An Untimely Confession
As one might expect, the soundproofing between the interior rooms had only ever been installed to the bare minimum — enough that ordinary living noise wouldn't stress the people next door.
So before Soyeon's hand, approaching with that terrifying look in her eyes, could reach me, someone knocked on the door.
Given the sound of that knock and the cursing that had come before it, the door opened without anything resembling a request for permission.
"…Um…"
A woman stepped in with a worried look. I still didn't know her name. I'd seen her face at every meeting, but names were rarely called out in those sessions.
"Are you… okay…?"
She looked back and forth between me and Soyeon, seemed to register that something was off about the atmosphere, and asked the question while holding the open door in an awkward half-stance.
"Ah— hic— hck…"
The image of that violent, forceful scene still flickered in front of my eyes. Hiccups started up, mixed with some unnameable sense of relief, and what came out of me was the sound of someone who couldn't breathe properly.
"…Ah. Haa… Yes. I-I'm fine. Um. I'm sorry."
"…Should I, maybe, get you out of here?"
The woman asked. Personally, I hoped she wouldn't leave. Something about it — the thought that if there were several people present, at least, it wouldn't be as frightening as a moment ago.
Of course, I still had no idea who she was worried about when she said and did those things.
For all I knew, she might have been disappointed that I wasn't the one getting hit.
"…Yes. We'll wrap this up soon and leave. I'm sorry."
"……Alright. Then…"
With a soft creak, the woman looked between me and Soyeon one more time, then quietly shut the door and left. The room was just the two of us again.
What had that reaching hand meant, before the woman came in? What would have happened once it touched me?
"…"
Carefully, I turned my head. Soyeon stared toward the door for a long time, then collapsed into the chair as if her strength had given out.
"I-I'm s-sorry…"
"…"
Soyeon clutched her own head.
"Unnie…"
"Y-yes, yes…!"
"…I'm sorry. No — this wasn't the place to do it like that. I just got a little too, no, um. Haa…"
Still not looking at me, Soyeon spoke while staring down at the table. Then, before long, she shifted into the kind of practical talk that had to be had out of necessity.
"…Want me to move your room?"
"Ah, um, i-it's f-fine, really…"
"…Yeah. Honestly, going somewhere else wouldn't solve the problem, would it. I don't think I could hold back either, right now."
Couldn't hold back? Hold back what?
"…Or I could just pull one bed out and put it in the captain's quarters. Though all the tables and furniture have already been stripped out of there…"
"I-it's really fine, I-I can, I can handle it well enough, a-and the really bad stuff hasn't even—"
"That way of thinking is the problem. Haa."
It had been a careful answer, but something about it clearly didn't sit right. Soyeon gripped the hair she'd been holding as if she might tear it out.
"Euk… Sorry…"
"What are you even sorry for— no. No. You can go. Unnie…"
Still wearing that pained expression, Soyeon forced out a softened dismissal.
So, in an atmosphere where I couldn't even bring up something small like what those green slimes in the Cultivation Room actually were, I carefully rose and tried to read the room as I made for the door…
"…Unnie."
Soyeon's voice from behind me.
"Ah, yes…?"
When I turned, Soyeon met my eyes as if she'd been watching me walk the whole time, and went on.
"…Will you go out with me? I've liked you for a long time, unnie."
"…"
It was a confession whose meaning I couldn't grasp. The timing was so completely out of nowhere that it almost felt like some kind of code or signal I was supposed to decipher.
So I just made strange little sounds for a long while, never managed an answer, and left the room.
Looking at that dark daylight, I couldn't get my feet to move. More precisely, the strength went out of my whole body. Part of me regretted saying anything at all, and at the same time I just wanted to flop onto a bed and pour out every last drop of depression I had.
"…"
Of course I couldn't actually do that, so I rummaged open the cleaning locker, took a dustpan and broom, a rag and a mop, and made my way with difficulty toward the Cultivation Room…
"Ah, you're here again. This way."
My head was a mess. Dahyun-ssi must have told me out of concern — expecting that Soyeon would have the ability to resolve this kind of conflict.
But Soyeon had reacted in a way that was nothing like what I'd expected. It had almost started to slide into something similar to my relationship with Minseo, and then at the end she'd still fretted over me and offered alternatives, and then—
A sudden confession attack on top of everything. And between all of it, raised voices and cursing.
My head stayed foggy all day. Whether it was from days of hard cleaning or not, even while I wiped and re-wiped the Cultivation Room until it shone in every place people didn't frequently pass through, I couldn't form a single proper thought.
I didn't want to go back to the room. Part of me felt I'd just become prey for Minseo and Jiu, who were rolling around looking for something to do — and in this mood, I didn't think I could take that kind of teasing.
So I wiped and wiped places that were already clean, places that might or might not have had anything on them at all.
Maybe I shouldn't have done that with Jiu. Maybe I shouldn't have given permission for that kind of thing in the first place — thoughts like that were all I had when a tap on my back made me turn my head.
"…Ah."
I stood and absently brushed off my top. It was someone from the security team. Had something else come up that they wanted to experiment with?
I slipped past people who each had at least one talent and one body of knowledge and were working hard, my shoulders hunched as small as they would go. The security team woman walked with her head buried in her terminal and made no effort to match my stride.
Before long we were back inside the ship, entering a room I'd come and gone from fairly often, and I carefully closed the door.
"You're here? Upsy."
People who'd been lounging a little rebelliously against surfaces or chair backs pushed themselves upright.
"Go in through route one, yeah. Uh. Right. That one."
"Think it'll work?"
"Yeah. No, not that. Yeah. Okay. Let's try it first. Yeoreum-nim, wait out in front of that, please."
They talked among themselves for a bit, and then one of the women called my name.
It was such a small thing, but maybe it made me feel a little better. A little less indifferent than usual, somehow. She'd even used my name…
"I-is this the r-right spot…?"
"Yeees~."
She answered vaguely without even looking my way, but I didn't mind.
Inside the room, boards from various disassembled things lay roughly on the floor. She tapped a few times on a laptop connected to machinery by thick cables, fiddled with the screen of a terminal linked to it, and then—
"Oh."
A short sound almost like admiration—
"Whoa. It worked."
"Holy shit. Holy shit. For real? Whoa!"
…Nothing visible happened. The place I'd been told to stand was clear enough that I didn't dare move, but their reactions were positive.
"U-um, what exactly…"
"How far does this go, then?"
"We can raise the power, expand the synthesis modules more. Wait. With biometrics we can…"
"Does hot water work? I've seriously been dreading washing lately."
"Hot water works. Whoa! Yeoreum-nim. Come over here."
"Finally… finally… cold showers are over…?"
The woman yanked me hard enough to throw off my center of balance, and I half-stumbled into the middle of them, but she paid it no mind and shoved the laptop at me.
"Uh, uh…"
"Just wait. Uh… this one, and this one done. Ah. Got it. Look at the lens."
The screen shifted into an interface like a phone waiting to unlock. When I looked at the lens as instructed, a tiny lens inside whirred this way and that.
I didn't know what something like that was called, but it wasn't the kind of hardware that belonged in a laptop, so it made the fact that this was the future feel real all over again.
The lens stopped moving, and a soft beep sounded.
Right after, they fitted something like a machine that checked blood vessels without damaging the skin onto my wrist…
"Hik…! Ah, that hu—"
A slight burning sensation made me speak up in a hurry, but far from worrying, they didn't even answer — just stared at the monitor.
"…Done. Done!"
After a short stretch of time, a low wooom of machinery began to roll through the entire ship.
A deep humming, the kind that could almost pass for ordinary building noise.
"Whoa. Fuck. It actually works."
Then the woman pushed me aside as if I were no longer needed. The attitude wasn't any different from usual.
"Eut."
Something good had clearly happened, and yet they didn't offer so much as a simple explanation. Was even wanting a brief rundown in a situation like this a luxury for me?
If it had been Soyeon, she would have explained, even in a small voice…
"…"
The same feeling as when I'd just left Soyeon's room drained the strength from my body again. I already knew I'd fallen into a world that wasn't kind — and still it hit me like this.
So when I tried to leave the room, leaving them squealing and celebrating among themselves—
I felt one of the women looking at me. She made a face as if turning something over carefully in her mind, then opened her mouth.
"…Ah. Right. Yeoreum-nim."
I flinched.
The woman who'd stood up came toward me. Thinking that maybe, when the mood was this good, she'd at least spare a few words, I turned — and she kept coming, close enough to feel oppressive, and then—
Thud. She slung an arm over my shoulder and almost pulled me into an embrace.
"Eut…!"
"Where are you going?"
"Ah, th-that is…"
"I wasn't trying to eavesdrop earlier, but Soyeon-nim was seriously pissed. What happened?"
Somehow, the atmosphere was starting to feel like the first time I'd met Minseo and Jiu after losing my private room.
I wanted to run.
"Ah, ah…"
So when I tried to give a rough explanation and leave, the thought hit me.
How was I supposed to explain this?
When I thought about it — to explain the situation where Soyeon had raised her voice like that, pounded the desk as if she might break it, and reached a hand toward me…
I'd have to tell them what that act had been, too.
"Ah, auh, th-that is."
Maybe because the talk had turned into gossip material. People who normally never even met my eyes were looking at me.
Those gazes felt welcome and burdensome at the same time.
"…Ah. That. Right. Yeah. She's someone who almost never gets angry."
"…"
"Ah, so that was with the Administrator?"
"Yeah yeah. You could hear it all the way across the corridor."
"What was it? Huh?"
The woman looking at me like she'd found something to work with still had her arm around my shoulders, so from the outside it might have looked friendly — but in reality she was pressing me steadily downward.
Maybe I only felt it that way because I was weak. Either way.
"Aht, eu, eut…"
"Is it a secret? Ah, did you break something?"
"No way. If that were it, they'd have kicked you out on the spot."
"Pfft. Hey, you can't say that to her face."
Everyone started tossing in a line. Of course, there was none of the intimacy you'd find between friends.
Maybe they were treating me a little more comfortably.
In other words — treating me like a convenient person. Someone they could handle however they liked.
"Come on. Secrets don't exist here."
The woman shook my body without the slightest consideration.
"Ugh, ah, no…"
"But I'd be pissed as hell too, right? Someone who doesn't do anything and just eats the food."
"I'll give you that one. Yeah."
Words that could cut, tossed out as if they were nothing.
I knew the first response mattered most in situations like this, so I could tell mine had been very wrong. I'd taken it for a long stretch the way kids do when they've found an interesting toy.
Around the time the barrage of questions that felt like it had gone on forever was winding down—
"You're cuter than I expected. Administrator?"
—the woman with her arm around my shoulders whispered.
"Eu, eut, ah, no. I-I was j-just going to cl-clean—"
"I heard that completely gets in the way. Pfft. People keep saying it's annoying how you always block the path."
"…I-I'll go. Next time, next time if you n-need something again…"
I slowly worked free of the arm around my shoulders and said that, and still smiling—
"Ah. Me. I could use some help with sexual frustration, actually?"
"Pfft…! Oh my god! She's talking nonsense. Administrator! You're not taking that seriously, right?"
I forced myself to ignore the women tossing out lines like that and slipped away.
They made little aah sounds as if they were sorry to see me go, but they didn't actually grab me. The questions hadn't been asked because they wanted answers, either.
"…"
My mood was at rock bottom, so I hid in the bathroom for a while.
For lunch, figuring I was less likely to run into Soyeon, I thought I'd look around a little outside the ship — just walk a short, safe stretch nearby — when.
"Kek—!"
Women grabbed me by the scruff hard enough that I nearly bit my tongue and hauled me into a room. At the explanation that I wasn't to go wandering around on my own, I bowed my head in apology and lay down on the bed.
Even though I hadn't eaten, luckily I wasn't hungry. The ship was so impressive that looking around had taken every scrap of my attention.