Kibum woke with a jump to the sound of Taemin’s voice, raised high in indignation. “Hyung! Jinki-hyung!”

Kibum sat bolt upright, heart pounding at his sudden awakening. Taemin’s voice sounded so loud that for a moment he thought he was right there in the bedroom - but no, Taemin’s running feet pattered along outside from the lounge area to the kitchen. Across the room, Minho sat up too, looking dazed. His hair was a tangled lion’s mane sticking straight out in all directions.

“What is it?” Jinki’s voice called.

“Someone’s done my homework!” Taemin sounded utterly outraged.

“Uh-oh,” Kibum murmured. He stood up and made for the door, missing Minho’s confused glance as he did so.

“Why would anyone do your homework?” he heard Jinki say reasonably. “You probably did it yourself last night and forgot.”

“I did not!” Taemin cried, outraged by this suggestion. Kibum hovered apprehensively in the kitchen doorway, taking in the scene. Taemin was dressed in his school uniform, but his tie was flung carelessly around his neck and his hair was a wild brown mop. “I would know if I finished my entire maths workbook in one evening. Look!” He shoved the book into Jinki’s hands.

Jinki looked obediently at the pages. He frowned, flipping over to see that the whole book had been filled in, the pages covered in neatly written numbers and symbols. It was obviously not Taemin’s scribbly handwriting.

“And they’re all right. I checked the answer book, it was still in my schoolbag so I know they weren’t copied.” Some of the indignation was fading out of Taemin’s voice now, replaced by bewilderment. “Who of us is this good at maths?”

“Not me,” Jinki murmured. He looked up then, straight at Kibum, and Kibum swallowed. He rather thought by the look in Jinki’s eye that he had recognized his handwriting.

“I did it,” he blurted out before Jinki could say anything. He was going to have to confess sooner or later and he might as well get it over with now. Nobody was going to believe it was the bored ghost of a maths genius, which was the only other idea his still half-asleep brain could produce.

Taemin turned around to stare at him. His scents were splashing everywhere, drowning out Jinki’s with pine needles and the rain on hot concrete. That was the scent Kibum had previously identified when Minho had hurt Taemin’s feelings by ignoring him. He frowned. What was making Taemin feel upset? The youngest was masking it with anger, but Kibum could see – or smell – straight through his act.

“Why did you do that?” Taemin cried. His scents surged violently. “Do you think I’m an idiot? That I can’t do my own homework? I’m not a baby, you know, even though everyone in the world seems to think so!”

“I know,” Kibum said, a little unsteadily. Faced with Taemin’s wild emotions battering at him, he was finding it very difficult to pull up his number web. It had slipped away during the night, and Taemin wasn’t giving him a chance to find it again.

“What am I supposed to tell my teacher?” Taemin continued. “This is the whole term’s work. She’s going to think I cheated and copied them all from the answer book. I can’t even erase them because you wrote them in pen!”

“I’m sorry, Taemin-ah.” Kibum felt like he was being hammered into a hot sidewalk by a crushing downpour of rain. He could feel the blood draining from his face. “I didn’t mean...” He broke off and clung unsteadily to the doorframe.

“Are you okay?” Jinki was beside him, sudden and sharp with new plastic. “Kibum? Do you feel dizzy?”

Taemin was suddenly silent. His eyes had gone round, and the smell of crushed roses was strong, strong. Worry. Fear.

“I-I’m okay,” he gasped. He would be, he knew, if they just gave him a few moments. Taemin’s scents were still strong but they weren’t directly attacking him anymore, and with the reprieve he was able to find the string of prime numbers that had been listed on one of the pages of the textbook and visualise them. They leapt into his head, and with them came the pieces of web he had built yesterday, slotting and whirling into place.

Jinki took his arm and Kibum was glad of the fabric of his sweater between their skin, shielding him from any unwanted visions. He guided Kibum over to the table and into a chair, poured a glass of water and pressed it into Kibum’s hands. He drank shakily, the glass chinking a little against his teeth. The water washed away the taste of hot concrete and plastic, and he had his number web now, glowing behind his eyes, protecting him from the worst of it.

Jinki had dropped the workbook onto the table. Kibum looked at it, then up at Taemin. The youngest still hadn’t said anything, but his delicate features matched the worry and guilt in his scents.

“Sorry, hyung. I didn’t mean to upset you,” Taemin said unhappily.

Kibum’s heart melted. “I know. I’m fine, Taemin-ah, I promise” he said, projecting as much reassurance into his aura as he could. He didn’t know how much other people responded on an instinctive level to essence scents, but it couldn’t hurt to try and back up his words with his emotions. He looked across at Jinki, projecting the same reassurance towards him “I’m sorry about your homework. I saw it on the table last night and I just got caught up in solving the problems. It was fun. I didn’t think about anything else. I never thought you couldn’t do them yourself.”

Taemin gave a shrug that was meant to look unconcerned, though it failed rather in this goal. “I didn’t really mean it. I was just surprised. I never knew you were so good at maths.”

“Neither did I.” Jinki sat down on the third chair and looked at him intently. “You really did that whole textbook in one evening? An entire CSAT-level maths textbook? For fun?”

Kibum shifted awkwardly. “Well, some people do find maths fun,” he said evasively.

“And you got them all right,” Taemin continued. He pointed at the page the book had fallen open at. “I don’t even know where to begin on this.”

“Our Kibum is a dark horse,” Jonghyun announced from the doorway. Minho was haunting his left shoulder like a tall, thin shadow. “A secret maths genius! How come you haven’t demonstrated this on a variety show? The fans would love it.”

“Dunno,” Kibum mumbled. He tried to change the subject. “I’ll buy you a new workbook, Taemin. Can you get them from the school bookshop? I’ll give you money.”

“I think so,” Taemin said, but apparently, he wasn’t as easily distracted the others were by Kibum’s well-placed subject changes. “What else can you do?” He asked eagerly. “Can you do big calculations in your head? Like, you know, what’s 76 times 381?”

“28,956,” Kibum said before he could think. There was a stunned silence, during which Kibum had to use the thickest part of his number web to screen himself from their astonishment. Silently, Jinki pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed in the sum. He held the screen up to show the others. The number was correct, just as Kibum knew it would be. The number web told him, because numbers were all connected, and there was no reason for a sum with big numbers to be any harder than one with small ones. The answer was just there, where it had always been, only Kibum hadn’t known how to see it.

“Well, crap,” Jonghyun said from the doorway. It seemed to sum up the situation quite nicely.

“How did you do that?” Taemin’s eyes were nearly falling out of his head. “How come we didn’t know you could do that?”

Kibum shrugged uncomfortably. He could only guess that the part of his brain that understood numbers had been enhanced along with his senses. Now that he came to think of it, his memory had gotten better too. He would never have been able to memorize all the equations that made up his number web before. He had pulled Jongin’s name practically out of thin air last night. He was pretty sure that if he wanted to, he would be able to repeat the entire conversation they’d had this morning, word perfect.

His new abilities didn’t seem to have halted at a certain level. They were developing. Evolving. Kibum wondered uneasily where they would end. His identity seemed suddenly unstable, unreal to him. What was happening to him? How different would he become? He didn’t want to be different, didn’t want to change in ways he had no control over. It was scary not knowing what was happening. He thought again of Dr. Ji and Minho’s changing essence smell and wondered, if he could smell his own essence smell, would it be changing too?

Taemin had swung from being unhappy to wildly excited. He bounced in his chair as he pelted maths questions at Kibum, multiplications and divisions with any large number that came into his head. Kibum answered obediently, mainly because he was so relieved that Taemin’s guilt and worry had gone away and his happy pine-needle scent was back, but also because with each calculation Taemin asked him to make, the numbers shone in his number web, making it stronger and thicker. Jonghyun and Minho came to sit around the table and eat with them. Kibum attempted, with not too much success, to take bites of breakfast between answering Taemin’s questions. It was tasteless because he couldn’t drop his number web under all the attention, but he tried to swallow it anyway. He noticed with some relief that Minho was eating too. He didn’t join in the question and answer session like Jonghyun did, but his eyes were on Taemin the whole time.

“That’s enough, Taemin,” Jinki said eventually. “You’ll be late. Let Kibum eat his breakfast.”

“We should get him to do it on our next variety show appearance,” Taemin said excitedly. He jumped up and bounced over to Jinki, holding up his chin so that Jinki could do his tie for him. Finally left to himself, Kibum moved to a thinner section of his number screen and focused on Minho. To his dismay, he could smell liquorice quite strongly, and the violets were hardly present at all – and Minho was still watching Taemin. Kibum frowned. Was the liquorice scent something to do with Taemin, then?

A soft brush against his leg made him look down. Mei Mei was winding around his ankles, and as before, focusing on her blanked out most of the essence smells around him, just as if he was using the thickest part of his number screen. She looked up at him and Kibum got the stro