“Yes—I mean no.” Kisa can’t help herself. Her eyes fasten on the sword that Seokga has reclaimed from the ground, on the strangely luminous silver metal. “Four, tell me…Is it true that godly weapons are crafted by moon-harvested silver and forged in bulgae fire?” The pantheon is notoriously close-lipped about their relics. Entire fields are devoted to dissecting the few artifacts shamans have been able to get their hands on, attempting to discover what ore the blades are composed of.

The god gapes at her.

Kisa frowns impatiently. “Well?” She jabs at his nose again—and accidentally hits the tip.

Somebody in the crowd gasps sharply as if expecting Kisa to be struck down then and there. But nothing happens, save for the odd expression that crosses Seokga’s face. He looks, somehow, both mortally offended and incredibly pleased.

“Dokkaebi fire,” he says a moment later, expression fading into something like…hesitantly fond confusion. “Bulgae fire is too unpredictable. The Okhwang weapon-smiths use dokkaebi fire. As for the rest…” Seokga hesitates before crouching down and beginning to pick up the feathers.

After a moment, Kisa joins him.

Chapter Ten

Seokga

“It has to be some sort of conduit that allows for cerebration transference,” muses Kisa, hands cupped around her late-night coffee, knees drawn up to her chest as she sits across from Seokga in the Creature Café—which is now a twenty-four/seven chain, practically a dream come true. The café is empty save for them, and the weary worker behind the counter. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? Although, I think if it was constant, we’d both go positively mad. The thoughts seem to be transferring at random. I wonder what function it serves. And you’re hearing mine in Korean?”

“Yes,” Seokga confirms, which sparks a lengthy musing on cerebration transference translation from English to Korean. Kisa has been vocally pondering the red thread, this new development of hearing each other’s thoughts, for the past fifteen minutes they’ve been in the café. Seokga, grudgingly taking Hwanin’s advice, has simply let Kisa talk. And in this time, he’s learned that Yoo Kisa is frighteningly intelligent, with a mind that works at least twice as fast as his own. Her thoughts, which he hears in short clips, are spat into his brain so rapidly that he can hardly make sense of them. They’re like frantic scribbles, marking the ridges of his mind in smudged ink.

The greenhouse “fiasco,” as she put it, is less than an hour behind them, but Kisa seems to have warmed back up to him already. One other thing he has learned: Yoo Kisa is quick to forgive.

“Intimacy,” Seokga suggests, taking a long drag of his iced coffee and savoring its coldness. His body feels uncomfortably warm underneath Kisa’s gaze. Hani’s eyes.

Kisa blinks, cheeks tinting blue. “I, er—what?”