Chapter Two
Once I finished my job, there was nothing to do but take a bite of my cheese corn dog and wait for the bloodshed to begin.
It was Friday, August 12, 2011, 7:47P.M., one minute before a disaster that would change the course of history. But even a decade of distance from that afternoon’s swim with Jihoon wasn’t enough to stop me from cringing in between bites of corn dog. Once I’d arrived at headquarters, I’d barely had time to change out of my soaking wet school uniform before my mentor had dragged me on another mission.
It might have been a good distraction, if I weren’t the kind of person who relived my most embarrassing moments in a cold sweat at three in the morning. I took an angry bite of my corn dog and tried to focus. This mission was too important to mess up because of a boy.
I was standing in Yongma Land—a sad excuse for a family theme park in a tiny overgrown section of forest, and the best park in Seoul before Lotte World became popular. In the present day, it wasrusty and deserted. But right now, it was a visual assault of flashing lights in colors that human eyes probably weren’t meant to perceive, the air thick with grease from the fried dough and corn dogs, with a faint undertone of vomit. For only 10,000 won, children could climb into buckets held up by giant octopus tentacles and swing in nauseous circles, or run around the scattered plastic gnomes with their leering facial expressions, or crawl through the fairy houses braided with overgrown flowers just starting to die as summer wound down.
I’d stood in this exact place in 2025, fourteen years after the park shut down.
By then, it was just a deserted ghost playground that you could visit for 3,000 won and use as a pretty backdrop for Instagram photos. There was only a slight risk of tetanus from all the rusted metal, and a slightly higher risk of being haunted by carnival ghosts, which probably made it worth way more than 3,000 won.
Two thousand eleven was the last year the park was supposed to be open. At least, until a rogue descendant had interfered.
I supposed there were more insidious actions than keeping a family-owned amusement park open another decade, but that was hardly the point—descendants couldn’t go around picking and choosing what parts of the original timeline we liked best. If enough people did that… well, it was the fastest way to end up with ten-foot-tall spiders roaming the streets. Again.
My mentor—Jang Hyebin—inhaled her corn dog as she stood beside me, then glanced unsubtly at mine. I handed it to her without comment. I had only taken a few bites and was starting to feel sick thinking about what would happen because of me.
At twenty-five, Hyebin was the youngest descendant in Korea to ever hold the position of senior agent. Legend said she could work 24/7 because she took micro-naps every time she blinked, and that she’d lived the equivalent of ten lifetimes with all the time traveling she’d done. Others said that her brain worked at two timesthe potential of the average human’s because she’d simply burned all her memories of her life before she started her job. Some even said she had more Red Bull than blood in her body, and I suspected that rumor was actually true.
As lucky as I was to be shadowing someone like Hyebin, standing next to her always made me feel conspicuously uncool. She was even taller than me, but her height somehow made her look like a fashion model, while mine made me look more like Godzilla. She had an unusually sharp face with purple shadows under her eyes and bangs that hid her burning expression, the rest of her hair a jagged wolf cut stopping at her shoulders. Part of me wondered if she was also mixed race like me, because she looked so unlike anyone I’d ever seen. But of course, you couldn’t just ask Jang Hyebin questions.
She might have looked too memorable for this line of work, but she had an uncanny ability to slip like a shadow into any time period and go totally unnoticed, like the sheer force of her anger repelled other people’s gazes.
It was a bit harder for someone like me to blend in.
I did my best by dyeing my hair a few shades darker and ironing it perfectly straight, but there was only so much I could do about being mixed. If I wore glasses that were in fashion from whatever time period I was visiting, older people wouldn’t stare at me from a distance the way they would foreigners with blond hair or dark skin. But the second anyone made eye contact with me, their expressions changed. No one had ever looked me in the eye and thought I belonged here. But they were right—I didn’t belong here, or anywhere.
“Look,” Hyebin said, pointing at the Viking ship ride with her—my—corn dog.
As the ship swung high to the right—far higher than it was supposed to—the passengers lifted in their seats with a delighted yell.Rides were supposed to be scary, after all. No one ever thought something would go wrong until the moment it did.
On the next upswing, all the safety bars released.
The passengers flew forward, tumbling headfirst into the other half of the boat with screams that were no longer delighted. Some of the passengers hit the cement platform below and didn’t get up, bright bursts of their blood splashing across my face. As I tasted salt, I was suddenly glad I’d given Hyebin my corn dog. She’d assured me that no one would actually die, but then again, Hyebin wasn’t exactly above lying.
In the original timeline, a mechanical failure on the Viking ride combined with an inexperienced operator resulted in eleven injured and two lawsuits that the park owners couldn’t afford. Yongma Land closed down within six months. A lot of factors led to the accident, but the last chain in the sequence was that the man who operated the Viking ship ride had gotten a flat tire and ended up stranded on the side of the road right before his shift. His substitute was an eighteen-year-old who didn’t know how to stop the ride.
At least, that was how it was supposed to happen.
Until this morning, when a rogue descendant heroically gave the Viking ride operator a lift to work. No accident, no lawsuit, and Yongma Land lived on in perpetuity.
The change had set off alarms all over headquarters—the descendants kept a close eye on Yongma Land because a lot of rogues saw it as an initiation, trying their hand at cause-and-effect, getting their first taste of unsupervised, unsanctioned power.
It was my job, as a “loyal” descendant, to take that power away.
That was why I’d handed the Viking ride operator a bag of chili fries.
I already bought these, but I feel sick from the rides and don’t want to waste them, I’d said with big, innocent eyes, standing under the green neon light of the octopus ride so I looked slightly ill. I mighthave been behind schedule with Operation: Kiss Kim Jihoon, but that didn’t mean I had no clue how to infiltrate a scene.
The operator gratefully accepted my fries and went to the bathroom a few minutes later, where he was currently locked in a stall with the door jammed shut, and absolutely no one was operating the ride. The timeline would correct itself, and it had only cost me 4,000 won at the snack bar.
No matter what country I worked in, the higher-ups preferred this indirect approach to adjusting the timeline. They called it the butterfly principle, based on the theory that a butterfly flapping its wings could indirectly cause a typhoon on the other side of the world. For descendants, the principle basically boiled down to this: Never solve a problem at its source. Making a small change from a distance creates fewer unwanted ripple effects and makes it harder for rogues to undo your work.
For instance, rather than crashing a car, we’d drop a persimmon out a window. A seagull would eat the persimmon, which would give it violent indigestion, and it would poop all over the windshield of a passing car, which would run a stop sign and plow into the car we’d wanted to crash in the first place.
The timeline architects said it was more resource efficient this way, but I doubted that was the real reason. It was probably so that we could pretend that the end result wasn’t our fault.
