Chapter Ten
Hyebin forced me to see the medics, who examined each of my toes with exquisite care and poked around the inside of my mouth until they determined that the mysterious wave of nothingness hadn’t rearranged my organs. Somehow, I’d escaped with only a lock of white hair.
By the time the medics were finished with me, Hyebin had done enough research to determine that the bleach tsunami was most likely a timeline fluctuation.
She marked it in her report as an Unexplained Illogical Behavior While on an Alternate Plane of Time, the catch-all phrase for Something Very Bad That We Don’t Know How to Fix.
“I’ve read through some past incident reports,” Hyebin said, fingers dancing across the scrying pool. “Similar events have been reported due to unresolved paradoxes, which started the process of timeline decay.”
“Decay?” I echoed, hugging my backpack to my chest.
“Think of the timeline like a piece of wood, and paradoxes are like hungry termites,” Hyebin said, now using both hands to pull up different files at once.
“We can never eliminate paradoxes completely—time traveling is inherently paradoxical—but we try to keep the amount of paradoxes below a certain percent. Otherwise, the holes get too big and strange things start happening.”
My lock of white hair fell in front of my eyes, and I hurriedly tucked it behind my ear. “On a scale of one to ten, how panicked should I be?” I said.
“The paradox seems to be isolated for now,” Hyebin said, rather than answer my question, “but I have to do some more digging to find the cause.”
“What could cause this?” I said.
Hyebin shrugged. “People messing up their assignments, open time loops, unauthorized traveling … there’s too many possibilities.”
Unauthorized traveling? I thought back to Yejun releasing the butterflies into the sky at Namsan Seoul Tower.
My hands broke out in a nervous sweat, so I jammed my fists into my pockets.
Had Yejun and I caused this? Did bringing back Timeline Alpha mean destroying the current timeline while we were standing on it?
On any other day, Hyebin probably could have read the terror in my eyes, but she was too preoccupied with the scrying pool to even meet my gaze.
“In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m too busy to train you today,” Hyebin said. “Go home. Text me if you spot any paradoxes.”
“Right,” I said, jumping to my feet. I’d take any excuse to leave before I sweated through my shirt and blurted out all my sins to Hyebin.
I tried to bow, but as I lowered my head, pain blared behind my eyes, my vision flashing white.
It was that same timesickness headache, but so sudden and sharp that it felt like someone had taken a pickaxe behind my eyes.
For a moment, I actually thought my eyeballs were going to pop out and roll across the floor of Hyebin’s office.
I reached out for balance but only managed to grab a handful of potted plant before I felt hands on my shoulders.
My vision cleared just as Hyebin pushed me back into my chair.
“What’s wrong?” she said, gripping my face, her dark eyes scrutinizing me. When I couldn’t find the words to answer right away, she scowled and shook her head. “Those medics are useless.”
I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. The pain had faded a bit, now back to a dull ache. “It feels like a timesickness headache,” I managed, though my tongue felt heavy in my mouth. “But according to my scrying pool, I don’t have any open loops.”
Hyebin pressed her lips together, then turned back to her desk.
She grabbed an item too small for me to see, then slammed the drawer shut and knelt in front of me.
With one hand, she took my wrist, then with the other she tore open an alcohol wipe between her teeth and swiped it across my arm.
Before I could ask what she was doing, she pulled out a thin needle and poked it into my wrist.
I flinched, but Hyebin held my arm steady so I couldn’t pull away. As soon as the surprise faded, I realized my headache was just … gone. I blinked, glancing experimentally up at the light, which no longer seared my eyes. My gaze dropped to the thin needle sticking out of my arm.
“What did you do?” I said.
“Acupuncture,” she said, tossing the alcohol wipe in the trash.
I shook my head. “I’ve tried that before,” I said. “It’s never worked for me.”
“Because you’re not human,” Hyebin said. “Human acupuncturists can’t help you because your nervous system is different from theirs.”
I feel pretty human, I thought, wincing as Hyebin plucked out the needle. “You’ve had this kind of headache before?” she said, sitting in front of her scrying pool.
“It didn’t start today, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. “I don’t think the paradox scrambled my brain or anything like that.”
She made a wordless sound of acknowledgment, her fingers dancing across the pool and her frown deepening.
“You’re right, you don’t have any open loops,” she said, glaring at her reflection in the water.
“The architects must have missed something,” I said. “I saw one of my Echoes a few days ago.”
Hyebin’s gaze snapped up. “You did?” she said, her expression grave. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, even though the intensity of Hyebin’s gaze could have scared me into forgetting my own name. “But that just means the architects made a mistake, right?”
Hyebin’s lips pressed together. She nodded stiffly, averting her gaze. “Probably,” she said, as if the word had been choked out of her throat. “I’ll ask them about it.” Then she turned back to me, her expression softer. “I want to check you again, just in case. I don’t trust those medics.”
It was no use arguing with Hyebin, so I kept my mouth shut while she poked me and tested all my joints. She took a step back, which I took as a signal that she was finished, but she was still looking at me like I was a wilted salad or something equally displeasing.
“Text me in three hours with an update, then again before you go to bed,” she said, crossing her arms.
“You have work to do,” I said, shaking my head. “Really, I’m fine.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Hyebin said. “Do it or I’ll show up at your apartment and kick the door down.”
I swallowed and nodded quickly. Hyebin didn’t make idle threats.
I bowed—this time without falling on my face—and headed for the door, but Hyebin didn’t simply wave goodbye like usual.
Instead, she followed me into the hall and trailed behind me all the way to the elevator.
She pressed the elevator button, then waited in silence with me until the doors opened.
I bowed and stepped into the elevator, but she held the door open with one arm.
“Be careful, Mina,” she said. Her words were so quiet, the only thing she’d ever said to me that didn’t sound like an order.
“I will,” I said. “I’m just going to grab a coffee and go home. The only danger at Caffebene is too much processed sugar.”
I laughed awkwardly at my own joke, but Hyebin’s expression stayed cold because Jang Hyebin never smiled. Wordlessly, she pulled her arm back and turned away, letting the elevator doors slide closed.
I let out a breath, sinking back against the wall. The minute the elevator doors opened on the bottom floor, I took off running.
I had to talk to Yejun.
I drummed my fingers on the table, checking the time on my phone. Yejun was late. He’d agreed to meet me in fifteen minutes, but that was twenty minutes ago.
I was waiting at the same café where I’d first met him, the same type of cheesecake on the corner of the table—after nearly being obliterated from existence, I deserved it.
If the timeline decaying really was our fault, we needed to change our plan. Fast.
I couldn’t find Hana if I got sucked into a vacuum.
And of course, I didn’t want other descendants or humans to get hurt in another paradox.
I also wasn’t particularly keen on destroying the entire universe by accident.
Whatever calculations Yejun had done for his plan to recover Timeline Alpha, he needed to run them again.
After another ten minutes, I texted Yejun to hurry the hell up, but the text went unread. He was probably taking his sweet time just to annoy me.
But then I thought back to the sudden wave of nothingness that had surged across the horizon that morning. Hyebin said it was an isolated incident, but a decaying timeline didn’t care about prior appointments. What if Yejun had gotten sucked into a paradox on his way here?
I took a quick bite of cheesecake—I’d read that eating activated your parasympathetic nervous system and told your body that everything was fine, but everything certainly did not feel fine right now.
Yejun was annoying, but that didn’t mean I wanted him wiped from existence.
He was supposed to help me pass calculus and find Hana.
In my mind, I could picture him being unmade by the timeline, his shiny blond hair and absurdly pretty eyes dissolving into stark whiteness.
I stuffed a bigger bite of cheesecake in my mouth, tapping my phone screen again just to make sure I hadn’t missed a text.
I finished my cheesecake, which sat like a rock in my stomach, and tried to tell myself that I didn’t care at all what happened to Yejun.
Then, through the windows, someone with blond hair and a blue raincoat hurried down the sidewalk. The tightness in my stomach untangled and I sank down in my seat, quietly humiliated that I was actually glad to see Kim Yejun.
Except … he walked straight past the café.
He stormed down the sidewalk, his expression stern as he passed the front door, drawing to a stop in front of … another Yejun.
The second Yejun was clutching a takeout bag in one hand and his school bag in the other. He jolted back at the sight of the first Yejun, holding the takeout bag protectively against his chest.
One of them is an Echo, I realized. Hopefully the one without the takeout, since I was hoping that was for me.