“You’re kidding, right?” Haseul brandished her fingers in front of Hyunjin’s face. “You took out the knives?” 

Hyunjin held her gaze. “You’re on one of the most secure ships in this system. You’re not getting a weapon.” 

“My fists are part metal,” Haseul held them up, “that’s a weapon.” 

She smiled. “My hands’re also a weapon.” She lifted a foot clad in a very heavy looking boot. “So’s this.” 

Haseul lowered her hands. “You win.” 

Hyunjin laughed. “You need to stop with this tough act. It didn’t work when we caught you, it won’t work at all now either.” 

“It didn’t work when you caught me, because you set me up.” 

“We had good timing,” Heejin corrected. She was holding a case, one she put in front of Haseul. 

Haseul looked at it. 

“First part of the job.” Heejin gave her a smile. It was almost more threatening than Hyunjin’s glare. “Research.” 

She opened it, revealing two thick piles of paper. Some of it was handwritten, in a scrawl only a scientist could manage. 

“These aren’t on any computers, because, well,” Heejin gave her a pointed look, “certain people could gain access to it.” 

Haseul just smiled back at her. “This’s from Artemis, isn’t it?”

Heejin frowned. “How do you know that?” 

“The paper,” Haseul lifted a sheet, “and ink that’s got a little metal in it.” Then she grinned. “But thanks for confirming where your top secret operation was done.” She moved one of the stacks out of the case and flipped through the first few pages. “Jung Jinsoul really is a remarkable woman, isn’t she?” 

She almost laughed at how the other two froze. 

Then she looked back to the pages. There were two other bits of writing she didn’t recognise. It was all dated, the earliest being ten years ago, with a rudimentary plan for emergency preservations in the case of an accident. The latest was two years ago, right at the bottom of the second pile of papers. That one described the procedure for transferring cells that aged properly. It hadn’t been written by Jinsoul, because the writing was actually neat. 

“You missed something.” Hyunjin tapped the case. She was fighting a smile. 

Haseul looked, only to find that there was a sticky note. 

“She still uses those?” She peeled it off the bottom of the case. 

To whoever is going through my team’s notes (sorted, by the way, this is far from everything). 

If you rip any one of these papers, or my computers pick up on the information being sent through space, I’ll send a cybernetic shark after you. They’ve already made the trip between Kepler and Artemis. Don’t push your luck. 

Haseul put the sticky note back down. “How’d you manage to convince her to hand them over?” 

“Vivi’s likeable,” Heejin replied. “And persuasive.” She sat down across from her. “Want anything while you go through that? Water? Something stronger? A snack?” 

“Both?” Haseul flicked through until she got to something on the brain. Jinsoul wasn’t a neuroscientist, but a biologist. She knew things about the body that Haseul could only dream of, which was how Viian still had scar tissue and working blood vessels. “Vivi?” 

“Not a name you’ll ever use in your lifetime,” Hyunjin said. 

“So,” Heejin turned back, “what’ll it be?” 

“Tea,” Haseul replied. “And something sweet, maybe cereal, or whatever the royalty eat for that.” 

“We have cereal,” Heejin nodded at Hyunjin, “so get her that and a pot of black tea.” 

Hyunjin’s expression soured, but she left. 

Haseul stared at Heejin. “Are you secretly related to the queen or something?” 

Heejin smiled. “Hyun’s used to me being like that,” she replied. “And she usually repays the favour.” 

Haseul was suddenly grateful for her unbearable experiences in Eden, spent watching two pairs narrowly avoiding each other on their respective orbits. She knew the signs. 

And that was exactly the case here. Wonderful. 

“Vivi said you’d recognise this stuff,” Heejin said, peering at one page, before frowning and shaking her head. “And that you’d get back into it pretty quickly.” 

“You didn’t?” Haseul raised a brow. 

“Well,” she stretched her arms above her head, “let’s just say I’m hesitant.” She looked at her out of one eye. “You’ve been out of this field for how long? Eight years?” 

“Nine.” She pulled the oldest papers over to her. They were legitimately the first rudimentary blueprints for reconstructing the circulatory system. Jinsoul had even been trying to think of a way to make a robotic lung. 

Except the queen seemed to breathe normally, so she probably still had her lungs. 

Or Jinsoul had managed to make an equivalent to lungs that weren’t made of steel cylinder, filters, and tubes. 

“And what would you say are the odds that you can get the virus out of her head?” 

Haseul narrowed her eyes. “I can’t exactly tell you that if I don’t even know what kind of virus is in there.” 

“Well,” Heejin folded her hands together, “I can’t get it out without the nerves getting corrupted. Vivi can barely focus on it without her head feeling like it’ll split open.” 

“So your queen is like that,” Haseul said. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say outright that the queen wasn’t fully organic. “And you only have two people on the ship who can even try and fix her? One of which actually being the queen?”

“Now three,” Heejin replied. “If you can do it.” 

“I can do it.” She put away a first little stack of papers. That was all background information, nothing that was actually going to help with knowing how to extract that virus. “I just have to know what I’m actually dealing with.” 

What she knew so far was that it got worse when Viian used whatever control she had on the tech around her. And now Heejin had pretty much told her the virus had gotten into her neurons, which had to mean they were synthetic. Viian was also being blocked from fixing herself. Somehow.

“And for that you also need to know how she works,” Heejin said. “Because enough of her is human that we can’t just repair her if something goes wrong.” 

Haseul frowned and went for the papers from around the accident. She winced when she saw a picture of the queen, covered in wounds, with an arm missing. The rest couldn’t be seen, thankfully.

Heejin took it away in the next moment. “I don’t know why Jinsoul needed to keep that in there,” she shook her head, “we erased all evidence that the explosion had been successful.” She tore it from the paper, before catching Haseul’s eye. “Don’t worry, Jinsoul will know it was me. And she also knows she can’t send a robot after me.” She looked for other papers with pictures of the queen, tearing those away as well. 

Hyunjin came back then. She set the tray down with surprising gentleness. She had a scowl on her face. 

“You say one wrong word,” she muttered, before sitting down beside Heejin. She pulled out a reading tablet. 

“What’re you reading?” Haseul resisted the urge to lean forward. Something like that could be hacked, but all she’d get would be Hyunjin’s reading habits and the database from where she got those books. Haseul didn’t need either of them, even if she was interested if the girl read about blood and gore, or romance. 

“The Art of Silence,” Hyunjin replied. “By Dr. Jo Haseul.” 

Haseul grimaced. “Can we please not use the doctor?” 

Both of them looked at her, one confused, the other surprised. 

“Is this where you tell us the title’s fake?” Heejin asked. 

Haseul shook her head. “It’s very real.” More than eight years of work, going from the academy to the university, and then the lab. 

“Then what’s the matter with it?” Hyunjin raised a brow. “Not proud of it anymore?” 

Haseul wasn’t sure if she liked it when Hyunjin was being inquisitive. It felt like that was Heejin’s job. 

She went through the next papers. They described the extent of Viian’s injuries and how they’d gotten her over there. They’d gotten to her in time to preserve her brain, but her heart had stopped beating. They must’ve already been working closely with the right people, because they’d had the machines necessary to keep the brain supplied with oxygen. At least until they’d reached Jinsoul and her team. 

Haseul kept rereading the bit on the attack. Then she compared it to the aftermath. The explosion had been on Viian’s ship, before it had taken off. Three crew members had been badly injured, two just with burns, but Viian had caught the worst of the blast. The others had been taken to hospital. Viian had been carried off to Artemis. 

The explosion had killed her. She hadn’t been horribly injured, or close to the brink of death, but dead.

“Did you catch them?” Haseul asked. 

Hyunjin and Heejin looked up. They’d been reading together. 

Haseul chuckled. “Am I disturbing you two?”

“I can always take those fingers off you,” Hyunjin said. “Again.” 

Haseul hid her hands behind her back. “Back to my question, did you catch the ones that did it?” 

“The ones who’d actually caused the explosion,” Hyunjin replied. “Not enough from the people who’d organised it.” She looked ashamed. 

She tried not to looked too surprised. Finding criminals in the galaxy was quite the chore, so most petty crimes weren’t even chased after. Even bigger crews weren’t followed if they avoided messing things up completely. Artemis was practically a hub for certain syndicates, while the entire Kepler system was overrun with smugglers, illegal trades, and a few other things. Haseul missed it. 

“I know,” Hyunjin sighed, “the chances that they made the virus are high and we’re working on it.” 

“So I’m the backup plan?” Haseul asked. “You catch them, you probably have the guarantee to get it out. You don’t, you’ll just have to wish I can do it.” 

“And if we find them, Vivi doesn’t have the virus, then I get to do whatever I want to ‘em.” Hyunjin’s eyes hardened. 

Haseul was suddenly glad she just got the annoyed version of Hyunjin. It was easy to forget on the ship what exactly it meant that Hyunjin and Heejin were Viian’s inner circle. They oversaw, and probably were responsible for, a lot of what happened in the southern half of Aphrodite. 

Then there was a chime. 

“Would High Lady Jeon please come to the cockpit?” The voice was both childish and deep at the same time. The demon in the cockpit. 

Heejin sighed. “Time to swap.” 

Hyunjin grinned. “Send her over here?” 

Haseul shook her head. “Please don’t. If you want me focused, you’ll keep her away from here.” 

“Alright,” Heejin bowed her head, “she’ll join you for dinner.” Then she was off. 

Hyunjin was still smiling. 

“Oh you’ll love this, huh?” Haseul asked. “Revenge.” 

“Yeojin’ll annoy us both,” she replied. “But it makes it better that you’re crap at hiding it.” 

Haseul gave her a look, before going back to the research. She needed to know what the queen’s brain was even made of. 

______

Author's Note 

One of my biggest hopes for the story is that things are making sense. As I write, I'm trying to make sure the technical stuff isn't too much, but if it's there, I try to make it somewhat logical. However, I'm by no means well-versed in science or the workings of the body, even if a lot of my courses involve it. 

However, I hope it'll still be a fun read in spite of that. This was a shorter chapter, in part because there's a lot of new information. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! I'd love to know your thoughts so far. 

Also, the characters have all been aged up. For reference, both Haseul and Vivi are in their thirties. See you next chapter. 

Twitter: hblake44