Chen rang on Monday afternoon while Yeonhee was in the middle of painting a vase full of spring flowers for her grandmother.  She set the phone on speaker so that she could continue.

“I’m going to start with the good news,” he told her, “which is that there’s nothing currently suspicious in your room.  It looks like it was just the mug and the plant pot.  I’ve added extra security and encryption to your laptop, too, but you’re going to have to make sure you don’t let anybody use it except for you.  Don’t even let your friends borrow it for the time being.”

It was definitely the same voice as the cheekbones man who’d approached her after the panel discussion, which gave Yeonhee a lot of relief.

“The bad news,” Chen went on, “is that this stuff is seriously hi-tech.  I think you’re being targeted by their action groups, not just Antiroyo’s main front.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Yeonhee said as she carefully mixed a light purple from her oil paints.  “My ex-boyfriend told me yesterday that Antiroyo apparently has their eye on me as their poster girl or something.”

“Not an awful lot about Antiroyo does make sense,” Chen agreed.  “Our intelligence currently tells us that they have the radical action branch, which essentially devotes itself to terror and other acts of violence and assassinations and meddling and whatnot, and then they have a more peaceable front which is more of a campaigning lobby to give them a more approachable, peaceable public-friendly face.  If they manage to get a young, pretty, intelligent girl who’s already known to the public and popular to boot as the main face of their cause, it will give them a lot more traction, particularly among the youth, and it will also give them much more credibility.  You’re still highly respected in the republican movement, although that’s going to tank the second it’s discovered you’re dating the prince.”

“But why are they spying on me, in that case?” Yeonhee asked.

Chen sighed heavily on the other end.  “My guess is either that they’re trying to learn more about you so that they make you an offer you can’t refuse, or they intend to blackmail you into it.  Or they want to bring you down – one of those if we can’t have her, nobody can things.”

“I’m not that influential.”

“No, but if the republican movement is discredited, which it will be among students if they can somehow get rid of you, the public-friendly side of Antiroyo could easily slip into the gap.  They’d become the new face of separationism.  The student tension among the Hanmi and Zenyu communities at the moment would like drive most of the student population straight into their arms.  We also can’t rule out the possibility that they suspect something between you and his highness.”

Yeonhee paused in her paint mixing, biting her lip.

“We got the poinsettia before it could conceivably cause any damage,” Chen went on.  “And when I’m talking hi-tech, I mean hi-tech.  They had a miniature camera on the label on the pot, and there were a pair of very powerful little microphones hidden in a false bottom the pot had.”

The paintbrush nearly slipped from Yeonhee’s nerveless grip.  “They put a camera in my room?”

“Yes.  It was pointing towards the door, from the position I found the plant pot in, but that might just have been because you and your friend both moved it.”

Yeonhee didn’t have any words to respond to that with.  Shakily, she exhaled, and tried to calm herself down by focussing making the crocus she’d mixed the paint for take shape.

“Regarding the bugged mug,” Chen went on, “my professional opinion that you fortuitously broke it before they could glean anything useful from it still stands.  I’ve checked it thoroughly, and the transmission it was capable of sending out was very weak, so unless they had something to pick it up either within your room or directly outside, I sincerely doubt that anything much will have gone through.  It might have been strong enough for them to get snippets of words very occasionally, but the flashes of transmission strong enough for that were very few and far between, so I don’t think they will have got anything useful from it.  We’re talking nanoseconds’ worth here.  They barely will have got enough sound from any clips to be sure of making out words or voices.”

“That’s good,” Yeonhee mumbled.

“And I did check outside the room, by the way,” he said.  “The only thing capable of picking up transmissions or being hacked to pick up transmissions is the wifi repeater, but it didn’t have anything suspicious on it whatsoever.  I’ve got a remote watch on it now so I can make sure nothing further happens on that front.”

“That’s good,” Yeonhee repeated.  “Thank you.”

“Still, you need to be careful,” he said.  “I don’t have any fingerprints or DNA to go on with this – all I could pull from the mug was you and Minseok and all I could get from the plant pot was you and a fingerprint that was on your phone screen when I looked over your phone, and I’m assuming that’s from your male friend, because the fingerprints were recent enough for it to be around the time I spoke to you on the phone the first time.”  He hesitated.  “The only thing the camera will have got from its brief time in your room is the song line-up for your friends’ debut album, which would be disappointing for them if it got leaked to the public, but ultimately not that much of a problem.”

“Do you think there is a danger that somebody’s following me and Yixing?” she asked anxiously.  After the two buzz questions the previous day, both of which had made it into the media reports because they had the most complex and controversial answers and opinions surrounding them, she couldn’t deny being very worried about some people genuinely just having it in for the prince.  The outlook of Antiroyo that Sohye had been so keen to promote was an obvious example of it, but so was the very notion that he might be on a power-grab mission.  It clearly wasn’t just limited to Antiroyo, either, because Jiyong had mentioned it again over dinner and most of the dinner conversation had revolved around the king’s health and what the prince was likely to do about it.  Yeonhee had kept quiet for as much of the discussion as was humanly possible, pleading tiredness and a headache, and Sehun, who had been sitting next to her, wouldn’t stop shooting her concerned glances.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Chen said sombrely.  “Even if nobody’s caught onto the pair of you just yet, there’s every possibility you’re being individually followed, and that some kind of connection will be made sooner or later.”

Yeonhee nodded to herself.  That made perfect sense.

“I don’t know how much of the talk you were at yesterday,” she said, “but there was at least one person from Antiroyo there.  She spoke to me afterwards.”

“Really?”  Chen didn’t sound too surprised.  “Any names?”

“Kim Sohye.  She’s around my age, publicity officer for the student section of the site.  She was the one who posed the question about the implications of the king’s life support being turned off.”

Chen said nothing for a good few moments, the silence on the line only broken by what sounded like him typing rapidly away on a keyboard.

“She’s annoyingly bubbly,” Yeonhee grumbled.  “Comes across as a total airhead.”

“Hang on a second,” Chen mumbled back.  “Let me just add her to the list of people to run checks on.”  More tapping at a keyboard, and then he came properly back online.  “I can’t say she’s been on our radar before, but it’s a little worrying somebody from Antiroyo is asking those kinds of questions and I’m willing to bet it was planted.”

“Planted?”

“Yes – to get the public thinking about it.  It got picked up by the media this morning.  We did the same thing with getting Minseok’s cousin to ask the question he did because we knew the media would be there  and that it was likely to get picked up by the news and therefore enter into the public consciousness so that mischief-makers won’t be able to cause the royal family trouble when it comes out later this week that the prince has been given power of attorney along with his mother.  If the public is thinking about the possibility of the royal family deliberately shutting off his majesty’s life support as a power-snatch to solve the current political situation or to get the prince out of a limbo, if anybody then shuts it off for any reason, whether or not it’s considered a medical necessity, there will always be a number of people who suspect foul play.  If it’s actually shut off in a situation that looks like foul play, only radical groups and the palace are going to be blamed for it, too.”

“Do you think they were doing it to set the prince up to take a fall?” Y