Chapter Four
There were very few times in my life that I’d considered cracking open my box of time magic for an unsanctioned redo. The moment that Kim Yejun walked into my classroom and winked at me was one of them.
I decided that after school, I would petition HQ for a do-over so I could call in sick that day, or better yet, throw myself from the third-story window.
I reeled back in my seat at Yejun’s eye contact, sure I looked like Mr. Oh had just dragged roadkill in behind him.
My fist clenched around my pencil, which snapped in two and clattered loudly to the floor.
“Does he know her?” one of the girls in the back whispered unsubtly. Beside me, Jihoon had gone full statue mode, everything frozen except for his eyes, his gaze darting between me and Yejun.
What did Yejun think he was doing here?
Did he really think he was handsome enough to stop me from calling Hyebin to have him dragged off in handcuffs? The girls whispering in the back probably would have argued yes, but they wouldn’t be ripped from the timeline if they made a mistake.
“We’re one desk short,” Mr. Oh said, frowning, “but for now, Im Daeun is absent, so you can take her seat beside—”
Yang Mina, I thought mournfully as Mr. Oh finished his sentence. Of course Daeun had to have food poisoning today of all days. Maybe I could go back in time and eat her spoiled kimbap for her so I could be trapped on a toilet instead of between Jihoon and Yejun.
Yejun slid into the seat beside me and pulled out a notebook.
I could feel Jihoon’s questioning gaze searing the other side of my face, so I looked straight ahead, pretending to be totally oblivious.
I needed to tell Hyebin about this, but I was in the front row and couldn’t exactly whip out my phone and start texting—Mr. Oh didn’t need an excuse to fail me.
So instead, I sat perfectly still and did my best to become a piece of furniture.
Mr. Oh might as well have been speaking Russian, because I wasn’t retaining a single word out of his mouth.
I heard one of the girls in the back whisper my name and slouched down in my seat, as if I stood any chance at hiding under the sterile classroom lighting.
I’d spent the past month carefully designing this new life, one where I was completely unseen.
A person first and a foreigner second, the chameleon the descendants needed me to be.
I cut my hair into annoying wispy bangs like the popular girls, even though they poked me in the eyes.
I made a point of never standing up straight so that I would seem shorter.
I talked as little as possible so no one could make fun of my accent.
And in a single moment, Yejun had made sure everyone knew my name.
I decided in that moment that I hated Kim Yejun.
It was easy for someone like him. Sure, maybe he was having fun attracting stares with his bleached-blond hair now, but when he got sick of it, he could dye it back and be a normal person again, while I never could.
My grip tightened around my second pencil, which creaked threateningly.
“Yang Mina?”
I tensed. Mr. Oh was looking at me, tapping the blackboard. “The derivative of the function,” he said in a tone that told me it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.
I quickly scanned the equation, but with all my classmates staring at me—and two boys on either side of me—I could barely remember my own name much less how to do calculus.
My brain felt like an old laptop overheating, fans whirring loudly in my ears.
No one thought I belonged in this class anyway.
They were all waiting in anticipation for my wrong answer.
Normally I could brush it off, but something about failing in front of both Yejun and Jihoon made me want to cry.
Yejun would realize I was too stupid to help him with anything, and Jihoon would be glad he wasn’t dating the dumbest girl in class.
I could have been smart, I wanted to scream.
Maybe I had been, in a life where I hadn’t had to transfer schools every few months.
Where I’d had the time to become good at something, to actually take an interest in what I learned instead of always trying to catch up, spending nights watching Crash Course videos because I didn’t have any friends to ask for help.
Yejun raised his hand. “Seonsaengnim?” he said. “Could we do another example? This is different from how we did it in my old school and I want to make sure I understand.”
Any other teacher might have resented the interruption, but Mr. Oh was used to talking to a class of half-dead third years who would sooner eat dirt than speak to him before nine in the morning, so he gleefully started to break down the problem on the board.
I slumped back in my chair now that I’d escaped the jaws of calculus unscathed and no one was staring at me anymore.
Once I was fairly certain Mr. Oh had forgotten about me, I turned and shot a glare at Yejun. I hadn’t asked for his help, and he’d lost his mind if he thought it meant I owed him anything, but he only winked like we had some secret, and my second pencil snapped in my hand.
For the rest of the class, Yejun did his best to become Mr. Oh’s favorite student. It seemed that he not only knew all about calculus but enjoyed it. Mr. Oh was probably going to send him a fruit basket in gratitude after class. On my other side, Jihoon was staring unsubtly at both me and Yejun.
The music started playing over the intercom to signal the end of class, but before I could stand up, a shadow fell over my desk.
“Let me carry your bag,” Kim Yejun said, snatching it from the back of my chair before I could. In my peripheral vision, Jihoon stared open-mouthed while the girls behind me whispered.
“Mina, you know him?” Jihoon said.
“No,” I said, before Yejun could answer. “And I can carry my own bag.” And the phone inside it, I thought.
Yejun smiled like I was telling a joke, tugging my bag higher on his shoulder. “But I want to talk to you,” he said, smiling sweetly. “Come on, I have English next.”
So do I, I thought. Of course it wouldn’t be enough for Yejun to crash only one of my classes. He’d probably copied my entire schedule. Maybe he even gave Daeun food poisoning—skilled descendants were good at manipulating the world to work in their favor.
“Come on, Yang Mina,” he said, smirking conspiratorially. As if emphasizing my fake name in front of my classmates would win me over. But he was already leaving with all my things, so I had no choice but to follow. I cast Jihoon an apologetic glance and hurried after Yejun.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I whispered as soon as we made it into the hallway. “What part of ‘leave me alone’ don’t you understand?”
“And what part of ‘the world will literally end’ do you not understand?” he said, smiling through clenched teeth. “Forgive me for being persistent, but the stakes are rather high.”
“And you think stalking me will convince me to help you?”
“Is it a crime to want an education?” Yejun said, nearly rounding the wrong corner before I yanked his sleeve, pulling him toward the English classroom. It was the one class I was decent at, so I couldn’t afford to be late.
I stormed through the door and pointed to my desk, which, thankfully, had no empty seats next to it. Yejun sighed and dropped my books on the desk, then plopped my bag on my seat. For one glorious moment, I thought I’d bested him.
But then Yejun reached into his pocket, took out an envelope, and placed it on top of my notebook.
“What’s this?” I said, glaring like he’d dropped a dead rat on my desk.
“A love confession,” he deadpanned, then moved to the back of the room to take the empty seat in the corner.
I should have thrown it in the trash just to see the look on his face. My life would have been a lot simpler if I had.
But the envelope wasn’t fully closed, too overstuffed to seal, and I could see the frayed edges of a stack of photographs. Who even prints photos anymore? I thought, before my curiosity got the better of me and I dumped the stack on my desk.
The first picture was a shot of the Bulgwang stream—I could tell by the giant M painted on the officetel in the background, the one right next to my apartment.
It looked like Yejun had photoshopped it too much, because the sky was a blazing blue, the shrubs bursting with flowers.
He’d even photoshopped solar panels onto nearby buildings, their reflections bursts of white light that the camera couldn’t capture clearly.
I flipped the photograph over.
April 7, 2025, Timeline Alpha was scrawled across the back.
I scoffed. Whatever “Timeline Alpha” Yejun had invented didn’t seem that different from this timeline, at least not enough to justify risking my life for. Was that really his best argument? “Betray the descendants so we can live in a world with five more solar panels!”
I cast the photo aside and examined the next one.
This one was a wide shot of Gyeongbokgung Palace—I recognized the three arches of the main gate with the two tiers of roofs on top.
But the interior looked different than I remembered—the Gyeongbokgung of today had vast courtyards of pale dirt between sparse buildings, but the palace in this photo had far more buildings, and instead of white dirt there were blooming gardens and curved ponds.
All the temporary fencing for construction was gone, which meant it must have been sometime in the future. I flipped the photograph over.
October 1, 2017, Timeline Alpha
Yejun really was audacious.
Imperial Japanese soldiers had demolished Gyeongbokgung Palace in the early 1900s, and Seoul had planned a fifty-year reconstruction plan for it that still had twenty years to go.
Was Yejun really trying to convince me that the palace was still standing in 2017?
That the Japanese had never occupied Korea? He was out of his mind.