In spite of Park Jinyoung’s rude brush-off the other day, Jisoo was still curious. She still wanted to know a little more about what it was they were here for. Unfortunately, the only available reading material on the subject was Jinyoung’s dissertation itself, so she had settle for that. Her father has excused himself to his tent for a late afternoon nap, so Jisoo was lounging in his deck chair in the rest area. In the deck chair next to her, Song Minho was sunbathing, with sunglasses and his shirt off and everything. 

“What are you reading?” he asked.

Jisoo sighed. “Park Jinyoung’s dissertation,” she said. “I’m just suddenly interested in this paleoanthropology thing, but asking him about it is out of the question.”

Minho scoffed. “You know, I went to school for paleoanthropology, too, Chichu,” he said, and Jisoo inwardly cringed at his use of her nickname. She didn’t remember telling him he could use it.

“If there’s something you want to know, you can ask me,” Minho said. Jisoo looked up from the paper and tilted her head at him.

“I didn’t know you were a paleoanthropologist, Minho,” she said. “When did that happen? The last thing I really heard about you was that you were interning at Antiquities, but I didn’t know you got licensed, too.”

Minho’s sunglasses hid his slightly irked expression. 

“I got my license the same year as our Mr. Park Jinyoung, in fact,” he said, still keeping his face turned to the sun.

“Did you do any fieldwork?” Jisoo asked.

“Some.”

“Why don’t you do more, then?”

Minho’s jaw twitched. 

“Because I have a job at the Department, making sure troublemakers like Mr. Park keep to the behavioral code,” he said. “It’s actually a very important job, Jisoo, and I don’t really appreciate you questioning my role here.”

She raised a brow at him, which he didn’t see because he was too busy sunbathing. 

“I didn’t,” Jisoo said. “I was just curious. I mean, don’t you want to be doing field work?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? This is the field, I am here, working. This counts as fieldwork.”

Jisoo glanced at him, soaking up the sun and begged to differ. But she kept her thought to herself.

“Yeah, but I mean…” Jisoo said, pausing a moment. “Don’t you want to be the leading paleoanthropologist on an excavation of your own? Don’t you want to scout find spots and dig up deserts and mountains? Don’t you want to find a hominid skeleton, too, someday?”

He sighed. 

“Everyone in this field dreams of finding a skeleton, Chu,” he said. “But there’s a difference between dreams and delusions. Park Jinyoung? Delusional. Everyone wants to find a skeleton, but the truth is, there really aren’t many to find. Plenty of paleoanthropologists much better than I waste their time on these wild goose chases. In reality, men like me who choose to work in administrative roles, we get more done than men like—say—our Mr. Park Jinyoung here. The world of academia relies on the steady work of men like me.”

Jisoo examined Minho for a moment. It was almost surreal to think that he had the same occupation as the stiff leading this excavation. They were both paleoanthropologists, Minho and Jinyoung, but the two couldn’t be more different in their approaches. Minho’s voice didn’t lilt with passion and vulnerability when he spoke of his work the way Jinyoung’s did.

“You really should put that paper away,” Minho said when he noticed Jisoo keeping quiet. “Don’t you know you lose six brain cells for every one word you read of that dissertation?”

She looked down at the paper. She had gone about three-quarters of the way in.

“I mean… it’s far-fetched for sure,” Jisoo said. “But… I think the logic of his points are pretty sound, and he crafts his argument really elegantly. Actually, his writing has a kind of… lyrical quality.”

“Maybe he should drop paleoanthropology and be a poet, instead,” Minho laughed.

Jisoo pursed her lips. “I mean, I don’t know much about paleoanthropology, but—,”

“No, you don’t know much about paleoanthropology at all,” Minho interrupted. He took his sunglasses off and then turned and looked at her. 

“Anyway, don’t worry yourself with all this stuff,” he said, smiling. “You really should be wearing a hat. The sun’s intense out here. Honestly, you were Social’s Heiress of the Year 2016, but if anything happens to your pretty skin out here, 2017 will slip right out of your fingers. You should be careful.”

Jisoo huffed her breath. Honestly, winning Heiress of the Year had been nothing but a burden.

“You know I don’t really care about what that stupid tabloid says about me or my appearance anyway,” she said through gritted teeth. “Besides, this is my skin, thank you very much, and I’ll scorch it out here if I want to.”

She set the paper aside, stood, and began walking away from the rest area. Minho lifted his sunglasses and watched her stalk away.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” Jisoo called back.

Minho scoffed and let his sunglasses settle back onto the bridge of his nose. That Kim Jisoo sure was a spirited girl, he thought. 

“Be sure not to wander too far, Chichu.”

Jisoo fought back the shiver that traveled up her spine when he called her ‘Chichu’ again. It was fine when her father called her by that name because, well, he was her father, a parent. It was weird when a boy scarcely older than she was used it. Minho pronounced it in such an odd way, too. Something about the tone of his voice when he said it just made it sound even weirder.

She shook those thoughts from her head. She had walked away from the rest area because she was annoyed with the direction her conversation with Minho had taken, but she wasn’t exactly sure where she was going. Jisoo stopped just before she could actually enter the dig site.

Jackson and Yugyeom were crouched down in one of the square holes, carefully sifting through the dirt and dust. Bambam was directing some of the other staff to move the bulkier pieces to the rock pile beyond the tents. Mark was helping Youngjae with a bit of surveying, and Doyoung was busy taking inventory of their equipment. 

Everyone was busy. There was no one she could talk to. 

Then she happened to look up again at the bright red flowers lining the tops of the cliffs, and she remembered that Jinyoung had pointed out a slope near the southern end of the valley where she could hike up to the hibiscus bushes. 

She sighed. Why not?

The climb up the slope wasn’t too strenuous, but it was a bit of a hike. Jisoo didn’t realize it until she finally reached the top of the cliffs where the forest treelike began that she had run out of breath. The red of the bushes up here was even more intense from the view down below. She walked into the middle of them, holding her hands out to brush against the petals and the leaves. Yellow pollen stuck to her fingers.

Jisoo walked closer to the edge of the cliff to get an aerial view of the site. From up here, she could see all the five-square meter holes that the staff had dug up, and she saw the roped off area that still needed to be dug up. Minho was still sitting in