Chapter Nine
My mom might have been content with being a takeout family, but I was starting to feel like my veins were full of oil.
I couldn’t stand any more takeout pizza, so I did my best to chop up some kimchi and make some semblance of a meal with the frozen rice, vegetable bags, and freezer-burned garlic cloves.
A runny egg and some scallions on top would fix just about anything, anyway.
I made extra, hoping my parents would be home to eat it but knowing they probably wouldn’t be. I hadn’t seen them at home in days, so they were either coming and going while I was at school or they hadn’t returned at all. It wasn’t unusual for floating agents, so I wasn’t worried yet.
As I scraped some rice onto a plate, a sharp pain stabbed behind my eye and my hand twitched, dumping so much rice out that it spilled over the counter.
I’d been getting headaches more frequently lately, but every time I checked, the banana milk mission still hadn’t populated in my assignment list. I would have to talk to Hyebin about it the next time I saw her.
My eyes throbbed again and I set down the pan, sliding back against the cabinets.
I fished an ice pack from the freezer and slapped it over my eyes as I lay down on the floor.
When the pain faded, I realized I was lying across my mom’s shoes, which were spilling out of the overstuffed shoe rack in the hyeon gwan and slowly migrating into the kitchen.
I tossed the ice pack in the sink and gathered up the shoes so no one tripped and fell to their death when returning home at three in the morning.
As I matched up all the boots and sandals, I thought about Yejun’s mother and her green shoe.
What if my mom dissolved like Yejun’s mom and left nothing behind but a mismatched shoe?
If I got caught, maybe Hong Gildong would erase my parents too just for good measure—raising two traitor daughters probably wouldn’t look good on their records, even if none of it was their fault.
I tucked my mom’s boots into the rack as gently as possible.
No matter what happened to me, I had to make sure my parents were safe.
I grabbed my backpack and fished out my wallet, then pulled out Hana’s note and read it with one side of my face pressed against the cool laminate of the front door, letting her words and the cold temperature slow my heart rate.
When you’re ready, come find me. I will keep you safe.
I tried to imagine, as Yejun had, what kind of person Hana was.
I pictured her hunched over a desk, writing the note with a fine-tip pen, blowing on it to dry the ink.
I already knew what clothes she would have worn, because I had her hand-me-downs.
I pictured her in my striped pink-and-orange sweater, gray sweatpants, and maybe fuzzy purple socks.
Yes, that felt like something Hana would wear.
But still, I couldn’t imagine her face at all.
I could only see her shoulders, her spine, her coppery hair draped down her back.
Maybe my imagination just wasn’t as good as Yejun’s, or maybe I just didn’t want to be wrong, to love someone who wasn’t real.
Hana will keep me safe, I thought, hugging the note close to my chest. She promised. She wouldn’t promise that unless she was still here, somehow.
The door pulled away and I fell into the hallway, where my dad took a startled step back.
“Oh, sorry!” he said, frowning as I scrambled to my feet. “Were you … sleeping on the floor?”
“I was rearranging the shoes in the shoe rack,” I said quickly, folding up the note and stuffing it in my pocket so he wouldn’t see. “Sorry, I didn’t expect you home so soon.”
I all but ran back inside, too conscious of the wary look on my dad’s face as he sat down to untie his boots.
“I made kimchi fried rice,” I said quickly, trying to disperse the awkwardness from the air. “Or something close to it. Want me to add another egg for you?”
My dad took his time putting his shoes away before answering. “Are you all right, Mina Bean?” he said. “You seem … on edge.”
I swallowed, feeling like I was on another infiltration mission. Of course I’m on edge, I thought. I’m a traitor waiting for the guillotine blade to fall. But I couldn’t say that to my dad, and denying it would only make him more suspicious.
“Just a lot of work at school,” I said, looking away. “Calculus is hard.”
My dad nodded sympathetically, the tension leaving his shoulders. “Make sure you’re getting enough sleep,” he said. “You’re not a calculator—your brain won’t work if you don’t recharge it.”
“I’ll go to bed after I eat,” I said, cracking an egg over the pan of rice.
I could feel my dad’s eyes on me as I cooked, so I ate as fast as I could before saying good night and hurrying to my room.
Once I locked my door, I let out a breath.
I pulled down the shades and put Hana’s note back in its designated place in my wallet, safe and secret.
“That’s twenty-five,” Hyebin said as I dropped another eunhaeng into her bag.
“It’s twenty-six,” I said, frowning and swaying precariously on my tree branch as it wobbled in the breeze.
“I know how to count, Yang,” Hyebin said.
I sighed and resigned myself to plucking another two eunhaeng just to placate Hyebin.
After school on Monday, Hyebin and I traveled to May of 2013 for a mission of paramount importance: plucking twenty-seven pieces of stinky fruit off one specific tree in Olympic Park.
Eunhaeng looked like yellow cherries and smelled like garbage when they fell to the ground and burst under people’s shoes.
Removing twenty-seven of them from this tree was supposed to prevent a truck rollover on the highway in three days, though I hadn’t bothered to look up exactly how that worked.
I’d stayed up half the night finishing my calculus homework, so at this point, if Hyebin had asked me to lick eunhaeng off the sidewalk, I probably would have done it just to finish the mission quickly.
I stretched higher, trying to reach the closest eunhaeng, but my fingertips barely brushed it. I wasn’t keen on taking a heroic dive and plummeting to the ground.
“Reach for it, Yang,” Hyebin said. “You move like my grandmother.”
I hesitated before making another grab, looking over my shoulder at Hyebin. “You have a grandmother?” I said before I could help it. I’d always thought of Hyebin as totally unattached, floating around across the timelines without a tether.
Her expression went blank. “Everyone has a grandmother,” she said—a calculated non-answer.
“Is she a descendant?” I said, stretching my wrist. I imagined an older version of Hyebin and cowered at the thought. The only thing scarier than Jang Hyebin was Jang Hyebin with the authority of a halmeoni.
Hyebin took so long to respond that at first, I thought she hadn’t heard me. When I looked over my shoulder, she was staring into her fruit bag. “I’m the only descendant left in my family,” she said at last.
I frowned, peering down between the branches. “What? How is that possible?”
“They all opted for the brain wipe,” Hyebin said, shrugging as if it didn’t matter.
When descendants turned twenty, we could opt to turn in our magic and have our memories scrubbed rather than serve the timeline.
As tempting as it was at times, my mom told me that it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.
The descendants didn’t put new memories in place of the years you’d spent training.
Instead, they ripped out everything even remotely related to time travel.
If Hyebin’s parents had had their memories erased, there were probably huge chunks of Hyebin’s childhood they couldn’t remember at all.
No wonder Hyebin seemed like such a lone wolf. She really had no one.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Hyebin’s expression twisted like she’d eaten something sour. “I’m not,” she said. “They’re not the ones pulling stinky fruit from a tree right now. Speaking of…” She gestured impatiently toward the tree.
I sighed and turned back to the tree, tugging myself up high enough to pluck the last two eunhaeng.
I let out a breath as I dropped them into Hyebin’s basket.
That was one more mission I’d managed not to mess up.
Ever since the wedding incident, I was hyperaware that the next mission I failed would probably be my last.
I was just about to climb back down when a low rumble shook the earth.
I grabbed the nearest branch for support as the leaves and eunhaeng trembled. Hyebin steadied herself on the ladder and looked around.
“Earthquake?” I said, digging my hands into the bark as the ground shook even harder.
Hyebin ignored me, narrowing her eyes and peering around as if she could smell a change in the air. The world lurched again and I smacked my head against the side of the tree.
“We have to go,” Hyebin said suddenly.
“Uh, okay,” I said. “What should I do with the eunhaeng?”
“Yang, now!” Hyebin said, her eyes wide.
I reached out for her hand, but another vibration shook the ground, and Hyebin’s ladder tilted to the side, her fingers sliding away from me.
Hyebin hopped off the ladder and landed easily on her feet as it clattered to the ground, then hurried to pick it up and settle it against the shivering tree again.
I clung to the trunk, praying that the whole tree didn’t topple over with me on it.
On the horizon, a wave of white began to roll in.
At first, I thought it was a tsunami, but those were far more common in Japan than Korea. Something that resembled ocean foam rolled closer and closer, until I realized it wasn’t water at all, but … nothing.
It was as if a wave of bleach was flooding the horizon, stripping the colors from the storefronts and sidewalks, leaving the world a vacant white with nothing but ghostly outlines of what remained.
The wave devoured the skyline and all the buildings on the horizon, slowly ripping a hole in the sky.
People on the streets sprinted away, tripping over each other and running out into traffic.
My fingers on the upper branch stung with a sharp coldness. I looked at the branches overhead, now white as a birch tree, the eunhaeng gray like rocks. The wave of white had begun to wash over my hand, which was quickly going numb.
I scrambled to a different branch as the whiteness crept farther down the tree, breathing frigid air over me. I was positive I had never learned about anything like this in my descendant classes.
Hyebin gave up on trying to steady the ladder, tossing it aside with a frustrated cry when the ground shook even harder beneath her. She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the white approaching from all sides, then held a hand out to me, one palm glowing blue. “Just jump!” she said.
It was too far to jump. I was going to crush her into the ground. “I don’t think—”
“Yes, don’t think!” Hyebin said, her eyes wide and desperate. “Just jump!”
As always, I listened to Hyebin.
I dropped from the tree right as the whiteness devoured my branch. My left hand closed around Hyebin’s, and the world exploded into color.
We tumbled to the sidewalk, crushing a display of grapes spread out on blankets in front of a market. An old woman started yelling at us, but Hyebin had already rolled to her feet and yanked me upright, gripping me by the shoulders.
“Are you okay?” she said.
I looked to my hand, which had returned to its natural color. “I think so,” I said, though I lurched unsteadily to one side because the ground felt a bit more like gelatin than cement.
Hyebin frowned and tugged at a lock of my hair near my face. Before I could ask her what was wrong, the lock fell in front of my eyes, and I realized it was stark white. Frantically, I tugged at the rest of my hair, relieved that most of it was still brown. “What was that?” I said.
Hyebin passed the grape vendor a 50,000 won note and mumbled an apology before tugging me away from the scene of the crime, then uttered the most terrifying words I’d ever heard Jang Hyebin say.
“I don’t know.”