Chapter Six
“I hate weddings,” Hyebin said, as if that wasn’t patently obvious from the way she was storming across the reception hall and tugging up her green velvet dress, which she wore with the enthusiasm of a snake clinging to its own dead skin.
Unfortunately, her normal sweatpants wouldn’t cut it for a wedding of this caliber.
Apparently, one of the wedding guests was a future K-drama actor, but I wasn’t allowed to know his name.
Celebrity-adjacent missions were highly classified ever since a descendant had tried to twist the timeline so that she could marry Min Yoongi from BTS.
All I knew was that thanks to a butterfly effect from a rogue agent, the actor was going to get food poisoning here and miss an audition, ruining his acting career.
He was supposed to be the first Korean actor to win an Emmy, so it was paramount that we corrected the mistake.
Hyebin stormed up the stairs rather than wait for the elevator, jammed two envelopes of gift money at the bride’s attendants in exchange for banquet tickets, then all but ran down to the banquet hall while I tried not to trip in my heels.
“Who wants to spend this much money just to be a slave to their in-laws?” Hyebin said under her breath.
“People in love, maybe?” I said.
Hyebin’s eye twitched, but she didn’t turn to glare at me like usual, hurrying down the stairs.
She hadn’t looked me in the eye since yesterday’s neutralization mission.
I couldn’t tell if she was just busier than usual, or if she felt strange about me seeing her help turn another descendant to dust. She didn’t seem the type to care what other people thought, but then again, I knew very little about her other than her work.
If it meant keeping my cover until I could find Hana, would I have held someone down while Hong Gildong jammed a yeouiju down their throat?
I didn’t know the answer, which was why I couldn’t judge Hyebin for it.
Still, all night I’d dreamed of Hong Gildong holding down a faceless girl in a striped sweater with a silver watch on her wrist, coppery hair splayed out around her on the gray carpet.
Mina! she’d cried, reaching out for me just before Hong Gildong jammed a box of time magic between her teeth.
I’d woken up before Hana turned to ashes, then emptied my backpack on the floor in a panic and clutched Hana’s note to my chest.
Hong Gildong had tried to scorch all of Hana Yang from the timeline, but somehow, against all odds, some small part of her had survived and was trying to protect me. Her note was proof that she wasn’t completely gone.
Hyebin yanked me by the wrist right before I could collide with a wedding guest. Minus one point for unauthorized physical interference with a scene, I thought grimly.
“Are you awake?” Hyebin said under her breath, her grip painfully tight around my wrist. “You’re usually better than this.”
“Yes, sorry,” I said quickly, focusing on the way my high heels pinched my toes and my strapless bra dug into my rib cage—anything to ground me in the moment.
“Don’t be sorry,” Hyebin said, releasing my wrist. “Be better.”
We hurried to the crowded banquet hall, a vast redbrick basement decorated with fake ivy and fairy lights.
Some guests swarmed around buffet tables under a glittery arch on the left, and others sat at round tables with fake floral centerpieces.
Guests from three different weddings ate together while the brides and grooms in hanbok walked around to greet them.
Senior agents had run a few scenarios to determine the strategy with the fewest ripple effects, and had ultimately decided that I needed to set off the fire alarm and evacuate the hall.
But the pull-down alarms were all on security cameras, and descendants weren’t supposed to appear in photos or videos while on missions, so I needed to set one off the old-fashioned way.
“If we have to be here, I’m at least getting some cake out of it,” Hyebin said, eyeing the dessert table. “You got this, Yang?”
“Got it,” I said, already mentally calculating my score after finishing this mission. Hyebin’s gaze lingered on me for a moment as if she didn’t believe me, but apparently the siren call of cake was too loud to ignore, because she turned and disappeared into the crowd.
I wove my way to the back of the hall, scanning the ceiling until I spotted the smoke detector overhead.
Just as the case file described, I found a neat stack of gold paper napkins beside the silverware.
The napkins would go up in a quick burst of flames directly under the fire alarm, forcing everyone outside with minimal fire damage.
I readied the lighter in my pocket, eyeing the emergency exit just a few feet behind the table, where I was supposed to take my leave as soon as I finished. I flicked the wheel of the lighter and a flame bloomed in my hand.
“Mina!”
I froze. Even in the crowded room, the word sounded bright and clear. It wasn’t Hyebin’s voice, and she was the only person who would have called for me here.
Mina! the girl in my dream had said, struggling against Hong Gildong. I didn’t know what Hana’s voice sounded like, but that only meant she could be anyone at all.
“Mina!” a voice said again. But this time it wasn’t the faceless girl in my dreams—the sound was coming from behind me.
I turned, squinting through the sunbeams cast down from the skylight.
Someone was approaching, her face blurred by the light.
It was just like in Yejun’s photograph of me in the board game café—the other girl in the photo was looking over her shoulder, turning to face the camera, the sun from the high windows blaring across her face, and as she turned all the way around I could finally see—
“Mina, you can’t run in here!” said a woman, bursting through the crowd and scooping a young girl off the floor. “Stay with Eomma!”
Clouds rolled across the skylight, extinguishing the glaring sun. The woman walked away, her own Mina in her arms. I tried to imagine Hana again, but now I could only see a pile of ash.
Someone bumped into me.
I stumbled into the table and fell over the napkin pile, the lighter still clutched in my hand. With a sudden whoosh of light and heat, the tablecloth caught fire.
The decorative ivy must have been highly flammable, because the flames raced across the table in bright sparks, like a dragon’s tail flashing through the decorative arrangement of seeded bread rolls.
A woman in hanbok was trying to serve herself some cake, but the long dangling goreum of her top draped over the flowers and caught fire, devouring the front of her jeogori.
She screamed, dropping the plate and reeling back into a guest, who dropped a bowl of kimchi jjigae to the floor.
It occurred to me then, as I watched a bride go up in flames and fall over shattered dishes, that Hyebin was going to kill me.
I spun around, looking for some sort of liquid to douse the bride with, but someone else got there first.
Hyebin shoved her way through the crowd and overturned a punch bowl on top of the bride. As the woman sputtered and the flames fizzled out, Hyebin cast the bowl to the side with a clatter, then turned to me, her eyes blazing gold, the tablecloth still alight behind her.
Oh no.
Hyebin seized my wrist and yanked me out the emergency exit, into the street. Time magic surged through my arm as we walked, window displays in each shop shifting, the street signs morphing, the crowd patterns speeding up as people flickered in and out of existence.
She carried us back to the present in broad daylight? I thought. The only reason Hyebin would do that was if the whole mission was a wash, if she knew it would all have to be redone anyway.
She stormed into a side street and finally released me, standing at the mouth of the alley with her hands on her hips. She hadn’t pushed me, but the sudden loss of tension sent me off-balance, and I fell hands-first into a puddle. I tried to get up, but Hyebin’s furious gaze pinned me down.
“What the hell was that?” she said. Her eyes had turned blistering gold, forcing me to lower my gaze in submission. Blood trickled from between her fingers, and I realized her claws had descended, cutting into her palms.
“I’m sorry, Sunbaenim,” I said, folding into a bow.
“Sorry?” Hyebin said, letting out an incredulous laugh. “You think that fixes anything? I have to wipe this mission from the timeline and do it all over again. Do you have any idea how busy I am?”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, wishing I could drown myself in the murky puddle. “I’ll fix it,” I said. “Just let me—”
“No.”
I looked up slowly at Hyebin. “No?”
“You’re done for today,” she said. “This is pointless if you’re not focused. The stakes are too high for you to mess up.”
“I tried my—”
“Don’t say that,” Hyebin said, raising a hand to silence me. Four puncture wounds on her palm glistened with blood where her claws had sliced into her skin. “Whatever you do, do not tell me that was you trying your best. Because if it was, I need to tell HQ that you’re wasting my time.”
I curled in on myself, feeling impossibly small at her feet.
“This wasn’t even a difficult mission,” Hyebin went on. “How could I send you farther into the past if you can’t even do this? You’re unfocused. Clumsy. You don’t listen. You’re so…”
“Human?” I finished quietly.
Hyebin closed her mouth, but the look in her eyes told me I was right.
Humans are allowed to make mistakes, Hong Gildong had said. But descendants weren’t.
Even a single drop of dragon blood was supposed to make you skilled, graceful, beautiful, brilliant beyond measure. But somehow, I was none of those things.