The glass doors slid open automatically as I passed through,sensing the tiny amount of dragon blood running through my veins. I stepped into an office space with sad beige walls and framed paintings of dragons. Each door had an ominous dragon’s head knocker with gemstone eyes that gleamed as you walked by. I thought it was a weird decorating choice, considering that humans didn’t use human heads as door knockers.
I tossed my opened banana milk in the trash as I strode past the rooms for costuming, yeouiju maintenance, claw and fang repair, the mail, and headed straight for the scrying area.
The southern side of the lair was an open floor plan, lit only from the sunlight through the anti-glare windows—one-way glass so that we could see out but no one could see in. Overhead lights caused too much glare for our purposes.
The other descendants knelt in rows on the floor before shallow-reflecting pools, their fingertips tracing delicate arcs into the water before them. No one looked up as I walked in, too engrossed in their own work. This was perhaps the only place on earth I could blend in, because everyone here was too busy to think about anyone but themselves.
I grabbed a floor cushion from a stack in the corner and sat in front of an unoccupied pool with a white marble rim. My reflection glared back at me, her hair sticking up from how I’d haphazardly yanked the sweatshirt over my braid. I rinsed my hands with a small bowl and cup beside the pool, toweled them off, and dipped a fingertip into the water.
Words floated to the surface of the pool, prompting me to enter a password. We all had signatures that could unlock different information in the scrying pools depending on what kind of clearance we had. My signature was a mixture of my names written in English, Japanese, and Korean—something a stranger wouldn’t be able to forge.
All the descendants used bodies of water to communicate—dragons were water creatures, after all—and these reflecting poolsoffered the highest resolution and greatest amount of privacy. Perhaps the later generations of descendants would have preferred to work over email rather than water scrying, but good luck convincing the Dragon King to use a keyboard. There was also the extra layer of security—anyone who wasn’t a descendant could never hack our systems and find our secrets. They would find nothing but chlorinated water.
As soon as I finished my signature, the screen glowed with moving images playing back my last few missions with Hyebin—the domestic violence rally in 2005, the bakery incident in 2007, the typhoon in 2009. All of them had a blue ring around them because Hyebin had marked them as complete.
I opened the tab for new assignments, expecting to find the mission to go back and pour banana milk on my own shoes, but there was nothing there.
That’s strange, I thought, as the headache flared behind my eyes. Normally, if I had a timesickness headache, I’d find the reason for it right here, with a bright red ring around it forINCOMPLETE MISSION.
The timeline architects reviewed all our missions and checked for unintended ripple effects. If we deviated too much from the plan and caused problems down the line, they would tell us to send back Echoes to make minor corrections, and those missions were supposed to populate here. Whenever I saw another Mina, it was theoretically because I’d made a mistake on a mission and been sent back to fix it, dragging along a disgruntled Hyebin to supervise.
The banana milk–wielding Mina’s mission should have been here.
I splashed the pool, the ripples distorting the screen, and waited until the water settled again to see if it changed anything—you couldn’t really turn a scrying pool off and on again, but it was worth a shot. Still, myNEW MISSIONSpage was empty.
Maybe my headache was really just a headache. I’d thought Iwas good at telling the difference, but if today had proven anything, it was that I wasn’t as clever as I thought.
Footsteps echoed behind me, and suddenly Hyebin’s reflection appeared in my scrying pool. I turned around.
Hyebin was wearing black leggings and a gray hoodie thrown over the top. She panted like she’d just run up a flight of stairs, her face flushed red. “Oh good, you’re already here,” she said.
“I texted you,” I said. “At my school, there’s—”
“We can deal with that later,” Hyebin said. “There’s an emergency we have to handle first.”
“We?” I said. Usually, I wasn’t allowed to go with Hyebin on any mission of real importance.
“Yep, you’re shadowing,” Hyebin said, waving for me to follow her. “Look but don’t touch.”
“What’s the emergency?” I said as she all but shoved me toward the clothing designers, who urged me to sign their scrying pool so they could access my size.
“We’re going on a neutralization mission,” Hyebin said.
I froze, my whole body suddenly stiff as the costumers tried to wrench my sweatshirt off. “Neutralization?” I echoed, even though I already knew what that meant.
Maybe Hyebin thought I hadn’t heard of it—I probably should have acted like I didn’t, but she was too preoccupied to notice. “Yes,” she said, nodding gravely. “We’ve found a traitor, and we’re going to erase them.”
Chapter Five
“Do not, under any circumstances, use this,” Hyebin said, holding out a pistol.
I stuffed my hands deeper into my jacket pockets and made no move to accept it.
Costuming had outfitted me and Hyebin in a slick black material that looked like leather but was designed to match the exact hue of night shadows. The descendants had poured a lot of money into finding the color scientifically proven to be the least noticeable under Seoul’s streetlights. It was reflective in photographs, blurring anything around it.
“I’m not firearm trained,” I said.
“That’s why it’s not loaded,” Hyebin said, pulling back the slide and showing me what I assumed an unloaded gun was supposed to look like—not that I would know. “But pretend it is, and don’t point it at anyone or I’ll kill you.”
