He blinked, then his gaze dropped to my cheesecake, which was teetering precariously on the edge of the table. He quickly shoved it back to the center. “Is it strawberry?” he said. And there was that same warm voice, which had no business being that smooth and low coming from a guy who couldn’t be more than nineteen. Jihoon’s voice still cracked, which always made him flustered and made meless nervous about my infiltration mission. But talking to this guy in my third language made me feel like my mouth was full of pine cones.
When all I did was stare back at him, he let out an awkward laugh. “Sorry, let me start over. You’re Yamamoto Mina?”
I shook my head—how did he know my Japanese name? Something about his undivided attention and his big brown eyes made me want to melt into the floor. So I did the only thing I could think of—I pulled out my phone.
“Wait wait wait!” he said, holding out a hand, eyes bright with alarm. “What are you doing?”
“Calling my mentor,” I said.
“Why?” he said. “What have I done?”
I frowned. “I saw you last night.”
“What?” he said, drawing back. “I wasn’t here last night.”
“No, I saw you outsidemy apartmentlast night,” I said, my grip tight around my phone.
He shook his head. “That’s not possible. Look, can you just give me a moment to explain before you call Hyebin?”
My finger froze an inch away from my phone screen. “You know my mentor’s name?” I said. I probably should have been worried at that point, but I was too confused to think about any worst-case scenarios yet. This wasn’t the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me, but usually awkward and confusing scenarios were the result of my own Echoes, not random cute guys in cafés.
He grimaced. “I don’t really have time to explain that part,” he said. “Please, can you just listen to me for a minute?”
I drew back against the booth, clutching my phone to my chest in case he tried to grab it from me. I still didn’t want to spend the next week filing a rogue report, but it seemed this problem wasn’t going to go away on its own. Maybe if I turned him in, I would at least be rewarded with some more points and get one step closer to a promotion.
He leaned back slightly, like he could see my thoughts rapidly sliding out of his favor. “If you call Hyebin now, I’ll run,” he said, hands braced against the table as if to push himself off and get a running start. “They’ll probably never find me, but here’s one thing I know for certain: I’ll never see you again. And if I never see you again, then in fifty years, the world will end.”
The caféseemed to quiet at his words, the whirring of the coffee bean grinder and clinking of mugs such oddly mundane sounds compared to the bomb this guy had just dropped. Who the hell discussed the apocalypse in a Caffebene over a plate of cheesecake? I wondered if I’d had too much sugar and was starting to hallucinate.
“The world doesn’t end in fifty years,” I said at last. This I knew for certain. I had seen the entire timeline laid out in scrying pools at headquarters.
“No,” he said, shrugging, “because you haven’t called Hyebin yet, have you?”
I frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s a logical fallacy.”
“Look,” he said with a sigh. “How about this: Listen to me talk for five minutes. I’ll… I don’t know, buy you another piece of cheesecake for your time, okay? Then after five minutes, you can decide if you want me to get lost, or if you want me to keep talking. Worst-case scenario, you wasted five minutes of your life and got a free piece of cheesecake.”
I glanced down at my half-eaten cheesecake. I hated to think I could be bought so easily, but…
“Fine,” I said. I set a timer for five minutes on my phone and placed it on the table between us. If nothing else, this would make him go away so I could get back to studying. He glanced uneasily at the countdown, then sighed and straightened up.
“My name is Kim Yejun,” he said, switching to Japanese—a skill common for descendants but less so for anyone else. He glanced around in case anyone else was listening, but we were in a quietcorner of the café. “I’m a descendant, just like you. But I don’t work for the organization anymore, because I’ve been on the run ever since I found out the truth.”
“The truth?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
Kim Yejun nodded. “I know you’re new there. I know they don’t tell you much, but you know why they have you make adjustments to the timeline, don’t you?”
I frowned. Had Hyebin sent him just to give me a pop quiz? “To correct it back to how it was before rogues started interfering,” I said. “The original timeline.”
“Yes,” Yejun said, “except it’s not the original timeline at all.”
“Of course it is,” I said, starting to regret giving him the chance to talk. Clearly he was some conspiracy theorist who had tumbled down one too many internet wormholes.
“But you wouldn’t know that, would you?” he said, leaning closer. Suddenly illuminated by the overhead light, his eyes looked black with starry flecks of brown, like constellations in a summer sky. “You live on this timeline just like everyone else,” he went on. “The moment it refreshes, you believe that this is the way it’s always been.”
I shook my head. “Why would anyone try to change the timeline?”
Yejun let out a sharp laugh. “Money, of course. The descendants have no honor anymore. They can be bought by whatever company will pay them enough to build a future where their company succeeds. The descendants are driving us headfirst into a brick wall of climate change, and they don’t even care.”
