Chapter One
SEOUL, EUNPYEONG
Present Day
As far as new lives went, this one was my favorite.
This time, I was in Seoul on the last Tuesday in September. As I crossed the stepping stones over the Bulgwang stream, Kim Jihoon held my backpack in one hand and followed me unquestioningly across the water, looking at me like I actually mattered, like I was someone he would remember ten years from now, even though I knew he never would. I had already looked up how he died, and I wouldn’t be anywhere near him when it happened.
It was the end of my first month as Mina Yang, eighteen-year-old American exchange student, the only child of an American consultant and a flight attendant for Japan Airlines. I got to attend a public school this time, which unfortunately made my presence a bit more conspicuous since there weren’t a lot of foreigners. But it was better than private international schools, where everyone was some sort of alpaca farm heiress or had a parent who invented and trademarked the color Teal. My family probably had more money than all their families combined, but the problem was that we weren’tallowed to use most of it. We weren’t important enough to access our ancestors’ fortune, but we were important enough to die for them.
Jihoon hopped to the next step and suddenly we were sharing a stepping stone, his hand on my arm to steady me. I hugged my bag of honey butter chips to my chest, the plastic creaking in protest and threatening to pop, which would be both embarrassing and a tragic waste of snacks. I looked away, a nervous smile on my lips—not because someone like Jihoon could ever faze me, but because boys tended to feel more comfortable around nervous schoolgirls than ruthless undercover agents. I took a step back to the next stone, hoping I looked somewhat cute and playful rather than like a startled pigeon fleeing in a panic and pooping everywhere.
Jihoon was both the tallest guy in my homeroom and currently leading Mr. Oh’s exam score board. He had an inoffensive smile and smelled like soap and walked his little sisters to school. When we first met, he’d complimented my shoes, then promptly spilled orange juice on my shirt and ripped off his own shirt to offer to me in a panic.
I’d only been in class with him for a month, so it was a little soon to start planning a wedding. But every morning, he wordlessly passed me a tiny bottle of mostly-frozen Yakult, which I felt fairly certain was an indication of love. All in all, it seemed like a nice beginning of something more.
I was an expert in beginnings because I’d had a lot of them—I moved every three to six months, ping-ponging between different parts of Korea, Japan, and the States. That was how I knew there were worse ways to start over than with Jihoon.
Plus, kissing him would earn me one hundred infiltration points.
In other lives, I’d had to prove how good of a chameleon I was in much more humiliating ways, like convincing my elderly neighborto ride a tandem bike with me, or pretending to be a delivery driver and carrying thirty packs of Buldak fire ramen out of the corner store without paying. All things considered, having Jihoon as a mission was a pretty lucky draw. It would be a lie to say I would have paid him much attention if he weren’t my assignment, but it would be a double lie to say I hated his dimples when he smiled or the way our classroom brightened when he laughed.
Jihoon teetered on the edge of the stepping stone, then righted himself with an undignified flapping of his arms, his face red.
“Are you not strong enough to carry my bag?” I said, smiling and crossing my arms. I was walking the tightrope between Shy New Girl Who Needs a Boy to Save Her and Mysterious Foreigner Who Can Get Away with Being a Little Sassy. Most boys liked some combination of the two. The last month had been a delicate dance of pretending to be perpetually lost in school so he’d walk me around, playfully asserting the superiority of sushi over kimbap while eating lunch together, and flubbing a few Korean quizzes so I could ask him to explain my mistakes.
When I’d first planned out this mission, I’d aimed to wrap it up in three weeks. That was when the azaleas bloomed on school grounds, and I’d been dropping hints for days about how much I loved them. Sure enough, when Jihoon walked me home from school, he presented me with a bouquet of purple azaleas. I hugged him and hesitated before letting go, and that was when he was supposed to kiss me.
But instead, he’d only tucked an azalea behind my ear with a soft smile and said he’d see me at school tomorrow. Now I was behind schedule, all because Jihoon was the one boy in year three who was stingy with his lips.
“Maybe I should take it back,” I said, reaching for my backpack with a playful smirk.
“No, absolutely not,” he said, holding my bag high above me.When I reached for it anyway, he strapped it to his front like some strange double-sided turtle and put his hands proudly on his hips. “Pretty girls shouldn’t carry their own bags.”
“Pretty?” I echoed, looking up as if the word surprised me.
Jihoon blushed as if he hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He stopped on the middle stone, halfway across the stream, and put his hand in his pocket.
Before I could think to stop myself, I copied the gesture. My hand slipped into my skirt pocket, closing around the small box inside. Jihoon was hiding something, and in my line of work, this was almost always a bad thing.
But before I could crack open my box and crush him with thousands of years’ worth of hand-me-down Japanese magic, he pulled out a tiny blue silk bag and offered it to me with both hands.
“For you,” he said quietly.
Slowly, I released my grip on the box in my pocket and accepted the bag. I pulled on one of the drawstrings and emptied the contents into my palm.
A bracelet.
A strand of tiny polished white-and-green-jade beads held together by a silver clasp. Each bead looked like its own dream, a miniature planet of bright clouds and green mist.
“My noona told me that the Hanja for your name means ‘beautiful jade,’” he said, staring at his scuffed shoes.
He was sweet, but wrong. The characters for my name could mean “peaceful beauty” or “beautiful beauty” or “that beautiful one over there,” none of which made a ton of sense, but there was definitely no jade. But of course, he was thinking of Mina as a Korean name. It was one of the few names that sounded “normal” in Korean, Japanese, and English, which of course was 100 percent intentional for someone like me, who had to lie a lot.
I turned the bracelet over in my hands, considering my nextwords. We were balanced on the edge of something more. One wrong word could destroy everything—that was how it always was in the beginning. Saplings were so easy to kill.
“Why are you giving me this?” I said, as if I didn’t already know the answer.
