To find out about the other person, he also had to offer something in return. Uncovering the secret Yoon Tae-ha held. It seemed difficult to find a more suitable place than here, without surveillance cameras.

“My hand was cut first. And I gripped the green feather tightly to separate it. The flame occurred after that.”

Having given an honest answer, he rose and checked Yoon Tae-ha’s expression. Her face looked a little tired. She hadn’t moved her position, only shifted away from his shoulder. He didn’t want to create distance.

“...Still, it’s a relief it didn’t escalate into something bigger.”

“Were you worried?”

“How could I not be? The gunshots stopped, so I came to check, and your arm was...”

Yoon Tae-ha stroked her own arm, as if trying to calm her emotions.

“I thought you had been eaten.”

“So you flew here.”

The distance between the two was closer than before. They stared into each other’s eyes as if having a silent battle.

The first to turn away was unexpectedly Cheon Geon-young. He slightly lowered his gaze. Yoon Tae-ha realized he was looking at somewhere on her face.

Was he looking at the injured area?

Unconsciously, her fingers moved. Like someone wanting to hide a weakness, she covered the bandage with her index finger. But it seemed that wasn’t what he was looking at.

His gaze remained in the same place. Yoon Tae-ha’s finger moved past the bandage and lightly brushed her lower lip. The sensation of her own flesh being grazed felt strange.

Cheon Geon-young, who had been watching this, frowned briefly. An emotion difficult to read flickered in his eyes, gradually intensifying.

In contrast to his eyes, which held a turbulent emotion, his body moved slowly and leisurely. Cheon Geon-young leaned back against the sofa without a word.

The arm, with veins protruding where he exerted force, was draped over the back of the sofa. His lips were relaxed, and his breathing was regular. It seemed like an expression of no intention to attack.

Nevertheless, heat bloomed all over her body. A hot breath escaped her lips, and she wanted to get out of the man’s sight. She even felt a strange urge to press down on the new wound again.

The sound of the second hand of the clock hanging on one wall of the living room was loud.

“Why did you touch the bandage?”

Cheon Geon-young, who had been observing Yoon Tae-ha for a while, pointlessly picked a fight with the perfectly attached bandage.

“It was itchy.”

Watching her lips move in a circle was unbearably ticklish.

Did this woman know that? He hoped she didn’t, but if it meant he had to silently watch her touch her lips with her finger again like she had just done, he wished she would notice.

“You still have to endure it.”

Cheon Geon-young, who had succumbed to his desire, reached out his hand.

Yoon Tae-ha, who didn’t run away even though she sensed something was strange. She sometimes tended to see him as something newly born, young, and fragile.

He didn’t dislike it. He just felt sorry for her ignorance of his own despicable intentions, which were enough to exploit that perception.

His fingers touched the edge of Yoon Tae-ha’s lip where the bandage had loosened due to the applied medicine. The tip of his finger also lightly brushed her lip, but he pretended not to notice. Instead, he applied pressure.

“You’ll have to reattach it if it falls off.”

Yoon Tae-ha’s eyelashes fluttered slightly in response. They exchanged warmth through the thin bandage. Like someone who had achieved his goal, Cheon Geon-young cleanly removed his hand. In that brief contact, her lips had become red and swollen.

Yoon Tae-ha, who habitually tried to pull and bite her lower lip, stopped her movement and leaned back against the sofa. As a result, their gazes, which had been stubbornly connected like a thread, snapped.

It wasn’t enough. Cheon Geon-young felt a deepening yearning.

He wanted to know her. Her childhood spent in the North. The reason she was wary of Dr. Moon. The purpose of her hiding his secret together. And most of all, what he wanted to know was.

What thoughts were going through her mind as she kept him by her side.

A while later, Yoon Tae-ha got up from the sofa, saying she had a headache. “Good night.” Lost in thought, Cheon Geon-young didn’t respond to her early evening greeting.

•

Yoon Tae-ha, who had fled into her room, spent the night wide awake. Her lips stung, preventing her from falling asleep.

It wasn’t until the morning sunlight peeked through the half-closed curtains that she nervously closed her laptop. Then she threw herself onto the bed.

A suspicious intruder and outsider.

But why did this outsider possess the constitution that Ark was desperately searching for?

Was it to show how futile Professor Yoon’s desire to create advanced life forms was? So did the great providence of nature send him?

To show you your grandfather getting screwed over. That what he couldn’t create even after pouring in his time, money, and desires existed in the outside world.

It would be better if it were this way. Unfortunately, her reason was telling her that wasn’t it.

‘Could that child have also been experimented on somewhere?’

It was an assumption she dared not even utter. Just the assumption made her heart feel like it was burning black.

Absolutely not. She could never ask someone that. Because she knew better than anyone how painful such a life was. It wasn’t a side of her she could show others.

You were a test subject, weren’t you?

If someone asked her that, Yoon Tae-ha would never see that person again. Because it was shameful and painful.

Her childhood spent trapped in a space where she couldn’t see the outside from the inside. She was powerless. Just the thought of Cheon Geon-young seeing that side of her made her feel like the floor was collapsing beneath her.

A tingling pain pierced her body. Burying her face in the blanket, she let out a low groan.

‘First, the information mustn’t leak out. Not just to Ark, but to anywhere else.’

Whether he was a being born without artificial intervention or not. Cheon Geon-young was her guide. Her partner. And in some way, the first friend she had ever acknowledged.

Her lips stung again. She didn’t know why it hurt where his fingertips had touched, not where she was injured.

Yoon Tae-ha, who had rushed to the bathroom and washed away her emotions with cold water, removed the bandage in front of the mirror with a clear face.

The wound had healed cleanly.

Her recovery ability was working normally again. She rolled up the bandage into a small ball and went out to the living room.

The man who shared the house hadn’t come out of his room yet. Feeling relieved, she opened the refrigerator.

Cheon Geon-young came out while she was cracking eggs into a clean bowl. With a towel on his head, he subtly appeared from behind Yoon Tae-ha. He smelled nice.

She roughly whisked the eggs and poured them straight into the pan that still needed to heat up more. Cheon Geon-young made a puzzled expression, as if asking why she was making such a basic mistake.

“You should have poured it in a little later.”

The smell of the eggs cooking rose. “Trust me. I’ll make it delicious.” Yoon Tae-ha played it off and asked him to bring the bread.

They sat facing each other across the simple breakfast table. Besides the manifestation of her guide’s superpower, there was still an unresolved question.

“Is it like a stone that lets you use superpowers? Something that draws out latent power?”

She asked the question while spreading jam on her toast. After finishing her own, she didn’t forget to ask his preference and spread jam on Cheon Geon-young’s toast as well. He smiled secretly at her meticulous care, like a mother bird.

“The monster also used it to revive and even devoured its surrounding companions. It’s true that it has a special power.”

Even if it wasn’t a magic lamp, the green feather clearly seemed to be a substance that affected humans.

Yoon Tae-ha, who had been tired from searching for information all night, leaned back in her chair. Cheon Geon-young refilled her empty cup with fruit juice. And he threw a question with impure intentions onto the table.

“Should we ask the center? Dr. Moon or someone like that. They’re experts.”

The woman, who had been tracing the condensation on her glass with her finger, paused.

“Why bother? Your company has a lot of great research teams too.”

“In terms of the amount of data, it doesn’t match Ark’s. If we ask our company’s lab, my uncle will find out one way or another.”

The sliced sausage rolled around under her fork. The faint sound of the washing machine operating came from the utility room across from the kitchen. Yoon Tae-ha, who had been listening to the everyday noise, opened her mouth with difficulty.

“I know this sounds strange.”

“......”

“It’s not like only good people work at our company. If they see a case as unique as this, some people would risk their whole lives to...”

She was desperately searching for the right words.

“There are quite a few people who want to check various things.”

“Experiment?”

A fish tank full of water. An empty room where only the eerie sound of machines could be heard. Researchers wearing gowns that smelled of chemicals. Cheon Geon-young easily recalled such things.

That must be what she wanted to warn him about. The story of the North she had told in a cheerful voice couldn’t be everything. What she wanted to show him. The anecdotes she had told with a smile would fall into that category if classified.

“You don’t actually believe that we achieved these results while only conducting ethical experiments, do you? Even the followers don’t think that.”

While she was speaking, the expression disappeared from Yoon Tae-ha’s face. Unlike her upright demeanor, the underlying meaning of her words was sharp.

“I know.”

“Then, that’s a relief.”

Having finished speaking, she picked up her cleanly emptied plate and stood up. Cheon Geon-young also picked up his cup and stood up. They started their day together with the clinking of dishes.

That day, Cheon Geon-young didn’t leave his partner’s side, using his injured hand as an excuse. Whenever she tried to go somewhere, he called her. For things that turned out to be nothing much when she went.

Eventually, Yoon Tae-ha grabbed him in the hallway with a bewildered voice and asked.

“Are you acting clingy right now?”

Clingy. Cheon Geon-young blinked at the unfamiliar word. It was the first time he had heard it in his life. Even though he had heard quite a few times that he was disgusting because he didn’t act like a child. Is what I’m doing now clinginess? Well, so what. He didn’t want to leave the fragile side of the woman he had finally discovered.

Yoon Tae-ha, who had no way of knowing such circumstances, was worried that she might have said something too harsh.

“Why are you blinking so slowly? If you appeal like that, it makes it seem like I’m someone who will grant you everything.”

He quietly looked down at her. His aimless gaze traveled down Cheon Geon-young’s eyes, nose, and lips before returning upwards.

“There’s nothing I can’t grant.”

A declaration of defeat mixed with a slight sense of injustice came from Yoon Tae-ha.

“You rest today too. You don’t have any schedule.”

“That’s because Mr. Kim So-bae said that the boars probably won’t come back for a while, since someone sacrificed their own hand to clean up the ones that appeared in the farmland yesterday.”

“So we can eat french fries.”

“I like that.”

Cheon Geon-young grabbed both of her shoulders and moved to the living room. Like playing choo-choo train. Yoon Tae-ha, who was the front car of the train, moved like a scarecrow with a broken arm and plopped down on the sofa.

It was a four-seater sofa, but Cheon Geon-young didn’t seem to intend to use the space widely. He took the seat next to her again. Yoon Tae-ha, who had told him to move to the side when the first movie started, gave up by the middle of the second movie. Actually, she realized it then.

He’s doing this on purpose. Because he’s worried about me.

It felt like a kind of comfort. Her partner didn’t touch the injured area at all. Even his seemingly unreasonable behavior felt like part of a strategy.

In his presence, her gloom scattered without even having a chance to settle.