Kibum kept one hand against the wall as he made his way down the empty corridor. His legs were shaking so badly he could barely keep them beneath him. His mind felt like someone in the dark, stumbling about among huge pieces of furniture with sharp corners on them. How white Krystal had gone – that was one corner. Her terrified eyes staring at him like he was something to fear – that was another. How he had used his extended senses to force her into telling him something she didn’t want to – that was another – and the horrific vision he’d seen when he’d touched her – that was yet another. His memory played the scene over and over in sickening clarity, until he had to stop and lean against the wall. He pressed his hands hard against his eyes in a vain attempt to block out the images, but it didn’t help.

He stumbled away from the memory, and into his mind came Dr. Ji and his dominant pulses of ozone. The waves of essence scent beating over Minho in the hospital waiting room. Minho’s voice, answering the doctor on a strange monotone, the words jerking out of him if he couldn’t help himself. It was exactly the same way Krystal had just spoken to Kibum.

Now he understood what those pulses of ozone meant. Dr. Ji had used his dominant energy to force Minho into obeying his will. Whether Dr. Ji did this consciously or instinctively, Kibum didn’t know, but it made no difference to the way his mind stumbled into the most important and painful corner of the lot. He had acted just like Dr. Ji.

He finally reached the elevator and stabbed blindly at the button. He had no idea where he was going. Krystal was long gone. She might not even still be in the building. By the look in her eyes, she wasn’t going to let Kibum come anywhere near her even if he did find her. A strange, muted noise of despair left his throat. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but he had done so all the same.

The elevator arrived. Kibum stumbled inside and stared numbly at the controls. He didn’t know which floor to press. He caught sight of his own reflection in the mirrored surface around the buttons. He was pale and haggard, his hair dishevelled, like he’d run his fingers through it without realising. He knew the familiar lines of his face, thin though it was, but he didn’t know himself. Not anymore. Who was he? What was he? He was different and changing. Every day some new change flipped another switch inside his mind, turning him into a person he didn’t know. He stared at his reflection, and a pair of wild, haunted eyes stared back at him.

The elevator doors slid closed of their own accord and it started to rise. Distantly Kibum understood that someone had called it from another floor, but he couldn’t really process the fact. He couldn’t bear to look at himself anymore. He crouched down in a corner and wrapped his arms around his knees, pulling himself into a tight ball. Again, Krystal’s terrified face flashed before him, the new clarity of his memory a curse, now. The way she had scrambled away from him, the desperation in her frantic movements. How hunted she had looked. She knew he had done something to her, that was for certain. Did she know he had seen the vision of Jessica forcing her to drown the kitten? Had she experienced it along with him? Or was she just running instinctively, the way a deer runs from a lion?

His mind jerked back to the vision. He could still feel the kitten’s desperate struggle. As if his hands had a memory of their own, he felt again the moment it had died, how it had gone limp and lifeless in his hands, a cold, soggy lump. He rubbed his hands against his jeans, trying to scrub out the sensation with the feel of the rough fabric. This wasn’t even his own memory. He could hardly bear to think how Krystal must feel, forced to live that traumatic event again.

Jessica. He could barely believe it. She’d always been so cheerful and sunny, and all this horror was in her past. Despite the vision he’d seen through Krystal, despite his instinctive fear of the wrongness in Jessica, he found his heart twisting with a kind of appalled pity. If Krystal was right, and Jessica had changed after she’d been , then whatever it was that made her smell so bad and do such an awful thing to her little sister, it was caused by that horrific incident.

At this thought, Kibum raised his head from his knees and stared unseeingly at the elevator wall. Jessica had been hurt, badly hurt, but not just outwardly. There was another level of existence, the hidden world he became more aware of every day, the world of essence smells and coloured auras. The part of Jessica that existed on that level had been wounded too. If wounds weren’t treated, they got infected and festered, the flesh turned to rot. People’s essences gave off their individual smells, but Jessica’s was dying. Maybe that was why she didn’t have an essence smell. Maybe that was why she stank of decay. She had a wound in her essence, and her soul was rotting away.

She had been treated at Yonsei University Hospital. Just like him. He remembered Dr. Ji’s voiceless whispers. Dr. Ji had wanted to keep him in the hospital and not let him go home. He'd given him drugs that dulled his senses and depressed his mind. He'd kept on and on touching him, changing his dressings and checking his IV lines, even though that wasn't part of his job. If he had thought Kibum might have a spiritual wound, then all he would have to do was touch him, and like bacteria creeping into a cut, those whispers would find their way into his soul, and the sickness would spread. Because that was what sicknesses did. That was their biological imperative.

Again he remembered the ozone pulses beating down on Minho in the hospital waiting room. The way Minho had agreed that if he couldn’t protect his friends and family, there wasn’t much point in living. A chill of horror started at the back of his neck and crept all over his skin. What if Dr Ji had noticed Minho’s pain, and was trying to open up his wound, so that he could infect Minho too?

There was still so much that didn’t add up. For a start, Dr. Ji smelled bad, but still had his essence smells. He wasn’t rotting away inside like Jessica, so how could he infect people? Maybe he’d never been wounded, but still was able to carry the sickness and infect other people with it, like some people carried the HIV virus but never developed AIDS. That made sense, but it still didn’t tell Kibum whether Dr. Ji was doing this knowingly, or if it was some kind of instinct to spread that was prompted by the sickness itself. If the sickness wanted to spread, it made sense that it would have prompted Jessica to try and wound her little sister to infect her too, by forcing her to drown her kitten. But Krystal didn't have the sickness. Perhaps she had been able to fight it off, like an immune system response to getting an infection. Perhaps the same thing applied to whatever had happened to Minho. He was hurt, but the sickness hadn't managed to infect the wound. Not yet.

Kibum had felt such a strong sense of something conscious - something evil - looking out of Jessica’s eyes. The sense of danger had been so strong that he had been forced to clamp down on his extended senses so that the thing inside Jessica would not become aware of him. Was that the sickness? Was it sentient? If it was, he was afraid it already suspected him. Something was prompting Jessica to show an interest in him, where she never had before. It must be able to sense that something was different about him.

“Kibum? Kibum! What’s wrong? Look at me!”

Somebody grabbed his shoulders and gave him a shake. Kibum snapped into his body with a gasp. He’d been so caught up in his racing thoughts that he’d completely lost track of where he was. Scents flooded over him, sharp new plastic and steady vanilla. Jinki, and Jonghyun with him. Both of them were kneeling on the elevator floor in front of him, and it was Jinki holding his shoulders. Thankfully Kibum’s sweater protected him from any unwanted visions, but it couldn’t drown out the overwhelming turmoil of his worry.

He slipped away from the new plastic smell and focused instead on Jonghyun’s steady, warm vanilla, letting the calmness of that scent anchor him. As soon as he was able, he started counting in his head. The numbers connected with the threads of his number web and it shimmered into existence around his mind, the calculations absorbing the overload from both Jinki and from his own inner turmoil.

“I - I’m okay,” Kibum croaked. His voice sounded awful. He coughed, trying to clear it.

“Don’t give me that!” Jinki sounded almost angry, but Kibum could feel the way his worry was so acute it had become like a physical pain for him. “You’re on the floor and you look terrible. What happened? Do you feel dizzy again? Does your head hurt?”

Kibum shook his head. “No, no. I’m fine, don’t worry. I...I got a bit upset, that’s all.” He tried to sound offhanded, as if being found on the floor in the elevator was a perfectly normal reaction to being upset. “It’s nothing. You know what I’m like. I should get a drama queen of th