Jinsu was bad at meeting people halfway, she discovered.  Baekhyun was still taking whatever Kyungsoo had said to him terribly seriously, and after being a social outcast for so long, Jinsu was not at all sure how to take charge of the situation.  Sure, if he’d been like Minhwan and incapable of not insulting her every second breath, everything would have been dandy: she’d been getting better at the ripostes and more confident in delivering them, even if they did descend into your mum reparties.  But dealing with somebody so silent he was practically a ghost or not there the majority of the time when they had almost nothing in common?  Forget it.  It was much easier to laugh along with Kyungsoo and be oblivious to Baekhyun sitting on Kyungsoo’s other side on the bed, legs stretched out as he stared at the ceiling and chewed absently, lost in thought.  It spared her the awkwardness, at any rate.

At least, until after breakfast.  Baekhyun had left first with the trays, leaving Kyungsoo and Jinsu to chat – Kyungsoo wanted to know everything about the tribe that they’d met, and was suitably horrified at the suggestion she be sold to them (“reckon they’d be satisfied with Minhwan instead?”) – but after Jinsu had helped Kyungsoo taking his painkillers (he really could have done them himself, but instead he insisted on opening his mouth and chirping like a baby bird while she tipped the pills and water into it and nearly chooked himself to death for being such an idiot), she decided that she really ought to get on with some work and see what she could do about the Attayear’s virus situation while the time machine was not in transit.  Or how to maximise the energy and fuel efficiency, or cut fuel consumption without lowering efficiency, or anything of the sort.  Whatever she did, she didn’t fancy going back out into the snow and potentially being eyed up against a bride price of logs to burn.  Quite apart from anything else, there was no guarantee she’d be able to get back to the Attayear before it left if she was, well, sold, even temporarily to a local tribe.  She refused to sacrifice herself for something like that.  She knew that some people would consider that selfish, but Jinsu believed in the integrity of a person as a person, not as a thing, and the idea of having a price put on her felt more humiliating than being publicly egged and floured at school.

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the door opening just as she leant against it and reached for the handle, and she toppled out into the passage, completely off balance, and straight into somebody’s arms.  Her face collided with the boy’s torso, her nose squished against his chest, and she squeaked.

Hands grabbed at her shoulders immediately to steady her and he pushed her out to arm’s length.  Jinsu looked up, ready to thank him unless it was Minhwan or Youngdo, to find Baekhyun looking down at her, and the words died in .

He let go of her like he’d been electrocuted, and a split second later was backed up so hard against the railings Jinsu worried he might fall.  They stared at each other.

Baekhyun’s adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.

Jinsu swallowed uncomfortably.

He shuffled his feet a little.  She attempted to twiddle her thumbs, only to realise it was a bit too awkward with one arm in a sling.  Baekhyun looked like he might say something, but then he turned his head away, raising one arm to scratch at the back of his head, and peeked cautiously at her out of the corner of his eye.

Jinsu swallowed again.  Now would be a very good moment to thank him for launching the mini-satellites for them the previous night, and also for the hot chocolate.  All she needed to do was get the words out and try to sound sincere and—

“Your sleeve paws are different lengths,” she blurted out, her voice several octaves higher than her usual range.  Baekhyun jumped, hastily pulling his sleeves down over his hands.  Face flaming, Jinsu fled.

Beyond that incident, the morning was quiet.  Jinsu had heard some of the boys – Kyuhyun and Youngdo among them – discussing trying to find the tribe again when she snuck down to the main control room, and she suspected that almost all of them must have gone out, because nobody attempted to oust her from her position at the computer.

The virus progressed at a slower rate when not all the engines were running and the Attayear was not moving.  It was a pretty satisfying discovery, and Jinsu planned to put it to use where she could.  The knowledge that they had to stay put for the time being and the break out in the cold the previous day, not to mention no Baekhyun hovering at her shoulder, had given her mind time to calm and reset and think about other ways to look at what the virus was doing.  She’d been too preoccupied with the time running short and problems with controlling the Attayear to really take a step back before, to get out of the code and see what the virus was affecting on the surface.

Safe in the knowledge that the Attayear wasn’t going anywhere without Baekhyun pressing any buttons, and also that Baekhyun wasn’t anywhere around to press any buttons, Jinsu found her way into a test-run of the controls and instruments that she vaguely remembered Minseok having mentioned both before and after the virus had hit, and putting it through its paces as best she could to see how the Attayear had been affected for herself.

She discovered little things, like the fact that the fuel tanks were both verging on empty.  The explosions had damaged the Attayear enough for it to be listing, but somebody – it probably wasn’t Baekhyun because she suspected he would have told her, expecting some kind of praise in return, so maybe Kyuhyun or Junmyeon? – had managed to adapt the individual rooms so that the floors tilted to make up for the machine leaning just a few degrees in the wrong direction.  Some of the solar panels had blown out and needed repairs – not that solar panels would be able to get them an awful lot of energy in the current weather conditions.  Somebody had also shut down functions requiring energy for all the rooms that were currently not in use.  What really stood out, though, even though she’d known it before, was that the area the virus had messed up the most was navigation.  It was something they were going to have to contend with when the Attayear was travel-worthy again, but until that point, Jinsu was happy to stare in fascination at the 3D models on the scree