"Are you alright?" 

Ken's soft voice was filled with worry as he slowly poked Yoohyeon's arm, attempting to get her attention. At once, she jerked back a bit, as if she'd been brought out of a hypnotic trance, and she looked around as if she'd forgotten where she was.

Ken was worried. Sleep deprivation was one thing, but this?

This was not sleep deprivation.

"W-what happened?" she asked.

"You zoned out for around fifteen minutes," Ken informed. 

"Zoned out?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah, you kept staring at the door. You didn't even respond to me."

She narrowed her eyebrows. "Zoned out?" she questioned. "No, no. I-I was watching somebody. T-that guy...was at the door and he was staring at me..."

"What guy?" Ken asked. "There's no one there."

"He left," she said, her voice reducing in shakiness. "You might have not seen him."

He watched her for a few moments before leaning a little closer to her so that he wouldn't need to disturb the rest of the class.

"Yoohyeon," he said slowly as if she were a five year old child, "I've been with you the entire class, right here next to you, so I'd know."

"There was no one at the door."

What the hell was that about?

Yoohyeon wondered all the way to the cafeteria.

How could she have been wrong? She saw him standing there, she definitely did see him! But how could Ken not see him? Could she have made him up?

No, that couldn't be possible. How could she remember someone she made up so clearly?

"It is possible that Ken might've missed him," Siyeon said. 

"Are you calling me an idiot?" Ken protested.

Siyeon ignored him, focusing on Yoohyeon, who's face was a bit paler than usual. "But if he's on campus, then the janitor must've seen him. The time coincides with cleaning and the janitor must've been cleaning right opposite the classroom."

"Can you tell us what he looked like?" Handong softly asked. 

Yoohyeon nodded. "H-he was tall," she offered, "around as tall as Jaehwan, maybe taller. He had..." She squinted in order to remember. "...black hair, big eyes, like a doe or something..." The others stared at her as if she was nuts as she struggled to find the right words to describe him. "He...had thin lips...or maybe not..."

"You would be a terrible witness," Ken cut her off with a sigh. "Calm down, its clear you're not the best at describing people."

Jiu smacked his arm before turning back to Yoohyeon. "Can you at least tell us what he was wearing?" she asked. "If it was something strange, then it'd be easier to remember him, right?"

Yoohyeon sat up at once. "Yes," she said. "Yes, he was wearing something different!"

"What was it?" Handong leaned over, highly interested.

"He was barefoot," Yoohyeon related. "He wasn't wearing much, just a black shirt...and black pants."

"Just that?" Jiu narrowed her eyes.

"It's strange," Siyeon said. "I think someone might have noticed a barefoot guy dressed in all black wandering around the campus."

"Yeah, and called security," Handong agreed. "But how come its so normal around here?"

Ken didn't respond, instead turning to Yoohyeon, who's eyes had dropped to the table as she unconsciously clutched at her cup of coffee. "It'll be fine," he softly told her. "We'll go ask the janitor about that guy. I'm sure that he won't be too hard to miss."

Yoohyeon nodded, swallowing slightly. She had no idea what was going on, but the look that guy gave her had shaken her to her core.

It wasn't like an angry gaze, or like he wanted to hurt her. He didn't mean any physical harm to her at all. But rather, what she saw in those deep dark eyes...was pain, a lot of pain.

It was unsettling, the pained look he gave her. It was like she was the one responsible for it, somehow.

She wrapped her fingers around her cup a little tighter.

She'd told her friends about the strange guy she'd seen, but she kept the visions of the hand in chains to herself. Something in her prevented her from divulging that small bit of information.

"So, what're you planning on doing?" Ken asked.

"Huh?" she asked.

"About the project, what do you plan to do?" he clarified. "Weren't you listening in class? Professor Yang was talking about the project for the next semester that he wants us to undertake."

She stared at him dumbfounded, so he sighed again. "Clearly you weren't in the right state of mind to be listening to your assignment details that will account for at least 60% of our grade," he said. "Never mind, I'll let you know."

"Is that why you asked me to the library?" Yoohyeon asked.

He nodded. "Yep."

"So what was the assignment?" she asked as they reached the college library, a massive building made of white marble, and pushed open the brown wooden door.

"Professor Yang wants us to go through old cases, analyze them, give them new perspectives," Ken explained as he led her to a table near a corner. "He wants us to touch on unsolved cases, old cases, anything that we feel is interesting, investigate, and submit a report."

"He wants us to play detective?" Yoohyeon asked.

"Well, not exactly," Ken replied, sliding into a chair opposite her. "He wants us to do what we'll be doing once we graduate."

"And that is?"

"Profile."

When she seemed a bit dumbfounded, he sighed. "We pick up some old cases, ask questions, investigate, and at the end of the term, we submit a report on our findings, and we get graded," he explained. 

"But why would he assign something like this?" she asked as he pushed back his chair and got up.

"Oh, don't tell me you don't know," Ken scoffed lightly. "Professor Yang's notorious for this! He always gives this assignment to his students. We're lucky we were able to catch it in first year."

"He...does?"

Ken nodded. "According to him, fresh insights are usually what's missing in the Criminal Justice System today. So, he usually makes his students study cases. Says that newbies can come up with fresh diagnoses that someone who's been working with criminals for years might have missed."

"And it's worked?" 

He grinned. "Why do you think I came all the way to Korea to study?" he asked. "T-this guy is amazing," he said, placing his palms on the table with his voice trembling with excitement. "Three years ago, a couple of his students solved a serial killing case that had been unsolved for ten years."

Yoohyeon stopped, looking at him strangely. "Ten years?"

"Yeah," he laughed lightly. "And it even made the news. A grieving widow and mother finally got justice, just by these two girls asking a couple of seemingly dumb questions."

She leaned back in her chair. "Wow," she said."That's pretty rad."

"I know, right?" he grinned, his smile wide as if he were talking about the greatest thing on earth.

She turned her eyes up to him. "So that explains why the others went to the police station and to city hall," she said. "But why are we in a library?"

"Because, some records can only be found in the deepest of crannies," Ken answered.

"So...you're in a library?"

He breathed in deep. "I don't want to just solve a case that's ten years old," he admitted. "I want to go older, before we had things like profilers or DNA sequencing or forensic science." He exhaled lightly. "I want to do something no one else has done so far. I want to stretch my horizons."

Yoohyeon couldn't help the smile that erupted on her face. Even after four months here, this was the first time she'd seen him like this. "So, why ask me here?" she asked. "Want to find cases together?"

He shrugged. "Two is always better than one," he rationalized. "And I trust you the most out of the others."

"Why not ask Jiu?" Yoohyeon asked. "You had the chance, right." Then she paused, and a sly smile tugged at her lips. "Or have I answered my own question?" 

Ken sighed. "You knew?" he asked in a low voice.

"Hard not to," she answered. "I've seen the way you look at her. You can't hide that from me."

He pursed his lips in agreement. "And that is exactly why I want to do this with you."

"Because I know you like one of our friends?"

"Because you have an eye for detail," he told her. "You can pick up stuff that we tend to miss. And it'll be invaluable for me to have you on my team."

She leaned back in her chair and put her arms behind her head. "So, you just wanna pair up with me because I have the best chance of getting you an A on this assignment?"

He chuckled. "I'll go and see if there's something I can find. Can you look after our stuff?" He gestured to the two bags on the chair next to her. She hummed. "I'll be right back," he assured before heading over to another part of the library.

Finding herself with nothing to do, Yoohyeon cast her eyes down to the table, and her gaze fell on her hand lying on the wood surface. She considered the light tanning around the fingers, from the days she was too lazy to apply sunscreen and yet wanted to wear rings, leaving light colored patched around her fingers. 

Her mind went back to the hand in her vision. It had been male, definitely, judging from the shape. It had looked pale, as if the person hadn't gotten sun in years. Even in the places where she had noticed the chain shifting, there were no tan marks.

Either that guy had a serious vitamin D deficiency, or something was wrong.

Just then, a flash of light appeared in her vision, and she saw the hand.

Another flash, and the hand had chains around it.

A flash of red.

She gasped lightly, closing her eyes. When she opened her eyes, she found herself still in the library, the soft murmurs and the shuffling of books taking up her senses. She looked around, at the other tables filled with students going about their studies, at the librarian busy sorting books, at the students looking through books on different shelves.

Her hand clutched at her heart.

Racing.

What was that? Did she have that vision again?

Why?

It hurt her head thinking about it. She wondered whether it was a coincidence that the vision was succeeded by a headache. It had happened the first time too. And then after that...

She brought her fingers up to massage her temples, looking over at the bookshelf where Ken had apparently disappeared. She in a breath when the person she was expecting to see wasn't leaning against the bookshelf.

He was tall, dressed in loose black clothes, with black hair that swept over his forehead and small, droopy eyes. Yoohyeon gulped as fear began to fill up in her chest.

This guy wasn't the person she'd been looking for.

She had no idea who this was.