“Colonel!” Jae tries to explain. “I threw a smoke grenade—that new rubber model we were given—and I didn’t realize that there was spilled fuel on the deck. You see, I didn’t know why there was ethanol just lying around in the open. I mean, the sterndrive engine isn’t anywhere near—"

“Haven’t you read the manual?” Colonel Yang looks at him darkly. “We shifted from marine fuel to ammonia ages ago. It’s not ethanol – the last time any mariner used ethanol, the engine broke down and the tank ended up with a large lumping hole.”

“O-Oh… I’ve read the manual, Colonel, but isn’t ours two years outdated…?”

“Then let me teach you something.” Yang Rong taps his foot on the planks, assuming the posture of a strict instructor. “Liquid ammonia is sustainable liquid energy. Though most is used as plant fertilizer, the fuel is carb-free and ah, is easier to distribute. A prime resource for doomsday, right, Noah?”

Noah is caught off-guard by the sudden scientific spiel. It had sprung so far out of left field he doesn’t know how to respond. Yang Rong has a strangely proud expression on his face – was he bragging? – and is preened for praise.

Noah responds, “The term is ‘carbon-free.’”

Five seconds of silence follows and then Yang Rong suddenly lifts the heel of his boots to kick at the unsuspecting Jae who is still fumbling around. The colonel raises his voice to be heard. “Does it matter?! Jae, reflect on your actions right now else your paycheck will be suspended until next decade, you fool!”

“I’m not getting paid!” The soldier almost sobs. “I only wanted to start a small fire by the bow like you told me to, but…! Colonel Yang, I promise to make up for my blunder with two weeks of heavy-lifting and strength training, one thousand sit-ups a day, five hundred push-ups, ten sets of walking lunges, eight—"

“—And how long are you two going to be pressed onto each other?” The colonel ignores the sob story and proceeds to poke Jae with the hilt of his rifle. He’s not gentle when he smacks the younger man a few times – purposefully – on the shoulder. “Get off of him already.”

“But he’s on me!” the soldier tries to refute before realizing the impact of his words. He quickly changes his tone and profusely shakes Noah back to life – nevermind that the motion does opposite. “Noah, thank you for taking the blow for me… Would you like me to kneel before you? How about I carry you to the cabin and give you a massage? I’m pretty good at it – Yoo Seok-hyung would vouch – and I promise I—"

“…Mhm…” Noah hoists himself off the soldier’s body and settles on a more comfortable sitting position. He slowly rubs the back of his head, his hands roaming down his neck and then his shoulder blades, checking for any external wounds. His fingers come out clean and unbloodied. “No problem.”

“Hey!” Colonel Yang squats down and meets him on eye-level. “Didn’t I tell you to go inside the cabin? What took you so long? And why do you look like a ghost?”

“No reason,” he says though he’s still reluctant to talk to the other man.

Yang Rong clicks his tongue, turns to Jae and yells, “Get back to work!”

“Y-Yes Colonel!” Jae salutes him as he runs off, heading to where his trusted companion, Yoo Seok, is situated on the upper level.

Yang Rong dismisses him easily. His attention is drawn back to Noah not even a second later.

The colonel squints and examines him from head to toe, not missing even the flimsiest speck of dirt on his body. He lingers on the dirt caught in between his fingernails, the black stains on his jeans, the soot on his coat. He catches sight of the black dagger haphazardly sheathed and strapped onto Noah’s belt. Unused. Yang Rong stands up and offers him a hand. “Come on. I’ll take you.”

The colonel’s palms are unclean and calloused with bits of sludge on the cracks, some slime-like substance on the knuckles. The rain had washed away most of the gore, but Noah can still see the residues – pink liquid trailing from his thumb down to his carpals.

Noah wonders where he’d been hurt. No external cuts on his hand, not on his fingers – the two teeth pricks have healed – and not on his forearm either. Conjecture holds it isn’t his own blood. Unsurprising. It doesn’t smell of him either.

He blurs out the colonel’s hand and flicks his sight elsewhere in peripheral, past the man’s broad frame, past his long legs and into the distance. He remembers there was another person here, that brunet soldier… There he is – moving from the ledge to the side of the vessel, away from the commotion and toward the boarding stairs. He walks with a limp.

“What are you doing gawking at me like that?” Yang Rong asks. “Hurry up and ho—take my hand.”

“Colonel Yang.” Noah takes ahold of his hand and turns it over. Washed-out blood. He rubs a finger on the colonel’s palm, tentatively touching a vein. “Is this shark blood?”

Yang Rong, distracted, takes some time to respond. “…Yes. What is it?”

The brunet stranger lifts a leg to go down the stairs and Noah sees it immediately. The man is placing extra weight on one ankle, his body tilted a few degrees to accommodate. His trousers hike up for a millisecond – less than a millisecond, an interval so abysmal it wouldn’t have been possible to identify without heteroclite eyes.

An ankle injury. The shark’s fangs had sunk into the man’s Achilles tendon, tearing off some slabs of flesh. It’s impossible for a human to see the blackened skin from so far away, especially in a dark night. The brunet soldier hides the pain exceptionally well.

Noah hoists himself up using the colonel as an anchor. He leans forward and says, “Colonel Yang, that person is infected.”

The safety is clicked off.

He’s shocked. Not Yang Rong, but Noah is shocked when the former points the gun and shoots. Instantaneous, unhesitant, the action so fluid it must have been practiced for decades, must have been done countless untold times. Cold-blooded. Yang Rong had done it with one hand. His other is still holding Noah’s.

The bullet cracks through the wind current and impales the brunet soldier on the head – pinpoint accuracy, zero wasted movements. Yang Rong’s eyes didn’t blink either, did they?

Only the recoil and the strong rush of air would indicate anything out of the ordinary. Noah’s heart is pounding and he’s unsure why – the adrenaline, perhaps, the deafening gunfire that took his breath away. Perhaps it’s the colonel’s unsettlingly cold eyes – though when he takes a look again, the hue of willow green isn’t so much cold as it is indifferent.

Yang Rong catches him staring and quirks his brow at him – what’s wrong?

Noah is obviously shaken. He watches the soldier’s body topple off the railing, half of a brunet head rolling down the steps and onto the pier. The bullet was deadly enough to blow the man’s face into smithereens, leaving a messy, gory trail of brain and slime. Noah has no attachment to the person whatsoever and yet, an inexplicable surge of emotions fissures in his mind. He can’t distinguish revulsion from disbelief, distress from panic.

Yang Rong watches him quietly.

“He was infected,” the man says matter-of-factly. He is more than six inches taller than Noah. The height difference only perpetuates. “Isn’t that what you told me, Noah?”

Afraid. Noah realizes he feels afraid.

The colonel’s hands are so firm they could grasp him easily and choke him by the throat. The calluses are etched so deeply they could scrape the nape of his neck, dig into him and break him. Noah flinches – an electrical current spasms through where they touch – and then he lets go.

When Yang Rong reaches for him again, he jolts backward so abruptly he collides against the cabin wall. Noah sees in chaotic inkblots, his vision blurring from the man’s raven-black hair to his bloodstained uniform and the loaded machine gun in his hand. He’d seen him like this a few times but never this close – close enough to send uncontrollable shivers down his body.

Noah thinks of a particular set of words – “I will not hesitate to shoot you if I find you an endangerment,” said the man with startling features, clad in noir. And oh, Noah knows this man is utterly, painstakingly dangerous.

“Noah." Yang Rong frowns and now his eyes have turned into a healthier, viridescent glow. It’s more deceiving. “Are you alright?”

“—No.” He takes a step aside. “No. Get away from me.”

Noah turns and rushes into the cabin, not giving him a single glance. Yang Rong, startled, doesn’t go after him – not like he can, because Noah promptly slams the door in his face and wrenches it shut. He deadbolts it twice.

He leans against the door, his heart pumping so erratically it threatens to burst. The commotion is ear-shattering outside – intense deluge of rain, roaring wind, sparks of inferno that only gets noisier. Yang Rong knocks on the cabin door – softly, carefully, but Noah registers the taps deafeningly loud. The colonel might have said something too, though his voice is muted through clamor.

Ming Tang, standing directly in front of him, watches attentively. The young boy’s coat is clean and unsullied and as for Noah’s – his is covered in soot and dirt. His silver hair, too, is slicked with the rain and sweat on his forehead.

Ming Tang hands him a towel. “It is clean.”

The towel smells of boxwood and birch, some kind of familiar, mass-manufactured detergent. He remembers the same foul scent from the military base. Noah lets out a low sigh, plops the towel on his head and slinks down to the floor. The colonel had stopped calling his name but Noah still senses his presence outside the door.

Some more heavy footsteps, the wooden planks creaking underneath, a clink of metal and then Yoo Seok’s voice can be overheard.

“Colonel Yang,” the soldier says, “we need you to judge three survivors.”

“Alright,” Yang Rong replies – he’s so close to the door that his voice reverberates through. Deep, honeylike in timbre, captivatingly alarming. “Have the others been dealt with?”

“Yes.”

They leave.

Noah calms down – just a bit. With shaking hands, he starts to rub his hair dry. The motion is meticulous – cleaning every residue of grim, circling the same spots over and over again as distraction. Five minutes of eerie silence, the cabin closed-off from the chaos around them. Ming Tang sits on the edge of a wooden desk and doesn’t say a word. He busies himself with a random navigator’s map, wedged in somewhere among a pile of documents.

Noah rather likes that the boy is indifferent yet perceptive all the same – no needless conversations, no questions asked.

The cabin is a small, cramped space. There is very little furniture – a desk, a bunk bed, a chair tumbled sideways. There is also a window that allows them both to see outside. In a dark shrouded room, two people sit in absolute repose, paying no heed to the flickers of red and orange that remind of carnage. They don’t smell the smoke from here – an air purifier is installed, probably – and the space is comparably safe.

Noah breaks the stillness first. “Maybe I should have left after all.”

“Will you be better off on your own?” Ming Tang matches his sotto voce.

“I don’t know.”

“If you leave, you won’t go to the city,” Ming Tang tells him. He rummages through the desk and pulls out another map – coordinates of some primitive village, long a ghost town. “Because you are an omega.”

“…Really,” Noah chuckles airily, “you are too intelligent.”

“Did you run away?” the boy asks him.

“No,” he replies. “I was thrown out a long time ago.”

The boy only hums in response and doesn’t inquire further. Five more minutes and then a coarse voice resonates through the quarters. Half a wail and half an aggressive yell – a woman compromising for her life. Her tenor is that of a seasoned mariner – imposing, rough on the edges, yet fear stricken.

“I was the one who set the fire to stop the spread,” she could be heard saying. “Colonel Yang, if you could monitor me for a day—no, half a day, then—"

“I cannot do that,” Yang Rong says in that same remissive tone. “It has spread to your neck. You will be dying in a matter of minutes.”

“There can be a miracle,” the woman says. “Colonel Yang, you’ve been informed of the possibilities of a nonreactive human. They’re trying to make it happen through embryotic fusion. Won’t there be a miracle? Perhaps there has already been a miracle, I—"

Yang Rong only says, simply, “There may have been, but you are not one of them.”

What follows is three consecutive shots – three shots and three infected victims, Noah doesn’t have to see them to hear their bodies dropping onto the ship deck. In a matter of seconds, their corpses are being dragged along scorched planks and thrown into the fizzling fire.

“Be thorough.” There is no emotion in the colonel’s words.

“Alright.” Neither is there any in Yoo Seok’s.

The air is acrid when it wafts inside the small cabin. Through the cracks of the window comes a coppery, metallic pungency that isn’t ventilated by the purifier.