Miran regained consciousness to the sound of a blow drier and quiet female chatter.  Groaning, she sat up and gingerly felt the back of her head.  There was a large lump there and her hair was damp.  From the sting as her fingers touched her scalp, she assumed she had some kind of cut or abrasion, but when she took her fingers away to check, there was no blood or pus.  Confused, she leant back against the wall of the cubicle she was in and took stock of her surroundings.

She was in a (thankfully locked) toilet stall with familiar tiles indicating it was the ladies’ bathroom on the second floor.  A plastic bag was beside her, and she frowned at it for a few moments, wondering what it was doing there, until her brain kick-started and she opened it up to rummage through.  It contained her equipment that she’d used to contact Scout.

Wincing at the pain in her head, Miran set the bag aside again and leant back against the cubicle wall.  There was something important in this all, but her brain was too fuzzy to recall it.  With a grimace, she got to her feet.

A sharp wave of pain washed over her and she stumbled.

Oh, right, I’m probably concussed.  Miran reached clumsily for the bag and then waited while her body readjusted to being upright.  It felt like she was simultaneously drunk and hung over, except with a headache that had a point of origin.

The toilet in the stall next to her flushed as she got out into the main part of the bathroom and Soojung emerged, heading for the sinks.  Her eyes widened when she caught sight of Miran in the mirrors and she hastily doused the soap off her hands with water, forgetting about drying them as she hurried over.  Miran realised to her chagrin that she’d barely got more than a few steps.  Her body wasn’t liking this at all.

“What on earth happened to you?” Soojung asked.  “You look like you hit a train.”

Miran peeked past her at the mirrors and realised that she was right.  Her suit was all crushed and her hair looked like she’d been dragged backwards through a hedge.  She turned, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse of her injury, but it was too far round.  She prodded at it just to make sure it really wasn’t bleeding.

“I’m not sure,” she said, but then admitted, “I got knocked out.”

“In the toilet?”

It was clearly a shocked, rhetorical question, but Miran answered it anyway.

“No.  I was up on the sixth floor and…”  She frowned.  “How the hell did I end up here?”

Soojung grabbed her wrist.  “We should go to the police.  Or the hospital.  Come on.”

“There’s an in-house doctor for minor—”

“This is not minor,” Soojung snapped at her.  “You got knocked out by some creep and woke up in a toilet stall four floors below where it happened.  What if this person moles—”

Miran looked down at her clothes again.  They looked scruffy, but not like somebody had tried anything funny.  “I’m fine.  I think.”

“What if you were drugged?” Soojung persisted.  “And you are definitely not fine.  You look like a wreck.”

With a sigh, Miran had to concede Soojung was right, and she allowed the other woman to drag her off for a check-up and blood tests.

Chanyeol happened to be in the small sickbay when they walked in and his immediate reaction was one of alarm.  Soojung explained what she knew while the nurse sectioned an area off to check how Miran was.

“It just looks like a straightforward concussion,” she was told as the nurse put away the light she’d just shone into her eyes.  “The injury’s already been cleaned up, too.  We’ll have to wait a little to see the results for the blood tests—”

The curtains were suddenly swept back.

“I need your clothes,” Chanyeol commanded.

Miran and the nurse both spluttered in shock.  Miran was trying to frame a coherent sentence to tell him that he was never going to fit into her clothes when Soojung also appeared with what Miran recognised as her training gear.

“Put these on,” she said, shoving the nurse and Chanyeol out.  “Chanyeol thinks we should send your clothes down to forensics to see if we can get any clues on who it was.  Then we’re going to check the security cameras while we wait for results to come through because we might be able to catch somebody on that.”

It sounded like a reasonable plan, so Miran shooed Soojung away and changed.  Chanyeol whisked her clothes away down to Jongdae in forensics, along with her plastic bag and the kit to contact Scout, and Miran led the way to her work station, Soojung hot on her heels.

Only Yeri and Kyungsoo were there when she arrived.  Yeri spared her a glance from her cubicle and frowned.

“You look grim, Miran.  What happened?”

There was a choking sound and then Kyungsoo popped around to see what was going on.  He had a scrap of paper in his hand, which crumpled slightly when he caught sight of her.  Miran was a little taken aback by the look on his face, but that was nothing compared to the surprise of him almost dashing over and turning her around to inspect her.

“Wha—?” she managed as he found the injury on the back of her head, but he didn’t touch it, just let her hair gently down again.

He cleared his throat and backed off, and then gave her the piece of paper he’d been holding.  Miran was very aware of Yeri staring, slack-jawed, in the background.  Even Soojung looked a little put out.

Miran glanced down at the note.  It was hand written, which meant she could probably send it for forensic analysis as well.

You’ll find Cho Miran with a head injury in the second floor bathrooms, it said.  She looked from it to Kyungsoo and back down again, and then passed it to Soojung, who looked as perplexed as she felt on reading it.

“I got back from my lunch break literally three minutes ago to find that on my desk,” Kyungsoo explained, though it looked like he was for some reason having difficulty meeting her eye.  Miran swallowed.  That meant she’d been out of it for a couple of hours.  “I was about to go and find you.”

Yeri stuck her hand up, drawing attention back to her.  “So, er… what exactly has happened?” she asked.  “Bit out of the loop here.”

“Miran was attacked and knocked out on the sixth floor,” Soojung said.

Yeri a sympathetic breath in through her teeth.  “Ouch.”

Miran decided to speak up.  “I woke up in the second floor bathrooms with my injury already cleaned up and everything I’d been holding neatly put in a plastic bag beside me.”

Kyungsoo and Yeri exchanged confused glances.

“Where on the sixth floor were you?” Kyungsoo asked slowly.

Miran grimaced, the muscles of her face twitching as she struggled to remember.  It was a foggy haze.  Whoever had hit her had done it hard.

“It sounds like whoever did this to you wanted to make sure there was something you didn’t see or hear,” Kyungsoo pointed out.

Miran shook her head.  “Somewhere near the meeting rooms, though I can’t remember which specific one.”

Kyungsoo took another long look at her, and then tilted his head in the direction of the passage.  “CCTV,” he said.  “Come on.”

They passed Yugyeom and Woohyun deeply immersed in some kind of technological conversation as they passed through the computer department to the security control room.  Miran had only been in once or twice before to get hold of one or two pieces of security data, but it didn’t stop her from being impressed yet again by the sheer size of the computer bank.  Kyungsoo sat himself down in one of the currently vacant seats and politely requisitioned two more from nearby agents.

“So what time – roughly – are we looking for?” he asked, logging into the system.  A quick glance at the clearance notice he received as the machine accepted his credentials told Miran – though it was something she already knew – th