Chapter Four #2
The next photograph was a board game café in Hongdae—I’d gone there on Christmas last year with my parents, so I recognized the shelves packed with board games, the fairy lights, the exposed brick walls, the window overlooking the street, and the ramen restaurant on the other side. And there at the table …
… was me.
My hair was cut to my shoulders and I wore a fuzzy gray sweater that I’d never seen before, but that was undoubtedly me, smiling over a game of Don’t Break the Ice.
I held a can of Sprite in one hand, the silver watch my parents had given me reflecting sunlight off its face.
I knew it was me, yet somehow this looked like a complete stranger.
I was the opposite of Hyebin—while she could blend in anywhere, somehow I looked hilariously out of place in every year, like I was an orphan of the timeline, never at home no matter where I went.
In the few photographs my parents had taken since I started high school, I always looked like my skin was an itchy costume I wanted to peel off, my eyes haunted, my smile like I’d been forced to grin at gunpoint.
But the Mina in this photo looked completely relaxed. Her hair was my natural shade, not dyed darker to match the other girls’, and this Mina had also forgone the trendy eye-poking bangs.
How did Yejun get a picture of me?
My gaze slid to my right, and what I saw next was even worse.
In the photograph, a girl sat across the table from me, a wave of long, coppery brown hair—the same shade as mine—blocking her face.
Her sleeve was rolled back, revealing a silver watch.
A watch that my father had brought back for me from America for Christmas.
It was from a specialty store—a Swiss watchmaker in Grand Rapids made his own watches from the discarded parts of vintage luxury watches.
It was a gift no one else in Korea should have had …
unless my dad hadn’t bought one just for me, but for us.
Hana?
The bell music played and Ms. Choi stood up from her desk to begin class. I quickly crammed the photographs in the envelope and stuffed them into my bag. I cast a nervous glance back at Yejun, whose infuriatingly pretty eyes looked so full of hope. I turned around quickly, sinking into my chair.
It’s just a badly photoshopped picture, I thought again and again, trying to sear the sentence into my brain.
But somehow, my stomach still clenched like I was falling from a great height, the last photograph burned across my vision.
I couldn’t let go of it in the same way I couldn’t ignore Hana’s absence.
It was the way the stars felt just slightly off-kilter, the way that empty chairs somehow took up more space than full ones, how the trees leaned a bit too far to the left.
Hana’s disappearance had cast the whole world off-balance.
I sat rigid in my seat as Ms. Choi started passing back papers.
I couldn’t even remember the topic, but I knew I’d turned mine in three days late—Hyebin and I had been on a mission in Gangneung and I’d lost track of the days with all the driving back and forth.
I always saved my English homework for last because I could type up something while half asleep and it would be good enough to impress my teachers.
Not this time. I peeked at the corner of my paper and saw 70% in bold. A ten-point penalty for each day late.
I jammed the paper into my folder and slammed it shut before anyone could see.
Dragon descendants were supposed to be fast learners, good at retaining large amounts of information, excellent students. I was descended from a literal god. And yet, here I was, about to lose my chance at finding Hana because I was too incompetent to handle basic high school classes.
As soon as the bell music played, I grabbed my books and rushed into the hallway before Yejun could catch up. I heard him call my name, but I hurried to my locker and stuffed my books in my bag.
“Mina?” he called. “The photographs—”
“Just how stupid do you think I am?” I said, slamming my locker shut and glaring at him. I needed to stick to the plan. The way to find Hana was by infiltrating headquarters, not by trusting a random guy who bought me cheesecake.
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said, frowning. “These are relics from the other timeline. I thought if I showed you proof—”
“It doesn’t prove anything,” I said, tugging my bag over my shoulder.
“Look, I know I’m not as smart as our”—I glanced around in case anyone was listening—“classmates,” I said at last. “I know I’m a foreigner and no one trusts me.
But if you want me kicked out of the descendants, you’re gonna have to try harder than that. ”
He reeled back as if I’d slapped him. “I don’t want you to get kicked out,” he said, his voice so gentle and hurt that if I were anyone else, maybe I would have fallen for it.
Descendants are good liars, I reminded myself, turning around before he could say anything else to try to persuade me. I sensed him following me, but I stormed into the girls’ bathroom—the one place he couldn’t follow—then locked myself in a stall and took out my phone.
I found a rogue, I texted Hyebin, a cold jolt of satisfaction washing through me. She didn’t respond right away, but that was normal—she never let anything break her focus.
What wasn’t normal was that five minutes later, while I waited for the sound of Yejun walking away, she still hadn’t responded.
Hyebin never spent more than three minutes on any single mission. Even if she’d just started when I texted her, she should have been done by now.
I gnawed my lip. The thought of going through the rest of the school day with Yejun trailing after me sounded about as fun as walking barefoot over needles.
I tugged a long pink sweatshirt out of my bag and pulled it over my head, covering up most of my school uniform, then shoved open the sliding window and climbed outside, crushing decorative plants as I landed.
I walked confidently down the front stairs of the school—that was what Hyebin taught me—no one questioned where you were going or what you were doing if you looked confident—and made it out to the street.
If Hyebin wouldn’t answer her phone, I would tell her myself.
Maybe skipping school wasn’t the smartest idea for someone in danger of failing, but all I could think about was that photo of maybe-Hana, and how happy Yejun was to taunt me with the only thing that I cared about.
Punching him in the face and getting kicked out of school was arguably worse than disappearing for a few periods.
I stormed toward headquarters, bending my knees so I wouldn’t roll down the incline again. My school sat at the top of a hill, all of western Eungam spread out beneath me.
Before I’d come to Seoul, I’d imagined polished glass skyscrapers that echoed the whole city back at you, flashing neon signs, and a sky lit by fluorescent office lights instead of stars. But that was just the rich parts of Seoul.
Here, on the western side, the tallest buildings were a mix of faded gray concrete and weathered brick, each with perfect rows of square windows like a thousand gaping mouths on haunted faces.
Far in the distance, a row of identical concrete skyscrapers stood like sentinels, the barrier between Seoul and the mountains of Gyeonggi.
With the haze of fine dust blown over from China, the tops of the distant buildings blurred away, like everything beyond the border of Seoul was no more than a dream.
As I descended the hill, the street rose higher and blocked my view to the west. I reached street level and waited at the intersection, wordlessly accepting a handful of commercial fliers that some old lady handed me.
A bicycle sliced diagonally through the crosswalk and nearly ran over my toes, but I made it to the other side of the street unscathed and could finally breathe easier with my school far behind me.
After a few minutes, I reached the tallest building in Eunpyeong. On paper, it was a grocery store, but in reality it was something far more important to humanity.
Emart was the Korean equivalent of Walmart if you could only build up instead of out; a towering Eye of Sauron in the western part of Seoul, except instead of black slate and evil incarnate, it was full of seven-dollar peanut butter and old ladies trying to run me over with their shopping carts.
It was ten stories of everything you could possibly want to buy, plus an eleventh floor that was mysteriously always “under construction.”
I grabbed a two-pack of banana milk on the first floor, because after dealing with Kim Yejun all morning, it was the least I deserved.
I hesitated for a second at the smell of the bakery, my hand lingering over the knotted sausage-and-cheese bread, but thought better of it because Hyebin would surely not appreciate it if I had greasy hands.
I picked up a prepackaged vegetable kimbap and hurried upstairs, swearing under my breath when a family with a grocery cart blocked the entire escalator.
I managed to rush around them and cut ahead before they could turn the corner for the next escalator, then I was fast-walking as subtly as humanly possible up to the clothing level.
A headache started brewing behind my eyes. I groaned, closing my eyes against the bright fluorescent lighting. Just what I needed.
I knew this kind of pain well—the kind of headache that cast star flashes across my vision and threatened to pop my eyes out.
It was a symptom of timesickness, which you only felt if you were part of an incomplete time loop.
I hadn’t yet gone back in time to pour banana milk on my own shoes, so that was probably why I was feeling sick.
I would have to check my new missions to see the exact time and date I needed to close the loop.