“My parents were researchers, and they always told me they were proud of me,” Jinki said, eyes vacant as he held the cup of cold black latte in his hands, Yesung sipping his.

“Aside from work, they would always talk about me. How proud they were that they're son turnt out as smart as his Rhodes Scholars parents. Before Chaelin and Hayi came along, they always told me they were lucky to have a kid as smart as I was.” He was circling around the same point as though he didn't realize anymore, and Yesung turned to look at him. The same vacancy in his eyes.

“They probably thought intelligence came with independence.”

Yesung turned back to him cup so that Jinki wouldn't know that he was staring at the latter before, when Jinki rubbed his eyes with a gloved hand, “I was five when they took me to a homestay apartment for work. They slaved through their Phd. Thesis for 16 hours a day. I had to buy my own food and entertain myself. Then one day, I climbed onto the roof and fell into the containment tank.”

Yesung split his coffee over his palm and swore, frantically dabbing his labcoat on his arm. But Jinki didn't seem to notice.

“I held on to the float and threaded water for on and a half days until a janitor found me. I passed out the minute I heard someone climbing the ladder up the containment tank. And turns out, my parents didn't even know I was missing until they got a call by the hospital 3 days after I was rescued.”

“But that's not the point,” Jinki finally took a sip from the coffee, “the point is, when I was out, I saw something. A black shape like a hound, and it kept attacking me. I kept crying and screaming for someone to save me from it... then, it spoke.”

“What?” Yesung looked up.

“It said, 'You can't hide from me, I am Death. From now on, you will always see me. You can either choose to stop me, or you will ignore me. Your choice.'. Then, I woke up.”

“Those premonitions started after that?”

“It wasn't like seeing the math answers for next week's test; I always saw horrible things that could kill us in the form of dreams. I saw my house burning when I was eight, and had my sister cleared out. One hour later, it exploded. I saw Chaelin suspended in water once and woke up the next day to find that she had passed out, face down in the bathtub from a fever.”

“This time, I saw Chaelin kidnapped, and we saved her from a apparent homicidal sociopath. But I keep having this bad feeling that it's not over.”

“Why?”

“I had another dream two weeks after Chaelin was found. I dreamt that she was taken by masked men in an alley.”

Yesung forgot the burn on his hand from the coffee and he looked into the skies. He remembered Jiyeon, who had possessed Daehyun and Ji-Eun to find her killer. He was a doctor – a man of science, but these few years had challenged his initial perceptions drastically. So drastically that he believed Jinki.

“What if you didn't see Chaelin,” Yesung said quietly, “your sisters look quite alike, what if you saw Hayi?”

Onew kept quiet.

“That's what I thought. And it means her life is in danger.”

*

The first thing Hayi saw when she opened her eyes were angels, and she was seized with a sense of peace. She was enveloped in soft, feathery clouds, and her whole head was cushioned in the kind of softness she could only imagine in heaven. Painted cherubs laughed overhead, playing between the pink cottons of water, before she registered the silver cobwebs forming an intricate network at the right angle of the ceiling. She blinked, and slowly the hardness of her pillow materialized, bringing forth a kind of dizziness that she had only experienced in a fever.

She felt her own forehead. She was fine.

She sat up slowly, using her elbows to push her torso up in the pink, lacy bedsheets and looked around in surprise. She wasn't in her own room – this room like one of the little rooms of a dollhouse, with dainty furnishings, a parliament of stuffed toys sitting on the shiny, white mantelpiece and lace curtains. There were children's books on a bookshelf, all with royal green covers and gold linings, and the windows were shut. She immediatel felt a pang of uncertainty.

Where am I?

The lights at the post-office had gone off, that was all she remembered. As Hayi pulled out a leg to step on the floor, to her newfound surprise, she realized that she was wearing a silk dress, that flowed to the parquet oak floor. Her white feet were fitted with silk stockings as well as satin slippers and her hair was, she realized as she ran a finger over her head, painfully tied up into a French braid. Panic started to set in.

She pulled aside the covers roughly, and tried the door. To her surprise, it swung open easily, and she found herself facing a hallway with rose wallpaper. Everything was decorated in baby colours, and as she ran past open halls, she saw that they were all femininely furnished. The light parquet let her footsteps leap lightly over them as she fled down the endless hallway towards a door. When she finally reached it, she jiggled it desperately. It unlocked into a garden. She gasped.

She had never seen such a surreal view in her life. A pathway that seemed to stretch forever into the horizon was lined by shrubs and shoots of roses of every colour. Some were tinted with three or four colours so that they stood out like rainbows between the foliage. The sun shone somewhere above the roof and blue baby-breaths hung down the porches.

She breathed heavily, the panic leaving her momentarily before taking the path. She looked at the , breathed in the sweetness and let her gown smooth over frail grass outlining her pathway. Despite all the beauty, something kept nagging her at the back of her head.

The path was a dirt pathway, but felt a strange, even hardness under her soles. The grass seemed too green, and the were still, without the slightest flutter. She stopped.

The path still stretched on, but there was something strange.

She reached out, and immediately, her hand touched something.

A barrier. An invincible barrier.

Fear cascaded on her like an avalanche and she started pounding incessantly onto the glass, calling for help. Her eyes darted to and fro wildly, looking for somewhere, anywhere to get out. She dug feverishly at the ground, but her nails hit something concrete. She smoothed out the dirt.

“Oh my...”

She ripped out a handful of the grass and her heart turned cold.

Concrete, it was concrete. All the plants and grass were planted on concrete. In her confusion, she looked up and nearly screamed. A spotlight – about 10 ft wide glared down at her from above the house, which had no roof. There were security cameras on every angle of the porch, as well as the ceilings of the hallway. She groaned, falling on her back, as mechanical eyes whirred towards her, training on her, before the front door whirred wide open.

She froze.

There was a thump from inside the house, and footsteps.

Come in, a voice seemed to whisper to Hayi, come in.

Slowly, as though in a trance, she obeyed the voice and drifted in. Like a ghost, she stepped onto the threshold and into the hallway. Something seemed to lead her, past painfully child-like furnishings and into a dining hall. This room was different.

It was adapted from the royal dining hall of Buckingham Palace, with 3 candelabras on a long mahogany table covered with gold lace. A meal was spread on the table and the chair at the end of the tablehad been pulled up. The other chairs were filled with toys and dolls, and when she sat down, she broke out of her trance. Instantly, cuffs whirred up and clasped her hands and neck back. She screamed with terror.

“Be quiet.”

The voice was soft, soothing but carried across like a venom. Hayi breathed heavily, tears forming from the painful clasps locking her neck against the mahogany chair. The chair gave another whir and shifted inwards, closer to the table.

There was a dark figure across her, all clad in a dark suit. He had piercing eyes that sliced through the room straight into hers, staring into her, searching and unreadable. He had a tatoo or some sort at the side of his eyes, and his nose and lips were concealed by a black mask. She could just make out the crinkle of a smile.

“Beautiful.”

She blinked back tears, “w-who are you?”

“My name is Jack, and I am your friend.”

“I want to go home. Why did you bring me here? I want to go!”

“You are home, this is where you'll live from now on.”

“You're insane.”

“Listen to me,” the man stood up, “you will address me as Jack, nothing else. You will be polite and you will smile at me. You will wear those clasps until you learn how to sit properly when you eat and talk to me. And I will have no crying here.”

“I'm not listening to you,” Hayi snarled, “you have issues and if you don't let me out now, I will make your life a living hell.”

“You will not swear and disobey me, and if you make that ugly face at me again,” the steak knife beside his plate disappeared and embedded into the chair a second later, two inches from Hayi's face at eye level, making her skip a beat, “I will carve a smile into your face, and make you bleed beauty for me.”

“What...?”

“And if you ruin your nails like that again,” Jack jerked Hayi's arm forwards and she winced, “I will rip them out one,” he pulled out the knife from the chair and caressed her cheek with it, the tip sliding over her lower lashes, “by,” it stopped at the corner of her eye and she daren't blink, “one.” he stabbed the knife back into the chair, and Hayi couldn't help but flinch, fighting back tears.

“Are you going to cry?”

She shook her head mutely, tears threatening to pour out.

“Good doll,” he leaned forwards and kissed her forehead, “then we'll get along.”

He picked up a staff she hadn't seen from the side of his seat. It was black and wavy, the tip a silver arrow – and a silver skull with its lower jaw removed was embedded on the top. He held the staff on the side, as though he didn't need help walking, and pointed in the direction of her room with the tip, “you may sleep in any bedroom you'd like except the Red Room. There's a map on the side table of the Pink Room you slept in last night, and a copy of your daily timetable next to it. I have cameras on every corner of the house, so if you try to escape... you won't.”

The clasps whirred back into the chair and Hayi coughed violently, gripping her neck.

“Close your mouth,” he hissed, “if you do not learn proper manners by this week, I will deem you useless and kill you, understand?”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you keeping me here?”

“I adopted you – you're my doll now.” He said and the front door creaked eerily open.

“My baby doll.”

*

Junmyeon was startled by a sudden bang of the door of the station followed by a squeal of wet soles stopping on stone floor. He turned and his eyes widened at the sight of the young doctor – Lee Jinki standing at the doorway, expression wild and...

A gun in his hand.

“Where is he?” Jinki yelled into his face, the movement of his eyes “where is that jacked-up son of a ?” He moved quickly, shoving past people and one female officer, and Junmyeon grabbed him by the arm, “Jinki, calm down...”

“Get off me!” Jinki tossed off his hand, “if you guys aren't gonna do your gawd-forsaken job, I'm going to do it. I'll blow his tongue out if I have to to get my sister back! Now, where the hell is Nichkhun Horvejkul?” he yelled all the louder and Junmyeon grabbed him by the collar.

“Listen to me,” he hissed at Jinki, keeping eye-contact as Jinki tried to rip away, “Investigating Officer Yunho is interrogating him right now, and if you don't calm the hell down... it's fine!” he gestured for the approaching officers to back away, “I've got this. Now, instead of barging into a police station with a gun in your hand, I want you to calm the heck down and fecking remember how many felonies that is. Do you want to spend the next year in jail instead of being useful?”

“My sister is going to die,” Jinki hissed back, his features twitching and contorted with rage, “I saw it. And I'm not going to sit around and wait for a tongue-tied bastard to take his time to crack.”

“I told you,” Junmyeon tightened his grip on Jinki's collar all the more when he tried to toss it off again and jerked the young doctor aggressively to get him to focus, “to see a damn shrink. All those sleeping pills you're taking are messing with your brain.”

“I have a damn shrink, and she knows that everything I dream comes true.”

Junmyeon paused, as a recollection of his interrogation with Dr. Ji-Eun returned.

“In fact I have 6 damn shrinks, 2 of them have Masters and they believe me. The other 4 think I dapple with black magic because they know I see it when my family members are in mortal danger. Now I'm telling you I saw Hayi last night, and I will not sit around...”

Junmyeon yanked Jinki by the arm and tugged him roughly into his office. Then, he bolted the door and snapped the shades shut.

“What did you see?”

What did you see that made you go crazy like this?

Jinki scowled at Junmyeon, eyes blazing, before breaking down.

“I saw my youngest sister in a circular duct,” he barely managed to choke out, he could barely breath between his panic attacks, “and she was dripping in oil and screaming my name.”