively started going back in time, which required less of an effort than slipping into the stasis or stopping it because most of the momentum was already there and it just needed a final nudge."

There were several murmurs of interest from the others in the Attayear, and Kyungsoo lowered his hand, his sudden burst of confidence wearing off.

"You're sixteen, right?" Noah asked. Jinsu wondered how he knew, but then figured that he'd probably heard about Bonggu's friends from Bonggu, even if he'd never met them. Kyungsoo nodded. "Very impressive."

Kyungsoo's cheeks turned a little pink.

"And based on that extremely shrewd analysis, who can guess how long it took us to disappear from present time?" Noah asked.

This time, it was Kim Wonsik who spoke up. "It would have to be in less than a second, if we weren't moving forward in time," he said, "which would necessitate a time vacuum forming around the machine."

"Exactly!" Noah beamed at him and turned back to Junmyeon. "There you have it." He shifted, presumably for comfort. "Now, I know that most of you have looked around already, but we have time on our hands, so we're going to split you all into groups and take you on a proper guided tour, but before that, some maths for you." He cleared his throat. "At the speed we're currently going at, which is Temp 3 and the highest speed we can safely do – we go back one year every seventy-two seconds. So how long will it take us to reach Balhae?"

"Well, that's a thousand, one hundred and eighty-one years," Minhwan said before anybody else could chip in. "There are 86400 seconds in a day, and 1181 years will take 85032 seconds, so I'd put that at round about twenty-three and a half hours."

"Yup," Noah agreed. "Twenty-three hours and thirty-seven minutes for the pedantic among you. It'll be nearer twenty-three hours fifty before the machine powers down and it'll be possible to get out of it, because the physical location we're going to in the past isn't the same as the one that we left from, so we need to factor in a bit of travel time. When we hit the 1000 AD mark we'll start travel floating as well, so we'll be moving in increments towards our target destination, which is set by these lovely hardworking people on the computers here." He waved a hand behind him to the technicians. "The vector adds on travel time, of course. Anyway. I'm going to hand you over to our federal agent now so Yixing and I can do our rounds and make sure everything's functioning as it should before we take you on a proper tour, and you can all learn about what you can and can't do in the past. They're all yours, Jino."

A tall man with a buzzcut stepped out from underneath the Lintel. He wasted no time in getting down to business, waving a sheaf of papers at them.

"You all signed these on entering the Attayear," he said once he had introduced himself and told them he'd been detailed to board the time machine by the president. "You should therefore already know what's on this, but since I know excited young hotheads sometimes forget to read this kind of thing, I'm going to spell it out loud and clear."

Jinsu squinted at the pieces of paper. She hadn't been made to sign anything. Maybe it was because she was her father's daughter.

"First and foremost: there is to be no interference or interruption with the lives of the people we meet, or the world at that time. This far back in time, the larger the effect of any ripples we create. We are observers and nothing else.

"Second, any interaction or resources that is necessary is to be kept to the absolute bare minimum. We do not know what disruption this could cause.

"Third, the machine itself must be hidden and remain hidden, and nobody from the past may be brought near or on board it.

"Fourth, those leaving the Attayear must be dressed in attire of the day, and ensure they have nothing on them that would be anachronistic. There is a clause in this allowing for photographs to be taken, but these must be done secretly.

"Fifth, no stealing; no murder; no breaking of laws. Above all, do not bring back unlawfully obtained souvenirs.

"Sixth, rules set down by those staffing this machine are to be followed. Severe instances of flouting regulations will be treated as a federal crime, as they risk the lives of a good number of you and the impact on the years ahead of the time it happens in are unknown and potentially far reaching.

"Seventh, and most important as far as I'm concerned, there is to be no tampering with the future. Yours or anybody else's. This will result..."

Jinsu tuned out as Jino droned on about the laws and rules and began looking around her instead. Yixing and Noah had vanished silently, the only evidence of the former being the neatly bundled green cloth, presumably now wrapped around whatever it was he'd been working on. The hands on the central clock on the Lintel were still zipping around like bunnies on steroids, but the men at the computers seemed to have relaxed, their jobs done beyond monitoring for probably a good few hours. They were chatting quietly to each other instead. Looking back at her peers, Jinsu could see a good number of them losing interest in the federal agent. Most were looking down at their watches as something else to do.

Somehow, Jino managed to drag out his speech for a full twenty minutes, and Jinsu could see at least five boys who'd fallen asleep. Yejun was one of them, elbow on his knee and chin propped on his hand, a loose curl of hair falling close enough to his mouth to flutter every time he exhaled. Now that Jinsu thought about it, he was quite a handsome boy, with a spectacular personality and a great inheritance to boot. It wouldn't be the end of the world by any stretch if they weren't able to get her father to back off on his proposed arranged marriage.

Everyone jolted awake with the reappearance of Noah, who was proving to be quite a showman. Just as Jino eventually droned to a halt, Noah bounded up onto the chair he'd been using before, holding aloft a piece of paper.

"Are we all mature young adults?" he bellowed, jolting the sleepers out of dreamland. There was a blank silence. "I can't hear you!"

"Yes!" came the response.

"And do we all think that being chosen to travel back in time is really cool?"

This time, the response was more animated.

"Do you want to be treated as grown ups rather than us nannying you?"

The mood perked up, some people clearly thinking this meant that Noah wasn't going to be as prescriptive as Jino was.

"Yes!" the boys shouted back.

"Good!" Noah beamed. "If you want to be treated like grown ups, that means the good and the bad! Which means you have all just volunteered your services for cooking and cleaning duty this week. I'll draw up a rota to pin on your bedroom doors. Now get into groups of five or six, because we're going on a tour of the ship and we have more than enough people working on here to deal with four or five groups."

A confused buzz broke out among the boys, some irritated at being tricked and others more keen to actually get to know their way around the machine they'd be living in for the next week. As they organised themselves into groups, Noah hopped down off his chair and made his way over to Jinsu.

"You already know your way around and you know more than we're going to tell most of them, so you can either join or go do your own thing," he told her as he surveyed the mingling students.

Jinsu grimaced at the prospect of being stuck in a group that had somebody who didn't like her in it. She could already see that Junmyeon was talking to Minhwan, and it felt a bit unfair to land herself on Yejun for everything. Chanyeol was laughing with Bonggu, so that was a no-go too.

"I think I'll just keep out of the way."

"Fair. Lunch will be in about forty-five minutes and we'll reconvene probably three hours from now in here to have a brief chat about the history of the place as a group. Though, I would suggest going to talk to Jino, because I think your dad said something about you being responsible for bringing back souvenirs for the National Historical Association and Jino might want to give his two cents on that. Oh, and drop by my room at some point. Yixing shares it with me and he was planning to go up there and put together your watch for you so you're not left out."

Jinsu nodded.

"Just make sure to actually stay within the machine. Going out through the portholes and, say, sitting on the roof will be dangerous."

Jinsu nodded again. He clapped her on the back and moved towards the boys. He had their attention again within seconds and they neatly fell into order. Jinsu was very impressed. He had more of a flair for natural authority than any teacher she knew. Of course, all the teachers she knew didn't have the benefit of being in charge of a once-in-a-lifetime trip aboard the world's first operative time machine, but that was beside the point.

"Special treatment?" a snide voice commented in her year. She turned to see one of Minhwan's friends there. He was wearing a name badge that declared him to be Jaemin. Looking around, Jinsu saw that all the boys were now wearing one, most likely because Noah hadn't had a chance to learn everybody's names and wanted to keep tabs on them all. Or it could have been Jino. He seemed like the type to do that too.

"Looks like Daddy couldn't hack the embarrassment of one of his own not being on the ship," Jaemin went on. "It really was a last minute thing to put you on after all." He held up his left arm, pointing to the watch. "Not that one of these watches would suit you anyway."

"Go away," Jinsu said tiredly, not in the mood to deal with yet another pompous idiot.

"Or is that because you're actually here to work? I'm sure we won't actually be needing that rota for cleaning and cooking."

That was below the belt. Jinsu glared at him. "I'll have you know I designed and co-ordinated the interior of this ship, and if you dare mess it up, you will be scrubbing it clean with your bare hands!"

He looked a bit taken aback by her fire, but was soon joined by Minhwan.

"Why are you talking to her?" Minhwan asked in disgust, turning his friend away. "Do you not know who she is? Her dad shoved her on to save face. She's not even included in the tour; she's not one of us."

Jinsu glared at the back of his head as the two boys made their way back to their group, which had already moved off, but she was too slow to bite back a retort. That said, she wasn't sure Minhwan wouldn't have found something to mock her about when it came to the interior of the Attayear, so there wasn't necessarily anything she could have had as a good comeback.

Chapter 16

Jino was a lot less boring in a more personal situation. He had a little room to use as an office near the kitchen and actually got quite enthusiastic about the arts and crafts of the era they were going back to. On further probing, when Jinsu laid out her father's plan and the National History Association's request, he was willing to bend rules here and there. So long as it wasn't something fantastically unique, and was paid for, and didn't somehow drastically alter a person's situation and standing in life, he figured the difference would be negligible, and set about quizzing her on her ability to speak more like somebody from the Balhae period. A few more questions revealed that he'd studied the history of language at university, which was why he was on this particular job.

Exhausted nevertheless from their conversation, and also from her lack of sleep the night before, Jinsu decided it would be a good idea to avoid the groups of boys traipsing around the Attayear and slipped off to her bedroom, intending on a quick nap to freshen herself up. She was so tired she ended up knocking out for a full six-and-a-half hours before waking with a start during a bad dream in which she'd forgotten to hand her homework in to Mr Song and he'd put her in detention.

Disorientated and wincing, Jinsu propped herself up into a sitting position, only for pain to shoot through her right hand. She lifted it at once, but it was throbbing madly from her putting too much weight on it, and the dressing was half off. She was going to need somebody to help her with that. Mrs Kwon and Saeeun had largely been the ones to ensure her splint was on properly and that her fingers were strapped together, but it wasn't something she would be able to do herself.

It was time she got out of bed anyway. Figuring she should go find Yixing to ask about the watch and combine that with getting him to held her with her hand, she made her way into the en suite and grabbed her toiletries bag, her right hand hanging uselessly by her side.

There was a general air of liveliness when Jinsu got out into the balcony passage. One or two doors along the way had been propped open to a shoe's width, and voices proceeded from within. A quick glance over the balcony told her that more of her fellow students were downstairs and trying to follow what was going on with the machine's progress, or exploring again.

From what she remembered, Noah's room was right round the other side. Jinsu hesitated for a moment, trying to remember exactly which door it was, because she figured it wouldn't be great if she knocked on some random boy's by accident, but was thankfully spared the possibility of that when she noticed the two signs attached to every door – one with the names of the three occupants in every room, and the other with what had to be Noah's chores rota. Nam Taehyun, Lee Taemin and Kim Wonsik were next to her. Her eyes flicked down to the rota, and she had to restrain herself from reading it before the urge to ensure she'd scanned and memorised every last detail became overpowering. She could almost hear her brother's exasperated voice telling her she needed to learn not to freak out at leaving things undone, or skipping things if she didn't need to do them. It was a side to her OCD he probably understood less than her need to have everything inhumanly tidy the entire time.

She continued on round, noting that Yejun had located himself slap bang in the middle of the horseshoe of rooms with three friends, and that Bonggu and Chanyeol were next door to him with Kyungsoo and Hamin, which made the prospect of popping in to see Yejun every now and then less than palatable. Junmyeon and his friends Minho and Kyuhyun had sandwiched themselves much further round between the rooms the staff were sharing and Noah and Yixing's shared room at the end.

Arriving in front of the room with Noah and Yixing's names on the door, Jinsu reached out to knock, then remembered it was best not to with her broken hand. Tucking the medical stuff she was going to need under her armpit, she reached up with her left hand instead.

Voices on the other side abruptly gave her pause.

"I don't care. She's the only girl on the ship and it's completely inappropriate."

Noah sounded exasperated. Jinsu frowned, slowly lowering her hand. They could only be talking about her.

The voice of the other male was too muffled for Jinsu to be able to make out, but the tone sounded familiar.

"Chanyeol's already spoken to me," Noah said firmly. "It makes no difference whether or not he's okay with the idea, or whether or not it was hisidea, or whether or not they're cousins. It's still inappropriate to foist some boys or even aboy into Jinsu's room. The curve of the ship makes your room one of the two biggest – yes, it's a squeeze with four of you, but it's only for a week. I'm sure you can take it in turns to sleep on the floor if it really bothers you that much. If you really want, you can move in here with me and Yixing, but that would also be inappropriate as we're mentors and you're students, and there genuinely isn't enough space for an extra body in here."

There was a short noise of protest.

"It's a week, honestly. You've survived longer on camping trips. Just suck it up."

More inaudible complaints.

"I'm not siding with her. I'm not siding with anyone—"

Noah was cut off for much longer this time. Jinsu shifted awkwardly, contemplating moving away and stopping eavesdropping, but just as she was about to, Noah spoke again.

"Baek, please. You're like the little brother I never had and you know that. The world isn't against you—"

There was an angry interjection.

"I know you're hurt," Noah said tiredly, "but it's possible she's just as lonely and hurt as you say you are. Just take the bloody log out of your own eye for a bit and think about it."

Jinsu swallowed, her hand beginning to shake, as she took a couple of steps back, not sure she wanted to listen anymore. If Bonggu found out about any more of her weaknesses—

The scoff he gave was audible even two feet back from the door. Noah's reply to it was barely so.

"You haven't seen the way her father treats her. I have. Just think—"

Now that was humiliating to know Bonggu knew. But Jinsu had no time to dwell on it, because somebody tapped her on the shoulder. Expecting Yejun, because she didn't know anybody else who wouldn't consider it beneath them to touch her, Jinsu turned, but she found herself face to face with a smiling man with dimples instead.

"Looking for me?" Yixing asked her. "Because I'm looking for you."

"Ah. Well," Jinsu said awkwardly. "I guess so."

Yixing jabbed at the door with his thumb. "Noah's been holed up in there with this Chae Bonggu kid for a couple of hours. I left because it looked like a private conversation." He paused. "Bonggu seems quite upset at being here, for some reason."

It threw Jinsu for a loop that somebody involved with time machines (or her family in general) didn't seem to have much of a clue about the history between her family and the Chaes. In fact, it was pretty common knowledge for most people who lived in Seoul. She decided Noah or somebody else could correct that knowledge, though. It wasn't something she wanted to subject herself to again.

"Anyway," Yixing went on, unwinding the cloth in his hands. "I have your watch for you. Played around with the design a bit while I was putting it together, because I noticed you have really slim wrists, so I went for something a little different."

He held up a bangle – at least, Jinsu assumed that was what it would be called, since it was more a collection of swirls of pieces of silver that looked a little like branches coming off a tree that had been bent to wrap around an arm – that was about eight centimetres long and that would go most of the way up her forearm if she put it on.

"It's silver," he told her, "high quality, and so it's soft enough for you to manipulate these four bits here to get it on and off—" he indicated four branches on the underside, "—and the layout is the same as on the Lintel for the watch faces – left is time at home, central is current time of where you are, and right is the stopwatch so you know how long you've spent in a place. It's just yours is much prettier than everybody else's." He beamed proudly and held it out.

Jinsu smiled back at him. It was probably the sweetest thing anybody had done for her all month.

"It's gorgeous," she said, and she meant it. For somebody who was not a fan of assymetry, the watch-bangle was incredibly easy on the eye. She peeked across at the first of the three watchfaces on Yixing's wrist to check that the times matched up, and then watched the blur of movement on the second face of her own, which was set about halfway along the bangle and looked like it might just have a diamond face. The rhythmic whizz was calming and she smiled at it.

"Thank you," she told Yixing, eventually looking up again. He just shrugged.

"My sister's into metallurgy and jewellery making. I just picked up a few things. I'm actually more of a mechanic." He patted her on the shoulder, about to move off, when he spotted the thin bandages half off Jinsu's fingers and Jinsu wondering how best to actually put the bracelet on with her broken hand. There was the option of having it on her right wrist, but she was right-handed and her watches alwayswent on the left. Changing that round would knock her for six.

"Whoa, does that need dressing again? Let me help!"

Jinsu gratefully accepted, handing him the bag with everything he needed, and allowed him to patch her up. He wasn't as neat as Mrs Kwon or Saeeun, who both knew exactly how perfect everything had to be, and she spotted one wrinkle in the tape that she knew was going to irritate her all evening if she didn't do something to distract herself, but he was done in no time and slipped her medical supplies back under her arm, telling her to come and knock any time she needed help.

Just as he reached for the door handle of his room, the door opened and a sullen-faced Bonggu came out, gaze on the ground. He was startled when he nearly walked into Yixing, and his gaze shot up before it slid onto Jinsu, his apology dying in his throat. Yixing just patted him on the shoulder as he had done to Jinsu and went into the room, closing the door behind him.

For several long moments, Bonggu and Jinsu remained unmoving in the balcony passage, Bonggu's icy gaze hardening with every passing second. Jinsu was the first to break, the hostility making her uncomfortable, and she shifted from foot to foot before turning to walk away, tucking her bag more securely under her right arm.

Bonggu's gaze fell to the bracelet Yixing had helped her to put on, and he gave a bitter laugh.

"Well, at least there are no pretences," he said. "Nepotism might have got you here, but at least your specialwatch clearly shows you're not here on merit and you're not one of us."

He was gone before Jinsu had a chance to register how offensive his words were.

Chapter 17

Four hours before they were due to touch down in Balhae, the Attayear was humming with activity. Apparently the fact that it was only about five-thirty in the morning back in Seoul made no difference, nor did the fact that Noah had only actually forced everybody to go to bed about five hours previously because he thought it would be more interesting for them to be up when they started travel floating, and they weren't going to want to sleep when they were actually back in the past.

Jinsu lay on her bed, staring up at the ceiling and trying to block out the noise by listening to music on her phone. There were plugs all over the Attayear for all the electronics on board, but signal was non-existent. Still, she saw nothing wrong with using it as an MP3 player for the time being. Being able to flick back through to see photos of her brother was comforting, too, and a large part of her wished that he'd been there with her. Failing that, a roommate might have been nice.

Might. Assuming they kept things impeccably neat. Jinsu had never had to share a room before, and she wondered what it would be like. The room she was in was only a quarter of the size of her one at home – there was still ample space for two beds and two wardrobes and a desk and a bookshelf – but the size didn't really bother her. It was more that it didn't really feel like her space. The spare bed made it feel like there was someone missing, and she didn't like that.

Not just that, but what Bonggu and Jaemin and Minhwan had said to her the previous day would not get out of her head, and their remarks really stung. She didn't often meet people as sexist as her father, but the idea that she'd be doing all the cooking and cleaning because she was the only girl and because she wasn't actually one of the winners was very insulting. Likewise the idea that she wasn't capable of producing something of the standard needed to win the competition. She had no idea if she had actually been slated for first, but she had been capable of getting in the top five and could well have earned a place on board the Attayear in her own right if her father hadn't stuck his foot in.

But it was Bonggu's comment that hurt the most. The other two were outrageous and easily proven wrong, but it was true she didn't fit in. She wasn't one of the winners, however much she could have been, and was the only girl – and she'd been singled out twice over for it, first by being given a room all to herself, and second by Yixing's beautiful watch. Furthermore, she'd been singled out for not being a winner by the manner in which her father had put her onto the Attayear.

To make matters even worse, it wasn't as if she had very many people she could hang around with or talk to. Her cousin was practically joined at the hip to Bonggu; Junmyeon she barely knew, and he was friends with Minhwan and his awful cronies; Noah and Yixing, though perfectly nice, had a lot of work to do and wouldn't want her under their feet the entire time (not to mention that Noah and Bonggu had hour-long chats from time to time); and it would be unfair to trail Yejun all over the place, especially since there was a strain of awkwardness about a potential impending marriage. It was probably best to give him reasonable breathing space. Clinginess would only make her irritating.

All in all, prospects were not great. But it was only for a week. She could keep her head down and remain more or less invisible – maybe spend as much time as possible off the Attayear and mingling with the locals or exploring the terrain. Noah had mentioned something about a curfew, but that was only to be expected: it was the easiest way to keep track of them all and make sure nobody went missing in the past.

A sudden jolt nearly knocked Jinsu out of her bed, and the Attayear shuddered. Sitting up, she took her earphones out of her ears, wondering what was going on, as the walls started to vibrate. It sounded like several hundred sports cars were all revving at the same time.

All at once, doors were banging nearby, and she heard somebody yelling for everybody who wasn't yet up to come out and go down to the lounge – something to do with some TV display and it being like an in-flight interactive map, but cooler.

Jinsu waited for the stampede to pass before poking her nose out of the door. The last two boys were clattering down the stairs, and after checking the corridor both ways, she opened her door wider to follow them. Her nose immediately caught a whiff of bacon, which she hadn't had since the last time she was abroad, and she decided that it might actually be a better idea to keep out of people's way for a little longer and go in search of breakfast first. Especially if they had ingredients to make western-style meals. It was very unpatriotic of her, but she loved the western food palette, and Jimin (until very recently via Mrs Kwon) and Mrs Kwon would often treat her to an English breakfast when it was a special day or when they sensed she was feeling a bit down. Comfort food. It was just the thing to lift her mood.

And for some reason, a large tray of it was sitting on the floor just outside her door. Wobbling for a moment as she tried to regain her balance after almost stepping on it, Jinsu stared at the tray for a moment, then rubbed her eyes. Was she hallucinating? But then... it would explain the potent smell of bacon.

Looking down at it again, Jinsu spent some time contemplating the food. There were four slices of toast, two buttered and two not, with a tiny little pot of strawberry jam. The glass next to that was full of what looked like freshly squeezed orange juice, pulp and all. Then the main tray had a heap of sausages on it with a handful of hash browns, several large mushrooms and the two most gigantic tomatoes (she was not a fan) Jinsu had ever clapped eyes on. A second plate, almost as big, was overflowing with scrambled eggs and baked beans. To her amusement, there was also a ramekin with kimchi in it.

The bacon was on a plate of its own, and evidently still hot. Jinsu's mouth watered at the sight of it. It looked a little burnt on several pieces – so did the scrambled egg, but she wasn't terribly fond of scrambled egg so that wasn't too bad. She wondered who the food had been left for, because there was definitely too much for one person to eat.

But then, it was directly outside her door, and had been pushed in as far as the doorframe allowed. The cynic inside Jinsu told her that one of the boys had probably just shoved it in the nearest convenient space before bolting downstairs with the others, but the food looked so warm she figured that would only really make sense if it had been the boy who'd come up to yell for the stragglers, since the kitchen was downstairs, and it would have made more sense for anybody on the balcony to leave it in their own room rather than outside hers.

Deciding she was touched and that she was going to adopt the food regardless, Jinsu used her foot to nudge it inside. The boy had even left a knife and fork and chopsticks on the tray, which was very thoughtful, except that Jinsu could only eat with her left hand and western food did not like being eaten with chopsticks. It would mean... well, it would be likely that grease would get everywhere. And she also wouldn't be able to eat the whole thing. Not that that would be possible with just one of her anyway.

Twenty-five minutes later, having changed out of the clothes which had been on the receiving end of bacon grease when she'd tried to eat the rashers with chopsticks, Jinsu emerged from her room again, feeling happy and well fed. She balanced the tray with the remainders on her left hand as she headed down the stairs, very aware of the excited vibe and the people moving around on the Attayear with her.

The kitchen was nice and spacious, at least triple the size of her room upstairs, with a wooden table in the middle and work surfaces and cupboards lining the walls. There was nobody in it when Jinsu walked in, but it showed clear signs of recent occupation. The dishwasher was full and had been left open, nobody bothering to run. Some conscientious soul had washed up several plates and a number of frying pans, leaving them all higgledy-piggledy on the side near the sink and in the drying rack. Several less conscientious souls had left dirty plates, cutlery and pans all over the place. Jinsu grimaced, her fingers itching to tidy the place up. How were they happy to live in such squalor?

She got no further than starting up some nice, foamy hot water in the sink with copious amounts of fairy liquid before somebody put their hands on her shoulders and moved her to the side.

"I sincerely hope you're not trying to wash up with a broken hand," Noah said. "And I also hope you're not trying to wash up anything you haven't used."

Why not? was Jinsu's instinctive response, but Noah's tone made her feel like a ticked-off school child. "I was just going to soak them," she lied hastily.

Noah raised a disbelieving eyebrow. "Okay." He began piling dishes into the sink. "How come you weren't down for breakfast? I'm sure I told you when it was."

Jinsu did remember him telling her, since he'd wanted everybody up half an hour before the travel floating started.

Noah started piling cutlery into the sink as well. "I want to get a proper sense of community among everybody here. There are already rifts and this is a good a chance as any to try to heal them."

Bonggu's bitter smile from the previous day burned against Jinsu's mind's eye.

"I want everybody to eat together for at least one, maybe two meals a day. It's easy to make any announcements when everybody's gathered in the same place, as well."

Jinsu cringed. As far as she was concerned, that would be worse than eating in the cafeteria at school, which she tended to avoid as much as possible.

Sighing, Noah clapped her on the shoulder. "Did you at least eat this morning?"

"Yeah." Jinsu pointed to the tray she'd brought down. "Somebody left enough food for six outside my door."

This time, Noah's eyebrows shot up in surprise rather than disbelief. "Who?"

It wasn't the comment Jinsu had expected. She shrugged. "Dunno."

Banished from the kitchen when she tried surreptitiously to scrub down one of the surfaces, Jinsu found herself relegated to the laundry half an hour before they were due to land in Balhae, looking through clothing of the period and checking off sizes that were going to be needed. Pulling clothing off the shelves to put on the trolley was something she could do one-handed, but she was momentarily stumped when it came to wheeling the trolley. With one hand, she'd have no control.

Right on cue, Yejun breezed in with a bag of what appeared to be dirty clothes.

"Need help?" he offered eagerly, dumping the bag on the ground when he saw her. The top spilled open and several boxers tumbled out. He was clearly on laundry duty for the day.

"Could you take the trolley up to the lounge?" Jinsu was already half-crouching over the open laundry bag, clenching and unclenching her uninjured hand. She couldn't decide which was worse: handling used underwear or leaving it lying messily on the floor.

Yejun hauled her up by the armpit. "Nope. Your brother told me not to let you do that. Come on."

He'd pushed her onto the trolley and wheeled her out of the room before she could protest. The door slammed loudly behind them.

"Yejun!" she whined as he zipped down the corridor, sliding on the linoleum as the trolley rumbled along. "You're making me crush the clothes!"

"They didn't have irons in Balhae! Crushed clothes are the new black!"

They hit the carpet and the trolley nearly capsized. Yejun caught Jinsu with a merry laugh and set her back on her feet. He looked both ways down the corridor, one hand on the trolley. "Which way's the lounge? I always get lost in this thing."

The vast majority of the boys were in the lounge when Jinsu and Yejun arrived there. Many were gathered around the screen, which had an ariel-view in-flight map on it showing the northern part of the Korean peninsula. One of them was pointing out landmarks and talking excitedly to the others.

Another group – the boys who'd won fifth place – were sitting around a low coffee table playing a game of cards. The boys from Jinsu's own school were sitting in a circle near to where Yejun had stopped the trolley and was busy unloading its contents onto the table, sorting the clothing haphazardly by size. Jinsu tore her eyes away from the delicious flick of Hamin's black-leather-braceleted wrist as he tossed a tennis ball up and down and scurried over to neaten everything up, attempting to colour co-ordinate it as she did so. Yejun started making small talk again.

"I have a very inappropriate question to ask you," he said a few minutes later as Jinsu straightened out the front of a dull green hanbok. "How do you get dressed with only one functioning hand? Or, like, wash, or eat?"

"It's hard." Jinsu tweaked a crease out of another hanbok. "Were you the one who left breakfast outside my room?"

Yejun paused. "No. I ate in the kitchen. Why?"

"Someone left a full English with enough food for several people outside my room and you're pretty much the only person I know nice enough to do that."

"I can't cook," Yejun said immediately. "Maybe you have a secret admirer."

Jinsu pursed her lips. "Is it the kind of thing Junmyeon might do?"

"Maybe, but he's a hardcore vegetarian and won't touch meat, so I don't think he would have cooked you a full English. Could it have been your cousin?"

Jinsu glanced in Chanyeol's direction. Her cousin was talking to Bonggu, but Bonggu seemed a little distracted for whatever reason. Just before Jinsu turned back to Yejun, Bonggu lifted his head, his eyes flickering in Jinsu's direction, and their gazes met. Jinsu blanched and swallowed, but Bonggu's face remained impassive as he turned away again.

"Possibly," she murmured. "He's more likely to give me chocolate bars. I don't think he can cook either."

Yejun chuckled. Not long after, the Attayear's engines suddenly whined loudly, and one of the boys near the screen let out an ecstatic whoop.

"We're touching down! We're touching down!"

"Keep your pants on, Junho, it's only 835 AD," Jinsu heard Minhwan snorting. "Even the water out there could kill you."

It was impossible for him to be a dampner for long. Several boys hurried out to watch the Lintel as the Attayear came to a stop, others more interested in being in the main computer room. Those that stayed were eagerly checking their watches. Hamin even tossed his tennis ball away in his excitement.

Jino came in a few minutes later, just when the engines' whine was becoming a loud screech.

"Everybody grab a hanbok and get yourselves to the Lintel! We have two minutes until landing and I'm sure you'll want to go out and explore as soon as possible, so we need to brief you!"

The table by Yejun and Jinsu instantly became a mad scrum. Yejun thoughtfully pulled Jinsu out of the way. After a moment or two, Jinsu decided it was probably best if she went back upstairs to find some of the clothing her father had provided for her so that she wouldn't have to fight with everyone else.

She had just reached the door of the room when there was a gigantic lurch.

They had touched down in Balhae, 835 AD.

Chapter 18

They drew lots to put them into groups and see who would go out first, since Jino said it was a bad idea for a group of over twenty kids with weird accents to suddenly show up en masse in the nearest town. Jinsu landed herself in the first group with Kyungsoo, Hamin and Do Eunho, which left her jittery, but considering that Minhwan was picked out in the next lot, she decided it was actually a very good group to have. After being told the rules yet again by Jino (which resulted in a lot of chafing at the bit from the boys), they were allowed to leave. Eunho and Hamin practically sprinted out of the Attayear like they were starting a one hundred metre dash, leaving Kyungsoo smiling and shaking his head as he followed them at a brisk, but much slower, walk.

Unsure of whether she should stick with them or whether they'd prefer her to go off and leave them alone, Jinsu hesitated for a few moments before stepping out into the bright sunshine of the Balhae kingdom.

The first thing that struck her was the noise. The Attayear's engines had powered down, leaving the machine silent, and they'd landed in a clearing in what had to be a forest. Dappled shadows ran around the clearing and trees rustled under a light breeze, but the bird song... Transfixed, Jinsu stopped to listen. She'd never heard something so beautiful. Seoul had its fair share of pidgeons, but the main wildlife noises on the streets came from cicadas, especially in summer. She reckoned the last time she'd heard proper birdsong was several years back when she'd been on a family holiday in the Camague in France.

It wasn't just one bird, either. Jinsu struggled to identify exactly what type of birds were singing, but it was harmonious, dancing back and forth between the trees as though the feathered animals were having some banterous conversation. She turned, squinting into the trees as she tried to catch sight of one of the singers, but was soon distracted by a train of large yellow and purple butterflies fluttering past.

Delighted, she felt a proper smile breaking out over her face, her anxiety over being stuck in the Attayear melting away. Who would have known that the colours and sounds would be so beautifully vibrant? Even the air smelt fresher and cleaner than any she'd experienced – even compared to high altitude when she was skiing.

One of the butterflies darted down and landed on her shoulder, so close that one of its wings brushed against her neck as they trembled in the breeze. Jinsu held her breath, hardly daring to turn towards the brilliant purple creature in case she scared it away.

Kyungsoo did that for her.

"Fine by us if you want to be left behind!"

Jinsu jumped at the same time that the butterfly took flight again, and looked round. The three boys had stopped at the edge of the clearing in the shadow of the trees, Kyungsoo noticeably shorter than the other two, but somehow managing to look much more dignified than the pair of them put together in his two-toned brown hanbok. Maybe it was because Hamin was fiddling absently with his very anachronistic leather bracelets as he looked around him and Eunho looked like he was trying to tuck his hands into a pair of trouser pockets that weren't there.

For a moment, Jinsu hesitated, but she figured that if they genuinely intended to desert her, Kyungsoo wouldn't have said anything. It surprised her, but the reason why they weren't too averse to having her in their group became apparent when she drew level with them and Eunho reached for the sack she had slung over her shoulder.

He looked inside before Jinsu could grab it back.

"I thought Jino was kidding," he said, taken aback. "She does have proper currency. Look."

Jinsu's eyebrow twitched as he dipped a hand in and passed a couple of coins to Hamin and Kyungsoo each.

"Hey, don't do that here," Kyungsoo murmured. "If they see us with money, they'll go mental and everybody will want some."

"Give them back," Jinsu said wearily as the boys drifted further into the trees. "They're mine."

Eunho's gaze dropped pointedly to her broken fingers. "I'll carry."

Kyungsoo gave his coins back and plucked Hamin's out of his hands, popping them back into the sack.

"How much money did you bring with you?" he asked. "Is there enough for us to buy things for ourselves to take back too, or are we only allowed to purchase for the museums?"

Jinsu sighed and didn't reply, walking past them. The last thing she wanted was to become the bank for everybody who wanted a souvenir from Balhae.

"That's a no, then," Kyungsoo concluded from behind her. "Pity."

"Where did you get the coins from?" Eunho asked, jogging a couple of steps to catch up with her. "Are they a museum hoard or forgeries or what?"

"I don't know," Jinsu said tiredly. "My dad gave them to me on behalf of the national archaeological and historical associations. It's not technically my money to spend."

Eunho turned over a coin he still had in his hand, looking at it thoughtfully. "I wonder how much this is worth. Hey, Kyungsoo, you do history – how much is this worth in modern money? How much rice could I buy with this here?"

"You're off your head if you think I pay attention in numismatics," Kyungsoo said dryly, causing Hamin to let out an amused snort. Jinsu fought the temptation to turn around to see if he was smiling, aware that her cheeks were colouring. Eunho immediately turned back to Jinsu.

"Do you know?" he asked.

"No," Jinsu replied, her voice coming out a lot more snappish than she'd intended. Eunho looked taken aback, his brown eyes large with surprise.

"Whoa. Chill," he muttered, edging away from her.

They lapsed into silence for another few minutes, surrounded by birdsong and with the tread of their feet crunching against the lush green grass. Kyungsoo was now leading the way, and not too long after, they found themselves on a dirt track wide enough to suggest it was a main route to somewhere. Close by, a couple of trees appeared to have been cut back so that they didn't infringe on the passage between the trees. Hamin went over to study the branch stumps, the lowest of which was about the height of his chin.

"This track must be used for horseback travel and litters," he mused, his long, slim fingers caressing the tree bark. "That or history has lied to us and our ancestors were giants."

Kyungsoo squinted both ways down the track. "That means civilisation, but which way?"

"We should have asked Noah for a map," Eunho said, drifting a little downhill along the path to the right. The others followed him. "Not like Naver maps is going to work here. Satellites don't exist yet."

"I know we're supposed to be near Mount Baekdu," Hamin said, reluctant to leave the tree he'd been stroking. "According to the map, didn't we land in the mountain range? Actually, if we're close enough, it might be nice to hike up one day to see the Heaven Lake—"

"That doesn't exist yet," Kyungsoo and Jinsu pointed out simultaneously. Jinsu looked at Kyungsoo nervously, but he barely batted an eyelid about it.

"It's another one hundred and eleven years before the eruption that blew the top of the crater off," Kyungsoo explained as though Jinsu had never spoken, and also as though Hamin had left part of his brain at home. "And it's also probably not a good idea to go sauntering up an active volcano."

"I was planning to walk up it rather than saunter, but if you insist." Hamin shrugged, unfazed by Kyungsoo's attitude.

"We should have brought a national flag to leave at the top for future generations," Eunho mused.

"Grandfather clauses," Kyungsoo said immediately. "No."

"I was kidding." Eunho pouted and slung the sack over his other shoulder. "Wait. That's the millennial eruption, right? Isn't the skyline of Mount Baekdu going to be completely different? I thought it blasted the top off or something."

"Yup," said Kyungsoo happily. "We're probably not going to recognise it. For all we know, it's that mountain there." He pointed up between the birch trees at a mass of rock and snow rising far above them, the scant clouds hovering near the top of the treeline.

"That looks too unthreatening to be a volcano," Eunho said immediately, almost tripping on a rock and scrambling to regain his balance. The rock tumbled a little way across the path, sending Hamin stumbling.

Kyungsoo actually laughed at them. Jinsu hovered towards the back of the group, unsure whether or not she was allowed to react, but she was certain she'd never seen Kyungsoo so... maybe carefree wasn't the word to describe him, but it was pretty close.

"Yeah, wouldn't a volcano be smoking?" Hamin joked as he dusted himself down. "Eruptions are because volcanoes are forced to go cold turkey for their health. Everybody knows that."

"Old Man Baekdu is clearly nicotine free."

It was Eunho's turn to laugh at Kyungsoo's dry statement, and the sound warmed Jinsu to him slightly. Do Eunho had a warm smile and an even warmer chuckle, and had she been forced to guess, Jinsu would have said he must have known Hamin and Kyungsoo for years. Kyungsoo didn't relax this much around people unless he was really comfortable with them.

"So, Jinsu," Eunho said, turning to her and making her start with fright. Kyungsoo and Hamin exchanged glances and grimaced, and Jinsu thought she might just have caught sight of Kyungsoo trying to mouth to Eunho to shut up, though that could just have been paranoia. "What do you reckon? Could that be Mount Baekdu?"

"I... I don't know," she squeaked out, backing up a few steps. People her own age normally only asked her questions if they wanted to extort something (like homework) or to make fun of her, unless they were Junmyeon or Yejun. She didn't think that was Eunho's intention, but she didn't want to say the wrong thing or to make herself look stupid in front of Hamin, and she definitely didn't want to say anything they'd find amusing enough to repeat elsewhere to humiliate her, which was something a number of her peers had done to her at school.

Eunho didn't look at all put out by how jumpy she was. In fact, he appeared completely oblivious, and immediately turned back to the others to continue making inane chatter.

About another five minutes passed as they continued on down the path, vegetation and undergrowth rising higher on either side but with slightly more signs of civilisation (a hoof-print here, a sandle strap there), before Jinsu became aware of the fact that the forest had gone silent around them. She wondered if it was because Eunho and Kyungsoo were talking too loudly, or if it perhaps meant that they were approaching civilisation, and began trying to peer between the vegetation in front of them to see, but the others didn't appear bothered by it.

Well, Eunho and Kyungsoo didn't appear bothered by it, or two have noticed it at all, but Hamin abruptly came up alongside Jinsu from his position at the back of the group, grabbing her elbow to stop her dawdling as he turned his head from a quick glance behind.

"Um, guys," he said neutrally, "not to freak you out or anything, but there's a tiger following us."

He pushed Jinsu in front of him, sandwiching her between his body and Eunho's towards the side of the path, before Jinsu could turn to look.

"Very funny, Hamin," Kyungsoo said sarcastically as Eunho turned around.

"You really expect us to believe— holy sh*t!"

The way Eunho jerked back in alarm and the colour leeched from Kyungsoo's face as he turned to see what the problem was was enough to inform Jinsu that Hamin hadn't been attempting a bad practical joke. Kyungsoo froze up.

"Are tigers supposed to be that big?" he asked in little more than a whisper.

"Does anyone have a gun?" Eunho asked hopefully as he slowly continued backwards down the path, Hamin and Kyungsoo keeping pace with him and Hamin prodding Jinsu along. "Er, nice kitty. Are you interested in becoming a vegetarian? There's looooots of lovely flora just on either side of you."

"Eunho, don't talk to it. We just want to make sure we're not its next meal!" Hamin hissed.

"Do we run?" Kyungsoo murmured. "I think sudden moves might piss it off. They usually piss dangerous animals off. But it looks like it's stalking us."

"Look on the bright side," Eunho returned immediately. "It'll probably only be hungry enough to eat one of us, so I say we ditch the slowest of us and run."

Jinsu noticed Kyungsoo's eyes darting to her at that, and she felt a chill running through her. Surely they couldn't—

Hamin abruptly pushed her flat, straight onto her broken hand, flinging himself out of the way as something large leapt in their direction and went crashing into the foliage beside them.

"Eunho, how can you joke about that when our lives are in danger?" Kyungsoo yelled as Jinsu lifted her head, eyes watering with pain, to see that the boys had scattered – Kyungsoo and Eunho several metres apart on the other side of the path, the latter trying to regain his balance after nearly tripping on a large fallen branch, and Hamin some way in front of her, rolling to his feet.

There was a low growl near Jinsu and she looked up to see a large mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Her breath stopped in her throat as she tried to process how close to her the tiger was – Kyungsoo was right: it was enormous – and just how vicious the animal looked with its slanted eyes, one brown, one blue, and extended claws. The irregularly shaped stripes in the dappled light looked like dark, gaping wounds that had bled dry.

Dimly, she could hear somebody yelling at her to move, but her body felt like lead glued to the ground as the tiger sprang.

She snapped back to her senses when there was a loud crunch and a dead tree branch sailed into the side of the tiger's head with considerable force, knocking it off balance. It skittered as it landed, forgetting about Jinsu in face of the new threat. A loud snarl contorted its maw, and disorientated as she was, Jinsu could still see the terror in Eunho's and Kyungsoo's eyes as it turned its attention on them. Eunho was crouching, his hand feeling around as though for another branch.

"The trees!" Kyungsoo yelled as the tiger stepped over Jinsu, circling round towards the boys. "Get in the trees!"

Jinsu was almost too scared to sit up in case she attracted the tiger's attention again, and she wanted to scream at Kyungsoo that there was no way she was going to be able to climb with a broken hand when Hamin was abruptly beside her. The branch went sailing through the air and clocked the tiger around the head again, causing it to snarl and spit, but before Jinsu could tell Hamin he was suicidal to attracting the large cat's attention again, he'd scooped her up in his arms and thrown her over the tiger, which swiped at her and tore her clothing with its claws, to Eunho, who launched her up towards the branches with a powerful two-handed thrust. Kyungsoo, already among the lowest branches, caught her by her injured hand and quickly clamped his other hand around her wrist, hauling her up. Seconds later, Eunho was scrambling past them with a garbled, "pass her up, Soo, she can't climb."

It was a hair-raising few moments. Hamin, the last in the tree, got a nasty gash on his leg and was nearly knocked out of it when the tiger took a running dash at the trunk and launched itself at the branch he was on. Years of sport had evidently given him quick reflexes, because he managed to get most of the way up to a branch some way above, but left one of his legs dangling within the tiger's reach in the crucial split-second as he tried to change his body's momentum to haul himself up. The tiger perched on the branch he'd been on, which was a good twelve feet up in the air, eyeing them all with a predatory gaze as its tail flicked back and forth and it hissed.

Probably because he was injured, Hamin was the only one not to be transfixed with horror at the site of the gigantic cat in the tree with them.

"Come on," he urged. "If we go higher it'll be too heavy to follow us up."

They had gained another few feet, carefully passing Jinsu between them, before the tree's branches could no longer support more than two of them, and even that was at a pinch, and they had to spread out a little, and the tiger carefully jumped up another couple of branches to keep them in its sight.

Jinsu was surprised when Hamin remained on her branch with her, sort of straddling it with another tree limb just a few inches down and not far away, one arm grasping a branch just above their heads for security and the other around her waist to ensure she wouldn't fall. She could feel her heart pounding in her throat, and she wasn't sure if it was from his proximity or the adrenaline.

"I thought tigers didn't climb at all," he said, shaken. "I thought that was only leopards."

"What do we do now?" came Eunho's hushed voice from round the other side of the tree.

"Well, I'm going to take a photo and then I think I'm going to sh*t my pants," Kyungsoo announced matter-of-factly. "Hopefully this will be the only time I ever have the fortune to see a wild Amur tiger up close."

"There's something wrong with you," Eunho muttered back.

"Excuse you, you were the one who threw the f*cking log at it!"

"Yeah, so much for ditching the weakest of us and booking it." Hamin's voice was shaking as he tried to make light of the situation. "F*ck, though. I totally forgot this time period kind of had more wild animals. What if the others run into something?"

"I think Jino mentioned wild animals," Eunho said thoughtfully, "but I also think not many people were listening to him."

There was a soft thud and Jinsu peeked down to see that the tiger was back on the ground, prowling around the base of the tree as it looked up at them.

"It's gone down." She meant it to come out confidently, but her voice was barely more than a whisper.

"Thank f*ck," Hamin said fervently.

"Now we just have to wait for it to go." Eunho sounded like he was trying to look on the bright side of things.

"Thanks, Captain Obvious."

"Could be days," Eunho went on. "I heard a story about some guys in Bengal or somewhere who got stuck up a tree for five days because tigers—"

"Eunho!" Hamin's voice cracked. "Please, shut up!"

"Oh good, I'm not the only one who's terrified," said Kyungsoo. Despite the dire situation, Jinsu found herself trying to suppress a chuckle. It was obvious all three of them were just as scared as she was, and that Eunho and, surprisingly, Kyungsoo, handled it by babbling and trying to make light of the situation.

As for Hamin, he appeared to be on the verge of going into shock. To be fair, they probably all were. The adrenaline seemed to be wearing off for Hamin, though, because Jinsu could feel his entire body trembling violently. He lowered himself carefully onto the branch beside her, making her budge up a bit so that he could sit at the juncture between limb and trunk. "I thought we were all goners."

There were general noises of agreement.

Then Eunho piped up. "Hey, Jinsu, since I almost got myself killed carting the money up the tree, can I use a couple of coins?"

What a time to be thinking about something like that. Jinsu groaned to herself, but since he'd saved her life, she figured she had no grounds for refusing.

"Thanks, hun," he said, stretching round the trunk to press a couple of coins into Hamin's hand and presumably giving some to Kyungsoo too. "Right, who wants to make a bet on how long we're going to be stuck up here with an angry, concussed tiger prowling around our feet?"

Chapter 19

They were up the tree for what felt like hours. Eunho and Kyungsoo played I-Spy until they ran out of things to call, but Jinsu and Hamin remained largely silent. The tiger continued to prowl around the base of the tree, sometimes sitting and watching them, and other times winding around the trunk.

Hamin was remarkably stoic for somebody who'd had their leg gashed open. The injury was bleeding profusely, and the limb dangled down from the branch they were on as it was too painful for him to bring it up to balance properly like the other one. The only other outward sign of discomfort he showed was a slight tremor in his breathing.

The treebark and surrounding dirt that was getting all over her had been more than enough to put Jinsu on edge without the tiger, but the sight of blood staining Hamin's clothes was a bit much for Jinsu's OCD to take, and she began fidgeting nervously. Hamin grabbed her as the branch creaked under their combined weight.

"Stop," he said weakly. Jinsu peeked up at him. His expression very much said he wanted to throw up.

"Sorry."

"If you're freaking out about the dirt again, I'm warning you now, I'm not going to be able to keep hold of you."

Jinsu stilled, trying to work out if it was a threat or if he was trying to be friendly.

"Just remember it'll be muckier down there than up here," he added.

Friendly, then. She nodded.

He was silent for a while. Jinsu could hear Eunho and Kyungsoo murmuring to each other round the other side of the tree. The only other noise was the breeze rustling the leaves: the tiger padding on the earth down below was soundless – so soundless it was terrifying.

She didn't realise she was still fidgeting with her fingers until Hamin impatiently took hold of her injured hand and began pulling the dressings off. She flinched back, almost slipping off her perch.

"What are you doing?" she protested, trying to pull her hand back. Hamin tossed the dirty bandages and splint away. Ignoring Jinsu as the tiger pounced on the castaways, sniffing around them and then attempting to eat them (it spat them out with what Jinsu could have sworn was an expression of disgust), Hamin leant back a little for a better view around the other side of the tree.

"Kyungsoo," he called softly. "You got any water?"

There was rustling and then something landed in Hamin's outstretched hand with a soft thunk. Jinsu barely had time to register a sports-capped plastic water bottle before Hamin was tipping its contents over her hand. She threw him a disturbed look.

"Don't want this getting infected," he mumbled as he brushed the dirt that had got under the dressings away, making her hiss with pain as he put pressure on the bruises that were still there. "We'd all have to go back early." His gaze dropped to the tiger still prowling below. "Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing," he added under his breath.

It took a moment or two to twig that Hamin was being genuine in his kindness as well as practical, because Jinsu initially took the idea of having to go back early for medical reasons as a complaint.

"Y-you should do your l-leg," she stuttered as he capped the bottle again, her heart rate abruptly picking up.

He grimaced, looking down at his leg, then the tiger, and then back her, holding out the water bottle. When Jinsu made to take it, he had second thoughts.

"Hold still." His voice cracked a little, and he reached out to balance the water bottle on her head.

"What—?"

"You only have one functioning hand. You might fall." Bracing himself against the branch and the tree trunk, Hamin hauled himself up so that he could inspect his injured leg. Once he felt he was seated securely, he took the water bottle back. A bit miffed he didn't bother to thank her, and also that his arm was no longer around her waist, Jinsu looked away.

Something brightly coloured and human-shaped was visible between the trees. She sat forward, squinting, and apparently freaked Hamin out enough for him to grab at the back of her clothing to haul her back. She almost shrieked when cold water spilt down her back.

I think I just saw a person, was what she wanted to say, but what came out instead was, "Your face is green."

Hamin looked like he was too ill to take offence.

"I hate heights," he said weakly.

Jinsu felt herself turning scarlet. She tried to find something reassuring to say, like how brave she thought he was (only that sounded like she was hitting on him), but before she could get her tongue to cooperate with her, Kyungsoo spotted what she'd spotted.

"Wait, there's people! Help! HELP!"

The tiger let out a snarl at the noise, flattening its ears against its skull, and Jinsu saw that three young men had come into full view, all wearing brightly coloured clothes that practically screamed your dinner has arrived! at the tiger. Two were bearded and froze up at the sight of the big cat whisking around towards them, but the third had the situation appraised in a matter of seconds: before anybody could blink, a bow was off his back with an arrow nocked. There was a twang and a thwack! as he released the arrow straight into the chest of the pouncing tiger, and then a second and then a third. He had a fourth trained on the animal, ready to fire again, but it collapsed, unmoving. Satisfied, he put his weapons away, and he and his companions moved to the base of the tree.

"Do you need help?" he called up.

Kyungsoo and Eunho went scrambling down the tree like monkeys. Hamin tilted his head back against the trunk, closing his eyes. He was blocking the way for Jinsu to have the sturdiest footing down, but it wasn't like she could climb with only one hand.

"I don't think I can get back down," he admitted.

Neither. The word left Jinsu's mouth as an unintelligible croak.

"You need to jump!" the archer called up to them. "We will catch you!"

Swallowing, Jinsu looked down. Hamin gave a very audible gulp beside her as he did the same. Eunho was pointing up at them as he talked to one of the bearded men, the archer hovering at their shoulders. After a moment or two, Eunho stepped back, and the other four lined up under the branch Jinsu and Hamin were sitting on, two on each side with a distance of about two feet between them, and then they braced their arms against the shoulders of the man opposite.

It took a bit of persuading for Jinsu and Hamin to overcome their misgivings, but Hamin courteously offered to help let Jinsu down, sprawling himself over the branch as he grasped her wrist with his hands and lowered her as far as he could. It was still a fall of a good number of feet once he released her, but it wasn't as far as Hamin had to let himself fall.

The three men agreed to walk them to the nearest village – or rather, insisted on it when they saw Hamin's bleeding leg, because there was apparently a fantastic healer who could look at him for a very low price. Hamin hobbled along, grimacing with pain and attempting to use Eunho for a crutch, but then swapped him for Kyungsoo since Eunho was too tall. Jinsu dawdled at the back of the group again, eavesdropping on their conversation.

The archer introduced himself as Han. He was from the north of the Balhae kingdom and alternated his time between hunting and being a mercenary. Jinsu suspected there was also a third element of poaching, not least because he made a point of dragging off the tiger's carcass into the undergrowth to reclaim at a later point, and because he kept glancing back over his shoulder as if worried somebody would appear out of nowhere and steal it.

Han had a babyface and proved to be quite a chatterbox. His two companions remained at the front of the party, cautiously going around corners as if they expected another tiger and never even saying a word. Han introduced them as Hoon and Bin anyway and then launched into how he'd first met them, which was apparently on one occasion that he'd been travelling along a major trade route between two cities and had been ambushed by brigands.

"It even happens here sometimes, too," he said, drifting back so that he was walking on a level with Jinsu. Hamin looked like he was in too much pain to really care and Eunho frustrated that he'd found somebody who liked talking just as much as he did, but Kyungsoo was listening with rapt attention. Jinsu swore she saw his phone peeking out of the sleeve of his hanbok and wondered if he was possibly recording the situation.

Siguing his conversation with ease from Hoon and Bin adopting him while he was away from home, Han proceeded to tell them that he was nineteen and that he had five younger brothers, and that once the hunting season was over, he was planning to make his way to the royal court and try his luck there, since he had contacts at the palace.

"What about you?" he asked, offering his arm to Jinsu with the reasoning that she looked tired. "I can tell you're not from around here."

There was a silence that went on for just a little too long. Hamin and Eunho tried to hide their non-plussed expressions, and Jinsu could see the cogs turning in Kyungsoo's mind as he tried to think of the best way to answer, and of the names of any small places that had actually existed back in the time of Balhae.

"We're from down south," she piped up when it was obvious nobody else was going to.

Han frowned. "From Silla?"

"Yes," Kyungsoo agreed.

One of Han's eyebrows rose, and he laid his other hand over Jinsu's arm, which was resting on his. "No wonder you don't know how to treat your woman right."

All three boys looked like they'd just inhaled a plum stone.

"I'm sorry?" Eunho wheezed out.

"Your lady is dressed in beautiful silk." Han tilted his head towards Jinsu. "And yet you're making her walk. Why do you not have a litter?"

Jinsu dearly wanted to laugh at the boys' stunned expressions.

"There's a wonderful carpenter in the village," Han went on. "I shall ask him to make a litter for you when we arrive."

Jinsu almost tugged her arm away. "No, please, that won't be necessary."

"You are being made to walk," Han told her in a tone that brooked no argument. "You must have come miles on foot and that is not acceptable for a lady such as yourself."

"We're paying our dues to the god of the grove," Jinsu blurted out. "One of our main worshipping sites is in the woods not far from here. It would be insulting to him if we did not approach him with humility, so a litter is out of the question."

Han looked a little surprised. "This far from Silla?" he asked.

Jinsu nodded, and then frowned. Was it wise to be making up some anachronistic cult?

Kyungsoo dropped back to their pace, causing Hamin to whine with distress. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he said. "For a year, we travel up the peninsula and into the heartland of the continent, and we spend a week at each sacred grove along the way. It's an opportunity to find ourselves."

Eunho and Hamin both shot him alarmed looks. Hamin's read stop talking now I don't want to know you anymore and Eunho's read a more simple how high are you?

Han nodded thoughtfully. "And is it just the four of you?"

"No," said Kyungsoo. "There's a large group of us, but we're going to the village as we need more rice."

"And you have no warriors? No protection from wild animals?"

"We're people of peace," said Kyungsoo. "We do not like to kill."

For a moment or two, Han mulled this over. "You are either foolishly brave or mad," he declared. "I had heard there was a tiger in the area and assuming it was the only one, it is now dead, but there are many leopards in these parts, and wild boars and bears. Today we have been hunting for wolves. The villagers heard them howling at the full moon just a few days back. The cattle are also being attacked."

Jinsu swallowed. It was rather worrying that there were quite so many wild animals around. From what she remembered from documentaries, most of the big ones wouldn't attack or kill humans unless provoked or starving, but given they'd just been rescued from an aggressive tiger, she wasn't sure how firmly she believed that.

Eunho, however, clearly thought it was cool. He slipped in between Han and Jinsu, encouraging the man to walk a little faster.

"So," he said, Han wrinkling his nose at Eunho's accent, though he said nothing. "How many bears have you seen?"

As soon as Han was preoccupied with satisfying Eunho's curiosity, Hamin turned to Kyungsoo. "Why did you back up Jinsu's dumb story about us being fervent religious nuts?"

"We're obviously outsiders and weirdoes," Kyungsoo mumbled. "Did you not see Han's face? The only person whose accent he doesn't think is totally bizarre is Jinsu's. We have no clue about the local area and no practical common sense on how to live here either. He's clearly familiar with a lot of it and thinks we're off our rockers. Since it's obvious we're foreigners, he's going to think we're staying somewhere local, but if he roams around, chances are we might bump into him, or he might bump into some of the rest of us, over the course of this week, not to mention if we frequently go into the village and he spots us there, he's going to wonder where we're coming and going from every day. We can't let anybody find the Attayear. It's much safer he believes we're a seclusive religious group camping in a sacred grove in the forest and thinks it acceptable for us to come and go into the village for food or something every day before moving on in a week to somewhere else than for anybody to start asking questions or snooping around. Besides, without an excuse like that, people will wonder why we're not staying in the village. If there isn't another one we could easily get to by nightfall, they're not going to be happy letting us leave the village again without company when there are dangerous animals about."

"You and Jinsu have created a cult," Hamin objected. "Isn't that messing with a Grandfather clause?"

"You could say meeting Han at all is messing with a Grandfather clause," Kyungsoo grumbled.

"W-we haven't actually created a c-cult," Jinsu piped up nervously. "We just talked about one vaguely. There's nothing material, so it'll fade pretty quickly. Hopefully."

Hamin was not very keen to see the healer when they arrived. Kyungsoo vanished almost the second Han left them at the healer's hut, swiping a few gold coins from the sack Eunho was still carrying. The healer was tending to somebody else, leaving the others with time to look around the dark inside of the room. Jinsu saw Eunho surreptitiously sneaking a couple of photos.

"Can't you just carry me back to the Attayear?" Hamin pleaded in a whisper to Eunho. "What if he decides the only cure is to amputate my leg?"

Eunho considered for a bit as he tucked his camera back up his sleeve. "Think of this as a brilliant opportunity to learn something about contemporary medicine first hand."

"You're a d*ck," Hamin told him blandly. Eunho patted him on the head and left, grinning cheerfully. Jinsu dithered, unsure whether it was better for her to stay or go. Hamin's pitiful expression convinced her to stay.

The healer didn't seem to think that amputation was the answer, much to Hamin's relief, but he did produce a rather icky-looking concoction he said was made from plants and herbs and slathered it on the wound. Hamin looked like he might throw up, but he bore it gamely, even if it was obvious he didn't trust it to work.

"This looks like alien puke," he whispered to Jinsu the second the healer was out of sight, and she had to cover her mouth not to burst out laughing. He quickly turned the tables on her with a sly grin. "Maybe you should ask for some yourself to help with the aches and pains."

That shut Jinsu up pretty quickly. The last thing she'd be able to cope with was alien puke on her hand.

Hamin drummed his fingers on the sides of the low wooden examination bed he'd been confined to. He didn't seem bothered by the silence, but Jinsu was finding it increasingly awkward to be in his presence since it was making her more and more self-conscious, and she wondered if there was a good way to escape. He turned back to her before she could make the excuse that she ought to run after Eunho and ensure he didn't spend all her money.

"By the way, how is the... you know." He gestured vaguely at her torso. Jinsu frowned, wondering what he meant. "Hand?"

She had the bizarre urge to hide it behind her back.

"What do you reckon the alien goo healer person would have made of the tape you had on your fingers?" It sounded like Hamin was searching for things to say. The idea that he actually wanted to make conversation was a pretty shocking one.

"It would probably be alien puke to him too," Jinsu said awkwardly, unable to think of anything else.

To her utter astonishment, Hamin actually smiled. It felt like a firecracker went off in Jinsu's head, along with a fanfare announcing Mission Objective 3 of 400 complete: make Yu Hamin smile!

"Fair play," he acknowledged. "Is your hand okay, though? I was kind of paying more attention to the tiger potentially eating all of us than individual injuries—"

"Thank you," Jinsu interrupted him, and then, before her nerves could fail her utterly, she added, "I actually thought you were all going to ditch me for a few seconds."

Hamin looked scandalised, but his expression morphed to hurt. "Why would we do that?" he demanded.

Jinsu wanted to ask him if she really needed to answer that, but he seemed to be able to tell that from her expression.

"Let's be real: your dad would have lynched the lot of us if we came back without you, and then told him we'd left you for a tiger's dinner."

The prospect that it could just have been fear of retribution hurt more than Jinsu wanted to admit. She gulped as tears stung at her eyes, and after a second or two, she turned away.

Hamin grabbed her wrist. "I was only joking! Jeez, girl."

"It's really not very funny." To her embarrassment, Jinsu's voice cracked. Hamin tugged at her arm. When she didn't turn around, he did it more insistently, dragging her back towards the bed. Jinsu was taken by surprise and tumbled onto it, causing a yelp from Hamin.

"Ow! Wait a moment." He extracted her leg from under her. "Yuck. You may have alien goo on your hanbok now, just saying."

Jinsu leaped up, grossed out, and turned frantically to check, almost tearing at the hanbok, but if it was there, it wasn't easily visible. Hamin observed her with curiosity as she panicked.

"You are so—" He stopped and shook his head. Jinsu managed to halt herself to see what he had to say. "I was going to say you're so OCD," he told her, "but I think it's more accurate to say you have severe OCD. It's the second time I've seen you freak out big time over something really small and it's not really normal."

Jinsu wasn't totally sure where he was going with this, but she wanted to believe he wasn't trying to be malicious. "Can you shut up before you insult me more?" she asked in a small voice.

The expression that crossed Hamin's face clearly said he hadn't even considered any of his words to be offensive. "My bad," he acknowledged. "But do sit back down. I don't want to be left on my own with that alien gunk maniac."

The invitation all but dispelled all Jinsu's misgivings as the warmth of being valued, or at least wanted, spread, and she sat again, this time careful to avoid Hamin's injured leg.

They barely talked at all after that. About half an hour later, the healer returned with a sleeping draught of some kind because he wanted to stitch Hamin's leg up. Looking somewhere between green and grey, Hamin swallowed the concoction, much happier to knock himself out than to try to be macho. He didn't quite grasp at Jinsu's hand, but he did grab a handful of her hanbok skirt, mumbling something about not telling Kyungsoo or Eunho he was a sissy, or that he was afraid of heights, before his eyes fluttered shut.

Establishing that it was going to take some time to finish the stitching, Jinsu promised to return later with money for the healer and headed out into the village.

She'd been to the government-funded-and-preserved cultural heritage villages before, but this was definitely a different experience. The low-roofed houses were there, definitely, as were the walled gardens and the rice field surrounding them, but that was more or less where the similarities ended. The roads were all beaten dirt, a few stones to trip on here and there, and there were no wires or cables or cars lurking just out of sight to dispel the illusion. Grubby-faced children were squealing happily as they played on the roads, darting between the men and women out doing the last chores before the sun began to tinge the sky orange. Farmers were driving their cattle into shelter during the night. Jinsu almost went sprawling when a couple of stray hens pecked their way across her path.

She found Kyungsoo and Eunho at the local tavern as the sun was beginning to set, and was about to go over to join them (though with misgivings) when she realised that Chanyeol and Bonggu were with them. After a second or two of dithering, she decided it was probably best to end exploration and go back to the healer's.

But Eunho had her money.

And then Chanyeol spotted her and started waving very obnoxiously in her direction.

Internally groaning, Jinsu dragged her feet over to him and plopped down on the bench as he made Kyungsoo budge up so that there was room for her. Eunho appeared not to notice her, but Bonggu gave her the stink-eye and another disgusted expression that made her want to disappear.

"Eunho and Kyungsoo are idiots," Chanyeol told her. "They've forgotten how to get back to wherever they ditched Hamin and they're too scared to ask the locals."

To be fair to them, the healer's had been pretty out of the way, so Jinsu offered to take them back there once the boys had finished their stew. Chanyeol offered her a few spoons of his portion, but Jinsu wasn't really one for eating off other's cutlery or even dishes because the potential germs gave her the heebie jeebies, so she declined. It wasn't too long before they were all done, anyway.

Eunho was contemplating the money sack as they got to their feet, apparently not too keen to carry it around much further.

"Oh, Jinsu, this is—"

"Give me that," Bonggu interrupted, snatching the sack up as Eunho reached to pick it up and presumably hand it to its rightful owner. Eunho shrugged and dropped the subject. The others turned and headed out onto the main street. Jinsu trailed behind them, shooting glances back over her shoulder at Bonggu and wondering if he knew the money was actually hers.

He hefted it onto his shoulder and quickly caught up with her, his eyebrows raised.

"Cult worshippers?" was all he said, the disdain in his tone clear. "Really?"

And then he was at the front of the group and the others were calling for her to join them because they didn't know the way.

Jinsu wondered when she'd stop being surprised at how much his words hurt.

Chapter 20

Hamin was too drowsy to walk back to the Attayear with them, especially since night was drawing in, so after giving the healer double the money for his time, the others continued on back to the time machine. Jinsu trailed at the back of the group, feeling out of place.

The boys ditched her when it came to reporting the state of affairs to Noah, and the trauma of the day's events sank in, she found herself requesting with teary eyes to stay on the Attayear the next day rather than going anywhere. Noah looked like he wasn't too keen to send out anybody full stop until they'd established the frequency of wild beast attacks in the area, though it was clear that a group would need to go back to the village they'd found to bring Hamin back the next day, or to at least get him some tetanus shots and antibiotics, just in case.

Jino popped in an hour through their conversation to report that everybody had returned and checked in via the fingerprint system attached to the buttons to open the doors save Hamin, and Noah promptly got Jinsu to tell Jino about the incident with the tiger. As Jinsu was finishing up with that, Yixing let himself into the increasingly cramped room.

"Oh, hi," he said on seeing Jinsu and Jino. "Noah, we need to get the scraggamuffins to eat at some point, and we also want some kind of forum on feedback and discoveries this evening, so what do I tell them?"

With a groan, Noah got to his feet and stretched. "I'll be down in a moment. Food first." He turned to Jinsu. "We'll discuss this again tomorrow morning when I've consulted with Jino on the best way to continue."

Jinsu detoured via her room on the way downstairs to change out of the dirty hanbok. She contemplated taking it down to the washing machines, but Han was correct about it being pure silk, which meant it was probably hand wash or dry clean only. She grimaced before folding it as neatly as she could with one hand and tucking it away on the bottom shelf so that she would remember not to use it again before proceeding on downstairs in a light casual dress that didn't have any buttons or zips to worry about.

The boys and staff members of the Attayear were already stuffing their faces when she arrived in the kitchen. A pair of doors had been opened at the end, extending the room into more of a cafeteria, but the majority of people were crammed around the wooden table in the kitchen side of things, were Eunho was engaged in full flow of an embellished version of what had happened.

"—And this tiger's all like, oh, don't mind me, I'm just a stalker—!" she heard him saying excitedly, gesturing to add emphasis. Jinsu turned towards the hobs to see that somebody had made a gigantic vat of pasta that everybody seemed welcome to help themselves to, so she did, Eunho's voice still ringing in the background.

"—It was f*cking gigantic, I tell you – Kyungsoo, it was bigger than a normal tiger, right? – and it actually followed us up the tree, all clinging to the trunk and stuff! Snapping at our legs and everything."

"I thought tigers couldn't climb," Kyuhyun piped up.

"Ah ha ha, you shouldda seen this one." Eunho leant over the table. "We had to get right up into the high part of the tree so it couldn't follow us. I don't know how much it weighed, but that tree was not listening to gravity when that tiger was in the branches, I'm tellin' ya."

Not seeing a space near anybody she would have felt comfortable joining, Jinsu stood by the worktops and forked pasta into her mouth as quickly as possible so she could leave again. Eunho had got past meeting Han and them all becoming members of a cult (there were several laughs and Kyungsoo got all the credit for quick thinking) and had a good laugh when he managed to convince several of his peers that the reason Hamin hadn't come back with them was because he'd fallen and been eaten by the tiger before Jinsu was done. She slipped her plate and cutlery into the dishwasher and headed back to her room, set to call it an early night.

Jinsu was all ready for bed and had just managed to snuggle under the covers with the intention of listening to music on her phone when the knock at the door came. She tensed up, wondering who it could possibly be, and then reasoned that if she pretended not to be there, they'd probably go away. The door handle creaked, sending her into a panic over not locking the door, but the head that popped into the room wasn't Minhwan or Bonggu.

"Hey." Chanyeol managed a wan smile. "Can I come in?" His hand slipped through the door to hold up Jinsu's sack of money. "I gather this is yours."

Jinsu's throat abruptly felt very dry. "Just leave it by the door," she croaked out.

Chanyeol took it as an invitation to come right the way in and did exactly that, placing it along the wall by the door's hinge.

"Thanks," Jinsu managed. He flashed her an awkward smile and stood there for a couple of moments, scratching behind one of his ears. Jinsu hoped he'd leave.

He didn't. He came over and gingerly sat on the bed opposite her.

"So, um. . ." Chanyeol cleared his throat. Jinsu contemplated asking him what he thought he was doing, but came to the conclusion it would be rude.

"I'm glad you're alive." It came out as a bit of a rush, but Chanyeol smiled more naturally when the words were out. Jinsu blinked at him. "I mean, you could have died. Eaten by tigers. Not a nice way to go. And you're my cousin, so that would be bad."

Jinsu blinked at him again. "Okay. . ." she said slowly.

"Really," Chanyeol insisted. "I heard from Kyungsoo when he and Baek got back to our room. He said it was terrifying."

The smell of decaying meat on the tiger's breath suddenly assailed Jinsu's nostrils again, and she shuddered. "Well, he's right."

Somehow, her obnoxiously emotionally dense cousin had the presence of mind to ask the question Jinsu had needed to hear all day.

"Are you okay?"

Jinsu closed her eyes, feeling the sudden burn of tears. It was humiliating that she'd been crying so much recently, but Chanyeol had sounded like Jimin for a second there, and she would have given her right arm for her brother to be with her at that moment.

"No," she whispered. "I'm really not."

And then he was back to being Awkward Cousin Chanyeol.

"Well, er. . . is there anything I can do?"

Jinsu was on the brink of responding no when he had another moment of genius. "What do you want to tell me about it?"

Not even do you want to talk. What do you want to tell me. Somehow, it made all the difference.

It all came flooding out. All the pent up pain and hurt and anger of the past few years came flooding out, half in words and half in tears, and when Jinsu came to her senses some time later, she and Chanyeol were both sitting horizontally across her bed with their backs against the wall. One of his long arms was draped around her shoulders, and she was slumped comfortably half against the front of his torso and half against his side, so tired that she felt like she might drop off at any moment.

Chanyeol had barely said a word the entire time she'd cried and talked, but that didn't really matter. What mattered was he had an awesome bear hug and it was actually more comfortable than Jimin's.

"I've been a bit of a failure of a cousin really, haven't I?" he mused. "I'm sorry."

Jinsu nodded mutely against his armpit. She felt him tense up with a little hiccup, but he didn't mention the fact that it tickled.

"Uncle Jiwoon is even worse than I thought."

Jinsu nodded again. Chanyeol wriggled in an attempt to get her head away from his armpit, but he didn't bother complaining.

"Hey," he said, his bass voice very gentle. "I've been thinking this over awhile, and... well, you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it, right? Is it too late to start on a clean slate? "

In her dopey state, Jinsu began to agree with him, but then switched to shaking her head.

"You had me worried for a minute there." He gave a breathy laugh. "Wanna join my group exploring tomorrow?"

"Not going tomorrow." Jinsu shook her head.

"Why?"

"Noah's giving me a crash course on the Attayear's IT base code."

"I forgot you were a computer geek," Chanyeol said thoughtfully after a moment or two. "Anyway, are you all right with me leaving you now? You're bushed and I'm tired too. It would be a good idea to get some sleep."

"Go away," Jinsu mumbled in agreement, the mere mention of sleep beginning to cloud her mind over.

"Aren't you charming?" There was no venom in Chanyeol's voice as he eased himself away from her. Jinsu rolled onto her side, sandwiching herself in the duvet. Chanyeol's voice was further away when he next spoke.

"Hey, Jinsu, you know you can talk to me about anything, right?"

She hummed sleepily. It wasn't until she heard the door creaking open that something came to mind, though.

"Yeollie, did you cook me breakfast?"

Chanyeol's tone was very frank. "I can't cook for sh*t, Jinsu. I don't even know what you like to eat, except chocolate. I don't think I can even remember the last time I saw you in the school cafeteria."

"Mm."

The last thing Jinsu remembered between the door shutting and the yawn before she dropped off to sleep was the cosy, protected feeling she basked in whenever she was around Jimin.

For the second day in a row, Jinsu nearly tripped over a breakfast tray when she emerged from her room, having given up trying to straighten out the duvet on the other bed from where Chanyeol had been sitting the previous night. She came up short, blinking at the boiled eggs she'd almost stepped on, and then backed up a few steps to think about what was in front of her. For the most part, it was identical to the previous day, though there was a more manageable portion on each of the plates and the scrambled eggs had been replaced by boiled ones and two pieces of toast had neatly been cut into soldiers. Come to that, looking closely, the boiled eggs had been sliced expertly across the tops, which had then been replaced, presumably to keep them warm and the yolks from spilling.

Too bleary to think beyond the fact that twice meant whoever was leaving the food clearly intended it for her, and that it was a blessing to her growling stomach, she carefully picked the tray up and balanced it so that she could open the door again.

She had a moment of wobbliness when the door was abruptly pushed open from behind her.

"There you go," Minhwan said, his voice oozing patronising slime. "Much better for you not to join us, after all. At least you know your place."

He had gone and the door slammed shut behind Jinsu before she could turn to confront him.

When there was a knock on the door just a couple of minutes later, Jinsu was still stewing angrily and contemplating between storming downstairs to sit and eat at the kitchen table (though she knew she didn't have the courage to do that), and happily stuffing her face in private without potentially offending the person who'd made the food for her by taking it downstairs.

Getting no reply to his knocks, Yejun came into the room. Jinsu turned at the door creaking.

"Minhwan is a prick," she said.

"Well, hello to you too." He sat in the second chair at the desk, since Jinsu was occupying the first, and made puppy eyes at the food. "I came to ask if you'd had breakfast delivered to you again, and since the answer is yes, is there enough to share because that looks scrumptious?"

Jinsu handed him the chopsticks and picked up the fork. "Help yourself. There's no way I can eat all this, even though it's less than yesterday."

Yejun helped himself to a sausage and groaned with satisfaction. "Oh, this hits the spot. Where did this person get Cumberthingie sausages from? I didn't even know we had imported food on here. I thought it was all Korean."

Jinsu stabbed at a sausage with interest. "These are imported?"

"Yeah." Yejun reached for the knife to cut the sausage into bite-sized chunks for her. "Dad made me and Junmyeon taste all the food we offer across all our hotels a month or two back – I swear I put on so much weight – and these were in the breakfast section for our flagship because it gets loads of foreigners and Dad wanted to offer them a range of meats. This one's European. I think the name is English, but I'd remember the taste anywhere because it's so good." He stole one of the chunks he'd cut for Jinsu. "Honestly, I could eat these sausages for every meal for the rest of my life."

"I thought Junmyeon was vegetarian?"

"He didn't get fat and he only had about a quarter of the menu to taste." Yejun smacked his lips. "I was in heaven, I swear. Hash brown?"

The door swung open again, and they both turned to see Chanyeol there. It took him a moment or two to realise that Jinsu had company and that Yejun was trying to feed Jinsu part of a hash brown with his chopsticks even though she didn't want it.

"Just wanted to check on you after last night—" Chanyeol began before tilting his head to the side in surprise. "Is there something going on between you two?"

"No!" Jinsu said hastily, accidentally allowing Yejun his moment to strike.

"Score!" he cheered as Jinsu spluttered on the unexpected potato, only to give a whine of pain when she kicked him in response.

"Okay," said Chanyeol blithely. "Well, I'm gonna... go hunt for breakfast, I guess—"

"Mmm-mm!" Jinsu shook her head, frantically swallowing the remaining hash brown, and stabbed a sausage, extending it in Chanyeol's direction. "It's foreign! Try it!"

"Jinsu, how could you? That's the last one!"

There was a lot of awkwardness between Chanyeol and Yejun, a large part of which Jinsu suspected was due to Yejun potentially having punched her cousin for being a rotten relative. At any rate, Chanyeol was reluctant to join them for food, but did so because Jinsu insisted and Yejun made a couple of jibes that Jinsu couldn't tell if they were playful or threatening before he settled down and started on the bacon.

After they'd polished off the entire tray of food, Yejun offered to help Jinsu with her dressings.

"We ought to make you a splint from twigs," he said absently as he wrapped tape around her fingers.

"The tape's not that noticeable," Chanyeol objected.

"Saeeun told me provided the fingers are straight, it doesn't matter whether it's a splint or tape," Jinsu volunteered. Yejun shrugged and patted her hand to let her know he was done. Out of habit, Jinsu tried splaying her fingers.

"Yejun!"

Spluttering with laughter, Yejun skittered out of her reach, holding up his hand. "Live long and prosper!" A split-second later, he was out of the room.

He'd taped her broken middle and index fingers together, but also her ring and pinkie fingers. Once she overrode the frustrating feeling of being able to stretch between her third and fourth fingers but none of the rest of them, Jinsu allowed herself to be amused. Chanyeol clearly was from his snort too.

Jinsu's head jerked up. "You're a Trekkie?"

A grin spread across Chanyeol's face at potentially having something in common. "Only casually. I've been watching American TV shows to improve my English and I quite liked that one."

"You should come over for marathons!" Jinsu told him. "I have the entire series, and the latest films."

It was an exciting enough discovery for Jinsu not to be bothered about having a hand stuck in a Vulcan greeting for the rest of the day.

Chapter 21