Kisa can’t keep a wry little smile from turning the corner of her mouth slightly upward. “From what you and Seokga have quarreled about, I know, at the very least, that we were friends. That my name was Hani, and you betrayed her—me—somehow during the Dark Days.”

Somi gnaws on her bottom lip. “I’d say that’s mostly true…” But she doesn’t follow as Kisa makes her way down a few more steps. “I could tell you, if you want to know. About you and me. About you and Seokga.”

As Somi’s offer floats through the air, Kisa’s fingers twitch imperceptibly at her sides, as if she might grab it. For some unknowable reason, she thinks of Seokga’s green eyes and how they might light up if she remembered…If the two ships didn’t have to be so separate after all…

Slowly, Kisa turns. “You can tell me about you and Han—me,” she says with difficulty, “but I’d rather not hear about myself and Seokga.” It fills her with an anxious dread to think of what Seokga might expect from her if she learns about their past.

What she might…feel for him.

And a tiny part of Kisa has decided if, at some point—for whatever reasons she cannot fathom now—she does want to hear their story (for purely scientific purposes, of course, nothing more), she wants to hear it from Seokga.

If the gumiho is confused by Kisa’s refusal to learn more about her Threaded partner, she doesn’t show it. It is something that Kisa is beginning to appreciate about Somi. Despite being a former mass-murdering Unruly gumiho (Kisa is still, admittedly, wrapping her mind around how the petite woman with a French bob and manicured hands can possibly be a serial killer), Somi is, well, polite. To a degree.

She’s polite to Kisa, at least, she amends. She tried to take a large chomp out of a guest, after all.

As the two women slip toward the security room, Somi begins to tell a story in a low voice. It’s a story about two gumiho who worked together in a café. Somi and Hani. The portrait that Somi paints of the older gumiho is vibrant. A woman full of life and mischief, an older sister, in many ways, to the younger Somi.

As they carefully trail Korain out of the security room and toward the upper decks, Somi tells Kisa in a whisper of how Hani killed two NSU men and brought her the livers. How Somi began to spiral, suffering from the Jitters, feeling unwell in both mind and body. How scared she was.