“A love confession,” he deadpanned, then moved to the back of the room to take the empty seat in the corner.
I should have thrown it in the trash just to see the look on his face. My life would have been a lot simpler if I had.
But the envelope wasn’t fully closed, too overstuffed to seal, and I could see the frayed edges of a stack of photographs.Who even prints photos anymore?I thought, before my curiosity got the better of me and I dumped the stack on my desk.
The first picture was a shot of the Bulgwang stream—I could tell by the giantMpainted on the officetel in the background, the one right next to my apartment. It looked like Yejun had photoshopped it too much, because the sky was a blazing blue, the shrubs bursting with flowers. He’d even photoshopped solar panels onto nearby buildings, their reflections bursts of white light that the camera couldn’t capture clearly.
I flipped the photograph over.
April 7, 2025, Timeline Alphawas scrawled across the back.
I scoffed. Whatever “Timeline Alpha” Yejun had invented didn’t seem that different from this timeline, at least not enough to justify risking my life for. Was that really his best argument? “Betray the descendants so we can live in a world with five more solar panels!”
I cast the photo aside and examined the next one. This one was a wide shot of Gyeongbokgung Palace—I recognized the three arches of the main gate with the two tiers of roofs on top. But the interior looked different than I remembered—the Gyeongbokgung of today had vast courtyards of pale dirt between sparse buildings, but the palace in this photo had far more buildings, and instead of white dirt there were blooming gardens and curved ponds. All the temporary fencing for construction was gone, which meant it must have been sometime in the future. I flipped the photograph over.
October 1, 2017, Timeline Alpha
Yejun really was audacious.
Imperial Japanese soldiers had demolished Gyeongbokgung Palace in the early 1900s, and Seoul had planned a fifty-year reconstruction plan for it that still had twenty years to go. Was Yejun really trying to convince me that the palace was still standing in 2017? That the Japanese had never occupied Korea? He was out of his mind.
The next photograph was a board game caféin Hongdae—I’d gone there on Christmas last year with my parents, so I recognized the shelves packed with board games, the fairy lights, the exposed brick walls, the window overlooking the street, and the ramen restaurant on the other side. And there at the table…
… was me.
My hair was cut to my shoulders and I wore a fuzzy gray sweater that I’d never seen before, but that was undoubtedly me, smiling over a game of Don’t Break the Ice. I held a can of Sprite in one hand, the silver watch my parents had given me reflecting sunlightoff its face. I knew it was me, yet somehow this looked like a complete stranger.
I was the opposite of Hyebin—while she could blend in anywhere, somehow I looked hilariously out of place in every year, like I was an orphan of the timeline, never at home no matter where I went. In the few photographs my parents had taken since I started high school, I always looked like my skin was an itchy costume I wanted to peel off, my eyes haunted, my smile like I’d been forced to grin at gunpoint.
But the Mina in this photo looked completely relaxed. Her hair was my natural shade, not dyed darker to match the other girls’, and this Mina had also forgone the trendy eye-poking bangs.
How did Yejun get a picture of me?
My gaze slid to my right, and what I saw next was even worse.
In the photograph, a girl sat across the table from me, a wave of long, coppery brown hair—the same shade as mine—blocking her face. Her sleeve was rolled back, revealing a silver watch. A watch that my father had brought back for me from America for Christmas. It was from a specialty store—a Swiss watchmaker in Grand Rapids made his own watches from the discarded parts of vintage luxury watches. It was a gift no one else in Korea should have had… unless my dad hadn’t bought one just for me, but forus.
Hana?
The bell music played and Ms. Choi stood up from her desk to begin class. I quickly crammed the photographs in the envelope and stuffed them into my bag. I cast a nervous glance back at Yejun, whose infuriatingly pretty eyes looked so full of hope. I turned around quickly, sinking into my chair.
It’s just a badly photoshopped picture, I thought again and again, trying to sear the sentence into my brain.
But somehow, my stomach still clenched like I was falling from a great height, the last photograph burned across my vision. I couldn’tlet go of it in the same way I couldn’t ignore Hana’s absence. It was the way the stars felt just slightly off-kilter, the way that empty chairs somehow took up more space than full ones, how the trees leaned a bit too far to the left. Hana’s disappearance had cast the whole world off-balance.
I sat rigid in my seat as Ms. Choi started passing back papers. I couldn’t even remember the topic, but I knew I’d turned mine in three days late—Hyebin and I had been on a mission in Gangneung and I’d lost track of the days with all the driving back and forth. I always saved my English homework for last because I could type up something while half asleep and it would be good enough to impress my teachers.
Not this time. I peeked at the corner of my paper and saw70%in bold. A ten-point penalty for each day late.
I jammed the paper into my folder and slammed it shut before anyone could see.
Dragon descendants were supposed to be fast learners, good at retaining large amounts of information, excellent students. I was descended from a literal god. And yet, here I was, about to lose my chance at finding Hana because I was too incompetent to handle basic high school classes.
As soon as the bell music played, I grabbed my books and rushed into the hallway before Yejun could catch up. I heard him call my name, but I hurried to my locker and stuffed my books in my bag.
“Mina?” he called. “The photographs—”
“Just how stupid do you think I am?” I said, slamming my locker shut and glaring at him. I needed to stick to the plan. The way to find Hana was by infiltrating headquarters, not by trusting a random guy who bought me cheesecake.
