I took a step back as another person crashed into the pavement, their forearm crunching beneath them. A crowd was gathering around the fence now, screaming and pointing. The octopus ride spun in my peripheral vision, its flashing lights making me nauseous.
“All right,” Hyebin said, tossing the two corn dog skewers in the trash. “Let’s see if you pulled this one off.” She pushed back against the crowd, heading toward the exit and waving for me to follow. “Wipe your face!” she called over her shoulder.
I swallowed, the few bites of corn dog sitting heavy in mystomach. I’d done what I was told, but that didn’t necessarily mean I’d succeeded—a lot of things could go wrong on a mission without revealing themselves right away. Maybe I’d bought the last corn dog and ruined the day of a future war general who would flatten the earth in retaliation. Or maybe a famous artist had seen my face and would showcase a portrait exhibit titledNervous Foreigner Eats Corn Dog, which would have all sorts of butterfly effects. That was why Hyebin and I never spent more than a few minutes on any assignment.
My time with Hyebin was my first field experience. In Japan and the States, I’d spent hours every day after school in a classroom with other descendants. We’d studied time travel principles and infiltration techniques and case files of other descendants who’d nearly destroyed the world with their carelessness. I’d finished all my classroom hours just before moving from Tokyo to Seoul, where I had the great fortune of attempting to master time travel in my third language.
Over the last month, Hyebin had taught me many things that a classroom never could: how to move unnoticed through a crowd, how to get through most interactions as quickly as possible, how to walk through the past like it was made of glass and I was a wild elephant who could shatter everything if I turned around too quickly. Until I was cleared for independent travel, we did our missions together.
After all, the descendants didn’t let just anyone travel through time. No matter how much they needed more descendants, a descendant you couldn’t trust was worse than none at all—it was too easy to make mistakes that would end the world. Hyebin graded me on every mission, and her score combined with my infiltration mission points would determine whether I could move up the ranks and be trusted with important tasks, or if I was better off being fired and brain scrubbed.
That was the worst-case scenario, because I had no backup plan for the rest of my life. I had never thought about college, didn’t have the extracurriculars to get into an American university because all my time after school was spent working for the descendants, and didn’t have the grades to get into a Korean or Japanese university. I wasn’t even studying for the Korean college entrance exams—I’d told everyone that I was applying to international schools. There was no option but to keep plowing forward with the choice I’d made.
I dragged my sleeve across my mouth, wiping off the blood, and hurried after Hyebin. “Are you sure that no one died?” I said as we left the fairground. I could still taste blood, which somehow couldn’t overpower the taste of corn dog.
“Would it matter if they did?” Hyebin said, her gaze flat. “Would you have gone against orders?”
“No,” I said, before I could even think about whether or not I meant it. I knew that insubordination was the fastest way to guarantee I never got top-level security clearance.
“People die,” Hyebin said. “Our job is not to stop death, it’s to make sure everything is the way it’s supposed to be. There’s no way to save everyone in the world from dying.”
“Yes, Sunbaenim,” I said quietly.
Hyebin was making that face that I knew meant I’d annoyed her. Blue and red lights gleamed off her dark eyes as police cars drew closer.
She held her hand out stiffly. “Come on.”
I took her hand, grimacing at the feeling of corn dog grease between our palms. I was sure Hyebin hated touching me, but it was a necessary step when using our powers.
Hyebin was not a descendant of Ryujin like me, but of one of the Korean dragon families. Instead of boxes of time, the Korean descendants all had yeouiju—orbs of concentrated magical power. Korean legend said that fledgling dragons claimed their final and all-powerfulform when they caught a yeouiju in their mouths. Though the mythical dragons were gone, some of their descendants—like Hyebin—still carried yeouiju full of immense power.
For now, since I wasn’t cleared for independent travel, Hyebin’s powers carried us both across the timeline. She held tight to my hand and pulled out the glowing yeouiju from her pocket.
“Are we clear?” she said.
In other words,Are we about to accidentally traumatize anyone by vanishing into thin air?
First, I scanned the empty street for humans. When I didn’t see any, I closed my eyes and listened for footsteps or car engines but could only hear cicadas and the low buzz of streetlights. Lastly, I raised my gaze to the sky.
“No,” I said.
“No?” Hyebin pressed.
I nodded to a telephone pole, where a security camera was mounted high up, angled toward us. Descendants had to avoid showing up in photos or videos while on missions.
“Where should we stand to avoid it?” Hyebin said, even though she knew the answer.
“Directly under it,” I recited. “Unless there’s another camera on the next pole, in which case we should move into the forest.”
Hyebin nodded in approval—the closest she ever got to praise—and walked toward the pole. Once I confirmed that there weren’t any other cameras nearby, her greasy grip tightened painfully around my hand. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and as she exhaled, her bones bloomed with light.
She opened her eyes, which were now piercing blue, her normally shadowed face glimmering. The light rushed across her skin and spread to my hand that was locked tight around hers, her palm as hot as a shooting star. The warmth surged into my bones and the edges of the world began to blur.
Time flowed like silk around us, the years whispering across my face, glinting beneath my fingertips, tightening around my throat. Most people thought of time as an unyielding constant, a sworn promise of sunrises and sunsets and shifting seasons. But only the descendants knew that time was nothing more than the whim of a forgotten god—it promised nothing, often lied, and had sharp, glistening teeth.
When I opened my eyes, we were standing on the same street as before, but the sky was an ominous gray, the light gone. The air tasted wet with an impending storm, clouds gathering overhead. The arrangement of parked cars had changed, the sidewalks were cracked with weeds bursting through them—a scene I remembered from the present, which meant we were back in 2025. I looked over my shoulder at Yongma Land…
Where the carnival lights were still as bright as ever.
