Chapter Ten #4
“I’m trying to make it hard for you!” he said over his shoulder. He reached a small footbridge over the Bulgwang stream, checked his watch, then placed the bear on the edge and patted it on the head before turning around and rushing in the other direction.
Over the next few minutes, he folded a receipt from his pocket into a paper boat, which he set sailing down the stream, then walked across said stream and soaked his pants up to his ankles, and finally, removed one single dandelion from the grass and tucked it behind my ear.
I flinched at the touch of his fingers on my cheek. He’s just working, I reminded myself.
“There!” he said, sitting down on a bench and panting. “Now tell me, Yang Mina, what was the adjustment?”
I sat down on the opposite side of the bench, my left eye twitching as the wind blew dandelion parachutes into it. “Are you not worried about ripple effects?” I said stiffly. “Don’t tell me you ran all those scenarios too.”
“I like running scenarios!” he said, edging away as if this actually embarrassed him. “It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube.”
I sighed and sat back. “If I guess right, can we go home?”
He nodded quickly. “Pinky promise,” he said, holding out his pinky, which I pointedly ignored.
I crossed my arms and played back the last five minutes in my mind. Yejun had checked his watch before every strange thing he’d just done, and all his actions seemed weird enough to be actual adjustments. That was … except for one thing.
“You asked for a bag for the stuffed bear,” I said. “It was the last one the cashier had.”
Yejun raised an eyebrow. “That was the weirdest thing I did?”
“You knew you were going to put the bear on the bridge, so you didn’t need a bag,” I said. “Besides, you keep trying to tell me the descendants are causing climate change, yet you would go out of your way to get unnecessary plastic?”
Yejun smiled, leaning back. “The cashier is going to have to grab more bags in the back, causing the line to build up,” he said. “One customer is late for work and will put his candy bar back rather than wait.”
“And then what happens to him?” I asked.
“He won’t choke to death while driving and run through a crosswalk,” Yejun said, shrugging.
“Are you serious?”
“Yup,” Yejun said, grinning. “That guy is an entomologist, and he’s going to save the dung beetles. It’s nice to save lives for once instead of ending them, isn’t it?”
It was true—more often than not, it felt like my descendant work involved making things worse, just because that was how things were “supposed” to be.
My anger toward Yejun slowly faded—it was hard to keep glaring at a guy who had just prevented a traffic accident. I slowly uncrossed my arms. “So the croffle place being near this adjustment was just a coincidence?”
“No such thing as a coincidence,” Yejun said. “There are a lot of ways to save the dung beetles—thirty-six, in fact—but only one of them involved croffles, so, naturally, that was the one I picked.”
In a way, he still did this for me, I thought. Just … for me and also the dung beetles. Does that make it better or worse?
“Well, okay, two of them involved croffles,” Yejun said, “but the second one also involved arson, so I scrapped that idea.”
I laughed, startling one of the ducks toddling down the path in front of us. “Good call,” I said. “I suppose this isn’t the worst place you could have brought me as a reward.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Yejun said, bowing melodramatically. “But if you could pick next time, where would you go?” He spread his arms out across the back of the bench as he spoke. When had he scooted closer? I leaned slightly forward, careful not to lean back against his forearm.
“I don’t know,” I said, staring at my lap.
“Come on,” he said. “If you could travel anywhere in the timeline and the descendants couldn’t stop you, where would you go?”
To Hana, I thought at once. But of course, I had no idea when that was, or if any moment from that timeline still existed. I tried to conjure my happiest moment in my mind, a day I’d love to go back to, but I could only seem to recall a blur of airports and moving boxes.
“October 1, 2015,” I said at last. “Before lunch.”
“Why then?” Yejun asked.
I looked down at my shoes. “My parents took me out for lunch and told me I was a descendant,” I said.
At the time, it had been exciting. What kid wouldn’t be thrilled at the idea of time travel being real?
But that was also the day that any dream of what I could have done with my life had died.
I must have had dreams before that day, but I couldn’t remember them.
Maybe if I’d run away, things could have been different.
Maybe if Hana had left when she found out, she’d be hiding in Tokyo instead of wiped from existence.
“I get it,” Yejun said quietly. I believed him, because I’d tasted the sadness in his soul in the moment our magic touched. Being a descendant felt like a great adventure on some days, but it was also lonely, especially for a rogue like him.
“What about you?” I said when the silence had stretched out too long.
Yejun crossed his arms, leaning back in thought. He looked up at the sky as a flock of birds arced overhead. The clouds shifted and the sun fell at a sharp angle over the stream, which glinted like it was full of crystals.
“Here,” he said at last.
I frowned. “The Bulgwang stream?”
He shook his head. “This moment. Right here, right now.”
I recoiled, gripping the edges of my skirt with hands that were suddenly sweaty. “Why?” I said.
“Because right now, I feel hopeful,” he said, still looking at the sky, a calm smile on his face. “It’s not every day that I get to feel this way.”
Hopeful? I thought. It was a strange word for a descendant to use. Hope was a shield against uncertainty, and there was so little uncertainty in the life of time travelers. Descendants didn’t have hope, we had timeline adjustments.
But in that moment, as I watched the flock of birds grow smaller on the blue horizon, the sun warming my face, I felt it too—that warm ember of forbidden hope deep inside me, a secret that existed only in this moment.