“What are you doing?” Her co-worker Kim Hajun is staring at her with abject horror from where he’s restocking one of the white medicine cabinets. The former K-pop star looks unsure as to whether he’s meant to laugh or to stride over and shake Kisa’s shoulders.

Hajun is one of Kisa’s only friends on the SRC Flatliner, despite having met each other just six months ago. He is one of the newest crew members on the ship, having died in April. Kisa had been the one to Restore him, carefully binding his bleeding inner wrists and treating the slender singer for blood loss.

The true treatment, though, should have been focused on his mind. There was such darkness inside of him, a sort that nobody would ever expect from a boy with such a sweet smile and sparkling eyes. Certainly not even the jeoseung saja in charge of SRC recruitment, who took one look at his file, saw K-Pop Star in huge red letters, and plopped him into servitude without a care for the stress Hajun must have been under while alive. Kisa fervently attempted to school herself in the field of psychology with the limited medical journals on board, but she was utterly out of her depth. She is a doctor of flesh and bone, and is terrified of damaging the fragile system of the psyche with indelicate hands. So for now, she can only offer Hajun one thing: friendship.

And it’s so easy to be friends with him. Hajun is a gentle, kind soul who has made her time on board so much easier. He’s quick at learning medicine: Under her watchful eye, he’s becoming a capable ship medic. She likes to think that he’s healing, too, away from the pressures of the entertainment industry. He certainly laughs more these days.

“Kisa?” Hajun repeats anxiously.

“Hajun,” says Kisa, careful not to drop her practiced smile, “I am in a perfectly natural state of pleasantness.”

“You look…constipated.” He shuts the cabinet and turns back to her, eyebrows high on his delicate face. “And your left eye is twitching.”

“That,” she retorts, dropping her pose, “is because of you.” Kisa shifts from foot to foot nervously, glancing at the medical center’s swinging doors that have yet to open. The red thread is growing shorter, tighter. No doubt that signifies that whoever is at the other end is approaching Deck 3. “If you must know,” Kisa says with a sigh to a confused Hajun, “I am waiting for my soulmate.”

He chokes. Hajun is the only person Kisa has confided in, and although he can’t see it, he stares at her pinky where the thread is wrapped. “Right now? The thread?”

“Yes,” says Kisa. “The string is growing shorter by what I estimate to be ten inches per every thirty seconds. If each foot represents space traveled, then—”

“Oh, please,” Hajun murmurs, but he’s smiling softly. “Not the calculations.”