As are Soo-min’s next words, urging her to stop “dillydallying” and get back to work. Kisa clenches her jaw but obeys. If she ever wants to retire from the SRC Flatliner, she needs to be on her best behavior.

For the next few hours, Kisa works herself to the bone, as she’s done for years now. Yet there is no satisfaction of a safe delivery, no joy upon hearing the wailing cries of an infant. There’s only a stack of work that keeps piling up, and up, and up…and that perpetually hollow feeling in her chest, that sort of panging ache for something she still can’t quite put her finger on.

Her old life, perhaps? Before the hospital, before it all crumbled to ash in her hands…The misty, rainy mornings at NSUMD, studying in the cavernous library, chewing on the end of her pen and flipping through the thin—nearly translucent—yellow pages of her treasured textbooks. The coffee shop near campus, where creatures clustered and chattered over mugs of macchiato and frappés. Could that be it?

Yet a small voice deep down asks if it’s something else she longs for. Something entirely different from beloved textbooks and campus cafés. It whispers in half-ignored words that if only she sat down and put her brilliant mind to the psychological puzzle, she’d have it solved within no time. Yet time is exactly what Kisa lacks. So this longing…Well, the reason for it is still a mystery, just as it was the day she died. She calls it a longing for what she lost and leaves it at that.

There’s no time for anything else.

After finishing off-loading the rest of the luggage pile, she grudgingly moves on to her next chore of changing the linens in the Deck 6 cabins alongside a few other girls who normally work in waitressing. It doesn’t matter what their usual jobs are: On turn-around day, everybody does everything.

What Kisa wouldn’t give to be on her usual shift in the SRC Flatliner’s sick bay. Some crew members who die particularly violent deaths (like, for example, falling off a skyscraper) receive treatment the moment they are assigned to the Flatliner, so as to not scare away the guests.

None of them are at risk of dying, obviously—the treatments are really for psychological purposes: When a dead soul sees their wounds being treated just like they would be in the world above, their identity becomes less intertwined with the injuries of their death. Thus, their form can return to how they remember it existing before the gunshot, the car crash, the fall, the disease, et cetera. Restoration, it’s called.

It’s dull, tiring work…But at least it’s interesting, to a degree.

As she stuffs the dirty sheets into the wheeled hamper, Kisa jolts in pain, something between a shriek and a swear escaping her lips.