***Double update so make sure you've read chapter 31***

Baekhyun seemed to trust Jinsu more when she was asking him to press the green button.  There was a lot to go through when it came to powering down the entire time machine, and they fell in sync in a way Jinsu would never have believed possible.  She found the area that needed locking off, checked to see how secure the automatic ring-fencing mechanism was, shored it up with a chain of commands that Baekhyun had to ratify, and then locked it down.

“Ready?” Baekhyun would check before consigning the coding to temporary cyber oblivion.

Jinsu would nod because she had no desire to speak to him, and he would press the button and somewhere on one of the motherboards, lights would go out and something somewhere in the Attayear would power down.

They had just done the twenty-third one when Minseok reappeared, blood streaked down the side of his head.

“What are you doing?  Powering down?” he asked.

Jinsu nodded.  “The virus got into the speed coding before I could alter it and there’s significant heat damage to some of the solar panel circuits, and if they go they could jeopardise the whole machine.  And the virus gets to parts of the code we have open and are viewing more quickly than parts which are droning along in the background.”

“One of the engines has gone completely and we’re on a backup generator to fossil-fuel a small backup engine,” Minseok told her.  “If we outright stop in the middle of the timestream, we’ll never be able to leave.  We won’t have enough energy reserves to.”

Jinsu hesitated, her hand hovering above the keys, as Baekhyun swallowed and looked up at Minseok.

“But doesn’t that mean the only way to stop is to. . . ?”  Jinsu also swallowed.  “Is to. . . lower the wards putting us into a vacuum that allowed the time travel, and crash-landing in whichever time period we get ejected into?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s really dangerous,” Jinsu said in a small voice.

“Gotta take risks in life,” Baekhyun interjected suddenly.  “Let’s do this.”

“Keep powering down,” Minseok told Jinsu.  “Leave the wards and the actual engines as long as you can.  I just need to warn people it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Worrying her bottom lip, Jinsu nodded and resumed what she’d been doing.  Baekhyun looked happily fired up, even rolling up his hoodie sleeves in readiness to override more system commands.  They made steady progress before Minseok returned.  He waved off Baekhyun’s question of “hyung, why is your head bleeding?” and leant over Jinsu’s shoulder, squinting at the screen.  He directed her to shut down several more things before placing a hand on her upper arm.

“Okay, now I want you to shut down the vacuum wards on one side of the Attayear.  It should send us into a spin, and as soon as you begin to feel that, shut down the other side and then power down completely.  We should be ejected from the timestream, but I can’t say what happens beyond that.  We’ll just have to pray.”

Jinsu squeezed her eyes shut as she finished off the manual command and waited for Baekhyun to sanction it.  The effect was instantaneous: like a car that had lost a wheel, the entire time machine started spinning around, and Minseok had to cling to the motherboard for stability as he reached across Jinsu to shut down the other set of wards with Baekhyun’s help.  There was a brief moment where the spinning seemed to stop, and then Baekhyun tapped down on the button again and the Attayear shot forward as though launched from a spring, sending all three of them tumbling on the floor.

It felt like being inside a large animal going through its death throes as they were tossed about.  Jinsu’s head cracked against Minseok’s and then against the chair wheels before a wild swing of the machine flung her under the motherboard again, where she collided with Baekhyun.  He immediately grabbed her around the middle and clung onto her (his eyes were tightly closed, so she reckoned he thought she was Minseok), and as they were thrown together again by the machine continuing to buck, she noticed that he’d latched his bare ankles around the thin metal table legs that were supporting the motherboard, and that the skin had broken on one of them so his foot was bleeding.  His grip on her was stronger with one hand than with the other, which actually made her more uncomfortable than the fact that he was holding her.  She was also pretty certain that she could hear him muttering “we’regonnadiedon’twannadieohmygodohmygodohmygod” under his breath, over and over and over.

The roughhousing seemed endless.  Jinsu tried counting to one hundred to stay calm, and then as high as she could in prime numbers because it was more satisfying, but she only managed 3449 before a particularly vicious jerk distracted her.  If not for Baekhyun clinging to her, she was convinced it would have been like being in a washing machine.  Finally, the tossing and turning slowed.  Baekhyun relaxed too early, though, and one last jolt sent him and Jinsu rolling back out towards the chairs.  Minseok was already pushing himself to his feet when Baekhyun let go of Jinsu with a groan, eyes still firmly shut.  Jinsu slid off him, but she was too rattled to stand up immediately.

“We had casualties in the boiler room before I left,” Minseok said groggily.  “I ought to go see how people are.”

Baekhyun gave a breathy chuckle that bordered on hysteric.  “Well, not bad.”

Jinsu and Minseok both looked to see that he was pointing at the Lintel.  They were under a hundred years out from the present.  Considering the loss of control, it was very impressive, but they’d barely hit the twelve-hour mark for travelling, which meant the speed they’d been going at was truly frightening.  They were very lucky the Attayear hadn’t disintegrated around them.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” Jinsu announced.

“We’re in Japanese colonial times,” Baekhyun added, as though that was the reason for Jinsu’s nausea.  He sat up, wincing.

“You two should get some rest,” Minseok told them.  “You’ve worked hard.”

Jinsu wanted to snort at the idea of Baekhyun working hard, because most of what he’d been doing was lifting a finger, but she kept that to herself.  Rest – sleep – it sounded like a very good idea.

With the chaos of the travel during the night, Jinsu was genuinely surprised to find herself with breakfast on a chair beside her bed when she woke up.  It was based around fruit and cold pastries this time, but she saw no reason to object to that.  She’d completely forgotten about the mystery chef in the turmoil and when she saw the food, she wondered how this person had had the care to continue making food for her when there were probably a million and one other things that everybody needed to be doing.