Chapter Two #2
That was the worst-case scenario, because I had no backup plan for the rest of my life.
I had never thought about college, didn’t have the extracurriculars to get into an American university because all my time after school was spent working for the descendants, and didn’t have the grades to get into a Korean or Japanese university.
I wasn’t even studying for the Korean college entrance exams—I’d told everyone that I was applying to international schools.
There was no option but to keep plowing forward with the choice I’d made.
I dragged my sleeve across my mouth, wiping off the blood, and hurried after Hyebin. “Are you sure that no one died?” I said as we left the fairground. I could still taste blood, which somehow couldn’t overpower the taste of corn dog.
“Would it matter if they did?” Hyebin said, her gaze flat. “Would you have gone against orders?”
“No,” I said, before I could even think about whether or not I meant it. I knew that insubordination was the fastest way to guarantee I never got top-level security clearance.
“People die,” Hyebin said. “Our job is not to stop death, it’s to make sure everything is the way it’s supposed to be. There’s no way to save everyone in the world from dying.”
“Yes, Sunbaenim,” I said quietly.
Hyebin was making that face that I knew meant I’d annoyed her. Blue and red lights gleamed off her dark eyes as police cars drew closer.
She held her hand out stiffly. “Come on.”
I took her hand, grimacing at the feeling of corn dog grease between our palms. I was sure Hyebin hated touching me, but it was a necessary step when using our powers.
Hyebin was not a descendant of Ryūjin like me, but of one of the Korean dragon families.
Instead of boxes of time, the Korean descendants all had yeouiju—orbs of concentrated magical power.
Korean legend said that fledgling dragons claimed their final and all-powerful form when they caught a yeouiju in their mouths.
Though the mythical dragons were gone, some of their descendants—like Hyebin—still carried yeouiju full of immense power.
For now, since I wasn’t cleared for independent travel, Hyebin’s powers carried us both across the timeline. She held tight to my hand and pulled out the glowing yeouiju from her pocket.
“Are we clear?” she said.
In other words, Are we about to accidentally traumatize anyone by vanishing into thin air?
First, I scanned the empty street for humans. When I didn’t see any, I closed my eyes and listened for footsteps or car engines but could only hear cicadas and the low buzz of streetlights. Lastly, I raised my gaze to the sky.
“No,” I said.
“No?” Hyebin pressed.
I nodded to a telephone pole, where a security camera was mounted high up, angled toward us. Descendants had to avoid showing up in photos or videos while on missions.
“Where should we stand to avoid it?” Hyebin said, even though she knew the answer.
“Directly under it,” I recited. “Unless there’s another camera on the next pole, in which case we should move into the forest.”
Hyebin nodded in approval—the closest she ever got to praise—and walked toward the pole. Once I confirmed that there weren’t any other cameras nearby, her greasy grip tightened painfully around my hand. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and as she exhaled, her bones bloomed with light.
She opened her eyes, which were now piercing blue, her normally shadowed face glimmering. The light rushed across her skin and spread to my hand that was locked tight around hers, her palm as hot as a shooting star. The warmth surged into my bones and the edges of the world began to blur.
Time flowed like silk around us, the years whispering across my face, glinting beneath my fingertips, tightening around my throat.
Most people thought of time as an unyielding constant, a sworn promise of sunrises and sunsets and shifting seasons.
But only the descendants knew that time was nothing more than the whim of a forgotten god—it promised nothing, often lied, and had sharp, glistening teeth.
When I opened my eyes, we were standing on the same street as before, but the sky was an ominous gray, the light gone.
The air tasted wet with an impending storm, clouds gathering overhead.
The arrangement of parked cars had changed, the sidewalks were cracked with weeds bursting through them—a scene I remembered from the present, which meant we were back in 2025.
I looked over my shoulder at Yongma Land …
Where the carnival lights were still as bright as ever.
The delighted screams of children carried across the hill, the mechanical whir of rides and scent of fried foods along with them.
I failed, I thought, going as still as a rabbit under Hyebin’s glare. Maybe if I didn’t move, she would forget I was there and go home without skinning me for a stew.
Foreign transfers like me didn’t typically get to do this much fieldwork—the only thing saving me from toiling away in the classroom was my high scores on the infiltration simulations in Japan.
If I started failing these missions, there were a dozen domestic descendants who would be happy to train with Hyebin in my place.
“Don’t throw your pity party just yet,” Hyebin said, arms crossed. Of course she could tell what I was thinking by reading my face. “What time is it?”
Tentatively, I pulled out my phone. “Three?” I said, wincing at Hyebin’s glare that told me that was the wrong answer.
“Descendants don’t round up, Yang,” she said.
I looked back to my phone, which said 2:59 P.M. At once, I understood.
Maybe one minute didn’t make much of a difference to a regular human, but to a descendant, it meant everything.
I tucked my phone in my pocket and turned toward Yongma Land once more.
The wind picked up, its high-pitched shriek swallowing the sound of children’s screams and wheels scraping over metal tracks. A flurry of dead leaves blew across my vision, and I held up a hand to shield my face as they spiraled up and up toward the white sky, dimmed behind a veil of smog.
When I lowered my hand, Yongma Land was deserted.
The sign, once brightly lit, was now yellowed and cracked. The octopus ride spun lazily in the wind, but all the colors were pale, all the rides empty, the grass yellow and dead.
“Here it is,” Hyebin said, flashing me her phone, where she’d pulled up a Wikipedia article on Yongma Land.
Yongma Land is an abandoned amusement park in Seoul in operation from 1980 to 2011.
It worked, I thought. I bit back a smile, only because I knew Hyebin didn’t like it when I was smug.
The timeline refreshed every hour, on the hour. None of the changes a descendant made would go into effect before then. Afterward, only descendants would remember the secret world of what used to be, the world we had irrevocably changed.
Any Echoes not on their origin timeline during the refresh were dragged back home by the timeline itself, a process which Hyebin had likened to “being forced through a cheese grater one hundred times,” which usually left people maimed if not dead.
It was like the timeline’s immune system—a safety precaution to prevent paradoxes.
Some descendants had a gene that made them immune to the pull, but the only way to test it was to try to weather a refresh, and the cost for being wrong was ending up as a puddle of time jelly.
“Great,” Hyebin said, already turning away. “That should earn you a few experience points. Now come on, I’m starving.”
I wasn’t sure exactly how the descendants had built a BBQ restaurant that existed outside of any timeline, but with meat this good, I wouldn’t question it.
The restaurant sat in a limbo where time didn’t pass, which was helpful for descendants who desperately needed a dinner break but didn’t have time for one.
It was a traditional Korean restaurant, the kind of place that made you leave your shoes at the door and sit on the floor and never let you leave hungry.
There was no menu, because apparently they could cook whatever you wanted.
A white expanse of nothingness blared through the windows of the restaurant, the flat plane of a world without time.
Hyebin had warned me not to stick my fingers out the window in case the timeline bit them off, and I still wasn’t sure if she was joking.
The only way in or out of the restaurant was through a hidden door in a bathroom stall marked OUT OF ORDER in Saejeol station.
Within thirty seconds of us sitting down, waiters crammed our table full of kimchi, bean sprouts, spinach, and a huge bowl of gamja-tang in the center—the staff had an uncanny skill for knowing just what Hyebin wanted to eat.
She ladled a big chunk of pork and potato into my bowl before filling her own and digging in as if I wasn’t even there.
This was the only place I’d ever seen Hyebin sit down to eat. Most of the time, she ate like a cat, gorging herself on prey when it was available in preparation for long stretches of going without.
This was what my life would be like if I ever became a senior agent like her.
Ironically, the people trusted to wield time had so little of their own.
But at least Hyebin didn’t have to move around like my parents, who had never been promoted past floating agents, and at this point were too good at their jobs to justify changing them.
But my fate hadn’t been sealed yet. I could still be like Hyebin if I worked hard enough.
I could still have access to the kinds of files that the boss handed her without question.
I’d seen them once in her scrying pool—the record of an ex-descendant, marked LEVEL 1 SECURITY CLEARANCE.
But she’d closed the file before I could get a better look.
“Sunbaenim,” I said, stirring my soup. I didn’t feel particularly hungry after the corn dog. And the blood. “How many points will I get for this mission?”