Chapter Seven
On the first day of my life as a traitor, I leaned over the railing of a bridge and stretched my honey-coated fingers toward the sun. The Han River rushed below, a fleet of orange kayaks bobbing by while bikes flashed past on either side of the water.
Almost there, I thought.
A single ladybug darted around me, scarlet against the white sky. I leaned even farther over the railing. What good was being tall if I couldn’t even do this much? I stood up on my toes, my weight tipping forward.
The ladybug hovered around my palm for a moment, then landed on my ring finger.
I tipped forward, my stomach dropping as the balance shifted, and suddenly my feet were off the ground and the river was opening its jaws.
Hyebin yanked me back by the belt and jammed a plastic bag over my hand, tugging it tight with a drawstring.
“Got you, asshole,” Hyebin said. “The ladybug, not you.”
“I know,” I said, though I never really knew with Hyebin.
It had been one day since the flaming bride incident, and I’d shown up early for work with extra Choco Pies and chips to placate Hyebin.
I’d had two extra coffees that morning so my focus would be laser sharp, but my blood was buzzing from the caffeine and I desperately had to pee.
Worst of all, my bones screamed that Hyebin must have known about my deal with Yejun, that she was just waiting for the right moment to kill me in the most satisfying way.
At least she hadn’t said a word about the wedding incident. Maybe she was truly too busy to hold grudges, or maybe my extra bags of honey butter chips had really earned my forgiveness. Still, though she didn’t seem outwardly upset, she’d pointedly avoided eye contact all morning.
She grabbed my wrist and examined the ladybug through the plastic, then pinched it to death inside the bag.
“Let’s go,” she said, turning around as if she hadn’t left me with a sack of sticky bug guts on my hand.
The briefing for this mission had been particularly short on details—it was a cleanup for an error another descendant had made, a quick three years into the past. I’d only done one cleanup before, where a descendant had blown his nose on a mission and tried to throw the tissue away but missed the trash can.
A seagull ate the tissue and choked to death in the middle of the bike path, then a human moved its corpse to the side and got E.
coli, causing a massive outbreak. But I didn’t know the crimes of this particular ladybug.
Hyebin and I hid in a public bathroom stall, where her time magic carried us back to the present. I’d tried to wash up, but she said we would miss the bus, so I ended up crammed into a crowded bus with a honey hand that was quickly hardening inside the bag.
“Are bugs really worth your time?” I said, grimacing at the bug guts under my fingernail. “Isn’t this below your pay grade?”
“You’d be amazed how integral most bugs are to the ecosystem,” Hyebin said, the city flashing past as the bus rattled down the road.
All the seats were taken, so we were clinging to the same metal pole by the back door.
“This particular species was supposed to go extinct six years ago, but one hitched a ride on an agent’s ear. We’ve been chasing it down for years.”
“Was it really that hard to find?” I said. The descendants regularly tracked down people without issue. How could an insect be that stealthy?
“Normally, no,” Hyebin said, “but this one disappeared during daylight savings.”
I blinked. “But there’s no daylight savings in South Korea?” I said, suddenly unsure.
“Yes, not anymore,” Hyebin said. “It was tested in 1988 for the Olympics. So there’s no 2:00 A.M. through 2:59 A.M. in the spring, and there’s duplicate times for 1:00 A.M. through 1:59 A.M. in the fall that year. It complicates things.”
I frowned, suddenly grateful I wasn’t training to become a timeline architect—my brain hurt just imagining how to fix that kind of problem. “And the timeline refresh didn’t just … squash it?”
“Well, no, because it wasn’t on the timeline,” Hyebin said, like it should have been obvious. “It went from not being on the timeline at all to landing at three A.M. on May 8. It was kind of like being born on that day—1988 became its new origin timeline.”
“So, it survived the refresh because it was hiding in a time that didn’t exist?” I said.
“Yep,” Hyebin said. “Then it got deprioritized until it ate one too many spiders and caused a tsunami. We kind of had to deal with it then.”
“Well now I feel like I should be checking more carefully for bugs after missions,” I said, running a hand through my hair and imagining half a dozen insects falling out.
“As long as you don’t have head lice, you should be fine,” Hyebin said, grimacing like it wasn’t actually a joke.
The bus turned a sharp corner and I stumbled into Hyebin, who grumbled and went rigid like my touch was radioactive. “Watch it,” she mumbled, looking out the bus window rather than at me.
Normally, Hyebin looked at ease in every situation, which was why she made such a good descendant. She was so confident that she could probably barge into any stranger’s house and raid their fridge without anyone questioning it.
But now, with her tight grip on the pole as the bus rattled her side to side, she seemed out of place.
The way she gazed out the front window felt too calculated, too obvious.
Maybe it was an extension of my dragon senses of knowing when I was being followed—maybe I also knew when I was being watched … or deliberately not watched.
One thing was certain: This wasn’t about Yejun.
If she knew about him, she would look angry, not nervous. In fact, she would already have my head on a pike.
“Mina,” Hyebin said, her voice low, her gaze fixed on my reflection in the scratched bus window. “I was wondering…”
I held my breath as I waited for her next words. Call it a dragon sense, or a hunch, or just overactive anxiety, but I sensed that her next words were of great importance.
She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it and looked away.
“This is our stop,” she said.
As we stepped off the bus and walked back to headquarters, I realized that I had learned something valuable that day.
I couldn’t lie to Jang Hyebin, but Jang Hyebin couldn’t lie to me either.
The city unfolded beneath me as I rode the bus up to Namsan Seoul Tower that afternoon. It was a tourist trap, one of the Top Ten Places to See in Seoul. Maybe Yejun hoped the crush of foreign tourists would make a good distraction when we started destroying the timeline in broad daylight.
It was a bad-air day, so the panoramic view from the top of the hill hid behind a silk veil, and I doubted the view from the observation deck was much better.
People came here to take scenic pictures of the whole city from behind fingerprinted glass, but they were going to be disappointed if they came today.
I stepped off the bus and lingered outside the main entrance, staying far away from the neon love staircase and the locks that annoying couples clipped to all the railings to promise their eternal devotion—I was pretty sure that maintenance had to come around with clippers every month and prune the gate just so no one got tetanus from all the rust.
Yejun hadn’t told me how to find him once I arrived, and I felt too awkward waiting by the door, so I ducked into the OLED tunnel by the main entrance.
There were panels like this all over the tower—screens so crisp that they looked more like windows to another universe.
This one played a video of outer space rushing over my head, like I was in a rocket spiraling upward into oblivion.
The sharp brightness of the digital stars made my eyes hurt, yet another headache stabbing into my skull.
I’d had a headache all morning and Advil hadn’t even touched it, supporting my theory that it was timesickness.
But I didn’t know how to fix it when I couldn’t figure out where I’d left a loop open.
In the panels overhead, the spinning stars grew dim.
The camera panned to the fiery red surface of the sun, scarlet flames lashing their tongues at the darkness, gold simmering beneath the surface.
Something about its brightness ignited a warmth inside my rib cage, relaxing my muscles, forcing my jaw to unclench.
Dragons were creatures of water, not fire, but we were also drawn to gold. It was a symbol of power in both Korea and Japan. Every year, there was a golden dragon dance in Tokyo that was meant to celebrate the return of golden dragons to heaven.
Descendants were only echoes of dragons. But sometimes—like now—I could sense the sizzling embers of who I used to be, the fire waiting for oxygen to breathe it back to life. I looked at my hands, imagining my nails sharpening into claws.
A shadow spilled across my feet as someone blocked the light behind me. I turned around.
Yejun stood at the mouth of the tunnel, a Paris Baguette bag in one hand and a backpack slung over his shoulder. With stars flashing by in the OLED panels all around him, he looked like a falling star tearing through the night sky.
“Yes, I got your cheesecake,” he said, grinning and waving for me to follow him.
“I didn’t say you had to get me cheesecake every time we met,” I said as I emerged from the tunnel, snatching the bag from him anyway and peering inside at the slice of cheesecake with a little plastic lid over the top—strawberry, just like I’d had at the café.
I hated that he’d remembered. He probably felt so smug about it, probably expected me to be impressed.
Yejun shrugged and turned left, away from the lobby entrance. “It seemed like an investment in my safety. I don’t know how you eat something so heavy, though. Have you ever tried banana milk mixed with melon milk and a ginseng candy chaser? That’s the best dessert.”
“That sounds disgusting,” I said.