The descendants were liars and guardians of secrets. The only way I would know the truth was if they trusted me, if I was one of them.
I turned around and clambered back onto the stepping stones before Jihoon could offer to help me up, then stormed down the street. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Jihoon had walked away, then turned to the alley. My socks squished in my shoes with every wet step until I reached the person waiting for me.
There I was—another version of me—standing next to the CU store with my arms crossed.
This Mina was wearing a black hoodie, the collar of her school uniform peeking out underneath. Her hair was tied up in a way I knew meant I hadn’t had a shower in a while because I was swamped with homework. I almost felt bad for her. I might have, if I couldn’t still taste mud between my teeth.
I’d been on the other end of this interaction many times, so I knew how this worked. There was no room for politeness or considering anyone’s feelings. Things like that weren’t important to descendants of Ryujin, the Japanese dragon god.
Long ago, Ryujin’s second daughter—Otohime—fell in love with a human and gifted him a box of time magic. The human mishandled it and unfortunately ended up as a pile of lint. But even though he got what he deserved, the damage had been done—once you brought magic to Earth, it was pretty hard to take it back.
Otohime’s descendants went down to claim her magic, butfound that they weren’t the only dragons who’d spilled a bottle of time magic on Earth and were frantically trying to mop it up. The Korean descendants were already downstairs, thanks to the last wishes of one of their dragon clans.
None of them realized, at first, what kind of price they would have to pay for playing with time.
In the beginning, it must have been fun—to bend time to your will so you never had to suffer any consequences, or regrets, or nostalgia. But the descendants realized slowly, and then all at once, that the timeline was very easy to break and very difficult to put back together. It was actually quite challenging to change the past without creating a paradox, undoing your own birth, or accidentally ending the world. After about a century (or no time at all, depending on where you were standing) the whole timeline turned into a pretzel twisted around on itself.
I obviously had no memory of that timeline, but I’d heard rumors of pterodactyls snatching humans off the sidewalk, sweet potato trees so tall that falling potatoes split skulls open, the extinction of all domesticated dogs, etcetera.
These days, the descendants were a bit more organized.
It was too late to fully contain time travelers—that cat got out of the bag centuries ago—but the majority of the descendants didn’t need much convincing to see the importance of having the world in one piece. Both Korean and Japanese dragon descendants worked together to correct the timeline back to its original state—to before reckless rogue travelers had their fun with it—in exchange for our living expenses and a respectable stipend. But there were plenty of rogue travelers still running free, so it was a constant battle of making adjustments, fighting the selfish chaos that would tear a hole in the universe.
I was raised to be a trilingual superweapon of a descendant, able to work wherever I was needed, worth my weight in dragon gold… assuming that I could pass calculus.
I stopped in front of my Echo and crossed my arms, mirroring her stance.
“What?” I said. There were more colorful things I could have said, but I knew my mentor was probably watching somewhere, trying to stay out of the way but making sure I didn’t mess up the timeline too badly.
The other Mina turned and picked up a bottle of banana milk from the outdoor table, then dumped it all over my—not her—shoes.
“Sorry,” she said, not sounding particularly sorry. But of course I was never sorry either.
I grimaced, looking down at the shoes that I definitely would not be able to wear to school tomorrow because they would never dry in time. “Is that all?” I said. “Any more infiltration missions you want to ruin for me while you’re here?”
She shook her head, reached into a pocket of her bag, and tossed a handful of confetti over me.
I sputtered as one of the tiny pieces got in my eye, waving my hand to disperse the rest of it. “Are you serious?” I said.
But even through the haze of paper, I saw her turning away. When the confetti settled, she was gone.
I hope that was worth it, I thought.
But of course it was—that was the whole point of time traveling. Every single action we took, even something as insignificant as tying a shoe or taking a sip of coffee—had a ripple effect across the entire universe.
Maybe there would be a mudslide tomorrow, and my school sneakers would have gotten sucked into the silt and caused my death. Or maybe it was imperative to the integrity of the universe that I ran the washing machine tonight because that tiny amount of water would be stolen from the mouth of an ancient fish that was destined to go extinct. Or maybe I would wash my shoes and find the laces unsalvageable, then be forced to go out and buy new shoelaces, andthe receipt printer would jam and the cashier would have to go to the back room to replace it, where she would meet the man she was meant to marry.
I had trouble justifying the confetti, though. Sometimes I was just a jerk.
I jammed a pinky into my ear, trying to fish out another piece of confetti before it wormed its way into my brain. Death by confetti was a hilarious way to go, but I had a lot to do before my death day.
In my pocket, I clutched the tiny tortoiseshell box full of time. It constantly radiated heat that spread through my bones. I held it tight and started to trudge to headquarters, aka the “after-school classes” that Jihoon had been walking me to. In the distance, the ten-story tower cut through the smog overhead, the one-way glass of the top levels gleaming like a lighthouse beacon.
Somewhere up there, someone knew the truth about my family.
I would make them trust me, maybe even love me. And only then, with their throats exposed and backs turned, would I take what I wanted.
While I no longer had a dragon’s scales or claws or fire, no one could take away my teeth.
