Chapter Three #2
My dad laughed at his own joke while my mom rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “The descendants have saved the world many times,” she said. “They have a plan, even if we can’t see it right now. All you have to do is trust.”
The next day, I hurried into calculus class two minutes before the bell, hoping that it wasn’t enough time for Jihoon to start a serious conversation. Our seats were next to each other, and suddenly changing now would draw more attention to us than it was worth.
“Morning,” I said to him, sliding into my seat. He turned around and brightened like he’d just noticed me, even though I knew he’d carefully tracked my steps across the room while trying to look unflustered.
“Morning, Mina!” he said, reaching into his bag and pulling out a bottle of Yakult. Apparently he’d forgiven me for my weirdness by the river, and I was more than fine with pretending it had never happened.
“Thanks! Sorry for running off yesterday,” I said, laughing awkwardly as I accepted the bottle. I would play it off like it wasn’t a big deal, smooth over the memory in his mind, do absolutely anything but act like he’d nearly caught me time traveling.
“Don’t worry,” he said, holding a hand out when he saw me “struggling” to peel the foil lid back. I passed him the bottle and he peeled it easily and handed it back to me, our hands brushing for just a moment longer than necessary. “What are you doing after school today?” he said.
“More classes,” I said, shrugging and sinking down in my seat, cradling the Yakult.
“It’s too bad, though. They’re so far away and it’s boring walking there all by myself…
” The end of my sentence trailed off in an unspoken invitation.
I stared resolutely at the Yakult, resisting the urge to peek at Jihoon’s face.
“I have English tutoring right after school,” Jihoon said mournfully, like he was telling me about a funeral. “I would walk you, but—”
“No no, don’t miss your class,” I said quickly, only because it would be rude to say otherwise. It was all part of the delicate choreography—don’t be too needy, make him think about you during class instead. Still, I would have loved to wrap up this mission before reporting in.
I was about to innocently suggest that we meet up after his class, but the words died in my throat when I caught a glimpse of dark eyes in the doorway. The shadow retreated behind the fogged glass of the half windows between our classroom and the hallway. Hyebin.
I didn’t have time to consider what Hyebin was doing at my school because Mr. Oh swept into the classroom and greeted us before loudly shutting the door. I stared resolutely ahead as he announced that he’d finished grading our exams and was going to pass them back.
I could hardly even remember taking that test last week—that was when Hyebin and I had been tasked with catching one very specific duck from the Han River in 2005, which our bosses thankfully understood would take us more than one attempt.
Nearly every day after school, I’d been knee-deep in the water, swinging a net at feral ducks while Hyebin tried not to shoot me with a tranquilizer gun.
Mr. Oh set my test face down on my desk before moving to the row behind me. I lifted the corner of the paper and dared to peek, then held my breath and turned it over.
67%
I slammed the paper back down, praying no one else had seen.
This was my only class with Jihoon, and I couldn’t afford to flunk out of it.
Maybe he would still see me outside of class, but he’d probably second-guess his interest in me once he realized I wasn’t smart like him.
Besides, having to tell the descendants I needed a new slate of infiltration missions because I’d gotten held back a year was definitely not going to get me promoted any faster.
Maybe they’d refuse to assign me anything new, and I’d be stuck collecting points six at a time with Hyebin.
If I were better at math, I could have calculated how long that would take me to reach five hundred, but I was too afraid of the answer to try.
I sat in a daze through the rest of class, trying to listen to Mr. Oh so I wouldn’t fall even further behind, but I felt like 67% was branded across my vision. Dragons were supposed to be highly intelligent, but apparently my dad’s human genes had overridden that particular trait.
When the bell music finally played, I grabbed my bag and shouldered my way out of the classroom before anyone else, terrified that Jihoon would ask how I did on the test.
“Mina?” I heard Jihoon call, but I pretended not to hear him and hurried into the hallway, where Hyebin grabbed my arm and yanked me into the nearest bathroom.
“My phone is on!” I said. “You could have texted me!”
Hyebin slammed a gloved hand over my mouth, shoving me back into a stall. The leather smelled of fire, the scent stinging my eyes.
“Shut up,” she said, her eyes dark.
Something was wrong with Hyebin.
Her face looked gray and thin under the weak bathroom light, her eyes tinged red.
Instead of the joggers and pullover sweatshirts that she normally wore until she had to change into a costume for a mission, she wore black leather that didn’t look like it belonged to any time period in particular, tight to her skin, meant to make her disappear into the shadows.
She dropped her hand from my face, and as she reached for her pocket, her jacket swung back, revealing a gun against her belt.
“You brought a gun into my school?” I whispered.
“I said shut up,” Hyebin said. “Give me your hand.”
I held out my hand without thinking, and Hyebin dropped something cold into it. When she pulled back, I held four bullets in my palm, glowing from the overhead light.
“Hide these somewhere, and don’t bring this up when you see me,” she said. “I was never here.”
“Don’t bring this up?” I said, my blood suddenly cold. There was only one reason Hyebin would ask me this. “You’re an Echo, aren’t you?”
Hyebin didn’t dignify my question with an answer. Instead, she drew her face mask up over the bottom half of her face and stormed out of the stall, yanking open the bathroom door. The stall door swung shut, and I looked down at the shells in my hand that suddenly felt impossibly heavy.
Two weeks ago, I’d seen Hyebin loading a gun with quick precision before heading out for a mission deemed too dangerous for me to join. We kept our guns with the police and our ammo at headquarters—unlike the American branch, we only brought out guns here if they were absolutely necessary.
I closed my fist around the shells, their coldness spreading through my bones.
If Hyebin had given me bullets, one thing was certain: Someday, I would need to use them.
With fingers I could hardly feel, I opened up the smallest pocket at the front of my backpack and dropped the bullets inside. All you have to do is trust, my mom had said last night. I hoped, more than anything, that she was right.
When the final bell rang and all my classmates went to their hagwons to study until their brains bled, I went straight to the café a few blocks from my apartment to do exactly the same thing, but for free. Jihoon had class, and Hyebin had meetings, so for once, I was on my own.
I claimed the window table with an outlet and slammed my calculus book down, determined to steamroll my worries under the weight of differential equations.
It would be humiliating if the reason I never became a full agent wasn’t to do with my being Japanese, or American, or any sort of skill related to wielding time, but rather that I was just really bad at math.
I knocked back a tall cinnamon latte and kept a piece of cheesecake at the corner of my table as a reward, because it had been a royally shitty week and if I couldn’t date Jihoon or pass calculus or get a promotion, I deserved to drown my misery in sugar and cheese.
After ninety minutes of toiling through my homework and sneaking bites of cheesecake, I pulled up some explainer videos in English on YouTube, hoping switching to another language would reboot my brain.
With my headphones on, peering intently at some math nerd trying to explain my homework to me on my smudged screen, I almost missed when someone dropped into the seat in front of me.
I looked up, unable to hear the words out of the stranger’s moving lips because the calculus video was still playing through my headphones.
The first thing I noticed was bright blond hair. Foreigner or K-pop wannabe, I thought instantly, but of course I had already had that thought. I had seen this person before.
He was, undoubtedly, the rogue traveler I’d seen running away the other night.
Today, he was wearing an oversized white T-shirt and black sweatpants, his blond hair slightly damp.
He pulled off his black cloth mask, and I nearly choked on my next breath.
He could fight Jihoon for the title of Cutest Guy in Year Three.
He had the kind of bright, disarming face that you saw on subway posters where impossibly beautiful actors advertised bottled tea or snail cream or Samsung phones by holding them close to their airbrushed faces.
I took off my headphones. There were many things I could have said, things that a more experienced and assertive descendant might have said.
Hyebin probably would have cuffed him to the table before he could blink.
But somehow, spectacularly, all that came out of my mouth was “You’re going to knock my cheesecake off the table. ”