There's a faint clicking noise. I pull the blankets up over my shoulder and bury my head in the pillow. Drip. Drip. Drip. It's as if someone forgot to turn off a faucet somewhere in the distance.

(ﾒ￣▽￣)︻┳═一

I yawn under my thick comforter and rub at my eyes. I couldn't fall asleep for a long time last night, and all I want to do is roll over and burrow farther under my comforter. But the light is already peeking through the edges of the heavy curtain and I want to talk to Sejeong about that horribly assembly before we have to go to class.

The books Sejeong gave me are with me in bed, where I passed out reading them. I stretch and wince. My muscle are sore from all the sparring exercises Sehun and I did.

I toss off the covers and swing my legs out. When my feet hit the cold stone, there's something gritty under my toes, and I yank them back up. Something's wrong. There's never dirt on the floor; they keep this place spotless. I kneel on my bed, my mind racing through every terrible thing that could possibly be on that stone, and I pull back the curtains, letting the morning light spill in.

When I look back at the floor, I start to scream but stop myself so fast it sounds like a strangled yelp. Next to my bed, written in dark brown smears, are four words: You will be eliminated.

English. Eomma and Uncle Jin  are half American and spoke in English when I was young. Uncle Jin still does sometimes. I'm not amazing with it, but I can translated that easily.

I immediately look at my bedroom door. The lock's no longer in place. My adrenaline spikes and I run to get Sejeong. I knock on her door and vigorously brush off the bottom my feet.

Within two seconds she unlatches her door. She takes note of my spooked expression. "What happened?"

"I don't . . Come here," I say, leading her back to my room.

Sejeong walks in, freezes as though someone pressed a pause button, and them resumes her fast pace. She knells down my floor and sniffs at the brown smears and scattered droplets. "That's . . . blood," she says, confirming what I already suspected.

I immediately think of Kai and Sehun and whole traumatic bloody scene in the dining hall yesterday. I swallow. "I can't imagine that anyone is walking around carrying blood to write a message in," I say mostly to myself.

"No," Sejeong confirms. "It's highly unlikely."

"Which means someone must have cut themselves in my room?" I shudder, immediately pulling up a mental image. "So creepy. Who would do that?"

Sejeong shakes her head. "Someone who was going out their way to scare you, that's who. And someone cocky. It took time to write this while you slept, as opposed to slipping in with a message that has already been written out and just placing it on the floor."

The thought that someone was in my bedroom, bleeding a warning onto my floor while I slept through the whole thing, makes me want to march right back to Kang's office and demand to leave again. If she hasn't threatened me with that dungeon, I would head there in my nightgown, etiquette be damned.

"The worst part is, I vaguely remember hearing something," I admit to Sejeong. "Although what I would I have done if I woken up and found someone here? Fought them?"

She looks up at me. "I can't imagine that would have gone well for you. And whoever it was probably had something sharp with them."

"Taemin or Jennie?" I ask.

"It's possible," she says. "They have every reason to be angry with you after the way things ended with Kai yesterday. Even though he was a newish addition to their group, Jennie was dating him and Taemin fully accepted him as part of their unit. That alliance was a bond. They would do almost anything to protect and defend each other."

I nod and find myself wondering if Sejeong and Sehun might ever feel that way about me. "What about Rose? Given the unpredictable factor?" I ask.

Sejeong exhales audibly. "This is her kind of game, but it's clear that the letters were formed by someone who is right handed, and Rose's left-handed. Granted, she could have written them with her right hand to confuse things, but she, unlike most people, typically likes to take credit for her threats. And the width of the is bigger than hers, or she used her thumb. Or there was more than one person - Jimin, for example. But all things considered, I would say Taemin is more likely."

I blink at her. Her brain is amazing.

"We need to clean this up," she says. "Sohee is going to be here any minute."

My eyes widen. "Clean it up? Don't we need to tell -"

"No," Sejeong says forcefully, and takes the washcloth off my dresser. She dips it in the basin and starts scrubbing up the blood. "If we bring Kang into this, we will get hit with retaliation twice as hard. It's just not how we do things here."

"But how do we explain that much blood on the -" I whisper, and Sejeong hushes. The latch on the main door rattles.

With lightning speed, Sejeong grabs my empty water glass, wraps the cloth around it, and uses a book from my bedside table to crush it.

In the next second, she somehow scatters the glass without making a sound, motioning for me to join her on the floor. The she picks up a shard and grabs my hand. My eyes widen. She nicks me on the palm and I wince but refrain from shouting.

Sohee knocks lightly and comes into my room. Her eyes widen at the sight of blood dripping down my palm onto the floor. But I have to hand it to Sejeong: there is nothing all that out of the ordinary about a sleepy girl who knocked over her water glass and then cut herself trying to clean it up.