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The night of the assassination attempt came far too soon.

Jandi hadn’t seen her husband since her coerced lunchtime visit to the palace; she rather suspected he was still cloistered in some meeting room with the Empress Dowager making elaborate plans, and with all her heart, she hoped those plans were strategies for foiling the assassination attempt. How will I live with myself if I’m wrong and they don't know about the assassination? What if Kyungsoo and the Empress Dowager are planning something else entirely and have no idea there’s going to be an attempt? Their blood will be on my hands!

And as Jandi knew all too well, the blood of one innocent girl on her hands was far too much already.

Please don’t let me have misinterpreted their words, she prayed, hugging her knees to her chest and pressing her back against the wall of the closet. There were only a few hours left before dawn, and now, under the cover of darkness, would be an ideal time for the plotters to strike. Taking a deep breath, Jandi checked one last time that the gap between the closet door and floor was thoroughly blocked by a scarf, then switched the handheld radio on.

For a moment, only white noise reigned, and Jandi feared that it was too late, the assassination had already been carried out the mission had been completed. But a few horrible seconds later, the radio buzzed to life with a jolt.

“Code Red! I repeat, this is Firefly. Code Red.”

“What the hell is -”

“What do you mean Code Red -”

“ - going on over there, you said -”

“Everything was ready yesterday, I -”

“ - Red! They -”

Pressing her ear against the radio, Jandi strained to make out the different voices as they all overlapped and shouted over each other.

“They’ve all gone missing from the arsenal, and who -”

“How is that possible? Firefly, you said you just checked them yesterday!”

“ - the key, and -”

“How are we supposed to carry out an assassination attempt without weapons?”

“ - responsible for this? I’ll have their heads, I will!”

“No funds left over, and -”

“For God’s sake, I don’t know!”

“ - supposed to do with all the villagers we’ve gathered?”

Jandi hardly dared to breathe. Was she hearing this correctly? Was this a dream? Could it truly be that all the weapons prepared for the assassination attempt had mysteriously vanished the night of the attack?

The voices on the radio continued to grow more and more agitated, and Jandi struggled to follow along. “What choice do you think we have? How do you propose we get through palace security with no weapons of any sort? That’s a suicide mission. I -”

“ - pulling my people! If you lot want to go get thrown to the wolves, then -”

“ - but the plans!”

“Just accept it! What’s more important is figuring out what the hell happened to the weapons and how you managed to lose track of an entire grain elevator full of guns and ammunition.”

The voices erupted into angry shouts of accusations and blame, and Jandi shoved the radio under a blanket, not wanting sound to escape the closet. 

Unprompted, a grin of disbelief and stunned amazement made its way onto her lips, and she felt the absurd urge to giggle with the sheer joy and relief of the moment. Kyungsoo! It must have been Kyungsoo and those plans he was working on with the Empress Dowager for so long. It certainly explained why he had been so stressed and busy lately, working long hours and rushing around with an omnipresent frown. He had only relaxed and lost that horrible, worried look yesterday, which was when he must have had the weapons stolen from the grain elevator.

Flopping down on her back with a cushy pile of sweaters underneath her head, Jandi felt as if the burden of the sky upon her shoulders had been removed with this one radio conversation. Without weapons of any sort, surely the assassination attempt couldn’t proceed. It did seem rather short-sighted of the plotters though, she thought with a frown, to have concentrated all their weapons in one area. They must be a rather poorly organized group, or at least one with very little experience in this sort of business. It would explain why they use walkie-talkies with frequencies accessible by old radios like this one, as well - no source of funds for more discreet forms of communication, perhaps.

Yesterday, she had tried to find the same frequency on the larger radio that had been in her room when she arrived, but to no avail. Due to government censorship, radios these days could only access certain state-controlled frequencies. That, at least, had explained why Jongin had given her such an old model. But the mystery of why exactly Jongin had provided her with the radio, why he’d had it in his pocket in the first place, and how Kyungsoo and the Empress Dowager had learned of the assassination attempt themselves still niggled in the back of her mind.

Questions for another day, Jandi decided, still deliriously relieved that the assassination attempt had been foiled. Oh! The radio! Rolling over and patting the pile of clothes under her in search of the radio, she frowned. After realizing that such an old model of radio probably used different batteries than were used in the newer ones, she had decided to use the radio as sparingly as possible to preserve its lifespan.

After a few seconds of blind groping, her fingers closed around the familiar, cool plastic of the radio, which was still buzzing softly. The conversation had quieted significantly, which made her frown. She had expected them to still be arguing, considering the way they had been going on earlier. Peering closer, Jandi realized with a jolt that when she had smothered the radio under the clothes, she must have accidentally turned a knob, switching to a different frequency. She pressed her ear to the radio. Now, only one voice was speaking, very softly and deliberately.

“Seven. Six. Seven. Four. Three. Two. Seven. Eight. Seven. Stop.”

Jandi froze, feeling as if her blood had turned to ice and shattered within her veins.

The last time she had heard that voice, it had been screaming for her father-in-law to stop as she was dragged away in a haze of pain by dozens of terrified hands.

Hyemin.

***

“Jandi?” Kyungsoo stuck his head in through the open door of the library and smiled when he spotted her curled up in an armchair. “I thought I’d find you in here.”

Startled, Jandi marked her spot in the book and set it down in her lap. She hadn’t really been reading anyway, just staring blankly at the words in an attempt to come to terms with what she had heard earlier that day. It was hard to concentrate on anything but the fact that Hyemin was alive, alive, alive, not six feet under the ground, and that Kyungsoo had lied to her about the girl’s death. From what she knew of Kyungsoo, he likely had a good reason for doing so that he would never tell her, which had frustrated her to the point of tears earlier that morning, now leaving her numb and in desperate need of a more engaging distraction than a book.

“I didn’t know you had come home already,” she sa