By Tuesday evening, Jinsu was feeling much better, and by Wednesday, she was anxious to get back to school before she began missing too much work.  Her father, however, had other ideas.

“Do tidy yourself up, Jinsu dear,” he told her when she emerged for breakfast.  “You’ll be in TV in an hour and a half.”

“But I have school.”

“This is more important.”  He slid a sheaf of papers across the kitchen table towards her as Mrs Kwon gave her a large bowl of rice and set about gathering her some side dishes.  “This is a list of questions the reporters weren’t able to ask you when you got off the Attayear because you weren’t feeling well.  You should have time to learn the answers before you have to leave the house, but don’t change any without running them past me first, please.”

Jinsu glanced down at the first page and saw that the question at the very top was the one on the reasonable parameters of how to responsibly use time travel.  The one after it was what it could be used for.  All it talked about was medical advancement and historical scholarship, and the potential for it to become commonplace.

“This is ridiculous,” she said in disbelief, pointing down at the question list.  “You’re never going to be able to keep it purely for medical advancement and historical research.  Maybe if it’s a private enterprise, but the Attayear technically belongs to the government at the moment even if you’re a private contractor and all you need is the wrong kind of lunatic getting their hands on it and deciding to change the outcome of the Korean War for everything to go horribly wrong.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.  “Does this mean you think it should be destroyed?” he asked sharply.

Jinsu was a bit too ticked off to back down immediately, not least because she wanted him to see her point.  “The Attayear’s currently a military secret, father.  That automatically means it’s a weapon.”

Her father’s gaze sharpened further.  “What on earth makes you think it’s a military secret?”

With a sinking feeling, Jinsu realised she’d slipped up, and masked any betrayal of that in her expression by turning towards her food and digging in.

“Well, you invited a number of military personnel along to the launch when it was completed, didn’t you?” she said with a shrug, trying to be nonchalant.  “I just assumed that was the case.  You were pretty secretive about what I could and couldn’t know about it.”

Park Jiwoon eyed her for several long moments as she spooned rice into , but her answer appeared to convince him, because he harrumphed and let it drop.

After her mistake in the kitchen, Jinsu thought it prudent to stick to the script for a while and do as her father wanted.  If she wasn’t careful, she could instigate a confrontation long before she was ready, and she didn’t want to do that until she at the very least had confirmation of a lawyer onside, for her own personal safety as much as anything else.  Her father had managed to shut Jimin up; she didn’t particularly want to find out what he’d do to shut her up, and she was also in no doubt that the instant he realised what she was planning, he’d set about destroying or falsifying any evidence he could get his hands on as well as paying off everybody he’d need to to get any legal challenges swinging in his favour.  He had resources; she didn’t: that meant that she had to be more resourceful with her strategy.  It was tank versus sniper.  Timing was crucial or he’d steamroller over her.

The interview was predictably boring, what with all the prepared questions and rehearsed answers.  Rather than changing the responses, Jinsu omitted one or two things she really disagreed with on the grounds that it could be attributed to not being able to remember absolutely everything.  Her father might get a bit annoyed, but it was small enough for him to get over.

To her surprise, when she left the TV station, it was her father’s work chauffeur rather than Sungwoo who was waiting to pick her up.  She hesitated by the car, wondering what was going on, before he prompted her politely to get in and then shut the door behind her.  Jinsu noticed that he was wearing smart white gloves – something Sungwoo had ditched several years back.

“Am I not going back home?” she asked when the chauffeur got into the front and started off down the street in the opposite direction to where Jinsu lived.

“No, Ma’am.  Mr Park has requested your presence at his place of work.”

“What for?”

“I couldn’t say, Ma’am.”

Bemused, and not a little worried, Jinsu sat back and watched the buildings of Seoul slip past.  It was a good forty-five minutes or so before they pulled up in front of the skyscraper the company owned.  Jinsu gulped nervously as she got out of the car, the chauffeur holding the door for her, and two security guards approached to her inside.  From there, it was an elevator ride up to the penthouse-style suite at the top that her father used as his office, where the two guards left her.

Her father’s PA, a pretty woman with a short pixie cut, showed her into her father’s office proper.  As she entered, Jinsu heard her own voice issuing out of a sound system, giving one of the replies she’d learnt for the interview earlier, and she realised that her father must be reviewing the footage before it went out on TV, no doubt in case she