Dragon Pearl

Min awakens in the medical bay, still feeling the reverberation of her connection to the ship’s meridians. Reasoning that everyone will be distracted with the battle, she uses Charm to sneak to the captain’s quarters and find answers about Jun. In Captain Hwan’s cabin, she discovers a heavy residue of Charm and a journal in which the captain wrote, “The cadet is a fox. He will be useful” (172). Min learns that the captain sent Jun to the Fourth Colony to Charm his way past the ghosts that reside there and retrieve the Dragon Pearl.

Seeing a map of the Fourth Colony with specific coordinates marked, Min commits it to memory before replacing everything and sneaking back to the medical bay, where she falls into an exhausted sleep. When she awakens, Byung-Ho, the pilot of the freighter ship, is conscious in a nearby bed and is asking about her. A medic tells him that Min died. Feeling guilty for the pain that her deception is causing him, Min tells Byung-Ho that she survived, but she does not break her disguise as