“Perfect!” my dad said, clapping his hands together. “I bet you boys could use some guy time anyway.”
“Oh, absolutely!” Yejun said, slinging an arm around Jihoon’s shoulders and yanking him close a little too harshly, his smile sharp. “We’ll have lots of fun.”
“That settles it,” my dad said. “Come on, Mina, I made a reservation at your favorite barbecue place.”
“Okay,” I said weakly, casting a wary glance at Yejun and Jihoon as I followed my dad down the hill.
“I got it,” my dad said, snatching the tongs from my hands and laying sheets of pork belly across the grill on the table before I could do it first. My dad liked to call the person who manned the grill “Meat Daddy” even though I’d repeatedly told him he wasn’t allowed to say that in public.
He’d brought me to a BBQ restaurant in Hapjeong, which wasn’t that busy on a weekday. I’d stuffed my backpack and school jacket into a plastic bag so they wouldn’t absorb the smell of meat, then gone to town on the kimchi while we waited for the pork to cook.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat down for a meal with either of my parents. As my dad hummed the tune that our rice cooker played when it finished and crammed the grill full of way too much meat, I realized he had more gray hair than I’d remembered, that the smile lines around his eyes had carved deeper into his skin. Was the stress of his job wearing him down, or was he just getting older? Even though we lived together, I felt a bit like a boardingschool student who only saw her parents on holidays. I put some extra kimchi on his plate and helped him rearrange the meat on the grill so everything would cook evenly.
“What do you think about Hokkaido?” my dad said as he dropped some slightly scorched meat on my plate.
Hokkaido was on the northernmost island in Japan. We’d taken a sleeper train there a few years ago for Christmas. I remembered little of it except the hot springs and fishing out moss balls called marimo from the lake and pretending they were little green pets.
“I guess it’s nice,” I said between bites of meat.
“Great!” my dad said, waving a piece of pork in the air. “Because we’re moving there!”
My chopsticks clattered to the table, precious meat lost to the floor.
“What?” I said.
“We’ve been transferred,” my dad said, adding more meat to my plate, as if that would distract me.
I shook my head, my appetite gone. “When?” I said.
“Well, your mother and I are leaving on the fifteenth,” my dad said, expression sobering as he seemed to catch on that this wasn’t good news to me. “But your supervisor says you have some work to finish up, so you can come the week after you’re done.”
I shook my head, gripping the edge of the table. The fifteenth was only six days away. How was I supposed to pull up all the anchors of Timeline Beta if I wasn’t even in the same country as Yejun? More importantly, would I be able to find Hana in Japan? She’d left the note for me in Seoul, so some part of her was still alive here.
“Are you sad because of your new boyfriend?” my dad said. I grimaced, still not sure if he was talking about Jihoon or Yejun. When I didn’t respond, my dad sighed and set down his chopsticks. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “You know I’d let you stay if it was up to me.”
I shook my head. Of course it wasn’t up to him—nothing ever was. My parents were only floating agents, so they had no say in their lives and never would.
But I didn’t have to live like them.
I was less than ninety points away from getting promoted to a full agent, and Jihoon was the key.
If I could convince him to kiss me, I’d pass the point threshold and could submit my application. Then, if Hyebin was willing to put in a good word, I might actually stand a chance at staying in Seoul and finding Hana.
I let out a breath.It’s not over yet, I reminded myself.Hana isn’t gone yet.I drank the rest of my water like a shot of soju, then slammed the cup down.
My dad watched me warily. “Are you gonna be okay, Mina?” he said.
I nodded, my mind already far away as I mapped out my next series of texts to Jihoon. We had a date tomorrow, after all. I would finish the mission then.
“I’m great,” I said, stuffing a burnt piece of beef in my mouth and tearing through it with my sharp teeth.
Chapter Twelve
During the two-hour mandatory workshop on scrying pool maintenance that night, I’d missed three calls and twenty-one texts from my dad. I nearly dropped my phone as I scrolled through the notifications, sure that absolutely everyone must have died.
As soon as I unlocked my phone, a picture of a fat panda sitting in a basketball hoop filled the screen.
I blinked, then scrolled down through my dad’s texts, which were all pictures of pandas behaving like large furry toddlers. At the very end he’d asked if I wanted fried chicken for dinner tomorrow, complete with six chicken emojis.
