Chapter Three #3
He blinked, then his gaze dropped to my cheesecake, which was teetering precariously on the edge of the table.
He quickly shoved it back to the center.
“Is it strawberry?” he said. And there was that same warm voice, which had no business being that smooth and low coming from a guy who couldn’t be more than nineteen.
Jihoon’s voice still cracked, which always made him flustered and made me less nervous about my infiltration mission.
But talking to this guy in my third language made me feel like my mouth was full of pine cones.
When all I did was stare back at him, he let out an awkward laugh. “Sorry, let me start over. You’re Yamamoto Mina?”
I shook my head—how did he know my Japanese name? Something about his undivided attention and his big brown eyes made me want to melt into the floor. So I did the only thing I could think of—I pulled out my phone.
“Wait wait wait!” he said, holding out a hand, eyes bright with alarm. “What are you doing?”
“Calling my mentor,” I said.
“Why?” he said. “What have I done?”
I frowned. “I saw you last night.”
“What?” he said, drawing back. “I wasn’t here last night.”
“No, I saw you outside my apartment last night,” I said, my grip tight around my phone.
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. Look, can you just give me a moment to explain before you call Hyebin?”
My finger froze an inch away from my phone screen.
“You know my mentor’s name?” I said. I probably should have been worried at that point, but I was too confused to think about any worst-case scenarios yet.
This wasn’t the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me, but usually awkward and confusing scenarios were the result of my own Echoes, not random cute guys in cafés.
He grimaced. “I don’t really have time to explain that part,” he said. “Please, can you just listen to me for a minute?”
I drew back against the booth, clutching my phone to my chest in case he tried to grab it from me.
I still didn’t want to spend the next week filing a rogue report, but it seemed this problem wasn’t going to go away on its own.
Maybe if I turned him in, I would at least be rewarded with some more points and get one step closer to a promotion.
He leaned back slightly, like he could see my thoughts rapidly sliding out of his favor.
“If you call Hyebin now, I’ll run,” he said, hands braced against the table as if to push himself off and get a running start.
“They’ll probably never find me, but here’s one thing I know for certain: I’ll never see you again.
And if I never see you again, then in fifty years, the world will end. ”
The café seemed to quiet at his words, the whirring of the coffee bean grinder and clinking of mugs such oddly mundane sounds compared to the bomb this guy had just dropped.
Who the hell discussed the apocalypse in a Caffebene over a plate of cheesecake?
I wondered if I’d had too much sugar and was starting to hallucinate.
“The world doesn’t end in fifty years,” I said at last. This I knew for certain. I had seen the entire timeline laid out in scrying pools at headquarters.
“No,” he said, shrugging, “because you haven’t called Hyebin yet, have you?”
I frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s a logical fallacy.”
“Look,” he said with a sigh. “How about this: Listen to me talk for five minutes. I’ll …
I don’t know, buy you another piece of cheesecake for your time, okay?
Then after five minutes, you can decide if you want me to get lost, or if you want me to keep talking.
Worst-case scenario, you wasted five minutes of your life and got a free piece of cheesecake. ”
I glanced down at my half-eaten cheesecake. I hated to think I could be bought so easily, but …
“Fine,” I said. I set a timer for five minutes on my phone and placed it on the table between us. If nothing else, this would make him go away so I could get back to studying. He glanced uneasily at the countdown, then sighed and straightened up.
“My name is Kim Yejun,” he said, switching to Japanese—a skill common for descendants but less so for anyone else.
He glanced around in case anyone else was listening, but we were in a quiet corner of the café.
“I’m a descendant, just like you. But I don’t work for the organization anymore, because I’ve been on the run ever since I found out the truth. ”
“The truth?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
Kim Yejun nodded. “I know you’re new there. I know they don’t tell you much, but you know why they have you make adjustments to the timeline, don’t you?”
I frowned. Had Hyebin sent him just to give me a pop quiz? “To correct it back to how it was before rogues started interfering,” I said. “The original timeline.”
“Yes,” Yejun said, “except it’s not the original timeline at all.”
“Of course it is,” I said, starting to regret giving him the chance to talk. Clearly he was some conspiracy theorist who had tumbled down one too many internet wormholes.
“But you wouldn’t know that, would you?” he said, leaning closer.
Suddenly illuminated by the overhead light, his eyes looked black with starry flecks of brown, like constellations in a summer sky.
“You live on this timeline just like everyone else,” he went on.
“The moment it refreshes, you believe that this is the way it’s always been. ”
I shook my head. “Why would anyone try to change the timeline?”
Yejun let out a sharp laugh. “Money, of course. The descendants have no honor anymore. They can be bought by whatever company will pay them enough to build a future where their company succeeds. The descendants are driving us headfirst into a brick wall of climate change, and they don’t even care.”
I pressed my lips together tightly, eyeing Yejun up and down for some sign he was joking. “The Japanese descendants follow the same timeline,” I said.
“Yes,” Yejun said, nodding vigorously, “because Korea and Japan are in on it together.”
I sighed and shut my laptop. The idea that Korea and Japan would conspire together about anything was even more unbelievable than a secret second timeline.
The descendants only cooperated across countries because they didn’t have a choice—you couldn’t exactly fix the timeline in two different ways at once.
“Why would you tell me this?” I said. “Is this some sort of test? You think I’ll just believe anything some stranger tells me? ”
His expression crumpled at my words, a sudden sadness pulling at the corners of his annoyingly beautiful brown eyes. “I’m asking because I need your help,” he said, lowering his gaze. “I know you’re new, so in a lot of ways, telling you isn’t ideal, but I need your help, specifically.”
“Why?” I said. Surely there were much more qualified descendants he could have chosen from. Ones with way more experience and points to their name.
“You’re not Korean, so you have a different source of time magic than me,” he said, shrugging.
“If we combined our powers, we’d both be able to use half as much, and the respective amounts would be so low that neither of our agencies would be able to track us.
We could move freely around the timeline, totally unseen. ”
I blinked slowly as his words sank in. “You decided to come to me with this proposal that could get both of us erased … because I’m a foreigner?”
He winced. “Well, it sounds bad when you put it that way.”
The timer on my phone went off. I silenced it, then stood up and started packing up my books.
“Are you going to call Hyebin?” Yejun said, eyeing the door like he was ready to run.
I should have. But Hyebin wouldn’t get here in time, and I wasn’t about to tackle this guy in the middle of a coffee shop, so it would mean a lot of paperwork for me and he would escape regardless.
“I’m going to finish packing up my bag, and then if there’s still a rogue sitting in front of me, I’m going to call Hyebin,” I said.
“But maybe, if I’m alone by the time I finish packing, then I’ll have no choice but to accept that this was all a caffeine-induced hallucination which will never happen again, and I can move on with my life. ”
Yejun sighed, his expression wilting. I turned away as I put my laptop back in its case, zipped it up, and slipped it into my bag. By the time I bent down to get my charger, Kim Yejun was gone.
A 5,000 won note was sitting on the table, held down by my plate. On the napkin was a note in messy handwriting:
Cheesecake money
I crumpled up the napkin and used it to wipe the table clean, then shoved the 5,000 won in my wallet—hey, money was money.
I stormed home, where hopefully no more handsome boys would pop up when I wasn’t looking.
He’d lost his mind if he thought I’d help a stranger with an idea like that.
It would only end one way: with me scrubbed from existence.
I pictured my parents alone in their tiny apartment telling jokes late at night, happily eating their stale cereal, and not missing me at all.
If the descendants didn’t destroy me, calculus class would.
Last night, I’d been so busy trying to make sense of my class notes that I’d completely forgotten we had a workbook chapter due today.
I’d downed my daily bottle of Yakult like a shot of soju and otherwise pretended Jihoon didn’t exist while I tried to do calculus at hyperspeed before Mr. Oh arrived.
I glanced up at the clock and grimaced. I’m a time traveler; how am I always running out of time? I thought.
The uninvited guest at my study hour certainly hadn’t helped my concentration last night. In between equations, I found myself playing back his words in my mind.
If I never see you again, then in fifty years, the world will end.
I shook my head, wishing I could beg Hyebin for a partial brain wipe to erase the memory.
The words had somehow gummed to the inside of my brain, as well as the memory of Kim Yejun’s dark eyes as he leaned across the table.
The more I thought about his proposal, the more ridiculous it seemed.
The idea that the fate of the world could depend on someone like me—currently scrambling to make up my calculus homework, wearing mismatched socks because I woke up late—was the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard.
The bell music played, but Mr. Oh still hadn’t arrived, so I plowed ahead with my homework. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with calculus, it might have occurred to me that Mr. Oh never showed up late, that there must have been some reason for it.
I finished a passable attempt at my homework and dropped my pencil, slumping back against my chair with a sigh of relief just as the door at the front of the classroom slid open. Mr. Oh walked inside, and a student following closely behind him turned around and slid the door shut.
“Attention class,” Mr. Oh said, standing at the front of the classroom and gesturing to the student. As he turned around, my blood ran cold.
“We have a new student today. Everyone please welcome Kim Yejun.”