Mr. Oh set my test face down on my desk before moving to the row behind me. I lifted the corner of the paper and dared to peek, then held my breath and turned it over.
67%
I slammed the paper back down, praying no one else had seen.
This was my only class with Jihoon, and I couldn’t afford to flunk out of it. Maybe he would still see me outside of class, but he’d probably second-guess his interest in me once he realized I wasn’t smart like him. Besides, having to tell the descendants I needed a new slate of infiltration missions because I’d gotten held back a year was definitely not going to get me promoted any faster. Maybe they’d refuse to assign me anything new, and I’d be stuck collecting points six at a time with Hyebin. If I were better at math, I could have calculated how long that would take me to reach five hundred, but I was too afraid of the answer to try.
I sat in a daze through the rest of class, trying to listen to Mr. Oh so I wouldn’t fall even further behind, but I felt like67%was branded across my vision. Dragons were supposed to be highly intelligent, but apparently my dad’s human genes had overridden that particular trait.
When the bell music finally played, I grabbed my bag and shouldered my way out of the classroom before anyone else, terrified that Jihoon would ask how I did on the test.
“Mina?” I heard Jihoon call, but I pretended not to hear him and hurried into the hallway, where Hyebin grabbed my arm and yanked me into the nearest bathroom.
“My phone is on!” I said. “You could have texted me!”
Hyebin slammed a gloved hand over my mouth, shoving me back into a stall. The leather smelled of fire, the scent stinging my eyes.
“Shut up,” she said, her eyes dark.
Something was wrong with Hyebin.
Her face looked gray and thin under the weak bathroom light, her eyes tinged red. Instead of the joggers and pullover sweatshirts that she normally wore until she had to change into a costume for a mission, she wore black leather that didn’t look like it belonged to any time period in particular, tight to her skin, meant to make her disappear into the shadows. She dropped her hand from my face, and as she reached for her pocket, her jacket swung back, revealing a gun against her belt.
“You brought a gun into my school?” I whispered.
“I saidshut up,” Hyebin said. “Give me your hand.”
I held out my hand without thinking, and Hyebin dropped something cold into it. When she pulled back, I held four bullets in my palm, glowing from the overhead light.
“Hide these somewhere, and don’t bring this up when you see me,” she said. “I was never here.”
“Don’t bring this up?” I said, my blood suddenly cold. There was only one reason Hyebin would ask me this. “You’re an Echo, aren’t you?”
Hyebin didn’t dignify my question with an answer. Instead, she drew her face mask up over the bottom half of her face and stormed out of the stall, yanking open the bathroom door. The stall doorswung shut, and I looked down at the shells in my hand that suddenly felt impossibly heavy.
Two weeks ago, I’d seen Hyebin loading a gun with quick precision before heading out for a mission deemed too dangerous for me to join. We kept our guns with the police and our ammo at headquarters—unlike the American branch, we only brought out guns here if they were absolutely necessary.
I closed my fist around the shells, their coldness spreading through my bones.
If Hyebin had given me bullets, one thing was certain: Someday, I would need to use them.
With fingers I could hardly feel, I opened up the smallest pocket at the front of my backpack and dropped the bullets inside.All you have to do is trust, my mom had said last night. I hoped, more than anything, that she was right.
When the final bell rang and all my classmates went to their hagwons to study until their brains bled, I went straight to the caféa few blocks from my apartment to do exactly the same thing, but for free. Jihoon had class, and Hyebin had meetings, so for once, I was on my own.
I claimed the window table with an outlet and slammed my calculus book down, determined to steamroll my worries under the weight of differential equations. It would be humiliating if the reason I never became a full agent wasn’t to do with my being Japanese, or American, or any sort of skill related to wielding time, but rather that I was just really bad at math.
I knocked back a tall cinnamon latte and kept a piece of cheesecake at the corner of my table as a reward, because it had been a royally shitty week and if I couldn’t date Jihoon or pass calculus or get a promotion, I deserved to drown my misery in sugar and cheese.
After ninety minutes of toiling through my homework and sneaking bites of cheesecake, I pulled up some explainer videos in English on YouTube, hoping switching to another language would reboot my brain. With my headphones on, peering intently at some math nerd trying to explain my homework to me on my smudged screen, I almost missed when someone dropped into the seat in front of me.
I looked up, unable to hear the words out of the stranger’s moving lips because the calculus video was still playing through my headphones.
The first thing I noticed was bright blond hair.Foreigner or K-pop wannabe, I thought instantly, but of course I had already had that thought. I had seen this person before.
He was, undoubtedly, the rogue traveler I’d seen running away the other night. Today, he was wearing an oversized white T-shirt and black sweatpants, his blond hair slightly damp. He pulled off his black cloth mask, and I nearly choked on my next breath. He could fight Jihoon for the title of Cutest Guy in Year Three. He had the kind of bright, disarming face that you saw on subway posters where impossibly beautiful actors advertised bottled tea or snail cream or Samsung phones by holding them close to their airbrushed faces.
I took off my headphones. There were many things I could have said, things that a more experienced and assertive descendant might have said. Hyebin probably would have cuffed him to the table before he could blink. But somehow, spectacularly, all that came out of my mouth was “You’re going to knock my cheesecake off the table.”
