Archive of Our Own ^beta

SIYEON

“Siyeon!”

I turn and run back down the hall, following her voice. “Coming!” My sister’s frustrated screech is easily recognizable as a sign that things aren’t going quite the way she intended them to.

As is indeed revealed to be the case when I reach an intersection of hallways to find her pinned down, struggling to escape from another girl. Gahyeon squirms frustratedly as the second member of the other team snatches the flag we’re supposed to be protecting. “Thanks, Gah—” Jiu spins around to see me. She turns and sprints down the opposite hallway at top speed.

Sua releases Gahyeon and scrambles to her feet just in time to grab me as I chase after her teammate. “Oh no you don’t—ah!”

My little sister jumps up and tackles her former captor to the floor from behind with a frankly terrifying shriek. “Siyeon, go!”

I’m not sure leaving Gahyeon to deal with Sua is the best idea, but I don’t really have a choice since if Jiu escapes with that, we lose. “Aw, shit,” I grumble, and take off after the oldest girl just as she rounds the corner farther down the hall.

Despite being older and bigger, Jiu can’t outrun me all the way to the flag base and she knows it, so I’m not surprised when I round the corner and she’s nowhere to be seen. There are several open doors in this corridor. All of them lead to small storage rooms with no escape routes, but she could be hiding in any of them and she has the advantage since I don’t know where she is.

Why are there so many storage rooms on this ship? I complain silently, stopping just past the corner and looking around. If I were in her position, I’d hide the flag somewhere and jump out at the person chasing me when they had their back to me. The rooms are in perfectly aligned pairs—I can’t look in one without turning my back to another. “Very clever, Minji,” I mutter under my breath.

It’s a stalemate situation: I can’t look for her without leaving myself vulnerable to attack from behind, but as long as I stay here she can’t leave her hiding place. Unfortunately, she has another teammate. I can’t rely on Gahyeon to prevent Sua from coming after me for very long. All Jiu has to do is stay hidden long enough for her sister to escape from mine.

I don’t see any way out of this other than hoping to be lucky. With a sigh, I move toward the first room, poking my head inside. These little rooms aren’t much more than alcoves, so it’s not hard to determine that she isn’t there. Since she doesn’t leap out at me from behind, presumably she’s not in the one opposite that one, either.

I move on to the middle pair of rooms, and after a moment of debate, choose the one on the left.

Jiu launches herself out from behind the door before I get close, tackling me to the floor. I yelp, shoving her off and rolling away, into the room, where I see the flag lying on a crate as I scramble up.

Grab it and make a run for it, or fight her?

Suddenly there’s loud footsteps and Sua charges around the corner of the hall. Well, that makes my decision easier. I seize the flag and dive past Jiu as she lunges to stop me, taking off running. Where the hell is Gahyeon when I need her?

Considering how long it took Sua to show up, either my sister had a spectacular improvement in combat ability suddenly and managed to prolong their fight for several minutes past what I would have expected, or the older girl spent that time finding a way to delay Gahyeon from coming to help me.

Probably the latter.

Aw, fuck.

I’m so busy considering my problem that I nearly don’t remember that this hallway leads to a dead end around the next corner in the form of a restricted door I can’t get through. Spinning around, I race back toward the nearest side hall.

Jiu and Sua aren’t expecting a head-on charge and their reactions are different, resulting in Sua stumbling over Jiu as the oldest girl dives out of the way. They both end up on the floor with yells of surprise and I jump over them, sprinting down the side hall before they can disentangle themselves and chase after me.

Which is why I’m so startled when someone comes seemingly out of nowhere and slams into me, knocking me into the wall.

“Ah—” I gasp, struggling to regain my breath, the wind knocked out of me by the impact. What the hell—how did they catch up that fast—but when my attacker grabs me from behind and spins me around, pinning me against the wall, it’s not Jiu or Sua.

You idiot, Siyeon! I mentally kick myself. I forgot about the third pair—though with good reason, since I hadn’t seen either of them since this game began. Were they hiding here the entire time?

“Sorry, Siyeon!” Yoohyeon apologizes, though she’s grinning wildly.

“Yeah, actually, not that sorry,” Dami counters, ducking out of the side hall I failed to notice, “and I’ll take that.” She snatches the flag from my hand and takes off as I struggle futilely against Yoohyeon, who’s restraining me by the shoulders, effectively preventing me from fighting back or chasing her teammate.

Sua chooses that moment to barrel around the corner of the hall and ram into Yoohyeon from behind, knocking her away from me and to the floor. She’s momentarily confused when she realizes I no longer have the flag, though. “What the fuck-?”

Jiu is quicker than her sister to realize what’s happened as she catches up, and she bolts down the side hall Dami took, the quickest way to the flag base.

Sua starts to follow, but Yoohyeon looks between the two of us as she scrambles to her feet and then tackles Sua, leaving me free to chase Jiu and Dami. Apparently two members of different teams pursuing her friend is preferable to two teammates.

Or maybe she just wants revenge for Sua knocking her down. Either way, it’s not my problem, since they’re both out of my way for now.

There’s a screech from up ahead and I run faster, rounding the corner to find Jiu and Dami struggling for the flag. The much taller girl has the advantage, trapping Dami against the wall, but Dami is only twenty feet from the entrance to the base—an unused storage room randomly chosen as our goal—and it’s clearly giving her extra motivation. I’ve rarely seen her fighting this wildly.

“Siyeon! Help!” Jiu yells, struggling to keep Dami pinned. She’s not my teammate, but we both lose if the younger girl gets through that door, so I decide a temporary truce is in my best interest.

I run to help, but before I reach them, Dami breaks free, shoving Jiu into the wall, and bolts for the door. “Oh no you don’t!” I yell, changing my course and sprinting after her. “That flag is mine, Lee Dami!” Footsteps behind me announce Jiu pursuing as well, but while we’re both faster than Dami, I’m the only one with a chance to catch her before she reaches the door.

I’m gaining on her, but I don’t think I’m going to catch up with her in time. She’s a few steps from the door when I throw myself forward in a last-ditch attempt to grab her.

I slam into the smaller girl and she loses her balance with a yelp, skidding. Dami stumbles forward, but I grab her, yanking her back from the doorway and making a grab for the flag—just as Jiu collides with both of us from behind.

I don’t know who’s holding the flag when we tumble through the doorway, but it’s in my hand when the three of us end up on the floor, half on top of each other.

Dami shoves me off her, rolling to her feet, and triumphantly yells, “I win! Siyeon, that doesn’t count!”

“The hell it doesn’t!” I argue, scrambling up. “You didn’t have it when you crossed the threshold!”

“How do you know?”

Okay, she’s got me. I can’t prove she wasn’t holding it at the moment the three of us fell into the room, but— “How do you know you had it?”

“Siyeon! Dami!” Jiu has gotten to her feet as well and holds out a hand to stop both of us. “None of us can prove who was holding it,” she says, pausing to catch her breath, “but my mother can, if she has the security camera footage.”

Of course, that’s the point when Sua, Yoohyeon, and Gahyeon finally catch up, bursting into the hallway and skidding to a half-colliding stop as they see the three of us standing in the room.

Everyone stares at me and the flag in my hand for a moment.

“Did you win?” Gahyeon is the first to break the silence.

“No, I won!” Dami counters. “Siyeon grabbed it after we fell through the doorway!”

“Calm down!” Jiu exclaims, raising her voice to be heard over both of us. “We’re going to ask Nayeon to review the security cameras.” Since she clearly didn’t win, she’s the neutral party in this dispute. Also, we’re all used to obeying her and we shut up.

Jiu turns to face the intercom system speaker, which is mounted on the wall at the back of the room, above some shelving. “Okay, Nayeon, who won?” she demands.

No response, which is odd. Is Nayeon not watching? She’s supposed to be supervising us, so she should be, unless there’s some sort of emergency. Perhaps she’s distracted.

“Nayeon,” Jiu repeats, louder, trying to get her mother’s attention. “Nayeon, we have a question!”

The six of us exchange puzzled looks when there’s still no reply. Jiu frowns, approaching the speaker. “Maybe it’s not working?” She tugs on the shelving, making sure it’s bolted to the wall, before she climbs up to examine the speaker.

Dami looks frustrated, pouting slightly. She gives me an odd look when she notices me watching her, but I can’t help it, she’s too cute when she pouts. If Gahyeon wasn’t too busy talking with Yoohyeon to pay attention to me right now, she’d probably tease me.

Okay, she’d definitely tease me. According to what my sister said last week, I look like a protagonist in a cartoon looking at their crush. ‘Ew, Siyeon, stop staring at Dami with the heart-eyes face.’

Unfortunately, Gahyeon chose to make that observation during a math quiz, and the instructors generally frown on committing murder in class, even if it’s entirely justified by what your sister just whispered into your ear. Also, I was not looking at Dami, I was looking at her quiz paper. Is it my fault she’s brilliant as well as beautiful?

Gahyeon’s response to that was to inform me that if I spent more time looking at the teacher and less time looking at Dami during class, maybe I could pass the quiz without cheating.

The fact that I did not strangle my sister was an incredible feat of self-control.

“Hey, uh, Siyeon? Hello?” As if on cue, Gahyeon’s voice snaps me back to the present. She gives me a look that says, I know exactly what you were thinking about.

“Sorry, was just thinking,” I say, and glare at her in a way that’s meant to communicate, You have no idea what I was thinking about, which earns me a knowing smirk.

Sometimes I really hate having a little sister.

Fortunately, Dami is paying no attention to either of us. She’s looking at Jiu, who’s fiddling with the speaker buttons, balanced slightly precariously with one foot on the second-highest shelf and the other on the one below.

“Nothing seems to be wrong with it,” Jiu says in confusion, letting go of the speaker with one hand to twist around and look down at us. “Maybe she’s just busy—”

There’s no warning before the entire room suddenly shakes and the lights go out.

I don’t know whether it’s Dami or me who loses our balance first, but both of us tumble into shelving units—and not the ones bolted to the wall. Already destabilized in the shaking, they tip over, banging into others in a cacophony of clanging metal.

When the ship stops shaking, I’m lying on the floor, entirely disoriented, and the sudden darkness of the room doesn’t help. “What the…?” I say out loud, sitting up cautiously.

“Siyeon! Jiu!”

“Dami!” I scramble to my feet, trip over a shelving unit that’s lying on the floor, and grab one of the still-upright ones to keep my balance. It’s bolted to the wall, meaning I must be near the wall.

Though that doesn’t tell me much as there’s not a lot of this room that isn’t near the wall, since it’s six by six—the standard size for a shipboard storage room that’s not meant for anything special—and the wall shelves extend out at least six or eight inches from each wall. I look around, but it’s still dark. Very dark. “Are you okay? Where are you?”

“I don’t know! It’s pitch fucking black in here, Siyeon!” She sounds annoyed, but not hurt, at least. “The door must have closed when the lights went off.”

Holding onto the upright shelves to keep my balance, I shuffle towards the direction of her voice, somewhere to my left. She’s right, if the door was still open we would see the emergency lights of the hallway, but it’s totally black in here.

So if the door shut too, then it’s not a lighting outage, it’s a general power outage. Great. “Dami, talk, it’ll be easier to find you.”

“Uh. Right. So what was that?”

“I don’t know.” I hesitate, realizing as soon as I say it that it’s not exactly true. I don’t know, but I have a guess and I don’t like it. “Well…if Nayeon was called away from watching us…”

I take the swear word she responds with to mean that she’s come to the same conclusion as me, which she confirms with her next words. “Who the hell suddenly came out of nowhere to attack us then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think of why anyone would when we’re like literally in the middle of nowhere and we don’t have any cargo,” I admit, “but what else could it be?”

“Maybe it was a random power malfunction?” she suggests. “It would account for the intercom failure, too.” I can hear the doubt in her voice. A random power malfunction is, in fact, a perfectly plausible explanation for both Nayeon not responding to us and the power outage. But it wouldn’t account for the ship shaking, unless something exploded—in which case we have almost as big of a problem as if we were being attacked anyway.

I take another step forward and bump into Dami, grabbing her to keep my balance. She’s holding onto a shelf as well, fortunately, so we don’t both tumble to the floor. “Okay, whatever it was, we get out of here, then we figure it out.” We’re not trapped in here—the door has a manual release, in case of exactly such a situation. We just have to find it.

“Siyeon! Wait,” Dami exclaims suddenly, before I can take a step toward my best guess at where the door is. “There were three of us in here—where’s Jiu?”

Shit.

Where is Jiu?

“Jiu?” I call, turning around. Dami wraps her arms around me from behind. Her head is practically on my shoulder. Under any other circumstances this would now be officially the best day of, like, maybe my entire life, but in my alarm and concern for our friend I barely even notice. “Jiu!” No response. “Minji!” I yell.

My voice echoes off the walls of the room, but she doesn’t answer.

“She was balanced on the shelving.” Dami’s grip on me tightens. “Siyeon, she was climbing on the shelves!” she repeats, more frantically.

“I know, I know!” The one Jiu climbed was definitely attached firmly to the wall, so I doubt it fell over, but if Dami and I, who were standing on solid, flat ground, both fell down, there’s no way Jiu kept her hold on the shelving.

She fell off. The fall itself wouldn’t have been more than two or three feet, but she must have been thrown into the wall, or the shelves on the floor, by the shaking. Since she isn’t answering, she’s unconscious—at best.

Dami is holding onto to me so tightly it’s hard to breathe. “Siyeon,” she whispers, “Siyeon, what—what if—”

I cut her off before she can say the words, as if afraid speaking them will make them real. “No, she’s okay. She’s okay, she has to be, we just have to find her,” I insist, hoping desperately to be right. “Come on.” I take a step forward. She hesitates, but unwraps her arms from my waist and grabs my hand instead.

Like twenty percent of my brain is freaking out because Dami is holding hands with me and the other eighty percent is freaking out because the power is out, the ship is probably under attack, and Jiu could be hurt badly—or dead—no, don’t think about that, she’s not, she’s okay, she’s got to be… The end result of that math is that zero percent is paying attention to walking.

I collide with a somehow still upright shelving unit in the middle of the room and stagger sideways, tripping over a fallen one and landing hard on it, letting go of Dami in the process. “Ow!” I yelp, tumbling off and colliding with someone sprawled on the floor.

“Siyeon!” Dami shouts.

It takes me a split second to realize and then I roll to my hands and knees. “Dami! Dami, I found her!”

“What?” Dami demands. “Is she okay?”

Jiu is definitely unconscious, but she’s breathing, and she doesn’t seem hurt. Thank God. “Yeah, I think so, I mean, as far as I can tell, anyway.”

“Ah—” Dami yelps and it’s my turn to call out for her as something clangs loudly.

“Dami!”

“I’m fine,” she responds after a moment, “Uh, I found the door. It’s right here.” From her voice, I’m guessing she’s not far from the other side of the shelf I tripped over.

“Oh, good.” I can’t really say I’m enjoying being trapped in the storage room, after all. “Help me with Jiu.” The unconscious girl is bigger than either of us alone, and it’s a struggle to get her over the fallen shelf to the door, especially when we still can’t see more than outlines in the darkness. As the one on Jiu’s side of the shelf, I end up doing most of the work.

I collapse beside Jiu, panting, when we finally manage to get her to the door. I know she can’t be much heavier than me but it sure feels like she is when I’m trying to crawl over a fallen shelf with her.

“Siyeon?” Dami puts her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” If there’s one upside of our situation it’s the fact that I’ve gotten more one-on-one time with her than I have in the rest of the past week at least. Now that I really think about it, probably more than the past two weeks—and we can’t have been in here for more than twenty minutes.

Okay, that’s just sad. But it’s also kind of funny. Fuck, you should have told her, Siyeon, you idiot, I kick myself mentally. Dramatic confession in an emergency situation. Would have been a brilliant idea.

I’m laughing helplessly at my own stupidity. Only I could end up trapped in a (kind of) dangerous situation, alone with my crush—okay, not strictly alone, but Jiu doesn’t count since she’s unconscious—like a movie scene and still fail to tell her anything.

“Siyeon?” Dami demands.

“Fine—I’m fine—oh, just open the fucking door,” I groan. Gahyeon’s going to kill me, I can already hear her incredulous exclamation in my mind. ‘You were locked in a room with her while the ship was under attack, Siyeon! How fucking clueless can you be?’

I hear a clunk as Dami yanks down the lever, but the door doesn’t open.

What?

“Dami?”

“It’s stuck.” The alarm in her voice is poorly concealed and I can’t blame her. If we can’t open the door manually, we’re stuck in here until the power is fixed. The storage area of the ship is not exactly high priority for power restoration right now. We could be trapped here for days, if it’s a full-section outage, since our friends wouldn’t be able to get out of the section and tell someone we need help—

No, that’s stupid, Nayeon knows that the six of us, including both her kids, are in this section, she’s not going to let us just be stuck here. We just have to wait for the state of active emergency to end.

It occurs to me that we haven’t felt the ship shake again, or perform any wild maneuvers, which is strange if we’re really under attack. Maybe there was some sort of accident. If so, it might be more than a couple hours before anyone can come pry the door open.

“Try again,” I urge. I’m no longer laughing. “Try again, Dami, pull harder!”

“I’m…trying!” she groans. “It’s really stuck.”

I push myself up to a kneeling position, fumbling to find the lever. It’s hard to get a good grip on it, especially since her hands are in the way, but I finally manage it clumsily. “One,” I count, “two, three—pull!”

Both of us yank on the lever as hard as we can. My tugging is fueled by the sheer desperation of my desire not to be trapped in this storage room for hours.

It’s useless. The lever is well and truly jammed. I let go of it in defeat, slumping back down to a sitting position with my back against the door. “We’ll just have to wait, then. It can’t be that long, right?” I force down my fear. The room is not that small, it just seems more cramped because of the fallen shelving units covering the floor. It’s not that small. Come on. It’s really not.

“No,” Dami says, staring at the lever. “Oh, fuck.” Her voice is carefully controlled, as if she’s trying just as hard as me not to freak out. “Fuck!”

“What? It—it’s only gonna be a couple hours,” I say, clinging to my own words like a lifeline.

“That’s too long.” She huddles against the door, staring up at the useless lever. “Siyeon, there’s no power.”

“Yes…and?”

“And no power means no air.”

Wait.

What?

Oh God, she’s right. If there is no power then there’s no air circulation. This is a ship, air isn’t meant to move from one place to another without being forced to. If the hull breaches in one room you don’t want the air in the other rooms to escape, after all.

The door is as close to an airtight seal as possible and the vents will have sealed as well when the power went out. It’s a storage room, people aren’t expected to be in here—and if they do end up trapped here, well, that’s what the manual door release is for. Except it’s not working.

“No. Oh, no, no, no, no—” My voice rises until I’m screaming, panicking completely. “No—help! Gahyeon! Yoohyeon—Sua—help us!” I bang on the door wildly. “Gahyeon! Get this open!”

Why I’m yelling for my sixteen-year-old sister to pry this door open, I have no idea—hell, the door probably effectively weighs more than she does, since it’s sealed as a power outage failsafe. And she probably can’t even hear me through it, but I don’t actually care who opens it, I just need it opened, right now. “HELP!” I shriek.

“Siyeon!” Dami grabs me and pins me against the door, repeating my name until I stop struggling. “Siyeon, stop—panicking will kill us—uses up the air faster.” Her own fear is visible in her face even in the dark, but she’s making a clear effort to control it and breathe slowly. She’s not entirely succeeding, having to pause every few words to control herself, but she’s certainly doing better at it than me.

I’m breathing way too rapidly and no matter how hard I try I can’t stop, the room feels far more confined than before.

“Siyeon, calm down,” Dami pleads, “Siyeon, you have to get control of yourself, please—Siyeon—Singnie, come on!”

I’ve never heard her call me by my nickname before but that barely even registers in the face of my other concerns. “Can’t—I c-can’t, help—” I can’t even speak clearly, crying in fear and frustration, and still hyperventilating. “Dami—Dami, help me—too confined—get me out—”

The urgent look in her eyes tells me I need to stop now. And I’m trying, trying as hard as I can, but I can’t control my breathing. I can’t stop hyperventilating, and panicking further over the fact that I can’t stop.

My lack of self-control is going to kill not just me but Dami, and Jiu too, not that she’s even conscious to know she’s in danger—but Dami is very much aware, staring at me pleadingly, her face inches from mine.

Kiss her, you idiot, it’s not like you’re gonna get another chance, some crazy, irrational part of my mind insists.

Before I can decide whether to listen to it, she pulls back, her eyes widening in realization. “You’re claustrophobic,” she gasps in almost a whisper. “Is that it, Siyeon?”

Yes. Yes, but I can’t say it, can only nod, don’t dare open my mouth because I don’t know if I’d speak or cry or scream or just start gasping again, and none of the latter options would be good.

Dami twists around, scooting so that she’s the one with her back to the door, so that I’m curled against her instead of trapped between her and the door. And that does help but not nearly as much as when she wraps her arms around me, holding me against her. “It’s okay. It’s okay, don’t look at the walls, don’t look at the room, just focus on me. She lets me squeeze my eyes closed and lean my head against her, trying to forget the outside world, forget we’re stuck in a tiny, airtight room.

My breathing slows down, gradually, going from full hyperventilating to just rapid, but I’m still struggling to get it to normal. I can’t forget the danger we’re in, or stop trying to work out the odds that power is restored quickly—which I don’t like the results of.

She shifts her hand from my shoulders to the top of my head, running her fingers through my hair, tugging with just enough pressure to smooth the tangles without yanking painfully. “It’s okay, Siyeon,” she whispers barely audibly. “It’s okay. The others will get us out of here.” In her voice, it’s a promise, a fact she’s stating. We will be okay. They will rescue us.

Several minutes pass before I dare to ask. “How long?” How long do we have? And the unspoken question, How much time did I waste by panicking?

“I don’t know.” Dami is silent for a moment, her hand pausing, partially entangled in my hair. “Six by six by…ten? How tall is the room?” She’s thinking out loud.

I picture Jiu climbing the shelving. She’s five and a half feet tall, and the speaker was at the very top of the wall. The shelving is somewhere between five and six feet tall…It’s hard to concentrate but I force myself to push through it. “Can’t be ten. Jiu would’ve climbed higher.”

“You’re right. Six by six by eight.” She’s silent again. “One to two hours?” she says finally. “From when the door closed. So…Thirty minutes left? Ninety?”

“Dami, there’s a big difference between those numbers!”

She half-shrugs helplessly. “Siyeon, I don’t know. Too many factors. I can’t…It’s hard to focus.” Silence for another moment, and then, “Probably closer to thirty.”

Because I panicked. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. Like I said, too many factors.”

But it is my fault, it has to be, at least some of it. What are the odds we we’re rescued within thirty minutes? I have no idea what’s going on outside the room, but I can guess that the chances are a lot lower than within ninety minutes.

“Is it bad that Jiu is still unconscious?” I don’t really know where that question comes from—I keep forgetting our third friend is here at all, in fact—and I don’t know why I’m expecting Dami to have all the answers. I don’t even know why I’m talking at all—wouldn’t it be better not to? But I can’t just sit here in silence.

“Bad for her, maybe. Might be good for us.”

The darker implications of that fact, that endangering or even sacrificing one of us may help the other two, aren’t lost on me. If three people have an hour, how long would two people have?

Jiu isn’t the third person who’s the problem here, though, I am. How much more time would all three of us have if I had been the one trying to figure out why the speaker wasn’t working and therefore the one to fall in the shaking, if I hadn’t been conscious to panic in the first place?

GAHYEON

“Come on, you can’t just huddle here. It doesn’t do them any good for you to freeze,” Yoohyeon insists, trying to drag me away from the door.

The emergency lighting of the hallway is barely enough for me to see her face, and bathes everything in a dim red glow. Red for danger, warning. An appropriate color for right now, definitely.

With no power in this section, there’s no heating, and that means it gets cold quickly. Ironically, our three trapped friends may be better off than the three of us out in the hall right now—though they won’t stay that way for long, with no ventilation.

I huddle closer against the cold metal of the storage room door, ignoring the chill. “Go away, Yooh.”

The older girl sighs and retreats temporarily, though she’ll be back to pester me again. She doesn’t seem to get that I don’t care how cold it is. I don’t want to huddle with the others in a corner.

I want my big sister.

“Siyeon,” I whisper, leaning my head against the door. “Siyeon, please be okay. Please, I—I need you.” There’s no way she can hear me through the door. She probably wouldn’t hear me even if I screamed.

So I don’t scream. I cry silently instead, curled on the floor beside the door, separated from my sister by surely no more than a few inches and a sheet of metal, and simultaneously as far from her as if she were on the other side of the universe.

“Is she okay?”

At first I think Sua’s talking to me and I’m confused, but then Yoohyeon replies. “No, but honestly, Bora, are any of us okay right now?” Though they’re a ways down the hallway, huddled in the doorway, I can hear them clearly in the silent hall.

I’m momentarily shocked. Yoohyeon said Sua’s name. We all know it, of course, but we don’t use it unless things are really serious. Only her mothers call her Bora.

Then again, if there was ever a time that the situation was really serious, I think right now qualifies. I feel guilty as I’m reminded that I’m far from the only one who has someone I love trapped behind that door. Sua has a sister locked in that room too.

And for that matter Yoohyeon may as well be Dami’s sister, though they aren’t really related. At least, I don’t think they are, though for all we know about their past they could be. They don’t look anything alike, but neither do Jiu and Sua.

The six of us—Jiu and Sua, Siyeon and me, Yoohyeon and Dami—ended up on this ship in several different ways. Jiu and Sua were born here. Siyeon and I both, well, we sort of made a choice, but it really wasn’t much of one. As for Yoohyeon and Dami, they were born on a station and lived there for a lot of their childhood, and that’s all we know, up to the point where Nayeon introduced them to us as the two newest ship trainees.

Whatever their past is, it’s certainly different from any of ours. Yoohyeon almost said something about it once, when they had only been here a few weeks and she was very tired—and Dami smacked her before she could get more than a few words out, and hissed something at her. Dami never hits people, even playfully, and that wasn’t playful, she really whacked her. And more than that, I could swear that she said, ‘We can’t talk about that.’

So there’s something going on with those two, for sure, and I don’t really think it ended when they were brought here either. Would I like to know what it is? Yeah, but really only out of curiosity. I can’t really imagine that they would be causing trouble, at least not for us. I know them and I trust them.

Okay, I haven’t known them for that long, but Siyeon has, and I trust her judgement…Even if she’s hopelessly in love with Dami and somehow thinks the rest of us don’t know that. I mean, really, does she think we’re all blind and deaf?

What I don’t know is why Dami is ignoring that. Unless she’s actually more oblivious than Siyeon, which I’m pretty sure she isn’t, she must have figured it out by now and yet she’s done nothing about it. She doesn’t encourage her, she doesn’t discourage her, she just acts as if she doesn’t know.

I could maybe see that happening if she doesn’t return her feelings and doesn’t want to cause a weird situation between them, but honestly, it’s already weird, at least for the rest of us. We just want them to resolve it one way or the other.

A few days ago Jiu tried to convince me to either tell Siyeon to just spit it out and confess to Dami, or ask Dami why she’s ignoring Siyeon. She offered to let me copy her classwork in all our classes for a week. Jiu strongly disapproves of cheating, but she always gets her answers right, so that’s a serious bribe by both how much she wants me to do it and how much I want the bribe. Unfortunately, getting straight A’s for a week isn’t quite worth being murdered by my sister.

I should have done it. Instead I sat and hoped for something to happen that would force them to work out the feelings between them.

This was not even remotely what I meant by that.

“Okay, Gah, come on.” Yoohyeon is back, with Sua behind her this time. Since my two friends clearly mean to drag me forcibly away from the door if I don’t listen and they’re both bigger than me, I give up.

“Fine,” I say, raising my head and sitting up. Yoohyeon looks surprised at my agreement, but she grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet, scurrying back down the hall quickly as if she’s afraid I’ll change my mind.

Sua follows and the two of them settle into their corner again, against the sealed door at the end of the hall. Reluctantly, I curl up beside Yoohyeon, my back to the door and my eyes fixed on the storage room door further up the hallway.

“This isn’t even any warmer,” I grumble in annoyance. I don’t really care if it is or isn’t, though. It is quite a bit brighter, at least, with more lights near the door.

“Yes it is, try actually being up against the edge of the door,” Sua mutters, “with this warmer draft—”

She stops mid-sentence as she realizes what she just said. Sua, Yoohyeon, and I stare at each other for a full second before the oldest girl snarls, “I’m a fucking idiot. How can the section door have a draft if it’s properly sealed?”

“It can’t,” Yoohyeon agrees, “and that means it’s not.” She jumps up. “And that means maybe we can get it open.”

“It also means the other side of the door has power, or air wouldn’t be moving on that side either,” Sua says, “so it’s just our section that doesn’t. What the hell happened?”

“Figure it out later, open the door now!” Yoohyeon orders, grabbing hold of the door handle. I get up as well, joining her.

Sua stares at the door. “Yooh, this door probably effectively weighs more than all three of us combined when you consider that we’ll be pushing it in a direction it really doesn’t want to go right now,” she points out, though she stands up and grabs the handle.

“Then push it really hard!”

That’s…not really how it works, I object silently, but I obey, hoping against hope that she’ll somehow turn out to be right and the three of us together can open the door.

Unfortunately, physics stubbornly continues to work as usual. The door slides maybe a centimeter or two with a screech, then slams shut again as we fail to maintain the force we need to open it.

Yoohyeon growls frustratedly under her breath. “Damnit!”

Sua collapses to the floor, panting. “Told you,” she groans. “It’s too heavy.”

“No, try again! Just—give it a moment,” Yoohyeon argues. She glances back at the door.

“It’s not going to work,” I sigh. “Physics, Yooh.”

“Fuck, I can’t do this, I need Dami for this.” Her mutter is so quiet I’m not sure I even heard her right—why would she specifically need Dami’s help to open the door? It’s not as if the younger girl would be particularly useful physically, being barely bigger than Sua and probably not stronger.

Yoohyeon looks up suddenly, turning to me. “Gah, go check the other end of the hall, see if that door closed properly.”

“How is that going to help?” I counter frustratedly. “It’s not even a section door and the power outage is probably the entire section. And what are the chances that two doors failed to seal?”

“Just—go look!” she insists, gesturing around the corner.

Okay, well, she’s the engineer(-in-training) here, maybe she knows something I don’t—but I’m not terribly surprised to discover the door at the other end of the hallway is in fact firmly sealed. “It’s shut!” I yell.

“Are you sure? Check it really carefully!” Yoohyeon answers way too quickly.

Either she thinks I’m actually stupid and wouldn’t notice an air current around the door, or she’s up to something.

“Okay!” But I do not check the door really carefully. Instead I creep back to the corner and peek around it to see Yoohyeon messing with the emergency override keypad beside the section door.

Whatever she’s trying to do, it’s not working. She stands there staring at it for a moment. I can’t see her face, but I can tell from the way she’s standing that she’s frustrated.

What the hell does she think she’s trying to do? Did she think she knew the override code to open the section door? How would Yoohyeon even get hold of that? Even if she watched someone else use it, I can’t really see her memorizing it. That’s the kind of thing Dami might do, but not her.

I’m about to give up on my pretense of checking the door when she suddenly grabs the keypad again. I can’t see which buttons she presses because her body is in the way, but I’m pretty sure it’s more buttons than there should be in an override code.

The keypad screen blinks and goes black.

What?

Yoohyeon grabs the door handle. “Gah, Sua, come on, try again!” she urges.

In the second it takes me to step around the corner, Sua goes from being curled on the floor to on her feet and pinning Yoohyeon against the door. “How about first you explain how the fuck you just rebooted the section door,” she snarls.

Yoohyeon’s expression is very much, Oh, shit. “Uh—what?”

Sua nods sharply towards the keypad. “How did you know that code?”

“I—uh—I don’t know, one of the senior engineers must have mentioned it—”

Sua actually shakes her roughly. Despite their significant height difference, Yoohyeon is clearly the one at a disadvantage, unable to escape the smaller girl’s grasp. “You can’t lie for shit, Kim Yoohyeon, so start talking. I want to know how you got that and I want to know it now.” She shakes her again to underscore her point, nearly slamming her head against the door.

Yoohyeon struggles frantically, eyes wide. “Sua, stop! Let go of me—stop!” she shrieks as the older girl tightens her hold instead. “Bora! Please, just help me open the door right now!”

“I’m waiting for an explanation,” Sua snaps.

“I—I can’t tell you—” Yoohyeon finally seems to notice me standing at the corner, not sure what to do. “Gahyeon, help!”

I hesitate, not really wanting to get involved, but she’s right, getting through the other section is more important than arguing over this right now. We need to find someone who can help Jiu, Siyeon, and Dami, quickly. “Sua, stop.”

Sua twists around to glare at me, though she loosens her grip on Yoohyeon. “What, are you part of this too?”

“No, but this isn’t the time! I don’t know what she did or how she did it—actually there are apparently a lot of things I don’t know about her—but what matters right now is rescuing Jiu, Siyeon, and Dami!”

Sua considers that for a moment before turning back to Yoohyeon. She opens her mouth to say something, and then the keypad starts blinking red.

“We have thirty seconds until it relocks itself, properly this time!” Yoohyeon yanks herself free of Sua’s loosened grasp and grabs the door handle, shoving it. “Do what you want, but I’m trying to rescue our friends!”

Sua growls under her breath and wraps her hands around the handle as well, adding her strength to Yoohyeon’s. The door screeches and creeps open, slowly, revealing that the other side indeed has power.

I run forward and reach to help with the door, but Sua snaps, “No, Gahyeon, as soon as you can fit, go!”

“You’re staying in here?” I blurt, confused. The gap is probably almost big enough for me to squeeze through, but I hesitate.

“We can’t let go of the door, can we? It doesn’t take multiple people to find help anyway!”

Oh. She’s right, if they let go it will slam shut. I’m concerned about the way Sua is glaring at Yoohyeon, but I’m more concerned about rescuing our three trapped friends, so I’m going to have to trust the two older girls to work things out without hurting each other.

“Go!” Yoohyeon yells, straining to hold the door open, barely wide enough to fit through.

I dive forward a split second before the keypad stops blinking.

Yoohyeon and Sua can’t possibly hold the door open against the motors now trying to close it, but I can’t stop, already throwing myself through. The door slams shut so close behind me that I don’t even want to consider if I had been a half second slower.

The light of the hallway, actual normal lights, not the red emergency ones, nearly blinds me for a moment before I scramble to my feet. Every moment I delay waiting for my eyes to adjust is another moment Siyeon, Dami, and Jiu are trapped in the airtight storage room, not to mention anything could be happening between Sua and Yoohyeon right now.

I need Jeongyeon, or possibly Jihyo or Nayeon but I’m guessing the only way to open the storage room door without power is with tools. Presumably Yoohyeon’s reboot code—how the hell did she get that—won’t work if there’s no power on both sides of the door, or she would have used it.

Which means, Jeongyeon. As the lead engineer she’ll certainly know how to get the door open the fastest and she probably won’t have to go through Jihyo or Nayeon for permission—though since this is a time-sensitive emergency I doubt that would be necessary anyway.

I take off running up the hallway, searching for the way to the engineering level and praying she’s actually there right now. Considering the power outage, the chances are probably good that she is, at least.

She had better be.

SIYEON

It’s been well over thirty minutes, probably closer to an hour, since Dami’s calculations. I struggle to figure out what that means in terms of how much longer we have now but I can’t focus on the math. After losing my concentration for the third time I give up. I’ve never been good at doing math mentally anyway and right now my head hurts too much.

“Dami?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Dami,” I say louder. Over the last however-long-it’s-been, the two of us have ended up lying on the floor next to each other, neither of us having the energy to waste on sitting up.

“Dami.” I can barely see her—I swear the room has gotten even darker, if that’s possible—but I reach out and shove her. Okay, it’s meant to be a shove, though it’s really more of a clumsy nudge.

“Uh?”

“How…” Speaking is hard, especially since I can’t breathe and talk at the same time, leaving me feeling dizzy. “How long is left?” Four words at a time is apparently too much because I feel dangerously lightheaded for a moment.

“Mm,” she mumbles noncommittally, but then she pushes herself partially upright, rolling to face me with considerable effort. “D’know. Can’t think.” She pauses, breathing rapidly. “Sorry.”

“S’okay.” I don’t think the exact amount of time really matters that much anyway. It can’t be much.

I’m about to reach out to her, needing physical contact, needing to know that I’m not alone in this room, when she beats me to it, draping her arm over my shoulders.

It’s so subtle that it’s easy to not realize that we’re gradually inching closer together, expending precious energy to move little by little over the next five or ten minutes, until we’re curled together, arms around each other.

“I love you.”

I’m not even sure I managed to say it out loud until she responds softly. “I know.”

‘I know?’

I’m so stupid. Of course she knows. I wasn’t exactly subtle, was I? Stupid, to think she didn’t know. How could she not?

“I love you too. Oh, Siyeon...I’m sorry.”

At first I think I imagined her response.

But no, that was real.

What is she apologizing for? That she knew, and she never said anything?

That she let me think she didn’t know?

That we’re both going to die?

All of those and more?

I don’t know, but whichever it is, I’m at fault too, for not having the courage to just confess. To say the words before, not now when it’s too late.

I’m sorry too, I try to say, but I can’t. I can’t speak. Can’t breathe, or rather I can but it’s not doing any good.

“Siyeon?”

Dami, I respond in my head, because I can’t out loud. The sound of metal scraping against metal faintly reaches my ears.

“Siyeon!”

She’s shaking me again, I think, I’m not quite sure. The motion seems distant, detached, along with the screeching metal, which is barely audible now.
“Siyeon—Singnie, no—hold on—” Dami pleads.

I can’t.

I’m sorry, Dami, my love.

DAMI

“Dami.”

I know who the voice that drags me out of my nap belongs to, and I know I should listen to her, and I decide after a moment that I don’t care. So I do nothing.

“Dami, I know you aren’t asleep.” Nayeon isn’t amused. I still don’t care.

“Dami.”

I don’t know why she thinks repeating my name is going to accomplish anything. “For the record, I was asleep, the first time.” I still don’t move.

“For the record, I am not in the mood for you to be a smart-ass right now,” Nayeon snaps. “And neither is she.”

The emphasis she puts on the last word leaves me in no doubt to exactly who she means by that. And while I may be willing to invite Nayeon’s irritation with my disobedience—especially with the lingering headache making it a lot harder to care—I’m not going to mess with her.

I uncurl and look up at Nayeon—there’s no way I’m sitting up, I know from the experience of the past few hours that doing that will only make my head hurt more.

She’s holding her personal tablet. She looks pissed, eyes flashing as she shoves the device into my hands. “My advice: try to not speak that way to her. It never worked well for me and I can’t imagine it ever does for you.”

She spins around and stalks out, shutting the door, though I’m certain she’s standing right outside it.

Ignoring the tablet for a moment, I turn my head carefully, though I can’t imagine Nayeon would have said any of that, or given me the tablet, with someone else awake in the room. She’d have hauled me to her office, Mina’s orders about staying in this room notwithstanding.

Siyeon is indeed still asleep. I’m trying not to be overly concerned, since Mina said it won’t be all that surprising if she doesn’t wake up until tomorrow, but it’s hard.

She very nearly died—I’m not even sure if she was breathing when the door was pried open—but Mina says she’ll be okay now. She must mean it, or she wouldn’t have left her unmonitored like this but it’s hard to fully believe it when she’s still unconscious.

Honestly, Mina didn’t seem extraordinarily concerned about either of us, or Jiu, once we were out of immediate danger. She did lock Siyeon and me in this medbay room for the night, but that was about it. She would have put Jiu in with us too except Jihyo put her foot down and said she was taking her daughter to her own room, and well, she’s the captain, so that was pretty much that.

Mina just let the issue go without arguing though, so I don’t think she’s worried. She said the lingering effects—the headache and tiredness—might last a few days, unfortunately, but that should be it.

Which does mean Siyeon isn’t likely to be in any better of a mood than me when she wakes up and the two of us may have some problems with being cooped up in here together. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Satisfied that Siyeon is still fine (as far as I can tell), and also not awake to eavesdrop, I look at the tablet screen, sigh, and push the blinking call notification icon.

“Took you long enough, didn’t it?” The woman on the other end is not amused. As always, her camera is off, so I can only hear her, not see her, but I can perfectly picture her disapproving glare. “And you’re holding the camera the wrong way again, for God’s sake.”

“Am I really? I hadn’t noticed…Or could it possibly be that I don’t actually care if you can see me or not?” Too late I remember not to backtalk her.

“You may not care, Yubin, but I do, so fix it. Now.” Sighing, I hold the tablet upright, though of course she’s still not pleased. “And why are you lying down? Is that how you answer my calls?”

“It is when I nearly died and my head hurts like hell.”

“I suppose it would be cruel to make you actually get up this time, wouldn’t it?” she mutters. “At the very least sit upright, though. Make an effort to seem like you’re paying attention.”

Grumbling, I shove myself upright, with the accompanying increase in head pain only making me more annoyed. “So what did I do to earn this call?”

“I would presume you already know that. So tell me, what happened?”

There’s no way she didn’t already hear the full story from Nayeon, but there’s also no point in arguing. “A section power outage trapped me in an airtight storage room for ninety minutes.”

“You and who else?”

Where is she going with this? “Jiu—Minji,” I correct myself as she sighs, knowing she dislikes nicknames, “…and Siyeon.”

“Ah yes. Lee Siyeon.” Something about the way she says Siyeon’s name makes me want to slap her. Then again, that’s true for a lot of things she says. “This is the stupid girl who’s convinced she’s hopelessly in love with you, correct?”

“Siyeon isn’t stupid,” I snap, regretting my words instantly. That was deliberate bait and I fell for it. I can’t think quickly enough to avoid her damn traps with this headache, and no doubt she knows it.

“If she thinks she loves you, she must be. She doesn’t even really know you, after all.”

“Maybe you’re the one who doesn’t know me as well as you think you do,” I mutter under my breath, forgetting how unfortunately sensitive the mic on Nayeon’s tablet is.

The woman laughs. “Oh, Yubin, you silly little girl, I know you better than you know yourself,” she replies. “Certainly better than your little puppy dog does.”

Okay, that was definitely a trap, but I don’t even care at this point. “What did you say?”

“She follows you around and hangs on every word you say. I fail to see the error in my statement.”

“She—what—Siyeon does not do that!” I remember Nayeon standing outside the door and lower my voice. “And she’s not a fucking pet!”

“Careful, Yubin, it almost sounds like you have feelings for her, too.”

She wants me to deny it. I stay silent, because my other choice is to lie to her and that never ends well. Of course, refusing to respond is as good as admitting it.

“…Nothing to say?” She sounds astonished. “Well, well, well. Perhaps I don’t know you as well as I thought after all. I didn’t think you were capable of even that much. You do know you can’t keep her, right?”

“And why not?” I demand. “Why can’t I have a girlfriend? Why are you so determined to control my entire life? I never asked for this.”

“Yubin.” She speaks slowly, as if explaining something to a toddler. I can picture her looking at me with a patient expression, waiting for me to realize where I went wrong. ‘Oh, you poor, misguided child,’ her tone says clearly. “I’m trying to protect you. Love only leads to pain for us, Yubin, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

She’s speaking from experience. There’s hidden pain buried deep in those words. I didn’t know she had ever loved anyone, let alone had a partner. But that doesn’t change my frustration with her. “Just because you couldn’t make it work doesn’t mean I can’t. I’m not you, stop thinking I am.”

“It’s not just about who you are. It’s about what you are. Trust me, this will end one of two ways. Either you lie one too many times and she leaves you, or she dies.”

My grip tightens so much that I half think I’m going to break the tablet. I force myself to loosen my hold on it before I speak. “If you dare hurt Siyeon—”

“It’s not a threat!” Now she sounds exasperated. “Trust me, when I threaten you, you will damn well know it, Lee Yubin. That was not a threat, it was a statement of fact. I’m not the one who would want to hurt you.”

“So are you saying I’m not capable of protecting someone? Cause that sure makes my assignment an interesting choice.”

“No, you’re perfectly capable of protecting someone—the person you’re supposed to be protecting. Well, actually, you’ve kind of done a shit job of it recently, but I suppose I can’t blame you for a freak mechanical accident.” Though her tone suggests she absolutely can. “However, I highly doubt you’re capable of protecting three people—four counting yourself.”

“Hold on, where did you get that number?” I’m puzzled by her claiming there’s three. “Don’t you mean Siyeon would be the second?”

“Well, it should be two, yes, but your idiot of a partner is clearly hopeless—”

“Don’t talk about Yooh that way—”

“I’ll talk about Yoohyeon however I want, considering the amount of effort it took me to prevent her from being locked up and subsequently kicked off the ship. Can you believe she somehow managed to let the captain’s daughter catch her using the door codes?”

“Wait, what? But J—Minji was with me.”

“The other daughter, Yubin, honestly, think a little harder before you open your mouth.”

“Well, I’d try, but it hurts to think,” I mutter. “And I’m pretty sure Bora wishes she wasn’t Jihyo’s daughter, considering the amount of time she spends trying to pretend she’s not.”

“Jihyo no doubt wishes Bora wasn’t her daughter, too, but the fact remains that she is—”

“Also, you realize you just disproved what you said about falling in love?” I point out. “Look at Nayeon, she and Jihyo are married with two kids. Clearly some of us can manage it.”

“Dear Yeonie is a special case. Yes, she has her own family, but even she didn’t get there without significant struggles. And, to put it bluntly, you’re not Nayeon—and Lee Siyeon is very much not Jihyo.” She pauses for a moment.

“What’s so special about Nayeon and Jihyo then?”

Of course, she ignores me. “You can try and keep your puppy-dog girl if you want to. It’s nothing to me what happens to her, after all. Just don’t come crying to me when you lose her one way or the other. You can’t love someone when you live this life, but I suppose you’ll have to figure that out for yourself just like the others.”

“What others?”

I’m ignored yet again, though I’m not sure if she just didn’t hear me because she was talking over me. “And before you decide that the obvious solution is to try to run, like some people have, remember something, Yubin. Maybe you and your girl can escape, but you have a partner for a reason—it’s certainly not because she’s competent. But she’s yours, and without you, well, I don’t need her, do I?”

Alright, that’s a threat if I’ve ever heard one from her. “You wouldn’t.” Yes, she absolutely would, though, and she’s right that Yoohyeon only got dragged into this in the first place because of me. I was trying to get her out of trouble, and I suppose technically I succeeded, but it’s still my fault.

“Try to run and find out then,” the woman invites. “Really, you should know exactly what I’m capable of by now, though. I have to go, Yubin. As I said, Siyeon is nothing to me. By all means try and keep her—I suppose if any of us could manage to protect her it would be you. But know that her blood will be on your hands if you fail.” She abruptly ends the call before I can respond.

“Fuck,” I mutter, staring at the blank tablet screen. I resist the urge to throw it, for two reasons. First, she meant—most of—what she said. As twisted as it may seem, she really is trying to protect me from getting hurt. She might actually care about me at least a little, not just what I can do. Well, of course she does. Put years of effort into a project and you’ll end up emotionally invested in it, won’t you?

More importantly, Nayeon doesn’t like it when I break her things and I don’t need my life made any more difficult right now. Especially since she’s already pissed at her mother’s interference. So I put the tablet down on the table beside the bed.

I look down at Siyeon. Much as I hate to admit it, the woman probably wasn’t wrong about the risks. She’s rarely wrong.

“Well, this time you will be,” I say out loud as I slump back down beside Siyeon, draping my arm over her protectively. Because I’m not you, no matter how much you want me to be. And I will prove you wrong about me.

So fuck you and your advice, because you don’t know me like you think you do.