Jisoo POV

Turns out running a ship is hard work. 

 I guess I should've known this. I've been on the Varuna enough times before. But I've never been in charge of an entire crew, especially not one trying to figure out crates full of Nemo-based alt-tech.

My meeting with the prefects goes well enough. We organize our assignment schedule and daily shifts. One Dolphin and one Shark will be on the bridge at all times as quartermaster and officer of the deck. Orcas and Cephalopods will conduct a careful unpacking and analysis of our gold-level tech. Yuna and Lia will alternate in the sickbay looking after Dr. Hewett. Everyone will take turns preparing meals, keeping an inventory of supplies, monitoring the critical systems, and cleaning the Varuna. (Ships get dirty quickly with twenty-one people and a dog onboard.) Meanwhile, Hank will follow Roseanne around and look cute. Socrates will come and go as he pleases, eating fish and playing in the ocean. Why do the animals get the best jobs?

Once all that's decided, I set our course. I figure we'll have to risk traveling in a straight line to the island. We don't have enough time or supplies to be tricky and zigzag around the ocean, hoping to throw off any pursuers. Hewett's advanced camouflage and anti-sonar tech had better work.

 I leave Lisa in command for the first watch. Roseanne stays on the bridge, too. She's been working on Dr. Hewett's control pad, trying to get access and route the encrypted data to the onboard computer. I wish her luck, though I'm not sure I can handle any more mind-blowing secrets that Dr. Hewett might have been waiting to spring on us. 

I spend the first part of the day making the rounds. I check on the crew. I give them encouragement. I try not to trip over the many open gold-level boxes now scattered around the ship. I get a lot of questions from excited Cephalopods and Orcas: What is this? How does it work? Most of the time, I don't have a clue what I'm looking at. I might have Nemo's DNA, but it did not come with any latent knowledge or a handy user's manual.

By noon, rain is hammering down. Swells have risen to five feet. It's nothing we haven't handled before, but it's not great for morale. If you're stuck working below decks and can't get fresh air or see the horizon, even those with the strongest stomachs can get seasick.

I find Jennie in the engine room. She's sitting on the corrugated steel floor, her legs in a V with a gold-level crate open in front of her. She seems completely engrossed in sorting through wires and metal plates. I have a flashback to Taehyung in sixth grade, building Lego robots.

I turn to Hwasa, who's been following me around all morning. 'Why don't you get some lunch? I'll be fine.' 

She looks torn between her duty as a bodyguard and her discomfort at being around Jennie. Finally, she nods and lopes off. This is a relief. She's been standing behind me so long, I'm starting to think her breath is leaving an impression on my shoulder.

'How's that going?' Jennie waves her screwdriver at the spot where Hwasa was standing.

 I'm tempted to say that Hwasa isn't so bad, but that's not for me to tell Nelinha, given their history. I just shrug.

'Hm.' Jennie turns her attention back to the half-disassembled device in her hand.

I barely registered her words. Too much had happened in the past 24 days. Jennie turned around and took in my face. I probably didn't look too good. I certainly didn't feel good. Jennie reached for my hand.

I think back to that infamous day in September of our chum year. We were brand new, trying to survive the meat grinder of orientation month. Two of our classmates had already dropped out and gone home in tears.

Jennie was struggling more than most. Her English was excellent, but it was still her second language. She was relieved to sit next to me in the cafeteria because I knew Korean. Then,one night at dinner, Hwasa's shadow fell across our table. She stood over us, gawking at Jennie like she was a unicorn.

'Are you the scholarship kid?' she asked. 'From Korea?' 

There was no malice in her voice, but her words carried. We'd just finished a hard day of physical training. Nobody had much energy left for chatting. Our classmates turned to see who Hwasa was talking about.

The scholarship kid. 

Jennie's face hardened. My fingers curled around the handle of my fork. I was tempted to stab Hwasa in the thigh. She'd just reduced my new friend's identity to three words that would cling to her for the rest of the year. 

Hwasa seemed oblivious. She started rambling about her brother who was an LDS missionary in the North-South Korea border. Did Jennie know him? Had she met any of the missionaries? How was life in Korea?

Eventually, I would realize that being a straight shooter was just an extension of Hwasa's personality. When she saw a target, she aimed and shot. She did not think about collateral damage.

Jennie put down her utensils. She gave Hwasa a sour smile. 'I don't know your brother. Chu, you finished?'

She stormed off. I gave Hwasa a withering look, then abandoned my dinner and rushed to follow her out of the cafeteria.

Later in the eighth-grade barracks, after lights out, I heard Jennie sobbing in her bunk. At first, I assumed it was Roseanne. But Roseanne and Lisa were fast asleep and snoring. Jennie was curled up and miserable, shivering under her blankets. I crawled in next to her and held her while she wept, until she finally fell asleep. 

Jennie had gone through a lot in her thirteen years. She grew up an orphan – no family, no opportunities, no money. Then, thanks to an elementary-school teacher who saw something special in her, Jennie was recommended for the HP entry tests in Rio. She blew the tops off all the mechanical-aptitude scores. She deserved to be known as more than the scholarship kid. 

Since that day in the cafeteria, I've stayed angry at Hwasa for almost two years. I guess that wasn't fair or justified. But I don't like anyone making my friends hurt.

Now, HP has been destroyed. Jennie's future is once again a giant question mark. Like me, she doesn't have any family or home to return to. All we have is this boat ride to the middle of nowhere.

 I look at her side profile as she works. Today, she has refreshed her bookish look with a yellow striped top and thin-framed glasses. Her hair is pulled back in a chaotic mess of a bun with a brown strand directly in her face. I would have offered to redo her hair for her, but most of the time her hair ends up doing its own thing. Still, I undo her hair and start braiding it.

'This is crazy.' Her voice breaks me out of my trance. I wonder how long I've been standing there watching her work.

'What's crazy?'

 She holds up her gadget, which looks like a bespoke metal tennis ball that had a head-on collision with a Slinky. 'If I'm right, this is a LOCUS.'

I try to place the name. The memory of Dr. Hewett's dry voice comes back to me from some long-ago theoretical marine sciences lecture. 'An electrolocation sensor?' 

'Correct!' Jennie wriggles her immaculately groomed eyebrows. 'Imagine a more effective, undetectable alternative to radar and sonar, based on aquatic mammals' senses. Whales. Dolphins. Perry the Platypuses. If I can figure it out, it could allow us to check for incoming hostiles without giving away our position.'

'Or it could make us light up on sonar screens,' I speculate.

 She tosses the LOCUS into the air and catches it again. 'Babe, our understanding of the laws of science changes all the time. We've only got so many senses. We have such a narrow perspective on reality –'

'Uh-oh.' I realize I've blundered right into a #JennieLecture. 

'That's right, uh-oh. This LOCUS ... it's like something dolphins might engineer if they wanted to augment their natural senses. Or squid, if they had a few more millennia of evolution. Your Madman Ancestor was a genius. It's like everybody was looking at the world in three dimensions, and somehow he was able to step back and see it in five. Everything is the same, but everything is different. If we could replicate –' 

I tackle her to the ground, effectively shutting her up. She squeals, kneeing me in the stomach as she kicked every part of my body to get me off her, but even though she was taller than me, she couldn't defeat me in wrestling. I pinned her down, but my smirk soon got wiped off my face. Jennie wrapped her hands around me in a python-like grip, grinning devilishly.

I'm saved from the rest of the torture when Roseanne stumbles in breathlessly, Hank at her heels.

'Come with me-you need to see this.' Her eyes are red from crying. 'You don't want to, but you need to.'