Chapter Twelve #2
“What are you doing?” Yejun said, drawing back.
“I just love wasabi,” I said as my eyes watered. I didn’t have to pretend not to cry now—the wasabi was doing its job.
“I can tell,” Yejun said, pulling out his phone and taking a picture before I could wipe my face.
“Delete that!” I said, grabbing a bunch of napkins and scrubbing my face before he could take any more pictures.
“Never,” he said, clutching his phone protectively to his chest. “This is amazing blackmail material.”
“Do you want to die?” I said, hurling a soiled napkin at his face. He laughed and looked as if he was about to respond, but then his gaze flickered to something behind me. I turned around just as another Yejun in a blue raincoat stormed across the restaurant.
The Yejun in front of me tried to stand up, but the Echo reached him first, snatched his water off the table, and poured it over his head.
“Idiot,” the Echo said, then stormed away, casting the tin cup to the ground.
Yejun tossed his phone to a dry corner of the table, then wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. As his phone spun toward me, I caught a glimpse of his unread texts. My tears dried up as I read the name of the sender: Mom.
“Mom?” I echoed, looking up at Yejun, who had frozen with a handful of napkins. My gaze fell to his tattoo. “Your mom who you told me was erased?”
When Yejun didn’t deny it, dread gnawed through my stomach. Yejun’s phone screen went dark as he set down the napkins and looked away.
I should have been angry, but when the heat under my skin and the gold at the edges of my vision had faded away, I only felt cold.
“You lied to me?” I said. The words didn’t feel real as they left my lips, like this was some strange dream. He was the only person I’d ever told about Hana, but now I wanted so badly to take that moment back. I’d traded my most precious secret for a lie.
I stood up to leave but froze at Yejun’s next words.
“I thought it was true,” he said, staring at the sushi scattered across the table. It was the quietest I’d ever heard him speak. “My dad told me she was erased and gave me a note on a napkin that he said she’d left for me. Last year, I got it tattooed on my arm.”
I sat back down slowly. Not because his story made any sense yet, but because I had never seen him look so dejected, sapped of all his usual light and energy.
“I worked so hard before I went rogue,” he said.
“That’s how I got so good at running scenarios.
I thought if I got promoted, I could find out more about her, maybe even bring her back.
Then, a few months ago, she called me.” Yejun swallowed, tracing the lines of his tattoo with his left hand.
“It turned out that my dad lied. She wasn’t erased and she never wrote me a note.
She just left because she didn’t want me. ”
He looked up, his dull gaze meeting mine. “She wants to talk to me now, but it’s too late. So I’m sorry that I lied to you, Mina, but it was because I liked that story better than the truth.”
As he slumped back down against the booth, I tried to conjure anger but could only think of the sadness I’d tasted through his magic, the soft ache of grief.
I thought of my own mother walking out on me, the gaping hole it would leave in my life and my heart.
At least I could direct my grief over Hana toward the people who had taken her from me, but Yejun’s mother had chosen to leave him.
My fingers felt warm, and I glanced down at purple ribbons of magic blooming to life in my palm, starting to reach toward Yejun. I clenched my fist and they disappeared.
Even if I wasn’t angry, I wouldn’t let him off the hook that easily. “No one gets to rewrite their life story,” I said quietly.
There was no anger behind my words, but Yejun winced and looked away as if I’d scolded him. “You don’t get it,” he whispered. “Your parents want you.”
Less than they want their jobs, I thought. But I knew what he meant, and didn’t want to be pedantic about it. “But your mom wants to be part of your life again, right?”
Yejun shook his head. “She wants money. I gave her some, which I know I shouldn’t have. But it wasn’t enough, and now she’s upset. I’m worthless to her if I’m not an ATM.”
I didn’t know how to respond. There were no words in any language that could fix this.
“Maybe she’s right,” Yejun said, stabbing a piece of sushi with a chopstick but making no move to eat it. “I worked so hard but have nothing to show for it but dung beetles.”
“She’s wrong,” I said, frowning. “You’re not worthless.”
Yejun looked up, this time looking at me rather than through me, like he’d just remembered I was there.
“You’re trying to save the world and are doing a good enough job at it to not destroy the timeline,” I said. “That’s worth something. It’s worth a lot, actually.”
Yejun set his chopsticks down, blinking at me like I’d just spoken a foreign language. I realized—too late—that I had actually sounded … nice.
Heat rushed to my face. I pressed back against the booth, crossing my arms and looking away.
“I just mean that if you were totally incompetent, then that would make me incompetent for working with you. And I know I’m not great at calculus but I wouldn’t hand my life over to someone who didn’t seem halfway intelligent, and—”
“Thank you,” Yejun said quietly, halting my deluge of words. I dared to glance back at him just in time to see him putting more sushi on my plate. “Here, eat more before you start sounding too nice and your soul climbs out of your body.”
I picked up my chopsticks but hesitated before taking any more food.
“Kim Yejun,” I said. “Don’t ever lie to me again.”
Yejun went still, as if pinned in place by my gaze. Then his shoulders slumped and he set down his chopsticks, bowing slightly. “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mina. I only—”
“I understand why you did it,” I said. “And you’re right, I don’t know what it’s like to not have parents. So I’ll forgive you, just this once. But this is the last time.”
He nodded, bowing again. “Understood.”
Satisfied, I finally grabbed another piece of sushi. Yejun looked up hesitantly, as if afraid I would jump across the table and bite him. When he saw me eating, his shoulders relaxed and he checked his watch.
“It’s almost time,” he said.
He wrapped a piece of sushi in his napkin, then slipped outside. I watched through the window as he held the fish up to a pigeon, who snatched it out of his hand, nearly biting his fingers off. I stifled a laugh as he jogged back into the restaurant.
“And that pigeon is going to single-handedly save the Sewol ferry?” I said.
“Not quite,” Yejun said. “This is actually the biggest adjustment yet, and the causes are complex, so it will take a few more adjustments.”
That wasn’t surprising. The Sewol ferry sank in 2014 in the sea between Incheon and Jeju, killing hundreds of high school students.
People had blamed a lot of different things—the crew, the coast guard, the president …
it wasn’t clear exactly what the main cause was, so it made sense that there were multiple factors that had to be changed.
“The pigeon will be too full after the sushi and will sleep in a tree, where a cat will kill it and bring it to its owner,” Yejun went on.
“The owner will scream in terror and pass out, smack his head on the table and get a concussion. That will knock a few points off his college entrance exam, and he won’t get into his top school, so he’ll decide to do his military service in the navy right away.
He’ll join the crew for a few different merchant ships, and eventually he’ll get a job on the MV Sewol instead of one of the crew members who abandoned ship. ”
As he finished talking, Yejun gave a melodramatic bow, as if he’d just won an Olympic medal. “It’s brilliant, I know.”
“It’s … elaborate,” I said—the closest I wanted to get to actually complimenting him again. “And none of that will cause unwanted ripple effects?”
Yejun shook his head. “The vast majority of ripple effects are inconsequential. Most butterflies don’t actually cause typhoons all on their own.
A lot of factors have to line up for the typhoon to happen, and the butterfly is only one of them.
It’s actually not that hard to implement change without negative effects if you know what you’re doing.
The problem is, back when they first discovered time magic, no one knew what they were doing. ”
I blinked as his words sank in. It was so contrary to everything I’d learned in my descendant classes. “Then why do they teach us to be so neutral and obey the ‘almighty timeline’?” I said.
Yejun rolled his eyes. “Because they don’t want you making changes on your own. They want to be the ones who call the shots.” Then he straightened up and glanced at his watch. “But at any rate, the sushi in and of itself isn’t going to save the ferry. The watermelons should help with that.”
“Watermelons?” I echoed.
“Don’t worry about that yet,” he said, standing up. “I only calculated for a half-hour meal, so we should go back. Meet me in the bathroom in five.”
He went up front to pay, and after four awkward minutes sitting alone, I followed him to the accessible restroom. I knocked twice, then Yejun cracked the door open and glanced around the hallway before letting me in and locking the door behind us.
“Duty calls,” he said, smiling half-heartedly and holding out his hand. I reached for him, part of me alarmed at how natural the gesture felt, how familiar I now was with the color of his magic, the way it felt like silk caressing my skin and sunlight blooming in my bones.
The mirror shattered.
Yejun shielded his face as shards flew at both of us, white light spilling from behind the mirror like a dam unstopped. Whiteness crashed through the bathroom, peeling color from the walls, ripping up the tiles. Another paradox, I thought, scrambling back against the far wall.