Wednesday morning was bitterly cold.  The whole of the week so far had been pretty cold, even for early autumn, but Miran had been surprised to wake up to frost encroaching on the glass panes of her window and slicking the pavements.  Her breath condensed on the air for the first time in over half a year as she exited the apartment building that she lived in, and as she waited for the number 16 bus, hands tucked tightly into her coat pocket and balled into fists, she sincerely regretted not taking the extra twenty seconds to grab a scarf out of the back of her closet.

Other people around her appeared to be suffering from the same predicament, and everybody looked grateful to board the bus.

It was a twenty-five minute ride – it would once have been seventeen minutes, but three major roads were currently having work done after being hit by bombs and it took time to fill in craters – to the stop just around the block from the Secret Service building, and Miran nearly dozed off again, still shattered from the work of the previous day.  Trying not to yawn, she just hoped that Sehun would be more awake than she was, and that COO Shin or whoever she needed to get permission from would be happy to let her work with the captive again.

At the security barriers, she bumped into Boa, who was pulling off a pair of woollen gloves as she fumbled with her employee card, evidently cold, to swipe it and get into the building.  Boa looked about as awake as Miran felt.  Miran followed suit in fumbling with her card.

Gayoung smiled at her as she passed reception.

“Kim Junmyeon’s left you a bouquet,” the secretary told her.  “I advise against taking it.”

Miran saw Boa pulling a comical grimace out of the corner of her eye.

“When will he stop treating his job like a massive pick up line?” the woman grumbled.  Miran snorted and headed over to the stairs, blowing on her hands and chafing them together in an attempt to restore circulation.  Boa followed her up as far as the second floor and parted with a quick query as to whether or not Miran was expecting to be talking to Oh Sehun again that day.  Miran replied with a shrug that she probably was, but that it would depend.

Kyungsoo and Woohyun were already in the office – the former apparently an early bird as he was already working, and the latter definitely not as he was slumped over his desk.  Miran gathered from garbled mumblings that Key had gone to get him coffee.  It was clearly needed.

Reckoning she could last at least until Yeri came, at which point they’d both be able to take a break as they went in search of coffee, Miran sat down on the floor and opened the door for the desk cupboard so that she could access the safe at the back of it.  It had three locks – the first a standard safe mechanism, the second a personalised code, and the third a key.  She frowned at the first one, since the pointer on the outer ring of number was resting between two and three and she seemed to remember putting it between three and four, though admittedly she’d been very tired the previous night and in a bit of a rush to leave, but when she got the safe open, all the files were still neatly arranged inside, just the way she’d left them.  With relief, she pulled them out and rifled through them, looking for the sheets of paper she and Sehun had been writing on the day before.  The charts with Yerim were all there, as was the testimony, and she pulled them out, straightening the crumpled page full of Sehun’s writing.

There was a tiny rip along one of the folds.  Miran frowned.  Had that been there the day before?

Deciding it was better safe than sorry, she put all the papers on her desk and slipped around Yeri’s cubicle to knock on the side of Kyungsoo’s.

“Sir?”

He’d turned around before she’d even opened , making her squeak the word out in surprise, and raised an expectant eyebrow.

“Do we have a forensic on the team?” she asked.

He shook his head and turned back to his desk, snatching up a pen and scribbling a number down on a post-it, which he handed to her.

“It’s an internal number, so you don’t need to put a nine or anything funny at the beginning of it,” he told her, before hesitating.  “Why do you need a forensic this early in the morning?”

“I think somebody’s been going through my stuff,” Miran admitted.

Kyungsoo looked alarmed.  His gaze fell to her hip, and Miran abruptly remembered that her holster was empty.

“Did you leave your weapon here overnight?” he asked her.  She nodded.

“Permission to keep a firearm with you at all times means all times,” he said.  “That’s why it’s not often given out, Cho.  They don’t want the entire office taking guns home with them because that’s way too many weapons out on the street and that’s the last thing we need during a war.  If somebody’s going through your stuff here, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be going through your stuff at home, too, and if they know you’ve figured it out, they’re probably not going to take prisoners if you cross paths.”

Miran could see his point.  Kyungsoo sighed.

“I want to say that you’re a rookie, so it’s okay to make mistakes, but unfortunately you’re in a job where that could get you killed.”

Miran nodded.  “I’m sorry, sir.  I’ll be more careful.”

His brown eyes softened slightly.  “You don’t need to apologise.  Just learn big lessons from minor mistakes.  It’s not university anymore, and you were picked because you have potential.”

Forensic Kim Jongdae arrived at the same time Yeri did, and it was apparent that they knew each other.  Most likely very well, from the way that his arm was wrapped around her waist.  Miran saw Kyungsoo raising an eyebrow as he leant out of his cubicle to see who the new arrivals were, though he said nothing in the way of admonition towards Yeri, however much his expression screamed disapproval.  Yeri appeared totally oblivious.

Jongdae was chipper as he got down to work, asking Miran briefly what the problem was and then quickly dusting down the safe and all the files with some pink kind of powder.  Miran watched him in fascination.  Before the war had started, when she and her parents and her little brother had still lived happily in a little terraced house in the outskirts of the city, they’d all sat down together as a family on a Sunday evening to watch a long-running crime show that had been the obsession of most of the nation.  Now the only things on TV were the news, propaganda reels and the occasional film or drama, but the entertainment industry had largely nosedived due to conscription and the beloved crime show had finally ground to a halt only a few months after the war had started with the announcement that the script writer and most of the male members of cast were going to represent their country.  Half of them were now dead.

It took a little while, but Jongdae managed an initial processing of results on site.

“I’ll run them through the database,” he said.  “Which reminds me: you aren’t yet on it.  If you drop by level two in a couple of hours then I’ll be able to give you proper results and I can put you through formal processing at the same time.  It won’t take very long.”

Miran thanked him, trying to bit back a yawn, and poked her head into Yeri’s cubicle to ask if the other woman wanted to grab a coffee.

Byun Baekhyun – or Scout, as Miran gathered his codename was – clocked in at two minutes past nine, distracting Miran from gathering her things and making a beeline for the basement.  Swallowing the last of her coffee, she donned her headphones and glanced up at the chart that Woohyun had put up above her desk on her first day showing her which switches she needed to press on the communications device to answer the call.

There was a fair amount of crackling static as she tried to find the right buttons and dials, and then more as Scout responded with one more to ensure full connection.

“Hey, Fresh Air!” he greeted her.  Miran wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to that particular handling name (Yeri had snorted at her and Kyungsoo had looked a little put out, but Woohyun and Scout had both insisted it was great).  “Cobbles are a curse.”

Miran smiled as she recognised the code and gave the response they’d agreed on.  “How’s your ankle doing?”

“Same old, same old.  There’ve been rumours of some pretty shocking stuff going down your end.  I hear the lion walked straight into your den.”

It took about half a second for Miran to twig that he was talking about Sehun, and that reminded her of the warning he’d given that Baekhyun could be in danger if Yerim had given away too much information.  Come to that, if Sehun had been familiar with Baekhyun’s real name and Yerim had known Baekhyun’s codename, then he was no longer anonymous, and that was a problem.

“How’s the family?” she asked him, looking at the dials and blinking lights and wondering if Woohyun would have any tips for recognising machinery that had been bugged.

Either Scout was used to euphemisms or he was just very quick-witted, because he seemed to have no problems understanding that she was talking about the group of rebels he was with.

“Short on supplies of every kind,” he told her, his cheery tone dropping.  “The nucleus is fine, but we’ve stopped growing and now everything’s shrinking scarily quickly.  We probably need to move house.”

“Any new additions recently?”

“There are always new additions.”  Scout just sounded tired now.  “And the ferrets seem to be finding the burrows.”

Miran tried to swallow away her alarm.  “You’re aware of why Old News died off, aren’t you?”  She wasn’t sure just how much Scout was aware of the details surrounding his former handler, but she did at least have to admit that Fresh Air was a better nickname than Old News.

Scout gave a non-committal hum.  It was several seconds before he said anything.  “I think I can guess.”

Miran decided to take a gamble.  It was incredibly risky: this was only her third day and it was only the second time she was speaking to the man at the other end of the line, but the files she’d inherited stated that he’d been posted in the insurgencies for well over a year and had risen to a senior position in the line of command, and she suspected that he probably hadn’t been back to his home country since his posting, not with the frequency of supplies that had been dropped to him.

“I’ll be frank.  Yoo Yerim was a double agent and we have at least one other somewhere in our ranks,” she said in as low a voice as she could while still being caught in the microphone.

Scout cursed softly.  “We were expecting that with Old News,” he murmured.  “We kept getting compromised and the death tolls were too high from information only a few of us knew.  I’d actually set myself up with a different handler after his agent was killed working with us to minimise catastrophe, but it explains why things haven’t exactly improved.  Well, it’s perfectly possible we’ve been infiltrated on ground level over here as well, but for decisions only about five of us are taking in conjunction with you lot at HQ and trying to coordinate with military activities, there was still far too much we were getting caught out on.”  He paused for a moment.  “I was calling because in light of recent incidents and casualties, we’re going under wraps for a few weeks to regroup and recuperate.  And we need more medical supplies and ammunition.”

“I’ll get them out to you,” Miran promised.  “But it might be a little while because I need to make sure the people I use to make the drop are totally trustworthy.”

“Grease was usually pretty good at requisitioning somebody to make drops with drones if he couldn’t remote-pilot them himself.”

Miran nearly snorted.  Yerim might have had a bad codename, but Woohyun’s was genuinely terrible.

“Could it be within the week?” Scout went on.  Miran hummed absently.

“Scout,” she said.  “The ferrets know your real name.”

“I know,” he admitted.  “Listen, at this stage, it doesn’t make a difference.  I am where I am, and the connection I have back to HQ is a real blessing, but if we’re cut off, I’ll manage.  I was sent here to help the underdogs and that’s what I’m going to do.”

There was a very awkward silence.  “Be careful with the turncoat,” Scout added.

“Oh, and Scout?”  Miran paused with her hand above the dial to shut off connection.

“Hmm?”

“Who was the other handler you set yourself up with?”

“I don’t know his real name – but he’s definitely male because I spoke to him – but we went with Weasel.”

Miran was sta