Chapter Seven
On the first day of my life as a traitor, I leaned over the railing of a bridge and stretched my honey-coated fingers toward the sun. The Han River rushed below, a fleet of orange kayaks bobbing by while bikes flashed past on either side of the water.
Almost there, I thought.
A single ladybug darted around me, scarlet against the white sky. I leaned even farther over the railing. What good was being tall if I couldn’t even do this much? I stood up on my toes, my weight tipping forward.
The ladybug hovered around my palm for a moment, then landed on my ring finger.
I tipped forward, my stomach dropping as the balance shifted, and suddenly my feet were off the ground and the river was opening its jaws.
Hyebin yanked me back by the belt and jammed a plastic bag over my hand, tugging it tight with a drawstring.
“Got you, asshole,” Hyebin said. “The ladybug, not you.”
“I know,” I said, though I never really knew with Hyebin.
It had been one day since the flaming bride incident, and I’d shown up early for work with extra Choco Pies and chips to placate Hyebin. I’d had two extra coffees that morning so my focus would be laser sharp, but my blood was buzzing from the caffeine and I desperately had to pee. Worst of all, my bones screamed that Hyebin must have known about my deal with Yejun, that she was just waiting for the right moment to kill me in the most satisfying way.
At least she hadn’t said a word about the wedding incident. Maybe she was truly too busy to hold grudges, or maybe my extra bags of honey butter chips had really earned my forgiveness. Still, though she didn’t seem outwardly upset, she’d pointedly avoided eye contact all morning.
She grabbed my wrist and examined the ladybug through the plastic, then pinched it to death inside the bag.
“Let’s go,” she said, turning around as if she hadn’t left me with a sack of sticky bug guts on my hand.
The briefing for this mission had been particularly short on details—it was a cleanup for an error another descendant had made, a quick three years into the past. I’d only done one cleanup before, where a descendant had blown his nose on a mission and tried to throw the tissue away but missed the trash can. A seagull ate the tissue and choked to death in the middle of the bike path, then a human moved its corpse to the side and gotE. coli, causing a massive outbreak. But I didn’t know the crimes of this particular ladybug.
Hyebin and I hid in a public bathroom stall, where her time magic carried us back to the present. I’d tried to wash up, but she said we would miss the bus, so I ended up crammed into a crowded bus with a honey hand that was quickly hardening inside the bag.
“Are bugs really worth your time?” I said, grimacing at the bug guts under my fingernail. “Isn’t this below your pay grade?”
“You’d be amazed how integral most bugs are to the ecosystem,” Hyebin said, the city flashing past as the bus rattled down the road. All the seats were taken, so we were clinging to the same metal pole by the back door. “This particular species was supposed to go extinct six years ago, but one hitched a ride on an agent’s ear. We’ve been chasing it down for years.”
“Was it really that hard to find?” I said. The descendants regularly tracked downpeoplewithout issue. How could an insect be that stealthy?
“Normally, no,” Hyebin said, “but this one disappeared during daylight savings.”
I blinked. “But there’s no daylight savings in South Korea?” I said, suddenly unsure.
“Yes, notanymore,” Hyebin said. “It was tested in 1988 for the Olympics. So there’s no 2:00A.M.through 2:59A.M.in the spring, and there’s duplicate times for 1:00A.M.through 1:59A.M.in the fall that year. It complicates things.”
I frowned, suddenly grateful I wasn’t training to become a timeline architect—my brain hurt just imagining how to fix that kind of problem. “And the timeline refresh didn’t just… squash it?”
“Well, no, because it wasn’t on the timeline,” Hyebin said, like it should have been obvious. “It went from not being on the timeline at all to landing at threeA.M.on May 8. It was kind of like being born on that day—1988 became its new origin timeline.”
“So, it survived the refresh because it was hiding in a time that didn’t exist?” I said.
“Yep,” Hyebin said. “Then it got deprioritized until it ate one too many spiders and caused a tsunami. We kind of had to deal with it then.”
“Well now I feel like I should be checking more carefully for bugs after missions,” I said, running a hand through my hair and imagining half a dozen insects falling out.
“As long as you don’t have head lice, you should be fine,” Hyebin said, grimacing like it wasn’t actually a joke.
The bus turned a sharp corner and I stumbled into Hyebin, who grumbled and went rigid like my touch was radioactive. “Watch it,” she mumbled, looking out the bus window rather than at me.
Normally, Hyebin looked at ease in every situation, which was why she made such a good descendant. She was so confident that she could probably barge into any stranger’s house and raid their fridge without anyone questioning it.
But now, with her tight grip on the pole as the bus rattled her side to side, she seemed out of place. The way she gazed out the front window felt too calculated, too obvious. Maybe it was an extension of my dragon senses of knowing when I was being followed—maybe I also knew when I was being watched… or deliberatelynotwatched.
