He ducked into a Daiso and dodged an old woman in the checkout line, then snatched a stuffed bear off the shelf.
Please don’t let that be for me, I thought as the cashier bagged the bear. Yejun checked his watch, foot tapping impatiently. As soon as the cashier handed him the receipt, he rushed outside, barely dodging a biker on the sidewalk. At least he’d finished the croffle at that point or he probably would have spit it everywhere.
The pedestrian light switched on and he jogged across the street.
“Slow down!” I said, barely evading a flock of schoolchildren. “Are you trying to get me flattened by a car?”
“I’m trying to make it hard for you!” he said over his shoulder. He reached a small footbridge over the Bulgwang stream, checked his watch, then placed the bear on the edge and patted it on the head before turning around and rushing in the other direction.
Over the next few minutes, he folded a receipt from his pocket into a paper boat, which he set sailing down the stream, then walked across said stream and soaked his pants up to his ankles, and finally,removed one single dandelion from the grass and tucked it behind my ear. I flinched at the touch of his fingers on my cheek.He’s just working, I reminded myself.
“There!” he said, sitting down on a bench and panting. “Now tell me, Yang Mina, what was the adjustment?”
I sat down on the opposite side of the bench, my left eye twitching as the wind blew dandelion parachutes into it. “Are you not worried about ripple effects?” I said stiffly. “Don’t tell me you ran all those scenarios too.”
“I like running scenarios!” he said, edging away as if this actually embarrassed him. “It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube.”
I sighed and sat back. “If I guess right, can we go home?”
He nodded quickly. “Pinky promise,” he said, holding out his pinky, which I pointedly ignored.
I crossed my arms and played back the last five minutes in my mind. Yejun had checked his watch before every strange thing he’d just done, and all his actions seemed weird enough to be actual adjustments. That was… except for one thing.
“You asked for a bag for the stuffed bear,” I said. “It was the last one the cashier had.”
Yejun raised an eyebrow. “Thatwas the weirdest thing I did?”
“You knew you were going to put the bear on the bridge, so you didn’t need a bag,” I said. “Besides, you keep trying to tell me the descendants are causing climate change, yet you would go out of your way to get unnecessary plastic?”
Yejun smiled, leaning back. “The cashier is going to have to grab more bags in the back, causing the line to build up,” he said. “One customer is late for work and will put his candy bar back rather than wait.”
“And then what happens to him?” I asked.
“He won’t choke to death while driving and run through a crosswalk,” Yejun said, shrugging.
“Are you serious?”
“Yup,” Yejun said, grinning. “That guy is an entomologist, and he’s going to save the dung beetles. It’s nice to save lives for once instead of ending them, isn’t it?”
It was true—more often than not, it felt like my descendant work involved making things worse, just because that was how things were “supposed” to be.
My anger toward Yejun slowly faded—it was hard to keep glaring at a guy who had just prevented a traffic accident. I slowly uncrossed my arms. “So the croffle place being near this adjustment was just a coincidence?”
“No such thing as a coincidence,” Yejun said. “There are a lot of ways to save the dung beetles—thirty-six, in fact—but only one of them involved croffles, so, naturally, that was the one I picked.”
In a way, he still did this for me, I thought.Just… for me and also the dung beetles.Does that make it better or worse?
“Well, okay,twoof them involved croffles,” Yejun said, “but the second one also involved arson, so I scrapped that idea.”
I laughed, startling one of the ducks toddling down the path in front of us. “Good call,” I said. “I suppose this isn’t the worst place you could have brought me as a reward.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Yejun said, bowing melodramatically. “But if you could pick next time, where would you go?” He spread his arms out across the back of the bench as he spoke. When had he scooted closer? I leaned slightly forward, careful not to lean back against his forearm.
“I don’t know,” I said, staring at my lap.
“Come on,” he said. “If you could travel anywhere in the timeline and the descendants couldn’t stop you, where would you go?”
To Hana, I thought at once. But of course, I had no idea when that was, or if any moment from that timeline still existed. I tried to conjure my happiest moment in my mind, a day I’d love to go backto, but I could only seem to recall a blur of airports and moving boxes.
