Chapter Three
I woke to the sound of the front door unlatching. That meant two things: One of my parents was home, and it was still the middle of the night, since the kind of work they did never wrapped up during business hours.
My neck twinged as I sat up and nearly knocked over my half-eaten bowl of cheese puffs.
I’d fallen asleep face down on my calculus book on the kitchen table, the only surface in our apartment big enough for me to actually study.
You would think the descendants of a literal god would be able to at least buy a house, but that kind of stipend was reserved for senior agents, not floaters who would probably be gone in a few months anyway.
At least I had my own bedroom this time around.
My mother shut the door and jolted at the sight of me.
“Oh, Mina!” she said, toeing off her shoes. “You’re awake.”
She was wearing a mint-green hanbok, her hair tied up in a braided bun, which meant she’d probably been working pretty far back in time—sometimes she had to go back to the Joseon dynasty to make sure no rogues tried to insert themselves into the royal family again.
Rogues seemed to think it was hilarious to try to get their own faces on the 10,000 won note instead of King Sejong, even if they could only enjoy it for a few moments before other descendants swooped in to correct the timeline.
“Are you hungry?” my mom said, pulling up a stool and peering into the high cabinets.
I was, but for actual food. To my mom, “cooking” meant “assembling a snack plate.” She was a highly skilled agent, fluent in three languages, yet had managed to break five rice cookers before making the executive decision that we were a takeout family.
That was after she’d already ruined our kimchi fridge because she thought it was a freezer and packed it to the brim with ice cream.
We were still scraping chocolate chunks off the ridges.
She dropped a few boxes of snacks on the counter and hopped off the stool.
Her boss often sent her home with processed food from across the timeline, like some sort of bonus to distract her from the fact that she hadn’t been promoted in twenty years, and I hated that it actually worked.
Last week, she brought home a box of dalgona candy from the sixties, which she claimed were definitely different from the kind you could buy in Emart today.
There was also hamburger gummy candies from the ’90s, Apollo sugar sticks from the ’80s, and occasionally a fried pork cutlet vaguely shaped like Pikachu, which was apparently a thing in the early 2000s.
I grabbed a box of chocolate cereal before my mom could empty out all our cabinets onto the counter. She smiled and snatched a few of my cheese balls, then passed me a carton of milk.
I tried to pour myself some cereal, but a red rectangle came flying out of the box and fell into my bowl. It took me all of two seconds to realize it was my mom’s passport.
“Shit!” my mom said, snatching it. “I mean, Oh no! You didn’t hear me swear.”
“I’m eighteen,” I said.
My mom sighed and shook the crumbs off her passport. “I forgot that was in there,” she said, before looking around for a safer place to hide it.
My parents and I had three passports, three names, three identities.
In Korea, I was Yang Mina. In Japan, I was Yamamoto Mina.
And in America, I was Mina Young. When I was a kid, I’d asked my parents which name was my real name, and they hadn’t known how to answer because they didn’t want to give me an identity crisis (and they’d also lost my actual birth certificate and weren’t sure themselves).
My mom had somehow gotten it into her head that we had to hide our unused passports in different places, in case the Korean police investigated us for identity fraud and found all our passports in her nightstand.
I felt fairly certain the descendants would intervene rather than let valuable employees rot in jail, but try telling that to a worried mother.
The door unlatched again and my dad appeared in the doorway.
“Meet any princes today?” he said to my mom, bending down to untie his boots.
He was dressed in a military uniform because there were only so many roles a white man could realistically play in Korea’s past. He spent most of his days interfering in switchboard operations during the Korean War, undoing the mistakes of rogue vigilante travelers.
The war was a hotbed for unauthorized rogue interference, so there were always plenty of timeline inconsistencies for my father to clean up in order to prevent a paradox from devouring us all.
My parents had met when my father was studying abroad at the University of Tokyo.
Only my mom was an original descendant of Otohime, the Japanese princess who’d bestowed boxes of time on the world.
But the Japanese descendant branch was notoriously short-staffed and shrinking along with the declining Japanese population, so they’d been willing to train my dad as long as he’d help my mom make lots of descendants.
But the joke was on them, because my parents had only had me.
At least, as far as they could remember.
Honestly, it didn’t make much sense. The bosses had made their expectations explicitly clear to my parents as a condition of their marriage—two children, minimum.
My mom had never mentioned any trouble having another kid, and the descendants had no shortage of money to throw at that sort of problem, which was a tier-one priority. Yet, somehow, there was only one of me.
When I was growing up, my clothes and shoes had always been hand-me-downs, supposedly from a cousin I’d never met, who my mother couldn’t tell me much about.
Until I was ten, all my bedrooms had a bunk bed.
I slept on the bottom bunk and stared up at the springs of the upper bunk with a strange fixation, somehow knowing innately that the upper mattress wasn’t mine.
We didn’t have a single family photo from before I was ten, and the pictures from that year looked oddly asymmetrical—my mom’s hands on my shoulders where I stood in front of her, my dad’s hands awkwardly tugging at his pockets, like he didn’t know what to do with them.
There was only one photo that made sense.
It was a picture of me when I was seven, swinging on a playground set in Michigan, a girl with long brown hair on the swing beside me.
Both of us faced away from the camera, looking toward the sun over the fence, the light illuminating our silhouettes in gold.
My mom had written Mina +? on the back and said she couldn’t remember who the other girl was—she must have been a neighbor’s kid. But I knew better.
If I ever had another girl, I would have named her Hana, my mom once said. It’s just like your name—it works in Japan, Korea, and America. I’d have two little chameleons.
And then, a month ago, when we’d first moved into this tiny excuse for an apartment in Seoul, I’d found a note waiting for me on my pillow:
When you’re ready, come find me. I will keep you safe.
—Hana
Manipulating the timeline was an art, not a science.
It was difficult to completely extract a single event—or person—without creating a thousand other undesired ripples, so sometimes you had to let the loose ends be and hope for the best. For all their snobbery, the descendants didn’t always clean up after themselves that well.
That was why, when they tried to erase someone, they often left pieces behind.
Somewhere on the timeline, I had a sister.
I couldn’t remember her face or her voice, because those things had been stolen from me.
But I felt her absence in the empty chair at the kitchen table, in the loose threads of her worn hand-me-down sweaters that felt like her arms around me, in the cavernous silence in my room at night, the certainty that once, somewhere, in some timeline, there had been another heartbeat in my room, so close to mine.
My dad took out a bag of chips and laughed when my mom’s American passport fell into his bowl. My mom smiled and handed him a Coke, and something about their joy made my milk taste sour. They did not miss Hana, not even a little bit. You couldn’t miss someone you didn’t remember.
If I ever got caught, the other descendants would erase me too.
Would my parents still smile and laugh and happily eat junk food and feel perfectly fine about their lives without me?
Or would they know, like I knew, that they harbored a secret love in their heart for someone who was no longer here, and now that love had nowhere to go?
“I made a bunch of people fall off a carnival ride today,” I said, because I wanted my parents to stop smiling.
“Yikes,” my father said, turning toward me. “Yongma Land again?”
“Someone really wants that park open,” my mom said, shaking her head. “I don’t see why. I like it the way it is now. And so many K-pop idols have done photo shoots there! The haunted carnival aesthetic is so beautiful.”
“Yes, it’s the aesthetic that you appreciate in those photos,” my dad deadpanned.
“They’re all too young for me!” my mom said, her face red.
“Don’t you think it’s wrong?” I said.
My parents stilled. They both tried to speak at the same time, closed their mouths, and looked at each other.
“Don’t we think what’s wrong?” my dad said carefully.
Unquestioningly taking orders from higher-ups, even if it ends up with children bleeding on the pavement? I thought. Or maybe your own child disappearing? “Putting someone out of business,” I said instead. “Shouldn’t we feel bad about that?”
“Mina, we’re not designing the timeline ourselves,” my mom said, setting a gentle hand on top of my own. “I don’t trust myself to make those kinds of decisions, do you?”
“I certainly don’t,” my father said. “I can’t even decide what to eat for dinner, much less the fate of the entire world.”