Watch Over Hana
"This fever just won't break..."
Bora murmured it as she watched Hana asleep in the bed. Just as she'd said, the girl's temperature showed no intention of coming down.
Even now her face was flushed, the heat clearly still clinging to her. A full day of nursing had brought it lower than it had been at the start, but this was still a vigil that couldn't be abandoned.
"Bora... Haru... Baldy..."
Even in her sleep Hana mumbled their names, the words slipping out like sleep-talk. The sound made Bora's heart ache all the more. She had been certain the building's climate control was flawless—that catching a cold in a place like this was impossible—and it seemed her judgment had been wrong.
Or perhaps a month had passed since Hana crossed over through the gate, and just when they had let themselves relax, the aftereffects had chosen to surface. Medicine was out of the question. Hana wasn't human, and dosing her felt too fraught, so they had settled on letting her recover as naturally as they could.
Bora was still at her side, sighing through the long watch, when Hana's eyes fluttered halfway open.
"Hana, you're awake?"
Bora stroked her hair and spoke gently. Still drunk on sleep, Hana's gaze was unfocused and hazy.
"Bora... am I dying...?"
The words came out thin and strengthless. Looking at her, Bora's chest tightened. More than a month had passed since they'd met, and unlike the beginning she had grown attached to the girl—that was probably why. Gazing down at the wilted little figure, she said,
"No. You are absolutely not going to die."
"Really?"
The reassurance seemed to put a little life back into her. Hana tried to lift both arms in a show of strength, but the strength wasn't there. She had barely held them up for a few seconds before they dropped, limp, back onto the mattress with a soft thud.
"You don't have to push yourself."
Bora figured it had happened because Hana's body was simply too young, her immunity too weak. A child's body was not an adult's, and a little one needed far more devoted care. She set to kneading the small body in the bed, and the hands that had been working Hana's arms climbed steadily higher until they were headed for her face.
Squish, squish.
Bora gently worked the plump, soft flesh of those cheeks. There was something quietly addictive about them. For a moment her mind was entirely given over to Hana's cheeks; then she caught herself and sent her hands back down.
Hana lay with her eyes closed, feeling the touch, when Haru came in from outside. Her expression was far from good. Something was wrong.
I kept my eyes shut and eavesdropped on Bora and Haru talking beside me. It sounded important.
"Hana's this sick, and they still want it today?"
"I know. I protested too, but there was nothing we could do. Are they going to wait until something actually happens to her before they come to their senses?"
"I suppose it can't be helped. The way we see things as researchers and the way a businesswoman sees them were never going to be the same."
What were they planning, to be talking like that? My body felt better than it had earlier, so I opened my eyes and spoke to the two of them standing beside the bed.
"Bora, Haru—why do you both look so serious?"
"It's... something you don't need to worry about."
"Hng. Is it something important I'm not allowed to hear?"
I turned the saddest eyes I could manage on the both of them, and especially on Haru, whose heart was the softer of the two. Bora had built up a certain resistance to my Sad Eyes skill by now, so aiming it at Haru, who still had almost none, was a direct hit.
Whether she simply lost to eyes that looked one blink from spilling over, Haru answered with a gloomy face.
"They told me to cut your hair again today. I objected, but it didn't do any good. I'm sorry, Hana."
Ah. So this was why they'd been so down—because they had to cut my hair every night before bed. I didn't think it was such a big deal. Even back when I was human, hadn't I gotten a haircut once a month? All that had changed was the schedule, once a day now, and aside from that there was nothing particularly difficult about it.
"It's fine. You don't have to be sorry."
I said it, and yet, watching Haru droop beside me, I couldn't help thinking it would serve them right if the people concocting things out of my hair got a nasty surprise.
"If we sell a single bag of Starlight Green Tea, the profit comes to roughly 4,900 won per bag."
Early morning, and the moment she walked into the office, Kim Sehee sat with her legs crossed, eyes on the executive delivering his briefing with everything he had. Until Starlight Green Tea launched, she had never much cared for sessions like this. Not one product had ever succeeded, and a briefing had only ever left her angry.
The food business already had its cartel, solid and long entrenched, and a relatively small firm like Starlight Food had looked to have almost nowhere to wedge itself in. Did Starlight Guild headquarters offer support? Hardly. If anything, with blood kin watching her through spiteful eyes, they might well have held rites praying she would go under.
Then again, things between the siblings weren't that bad. It was simpler to assume they simply had no interest in her at all.
The executive laid out chart after chart and walked her through them in presentation form. Kim Sehee no longer had to sit there and—to put it bluntly—listen while she cowered. Her product was sweeping the market.
"So how many bags of Starlight Green Tea have we sold so far?"
"About eleven million over the past month. Of course, that was back when the price was three hundred won, so the operating profit isn't enormous. Still, if we set aside the fifty thousand bags we stockpile each day, every last one of the rest sold out. I think that's the figure worth holding on to."
"Then if we call it roughly ten million and run the profit..."
Kim Sehee tapped out the figures in her head.
"We made about three billion won."
Vice President Park Jeontae spoke from beside her.
"Vice President—that's after factory operating costs, labor, and all the rest, yes?"
"Yes, President. That's correct. The plant is on the small side, so the miscellaneous costs didn't amount to much. The tea was also run on a separate production line, which kept expenditures relatively low."
"And before the green tea, about how much was the factory making?"
"Well... the exact profit is difficult to pin down..."
What he meant, and could not say to the president's face, was that once the tea was taken out of the picture the rest of the business was running at a loss. He let the sentence trail away. Kim Sehee seemed to catch the gist well enough, and she didn't press him.
"Then what about our profit for the first week of this month?"
She put the question to the executive giving the presentation and did her best to ignore the thud of her heart. They had raised the price to five thousand won, and she had expected the market to push back. Even if only half of it sold, she would have called that a resounding success.
"The momentum is real now, President. Three hundred thousand bags a day through the first week—about 2.1 million teas in seven days."
He said it with his head high. He couldn't remember the last time he had briefed Starlight Food on anything this good. Every presentation before this one had gone badly.
A little flushed with excitement, Kim Sehee asked,
"And the total profit?"
"We estimate operating profit of close to ten billion won."
At that, a bright smile broke across her face.
"This is thanks to every one of you, for holding the line this long. Truly excellent work."
Starlight Food had become a cash cow: ten billion won a week, forty billion a month, some five hundred billion a year. The income was so staggering that they could have torn the Starlight Food name off the building and replaced it with the tea, and no one would have blinked. And this was not revenue. It was pure operating profit.
"Not at all. The credit is yours, President."
Vice President Park Jeontae offered it quietly from the side. When the boss was in a good mood, a little flattery never hurt.
Mid-meeting, though, the door flew open and an employee burst in.
"P-President!"
"What is it?"
Kim Sehee turned to the intruder without so much as a frown, her expression mild. She made a point of treating her people with respect.
"Something terrible has happened! I think you need to come right away!"
One look at him and she knew this was no ordinary fuss. Nobody was brave enough to announce a disaster to the president's face over something trivial.
Escorted out by the executives at her side, she understood at once why the man had come running.
Every time a delivery of Hana's hair came in, the researchers set aside about ten strands to test, steeped them on the spot in green-tea bags, and drank. They never knew when the effect might suddenly change.
By all rights, tea brewed on Hana's hair ought to have tasted extraordinary. Today it did not. Not in the slightest.
It tasted exactly like the Starlight Green Tea that had once crashed and burned on the market—worse, even. Perhaps because they had cut back on the tea leaves themselves, it was poorer than that old failure had been.
Early that morning, Starlight Food was turned on its head.