“You felt something!” Hajun is staring at her, looking equal parts triumphant and concerned. “You’ve felt it already. You’ve felt something for him, and now you’re scared. Kisa, you’re pulling away because—what? You think you won’t leave the Flatliner if you let yourself stare at his butt?”

“Yes,” she snaps, finally giving up the act. “Yes, Hajun, that is precisely what I’m afraid of. How discerning of you.”

“Oh, Kisa.” Hajun is snorting, pressing a hand to his temple like he has a headache. He just might. Kisa certainly does. “I’ve never seen you like this before. So frazzled over somebody’s posterior.”

“It’s a great bum,” she whispers sadly, anger flickering and fading to a pathetic sort of longing. She massages the spot over her heart where it’s lodged itself, panging in desolate despair.

“Please, Kisa, for my sanity…” He drags that hand down his face, pulling on his eye and giving her a grotesquely woeful look. “Have some fun with him while you wait for reincarnation. You need it, and I think you’d like it—”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know how,” she interrupts in a mutter. It’s the ugly truth.

“You don’t need to know how.” Hajun frowns in clear concern. “Fun isn’t like medicine, where you need a giant textbook and time to study. You don’t need to do anything but be in the moment.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Kisa shakes her head stubbornly, avoiding Hajun’s eye. “We have a deal with the CEO, and there’s no point in getting distracted by—by anything.” And she will not let herself get distracted by a certain green-eyed trickster god.

Her friend hesitates, like there’s something more he wants to say, but evidently thinks better of it. For the next half hour, they wait for the others and lapse into their daily routine. Day 2 of the cruise means that there are virtually no patients, many having already been treated for seasickness.

This routine of cleaning the sick bay and checking medicine stock is only broken when Kisa’s head jerks up from the shelf of medicine she’s hunched over and—in a markedly improved mood—exclaims: “Blueprints!”

“Uh,” says Hajun in bewilderment, “what?”

Kisa whirls to him, curls slipping from their band to flutter around her face. “I’ll be right back,” she says excitedly before dodging out the door and racing down the hallway and back down the stairs that will take her to the security room one deck below.

The door is ajar, and Kisa peeks inside, hastily drawing back when she sees Korain leaning against the table and wearily drinking a cup of hot coffee. Her hand floats to her scrub pockets, where the little notebook rests, Korain’s name jotted down inside it. Keeping quiet, she leans back so she can watch the haetae as he takes another long sip of coffee.