It was the last day of relative peace that Jinsu had before one of the boys made the unwelcome discovery that having a woman in the group substantially increased the opportunity of bartering decent prices for food and firewood.  As the key component in making the Attayear function, Baekhyun was unceremoniously ordered to stay on board, because if anything happened to him, they were all done for, and he took it upon himself to ensure a proper supply of water by gathering copious amounts of snow to melt and filter.  It didn’t take much filtering, he admitted to Jinsu when she re the first evening, feeling thoroughly objectified and dispirited, even though Junmyeon had almost called off the deal for more food in anger at the way she’d been treated.  Snow was fresh and there was much less pollution back in the times they were in.

Jinsu barely heard a word he said, flopping onto Kyungsoo’s bed and curling around the boy’s legs as she morosely thought back over the day.  At least Junmyeon had principles, unlike almost everybody else, even if he didn’t always display them unless his back was against the wall.  Kyungsoo seemed to sense that she was too glum to move, even though he shot her a few exasperated glances before asking Baekhyun to pass him a spare blanket to throw over the girl.  Baekhyun did so before disappearing to get them some food.

Once they were alone, Kyungsoo gave the door a quick glance and then twitched his foot up as best he could, poking Jinsu in the cheek.  She looked up.

“Why the long face?”

“I’m tired,” she complained.  “I’m just so tired of being treated as inferior just because I’m a girl.  I get it enough at home, but here it’s just demeaning.  Sure, we need food and all that, but the tribesmen literally look at me like I’m something to buy and it’s just disgusting.  I’m not cattle.”

Kyungsoo looked like he was searching for the best response.  In the end, he gave up and changed the subjects.

“While you were out, I started on the engineering formulae and equations for controlling the Attayear by fuel injection,” he said.

Jinsu sat up.

“But I have a question,” he added.  “Do we know how pure the oil we’re going to get is?  I mean, it’s not the same as using petrol or whichever fossil fuel it was by any means, but I need to know as much as possible about the molecular makeup and behaviour of whichever oil we’ll be using to make these as accurate as possible.”

“Olive oil.”

“Yes, but are we talking crude and out of date, possibly a few years old?  What kind of chemicals will be mixed in from transport and storage – clay?  Metal?  Wood?  Or is it brand new and very purely refined?  ?  Extra ?”

“Who’s extra ?” asked Baekhyun, backing into the room with a tray of food.

“You,” said Kyungsoo mercilessly.  Jinsu failed to suppress a little snort at the bad timing.  “Oh good, got you smiling again, Jin.”

Baekhyun refused to let the jibe get to him, pushing his fringe out of his eyes as he set the tray down.  “Do you always talk about me when I’m not in the room?  Next thing I know you’ll be developing a crush on me, Soo.”

Kyungsoo grinned wickedly.  “Which Soo are you talking to here, pray tell?”

Confused, Baekhyun blinked at him for a moment, but then his gaze drifted over to Jinsu and he flushed, clearing his throat.

Kyungsoo reached towards the food and popped a meatball into his mouth.  “Handsome as you are,” he said around the food, making Jinsu wince, “I would not go gay for you.  Tragic, I know.”

“Well, good.”  Baekhyun looked and sounded like he was trying to dig himself out of a hole, his entire face beginning to heat up.  “Because it’s mutual.”  He stabbed right through another two meatballs with his chopsticks and stuffed them into his mouth, almost choking on them.

“What dignity,” Kyungsoo drawled, making Jinsu laugh.  “Was it really necessary to prove your prowess by shoving two—”

“NO.  INNUENDOES!” Baekhyun almost shrieked, picking up a clump of rice and all but shoving it in Kyungsoo’s mouth.  Kyungsoo was laughing so hard he nearly spluttered it all back out.  Baekhyun glared at him.  “You were bad enough yesterday.  Don’t you dare start again.”

Grumpiness forgotten, Jinsu clambered over Kyungsoo to get at the food.

“What happened yesterday?” she asked conversationally as she picked up the remaining pair of chopsticks.

“He was all giddy because—”

There was a dull impact and Kyungsoo let out a small whine that wasn’t so much pain as disappointment that he wasn’t allowed to continue.

“Baekhyun will skin me alive if I say,” he declared before stealing the food that Jinsu had just been about to scoop up.

“Hey!”  She jabbed at his hand with her chopsticks.

“First come, first served!”  He gave a cheeky wink and turned back to Baekhyun in order to change the subject.  “I’m trying to figure out the equations for controlling the Attayear via fuel consumption.  You wouldn’t happen to be able to give me any insight into the oil we’re supposedly using, would you?”

Baekhyun leapt on the new topic with gusto, and while Jinsu joined in, a niggling part at the back of her mind wondered what he so fiercely wanted to keep private from her.

The longer they spent in Siberia, the more Jinsu appreciated Baekhyun’s cloak.  It started snowing again at random points during daylight hours, and the Attayear control panel put the temperature at a good way below zero.  Snuggled up in the cloak, hiding a pair of deerskin gloves Kyungsoo had let her borrow (Baekhyun said that it wasn’t good for her to be wearing something even faintly tight over her broken fingers, but it was cold and she didn’t care), and with its hood pulled close around her face, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.  The day with Hyunwoo and Jisung ended successfully with them carrying back several bundles of coal and charcoal.  The day after was silent and awkward since Minhwan had insisted on taking Jinsu with him and Junho to seal a deal of some importance on more wood and food, and on a barrel of oil that the tribe was willing to part with, though Jinsu was pretty shocked that Minhwan bullishly refused to accept the tribe chief offering to double the resources he was giving them as a bride price for Jinsu – from the pictograms they were drawing as communication, it was obvious that the tribe was short on young women.

“That’s a last resort,” Minhwan snapped at her when he caught her staring.  “A very last resort.”

It didn’t make Jinsu feel remotely better about the situation, because he appeared not to be ruling the possibility out if they really were desperate.  However, they were still out in the middle of nowhere in the snow, and she felt it was best not to say anything to that effect.

All in all, she seemed to have crashlanded the Attayear in a rather fortuitous spot.  There were a number of tribes within walking distance from them, even if it did mean getting up well before the sun was up and being prepared to spend the last hour or two of the journey back in darkness.  Wild animals didn’t bother them (if there even were any; Jinsu reckoned they were most likely hibernating), and over the course of the next few days, they managed to stock up a decent amount of food and a formidable amount of burnable fuel.  Their gold stocks, however, were almost completely gone.  Minhwan guarded them jealously as they had only really paid a deposit on the oil barrels that the tribe had negotiated for them, and there was still a lump sum that needed to be handed over when they actually got them.

While Jinsu was shipped around the various pairs of boys that went off to negotiate with the tribes (somehow managing to dodge Youngdo), Baekhyun was confined to the Attayear with either Kyuhyun or Junmyeon, though since Junmyeon was a better deal-broker than Kyuhyun, it was more often the latter that stayed than not.  Jinsu resented having to stand there and look pretty, but even she had to admit that it aided the argument all of the boys put forth of we have women and children in our camp, which was technically true, even if she was the only women and she, Baekhyun and Kyungsoo were technically the only children – or minors.

There had also been a definite shift in Baekhyun’s attitude towards her.  As soon as it got dark, the navigation lights on their watches would ping as he set up the satellites to guide them in, and Jinsu suspected that the satellite must give some identification as to who was who, because whenever Jinsu and her group for the day arrived back, Baekhyun would be lurking just out of sight and nab her the second the boys had disappeared into the nether regions of the Attayear to put away their haul from the day, and a cup of just-made hot chocolate into her hands.  From there it was a quick “how was today?” as they climbed the stairs up to his room, where dinner was waiting with Kyungsoo (who never did more than raise an eyebrow at them, usually because Jinsu was in a foul mood when she got back and he seemed to sense she’d get prickly if he even contemplated making a comment about them being attached at the hip), and then Jinsu would collapse into bed.  Sometimes  the three of them stayed up talking for half an hour or so – though it was really either Kyungsoo and Baekhyun talking with Jinsu listening in and nearly half asleep, or Kyungsoo and Jinsu talking while Baekhyun read or did something in the background.  Baekhyun had managed to sneak up a ladleful of the first barrel of olive oil that they’d been given, which got Kyungsoo terribly excited.  Even though he