They’re careful to blend into the morning crowds on board as they follow the haetae, hoping he’s heading to a café or somewhere equally casual, where Somi can—in her words—charm an alibi out of him. Cautious not to be spotted, or to lose him, Kisa keeps her eyes on the officer’s retreating back as Somi continues.

Hyun-tae was the name of the possessed jeoseung saja. As Somi speaks of him, there’s a sense of real grief—the first time she met him, in the café, he was fully himself and maybe even smitten with her. The next day, Eodum—the eoduksini—had slipped into his body. What follows is a saga of manipulation, in which Somi seems like a pawn…Although Somi never puts it in those terms. Instead, the gumiho’s voice is heavy with regret as the Dark Days begin, and her killing spree starts. Kisa gets the sense that Somi isn’t very upset about the murders themselves, but rather her decision to side against Hani.

“You let me go,” Somi whispers, shamefaced, as they trail Korain up a winding staircase, a dozen or so feet behind and hidden by throngs of breakfast-hungry guests. “I ran from you, and you let me. I would have lost that fight,” she adds with a bitter smile. “You were the Scarlet Fox—”

Kisa chokes on her own spit. “What?”

“You have the same eyes, you know,” whispers Somi. “The same eyes as Hani. I always thought they were so pretty…”

It was enough of a shock hearing that she had been an Unruly gumiho.

Hearing that in her past life, rule-abiding Yoo Kisa had been, like Somi, an infamous and centuries-old serial killer—a terrifying urban legend that she shivered to as a child—is enough to turn her legs into jelly. The two ships are most certainly not the same. At this rate, Kisa is not a ship at all. She’s a perfectly respectable airplane.

They learned about the Scarlet Fox in the shaman academy, and then later in NSUMD. Her upperclassmen’s anatomy class’s autopsy portion focused heavily on Unruly murders, and diagrams of the Scarlet Fox’s victims had been pulled from the archives.

She had been brutal.

Kisa…had been brutal.

Her vision swims. Somi grimaces, grabbing Kisa by the shoulder before she can fall. “I see I left out that particular subplot,” the gumiho mumbles as Kisa has an existential crisis right there on the spiraling staircase, underneath the ship’s ginormous chandelier. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a rather lovely place to have a midlife crisis. Or an afterlife crisis, in Kisa’s case. “But, Ha—Kisa, I…I shouldn’t have been so angry at you, all those years ago. You gave me the greatest gift of all.”

Gods.

Kisa is an enabler of serial killers.