Suffice to say, I was a mess at work that following Monday. Ever since I had driven home from the shopping mall - by the insistence of Min Yoongi and Kim Seokjin over the sound of loud screaming from inside as four boys tried to calm Jeongguk down - I had been unable to think about anything that was unrelated to that past weekend. After my stunt of missing the meeting and then being completely unproductive, I honestly wonder why I wasn't fired. I just couldn't stop worrying about the last several hours at the mall.

Andromeda had vanished and hadn't come back. Apparently, there wasn't an electric power source in the mall, as I had thought. The lights and heating system had actually been powered by the star, and they all stopped working when she left. In order to be able to see and not shiver uncontrollably, a couple of the boys had made several small fires in the mall. When Yoongi and Seokjin asked me to leave, I told them that they should come with me. My house wasn't anything compared to this gigantic shopping mall, but at least the lights turned on and there was a working furnace.

They shook their heads. "No," Seokjin said. "We can't risk being seen. We're fine here."

There was another pained yell from the circle inside, and they winced. I had told them I would be coming back as soon as possible, then said they should probably go back in and help their friend.

What I hadn't realized when I said "as soon as possible" was that 'soon' was going to be really soon. That Tuesday afternoon, I slogged out of work, tired and generally drained, and made my way to my car, hoping to drown myself in cheap ramen noodles and bad TV reruns that night. But as soon as I stepped onto the pavement of the parking lot, I could feel something in the wind shift. The orange sunset became a little brighter and the air became a little warmer.

"Damn it," I whispered.

"Sorry," Andromeda said, as hands gripped my shoulders and pulled me into darkness. 

Then I found myself in the middle of the shopping mall again. I still felt the need to vomit up everything I'd eaten in the last two days, but I managed to swallow it down. Alternatively, Jeongguk looked far better than he had the last time I saw him. He still had dark circles under his eyes and looked like he had lost a fight with someone four times his weight, but his eyes were clear and he wasn't crying. Both of which were definite improvements.

"Hi," I said after a few moments of panting and swallowing harshly to keep my puke down.

"Hey," Hoseok said.

I took in one last deep breath and looked around at the boys. Jeongguk looked the worst, but I didn't think any of them looked spectacular at the moment. Still. "Looks like you guys survived," I said. "Well done. I don't know if I could have lived without running hot water."

A few of them smiled at that. "We're Korean. We're tough," Namjoon said.

I looked around for a certain girl made out of starlight. "Where is she?"

The familiar swirling mist formed on the second-floor balcony above us. "Here," a boy's voice said. I jumped. Much to my surprise, instead of a young girl sitting on the balcony, a glowing boy with short silver hair, a large chest, and a long rat's tail braid sat there.

"What the hell?" I asked.

Andromeda shrugged, the gesture hilarious with her new form. "I felt like going a little more masculine than usual today. What do you think?" The voice was oddly deep for such a soft, effeminate boy.

I examined her (him?) more closely. "Why do you kinda look like Seokjin?"

Seokjin made a weird choking noise, spitting out some of the water he'd been drinking out of a childish purple cup. "Um," he sputtered.

"Can we all just acknowledge the bear in the room and get through the awkwardness?" Yoongi said.

"Elephant," Andromeda and I corrected at the same time.

Yoongi groaned. "Never mind. I give up."

"Oh, you big grouch," Andromeda said in her female voice. She pushed herself off the balcony and was back in her girlish form by the time her feet touched the ground. "Very well. I'm okay, and I'm sorry about my overreaction the other day." This she said to me directly.

"And what else?" Namjoon said. He obviously knew I hadn't been told everything. Jeongguk flinched.

Andromeda glared at Namjoon. She obviously didn't need to be prompted. "And I spoke to my mother, while I was gone. She told me something that I had guessed for a while was true."

"That you're dying?" I guessed. It seemed brash, but it was logical. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jeongguk was slowly reaching his hands up to cover his ears. He didn't want to hear any of this.

She sighed. "Sort of. I'm sort of dying."

"How can you be sort of dying?"

In the air between us, an illusion of the planet appeared. I could tell that it wasn't anything physical because I could vaguely see the marble floor through it. "Stars aren't supposed to be living in the lithosphere of mortal creatures. No star has ever spent as much time under a living planet's atmosphere as I have. We're not supposed to. I've only been able to spend this much time on Earth because my mother's physical form is made out of the same general material as the Earth."

Hoseok's brow furrowed. "How long have you been here?"

Finally, she smiled. If only the rest of us knew why she was smiling. "I've been watching humans since before you were called humans."

"What?" Namjoon asked. "That was an awful answer. How long have you been here?"

The illusion of the Earth faded. "When I got here, the only creatures walking on two legs were various species of giant reptiles."

My jaw dropped. "Are you talking about dinosaurs?"

A nod.

"You've been here millions of years?"

She shrugged. "More or less. I used to spend a lot more time with my mother because there weren't many creatures that I could interact with until hominins started civilizations."

And here I thought I was gaining an understanding of what was going on. "You can interact with other creatures?"

Andromeda laughed. "Of course." She gave the universal 'Wait' gesture, then paused. She laughed suddenly, and there was another flash of light. Then, a beautiful silver hawk began flying through the old mall.

Hoseok and Taehyung laughed and yelled in surprise as the hawk swooped right over their heads.

"You have got to be kidding me," I laughed as I watched the bird soar around before carefully landing on Seokjin's shoulder. She stared at him until a smile formed on his lips. Then the hawk hopped to Jeongguk's shoulder and nuzzled his face with her head. He giggled quietly at this, and I could actually see his tense shoulders relaxing. The hawk gave a satisfied nod, then flew back to the open floor.

I was almost disappointed when there was another flash and Andromeda stood there in her teenage girl form. She had a confident smile on her face. "You humans have such an overstated sense of your own self-importance," she said.

"Well, we can't all turn into other animals, we have to make ourselves feel better somehow," Namjoon said.

Andromeda nervously braided some of her hair. "So, are you guys not pissed at me anymore?"

"I'm not sure I was at all," Taehyung said.

"That's one person's opinion," Jeongguk grumbled, the first words I heard him say. But he said it with a smile, and I knew he wasn't angry at her. If he ever was at all.

"So that's where you've been for a couple of days now?" I asked. "With your mom?"

"Mother," she said quickly. "I don't know if she and I are currently close enough for me to consider her my 'mom'. Maybe some of the time, but not for the last several decades."

"Annie..." Yoongi said.

"Yes?" she asked.

"You're rambling."

She blinked. "Oh. I didn't realize. Sorry."

I got the feeling that while she was definitely better than she had been before she vanished, she was still... off. Leaving to visit her mother for a few days wasn't going to save her. "No, I've been here for a while now. I had to fix some things before I went and got you, you understand."

Yeah, the conversation between Andromeda and Jeongguk would definitely have been awkward to be a witness for. Seeing how no one was in tears - or worse, disintegrated or otherwise dead - it seemed things had gone well.

"Still. You could have given me a call or something."

"We don't have your phone number," Seokjin pointed out.

I thought about that for a second. "Oh."

Some discussion about the societal expectations of needing to know a person's phone number before really knowing them started up, and I walked into one of the nearby old stores. I found a piece of crumpled paper and a pen and scrawled my phone number on it. I went back to the circle, where the discussion had turned into a full-blown argument. I handed the piece of paper to the person closest to me - Taehyung- and said, "In case of emergencies."

He folded it and put it into his pocket. I noticed Andromeda was looking curiously at the paper.

"I've never understood you humans and your telephones," she said, very effectively stopping the argument going on around her.

"What?" Yoongi asked.

She shrugged. "I just don't understand it, I suppose. It's as if you all prefer speaking to someone at a distance through this rectangular device rather than speaking to them in person."

"We're human. We can't always be where we want to be," Seokjin said.

I nodded. "We can't all travel at the speed of light."

Andromeda clicked her tongue. "I can actually travel much faster than the speed of light," she said. "Anyway, what I mean is today you all stare at your phones instead of speaking to the people around you. It's like instead of using your devices of communication to actually communicate, you use them as an excuse to not communicate. Why not just talk to the people around you?"

I suppose none of us had an answer to that, as none of us answered.

"You all could at least try to speak to people around you. Or spend your time with the ones that you want to speak with."

"Look who's talking," Jeongguk muttered darkly.

"I don't think you quite get humans," Yoongi said quickly. I think he was trying to avoid a conflict started by what Jeongguk had just said. "We can't always be around the people that we want to be with."

Andromeda shook her head with a slight smirk on her face. "I watched humans evolve. Trust me, I understand your kind. Probably better than you understand yourselves. What I don't understand is why you created a world in which you spend time with people you don't want to be with, do things you don't want to do, and choose to make yourself suffer. In pursuing your own freedom, you chose to live in your own small, structured prisons."

What she was saying was poetic, but sounded so innately naive to me. How could she go on saying things like that? She was nearly immortal, and was able to go where she wanted, do what she wanted, and be who she wanted to be with. Or at least had been for her whole life thus far. She ought to have the wisdom of someone who had been alive for millions of years, yet had the responsibility and sensibility of a child.

Yet, when I thought about it, what she was saying did perhaps make sense. Humans, while we did live often in more protected environments than animals did, suffered things that other creatures didn't. Animals didn't deal with angry bosses upset about you missing your train, and they didn't worry about so many of the things that humans preoccupied themselves with.

"You chose to join us in those prisons," I pointed out.

She laughed, in an odd, self-deprecating, manner. "No. I'm like a bird. I don't go in any prisons. If I were to find myself in one, I'd get out."

Jeongguk stood up quickly. The fluid, sudden rage in his eyes seemed to freeze the area all by itself. "And I suppose you just leave everyone in that prison when you leave?"

Andromeda flinched as if his words had been a knife. "I never said anything like that."

"You didn't have to." And with that, he stormed out of the mall, thick metal doors clanging after him and letting in a gust of freezing wind that sent shivers down my spine.

Just then, I looked up through the glass ceiling and noticed the evening moon. I couldn't be sure, but it almost seemed as if she were glaring down at us. As if she were accusing us.