Mark watched Taemin disappear into the elevator as soon as the others started mingling.

He frowned as soon as he saw him leave, then glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. Apparently not. Baekhyun and Shao were still chumming it out over at the massage chairs, Taeyong as Lucas drinking in silence at the watch point, and Kai and Ten looked hammered—well, at least, Kai did. The only thing different about Ten was the slight, languid smile on his lips as he observed Kai try to down another glass, a shot glass hanging between his fingers.

Mark bit his lip and glanced back at the closed doors of the elevator uncertainly. On one hand, he kind of wanted to join Taeyong and Lucas, since this was his one opportunity to interact with them, but on the other hand, his hero could be downstairs doing something Mark could help out with.

With a sigh and a few seconds of making up his mind, he set his jaw determinedly, grabbed his lime soda from the table, and slipped into the elevator while no one was watching. Only once the doors shut in front of him did any doubt enter his mind—the place had like, forty floors, and Taemin could be on any one of them.

Mark shook himself out of it and pressed the button leading to the meeting room. It was the floor the team hung out on whenever they were together in Nova Tower, and not only did it house their training rooms, but also the laboratory and a few mysterious doors that always seemed to remain closed.

The elevator doors slid open when Mark was still absorbed in his thoughts, so soundlessly that he didn't even realize it at first. He came back to his senses with a jolt, and stepped through, walking the isolated hallway connecting the elevator doors to the second set of protected gates. He paused at the entrance, bending to pass the retinal scan before they opened, allowing him access.

He stepped inside, and the doors shut behind him, leaving him blinded in the pitch darkness before the elevated circle in the center of the floor lit up with a dulled orange glow. Unlike the rest of the building, this floor was built with a strange floor plan shaped like the figure eight, with a door in the middle separating the two circles. Doors lines the walls of the compressed-cylinder-like structure, identical except for the etchings on their surface, designating them their identities. Being on this floor sometimes reminded Mark of the inside of a microwave oven—if the microwave oven had been circular.

Thankfully for him, it wasn't hard to guess where the billionaire was. The door to the meeting room was firmly shut, but a soft blue glow emanated from the thin slit at the bottom, indicating that it was occupied.

Mark punched in the password, and the door opened to reveal the meeting room. Unlike usual meeting rooms, this one was also in the shape of a cylinder—Taemin liked his circles—and was floor-lit, with high walls that led up into a beckoning darkness. Half the walls were one-sided glass, allowing them a view of the city outside. It did have the normal meeting furniture, too—a long table covered with Lucas's conspiracy theory magazines, a few chairs, and appropriately messy couches. They had all left their marks in the room, and the artifacts left behind were much like a dog pissing over a place to mark its territory, ranging from Taeyong's neck pillow (one he actually used, seeing as he slept more than he contributed to the assembly) to napkin bits covered in Ten's surprisingly beautiful doodles.

Taemin was standing over the long table, a section of which he had cleared away, and was apparently studying an issue of The Conspirator. No, it wasn't actually that, as Mark noticed when he got closer, but a heavy-looking notepad filled with pictures and scribbled evidence of the Foursaken, probably from Jae's basement.

"I noticed you left the party," Mark began, and Taemin looked up, surprised at first, but a slow smile curved his lips as he realized who had crashed his mini-party. He hesitated, then backtracked, cheeks burning as he tried to rephrase his words. "I mean—not like, left left, but that you didn't stay to kind of interact or make a toast like they do in movies or—"

"Yes, well," Taemin said, shrugging slightly before glancing back down at the open notebook, "parties aren't really my thing."

He hadn't yelled or made a strict face, which Mark took as a sign of a successful start to the conversation, and glided over to his side to look at the notebook. It was open on a grainy polaroid of three people—a smiling girl with a red cup and her arm around a boy, and dark-haired woman with wind lifting strands of her hair into the air around her face, as if she were underwater.

"That's Irene, isn't it?" Mark asked, surprised. Taemin nodded slowly, looking lost in thought, and traced the lines of her face with his fingertips. Mark looked at him out of the corner of his eye, hesitant, but curious and worried. "You knew her, right?"

Taemin stopped, dropping his hand, and pursed his lips. Mark's shoulders tightened, and he worried that he had said something he wasn't supposed to, but Taemin just looked sad and tired. "Yes," he said. "A very long time ago."

Mark licked his lips and tasted a lemony tang on them, realizing he was still holding his glass of lime soda from the party. Gingerly he picked aside a magazine and set down the glass on the table, making Taemin shoot him a curious glance.

"I'm not twenty-one yet," he explained, a little nervously.

Taemin laughed. It was a bright laugh, a sudden one, and it made Mark both jumpy and glad. He smiled a nervous smile, and Taemin's eyes glinted as he gestured to the file with a smaller smile. "Want to work the case with me?"

Mark's eyes widened, becoming glittering circles of hope and unrestrainable excitement. "Do I want flight powers?" he asked, and Taemin raised an eyebrow. "Heck yes!"

Taemin chuckled again, then inclined his head to give Mark a secretive look. "What I'm about to show you isn't for mortal eyes," he said. "Which means it hasn't been released to the public yet."

"The 'mortal eyes' part sounded cooler."

Taemin smiled, then cleared his throat. "Sibyl?"

There was a low humming sound like a computer being rebooted, and the lies separating the metal walls lit up a fluorescent blue, leading up to the darkened roof. Light flooded across the ceiling, like a flicked switch, and Mark realized with a start that instead of a wall, the ceiling had a spherical machine attached to it, like a massive robotic eyeball. There were thick cable jumpers attaching the sphere to the ceiling, like optic fibers. The colors, cool gray with electric blue—Mark's favorite shades.

Hello, Taemin, said a clear female voice, and Mark jumped. The voice was cool and neutral, so steady that it almost seemed nice. It was coming from all around them—no, Mark thought, as he saw the way the spaces between the walls were lit up, it was coming from the walls themselves.

"Yeah, hi, honey," Taemin replied to the voice, and Mark saw the center of the sphere glow a shade brighter. "Pull up all files on kidnappings within city perimeter from the past three years, segregated by location. Report any spikes in average crime rate beyond ten percent, and twenty-five percent in the last year."

Processing files. Approximate response time: three minutes.

"An integrated audio system and voice-activated software?" he whispered, unable to control his exhilaration. "That is so cool."

Taemin gave him a rare, indulgent smile. "Sibyl was my first project, even before I started the company," he said. "She's called Sibyl because of the Sybil of Cumae—have you heard of that legend?"

"Of the nine books a lady wrote and then burnt?"

"A gross oversimplification, but basically, yes," Taemin said. "The books were prophecies about the future, and that's what Project Sybil is about. Looking at the details of the past—a person's history, academic and criminal records, every single piece of information they've ever let out on the internet, to determine what kind of person they're going to be in the future."

Mark's eyes rounded. "Isn't that, like, an invasion of privacy, though?"

Taemin nodded. "Exactly why I left it half done," he said. "It started out as a government-aided initiative which was scrapped because of the obvious ethical violations." His tone was grim. "I was just a researcher back then, barely a programmer, young and ambitious and full of ideas that would never take shape—which is why the Sybil Project was such a big deal for me."

For Mark, it was almost impossible to believe that one of the most acclaimed geniuses of the world could have started out like that. "What does she do now?"

"Still delves into people's past, but only the publicly accessible bits. Tweets, bits of conversation, criminal records." He shrugged. "Not half as efficient, but it's helpful in its own way. And then, it's not her only objective anymore. Sybil is now built into a standalone AI which helps me out with many more important things. For example, she's currently picking up abnormalities in the kidnappings, sorting them out geographically, and sending them to the backup software in the Blue Room."

"All of this is so insanely cool I can, like, barely process it," Mark replied in a daze. He took a sip of his soda and set it down, looking at Taemin. The blond's expression was brooding, almost regretful. "...but that's not why you're telling me all this?"

"When Sybil was a fresh project, I let people into my workplace," Taemin said regretfully, and Mark's stomach turned instinctively. This is gonna be bad. "People who, I believe, could in the long run benefit from the software and were not happy to see it shut down."

Uh-oh, time for a history lesson. Mark swallowed down the bitter taste in his mouth, but it refused to go. "Lemme guess," he mumbled warily. "Irene."

Taemin didn't say anything, which only confirmed it. "We worked the project even after it was shut down, tweaking the programming, tearing down boundaries we thought would limit the system," he said. "I got swept away, and by the time I realized what we were building, it was too late."

Mark's teeth worried at his lower lip. "But you shut it down after?"

The martyred look Taemin gave him after did nothing to reassure him. "I was too wrapped up in my achievements," he said. "I couldn't bear to destroy it, thinking it was over, that she had left and would never come back."

"But she did."

"But she did," Taemin repeated, and Mark felt the floor give way underneath him.

He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, the cool voice interrupted him.

Files processed. Prospected increase in specified crime rate: twenty-five percent. Estimated increase in specified crime rate: fifty-six percent. Mortality rate: constant. Abnormality reported: conflicting death count.