Death isn’t what she thought it’d be. No, not at all. What she’s seen so far of Jeoseung reminds her of any congested city: towering buildings, cramped coffee shops, narrow streets littered with newspaper clippings, and a central park. The only differences are that the office buildings display buzzing neon signs advertising themselves as the Department of Afterlife Reincarnation (the DAR, said to have agonizingly long lines), the Courtrooms of Hell Sentencing, and an amalgamation of other equally terrifying yet fascinating company names. The newspaper clippings don’t have an obituary column: Instead, they’re drowning in announcements of who was reincarnated as what (Congratulations to Shim Him-chan on his reincarnation into a puppy!) and gleefully gloomy gossip about who was sentenced to what hell and why. The central park’s trees are twisted and skeletal, some bone white and others pitch black. And, of course, the city’s denizens who visit the coffee shops and wander the streets are very, very dead. Ghosts. Gwisin.

She’s a gwisin, too, now. Part of Kisa is still fascinated with this, even after seven years—and she itches to research, to seek into the why. Why, for example, has she maintained a corporeal form? It’s not her original one, but it might as well be, down to the exact hue of her wine-brown eyes and the heart-shaped birthmark right above her left brow. Is the soul inextricably attached to the flesh? And why does she still breathe? She doesn’t need to, but her body still unconsciously sucks in the underworld air. A heart even beats in her chest, despite Kisa’s status as very much deceased. Her working theory: She exists in the underworld as she remembers herself existing in the living realm. And she remembers her heart beating, her lungs working. Oh, if Kisa had access to a lab, she could run so many tests…

“Kisa!” a voice snaps at her back, and she turns—wrenching her gaze away from the miserable black skyline of Jeoseung and the jeoseung saja working the port—to see the cruise director, Lee Soo-min. Soo-min stands in the middle of the I-95, forcing other crew members to squeeze by her as she props a hand on her hip.

In her life, Soo-min was heiress to a technology company before meeting her untimely end at the hands of her money-hungry fiancé. At least, that’s the rumor around the ship: Soo-min has stubbornly maintained that she died saving a kitten from a fire somewhere in Itaewon.

It’s unlikely. Soo-min is a samjokgu—a three-legged dog-shifter. And samjokgu famously despise cats. Besides, diving into a fire would almost certainly go against Soo-min’s fourteen-step skincare routine, the details of which Kisa has been unfortunate enough to overhear at staff meetings.