Jinsu was still unwell enough for it to take her quite a long time to figure out exactly what had happened to the coding and what Baekhyun had managed to do.  The boys stayed with her while she trawled through the coding, eyebrows furrowed as she tried to make sense of it – large portions of it weren’t Tardis and were completely unfamiliar, and also completely unlike most coding she’d seen before in general – Minhwan sat a little way back with his arms crossed and his injured foot up on a second chair while Baekhyun was content to hover at Jinsu’s shoulder.  Eventually, the constant presence began to irritate Jinsu and she had to shoo him away.

Her eventual conclusion was that the Attayear’s ability to turn back time the way it had not only wasn’t in the original coding, it wasn’t even in the virus coding.  Instead, it was some kind of mongrel bi-product resulting from the clash of the two.  Even then, she didn’t fully understand how it happened or how it worked.  From what she could make out, Baekhyun had misunderstood a fair amount of the coding, in part because he had been panicking and in part because he wouldn’t have had a chance of understanding it anyway, and he’d set the whole thing on track when he mistook part of the coding about the time wards to be asking whether there was an internal or external problem when the question that had needed answering was whether extra vacuum wards were wanted inside or outside the main doors to attempt to stabilise them.  She had no idea how the science behind the rest of it worked, but he’d somehow managed to direct to turn some of the vacuum wards inwards, leaving enough of the rest of them in place surrounding the outside of the Attayear for them not to be expelled from the timestream, and to direct them to the specific point where she had been, which Jinsu reckoned had been through the system recognising her body heat or something.  Turning the wards in and giving them focus was all very well, but it didn’t explain how they’d managed to whip up a mini-timestream inside the Attayear, which was what had acted on her and brought her back.  Or maybe it had whipped up her personal timestream, if such a thing existed, and that was what it was altering.  Either way, it still didn’t make sense.

Baekhyun was dozing off, leaning against one of the motherboards, by the time Jinsu reckoned she’d finally managed to isolate the parts of the code that could be altered safely to try to bring people back.  Rubbing her eyes, she sat back in her chair.

“Done?” Minhwan asked her.  She nodded tiredly.

Minhwan took the opportunity to lob a pencil in Baekhyun’s direction to wake him up.  At some point while Jinsu had been working, Minhwan had got bored and started off a series of calculations, though what for, he wouldn’t say.  Baekhyun let out a yelp as the pencil glanced off his ear, but managed to save himself from falling onto the motherboard.  He glared at Minhwan but made no effort to retaliate.

“Grow up,” Jinsu grumbled around a yawn.  She wasn’t sure who she was directing that to, but it could easily have applied to both.  

“So what can you tell us?” Baekhyun asked.

“For a start.”  Jinsu stiffled a yawn.  “I have never seen code like that before.  It’s some kind of Tardis-virus hybrid baby.  There are whole strings of it I don’t understand.  But I reckon so long as we alter as little of it as possible, there won’t be a problem.  The main thing is the time we want to turn them back, which is here—” she highlighted the text, “—and the precise location of what we’re turning back time on, which is here.  And which could be much better specilised to really localise on the person we’re doing it to, which I imagine will be safer for the machine.  Oh, and it’s probably a good idea to keep it in the atrium.  I don’t know if the rest of the Attayear has the capability of turning enough of its wards inwards.  Best to use this in an area we know it’ll work.”

“That’s everything?” Minhwan asked.

“No,” said Jinsu, “but it’s about as much to you as I can definitely explain, and that’s all you need to know to make it function.  I think.”

“You think,” Minhwan echoed.  There was definitely some kind of judgement in his voice, but Jinsu was too tired to be bothered by it.

“I’m going to bed,” she announced, staggering to her feet.  “I still feel sick.”

Baekhyun automatically moved to go with her, but Jinsu shook her head at him.

“Just wake me up when we land.  It should be about eight and a half hours.”

The Kazakh Steppe was beautiful in its semi-aridness, but it offered virtually no cover to the Attayear.  Few trees grew in the area, though there were bushes, and it made Jinsu feel vulnerable.  Baekhyun voiced as much as well as he fiddled with his broken watch.  He’d made sure to set up the satellites before dragging Jinsu out with him and they had been pleasantly surprised to see three extra dots denoting other watch-wearers a mile or two to the north-east.  Either Baekhyun had been almost flawlessly accurate with his calculations for where Jongdae and co. had landed, or he’d been extremely lucky and by coincidence they’d managed to move towards where the Attayear would eventually land.

“We should only be an hour or so after they ended up here,” he said nervously.  “We’ll probably cross paths with them.  They’ll come to meet us with the watches guiding them in.”  He sniffed.  Looking past him, Jinsu could see that the sun was beginning to set in the west, orange streaking across the sky and in the distance, reflecting off the surface of the Caspian Sea.  “At least we know we’ll be able to see them when we’re near.  Sehun’ll be the tallest thing in this landscape.”

There was a loud yell of “Byun!” from inside the Attayear.  Groaning, Baekhyun turned back and went inside.

Jinsu stood for a few moments on her own, just taking in the place.  It wasn’t winter and it wasn’t raining – in fact, she reckoned from the colour of the vegetation that it might even be spring or early summer – which made a big change from Siberia and the weather in Korea during the 1900s.  The place was utterly deserted when it came to people – animals too, as far as she could see, which she considered to be a good thing for the time being – and so after a moment’s contemplation, she pulled out her phone to take a couple of photos.  She doubted she’d get another chance to see this corner of the world in this time again.

Baekhyun rejoined her as she was tucking her phone away and did a double take.

“You’re wearing my cloak,” he said as they set off.

“You gave it to me.  It’s international dress across the centuries, so I figured on the off chance we run into somebody, nobody’ll think I look weird.”

“You seem to wear it a lot.”

Jinsu snorted.  “Yes, Baekhyun, I like it.  Are you done fishing for compliments?”

He slung an arm around her shoulders.  “How long is a piece of string?”

Exasperated, Jinsu didn’t reply.  It was best not to feed Baekhyun’s ego.  The better option sidle closer so his arm was tighter around her, and to lean her head obnoxiously hard on his shoulder.  Baekhyun was a cheeky nuisance with his words, but he was a gentleman with his actions.  Jinsu was pretty sure if she’d asked him to carry her that he would have acquiesced.  He would have grumbled first, of course, but she was dead certain he was too sappy to refuse.

As they continued walking in comfortable silence, Jinsu’s thoughts drifted.  She wondered how many opportunities they’d have to do something as casual and carefree as walking around with their arms around each other when they returned home.  It would be nice to get out into nature.  It would feel. . . like they’d managed to find something of their trip into the past still there in the present.  She could look up national parks and get Sangwoo to drive them out – except there was the problem of her father finding out about Baekhyun.  He’d ground her for life if he thought they were cavorting off anywhere together.  She didn’t want to think what he’d do to Baekhyun’s family.

“Are we still going on that Daegu date when we get back?” she asked absently.

“It’s a date now, is it?”

Jinsu elbowed Baekhyun lightly in the ribs.

“Yes,” he sa