Weiyi’s ankle was still paining her the next morning.  Sehun dug out lone instant icepack he’d almost forgotten he had and wrapped it up in a t-shirt for her so that she could rest it on the injury.  The whole concept of cracking something so that it produced a completely different temperature was utterly alien to Weiyi, and she spent some time prodding the icepack and staring at it while Sehun prepared breakfast.

“Is this magic?” she asked eventually.

He couldn’t help an amused grin.  “No.  Just science that’s too complicated for me to explain.”

Weiyi said nothing more on the subject, but it was clear she didn’t believe him.  Explanations, however, reminded her of something she had wanted to ask about the night before.

“Why did you live with your grandparents and not your parents?” she asked.  “Were you abducted too?”

Surprised that she’d remembered that little detail from the previous night, Sehun paused as he divided food between the two plastic plates they had.

“This is going to be a long story,” he warned.

Weiyi snorted in a manner that reminded him hugely of his sister.  “I’m not going anywhere,” she pointed out.

“Well, back in the 1940s, there was a horrible war in Europe that ended up in various nations across the world,” he began as he passed Weiyi a plate and glanced at their water supply.  They were going to need to fill up soon.  “Germany, the nation that started the war, got pincered by Russia to its east and Britain and various other European countries in the west and eventually lost.  There was political turmoil in Europe after that because Russia was a communist country, which none of the other countries were, and spread communism to other countries it influenced at the time.”

Weiyi looked too confused to think about starting to eating.  “What’s communism?”

Sehun mulled over the best way to explain it succinctly.  “It’s based on the principle that everybody should have all things equally,” he concluded.  “Everybody is equal.”

“That sounds nice,” Weiyi said.

“Yeah, but it’s also impossible to implement in practice unless every single person is on board with it, and you still need some people in positions of power because otherwise nothing would ever get done, so you end up with a system where some people are more equal than others.  It basically completely fails to factor in that people and their personalities and identities and humanness can’t be fit into a predictable box and programmed or made to function like robots.  I mean, if you’re doing heavy manual labour, you’re probably going to be pretty upset if somebody in a bank is earning the same amount you are for more or less just sitting there all day, but if you adjust wages to reflect the work you’re doing, you start to introduce competitiveness.  Everybody wants the better jobs or the jobs that pay more, which are usually considered to be the same, which means that people are going to get siphoned off into jobs they don’t want to do, which means that malcontent begins to spread.”  He plucked some fruit off his plate.  “Actually, the Chinese regime is communist.”

Weiyi frowned.  There wasn’t so much of the equality aspect communism was supposed to have.  Or, at least, she’d barely seen any if there had been.

“But why were you living with your grandparents?” she asked after a moment or two.

“I’m coming to that.  Anyway, America, which had played a significant part in helping the western Europeans winning, thought that Russia was a threat, in part because of its different political regime.  They went into a state of Cold War during the 1950s and 1960s, during which they influenced other countries and more or less used them as pawns against each other.  Korea was one of them.”

Weiyi took a moment or two to digest this and then nodded.

“I’m guessing you came to Korea by boat,” Sehun said, and Weiyi nodded.  “Korea and China are actually linked together.  They’re continuous.”

She looked baffled by the unfamiliar word, but Sehun ploughed on nonetheless.

“Anyway, rewind back into the mid 1940s,” Sehun went on, “and Korean was under Japanese imperial rule.  America and Russia were more or less allied during the war because they had a common enemy in other countries, and in 1945, both countries attacked Korea in part of a declaration of war against Japan and occupied the northern half.  The US forces then moved into the southern half and expelled Japanese forces, but the political tensions between Russia and the US were too great at that point for much to happen beyond creating an arbitrary division and having a democracy-backed government in the south and a communist-backed government in the north.  Both claimed legitimacy to the whole country.  1950, the communist north, backed by Russia and China, invades the southern part.  There was a very vicious civil war and eventually the country split in half.  The north’s remained communist with support of China after the collapse of the communist regime in Russia, and the south’s remained a democracy with support from the US ever since.  But the two countries never actually declared peace, so they’ve remained in a state of cold war since 1953, and both sides right from the start, even up until today, used spies.  It was incredibly dangerous – you’d be tortured before you were killed if you were caught.  The North in particular had this thing about punishing three generations of your family if they thought you were a criminal of any kind.”

Weiyi chewed on her fruit, interested.

“My grandparents were two of those spies.”

Weiyi choked on the fruit.

“My family was pretty well known, and in order to protect my parents, my grandparents moved away.  Round about the time I was born, the North started getting really aggressive again, and they’d also discovered where my parents lived and were flinging all this stuff around about punishing three generations of my family because of my grandparents, especially since they’d just disappea