Chapter Eight
As I stepped off the elevator into this new world, I was sure the tiles would disappear beneath my feet and drop me into the pale blue sky.
Visiting the past with Hyebin had always felt like riding shotgun while she reluctantly chauffeured me around the timeline, but arriving with my own magic was like writing my own story—I had conjured the blue sky and glass skyscrapers and shadowed mountains disappearing into the horizon. This world was my creation.
Well … mine and Yejun’s.
I realized belatedly that I was still holding his hand and took a deliberate step away from him, stuffing both hands in my pockets.
“Not bad,” he said, “though you cut it a bit close there. I thought the timeline was gonna chop me in half for a sec.”
“Can that actually happen?” I said, imagining the elevator doors opening to a pile of severed limbs.
“Let’s not find out,” Yejun said, waving for me to start walking.
I followed him outside, half a level down, where people were allowed to gawk at the panoramic views from behind carefully installed fences to make sure no one plummeted all the way down.
There were more love locks hitched to the fences on this level, which Yejun walked annoyingly close to before shrugging off his backpack and pulling out a shoebox that looked like it had been stabbed to death with a blunt pair of scissors.
“Would you like to do the honors?” he said, holding the box out to me.
I edged away, crossing my arms. “What’s inside?”
“Don’t you trust me?” Yejun said with a pout.
“Not at all.”
Something rustled inside the box, and I took another step back. “Is there something alive in there?”
“I sure hope so,” Yejun said, turning away and holding the box over the railing. “Otherwise, this was a waste of time.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he took off the lid.
A flurry of butterflies surged from the box and spun into the air, fluttering red and yellow and orange into the blue sky.
They swirled around us, their delicate wings tickling across my face.
I blinked quickly rather than swat them away—squishing a butterfly to death on my own eye was probably bad luck, not to mention gross.
A yellow butterfly landed on Yejun’s nose. He laughed and looked at it cross-eyed for a moment before gently blowing out a puff of air. It fluttered between us before joining the others in the sky. Yejun smiled as he watched them disappear.
He turned to me, then laughed. “Someone likes you,” he said.
I froze. “What?”
He reached forward, gently tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. I had half a mind to twist his wrist backward—and probably would have if not for the people around us—but when he pulled back, he had an orange butterfly on his finger.
“This one didn’t want to let you go,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, wanting to smack myself for not saying something halfway intelligent. Yejun always knew what to say, and here I was, fumbling through a simple conversation.
“Maybe your hair smells like nectar,” he said, turning to the railing and holding his hand out until the butterfly took off, chasing after the others. He waved as they dispersed. “Thanks for your hard work!” he said. Then he turned to me. “See? That wasn’t so scary, was it?”
I tucked my hair back, oddly conscious of how it smelled. “How will this change the timeline?” I said, rather than answer.
He squinted in the sunlight, stepping closer to me to avoid its rays. “What fun would it be if I told you that?” he said.
“Fun?” I said. “Is this supposed to be fun?” Betraying the descendants and plotting the downfall of Hong Gildong wasn’t exactly my favorite pastime.
He shrugged. “As descendants, there are so few surprises left for us,” he said. “Isn’t it nice to leave a little bit of mystery? Something to wonder about?”
I let out a sharp laugh, then realized he was serious. “I can wonder about what’s for lunch today, not whether or not the world is going to end.”
“How boring,” he said, picking up his Swiss-cheesed shoebox under one arm.
“If you really must know, these thirty-four butterflies will pollinate a slightly higher number of golden asters on Jeju Island, where a Swedish billionaire will vacation in five months. His daughter will pick one of the flowers and tell her dad that yellow is her new favorite color, so he’ll start to buy her everything yellow that he can find.
He’ll buy more shares in a candy company and get his daughter a private tour of the factory where they make butterscotch, and his investment will allow the company to distribute in Korea—at his suggestion—with a social media campaign that emphasizes the honey in candy corn, with lots of pictures of bees and flowers and, of course, golden asters. ”
“Wow,” I said, blinking at the last of the butterflies on the horizon. “That’s…”
“Impressive, I know,” Yejun said, smirking. “I was training to be a timeline architect, so I’m good at scripting scenarios.”
It was impressive, but I wasn’t about to tell that to Kim Yejun. “Did you get caught because you bragged too much about breaking the rules?”
Yejun scowled. “I got caught because I left a paper trail. Hence the milk.”
“I think milk can only do so much to protect us,” I said. “Now, are you going to help me with calculus, or are we gonna stand here until the timeline wipes us?”
“Right,” Yejun said, rolling his eyes. “Heaven forbid you help save the world out of the goodness of your heart. How could I forget the importance of calculus?”
Heat rushed up to my face, but Yejun had already turned away, waving for me to follow him like I was a dog.
I stormed ahead, elbowing him out of my way just so he would have to walk behind me instead.
When we took the elevator back down, if he noticed that my grip on his hand was tight enough to crush bones, he didn’t say a word.
Back on the lower level of Namsan Seoul Tower in the present day, Yejun slurped his bubble tea while shaking his head at my poor attempt at calculus. “That’s wrong,” he said through a sticky mouthful of boba.
My grip tightened on my pencil. I consciously relaxed every muscle in my hand—I was snapping too many pencils these days. “Why?” I said as patiently as I could manage.
“Because that answer defies the laws of physics,” Yejun said.
It had been forty-five minutes, and we’d only gotten halfway through the first page of my homework. I was starting to think that all this had been a mistake. I’d betrayed the descendants in exchange for an hour-long torture session.
Yejun sighed and set his bubble tea down, then plucked my pencil from my hand and scooted his chair closer to mine. I instinctively pulled my chair away, but he raised an eyebrow and shot me an unimpressed look. “You can read the worksheet from all the way over there?”
“Dragons have excellent vision.”
He rolled his eyes, then hooked his ankle around the leg of my chair and yanked me closer.
“Get over it, I don’t smell that bad,” he said.
He crossed out my indecipherable attempt and started to underline parts of the question.
“‘If a ball is thrown into the air, when will it reach its highest point?’” he read.
“Okay, so to figure this out, you need to know the velocity at the highest point. Do you know what that is?”
I glared at the worksheet, wishing the answer would suddenly come to me or I’d get struck by a bolt of lightning, either one was fine. I could tell by the way he asked that I was supposed to know the answer.
This was a terrible idea, I thought. I’ve just given Kim Yejun an excuse to laugh at me.
I stayed perfectly still, hoping Yejun would just tell me the answer. But instead, he pushed his chair back and started to untie his shoelaces.
“What are you doing?” I said, leaning away.
“Demonstrating,” he said, kicking off his shoe and removing one of his socks.
“What does your foot have to do with anything?”
He balled up his sock, then tossed it experimentally from hand to hand. “I didn’t bring a ball, so this will have to work.” Then he threw his sock straight up in the air, nearly hitting one of the overhead lights.
“Stop that!” I said, grabbing his arm. “No one wants to get hit in the face with your sweaty sock!”
“What’s the velocity at the highest point?” he said, ignoring me. “You said dragons have excellent vision, so watch.”
He tossed the sock up again. The lady working at the bubble tea counter was staring at us, whispering nervously to her coworker, and I wanted to melt into the floor.
“I don’t have robot eyes that measure velocity,” I said, tugging at his sleeve.
“You don’t need them,” he said, pulling away. “Just watch, Mina.” Then he threw the sock into the air again.
This time, my gaze focused on the sock as it arced higher and higher.
The bubble tea shop, the beams in the ceiling, the crowds moving past us—everything disappeared except for Yejun’s sock.
It moved up and up and up, then slowed down until it was suspended for one single moment, motionless in the air.
Then the sock fell back down. Yejun caught it with one hand, and the sounds of the food court filtered back in.
“It’s zero,” I said quietly, looking at my feet.
“Great,” Yejun said, putting his sock on. “So substitute that back into the equation.”
I picked up my pencil, but my fingers felt numb. “That was stupid,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Rude,” Yejun said, yanking his shoelaces tighter. “I was trying to help you.”
“No, not you,” I said. “Of course it’s zero. I was overthinking it.”
“Oh,” Yejun said, sitting back. It was the first time since I’d met him that he didn’t seem to have his next response spring-loaded. He took a long, noisy slurp of bubble tea.
“Calculus isn’t that important anyway,” he said. “In fact, it’s really boring.” He inhaled the last of his boba from his cup and set the cup down. “I need to refuel.”
I pushed my sealed bubble tea toward him. “Take mine.”