Chapter Sixteen
After school on Tuesday, I was shooting bullets at a paper target, trying with all my might not to imagine Hong Gildong’s face.
Hyebin had brought me to a shooting range in Myeongdong for firearms training.
I’d been hesitant at first, not really wanting to start the day with a bullet in my foot, but Hyebin had only rolled her eyes and said even a toddler couldn’t get hurt at this range.
I hadn’t understood what she meant at first. Then when I arrived, I was strapped into a Kevlar vest, safety goggles, and headphones, then pushed in front of a gun suspended on bike chains so that I couldn’t turn it away from the target if I tried.
The recoil forced my wrist back, bullet casings popping out and falling to the floor around me. The air smelled bright with gunpowder, the echoes of the gunshot still stinging in my ears even through the headphones.
I tried to narrow my vision to nothing but the target, to forget about Jihoon and Yejun and everything except the mark in front of me. Still, Yejun’s words from last night echoed in my mind. I don’t care. I clenched my teeth against the thought and fired.
The staff member pulled my paper target back on a tether and made an impressed sound. My bullets had punched a tight ring of holes right through the center of the target.
“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” he said, replacing the paper with a printout of a masked man holding a cartoon woman hostage.
“Don’t get too excited,” Hyebin said as soon as the staff member walked away. “Dragons have enhanced vision. If you weren’t hitting your target, I’d be concerned.”
“Thanks,” I said flatly.
“Next time, we’ll take you somewhere without childproofing. This is just to get you used to it.”
I didn’t think I would ever get used to handling a gun, or preparing to shoot someone made of actual flesh instead of paper.
It had been a full day since I’d spoken to Yejun, and I still hadn’t found a way out of my final exam.
For now, I was only going through the motions of preparing for it so I wouldn’t be executed on the spot, but I really hoped I could come up with an actual plan by the day of the rally.
Hyebin nodded toward the next target. “Now shoot that guy in the nose.”
“He’s wearing a ski mask,” I said. “I can’t see his nose.”
“You know where noses are,” Hyebin said. “Or is this too hard for you?”
“Yes, the idea of preparing to kill someone is pretty hard,” I said, tightening my grip on the pistol.
Hyebin shushed me, glancing around in case anyone overheard. “Watch it,” she whispered. “We all had to take a final exam. Stop whining about it.”
My finger clenched reflexively on the gun and I fired without meaning to. The bullet flew somewhere into the corner, not even clipping the target paper.
“Whining?” I said. “About being forced to cause millions of deaths?”
“Mina, you’re not the one causing their deaths,” Hyebin said, crossing her arms. “You’re doing your job. Or you would be, if you could hit the target without complaining so much. Try again, and try harder.”
My skin suddenly burned, and I clenched my jaw so hard it ached. Nothing I did was ever good enough for Hyebin, or for any of the descendants. I’d given them everything, and still they’d pushed me between them and a nuclear war.
I tightened my grip around the gun, but this time the plastic creaked and snapped in my hands. It fell to the floor in jagged shards, the casing hitting the tile with a thunk at my feet.
“Is that hard enough for you?” I said. The words hardly sounded like my own. They had a strange edge to them, a weight that reverberated through the room, making the paper target shiver in the distance.
Hyebin narrowed her eyes, which were now searing gold. Fangs pierced her bottom lip and a bead of blood raced down her chin.
The heat melted out of me and I took a step back, instinctively lowering my gaze. Hyebin’s presence eclipsed the sterile overhead light and darkened the small room, as if the sun had cowered back under the horizon.
“What did you say to me?” she said. Her words simmered, embers of a coal fire beneath each vowel, an ancient language bleeding through into her Korean.
I clenched my teeth against the dragon instinct to throw myself to the ground in apology. Hyebin wasn’t going to help me out of my mission, so what did it matter? She’d left me all alone.
“Nothing is ever enough for you,” I said, looking up at her defiantly.
Dragon manners weren’t something any of us were taught, but I knew instinctively that I wasn’t supposed to meet her gaze at a moment like this, not if I wanted to keep my head on my shoulders.
“You think you’re so much better than everyone else. ”
“I earned my position with my skill,” Hyebin said, taking a challenging step forward.
I ground my heels into the tiles, forcing myself not to step back, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“All you’ve done so far,” she said, “is kiss a boy.”
My jaw throbbed, and I felt dangerously close to shattering all my teeth from how hard I was clenching them.
Of course my infiltration mission seemed silly to Hyebin, who’d blown up a bridge just because Hong Gildong told her to.
Nothing mattered to Hyebin except her work—not anyone else’s feelings, not the lives of humans, and definitely not me.
“You’re good at your job because it’s all you have,” I said, taking a step forward. “You don’t have any family or friends or anyone depending on you except Hong Gildong. You’re a jerk to everyone else because you’re jealous that we still have people who care about us!”
I braced myself for the attack, for Hyebin to grab me and shove me against the wall, or push me to the ground, or bare her teeth and go for my throat.
But instead, she went very still.
The gold in her eyes dimmed until her irises had faded to a dull brown, and her fangs disappeared behind her chapped lips. A single bead of blood traced down her chin, vivid in contrast to her sallow skin.
The staff member opened the door right at that moment, then let out a gasp at the sight of the broken gun. “What happened?” he said, hurrying to gather up the shattered remains of the weapon.
“These guns are pieces of crap,” Hyebin said, turning away from me and grabbing her jacket off the hook. “Better look into that before someone gets hurt and sues. We’re done here.”
She turned to leave, tossing her jacket over her shoulder. I struggled out of my Kevlar vest and stowed it back on the shelf, then hurried after her. I hadn’t actually hurt her feelings, had I? Hyebin had always seemed so impenetrable. Someone like me could never take her down.
“Sunbaenim,” I said as I caught up with her halfway down the block. “I didn’t mean—”
“Let’s go back,” she said stiffly, heading for the bus stop.
“Sunbaenim?” I tried again. “Are you—”
“Yang Mina,” she said, “stop talking.”
I clamped my mouth shut and drew to a stop beside her as we waited for the bus.
I had always seen Hyebin as the ideal descendant, the closest we could come to our dragon ancestors, fast and sharp and deadly.
But without the light behind her eyes, she looked as if the sun had stripped all her colors away.
She shivered as the wind blew her jacket back against the sharp line of her shoulders.
We boarded the bus together and rode in silence. When we got off in front of Emart, she turned toward headquarters.
“Go home,” she said.
“Sunbaenim, I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked over her shoulder, the sun lighting up her silhouette in gold, but wouldn’t turn all the way around, wouldn’t look me in the eye. “Go,” she said again, stuffing her hands in her pockets and walking away.
I stood alone on the sidewalk, wishing I could send an Echo back to throttle my past self into unconsciousness before I could hurt Hyebin.
I wanted so badly for her to yell at me, to tell me how worthless I was and how dare I speak to her like that, anything but calmly accept my insults and walk away.
I turned my face toward the white sun, which offered no warmth at all, then pressed my hand over my pocket, where Hana’s note was tucked into my wallet.
Show me what to do, Hana, I thought. I can’t do it on my own.
Yejun didn’t bring me cheesecake that afternoon, which was how I knew he was still angry. The way he carefully avoided looking me in the eye and stood a calculated distance from me as we walked down the street were also good clues.
I glanced at him as we walked in silence, remembering his claws pressed against my cheek, his hands on either side of my face. As if he sensed me looking, he turned and locked eyes with me for a moment before I quickly looked away.
I wanted to scream. Nothing about Yejun made any sense to me.
He acted like he liked me, but then he snuck around with other girls.
He knew that my mission with Jihoon was part of my job, but acted like me finally completing it was a personal attack.
It wasn’t as if I’d married Jihoon. And even if I had, what right did Yejun have to be mad about it? We weren’t together.
“This way,” Yejun said, turning a corner so sharply that I nearly tripped off the curb when I tried to follow him. He pointed at a secondhand clothing store at the end of the block.
“We can travel in a changing stall here,” he said stiffly. “We’re not going back that far, so the stalls will still be here.”
“What do you mean ‘not that far’?” I said, frowning. “Didn’t the Sewol ferry sink like ten years ago? How are we going to stop it from sinking after it’s already sunk?”